Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

100. Richmond Climax, November 28, 1888; Otterbein, Feuding and Warfare, 236.

  101. “S. B. Buckner to Hon. H. C. Lilly, December 14, 1888,” “Adjutant General’s Report for the Year 1889,” KPD, vol. 4 (Frankfort: E. Polk Johnson, 1889), 7, 58 (quote); MVB, November 6, 1888; NYS, December 16, 1888; Richmond Climax, January 9, 1889; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 85–86.

  102. KPD, vol. 4, no. 17 (1889), 58 (quote), 64; “Simon Buckner to H. C. Lilly, February 8, 1889,” Sheriff Jeptha Watts to his Excellency S. B. Buckner, March 26, 1889, Governor’s Correspondence, March–April 1889, box 2, folder 24, KDLA; MVB, December 11, 1888; Hartford Herald, January 9, 1889; SIJ, July 25, 1890; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 211.

  103. “James S. Mahan et al to his Excellency Simon B. Buckner, Governor of the Commonwealth of Ky., November 26, 1888,” “J. B. White et al to His Excellency S. B. Buckner, December 4, 1888,” Governor’s Correspondence, November–December 1888, box 1, folders 18, 19, KDLA; Sandra Lee Barney, Authorized to Heal, 22–23.

  104. SIJ, July 25, 1890.

  105. Hartford Herald, January 9, 1889.

  106. In the August 1889 election for state treasurer, Breathitt County was apparently the only county in the state not to report. MVB, September 5, 1889.

  107. Richmond Climax, September 3, 1890; MVB, December 9, 1891 (quote).

  108. HGH, July 7, 14, 1886, October 7, 21, 1892; MSA, October 25, 1892; MVB, November 19, 1892.

  109. Carl S. Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief, 86, 90, 163, 172.

  110. David Blight divides these postwar rationalizations among whites in the North and South as the “reconciliationist” and “white supremacist” visions, both of which worked toward national reconciliation by depoliticizing the Civil War’s memory. While reconciliationists might recoil in horror at the murders of black southerners as a means, they could understand the white South’s intended ends. Blight, Race and Reunion, 2.

  111. Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox, 36–37, 76–77, 116.

  112. Despite its being a “meaningful social action” laden with interpretive possibilities, violence is often treated as “an unchanging ‘natural’ fact” that defies characterization or study. By being taken out of the political realm and placed within the context of geographical or racial determinism (i.e., “natural”), feud violence became “senseless” but only in the ways that it was defined by people with no direct experience with it. Blok, Honour and Violence, 112–13 (quote).

  113. Richmond Climax, September 17, 1890; MVB, January 23, 1891.

  114. Waller, Feud, 37–52, 98–101.

  115. In their study of Clay County, the site of the later Garrard-Baker-White feud, Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee note a break in stalemate between county and state government initiated by the election of Kentucky’s first Republican governor. Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 299.

  116. Columbus Enquirer, November 4, 1892.

  117. CDT, May 12, 1889; Richmond Climax, May 22, 1889. See also CDT, April 8, 1895.

  118. Richmond Climax, May 22, 1889.

  119. CDT, September 14, 1890 (quote); Philadelphia Inquirer, September 14, 29, 1890; Wheeling Register, September 14, 1890.

  120. Macon Telegraph, September 19, 1890.

  121. SIJ, September 26, 1890.

  122. Ninth Report of the Railroad Commissioners of Kentucky, 27; MVB, November 13, 1888; SIJ, June 20, 1890; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 217.

  123. Jackson Hustler, April 3, 1891.

  124. MVB, November 20, 1891; HGH, January 29, 1892.

  125. HGH, June 15, 1887; SIJ, October 14, 1887; Richmond Climax, January 23, 1889; MVB, February 18, 1889; MSA, November 17, 1891.

  126. Handy, The Official Directory of the World’s Columbian Exposition, 715.

  127. AGACK, Regular Session, Begun 31 December, 1875 (Frankfort: James A. Hodges, 1876), 2:285–87. One large fork of Troublesome had been declared navigable in 1871, making the building of dams, booms, seining nets, and household mills on it punishable by law. KHJ, 1871, 981–82.

  128. Burch, Owsley County, Kentucky, 41–43.

  129. FRA, April 25, 1891; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 110–12, 205–6.

  130. “The Timber Boom,” 279.

  131. “A man is as much a thief who steals the saw logs of a rich corporation as the one who enters a church by night and bears away the Bible or the communion service. That men should be guilty of this crime and yet ask to be considered respectable, is a marvel of impudence and effrontery. The law can not be too rigidly enforced against violators of law of any kind, and especially should it be done when the principal industry of this great country is so effected.” Jackson Hustler, April 17 (quote), May 3, 24, 1891.

  132. “How speculative rent checks production may be seen not only in the valuable land withheld from use, but in the paroxysms of industrial depressions which, originating in the speculative advance in land values, propagate themselves over the whole civilized world everywhere paralyzing industry and causing more waste and probably more suffering than would a general war. Taxation which would take rent for public uses would prevent this, while if land were taxed to anything near its rental value, no one could hold land that he is not using and, consequently, land not in use would be thrown open to those who would use it. Settlement would be closer and, consequently, labor and capital would be able to produce much more with the same exertion.” Reprinted in ibid., April 3, 1891.

  133. MSA, April 21, 1891; Alexandria Gazette, April 21, 1891; Knoxville Journal, April 22, 1891; Columbus Enquirer, April 22, 1891; Roanoke Times, April 22, 1891; Wichita Eagle, April 23, 1891; Dallas Morning News, April 29, 1891 (quote); Big Stone Post, May 1, 1891.

  134. Between 1880 and 1900 there were at least 140 strikes in Louisville alone, most over companies’ failure to maintain wages. With small lines crossing the state’s more rural areas, it is likely that work stoppages were even more common but left unreported because of smaller newspapers’ unwillingness to report bad news about local economic conditions. Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 311.

  135. NYS, May 2, 1891; SIJ, May 15, 1891; Hickman Courier, September 11, 1891; Karin A. Shapiro, A New South Rebellion, 139–72.

  136. Columbia Finance & Trust Co. v. Kentucky Union Ry. Co. et al., Circuit Court of Appeals, 6th Circuit, February 5, 1894, The Federal Reporter, 60:794–803; SIJ, May 15, 1891; Big Stone Post, May 15, 1891; MVB, July 17, 1891; NYT, November 29, 1892; SIJ, August 8, 1893; HGH, September 13, 1894; MPL, January 23, 1894; Wall Street Journal, February 12, 1891, March 12, 1894; George Copland to Joseph T. Tucker, September 12, 1900, Kentucky Union Land Company Records, box 1, folder 5, KLSCA.

  137. MPL, October 15, 1894; SIJ, October 16, 1894; MVB, October 17, 1894; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 119; Herr, Louisville and Nashville Railroad, 183–84.

  138. The L&N eventually purchased the entirety of L&E stock in 1909. Klein, History of the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, 401–3; Herr, Louisville and Nashville Railroad, 184–88.

  139. CSS, vol. 347, no. 4, 25th Cong., 3rd sess., H. Doc., p. 139.

  140. Quoted in MVB, December 3, 1891.

  141. D. H. Davis, “Urban Development in the Kentucky Mountains,” 95.

  142. Louisville Commercial, December 8, 1878; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, December 9, 1878; MVB, July 13, 1885. Despite the weakness of the regulation, a majority of counties followed suit; by 1908, 94 of the state’s 119 counties were dry. Jutkins, Handbook of Prohibition, 166; “The Amazing Progress of Temperance in Kentucky,” 23; Gambill v. Commonwealth, February 16, 1911, Kentucky Reports, vol. 25 (December 1, 1910–February 1, 1911), 312–14; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 390; Ayers, Promise of the New South, 178. For the local attribution of violence to alcohol consumption, see HGH, November 4, 30, 1891, May 14, 21, 1896.

  143. HGH, September 2 (quote), 23, 1892.

  144. The levying of the first postbellum whiskey tax was a source of social and legal disruption in the Kentucky mountains
and the uplands of other states farther south. The distillation of homemade liquor had endured since the Jefferson administration; whiskey making was especially important to farmers with limited access to acreage and wagon roads since corn was more valuable (as well as more easily transportable) in distilled liquid form than it was by the bushel. Southern mountaineers considered the 1867 tax law a violation of their commercial rights and went to great efforts to resist federal efforts toward regulation. Large-scale organization of outlaw distillers, sometimes in numbers that encompassed whole communities, was used to resist and expel federal revenue enforcement. “Blockaders” found enough of a common cause within their trade to form organized groups, often numbering in the dozens, to guard production sites, repel revenue agents, and punish informants. Between 1870 and 1900, “moonshining” was probably more prevalent in Kentucky than it was anywhere else outside of the former Confederacy. Federal revenue agents began coming to Breathitt County in search of illegal distillers as early as 1882. SIJ, December 8, 1882, February 9, 1883; Bourbon News, February 20, 1883; Holmes, “Moonshining and Collective Violence,” 593–95; Bensel, Yankee Leviathan, 378. For mass organization of moonshiners in Breathitt County and elsewhere in eastern Kentucky, see “Letter from the Secretary of War in Relation to the Papers in the Claim of George Williams, March 8, 1880,” CSS, vol. 24, no. 4, 46th Cong., 2nd sess., H. Doc., pp. 83–84; NYT, July 7, 1871, March 13, 1881, July 15, 1886; HGH, July 14, 1886.

  145. “The moral and religious atmosphere of Jackson is wonderfully improving, due greatly to the vigilance of the police authorities and the hasty execution of the law against the guilty. The police court is presided over by C. X. Bowling, with Charley T. Byrd, a Wolfe County man, for city prosecutor. The ‘blind tiger’ cannot thrive here, and other evidences of evil are conspicuously absent.” “The late grand jury of Breathitt is also to be commended for the noble week’s work it has just recorded in history. One hundred and seventy-five indictments were returned against all offenses known in the calendar of crime, and all indications point to a good omen for Breathitt County.” HGH, June 19, 1899. For Jackson’s incorporation, see AGACK(Frankfort: E. Polk Johnson, 1890), 1:846–59. See also Richmond Climax, March 20, 1895.

  146. MSA, May 30, 1893; MVB, June 1 (quote), 6, 1893; SIJ, June 9, 1893.

  147. MVB, June 6, 1893.

  148. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 326.

  149. SIJ, April 9, 1895.

  150. MPL, April 11, 1895.

  151. NYS, December 16, 1888; HGH, May 23, 1895; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 257; Waller, Feud, 95–97. Smith’s preexecution confessions led to French’s indictment the following fall. MSA, September 24, 1895; SIJ, September 24, 1895; HGH, September 26, 1895; Lexington Herald, May 26, 1896; Richmond Climax, June 3, 1896.

  152. Catherine McQuinn, the woman at the center of Smith and Rader’s quarrel, was convicted as an accomplice to Rader’s murder but pardoned in 1897 after new evidence suggested her innocence. HGH, February 14, March 21, 1895; MPL, March 14, 16, 18, 1895, November 30, 1897; SIJ, March 15, 1895; MVB, June 1, 22, 1895; Hartford Herald, June 26, 1895; HVK, March 19, June 28, 1895, December 3, 1897; FRA, June 29, 1895; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:101–13.

  153. HGH, April 11, May 30, June 20, 1895; HVK, May 7, 31, June 25, 1895; MSA, May 7, June 25, 1895; SIJ, May 7, 31, June 18, 25, 1895; Richmond Climax, May 22, June 19, 1895; Knoxville Journal, June 1, 24, 1895; MVB, June 1, 22, 1895; Hartford Herald, June 26, 1895.

  154. Kansas City Star, June 28, 1895; FRA, June 29, 1895; Hickman Courier, June 28, July 5, 1895; HVK, June 28, July 2, 1895; Knoxville Journal, June 29, 1895; MPL, June 29, 1895; MVB, June 29, 1895; MSA, July 2, 1895; SIJ, July 2, 1895; HGH, July 4, 1895.

  155. HVK, June 28, 1895; SIJ, July 2, 1895; HGH, July 4, 1895; Hickman Courier, July 5, 1895; Charles Hayes, The Hanging of “Bad Tom” Smith; William Leonard Eury Appalachian Collection, Carol Grotnes Belk Library & Information Commons, Appalachian State University. For similar, almost textbook, prehanging performances, see Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 39.

  156. LCJ, June 30, 1895.

  157. MPL, June 29, 1895. “Public executions in early America were pageants designed to reinforce the moral order of the community and express the ineffable force of law, carefully staged dramas devised to impart an array of lessons to an audience brought forth and transfixed by the promise of violent death: the state shall punish vice; religious authorities shall ensure that the moral order be reestablished; the offender with his death shall atone for his sins against man and God. If everything went according to script, the criminal would see the error of his ways and warn the spectators to never tread his awful path.” Schoenbachler, Murder and Madness, 202. See also Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle, 19–44 (particularly 38–41).

  158. HVK, June 25, 1895.

  159. Hartford Herald, June 26, 1895.

  160. Kansas City Star, August 15, 1895.

  161. Charles C. Moore, the Voltairesque editor of Lexington’s Blue-grass Blade, disagreed with the buoyant assessment of Smith’s public death, especially after publicized violence was reborn in Bloody Breathitt in 1902: “Kentucky papers printed that excursion trains were run to Jackson, Ky., to witness the hanging of ‘Bad Tom Smith’ and that there were numbers of pregnant women in the brutal mob that witnessed the criminal dangling at the end of a rope. The conditions of affairs at Jackson, Ky., today prove the brutalizing influence of such scenes. If hanging prevents or deters the criminal classes from murder, why do our authorities deem it best to conduct them in private, as is becoming general now?” Blue-grass Blade, August 10, 1902.

  162. LCJ, June 28, 1895. “Bad Tom” Smith’s hanging and his improvident life that led to it remain subjects of discussion in the twenty-first century. Aside from his being a frequent topic on Kentucky genealogical Web sites, Smith’s execution was memorialized in an eponymously titled song by the Lexington band Blind Corn Liquor Pickers in 2004. More recently, a Cincinnati microbrewery commemorated Smith’s memory with a Bad Tom Ale.

  163. MSA, July 2, 1895.

  164. HVK, October 23, 1896; Knoxville Journal, November 24, 1896; Lexington Herald, October 15, 22, 25, November 26, December 1, 1896; Mt. Sterling Democrat, December 8, 1896.

  5. Death of a Feudal Hero

  1. HMC, October 3, 1884, February 5, 1886; SIJ, January 29, 1886; HGH, February 3, 1886; FRA, September 17, 1892.

  2. HGH, February 16, May 18, 1887; Richmond Climax, August 31, 1887.

  3. SIJ, January 25, 1889; Ed Porter Thompson, History of the First Kentucky Brigade, 704.

  4. Lexington Herald, May 18, 1896; SIJ, May 19, 1896; Richmond Climax, May 20, November 11, 1896.

  5. Waller, Feud, 37–41, 152–55, 204–5.

  6. FRA, February 18, 1893; Miller v. South &c., Kentucky Court of Appeals, filed September 16, 1890, KLR, vol. 12, no. 1 (July 1, 1890), 351–52; Morse v. South et al. Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, The Federal Reporter, 80:207–8; H. F. Davis & Co. v. Sizemore et al., Court of Appeals of Kentucky, December 20, 1918, SWR, vol. 207 (January 22–February 12, 1919), 17; SWR, vol. 37 (1896–97), 260; Aikman v. South et al., Court of Appeals of Kentucky, October 31, 1906, SWR, vol. 97 (1906–7), 5. Writing in the 1930s when squatters were still being found on titled land in Breathitt County, E. L. Noble used the nomenclature “wood denizens” interchangeably with “squatter,” suggesting not only Breathitt County squatters’ affinity for unimproved, wooded land but also their foreignness to the mainstream of local society suggested by their apparent unwillingness to seek out legally recognized land tenure. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:58.

  7. HGH, May 10, 1894.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Morse v. South et al., Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, The Federal Reporter, 80:206–18; Strong et al. v. Kentucky River Hardwood Co. et al.; Morse et al. v. Same, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, November 12, 1920, SWR, vol. 225 (December 15, 1920–January 26, 1921), 359.

  10. The Min
e, Quarry and Metallurgical Record of the United States, Canada and Mexico, 476.

  11. MPL, March 30, 1896; Wiltz, “The 1895 Election,” 118, 124; Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 131–32; Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, 197–98.

  12. This was with just under 446,000 ballots counted (over 100,000 more than in the previous presidential race). NYT, December 28, 1896; CDT, November 28, 1896; TAPR, 1896, 238; 1897, 241; Shannon and McQuown, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 67–73.

  13. Hartford Herald, January 6, 1897. A 1902 amendment weakened the law after Bradley left office. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 177–83, 310–19.

  14. CDT, December 29, 1896 (quote); MVB, November 17, 1896; HVK, November 20, 1896; Crittenden Press, January 7, 1897; Paducah Sun, March 29, 1897; Hartford Republican, October 15, 1897.

  15. Lexington Herald, May 22, 1896. Later that year “a gang of female white cappers” attacked a woman in Pike County. SIJ, October 6, 1896.

  16. SIJ, June 16, 1896.

  17. WKY, December 17, 1878.

  18. With fairly perceptible resemblances to the Ku Klux Klan, which had withered in the previous decade, groups identified as whitecappers first appeared in the late 1880s in Indiana. Whitecappers lacked the Klan’s specific iconography, ritualism, and affiliation with southern Democrats. In terms of tactics, however, “[whitecapping] seems to have been an important link between the first and second Ku Klux Klans.” Quote from Gurr, Violence in America, 39. See also LCJ, December 17, 1888; Lexington Herald, January 19, 1896; Crozier, The White-Caps; Palmer, “Discordant Music,” 5–62; Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 62, 312; Holmes, “Whitecapping,” 165–85; Holmes, “Moonshining and Collective Violence,” 593–95; Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 24–25, 17–48.

  19. SIJ, May 5, December 1, 11, 1896; HVK, December 18, 1896; MPL, December 22, 1896, March 8, August 10, 1897; CDT, December 29, 1896; Lexington Herald, January 25, May 2 (quote), 1897; MVB, January 26, 1897; Wheeling Register, March 9 (quote), 1897; LCJ, May 10, 1897; Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, May 10, 1897; Spout Spring Times, August 14, 1897; Richmond Climax, August 18, 1897; Crittenden Press, August 19, 1897; interview with Harlan Strong, 1978, AOHP, no. 279, pp. 20–21; Luntz, Forgotten Turmoil, 61–62. The purported appearance of Klan organizations in conjunction with new railroad construction is consistent with the Ku Klux Klan’s growth in the Carolinas during its Reconstruction heyday. See Scott Reynolds Nelson, Iron Confederacies, 72–94, 106–14, 126–38.