Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  251. HVK, July 22, 1909.

  252. Fox, “On the Road to Hell-fer-Sartain,” 353–55.

  253. HMC, April 13, 1911.

  254. Hartford Republican, May 10, 1912; “Telephone to Open Feud-Ridden County,” 196. Telephone service was apparently available in Jackson in 1902 but extended to the more remote Crockettsville only a decade later.

  255. LCJ, May 4, 5, 1912; NYT, May 5, 1912; MPL, May 6, 13, 14, October 26, 1912; Hartford Herald, May 8, 15, 22, 1912; Berea Citizen, May 9, 1912; HMC, May 9, 16, 1912; HVK, May 9, October 22, 1912; Bourbon News, May 10, 1912; Hartford Republican, May 10, 1912; SIJ, May 24, 1912; Clay City Times, October 17, 1912; MSA, October 23, 1912; Berea Citizen, October 24, 1912; The American Library Annual, 1913, 15.

  256. MPL, May 14, 1912.

  257. Hartford Republican, October 2, 1908; BCN, October 2, 1908.

  258. MSA, March 5, 1913; Lexington Herald, March 13, 1913; Law Notes 16 (April 1913): 17; William M. McKinney and Greene, Annotated Cases, 59–64.

  259. MPL, January 7, 1915.

  260. NYT, September 19, 1916; clipping, St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 22, 1916, Appalachian Feuds Collection, box 1, series 6, Southern Appalachian Archives, HLSCA.

  261. Jett, From Prison to Pulpit, 17.

  262. “Religion”; Donald Lee Nelson, “The Death of J. B. Marcum,” 16–17.

  263. New York Tribune, July 31, 1903.

  264. Douglass, Christian Reconstruction in the South, 326.

  265. LCJ, June 3, 1904.

  266. Ibid.

  267. CDT, May 10, 1903.

  268. Ibid., June 5, 1905.

  269. Colby, The New International Year Book, 401.

  270. This may have been because it was his wife’s lawsuit that intitiated the appeal. Although she was one of very few to announce her husband’s death as a premeditated act carried out as part of a political conspiracy rather than a “feudal” action, Abrelia Marcum’s litigation probably exacerbated the event’s false familial significance. “Notes on Important Decisions,” 118–19.

  271. Lewis Franklin Johnson, Famous Kentucky Feuds Tragedies and Trials, 331.

  272. Fox, “On the Road to Hell-fer-Sartain,” 350. For Fox’s role in publicizing and interpreting feud violence, see Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 362–63, 367–69.

  273. William Dinwiddie (?), untitled manuscript, Personal Collection of Charles Hayes.

  274. BCN, January 18, 1907.

  275. Ibid., September 11, 1908.

  276. William Dinwiddie [?], untitled manuscript, Personal Collection of Charles Hayes.

  277. Hubac-Occhipinti, “Anarchist Terrorists of the Nineteenth Century,” 117–18.

  278. Ibid.; Alexander, The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, 311–12; Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 695; Therborn, “ ‘Europe’ as Issues of Sociology,” 22–23; Frasca, The Rise and Fall of the Saturday Globe, 120–21; Blanchard, Revolutionary Sparks, 40–41; Elwin H. Powell, The Designs of Discord, 72–73, 152–53, 165; Nieburg, Political Violence, 118–21.

  279. A San Francisco anarchist used the Kentucky Republicans’ purported guilt for killing Goebel to defend his party after McKinley’s death: “Was any political party ever held accountable for a political murder such as the murder of Governor Goebel of Kentucky by the conspiracy of Republican politicians, or any religion held accountable for a religious murder such as the murder of President Garfield by a Christian enthusiast (Or a fanatic if you please)? Why, then, should anarchists be held accountable for the first murder by an anarchist in the United States?” Sturber, The Anarchist Constitution, 4.

  280. Bryan, The Commoner Condensed, 304.

  281. Watterson, “Murder Is Murder,” 7.

  282. Hartford Republican, February 2, 1900 (quote); Cyclopedic Review of Current History 10 (1900): 83–84; Caleb Powers, Appt., v. Commonwealth of Kentucky, Kentucky Court of Appeals, LRA, 53:260.

  283. Since Goebel’s position as governor-elect was not roundly recognized, his assassination can be interpreted as either “assassination by one political elite to replace another” or “assassination by the government in power to suppress political challenge,” two very different motives for political murder. Kirkham, Levy, and Crotty, Assassination and Political Violence, 3, 6.

  284. Lexington Herald, April 15, 1902; Blue-grass Blade, April 27, 1902; New York Tribune, April 3, 1905.

  285. Hartford Republican, July 25, 1902; McClure, “The Mazes of a Kentucky Feud,” 2219–20; “Assassination in Kentucky,” 778; Jett v. Commonwealth, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, March 25, 1905, SWR, vol. 85 (March 15–April 19, 1905), 1179, 1181; KLR, vol. 27 (Frankfort: Geo. A. Lewis, 1905), 605.

  286. William Dinwiddie (?), untitled manuscript, Personal Collection of Charles Hayes.

  287. LCJ, May 6, 1903.

  288. NYT, September 19, 1903; Linner, “The Human Side of Jim Hargis,” 21.

  289. Linner, “The Human Side of Jim Hargis,” 21.

  290. Jackson Hustler, reprinted in HGH, November 17, 1904.

  291. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 327.

  7. “The feudal wars of Eastern Kentucky will no doubt be utilized in coming years by writers of fiction”

  1. Interviews with Edward C. Strong, July 21, 1898; and Henry Duff, July 22, 1898, JJDD, reel 3, pp. 2424, 2428–29.

  2. The small number of historians who have addressed the cattle war have followed this logic without question. See Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 375; Pearce, Days of Darkness, 124. Despite the sixty years between the two events, Billings and Blee and Pearce do not question the causal relationship between the cattle war and the Strong-Amis feud.

  3. Colby, The New International Year Book, 406.

  4. Strong Family Papers, 106, Breathitt County Public Library.

  5. NYT, June 2, 2002.

  6. Richmond Climax, May 22, 1889.

  7. Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, 8–9, 273–308.

  8. Blight, Race and Reunion, 351–54 (quote 352). See also Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 149–59.

  9. “Innumerable people use words and expressions which they have either ceased to understand or employ only because they trigger off conditioned reflexes; in this sense, words are trade-marks which are finally all the more firmly linked to the things they denote, the less their linguistic sense is grasped.” Horkheimer and Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” 166.

  10. Dobson, “The Word Feud,” 52.

  11. Simpson and Weiner, The Oxford English Dictionary, 860. The anthropologist Christopher Boehm defines the blood feud as “a pattern of homicidal conflict that simultaneously involves the ideas of scorekeeping and alternating retaliation and that is theoretically interminable but generally is pacifiable through the payment of compensation for blood.” Blood Revenge, 222.

  12. Humphreys, “Law of Tenure,” 7–12.

  13. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 50–51.

  14. Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry, 306–34.

  15. Grutzpalk, “Blood Feud and Modernity,” 130. (Grutzpalk uses “blood feud,” “blood vengeance,” and “vendetta” interchangeably.)

  16. Ibid., 124–31.

  17. Even though very recent scholarship on violence still draws a sharp distinction between “the feudistic and the political,” empirical data on feud and vendetta (particularly in the Mediterranean but not in the United States) demonstrates a clear overlap between violence traditionally thought of as feud based and conflicts over political power, sometimes associated with class conflict and often within the boundaries of “strong” states. The distinctions between the seemingly mutually exclusive categories of feud, warfare, and revolution are not always so well defined as some scholars have assumed. However, this has not led any of them to question the very descriptive validity of feud as a descriptor for the events to which it has been applied. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 21–25, 99, 343–46, 367 (quote), 379–81; Finley, The Most Monstrous of War
s, 29; Stephen Wilson, Feuding, Conflict and Banditry; Boehm, Blood Revenge; Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, 4. For works that draw a much stricter delineation between feuds and more political forms of conflict, see Warren Brown and Górecki, Conflict in Medieval Europe, 334; Strathern and Stewart, Arrow Talk, 115–27; Otterbein, Feuding and Warfare, 160; Blok, Honour and Violence, 96–100; Oscar Lewis, Tepoztlán, 46.

  18. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 33–41; Williams, Appalachia, 191; Sir Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather, 45 (quote). See also Frasier, “The Book of Carlaverock,” 194–200. I am grateful to John A. Williams for encouraging me to look into Sir Walter Scott’s significance in the cultural construction of feuding.

  19. Franklin, The Militant South, 193–95, 200 (quote 194).

  20. The island nation of Corsica was very much on the minds of nineteenth-century literate Americans, especially those who enjoyed English translations of popular continental novels. A large part of Corsica’s popularity as a literary subject among English readers was Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, in which Corsican bandits figure prominently. See also Gillies, Palmario; Balzac, “La Vendetta,” 364–78; “The Family Feud—A French Story,” 796; Brewer, The Historical Notebook, 997; Westengard et al., “International Tribunals in the Light of the History of the Law,” 833.

  21. Gregorovius, Wanderings in Corsica, 21, 176–85 (quote 177).

  22. “Corsican Bandits,” 273.

  23. Scales and Zimmer, Power and Nation, 289.

  24. Westengard et al., “International Tribunals in the Light of the History of the Law,” 833; Lydston, The Diseases of Society, 234; Philadelphia Inquirer, December 23, 1878; NYT, December 26, 1878.

  25. NYT, December 26, 1878.

  26. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 3.

  27. “Application of the term ‘feud’ itself to events in the United States must be fluid because no simple criteria fit every case. ‘Feud’ and related labels like ‘vendetta’ have been used for a variety of historical conflicts that entangled personal revenge and family rivalries with material interests. As studies of particular feuds in their local contexts are beginning to show, feuds in the United States were more irregular, more complicated, and more comprehensible than traditional portrayals would indicate. Each feud arose from its own concrete sources in political, social, and economic turmoil.” Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 4. Although he recognizes the difficulty of applying the concept of feud in the United States as easily as in other locales, Johnson does not suggest that the word necessarily loses validity or believability in an American context due to its being overly subjective. I submit that the word is problematic when applied uncritically to any historical or geographic context. Feud has too often been used by exogenous observers (anthropologists and journalists or, as shown in earlier chapters, missionaries and politicians) in order to fulfill the observers’ expectations or goals rather than to express the actual viewpoints of “feudal” participants who may or may not consider their own use of violence (or victimhood from someone else’s) to be part of a custom or institution. Feud is more likely a rhetorical device to make violence appear strange or illegitimate to a cosmopolitan audience or a “dominant culture” or, as demonstrated in chapter 5, to meet the needs of a dominant faction wishing to disguise its counterrevolutionary use of violence as a reciprocal response to an opponent of equal means. See Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 39; and Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 370 (quote).

  28. Quoted in Burstein, The Original Knickerbocker, 262.

  29. Message of the President of the United States Relative to the Internal Feuds among the Cherokees, 298, Cratis D. Williams Appalachian Collection, Carol Grotnes Belk Library & Information Commons, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC.

  30. “William Hudson to Col. J. Y. Dashiell, September 15, 1862,” in War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 53, CSS, issue 3686 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1898), 828.

  31. Daniel, “From Blood Feud to Jury System,” 97–125.

  32. “A Kentucky Vendetta,” 3.

  33. Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South, 240.

  34. Richard H. King, A Southern Renaissance, 27.

  35. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 88.

  36. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 350–61; for the strict regimentation optimally used in a duel, see John Lyde Wilson, The Code of Honor.

  37. Peck, Our Country, 298 (quote); Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 173–206. Most, nearly all, accounts of Old South feuds were published at least a generation after the Civil War. DeForest, Kate Beaumont; Alfred Ludlow White, “A Provincial Family Feud,” 1; Marion Clifford Harrison, “Social Types in Southern Prose Fiction,” 31; Gossett, Race, 362; Carman, Social and Economic History of the United States, 440; Simkins and Roland, A History of the South, 397; Rogers and Clark, The Croom Family and Goodwood Plantation, 84; Cowan, The Slave in the Swamp, 196; Ulrich B. Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South, xxxix.

  38. Duclos, Son of Sorrow, 53–66; Hickerson, The Falkner Feuds, 12–18; Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 271–72.

  39. Burnett, Incidents of the War, 243–44.

  40. NYT, January 19, 1867.

  41. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 52 (quote).

  42. Pettit, “Mark Twain, the Blood-Feud, and the South,” 20–24; Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 54–60, 135–52.

  43. Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 194 (quote)–95. For the relationship between the supposedly factual Darnell-Watson feud and Huckleberry Finn’s fictional encounter with the Grangerfords and Shepherdsons, see Budd, “The Southward Currents under Huck Finn’s Raft,” 222–37.

  44. Billingsley, “ ‘Standard Authors’ in Huckleberry Finn,” 126–31; Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 115–34.

  45. Just as homicide in the South provided a subject for the northern press to use as a basis for regional reproach, southern newspapers used the same subjects to defend their inimitable honor-based society. Hamm, Murder, Honor, and Law, 48–57, 92–96.

  46. The same lesson is taught in Ludwig Harder’s A Family Feud. The novel portrays a Bavarian peasantry abused by the ramifications of a baronic family’s internal battles.

  47. NYT, October 14, 1872, quoted in Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 352.

  48. Savannah News, January 30, 1883, quoted in Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 70.

  49. “The Stalwart Policy and the Party Policy,” 138.

  50. Redfield, Homicide, North and South, 12.

  51. Ibid., 112.

  52. Perman, The Road to Redemption, 140. Perman erroneously identifies Redfield as a correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette.

  53. Redfield, Homicide, North and South, 5.

  54. Ibid., 18.

  55. Summers, The Press Gang, 196–97, 207 (quote).

  56. Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, 8–9, 308–9.

  57. New Orleans Picayune, June 11, 1852; Hutton, “The Hill-Evans Feud”; Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 351–52.

  58. James Jeffries Thompson, A Kentucky Tragedy, xi.

  59. Ibid., iii, xii. The author went on to have a violent end of his own back in Mississippi. After returning from a stint in the Peruvian navy in 1862, Thompson wounded his father and shot his sister, brother, and stepmother to death after failing to cajole his father into giving him the family’s cotton crop for an attempted blockade run to Liverpool. After he was found guilty of murder, he was lynched, but only after being given the chance to verbally repent his lust for “money, whisky and revenge.” Triplett, History, Romance and Philosophy of Great American Crimes, 540–44.

  60. The most thorough survey of feud violence’s historical geography observes that the phenomenon became firmly associated with eastern Kentucky in the mid-1880s during the New York Times’s coverage of the Rowan County War. This may
qualify as irony since Rowan County was more a foothill county than a mountain locale and far more accessible to the “outside world” than Breathitt County, where violence that earned the feud label had already been reported in the national press a few years earlier. Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 355–56, 373n. For a discussion of feuds being a product of the mountains and/or of the state of Kentucky, see Williams, Appalachia, 192.

  61. Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 355–56, 373n; Klotter, “The Black South and White Appalachia,” 837–38; Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 29–31. Books that collected the stories of multiple feuds into one volume tended to emphasize the “mountainness” of feuds in their retelling. However, “Kentucky” was in almost every book’s title, showing that either the state had not been completely eclipsed by its one troublesome region or that, by some point in the early twentieth century, the one region had come to define Kentucky as a whole despite its remaining “the Bluegrass State.” See “Kentucky’s Feuds”; Johnston, “Romance and Tragedy of Kentucky Feuds”; Spears, “The Story of a Kentucky Feud,” 494–509; MacClintock, “The Kentucky Mountains and their Feuds: I,” 1–28; MacClintock, “The Kentucky Mountains and Their Feuds: II,” 171–87; Litsey, “Kentucky Feuds and Their Causes”; McClure, “The Mazes of a Kentucky Feud”; Hartley and Smyth, “The Land of Feuds,” 494–509; O. O. Howard, “The Feuds in the Cumberland Mountains,” 783–88; Lewis Franklin Johnson, Famous Kentucky Tragedies and Trials; Mutzenburg, Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies; Burns, The Crucible; Coates, Stories of Kentucky Feuds; Meriel Daniel Harris, “Two Famous Kentucky Feuds”; Bernice Calmes Caudill, Pioneers of Eastern Kentucky; Jess D. Wilson, A Latter Day Look at Kentucky Feuds; Pearce, Days of Darkness.

  62. “A Kentucky Vendetta,” 3.

  63. Stanley later borrowed “Bloody Breathitt” in the title of a chapter in his 2010 memoir. In 1974 a Breathitt native who was one of Stanley’s backup musicians was shot to death during a visit home between performances. The accused served one month of a ten-year sentence, a miscarriage of justice Stanley attributed to Bloody Breathitt’s inherent qualities—as well as the defendant’s immense wealth. Stanley and Dean, Man of Constant Sorrow, 315–24.