Hugh White also prospered and soon became a rich man, head of a large, influential clan. His son Hugh II drowned in 1856 while taking a boatload of salt down the Kentucky River. One of Hugh’s sons, John, was five times elected to Congress and became Speaker of the House. Hugh’s son Beverly was elected circuit judge, and other Whites became powers in local and state politics.
They were not without scandal. Shortly before the Civil War, Hugh’s son William killed a woman with a butcher knife in what was said to have been a crime of passion in an illicit romance. Nothing was done about it. And then there was John Edward, who was a little strange and at times a little dangerous. Benjamin Franklin White, Hugh’s twelfth child, married Alabama Taylor, daughter of John Edward Taylor of Tennessee, and their son John Edward, named for his maternal grandfather, was born in 1838. He caused the family some anxious moments.
For instance, on March 1, 1859, Dillon (or Dillion) Hollin was born to a mulatto woman of that name. Everyone knew, and the principals did not deny, that John Ed was the father. Their back-door romance had been going on for some time, and John Ed wanted to marry her, but the Whites begged, threatened, and raised so much trouble that John Ed finally gave up the idea, though he admitted paternity and supported Dillon.
He was not a constant lover, however. Ten days after Dillon was born, John Ed recovered from his infatuation and married Elizabeth Garrard Brawner, a niece of T.T. Garrard. The Brawners, who lived in Owsley County but were preparing to move to Texas, disapproved hotly/probably because of the illegitimate son, so after a brief courtship John Ed and Elizabeth eloped. Dashing off into the night, they rode 125 miles to Tazewell, Tennessee, stopping only to rest the horses, were married, and shortly afterward left to join the Brawners in Texas, the parental objections apparently resolved. But they didn’t think much of Texas and within a few months, though Elizabeth was pregnant, they left and walked and rode back to Manchester. They were warmly welcomed, probably because Elizabeth was due to produce another White child.
But it was another White marriage that caused serious trouble.
Drawing the Lines
Because of the burst of bloodletting between the Bakers and Howards in 1898, many people accept that date as the beginning of the Clay County War. Actually, aside from the Cattle Wars of 1806-1850, the trouble started in 1844 when young Abner Baker Jr. married Susan White, James White’s daughter.
The Whites objected strenuously, though at first glance it didn’t seem such a bad match. Abner Baker Sr. was a respected man, having been asked by a committee of citizens to move from Boyle to Clay County in 1806, when the county was formed, to be the county’s first court clerk. He had a reputation for honesty, was an experienced surveyor, and, being an outsider, was considered more likely to be unbiased in disputes over property lines.
Several families or “sets” of Bakers came into Kentucky during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Most of them came through North Carolina, where they had settled after coming over from England and Ireland (though E.B. Allen of Rockcastle County, Kentucky, says that the Clay County Bakers came from New England, where Ethan Allen, of the famed Green Mountain Boys, was half Baker). The Clay County Bakers settled around Boston Gap and on Crane Creek, where they claimed or bought a large tract of land.
The first of the Bakers, Judah Robert, called Juder Bob, came into Clay shortly after the turn of the century. His son Robert (Boston Bob) was born in Lee County, Virginia, in 1800. No one knows where the Boston in Boston Bob originated; it may have been a hint of the New England ancestry mentioned by E.B. Allen. The Bakers originally lived in or near Boston Gap, and many are buried in the Boston Gap cemetery.
Boston Bob gained a measure of local fame by whipping a bulldog. The owner of the bulldog boasted that his dog, a fierce, thick-set beast, could “whip anything that moves.” Boston Bob was skeptical. He went to the man’s home on Sexton Creek, got down on all fours, and crawled through the front gate of the dog’s domain. With a vicious (and probably puzzled) growl, the bulldog charged. Boston Bob charged. Grabbing the dog by the throat, he fastened his teeth on the brute’s ear and hung on. The strangling dog twisted and snarled, but he could not get a grip on Boston Bob as long as Bob had a tooth-hold on his ear. At one point, Bob bit through his ear, but he got a fresh bite and lightened his grip on the dog’s throat. A cluster of neighbors looked on, shouting encouragement to the growling gladiators. The dog thrashed about. Finally Bob released his grip. The dog fled under the porch, and Boston Bob had established a reputation.
It was Boston Bob’s son George W. (Baldy George) and George’s son Thomas (Bad Tom) who collided with the Whites and Howards in the climax of the Clay County War. The origins of the nickname Baldy George, like that of Boston Bob, are lost in the fog of history. Even Jess Wilson of Possum Trot in Clay County, a prominent Kentucky genealogist and himself part Baker, is not sure. Neither does he know when Thomas came to be known as Bad Tom. He had a reputation as something of a brawler from boyhood but was referred to as Thomas in the newspapers at the time of his death.
But to get back to the wedding.
Abner Baker Sr. was cousin of Boston Bob, though not as rough in personal habits. Young Abner was not unpopular, but he had a reputation for erratic behavior and a bad temper, and the Whites made plain their disapproval when he began courting Susan. He was known to slam out of a room in a rage when he lost at cards or in an argument and seemed to suffer a strong streak of paranoia. Even his friend and later defender Dan Garrard said of him, “Dr. Baker was always very suspicious in little games of cards. When the witness [Garrard] and Dr. Baker were playing, Baker would always shuffle the cards over again, fearing they might be put up on him.”
Born in 1813, Abner Jr. grew into a slender, dark-haired, handsome young man. He attended East Tennessee College in Knoxville for three years but quit and returned home where, with his father’s help, he was elected county court clerk. But this bored him. He quit and served a hitch in the navy but resigned after an altercation with his superior officer. He then opened a store in Lancaster, Garrard County, but it failed in less than a year and he enrolled in the new Louisville College of Medicine, from which he received a diploma in 1839. For a few months he practiced in Knoxville, but he quit to return once more to Manchester. At the time, a Knoxville friend advised his brothers that Abner was showing disturbing signs of instability. He was nevertheless able to court and marry Susan White in 1844, though his success may have been due to a scarcity of eligible young men in Manchester.
After the wedding, the couple went to live in the home of Daniel Bates, a prosperous salt maker who had married Abner’s sister Mary, though they were separated at the time and were soon divorced. The fact that the newlyweds did not build their own home or move into one of the White or Baker residences suggests that their parents were not supportive.
At any rate, soon after the wedding Abner began to show signs that he was playing with less than a full deck. He began accusing Susan, in public and with increasing vehemence, of adultery with any number of men, including Daniel Bates, her own father, casual visitors, and even household servants. He swore that his mother assisted Susan in these liaisons and described in lurid detail how she sat by approvingly while Susan was boarded by her various lovers—or customers, as he charged.
As can be imagined, the Whites took a dim view of such goings on and tried to persuade Susan to return home. Daniel Bates, as well as Abner’s brothers, begged Abner to see a doctor. Instead, he stormed out of the house and moved to Knoxville (without Susan, needless to say). But on September 13, 1844, he rode back into Manchester, went directly to Daniel Bates’s salt furnace, crept up behind his friend, and shot him in the back.
Bates fell, turned, and, recognizing Abner, uttered a despairing cry as Abner fled the scene. As he lay dying, Bates dictated a will in which he freed his personal servant, Pompey, and his slaves Joe Nash and Joe’s wife Lucy. He directed his son to take revenge on Baker and see that he was prosecuted
, and to see that if the courts did not hang him, he was killed. He left $10,000 to make sure this was done.
The murder split the community between those who didn’t think a crazy man should be hanged and those who thought he should be strung up with the least fuss possible. But after hiding out in the hills for a few days, Abner surrendered to General Garrard. The Bakers, like the Garrards, were Democrats, and the two families had fought several election campaigns together. The Whites and Bateses, who demanded punishment, were Whigs.
Unsure of the legalities involved, Garrard refused to hand Abner over to the sheriff or to the Bates family and, on September 24, took him before two magistrates, one of whom was a Garrard, to decide whether he was sane and should be bound over to the grand jury for a possible charge of murder. This was obviously not a court, nor could the proceedings be called a trial. It was a competency hearing. Neither the Commonwealth’s attorney nor witnesses for the Bates family were called, though witnesses appeared both for and against Abner. The magistrates reasonably ruled that Abner was legally insane and released him to his two brothers, both of them doctors, who promised to place him under a doctor’s care.
They tried, but Abner, after spending some time in Knoxville with his brothers, left abruptly and went to Cuba, where someone had told him he would have the best chance of recovering his sanity. The Whites and Bateses were not amused and persuaded the Commonwealth’s attorney to indict Abner, in absentia, for murder. Governor William Owsley offered a reward for his arrest, and Bates’s estate added $850 to it. It was never paid, however, for Abner suddenly and without explanation returned of his own will. It proved an unwise move.
Abner Sr. was heartbroken. He insisted that his son was not a fugitive, pointing out that he had been found insane by a competency hearing. He announced that he would ask for a change of venue, since the powerful White and Bates families had poisoned public opinion against Abner. But for some reason he failed to tell his sons of his intentions, and they brought Abner Jr. directly back to Manchester, where his reception was not cordial. The brothers too might have obtained a change of venue but concluded that it was not necessary, assuming that any sane jury could see the Abner Jr. was crazy as a loon.
The trial was a sensation that rocked the state and became a minor cause célèbre throughout the courts and medical circles of the country, since Abner’s attorneys were pleading him innocent not only by reason of insanity but specifically by reason of monomania, insanity on a single subject. The nature of monomania and its validity as a defense were being hotly debated in judicial circles at the time.
The trial began on July 17, 1845, with a bank of prominent attorneys on both sides and the state’s outstanding medical authorities on hand to testify concerning Abner’s state of mind. George Robertson, considered the premier attorney in Kentucky, led the corps of defense lawyers, among whom was a Garrard. The Whites and Bateses brought in other prominent men to assist in the prosecution, as was the custom.
Defense attorneys offered testimony from doctors across the nation that monomania did exist. Other doctors affirmed that Abner was indeed suffering from the disorder, insanity on a single subject, in this case Susan’s lack of chastity and her desire to dishonor him. The jury was not moved. The Bakers were shocked and outraged when Abner was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.
The Kentucky statutes at the time contained no provision for appeal of felonies, including murder convictions, and efforts were begun to win a pardon from Governor Owsley. Petitions were circulated in Clay and surrounding counties, and a panel of physicians visited the governor to ask clemency. From the Whites and Bateses came other petitions asking the governor to refuse Abner a pardon and to send in troops to make sure that the convicted man was not taken from the jail and freed. In Manchester there were rumors that an army of Bakers and their friends had plans to storm the jail.
And the Bakers were indeed planning to free Abner by force if pleas for a pardon failed. Freeing him would not have been a great undertaking; the jail was a flimsy shack, and the jailer had placed Abner in an upstairs room behind a thin wooden door. The upper porch had been removed, but a ladder had been left, conveniently, against the wall. Abner’s brothers slipped him a pen-knife with which he hoped, in extremis, to cut an artery and bleed to death, thus cheating the gallows, but he cut only a vein before fainting. He lost enough blood, however, to make the brothers conclude that he was too weak to ride should they manage to rescue him.
It was all for naught. Governor Owsley said he had no intention of pardoning Abner, and on the morning of October 3,1845, he was led to the gallows. Despite the barbarity of the practice, public hangings were popular events in those days. A huge crowd filled the square, and 200 armed men surrounded the gallows to block any attempt at a last-minute rescue. Abner, gazing wildly about him, was led up the steps, struggled briefly with his captors, and then cried, as the noose was drawn about his neck, “Go on! Go ahead! Let a whore’s work be done.”
The hangman obliged. And a hard wedge had been driven between the powerful families of Clay County.
The Bakers wept with rage against the Whites for helping the Bates family bring Abner to trial when he was so obviously insane. The Whites felt justified in demanding retribution for the ruin of Susan’s name and took it as a family affront when the Garrards stepped in to help the Bakers. Because both families considered it their duty to maintain the peace of the community, no further violence resulted. But the lines were clearly drawn, and the resentment bred by competition over salt hardened into hostility.
At the time, however, the case was not seen as a benchmark event. Other matters involved the city fathers. The lack of roads was proving a huge handicap both economically and culturally, and delegations went regularly to Frankfort in hopes of getting help. Merchants had to bring in merchandise over rocky trails from Barbourville or London, while salt, timber, and crops had to be hauled out the same way or floated down the Kentucky River.
Such handicaps were momentarily forgotten when, in 1847, the Mexican War erupted and there was a general exodus of young men as they rushed to join the army. (It would become a grim joke that Eastern Kentuckians flocked to the colors without being drafted when they discovered that they could get pay for what they had been doing for free—killing people.) T.T. Garrard was among the first to enlist, was given a commission, and returned to Manchester a captain. He appears to have enjoyed his military service and his first views of the American West.
But he had been a widower for more than a decade, and the family rejoiced when, a few weeks after his return, he met and married Lucinda Burnam Lees. But then a strange thing happened. Ten days after the wedding, T.T. and his brother William and two slaves became Forty-Niners and set out for the gold fields of California. This did not indicate, as one might suspect, a honeymoon rift; in his memoirs T.T. explained that he simply did not want to miss the excitement of the historic gold rush, a desire his new wife understood.
The brothers joined a wagon train out of St. Louis, had a fine time crossing the country, marveled at the great mountains, the buffalo, the clear rivers, and finally the majestic Pacific, and in California bought a share of a gold mine. For a while T.T. hauled provisions to the mine, but the venture showed little profit, and T.T. showed little enthusiasm for mining. He sold his share and left. His brother William, however, had taken a fancy to the coast, and spent the rest of his life in California and Seattle.
T.T. went down to San Francisco and caught a ship for Panama. But before he left, one of the slaves begged to be allowed to stay and promised, in return for his freedom, to send T.T. $500 as soon as he could earn it. T.T. agreed, indicating considerable generosity of spirit or compassion for a pathetic plea; a male slave was worth many times $500, and T.T. must have suspected that he had scant chance of ever getting that. But he wished the man well, and several years later received a letter with $500 enclosed. The former slave had done well and had developed a business of his own. T.T. was delighted. The
other slave, William Tillet, was apparently impressed with neither freedom nor California and chose to return to Clay County.
The two of them caught a ship to Panama, crossed the mountains on foot, and took a dugout canoe down the Chagres River to the Atlantic, where they caught a freighter to New Orleans. There they booked passage on a steamboat to Louisville and rode home to Manchester, arriving on February 5, 1850. T.T. had kept a diary, noting the “Panama cane” that grew eighty feet high and was so strong that people made houses from it (bamboo, obviously). He had had a good time and had, as usual, learned a great deal from the experience. T.T. was marked by a lively curiosity and a wide-ranging intelligence. But he said he was glad to be home, settled down to the salt business, and was soon once more a candidate for public office.
Unfortunately, only days before his return, another incidence of violence had shaken the community and further damaged relations between the leading families. For almost four years relations between the Whites and Garrards had been chilly but peaceful and might have remained those of typical political rivals had not another Baker been accused of murder. In the fall of 1849 William Baker, the first child of Sarah and Boston Bob Baker, was arrested for the murder of Frank Prewitt, an itinerant shoemaker.
Days of Darkness Page 17