BLOODY BREATHITT.

Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South.

T. R. C. Hutton.

To my parents, Bill and Cathy Hutton.

PREFACE.

When I first decided to write about Breathitt County, Kentucky, I expected I'd be writing a local study similar to most of the serious scholarship on Appalachia. What I discovered was a place where those in power needed violence in order to maintain their control, while those who refused to knuckle under to them saw violence as a tool themselves. These were flawed people, and even those who ended up on the "right side of history" got into that position by killing. Their stories were distorted by the language used to describe their actions without their verification. These are themes familiar to anyone who has studied Oliver Cromwell or Che Guevara.

In the half century after the Civil War Breathitt County was a violent place, but no more so than many other places in a particularly violent time period in a very violent country. I also discovered that different kinds of killing were damned or praised or tolerated according to the needs and wishes of powerful men.

Much of what went on in Breathitt County between the Civil War and World War I stands as an indictment of American exceptionalism. The United States of America maintains, at this writing, a republic with unparalleled longevity and stability. Americans should remember that this has required a tremendous amount of bloodshed. It also provides a commentary on how Americans separate past from present, here from there, and self from other. We like to admit our nation-state's violence while pushing it further back into the past than it actually was, separating (in Hannah Arendt's words) "heritage" from the "dead load" of atrocity. The history of the United States is full of atrocities and most of them Americans don't mind acknowledging, but without considering that their own past draws parallels with corners of the globe they consider less fortunate. (On that note, I apologize for any lapses into the jargons of anthropologists, political scientists, and others, but they serve the purpose of demonstrating that there are common currents of human activity that can be described without lapsing into lazy assumptions about progress and not progress.) When it comes to brutality, the United States is hardly exceptional. The "savagery" of la Violencia in Colombia, or the Troubles in Northern Ireland, has happened in the United States, even if Americans consider themselves above such things. It's no wonder that what went on in Breathitt County was dismissed as so many "feuds."

From the moment I began my research I depended upon the support of others, especially an extraordinary publisher. The University Press of Kentucky's Anne Dean Watkins and Steve Wrinn are a skillful and patient editorial team. Their assistant Bailey Johnson helped me with technical details during the latter stages of my revising. Ashley Runyon and Mack McCormick helped me immensely during the early stages of promotion. Thanks also to Robin DuBlanc, an intricately perceptive copy editor. Bill Link, the New Directions in Southern History series coeditor, put me in contact with the press when my ideas for this book were in earliest bloom, and I still take that as a magnificent compliment. Finally, I appreciate Andy Slap and Bruce Stewart including my research in their anthologies published under the University Press of Kentucky banner.

Breathitt County, Kentucky, has its own dedicated native historians. Charles Hayes's kind permission to reproduce photos from his collection for this book is greatly appreciated. Stephen Bowling and Janie Griffith run the county's two public historical institutions, its library and its museum, respectively. They each provided me with matchless perspectives on how their county's citizens interpret their past. Sherry Lynn Baker is a thorough researcher and she shared some valuable materials with me while also helping confirm a number of vital factual details. Thanks also to Jerry Buck Deaton for doing the same. John Robertson, the webmaster for Historical County Lines (http://his.jrshelby.com/hcl/), helped me with the surprisingly formidable task of tracking down usable maps.

It is hard to imagine a state archive friendlier to a historian's needs than the Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives in Frankfort. In nearly a dozen visits I always received help and advice from its staff. The state capital's Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History was also useful. The staff at Berea College's library was especially attentive and a credit to the school's tradition of a student-run campus. Lastly, Dean Williams of Appalachian State University's William Leonard Eury Appalachian Collection has always supported my research immensely.

Bloody Breathitt began as a doctoral dissertation, and I owe much to those who supported me in its completion. David Carlton is a ready adviser, a meticulous reviewer, a constant resource for southern lore, and a friend. Richard Blackett, once he read part of my beginning chapters, was an early source of encouragement, and his dissertation seminars had a huge impact on later chapters. He and his wife, Cheryl, have welcomed me into their home many times. Dennis Dickerson, Larry Isaac, and Rowena Olegario are challenging intellects that provided important criticism. Although he was not on my committee, my MA adviser John A. Williams might as well have been since he set me on a certain path years earlier. The Vanderbilt University Department of History provided a young southernist with bed and board, and a generous amount of funding. The department's administrators, Jane Anderson, Brenda Hummel, and Heidi Welch, always helped me when I was in need.

I benefited from being surrounded by other young scholars who pushed me to excel. Tim Boyd shared with me an expatriated Briton's interest in the American South and its politics, and provided very important suggestions and criticisms. Countless conversations with Steven P. Miller deepened my thoughts on political culture and the importance of our work being relevant to the present though written about the past. Pete Kuryla provided an intellectual historian's perspective that motivated me to think beyond this book's most rudimentary purposes. I hope I was able to repay him, at least partially, by introducing him to the work of Christopher Lasch. Finally, Patrick Jackson was a knowledgeable sounding board while I was revising Bloody Breathitt. and, as my weight room partner, he never let a barbell fall on me and crush my face.

A historian's true home is the library, and Vanderbilt's Central Library provided me with a top-notch environment for reading, writing, and dawdling. Peter Brush is an excellent resource for history students, and Yolanda Campbell and Daisy Whitten were always helpful. The interlibrary loan staff, most notably Rachel Adams, tracked down the most obscure requests with what seemed like no effort. I could not have completed my revisions without help from Anne Bridges, the humanities librarian at the University of Tennessee's Hodges Library.

One of the best aspects of graduate-level research is becoming part of an international community of scholars. Professors Aaron Astor, Bruce Baker, John Burch, Bill Link, Sam McSeveney, Rob Weise, and Jason Yeatts have all been good enough to read chapters or portions of chapters and offer their ideas. Aaron Akey helped me track down a rare photograph. Robert Ireland, one of Kentucky's most important state historians, offered kind advice and clarification when it was asked of him. Jim Klotter and Altina Waller offered me encouragement when I told them I was following in their footsteps. The late George Graham was an intellectual inspirer nearly a decade ago when my research was at its very beginning. A special thanks goes to Steve Ash, Ernie Freeberg, and Bruce Wheeler for their advice on writing.

My parents, Bill and Cathy Hutton, provided decades of encouragement balanced with intellectual freedom. Childhood trips to museums fostered an early interest in American history and, growing up in the Hutton household, the past was never past. My grandparents Jim and Martha Clendenen were also especially supportive of all my goals.

This book is a product of my own work, but it is also a product of opportunity and infrastructure. Like other writers, I benefit from the leisure time provided by other peoples' labor. The chance to deal in ideas for a living came about because of the hard physical work of people, some still living and others passed, who worked for my family many years before I began higher education. George Cato, the Doss family, the Gentry family, the Ray family, Arch Skeens, the Surber family, the Thomas family, and the Wolfe family provided me with an education. I stand on the shoulders of the people who do the real work in this world, often without acknowledgment from the people who profit from it.

Introduction.

"THE DARKEST AND BLOODIEST OF ALL THE DARK AND BLOODY FEUD COUNTIES"

The means used to achieve political goals are more often than not of greater relevance to the future world than the intended goals.

-Hannah Arendt, On Violence (1970).

This is a history of Breathitt County, Kentucky, in its first seven or so decades of existence, before and after it became known as Bloody Breathitt. I consider the county and its nickname two separate entities; Breathitt (pronounced "breath-it") County is a political unit, founded in 1839 in eastern Kentucky. "Bloody Breathitt," as I use it here, is a collection of factual and fanciful explanations for the county's history of violence, with broader implications for Kentucky, the South, and the United States. Breathitt County is a place that earned a singular reputation for killing between the Civil War and World War I; Bloody Breathitt is the accumulation of information and misinformation this reputation was made from.

In the early twentieth century Breathitt County was called "the darkest and bloodiest of all the dark and bloody feud counties," the first-and the last-Kentucky county associated with prolonged, reciprocal, vengeance-based personal or familial conflicts.1 With that in mind, this book is also an attempt at explaining feud, a word Americans associate with history even though it has been used to defy and deny history in places like Breathitt County. This book is not about blood feuds. It is about acts of violence that were called blood feuds, and why this labeling is deceptive. I consider feud a vague expression, an element of what Wayne Lee calls "clouds of rhetoric" applied to various sorts of violent events in order to make their particulars less knowable.2 It was one word, among many in the English language, used as an unclear or false description of homicide.3 Above all, this book is about what one county's history reveals about how Americans think about killing.

Chapter Overview.

Chapter 1 details Breathitt County's formation in sparsely populated eastern Kentucky, one of the last sections of the Appalachia Mountains to be permanently inhabited by whites.4 The earliest settlers thrived raising unfenced livestock and hunting wild game until slaveholders and speculation-minded recent arrivals lobbied for the creation of a new county.5 They then pared a Democratic county out of three consistently Whig (and later Republican) counties, establishing something very close to one-party rule. They named their new county for Kentucky's recently deceased Democratic governor, John Breathitt, and its county seat for Andrew Jackson, a president who despised the sort of rapacious capital/government connivances the new county represented.6 The circumstances of Breathitt's very existence were a precondition for a crisis of legitimacy, a legitimacy questioned by its citizens and, eventually, by Americans looking in from the outside world (a phrase many observers used to intimate the supposed insularity of the county).7 It was a quiet affront to democracy, one that presaged the much larger crisis of legitimacy created by southern secession a little over two decades later.8 Decades later, the Progressive Era's reformist nabobs could not believe that the banal mechanics of county government might inspire armed conflict, even as they criticized counties as a retrograde form of government.9 What they failed to understand was the importance of local government, especially when larger institutions fell apart, as they did throughout Kentucky in 1861. After that, the question of legitimacy was applied to the diverse forms of violence witnessed in the county; some were found wanting (in the eyes of locals, the outside world, or both), while others, if carried out according to the wishes of white Kentuckians, were deemed legitimate.

When the Civil War began (as shown in chapter 2) Breathitt County was a Confederate beacon amid pro-Union counties. Poor mountaineers, both black and white, who had gained little from the county's formation, formed a long-lasting Unionist "stateless zone" within the county.10 Thus began a narrative familiar to many parts of the border states, a "war between neighbors" in which personal relationships mingled with sectional politics. Whatever legitimacy the county's combatants claimed came from their blue or gray uniforms. Long after these uniforms became moth-eaten relics, the war's political rupture remained, as did the blurred lines between soldier and civilian.

Breathitt County in modern-day eastern Kentucky. (Richard Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab; based on a map created by Lindell Ormsbee) The county's circumstances in the 1860s and 1870s, as shown in chapter 3, reflected the rest of Kentucky, a non-Confederate state on the Solid South's fringes.11 The state was not subject to presidential or congressional Reconstruction, and Confederate veterans were unhindered in maintaining a forceful counterrevolutionary control.12 Breathitt County's biracial Unionist/Republican minority fought back, creating the illusion of a contest between diametrically opposed equals. Considering the reunited American Republic's readiness to forget wartime politics, it was easy for Kentuckians to construe public violence as if it had strictly private meanings.13 It was not happenstance that a southern Democrat coined the doleful sobriquet "Bloody Breathitt" in one of the bloodiest years of Reconstruction.14 Chapters 4 and 5 explain how the 1880s and 1890s were even bloodier than the Reconstruction years. As railroad tracks and corporate capital made their way to Breathitt County, there were plenty of exogenous sources of violence common to an entire region or nation-state. But the political nature of white intraracial ("white-on-white") conflicts was obscured by repeated references to endogenous causes: isolation from the outside world, poverty, lack of education, mania for revenge, obsession with kinship and racial vestigiality (Anglo-Saxon or Celtic "blood") in eastern Kentucky's "feud belt."15 Kentuckians, in the mountains and beyond, maintained the flawed premise that economic advancement would bring an end to disorder. In these interpretations, violence simply "came natural."

These alleged endogenous traits had become the primary explanations for white intraracial violence by the time a political agitator named William Goebel was assassinated near the state capitol in 1900 (see chapter 6), leading to a similar public death in Jackson.16 From the Civil War to the Progressive Era, all of Kentucky's convulsions were manifest in Bloody Breathitt. For that matter, it also embodied the decades of white-on-black bloodletting in other parts of the post-Reconstruction South even though most (but not all) victims there were white (as shown in later chapters, the subject of race reappeared in Bloody Breathitt countless times).

During official war or official peace, these were premeditated acts of political violence between Unionists and Rebels (and, subsequently, militarized Republicans and Democrats) in the most prosaic sense of the word and in a more far-reaching one; known acts of violence in Breathitt usually accompanied elections, and, when they did not, they still directly affected power relations in the body politic.17 Breathitt County was subject to the contingencies of regionwide and nationwide trends-not least of these a civil war and the crisis of legitimacy that followed. However, "Bloody Breathitt" described an inherently violent place, defined by "irrationality generated by lack of information, randomness and unpredictability."18 Violence "that arises in a modern context but will not fit the story of progress" is written off as a product of a "pre-modern culture" that conveniently casts no harsh light on the activities of powerful men.19 And all of them men; women were not part of Kentucky's official political process until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, and were therefore neither victims nor assailants in violence centered on electoral politics. In fact, a few of the women who played significant roles in Bloody Breathitt were able to do so only because of their separation from the exclusively male realm(s) of politics and violence (including an enslaved woman who used gastronomical sabotage against Confederate soldiers, as told in chapter 2).

Inherency trumped contingency in most discussions of Bloody Breathitt, just as it usually has in most studies of violence in the American South. Wilbur J. Cash's inherent "savage ideal" has long competed with (among others) C. Vann Woodward's portrayal of a South undergoing changing contingencies of fortune and leadership. Neither interpretation has fully satisfied historians since places like South Carolina's "Bloody Edgefield" have produced an exceptional number of murders while still reflecting the South's regionwide contingencies.20 Readers still seem to prefer sweeping explanations based upon inherency; one recent neomodernist global study of homicide attributed the American South's violent history to an absence of "the civilizing mission of government."21 Perhaps the South has somehow preserved an "exceptional" culture given to pique and rapine. On the other hand, painstaking examinations of places like Breathitt County reveal a contested space where violence was deliberate, calculated, and connected with struggles for power; not, perhaps, unlike so many "trouble spots" all over the globe where political scientists, anthropologists, and historians have chosen to set aside Eurocentric, colonial assumptions about inherent violence and apply critical examination to the reasons people kill and die.

Nothing demonstrates this better than Breathitt County's typology of violence. Violence is not an inert substance. It has many different manifestations depending upon circumstances-a mugging and a carpet-bombing might both be deadly, but they are two very different events. In terms of quantities of injuries and deaths, Breathitt County was consistently violent, even by postbellum America's bloody standard. However, qualitatively, Bloody Breathitt contained "model-based" varieties of violence used all over the world.22 First, during the antebellum decades, there was the violence endemic to a society with slaves. The county was a locus for guerrilla warfare during the Civil War (especially during the war's last two years), as were other slaveholding states. When southern communities were rent apart during Congressional Reconstruction, election-related rioting and insurrection were reproduced there as well. In the 1880s and 1890s Kentuckians reacted to the disorders of rapid economic change with lynching, legal capital punishment, and mass vigilantism.23 Finally, when public assassination (like William Goebel's) became an international recurrence, it was employed in the streets of Jackson as well. From a broad comparative perspective, Bloody Breathitt represented nothing new under the sun.

Counterrevolutionary violence works best when the connection between means and ends is unclear, its motivations depoliticized, if not also its outcomes.24 This was the role played by feud, a word (explored in depth in chapter 7) light in definition but heavy with implications-implications of things Americans consider familiar but foreign to their republic and its politics. The feud was a popular topic in the semihistorical fiction (William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, Honore de Balzac) that Victorian readers adored.25 Anthropologists consider the feud an institutional conflict within "simple societies" where individuals, factions, families, or "clans" of equal standing supposedly engage in a relatively orchestrated exchange of fights or killings based on past enmities or injustices-a mutually recognized "pact of violence."26 No state oversight is needed since horizontal reciprocity between peers suggests moral equivalency and eliminates victimhood (Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet steps in only when teenagers from the two feuding families commit suicide).27 In an American context the feud's intimations were far more important than any of its meanings. Perhaps its most important intimation involved time, the distinction between "now" and "then." It suggested a communal setting, the "pre-political realm of the oikos [the family] and the extra-political 'barbarian' world beyond the polis."28 As popular as it was to say a century later, Victorian Americans did not believe that the personal was political; they also believed that the familial realm was to be kept apart from the public one. But they did acknowledge that their forbears believed otherwise, as did some unfortunate contemporaries they believed remained at the bottom of what Johannes Fabian has called a "temporal hierarchy": advanced societies often find it convenient to place their less-advanced neighbors in the past.29 With white intraracial violence rampant in the decades after the Civil War (though never as widespread or politically significant as interracial white attacks on black southerners), the feud provided a grand device for tucking the violence of the present safely away in a fictive past. Southern conservatives used it to misdirect northern critics from the political nature of postwar chaos, convincing them that most-if not all-murders in isolated rural places were sui generis "ideology-free conflict[s]."30 By Reconstruction's end many northerners had replaced their righteous anger with an acceptance of the South's "naturally" violent predisposition; the appearance of "racial instinct," according to historian Stephen Kantrowitz, trumped the reality of "counterrevolutionary conspiracy."31 The feud helped Americans-northerners and southerners-write off, excuse, and forget atrocities, and helped preserve racial and economic inequality-even in a seemingly homogenous place like Breathitt County. It was always metaphorical but, if repeated enough times, metaphor often became illusory hyperbole. Its eventual indelible association with eastern Kentucky was a combination of political design, cultural happenstance, and deliberate obfuscation. By then, feud was a local description for one violent corner of a remarkably violent section of the United States. The fact that most victims were white was all that differentiated it from the rest of the South.

This is not to suggest that feud gained currency only in America. It was a very old concept in the Western world, albeit with premodern meanings that are almost as irresolute as its modern ones. As it was understood from Icelandic sagas or the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, the feud simply did not exist in the United States. As one anthropologist has noted, "Travelers, administrators and anthropologists . . . have in the main studiously avoided formulating an exact definition of what they mean by the word feud."32 One medievalist has even expressed doubt as to whether it was ever a "particular mental category of dispute."33 Perhaps "feud" has always been nothing more than narrative form applied to violence after the fact, hiding bloody political expediency behind themes of vengeance, kinship, and honor.

In the twenty-first-century Anglophone vernacular, feud has transited-like Hayden White's "trope"-from metaphor to irony; it now whimsically suggests killing that is beyond modern America's understanding or caring, violence that can be smirked at and "reserved for ironic treatment" in written accounts.34 It suggests that the victims and perpetrators of violence are so distant in space or time (actually or virtually) or that their reasons for using violence are too arcane to investigate. For instance, isolationist congressman Hamilton Fish III spent five decades decrying Franklin Roosevelt's involvement in "ancient blood feuds" (that is, what most Americans knew as U.S. victory in World War II).35 More recently, the feud is occasionally referenced in television dialogue when a shorthand for the brutal, antiquated, and/ or primeval is needed (most notably on The West Wing and 30 Rock, two programs known for their supercilious "blue state" viewer demographics).36 More than anything else, the feud represents an act of segregation, a segregation of violence from its purposes. Removing the politics from political violence is something states and nonstate actors practice as a matter of course; the feud was simply a means to that end. Even now, it performs roughly the same function, though with more implied derision. Whether in the past or the present, using simplistic, disdainful language for violent death is harmful.

Why Does Bloody Breathitt Matter?

Thanks to journalism, popular fiction, and theatrical adaptations, the feud in a southern/Appalachian/Kentucky milieu remains a familiar subject, encapsulating historical events that underwent a "transformation from history to folklore."37 This misappropriation was partly due to an omission by consensus historians like Richard Hofstadter, who saw "a nation placidly evolving without serious disagreements," acknowledging only "legitimate" state violence.38 At the end of the 1960s it was becoming clear that "legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder," and Hofstadter conceded that historians could no longer ignore political violence in their homeland even if it was "hard to cope with."39 His Nixon-era admission coincided with a wealth of theoretical approaches to explaining political violence in a democracy.40 This new turn also coincided with the rise in the 1970s of Appalachian studies and the first serious attempts at examining the region's association with the feud.41 Appalachian historians attached this association to themes of economic exploitation and underdevelopment brought on by the forced transition from agriculture to industrialization.42 Feud violence, they found, was falsely attributed to "primordial explanations" for violence-definitively "illegitimate" within a wealthy nation-state (the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy uses "a feud on the order of the Hatfields versus the McCoys" as a counterexample for its definition of "war"), the better to justify exploitation by a "dominant culture."43 Most of Appalachian historiography has been defined by its preoccupation with dismantling (in the parlance of postcolonial studies) "hierarchies of place."44 I, too, try to set straight issues regarding Appalachia, most notably its place in southern political history. Nothing controverts Horace Kephart's spurious contention that preindustrial southern mountaineers "recognize[d] no social compact" better than their well-documented passion for the two-party system.45 With this in mind, I share my forbears' interest in dispelling misconceptions about the region. However, I wish to do more than, as E. P. Thompson put it, rescue a population "from the enormous condescension of posterity" (a condescension that even the most multicultural-minded academics still cling to for some reason).46 I see a portion of the mountain landscape where a "dominant culture" was present before corporations arrived, one that gained its power from the same confluence of class and race that defined southern politics.47 I do not think that variations of the "internal colony" model effectively explain political violence. Kentucky mountaineers, at least the white male ones, were voting citizens of the American Republic (although many briefly cleaved to the Confederacy); in peace or in fighting, their citizenship motivated their political participation.

I also think that Bloody Breathitt, the feud, and all they entail are important for reasons that extend far beyond any one region. They are important because the language we use to talk about violence is important. The concept of the feud is only one euphemistic chimera, one palatable and familiar to nineteenth-century American tastes. Since then there have been others, such as the 1950s invention of "police action" in lieu of "war." Purposefully confusing language about killing, such as George Orwell identified in his essay "Politics and the English Language," continues to this day. My interest in Breathitt County began during Operation: Iraqi Freedom, when "terrorist," "militant," and "insurgent" were bandied about interchangeably, while mercenaries became "contractors," placing gunmen among the ranks of carpenters and electricians. Torture and imprisonment without trial were hidden behind perplexing phrases like "enhanced interrogation" and "extraordinary rendition."48 All of that took place far from Kentucky. However, just like the word feud, this was language used to obscure, conceal, and lie in the service of, as Orwell put it, "the defense of the indefensible."49 Violence is hegemonic, and so, too, are the words used to describe it.

There is political violence, and then there is the politics of interpreting violence. The school shooting phenomenon, especially Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech in 2007, along with a deranged gunman's near-fatal shooting of an Arizona congresswoman in 2011 and mass shootings in Colorado, Wisconsin, New York, and Connecticut in 2012, contributed to heated political arguments over "gun control" (a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 was related to the "war on terror" and subsequently discussed in terms more related to geopolitics than to domestic policy) and reawakened debates over interpretation. While most of these crimes were not acts of "political violence" in the simplest sense of the phrase, they did spur political debate over the issue of "gun control." The common theme heard from the antiregulation side suggests that we live in social science's equivalent of a pre-Ptolemaic cosmos: acts that are "senseless," "tragic," or "irrational" cannot be counteracted because they passeth all understanding.50 This reductionist "senseless violence" argument, used all over the world, is itself politically motivated and disingenuous but, since most people prefer not to contemplate carnage and mayhem, it is also believable and attractive.51 What I show in later chapters is that these misleading lines of discourse have deep historical roots; it is how Breathitt County became Bloody Breathitt and it is how many homicides have gone unprevented or unpunished.

Firearm regulation aside, we cannot deny ourselves the ability to understand the most egregious acts of cruelty or the contexts that surround them.52 Violence can be condemned without discouraging scholars from "exploring meaning, interpreting symbolic action and mapping the historical and social context of activities defined as violent."53 Humans can understand human actions, and homicide is no exception. "[If] violence is whitewashed," wrote Jean Baudrillard, "history is whitewashed."54 In the interest of preventing this whitewashing, lessons must be learned from violence: the more uncomfortable these lessons make us, the more likely they are to be valuable. In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. called urban riots "the language of the unheard."55 Perhaps other forms of violence can also be translated and read in the interest of understanding how a country that deems itself the greatest nation on earth continues to pose so many lethal threats to its citizenry.

1.

"TO THEM, IT WAS NO-MAN'S LAND"

Before Breathitt Was Bloody.

Without hazarding any thing, I think, Sir, I may say, more of the happiness of this Commonwealth, depends upon the County Government under which we live, than upon the State or the United States' Government.

-Alexander Campbell, delegate to Virginia's.

Second Constitutional Convention (1829).

As an old man, George Washington Noble recalled watching a "pitched battle" when he was a child in Breathitt County, Kentucky, in the 1850s. It was a semiofficial Court Day event, a hand-to-hand tussle for money and prestige between various communities' "champion fighters," referred to locally as "Tessy Boys."1 As in a duel, the fights employed seconds to prevent foul play and to give a potential deadly free-for-all a measure of ritualized order; it was, after all, around the same time that another fight with no public supervision had ended in a fatal stabbing.2 In Jackson, Breathitt's county seat, this display of fisticuffs added entertainment, and an aura of masculine brio, to a staid political and legal event, augmenting the more formal proceedings going on inside the courthouse. It was an inclusive activity, establishing democratic homosocial interactions between men from disparate neighborhoods across a very large county, gathering "high and low into deeply charged, face-to-face, ritualized encounters."3 A rough, unruly, violent spectacle occurring during a public event that ensured civic order, the Tessy Boys' fight serves as an allegory for Breathitt County's social and political existence in the two decades before the Civil War. The incorporation of fighting into a state-ordained ritual like Court Day (an always-boisterous event in the antebellum South) mirrored the state's marginally successful attempt to bring stability to a chaotic environment.4 Antebellum Breathitt County was just another representation of southern society re-created in the Kentucky mountains. The Tessy Boys may have had a peculiar local name, but they were a pretty close facsimile to the semiorganized Court Day tussles that were then de rigueur throughout Kentucky and the other slave states.5 Reading about Bloody Breathitt in 1905, one would have been falsely led to believe that it had always been a wooded preserve for antediluvian chaos. Once it had been named "Bloody Breathitt" in the 1870s this relatively peaceful stage of its history, Tessy Boys and all, was mostly forgotten.

Long before the homicides and mayhem for which it would later be known, antebellum Breathitt County did contain the potential for turmoil. The 1839 formation of Breathitt County in eastern Kentucky's Three Forks region (the drainage area of the Kentucky River's three tributaries) happened out of desire to bring a governmental and commercial order to an inert, untapped wilderness.6 Well to the east of the old Wilderness Road (the main road between Virginia and central Kentucky that provided access to both for portions of southeastern Kentucky's mountains), it was one of the last areas of Kentucky with a permanent population. Breathitt County's creation was brought about by landowners who saw the area as a commodity rather than just a living space. It was a governmental entity, like other counties, but it was also a business venture carried out for personal, not public, gain. Moreover, it was a venture that ran counter to the interests of many of the preexistent population. This was meant to be a profitable order and, like many other such schemes of the nineteenth century, it had unforeseen outcomes.

"These people lived here in seclusion for several years; not knowing [of ]what country or nation they were citizens"

The story of early Breathitt County is one of in-state sectionalism, an upland county founded according to mostly lowland interests. The enormously luxuriant rolling hills of the Bluegrass in north-central Kentucky, a cultivator's paradise where a facsimile of the Virginia plantation economy could be re-created, was the first section of any economic consequence for white settlers and their slaves.7 "The [non-Indian] population of Kentucky until the separation from Virginia," wrote one early twentieth-century Kentucky historian, "was practically confined to the Bluegrass."8 From there Kentuckians spread outward after 1792 statehood, south to the Green River Valley and westward to the tobacco-growing Pennyroyal and Jackson Purchase sections.

The Cumberland Plateau, the mountain range that covers most of eastern Kentucky, was always defined in contradistinction to the rest of the state, and it was a subject of little curiosity in the early Republic. In 1751 explorer Christopher Gist and his party probably became the first white men to see Breathitt County's future location when they passed through on their return from the Ohio Country.9 "None of any particular note" is the only comment given for Kentucky's mountains in one 1815 atlas.10 With the exception of longhunters and trappers, most first-generation Kentuckians considered the plateau little more than an impediment.11 Settlers arrived only after lower-lying areas like the Bluegrass had become surveyed, taxed, and overcrowded beyond their satisfaction. Recognizing that theirs was a relatively new community, Kentucky mountaineers of the Civil War era still called the Bluegrass their state's "old settlements."12 In 1889 New England writer Charles Dudley Warner described Kentucky as divided into three distinct regions, "like Gaul," an oft-repeated allusion to Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic War.13 The dramatic contrast between the highlands and the central Bluegrass (the western third was eventually overshadowed or conflated with the central Bluegrass) popularized a more simplistic geographical commentary asserting "two Kentuckys" in place of Warner's three: one defined by the Bluegrass's agrarian wealth and the other by the highlands' hardscrabble deprivation.14 This geographic metaphor came to influence Kentuckians' self-image. The patrician, commercially vigorous Bluegrass was obliged to share Kentucky's (inter)national image with the plebian, underdeveloped uplands, "polished blue grass civilization" eternally saddled with "the semi-barbarism of the mountains."15 Residents of both sections eventually took this exaggerated stark contrast to heart. Breathitt County native E. L. Noble (George Noble's much younger cousin) portrayed his ancestors entering stateless "forest primeval worlds, rich in primeval glory and wealth of worlds now unknown to man. . . . These people lived here in seclusion for several years; not knowing [of] what country or nation they were citizens."16 Early travelers' accounts suggest that this was an old assumption, and one quickly challenged. In 1834 New Yorker Charles Fenno Hoffman was surprised to find highland Kentuckians "sing[ing] the praises of 'old Kain-tuck' with as much fervor as the yeoman who rides over his thousand fat acres in the finest regions of Kentucky [that is, the Bluegrass]" despite their general "ignorance of the world."17 Hoffman probably did not realize that his rustic hosts were likely themselves recent arrivals. Moreover, as unaware as eastern Kentuckians may have been of the "world" (which, to Knickerbocker Hoffman, was probably restricted to east of the Hudson River), they knew quite well who certified their contracts, counted their votes, and accepted their tax money. Early nineteenth-century eastern Kentucky was sparsely populated, but it was not the wilderness primeval "beyond the polis," as it was often portrayed.18 As Durwood Dunn noted about Cades Cove, Tennessee, during the same period, "isolation was always relative."19 Isolation was relative, and also a problem partially solved by bringing government closer to home. For generations, Kentuckians who chose to settle in the mountains were forced to make a long trip westward to see or use any functions of government. Early state maps show tremendous counties covering vast amounts of land stretching far from their respective Bluegrass courthouse towns. In the Three Forks region extraordinary circumstances made it abundantly clear that a more available jurisprudence system was necessary. In 1805 conflict arose among cattlemen living between the middle and north forks. Steers belonging to the Strong and Callahan families strayed from a Virginia-bound cattle drive and destroyed crops belonging to one John Amis. Amis took revenge on his careless neighbors by somehow drowning a number of their cattle in the north fork. In retaliation, the Strongs and Callahans allegedly killed Amis's own livestock and assaulted his wife. Amis and his confederates struck back days later by firing on the offending party and shots were returned, with no immediate resolution to the fracas. The shooting eventually died down, and word reached the state capital, Frankfort, of what had gone on, but prosecution of the accused would be difficult, with Madison County's seat of government nearly a hundred miles from the Three Forks. The Kentucky General Assembly first formed Clay County out of Madison and two other counties in 1807, a landmass with fewer than six inhabitants per square mile.20 If the state government's intention was to bring law and order to the area, it would seem that the effort was only partially successful; Amis was fatally shot while on the witness stand at Clay County's first court session.21 Typically, however, new mountain counties were founded because of everyday civic needs and desires. After a pioneer settlement turned into a multifamily village, those that saw a need for closer government-usually those with the most property-had only to gather a dozen or so signatures to form a new county. As tiny villages became county seats, petitioning "first families" gained tremendously, and enough of their new earnings trickled down to their neighbors to create a general agreement that county formation was an unalloyed good.22 In the spirit of pleasing voters, their requests were approved with alacrity. Drawing new county boundaries and the settling of subsequent border disputes became the Kentucky General Assembly's primary functions during the "frenzy of county-making" between 1806 and 1822.23 Nor did it stop then; between 1822 and 1860 the number of counties in the state increased from 71 to 110, bringing courts closer to citizens while intensifying social and governmental parochialism. Nineteenth-century Kentuckians considered new counties a remedy for most, if not all, public ills.24 The Three Forks region. (Richard Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab) In these newer counties' infant years no immediate funds were available to build courthouses, so county and circuit court sessions had to be held in private homes. Clay, Perry, Breathitt, and perhaps most other counties in eastern Kentucky began this way, usually in the homes of the pioneer-descended "first families," whose primacy of settlement and wealth of land suggested a measure of disinterestedness.25 Holding court in households was a seemingly innocuous arrangement that apparently attracted no complaints. However, as indebted Kentuckians came to realize after the Panic of 1819, patrician disinterestedness was fleeting-assuming it had ever existed at all.26 As the number of Kentucky counties increased, so did the general prevalence of county government, almost to the point of individual sovereignty. The powers of Kentucky county government in relation to the state were virtually "semi-federal" analogues to the state's balance of power with the federal government.27 Under the state's second constitution (drafted in 1799), county courts had broad-reaching powers comprising not only the judicial but the legislative and executive branches as well, with few checks and balances between the three. Until Kentucky's third constitutional convention in 1849, most county offices were appointed by justices of the peace rather than elected, and justice positions themselves were often passed down as inheritance. Judges, sheriffs, and court clerks were consequently under the control of familiopolitical cliques for generations.28 Justices and their clients could supervise election results, control local patronage, and use county funds for personal gain.29 Since Kentucky state legislators often served simultaneously as justices back home, the oligarchic influence was felt in the General Assembly as well.30 This all led to an early stagnation of political competition and an oft-permanent identification between county and party; in either the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, Kentucky had few "swing counties."31 Kentucky's incessant jurisdictional mitosis came with other unforeseen problems, particularly the decrease of county tax bases. County governments struggled to maintain revenue as land was chiseled away, often with little attendant legislative debate.32 By the end of the 1850s, many of Kentucky's 110 counties no longer contained enough productivity to match their tax burdens. This "pauper county" problem, resulting in a state deficit of nearly $54 million, became a matter for comment in other states' press.33 These pauper counties later became symbols of extreme parochialism, isolation, and poverty-as well as justification for conflating these three distinct problems.34 Progressive Era political scientists attacked the county as a regressive, problem-ridden form of government and sought to replace it with more enlightened institutions.35 But in the decades immediately before and after the Civil War, even the most reform minded had to accept what Thomas Jefferson had accepted decades before: counties produced poor government, but they were impossible to eliminate.36 Kentucky in 1800, 1820, and 1840. (Richard Gilbreath, University of Kentucky Cartography Lab; based on a map created by Mark Lassagne of GoldBug.com) In 1948 historian Charles Sydnor saw all of this as part of a larger nineteenth-century trend through which a southerner "naturally came to regard the county as having much and perhaps paramount importance among the governments to which he was subject."37 But legal historian Robert Ireland has since suggested that both the eager propagation of counties and their potential for internal authoritarianism were distinctively Kentuckian.38 More recently, John Alexander Williams concurred, saying that "no state carried the county government to greater extremes than Kentucky."39 Cursory evidence bears this out, at least in terms of proliferation; the only two states with more counties are Georgia and Texas, two states far larger than Kentucky in land mass and population.

"The county always went Democratic"

The "Clay County Cattle War" was still spoken of in Breathitt County (and recited as a locally penned poem) at the nineteenth century's end.40 But in comparison to Thomas Jefferson's nephews' slave murder in 1811 or the killing of Solomon Sharp fourteen years later, it never became a major chapter of Kentucky "dark and bloody ground" lore.41 It did, however, illustrate a long-standing theme in the South's agrarian history: the conflicts of interest between cultivation and droving on land bereft of fences or definite ownership. Before the county frenzy the state had already become embroiled in a lengthy competition between settlers and speculators in which "almost every inch of Kentucky land was disputed."42 After the Revolutionary War Virginia had doled out most of what became Kentucky as grants for Continental army veterans, a latter-day version of the colonial headright system. Most veterans either sold their titles or never claimed them, and by 1800 the reward system had turned into a market dominated by fewer than twenty men, even as countless settlers occupied the land.43 "The titles in Kentucky," an observer presciently foretold in 1816, "w[ill] be Disputed for a Centry to Come yet when it [i]s an old Settled Country."44 From this conflict emerged a political culture that inadvertently favored squatting, the landless farmer's only effective means of making a living without having to deal with the coercion of tenancy.45 Landless Kentuckians used universal manhood suffrage to elect legislators who supported them, placing Kentucky "on the vanguard in recognizing the rights of the squatter."46 Squatting may have violated property relations, some legislators argued, but it did so without challenging "the de jure distribution of property rights."47 Unlike the speculators, who often failed to pay their taxes, squatters "attend[ed] to their own business" without lobbying or otherwise meddling in statehouse affairs.48 In landowners' estimation, landlessness was synonymous with sloth, and repugnant to their sense of republican virtue, but their moral superiority was limited to their often-handicapped ability to prove their own legitimacy.49 This only lasted so long. Successful invocation of adverse possession turned squatters into landowners, while others migrated farther west. Under Henry Clay's Whiggish guidance, Kentucky legislators and judges came to look upon squatting more as a trespass than as inexpensive improvement of fallow land.50 As Kentucky went from being the "first western state" with widespread landlessness to a southern state with widespread land ownership, "squatters' rights" eventually lost favor.51 In the mountains, however, squatting persisted longer than anywhere else in Kentucky.52 There the squatter's presence was, if left otherwise unmolested, just as sustainable as "legitimate" land practices since landownership in preindustrial Appalachia often sowed the seeds of its own destruction.53 For years the Three Forks served as a haven for this unenclosed way of life, one that almost equalized the conditions of the landed and the landless. Due to steep conditions that made grazing and cultivation more difficult than in the flatlands, both depended upon "forest farming" (a technique that combined marginal cultivation, the hunting of large and small game, and open-range grazing of livestock on titled and untitled land) and access to a "commons," unfenced and uncommodified open land.54 Free-range grazing and long livestock drives, like the one that precipitated the Clay County Cattle War, were common throughout the nineteenth century.55 Even the wealthiest farmer made a living in a manner very much like the landless who probably surreptitiously used his land. Simon Cockrell, a well-to-do slave-owning Three Forks farmer, was rich enough to act as his neighbors' creditor and sell his cattle as far away as Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in the 1840s. Though "worth an immense fortune" once its mineral riches were realized years after his death, his land "was regarded as of but little value" in his lifetime.56 "Wealthy and arrogant" as he was, Cockrell "had no grass" and was obliged to graze his cattle on "cane and other winter forage" far beyond his own property boundaries.57 That the ends of market-oriented farming like Cockrell's and those of others who simply "subsisted" were separate was unclear, since both relied on the same means.58 For the nineteenth century's first three decades, both property owners and the propertyless farmed and extracted for Bluegrass markets made accessible by the north fork-open to anyone with a log raft and a modicum of skill, the rivers were also a "commons" of sorts. Flatboat traffic from the very headwaters of the forks, reportedly common since the 1790s, gave the lie to the myth of eastern Kentucky's isolation from the outside world.59 Three Forks farmers turned to market-based mining and forest extraction soon after their arrival.60 Extraction may have surpassed agriculture as the Three Forks' primary exports by the 1830s, especially in the southern headwaters, where slave-powered salt-mining operations began in the late eighteenth century.61 Cannel coal, a particularly valuable variety of the mineral, was common.62 "Shallow pits" and "farmers' diggings" were sufficient for most early mining enterprises, although larger slave-labored enterprises were in operation at least as early as the 1830s.63 In the long run, timber was an even greater asset to those interested in supplementing their farming. In 1835 flatboat crews felled and floated at least three thousand logs from the Three Forks to Bluegrass markets.64 The other recorded products that Three Forks mountaineers shipped to the Bluegrass in the early nineteenth century-deer skins, furs, honey, and ginseng-demonstrate the way in which hunting and gathering contributed to the market economy (and reason to leave much of the common land "unimproved").65 The three tributaries were adequate for "frontier" transportation but, as the Three Forks region increased in population in the 1820s and 1830s, there came new demand for land transportation. In 1833 eastern Kentucky's leading merchant, Thomas Sewell, financed a new twenty-mile-long wagon road from Perry County's remote War Creek community north to the hamlet of Hazel Green.66 Two years later, the state began financing navigational improvements on the north fork, and in 1837 a new road connecting Floyd County to the Bluegrass was completed.67 With enterprises "prostrated" in other parts of the state by the Panic of 1837, farmers from the Bluegrass and other areas of eastern Kentucky were attracted to the area.68 The Three Forks region was being "discovered" by both settlers and a revived speculative frenzy unmatched in Kentucky since the 1790s.69 The area's new interconnectedness with the outside world was flamboyantly demonstrated in 1838 when a traveling circus arrived, treating locals to the incongruous sight of an elephant tromping through the oaks and poplars.70 Breathitt County became Kentucky's eighty-ninth county a year after the elephant's visit, thanks to other recent arrivals.71 After building a second home on the north fork of the Kentucky River, Simon Cockrell's son-in-law, Madison County native Jeremiah Weldon South, procured the delinquent Thomas Franklin grant, a parcel spanning more than 116,000 acres (just over 182 square miles) of mostly forested land lying between the Kentucky's north and middle forks.72 The area's timber was what originally attracted South, but it was a difficult resource to exploit in the near future. Plans for massive timber and coal extraction, a railroad's arrival-these were schemes for a vaguely envisioned speculative future. The untapped abundance of coal and timber was remarked upon twenty years after the first official surveys of Breathitt County's mineral wealth in the 1850s.73 Eight years after South's death in 1888 well over half of the county's seven hundred square miles remained "unimproved," the "forest growth . . . almost untouched."74 The creation of a new county provided a much faster dividend for South's investment, attracting land buyers, potential tenants, and potential employees.75 Most of all, it would increase his property values. With Cockrell's support, he canvassed the area with a petition, and in the winter of 1839 the least developed, least populated portions of Clay, Estill, and Perry counties were removed to form the new county.76 Wealthy residents, most of them also recent arrivals, felt that "the [new] county in its undeveloped state offered inducements to men of enterprise to accumulate considerable money."77 Typically, new counties were formed around preexistent central settlements of one or more families. With Breathitt County this was not the case; it was a county formed without anything of a community that might constitute a town. Breathitt's founders were quick to fill this structural gap. Thomas Sewell's $1,000 sale of lots along the north fork, along with a reported ten-acre donation from Simon Cockrell, became the county seat, named Breathitt in 1839 and changed to Jackson in 1841 (when Jackson was incorporated in 1854, Sewell became its inaugural mayor). Jackson was adjacent to "the Panbowl," a narrow four-mile floodplain enclosed within a seven-mile bend in the north fork.78 By 1855 Jackson's coal trade supplied "most of the ready cash circulating in the country."79 Owing to Breathitt's commercial origins, it was a municipal rarity: an American county formed before any preexistent towns within its boundaries.

Table 1. Improved and unimproved land in Breathitt and surrounding counties, 1850 and 1860 Table 2. Agricultural and extractive production of Breathitt and surrounding counties, 1840 Jeremiah Weldon South, the "father of Breathitt County," circa 1878. South's ambitious real estate venture led to a cycle of bloodshed that lasted decades. (Courtesy of the Breathitt County Museum) Jeremiah South brought with him a formidable Kentucky pedigree. His Maryland-born grandfather John South helped construct Boonesborough in 1779; he fought in the Continental army and then served in the Kentucky General Assembly's first sessions ten years after losing a son at the battle of Little Mountain in 1782. Jeremiah's father, Samuel, played a key role at Little Mountain as a boy, and later punctuated decades of Indian fighting with his own stint as state legislator (losing the house speaker post to a young Henry Clay by a single vote in 1807) and a brevet general's commission in the War of 1812. He later served as state treasurer for six years.80 Although Jeremiah South came from outside the Three Forks region, many of the new county's locals were themselves newcomers, either from Virginia or the Bluegrass's "old settlements." They had little reason to think of him as an intruding comprador, especially after he and his brother Richard had both married Cockrell women, creating a definitive "first family."81 Any propertied Kentuckian was a fellow, not a foreigner, especially a descendant of men who had helped seize the "dark and bloody ground" from the Wyandot and Shawnee nations.

Jeremiah South volunteered his canvassing services "without compensation," according to one resident, but he stood to gain much from forming a new county around his enormous estate, especially since his holdings amounted to roughly a third of the new county's landmass.82 The formation of a new county seat placed de facto control over the county's government into South's hands and those of his cohorts-if nothing else, a handy arrangement at tax time.

With his new county established, South began building a local power base made up of mostly Bluegrass natives. As the primary petitioner for the county, South was able to name its first eleven justices of the peace, including himself.83 Joined by his brothers John and Richard, Jeremiah had the latter appointed as Breathitt County's first sheriff (John, a lawyer who made a legal career representing heirs to the old Virginia grants, might have received his own appointment had he not died in 1838).84 John Lewis Hargis and Simeon Bohannon, recent arrivals from Woodford County (a small Bluegrass county where a Virginia-style plantation economy took root), served as Breathitt County's first circuit court clerk and county clerk respectively, with Bohannon simultaneously serving as a justice of the peace and county commissioner.85 One of the petition signatories, William Allen, hosted the county's first court session in his home.86 He and Bohannon also served as two of Jackson's original town trustees.87 The titular "father of Breathitt County" and his Bluegrass associates exhibited considerable control over their new political unit.88 South became the county's first state representative in 1840 and was elected to the state Senate three years later.89 There he "favored [eastern Kentucky] even to the detriment of the state," and ended up "idolized by the mountain people."90 His attempt at a military venture did not equal his record as a solon. In 1846 South organized Breathitt County's troop contribution to the Mexican War but failed to recruit enough men to earn a commission or martial glory (still, following the affectation enjoyed by wealthy white Kentuckians, he was remembered as "Colonel South"). Although he was unable to repeat his father's and grandfather's military records, his popularity remained undimmed and he was soon reelected to the General Assembly.91 Making Breathitt County benefited Jeremiah South and his new neighbors, at least the more well-heeled ones. The Three Forks region previously lacked what geographer Mary Beth Pudup has called an "indigenous vanguard class," a group of professionals skilled in the commercial ways of the "Bluegrass System."92 Soon after he arrived, John Hargis hung out his shingle as the county's first attorney, a boon to many local farmers (and perhaps a bane to others); two more attorneys arrived soon afterward.93 By 1848, Jackson boasted "one Methodist church, one Reformed church, two schools, five stores and groceries, two taverns, three lawyers, one doctor and five mechanical trades" as well as land values far higher than in neighboring counties.94 In the early 1850s Hargis, South, and five of the county's other large-scale landholders became charter stockholders in the Lexington and Kentucky River Railroad Company, anticipating a future rail connection to the Bluegrass (a goal that did not come to fruition until after Hargis's and South's deaths).95 South and his fellows were imposing a new middle-class discipline on the Three Forks region, bringing purpose to a place business-oriented Jacksonian Americans considered void and without form.96 They became part of the "fifteen or thirty or forty people" empowered by forming a new county "not for the benefit of the people at large, but only for the benefit of people who were to be enriched by them"-or so charged a reformer ten years after South's death.97 During his lifetime, however, the statesmanlike intentions of "the father of Breathitt County" remained unquestioned.

South's most permanent legacy was the creation of an unfailingly Democratic electorate. Breathitt County was carved from the three counties that composed the northeastern corner of the "Whig Gibraltar," Kentucky's southeastern quadrant where loyalty to Henry Clay's party was unfaltering.98 In 1840 Breathitt County cast strong majorities for William Henry Harrison (by a nearly four to one margin) and Whig gubernatorial candidate Robert Letcher. Immediately thereafter Breathitt County began turning out Democratic majorities, a change that would seem inconsequential had it not happened so rapidly at a time when the Kentucky Democracy was failing.99 Mountain Whigs survived their party's national downfall in the following decade, making Breathitt County's affiliation all the more peculiar and consequential. It was one of a very few dependable Democratic islands in what would later become eastern Kentucky's sea of Republicanism. "The county," George Noble recalled proudly, "always went Democratic."100 Breathitt County's switch in voting habits happened so abruptly as to suggest something other than shrewd politicking. Hargis and Bohannon, as the first clerks of the county court and circuit court respectively, could monitor party loyalty and possibly even manipulate election outcomes.101 With his brother Richard as the first sheriff (and other fellow petitioners serving as the second and third), South was fully capable of using the carrot of patronage-and the stick of inconvenient summonses-to swell the Democratic vote.102 In 1846 South, John Hargis, and their fellow Democrats orchestrated a petit coup by holding a meeting of the justices of the peace with only one of the two Whig members present (Thomas Sewell was the absent Whig). The Democrats filled the two Whig-held vacancies with their own selections, placing the county court completely under their control.103 Whig governor William Owsley ignored Sewell's complaints of the Democrats' underhanded attempt to "get in power." In fact there was little that Owsley could have done and Sewell apparently did not press the matter any further.104 His suspicions were justified; with Democrats in exclusive control over patronage and public works, the party's majority increased significantly for years.105 Breathitt County's permanent association with the Democratic Party came to define practically every major event in its history.

For some of the county's "founding fathers," residency in their county was temporary. After his term as the first county clerk, Simeon Bohannon returned to the Bluegrass and kept his Breathitt County property as a summer home for his wife and daughters.106 The Griffling brothers, one of Breathitt's "nice families," grew impatient waiting on the bread they had cast on the new county's waters and moved to Memphis after only three years.107 Although he was a lifelong property owner in Breathitt County, South returned to the Bluegrass in the 1840s, leaving his son Andrew Jackson South in Breathitt County to manage local business (South fathered thirteen children, some of whom remained in or around Jackson until well after the Civil War).108 Decades before national and international corporations took notice of eastern Kentucky's extractable wealth, South, Bohannon, Sewell (who moved west to Estill County in 1858), and others were initiating the much-maligned trend of absentee ownership.109 As "one of the controlling voices in the Democratic party in Kentucky," Jeremiah South was appointed state penitentiary superintendent and lessee (a position that "allowed a private citizen to incur the financial risks and reap the financial rewards of the penitentiary") in 1859.110 As with Breathitt County's creation, his appointment revealed a constant collusion between government and private interests. The position meant personal control over all convict labor, ergo statewide control over internal improvements and a lifetime's supply of personal household servants.111 During his first four-year term, he accumulated "an ample fortune, as the product of convict earnings," and his flagrant venality was later used as evidence in demands for prison reform in many states.112 During a fifteen-year sentence for assisting runaway slaves, Methodist abolitionist Calvin Fairbank sustained some of his "thirty-five thousand stripes" under South's supervision. Still, the minister recalled South as having "more humanity . . . [and] less executiveness" than his cruel predecessor.113 His reputation outside of the prison walls was less qualified. South nurtured the relationships he had established in the General Assembly, supplying his political allies with "cheap boarding, cheap washing and free drinks," and giving out "curiously wrought walking sticks and cedar chests" to pet legislators.114 When he died he was remembered as "perhaps, the most popular and influential man in all of Eastern Kentucky," even though he rarely returned from the Bluegrass in his last two decades.115 John Hargis, a Virginia native who had not come to Kentucky until the 1820s, had fewer Bluegrass connections and stayed in the county longer.116 After starting his law practice he represented Breathitt in the state House of Representatives, where he supported road construction and river improvement.117 He unsuccessfully protested new counties' removal of territory from Breathitt County, and attempted to increase state funding for county common schools (in this he may have been more successful since the number of the county's school districts increased by nearly two-thirds during his time in office). Combs Academy, one of eastern Kentucky's first public coeducational high schools, opened in Jackson at the beginning of the Civil War.118 Table 3. Presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional (U.S. House) elections in Breathitt County and its "birth" counties, 18281856 At Kentucky's 1849 constitutional convention, "the alpha and omega of his political career," delegate Hargis made Jacksonian appeals for electoral reform, local sovereignty, and rural supremacy.119 Citing the "great danger to be apprehended from the influence [cities like Louisville] might exercise arising from the consolidation of wealth and numbers," he unsuccessfully attempted to prevent increases in urban representation.120 Hargis also proposed term limits for sheriffs, opposed limiting county judge candidacy to lawyers and, remarkably, spoke out against Kentucky's most cherished political institution, vive voce, or voice voting.121 Ballotless voting eased illiterate men's participation, but Hargis and others criticized it for allowing local elites to monitor and manipulate elections.122 "I want my tenant to go and drop in his ballot without my knowledge of the man for whom it is given," he said during debate. "If they vote by ballot what landlord will know anything about the vote of his tenant[?]" Since most of the other delegates owed their successes to this sort of knowledge, his plea for a secret ballot was ignored (by 1861 only Kentucky and Virginia still used vive voce).123 Hargis also unsuccessfully proposed reducing the number of local electable offices such as county attorney, coroner, jailer, and "other little petty officers," preferring they be appointed by justices of the peace (this, too, was ignored since most other Democratic delegates favored expanding electoral authority).124 With or without Hargis's suggestions (and mostly, it would seem, the latter), the new constitution ushered in his party's statewide resurgence. When it came to referendum in 1850, Whig citadel Clay County was the only county that rejected it.125 Table 4. Tabulation of election results in Breathitt County and its "birth" counties, 18101860 Hargis was absent due to illness for much of the convention and his contribution to the new constitution, and its vaunted expansion of herrenvolk democracy, remains ambiguous.126 In contrast, his support for slavery was forthright and obvious. In a convention noted for being a referendum on slavery, Hargis stood as one of only a few representatives unambiguously in favor of an institution he believed was "sanctioned by the Bible."127 Aware that men of the cloth had used the legislature as an abolitionist bully pulpit, he proposed a constitutional exclusion of "clergymen, priest or teacher of any religious persuasion, society, or sect" from serving as lawmakers.128 Dreading an unmanageable free black population, he also proposed that all emancipated slaves be required to leave the state under penalty of reenslavement.129 Hargis's fear of free blacks reflected his Virginia and Bluegrass past more than it did Breathitt County slave life.130 In the Three Forks whites outnumbered slaves by a tremendous margin, as they had since slaves were first brought to the area around 1800.131 Jo, one of Jeremiah South's slaves, "with whom everyone in the county was acquainted," roved about as a hired messenger in the 1840s while "Yaller Bill," another South bondsman, was an acclaimed hunter.132 Not far away, Clay County salt manufacturers broke state law by arming their slaves as members of biracial private militias.133 Slave and free, black, white, and biracial, commingled liberally; free blacks lived in slave-owning households, and 1860's census listed more than a third of Breathitt County slaves as "mulatto."134 Black and white were sometimes indistinguishable, particularly one "very pretty girl about 14 years old, well dressed with long golden ringlets, rosy cheeks and a fair complexion" who was sold "at a fancy price to a prominent bachelor lawyer" sometime in the 1840s.135 As a slavery "perpetualist," or a voice for Negrophobia, John Hargis's views did not match his constituents' habits.136 Breathitt County's relationship to the peculiar institution demonstrates slavery's pervasive political influence in places where its economic impact was limited.137 Slaves were an important investment for mountain farmers with low-valued landholdings; it was not unusual for masters to have slaves that were collectively worth more than the land they worked.138 In the twenty years before the Civil War, Breathitt's slave population grew even as neighboring counties' numbers dwindled.139 In a state with low numbers of slaves but widespread ownership, Jeremiah South, John Hargis, and Simeon Bohannon had little reason to see themselves differently than other Kentucky slaveholders.140 Still, slaveholders were only about 6 percent of the white population-a 6 percent that included all of the county's petitioners and almost all of the men who served as justices of the peace before 1860.141 This disproportionality of interests between the governing minority and the governed majority was nothing unusual, and some Kentuckians sensed their own Slave Power conspiracy.142 Antislavery activism had audiences in Kentucky until the late 1850s (albeit not without occasional violent reprisals), long after it was stifled in other slave states.143 Outright abolitionism was rare, but frank distaste for bondage was palpable, especially in the mountains. James Sebastian, born a few months before Breathitt County was formed around him, despised "mixing, laboring and competing with slave labor" so much that he left for Illinois, returning to the Three Forks to fight for the Union in 1861.144 Before young George Noble went off to join a Confederate unit that year, his father told him "that it was wrong to keep any human being in bondage."145 When Kentucky's flamboyant emancipationist Cassius M. Clay attempted a gubernatorial bid in 1851, Breathitt was one of a very few counties in which he commanded 5 percent or more of the vote. Heavily Democratic (by then) Breathitt was very different from the other nearby "Whig Gibraltar" counties that did so, including Breathitt's three "birth counties." Most were highly commercialized counties where slavery was a significant presence but not an overwhelming one. Finally, twelve of these counties (including all of the counties in the Three Forks watershed except for Breathitt) had hosted emancipationist or abolitionist gatherings shortly before 1851. That fifty Breathitt votes were cast for an unabashedly antislavery candidate in a county controlled and represented exclusively by slave owners reveals a conspicuous distaste for the local slaveocracy, a distaste only slightly more muted than what was seen in other sections of the mountains.146 It was a sliver minority of the voting public, but Kentuckians learned how powerful minority opinion could be ten years later.

The distaste was measured six years later when an English abolitionist minister named William Ellaby Lincoln visited the county. After seeing American evangelist Charles Finney preach in his native London, Lincoln immigrated to Ohio's Oberlin College to dedicate his life to ending slavery. In spring 1856 he left for Kentucky to offer his services to the Reverend John G. Fee, soon to be the founder of Berea College. Fee urged the young preacher to evangelize in Breathitt County and he agreed, beginning the excursion soon after. Along the way, Lincoln encountered resistance to his antislavery message until he arrived in Breathitt, where he was taken in by a sympathizer. Lincoln's unnamed host was "careful not to expose himself too much" since, as he said, local slaveholders were willing to defend their institution "even by mob violence."147 Table 5. Counties returning greater than 5% for Cassius M. Clay for governor, 1851 The two attended a revival meeting, where they heard a "colored preacher . . . whose sermon was a careful steer between the master & slave." In attendance were slaves, slave owners, and at least eleven men whom Lincoln found racially unidentifiable. The quiet abolitionist seated at his side asked Lincoln to play a strange game as the parishioners entered the meetinghouse. "Then in doubt, as to whether a man is colored or white, if white touch my right knee, if colored, my left," his friend told him. Unable to interpret the skin color of eleven of the men he saw, Lincoln was told that one of the men he had thought colored self-identified as white and "had killed 1 man and wounded another man who stuck to it, that [he] was colored." Lincoln's new friend was apparently trying to demonstrate the community's unique racial indistinctness, a population (in one local historian's phrasing) "considered part-black."148 But the young Englishman was not prepared for the reality of racial mixing that he saw in front of him, attributing it to the men's "work outdoors in the sun and the wind."149 When Lincoln got behind the pulpit later that day, sheriff's deputies arrived to warn attending slaves away at gunpoint. During his exegesis of Jeremiah, the preacher realized that the same pistols were pointed in his direction from a front pew. He was able to shame the deputies into sheepishly lowering their guns during worship, but afterward some "young slaveholders" warned Lincoln that he would be shot if he did not leave quickly. As he made his way back to the reticent abolitionist's home (who had bowed out of going to Lincoln's service so as not to attract attention to himself), the deputies first feigned friendliness but then began shooting. Lincoln claimed later to have barely escaped with his life after his horse threw him from his saddle under fire.150 Lincoln's visit was the first, if not especially adroit, recorded challenge to slavery in Breathitt County. It showed that, as in other southern communities, protests against the slaveholding order were punished with violence. Also, the congregation of black, white, mulatto, slave, and free that he saw (but never understood) represented a "mixed" community that would later play a remarkable role during and after the Civil War. The ballot deviation of 1851 and the small show of abolitionist sympathies (as well as the violent effort to suppress it) also reveal antebellum Breathitt County's lack of a perfect white consensus-but hardly a serious challenge to Jeremiah South. He, John Hargis, and others established a slaveholder's rentier state, one that need not be well organized to be profitable. In its official institutions and formal political character, Breathitt County remained in the image of its "father."

But South's mastery over court did not translate into mastery over country. For the rest of his life, and for years after, squatters lived on his gigantic estate, hunting game, constructing cabins, sending livestock to mast, damming creeks, cutting timber, and mining coal.151 Many of them probably occupied the land before South procured the delinquent title and considered themselves its rightful owners. Some even eventually received land patents that ignored the old Virginia grants, one of which was the basis for South's hardwood fortune.152 He and his children learned the same lesson absorbed by so many absentee owners before and since: contractual ownership was often no match for direct knowledge of the terrain.153 There were far too many people in the very large county who knew more about South's property-its creeks, coves, glades, timber, and coal seams-than he ever could, even with the most thorough land surveys. E. L. Noble described their viewpoint with his typical exaggeration: "To them, it was no-man's land."154 The "true" land value could be exploited by South's uninvited guests over the years. The result of all of these factors was a long-standing stalemate between landed and landless.

This was a source of constant dismay for South, and numerous times he attempted to recoup his profits by placing felled timber under attachment in court. He also tried hiring some of his land's occupants to aggressively prevent trespassing. John Aikman (George Noble recalled him as "the bully of the mountains"), the South estate's "guard," exploited Jeremiah South's absence and eventually laid claim to a substantial mass of his property through adverse possession.155 Aikman had the same problem with people he considered squatters, and he allegedly resorted to arson to get rid of them.156 More than a quarter century after Jeremiah South's death, Breathitt County was said to still have the worst problem with overlapping land claims in all of Kentucky.157 To complicate matters, the perpetuation of Jeremiah South's Democratic regime depended upon votes from men who brazenly violated his property. With vive voce, this was probably no secret.158 South's authority as statesman and landholder was limited to his ability to exert authority over his own property and over local public institutions. Although the latter was fairly secure throughout the antebellum era, the former represented the innate illegitimacy of Breathitt County's very existence.

Breathitt County's creation was beneficial to men whose wealth was based on speculation and slaves who wanted greater access to courts and the sense of community and order they provided. These new boundaries were of little social consequence to families and individuals whose political, social, and economic relationships had been established before 1839. The new county's initiators could expect support from those who shared their interests, and hope for acquiescence from everyone else. The potential for conflict existed since the county's creation.

Still, the county had existed for three and a half decades before it was dubbed "Bloody Breathitt." The violence that inspired this moniker was a result of Breathitt County's role in the Civil War, a role Jeremiah South and his family engineered. Writing just before Breathitt County's centennial, E. L. Noble observed, "The Souths, while not feudists, seem to have done more to perpetuate feudal conditions in Breathitt than any family otherwise directly or indirectly connecting her history."159

2.

"SUPPRESSING THE LATE REBELLION"

Guerrilla Fighting in a Loyal State