134. Though the crime was blamed on "rebel outlaws," implying a pro-Confederate act, the county's Confederate identity was well established and notorious, enough so that it could well have been perpetrated by Unionist Kentuckians. AGACK, 1864 (Frankfort: Wm. E. Hughes, 1864), 36566.

135. Haddix, adm'r, vs Chambers & Little, April 26, 1868, in W. P. D. Bush, reporter, Reports of Selected Civil and Criminal Cases decided in the Court of Appeals of Kentucky, 17273.

136. As has been the case in many other wars, desertion during the American Civil War was a communal phenomenon. Confederate units with large numbers of soldiers from the same community were more prone to desertion than units made up of men recruited from disparate areas. Bearman, "Desertion as Localism," 340.

137. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 199202, 2046, 21118, 64548.

138. KAGR, 21013; Strong Family Papers, 82, Breathitt County Public Library. Thomas Hargis notably stayed with the Fifth Infantry. He received a captain's commission and was captured four times. After the war he returned to Kentucky but did not resettle in Breathitt County. McAfee, Kentucky Politicians, 7475.

139. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 38287.

140. The "parochialization" of civil war takes place when extensions of a national conflict are acted out in an enclosed location. Local issues come to take precedence over national ones as the basis for conflict such that there is a "shift in meaning from the great to the little tradition" (my emphasis). Aikman's patrons, the South family, retained their national concerns in fighting for the Confederacy, namely, the upholding of "southern rights," but they were equally concerned with maintaining order and a modicum of political uniformity within their county. Although Aikman continued to fight under the Souths' leadership (or at least the leadership of Jerry South Jr.), his return to wage a more localized war against individuals with whom he was probably socially acquainted prior to the war represented a means by which local interests (i.e., the political and economic primacy of his patrons, the South family) came to eclipse abstractions like "southern rights" espoused by the patrons themselves. See James C. Scott, "Protest and Profanation," 22022. For "people's war," see Cooling, "A People's War," 11718.

141. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 59; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:1415 (quote).

142. Fellman, Inside War, 254.

143. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 83, 33036; Ash, When the Yankees Came, 125 (quote).

144. Jess D. Wilson, When They Hanged the Fiddler, 7576.

145. Lexington Observer and Reporter, April 18, 1863; Louisville Journal, April 20, 1863; Dalton, "Brig. General Humphrey Marshall," 192; Perry, Jack May's War, 6365.

146. Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 673; Burch, Owsley County, 35.

147. Washington National Republican, April 27, 1863; Thos. L. Wilson, Sufferings Endured for a Free Government, 98100. Storke and Brockett, A Complete History of the Great American Rebellion, 157576.

148. Jess D. Wilson, When They Hanged the Fiddler, 75.

149. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 32. Scout, in wartime parlance, described an unenlisted partisan. It was a term just vague enough for Strong to use to justify attacking civilians he suspected of subversive activity. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, xi.

150. Henry C. Hurst to William L. Hurst, March 2, 1865, in Hurst, Hursts of Shenandoah, 102.

151. KTY, December 22, 1878.

152. Whether or not Barnett's purported innocence alluded to his being nonpartisan or nonmilitary was not revealed. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 32, 78.

153. Noble's age and the minimal threat he represented may also have weighed upon Strong's decision. Ibid., 3536.

154. Said a Confederate veteran of the "secret rebel" Wilson Callahan: "He always told me he was a mighty good rebel; and whilst I was in the rebel army he gave me all the information he could. He would tell me where the Union forces were, and how many, and directed me how to manage." After the war, according to a "common rumor in the country . . . [Wiley Amis] was writing backwards and forwards to the rebels whilst he was a lieutenant in the Union army." Considering his postwar politics, his (as will be covered in the following chapter) collusion with Wilson Callahan, and his eventual violent break with his former ally William Strong, it is highly possible that Amis was himself a "secret rebel." On the other hand, as shown in the following chapter, Amis's postwar change in politics was also influenced by his disillusionment over the results of Union victory, a disillusionment shared by many Kentucky Unionists. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 169 (quote), 191, 195, 198.

155. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 54 (quote); Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 96.

156. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 84.

157. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, p. 200; KTY, January 7, 1879; Trimble et al. v. Spicer et al., October 17, 1900, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, SWR, vol. 58 (August 6December 3, 1900), 579; Strong Family Papers, 111, Breathitt County Public Library; Ed Porter Thompson, History of the Orphan Brigade, 746; Herbert W. Spencer, "Captain Bill's January Raid"; McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 22526.

158. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 62; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 111.

159. Only 95 men voted in favor of Bramlette out of a total 142 votes counted, a fraction of the usual voter turnout in the county but more than enough to give the Union candidate a considerable majority. Over the next two years of the war, the small number of extant returns suggests that Democratic ballots were virtually forbidden from being cast. TAPR, 1862, 61; 1863, 60; 1864, 59; 1866, 59; 1867, 57; Ernest Collins, "Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties," 63.

160. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, p. 195; interview with William B. Eversole, January 15, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, p. 2145; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 5354.

161. Wm. M. Combs agst. Capt. William Strong, Wiley Amis and Other Defendants, 18671869; Wm. M. Combs agst. Hiram Freeman and Jason Little, 18671869; William Strong Sr. vs. Wilson Callahan & comp., May 15, 1867, Breathitt County Circuit Court Records, KDLA.

162. Rhyne, "Rehearsal for Redemption," 18095.

163. Blight, Race and Reunion, 38183.

164. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 3848.

165. Rolt-Wheeler, The Boy with the U.S. Census, 23; Lewis Franklin Johnson, Famous Kentucky Tragedies and Trials, 320; Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 147; Haney, The Mountain People of Kentucky, 77.

166. Altsheler, In Circling Camps, 125.

167. Foote, The Civil War, 1002.

168. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 21, 71.

169. As subjective as definitions of guerrillaism may be, the prevailing ideas in military science at the time of the Civil War considered Forrest's tactics those of a "partisan" rather than a guerrilla. This was a distinction made not by virtue of Forrest's style of fighting but by his formal relationship to the Confederate war machine; Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerilla Violence in Missouri's Civil War, 1034.

170. Lewis Collins and Collins, Collins' Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 110.

171. E. Polk Johnson, A History of Kentucky and Kentuckians, 368.

172. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 22829. Coulter did, however, consider the possibility that the Confederate high command did not look upon guerrillas "with any great degree of aversion."

173. Stiles, Jesse James, 8182, 9597.

174. Lord, The Effect of Secession upon the Commercial Relations between the North and South, 7576. During the Deep South's secession in the winter of 1861, another author predicted that mountaineers would stall the Upper South from following suit. "Their interests are more directly opposed than those between the Cotton States and the extreme North, because the wide distance that separates the latter renders them independent of each other, while the Cotton States are seeking, by every possible means, to drag all the Slave States with them, for the purpose of compelling them to share their burdens, and of giving greater strength and dignity to their cause." "Southern Aids to the North," 242. This was only partially true. The Bluegrass, the section of the state with the largest number of slaves and slaveholders, had spotty interest in secession. In fact, it was the section of the state that produced the most vocal spokesmen (including Senator Crittenden) for trying to compromise: combining the continuance of slavery with the preservation of the Union. For an example of a historical verification of this exaggeration, see Robert L. Kincaid, "Lincoln Allegiance in the Southern Appalachians," 16479.

175. This image was important for comfortable reconciliation between the sections as well as the expansion of (as will be discussed more broadly in a later chapter) the postwar discourse on the region's supposed Anglo-Saxon purity. Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 14347; Noe, " 'Deadened Color and Colder Horror,' " 7780; Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia, 77.

176. Warner, "Comments on Kentucky," 263. See also E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 1:27071.

177. Emma M. Connelly, The Story of Kentucky, 268.

178. Ibid., 26667.

179. Spaulding, The Men of the Mountains, 47.

180. Brooks, "Back to Dixie, a Hard Trip," 58.

181. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:11.

182. Shaler, Kentucky, 405.

183. Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner, 133.

184. As will be detailed in the following chapter, after Kentucky's Unionists had lost control over state government, Jeremiah South was reappointed as penitentiary lessee and remained in that position until just prior to his death in 1880. Rockenbach, " 'The Weeds and the Flowers Are Closely Mixed,' " 12; Robert Gunn Crawford, "A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System," 24, 29.

3. "The war spirit was high"

1. As Brian McKnight has made clear, the finality represented by the surrender at Appomattox was of limited significance in eastern Kentucky. Although news of the Confederacy's defeat spread quickly, there was no assurance that fighting would end in an area where ties to both sides were often tenuous. McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 23134.

2. Stealey, Twenty Years in the Press Gallery, 208.

3. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 6. E. Merton Coulter's The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, the classic yet dated history of the state during the 1860s and 1870s, maintains the essentially pro-Confederate, white supremacist character of Kentucky politics during Reconstruction and suggests that the state's failure to join other states in secession was essentially a mistake that did not reflect the general will of white Kentuckians. Liberal historians, reacting to Coulter's neo-Confederate sympathies, later downplayed Kentucky's postwar conservatism. Ross Webb's revisionist Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era explains the state's lack of cooperation with postwar federal policies as resistance to unwelcome federal authority rather than genuine adherence to the Lost Cause. Thomas Connelly ("Neo-Confederatism or Power Vacuum") also deemphasized the importance of race and the Confederate memory in the years following the war; after 1865 Kentuckians were supposedly more caught up in sectional competition over internal resources and railroad construction than in issues relating to the recent war. By the mid-1870s the "New Departure" school of political thought, favored by the state's development-minded Democrats, had led the state into an era of relative prosperity unmatched by the rest of the South due to greater cooperation with northern interests. In Connelly's interpretation, as a state Kentucky was therefore detached from the ravages of Reconstruction disorder. Considering Coulter's overt Confederate sympathies, both Webb's and Connelly's revisions are understandable. But by taking a more local approach, and one that does not depend as heavily upon evidence from the Bluegrass as a supposed "Kentucky writ large," historians have more recently described a Kentucky countryside rife with counterrevolutionary violence against both blacks and white Unionists, suggesting that Kentucky's postwar Confederate sympathies have been underestimated since Coulter's time. Rhyne, " 'We Are Mobed and Beat' "; Crane, " 'The Rebels Are Bold, Defiant, and Unscrupulous in Their Dementions of All Men.' " See also Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 5580.

4. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 20.

5. Slavery was eventually outlawed in the state's 1890 constitution. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 27.

6. Foner, Reconstruction, 37.

7. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 199200.

8. Astor, "Rebels on the Border," 1016, 25556.

9. Patrick A. Lewis, "The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril," 14547; Berlin et al., "The Destruction of Slavery, 18611865," 4, 6667, 7374, 17374; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 25861, 316, 42023; Ross Webb, "Kentucky," 27.

10. Quoted in Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 22. Since then, historians have placed Kentucky's political turn slightly earlier. As conservative historian E. Merton Coulter semifamously wrote in 1926, the state seemingly "seceded in 1865" (The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 334). See also Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 53.

11. Astor, "Rebels on the Border," 14344.

12. LCJ, December 25, 1868, quoted in Prichard, "Popular Political Movements in Kentucky," 7.

13. KTY, December 2, 1865.

14. Ibid.; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 1014; Curry, Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment. On the other hand, E. Merton Coulter makes the questionable claim that the true Republican Party was not established in Kentucky until 1871, when the party's conservative faction wrested control from radicals. This does not take away from the fact that both factions, under one name or another, had existed in the state since 1865 (and, arguably, even before then under the name "Unconditional Unionists"). Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 27286, 43334.

15. Astor, "Rebels on the Border," 25556, 26667, 27175.

16. Marshall, " 'The Rebel Spirit in Kentucky,' " 64.

17. At its inception the Freedmen's Bureau was limited to the rebellious states. But passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was followed by recognition of the need for the bureau in Kentucky as well. The relatively small African American population in Kentucky and its resultant impact upon the electorate was also a hindrance to the organization. House Executive Document, no. 11, 39th Cong., 1st sess., p. 31, Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 70.

18. Robert Gunn Crawford, "A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System," 29.

19. LCJ, February 10, 1880.

20. Legislative Document No. 18, 982; KSJ, 1880, 3947; AAC 4 (1886): 53940; Tapp, "Three Decades of Kentucky Politics," 197206; Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn, 78 (quote); Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 8283.

21. FRA, April 17, 1880; HMC, April 23, 1880; Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn, 8688.

22. The most dramatic change was the adoption of a salaried warden to replace the graft-ridden lessee position. Robert Gunn Crawford, "A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System," 5962, 12225, 130; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 17882; Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn, 88.

23. Astor, "Rebels on the Border," 16270.

24. Nation, November 1, 1866; AAC 3 (1869): 42122; Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America, 568; Astor, "Rebels on the Border," 9, 162, 21819, 28081; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 359, 361; Ross Webb, Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era, 25.

25. From the 1870s until the 1920s, Kentucky had more white lynching victims than any state east of the Mississippi River. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 30711. See also Rhyne, " 'We Are Mobed and Beat' "; Crane, " 'The Rebels Are Bold, Defiant, and Unscrupulous in Their Dementions of All Men' "; Przybyszewski, "The Dissents of John Marshall Harlan I," 15455; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 359, 361; Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 59.

26. Dunaway, African-American Family, 247.

27. McKnight, Contested Borderland, 229.

28. J. W. Alvord to General O. O. Howard, January 29, 31, 1870, in Alvord, Letters from the South, 39.

29. NYT, November 12, 1870. While this may have been intentionally hyperbolic, many historical studies show a record of Reconstruction-era oppression on par with the Deep South, even though the stakes for conservative whites (i.e., the prospect of Negro political domination) were considerably lower. See Pem Davidson Buck, Worked to the Bone; Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky; Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky; Lucas. A History of Blacks in Kentucky.

30. Cincinnati Commercial, May 31, 1867; Sumner, Charles Sumner, 200202; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 334.

31. McConnelsville Conservative, January 20, 1871.

32. Kentucky's August 1870 elections were the first statewide balloting in which black men participated. Patrick A. Lewis, "The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril," 148. In his study of lynching, George C. Wright discovered that one-third of Kentucky's recorded lynchings happened between 1865 and 1875, preceding the national numerical peak by nearly two decades. The state's experience with the phenomenon suggests a heightened correlation between lynching and counterrevolutionary attacks on black citizenship (when lynching became far more widespread in the post-Reconstruction South, after black southerners were roundly denied the ballot, victims were most often men accused of murder or rape). Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 8, 30911.

33. AAC 3 (1867): 422; Emma M. Connelly, The Story of Kentucky, 25859, 31721.

34. Lewis Collins and Collins, Collins' Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 18384.

35. Foner, Reconstruction, 434. One 1872 testimony to a joint congressional committee illustrates the clear extrapolitical value of the concept of feud and one example of its being used to make the political appear communal. A congressman asked a Cleveland County, North Carolina, resident to explain a series of affrays between two planter brothers he had witnessed in recent months. The witness answered that, even though one brother was a Republican and one a Democrat and their enmity had begun with the close of the war, it was impossible to determine whether their rupture was related to the local "bad feeling" between the parties or was "merely a family feud" (the witness indicated that he considered the latter more likely). It was admitted that the Republican brother had been attacked by a body of men in a clear attempt to dispatch a dissident scalawag, but the witness repeated his invocation of "family feud" twice more. Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, 3067. See also Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction, 69093; Louisiana Affairs, 384.

36. Thorpe, The Constitutional History of the United States, 323.

37. Cooling, "After the Horror," 357.

38. Hahn, A Nation under our Feet, 28082; Rable, But There Was No Peace, 8586.

39. Tapp, "Three Decades of Kentucky Politics," 1213.

40. Albert Deane Richardson and Hanby, The Secret Service, 168; Thomas Louis Owen, "The Formative Years of Kentucky's Republican Party," 63.

41. KTY, March 17, 1871.

42. Ibid., January 2, 1866.

43. LCJ, October 9, 1874; Patrick A. Lewis, "The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril," 15051.

44. (Columbia, SC) Phoenix, March 26, 1868; J. W. Alvord to General O. O. Howard, January 29, 31, 1870, in Alvord, Letters from the South, 3739; AAC 10 (1871): 42627; Rable, But There Was No Peace, 93; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 810, 4950, 38185; Foner, Reconstruction, 428.