"Although originating not long after the war, it was personal and not political"

As in Kentucky's other mountain counties, in Breathitt County the war's memory changed the political landscape for years afterward. Conservatives who wanted a facsimile of the antebellum order competed with those who either accepted the changes wrought by the war or those who worked to further these changes. Some of the old Jacksonian counties of eastern Kentucky were permanently changed, always after turning out Unionist/Republican majorities; others snapped elastically back to the Democracy. Still others abided somewhere between the two extremes.65 Breathitt County was of the third group.

There were a number of years in which veterans of both sides of the war made a brave attempt at tense but peaceful coexistence. At least for a time, George Noble reasoned that "the true Union men . . . saved the Nation, and not the abolitionists," a variation on the reconciliatory depoliticization of the war's memory that lasted for decades in both North and South.66 This, even after he and fellow Rebels were arrested for foraging livestock and food from Unionist neighbors in November 1865 after other Unionists had promised his parents they would "never law [sue or indict] any of us for what I did." When he was arrested he was taken to Perry County ("All the jails in the mountain counties were burned except that one") and locked away for a short time until his father posted bail. By that time Breathitt County judge David K. Butler (apparently one of the vicinity's only Union Democrats) knew to hire both Union and Confederate deputies-as well as to ignore their shared tendency to drink on duty.67 Reconciliation was difficult but not impossible, and most of Breathitt County's veterans did not feel a need for vengeance. Even though political rifts remained, they endeavored not to let it remain personal-even after fighting their "intimate" civil war. "I do not call all democrats rebels," insisted a Breathitt Unionist in 1869, but this with an admission that the Democratic Party itself still represented disunion.68 Captain William Strong, recently decommissioned from the Three Forks Battalion, experienced his own combination of retribution and forgiveness. He, too, was sued by Breathitt County citizens for the livestock he had commandeered. Unlike Noble, he and other Three Forks veterans Wiley Amis, Wilson Callahan, and Hiram Freeman could all testify that wartime acquisitions were carried out for the purpose of "suppressing the late rebellion" and had the lawsuits transferred to federal courts in Louisville.69 In 1867's election for circuit court judge, Republicans in surrounding counties outvoted Breathitt's Democrats to elect former congressman William H. Randall, probably the first Kentucky jurist to admit Negro court testimony (before it became state law in 1872). Strong and other Unionists had an important ally in the "Radical" judge, and that balanced Strong's sometimes irascible behavior.70 After assaulting one of his plaintiffs, Strong was sued for $500 for assault and battery. George Noble, one of the case's jurors, remembered how "the war spirit was high" in the courtroom and "it was pretty hard to enforce the civil law." Still, he persuaded the other jurors (including one "strong Rebel") to "soften the enemy rather than hardening him" by reducing the fine to $100. The defendant seemed to be somewhat willing to play along; after the trial Strong "treated" the jury at a Jackson grocery store that also served as a tavern. Seeing little threat from the young man he had once captured, Strong also returned Noble's favor by supporting his nomination for town constable.71 Around the same time the captain, still wearing his dragoon's knee-high boots and two gun belts, surprised onlookers when he publicly extended his hand to a former enemy.72 It seemed that anything done in public was saturated by the war's memory.

This did not mean all was forgiven. After the war Jeremiah South supposedly put a $500 bounty on Strong for the lives of his sons Andrew and Jerry. Strong was sleeping in a Jackson hotel when a knife-wielding assailant attacked him. Strong was able to grab the man's Bowie knife and repel the attack, but he remained cautious enough to ask others to stay with him when he lodged in Jackson overnight after that.73 There was no proof that this would-be assassin had been doing South's bidding and, from then on, no more attempts on Strong's life of that type were attempted. Colonel South had his hands full in the Bluegrass for the remainder of his life, and Captain Strong went on to outlive him by nearly two decades.

William Strong maintained peaceful relations with his wealthy first cousin, former Confederate officer Edward C. Strong, who returned to the county judge's bench after David Butler.74 As an estimable landowner himself, William Strong was able to mediate between the area's black and white poor and elites like his cousin. In fact, the self-described "Republican in principle" (who apparently eschewed the "Radical" label, unlike some compatriots) comported himself peaceably after the war, though with occasional sarcasm. Strong feigned mock deference, refusing to "drink before [his] landlord" after a Democrat of his own social and economic standing tried to cajole him with a dram of brandy.75 Strong did not protest when Breathitt County's ex-Confederates voted in 1868 even though the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment forbade it.76 Instead, he showed up at the polls to cast his own vote. He knew that within two years of his winning the war for the Union, he and the Unionists/Republicans had become the minority, ruefully observing in 1869, "We have two parties in Breathitt County; occasionally they will run a democrat and then a rebel."77 It was not the behavior of someone who supposedly tried to, according to E. L. Noble, "rid the county of all but republicans."78 Although he never made any public pronouncements on enfranchisement, as the "special protector of the colored race," he personally represented Breathitt County's greatest extreme of radicalism whether he meant to or not.79 It is especially difficult to explain Strong's long-lasting association with Breathitt County's black minority, many of them former Strong family slaves. Though the association probably began as a wartime marriage of convenience, its longevity suggests that Strong's wartime experience molded his outlook on race and class; in the 1890s he was still considered the "feudal hero" of Breathitt County's landless and an "arch Republican" who, even in old age, refused to back down from confrontation.80 Henderson Kilburn and Hiram Freeman remained loyal to Strong and bore arms on his behalf numerous times after the war. In turn, his Democratic adversaries grudgingly respected him as a formidable power broker. Postwar attempts at compromise between former enemies suggest that mountaineers in one of Kentucky's most war-torn counties recognized the complexities of life after war and were willing to react in ways other than overt retribution-at least, it seems, for the first few years.

This lasted until Kentucky Unionism was split asunder. Aside from Captain Strong, no Federal veteran had played a greater role in punishing Breathitt County's "secesh" majority than former Union lieutenant Wiley Amis. Still, according to Strong and other Republicans, Amis's loyalty during the war had been halfhearted. With Andrew Johnson's 1866 split with Congress, Amis "turned democratic" and, like most other white Kentucky Union veterans, "took the side of the President."81 During the November 1868 elections Amis served as poll judge in Crockettsville, the county's most Republican precinct. Soon after voters gathered, he violated the neutrality of his post, first mocking the opposition's poverty and then threatening Republicans with a club brought, he said, "to break radical heads." "Amis commenced the difficulty himself with me at the polls, and called me an old abolitionist," one Republican testified a few months later. "He asked me how I would like to vote with a nigger, and sit by them and smell of them. I told him that I had rather vote with a nigger, sit by him, smell of him, than to vote with a rebel, and smell of and sit by him, and this ended the discourse between us."82 When Amis saw "the damned radical" William Strong, he verbally menaced his former compatriot until Democratic and Republican bystanders began nervously unbuttoning their holsters. A blood spilling was forestalled at the last minute. "Amis . . . seeing what it would lead to, returned to his seat and the election went on." Amis's aims were partially met after "two or three good Union men left and did not vote." It came to light months later that "good Union people" as well as "cowardly Union men" had stayed home from the polls in other precincts.83 With this coercion, and at least 138 ineligible Rebel votes counted countywide, Democrats carried Breathitt County and the entire eighth congressional district (although Ulysses Grant did quite well in many southeastern counties, his one-third of Breathitt County ballots was only slightly better than his poor showing in Kentucky overall).84 In the end, Amis was inelegantly successful.

Wiley Amis's abuse of power became a matter of public record the next year when Republican congressional candidate Sydney Barnes vainly contested his loss to Democrat George M. Adams. Dozens of depositions from Barnes vs. Adams revealed poll cheating and coercion in every Breathitt precinct (as well as the district's seventeen other counties), apparently more so than in any other county under investigation.85 It stood to reason that the eighth district's most hidebound Democratic county would go above and beyond the pale to support Adams. However, for the exact same reason, it was the county where graft and intimidation would have, theoretically, been least necessary. Even if Breathitt County was founded by followers of Jackson and an unbroken record of antebellum Democratic majority for nearly twenty years, re-creating this Democratic majority after the war required the same violence and intimidation utilized throughout the South. "A more determined democratic element" had regained the electoral advantage-but not without the threat of force.86 In George Noble's mind, a man who still persisted in voting Republican did so only "to spite his neighbors."87 Just as in the rest of Kentucky, "Redemption" came early in Breathitt County. And, just as elsewhere in Kentucky, Democrats employed an increasingly popular term to depoliticize this use of force; during cross-examination Congressman-elect Adams asked a Republican witness if the Election Day affray might have been nothing more than "a very bitter personal feud." The witness did not attempt to insist otherwise.88 Wiley Amis may have sympathized with the Confederacy even as he served as a Federal officer. Afterward he blamed his former compatriot William Strong for championing the war's most important result: black citizenship. (Courtesy of Sherry Lynn Baker via Ray Fox and Kash Eversole descendants) No sui generis dispute between mountaineers insulated from the outside world, Wiley Amis's outburst was one manifestation of a country watching its former slaves becoming citizens during an election that was essentially a national referendum on Reconstruction. The probability of black suffrage, even in a locality in which it would have a negligible electoral impact, was too much to risk. Wiley Amis's performance demonstrated his lack of confidence in his party's chances if unaided by violence. William Strong was Breathitt County's greatest advocate for black rights (granted, with little competition for that distinction) and the one most game to fight for it.

Under unspecified circumstances, Wiley Amis attempted to kill Strong the following winter. Strong did not immediately retaliate, but he began going armed.89 Thus followed what became known as the "Strong-Amis feud," between Amis's "Black Stock" and Strong's "Red Strings."90 The name "Black Stock" may well have been Amis's own ominous creation (he had announced them as his anti-Radical allies during the previous November's election) for himself, his brothers, his Union compatriot Wilson Callahan (apparently befitting, or despite, his position as the Crockettsville precinct's election "sheriff," Callahan maintained quiet during his friend Amis's disruptive behavior), and their friends-most likely including a number of Confederate veterans.91 "Red String," however, had currency elsewhere in the South. The "antiaristocratic" Red String (the name inspired by the book of Joshua), with origins probably in the North Carolina piedmont, was an enigmatic coterie of (mostly) white southern loyalists with connections to the better-known Loyal Leagues and "Heroes of America."92 For years after the war, Red String denoted "the small farmers, tenants, laborers and rougher classes of the region," the Reconstruction South's sansculottes, more willing than most southern Republicans to expose the economic meanings hidden beneath the facade of skin color.93 Despite their general obscurity, one North Carolina Klan klavern duly recognized them as an enemy organization "whose intention is to destroy the rights of the South, or of the States, or of the people, or to elevate the negro to a political equality with [themselves]" in 1871.94 Unlike the Upper South's mostly conservative (especially in Kentucky) Republican organizations, Democrats considered the Red String an existential threat to white supremacy.95 Just as Ku Klux Klan lasted longer in Kentucky than in any other state, the Red String, its opposite number, did the same-at least in Breathitt County. Breathitt County's Red Strings were still a force of interracial dissent and subversion in the 1890s, long after the name had become an obscure footnote of Reconstruction elsewhere in the South.96 And, after that, their class-based political culture outlasted the organization. As late as the New Deal, Breathitt County's landless still clung to the Republican Party, at least in local elections (of course, by then the local Democracy was still controlled by the wealthy).97 More than seventy years after Strong's death, the name Red String remained in local memory, providing an obscure reminder that the Bloody Breathitt narrative was not just a bizarre local legend or a manifestation of eastern Kentucky's alleged feud phenomenon.98 It was, in fact, part and parcel of a much larger struggle for control over the American South.

Details on what occurred between Strong, Amis, and their respective allies are scant and questionable, but it seems that fighting lasted sporadically until 1872 or 1873, when Strong finally "triumphed over his enemies and exterminated them."99 In the summer of 1870 reports of "[a] sort of guerilla war" emerged from Breathitt County. "There are about thirty on each side," one South Carolina paper reported without attribution, "well armed, and on the lookout for each other."100 The most detailed (and perhaps the least unreliable) sequence of events appeared in the Lexington Herald, but not until 1897, a few days after Strong's death: in spring 1870 Wiley Amis and his son John ambushed Strong as he was plowing. Strong took cover and returned fire, wounding John Amis in the legs. Wiley Amis waited until the following September (after his son had fully recovered) before attacking again, this time bringing a larger group of gunmen to lay siege to Strong's house. Hiram Freeman was wounded defending Strong's wife and children before Strong's young son Jim was able to slip away to Jackson to summon help. He returned with circuit court clerk Edward Marcum (William Strong's brother-in-law and his former lieutenant) and more than a dozen others, "nearly all of whom had fought under Cap. Strong" in the war. Marcum's group dispersed the Amises and rescued Strong. Strong appealed to Judge William Randall but was reportedly told that he would have to defend himself (future events suggest Randall used his courage economically). In October Strong gathered his forces together and confronted the superior-numbered Black Stock. All accounts agree that William Strong was the eventual victor after an indeterminable measure of blood was spilled. Wilson Callahan and at least three members of the Amis family were killed, after which Wiley and the other surviving Amises migrated to Kansas (he died in Arkansas, apparently from natural causes, in 1882).101 However large or small the conflict was in comparison to regulator and Klan violence in other parts of the state, the "Strong-Amis feud" began and ended without state intercession. When someone found a souvenir coin identifying Wiley Amis as an officer in the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry in 1898, no one in Kentucky knew where to send it.102 What became known as the "Amis-Strong feud" was a manifestation of a conflict going on throughout the South in the late 1860s, one commenced by the breakdown between the federal government's executive and legislative branches. Closer to home, it reflected Kentucky's postwar Unionist fissure over black citizenship, the same rupture that produced Confederate supremacy from the 1870s until the early 1890s. In fact, it was most likely part of a larger concerted effort to punish white Unionism and destroy black freedom in eastern Kentucky. The Ku Klux Klan and other violent political organizations that undermined Union victory materialized in the mountains as soon as they did in the Bluegrass.103 Their onslaught increased in 1870, the first year black Kentuckians cast votes.104 In fall of that year, Klansmen killed nineteen Union veterans and other Republicans, "most of them white men," in Breathitt and three surrounding counties.105 Estill County's state senator and local Democratic boss served as the head of a multicounty klavern in the early 1870s and led a barrage of torment against freedpeople who came to work in the county's iron industry (the Klan's authority in intensely Unionist Estill speaks to the intensity of "belated Confederate" sentiment Amis shared with other white Kentuckians).106 When federal marshals and cavalrymen captured four wanted Klansmen in Estill and Clay counties in 1871, it was a federal victory rare enough to receive national media attention.107 White mountaineers chose the Klan "rubric" because they saw connections between their own local conflicts and the larger struggle against black enfranchisement and federal authority going on all over the South.108 Even moderate young Democrat George Noble became a Klan "vice-president" after serving as Jackson's town constable. The former was a position, Noble laconically recalled years later, that "gave a man great power over his neighbor."109 Rather than some bizarre, personally motivated abnormality contained within one remote county, the "Strong-Amis feud" was only one battle in an exogenous political war. This, however, is not how it was shared with the outside world. The Herald's and all other descriptions of the "feud" appeared in print many years later, all ignoring Amis's confrontation with Strong at the 1868 election. All highlighted the personal over the political while also calling into question their legitimacy as soldiers by emphasizing their sordid motivations for self-gain. They all blamed it on a personal disagreement over the apportionment of confiscated livestock in the last days of the war or shortly afterward. They also grouped the conflict with others that supposedly defined eastern Kentucky's feud phenomenon.110 Owing to the fact that an earlier generation of Amises, Callahans, and Strongs had all been combatants in the Clay County Cattle War sixty years earlier, and considering that this more recent conflict was ostensibly started over livestock, it was widely assumed later on that this "feud" was nothing more than a continuation of ancient hatreds predating the Civil War (that descendants of both sides of the cattle war were allies during the Civil War was an unfortunate niggling detail).111 What makes the Amis-Strong conflict strange rather than familiar, if anything, was that it resulted in a bloody Unionist victory, the reverse of most reported southern violence circa 1870.112 Yet, by being remembered as a feud, it was not remembered as a political victory for either side. The political propositions were roundly ignored and perhaps even suppressed, while the conflict's longevity was stretched to thirty-five years to give it proper feudal longevity.113 "Although originating not long after the war," J. Stoddard Johnston protested too much in 1899, "it was personal and not political."114 When the conflict's Civil War connections were conceded, it was in as confused and misconstrued a manner as possible; in 1909 a Kentucky newspaperman recalled Breathitt's "two Federal regiments," which "apparently endeavored to exterminate each other" for no discernible reason.115 A few years later, another feud chronicler dubbed the "Strong-Amis feud" the first evidence that Breathitt County was "more fully imbued with the feudal spirit" than anywhere else in the Kentucky mountains.116 It was a spirit that twentieth-century Kentuckians did not want to remember as associated with the state's internal divisions half a century prior. Just as it was used to depoliticize lingering violence immediately after the war, the feud remained useful in the 1910s for separating the nastiest memories from what had finally been deemed a "noble mutual experience that in the long run solidified the nation."117 Short and picayune as it was, the "Strong-Amis feud" challenged this interpretation of the war and what came after it. It was better it be rendered apolitical folklore, if remembered at all.

William Strong avoided portraying himself as a postwar caudillo. In 1879 he told an interviewer that, after his service in the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry (he omitted his service in the more notorious Three Forks Battalion), he had "returned home to live in peace" and had only gone after the Amises after other Breathitt County citizens had asked him to form a supposedly bipartisan militia to end their postwar depredations. Strong fervently denied that he was the "head of a belligerent faction ever since the war," even though he was associated with violence numerous times afterward.118 Whether as a Unionist crusader or a "feudist," his reputation was permanently wedded to Bloody Breathitt.

"Too much attention to politics and not enough to corn"

A large part of the reason the "Strong-Amis feud" was easy to depoliticize was its lack of clear consequences. Strong's victory over the Black Stock did not stymie the Democratic reascendancy that was beginning in 1868. With decade's end came the expiration of the Fourteenth Amendment's ban on Confederates holding office (a ban scarcely enforced in Kentucky if the 1868 elections serve as evidence), a bolstering of the Democratic ticket, and the beginning of a long period of Confederate rule.119 Something very much like the antebellum status quo returned, and Breathitt County returned to the speculative purposes for which it had been created.

With the South family absent and otherwise occupied in the Bluegrass, no one embodied their commercial spirit more than newly elected county judge Edward Strong.120 In 1872 Kentucky's General Assembly authorized the county to increase the price of "vacant and unappropriated lands" in preparation for public sale.121 After doing so, Judge Strong sold a tract of "wild lands" around Troublesome Creek (a large tributary to the north fork of the Kentucky River) to a land company from outside of the county, unintentionally drawing ire from local farmers, some of whom may have been Red Strings. Farming practices had not changed since before the war, and these "vacant and unappropriated" woods and pastures were still vital to the livelihood of squatters as well as landed farmers with adjacent property. When Judge Strong's surveyors arrived to draw boundaries near Troublesome Creek, an armed squad dissuaded them. This demonstration of armed force delayed further surveying of the area for years.122 The "wild lands" remained wild regardless of who owned them.

Speculation was set back again the next year when the courthouse in Jackson burned to the ground, destroying extant land grants and calling into question virtually every land tenure in Breathitt County.123 Those who laid claim to the old eighteenth-century land grants, most notably Jeremiah South and his heirs, were dealt a serious blow by the apparent arson, and they were forced to fight for their ownership claims in court for decades afterward.124 On the other hand, the fire was a boon to those who most depended upon large expanses of unfenced, untitled land, those with little or no land-a population that had notably bucked the county leadership's pro-Confederate leanings in the previous decade.

As "republicans of the war element," William Strong and the Red Strings were implicated, but no indictments were passed down.125 This was not the first time Breathitt County's courthouse had burned. When it had happened last, in 1864, courthouse fires in Kentucky were practically commonplace. They were not uncommon nine years later during the counterrevolutionary violence precipitating "Redemption," but by then they were more likely to be caused by sundry local crises of legitimacy; they could no longer be blamed on invaders from the outside world. "Republicans of the war element" or otherwise, anyone who had motive to destroy the locus of state at this late date was probably someone from within the county's borders.

The 1873 fire was a sign of discord, but 1874 proved to be the county's-and perhaps Kentucky's-most chaotic year since the war. White-on-black killings had increased since 1870, but August and September of 1874 constituted a crescendo of violence. August 1874 marked the first election cycle since the U.S. Senate's passage of what would become the 1875 Civil Rights Act. In a fevered combination of conservative alarm and new assertions of black rights, local violence erupted throughout Kentucky and the South, most notably a "terrible war between the whites and blacks" in the southern Bluegrass.126 While newspapers gave Kentucky's disturbances due notice, the northern press was more keenly focused on Louisiana's White League revolt.127 William Strong's first public act of violence in years came soon after the tumultuous state elections, when a white man named David Flinchum allegedly murdered a Negro named William Hargis and was not prosecuted. With Hiram Freeman, Henderson Kilburn, and Freeman's sons William and Daniel, "Nigger Dick" Strong (a freedman said to have once belonged to Strong's father) and ten other unnamed men of both races, he performed what one newspaper termed a "coup d'etat," taking possession of the newly rebuilt courthouse and its surroundings.128 Strangely, Strong and the Red Strings seemed to have encountered little resistance, and there is no evidence of anyone in Jackson killed or injured, including Flinchum. By 1874's standard, it was relatively peaceful, a demonstration of the Unionists' refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the county's law enforcement and the men who ran it.

By mid-September rumors had spread to the Bluegrass that "outlaws, under the command of one Strong . . . have possession of the place and rule the county."129 Within a few days reports claimed that "200 desperados" had barricaded themselves in Jackson's courthouse.130 Unknown parties requested Governor Preston H. Leslie to send members of the militia to restore peace. Since his inauguration, Leslie had styled himself an active executive, but had since struggled with a legislature reluctant to punish or prevent mob violence.131 Perhaps more than any other Kentucky governor of the period, Leslie acknowledged the "weakness [and] often venality of county law enforcement officials," even if most of those officials were his party mates, and he sympathized with citizens "who looked more and more to the authorities at Frankfort, instead of to the local authorities."132 Still, he had been accused of personal hesitation in dealing with Klan violence, even after dispatching the state militia to two separate trouble spots in August 1874. Alarmed by the exaggerated reports, Leslie dispatched a militia company to Breathitt County and requested that Judge Randall suspend his other court dates in order to schedule a special session in Jackson that would allow no case continuances.133 After false reports that the company had been attacked, Leslie anticipated further requests from Breathitt and sent four more companies. By the end of September more militiamen had been sent to Breathitt County than to any of the counties that had recently requested interventions.134 Strong and the Red Strings had relinquished control of the town and the courthouse before the militia arrived, and they subsequently disarmed without any recorded protest.135 Beside the fact that they were far outnumbered by the militia, Strong and the Freemans were less reluctant to give up their arms knowing that the court was to be handed over to Judge Randall. Strong was not indicted for his attempted insurrection, and the Freemans, although indicted by a county magistrate in Crockettsville for delinquent murder accusations, were dismissed from trial due to a lack of witnesses for the prosecution.136 Randall's early arrival may well have been Strong's actual goal.

Still, Strong's rebellion did not affect lasting change in Breathitt County. Judge Randall's leniency to the Red Strings may have been reported because, shortly after the beginning of the special court session, Governor Leslie instructed Randall to turn the court over to Breathitt County's Democratic county judge, James Back. In November Back indicted Strong and the Freemans for carrying concealed weapons, but all four men were found not guilty.137 But Back did not attempt to reverse any of Randall's rulings, nor did he further pursue Strong and the Freemans for their earlier crimes. Randall's dismissal altered Leslie's original plans for the special court session. After Back was given control of the court, both criminal and civil cases were carried over to future court sessions, against Leslie's instructions.138 No one was ever indicted for William Hargis's murder.

Judge William H. Randall's impressive record as a Reconstruction-era champion of civil rights did not help him bring peace to Breathitt County. (E. Polk Johnson, A History of Kentucky and Kentuckians) Strong's courthouse capture was motivated by Hargis's unpunished death, but there were other complicating factors that probably encouraged more farmers to support or join the Red Strings. It came amid Breathitt County's worst economic straits since the war, repercussions from the Panic of 1873 and a bizarre blight or storm that caused a localized corn famine.139 Whatever his strategy, Strong's tactic in 1874 imitated an ongoing trend in the Reconstruction South. Court building usurpations were common in the 1870s although, unlike Strong's, the majority of recorded instances were carried out for counterrevolutionary purposes by groups like the Ku Klux Klan to prevent black participation in elections or jurisprudence. The Colfax Massacre in Grant Parish, Louisiana, in 1873, one of the single bloodiest events in southern history, began with a similar confrontation over a courthouse's physical custody.140 Strong's forced occupation was quixotic and perhaps little more than symbolic but, like that of his political opposites in Colfax the previous year, it represented his refusal to accept what had become of his home county.

Strong's attempt at insurrection and the ensuing militia occupation and trials made national news, and the first public association between Breathitt County and feuds. The Republican New York Times lambasted Kentucky as a place where political disputes continued to slow the state's postwar development. Continuing political scuffles, the Times argued, were a natural outgrowth of the creation of "pauper counties," the result of partitioning counties into smaller and smaller units for electoral purposes while simultaneously creating smaller, poorer tax bases, "a Democratic luxury for which the remainder of the state must pay." The correspondent blamed the county's inhabitants for their troubles, not in the context of their being mountaineers but rather in their identity as white Kentuckians. "Too much attention to politics and not enough to corn," said the Times reporter, "has brought want to many households, even in this corn-producing region."141 A Republican newspaper in Cincinnati reacted to the governor's dispatch of the state militia by speculating that he did so only for fear that "frequent outbreaks in the South, especially at this time, will injure the prospects of Democratic candidates in the North at the approaching elections," or that this and other contemporary outbreaks would result in federal involvement. "This modern activity of Governor Leslie, after hesitating so long with the Ku Klux raiding within sight of his residence, it is said, is the result of his fear that Uncle Sam will suppress the lawlessness in the State if the governor is unable or unwilling to do such work."142 Military Reconstruction was dwindling throughout the South, but the fear of its expansion to Kentucky was still tangible.

As they had since the 1860s, Kentucky Democrats used the concept of feud to parry these attacks. "The troubles in the county of Breathitt have been much exaggerated, especially by the radical press of Louisville and Cincinnati," said J. Stoddard Johnston's Kentucky Yeoman.143 The courthouse capture was simply the "outgrowth of an old feud between two families of the county."144 The Yeoman's hated adversary, the Republican Louisville Commercial, also used familial language, but to implicate Breathitt County in an attack on Kentucky's planter elite. "Men who carry on a controversy of open violence for years always involve others in their difficulties, especially if they belong to the so-called 'respectable families,' families of 'high social position.' There is no more dangerous or delusive influence exercised in society than that of ungentlemanly gentlemen and families of mythical respectability, who strut about with a package of penitentiary morals hidden under silk and broadcloth."145 Of course neither of these explanations had the faintest association with Captain Strong's courthouse capture. Brushing Flinchum and Hargis aside, the Yeoman and other papers conflated the insurrection with a series of assaults, deadly and otherwise, leading up to July 1874. Although Strong was said to have taken part in this "Jett-Little feud," there is no proof of his participation as either aggressor or victim. Strong was not even subpoenaed as a witness in the resultant personal injury lawsuit.146 It was better, however, for Strong's nakedly political crime to be cast within a contemporaneous apolitical conflict, one that played out (supposedly) in the fashion of an antebellum conte of southern intrigue. Bloody Breathitt was a plainly violent place in 1874, but distinguishing between different motivations and types of violence was to be discouraged.

Both of these Bluegrass newspapers' accounts demonstrated the strength that the language of the familial, and the intimation of there being some antebellum feud condition at work, held for their own antagonistic purposes. While the Yeoman used family to dissociate the incident from contemporary Ku Kluxing and such, the Commercial used the language of kinship to denounce what it saw as the harmful remnants of the South's ancien regime. Feuds, as they were understood in a nineteenth-century context, were a family-based phenomenon associated with the southern aristocracy.147 The fact that the courthouse raid was not acted out by a family group, of the planter class or otherwise, was immaterial to either account; both served the papers' public agendas. In further coverage, the Commercial scolded the Yeoman for failing to compete with smaller "stiff Democratic paper[s]" in its coverage, implying that the Yeoman was insensitive to the state's problems with civil unrest.148 Regardless of the actual details, Kentucky's most partisan members of the fourth estate saw Breathitt County as a foil for larger political purposes.

It became the task of Henry Watterson's Louisville Courier-Journal to diminish Breathitt County's political significance altogether. No newspaper dedicated more ink to Breathitt County in 1874, and no newspaper, consequently, ended up with a more varied, and puzzling, record of the year's events. The paper entitled one of its earliest articles on the incident "White and Negro Rioters in Breathitt," a headline that acknowledged the incident's similarity to contemporary, more blatantly race-based, crimes in other parts of the state.149 However, in weeks to come the Courier-Journal became more intent on distancing Breathitt County from the rest of the state and, as was customary in its and other papers' treatment of their state during Reconstruction, depoliticizing violence. Rather than placing the county's disorder within a larger regional or statewide political context, the Courier-Journal highlighted the isolation of the "beautiful, wild semi-barbarian county."150 The racially amorphous Freemans were first identified as "the terror of this county" since the Civil War but were scarcely given any other specific mention in the interest of diminishing the story's potential for racial significance.151 After the state militia's arrival, the paper's coverage of Breathitt County dwindled until the only subject of interest was the militia's incidental day-to-day activities; the paper's final story dealt mainly with a baseball game, complete with box scores, played between two companies.152 The seventy state troops remained another six weeks, apparently without incident, until the first week of December.153 As always, the Courier-Journal tried to maintain a middle ground between Kentucky's left and right flanks, befitting Henry Watterson's philosophy of North/South rapprochement. Other than placing implicit blame on the small number of people of color involved in the courthouse incident, Watterson's paper was less willing to make hay out of it than Republican newspapers but still willing to address the story to a greater extent than the Yeoman. Throughout the Reconstruction years, Henry Watterson's chief goal was to maintain his role as a leader among white southerners while simultaneously raising his state above the South's madding crowd (a balancing act he perfected), and by brushing Kentucky's violence under the rug and belittling black Kentuckians' role in their state without blatantly attacking them like other editors might choose to do (after all, race was the politically divisive issue of the day and-excepting his moment of anti-Hayes saber rattling in the winter of 187677-political divisiveness was to be avoided).154 Explaining away troubles in an obscure, overwhelmingly white county far from the Bluegrass was hardly among his most daunting challenges, even following the ominous significance of white and black men cooperatively seizing a public building. Four years later, the paper misremembered the whole affair as "originat[ing] from family quarrels and feuds."155

"Neither the state nor the United States have done anything for Breathitt, and, in turn, Breathitt has 'done nothing for nobody' "

In the end, the Red Strings' 1874 show of force did not deter the county's Democrats and may well have hardened many voters' resolve against the former Unionists. In the 1876 presidential election, Breathitt County had its largest Democratic turnout in its history, no doubt encouraged by the continuance of local Klan activity.156 But William Strong was given a new opportunity in 1878, when a newcomer challenged the local Democratic cabal. In 1875 a young Virginia lawyer named John Wesley Burnett moved to the county, joined the county bar, and made friends with then sheriff James Hagins and others in and around Jackson. Even though Burnett had a reputation for brashness (he was rumored to have come to Breathitt County to escape the repercussions of a duel he had won in Virginia), in the first three years after his arrival, he managed to remain aloof from Breathitt's internecine conflicts-until he decided on a bid for county judge.157 Burnett was a Democrat; but as a political neophyte with no preexistent ties to the county, he was an interloper on the post-Confederate political scene. The Democratic committee nominated veteran jurist Edward Strong, and one prominent Democrat, county treasurer John Seldon Hargis, swore to spend $1,000 to prevent Burnett's election.158 The weeks leading up to the August election were fraught with threats of violence, causing former county judge David Butler to withdraw from contention.159 Though considered "lawless" by Democrats, William Strong influenced an angry Republican minority, particularly those provoked a few years earlier by Edward Strong's land sale. A brush fire that singed at least fourteen square miles of pasture in the northern part of the county the previous spring made the "wildlands" that the former judge wished to sell that much more vital to drovers.160 Edward Strong sought out his cousin's endorsement through a third party, but William Strong instead endorsed Burnett and promised "to help protect him, no matter who molested him."161 The young newcomer, the first electoral challenge to Breathitt County's Democratic rule in ten years, won the August election by eight votes.162 Before his election, Hagins had deputized Burnett to arrest Jerry Little (quite possibly the same Jerry Little involved in the "Jett-Little feud"). Burnett was said to have acted with particular brutality in carrying out the arrest, and after Little's subsequent acquittal, Little's family remained angry. When Little's uncle, Jason Little, was arrested for murdering his wife, newly elected Judge Burnett had him transferred more than one hundred miles away to Lexington.163 Local Democrats interpreted the arrest and removal as politically motivated affronts or, just as likely, used the controversy as a stalking horse against Burnett.

Jason Little's return for trial during late November's circuit court session turned into a referendum on John Burnett's legitimacy as an elected judge. A confrontation between Civil War factions developed on Jackson's main thoroughfare before he could be removed from the jailhouse. On one side, a mob led by Confederate veterans John Aikman and Alfred Gambrel amassed, threatening to release Little. On the other, William Strong, Henderson Kilburn, Hiram Freeman, and Freeman's sons Daniel and William as well as a dozen other Red Strings who had come to town, according to Strong, to see that Burnett's (and circuit court judge William Randall's) court authority was respected.164 As Randall instructed the grand jury, the two groups faced off down the street from the courthouse.

Verifiable stories of encounters between Aikman and Strong are scant, but many accounts of Bloody Breathitt said that they had been personal enemies since the war.165 In 1873 Strong and seven other Union veterans testified against John Aikman in a murder trial. Five former Confederates testified in Aikman's defense and Aikman was subsequently acquitted.166 While their enmity over the years may have been exaggerated, Aikman can be seen as Strong's opposite number in 1878: a feared Confederate veteran who did not consider the Civil War a closed matter and never showed particular concern for diktat or morality in demonstrating his displeasure. His connections to the Little family are unclear (most of the Littles had been Unionists), and it is likely that Aikman and others simply saw an opportunity to draw the Red Strings into the open.

After both groups had assembled near the courthouse, Daniel Freeman approached Aikman and demanded to know his intentions. Declaring he would "take a dead nigger," Aikman shot him. When William Freeman ran into the street to retrieve his brother Aikman shot him as well. Daniel died soon thereafter but William survived, even after lying in the street for a number of hours before any of the Red Strings were able to rescue him (William Strong later said he eventually died from his injuries).167 At some point later in the day, a Red String named Wallace Maguire killed Tom Little, Jason Little's cousin who had joined with Aikman (William Strong later said that Tom Little had threatened to lead "two hundred Kuklux" from nearby Wolfe County).168 With Aikman's group unable to free Jason Little, the day ended in Pyrrhic victory for the Red Strings.

Calm was temporarily restored after both groups retreated behind whatever cover was available. However, as Burnett was walking to the courthouse to convene court with Judge Randall the following day, Gambrel fatally shot him, prompting Randall to flee the county, only later sending word to Frankfort.169 Even during the most horrible days of Reconstruction's crumbling into "Redemption," judges were rarely gunned down. Burnett's death represented a condition of local civil unrest far worse than anything reported in Kentucky at least since 1874. It was certainly a far greater emergency than that year's apparently bloodless courthouse coup that had prompted state intervention.

Yet a return of the militia was not an obvious proposition. Governor Leslie had run on a reform platform with an emphasis on bringing peace to Kentucky even while the rest of the South burned. During his term nearly $58,000 of state expenditures went into dispatching the State Guard to Breathitt and at least four other troubled counties.170 His successor, Confederate veteran James McCreary, was of a more conservative bent, preferring that Kentucky's counties utilize their generous measures of allowed local sovereignty to take care of themselves.171 When word of trouble drifted westward to Frankfort during the last week of November, McCreary initially dismissed the reports of rioting in Jackson as exaggerations. A county judge's homicide was not enough to persuade Governor McCreary to take action in Jackson, despite Judge Randall's constitutionally mandated request.

Executive complacency was not all that was at work. In 1877 Louisville hosted one manifestation of the Great Railroad Strike, the largest labor strike in American history, bringing commerce to a halt and causing massive property damage. City fathers were especially disturbed by a new cooperation the riot engendered between white and black workers. A few months later, emboldened immigrant laborers founded Louisville's first Workingmen's Party.172 Fearful of future uprisings, the General Assembly revised Kentucky's militia law later in the year. In April 1878 the Louisville Legion, an urban militia unit not mustered since the close of the Mexican War, was revived and captained by both Confederate and Union veterans (although the former outnumbered the latter four to one).173 The new sense of class antagonism provided an excellent opportunity for cheerful agreement between upwardly mobile Rebels and Yankees, and a grand step toward depoliticizing the war memory.174 Considerations of blue and gray notwithstanding, the new arrangement represented a stark divergence from the mentalities and strategies that had dominated Kentucky military life since the war. Most of the harm inflicted upon black and white Kentuckians since 1865 was meted out in rural areas, and it was there that Kentucky's militia had found itself most often until the mid-1870s. Since then, Klan and regulator violence had ebbed somewhat and white Kentuckians, particularly those of Henry Watterson's "New Departure" school of thought, were reluctant to believe that violence born of the war (at least when they were willing to admit said causation) could still bedevil the state. The Bluegrass urban middle class recognized that threats to civil order would now more likely emerge from cities, and it was deemed more important that Kentucky use its armed forces to protect commercial interests from further labor disruptions.175 In 1874 William Strong's courthouse capture, not unlike the actions of White Leagues, Red Shirts, Pale Faces, and Knights of the White Carmelia farther south, made Jackson one among a number of trouble spots in Kentucky. In contrast, Breathitt County in 1878 did not appear to Governor McCreary and other urban Kentuckians to represent a continuation of old problems so much as an unfortunate distraction from newer ones. Too much acknowledgment of the politics behind Breathitt County rioting might have suggested otherwise. After all, Reconstruction was over, and it had never happened in Kentucky anyway.

The deluge of condemnations of the Jackson situation from northern newspapers was stinging. The Republican New York Times, almost as eager to wave the bloody shirt as it had been during the worst years of Reconstruction, reported that "not one man in 10 who commits murder in Kentucky is hanged."176 "It may, perhaps, occur to Governor McCreary that it is disgraceful to have such scenes of violence and bloodshed enacted in a sovereign state of the Union," crowed the usually apolitical New York Herald, "but in any case the need of preserving the 'prominent citizens' of even so small a place as Jackson should move him to action. The State of the 'Mill Boy of the Slashes' [one of the late Henry Clay's nicknames] has no 'prominent citizens' to spare just now."177 Conscious of criticism from the northern press as well as Kentucky's papers, and equally conscious of the ramifications of a public official's violent death, Governor McCreary reluctantly dispatched the Legion to Jackson in early December.178 Soon after the Legion's arrival, Judge Randall returned and court was reconvened, only to be interrupted by political maneuvering.179 After Randall convicted Jason Little for his wife's murder, the Republican judge was removed from the bench and replaced by Louisville probate judge William Jackson to try the "conspirators" in John Burnett's death.180 Randall's party affiliation, and his flight from the county a month earlier, made him too controversial for the more politically charged cases. Judge Jackson was a former Confederate brigadier general and a more acceptable presence among Breathitt Democrats.181 An out-of-county jury convicted Alfred Gambrel for Burnett's murder, while Wallace Maguire, the only one of Strong's allies to be put on trial, was convicted for killing Tom Little.182 Aikman had fled the county on the advice of a Klan collaborator but was later captured and convicted for conspiring to murder Burnett. He was, however, acquitted for killing Daniel Freeman.183 Before his capture, the Kentucky Yeoman printed Aikman's letters accusing William Strong of using the chaotic situation for material gain.184 The influential South family eventually interceded on Aikman's and Gambrel's behalf, and both were pardoned.185 Breathitt County's old Democratic order was now truly restored, partly due to its own actions but not without help from the Kentucky state government.

Judge John Burnett's shooting death completely overshadowed those of his would-be defenders, William and Daniel Freeman, the biracial grandchildren of a slave. With this in mind, the shooting of the Freeman brothers looks quite familiar in the 1870s, people of color killed or injured amid a struggle for power by an all-white Democratic Party. As far away as Bloody Breathitt was from the former Confederacy, its incentive for violence in November 1878 was essentially a southern one. The northern press, particularly Republican papers, seemed to recognize this.

This was why it was so important to Kentucky Democrats that the Freeman brothers' roles as aggressors and victims, the racial/political meanings behind Bloody Breathitt, be minimized. No one played a greater role in doing this than the Louisville Courier-Journal. In 1874, after William Strong's capture of the courthouse first caught the Louisville paper's attention, Henry Watterson's column space was still spent more on terror farther to the South (most notably Louisiana's White League riots), and news from Breathitt County was relatively commonplace. Since then, Watterson had personally stirred the sectional pot, calling for a Democratic march on Washington, DC, to support presidential candidate Samuel Tilden.186 Even after reestablishing his New Departure stance, he and his editorial staff were still acutely sensitive to Kentucky's portrayal by the northern press. Initially, Watterson's task was defending Breathitt County-and, by extension, Kentucky-against their censure, particularly since phrases like "Kentucky KuKluxers" were bandied about in Pennsylvania. "These Kentucky KuKluxers are very much like the Mollie Maguires of this State," the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, "except that the latter were ignorant and poor, while the Kentucky knaves have had the benefit of education and are all in comfortable circumstances."187 Before long, to counter this northern perspective, Watterson and other Democrats began a long series of propaganda harangues on Breathitt County to prove that its populace actually was as "ignorant and poor" as the Pennsylvania coalfield's Irish killers, and isolated far from the real Kentucky and the South.

For a while, this involved grudgingly admitting the politics involved, as when the "copperhead" Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer noted that Strong had been "a notorious home guard and bushwhacker during the war" (the Courier-Journal also mislabeled him as a Home Guard).188 After the Louisville Legion was sent eastward, the Republican Cincinnati Gazette announced, "At the last State election [Breathitt] county was Democratic by a vote of nearly three to one."189 The Courier-Journal defended Breathitt County against northern Republicans' hypocritical jabs of "race prejudice" and Ku Kluxing and blaming the county's "Loyal" (that is, Unionist) minority for causing the trouble.190 When news arrived that many of the participants were of the same party of former Unionists that had captured the courthouse in 1874, Watterson countered the Ohio paper's insinuation with the subheading "Bad News for Deacon [Richard] Smith [the Daily Gazette's editor]-the Mobs Said to Be Loyal [Unionist] Bushwhackers." "The whole difficulty appears to be a Family Quarrel Among Republicans," he disingenuously reported, "who proved their loyalty during the war between the States by bushwhacking and murdering, and are now practicing among themselves."191 The fact that the riot had multiracial participation did not mean it was racially motivated, reasoned the Courier-Journal, since Breathitt County's population included only thirty-one black men over the age of twenty-one. "Those figures are sufficient to convince even that truly good and pious man, Deacon Richard Smith that the present trouble is not one of races, though one of the killed and one of the wounded are negroes."192 Watterson, determined that the latest riot was not to be pointed to as a persistence of rebellion in Kentucky, went to great lengths to see to it that the blame for the riot was placed upon the former Unionists while ignoring the fact that their adversaries were led by Confederate veterans.193 It was they who had ambushed the county judge, but Watterson distorted the facts by saying that Burnett was killed due to "his being a Democrat."194 After other papers' interest in Breathitt County began to flag, the Courier-Journal changed its portrayal as the trials began, accentuating the county's physical isolation and its relationship to exogenous politics-while still defending it to a degree. "Neither the state nor the United States have done anything for Breathitt," the paper intoned, "and, in turn, Breathitt has 'done nothing for nobody.' "195 The same correspondent concluded that he would "sooner live on the western plains and take the chance of being scalped by Sitting Bull, than to live in Breathitt County at the present time."196 In early 1879, during the rioters' trials, the Courier-Journal began to sound less sympathetic toward Breathitt County while retaining a portrayal of the community as a country as foreign to the Bluegrass as possible. Rather than rising against the New York Times's contention that the Ku Klux Klan "were gentle citizens compared with the desperadoes who infest the ravines and hills of Breathitt" (after it had once placed the Klan in Breathitt with no mention of topography), the Courier-Journal described Breathitt County as a savage environment with "meadows that were stripped of all pastoral suggestions" and "a land which did not overflow with honey and where civilization was but a puling strangled infant."197 This change in tone followed soon after the revelation that (and, to the Courier-Journal's credit, it was acknowledged) Confederates were the primary aggressors.

Shortly before this description was printed, a Courier-Journal correspondent interviewed William Strong and exonerated him as having acted in a purely defensive manner during the riot.198 Although Strong had been named specifically in 1874's courthouse capture, the reporter did not press the matter, accepting Strong's insistence that he had kept the peace since Wiley Amis took flight years beforehand. But by doing so, the paper belied the political and sectional stance it had taken toward the situation just short weeks earlier. The "King Bee" of Breathitt County was no longer a radical Unionist, "a noted Federal freebooter," as the Courier-Journal had said weeks earlier, but a quasi-Scots "chieftain" with American Indian likenesses, albeit "sans horns, war paint and other paraphernalia."199 "Instead of looking fierce as the lion in his native jungle, or the tiger in defense of her cub, his face was as calm as the surface of a sleeping lake and reminded me no more of war than do the innocent flowers of May. I felt considerably relieved when I shook hands with him and beheld that springtime smile upon his face, for my memory was just then quite vivid with recollection of the adverse criticisms I had indulged in toward the mountain Captain, and the smile dispelled the thought that he had come to chaw me up."200 A few days after interview was published, the Kentucky Yeoman complained that the Courier-Journal had handled Strong too "delicately."201 This was years before Stoddard Johnston learned the subtle craft of depoliticizing violence. In defanging William Strong, the more centrist paper was simply following the subterfuge it had used throughout the 1870s in most of its discussions of killings in Kentucky. Even if Strong was not the monster the correspondent had originally believed him to be (no doubt because of local Democrats' whispers), his image had gone from Union partisan to quasi-oriental exotic. Although he retained the title of "mountain Captain," by 1879 the partisanship that had led to his captain's commission in the previous decade was beginning to fade-thanks partly to papers like the Courier-Journal.

William Strong did not apparently try to counter this portrayal. He acknowledged his controversial position during the war but did not relate it to the 1878 election. He spoke of Burnett, his cousin Edward Strong, and others strictly by name, not by their political affiliation. Like other former guerrillas, Strong knew his enemies as local familiars before any of them chose different sides in the Civil War.202 At odds with John Aikman for more than fifteen years by the time of the 1879 interview, the captain had no need to place anonymous epithets like "Rebel" on a rival whose genealogy he could probably describe in detail.

There were other reasons as well. Captain Strong's struggle had always been against people he knew intimately, either because of kinship or age-old familiarity. Strong's actions, both before this interview and afterward, demonstrated unambiguous Republican militancy. But when discussing matters with a representative from the outside world, especially a reporter for one of the United States' most important Democratic publications, it behooved him to be sketched as a colorful, apolitical rustic. He knew Kentucky's political tides had turned against him, and describing himself as a impenitent Union partisan would probably not help his interests.

Altina Waller has identified the Louisville Courier-Journal's coverage of Breathitt County in 187879 as the media's initial "placement of feuding in the mountains."203 Considering that the paper's coverage began with a different tone than that with which it ended, and taking into account coverage from other newspapers of differing political stripes, there is room for more elaboration on this point. Even when the fact that violence was born out of competition between political parties could not be denied, the significance of race could be. As the harsh memory of Reconstruction became more distant, even northern members of the media followed suit. One delusional northern newspaper went as far as to explain, without elaboration, "There is no distinction between races up in that country."204 It was simpler and less troubling to tell this big lie than it would have been to discover why black and white mountaineers would take up arms together, especially with Reconstruction over. It was not long after that black involvement in Bloody Breathitt was forgotten.

In its place, Kentucky's flagship paper reified the otherness of what would later be called the "mountain whites." When, just after the Legion departed the mountains, reports of a courthouse riot in Perry County reached Louisville, Henry Watterson curtly remarked: "The people in the mountain counties need civilizing."205 Watterson's assessment of the eastern half of the two Kentuckys did not explicitly employ the idea of feud, as he and other observers would later, to describe Breathitt County and its environs.206 It did, however, demonstrate a commonly held determination to depoliticize a blatantly political problem in his state. Political and racial contingencies could be camouflaged by the mountain people's inherent savagery.

On its way home, the Louisville Legion was welcomed in Frankfort by a brass band and Governor McCreary. The relieved Democrat proclaimed the Legion an embodiment of the Second Amendment's well-regulated militia clause and commended their defense of the "good name and fame of Kentucky."207 In his message to the Kentucky General Assembly later in 1879, McCreary declared, "No county is more orderly or peaceable than Breathitt."208 His pronouncement of success failed to acknowledge that, less than a month after the Louisville Legion withdrew from Jackson, Breathitt County's log jailhouse had been destroyed by a mob in apparent reaction to the convictions of Little, Gambrel, et al.209 The following May a Confederate veteran named Andrew Carpenter was killed in ambush while working in his field.210 One national publication judged Breathitt County's troubles to be the outcome of "an imperfect organization [resulting] from the practical isolation of the people, the unlettered authorities, and the absence of schools and moral example" as well as the lack of contact with "more advanced communities," a summation happily echoed in the Bluegrass's "advanced communities," which had only just begun to eye the mountains' untapped natural wealth.211 Even as death and destruction continued in Breathitt County, Kentucky Democrats' apolitical interpretation of Bloody Breathitt had taken permanent hold. Within a few years it would determine how the United States thought of the supposedly all-white eastern Kentucky mountains and, by extension, southern Appalachia as a whole.

"A better, healthier public sentiment"

Andrew Carpenter's end marked a change in tactics for the Red Strings. Strong was never going to legitimately challenge his county's Democratic cabal. If the deaths that resulted from his support of Judge Burnett had proven anything, it was that his own public displays of force were of limited benefit; in the end, Kentucky's state government would always support his Democratic enemies. Still, unlike so many other southern Unionists who had already accepted Democratic "home rule," Strong refused to accede to those with whom he had fought for control of his county.

For this reason, William Strong stepped back to fighting a war of position, one paradoxically more bitterly violent than the war of maneuver he had tried since 1874. Gang occupations of the Jackson streets gave way to snipers skulking around secluded horse paths miles from the town. Between 1879 and 1884, at least nine men fell in "bushwhacker" killings attributed to Strong and the Red Strings. Strong's new practice guaranteed that, should he or his followers be indicted, witnesses and juries would fear being the next victims. Violence in Breathitt County was still as intimate as it had been during the Civil War. For the rest of his life Strong was wary of attacks but, for the most part, he strode around his home county without fear.

As horrible as this new state of affairs was, Captain Strong could always claim that, starting with the national rebellion he helped vanquish, his killing was always a response, not a drawing of first blood. He never tried to justify his actions, except perhaps in one apocryphal exchange published just after his death. "On one occasion a citizen of Breathitt county was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary for killing a man. He met Capt. Strong a few minutes after sentence had been passed and asked: 'How is it, Capt. Strong, that when I kill one man they send me to the penitentiary, and when you kill twenty men you are not even indicted?' The captain replied: 'I was right when I killed my men, and you were wrong.' "212 Untold numbers of white southerners dissented against their respective communities during the war, and many continued to do so during the Reconstruction years. Few, however, were willing to commit warlike atrocities like Strong did (the bulk of historical scholarship insists Unionists were far more likely to be victims than aggressors). Fewer still kept up after white Democratic "home rule" was complete. It is difficult to imagine that William Strong would go to such great lengths if he did not believe in the righteousness of his actions.

Or that of the Red Strings. Another reason for Strong's lack of indictments was the plausible deniability his followers' loyalty afforded him. Henderson Kilburn, broadly estimated the deadliest Red String, supposedly carried out most, if not all, of these ambushes. In January 1884 he and a Negro teenager named Ben Strong (most likely a descendant of Strong family slaves) were arrested for the murder of a purported Klansman named William Thorp. Thorp, before dying, identified Kilburn as his killer but Ben Strong was named as an accomplice for hiding Kilburn and bringing him food. After their arraignment both men were kept in the jailhouse without bail to await the next circuit court session. Sometime after midnight on April 9, approximately fifty masked men, "very orderly in their proceedings" and "under a leader who directed every movement with precision and dispatch," gathered around the jail and forcibly extracted them. The pair was then hanged side by side from the courthouse portico, both bodies pinned with notes instructing that they not be removed for a day.213 As always, the courthouse, the physical embodiment of the polis, was crucial to those who sought to bring about change, and to those who tried to prevent it. Just as William Strong's capture of the courthouse ten years earlier represented the Red Strings' attempt to reaffirm their wartime victory in Breathitt County, the lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong in front of the same structure demonstrated that their crimes violated the commonweal and that deadly justice was meted out in a public setting.214 The murder of Judge Burnett and the lynchings nearly six years later showed that local Democrats had realized that their own brand of extralegal violence was necessary for the maintenance of their status quo. The double lynching was met with approval both in Breathitt County and in the outside world. Since arriving in Jackson a year earlier, Methodist missionary John J. Dickey had witnessed various small crimes supposedly brought about by alcohol and isolation and, in his judgment, this was no coincidence. After seeing the mob gather, he knew that their deaths reflected "the sentiment of the county" and "a better, healthier public sentiment" to come. Even though he was evidently unsure of their identities, Dickey assured himself that "these regulators [were] of the better class."215 At least one Bluegrass editor agreed with Dickey. "The war in Breathitt County has ended," he said shortly after the lynching. "Circuit court is now in session and perfect peace prevails."216 Lynching, the "definitive metaphor for racial oppression," appeared in Breathitt County just as it began to increase in much of the rest of the South-and with the concomitant rituals and procedures associated with lynching for decades to come.217 Its first recorded usage in Breathitt (the first two, according to the most comprehensive survey, of seven lynching victims in Kentucky that year) coincided with eastern Kentucky's becoming the generally accepted locale for feud violence.218 White Kentuckians considered lynching a more orderly form of violence than anything feud suggested-in fact, this form of majoritarian violence that so many white Kentuckians looked upon with approval might yet have proven to be the cure for feuds and the outlawry they entailed (although some Democrats interpreted the lynching as a renewal of "the old feud").219 The lynching of the two men at the county's seat of government indicated not only that their deaths were the will of the county's population but also that the lynching had been acted out in the interest of law and order, a law and order determined by the wealthier landowners who headed the local Democratic Party.220 A highly ritualized, grisly performance, it was communal in one sense. But, like many other lynchings of the era, it was overtly political as well, since it was directed at those who had challenged the prevailing political party.221 And it apparently performed its intended function. The lynching of his most brutal compatriot and the black man who shared his surname marked the end of William Strong's aggression. After rumors circulated that he would avenge their deaths, Strong instead sent a request that their bodies be sent to him so that they could be "both buried in the same grave on his farm among their friends."222 Until his death in 1897, Strong remained the "chieftain" of the county's squatters and the dwindling black population (Hiram Freeman and his surviving family apparently left the county not long after his sons' deaths). Still, Strong would no longer attempt insurrections, act as a public endorser or enforcer during elections, or order the assassinations of his political enemies. Friendship with legitimate authorities was in the past, too, after "staunch Democrat" Robert Riddell replaced William Randall as circuit court judge.223 Any serious challenge to Democratic authority in Breathitt County, at least in the violent form that Strong preferred, had now come to an end. He was nearing sixty at the time of the lynching; his two youngest children-a ten-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter-still lived under his roof.224 Even after his former cavalry commander Henry Clay Lilly was narrowly elected as a Republican circuit judge in 1886, Strong still lay low, and he continued to do so until the last months of his life.225 In most of its characteristics this lynching was an event inherent to its time and place. Captain William Strong fought the one-party rule that took over the South after Reconstruction came to an end-a rule that had a head start in his home state. Two members of his small fighting force perished in a way identical, almost in minute detail, to that of so many other black and white southerners who skirted its authority. However, the peculiar contingencies of life in Breathitt County gave this lynching its most unusual trait: the races of its victims. Cooperation between a young Negro and a violent white squatter, the very fruition of what white conservatives feared most, represented an obstruction to that commercial order, Breathitt County's own iteration of what would come to be known as the New South.226 Neither that nor the broader phenomenon of lynching fit easily into the interpretation of violence suggested by feud. The 1884 lynching went on to be the most forgotten recorded incident of violence in Breathitt County's history.

Perhaps there were elements of feud in Strong and the Red Strings' ongoing assaults against Breathitt County Democrats. He was certainly faring better than southern Unionists who might have attempted what he was doing after Redemption. Perhaps in another part of the South he would not have survived his bold ventures of 1874 and 1878; and, since Strong had managed to carry out his quasi-guerrilla actions for so long afterward, did this mean there was some modicum of a horizontal conflict between equals? In a county with a small population, these were people who knew one another's identities quite well, and indeed there was surely some amount of personal enmity involved. Nevertheless, that he and the Red Strings were identified as "feudists" meant that the differences between them and other southern Unionists were emphasized while their similarities were concealed. Considering the disorder developing in eastern Kentucky in the mid-1880s, his was only one group among many, a developing trend that white Kentuckians preferred be interpreted as, if not "feudal," then certainly as nonpolitical. "There is much talk of the outlaws in . . . Breathitt, and other counties of Eastern Kentucky, belonging to Democratic or Republican factions," wrote a western Kentucky Democrat in 1885. "This is all humbug, they are violators of law, and should be spoken of and dealt with as such."227 There was far more to the story than feud suggested, a complexity of postbellum politics in a border state combined with the endogenous intricacies of life in Breathitt County. It was in Kentucky Democrats' interest that this sort of complexity went unexplored. Relying on the idea of feuding performed their task quite effectively, especially as Breathitt County's economic potential came to the attention of the outside world.

4.

"THE CIVILIZING AND CHRISTIANIZING EFFECTS OF MATERIAL IMPROVEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT"

Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

-Henry Adams, "The Grammar of Science," in

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

On Christmas Day 1884, Louisville's Courier-Journal printed an unsigned letter from Breathitt County touting "the richest undeveloped timber, coal, and iron district in America." In the last three years "Northern parties" had bought nearly twenty-five thousand acres of forestland (Breathitt County's average land value was estimated at 92 per acre).1 The long-anticipated Kentucky Union Railway Company (KU) had bought twenty times that amount in and around Breathitt County in order to link its coalfields to the Bluegrass and eventually create a transmontane connection to southwestern Virginia and, by extension, to the Chesapeake Bay.2 A Harvard geologist offered his high expectations of the future rail line's capabilities in a KU promotional booklet.

The line of the Kentucky Union Railway has . . . certain especial advantages over any other, in that it crosses the coal and iron belt at its widest part, and where there is the heaviest timber. . . . The distance from the eastern coal field to Louisville by this line would be shorter than by any other. . . . I believe it to be one of the most important roads for the mineral interests of Kentucky that can possibly be built. . . . The mountains of Kentucky, far from being a barrier to the passage of railways, constitute on the whole, a region more fitted for their passage than the Bluegrass Country.3 The KU's promoters predicted that theirs would be the Bluegrass's first direct access to "the only place in America where cannel coal can be successfully mined," connecting Kentucky's commercialized center with the Cumberland Gap by railway for the first time, making Jackson "a capital city" and Breathitt "a wealthier county than any in the bluegrass region."4 Breathitt's future was looking up, and potential investors in Louisville or the Bluegrass were about to miss out.

Even this most booster-minded of communiques was obliged to mention the county's checkered past, but only to announce its repentance. The chartering of a new school and the growth of Methodist and Presbyterian congregations demonstrated "marked change" in the "minds and purposes of our people": Our county people are not lacking in the qualities that have made mountain people famous in history, if their bottled-up energies in times past have found vent in partisan faction fights and neighborhood broils. With no communication with the outside world and no other way of working off superfluous steams, they must not be wholly blamed. They have had few opportunities for education of any kind. If their past annals have been more akin to those of the Highland Scotch and the boys of Tipperary, please believe that the days of local warfare are past, and nowhere will you find more quiet, earnest thought as to a great future than among some of the leaders of our county, which may yet pay more taxes into the State treasury than any two of the richest Bluegrass counties.5 The letter, presumably written by a Breathitt native, referenced Kentucky mountaineers' supposedly Celtic past and seclusion from the outside world with the same metaphors and comparisons used by local-color writers and home-mission workers.6 The writer's clear intention was that the "bottled-up energies" and "superfluous steams" of his (or her?) less enlightened neighbors be channeled toward more profitable motives. With the Red Strings now at bay (the lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong having taken place just seven months earlier), the political reasons for recent troubles were left unspoken, and for good reason, since potential Bluegrass financiers surely did not need to be reminded of the Civil War. The county's Democratic majority was sound, and prepared to guide commerce and advancement into its hills.

This pleading for investment and firm declaration of separating present from past were in keeping with the speculative strategy that had led to Breathitt's founding forty-five years earlier. Jeremiah South and his associates had a vision of railroads and massive timber and coal extraction, but these plans had not come to fruition in South's lifetime-instead, the county had become known as an uncivilized containment of chaos (some of which might have been avoided had South et al. not guided the county in favor of the Confederacy).

Since 1874 the media discourse on Breathitt County violence was intertwined with demands for industrial modernization. For sectional and political reasons, the New York Times preferred to editorialize on Breathitt County as a Kentucky problem rather than a mountain one: "All her best citizens deplore and condemn the violence which has so long disgraced her and made her seem deliberately barbarous. Kentucky is, as everybody knows, a fine State, which needs development."7 Bluegrass correspondents accompanying the state militia, however, saw things from a different perspective. They exclaimed, as if entering some untouched terra incognita, at the wealth of coal seams and virgin timber in what was, at the time, the physically largest county in Kentucky.8 The county had been geologically surveyed decades earlier, and the findings had long been a matter of public record. A sample of Breathitt cannel coal had won a gold medal at Philadelphia's Centennial International Exposition in 1876.9 Though the Bluegrass had been collecting the Commonwealth's revenue and casting its votes for years, now the county and its wealth were "discovered." Furthermore, the 1878 reawakening of Bloody Breathitt coincided with Democrats' glacial acceptance of state-funded improvement of the Kentucky River system-no doubt encouraged by coal prices soaring far above "poor men's prices."10 Articles stressed economic development's utility in ending eastern Kentucky's lawless atmosphere-even by pressmen who traditionally balked at any and all government expenditure. "The late disturbance in Breathitt county is only another argument in favor of improving the navigation of the Kentucky river," the Bourbon Democratic Kentucky Yeoman opined. "If we had good locks and dams, it would be an easy matter to send troops from Lexington or Frankfort to quell any unlawful outbreak in that remote quarter."11 And in a later article, the "insurrection against the civil authority" was blamed on "the further want of the civilizing and Christianizing effects of material improvement and development."12 Even the Courier-Journal correspondent who said he preferred taking his chances with Sitting Bull rather than living in Breathitt hoped that, with proper state funding, "the hills would reverberate with the sound of the woodman's ax and the whistle of the locomotive and steamboat, and employment would be given to thousands of men."13 Just a few months before the Christmas Day letter, Harvard professor Nathaniel Shaler predicted "money, avarice, that master passion of the race, will subdue this archaic vice of violence."14 The newness of these discoveries was exaggerated to highlight Breathitt County's isolation from the polis of the Bluegrass. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the publicity surrounding Judge Burnett's death and the resultant militia occupation of Jackson accelerated interest in Breathitt County's coal and timber. In 1885 an Ohio land speculator acquired sixty-seven thousand acres of timber and coal land and published an account of its potential wealth.15 Echoing his report four years later, Charles Dudley Warner estimated that Breathitt County's untouched cannel coal seams "excel[led] the most celebrated coals of Great Britain, predicting it would "have a market all over the country when the railways reach it."16 As always, plans for future development were leavened with promises of social uplift: "When railroads are built through these mountains civilization will reach the inhabitants, and the example of thrift and consequent profit will, no doubt, play its full part in inspiring a desire to indulge in habits of industry. Until then there is little chance of their improvement."17 It was not supposed that railroads and "habits of industry" brought with them complications that could cause violence just as easily as prevent it.

"Free American citizens who break up courts, and shoot Judges, and carve their political opponents, would not be likely to tolerate missionaries"

Railroads and coal and timber companies could arrive only at a rate that was physically and economically feasible. Track laying from the Bluegrass to the Cumberland Plateau required tremendous expenditures for even the most well-heeled investment firms. To make matters worse, the KU's Louisville lawyers were so ignorant of their state's geography they confused "Breathitt" with "Bourbon," a Bluegrass county, when giving instructions to land surveyors.18 As was the case in Breathitt County's first years of existence, capitalists' mastery of the local economy depended upon their relative knowledge of the place itself.

Before that could happen, Breathitt County's ill repute attracted what Appalachian scholars consider industrialization's scouts: outside evangelists. As of the late 1870s, eastern Kentucky became a favorite destination for missionaries who had given up on the uplift of the lowland South's freed-people, and may well have been the original target of eastern Kentucky's storied missions field.19 "You will be astonished to learn that there is not a single church building in Breathitt county . . . not even at the county seat, not even a schoolhouse in that town," one missionary reported in 1883. "The true Sabbath is unknown, Sunday being a holiday spent in hunting, fishing, shooting-matches, logging, etc."20 The eastern Kentucky mountains were "strongholds of cruelty and oppression" ripe to be "invaded" by Protestant enlightenment. Boasting of his recent conversions, one home missionary proclaimed that "people who had been kept under the power of darkness for a century past were brought to see the glorious dawn of a better day."21 Four years later, it was still generally agreed that Breathitt County was "a type of all that was darkest and most God forsaken in the mountains of [Kentucky]."22 But Breathitt County had never been so heathen as it was sometimes claimed. Since the very earliest days of white settlement, the Three Forks region had a willing spirit of Christian belief, even though it was hindered by a weak flesh of few churches. The county's "native" Christian faith was the "Hardshell" or "Iron Jacket" Old Regulars, antinomian Baptists whose only access to corporate worship was the occasional camp meeting organized by an itinerant preacher.23 Antebellum worship services were freewheeling. Occasionally, so recalled George Washington Noble, children initiated their own impromptu prayer meetings without adult guidance.24 Charlatans were met with merciless skepticism. Once an unaffiliated faith healer named Jeremiah Lovelace the Prophet visited the county to publicly walk on water. He failed to perform his miracle only after some young "Doubting Thomases" removed the planks he had placed beneath the rushing river's surface, causing Lovelace's near drowning in front of an unsympathetic audience.25 Antebellum religious activity was not always so unorthodox. In the early 1840s wealthy farmer Simon Cockrell sponsored the ministry of "Raccoon John" Smith, an early preacher for the Disciples of Christ (also known as the Christian Church or, more generally, the "Campbellites" after the denomination's founders, Thomas and Alexander Campbell). Cockrell's son-in-law Jeremiah W. South and his family were associated with the Bluegrass-centered denomination, and its arrival paralleled their role in connecting Breathitt County with the other side of the two Kentuckys.26 But, lacking church buildings and permanent congregations, the Disciples were as limited to the occasional camp meeting as were the more decentralized Baptists. The 1878 Jackson courthouse riot made Breathitt County appear quite heathen, perhaps redeemable, perhaps not. In reaction to plans for New York missionary societies to send missions to Breathitt County (they reasoned that southern mountaineers' prior knowledge of English made their souls more winnable than those of Africans or Indians), the Republican Cincinnati Gazette scoffed: "Free American citizens who break up courts, and shoot Judges, and carve their political opponents, would not be likely to tolerate missionaries."27 Urban sneers could not deter the outpouring of interdenominational zeal flowing in all directions in the years following Reconstruction, especially for the least of these like Bloody Breathitt. While Breathitt County caught northern missionaries' eyes, Bluegrass evangelists had the most lasting impact upon the county. The anti-Calvinist "Mountain Evangelist" George Owen Barnes visited shortly after Judge Burnett's murder. Although he found one local boy to be "a young savage, as ignorant as a Hottentot," he was impressed by his Breathitt congregation's willingness to include Negroes in "a better looking crowd than the average of court crowds in the Bluegrass."28 Barnes was enraptured when, at a camp meeting, the notorious John Aikman and other "desperate men . . . who had been at the centre of so many awful fights in Breathitt [came] to Jesus like little children."29 Barnes was succeeded by John Jay Dickey, a Methodist minister who initially passed through in 1882 out of "curiosity to see the people of Breathitt County because of the feuds."30 He eventually decided to preach there and expand the county's meager public education. Finding no church buildings in Jackson, Dickey held services in the courthouse using a pipe organ Barnes had left behind.31 With help from the KU's president and vice president, Dickey raised money for what was to become the Jackson Academy (later Lees College), Jackson's first attempt at schooling beyond the primary level.32 In 1886 he augmented the new school with a two-thousand-volume county library, a rare civic treasure in the rural South, let alone the Kentucky mountains.33 Next came Presbyterian minister and physician Edward Guerrant in 1884. Guerrant had last visited the county two decades earlier as a Confederate lieutenant under Humphrey Marshall's command, at which time he had first developed a jaundiced eye toward the "bitter, prejudiced and ignorant" highlanders.34 Parlaying old wartime acquaintances, he quickly established a congregation, and spent the next seven years attempting to wrest Breathitt County's religious life away from Dickey (the latter, it seemed, was unaware of there being any competition).35 When Mormon elders arrived at century's end, their impact on local worship habits was negligible.36 Aside from their denominational differences, the contrasts between Guerrant and Dickey were marked. With an unconcealed prejudice toward mountain society that originated during his Confederate service, Guerrant fit the mold of missionaries who conflated "civilizing" with Gospel spreading. Either was cure for the Kentucky mountains' inherent proclivity toward deadly violence. His later writings display the common late nineteenth-century explanations of Appalachian otherness that combined racial determinism and spatial isolation. "The law is slow and lax in its administration, and so the people take it into their own hands," he explained after decades in the mission field. "There is some excuse for this; but the crying cause back of all this violence and bloodshed is the want of religion."37 So, too, did he propagate other familiar tropes of preindustrial mountain life. "They are today the purest stock of Scotch-Irish and Anglo-Saxon races on the continent. For hundreds of years they have lived isolated from the outside world, with no foreign intermixture. I do not remember seeing a foreigner in the Cumberland mountains. They are not a degenerate people. They are a brave, independent, high-spirited people, whose poverty and location have isolated them from the advantages of education and religion. They have been simply passed by in the march of progress in this great age, because they were out of the way."38 Guerrant was convinced that many, if not most, Kentucky mountaineers were "as utterly ignorant of the way of salvation as the heathen in China," and that his ministry was reaching previously untested territory.39 Some mountaineers took issue with his arrogant assumption of their "want of the Gospel" previous to his arrival.40 "We may be mighty ignorant back here," one of Breathitt County's "principal men" told another Presbyterian evangelist, "but we're not such fools as to not know who Jesus Christ is."41 A few years later a local judge presented Dickey with a similar complaint. "We need no missionaries from the Blue Grass or from any other place . . . we know enough if we would only practice it. We have religion enough if we would only use it."42 George Barnes, who had personal gripes with the more Calvinist segments of Knox's church, expressed annoyance at Presbyterians who claimed too much credit for "evangeliz[ing] dear old 'Bloody Breathitt' " and predicted that haughtier preachers like Guerrant might turn tail should "some of [Barnes's] darling 'desperadoes' temporarily resume their abandoned habits."43 George O. Barnes, the "Mountain Evangelist," was not the first preacher to preach the Gospel in Breathitt County. He was, however, apparently the first to arrive after the county became known as Bloody Breathitt. (Price, Without Scrip or Purse) James J. Dickey, Methodist minister, educator, and newspaperman, tried harder than anyone to understand Bloody Breathitt. He spoke for other white Kentuckians when it came to distinguishing justifiable violence from chaos. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Wesleyan College Archives, Owensboro) Dickey and Guerrant were both Bluegrass natives but, while his competitor portrayed Breathitt County as a far-flung exotic locale, Dickey expressed a kinship with most of the people he met-they were, after all, fellow white Kentuckians with plans to improve their state. Guerrant never seemed to have abandoned his image of a homogenous Anglo-Saxon mountain population, but Dickey recognized early on (just, in fact, after witnessing the lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong) that his adopted community was led by a "better class" of white propertied men, and he fashioned his appeals for help in his enterprises in a way amenable to the Three Forks middle class and landed gentry.44 Dickey welcomed local preachers (mostly lay ministers) to his pulpit for ecumenical services. Though he had initially thought Breathitt Countians to be "primitive" before his arrival, he never seemed to have wanted to radically change the environment in which he preached (his connections with the Kentucky Union Railroad notwithstanding). He dedicated countless hours to interviewing locals for information on their pioneer ancestors. He did not consider his new parishioners any sort of pure ethnic "stock" (no purer than his own, anyway), and insisted that "environment and not heredity" (Dickey's emphasis) was to blame for "the chasm between the people of the Blue Grass and the mountains."45 Former Confederate officer Reverend Edward O. Guerrant, whose wartime impressions of Breathitt County and his later ministries there shaped public opinion of eastern Kentucky: "The crying cause back of all this violence and bloodshed is the want of religion." (Courtesy of Aaron Akey) Denominational tensions in Bloody Breathitt never came to blows, and locals figured that "better times [were] sure to come."46 Bluegrass observers approved of the Gospel's propagation, but they also appreciated the economic dividends of pacification. "The preacher in Breathitt saves ammunition to the State and saves money to the taxpayers while I doubt if all the missionaries who ever went to China have saved a dollar to anybody or cheated the devil out of a single almond-eyed Washee Washee man," wrote one Lexington commentator.47 A correspondent from the Democratic Hazel Green Herald (the newspaper most local to Breathitt until the 1890s) concurred: "The preaching of Barnes . . . Guerrant, Dickey and others, has saved the State more money than the courts and all the military companies that have been sent among us," said one who thought the reforming influence of mountain evangelism should be rewarded with state revenue. "And a bad man changed from his evil ways by the gospel becomes an instrument of good instead of evil."48 Further celebration was made of the conversions of "notable characters" like Aikman, Jerry Little, and one of William Strong's sons-although the senior Strong was not yet persuaded; Little reportedly offered Guerrant personal protection from the belligerent old captain ("the gospel of peace" having no need of bodyguards, the preacher demurred).49 By 1886 it seemed that Breathitt had become one of "the quietest and most orderly counties in the Commonwealth."50 As more credit was cast to the Gospel's civilizing effects and the promise of peace and railroads, fewer questions were asked as to what conflicts had made Breathitt bloody in the first place.

The Reverend Dickey shepherded church growth and public education and capped it off with another sort of civic engagement. In 1891 he leased the two-year old Jackson Hustler, Breathitt's first newspaper, founded by "a moral, enterprising young Kentuckian . . . whose father [had] vast landed interests" in the county.51 Though he disliked the name "Hustler," it became his pulpit for preaching a prosperity gospel based upon prognostications of future wealth, owing to the good graces of "wealth and enterprise" that were beginning to take notice of the region's cannel coal. Like other boosters, Dickey suggested that his adopted home had only recently been "discovered"-even by its own inhabitants.

Eastern Kentucky lay for almost one hundred years after the organization of the State a veritable terra incognita. Her mines of wealth and her illimitable forests were as completely unknown to the world as were the gold and silver of the Sierras and Rockies to the Apaches and Arapahoes. The old hunters roamed over these mountains after the wild game just as the red man did over Pike's Peak and the Black Hills, and equally as ignorant of the great possibilities around and beneath him. Wealth and enterprise have eyes that see. As soon as the commercial world learned of our great resources, experts were dispatched in haste to see if there was any truth in the reports that they had heard, and in every case the answer was, "the half has not been told."

In no part of the United States is there such promise to the capitalist as this region to-day offers. Fortunes have been made and the development has only begun. The increase is biblical, "some thirty, some sixty and some a hundred fold."

The capitalists are following the money gods to these mountain fastnesses and their devotion to this cause will be rewarded with thrones and kingdoms and scepters and crowns.52 This regalia-driven by Christianity, lucre, or both (like many Americans, Dickey saw little distance between the God of Abraham he professed and the "money gods" he prophesied)-would permanently alter the environmental factors that had created Bloody Breathitt. When he went to establish a new mission in London, Kentucky, in 1895, Dickey left behind a county that had become more interconnected with the urban centers of the Bluegrass while still retaining its internal political autonomy-prototypically Kentuckian.53 Still, "the civilizing and Christianizing effects of material improvement and development" did not heal the county's reputation, even as feud violence appeared in less remote places like northeastern Kentucky's Rowan County.54 When news of multiple killings in Rowan's county seat reached the press, immediate reaction was to compare it to the recent "bloody internecine feuds of Breathitt."55 In fact, Breathitt's new national attention as the center of the home-missions field may well have increased its notoriety as an inherently vicious place. Even as Dickey (who saw Breathitt's recent improvement as a positive example for other trouble spots like Rowan) and Guerrant built successful ministries, others considered Breathitt County too dangerous for even the most intrepid.56 One American Missionary Association member warned, "Last fall a friend of ours had occasion to ride through the country; he was assured by the best citizens that it was not safe for a man to be on the [Jackson] streets after dark" (an outrageous circumstance in a community with "no foreign-born residents").57 The Hazel Green Herald often sprang to its neighbor's defense, recognizing the subjectivity of "feud" as a descriptor of crime and often pointing out the contemporary rise in urban crime.58 "For some years it has been, it seems, the mission of some of the Louisville daily papers to magnify any murder committed in one of the mountain counties, into a 'bloody faction or family feud' and their readers are treated to a most sensational account of an affair, but for its location, would only have been given as an ordinary bit of news. The ordinary killings in Louisville . . . if committed in any of the mountain counties would be heralded by the Louisville papers as 'mountain lawlessness.' "59 Citing the recent construction of "two handsome church edifices and an elegant high school building" in 1885, the Herald declared, "Breathitt county is awakening to the fact that she does not deserve the malignant epithets which in the past have so frequently been bandied around and boosted by the press at large."60 The paper faintly praised an 1886 political rally said to have numbered between six hundred and eight hundred men, where "everything passed off in the most perfect order."61 Even after an Election Day stabbing a week later, the Herald insisted that "the fighting [was] not so bad as reported. Bloody Breathitt is not so bad, after all, when she gets justice."62 When the courthouse burned to the ground two months after that, a Breathitt County correspondent did not draw the intuitive correlations with the 1873 courthouse burning but blandly reasoned that the fire had settled the long-debated question over building a new one.63 Even in Bloody Breathitt fights could be isolated events, crimes could be punished, and accidents could happen.

"The Republican vote of Kentucky is made up very largely, if not almost entirely, of negroes and mountaineers"

If Breathitt County was improving itself under the tutelage of the Reverend Dickey and others like him, it was not recovering only from the county's local history. It was also rising above traits associated with the Kentucky mountains en masse. By 1880 Americans were coming to believe that "the eastern section of Kentucky [was] almost as foreign to the rest of the State as is Siberia to St. Petersburg."64 A large part of this development came from popular depictions of upland white southerners that local-color writers were using to great effect in the last years of Reconstruction and afterward.65 Not long after, the idea of the South's male "white savage," be he lowland or upland, became an increasingly useful device for convincing northern audiences that white-on-black interracial violence was "a fact of social life, almost a force of nature . . . cultural inheritance so deeply ingrained that it might as well be biologically rooted."66 And there was also a growing nationwide disdain toward rural America North, South, East, or West; in the 1880s hillbilly was only one of many newly popular scornful names-hayseed, rube, hick-for the yeomanry.67 The othering of eastern Kentucky was integral to Democrats' marginalizing of the state's Republican minority-a rhetorical process that "not only legitimized the state's Confederate identity but made it look like the preferable, more civilized one."68 Despite electoral evidence to the contrary, eastern Kentucky was assumed to be a one-party section, the better to fence it off from the South's white mainstream (where white-on-black interracial violence was not necessarily defended but, in the "New Departure" mind, understandable).69 This was more exaggeration than outright falsehood. Kentucky mountaineers were just as attracted to the Republican Party as were upland southerners in other states.70 Voting the same ticket as black southerners made them the target of Democratic derision just as in other southern states, although the charge was levied in slightly modified language. "The Republican vote of Kentucky is made up very largely, if not almost entirely, of negroes and mountaineers," wrote one Democrat in 1889. "As a Union soldier I was fond of the old chestnut about the mountains being cradles of liberty, because our volunteers in Kentucky were mostly recruited from these cradles. It is current belief that the mountains of Kentucky are cradles of illiteracy and lawlessness, and that deadly feuds are rife in these Republican strongholds."71 For the novelist John Fox Jr., mountain Republicanism encapsulated eastern Kentucky's paradoxical domesticity and strangeness, and one-party rule was a theme common to most of his novels about eastern Kentucky.72 By 1895 the conflation of Lincoln's party with mountain isolation and poverty was so complete a western Kentucky editor (who should have known better) counted unfalteringly Democratic Breathitt County among "four Republican pauper counties."73 Democrats still had use for the exaggeration over the course of the following decade, such as when Senator Joseph Blackburn declared that "lawlessness in Kentucky is confined to the mountains," surmising (without elaboration) that "many years ago all the escaped convicts from the adjoining States fled into the mountains of Kentucky, and their descendants are now raising the devil."74 "Negroes and mountaineers" were two populations that white lowland Kentuckians had come to see as inferior or dangerous. They were not maligned equally; Senator Blackburn apparently did not count 1904's lynchings of at least two black men and one black woman within the confines of Kentucky's "lawlessness."75 The mountain white was defined by, if nothing else, whiteness, and his vote was not taken away. However, it could be contained; in 1880 Kentucky's Democrat-controlled legislature gerrymandered a new congressional district circling most of the old Whig Gibraltar counties, effectively segregating most of the state's Republican electorate.76 But they were both, nonetheless, maligned. Their shared membership in the hated Republican Party was a valuable weapon in the Democratic arsenal. The section's membership in the Republican Party, any political party, proved it to be a decidedly modern "participatory" political culture, even if observers from the Bluegrass or other parts of the outside world wanted it to be a "parochial" or "tribal" one. No other part of the American Republic has had its elected officials described by historians as "feudal lords" and "chieftains."77 At the battle of New Orleans, the "Hunters of Kentucky" had represented the American Republic's "civic and archaic" backbone, "rustic citizen warriors" who mingled violence and egalitarianism to form a "virtuous militia" against imperial standing armies.78 Two-thirds of a century later, however, Kentuckians who seemed to most resemble their ancestors were no longer venerated in the same way. The difference was that in the War of 1812, unlike the more recent war, all Kentuckians had been on the same side.

After southern conservatives introduced it as a tool of depoliticization during Reconstruction, feud became more specifically associated with the Kentucky mountains in the mid-1880s, largely because of various feud scenarios identified by the Louisville Courier-Journal and other newspapers. By the turn of the century, Kentucky's Democratic newspapers, even those in the mountains, derisively referred to their state's unfortunate "feud belt."79 The feud belt's fictive designation established Republican eastern Kentucky as a political culture distinct from the American norm-even when the southern Democracy still carried with it the taint of Confederate recalcitrance.80 Henry Watterson's paper was liberal in its use of the word feud, applying it to isolated knife fights, brawls, and riots involving up to a dozen men, and to larger-scale affairs like the "Rowan County War." The only common denominator was that they were all white-on-white intraracial attacks and killings (ergo horizontal violence between equals) at a time when white-on-black interracial attacks and deaths were still very common in the state; between 1884 and 1886 at least a dozen black Kentuckians were lynched.81 Succinctly, the "feud belt" comprised a section of Kentucky that was supposedly homogenously Republican, a purposeful, long-lived oversimplification of mountain society.82 It was useful to Democratic state authorities faced with inveigling the public and maintaining law and order even as Kentucky bucked the prevailing southern trend in gradually becoming a two-party state. This task fell most heavily on Governor Simon Bolivar Buckner, a former Confederate lieutenant general whose administration marked the end of unchallenged Confederate control over Kentucky's executive functions. Buckner's election in 1887 was narrow, and his record number of vetoes showed a diminished Democratic dominance.83 Perhaps it is no coincidence that his administration played host to eastern Kentucky's most pronounced series of "feud" violence, mostly in counties lacking one-party dominance.84 Early in his administration Buckner dealt with his state's most storied "feud," that of the Hatfield and McCoy families in Pike County, Kentucky, and Logan County, West Virginia. Buckner became embroiled in an extradition debacle with the neighboring state's governor and reluctantly sent a segment of the state militia to Pike County. Of all the well-known "Kentucky feuds," that of the Hatfields and McCoys had the least obvious ties to party politics. Still, Pike County lawyer and entrepreneur Perry Cline, who manipulated all parties involved without once firing a gun, was among Buckner's most faithful mountain allies. Both wealthy Democrats reaped benefits from the feud's outcome.85 Decades later, the same area along the KentuckyWest Virginia border experienced a completely separate series of conflicts combining local politics with the fight between capital and industrial labor, and culminating in the "Matewan Massacre." Since it was an area already defined by the inherency suggested by "the feudin' Hatfields and McCoys," Americans in the outside world "turned a blind eye and a deaf ear" to the later events' contingencies.86 Not long after, unrest erupted in at least three contiguous counties in southeastern Kentucky. A conflict between a Three Forks Battalion officer's son and a newcomer in Perry County, both of them wealthy merchants, arose sometime in the mid-1880s and increased in notoriety as their hired gunmen fell.87 Republican Joseph Eversole's private war with Democratic rival Fulton French supposedly originated in the former's efforts to protect local landowners from the machinations of land speculators.88 As Perry County's poorer landowners' aggressive advocate, Eversole had a bit of a numerical advantage among its male, fighting-age citizens. To counter it, French sought out "thugs" from Breathitt County.89 Jerry South III, the grandson of eastern Kentucky's most ambitious land speculation schemer to date, was among French's "lieutenants."90 When he was finally brought to trial in 1895 for the various Perry County murders, French began a successful process toward acquittal by securing a change of venue to Breathitt in 1895.91 By then, he had already resided there for six years, amassing property and strengthening ties to Jackson's Democratic elites. Less than a decade later, he was implicated-but never convicted-in more politically motivated homicides.92 But not before his war with the Eversole faction had spilled into Breathitt, Knott, and Harlan counties, perhaps creating a more chaotic state of affairs than what had started in Perry.93 The Hazel Green Herald disingenuously assured readers that "there are no politics involved, it being merely a personal feud that has extended until both parties have gathered up friends, who, previous to the quarrel, knew neither party."94 Around the same time, Harlan County's "Howard-Turner feud" erupted between a Republican gang and members of a Democratic courthouse ring who (according to one of the former) "wanted to be the supreme rulers of the universe" behind the guise of "Law & Order."95 By the county judge's own admission, a seeming majority within the county either "openly espouse[d] their cause or quietly [lent] . . . aid, comfort or refuge" to the Republican outlaws Will Jennings and Wilson Howard (the judge attributed this to kinship-he did not address whatever grievances they had against him and his court).96 Once Governor Buckner was convinced that local coal and timber operations were being impeded, he sent state troops, just as he had in Perry County.97 The series of ambushes and skirmishes that comprised the 1889 conflict were roundly identified as actions within a "family feud," despite the large number of surnames involved. Also, the fact that the preexistent tension had flared into violence just after Fulton French had begun recruiting gunmen in the county went unexplored.98 Eventually, most of the oral folklore regarding the events accepted the "trivial causes and tragic consequences" of the standard feud narrative without including exogenous details.99 The actions of individuals, and their intentions, were hidden behind surnames.