Feud, as it was understood in the nineteenth-century lexicon, was a reciprocal form of controlled violence between equals, and all accounts of the early days of the "French-Eversole feud" seem to follow this model even if the "Howard-Turner feud" did not; it was something approximating gang warfare more than interpersonal revenge.100 However, by late 1888, the combination of the two led to a murderous crime wave in at least three of the six counties in Kentucky's nineteenth judicial circuit. In the eighteen weeks between court sessions, circuit court judge H. C. Lilly reported to Governor Buckner, there had been five killings and eleven nonfatal shootings. Court could not be held until juries and attorneys were unafraid to attend court. Despite Lilly's supplications to send a segment of the State Guard (a month earlier Buckner had dispatched seventy militiamen to Perry County), Buckner refused to believe Breathitt contained "any organized opposition to the civil authorities," instead claming it suffered from "acts of individual lawlessness."101 It is needless for me to say to you that in a Republic the employment of the military arm in enforcing the law is of rare necessity, and the occasion for its use should not be doubtful propriety. The law invests the civil authorities with ample powers to enforce the observance of law, and expects those officers to exert their authority with reasonable diligence. When this is done there is seldom an occasion when the military force can be employed without detriment to the public interests and without bringing the civil authorities into discredit. When a people are taught that they are not themselves the most important factor in the conservation of order in society and that they must depend upon the exertion of extraneous force to preserve order amongst themselves, they have lost their title to self-government, and are fit subjects for a military despotism. I do not believe that any portion of this Commonwealth has reached that degree of political degradation.102 Lilly's petition was one of many. A state prosecutor and mountain lawyers (and at least one doctor) from all over the district, Democrats and Republicans, implored Buckner to send troops.103 However, Buckner shared only Lilly's letters with the press, making it appear that the former Union colonel had lost his nerve. Democrats scourged the "worthless and cowardly" judge for his impotence in his circuit.104 "The court has not been held and the blame rests upon the shoulders of this Republican judge, who will neither perform his official duties nor exchange with a Democratic judge, who offers to travel his circuit unguarded and clear the docket for him," the Louisville Courier-Journal intoned.105 The following August, the county failed to report election results for the first time since the 1860s.106 Even though Bloody Breathitt had received more attention in the past for disorders, in terms of sheer number of deaths and ensuing public disruption, the last few months of the 1880s constituted the county's worst period since the Civil War.

It was also the first time a governor rejected pleas for peacekeeping in the county. By the end of 1891 peace was restored, but only after Buckner had purposefully humiliated Judge Lilly. The judge's criminal docket (said to cover "357 acres" of paper by December 1891), which included nine murders and fifteen malicious shooting indictments, was delayed for months.107 When Lilly ran for reelection in 1892 a young Democratic lawyer, David B. Redwine, soundly defeated him with the help of endorsements from the Jackson Hustler and the Hazel Green Herald (which had crossed party lines to endorse Lilly in 1886) and Lilly's own wounded reputation in his district's most Democratic county.108 Americans who read of troubles in southeastern Kentucky were no strangers to violence on their own soil. Since the Civil War, the reading public had become aware of counterrevolutionary violence against black southerners, the Great Plains "Indian wars," and the industrial class war escalating in various cities.109 Killing by various means for power-related reasons was commonplace. The eastern Kentucky feud phenomenon appeared strange to the outside world because this violence could not be legitimized in terms that late nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans could easily understand. White northerners and southerners devised ways of finding legitimacy in the preservation of the American nation and/or white supremacy when dealing with the recent memory of the war. Even northerners who despised white southerners' defiance during Reconstruction understood that the latter were fighting for the preservation of a political status quo threatened by black citizenship.110 Skirmishes with the Great Plains Indian nations were an expanding nation's culling of an obstinate, dying race; it was reasoned that, in such an immense struggle over power, killing was inevitable.111 These were struggles that made sense according to postbellum America's understanding of political violence-they were the kinds of violence that were allowed in the Pax Americana, even if bereft of state sanction, because they forwarded Anglo-American projects.

Factional fighting between white Americans for outwardly obscure reasons in obscure places could not be easily attached to the available legitimacies: furthering white supremacy, nationalism, and ever-expanding commerce. Outside of these contexts, violence could not be politically motivated but could only be defined as primordial, inexplicable, and senseless-and, most important, acted out between equals within a perfectly homogenous environment.112 Fighting among Anglo-Americans did not fit into this puzzle of legitimate violence. However, for those who benefited from this bloodshed, namely, Buckner and his Democratic Party mates, it was better not to address the particulars; "acts of individual lawlessness" could scarcely be traced to the ballot box. But, with or without Buckner, even the fisticuffs and knifings in many urban or rural communities were interpreted according to the dictates of feud when they happened in Breathitt County or nearby.113 Nearby was key; overshadowed by the Hatfield-McCoy, Howard-Turner, and French-Eversole feuds, Bloody Breathitt was bereft of media attention during the Buckner administration, even though the latter two situations affected the county (feud violence crossing county boundaries complicated and called into question significant parts of the feud narrative-particularly insularity from the outside world). As Altina Waller has noted, there must be core reasons for the contemporaneous "wars" so close to each other in eastern Kentucky, an allusive "common denominator." Waller pointed to a number of factors leading to mountain farmers' mounting poverty-ineffective farming techniques, partible inheritance, and other late nineteenth-century developments (new state regulations on hunting and fishing, heightened enforcement of federal revenue laws, land amassment by railroads and speculators)-that damaged eastern Kentucky's yeoman economy, bringing "forest farming" to a bitter, plodding end.114 These were contributing factors, especially since this sort of poverty created a male population desensitized and inured to violence. However, they cannot fully explain the mass violence seen in southeastern Kentucky in the late 1880s since there were plenty of counties that did not have analogous "feuds" during this time, counties undergoing the same economic hardships. What Harlan and Perry counties did not have (and what more stable mountain counties did have by 1885 or earlier) was either Republican or Democratic one-party dominance, and they were in a part of the state where wartime rivalries remained even after more than two decades. Intense examinations of political conditions in either county during the 1880s would probably reveal preexistent civil disorder exacerbated by Buckner's election (the relative calm in both counties after he left office suggests that something had changed).115 Indeed, even though feuding was first associated with the Kentucky mountains a few years earlier, the concurrence of factional wars roughly between 1887 and 1890 was when the phenomenon was cemented in the American psyche. It fell to public servants like Judge H. C. Lilly to confront the complexities involved. The vast majority of the reading public elsewhere in Kentucky and the United States preferred simpler, anti-introspective explanations with uncritical, Whiggish solutions, "relics of antiquity . . . Rapidly Dying Out Before Civilization's Advance."116

"What a mighty revolution!"

After being overshadowed by its neighbors for a few years, Bloody Breathitt caught media notice in May 1889 when Edward Strong's teenaged granddaughter eloped with a Negro named Milton Richmond. A posse pursued the couple and Richmond was fatally riddled with bullets after he fired a shot at Strong, injuring the judge's hand. When the girl was returned home, her father tried to kill her and then himself before he was restrained.117 What might otherwise have been only a local scandal in a community steeped in white supremacy (but, as described in previous chapters, also steeped in racial ambiguity) somehow reached the national wire service, most likely because "Judge Strong was a participant in the Breathitt war."118 After this scandal, the press renewed its interest in novel accounts of Breathitt's primitiveness, isolation, or general strangeness. Often facts fell prey to expectations. In 1890 the Chicago Tribune selected a drunken shooting in a Jackson "blind tiger" (a common enough case of tavern manslaughter in an era of high alcohol consumption), whimsically predicting it would be the beginning of "a new feud."119 Other papers across the country reported on the affray as well, except that in these other versions, it had happened at either a religious revival or a suicidal teenager's funeral (the more detailed articles suggested the latter). Further violence did not ensue, prompting a Georgia editor to express disappointment.120 When, later that month, "a negro preacher named Pennington" was shot to death in Jackson's streets over a stolen pair of trousers, the incident was not so widely disseminated.121 The Reverend James Dickey and other Jackson nabobs refused to let the troubles of 188889 dim their booster spirit, especially as the KU came closer and closer. After nearly three years of track laying (an enterprise said to have employed more than two thousand men), a spur connected northern Breathitt County with Beattyville (Lee County's booming county seat at the confluence of the Kentucky River's three forks) in 1890.122 By this point the ambitious plan to connect the Bluegrass to Virginia had been forgotten. Still, the connection of Kentucky's "darkest and most God forsaken" county to Lexington was considered an incredible transformation. "What a mighty revolution!" Reverend Dickey proclaimed in the Hustler. "Go to Beattyville by rail and steam boat in about two hours where formerly it required a day's hard riding on horse back."123 Despite local gripes over the requisite hike in property taxes, the Hustler insisted that the KU would save the county $40,000 per year.124 And fewer landowners had need to worry, anyway; as the rails approached, faraway firms purchased gigantic individual hardwood trees and vast expanses of forested land, in some cases at astounding prices of $10 an acre ($1 an acre having been a recent rate).125 The best was yet to come; in 1893 this new connection to the outside world was commemorated with another display of Breathitt County cannel coal at yet another international industrial fair, this time the Chicago's World Exhibition.126 Traffic on Jackson's original conduit to the Bluegrass, the Kentucky River's north fork, continued under new conditions. The river was no longer the freely accessed egalitarian watercourse it had once been. In 1876 Judge Edward Strong cofounded the Troublesome Creek Boom Company, a firm established to invest in a boom across the tributary for the acquisition and marketing of logs felled farther upstream. The charter allowed for the crossing of logs owned by those outside of the company, but it also provided an impediment to squatters' rafting traffic by recognizing only the passage of legally owned timber.127 In 1882 Republican congressman John D. White had secured $75,000 of federal funding for a lock and dam farther downstream at Beattyville (White was a native of Clay County, where large-scale industrial development had first begun in eastern Kentucky). Opened in 1886, it was the most expansive river improvement to date, but a mixed blessing since the dam created artificial rapids that endangered flatboats.128 However, this did not deter venture capitalists. By the mid-1890s, timber companies (some leasing railroad land and others buying their own) monopolized river passage, constructing log booms to control the movement of timber and clogging the north fork with far more logs than it had ever floated before.129 What had once been the free domain of yeomen and squatters was becoming the possession of corporations and holding companies. For the first time, wage labor was imposed upon a large segment of Breathitt County's male population. One journalist noted the organization of the new transportation system.

Cheaper as the boom system is than the rafting, the cost seems a big item when put into figures. The construction of pockets, etc., for a two and one-half mile boom, in Breathitt County, for instance, came to eight thousand dollars recently.

The work is sometimes fast and furious, as when logs are going by at the rate of from fifty to ninety a minute. Sometimes the men are obliged to work for two or three days and nights at a time, only the excitement of the work sustaining them. Their food during such an ordeal is taken by "jerks and snatches," and lucky is the "sorter" who is excused for a cat nap.130 The sorters who now worked for these corporations were probably the sons of men who had felled their own logs only a few years earlier.

Occasional timber piracy on company-owned land showed that the old freebooting economy persisted to a small extent, but with little sympathy from the law-and-order, business-friendly Hustler.131 On the same pages the paper also printed the speeches of Henry George and his acolyte John W. Kramer condemning the evils of land speculation.132 Dickey may well have been oblivious to the irony of reprinting criticism of land speculation in a county that had been founded for that sole purpose-not to speak of his simultaneous defense of corporate property. By 1891 the county was no longer under the thrall of the men who had created it and, with Gilded Age policies in full swing, the old ideal of disinterested government they had once violated had become moot.

Times had changed, and class lines between white Kentuckians had become more distinct than ever before. Soon after finally reaching the northern edge of Breathitt County, the KU fell months behind on paying track layers and local loggers who had sold it timber. In response, "ignorant mountaineers" tore up tracks, derailed cars, cut down telegraph poles, and destroyed bridges and culverts, inflicting up to $50,000 worth of damage less than a month after Dickey's declaration of revolution.133 The wildcat strike was an astonishing collaboration between yeomen and wage laborers (though only one of many Kentucky railroad strikes in the last two decades of the nineteenth century), and it caught the attention of papers from Virginia to Texas and Kansas, while the Hustler and the Hazel Green Herald neglected to mention it.134 The mass sabotage preceded a broad agitation among mountain workers. Early the next month railroad men and lumberyard workers went on strike in Whitley and Rockcastle counties near the Tennessee line; within months a massive workingmen's fight against convict labor in Kentucky and Tennessee had begun.135 Closer to home, however, the situation revealed more about the KU's weakness than it did class antagonism. The railroad lost backing and fell into court-ordered receivership before it reached Jackson that summer.136 Even after it was reestablished as the Lexington & Eastern (L&E) in 1894, the railroad could not afford further extension.137 Although the wealth of bituminous and cannel coal was touted over and over again throughout the 1890s, even the ever-growing Louisville & Nashville (L&N) octopus did not eye the L&E and Breathitt County with any serious consideration until a few years into the twentieth century.138 Still, connection to the small metropolis of Lexington by any railway was indeed a welcomed "revolution." Within two years of the railroad's arrival, Jackson was considered (but eventually rejected) for the site of a new federal district court, a consideration that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier.139 "Law is more rigidly enforced than at any time since the civil war," boasted the Hustler at the end of 1891. "The completion of the railroad has brought us in contact with the outside world."140 Within the next ten years Jackson's population increased by 1,100 percent.141 Breathitt County, especially Jackson, remained a disorderly place, but most agreed that the nature of local chaos had changed since the railroad's arrival. Alcohol, a nationally popular scapegoat, was a popular replacement for primordial explanations of violence. In 1873 Breathitt became the first of many Kentucky counties to enact a "local option" ban on all sales of alcohol, an ordinance that proved ineffectual, as it did all over the state.142 Whiskey sales continued unabated, and political mass meetings were always the best settings for tippling. Dickey's Hustler was as much a Methodist organ as it was a Democratic one, and the editor/preacher blamed both parties for turning conventions and rallies into debaucheries. "These meetings are usually more of a howling mob than of a dignified gathering of patriots. Liquor is king on these occasions and the candidates usually furnish the liquor. We look forward to the time when candidates will not dare use such vile means to secure nomination. We believe it is coming. Political meetings should be conducted with as much decorum as religious ones. The highest interests of the people are involved. May God hasten better times."143 Local ordinance or not, eastern Kentucky remained a major producer of unbounded spirits, and the new arrival of miners, loggers, and railroad men gave nearby distillers an insatiable clientele.144 This gave the Hazel Green Herald a source of blame for violence that was increasingly popular among investment-minded flatlanders, while also having a reason to praise Jackson's increasingly efficient law enforcement, after the town's 1890 incorporation necessitated appointing a constable and a police judge.145 The Democratic paper was torn between defending political allies in the neighboring county and conceding that Breathitt County did indeed seem to be a repository for mayhem. But the ambitious townspeople of the less notorious Wolfe County saw that their fortunes would soon be connected to those of their rowdier neighbor, so ameliorating Breathitt County's image was in everybody's best commercial interest.

It was a difficult task as, through the 1890s, Jackson and its county occasionally proved to be an untamable beast. As Jackson's population soared, demand increased to reverse Breathitt's local option and issue liquor licenses. In the pages of the Hustler Dickey remained adamantly in favor of continued prohibition until a Saturday night in May 1893 when saboteurs dynamited his office, destroying the printing press and "distributing type all over town." A collection was taken and, by the end of the summer, the Hustler renewed printing, advocating convict labor and greater scrutiny of candidates for public office. Two men, one of them Jeremiah South III (a grandson of the "father of Breathitt County"), were indicted for the destruction.146 If licensure had any public following before, it was now associated with "that lawless element which once gave Breathitt County such unenviable notoriety."147 Local option was vindicated, but "blind tigers" persisted.

As the county's population grew, so did juries' willingness to punish homicides. For years reform-minded Kentuckians had blamed the timidity of the courts for their state's record of white intraracial homicide. Their dissatisfaction fed the white fervor for lynching, as it did elsewhere, but it also increased demand for the state-mandated death penalty; in 1892 an unprecedented ten men (six black, four white) were executed in six Kentucky counties.148 Breathitt's citizens, many of them recently arrived from other parts of the state, also saw active law enforcement as the key to putting Bloody Breathitt to rest. The spring court term of 1895 produced an avalanche of guilty verdicts-including three murder convictions-evidence that "Breathitt" might "no longer be the synonym for crime." It also gave lowland Kentuckians a chance to self-congratulate for the good influence railroad connections to the outside world had on the county. "The good citizens of Breathitt are determined that murder and lawlessness shall cease in that county," one Bluegrass editor crowed after one of the sentences was passed down.149 "The county," another agreed, "seems to be inclined to wipe out its black record of such long standing."150 This new fervor for justice led to the famed public execution of Thomas "Bad Tom" Smith, the only legal hanging in Breathitt County's history. Branded a "feudist," Smith could more accurately be termed a ne'er-do-well willing to kill for money. Smith had been Fulton French's primary assassin in Perry County, and he exemplified a growing population that warlords like French could easily exploit: rootless, profligate men under forty, victimized by recent economic developments that pushed them away from yeomanry and toward drunkenness, gambling, and whoring.151 His first five admitted murders, all ending in acquittals or mistrials, had been at the wealthy French's direction. When he shot Dr. John Rader during an argument over a shared paramour in the winter of 1895, he had no patron, and he was no longer shooting for a faction that much of Breathitt seemed to sympathize with (for that matter, the death of the recently arrived Rader meant the loss of a physician in a growing town with measly medical resources). No longer part of a "feud," Smith was on his own, and he received a death sentence.152 While incarcerated, Smith feigned illness and unsuccessfully planned escape as his attorney fruitlessly appealed his sentence.153 But when it came time for his execution in late June, his gallows performance was the essence of meekness and resignation, a model of the repentant condemned convict, and a personification of the roguish county that was now enacting a cleansing justice in the form of his death sentence.154 With an estimated four thousand men, women, and children swelling Jackson's streets, Smith was baptized in the north fork a few hours before he ascended the scaffold (reporters noted the presence of Captain William Strong, John Aikman, Jerry Little, and other famed rogues). He tearfully embraced his sister, sang hymns to the crowd, confessed his life of murder and other sins, and implored all assembled to forgive their neighbors as Smith hoped to be forgiven.155 Confessing guilt, he also claimed victimhood to the archetypal Victorian rake's progress.

My last words on earth to you are to take warning from my fate. Bad whiskey and bad women have brought me where I am. I hope you ladies will take no umbrage at this, for I have told you the God's truth. To you, little children, who were the first to be blessed by Jesus, I will give this warning: Don't drink whiskey and don't do as I have Done. I want everybody in this vast crowd who does not wish to do the things that I have done, and to put themselves in the place I now occupy, to hold their hands.156 It was a presentation that mingled elements of the sacred and the profane, proclaiming Christian justice and redemption while also reaffirming the state's moral authority (befittingly, a rail-delivered one hundred gallons of Lexington whiskey was immediately sent back, lest the solemn hanging's wholesome atmosphere be spoiled).157 Of all Bloody Breathitt's storied killings, this one had the most witnesses and, by virtue of state sanction, the greatest blessings of legitimacy. Even, perhaps, more so than most public hangings; defying tradition, Sheriff Breck Combs did not bother to conceal his identity when he pulled the lever that opened the trapdoor beneath Smith's shackled feet.

Breathitt County's first (and it would turn out to be the last) legal hanging was cast as a triumph of state-sanctioned violence over feuds and all their antiquated connotations.158 It was the culmination of forces set in motion on Christmas Day in 1884, when an anonymous epistler requested assistance and investment in the Louisville Courier-Journal; next came missionaries and rail traffic and, finally, state-approved capital punishment. "In Breathitt county, which by many people is considered to be beyond the pale of civilization," the Democratic Hartford Herald remarked a few days before Smith's death, "the day of reckoning which will mark an era in the history of Eastern Kentucky is near at hand."159 Or, as a Missouri newspaper interpreted it: "Jackson built a school house and a railroad reached the town recently, and the ringing of the school bell and the whistle of the locomotive were the signals that told the hill country that the murdering days were over."160 By demonstrating that violence could be used to punish crime rather than commit it, Breathitt County ingratiated itself to the outside world. In the past, violent death had been a divider, but now it was a uniter. Bad Tom Smith had been a "feudist," but as part of an affair in another county, and it was probably a relief to many that the crime of passion for which he was hanged was unconnected to past power struggles. Unlike so many killings before it, Bad Tom Smith's execution was a civically consensual, apolitical killing. Almost no one questioned it as a legitimate form of violence.161 And, if it was to bring about an unprecedented peace accompanied by the riches of industrial growth, it reaffirmed the legitimacy of the local state (which, no doubt, many Kentuckians had come to doubt).

The same could not be said for the double lynching eleven years past. It is little surprise that Smith's hanging is a buoyant bit of Kentucky folklore, while Henderson Kilburn's and Ben Strong's are largely forgotten (the Louisville Courier-Journal erroneously called Smith "the first man ever hanged in Breathitt County").162 One Kentucky Democrat inadvertently echoed the Reverend J. J. Dickey's affirmation from eleven years past. "Whatever mistakes may have been made in the way of enforcing the law in the past, let us forget, and see to it that a healthy public sentiment is so openly expressed that it brings about a rigid enforcement of the law in the future."163 For all of these reasons, paradoxical as they may have been, Smith made an exemplary sacrificial lamb, a final propitiation for Bloody Breathitt's communal sins.

For a short time it seemed as if the act of atonement had worked. Then, a little more than a year later, came the arrests of former Breathitt sheriff William Bryant and his mistress after they absconded to Arkansas with embezzled county funds.164 Crime in Breathitt County had graduated to a form less sanguinary and atrocious and more avaricious and scandalous. It could only mean progress.

5.

DEATH OF A FEUDAL HERO.

Here beyond men's judgments all covenants were brittle.

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian; or,

The Evening Redness in the West (1985)

After Jeremiah South's death in 1880, his family experienced a number of setbacks. Barry, his most enterprising son, replaced him as penitentiary executive but, like his father, ran afoul of the reformers who sought to humanize Kentucky's appalling penal system.1 Barry South's 1887 bid for state treasurer was trounced in the Democratic primary just months before he lost thousands of dollars of uninsured property in a Frankfort warehouse fire.2 His elder brother, Confederate congressional medal honoree Colonel Samuel South, died the next year, while their nephew Jerry South III fell into a life of crime and dissolution.3 One of the few adult Souths still living in Breathitt County by the 1890s, Jerry was involved with the French-Eversole feud, and the dynamiting of the Jackson Hustler office (it was later revealed that he wanted to destroy the Reverend J. J. Dickey's paper because he was "strongly opposed to evangelists coming into Eastern Kentucky"). He was shot to death in 1896 while arguing over the spoils of a fish-poaching operation. His accused assailants were acquitted on a technicality.4 It was an ignoble decline for a family that had once been on the make. Any number of factors might be blamed for the Souths' dwindling prosperity, and most of them related to land ownership in an industrial age.5 They had never been able to properly exploit the vast Breathitt County acreage that had appreciated in value since their patriarch first purchased the land and arranged for the county's creation. Poor surveying kept farmers and speculators from making unimpeachable claims to ownership, especially when faced with well-lawyered timber and coal companies. As enormous parcels of Breathitt County land were sold in the 1890s, prices soared and state-recognized property demarcation became truly vital. The long-standing confusion of boundaries was no long tolerable.

An acceleration of litigation ensued, as Barry South and others tried to defend their holdings. For years after his father's death, other claimants challenged him for what was left of his inheritance as he tried to prevent unknown parties-the hunters and marginal drovers, Breathitt County's "wood denizens"-from felling what he considered his timber. As those who aspired to legitimate land ownership came upon hard times, they thrived on absentee-owned land for indefinite years until they were discovered and driven off.6 In 1894 Barry South told a federal judge that he and his coheirs had not been able to "invade" their Breathitt County property for twenty years because of a "lawless and desperate" population of squatters who were hostile to surveyors and unwilling to provide depositions. What was left of the old Thomas Franklin Revolutionary grant was far more land than even a family of means could survey or surveil. So it remained the domain of men "who built houses and eked out a bare existence," armed with superior knowledge of its landscape, its coal seams, and its phenomenally valuable hardwood.7 The landless never need worry about becoming land poor; railroads and large-scale extractors could also afford to bide their time. Barry South could not.

Of course many of these "wood denizens"-or their fathers-had also been on the opposite side of the Civil War from Barry South and his brothers. This may have mattered less if they were not still led by one Captain William Strong, "one of the most notorious men in the state" even as late as 1894. Strong maintained his hidden sylvan martial state on and around his farm in the southern part of the county. Although he was no longer a challenge to Breathitt's post-Confederate Democracy, he still served as the county's disfranchised and defiant, poor whites, and a small number of former slaves. In describing Strong, the South-sympathetic Hazel Green Herald trotted out all the specious feud associations it had always complained of when they appeared in newspapers from outside the mountains, including the ever-popular medieval analogy. "Strong is a sort of feudal hero," it read, "exercising over his own neighbors a greater power than ever did landed baron in the days of night-errantry." It was claimed (no doubt to raise the federal judge's hackles) that Strong was also the guardian of an unknown number of whiskey stills, and he had supposedly planned to immolate a revenue agent a few years before. Perhaps a far greater slander, the Herald suggested that Strong was to blame for John Burnett's death in 1878, even though it was public record that Strong had been the young judge's main defender (this sort of fact reversal being among the tasks feud performed best).8 That Strong had fought to restore the Union years earlier was left unmentioned. From the Herald's perspective, he was a villainous version of Robin Hood.

Also unmentioned was Strong's own claim to a large segment of the same land. In 1891 he and his nephew obtained a grant for 190 acres he claimed through "continuous, notorious and adverse possession."9 Unlike the Souths, Strong had lived in the vicinity the entire time, depending upon its resources for livelihood and knowing it firsthand in ways simple contractual ownership could not provide.10 It is little wonder that, since the war, the bond between him and the landless remained, even if he was a "legitimate" landowner. As had always been the case in the Three Forks, landed farmers and their unpropertied neighbors had ways of life that were deceptively similar. Ownership was not the latter's enemy so much as was the absentee ownership of speculators and corporations. His legal defense of his own adverse possession was also a defense of a threatened way of life.

William Strong's leadership among the "wood denizens" and his unrepentant Union partisanship were intertwined. But the old man's mildly subversive existence in the 1890s was a pale reminder of his brazen past. His willingness to go the peaceful route to civil law courts suggested that he had renounced his past aggression, as did his recent decision to begin attending church with his wife. His twilight years would have remained so, were it not for the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in Breathitt County, a development Strong refused to ignore.

As always, Bloody Breathitt's mass violence was symptomatic not of isolation but rather of statewide trends, most notably the challenge to Democratic one-party rule. The forty-eight homicides in the summer of 1896 indicated not a concerted counterrevolutionary revolt but a tension roiling all over the South. Even though white supremacy was never truly threatened in Kentucky, growing Republican successes, such as William O. Bradley's election as governor in 1895, were equated with "Negro domination" by proxy.11 A record-high turnout gave William McKinley a 142-vote advantage over William Jennings Bryan; a Republican presidential candidate carried the state for the first time in its history.12 The results triggered months of mob rule and "whitecapping," a vigilante tendency that appeared in various corners of rural America during the Gilded Age. In December at least six men, three white and three black, died in Kentucky's worst onemonth lynching pogrom since 1870. The spate of violence continued well into the winter, inspiring Governor Bradley's demand for Kentucky's first antilynching legislation in spring 1897.13 Even Democrats conceded that "inflammatory speeches" made "by the men who stumped the State for Mr. Bryan" were to blame.14 After "Bad Tom" Smith's 1895 execution there followed an agitation against whiskey and immorality in the Three Forks region. Unlike in most 1890s whitecapping situations, moonshiners were the targets rather than their constituency, often producing grassroots imitations of the growing temperance movement. In May 1896, fifty rifle-armed "women whitecappers" smashed a moonshiner's still and barrels in neighboring Knott County.15 One Breathitt grand jury assembled in summer 1896 included five Baptist preachers whose indictments were "making the way of transgressors hard."16 Bloody Breathitt, it seemed, was expunging its own sins through both legal and extralegal means.17 While whitecappers emulated the Klan's tactics in the 1890s, most did so without explicitly adopting the Klan identity (to many former Unionists and other white southern Republicans, the Reconstruction era's Klan was politically unacceptable even if its tactics were deemed necessary to maintain local interpretations of orderliness).18 In southeastern Kentucky, however, the Klan name of old was still used, particularly by the "band of regulators patterned somewhat after the old Ku-Klux Klan," made up mostly of newcomers "who had come into Breathitt since the advent of the railroad," all the while maintaining the old organization's implicit link with the Democratic Party.19 Even after men of "prominence" were arrested for ku-kluxing in Jackson, and even after citizens of both parties were outraged when a child was shot during one of their raids, the new "modern Kuklux" persisted.20 In response, William Strong gathered his Red Strings. Just as in the 1870s, the Red Strings were branded "the lawless element," purportedly counting "nearly all of the illicit whisky sellers and moonshiners of the mountain country" among their ranks.21 This was probably more an exaggeration than falsehood; the Red Strings had never been numerically large but it is likely that many of those that remained by Strong's side were involved in "blockading." Still, there was more at work in the winter of 189697 than just vigilantism and organized crime. The fact that both sides readopted the old Reconstruction-era names, Kuklux and Red String, showed that they saw their differences as part of a much older battle, a malevolent element of the two-party system that had survived since the 1870s. While the former represented a distinct memory (reawoken less than six years later when novelist Thomas Dixon published the first of his Klan-glorifying trilogy of novels), the more obscure Red Strings were largely forgotten, especially since most mountain Unionists had been long since cowed by the Lost Cause.22 The nomenclatures were especially significant in an aberrantly Democratic, formerly pro-Confederate, mountain county with a seemingly exceptional history of violence. When the seventy-two-year-old Strong "denounced [the Kuklux] in unmeasured terms" in 1896, he was condemning the same element-if not the same individuals-he had fought since the Civil War.23 In December 1896 the Breathitt Kuklux killed Thomas Barnett, the brother of a reputed moonshiner and Red String.24 The "copperhead" Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer, a paper that had often taken a sympathetic stance toward white southern conservatives, called Breathitt's Kuklux "an organization principally of responsible men, who were weary of the continued deviltry throughout that section."25 Vague reports of violence followed over the next few weeks until moonshiners killed a Democratic deputy federal marshal named William Byrd.26 Byrd had been popular in Jackson, and his friends had to be dissuaded from lynching the two suspects (one of whom died from measles while in custody) before their trial.27 The crime was never traced to Captain Strong, but the shooting death of a material witness in the surviving defendant's trial, and then an attempted shooting and a store arson, were all blamed on the Red Strings.28 William Strong next accused Edward Callahan of being the Kuklux ringleader.29 Callahan was the son or grandson of Strong's former Union army compatriot, the alleged "secret rebel" Wilson Callahan who was killed during the Strong-Amis feud thirty years past. Unlike most of William Strong's more relentless enemies, Callahan was not from Jackson or the area around the county seat. He lived in Crockettsville in southern Breathitt County, the hamlet that had served as a Union mustering ground in 1862. Callahan was one of the wealthiest men in that less developed area and the owner of the only mercantile outside of Jackson. He was chairman of the county's Democratic central committee, an influential Democratic presence in a part of the county that Strong had otherwise controlled during the 1860s and 1870s.30 By naming Callahan, Strong was asserting the Kuklux's union with Breathitt's old political order, as opposed to it being made up entirely of new arrivals, as was reported. Callahan never denied the accusation but he apparently did not welcome the attention.

In April 1897 Democratic county judge C. B. Day issued warrants against Callahan and Strong and arranged a public rapprochement in Jackson. Perhaps expecting a street confrontation as in 1878, Callahan and Strong each arrived with more than two dozen armed men. However, the two leaders peaceably appeared before Judge Day and assured him that they harbored no personal animosities. Day apparently did not admonish them for arriving with their small armies; rather than addressing their respective Kuklux and Red String leadership roles, and the larger significance these roles might have reflected, the judge accepted their assurances of peace and adjourned court. Their late conflict was considered an elevated personal grievance, and so an orchestrated handshake was assumed to be the end of the matter.31 Mass violence was averted, but without any acknowledgment of the larger problems that the continuing presence of the Red Strings and the Kuklux represented.

Edward Callahan, purported Ku Klux Klan leader and sheriff. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) And neither side seemed to have a problem with this. The same week of Strong's and Callahan's appearance before Judge Day, the former's claim to a large portion of the Thomas Franklin grant was upheld, assuring his family's financial future.32 While he was in Jackson, a Lexington & Eastern Railroad employee invited him to the Grand Army of the Republic encampment that was to be held the second week of May, and Strong made plans to attend.33 If his "feudal" status had overshadowed his military service, recognition at the fraternal organization's meeting would soon put it right. Strong told a Cincinnati journalist that "he was at peace with all the world, and hoped his declining years would be free from strife."34 On a Sunday morning less than three weeks later, Strong was found shot to death under his mule's carcass on a roadside ten miles south of Jackson. His wounds and evidence found nearby suggested that he had been waylaid by at least three gunmen hidden by a jury-rigged "blind." After he and his mount were shot from afar, according to later reports, members of the killing party approached his body and shot him several times more. Strong had grasped his pistol but had not managed to pull it from his holster before he expired. His young grandson, found screaming nearby, was unable to identify any of his killers.35 In recognition of Strong's controversial role in a nationally infamous county, newspapers all over Kentucky and beyond recorded the circumstances of his death. Wire copies from Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati papers announcing Strong's death were reproduced from Boston to Sacramento. A negotiation between differing interpretations of William Strong's colorful record ensued. "Capt. William Strong, the greatest mountain fighter in Eastern Kentucky, died with his boots on today, after successfully dodging bullets for twenty-five years," the Lexington Herald announced the following day.36 It and other newspapers maintained his depiction as a "mountain fighter" or "feudist," also detailing his Federal service (the Boston Globe opining that his "Confederate Neighbors Did Their Worst") and its connections to his later travails.37 Strong's expansive Louisville Courier-Journal obituary detailed his war record as a Unionist and Republican as well as his more recent opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and the ensuing trouble he faced against Edward Callahan-although with some confusions in chronology.

It seems that shortly after the war, and after Capt Strong had gone to work to pay for his home, the Ku Klux began to terrorize the community. It was generally conceded that the clan was composed chiefly of young men who were not old enough to enter the army at the breaking out of hostilities between the States, but who had grown up with a deep-seated prejudice against the Unionists. Capt. Strong was considered a leader among the ex-Federal soldiers and a strong Republican. He was outspoken against the depredations of the Ku Klux, and is credited with having organized an anti-Ku Klux party, which did much toward putting down the clan.38 The Courier-Journal omitted what the "strong Republican" had done in the 1870s. His audacious publicized actions, the attempted courthouse capture in 1874, and his defense of young Judge Burnett four years later were left unmentioned. The same newspaper that, in 1878, had branded Strong a "Loyal [Unionist] Whangdoodle" who exhibited the "Wonderful Effect of the Firing on Fort Sumter" poignantly lamented the passing of an aged "mountain fighter" who was "one of the most picturesque characters in Breathitt County."39 Nor did the paper express outrage, surprise, or approval that an organization not heard from for years was active in eastern Kentucky; "Red String" was roundly treated as a sui generis Breathitt County peculiarity.40 The Strong-Amis feud of the 1860s was given lengthy attention in all of Strong's obituaries, but it was treated as a strictly property-based conflict and suggested to be the original event that led to his death, even though Wiley Amis and the rest of his family were long since departed. Oddly, although it had reported his pact with Callahan weeks earlier, Wolfe County's Hazel Green Herald did not report his death.41 The Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune printed a description of Strong's life and death that differed little from the Courier-Journal's except for a slightly lengthier account of his military service. The Ohio paper told of Strong's service in the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry and later the Three Forks Battalion, but skirted the fact that this service had involved terrorizing Breathitt County (by this time the myth of eastern Kentucky's exclusively Unionist leanings was well entrenched). Strong was portrayed as quite popular among "the most powerful and influential citizens of Breathitt" regardless of his politics.42 The New York Times left out any mention of Strong's political affiliations but repeated a prediction that "Strong's friends . . . will never rest until his murder is avenged," thereby casting his killing as part of an interpersonal feud rather than a factional conflict with origins in wartime politics.43 When William Strong captured the Breathitt County courthouse and traded bullets with Confederate veterans on the streets of Jackson, these same newspapers had been nominally willing (as shown in the preceding chapter) to use him and his actions as grist for their own political ends. But since the 1870s, the widely circulated newspapers of cities far from the Three Forks region had abandoned their more obvious sectional and political biases and "claimed to be independent of party dictation."44 To varying degrees they had abandoned party loyalty for human interest. Had Kentucky's more partisan broadsheets, the dogged party organs printed in almost every county seat (like Wolfe County's Herald), taken a greater interest, the full implications of his death might have been explored further. As it stood, "Union partisan" and "feudist" were not necessarily mutually exclusive, but the latter was the more satisfyingly colorful and closer to what readers were acclimated to hearing about the Kentucky mountains. And in 1897, no one in Kentucky or anywhere else wanted to acknowledge that there remained deadly political breaches left over from the Civil War.

The more that was said of the captain's past, the less was speculated of who was behind his murder. No one apparently called foul when Bradley announced a $300 reward for the capture of Strong's murderer(s) two weeks after his death (the following July the governor offered $250 for the capture of Thomas Barnett's killer).45 It was initially assumed that his death resulted from the KukluxRed String conflict of late, but suspicion also fell on John Aikman, an enemy of Strong's since the war.46 Aikman implicated Callahan while other "leading men of the 'Kuklux' " disavowed any knowledge of the slayers' identities.47 Callahan had been in Frankfort at the time of the shooting and denied involvement, mentioning only that Strong "had many enemies in the country around Jackson."48 Neither he nor Aikman were ever prosecuted.49 Much of the publicity surrounding Captain Strong's death acknowledged his bizarre political role in a place where the two-party system had remained somewhat militarized. It is also fairly remarkable that practically no journalists contextualized Strong's death explicitly within the more recent "feud" violence in southeastern Kentucky. But Strong was to be remembered more as a "feudal hero" than a "strong Republican." When the newspapers of Louisville, Cincinnati, and New York had first taken notice of Strong in the 1870s, the memory of the war was pervasive, but the idea of the primitive mountain South was in its infancy. Then, feud was only a word used to depoliticize white intraracial violence at a time when it was commonplace in the South. Since that time, the "feuds" of Rowan, Perry, Harlan, and other counties had since been established in the public consciousness as horizontal conflicts fueled by the barbarism and primordial vengeance of the mountain white, rather than as issues of local state power. The conflation of these trends with mountain Republicanism (compounded by the party's diminished status in the South after the end of Reconstruction) further minimized the role of party politics in these fights. The ensuing attention of evangelists and their bestial portrayals of Kentucky mountaineers encouraged this communal interpretation. Although his own war making predated this reification of the "two Kentuckys," Strong's memory fell victim to this mass depoliticization, his most overtly political acts of violence forgotten and veiled by his personal and allegedly familial ones. He died exactly one day before the state Senate's passage of the antilynching law that Governor William Bradley had demanded, but no one related this to Strong's death or to the lynching of his Red Strings almost exactly thirteen years beforehand.50 These were deemed different kinds of violence.

Most of all, William Strong and his role in Bloody Breathitt were propelled into the past. In the interest of demonstrating that feud violence was not a product of Kentucky's present, the recent killing (or its motivations) were placed as far back in time as possible by both Breathitt County natives and newspapers from the outside world. Fourteen months later, John Aikman insisted that Strong's death was a very late retaliation for the late-1860s dispute between Strong and Wilson Callahan that involved the latter's, and Wiley Amis's, defections to the Democratic Party (Aikman, having no association with these former Unionists, told this story probably as a claim of innocence).51 Aikman took for granted that the younger Callahan would, as a matter of course, avenge his grandfather at this late date. He did not address the question of why, had this been purely a matter of familial revenge, Callahan had not killed Strong years earlier.

Some spoke of Strong in language that sent him back even further. What may have been a misspelling on the part of the Courier-Journal is nonetheless telling: clan, a word Americans would have associated with extended families and Scottish warlords of past centuries (a decidedly parochial time and place) was used in place of klan, which, in contrast, referred directly to a recent crisis of legitimacy in the American South.52 Within six years, when violence in Breathitt County had yet again gained national interest, the events that had led to Strong's shooting had become collectively known as the "Strong-Callahan feud."53 Similarly, a history of Breathitt County produced by the Works Projects Administration's Writers' Project described Callahan's source of authority as "a paternal rule, in the rustic style of a Scotch clan chieftain."54 Granted, these were only analogies, but they were analogies repeated so often that they ultimately overshadowed the actual events and their attendant political implications. The aberrational late persistence of the Ku Klux Klan in Breathitt County, its Red String enemies, and the fact that these groups founded during the South's internecine political wars in the 1860s and 1870s somehow remained in one isolated corner of Kentucky were all but forgotten. With the passing of a generation, the causes that men once killed and died for were becoming as distant and archaic as those of some ancestral Jacobite.

Even if the Strong-Callahan feud was personal, it was also political by virtue of the respective past and present roles of the men who took part in it. Strategically, the "bushwhacking" of Strong in 1897 was little different than the double lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong thirteen years earlier. By the time of his death, Democratic control over the county was in no electoral danger, and the old Republican patriarch had far less authority than he had in the 1870s. The county's African American population had dwindled and his role as "special protector of the colored race in Breathitt" did not garner him even a small measure of local support.55 What little political legitimacy he might have once held was gone. Even if Strong had ceased his belligerence, he and the Red Strings represented the county's past, a past that stood in the way of its continuing economic development. The pocket of guerrilla defiance he established during the Civil War could not be tolerated as Breathitt County became a more influential part of Kentucky and the New South.

Moreover, William Strong was not to be remembered as a kind of political leader but rather a premodern curiosity. A feudal chieftain had to be a thing of distant history, in fact as well as name. With Strong dead, the use of mass violence as had been employed by the Red Strings and the Ku Klux Klan in past years was no longer necessary. After Breathitt's grand jury indicted sixteen men for "ku-kluxing" in the summer of 1897, both groups apparently dissipated.56 Groups that openly went by the name were no longer heard from-at least until the 1910s and 1920s, when a new national version of the Klan emerged.57 The internal crisis of legitimacy that they represented had been resolved; political violence in Breathitt County had not come to an end, but it would no longer be dressed in emblems of the past.

Strong had enough enemies for Edward Callahan to avoid being implicated. But, given their history of political differences and mutual antagonism, Callahan was believed to be the one who had dispatched the last remaining threat to Democratic rule in the county (at least among threats that drew their power from a gun barrel), and this reputation added to his political stock considerably.58 Callahan would go on to further damage his home county's reputation while also becoming one of eastern Kentucky's most invincible politicians.

And even if Strong had not been so great a threat to Callahan in those later years, the former's death had a symbolic significance, a demarcation between Breathitt County's dark feudal past and its bright future that also worked in Callahan's favor. When Strong's nephew James B. Marcum later accused the ascendant Democrat of complicity in his uncle's death, Callahan could have responded like a "feudist," vowing personal vengeance for sullied honor and reputation. Instead, he upbraided Marcum for "keeping up the old trouble."59 But the county's next political debacle, one that placed it under unprecedented national scrutiny, produced a new complex turn toward violence that could not be tucked so neatly into the past. Even after the death of Bloody Breathitt's "feudal hero," the county's most famous killings were yet to come.

6.

"THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE BITTEREST POLITICAL FEELING IN THE COUNTY"

A Courthouse Ring in the Age of Assassination

So it should be noted that when he seizes a state the new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once for all, and not have to renew them every day, and in that way he will be able to set men's minds at rest and win them over to him when he confers his benefits. Whoever acts otherwise, either through timidity or misjudgment, is always forced to have the knife ready in his hand and he can never depend on his subjects because they, suffering fresh and continuous violence, can never feel secure with regard to him. Violence must be inflicted once and for all; people will then forget what it tastes like and so be less resentful. . . .

And it is to be observed, men are either to be flattered and indulged or utterly destroyed-because for small offences they do usually revenge themselves, but for great ones they cannot-so that injury is to be done in such a manner as not to fear any revenge.

-Niccol Machiavelli, The Prince (1532) "Republicanism," Henry Watterson envisioned in late 1888, "is simply an epidemic. Like Federalism, cholera, Know-Nothingism and yellow fever, when it has run its course, it will pass away."1 It was an oddly sanguine appraisal of incumbent Grover Cleveland's recent electoral defeat (Benjamin Harrison had narrowly lost the popular vote while winning the Electoral College) and Republican congressional gains. Marse Henry's lifelong raison d'etre was to rally his party, even in hard times. Nevertheless, it was a peculiar time to predict the Grand Old Party's imminent demise, even from the northernmost edge of the Solid South.

As far as Kentucky's near future went, Watterson was not so much overly optimistic as he was absolutely wrong. The 1888 death of vive voce and the adoption of a secret ballot benefited Republicans all over the state as well as the western counties' tobacco-belt Populist insurgency.2 Just as it had once been caught between North and South, Kentucky was again wedged between the state's agrarian past and its industrial future-an advantageous position for Republicans. In 1895 (the first year the secret ballot was used statewide) they captured the state's House of Representatives and elected William O. Bradley, "the Kentuckian who broke the 'Solid South,' " its first Republican governor.3 As they watched the rest of the South circle the wagons of Jim Crow, Democrats were appalled by what they called Bradley's "mongrel ideas of mixed schools and similar vicious principles."4 His plea to repeal the state's "separate coach law" was met with white jeers (and the aforementioned chaos of 1896), and his summoning of militia to Frankfort during a prolonged legislative conflict angered both factions.5 Even after such heavy-handedness, Bradley's party slowly flourished as Democrats "left the party in its hour of need."6 William McKinley's razor-thin 142-vote advantage over William Jennings Bryan, and the appointment of the state's first Republican U.S. senator, amounted to "a bitter morsel in the mouth of Kentucky Democracy."7 "It's goodbye solid South," a western Kentucky Democrat lamented as Bryan's defeat was confirmed.8 Even with vigorous, honest, two-party competition, Democrats refused to accept Bradley's legitimacy, especially given his vetoes of any and all regulation over the Louisville & Nashville (L&N) "Railway Emperor" and its ever-increasing freight prices.9 Distrust of Bradley and the L&N fueled the career of one of the South's most unlikely firebrand politicians, Democrat William Goebel.10 The Pennsylvania-born Union army veteran's son, a watchmaker's apprentice turned lawyer, represented the urban minority of a rural state still electing Confederate veterans as governors (a wizened James McCreary returned to the office in 1911 after a thirty-two-year intermission).11 For a time, "control by the conservative well-to-do, aristocratic, ex-Confederates of the [Democratic] party was passing," while politicians like Goebel, "more demagogic, more radical, more willing to please tenant farmers and labor were taking control" in many southern states.12 What set him apart from a Comer, Blease, Aycock, or Vardaman was his express openness to black voters (most of whom received him coolly).13 Goebel confronted not only the unwelcome Republicans but also the wing of his own party controlled by industrialized planters like the L&N's chief lobbyist, Confederate doyen Basil Duke.14 Working from within their own party, Goebel became the first real threat to members of Kentucky's Bourbonocracy since the days when they had counted people among their commodities.

Would-be governor William Goebel. Goebel's firebrand gubernatorial run in 1899 divided Kentucky's Democratic Party and brought the state to the brink of civil war. His assassination in 1900 reunited his party and reinitiated the state's status quo. (http://history.ky.gov/governors.php?pageid=27&sectionid=8) William Goebel compounded his controversy by his embrace of violence. He mastered Kentucky's vaunted art of killing in 1895, when an armed banker confronted him over an unflattering article Goebel had penned. Goebel responded with a bullet to the banker's head and was later acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Many accounts mistakenly interpreted the shooting as a duel, although there was no previous planning for the encounter and the banker never pulled his own gun, a scenario that hardly qualified as the traditional (and, by this time, sharply declining) white southern ritual.15 When arsonists burned tollbooths to protest high turnpike fees, the young state senator expressed sympathy for their aims, giving conservative legislators further reason to associate him with lawlessness.16 Nothing he did outside of the state capitol could surpass the controversy surrounding what became known as the Goebel election law. In 1898 Goebel (who was by this time senate pro tem) proposed a reform bill to centralize election management, a measure that would theoretically strengthen his party while simultaneously diminishing the power of county courts, most of which were Democratically controlled.17 Republicans considered it a disenfranchising "Force Bill," while many prominent Democrats opposed it on principle, but it passed over Bradley's veto in 1898.18 Goebel's nomination for governor the following year was widely attributed to the Democratic state convention chair, Breathitt County's "ardent Democrat of the Jeffersonian school" Judge David B. Redwine.19 A dark horse of the mountains, Redwine had few binding relationships and was not a member of one of the state's great dynastic political families like the Clays or the Breckinridges. His origins were relatively obscure even within his own impoverished, remote court circuit (where he had been accused of "boodle" and assisting in local election fixing since early in his judicial career).20 Perhaps most important, his residency in one of the only Democratic stalwarts in a heavily Republican section brought with it a certain pariah status; anyone outside of eastern Kentucky who had heard of it since 1878 associated it with nothing more than the irrational violence and depravity implied by feuds.21 As the political drama was recounted over the following years, particularly from Republican memory, the young judge (whose 1892 rout over H. C. Lilly surprised many mountaineers even after the latter's embarrassment over Breathitt County) was better remembered as being from " 'bloody' Breathitt."22 For years it was suggested that only a "mountain henchman" was intrepid enough to stare down a hostile convention floor.23 The Democrats' infamously rowdy "Music Hall Convention" of June 1899 was nationally known as a meeting of Kentucky's dregs brought to act as delegates. Riverfront roustabouts and gamblers mingled with policemen, firemen, and ward heelers as incessant brass band music, inebriated raucousness, and a constant threat of riot prevailed on the convention floor.24 Ignoring physical threats, Chairman Redwine insisted on a dizzying flurry of roll call votes and refused to adjourn until Goebel's other conventioneers could negotiate a firm majority. He managed enough aplomb to remain onstage beating time with his walking stick to some angry delegates' impromptu rendition of "We'll Hang Jeff Davis from a Sour Apple Tree" with "Redwine" substituted for "Jeff Davis."25 Throughout, Breathitt County's James "Big Jim" Hargis was "one of the main manipulators," cajoling delegates and supposedly threatening Redwine with bodily harm when he considered leaving the lectern for his own safety.26 Redwine "apparently desired the world to surrender on its knees," recalled a disgruntled Republican memoirist. "Parliamentary usages formed no part of his code. He was not there for the convention to direct, but to direct the convention. There was but one man he obeyed, but one man he served, and that man was William Goebel. Him he served with all the fidelity with which a slave serves his master."27 The twenty-sixth ballot produced a nomination for Goebel and nationwide outrage; Republicans saw correlations between Goebel and the specter of anarchy, while some Democrats reproved the Goebel election law as an attack on "home rule."28 David B. Redwine's reputation (and, to a lesser extent, James Hargis's) was indelibly connected to Goebel's contentious nomination, and for years Redwine was anathema among Republicans. Goebel himself coyly disregarded his role at the convention.29 "I want to know if Judge Redwine really was for me," Goebel said at a whistle-stop in Jackson. "They say he was but I want to know."30 From the chaotic 1899 Democratic convention in Louisville to the murders on the streets of Jackson in 1902 and 1903, Judge David B. Redwine was always near the center of controversy while always managing to walk between the raindrops. (Courtesy of the University of Louisville Law Library Collection) Nomination in hand, candidate Goebel scarcely mentioned his Republican opponent, Attorney General William S. Taylor, by name. "There are only two candidates for governor of Kentucky," he announced a month before the election. "There are more than that number who pretend to be candidates, but the only real candidates are the Louisville Company [the L&N] and the person who addresses you."31 His election law, by far his most outrageous legacy, was repugnant to "Honest-election" Democrats who nominated former governor John Y. Brown as their candidate at a separate convention.32 Even with William Jennings Bryan's support, and a reluctant late endorsement from Watterson's Louisville Courier-Journal (Goebel's meteoric rise coincided with an alarmingly rapid drop in subscriptions, apparently revealing some fairly disturbing writing on the wall), Goebel's divisiveness led to his apparent narrow defeat.33 The new election review board-Goebel's own notorious handiwork-found in William Taylor's favor.34 Goebel conceded shortly before Taylor's December inauguration, but Democrats (including "Honest-election" men) accused Republicans of fraudulent ballots and poll intimidation.35 Invigorated by this newfound support, Goebel rescinded his concession and returned to Frankfort in January to question more than one-third of the state's counties' returns. The Democrat-controlled legislature selected a committee made up of nine fellow party members (including James Hargis), one Republican, and one Populist to review the evidence as armed Democrats patrolled Frankfort's streets.36 The Republicans retaliated by summoning more than a thousand armed men from the eleventh congressional district, the district Democrats had gerrymandered around the upland "Whig Gibraltar" counties.37 The L&N volunteered its rolling stock to transport the Republican montagnards to Frankfort gratis except for (according to one horrified Democrat) each having a "pistol to get a free pass."38 "The roughest crowd ever gotten together in the mountains" came mainly from three southeastern foothill counties, Knox, Laurel, and Whitley, but Democrats described their origins less specifically, the better to emphasize eastern Kentucky's preexistent primitive image.39 One Democrat hoped the "invasion of hill billies from the Eleventh district" would disperse with the unusually cold January weather (most did depart, except for approximately 175 of the most dedicated), while the Louisville Courier-Journal warned, "If a single Democrat is harmed the guilt will be upon the Republican leaders and not the ignorant men" the party had "corralled in this little city."40 Only a few Bluegrass Republicans defended the mountaineers gathered to "protect their liberties."41 Cartoon depiction of a mountain Republican occupying Frankfort in January 1900. The cartoon was published just days before William Goebel was fatally shot. Tucked into the mountaineer's gun belt is a carte blanche pardon from Republican governor-elect William Taylor. (Louisville Courier-Journal, January 27, 1900) On the morning of January 30 a hidden rifleman shot Goebel as he and two Democratic friends walked by the statehouse.42 He was carried back to his hotel as premature rumors of his death spread, and armed men prevented the election committee from entering the capitol. Without knowing Goebel's condition, the committee announced a party-line decision in his favor without publicizing the exact numbers of the returns. Governor Taylor took this as an act of sedition and dismissed the General Assembly with instructions to reassemble in Laurel County. Only the Republican legislators complied, while the others assembled in the hotel where Goebel lay dying and ratified the election committee's decision.43 While being fed oysters and succumbing to a fatal case of pneumonia, Goebel twice took the oath of office from two friendly judges.44 Even as Taylor presided over a rump General Assembly in the eleventh district, Democrats declared his recumbent opponent the state's thirty-fourth governor.

Goebel's death three days later did not settle matters. Democrats had become incensed with the possibility that Taylor had directed Goebel's assassination through the "ignorant and uncouth" troop of "Republican mountaineers."45 One Kentucky Democrat combined his suspicion with the preexistent eastern Kentucky feud lore.

The outside world does not know the Kentucky mountaineers, one of whom shot Goebel. They differ from any other mountaineers on earth. They don't know how to do like other beings. If you give one the lie he doesn't smack your face like you or I might do, but draws and shoots. They have been raised that way and know no other law. Now, these men are attracted to Frankfort. They could not see the merits of the case, if there were any. All they could see was that one man was keeping up the excitement.

They regarded Goebel merely as a man in their way, and, as they have always done, they rid their path of him. There was no fanatical sentiment or even hatred, as with Booth when he shot Lincoln. They merely said he is in our way; he must get out of it.46 Apparently no one, not even Republicans, publicly entertained the possibility that Goebel may have been laid low by a fellow Democrat.47 After sixteen initial indictments, Republican secretary of state Caleb Powers and two other mountain Republicans were convicted of his murder.48 A jury "made up entirely of Democrats" sentenced Powers to life imprisonment, but years of politically charged trials and appeals eventually led to pardons for all three men (all but one by the state's next Republican governor, Augustus Willson).49 Two years after his release, the eleventh district voted Powers into Congress.50 Would-be governor Taylor fled to Indiana, where the Republican governor gave him a lifetime asylum (Taylor established a law practice in Indianapolis and never returned to Kentucky).51 After a series of court battles (the U.S. Supreme Court demurred from hearing the case), Goebel's running mate J. C. W. Beckham ended up governor.52 Perhaps seeing the wages of transgression in Goebel's death, Beckham avoided his mentor's controversial reforms and made sure the election law was repealed during a special legislative session in the late summer of 1900. He also became a firm friend of the L&N.53 Kentucky's 1899 gubernatorial election and the litany of ensuing events created an unparalleled crisis of legitimacy, almost "plunging a state into civil war."54 His death, however, healed a chronic fracture that had been expanding in the Kentucky Democracy since the 1880s. Even Democrats who had once hated Goebel frequently conjured up the "martyr to [the party's] cause," and his memory became "the bloody shirt of Kentucky politics" for nearly a decade.55 The assassination's aftermath provided Democrats with yet another impetus to conjure feud in eastern Kentucky. Sedate Laurel County became "the center of the so-called feud district," while the men who came to Frankfort became "regular mountain feudists."56 The supposed gunman in the Goebel killing, Jim Howard, was said to have agreed to act as sniper in exchange for a pardon for a previous murder charge (this came to light after the sum of all Democrat-imagined fiends, a mulatto "feudist" named "Tallow Dick" Combs, briefly fell under suspicion as the possible triggerman).57 Even the Hazel Green Herald, a mountain paper that had good reason not to sully its own section, held to the party line, while defenses of the mountains were few and far between among timid lowland Republicans.58 Whereas once a "feudist" was someone who fought for apolitical revenge against an equal, intimate enemy, now he was a raw brute whose violence could be directed by higher powers. Goebel's death, compounded with eastern Kentucky's wars and rumors of wars, allowed Democrats to make feud mean whatever they wanted it to mean.59 In the process, all of eastern Kentucky was pilloried as never before.

The Goebel affair and the supposed dangers posed by Kentucky mountaineers were entwined for years, providing a means for Kentuckians and other Americans to reconcile (or confuse) political and communal uses of violence and draw boundaries between the two Kentuckys. Novelist John Fox Jr. (for whom the Kentucky mountain feud was a recurrent leitmotif) made a fictionalized retelling of the Goebel affair, and its effects on a fanciful family feud, the subject of The Heart of the Hills (1912). His use of feud was different than that of the Democratic press in 1900, as were his purposes. Rather than claiming that Goebel had died due to the inherent "feudal" tendencies of his slayer, Fox devised a plot in which two families who had fought each other for untold generations finally united in opposition to "the autocrat" in Frankfort; the feud was prepolitical, and political involvement brought its end. After most of his stories had patronized eastern Kentucky for its violence and resistance to change, Fox meant for The Heart of the Hills to be a redeeming portrayal.60 However, like most of his previous writing, it upheld the supposed political chasm between the two Kentuckys, a purely Republican mountain region as the exception to white Democratic Kentucky's rule. It changed few minds and, for the most part, reaffirmed the otherness of the "mountain white."

What he omitted was the role mountain Democrats had played in Goebel's candidacy. Judge David Redwine's name would always be attached to Goebel's rise to power, but his and James Hargis's origins as mountaineers was discussed with decreasing frequency for the next few years until Bloody Breathitt yet again gained national attention. The notion of "feud" worked better if eastern Kentucky's two-party reality was eclipsed by "mountain feudists, cowardly assassination and things like that, which have become so closely associated with Republican government in Kentucky."61 Exceptions to that hard-and-fast rule were rarely discussed and, as subsequent events would show, were suppressed when Kentucky Democrats saw fit.

"Breathitt's debut into political circles in her long robes of state"

James Hargis's arch role in Kentucky politics began only after his mastery of his home county and his collaboration in building a quintessential Gilded Age courthouse ring. A few months after his nemesis William Strong's 1897 death, Edward Callahan, chairman of the county's Democratic Party, came to odds with Hargis over selection of nominees for county school superintendent (a position with immense power over the allotment of local spoils). After Callahan's favorite seemed to win the initial canvass by six votes, Hargis's man somehow won the party committee's endorsement. Still comfortable in using force to meet his ends (even after Breathitt's Ku Klux had apparently dissolved), Callahan led an armed party into the courthouse, captured the ballot box, and recanvassed the returns, not surprisingly finding in his own candidate's favor. Hargis knew that he was in no position to confront Callahan directly, so he contacted the chairman of the state party organization, who promptly recognized Hargis as the new county party chairman.62 Callahan was removed as chairman (though he was restored to the position within a year).63 Hargis had led a coup by responding to violence with an appeal to higher authorities, a clear indication that bureaucratic modernity was surmounting Breathitt County's history of "rifle rule."64 Callahan was a product of the Three Forks region's settler stock, related by blood or marriage to many of the "first families." James Hargis was a great-nephew of John Hargis, one of the Bluegrass Democrats who had helped engineer the county's creation in 1839 (his father had briefly served as a state senator). His first cousin was a former state appeals judge, one of the state's most influential career politicians.65 To turn-of-the-century local-color writers, the growing intraparty dispute between the Hargis and Callahan factions could have been interpreted as the flowering of conflict between two of Breathitt County's oldest "clans." But this was not to be the case. Callahan and Hargis (along with circuit court judge David B. Redwine) soon entered into a political partnership based upon their shared interests as merchants (Hargis in Jackson, Callahan in Crockettsville) and a desire to maintain Democratic supremacy.66 Their respective relationships to Breathitt County and its history were key to their alliance's success. "Hargis still sat high in the councils of his party, while Callahan," wrote a Cincinnati newspaperman a generation after the pair's salad years, "always the lesser light, kept his fingers gripped upon county affairs."67 As a former Klan chief, Callahan bridged the gap between postwar mass violence and legitimate political action. Hargis and Callahan had been young children during the Civil War, and they had little interest in exhuming the county's old mayhem. With a Republican in the governor's mansion, their mostly Democratic (the gold standard debate had swelled Breathitt's Republican ranks slightly, as had in-migration from other mountain counties) home county's political stock was high in the last five years of the nineteenth century.68 In 1895 Republicans had made a preelection boast that Breathitt would be theirs, but it had not come to pass.69 In 1899 Hargis became the first Breathitt County resident appointed to his party's state central committee, a position that gave him patronage power over his entire congressional district and a voice in the party's highest echelons.70 The Hargis-Callahan partnership (with Redwine as a fellow traveler) was recalled as "Breathitt's debut into political circles in her long robes of state."71 Camera-shy James Hargis posed for few photographs, and the reading public outside of Breathitt County had to rely on artists' renderings to know what the mysterious county judge looked like. (Courtesy of the Breathitt County Museum) The partnership also coincided with William Goebel's rise, and they saw to it that Breathitt County supported him.72 The Goebel platform potentially benefited them economically and politically. James Hargis had only one other mercantile competitor in Jackson, while Callahan's store in Crockettsville, far from the closest railroad tracks, was the only store for miles.73 Both men had numerous coal and timber investments but, next to the behemoth holding companies and corporations of the day, they were still small businessmen. Like most southern merchants they favored Goebel's brand of trust busting.74 The relatively small Lexington & Eastern Railroad had made Jackson a boomtown, and Goebel's attacks upon the much larger L&N probably appealed to Hargis and Callahan (and very possibly the vast majority of Breathitt County voters as well), since any reduction or regulation of the larger railroad kept freight rates amenable to local gentry. Any enemy of the L&N octopus was obliged to be an ally to Breathitt County's men of means; even a Democrat accused of turning his party over to "Anarchists, Socialists and Populiste" could support the local status quo.75 However, the Goebel election law may have been their primary enticement. The law established a state board of election commissioners as well as corresponding boards in each county. With a Democratic majority in the General Assembly and the consequent Democratic control over the majority of county boards, Callahan and Hargis could conceivably maintain their party's power within Breathitt County indefinitely, perhaps without continuing to make their county notorious for gunshots. Their connections to William Goebel and the methods that had been used to win the county for him dictated that a perpetual air of controversy would follow them both.

A mass meeting in the summer of 1899 produced a "a healthy rebuke to McKinleyism, Hannaism [a reference to William McKinley's campaign manager Mark Hanna], and the Phillipineism" in the next year's presidential race as well as a supposedly unanimous show of support for Goebel, but the entrance of "fair election Democrat" John Y. Brown represented a more conservative option, especially for Breathitt County's Confederate veterans.76 "Old line Democrat" county judge J. Wise Hagins endorsed Brown and accused Hargis and Callahan of fraud at every opportunity after the Music Hall Convention.77 It was the first gubernatorial election in which mountain Democratic votes could not be disregarded; Goebel's majority in the most famously Democratic mountain county was deemed crucial.78 Repeating a smaller version of his gambit from two years earlier, Callahan hired armed men to guard the most heavily Republican precinct's ballot box and repel Republican election inspectors during the November polling. An armed gang of "Goebel desperadoes" then interrupted the final count, firing pistols in the air, driving all the Republicans from the courthouse and then procuring the ballot box. Even in precincts where Republican inspectors were allowed to remain, all of the accompanying Democrats favored Goebel, with none present for Brown (who, in such a heavily Democratic county, may well have been the greater threat to Goebel). According to the state Republican campaign chairman's accusations, 400 Breathitt ballots were counterfeit. With "bulldozing never seen in Breathitt County before," Goebel won the county with 756 votes.79 Jackson, Kentucky, circa 1903, where calculated political violence hid beneath the guise of boomtown raucousness (as well as the town's "feudal" history). (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) "Every Republican knows that Redwine is the Circuit Judge and that the Sheriff is a Goebel man," Jackson's Republican election commissioner lamented while visiting Lexington a week after the election. "If a Republican resisted any sort of an attack he would be punished to the full limit of the law-if he were killed his murderer would be acquitted. What are you going to do about it?"80 "The Republicans are at the mercy of the Breathitt county Goebel men and they are even afraid to protest," the New York Sun reported, "as it would mean in many instances certain death."81 After the election, the only other counties that reported similarly "severe" tactics to secure the Goebel vote were those with large cities where ward organizations made fraud more common and expected.82 With the "strong Republican" William Strong dead for nearly three years, there was no one to match to the Democrats' extralegal electioneering. Whatever embarrassment Breathitt County's violence might have caused Bluegrass Democrats was outweighed by the advantage of having a Democratic bastion in the mountains that remained enigmatic (at least one out-of-state editor refused to believe mountain Democrats even existed and refuted Republican claims of wrongdoing thus).83 Governors were still required to await the request of a circuit judge for the militia to be summoned; even if Governor Bradley saw fit to do so, Judge Redwine was hardly inclined to make the petition, since the "bulldozing" benefited his gubernatorial endorsee. Breathitt County, long known for its singular record of violence, had become simply another piece of evidence for the statewide crisis of legitimacy, the most overtly forceful example of "the Goebel methods."84 As always, Bloody Breathitt was left to its own devices.

"There is no politics in the law"

Once Democrats reunited around Goebel's martyrdom, there was no demand for indictment, except in places where the "Goebel methods" had the most immediate local effects. In 1901 Hargis and Callahan ran for county judge and sheriff respectively to cement the hold on Breathitt County's government that they had already established as party heads. It was too much for many of their party mates. As popular as he was with many local Democrats, Callahan had a difficult time escaping his past "feudist" reputation, and his candidacy brought with it controversies other than his and Hargis's Goebel connections. Dissident Democrats imitated the recent anti-Democrat southern strategy, forming a fusion with Republicans.85 The fusion was organized by Jackson's Democratic town marshal Jim Cockrell and attorney James Buchanan Marcum, one of the election inspectors harassed by the "Hargis-Callahan Goebellites" in 1899.86 Despite his namesake, Marcum was a rising star among Kentucky Republicans, an affiliation inherited from his Three Forks Battalion veteran father Edward, and Edward's brother-in-law-in-arms Captain William Strong. During the 1890s James Marcum made an unsuccessful run for Congress (and later appellate judge) while representing his controversial uncle in court throughout as the older man asserted his legal possession over thousands of timbered acres.87 Though cut from the same political cloth as his uncle, Marcum was not a crusading "war element" Republican.88 A U.S. commissioner (appointed by Benjamin Harrison), university trustee, and counsel for the L&E, he had more in common with Republicans who championed the gold standard and the "McKinley Tariff," while addressing the "Negro Question" as seldom as possible.89 Rather than crouching in a fortified woodland hermitage with squatters and former slaves, he lived in a white clapboard house in Jackson and had a Democratic law partner, following Atlanta editor Henry Grady's entreaty to "put business in place of politics."90 Whatever his kinship or professional affiliations, no one could associate thoroughly modern Marcum with his uncle's so-called feudal origins in "night-errantry."91 The closest Marcum came to being involved with "feudists" was acting as counsel for Joseph Eversole's faction after the French-Eversole feud (he later represented Bad Tom Smith, Fulton French's primary gunman, in his murder trial) as well as his uncle's wartime nemesis, John Aikman.92 He did not harbor ancient hatreds, but he was angered by his recent opponents' dearth of fair play. Democrats had carried Marcum's home county for most of his life, but their need for violence was an exposed weakness. Moreover, his challenge to the Hargis courthouse constituted a fight between one of Kentucky's most influential Republicans against one of its most powerful Democrats-this in a county that, a few years earlier, had been a sparsely populated backwater ignored for everything except its nationally known proclivity for violence.

Unlike his uncle William Strong, James Buchanan Marcum challenged his county's Democratic ringleaders through peaceful means. His 1903 assassination became Bloody Breathitt's most infamous killing. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) With or without Marcum's credentials, the fusionist campaign was an abortive effort from the beginning. Repudiations of the Democratic Party could not work, and denouncement of the local party leaders could do only so much. Former county judge Wise Hagins released an anti-Hargis circular preposterously accusing him of supporting Republican candidates since the 1880s, jibes Hargis easily dismissed by invoking Goebel and William Jennings Bryan.93 In rebuttal, Hargis accused Hagins of approving the Goebel assassination, implying not only bad moral character but, more important, disloyalty (earning Hagins comparisons to Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold in the Hargis-friendly Hazel Green Herald).94 Hargis then retained Marcum's law partner, O. H. Pollard.95 In 1901's fall elections, the fusionists captured every local office except for county attorney and county judge. Hargis, the "alleged chief conspirator," retained his bench, but only after weathering the first electoral "just rebuke" against Breathitt Democrats in decades.96 Callahan's victory was slightly less sure. After Callahan won the office by a mere sixteen votes, his opponent contested the outcome, prompting Judge Redwine to declare the election void.97 Once in office, Judge James Hargis created an uproar by appointing Callahan acting sheriff until a new election could be held. Callahan's right to the office was challenged in the Kentucky State Court of Appeals in 1903 (which sustained Hargis's and Redwine's decisions). By then, Callahan had been serving as sheriff for nearly two years, hiring his and Hargis's choice of deputies and amassing influence.98 Even during Jeremiah South's lifetime, so much power had not been contained in so few hands in Breathitt County.

Sometime in early 1902, a verbal altercation in Marcum and Pollard's law office led to drawn pistols between them, Hargis, and Callahan. Shooting was avoided, but the police judge (an unstated fusionist supporter) issued a warrant for all four of them. Hargis refused to appear in police court and instead surrendered to a county magistrate he trusted. To allay future confrontations, Marcum moved the case be dismissed, but not before Jim Cockrell and his brother Tom (who was also his deputy) attempted to serve Hargis warrants in the courthouse, leading to another unholstering.99 Within judge's chamber walls and law offices, the mutual threat of violence was sufficient to maintain self-restraint and an uneasy stalemate, albeit a stalemate that did not stifle Hargis's and Callahan's power. A few weeks later Tom Cockrell confronted Hargis's younger brother Ben at a whiskey wholesaler's. The two young men initiated a roomwide gunfight, and each was seriously injured. Cockrell recovered under the care of his "guardian" (the Cockrells were both in their twenties and orphans), Dr. Braxton D. Cox. Ben Hargis died in Judge Hargis's home a day later.100 Ben Hargis's death was nothing unusual in its setting: an intensely masculine, alcohol-drenched environment replete with concealed weapons.101 Jackson, a small county seat turned coal and timber boomtown, was undergoing a rapid change in its population and character, as were so many other industrializing towns, and it was well acknowledged that this was a new sort of exogenous violence, even in a county with a nasty past. "These killings recall some old-time days when Breathitt was foremost as a bloody ground; there is a difference between those days and the present," a Jackson resident wrote to the Hazel Green Herald. "Feuds between factions, which were long and almost unending, were the causes of so many killings then, but recently there were no feuds, but owing to the resulting influence of so many 'blind tigers' existing in this county. This does not speak for the general morality of the county, nor for the will of the people, but owing to the lack of execution of the law, such is being carried on."102 Even if current violence could not be ignored, there was still a need to parse past from present. What the outside world once considered primitively quaint and picturesque was becoming a danger to prosperity and civic morality.103 Ben Hargis's end was an outcome of social ills common to intemperate communities all over the United States.

James Hargis saw it differently or, at least, he wanted the world to believe he did. Utilizing Breathitt County's past history, real and imagined, Judge Hargis pasted together a number of incidents from recent history with local genealogy to portray his brother's death as part of an ongoing, years-old feud. In 1895 his other brother, John Hargis, had tried to intimidate a black voter on Election Day. Jerry Cardwell, the Republican candidate for Jackson town marshal, came to the voter's defense and then earned John Hargis's further hatred by winning the election.104 The two met again the following year aboard an L&E passenger car en route to Jackson when Cardwell was working as the railroad's "special detective" (probably a temporary title inspired by the L&E's unease over statewide bloodletting during the McKinley-Bryan presidential race). Under unclear circumstances, Cardwell confronted the unruly Hargis and the men exchanged gunfire, leaving Hargis fatally wounded.105 Cardwell was convicted of manslaughter, only to be pardoned by Governor William Bradley (since the first melee happened during the election in which the Republican Bradley was elected, this would have infuriated the surviving Hargises all the more).106 Like many other white Kentuckians, James Hargis probably felt victimized by the Republican Party. Cardwell's shooting of John Hargis had no connection to later events, other than his kinship to men Judge Hargis considered enemies by 1902-and even that connection was circuitous. Jerry Cardwell's brother was the police judge Hargis had refused to appear before, while Dr. Braxton Cox was married to Cardwell's sister. Jerry Cardwell himself had not been involved in the ongoing post-Goebel commotion but that did not matter since feuds hid individuals behind their "clans." Feuds had been associated with Bloody Breathitt since James Hargis's youth, and he knew how to use the concept to his own ends; if he retaliated, or if his political enemies began to fall mysteriously, Hargis could hide behind his own surname and his loss of two brothers, claiming to be embattled. The declaration of a new feud in Bloody Breathitt would not be met with much skepticism. And it contributed to factual errors in the papers, including moving John Hargis's death from 1896 to 1902 so that it fit better into his brother's feud narrative.107 For years, Bloody Breathitt had had feud imposed upon it from the outside world. Now, at least one Breathitt native had found a way to use this contrived narrative to his advantage. By establishing that his family was besieged, he justified any future violence directed at his enemies as retribution, while simultaneously obscuring its political import. Even if Judge Hargis was implicated, an indictment would be unlikely (let alone a conviction), and his motives would remain unclear-in a time and place where "disentangling murder from assassination" was difficult.108 Even though he might be ridiculed as a "feudist," Hargis would still retain power.

Braxton Cox's shooting death the following April seemed to verify this feud's existence.109 After a late-night telephoned request for a house call turned out to be a false alarm, Cox was walking home on Jackson's main thoroughfare when he was riddled with buckshot.110 No witnesses ever came forward, but it was rumored that the fatal blast had come from either the courthouse or Judge Hargis's livery stables. Cox's eighty-year-old mother-in-law, secure in her age and sex, was the only Jackson resident willing to publicly accuse Judge Hargis.111 Apparently, no one ever expressed suspicion that the initial telephone caller was a conspirator.

The midnight shooting death of Dr. Braxton Cox initiated a new era of violent death in Jackson, one that reflected Breathitt County's recent changes. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) James Cockrell's murder that July attracted far more attention.112 This was a midday shooting, and it was widely acknowledged that the rifle shots had come from a second-story courthouse window (the schematic similarities to William Goebel's killing were palpable). Only days before, he had exchanged gunfire with Curtis Jett, one of Edward Callahan's deputies, in a hotel dining room, and he was preparing to leave Jackson to avoid more fights.113 Cockrell was trundled onto an L&E railroad car and transported to a Lexington hospital, as notice of his imminent arrival was telegraphed ahead.114 Before he expired from five bullet wounds the next day, the press had already placed his impending death within a feud narrative that swapped facts for plot coherence. One paper announced the young town marshal was the latest "Breathitt County feuds" casualty, and faintly praised him as "superior in every way to Thomas Cockrell, his brother" (whose killing of Ben Hargis was implicitly blamed for beginning the chain of events that had led to the older Cockrell's imminent demise). An evening edition interchangeably called Ben Hargis Judge James Hargis's son and brother, foreshadowing future media errors.115 The fact that Ben Hargis was killed via reciprocal-fire manslaughter, while Cox's and Cockrell's deaths were obviously premeditated assassination-style first-degree murders, was not addressed. Once the series of deaths was branded (no later than July 1902) the "Hargis and Cockrell feud," it was far less likely that such nuances would be acknowledged.116 Judge Hargis's insistence had done its work.

As circumstantial evidence built against James Hargis and Edward Callahan, their motive(s) became a subject of statewide speculation. Initially, the revenge motif seemed more likely than calculated elimination of political opponents, especially in light of the armed altercation between a Cockrell and a Hargis that had preceded another Cockrell's murder. The Republican Lexington Leader, the paper that had produced a stirring account of Cockrell's death the day before, was strangely unaware of Cockrell's role in the fusionist campaign. "One of the strangest features in connection with the feud is that while it originated in a political contest, and was increased by the killing of Ben Hargis by Tom Cockrell, both factions are Democrats, so that whatever political feeling exists in the feud it is all on one side and in one party."117 Instead, it was suggested that James Cockrell had been disposed of so that his brother, awaiting trial for murder in another county, would be utterly defenseless. While the Cockrells had been successful in securing a change of venue, Governor J. C. W. Beckham had assigned Judge Hargis's Bluegrass cousin and fellow Democratic State Committee member, Thomas Hargis, as special judge.118 Thomas Cockrell, the Leader predicted, was "to be left to the tender mercies of his enemies who are now said to be in control of the legal machinery of the county." As in past interpretations of feud violence in eastern Kentucky, Cockrell's death was headlined as only "Another Dark Chapter Added to Bloody Breathitt's Terrible Record That Savors of Middle Age Barbarism."119 Wolfe County's Democratic Hazel Green Herald reported its neighbor's tribulations with a typical combination of local defensiveness and regional solidarity, but with Breathitt County held at arm's length. During the weeks leading up to Thomas Cockrell's trial, it criticized other papers' factual errors in "the Hargis-Cockrell feud in Breathitt."120 Shortly after James Cockrell was killed, the paper criticized the Leader's (and other "outsiders' ") sudden interest in Jackson's internal affairs. Breathitt County's citizens were having an endogenous "hell of their own," and "people outside the immediate trouble do not know the cause of any of the parties involved, save as retailed to them, and are apt, therefore, to misjudge." Without explicitly announcing a feud, the Herald assured readers that the troubles were strictly a "family affair."121 But weeks later, when Hazel Green was selected as Tom Cockrell's change of venue (which Redwine attempted to block), the Herald editor crowed that a trial "out of the range of the 'feud belt' " would put an end to the sordid events.122 Judge Hargis was never implicated personally. No doubt noting that heightened exposure of Breathitt County would damage his administration, he stated that he and his adherents "were never in any feud" and elected to abort his pursuit of Tom Cockrell's conviction a month after James Cockrell's death (Tom Cockrell was acquitted).123 No one asked Hargis why the three homicide victims happened to all be fusionists. The political elements of the story were already fading.

The existence, or denial, of an ongoing "family feud" was not enough to misdirect all Kentuckians, especially Republicans who remembered the Breathitt judges' role in the Goebel campaign. After Judge Hargis withdrew from Tom Cockrell's prosecution, the Lexington Leader kept up its assault, using William Goebel's memory as a rhetorical weapon. "There never would have been an hour during the entire trouble when the Circuit Court could not have controlled the situation absolutely, if [Redwine] had injected into it one-hundredth part of the zeal shown on the occasion of the foul assassination of Mr. Goebel at Frankfort when the state was taxed $100,000 and every piece of its constabulary was set in motion to run down the assassins."124 A few months later, the paper again exhumed Goebel in connection to Breathitt's judges: "Breathitt county is today the political stink hole of Kentucky, and elections there are nothing more than licensed orgies of brutality and crime. Judge Redwine was the chairman of Goebel's Music Hall Convention and Judge Hargis was one of the master spirits of the Goebelites on the floor and, under their absolute sway Breathitt County is today the best exemplification of the horrors of Goebelism to be found in the Commonwealth of Kentucky."125 Only the newspapers that had bitterly opposed Goebel three years earlier called for further investigation of Cox's and Cockrell's murders.126 After James Marcum alerted the Leader of the death threats he had received since Dr. Cox's death, the Republican paper enhanced its attack, printing letters from Marcum, Hargis, and Callahan but allowing Marcum the lion's share of column space. He produced an affidavit signed by one of his criminal case clients, Mose Feltner, claiming that Judge Hargis and Sheriff Callahan had once offered him money to kill Marcum (Feltner had a lengthy criminal record and little apparent compunction against trigger pulling).127 Marcum's claims were reprinted all over the state, while the Leader proclaimed that "murder [in Breathitt County] has been used systematically as a means of intimidation" and that "the processes of the court have a terror only for innocent men."128 Hargis and Callahan both responded bitterly, claiming that Marcum had lied for incomprehensible reasons. Hargis cited his own record of shutting down blind tigers as evidence of his county's lack of troubles.129 Callahan was more candid, acknowledging that Marcum might have reason to be alarmed after the unsolved shooting deaths of "two prominent men." As sheriff, Callahan had to own up to the county's civil disorder, but he was quick to deny that it was anything but undirected disorder, and certainly not a "conspiracy."130 Marcum responded by expressing fear that Callahan's deputies, Curtis Jett and Tom White, were out to kill him. He also accused Callahan of involvement in the murder of his uncle, William Strong, in 1897.131 Marcum and the Leader's most damning accusation was that Breathitt's courthouse ring was protected by Democrats all over the state. "[Hargis and Callahan] have men employed, newspaper correspondents, to misrepresent the facts," Marcum asserted, "and Hargis is now trying to arouse political prejudices in order to secure the sympathy of the Democratic press. There is no politics in the law. It was made for all parties and should be obeyed by all, even the 'leading Democrats in Eastern Kentucky.' "132 Hargis directed Breathitt County's grand jury to indict Marcum for criminal libel, silencing Marcum for the next seven months (the charges were eventually dismissed).133 The year 1903 began with an apparent detente, but with Marcum going into self-imposed isolation.

In May 1903 Marcum was shot and killed in the doorway of the Breathitt County courthouse.134 A bullet entered his back, apparently fired from inside the building, and a second one was emptied into his head, apparently at very close range, after he had fallen.135 For months he had left his home only in the company of women or while carrying his infant son-his own portable "domestic sphere" was an effective deterrent.136 This noontime foray was said to be his first walk by the courthouse in adult male company since 1902. By dying violently after publicly implicating the courthouse ring, Marcum almost succeeded in his goal: demonstrating that what the United States knew as the "Hargis-Cockrell feud" was not a horizontal "family affair" but instead the outgrowth of a statewide struggle for legitimacy that Kentucky had dealt with for years. The daytime murder of such a prominent figure proved to be the beginning of the end for Jackson's courthouse ring. Still, James Marcum's death was forever after misunderstood as part of a feud narrative.

"This is only one of many similar feuds which have disgraced the State"

James Marcum's murder was the most widely publicized "feudal" death in years. Most of the fatalities in the French-Eversole feud and the Rowan County War (or, for that matter, the deaths of Judge Burnett in 1878 and William Strong in 1897) were men unknown outside their respective communities. But this mountain attorney was a leader in Kentucky's Republican Party, an officer of the federal government, a corporate representative, and the very incarnation of his section's recent advancement. His death presented a conundrum for Bluegrass Kentuckians who had previously interpreted the eastern third's feud phenomenon as a sui generis product of isolation or racial (Anglo-Saxon or Celtic) peculiarity. His ally Tom Cockrell's assertion that Marcum "was never implicated in any feud" motivated many to consider his death an accident of sorts.137 An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal printed soon after his death illustrates the turn in interpretation of what many Kentuckians considered a familiar occurrence presented by the Hargis-Cockrell feud's latest death.

The feud which took Mr. Marcum's life has caused, it is said, no less than forty deaths in the last two years. This would be an astounding statement to any one who was a stranger to these mountain vendettas. But this is only one of many similar feuds which have disgraced the State and will continue to disgrace it until the State shows a more resolute purpose and power to uphold the law.

These feuds have too often been looked upon as romantic episodes of primitive life in our backwoods. That is entirely too charitable a view to take of them. There is nothing romantic or manly about them. Originating in some trivial quarrel, they continue for generations of cowardice, treachery and assassination. The murders which are their outcome are not even committed man to man, in the open, but almost invariably are perpetrated after patient lying-in-wait and ambush extending over months and years.138 The editorial provided a succinct description of Kentucky's endemic feud violence as it was understood nationally: series of violent acts employing ambush-style homicides (as the same paper had described the death of William Goebel) taking place deep in the mountains, caused by disagreements of an unknown or unimportant nature, producing an undetermined number of deaths, and lasting over the course of generations by a mutual motivation of vengeance (the editorial notably omitted the family or "clan" as the basis for feud factionalism). But the ways in which the Hargis-Cockrell feud did not fit into this previously formed mold, namely, its chronological brevity and fairly clear political motivations, were generally ignored. The "forty deaths" was a melding of Jackson's new industrial age harum-scarum and its older postbellum reputation.