Marcum's assassination stood out from both, and the men who had engaged him in an editorial-page war of words a few months earlier had clear motive. Judge Hargis's best tactic was a continuation of feud-related rhetoric, with himself cast as indignant victim (it was not hard to do with his opposition keeping silent, as Hagins and other fusionists were doing). The previous year he had cast James Cockrell's death within a larger feud narrative that acknowledged enmity between his family (but not necessarily himself) and the Cockrells. Now, Hargis called Marcum one of a number of "Republican leaders" who had "endeavored to run [Hargis] out of the county." But Hargis still insisted that this was a communal, multigenerational conflict motivated by old, bitter memory, not current party matters. When Hargis was a boy, the judge told one journalist, Marcum's uncle William Strong had raided the Hargis farm, leaving him and his siblings hungry and shoeless.139 Marcum, he said, had since been "reared in an atmosphere of feuds" and that there was "not a family in Breathitt county some one of whose members has not been slain by Marcum blood" (my emphasis).140 Their local Civil War experience was so defined by intimacy, with the stories of visceral suffering that entailed, that its politics need not be addressed. Breathitt County's violent past was putty in Hargis's hands.

The Lexington Leader remained the only major Kentucky paper eager to examine the killings of 1902 through a political lens, placing Marcum's death specifically within the lineage of Cox's and Cockrell's, referencing Marcum's accusations from the previous November.141 Republicans had endured more than three years of abuse for their assumed complicity in William Goebel's death. Now that one of their own had fallen in a similar manner, they were quick to find the beams in their Democratic accusers' eyes. Maysville's Public Ledger minced no words a month after Marcum's death. "When it comes to real-simon-pure-unadulterated18-karat-brand-burned-in-the-barrel feudocracy, the good old rock-ribbed Democratic county of Breathitt can give any 'Republican mountain county' hearts and spades and beat it to never-come-back."142 "Amidst the newspaper illustrations and accounts of the 'War in Breathitt,' it should not be forgotten that Breathitt is one of the staunch Democratic counties of Kentucky. All its local officers are Democrats, and the Circuit Judge is a Goebel of Democracy."143 Even though the circumstances of these "political and feud murders" could not fully challenge the more popular explanation for mountain violence, it did at least temporarily call into question the assumption that eastern Kentucky was a "barbarians' world beyond the polis."144 Some Republicans even accused "the State Democratic machine" of finding "the Hargis outlaws" useful.145 "While the business men of Kentucky are trying to build up," said one, "the politicians are doing their best to pull down."146 Feuds existed in the mountains, blasted a Lexington Republican, but a feud proper was motivated by honor or revenge, not material gain. "Time will make a splendid civilization in the mountains of Kentucky, and the feud will be eradicated as it was in Scotland. As for that Breathitt county business-there is the filth of lucre in that, blood shed for money, not for revenge. That is disgraceful, and the mountains will not put up with it."147 A Republican insistence that contingent/political violence was taking place did not negate the inherent/communal explanations for violence that Americans of all political stripes had been absorbing and believing since the 1880s.

The Republicans' Goebel/Marcum comparisons were hardly flawless. "The assassination of Marcum was coldly planned in a business way-not in the heat of excitement," reasoned one Republican. "Mr. Goebel was shot at the Statehouse door during a period of unsurpassed excitement and tension, and nobody actually saw the man who fired the shot. The case as to Marcum was much simpler than as to Goebel." Perhaps, he opined, "the Democratic Machine [was] in the official saddle seeking to hide the facts and save the Democratic party," but it was beyond spurious and unfounded to say Marcum's killing was any more "coldly planned" than Goebel's.148 In trying to prove the true nature of Bloody Breathitt's most renowned crime, Republicans balked at admitting that political violence was a tool available to both parties. Pro-Hargis Democrats could still wave Goebel's bloody shirt in their faces.

Of course most Democrats preferred that Breathitt County's killings be considered "lawlessness" unrelated to party politics.149 Even Democratic papers that had no interest in using the language of feuding insisted on at least acknowledging that, since "murder is murder," politics aside, Marcum's slaying "was as bad as the murder of Goebel," while another disingenuously praised Breathitt County's "Democratic officials" for "using every effort to bring the guilty to justice," unlike when Goebel "was assassinated on the capital grounds under Republican rule."150 Hypocrisy, they said, was thick within any and all Republican censures of Hargis et al., and had Kentucky Democrats rushed to the defense of their malefactors as Republicans had done for Goebel's accused murderers?151 "There is not a Democratic paper in Kentucky that has stood back from denouncing the feuds and assassins of Breathitt county on account of the political aspect of the case. How different is the picture from that of the assassination of Wm. Goebel, when every cross-roads organ of the Republican party in Kentucky either openly or tacitly excused or defended his murderers."152 While Republicans had hindered Caleb Powers's and Jim Howard's prosecutions, the Democratic press, in contrast, could now claim to be "on the forefront" of nonpartisan justice for Marcum, "the Republican son of Breathitt."153 Democratic admissions of "the political aspect of the case" were exceptionally rare. At least one Democrat doubted that Marcum's killer "had any politics."154 Louisville's Courier-Journal continued its generation-old practice of balancing mild party loyalty with an attempt to mollify everyone with apolitical descriptions of violence. "Officers of the law and courts of justice" did not direct the actions of "assassins and anarchists," but were instead cowed by them.155 The "law officers . . . of the so-called county of Breathitt," were not so much vicious as inept.156 Well aware of the ever-present danger of libel charges, most other newspapers throughout Kentucky were careful to treat Breathitt County's violence as the local authorities' sins of omission rather than their directed violence. In a state with little central oversight over county affairs, Hargis and Callahan could withstand these insults while maintaining their tremendous amount of power. As commentators all over Kentucky yammered on, the judge and the sheriff remained in their lofty positions in Jackson. During May 1903, it was often said that the identities of Marcum's (and Cox's and Cockrell's) killer(s) were widely known, and that fears of reprisals kept the populace silent.

It took someone from outside the political sphere to expose the crimes of James Hargis and Edward Callahan. James Marcum's widow, Abrelia Hurst Marcum, wasted no time accusing Hargis and Callahan for her husband's death, not only implicating Hargis's "clan" in her husband's homicide but broadly blaming "the administration of Judge Hargis" for leading to a general atmosphere of lawlessness.157 Judge Hargis and the whole state knows that there have been thirty-eight homicides in Breathitt county during his administration as county judge. What attempt has been made by him as the highest official in the county to have the laws enforced? When he became county judge about two years ago there was no more peaceful county in Kentucky. Our people walked the streets at night in the pursuit of their vocations with absolute safety and no thought of danger.

Today business men who can are leaving. Our citizens do not dare to express their opinion for fear of assassination. Citizens dare not leave their homes at night for fear of being the mark of men who are immune from punishment. Every man whose life's blood has stained the soil of Breathitt county during Judge Hargis's administration of law has bit the dust at the hands of some adherent of their clan, or his identity remains unknown and no strenuous effort has been made to find him.158 Although Marcum interchangeably blamed Hargis for crimes of malice and of negligence, she notably blamed the entirety of Breathitt County's violence on him, with no reference to past troubles. If Breathitt County was presently a place where violence was tolerated, it was contingent upon individuals currently in positions of power, not because of the brutal inherencies suggested by the decades-old nickname Bloody Breathitt.

As a woman and expectant mother (she gave birth the following September), Abrelia Marcum was practically immune to the violence used on the streets of Jackson. Brutality toward women, especially spousal abuse, was not unheard of in Breathitt County any more than elsewhere else in the United States (an uxoricide arrest began the confrontation that led to the death of Judge Burnett in 1878). But deadly violence with clearly political purposes (that is, the vast majority of Bloody Breathitt's most notorious events) could not be directed at women since they were not recognized as political actors. Even the most ruthless men kept violence, especially politically motivated violence, as far from women as possible. James Marcum's successful tactic of shielding himself with women and children in the weeks before his assassination demonstrated the sacredness of the "separate sphere."159 Far from being a motivation for violence, as the narrative of feuds suggested, the women and children that represented family were obstructions to violence. Just as Dr. Braxton Cox's elderly mother-in-law felt free to speak out against the courthouse ring, Abrelia Marcum was able to do the same. She represented to Breathitt County men communal institutions that had not often been violated by the county's decades-old cycle of violence.160 In a time and place in which men were afraid to accuse the Hargis courthouse of murder, only a woman, Abrelia Marcum (pictured with her children), could expose the courthouse ring's misdeeds. (Washington Times, October 20, 1907) Even though she was protected from her husband's fate, her words could do only so much to implicate the men in power. Just after Governor Beckham offered a $500 reward for James Marcum's murderer, Curtis Jett was indicted.161 Jett hired Judge Hargis's business partner Fulton French as his attorney, and went to lengths to see that he was tried in Breathitt County (soon after, deputy Tom White was indicted as well).162 Edward Callahan recused himself from his role in summoning witnesses for the trial, and he and Hargis took a very public role in supporting Jett and White's defense.163 They and French engaged in an apparent effort to prevent Jett and White from plea-bargaining and implicating them all in a larger conspiracy. Jett was an agent of the county court, but that was minimized somewhat by the rumor that he and James Marcum had "quarreled" publicly shortly before the latter's death, a rumor that emphasized personal enmity over political calculation.164 Suspecting that the trial would prove to be politically charged, and chagrined by growing criticism of his relationship with the Hargis courthouse, Governor Beckham sent the state militia to Jackson.165 Beckham announced that the "situation" in Jackson "has been exaggerated" and he was hesitant to send more members of the militia to fortify the ones already sent. Less than four weeks later, the militia unit was ordered back to the Bluegrass to prevent a potential lynching during a highly publicized murder trial of three black men.166 As national attention surrounded Jett and White's trial, Harper's Weekly attacked Breathitt County as an example of a larger problem. "These assassinations in Kentucky are attributed by some observers to the system of county politics in Kentucky," it announced. "The struggle for the county offices is so intense that rival politicians and their partisans are led to murder to attain their ends, and assassination is further fostered by the spirit of the vendetta which prevails in the mountainous regions of the State."167 A fire that destroyed a hotel belonging to a witness for the prosecution during the trial prompted members of both political parties to concur.168 Yet circuit court judge Redwine remained aloof from implication. When the trial in Jackson ended with a hung jury (with Redwine on the bench), the Hazel Green Herald surmised it could only mean an end to the "holy alliance of Hargis & Redwine" (Redwine retired from the circuit bench later that summer).169 A change of venue to a presumably neutral county resulted in life sentences for both Jett and White.170 Jett was later found guilty of murdering James Cockrell and sentenced to death, but the sentence was reversed in 1905.171 Deputies Tom White (left) and Curtis Jett (right) under guard after their arrest for murder. Even though they were officers of the county court, it was difficult to prove that Judge Hargis or Sheriff Callahan had directed them to kill. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) Jett's and White's convictions convinced many that justice had been served, and for the rest of 1903, Breathitt's courthouse bosses were free from scrutiny. Throughout it all, Hargis's position in Kentucky's Democratic central committee remained safe. Shortly after Jett and White's change of venue, Democrats feted him at a banquet in Lexington.172 Governor J. C. W. Beckham's embarrassment was harder to hide. Hargis's boast that he could get anyone pardoned was enough to make many Kentuckians suspicious, and Beckham's (he had issued a record number of pardons in his first five months in office) subsequent pardoning of Tom White seemed to confirm this, as did Curtis Jett when he secured a Beckham pardon for an unrelated crime.173 Questions about Beckham's connections to the Hargis courthouse emerged days after Marcum's death, and the governor was forced to address the unhappy county at the beginning of his 1903 reelection campaign.174 With rote references to Goebel's death at Republican hands, Beckham countered that Governor Bradley had issued far more pardons, and cited accused conspirator James Howard (from his prison cell Howard angrily accused Beckham of using him to "distract the public gaze from [Beckham's] conduct, his political pardons, his trades and unholy alliances").175 Beckham accused Kentucky Republicans of making "political capital" out of the Breathitt murders, while applauding Democratic papers for condemning them apolitically.176 The governor also parried with northern critics over the relative quantity of violence in his own state compared to theirs. "The calling into service of the entire national guard of one of the northern states to suppress a strike, where hundreds may be slain, does not attract one-half the notice as does the use of one company of Kentucky militia in aiding some Circuit court in trial of a criminal."177 As the summer months passed, the Breathitt County issue did not go away. At the official opening of the Democratic state campaign, Beckham declared, That the Democratic officials have done everything in their power to put an end to the troubles in Breathitt County no one disputes. They were purely local, and not half as serious as the feudal outbreak in Clay County during the [Bradley] administration. If the Republicans had shown the same desire to punish the assassins of William Goebel that the Democrats did to punish Marcum's assassins, both crimes would now be avenged. Let the past be forgotten, and let us stand together henceforth shoulder to shoulder as Democrats, with our hearts full of devotion for the welfare of our State and Nation.178 Beckham's address had multiple insinuations. Even many of his own party mates may not have been convinced that Breathitt County's killings were rooted only in local conflicts. Breathitt County's violence had to be, as had always been the case in other eastern locales (especially where Republicans ruled), purely internal and without any greater significance or implication. In addition, his reference to an analogous "feud" situation in Republican Clay County during a Republican administration negated whatever attempts Republicans might make to pillory his party for sanctioning violence. Breathitt County's recent assassinations and the "Clay County War" were, by virtue of their placement in the state's (supposedly Republican) primitive mountains, cut from the same cloth, even if they had grown from two separate conflicts and under different regimes.179 Even if local party affiliations were the origin of violence, they were based upon small differences between decidedly local politicians and their henchmen, with no relation to larger issues faced by the state or national parties.

Beckham echoed the Courier-Journal's tone in portraying Breathitt County after the 1878 riot. Against the threat of northern/Republican censure it was to be carefully defended. But when addressing the issue to an audience within the state, it was more advantageous to rhetorically place the mountains outside of Kentucky and outside of the present. Implicitly, this suggested that these feuds were hardly political at all, but rather primeval products of their mountain environment and far into "the past," which was better "forgotten." "Purely local" "feudal outbreak[s]" could be easily dismissed, especially when individuals with direct connections to the governor's office were left unmentioned.

Beckham's November victory indicated that sacrificing the reputation of eastern Kentucky (at least when done to a Kentucky audience) was an effective Democratic tool. Safely back in office, Beckham repeated these claims in his annual address the following January. This time he did not try to excise Kentucky's highlands from the rest of the state but did repeat his critique of urban crime up north. "Irresponsible romances" had inflated Breathitt County's conditions. "It is not an exaggeration to say that there was not a day during the past year that human life was not safe in Kentucky, even in Breathitt County, than it is any night upon the streets of Chicago or New York, from the sanguinary columns of whose voracious journals the people have been told day after day of the awful condition of lawlessness and crime in Kentucky."180 Of course this was easy to say long after the assassinations had ended.

By the time of Jett's and White's convictions the county had received more critical inspection "than any other section of the world," revealing a small chink in the courthouse ring's armor.181 Henry Watterson's Courier-Journal declared what many already believed, that the two young deputies were simply "pawns" under the sway of higher authorities, and that Hargis, Callahan, and Redwine would be implicated in the future (although, at the time, Watterson refrained from naming names).182 The sheriff and judges did not fire back but, sensitive to complaints about their operating behind closed doors, they began making more public appearances like Jackson's Salvation Army street performances.183 J. Wise Hagins, now almost alone in his concerted effort to fight the courthouse ring, felt safe enough to publish an anti-Hargis paper, the Breathitt County News, that fall. He endorsed a Republican for sheriff over Hargis and Callahan's "Midnight Ticket," so named because the Democrats' six-man nomination committee met "in a lonely hall, long after honest yeomanry of the county had retired . . . in the company of the bats, owls and midnight marauders."184 In November Edward Callahan won reelection over the Republicans' "Law and Order Ticket" despite Hagins's continuing attacks (Hagins later impotently blamed the state militia for fixing the election in Callahan's favor).185 By the end of 1903 it appeared that the Marcum murder had far less of an impact on Breathitt County's political status quo than many had suspected months earlier. The Hargis-Cockrell feud that spawned it was all but forgotten for the time being. The Hargis-Callahan courthouse ring was popular among Bluegrass Democrats and, in Breathitt, it still inspired enough public fear that popularity was becoming unnecessary. Still, it is notable that public assassinations had apparently come to an end.

James Hargis's role in one of the most expansive pieces of Jim Crow legislation in American history proved how well regarded he remained among the Democratic patriciate. In January 1904, Carl B. Day, newly elected state representative for Breathitt and two other counties (and Hargis's nephew), introduced a bill to prohibit integrated educational facilities in all private institutions (Kentucky's public education system was already constitutionally segregated).186 The bill's sole target was Berea College, the only integrated school in the former slave states, which Kentucky Democrats wanted to "send to Ohio or some other Negro equality State."187 Day's inspiration, so the story went, was his disgust at seeing two different-complexioned female Berea students exchange a sisterly kiss at a train station.188 He was also hitching his star to the white southern outcry over Theodore Roosevelt's White House luncheon with Booker T. Washington.189 Perhaps "in the absence of any other," Kentucky Democrats wished to "make negro equality . . . the issue" to defeat "Rooseveltism" in 1904.190 Day conjured the specters of social equality and miscegenation, and averred that "co education . . . would ultimately lead to a downfall of the nation."191 He produced a petition signed by Kentuckians living near Berea who considered the school "an open defiance of the organic law."192 He also implied the bill was a platform of reunion for a party that had become dispersed and dissolute. "The Democratic party in our State stands almost as a unit on the race question, and I do not believe there is a Democrat in either branch of the legislature who would be willing to go back to his white constituents and say: 'I voted against a bill which prohibited white and negro children from going to school together.' "193 Those constituents' approval of Day's House Bill No. 25 was confirmed, not only by its seventy-three to five passage in the House but also by its five dissenters' (all from eastern Kentucky districts) electoral defeats the following November. The bill became law the following summer when the Senate passed it.194 Although Hargis's name had become synonymous with "feudism" during the past year, he and Redwine attended the closed session of the statehouse's educational committee (representatives from Berea College were excluded) to express their support as well as that of their "section." The press did not portray Judge Hargis's presence at the capitol as peculiar or deleterious to the bill's potential passage. In fact, many attributed its popularity to his endorsement.195 Indignant liberals blamed the "Day Law" on the whole South; others accused the state of Kentucky or Breathitt County for producing it. One unversed author, ignorant of Carl Day's mountain roots, decried "the other two thirds of the State" for imposing upon eastern Kentucky a needless inoculation against race mixing, and even favorably compared Berea to Breathitt County's own Jackson Academy.196 In good Progressive fashion, other critics conflated iniquity with backwardness. One member of Berea's board of trustees blamed the "notorious" Breathitt County itself while another attacked Day as "that polished and cultured statesman from Breathitt County-Bloody Breathitt-who is not sure whether Shakespeare was the discoverer of America or the inventor of a new kind of breakfast food."197 The imprecise attribution of the county's violence to "ignorance" worked equally well for its apparent production of state-mandated race hatred but failed to acknowledge the Day Law's overwhelming popularity among other white Kentuckians. For that matter, it also failed to acknowledge Bloody Breathitt's authoritative position in Kentucky's Democratic Party.

Many black Kentuckians blamed Berea's president William Frost more than they did the state's Democrats since his interest in educating "mountain whites" overshadowed his interest in teaching co-racial classrooms. For his part, Frost was careful not to blame personally any Kentucky legislators "compelled . . . to satisfy the rougher element among their supporters."198 One had told him that he had put aside misgivings and voted yea or else be obliged to "discuss the Nigger question in every political speech as long as I live."199 Rather, Frost spread the blame broadly across the "Bourbon movement which had extended over the whole South." "To understand the South," he wrote to northern benefactors, "we must remember that the Southern States have never had a really democratic government and that the majority of the people of the South have no comprehension of what fairness, equality, and republican institutions really are."200 In the years after the Day Law's June 1904 passage, various commentators blamed its unprecedented enforcement of segregation on Carl Day's egregious personal racism or his personal vendetta toward Berea College.201 Day's proposal to prevent "the contamination of the white children of Kentucky," and Hargis's and Redwine's endorsement thereof, was undoubtedly a product of an enduring popular belief in white supremacy, even in a place with few blacks.202 Their espousal of forced segregation reflected a local party apparatus as dedicated to white supremacy as any other Democratic courthouse clique in Kentucky. Hardly anyone questioned why a representative from the overwhelmingly white Three Forks region took such a great interest in segregation. Also, no one commented on Day's other bill, one that allowed timberland owners to deny others "rights of way over adjoining lands, for the purpose of securing an outlet to water or to market."203 It was meant to be the final nail in the coffin for the past century's free-ranging mountain economy, and it came as little surprise from the pen of a lawmaker from "one of the wealthiest and most prominent [families] socially and in business in the mountain section" who was "prominently identified with the commercial and timber interests of Breathitt County."204 As was typical of New South ordinances, racial concerns cast a haze over economic ones. The complex relationship between the seemingly all-white county and the maligned statute was also saved from widespread scrutiny. Most observers with close knowledge of the college and the state considered the Day Law more a cynical political maneuver than a sincere attack on integration. One defender of co-racial education avowed that, aside from its being "evidence of the negrophobia which is sweeping over the South," it was just as likely "a political move [by Hargis and Day] to win the favor of those who desire to keep the colored people in subjection, and also of those who dislike Berea's work for the education of mountain Republicans."205 An unnamed writer associated with Berea concurred, blaming Day, "Judge Hargis, Redwine, and other notorious characters" from the "bloody county" for trying to "win notoriety and favor with the masses by doing something which would be understood as an attack on the colored man."206 The Day Law represented Breathitt County's continuing importance as a Democratic bulwark within the Republican mountains, a function that was perhaps not as damaged by the Marcum assassination as some may have assumed. Although Hargis had been the source of violent scandal, it showed that he and the Breathitt Democrats were their party's exemplars. While it may have redeemed him in the eyes of his fellow party members, it may have instead demonstrated that he was never in need of atonement. "Whether it be just or not," the Lexington Herald charged, "those members of the Legislature who vote for this bill will be held to approve of what has occurred in Breathitt during the past six years."207 Embittered by the wound its hometown institution had sustained, the Republican Berea Citizen groused that the formation of a new judicial district "for the sake of enthroning the famous Judge Hargis" was next on the General Assembly's agenda (Redwine had said that a new gerrymandered district would "eliminate feudal warfare").208 The redistricting passed four days later, ensuring absolute Democratic control over the circuit courts of Breathitt and two other counties.209 Carl Day, already ailing when he introduced his bill, died from inflammatory rheumatism in April 1904, just shy of his twenty-ninth birthday.210 Since he had served as a legislator so briefly, the ban on co-racial education was his only legacy. After Berea was found guilty of violating the Day Law a few months later, its student body remained all white for the next forty-six years.211 Though Day did not live to see it in action, his bill had at least some of its intended effects a month beforehand: an expansion of power for the Hargis courthouse.

"Every Goebel Democrat in this county is hot for us"

Soon after Hargis's Frankfort appearance, Abrelia Marcum brought suit against him, his brother Alexander Hargis, Edward Callahan, and B. F. French for $100,000.212 By attacking Hargis et al. in a civil case outside of Breathitt County, Marcum hoped to avoid the politically concerned juries Hargis and Callahan had manipulated in the past. Hargis used his party affiliation in his defense, delaying proceedings by branding the trial judge a biased political enemy. "As leader of the Democratic forces of Breathitt County," Hargis had denounced the judge's bid for the state court of appeals bench years earlier. "Existing and continued state of hostile feeling," he said, was grounds for dismissal.213 Hargis's motion was denied, and he and Callahan were eventually found to be culpable for James Marcum's death, but the plaintiff was unable to connect French and Alexander Hargis to the crime (although both were charged with contempt of court for arranging to bribe witnesses for the prosecution and to spirit at least one out of state). Mrs. Marcum's tort strategy was only a partial success, barely damaging her targets' power and awarding her only $8,000 (with interest accrued, the award eventually amounted to $11,000).214 During the trial Breathitt's Democratic central committee saluted Edward Callahan's "executive ability and services to the party" by unanimously reappointing him its chairman.215 Nevertheless, it was the beginning of the end for the Hargis courthouse. The civil suit broadcast the details of the killings of 1902 and 1903 as never before. The next month a Lexington grand jury indicted Hargis, Callahan, and a number of confederates for Jim Cockrell's murder (although shot in Jackson, he had died in Lexington's jurisdiction).216 The indictment represented an unraveling of Hargis's earlier framing of Cockrell's death within a feud story. In 1902 many Lexingtonians had volunteered for "arbitration in the Breathitt county feud," but by 1905 the suggestion of mutual reciprocity between two families was seeming false; what they now saw was a series of unsolved murders. Fayette County's circuit court judge proclaimed that a trial of Hargis and the others was based upon "the serious charges made against the civil government of Breathitt county" rather than the accused individuals.217 Wise Hagins's Republican/Fusionist Breathitt County News lauded the indictment as "a revelation to the outside world" of what residents of Jackson had known for years.218 There were revelations to come, but the criminal trials that followed over the next two years produced more embarrassment than justice. Hargis, Callahan, and their associates were tried for involvement in three homicides, producing no convictions. With a massive number of testimonies against him, Hargis managed a hung jury, and then an acquittal, for Cockrell's murder by challenging the Fayette County court's right to try him for a crime committed in another county (a defense based upon Kentucky's age-old belief in county sovereignty).219 His trial in Lee County for James Marcum's murder was an even greater prosecutorial disaster the following year. After he signed an affidavit implicating Hargis and Callahan, Curtis Jett refused to testify that he had been hired to kill Marcum, instead attributing his actions to his own drunkenness (this he did while apparently inebriated on the witness stand). He swore to the jury (said to be packed with Democrats) that Marcum had been his personal "bitter enemy," approximating classic feud behavior.220 Hargis and Callahan were again acquitted in less than a week, this time by a Beckham-appointed judge known for his "unwavering allegiance to the Democratic Party."221 Finally, the trial for the murder of Braxton Cox, held in northeast Kentucky's "inaccessible and surrounded by wilderness" (and heavily Democratic) Elliott County in 1907, was dismissed before it had even commenced after the prosecution's key witnesses never materialized.222 In the meantime, Judge Hargis was allowed to await trial shooting marbles in the grass outside the jailhouse.223 Most spectators agreed that justice was being miscarried. The "uncrowned Czars of Eastern Kentucky" said a New York Times correspondent, were able to "maintain an army of retainers and dependents, as did the great feudal lords of the middle ages," so avoiding a murder conviction was a simple task.224 But the reporter's medieval metaphor belied the real force at work: Kentucky's Democratic Party. Nowhere was this more openly exhibited than the Lexington trials. "Men . . . no more loyal Democrats than I," lamented the prosecutor, "whose friend I have been all my life, have turned their backs upon me, because, in my capacity as an officer of the law, I have dared to prosecute James Hargis."225 Wise Hagins detected "something rotten in the execution of the laws of Kentucky" and traced it to the Democratic "State House gang."226 While Edward Callahan was incarcerated, a Lexington merchant treated him to "50 quarts of whisky and about 50 boxes of cigars a two bushel tub of apples and case of beer all free," to serve "at least 3000" well-wishers who visited his cell. Callahan assured one of his tenants of the local support he, Hargis, and the others enjoyed while on trial in Lexington. "The Fayette County Democrats are Red hot for us they want to fight for us too. Every Goebel Democrat in this county is hot for us."227 Breathitt County's old status as "the best exemplification of the horrors of Goebelism" was well remembered.228 For years before he was elected its sheriff, Callahan displayed a willingness to employ violence for Democratic victories. More than five years after Goebel's death, Bluegrass Democrats still recognized Callahan's forceful role in their most difficult campaign. With William Goebel's "bloody shirt" still on display in Kentucky politics, the hospitality shown to the imprisoned Callahan vindicated his actions and placed him on a higher pedestal than "mountain feudist." Indeed, however Bloody Breathitt was framed within the imprecise parameters of feuding, it all came back to William Goebel.

Despite Callahan's popularity among Bluegrass Democrats, the murder trials proved to be the beginning of the end for his and Hargis's political careers. During their trials Wise Hagins had time to revitalize the Breathitt County fusionists, supporting only one Republican and a raft of anti-Hargis Democrats, lest "the Hargis followers . . . slegmatize it as a republican measure."229 While Hargis awaited trial for the Cox murder, he was defeated by more than seven hundred votes, even as Democrats gained in local and district elections all over the state (Callahan was not on the ballot, although his proxy entrant for sheriff was also soundly defeated).230 Hargis unsuccessfully contested the election before falling ill.231 "No longer can [Hargis] claim to represent the State administration," announced one Democrat. "No longer can his adherents boast that they control the pardoning power; no longer can he and Callahan prostitute the offices of County Judge and Sheriff for the protection of assassins and the persecution of their enemies."232 Absent intimidation and violence, the Breathitt courthouse ring's foundation was brittle.

The revolt, however, was against the violent past, not necessarily the Democratic Party. Kentucky Democrats used the opportunity to cast out inner demons-and to demonize other party malefactors. "The ticket which will be declared elected in Louisville is no more a Democratic ticket than was the Hargis ticket in Breathitt," reasoned the Lexington Herald. "It simply masqueraded under the name of Democracy, and if those who controlled it lived in a Republican state and a Republican city they would be Republicans. They are a type of men who claim the name and sieze the organization of the dominant party in the state in which they happen to live."233 The Herald used Hargis's defeat to defend its party while reaffirming that the party's statewide advantage was a natural condition. Knowing his place, Wise Hagins concurred, calling the Hargis ticket "in no true sense a Democratic ticket, simply using the name because they had control of the Democratic organization."234 By intimation, any Kentucky Democrats who had assisted or approved of the Breathitt courthouse ring were exonerated.

Hargis's statewide power continued to crumble even as juries and judges absolved him in court. In October 1906, six men elected to the Democratic state central committee accused Hargis of arbitrarily denying them membership.235 The next month, with support from a Breathitt majority, Kentucky's tenth congressional district elected its first Republican representative since the 1890s.236 Bluegrass Democrats, who suffered not at all from Bloody Breathitt shootings, were "red hot" with approval for the "Hargis-Callahan regime." However, Breathitt County's voters saw no gain from ongoing bloodshed in their streets, and for a time they revolted by voting Republican. The most dramatic injury was when William Howard Taft carried the county in 1908's presidential election, Breathitt's first non-Democratic presidential majority since William Henry Harrison's 1840 victory-and the last one for exactly a century. The county's traditional party identity had not changed, but its most recent political leaders were chastened by the largest voter turnout (just over 92 percent) in the county's history.237 Even as Kentucky Democrats distanced themselves from Breathitt County, the murders of Bloody Breathitt still had statewide ramifications. As details of the various crimes came to light, Republicans charged the governor with joining Breathitt's "assassination chiefs" to further "Gobelism, Redwineism and Hargisism," and imposing "many indignities on Breathitt County's peaceful majority" since 1900.238 In 1907 the "stinking bung-hole" of "Hargis-Beckhamism" helped narrow the Democrats' legislative majority and give Kentucky its second Republican governor.239 When Beckham attempted to run for U.S. Senate a year later, four Democrats bolted and helped make William O. Bradley Kentucky's second Republican U.S. senator. Beckham's political wounds caused by his Breathitt connections were temporary, and he became Kentucky's first popularly elected U.S. senator six years later.240 Kentucky never rejoined the Solid South (the state elected two more Republican U.S. senators and three Republican governors before World War II), but Democrats retained a manifest advantage for most of the twentieth century, especially on the local level (the Whig Gibraltar counties remaining a notable exception). It was scarcely noted that, as in the Solid South, this advantage came about through intimidation and murder. The more scarcely the better, said the state's politicians; Augustus Willson, Kentucky's second Republican governor who knew that "the one hope of Republican success [was] in Democratic support," came to office promising "to eliminate the discussion of the Goebel murder trials and the Breathitt county feud cases."241 Later candidates for Breathitt County public offices had to be clear as to what kind of Democrats they were, even after their party had recovered. "I want to say in the beginning before stating my platform that I have not now, or ever have had, any connection in any manner whatever with any of the so-called Breathitt county feuds, Kuklux or Red String bands, or any other secret organization that would mar the peace and happiness of an American citizen," a candidate for school superintendent vowed in 1908.242 It was a plague on both of Bloody Breathitt's political houses, and it failed to acknowledge that the most recent violence had been a one-sided, nonreciprocal affair; it had been more than ten years since Breathitt Republicans had fired guns, at least for political purposes-and even then it had never been they who controlled any governmental office. Now, revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violences were both renounced, but the assumptions that comprised feud, its insistence of moral equivalency between the two, were affirmed. Further, as Kentucky Democrats disavowed Callahan and (especially) Hargis, they also distanced their party from the violence that had been used in its furtherance. Even with the Hargis courthouse removed, young men fled the county to avoid getting "mixed up in the feud troubles."243 Yet again, Bloody Breathitt was depoliticized.

Ensuing events went even further to suggest that, even if there was no ongoing feud in Breathitt County, the place seemed to be fraught with a preternatural penchant for violence. During Judge Hargis's trials, his oldest son, Beech, began bristling up the crest of his youth, often disappearing from Jackson only to be later retrieved besotted from Lexington brothels and Cincinnati jails.244 Enraged by Beech's most recent highly publicized escapade, the disgraced former judge beat his son almost to the point of unconsciousness in February 1908.245 A few days later Beech came to his father's store and shot him to death, and then attempted suicide by swallowing morphine. Judge Hargis's death at his son's hand appeared a "natural sequel" to recent events-patricide, after all, seemed a likely component of a "family feud."246 It could also be seen as a reproduction of a historical truism: children of powerful, corrupt men often inherit a capacity for committing horrible acts, but without their fathers' cunning and restraint.

On trial for murder, Beech Hargis was represented by his father's old ally David Redwine and, surprisingly, Senator-elect William Bradley. It was difficult to avoid a life of sin, they argued, with a father who turned the home into "the rendezvous of a band of murderers," and in this light, the younger Hargis had acted in self-defense.247 The bipartisan legal team also charged the Republican judge with political prejudice, leading to a second trial in which their young client was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.248 After he was paroled in 1916, he left to join the Canadian army and was never heard from again.249 After his former partner's death, Edward Callahan gradually withdrew from politics, but not without first being implicated in Breathitt County's worst election-related riot since 1878 (Republican governor Willson responded, less reluctantly than his Democratic predecessors, with yet another militia occupation of Jackson in 1909). David Redwine, unsullied by recent history, returned to the circuit bench as Breathitt returned to the "Democratic column" and "back to Hargisism," but Callahan felt his life in danger.250 Over the next few years he grew increasingly paranoid, avoiding Jackson and building a protective bunker around his Crockettsville home (he was sometimes seen running frantically between there and his nearby store). On the seventh anniversary of James Marcum's assassination, a hidden rifleman fired at Callahan as he stood at a window in his house, wounding him in the groin.251 When John Fox Jr. visited him forty days later, the author found him in comfortable convalescence, wearing a pair of bullet-punctured trousers. Asked if he thought it wise to leave Crockettsville, he insisted that "they would say I was a coward" were he to leave his home and business interests.252 A little over a year later, however, he put his home up for sale and prepared to leave the county to "escape assassination."253 Beech Hargis shot Judge James Hargis to death and then tried to use his father's ill fame to get an acquittal on grounds of self-defense. Judge Hargis's funeral was well attended even after the crumbling of his political empire and the bad reputation he had revisited upon his home county. By dying at his own son's hand, the judge punctuated the facade of kinship over politics he had used years beforehand; the phrase family feud suggested that the intricacies of Bloody Breathitt need not be explored too deeply. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes) Callahan never got around to moving. On the ninth anniversary, May 3, 1912, a rifle shot fired in precisely the same manner killed Callahan just as he was concluding a telephone conversation with his old adversary Wise Hagins. His shooting death seemed to confirm the existence of ongoing, permanent "feudal warfare" in Bloody Breathitt regardless of the county's recent advancements; the telephone, the "most useful invention of modern times," which gave his "feud-ridden county" the "opportunity of communicating with the outside world," played a role in Callahan's murder, just as it had in Dr. Braxton Cox's death (which Callahan may have directed) a decade before.254 While the timing of Callahan's murder suggested a motive of revenge for Marcum's death, the "noted feudist" had amassed too many enemies, both personal and political, for there to be a definite motive or suspect.255 As much as he had lived by the sword, most of the blood he had spilled was for the tangible modern goals of power and party. Still, one obituary ridiculously attributed Callahan's crimes to "the old feud spirit of his ancestors."256 The more evidence accrued showing the political nature of Bloody Breathitt, the more writers seemed bound and determined to say otherwise.

The same could be said for other men connected to the Hargis courthouse ring, although most came to ends unrelated to it. After opening a Lexington tavern named the Mountaineer, Tom Cockrell lived peacefully for a few years until he was killed in a railroad accident in 1908.257 Judge David Redwine, always on the periphery of controversy, managed a peaceful passing and a posthumous reputation untarnished by feud. Even his role in the Music Hall Convention was largely forgotten.258 Fulton French, who was probably personally responsible for more murders than any other single person in Kentucky, succumbed to asthma "in his chair" in 1915.259 Mose Feltner was killed by a federal revenue officer in 1916. His only role in the Hargis-Cockrell feud had been trying to prevent further killing by announcing Judge Hargis's culpability; nonetheless, he was eulogized as a "noted feudist."260 After Curtis Jett's release from prison he published a Christian bekenntnis about the deliverance of a "one time feudist" and became an evangelist.261 He later divided his time between the Bluegrass and the eastern coalfields, alternating between preaching Methodism and acting as a strikebreaking "gun thug" in Harlan County. After two divorces and a denominational swap to Baptism, he died in 1946 at the improbably ripe old age of seventy-seven.262 Abrelia Marcum remarried and eventually left Kentucky for Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she died in 1953.

"If such a state of affairs constitutes a 'feud,' it is, as regards active participation, a solitaire game"

Political consequences for politically motivated homicides: all of the horrible events contained within the Hargis-Cockrell feud had the potential to challenge most early twentieth-century Americans' preconceptions about eastern Kentucky. During Jett's and White's trials, a Louisvillian insisted to a New York newspaper that, despite most newspapers' "editorials, squibs and cartoons," there was "no family feud in Breathitt" but instead "one powerful, bold, bad man, served by minions and ruffians among them officers of the law, who lords it over his neighbors in the fashion of a mediaeval baron."263 As a home-missions campaigner observed a few years later, Judge Hargis "was neither poor nor ignorant, and had had no little contact with public affairs in the larger world of men."264 Feuding, it seemed, did not quite describe a machine politician's dispassionate use of underling-wielded deadly force to eliminate electoral and legal challengers. There seemed to be something else, something far more modern, at work.

In its extended coverage of Abrelia Marcum's 1904 lawsuit, Louisville's Courier-Journal wrote detailed local genealogy describing the manner in which almost everyone involved in the Hargis-Cockrell feud-Marcums, Hargises, Callahans and (in spirit), Strongs-was related by blood or by marriage, suggesting a kinship-based narrative going back to the pioneer generations. "Factional strife in Breathitt County is equivalent to family dissension. Internal warfare is waged not against aliens, but against one's own flesh and blood. The kinship of the people whose names have been prominently mentioned in connection with the troubles here is very close in instances, and it appears links of blood relation ought to tend to bind them together."265 Owing as always to its policy of New Departure moderation, Henry Watterson's flagship could admit both premodern "feudal" behavior and the political motives that were quite clear to many Kentuckians as equal dynamics in the disreputable county.

The following month the same paper printed what amounted to a mixed concession to its familial explanation, although it did not phrase it as such, acknowledging what Republican newspapers had long insisted: a definitive political element to the county's troubles based upon its peculiarly Democratic voting history. "As a rule, the Kentucky mountain counties are Republican, but Breathitt is unique in that, almost without exception, it has ever been found in the Democratic column. There has always been the bitterest political feeling in the county, and politics has been more or less directly responsible for every one of the feuds, and is to-day the cause of the terrible state of affairs there."266 As always, Watterson felt that he-and Kentucky-could have it both ways.

But this most summative and accurate of media statements about Bloody Breathitt was lost amid the barrage of more flamboyant feud interpretations. By including the events of the Hargis-Cockrell feud into the longer lineage of "feuding" in the county, the origins of the most recent troubles in Bloody Breathitt were completely forgotten. Unlike in past years easy answers were not more attractive to observers of particular political opinions. Assassinations that encapsulated the statewide furor over William Goebel were ultimately nothing more than "the human nature's daily feud."267 Accordingly, any and all news from Breathitt County was related in some way to the existence of an extant feud; relying on wire reports, the Chicago Tribune reported a random knifing at a fiddle show outside of Jackson as "feud" related.268 When Judge Hargis's nephew Matt Crawford was shot in 1910 his death was blithely recounted as part of "a feud which has long been carried on in Breathitt County," even though Crawford had no part in his uncle's political wranglings.269 Perhaps the most dramatic explication of the familial concealing the political appeared in a 1917 law review article in which James Marcum was characterized as a family, rather than an individual.270 "The Hargis-Cockrell feud was like nearly all the other mountain feuds," Lewis Franklin Johnson thoughtlessly wrote in one of the first book-length efforts to catalogue Kentucky's mountain feud phenomenon. "It was a family difficulty."271 For many reasons this was the more attractive reading. The feud narrative required kinship and historical longevity as its driving forces, even if these themes were not borne out by facts. Even though the murders James Hargis directed eventually cost him his political office (the prize that had motivated murder in the first place), his strategy of casting Cox's and Cockrell's deaths within the context of an ongoing family feud was an overwhelming success.

The gunshots that killed Hargis, Callahan, and Feltner were the effect of any number of factors that helped to portray Breathitt County and eastern Kentucky as an environment of directionless "lawlessness." With the possible exception of Callahan's ambush (carried out in a fashion strikingly reminiscent of William Strong's end, which Callahan was suspected to have directed fifteen years earlier), their deaths were not directly related to the feud that caused the three most famous murders of 1902 and 1903. In the course of a history of extrapolitical lawlessness, the huge amount of support from Kentucky Democrats for the Hargis courthouse ring was conveniently forgotten. Even John Fox Jr., who contributed to eastern Kentucky's renown for familial vengeance more than virtually any writer of fiction or nonfiction, was obliged to recognize a broader (but still quite parochial) political motif at the heart of Breathitt County's ill-gotten fame. "The outside world couldn't very well omit Breathitt when it made law, and Breathitt accepted the gift with gratitude so far at least as it should serve the personal purpose of the man who held the law in the hollow of his hand. Not that there are not bitter complaints of lawlessness in Breathitt, and stern upholders of the law. There are: but I observed that the bitterest and the sternest were not allied with the party that happens just now to be in power."272 Late in 1903, during the brief lull in public interest in Breathitt County that followed the convictions of Curtis Jett and Tom White, one of the bluntest accounts of recent troubles was composed, although probably not published.

For several months the gaze of the public press had been turned almost daily upon the little mountain town of Jackson, Kentucky, the county seat of "Bloody Breathitt" County the scene during the previous year of three assassinations of increasing boldness and atrocity, and occurring within a 100 steps of the business centre of the town. In the many newspaper accounts of the tragedies the word "feud" has been almost universally employed to denote the state of affairs in Jackson. "Feud" is a choice word for picturesque, romantic, and unique effects. It has a pleasant medieval sound, a distinct flavor of the antique, but in this instance it is misleading. An acquaintance of several years with the town and the people, including all these prominently connected with recent events in Jackson, leads me to think it necessary to look for other motives than those usually supposed to actuate participants in a family feud.

The three men who were assassinated were, it is true, in certain legal and business relationships to one another; but there was not among them any tie of blood so close as that subsisting between one of the victims of assassination and the man who according to the testimony of an eyewitness shot him deliberately from a well-selected hiding place. Personal feeling entered into the situation, as it must, but as will appear in the sequel political motives have been to all appearance at least as strong in their influence. And the so-called "other side" has not, so far as I am informed, fired a shot or attempted to fire a shot. If such a state of affairs constitutes a "feud," it is, as regards active participation, a solitaire game.

The author concluded that, instead of being part of a feud proper (if such a thing existed), the three men's deaths were part of "a conspiracy on the part of those in official power to accomplish criminal ends."273 This assessment was not rare or unprecedented; other observations on the deaths of Cox, Cockrell, and Marcum, especially those of the Lexington Leader, had expanded upon the political motivations surrounding their deaths and had tended to agree that the deaths on Jackson's streets were indeed a nonhorizontal "solitary game" carried out by men in power and unanswered by those they wished to eliminate.

The author fully acknowledged that the "family feud" was an existent social phenomenon and probably would not have denied that Breathitt County had experienced true feuds in the past. But the murders of 1902 and 1903, it seemed, were something different. The clear irrelevance of kinship and isolation in the affair removed the vital element of this form of institutionalized violence. Wise Hagins expanded on this argument four years later. "Our people are not feudists," Hagins insisted. "If there had been any feudal blood in our people it surely would have cropped out during these four years struggles in the courts, but not a hand had been raised to violence" since Hargis and Callahan had first been put on trial.274 Hagins knew better than almost anyone that what went on in Jackson's streets was scarcely a feud (in later years he often preceded the word with the phrase "so-called").275 But even he was not prepared to believe that feuding was not an actual thing, and one endemic to Kentucky's mountain whites.

Perhaps most important, the newly vital commercial center was only "90 miles by rail from the center of the 'Bluegrass,' " an observation of Breathitt County's loss of isolation. Feuds were an antiquated occurrence with no place in thriving Jackson, a town "by no means wholly outside the pale of civilization and progress."276 Indeed, it was difficult to blame isolation for crimes in such an unisolated place. This recent rash of killings, with clear political motivations, was a product of newer trends and a variety of violence that seemed more at home in such a progressive, modern setting. Assassination, it seemed, was a different animal than feuding.

"It is rare indeed, that one of these assassins and anarchists is brought to punishment"

In February 1900 William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal printed a prophetic quatrain by Ambrose Bierce alluding to William Goebel's recent demise.

The bullet that pierced Goebel's breast Can not be found in all the West; Good reason, it is speeding here To stretch McKinley on his bier."277 Hearst was one of President William McKinley's sharpest detractors and, when self-styled anarchist Leon Czolgosz fatally wounded McKinley nineteen months later, rumors flew that a clipping of Bierce's poem had been found in the assassin's pocket. Bierce swore that he had never meant for his stanzas to be taken as a veiled threat; his intent was to alert readers of the dangers posed by "foreign elements" who espoused Georges Sorel's deadly "propaganda of the deed"; in Italy, France, and Spain the public deaths of a king, an empress, and two presidents between 1894 and 1898 (and in the United States, before long, McKinley) revealed the emergence of a new style of industrial age political violence.278 Bierce had placed William Goebel's assassination within what he saw as a shock of the new, not as an outcome of inherent racial or cultural tendencies.

His analogy was made in vain, especially after McKinley's death; Kentucky Republicans, firmly entrenched within the two-party system, were legitimate, beyond the reproach reserved for anarchists, even when they apparently employed anarchist tactics.279 Accordingly, violence was granted with, or stripped of, legitimacy according to the politics of the groups or individuals that wielded it. "President McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist whose act had no political significance," William Jennings Bryan remarked on his old opponent, while "the Goebel assassination was purely a political act."280 Henry Watterson concurred: "Goebel was shot down for a purpose, for a price, while the noble life of McKinley was sacrificed to the wanton fury of a fiend."281 As clouded as the Goebel assassination was by the narrative of feud, it still was rated as more politically legitimate than anarchism.

When Kentuckians were alarmed by James Marcum's murder in front of Jackson's courthouse three years later, similarities with this new, insidiously foreign method of political violence were already widely recognized. Guerrilla warfare during the Civil War was carried out throughout the state with no measure of uniformity and often according to the whims of local military leaders with tenuous ties to the Union and Confederate causes. It was based upon material wartime goals: the weakening of the local state and the punishment of civilians with oppositional loyalties. The mass violence of the Reconstruction years were, with the exception of the symbolically charged act of lynching, without elaborate orchestration. Furthermore, these parochial acts of violence were generally aimed at victims whose political or social significance was, outside of their immediate communities, obscure. Like most violence during and after wars, it was among intimates.

In contrast, assassinations in Frankfort and Breathitt County had broader implications. They replaced the deadly intimacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction years with violent anonymity. Goebel was killed in the morning while walking through Kentucky's capitol grounds. While the assassin's identity was never proven beyond doubt, it was widely known that the rifle shot came from the second-story window of the State House, a building "tenanted by Republicans exclusively."282 Goebel's end was meant to publicly demonstrate his illegitimacy as (had he ever had the chance to assume the office) governor-elect.283 It was orchestrated so as to seem the will of the state, even though it was evidently only that of one political party's leaders. It was an undeniably political act loaded with symbolism.

The murders of Braxton Cox, James Cockrell, and James Marcum took place under remarkably similar circumstances, particularly the latter two. Dr. Cox was killed in the dead of night with a close-range shotgun blast in an area of Jackson close to both the courthouse and James Hargis's commercial property (some newspaper accounts erroneously said that Cox was leaving a church service when he was shot).284 Cockrell and Marcum were killed by gunshots aimed from the Breathitt County courthouse in broad daylight in front of numerous witnesses (Judge Hargis and Sheriff Callahan were in the general proximity, their presence sending a silent message).285 The town marshal and the lawyer were part of Breathitt's fusionist uprising, so their eradication was more public and flamboyant than Cox's; but all three men were killed within the physically small "assassination center of Jackson," a patch of earth that was nearly as heavy with meaning as Frankfort's capitol grounds.286 When Marcum's uncle William Strong attacked his neighbors during the Civil War he did so under the authority of the Union army, but he was at no more of an advantage than his Confederate enemies since so many locals had decided to renounce the Union's local legitimacy-neither side saw fit to disguise themselves in any way. When he overtook the courthouse on the same street in 1874, or when he faced down former Confederates to defend the newly elected county judge in 1878, the "ownership" of this symbol and repository of the local state was still under dispute. But as political life in Breathitt County became more complex and less parochialized, a greater measure of surreptitiousness was deemed necessary. Curtis Jett and other courthouse ring assassins carried out their appointments from hidden places within the building, sending an implicit message of whose will commissioned the slayings. Whereas once the courthouse had been the prize to be captured or destroyed, it was now a physical tool for counterrevolutionary violence. The new style of killing warranted a more contemporary vocabulary in Kentucky's flagship paper. "It is rare indeed, that one of these assassins and anarchists is brought to punishment," the Louisville Courier-Journal complained just days after Marcum's death.287 The conspirators behind William Goebel's death and the conspirators in Breathitt County's assassinations were probably unaware of continental anarchism's ideological underpinnings. But their deadly handiwork nevertheless utilized "the propaganda of the deed." And it was a far cry from anything implied by feuds. As easy as it may have been to include the "Hargis and Cockrell feud" with Bloody Breathitt's past, the differences in method outweighed the similarities.

This new strategy reflected Judge Hargis's political modus operandi. Since the Music Hall Convention, Hargis's statewide political strength had been bolstered by a healthy measure of stealth, and Hargis tended to avoid public settings-even in Jackson-and decline interview requests (in 1902 Hargis had a Louisville reporter threatened by "toughs," and a few years later threatened a visiting playwright who planned to write a dramatic account of Jackson's assassinations).288 Before his first indictment in 1904 he had avoided newspaper photographers, and during one of the ensuing trials even entered the camera-free safety of the courtroom with a quilt over his head (he later reluctantly posed for a photographer).289 Being Bloody Breathitt's mysterious faceless judge brought with it a measure of power, but that was coming to an end. It was not the use of directed violence itself that brought about Hargis's downfall, but rather the unexpected publicity attracted by the deaths of Cox, Cockrell, and (to the greatest extent) Marcum.

As these killings gained national attention, they overshadowed one of the most vicious acts of violence in Breathitt County's history. During Abrelia Marcum's lawsuit against Hargis and his co-conspirators a white man living in Frozen Creek (a community nine miles from Jackson) invited a group of Negroes to his home with the promise of free liquor. When they arrived the host opened fire in an apparent attempt to exterminate the lot, killing one of them.290 The crime was reported in two local papers, neither of which attempted to contextualize the racially motivated killing within a larger narrative of lawlessness or white supremacy-let alone feuding. A story of interracial mass murder did not support the larger description of a place defined by white intraracial violence. Worse, it challenged the delineation that Bluegrass elites, Democratic or Republican, preferred to have drawn between their own section and the mountains (white violence against black Kentuckians was still a common occurrence; between William Strong's and James Marcum's deaths at least twenty-nine Kentuckians were lynched).291 White-on-white assassination was easy to make strange, while white-on-black massacres were all too familiar in 1904 and they did fit into the narratives composed about Bloody Breathitt. It was the kind of violence that Kentuckians preferred go unspoken, and the story was unnoticed.

Breathitt County's assassinations and the ensuing trials of the accused were known to have broader implications when they took place. The political significance of violence in the county was emphasized most broadly by the Republicans who despised the island of mountain Democracy and its continuity with the hated Goebel legacy. But the Cox, Cockrell, and Marcum homicides were usually included within the older "Bloody Breathitt" narrative of violence, a cycle of convincingly inherent, communal violence devoid of politics. Feud endured as the dominant descriptor because of the influence of Democratic elites outside of the county, elites who, like their brethren farther south, profited from violence even as they distanced themselves from it.

Breathitt County's violence was depoliticized also by an American culture that legitimized or delegitimized violent acts according to parameters of race, class, geography, and history, parameters that could not easily include eastern Kentucky. Even with "mainstream" political violence a recent memory, the prevalence of the feud narrative in explaining white intraracial violence determined how Breathitt County was to be interpreted by its own citizens and by others from the outside world.

7.

"THE FEUDAL WARS OF EASTERN KENTUCKY WILL NO DOUBT BE UTILIZED IN COMING YEARS BY WRITERS OF FICTION"

Reading and Writing Bloody Breathitt

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass,

and What Alice Found There (1871)

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!

-Maxwell Scott, character in the cinematic adaptation of

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

In 1898 the Reverend John J. Dickey interviewed Edward Callahan "Red Ned" Strong to find out what the elderly Breathitt County native knew (or had heard) about his grandfather's role in the "Clay County Cattle War" between 1805 and 1807. The violent events that comprised the cattle war had begun and ended just over ninety years earlier, but Strong felt it had a much longer longevity. Not only, insisted the retired judge, had it somehow led to the Strong-Amis feud that involved his cousin William in the 1860s but, even at century's end, "the effects of the [cattle] war have not ceased to this day."1 Other interviews with Breathitt County's older citizens corroborated his opinion, although none explained the continuity between the cattle war and more recent troubles. In local folklore, the Clay County Cattle War was the first salvo of Bloody Breathitt.

The connection contains a measure of logic. The cattle war was the earliest known violent conflict since whites first settled the Three Forks region, and it involved family names-Strongs, Amises, Callahans-that later became notorious.2 Their descendants shed each other's blood later on: How could the combination of family names and deadly violence be a coincidence? The premise that Breathitt County was an inherently violent place (and residents like Judge Strong seemed to have accepted this) required that violence have an antediluvian heritage-or, at least, Jeffersonian origins before any living person's memory. The cattle war was an interpersonal, reciprocal dispute between equals in an isolated, semi-wilderness setting with no material implications beyond the direct experience of its participants; for all intents and purposes, it was a feud, albeit a short one. Strong was simply reapplying the most basic elements of the feud narrative to more recent events in his home county, a place already considered "the storm centre of the feud troubles of the State."3 The old judge's privileging of ancient continuity over historical and political contingencies may have just been an aged mountaineer's desire for something unchanging in an otherwise rapidly shifting world. And Dickey may have encouraged him; many of the preacher's oral histories were done "in an effort to determine why [people in Breathitt County] were always fighting each other."4 It was a durable and satisfying idea; in 2002, when election-related violence reemerged in the "fabled Kentucky hills," the New York Times traced "feuding" back to the cattle war's "poisonous precedent."5 A perfunctory scan of the historical record suggests this continuity.

In a close examination, however, this does not hold up. Between 1807 and 1861 the territory that became Breathitt County did not experience any recorded local strife that resulted in multiple deaths or paramilitary factionalism (or, for that matter, familial "feuds"). When the Civil War started, Strongs and Amises found a common cause fighting Confederate forces (Edward Strong himself chose to fight for the Confederacy) even though their forefathers had opposed one another sixty years before. William Strong and Wiley Amis did not bear arms against each other until 1868, and then it was for the same political reasons that divided Kentucky Unionists during Reconstruction, not age-old kin hatred. The commonality of surnames in the respective conflicts spoke not to a continuity of conflict but instead to the paucity of new blood in a place with large families but small overall population.

In any case, it was in Judge Strong's interest to make this case. Men like Edward Strong, a Democrat, a Confederate veteran, and a longtime member of Breathitt's commercial elite, wanted this-needed this-to be true because it was they who had caused most of the post-Civil War violence, directly or indirectly. Bearing a last name that he knew would always be associated with "feudalism" but possessed of a relatively unblemished personal reputation, he had good reason to portray "Bloody Breathitt" as a saga older than his own adulthood. His infamous cousin was now dead and, despite having himself once been identified as "a participant in the Breathitt war," Judge Strong had always managed to stand apart from the events he had lived through (the murder of his younger cousin James Marcum was still five years in the future).6 By extending the provenance of Breathitt County's troubles backward to a time long before the Civil War, Edward Strong and his peers remained blameless even if it meant portraying his home as a vessel for the alpine version of the southern "white savage."7 It was a story not unlike the one President McKinley was using even as the Reverend Dickey conducted the 1898 interview: diminishing the politics of "sectional feeling" to bring northern and southern whites together in mutual support for the war against Spain.8 Edward Strong's apolitical interpretation of his home county's history was a political act, whether he meant it to be or not.

It was an interpretation of Breathitt County's history that already had a massive following. Conceptually, blood feuds predated Bloody Breathitt and even the Clay County Cattle War. A feud, as an actual event or a literary subject, was familiar to nineteenth-century Americans through their knowledge of European history and even more readily via their most beloved novels and dramas-products of the nineteenth century's "culture industry." Because of its rootedness in (semi)historical fiction rather than history, the feud had a tenuous, perhaps nonexistent, connection to the "sedimentary existence" of modernity.9 It did not ask to be taken seriously, and it stopped questions from being asked, questions such as "Who was the aggressor?" "Who was the victim?" "How were lives affected"? Moreover, like a fight started over so many free-ranging steers, feuds' points of origin were always arcane, petty, and of no importance to anyone aside from the two involved parties. It suggested neutralization via reciprocation, and through neutralization came moral equivalency (how many people believe that the Capulets were right and the Montagues were wrong or vice versa?). It allowed audiences to view violence nonchalantly and refrain from asking questions about justice. Feud conveyed familiar but unspecific images representing something irrevocably rooted in the past and only accidentally thrust upon the present, not unlike Edward Strong's interpretation of his county's history. At some point in the nineteenth century, applying the concept of feud to real-life conflicts made these traits a sine qua non. Rather than face the internal problems that had caused political violence in Breathitt County, the rest of Kentucky, the South, and the United States, Americans relied upon the relatively easy answers provided by the idea of feuds. Eventually, so did the citizens of Breathitt County.

"People who live lonely lives and have few neighbors"

Perhaps not surprisingly, the word feud "made a comparatively late appearance" in the English lexicon and is "of unsolved etymology."10 The Oxford English Dictionary records its appearance in relation to enmity and violence no earlier than the thirteenth century.11 At least as late as the 1820s, scholars of medieval legal history used feud interchangeably with fief, a word for land tenure, not ritualistic bloodshed.12 By the time Noah Webster got around to providing his own American definition, it was requisitely treated as a vestigial British concept, "irrelevant or impossible" in an American context and, almost by definition, "consigned to the past."13 Nineteenth-century Americans deemed the blood feud a social mechanism carried out through pathos but motivated by ethos-at least the obscure ethos of certain erstwhile societies. Its tendency toward reciprocity for wrongs done to an individual or group were carried out in the conservative interest of maintaining a mutually accommodating status quo.14 Neither insurrectionary nor counterinsurrectionary, blood feuds were motivated by "strong feelings of justice and moral order" that traversed the possibility of chaos presented by a weak state.15 Nineteenth-century sociologists emile Durkheim and Max Weber each considered the blood feud a phenomenon exclusive to less developed societies. But Durkheim did not give violence as much credit for sustaining social order as did Weber. For Weber, the arrangements involved in a blood feud comprised a prototypical state; Durkheim instead cast the blood feud in a condition of prepolitical statelessness.16 Despite their divergent interpretations of feuds, there was a clear consensus: it was a specific kind of retributive violence with no direct relationship to modernity, and was only acceptable (if at all) in societies that had not achieved the occidental world's level of social and political rationalization.17 But most Civil Warera Americans got their blood feuds from novels and plays rather than encyclopedia or history books. Proper storybook feuds contained abrupt, impetuous acts of brutality instigated by hot blood and passion, not circuitous, studied schemes devised by politicians or generals and carried out by henchmen or soldiers. As Romeo and Juliet's opening scene demonstrates, underlings could act as violent proxies for their masters, but they did so for the same purposes of defending honor rather than over issues of state power. Fictional feuds, almost by definition, were more farcical than catastrophic at their points of departure, like Lilliput's factional division over breaking eggs. Their narratives invariably cautioned the listener as to the triviality and frivolity of the feud's point of origin as well the needlessness of the ensuing violence. Questions of justice or injustice were not addressed, lest one party seem too much the protagonist. Both sides must be at fault so that, through the equanimity of mutual violence, neither was at fault. Therefore, feud came to represent conflicts whose genesis was unworthy of serious inquiry.

Verona's doomed lovers and their feuding clans were more than familiar to Shakespeare-obsessed Americans. But more recent writers also played a major hand in popularizing the theme. Novelist Sir Walter Scott used feud motifs, skirting the boundary between myth and political history in late medieval Scotland; Scott always made a clear-cut distinction between the contingent/exogenous struggle against English oppression and the inherent/ endogenous Highland feuds, the latter always originating "in some quarrel of little importance."18 Notably, Scott's most avid readers were white southerners, and his indirect influence on their mores and behavior was a subject of snickering commentary on their society's belligerent inclinations. "Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war," Mark Twain quipped shortly before the release of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a novel featuring one of the most noted feud narratives in American letters.19 Scott's seventeenth-century Scotland was most antebellum Americans' point of reference for feuds, but by midcentury, Sicily and Corsica became equally well known for reciprocal "clan" violence.20 Vendetta, a more recent, Italian import to the English vocabulary, and one more explicitly specific to revenge, became almost synonymous with feud, and in Corsica the practice's rudiments were recorded in supposedly unbroken forms since the sixteenth century (with suggestions that it actually stretched back at least three centuries before that). In "regions not easily accessible to culture" used by Italian city-states and Ottomans as tokens of empire, vendettas were understandable outcomes of political stresses, according to one sympathetic Prussian. "In a state of nature, and in a society rent asunder by prevailing war and insecurity, the family becomes a state in itself; its members cleave fast to each other; if one is injured, the entire little state is wronged. The family exercises justice only through itself, and the form this exercise takes, is revenge."21 Most readers looking at the island from the outside world, however, preferred to think of the inherency suggested by the "primitive character" that "survived so many obsolete institutions" of government imposed by other nations over the centuries.22 It was a simpler explanation.

The Mediterranean model allowed Anglo-Americans to transfer their feud discourse from a temporal other (that is, their own British past) to a geographic, cultural other that persisted into the present. In the mid-eighteenth century, Corsica had formed a republic but was then bloodlessly absorbed by France, a consoling demonstration to sentimental Euro-Americans that political and economic change did not necessarily destroy sturdy folkways.23 This provided a historical correlation with the South that was probably not lost on hopeful postbellum industrialists. After the Civil War the North viewed the white South, lowland or highland, as civilization's outskirt, just as Corsica was to Europe. White southerners were a fiercely democratic people who could be easily integrated into a larger economy. But most, if not all, accounts of Corsican or southern feuds failed to delve into the material causes of conflict, demonstrating a preference for them to be shrouded in obscurity rather than be brought to the light of day. There was sufficient evidence to show that these feuds did not involve only kinship, but it was a concession that observers made reluctantly.24 When the 1878 courthouse riot on the streets of Jackson, Kentucky, prompted the New York Times to name the state "the Corsica of America," the editorial growled that "the Kentucky vendetta is worse than that of Corsica, since it includes not near relatives merely, but remote kindred and friends of the parties involved, and is carried on more openly and defiantly."25 The differences between Kentucky and Corsica could not make the two different, but instead only make the former "worse." In any case, the Corsican metaphor required little elaboration.

Narrators of American "feuds," Jeffrey Guy Johnson has succinctly observed, "have shown little obligation to veracity even when claiming to tell the truth."26 The interpretation of feud violence among American scholars and lay readers suffered from a liberal conflation of history, current events, and fiction. When the idea of feud violence came to be applied within the United States' confines, it was to describe events that were "not a discrete social practice with an accepted form, defined historical origins, or customary rules" as were their British or European analogues.27 If nonfictional feuds took place in America, they did so in a new, strange manner in which no one ever declared an "official" customary condition of mutual enmity and attack. In all correctness, the feud in America was little more than an analogy or metaphor. Still, the word persisted.

Some of the first uses of feud to describe factual deadly violence in North America came from a decidedly non-European subject: white descriptions of Native Americans in the era of removal. During an 1832 trip west of the Mississippi, Washington Irving complained of how difficult it was "to get at the right story" as to the origins of "these feuds between the White & red man."28 Some years after Cherokee relocation to the Indian Territory, the Polk administration became alarmed by what appeared to be the continuation of preexistent blood feuds among a native population thought to be pacified and "civilized."29 In fact, feud scarcely described the reality: a nation thrown into civil war by the conditions of forced removal and competition for power over its new domain. Once Cherokee emissaries arrived in Washington in 1846 to appeal for a brokered peace, it should have been abundantly clear that this was a political fight caused by new exogenously imposed conditions (that is, the previous decade's federally enforced exile), not the exercising of old hatreds. A Confederate officer's description of their Civil War partisanship sixteen years later ("the [most] serious feud ever existing among the Cherokee Indians") suggested that their demonstration was not well remembered.30 Even if the Cherokee Nation was ruptured by civil war as the United States was, the narrative of feud suggested that it was, nevertheless, not part of the "proper" war from a white perspective.

Reports of blood feuds among the Cherokee provided a precursor to the strange fusion of racial determinism and southernness that would be used to explain feuds among the "pure" Anglo-Saxon/Celtic mountain whites decades later, and it inspired the same debates over "native" populations' innate depravity versus ability to assimilate.31 The association stuck even after American varieties of feuding had become associated exclusively with eastern Kentucky, where ostensibly Anglo-Saxon "fighters of the fiercest kind" killed without compunction because of the "Indian blood in their veins."32 This, however, was not the prevalent racial association. Whiteness in its purest form (a valuable nineteenth-century commodity) was a more popular link to feuds, and familial feuds were said to be most common among a lowland South's aristocracy "resigned to [violence's] necessity."33 The lack of any "strong extra-familial institutions," such as a state that effectively monopolized legitimate violence, augmented the social significance of kinship beyond the normal boundaries of civil society.34 Even when the divergence began over "manifestations of public life," it always ultimately shrunk "to the sphere of the family."35 As Bertram Wyatt-Brown observed in Southern Honor, prolonged violent feuds between individuals or families often prevented the more ordered practice of dueling; duels were a procedural safety valve for masculine passions, while feuds seemed to be passion unfettered.36 This may be why such protracted conflicts appear in the historical record only through a glass darkly. Most accounts of Old South feuds, in fiction (more often) or nonfiction, were published in the North after "the fomenters of the great southern feud" [that is, the Civil War] were finally "out of sight and out of mind." All, like Twain, used the narrative of feud to underscore the obsolescence of white southern society.37 Real-life occurrences that resembled the feud narrative were rare, such as when novelist William Faulkner's great-grandfather William C. Falkner began a personal vendetta against an entire family in 1849. Falkner's feud with this Hindman family seemed to be an outgrowth of his status anxiety (he began initially stabbing and shooting after he blackballed a newcomer from a Mississippi temperance club) as he rose through the ranks of local society, with the Hindmans opposing his ascension at every turn. The "feuds" in which he took part were probably not ritualized and given to particular codes of behavior, but were called feuds only because of the length of time Falkner dedicated to his various fracases and because he earned the hatred of multiple males in the same family. More than likely, Falkner was simply a belligerent who attracted others like him. After he became "one of the richest men in his county," a former business partner killed him, sans facons, in 1889.38 Most southern feuds were understood to be between entire families and, through fact or embellishment, they followed the European model of ordered equal reciprocity over long periods of time. In 1863 a Union soldier observed an ongoing "family feud . . . quite 'Corsican' in its character" between neighboring Tennessee families even as the Chattanooga campaign was fought around them.39 The end of a twenty-one-year "domestic war" in eastern Tennessee's Carter County (begun "about a very trifling affair") ended in 1867 when the last male members of the respective families shot each other to death on the streets of the county seat (the possibility that this might somehow relate to the dozens of other white intraracial homicides all over eastern Tennessee that year was not suggested).40 Scott, Honore de Balzac, and other authors of feud narratives fascinated antebellum American readers, but the theme took on added significance after Appomattox. A feud was an "ideology-free conflict between evenly matched families," a perfect allegory to white northerners and southerners bent upon reuniting their nation-state and separating past from present without dealing with the political issues (race and slavery) that precipitated the war.41 But even before the novels that fixed feuding indelibly on the American scene, namely, George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) and Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the language of feud had already entered into the debate over Reconstruction. The "actual" Darnell-Watson feud Mark Twain reported in his 1883 Life on the Mississippi (and the basis for the feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdons in the next year's Huckleberry Finn) began at an undisclosed time over "a horse or a cow" between two well-fixed families on the Kentucky-Tennessee border near the Mississippi River (Twain also used a pretend blood feud between white southern belligerents in the unfinished Simon Wheeler, Detective).42 Recalling his hearing of the family feud before the war. Twain proclaimed that in "no part of the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families" than in the Mississippi backwaters.43 Befitting his jaundiced eye toward white southern society (and toward Sir Walter Scott), Twain made the bond between honor and deadly violence a lampoon, but one derived more from Shakespeare than from verifiable southern history.44 During the 1870s war of words between northern and southern newspapers, feud took on an unprecedented hyperbolic dimension. For southern conservatives, as demonstrated in an earlier chapter, it framed violence without any racial (therefore political) significance. It denoted locally endogenous causes for violence, suggesting that it would be appreciated if the North minded its own business.45 The North, on the other hand, could use a southern feud to exemplify not only white southerners' irredeemable affinity for needless violence, but also the region's continuing sustenance of a useless, premodern aristocracy fed upon the labor of others and, consequently, self-destructive.46 In both cases, the narrative of feud focused on the rock-ribbed inherencies of culture rather than the plastic contingencies of politics. It served the purposes of northern Republicans as they began giving up on the South and, therefore, inadvertently empowered white southerners as well.

As long as feuds seemed to be a habit of the white southern gentry-purely communal and fought over personal or local trivialities, strictly horizontal (as well as inherent to a society given to honor-based violence), and not concentrated in one discrete area of the region-hardly any criticism was projected in their direction. As indicated by the New York Times's 1872 prediction of an oncoming "good old fashioned southern feud" in Virginia, they were rare enough to be thought of more as quaint than threatening even as southern Republicans were harassed and killed throughout the former Confederacy.47 The concept of feud was instrumental for discouraged northern idealists expressing their cynicism and disillusionment after Reconstruction's failure. In 1883 former Radical Republican Carl Schurz included white-on-white "family feuds" among the categories of directionless violence he knew to be rampant after Reconstruction's end. It was a condemnation of the white South but one without racial or political significance; more than anything else it suggested Schurz's rejection of his own past zeal.48 The Nation kept the radical faith for years after Schurz abandoned it, denouncing the southern Democracy at every turn, yet nevertheless deduced in 1879 that violence in the rebellious states was "not a Democratic disease simply" and that even if "every Southern white voted the Republican ticket . . . there would still be plenty of outrages and assaults and batteries." Southern politics, it said, was afflicted not by race hatred and aristocratic rule but rather "by the family feuds which fill up the time and thoughts of people who live lonely lives and have few neighbors."49 That this was a variation on the same excuse for violence used by southern conservatives since 1865 was unmentioned. Schurz and Nation editors had lost any stomach for their postwar fight to reform the rebellious states. The idea of feuds helped them continue to criticize the white South while simultaneously disguising their resignation.

Homicide, North and South (1880), a state-by-state quantitative comparison of violent deaths compiled by Cincinnati journalist Horace V. Redfield, is best known for exposing the post-Reconstruction South's bloody record (many southern states each numbered the same total of killings as up to eight northern states in a year).50 Redfield's book was also one of the most authoritative pronouncements on white southerners' inherent appetite for deadly vengeance, regardless of the recent war or other exogenous conditions. Environmental factors were not to blame, Redfield surmised, since expatriated southerners carried it with them even when they left the former war zone-as in Illinois's "bloody Williamson" County, where "a feud among families or factions of the peculiar southern type" carried out "by population from the old slave States" and "originat[ing] among the [white] population of Southern antecedents . . . was carried on in the Southern shot-gun style." The only difference was that, it being a northern state, "the 'feud' was suppressed, murder was punished," eventually leaving Williamson "as quiet and orderly as any county in Illinois."51 Redfield's Illinois anecdote was consistent with his larger program of depoliticizing southern violence. As a southern correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial, Redfield was keenly aware of the difference between political and extrapolitical violence, especially after witnessing Alabama Democrats' vicious reaction to 1874's proposed federal civil rights act.52 While South Carolina's blatantly political Red Shirts and Louisiana's White League (as well as the countless Ku Klux Klan blocs across the southern states) seemed to have supplanted the older style of communal violence, white southerners' "natural" proclivity for bloodletting still seethed beneath national attention. Redfield seemed to concentrate solely on white intraracial assaults at a time when white-on-black interracial killing was more prevalent. In the same vein, he even dismissed white intraracial attacks on southern Republicans. "Although there have been many political murders in the Southern States, yet the great majority of homicides," said Redfield, "have no more connection with politics than has petit larceny in New York."53 This included South Carolina's knife fights and arsons, but oddly not as part of its "great political excitement" of 1876.54 As correspondent for the Queen City's conservative Republican daily (as opposed to the radical Gazette), Redfield had reason to underestimate "grossly exaggerated accounts of [white-on-black] 'outrages' " and depoliticize those that defied complete dismissal.55 His thesis demanded that white southerners be ferocious with or without politics-thus he could curse the white South without appearing to be a defender of the maligned black electorate. In less than two decades South Carolina's "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman was using a very similar argument to vindicate lynching.56

"The point of honor, as something to fight about, has pretty well disappeared in Anglo-Saxon countries"