2. Simple fisticuffs, a less drastic form of combat than armed dueling, nevertheless served a similar purpose in that the ordered undertaking of a "battle" ensured that disputes were settled in the public eye and according to community parameters; Gorn, " 'Gouge and Bite,' " 1843; William Barney, The Road to Secession, 157; Ireland, "Homicide in Nineteenth Century Kentucky," 14243. For the fatal knife fight between Arch Augh and J. B. Combs in Breathitt County, see Daily Ohio Statesman, April 25, 1857.

3. Quoted from Waldstreicher, "Rites of Rebellion, Rites of Assent," 41.

4. Noble's description of the Tessy Boy fights suggests an exhibition somewhat more regulated and sedate than some others on record. For descriptions of Court Day violence in Kentucky, directed and undirected, see Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 90100.

5. Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 110.

6. The "Three Forks region" refers to the area of land draining into the Kentucky River's north, middle, and south forks within the following counties (in order of formation): Clay, Estill, Perry, Breathitt, Owsley, Letcher, Powell, Wolfe, with parts of Knott and Rockcastle included. Verhoeff, The Kentucky Mountains, 6; Nineteenth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Agriculture Labor and Statistics, 43; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 28; Kleber, Clark, and Harrison, The Kentucky Encyclopedia, 204.

7. Wall, " 'A richer land never seen yet,' " 13940; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 131n.

8. Ibid., 42.

9. Johnston, First Explorations of Kentucky, 154n.

10. G. A. Thompson, The Geographical and Historical Dictionary of America and the West Indies, 12.

11. Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 141; Salstrom, "The Agricultural Origins of Economic Dependency," xvii (quote).

12. William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 251 (quote); Friend, Kentucke's Frontiers, 22325.

13. Warner, Studies in the South and West, 359.

14. James Lane Allen, "Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback," 50; Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 2629.

15. Philadelphia Inquirer, September 18, 1889. The Bluegrass's productive superiority to all other parts of the state remained a constant throughout Kentucky's agrarian history. The gross disparity between sections impeded the state's ability to make commonly beneficial state policies. See Clark, Agrarian Kentucky.

16. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 1:40, 81; Samuel Wilson Collection, KLSCA.

17. Charles Fenno Hoffman, A Winter in the West, 199200.

18. Keane, Violence and Democracy, 3839.

19. Dunn, Cades Cove, 145.

20. Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 133. The territory that Clay County covered in 1807 became most of what is, at this writing, nine other counties.

21. Interviews with Sarah Baker, Preston Campbell, Mrs. Candell, Andrew Combs, Harry Eversole, William Eversole, T. T. Garrard, William L. Hurst, Matilda Duff Lewis, James L. Moore, and E. C. Strong, JJDD, reel 3, pp. 212627, 2182, 227172, 2322, 236566, 240610, 241925, 243032, 2436, 2444, 246063, 2544; Strong Family Papers, 86, Breathitt County Public Library; Jess D. Wilson, A Latter Day Look at Kentucky Feuds, 4448; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 8687; DenBoer and Long, Kentucky, 117; Owings, The Amis Family, 79; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 1078.

22. Wheeling Register, March 9, 1897; KSJ, 1839, 377; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 110; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8.

23. Scalf, Kentucky's Last Frontier, 194 (quote); Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 12, 67; Webster, "The Spatial Reorganization of the Local State," 6667.

24. The trend continued after the war as well; between 1865 and the early twentieth century ten more counties were added. At this writing, Kentucky has the third most counties of any state. Shannon and McQuown, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 2; James Rood Robertson (ed.), Petitions of the Early Inhabitants of Kentucky to the General Assembly of Virginia, 84, 89, 1078, 114, 117, 130, 141. For the profligacy with which nineteenth-century Kentucky expanded its number of counties, see Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 2.

25. Interview with Judge Dickerson, March 9, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, pp. 217071; Pudup, "Land before Coal," 5, 161; Jess D. Wilson, The Sugar Pond and the Fritter Tree, 48; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8. For the significance of disinterestedness in republican ideology and practice, see Gordon Wood, "Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution," 69109.

26. In the first half of the 1820s, Kentucky's General Assembly's attempts to prevent foreclosures were blocked by a conservative court of appeals that sided with voracious creditors. The legislature bit off more than it could chew when it attempted to establish a debtor-friendly "New Court," rending the electorate between it and the "Old Court," thereby creating a dire constitutional crisis. In the elections of 1825 and 1826, the Old Court faction retook control, but only after many future Jacksonians had become disillusioned by the judiciary's siding with lucre. Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 23536. For a different take on the Old Court/ New Court battle, see Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 8688; KSJ, 1839, 377; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 10910; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8.

27. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 3940.

28. Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty; Pudup, "Land before Coal"; Burch, Owsley County; Wiese, Grasping at Independence; Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky.

29. Ireland, "Aristocrats All," 36869, 38283.

30. Ireland, "The Place of the Justice of the Peace in the Legislature and Party System of Kentucky," 2067.

31. Ireland, The County Courts in Antebellum Kentucky, 710, 1215, 7476.

32. Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 56, 12432, 152.

33. Charleston Mercury, December 5, 1859.

34. "Assassination in Kentucky," 778.

35. Progressives considered county government antiquated and corrupt, in contrast to the ongoing contemporary civic reform and centralized planning on local and national levels. If county government was not banal, it was, even worse, antiquated and corrupt in contrast to the contemporary civic reform and centralized planning ongoing on local and national levels during the Progressive Era. "County government is the most backward of all our political units," the National Municipal League announced in the early 1920s, "the most neglected by the public, the most boss-ridden, the least efficiently organized and most corrupt and incompetent, and, by reason of constitutional complications, the most difficult to reform." Quoted in Ogg and Ray, Introduction to American Government, 732. See also Beard, Readings in American Government and Politics, 55666; Forman, Advanced Civics, 195202; "Lobbyists and Legislatures," 197. For a secondary assessment of the Progressive attack on the county (and its long-lasting scholarly legacy), see Menzel, introduction, 410.

36. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 42, 285.

37. Ibid., 38. Robert C. McMath Jr. concurs with Sydnor: "For most nineteenth century southerners, 'The Government' and 'The County' were almost synonymous terms. The seat of the county court also became a center of trade and, to a lesser extent, of organized social life." However, McMath modifies the thesis in saying that, aside from being communities, nineteenth-century southern counties also "contained communities." "Community, Region, and Hegemony in the Nineteenth-Century South," 285.

38. Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 1, 33.

39. Williams, Appalachia, 136.

40. JJDD, reel 3, pp. 2272, 2322, 241925.

41. "Dark and bloody ground" was an appropriation from Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe's description of a sanguinary history since his nation had contended with the Shawnee for mastery of the region long before white settlement. The phrase was popularized by John Filson's The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784) and reapplied to various violent events in Kentucky's subsequent history. The phrase's intimation is of a territory inherently violent regardless of who occupied it. Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, 268312.

42. Quote from Watlington, The Partisan Spirit, 16. Aron, "Pioneers and Profiteers," 181.

43. Dunaway, "Speculators and Settler Capitalists," 54; Coulter, "Early Frontier Democracy in the First Kentucky Constitution," 665; Perkins, Border Life, 126, 147; Gates, "Tenants of the Log Cabin," 5; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 130, 13031n.

44. Dunaway, "Speculators and Settler Capitalists," 61.

45. Aron, "Pioneers and Profiteers," 181.

46. Kentucky's 1792 constitution was the second state constitution (after Vermont) to have no property requirements for voting or running for public office. Other states followed suit early in the next century. Wooster, Politicians, Planters and Plain Folk, 13. In the 1820s and 1830s, state legislation consistently favored occupiers' rights to the disadvantage of Virginia grant claimants. While one pro-squatter Kentucky law was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1823, it upheld a similar law nine years later; Ireland, The Kentucky State Constitution, 211. For other preemption legislation, see Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, 8183; Ramage, "The Green River Pioneers," 184 (quote), 190.

47. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 32. See also Aron, How the West Was Lost, 15052; Dupre, "Ambivalent Capitalists on the Cotton Frontier," 22526; S. Bolton, Territorial Ambition, 7276; Kulikoff, The Agrarian Origins of American Capitalism, 7790.

48. Ramage, "The Green River Pioneers," 184, 190.

49. "Without legal claim to land and often without permission to live where they did, the very poor seemed the greatest threat to the ideal of 'work & be rich.' Their alleged avoidance of work fundamentally clashed with the industry of persons determined to carve a profitable existence out of the West." Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 11011. This sentiment was shared by planters farther south for decades, especially after preemption laws came to be viewed as a threat to southern land values. In describing class differences in the antebellum South, Alabaman Robert Hundley described squatters as "useless to themselves and the rest of mankind." D. R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 119.

50. Although Clay had begun his career with firm support from landless Kentuckians, his "American System" looked askance at the rights of the unpropertied and he tended to support speculator interests, especially as they came under attack from Andrew Jackson. By the mid-1800s, Kentuckians followed suit with other southern states in opposing federal homestead acts. Register of Debates in Congress, 24th Cong., 1st sess., March 31, 1836, 1029. During the later years of Clay's congressional ascendancy, federal land policy, which ostensibly granted the right of preemption in 1841, favored only settlers who were able to purchase lands they were to occupy in the near future. Aron, How the West Was Lost, 199; Picht, "The American Squatter and Federal Land Policy," 7283; Feller, The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics, 7779.

51. The availability of land west of the Mississippi River could only threaten the value of southern real estate. When the last antebellum federal preemption bill was struck down by Congress in 1859, southeastern Kentucky's U.S. House representative, John Elliott, joined most other southern congressmen in opposing it. Congressmen representing New Appalachia realized (apparently correctly) that the opening of western lands would lead to the decrease of already marginal land values in their districts. TAPR, 1859, 23, 58; Salstrom, Appalachia's Path to Dependency, 2223.

52. Although it is difficult to trace accurately because of its inherent invisibility among public records, the continuation of squatting can be demonstrated somewhat accurately by identifying specific surnames registered as landless over the course of multiple decades. One survey of antebellum Appalachia suggests that landlessness was often intergenerational, with families that had arrived west of the Alleghenies without land in 1800 still without land in 1860. Dunaway, "Speculators and Settler Capitalists," 83. Dunaway insists that "there was no such thing as 'free' land or 'squatters" rights" in antebellum Appalachia (86). This statement pertains only to the contractual ownership of land and not the "ownership" brought about by occupation and applied labor that was the original legal and moral basis of preemption. While there may have been nothing resembling squatters' rights in most of the southern states by the eve of the Civil War, that does not mean that many people did not enjoy access to open land and perhaps profit from it as much as a farmer with "legitimate" ownership. Anecdotal accounts show that in Breathitt County farmers without documentation of land ownership operated with relative impunity until the early twentieth century.

53. Families of the nineteenth-century Cumberland Plateau were forced to deal with two factors that turned land inheritance into a process of increasing poverty: a dearth of arable land coupled with one of the highest birth rates in the United States. This condition was exacerbated by the practice of "partible inheritance" in which land was equally distributed to all eligible heirs (or all male heirs). As a result, familial landholdings became smaller over the course of generations. While landless farmers would have suffered from the increase in population along with their landed neighbors, partible inheritance had little impact on people with no land to inherit. In fact, the shrinking of individual landholdings may have made squatting seem more attractive. Salstrom, Appalachia's Path to Dependency, xxv, 2223, 5355; Wiese, Grasping at Independence, 26180; Waller, Feud, 2122, 5859; Williams, Appalachia, 15354; John Sherwood Lewis, "Becoming Appalachia," 11519.

54. Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 2728. For the inherent condition of inequality involved in land commodification in Appalachia, see Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 3639. Billings and Blee suggest that Kentucky mountaineers saw little problem in accepting land as a saleable commodity. For an opposing viewpoint on this subject (pointing out the cultural barriers to land com-modification), see Batteau, "Mosbys and Broomsedge," 45763. Both of these explanations of land commodification in New Appalachia take into account only land "known" by its owner and the legal and social implications of that knowledge. While this was the case for many landowners, the prevalence of absentee ownership had the effect of giving unauthorized land users greater knowledge of the land than its official owners. This chapter submits that direct knowledge of and engagement with land were indirect forms of "ownership" that, while not legally recognized, nevertheless served squatters' economic and perhaps moral purposes.

The portrayal of "peasant" societies as communities that perpetually work toward common goals has been criticized as a situation in which "scholars tended to idealize and homogenize the peasant community, constructing it as a seamless universe in which all agreed on how to define the moral economy and on what parts of the old world they sought to regain. Internal dissension, exploitation, or violence, no matter how important to the operation or definition of the community, tended to disappear from view." In his "post-revisionist" study of the political economy of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Floyd County, Kentucky, Robert Wiese calls this tendency "household localism" and contends that mountain yeomen of practically all possible financial situations were careful not to enter into arrangements that benefited anyone outside their immediate families. There is little reason to believe that eastern Kentucky's landless would have behaved much differently from their landed neighbors in this respect. Wiese, Grasping at Independence, 1113, 5960. For a recent critique of the drawing of a stark distinction between "nonmarket and market-based societies" (using water rights in the American West as its case study), see Arnold, "Rethinking Moral Economy," 8595; Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 64.

55. The raising of free-range livestock presented a challenge to private property just as it did in other parts of America. Sources that address the conflict between cultivation and droving in other parts of the South are Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, 23968; R. Ben Brown, "Free Men and Free Pigs," 11737; Walpole, "The Closing of the Open Range in Watauga County, N.C.," 32035; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 146.

56. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 5.

57. Quotes from Scalf, Kentucky's Last Frontier, 158, and Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 17; LCJ, June 3, 1904.

58. The distinction between the two has been of special importance to historians of Appalachia who disagree as to what degree the region's economy was based upon a larger market before the Civil War. Market relations are perhaps more difficult to trace in such terrain than would be the case in, for instance, the contemporary lowland South; however, this does not convince all historians that Appalachia was not the "target" of capitalistic enterprises from very early on after white occupation. For descriptions of the two "extremes" of this argument (and others that fall in between), see Blethen and Wood, "The Appalachian Frontier and the Southern Frontier," 3647.

59. Flat-bottomed "push boats" were the primary vehicle of eastern Kentucky's logging industry before the arrival of railroads and did not immediately disappear afterward, remaining common well into the twentieth century. Ellis, The Kentucky River, 5380; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 11.

60. Breathitt County native and historian E. L. Noble recollected a local fable from what he fancifully called "the medieval history of Eastern Kentucky" about a man who, sometime before the county's partitioning, traded "an entire creek of land, some two to three thousand acres" for a rifle. The moral of the story, Noble explained, was that while "the man buying the gun today [the 1930s] is looked on as an imbecile . . . in fact [at that time in history] he made the best bargain." While the deed to the land brought with it the potential for wealth, this was wealth that involved the application of arduous labor: the plowing of rough ground and fencing of crops, the tending of livestock, the hiring of possibly undependable help, not to mention the burden of paying property taxes. In contrast, ownership of the rifle, compounded with unfettered access to all the territory one was willing to traverse, made one "heir to all the game that roamed the woods in a thousand valleys, or on a thousand hills." Noble added that "a fish hook in those days was more valuable than a common farm." E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 1:13, 2829.

61. Tyrel G. Moore, "Economic Development in Appalachian Kentucky," 22234; Ellis, The Kentucky River, 56, 68, 7374.

62. Cannel is primarily a surface coal, and could be easily surface-mined without deep shaft digging, making early coal mining a simple winter vocation for farmers. The mining of cannel coal in the nineteenth century was statistically safer than bituminous mining due to a lessened need for blasting. Hower, " 'Uncertain and Treacherous,' " 312.

63. Banks, "The Emergence of a Capitalistic Labor Market in Eastern Kentucky," 191; Hoffman, A Winter in the West, 18485; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 1819; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 171n.

64. KSJ, 1835, 39 (appendix); Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 17475.

65. Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 21011; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 10. See also Ripley and Dana, The New American Cyclopaedia, 659; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 14142.

66. Perrin, Battle, and Kniffin, Kentucky, 776; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 1011; Mathias, Incidents and Experiences, 22.

67. WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 29; "Report of Board of Internal Improvement," KSJ, 1839, 38; Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 2330; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 1.

68. Mathias, Incidents and Experiences, 22.

69. Harry Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict, 16061; Robbins, "Preemption," 34345; McFaul, The Politics of Jacksonian Finance, 17274.

70. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 12, 8.

71. Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 95.

72. The Thomas Franklin grant had been sold for taxes numerous times before South's purchase. Stewart Kentucky Herald, August 13, 1799; Western Monitor, September 22, 1815; Morse v. South et al., Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, in The Federal Reporter, 80:20618; Jillson, The Kentucky Land Grants, 173; Old Kentucky Entries and Deeds, 101, 449; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:5152.

73. Owen, Fourth Report of the Geological Survey in Kentucky, 9496, 351, 357, 362, 367, 369, 372, 417, 419, 420; MacFarlane, Coal-Regions of America, 346.

74. In 1888 the state geological survey listed Breathitt County with just under 389 square miles of forest land, one of the state's largest acreages at a time in which forest reserves were said to be running drastically low. LCJ, June 17, 1889; Haskel and Smith, A Complete Descriptive and Statistical Gazetteer of the United States of America, 78; Davie, Kentucky, 273; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8 (quote).

75. WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 49; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 2; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9.

76. KHJ, 1839, 426; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9; Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 147.

77. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 11.

78. AGACK, December, 1838 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1839), 14445; and AGACK, December 1853March, 1854 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1854), 2:527; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 910; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 84; Conti, "The Cultural Role of Local Elites in the Kentucky Mountains," 54; Ellis, The Kentucky River, 113.

79. Quoted in Verhoeff, Kentucky River Navigation, 175.

80. During his time on the General Assembly as representative from Madison County, Samuel South would have represented the sparsely populated area of the Three Forks region that his son later purchased. "Samuel South Letter, 1825," microfilm roll 82-0026, Clift folder 884, KHS; Stewart Kentucky Herald, August 11, 1801; Western Monitor, August 9, 1817; Maysville Eagle, February 6, 1818; Lewis Collins and Collins, Collins' Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 2:179; George Robertson, Scrap Book on Law and Politics, 2; John Frost, Heroes and Hunters of the West, 147; Wilder, Kentucky Soldiers of the War of 1812, 240; Hume, "The Hume Genealogy," 11011; James Rood Robertson, Petitions of the Early Inhabitants of Kentucky to the General Assembly of Virginia, 51; Quisenberry, Kentucky in the War of 1812, 29, 110; Belue, The Hunters of Kentucky, 29293n.

81. Dunaway, The First American Frontier, 311.

82. Morse v. South et al., Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, The Federal Reporter, 80:217; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9 (quote). After Owsley County was created in 1843, partially carved out of Breathitt County, South's holdings amounted to more than 37 percent of land owned in Breathitt County and, by 1860, over a quarter of the county's land mass. Annual Report of the Auditor of Public Accounts of the State of Kentucky, 47.

83. KSJ, 1839, 377.

84. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9; KSJ, 1839, 309, 320, 343, 377. The office of sheriff put one in charge of all county-level tax collection and bond execution, thereby placing the financial well-being of an entire county within the discretion of one individual; William B. Allen, Kentucky Officer's Guide and Legal Hand-book, 2013.

85. KPD: Reports Communicated to Both Branches of the Legislature of Kentucky at the December Session, 1840 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1840), 15455; KSJ, 1838, 37778; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8.

86. AGACK: December, 1838 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1839), 144; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 10.

87. AGACK: December Session, 1844 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1845), 19798.

88. Jeremiah Weldon South was referred to as the "father of Breathitt County" in his later years and especially after his death in 1880. LCJ, July 27, 1877, February 10, 1880; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 9. For South's influence in Kentucky government, see Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 195; Lowell H. Harrison, Kentucky's Governors, 65; Robert Gunn Crawford, "A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System," 29; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 2.

89. Mt. Sterling Sentinel-Democrat, April 14, 1880; Hume, "The Hume Genealogy," 110.

90. Robert Gunn Crawford, "A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System," 29; Mt. Sterling Sentinel-Democrat, April 14, 1880.

91. FRA, April 17, 1880; Mathias, Incidents and Experiences, 31, 156; Hume, "The Hume Genealogy," 110. For Kentucky support for the Mexican War, see Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 17086.

92. Pudup, "Land before Coal," 127. Pudup's conception of class in nineteenth-century eastern Kentucky depends upon E. P. Thompson's dictum that class is defined not only by economic relationships but is also formed according to the dictates of very specific historical contexts. Essentially, class relations in eastern Kentucky were defined according to the parameters of the immediate vicinity, involving factors such as land ownership, profession, and kinship that may not have corresponded directly to other parts of Kentucky, the Upper South, or the United States as a whole. E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 11.

The "Bluegrass System" was the forerunner of Henry Clay's "American System" that favored a society led by planters and merchants. The creation of Breathitt County was one of many manifestations of the Bluegrass System transported to the mountains. Friend, Kentucke's Frontiers, 21819; Aron, How the West Was Lost, 12449.

93. "List of Lawyers in Kentucky," 416; interview with William L. Hurst, October 27, 1898, JJDD, 2453.

94. Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 21011.

95. AGACK: November Session, 1851 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1852), 728.

96. Discipline is the act Michel Foucault used to describe the treatment and manipulation of the body in the modern age. I use the term analogically since it is general yet not overly imprecise in describing the manipulation of bodies (or in this case a body of land and a body politic) in ways not limited to the physical, political, and economic but combining elements of all three. Breathitt County's creation involved a holistic attempt to combine contractual ownership with the establishment of a corresponding political and administrative unit. The level of control involved in such an undertaking (made structurally possible by the freedom granted to individuals in nineteenth-century Kentucky to almost single-handedly "create" a county) can be well described as "an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result and it is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement." Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 137. For analogous examples of the Foucauldian concept of discipline applied to a modern "managed nature," see Oliver, "The Thames Embankment and the Disciplining of Nature in Modernity," 22738; Peluso and Vandergeest, "Genealogies of the Political Forest and Customary Rights in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand," 761812.

97. It was the occasion of Kentucky's 1890 constitutional convention where delegates resolved to make county making more difficult. The new rule was tested in 1904 when the legislature voted to form a new county, Beckham County (after the names "Hardscrabble" and "Goebel" were rejected), but a lawsuit charging that the county was too small for the parameters drawn out by the constitution prompted the new county to be dissolved. It was not until 1912 that another county, McCreary County, was formed, to become the state's 120th, and last, county. Birchfield, "Beckham County," 6070; Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates in the Convention, 395 (quote). (I am grateful to John R. Burch for directing me to this quote.) For further convention debates on county government, also see 32829, 333, 358, 36869, 391, 399, 4034. For a thorough analysis of the problems associated with Kentucky county government addressed at the 1890 convention, see Webster, "The Spatial Reorganization of the Local State," 7180; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 143.

98. Wallace B. Turner, "Kentucky Politics in the 1850's," 132; Mathias and Shannon, "Gubernatorial Politics in Kentucky," 248. Those who gained their wealth from new roads and easy credit favored Clay's American System, while poorer elements voted Whig in areas where Democratic slaveholders dominated elections. Kentuckians of many societal strata had thrown their support to the Whigs and, as was the case in most southern communities, they created relatively homogenous party loyalties in their respective communities (loyalties that usually extended to the county level). Harry Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict, 220, 304; Volz, "Party, State and Nation," 2934; Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 6568. Historians of the nineteenth-century American South who consider political parties to be tools of the elite, as well as historians who deem them true vehicles of mass opinion, all recognize the Whig Party's special formidability in the upland South, particularly in eastern Kentucky. Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 109; Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 3435, 116; Degler, The Other South, 10910; James S. Brown, Beech Creek, 78.

99. (Columbus) Ohio Statesman, December 2, 1840; Boston Daily Atlas, November 27, 1844; New York Herald, December 15, 1845, November 11, 1848. Until majorities began casting votes for Unionists during the Civil War (perhaps due to violent coercion), Breathitt County's electorate produced majorities for the Democratic Party for all offices, legislative and executive, on the state and federal levels. TAPR, 1838, 28; 1840, 2526; 1841, 2324; 1843, 46; 1844, 56; 1845, 51; 1846, 48; 1848, 46; 1849, 55; 1850, 48; 1852, 47; 1853, 43; 1854, 47; 1856, 47; 1857, 52; 1858, 59; 1859, 56.