35. Lowell H. Harrison, "The Government of Confederate Kentucky," 8489, 9397; Astor, "Rebels on the Border," 71.

36. Historians have successfully debunked the myth of stolidly Unionist southern Appalachia, revealing a far more complex array of factors that contributed to the formation of divergent allegiances in the mountains. Civil wars create combatants, but they do not dictate that they fight uniformly and for uniform causes. Southern Appalachia's Civil War experience was more like that of the majority of the modern era's civil wars in which the larger war actually played host to a "mosaic of discrete miniwars," many of which had only peripheral connections to the "master cleavage" (in the case of the United States, secession) that initiated a state of war. For these phrases and their significance in describing civil war, see Berkeley, The Graves Are Not Yet Full; Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 151, 918, 11116.

37. Rockenbach, " 'The Weeds and the Flowers Are Closely Mixed,' " 3.

38. Volz, "Party, State and Nation," 467.

39. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 57.

40. Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times, 129.

41. KHJ, 1861, 327.

42. KSJ, 1861, 555; Rockenbach, " 'The Weeds and the Flowers Are Closely Mixed,' "12; Robert Gunn Crawford, "A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System," 24, 29.

43. Quote from Tomes and Smith, The War with the South, 54; Congressional Globe, vol. 54, part 2 (February 21, 1863): 116162.

44. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 17172.

45. Owen, Fourth Report of the Kentucky Geological Survey in Kentucky, 351.

46. Brian McKnight's history of the Civil War in the "central Appalachian divide" suggests that mountaineers were capricious in their loyalties and unwilling to provide firm support for either side. Having produced an unambiguous military history, McKnight does not take strong account of the role of local government or violent political agency outside the parameters of official military units or units of peripheral officiality. I contend that under the direction of local elites, eastern Kentucky's male population, white and black, exhibited a distinct interest in the war's outcome (or at least its local outcome) and thus participated actively, although not always within the confines of regular military forces. McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 35, 10913.

47. Wisconsin Daily Patriot, November 19, 1860; Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South, 206; Scalf, Kentucky's Last Frontier, 500; Volz, "Party, State and Nation," 44951, 500.

48. Hartford Herald, April 30, 1879; McAfee, Kentucky Politicians, 7475; Doolan, "The Court of Appeals of Kentucky," 463.

49. Brockman, History of the Hume, Kennedy and Brockman Families, 43; Hume, "The Hume Genealogy," 110; Walden, Remembering Kentucky's Confederates, 29; Kleber, Clark, and Harrison, The Kentucky Encyclopedia, 541.

50. Ed Porter Thompson, History of the Orphan Brigade, 700704.

51. "Campaign Sketches No. 3," 179; Scalf, Kentucky's Last Frontier, 281 (quote); Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 23, 3031.

52. Perry, Jack May's War, 15, 1314; Ed Porter Thompson, History of the First Kentucky Brigade, 753, 75556; Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 65.

53. Ed Porter Thompson, History of the Orphan Brigade, 701; Walden, Remembering Kentucky's Confederates, 29; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 1067.

54. War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 32 (1892), 433, 687; Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 147; KAGR, 21013.

55. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 8.

56. Cincinnati Press, November 8, 1861.

57. New York Herald, November 24, 1861.

58. Although nationalism does not fully explain Confederate loyalty in a Union state, Noble's testimonial suggests its contribution in conditions in which it was not previously part of the political or cultural atmosphere. "Nationalism is contingent; its creation is a process. It is not a substance available to a people in a certain premeasured amount; it is rather a dynamic of ideas and social realities that can, under the proper circumstances, unite and legitimate a people in what they regard as reasoned public action. Such a view of nationalism, moreover, underlines the political nature of the undertaking, directing attention to the social groups seeking to establish their own corporate ideals and purposes as the essence of group self-definition." Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 121 (quote 6); Martin Crawford, Ashe County's Civil War, 12124.

59. Christopher Phillips has said that the Civil Warera "border experience," in contrast to the attempts at Confederate nationalism farther south, "fits best within the political . . . rather than the cultural realm." " 'The Chrysalis State,' " 160.

60. Degler, The Other South, 122 (quote); McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 17. For similar views, see McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels, 6; Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray, 20, 26; Groce, Mountain Rebels, 70; Martin Crawford, Ashe County's Civil War, 132; Waller, Feud, 31.

61. Breathitt, Floyd, and Morgan counties were peculiar in being "Confederate in sympathy" compared to most counties in eastern Kentucky. Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 7; John Britton Wells, 10th Kentucky Cavalry, 46. Floyd County was the home of one of Kentucky's Confederate senators, John Milton Elliott. "Campaign Sketches No. 3," 179; KAGR, 1:21013.

62. The typical Kentucky slave owner, like the majority of slave owners throughout the South, owned fewer than ten slaves. In 1860 only seventy Kentuckians owned more than fifty slaves. Sprague, "The Kentucky Pocket Plantation," 69; Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.

63. Herbert W. Spencer, "Captain Bill's January Raid"; Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 910. In 1850 these contiguous counties were Floyd, Morgan, Owsley, and Perry. Goodrich, A Pictorial Geography of the World, 23343; Ernest Collins, "Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties," 9, 13; Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.

64. Tallant, Evil Necessity, 91100; Barnett, "Virginians Moving West," 244; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 68.

65. Ernest Collins, "Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties," 41 (quote).

66. For the patron-client relationships and martial violence, see Schmidt et al., Friends, Followers and Factions, xxxiixxxiii. White southern mountaineers, within and outside the seceded states, agreed with their lowland fellows that the alleged northern threat to slavery was an equal threat to all property and autonomy. Aside from this, even in a place like Breathitt County where black and white mingled freely, the white fear of a free black population was probably also a factor as it always was in the South (especially the Upper South). See Inscoe, Mountain Masters, 910, 12330.

67. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:5052; Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.

68. Dunaway, African-American Family, 10.

69. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:5.

70. Waldrep, "Rank and File Voters and the Coming of the Civil War," 7071; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 44047; Volz "Party, State and Nation," 18, 46981.

71. This suggests that southeastern Kentucky was consistent with the rest of the state, since cursory analysis of Kentucky's sectional divides on the 1861 neutrality vote reveals a consistent correlation between Democracy and antineutrality. The same areas that had supported Henry Clay and his Whigs during the party's salad days tended to favor neutrality in 1861 and contributed the greater amount of Union support after Kentucky's official participation in the war. Counties that had continued Democratic leanings since the 1820s opposed neutrality and accordingly provided the larger numbers of Confederate volunteers over the next four years after the state's early attempt at neutrality was revealed as a clear failure. Fox, "The Southern Mountaineer," 389; Rossiter, Parties and Politics in America, 8586; Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 2023. For similar data from other slave states (with relatively similar conclusions), see Trelease, "Who Were the Scalawags?" 44568.

72. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, p. 216; Coulter, "Some Reasons for Kentucky's Position in the Civil War," 5052; Volz, "Party, State and Nation," 500.

73. Astor, "Rebels on the Border," 4748, 71, 7475, 11718; Shannon and McQuown, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 3238.

74. Relatively few histories of the U.S. Civil War have used white southern class concerns to explain wartime Unionism in the southern states (in fact, only recently has the subject of southern Unionism been broadly explored). For four exceptions, see Degler, The Other South; Escott, Many Excellent People; Durrill, War of Another Kind; and Current, Lincoln's Loyalists. For a complex examination of the changing relationships of "aristocrats," yeomen, and poor whites in the occupied South, see Ash, When the Yankees Came, 17094.

75. Most Breathitt County surnames were found exclusively on either Union or Confederate recruitment rolls, showing that kinship played a significant role in picking sides-brothers and cousins often stuck together. But the small number of surnames found on both sides, when compared to 1861 tax records, suggests that economic considerations often trumped familial ones. Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS; War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 32 (1892), 433, 687; KAGR, 1:21013; Charles C. Wells, 1890 Special Veterans' Census for Eastern Kentucky.

76. Forty-fourth Annual Report of the American Bible Society, 67.

77. In E. P. Thompson's understanding, class is not so much a thing as it is an event, a historical phenomenon that occurs when people "as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs." Viewed as a continentwide conflict, the American Civil War hardly appears as a war between classes. However, within one divided community with no definite attachment to either North or South, class formation (at least for a historically finite length of time) is a useful heuristic for understanding what made some men fight for the North and some men fight for the South, and why some attempted (unsuccessfully) to avoid the war altogether. E. P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class, 9.

78. WPA, Military History of Kentucky, 240.

79. This is a bit of an irony considering Governor Thomas Metcalfe's clash with Andrew Jackson in 1830. National Republican Thomas Metcalfe was elected as Kentucky's tenth governor in 1828. He was a firm defender of publicly funded internal improvements, a trait that gave him natural distance from President Jackson's policies disdaining same. Jackson's veto of a federal bill funding a road between Lexington and the Ohio River during Metcalfe's term marked the beginning of Jacksonian decline in most (but not all) Kentucky politics. Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 2627, 9092; Friend, Along the Maysville Road, 25672.

80. Surprised by the amount of Confederate support he found in eastern Kentucky in early 1862, Colonel James Garfield advocated loyalty oaths for these heads of party, hoping that lead rams would change the flocks' direction. War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 10, part 2, p. 68; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 1314.

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

82. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 195, 199; KAGR, 1:388; interview with William B. Eversole, January 15, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, p. 2146; Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 25159; The Union Army, 356.

83. As of 1847, it had the only post office outside of the county seat. It was close enough to towns in other counties for regular commerce so residents of the community and its surroundings had only to visit Jackson on court days. Twenty years after the war, there was a failed proposal to make it county seat for a new county. MVB, January 24, 1884; SIJ, January 25, 1884; KAGR, 2:78687; The Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 18791880, microfilm reel S9268, p. 133, KLSCA; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 91, 9394.

84. Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 25758; Cincinnati Press, December 28, 1861; Richmond Climax, August 31, 1898.

85. Although Strong's grandfather had opposed members of the Amis family decades before during the brief but violent Clay County Cattle War, this apparently had little bearing on his willingness to join forces with members of the family during the war, further suggesting that, just as family loyalty was only one among multiple factors that influenced wartime loyalties, past familial enmities were put aside in the interest of mutual political interests. Nevertheless, those who wished to lessen the war's apparent impact on mountain society preferred to begin the story of Bloody Breathitt with the miniscule cattle war rather than the American Civil War. Therefore, when William Strong ran afoul of Wiley Amis after the war (as will be shown in the following chapter), their ensuing "feud" was attributed to a conflict that began and ended before their births rather than the political rift that formed between them in their own lifetimes. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 30; Pudup, "Land before Coal," 292; interview with Anderson Combs, April 26, 1898, JJDD, reel 3, pp. 226773; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:37; Strong Family Papers, Breathitt County Public Library; U.S. War Department, Official Army Register of the Volunteer Force of the United States Army, 1236; Perrin, Battle, and Kniffin, Kentucky, 728.

86. Bismarck Daily Tribune, October 18, 1894.

87. AGACK: Passed at December Session, 1845 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1846), 16.

88. E. Polk Johnson, A History of Kentucky and Kentuckians, 368; Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 220.

89. Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 148.

90. Although a local account that was generally sympathetic to Strong's enemies suggested that he had deserted the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry, records show that Strong was given official authorized leave from the unit. His official connection to the Three Forks Battalion bears this out as well. This is an important distinction since many of his actions in the latter part of the war that inspired much of his reputation as a brigand, murderer, and "feudist" were performed under the auspices of the Federal government. Suggestions that Strong had deserted the Union army were one of many attempts to depoliticize his memory. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 195, 199, 630; SIJ, February 16, 1892; HMC, April 1, 1892; KHJ, 1876, 1199; KAGR, 1:38889; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 2324.

The Three Forks Battalion was one of ten battalions within the "1st Regiment of Capital Guards" created by the Kentucky legislature in January 1864, and authorized by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton the following May, to suppress the state's internal "guerrilla evil" once major invasions from the south had trailed off. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 195, 202, 630, 64647; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 23; KAGR, 1:38889; Charles C. Wells, 1890 Special Veterans' Census for Eastern Kentucky, 52, 228; JJDD, reel 92, p. 2146; The Union Army, 360; Burch, Owsley County, 36.

91. Annual Report of the Auditor of the State of Kentucky, 191; AGACK: Passed at December Session, 1865 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1865), 272; Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 693; The Union Army, 360; Coulter and Connelley, History of Kentucky, 4:276; Burch, Owsley County, 36.

92. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 22224; Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 31724; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 18488, 22838.

93. For "peer pressure" as an analogy for the intimacy of guerrillaism, see Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, 201.

94. LCJ, December 3, 1878.

95. Quote from "H. Hawkins, Colonel Fifth Kentucky Regiment [Confederate] to Provisional Governor R. Hawes, November 23, 1862," in War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 20, part 2, CSS, issue 2575 (1889), 451; Burch, Owsley County, 36; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:56 (quote).

96. Breathitt County Slave Schedules, 1860, KHS; Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.

97. Morse v. South et al., Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, The Federal Reporter, 80:2089.

98. Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 2728. The assumption that belief in "tradition" is shorthand for resistance against market economics as a determinant of border state loyalties during the Civil War is found in Thelen, Paths of Resistance, 5962. See also Martin Crawford, Ashe County's Civil War, 12533.

99. William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 246.

100. "Unionist Highlanders" were said by one historian to have "disliked Negroes as well as slavery." Paludan, Victims, 59.

101. Slave assistance to regular Unionists was not unheard of in other parts of the South. See McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 290; Jenkins and Stauffer, The State of Jones, 8890; Storey, " 'I'd Rather Go to Hell,' " 7082; William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 254.

102. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 9; William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 461, 464. This "treachery" apparently did not surprise mountain native George Noble. The mobile nature of mountain agricultural labor afforded slaves a freedom of movement and lack of surveillance, two things rarely enjoyed by slaves in the plantation South. See Sprague, "The Kentucky Pocket Plantation," 7779, 84. The county's 1860 slave schedules reveal a large number of manumitted slaves living alongside those still in bondage, further contributing to their physical mobility and the covert conveyance of information. By 1860, more than half of Breathitt County's slave-owning households were also home to manumitted slaves. Breathitt County Slave Schedules, 1860, KHS. For the importance of relationships between slaves and free blacks as resistance networks, see Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 5761.

103. Williams, Appalachia, 10910.

104. At least one former Strong slave, Sam Strong, "who was with the Captain in all his wars," was still part of this arrangement at the time of William Strong's death in 1897. Lexington Herald, May 11, 1897. William Strong's decades-long bond with his former slaves and their families was indeed unique. However, there is documentation of Unionist slaveholders in other parts of the South employing their chattel as spies and saboteurs against Rebel neighbors. See Storey, Loyalty and Loss, 14051; Herbert W. Spencer, "Captain Bill's January Raid."

105. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:56; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 59.

106. Interview with Samuel Strong Jr., July 1973, AOHP, no. 280, pp. 23.

107. Lexington Herald, May 11, 1897.

108. Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.

109. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 172, 202, 630.

110. Ibid., 172, 202; KAGR, 1:388; Charles C. Wells, 1890 Special Veterans' Census for Eastern Kentucky, 223, 228; Kilburn and McIntosh Family Files, Breathitt County Public Library; KAGR, 1:388; Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 257. The act of switching sides was not unheard of, especially in the mountains. However, in most recorded cases, enrollment in either Union or Confederate forces involved the draft but was not as coercive as it supposedly was in Kilburn's case. Williams, Appalachia, 163.

111. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:56, 82.

112. Lincoln, "Memoir," 13, William E. Lincoln Papers, Founders and Founding Collection, HLSCA. Freeman was a Breathitt County surname long associated with biraciality or racial ambiguity. Years after Hiram dropped off the historical record, a nephew or grandson named Henry Freeman was identified as a "half-breed negro" who, because he "always associated with white people," was typically identified as white in and around Jackson. Lexington Herald, April 23, 1907. For Freeman's military service, see KAGR, 1:388; Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 257; Charles C. Wells, 1890 Special Veterans' Census for Eastern Kentucky, 239.

113. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line, 4344; Manual Ray Spencer, The Descendants of Joseph Spencer, 325.

114. Freeman v. Strong and Others, Appeal from Circuit Court, Clay County, April 20, 1838, Records of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky, KDLA. Among the nineteenth-century Kentucky county's most coercive constitutional powers was the ability to assign orphaned minors into forced apprenticeships, a practice that was used most often with free blacks. Poor children, black and white, were commonly bound to farmers and artisans to learn the "art and mystery" of various trades. Hollingsworth, " 'Mrs. Boone, I presume?' " 128n.

115. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line, 51.

116. Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, KHS.

117. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 55.

118. Phillip Gosse, The History of Piracy, 12; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:56; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 59.

119. Strong benefited from a sociopolitical dynamic common to all civil wars, in which command positions are extended to the individuals most willing to commit violent acts. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 5758.

120. Fellman, Inside War, 23.

121. After the possibility of forcibly swaying Kentucky toward the Confederacy proved to be a lost cause after 1862, most of the state's pro-Confederate resources were concentrated around the Virginia-Tennessee line in the interest of protecting the mines of Saltville, Virginia, and the vital Virginia-Tennessee Railroad from federal capture. Ramsey, The Raid, 14754.

122. "Marshall to General S. Cooper, January 20, 1862," in War of the Rebellion, vol. 17, p. 53 (quote); Burch, Owsley County, 37.

123. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 15556.

124. "To the People of Estelle and Adjoining Counties," broadside, John Hunt Morgan Papers, 18401870, 1890, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina. See also Louisville Daily Journal, January 29, 1863. Morgan had visited Breathitt County at least as early as 1856 to retrieve a lost horse. Lexington Leader, October 7, 1958; Bull, "Writings on Kentucky History, 1958," 241.

125. Louisville Daily Journal, January 29, 1863; Abingdon Virginian, July 3, 1863 (quote).

126. McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 22526; Jess D. Wilson, When They Hanged the Fiddler, 75; Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 24. Jackson County, located just west of the Three Forks region, was the only county in the state said not to have produced a single Confederate recruit while being drained of "every male under sixty years of age, and over fifteen" for the Union. On the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, Jackson County nevertheless became an oft-cited piece of evidence for southern mountain Unionism. It trailed only neighboring Owsley County in the percentage of its military-age population recruited by Federal forces and contributed 25 percent of its votes to Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, by far the highest county-level margin for Lincoln in the state. In 1864 it was the only Kentucky county Lincoln managed to carry. TAPR, 1867, 59; Fox, "The Southern Mountaineer," 389; Rossiter, Parties and Politics in America, 8586; Louisville Daily Journal, April 20, 1863; Storke, A Complete History of the Great American Rebellion, 157576; Dalton, "Brig. General Humphrey Marshall," 192.

127. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, p. 172.

128. Interview with Wood Lyttle, April 13, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, pp. 224243; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 14.

129. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 15960.

130. "H. Hawkins, Colonel Fifth Kentucky Regiment [Confederate] to Provisional Governor R. Hawes, November 23, 1862," 451.

131. Herbert W. Spencer, "Captain Bill's January Raid."

132. Ash, When the Yankees Came, 64. In guerrilla settings, civilian populations, even those with little or no direct connection to fighting forces, act as a "support system" for partisans in providing provisions, intelligence, or refuge. Wickham-Crowley, "Terror and Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America," 225.

133. Vahabi, The Political Economy of Destructive Power, 6970.