Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  The area’s timber was what originally attracted South, but it was a difficult resource to exploit in the near future. Plans for massive timber and coal extraction, a railroad’s arrival—these were schemes for a vaguely envisioned speculative future. The untapped abundance of coal and timber was remarked upon twenty years after the first official surveys of Breathitt County’s mineral wealth in the 1850s.73 Eight years after South’s death in 1888 well over half of the county’s seven hundred square miles remained “unimproved,” the “forest growth . . . almost untouched.”74

  The creation of a new county provided a much faster dividend for South’s investment, attracting land buyers, potential tenants, and potential employees.75 Most of all, it would increase his property values. With Cockrell’s support, he canvassed the area with a petition, and in the winter of 1839 the least developed, least populated portions of Clay, Estill, and Perry counties were removed to form the new county.76 Wealthy residents, most of them also recent arrivals, felt that “the [new] county in its undeveloped state offered inducements to men of enterprise to accumulate considerable money.”77

  Typically, new counties were formed around preexistent central settlements of one or more families. With Breathitt County this was not the case; it was a county formed without anything of a community that might constitute a town. Breathitt’s founders were quick to fill this structural gap. Thomas Sewell’s $1,000 sale of lots along the north fork, along with a reported ten-acre donation from Simon Cockrell, became the county seat, named Breathitt in 1839 and changed to Jackson in 1841 (when Jackson was incorporated in 1854, Sewell became its inaugural mayor). Jackson was adjacent to “the Panbowl,” a narrow four-mile floodplain enclosed within a seven-mile bend in the north fork.78 By 1855 Jackson’s coal trade supplied “most of the ready cash circulating in the country.”79 Owing to Breathitt’s commercial origins, it was a municipal rarity: an American county formed before any preexistent towns within its boundaries.

  Table 1. Improved and unimproved land in Breathitt and surrounding counties, 1850 and 1860

  Table 2. Agricultural and extractive production of Breathitt and surrounding counties, 1840

  Jeremiah Weldon South, the “father of Breathitt County,” circa 1878. South’s ambitious real estate venture led to a cycle of bloodshed that lasted decades. (Courtesy of the Breathitt County Museum)

  Jeremiah South brought with him a formidable Kentucky pedigree. His Maryland-born grandfather John South helped construct Boonesborough in 1779; he fought in the Continental army and then served in the Kentucky General Assembly’s first sessions ten years after losing a son at the battle of Little Mountain in 1782. Jeremiah’s father, Samuel, played a key role at Little Mountain as a boy, and later punctuated decades of Indian fighting with his own stint as state legislator (losing the house speaker post to a young Henry Clay by a single vote in 1807) and a brevet general’s commission in the War of 1812. He later served as state treasurer for six years.80 Although Jeremiah South came from outside the Three Forks region, many of the new county’s locals were themselves newcomers, either from Virginia or the Bluegrass’s “old settlements.” They had little reason to think of him as an intruding comprador, especially after he and his brother Richard had both married Cockrell women, creating a definitive “first family.”81 Any propertied Kentuckian was a fellow, not a foreigner, especially a descendant of men who had helped seize the “dark and bloody ground” from the Wyandot and Shawnee nations.

  Jeremiah South volunteered his canvassing services “without compensation,” according to one resident, but he stood to gain much from forming a new county around his enormous estate, especially since his holdings amounted to roughly a third of the new county’s landmass.82 The formation of a new county seat placed de facto control over the county’s government into South’s hands and those of his cohorts—if nothing else, a handy arrangement at tax time.

  With his new county established, South began building a local power base made up of mostly Bluegrass natives. As the primary petitioner for the county, South was able to name its first eleven justices of the peace, including himself.83 Joined by his brothers John and Richard, Jeremiah had the latter appointed as Breathitt County’s first sheriff (John, a lawyer who made a legal career representing heirs to the old Virginia grants, might have received his own appointment had he not died in 1838).84 John Lewis Hargis and Simeon Bohannon, recent arrivals from Woodford County (a small Bluegrass county where a Virginia-style plantation economy took root), served as Breathitt County’s first circuit court clerk and county clerk respectively, with Bohannon simultaneously serving as a justice of the peace and county commissioner.85 One of the petition signatories, William Allen, hosted the county’s first court session in his home.86 He and Bohannon also served as two of Jackson’s original town trustees.87 The titular “father of Breathitt County” and his Bluegrass associates exhibited considerable control over their new political unit.88

  South became the county’s first state representative in 1840 and was elected to the state Senate three years later.89 There he “favored [eastern Kentucky] even to the detriment of the state,” and ended up “idolized by the mountain people.”90 His attempt at a military venture did not equal his record as a solon. In 1846 South organized Breathitt County’s troop contribution to the Mexican War but failed to recruit enough men to earn a commission or martial glory (still, following the affectation enjoyed by wealthy white Kentuckians, he was remembered as “Colonel South”). Although he was unable to repeat his father’s and grandfather’s military records, his popularity remained undimmed and he was soon reelected to the General Assembly.91

  Making Breathitt County benefited Jeremiah South and his new neighbors, at least the more well-heeled ones. The Three Forks region previously lacked what geographer Mary Beth Pudup has called an “indigenous vanguard class,” a group of professionals skilled in the commercial ways of the “Bluegrass System.”92 Soon after he arrived, John Hargis hung out his shingle as the county’s first attorney, a boon to many local farmers (and perhaps a bane to others); two more attorneys arrived soon afterward.93 By 1848, Jackson boasted “one Methodist church, one Reformed church, two schools, five stores and groceries, two taverns, three lawyers, one doctor and five mechanical trades” as well as land values far higher than in neighboring counties.94 In the early 1850s Hargis, South, and five of the county’s other large-scale landholders became charter stockholders in the Lexington and Kentucky River Railroad Company, anticipating a future rail connection to the Bluegrass (a goal that did not come to fruition until after Hargis’s and South’s deaths).95 South and his fellows were imposing a new middle-class discipline on the Three Forks region, bringing purpose to a place business-oriented Jacksonian Americans considered void and without form.96 They became part of the “fifteen or thirty or forty people” empowered by forming a new county “not for the benefit of the people at large, but only for the benefit of people who were to be enriched by them”—or so charged a reformer ten years after South’s death.97 During his lifetime, however, the statesmanlike intentions of “the father of Breathitt County” remained unquestioned.

  South’s most permanent legacy was the creation of an unfailingly Democratic electorate. Breathitt County was carved from the three counties that composed the northeastern corner of the “Whig Gibraltar,” Kentucky’s southeastern quadrant where loyalty to Henry Clay’s party was unfaltering.98 In 1840 Breathitt County cast strong majorities for William Henry Harrison (by a nearly four to one margin) and Whig gubernatorial candidate Robert Letcher. Immediately thereafter Breathitt County began turning out Democratic majorities, a change that would seem inconsequential had it not happened so rapidly at a time when the Kentucky Democracy was failing.99 Mountain Whigs survived their party’s national downfall in the following decade, making Breathitt County’s affiliation all the more peculiar and consequential. It was one of a very few dependable Democratic islands in what would later become eastern Kentucky’s sea of Republicanism.
“The county,” George Noble recalled proudly, “always went Democratic.”100

  Breathitt County’s switch in voting habits happened so abruptly as to suggest something other than shrewd politicking. Hargis and Bohannon, as the first clerks of the county court and circuit court respectively, could monitor party loyalty and possibly even manipulate election outcomes.101 With his brother Richard as the first sheriff (and other fellow petitioners serving as the second and third), South was fully capable of using the carrot of patronage—and the stick of inconvenient summonses—to swell the Democratic vote.102 In 1846 South, John Hargis, and their fellow Democrats orchestrated a petit coup by holding a meeting of the justices of the peace with only one of the two Whig members present (Thomas Sewell was the absent Whig). The Democrats filled the two Whig-held vacancies with their own selections, placing the county court completely under their control.103 Whig governor William Owsley ignored Sewell’s complaints of the Democrats’ underhanded attempt to “get in power.” In fact there was little that Owsley could have done and Sewell apparently did not press the matter any further.104 His suspicions were justified; with Democrats in exclusive control over patronage and public works, the party’s majority increased significantly for years.105 Breathitt County’s permanent association with the Democratic Party came to define practically every major event in its history.

  For some of the county’s “founding fathers,” residency in their county was temporary. After his term as the first county clerk, Simeon Bohannon returned to the Bluegrass and kept his Breathitt County property as a summer home for his wife and daughters.106 The Griffling brothers, one of Breathitt’s “nice families,” grew impatient waiting on the bread they had cast on the new county’s waters and moved to Memphis after only three years.107 Although he was a lifelong property owner in Breathitt County, South returned to the Bluegrass in the 1840s, leaving his son Andrew Jackson South in Breathitt County to manage local business (South fathered thirteen children, some of whom remained in or around Jackson until well after the Civil War).108 Decades before national and international corporations took notice of eastern Kentucky’s extractable wealth, South, Bohannon, Sewell (who moved west to Estill County in 1858), and others were initiating the much-maligned trend of absentee ownership.109

  As “one of the controlling voices in the Democratic party in Kentucky,” Jeremiah South was appointed state penitentiary superintendent and lessee (a position that “allowed a private citizen to incur the financial risks and reap the financial rewards of the penitentiary”) in 1859.110 As with Breathitt County’s creation, his appointment revealed a constant collusion between government and private interests. The position meant personal control over all convict labor, ergo statewide control over internal improvements and a lifetime’s supply of personal household servants.111 During his first four-year term, he accumulated “an ample fortune, as the product of convict earnings,” and his flagrant venality was later used as evidence in demands for prison reform in many states.112 During a fifteen-year sentence for assisting runaway slaves, Methodist abolitionist Calvin Fairbank sustained some of his “thirty-five thousand stripes” under South’s supervision. Still, the minister recalled South as having “more humanity . . . [and] less executiveness” than his cruel predecessor.113

  His reputation outside of the prison walls was less qualified. South nurtured the relationships he had established in the General Assembly, supplying his political allies with “cheap boarding, cheap washing and free drinks,” and giving out “curiously wrought walking sticks and cedar chests” to pet legislators.114 When he died he was remembered as “perhaps, the most popular and influential man in all of Eastern Kentucky,” even though he rarely returned from the Bluegrass in his last two decades.115

  John Hargis, a Virginia native who had not come to Kentucky until the 1820s, had fewer Bluegrass connections and stayed in the county longer.116 After starting his law practice he represented Breathitt in the state House of Representatives, where he supported road construction and river improvement.117 He unsuccessfully protested new counties’ removal of territory from Breathitt County, and attempted to increase state funding for county common schools (in this he may have been more successful since the number of the county’s school districts increased by nearly two-thirds during his time in office). Combs Academy, one of eastern Kentucky’s first public coeducational high schools, opened in Jackson at the beginning of the Civil War.118

  Table 3. Presidential, gubernatorial, and congressional (U.S. House) elections in Breathitt County and its “birth“ counties, 1828–1856

  At Kentucky’s 1849 constitutional convention, “the alpha and omega of his political career,” delegate Hargis made Jacksonian appeals for electoral reform, local sovereignty, and rural supremacy.119 Citing the “great danger to be apprehended from the influence [cities like Louisville] might exercise arising from the consolidation of wealth and numbers,” he unsuccessfully attempted to prevent increases in urban representation.120 Hargis also proposed term limits for sheriffs, opposed limiting county judge candidacy to lawyers and, remarkably, spoke out against Kentucky’s most cherished political institution, vive voce, or voice voting.121 Ballotless voting eased illiterate men’s participation, but Hargis and others criticized it for allowing local elites to monitor and manipulate elections.122 “I want my tenant to go and drop in his ballot without my knowledge of the man for whom it is given,” he said during debate. “If they vote by ballot what landlord will know anything about the vote of his tenant[?]” Since most of the other delegates owed their successes to this sort of knowledge, his plea for a secret ballot was ignored (by 1861 only Kentucky and Virginia still used vive voce).123 Hargis also unsuccessfully proposed reducing the number of local electable offices such as county attorney, coroner, jailer, and “other little petty officers,” preferring they be appointed by justices of the peace (this, too, was ignored since most other Democratic delegates favored expanding electoral authority).124 With or without Hargis’s suggestions (and mostly, it would seem, the latter), the new constitution ushered in his party’s statewide resurgence. When it came to referendum in 1850, Whig citadel Clay County was the only county that rejected it.125

  Table 4. Tabulation of election results in Breathitt County and its “birth” counties, 1810–1860

  Hargis was absent due to illness for much of the convention and his contribution to the new constitution, and its vaunted expansion of herrenvolk democracy, remains ambiguous.126 In contrast, his support for slavery was forthright and obvious. In a convention noted for being a referendum on slavery, Hargis stood as one of only a few representatives unambiguously in favor of an institution he believed was “sanctioned by the Bible.”127 Aware that men of the cloth had used the legislature as an abolitionist bully pulpit, he proposed a constitutional exclusion of “clergymen, priest or teacher of any religious persuasion, society, or sect” from serving as lawmakers.128 Dreading an unmanageable free black population, he also proposed that all emancipated slaves be required to leave the state under penalty of reenslavement.129

  Hargis’s fear of free blacks reflected his Virginia and Bluegrass past more than it did Breathitt County slave life.130 In the Three Forks whites outnumbered slaves by a tremendous margin, as they had since slaves were first brought to the area around 1800.131 Jo, one of Jeremiah South’s slaves, “with whom everyone in the county was acquainted,” roved about as a hired messenger in the 1840s while “Yaller Bill,” another South bondsman, was an acclaimed hunter.132 Not far away, Clay County salt manufacturers broke state law by arming their slaves as members of biracial private militias.133 Slave and free, black, white, and biracial, commingled liberally; free blacks lived in slave-owning households, and 1860’s census listed more than a third of Breathitt County slaves as “mulatto.”134 Black and white were sometimes indistinguishable, particularly one “very pretty girl about 14 years old, well dressed with long golden ringlets, rosy cheeks and a fair complexion” who was sold “at a fancy price to a pr
ominent bachelor lawyer” sometime in the 1840s.135 As a slavery “perpetualist,” or a voice for Negrophobia, John Hargis’s views did not match his constituents’ habits.136

  Breathitt County’s relationship to the peculiar institution demonstrates slavery’s pervasive political influence in places where its economic impact was limited.137 Slaves were an important investment for mountain farmers with low-valued landholdings; it was not unusual for masters to have slaves that were collectively worth more than the land they worked.138 In the twenty years before the Civil War, Breathitt’s slave population grew even as neighboring counties’ numbers dwindled.139 In a state with low numbers of slaves but widespread ownership, Jeremiah South, John Hargis, and Simeon Bohannon had little reason to see themselves differently than other Kentucky slaveholders.140

  Still, slaveholders were only about 6 percent of the white population—a 6 percent that included all of the county’s petitioners and almost all of the men who served as justices of the peace before 1860.141 This disproportionality of interests between the governing minority and the governed majority was nothing unusual, and some Kentuckians sensed their own Slave Power conspiracy.142 Antislavery activism had audiences in Kentucky until the late 1850s (albeit not without occasional violent reprisals), long after it was stifled in other slave states.143 Outright abolitionism was rare, but frank distaste for bondage was palpable, especially in the mountains. James Sebastian, born a few months before Breathitt County was formed around him, despised “mixing, laboring and competing with slave labor” so much that he left for Illinois, returning to the Three Forks to fight for the Union in 1861.144 Before young George Noble went off to join a Confederate unit that year, his father told him “that it was wrong to keep any human being in bondage.”145