Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  When Kentucky’s flamboyant emancipationist Cassius M. Clay attempted a gubernatorial bid in 1851, Breathitt was one of a very few counties in which he commanded 5 percent or more of the vote. Heavily Democratic (by then) Breathitt was very different from the other nearby “Whig Gibraltar” counties that did so, including Breathitt’s three “birth counties.” Most were highly commercialized counties where slavery was a significant presence but not an overwhelming one. Finally, twelve of these counties (including all of the counties in the Three Forks watershed except for Breathitt) had hosted emancipationist or abolitionist gatherings shortly before 1851. That fifty Breathitt votes were cast for an unabashedly antislavery candidate in a county controlled and represented exclusively by slave owners reveals a conspicuous distaste for the local slaveocracy, a distaste only slightly more muted than what was seen in other sections of the mountains.146 It was a sliver minority of the voting public, but Kentuckians learned how powerful minority opinion could be ten years later.

  The distaste was measured six years later when an English abolitionist minister named William Ellaby Lincoln visited the county. After seeing American evangelist Charles Finney preach in his native London, Lincoln immigrated to Ohio’s Oberlin College to dedicate his life to ending slavery. In spring 1856 he left for Kentucky to offer his services to the Reverend John G. Fee, soon to be the founder of Berea College. Fee urged the young preacher to evangelize in Breathitt County and he agreed, beginning the excursion soon after. Along the way, Lincoln encountered resistance to his antislavery message until he arrived in Breathitt, where he was taken in by a sympathizer. Lincoln’s unnamed host was “careful not to expose himself too much” since, as he said, local slaveholders were willing to defend their institution “even by mob violence.”147

  Table 5. Counties returning greater than 5% for Cassius M. Clay for governor, 1851

  The two attended a revival meeting, where they heard a “colored preacher . . . whose sermon was a careful steer between the master & slave.” In attendance were slaves, slave owners, and at least eleven men whom Lincoln found racially unidentifiable. The quiet abolitionist seated at his side asked Lincoln to play a strange game as the parishioners entered the meetinghouse. “Then in doubt, as to whether a man is colored or white, if white touch my right knee, if colored, my left,” his friend told him. Unable to interpret the skin color of eleven of the men he saw, Lincoln was told that one of the men he had thought colored self-identified as white and “had killed 1 man and wounded another man who stuck to it, that [he] was colored.” Lincoln’s new friend was apparently trying to demonstrate the community’s unique racial indistinctness, a population (in one local historian’s phrasing) “considered part-black.”148 But the young Englishman was not prepared for the reality of racial mixing that he saw in front of him, attributing it to the men’s “work outdoors in the sun and the wind.”149

  When Lincoln got behind the pulpit later that day, sheriff’s deputies arrived to warn attending slaves away at gunpoint. During his exegesis of Jeremiah, the preacher realized that the same pistols were pointed in his direction from a front pew. He was able to shame the deputies into sheepishly lowering their guns during worship, but afterward some “young slaveholders” warned Lincoln that he would be shot if he did not leave quickly. As he made his way back to the reticent abolitionist’s home (who had bowed out of going to Lincoln’s service so as not to attract attention to himself), the deputies first feigned friendliness but then began shooting. Lincoln claimed later to have barely escaped with his life after his horse threw him from his saddle under fire.150

  Lincoln’s visit was the first, if not especially adroit, recorded challenge to slavery in Breathitt County. It showed that, as in other southern communities, protests against the slaveholding order were punished with violence. Also, the congregation of black, white, mulatto, slave, and free that he saw (but never understood) represented a “mixed” community that would later play a remarkable role during and after the Civil War. The ballot deviation of 1851 and the small show of abolitionist sympathies (as well as the violent effort to suppress it) also reveal antebellum Breathitt County’s lack of a perfect white consensus—but hardly a serious challenge to Jeremiah South. He, John Hargis, and others established a slaveholder’s rentier state, one that need not be well organized to be profitable. In its official institutions and formal political character, Breathitt County remained in the image of its “father.”

  But South’s mastery over court did not translate into mastery over country. For the rest of his life, and for years after, squatters lived on his gigantic estate, hunting game, constructing cabins, sending livestock to mast, damming creeks, cutting timber, and mining coal.151 Many of them probably occupied the land before South procured the delinquent title and considered themselves its rightful owners. Some even eventually received land patents that ignored the old Virginia grants, one of which was the basis for South’s hardwood fortune.152 He and his children learned the same lesson absorbed by so many absentee owners before and since: contractual ownership was often no match for direct knowledge of the terrain.153 There were far too many people in the very large county who knew more about South’s property—its creeks, coves, glades, timber, and coal seams—than he ever could, even with the most thorough land surveys. E. L. Noble described their viewpoint with his typical exaggeration: “To them, it was no-man’s land.”154 The “true” land value could be exploited by South’s uninvited guests over the years. The result of all of these factors was a long-standing stalemate between landed and landless.

  This was a source of constant dismay for South, and numerous times he attempted to recoup his profits by placing felled timber under attachment in court. He also tried hiring some of his land’s occupants to aggressively prevent trespassing. John Aikman (George Noble recalled him as “the bully of the mountains”), the South estate’s “guard,” exploited Jeremiah South’s absence and eventually laid claim to a substantial mass of his property through adverse possession.155 Aikman had the same problem with people he considered squatters, and he allegedly resorted to arson to get rid of them.156 More than a quarter century after Jeremiah South’s death, Breathitt County was said to still have the worst problem with overlapping land claims in all of Kentucky.157 To complicate matters, the perpetuation of Jeremiah South’s Democratic regime depended upon votes from men who brazenly violated his property. With vive voce, this was probably no secret.158 South’s authority as statesman and landholder was limited to his ability to exert authority over his own property and over local public institutions. Although the latter was fairly secure throughout the antebellum era, the former represented the innate illegitimacy of Breathitt County’s very existence.

  Breathitt County’s creation was beneficial to men whose wealth was based on speculation and slaves who wanted greater access to courts and the sense of community and order they provided. These new boundaries were of little social consequence to families and individuals whose political, social, and economic relationships had been established before 1839. The new county’s initiators could expect support from those who shared their interests, and hope for acquiescence from everyone else. The potential for conflict existed since the county’s creation.

  Still, the county had existed for three and a half decades before it was dubbed “Bloody Breathitt.” The violence that inspired this moniker was a result of Breathitt County’s role in the Civil War, a role Jeremiah South and his family engineered. Writing just before Breathitt County’s centennial, E. L. Noble observed, “The Souths, while not feudists, seem to have done more to perpetuate feudal conditions in Breathitt than any family otherwise directly or indirectly connecting her history.”159

  2

  “SUPPRESSING THE LATE REBELLION”

  Guerrilla Fighting in a Loyal State

  As the nation was rent apart, so was the commonwealth; as the state so was the county; as the county, the neighborhood; as the neighborhood, the family; as the family, so brother and b
rother, father and son.

  —John Fox Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903)

  He has only one idea: the revolution; and he has broken with all the laws and codes of morals of the educated world. If he lives in it, pretending to be part of it, it is only to destroy it the more surely; everything in it must be equally hateful to him. He must be cold: he must be ready to die, he must train himself to bear torture, and he must be ready to kill in himself any sentiment, including that of honor, the moment it interferes with his purpose.

  His name remained a bugbear for decades.

  —Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station:

  A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940)

  Breathitt County native George Washington Noble became a lifelong believer in divine portent when he was sixteen, not long before he joined the Confederate infantry. One winter night in 1860 or 1861, he saw an enormous comet in the winter sky. His father (no doubt informed by current events) said that it was an omen of impending war between North and South.1 Months later, George felt called to defend his home from northern aggression, especially after hearing rumors that Yankees were “killing women and children and carrying off the negroes” and Kentucky would soon be occupied territory. After the Upper South’s states seceded, most adult male Kentuckians followed a path of least resistance, many taking their families and slaves “to the hills” to “lay out” hostilities.2 Others put aside their distaste for Abraham Lincoln and his party and joined the Union army. But Noble figured that the Confederate army “was just as good as the Northern Army” and, against his parents’ wishes, joined a locally organized company in December. When Noble recalled his decision fifty years later, his reasoning remained succinct: “My grandfather came from the South, and I liked the Southern people the best.”3

  George Noble’s Confederate service took him to Virginia, where he was captured and sent to a Maryland military prison until he was paroled and returned to Kentucky in 1864. His harshest moments of fear and sadness lay ahead of him even then. Although he initially feared a “foreign” army, he and other Breathitt Countians found that the greatest wartime dangers were not invaders but close neighbors—“Southern people” the young soldier knew personally.4

  Years before Breathitt County was called Bloody Breathitt, its violent history began with the Civil War, its conditions determined by Kentucky’s intricate internal sectionalism. To its north and east, between the Big Sandy River and the Kentucky River’s northern fork, lay a pocket of pro-Confederate mountain Democracy. South and west of the county, between the Kentucky River’s middle and south forks, the eastern edge of the old Whig Gibraltar, was the most consistently pro-Union area in all of Kentucky.5 Like many wealthy Kentuckians, Breathitt’s leaders supported the rebellion, and Breathitt County became a Confederate staging ground for attacks on nearby Unionist counties.

  There were dissenters within the county; a defiant interracial martial polity “beyond the visible end of the spectrum” took up an intense offensive against their Confederate neighbors.6 Theirs was a campaign against secession and slavery, but it was also an indictment against Breathitt County itself. Nearly surrounded by counties with Unionist leanings, and beset by its own internal divides, Breathitt became a nexus of guerrillaism: a collection of tactics that blurred the distinction between social relations and military strategy.7 The intimacy between combatants, uniformed and otherwise, tempered the way in which they fought, amounting to what nineteenth-century Americans called a “social war.”8

  This was how the American Civil War was won and lost in many places, especially in the border South, although it was not a popular memory after the war. As the story of the “War between the States” was written after 1865, most Americans fancied a distinction between the guerrillaism in places like Breathitt County and the larger “legitimate” war. The stories of veterans like George Noble were overshadowed by the more popular, more acceptable “stand-up war.”9 In the sparse historical record, warfare there took on the appearance of personal vendettas, property theft (in the guise of military confiscation), and terrorism. By Noble’s own testimony, he fought for the South and he saw the Confederate cause as his own. But his home county’s “local cleavage” fit poorly into the “master cleavage” Americans wished to remember.10 For this reason, among others, Breathitt County’s Civil War history was eventually depoliticized and absorbed within a narrative less associated with war than with feud.11

  “A sublime spectacle of moral power”

  In 1861 the birth state of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis had reason to distrust both sides of the national divide. Kentucky had one of the United States’ largest slave-owning populations (but relatively few slaves), and many powerful Kentuckians wished to join their southern neighbors. They had few other practical motivations for abandoning the Union, and the federal government offered exceptional concessions to secure the state’s loyalty.12 Kentucky’s Senator John J. Crittenden aspired to a mediator position, proposing a modicum of Henry Clay’s 1820 Missouri Compromise just before Lincoln’s inauguration.13 After this failed, Kentuckians searched for other options as they watched the Union deteriorate. In May Southern Rights stalwart Governor Beriah Magoffin unhappily issued a proclamation of state neutrality.14 The fact that southern sympathizers opposed this neutrality (while Unionists settled for it) did not bode well for the prospects of maintaining internal peace. Still, Kentuckians were optimistic that their state could be “a sublime spectacle of moral power” to inspire a speedy national reunion.15 This lasted until Confederate forces entered the state in September 1861, prompting a decisive legislative declaration (over Governor Magoffin’s veto) for the Union.16 Eleven months later Magoffin resigned, leaving behind a mostly Unionist, and usually pro-Lincoln, coalition in control of the state.17 In testament to his compromise’s failure, each of Senator Crittenden’s sons received an officer’s commission, one in the Federal army, the other for the Confederacy.18

  Nowhere else did state government show less leadership. Instead of inspiring national reunion, Kentucky’s neutrality experiment allowed households and courthouses across the state to make their own decisions, ranging from Unconditional Unionism to rebellion, with countless variations in between. On the whole, neutrality worked to Confederate advantage since it made early Union recruitment difficult.19 By 1862 “each individual had by this time made his choice or was fast making up his mind” and “in the meantime was fast arming himself,” either as a recruit in a “regular” military unit or as part of a less formal armed arrangement.20 No other state that hadn’t seceded contributed more men to the Confederate army, while ostensibly loyal sheriffs, judges, and other guardians of public trust “conducted themselves in ways approaching secession.”21 As a result, the Union and the Confederacy each claimed Kentucky. More important, Kentuckians claimed both the Union and the Confederacy.22

  Slavery and preservation of the Union, the war’s “master cleavage” issues, remained crucial to white Kentuckians, especially since so many of them tried to save both. But once the fighting started, Kentucky’s Civil War played out as skirmishes fought over control of local government. As early as December 1861 it had become clear which counties favored the South and which ones favored the North. The “segmented sovereignty,” the quasi-federal balance of power between county and state Kentuckians held dear, gave way to a “fragmented sovereignty” in which counties became themselves smaller versions of states.23 While these counties’ representatives debated in Frankfort, members of their electorate had already begun killing each other.

  No group better defined Kentucky’s disjointed Civil War experience than the Home Guards, an organization that became a liberally defined epithet for brutality toward civilians. In 1860 Kentucky established the State Guard, a network of militias that remained only until most of its servicemen migrated south with their commander, Simon Bolivar Buckner, to join the Confederate army.24 Once the militias’ collective pro-South character became clear, the General Assemb
ly authorized the more loosely organized Home Guards, “wholly a defensive measure” but, unlike the State Guard, tacitly Unionist.25 Home Guards were mandated and armed by the state but, reflecting the state’s “little kingdoms,” they were maintained under the aegis of county judges and commanded by men who sometimes combined strategies of local defense with their own interests. For most of 1861 some Home Guards kept up Kentucky’s early Republic tradition of the apolitical militia; Southern Rights men and loyalists patrolled together out of mutual fear of slave insurrection.26 When southern sympathizers withdrew, Home Guards became local enforcers of Unionism, going as far as arresting state legislators suspected of southern sympathies.27 Like militias in other civil wars, they were ultimately more political than military, bent upon local state building and unbuilding rather than vigilance against invaders.28 In many places this meant excessive force against civilians and, in turn, a gradual corrosion of Unionist enthusiasm.29 Home Guard oppression may have actually created a significant number of Kentucky rebels, but only late in the war when the larger rebellion was proving futile—thus giving Kentucky a unique kind of wartime misery. Months after the war’s end, Governor Thomas Bramlette, having sacrificed all of his political fortunes to keep Kentucky in the Union, proclaimed the Home Guards a deplorable failure.30 By the 1890s only the most steadfast defenders of Kentucky Unionism attempted to defend their memory against “gratuitous and unjust charges of perpetrating outrages.”31

  The means used by these militias ultimately delegitimized the ends for which they fought. “Home Guard” became synonymous with “bushwhacker,” the nineteenth century’s most damning epithet for wartime irregulars.32 After the war, “Home Guard” mutated into an imprecise pejorative for men who supposedly took advantage of the war’s chaos for personal gain and love of havoc, a lot despised by Unionists and Confederates alike for sullying their mutually “honorable” cause.33 “Home Guard” became more a précis for the Upper South’s guerrilla warfare than the name of an actual organization, a catchall affront to the legitimacy that Yankees and Rebels claimed during their joint process of reunion—a process that disingenuously discarded the entire war’s political meaning.34 The decidedly political Home Guards became depoliticized after the fact, reframed in decades of written war memory as brigands with minimal interest in either cause. This after they, and soldiers that were erroneously called Home Guards, arguably had a greater political impact on wartime Kentucky than did “legitimate” armies. Far away from Manassas and Appomattox, most of Kentucky’s Civil War was a guerrilla war, especially in places like Breathitt County.