If the 1861 creation of Home Guards had made a “social war” in Kentucky more likely, the organization of the Three Forks (which was often misidentified as a Home Guard) and other units like it signaled an acceptance that a “social war” was well under way. After John Hunt Morgan launched his last Confederate foray in the summer of 1864, Federal general Stephen Burbridge (a Bluegrass native) tightened control over the entire state, summarily executing men identified as southern partisans and even arresting anti-Lincoln public speakers during the run-up to the presidential election. The new draconian measures only convinced Kentuckians of their preexistent suspicions of Federal malice, and former loyalists became Rebel guerrillas (not to mention Lincoln did not carry the state that November).92 State troops like Treadway, Strong, and the Eversoles felt more empowered to seek out and punish rebellion even when it was not gray-clad. Their brutal “peer pressure” against their own neighbors was an effective weapon against disloyalty, but it also made future reconciliation much more difficult.93 In 1864 Strong began, according to one descendant of pro-Confederates, “killing nearly every Southern citizen he found,” an assessment that seems to have been exaggerated but only slightly. “The majority of the people [in Breathitt County] were Southern sympathizers,” wrote the Democratic Louisville Courier-Journal more than ten years after the war’s end, “and that made them legitimate game for the devil, who appeared in the person of Captain Bill Strong.”94 By the time he reentered civilian life in August 1865, “Captain Bill” had become “the most powerful man in Breathitt County”—albeit after being erroneously identified as one of the “insulting and barbarous” Home Guards.95
In class terms, Strong had more in common with his enemies than with most of his allies. He was a landowner of some substance (albeit with far smaller tracts than his wealthy cousin), and he also owned slaves as late as 1860.96 William Strong did have personal reasons for opposing the South family. Jeremiah South’s holding of the old Thomas Franklin Revolutionary grant threatened Strong’s claim over land his father bought at the time of Breathitt County’s founding (decades later, William Strong refuted the Franklin grant’s veracity—as did many other local landowners).97
The Union rank and file had their own reasons for opposing the Confederacy. The Fourteenth Cavalry and the Three Forks Battalion attracted a cross-section of disenfranchised southerners, marginal landowners, tenants, squatters, and people of color, an alliance whose very existence threatened everything Confederate southerners sought to defend. Theirs was not an opposition based upon isolation and willful ignorance of the outside world, as mountain Unionism has been characterized, nor were they driven by premodern “traditional” modes of local economics.98 These were men—all deplored by one Confederate officer as the most “bitter, prejudiced and ignorant” of mountain men—who had not benefited from Breathitt County’s 1839 creation and, in fact, were simply following the Three Forks region’s prevailing political trend.99
Nor were they strongly motivated by the mountain Unionist’s alleged xenophobic fear of the African race.100 Anecdotal evidence suggests that some of Breathitt County’s black and mulatto population served as combatants.101 One slave owned by a Breathitt Confederate partisan traveled to Perry County to warn John Eversole of an impending attack led by his master, while another “fleetfooted negro” warned Unionists of Confederate arrivals.102 Mountain slaves and squatters used their shared “shadowy existence,” a barely discernible presence in extant records, to their advantage.103
Shared commitment to the Union cause created a bizarre common interest between slaves and white farmers, even, in William Strong’s case, white farmers who were themselves slave owners. Aside from “carr[ying] off” slaves on his raids against Confederate households, Strong also freed his own slaves early in the war and armed them, creating a small interracial alliance that confounded Breathitt Democrats for decades.104 By virtue of his unique arrangement with his own slaves and other local people of color, Strong was remembered as the “special protector of [Breathitt County’s] colored race” forty years after his death.105 According to a story passed down in the Strong family, one of his female slaves (who may have been manumitted but still living in the Strong household) performed her own sort of domestic resistance when a Rebel raiding party came to the Strong home and demanded that she cook their breakfast.
And so they told her to go ahead and cook for them and so she did. But this black woman, she fixed the bread up . . . instead of using milk or water to mix the meal with, she took [the flour] out behind the kitchen and urinated in this meal instead of using water. So she fixed this and mixed it up. So she went to the chicken house and got some eggs from under this old setting hen and they had little chickens formed in the eggs. She got them and took them and broke them up and stirred them all up together and fried these for the men. So they went ahead and ate and thought it was a pretty good meal.106
The woman was able to mete out her own form of punishment because of her innocuous role as cook, but she and other freedpeople probably depended upon William Strong during the war and for a long time after. Even as they fought side by side, and even though Strong risked his own life in his comrades-in-arms’ interest, it was never a relationship of perfect equality. A former bondsman “who was with the Captain in all his wars” and resided in “the Strong neighborhood” in 1897 still deferred to “Mars Bill.”107 Slavery was definitively unegalitarian, but paramilitary vigilance was only slightly less so.
Two of William Strong’s longtime associates, Henderson Kilburn and Hiram Freeman, represent his unusual black-white troupe. Historical records reveal little about Kilburn other than that he was a landless farmer at the beginning of the war, possibly on the South family’s acreage.108 He was from white mountain society’s lowest stratum, one that probably cared little for either sides’ overarching goals. In 1862 Kilburn was enlisted into the Confederate Fifth Kentucky Infantry but deserted after less than two months. After the war he claimed he had been “captured and taken in the rebel army” at gunpoint (his forced conscription was apparently not an isolated event; at least fourteen Confederate recruits from Breathitt County ended up in either the Fourteenth Kentucky or the Three Forks Battalion).109 Kilburn defected to the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry in December 1862 and became a corporal in the Three Forks Battalion in early 1865.110 A skilled sharpshooter, Kilburn was called Strong’s “chief Lieutenant” and his deadly “right hand, right foot and right eye,” killing an indefinite number of men between the war and his death in 1884.111
Hiram Freeman was part of the racially ambiguous population that had puzzled the Reverend William E. Lincoln before the war. Usually identified as a mulatto, Freeman negotiated multiple racial identities over the course of his life, including enlistment (along with his ostensibly white sons) in the officially all-white Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry and Three Forks Battalion.112 His father, George Spencer, was a former Virginia slave who adopted Freeman as his new surname when he settled in Clay County, Kentucky, after his manumission in 1812.113 Like many other children of impoverished freedpeople, Hiram and his siblings ended up as indentures of apprenticeship when he was in his mid-teens. In 1836 he and his brother were apprenticed to one of William Strong’s cousins to be “learnt the art and mystery of farming,” while his younger sister was bonded to be trained as a seamstress. Two years later nineteen-year-old Hiram successfully challenged his and his siblings’ bonds.114 Freeman spent the next two decades raising a large family (his wife and children were listed as white in census records) and working as a farm laborer in what became southern Breathitt County the year after his release from indenture. Back in Clay County, his family lost their meager assets in the 1850s mounting legal defenses against trumped-up charges ranging from hog theft to fornication.115 It was conditions like these that produced the quintessential nineteenth-century outlaw’s antipathy toward law enforcement and, when Freeman enlisted as a U.S. soldier in 1862, he may well have done so as an act of rebellion rather than putti
ng down rebellion. Though born free, Freeman’s early life experiences taught him how tenuous freedom could be for a former slave’s son in a society run by slave owners. Freeman was often seen armed in William Strong’s company after the war, while also working on his former commander’s farm.116 Though Freeman was not as brutal as Kilburn, Breathitt County Democrats remembered him as “among the worst” of Breathitt’s Unionists.117
Civil War side taking in Breathitt County, Kentucky, was a mingling of the peculiar and the mundane. Confederate recruitment was exceptionally successful considering it was in the most Unionist section of an unseceded state; but it would seem that most of the men were following local leaders in accordance with what they considered their economic interests. Unionist defiance in the county reflected the will of most of the Three Forks population, but it made for the strangest of soldierly bedfellows. Strong, the Eversoles, and the Amises shared a pioneer primacy; their inheritance was endangered by interloping speculative projects like Jeremiah South’s. Strong’s (manumitted) slaves had reason to support their former master, especially if his enemies were the official defenders of human bondage (even in a state where many slaveholders fought for the Union, arming one’s slaves as William Strong did was otherwise unheard of, let alone whites serving militarily alongside free people of color). Hiram Freeman, although born free, was fighting the inequalities inherent in white supremacy, a fight he shared with the rest of Breathitt’s colored population, free and enslaved. Henderson Kilburn and other squatters fought against the Souths’ speculative interests and the coercion represented by forced enlistment.
Wartime service under Strong’s command created a “small state” independent of the local state, heightening Strong’s power as the squatters’ “chieftain” and the “special protector of the colored race.”118 He produced a union of interests between blacks and poor whites, the sort of “radicalism” that many white southerners feared more than anything else. Just as was the case with the wealthy Eversoles, part of his leadership came from his socioeconomic position in southern Breathitt County, but it also came from his willingness to lead men in the most outrageous, sometimes heinous, acts deemed necessary for winning the war.119 This was a combination pregnant with more implications than Breathitt County Democrats could stand after the Civil War.
“I knew the man I shot”
Breathitt County’s Civil War presents a stark contrast with Americans’ preferred memory, what Michael Fellman has called the “stand-up war with uniformed, flag-carrying massed troops charging one another in open combat.”120 Early in the war many Breathitt Confederates were sent to southwestern Virginia, an area structurally crucial to the Confederacy’s survival (unlike eastern Kentucky).121 In their absence, “official” southern forces were busy in the Three Forks, oftentimes with the assistance of men who had never enlisted in any army. Publicly, General Humphrey Marshall was critical of ostentatious rapparees (like his comrade and fellow Kentuckian John Hunt Morgan) for the bad press they earned in the border states. Marshall realized that convincing the Kentucky public of Confederate legitimacy was an uphill battle, and he did not want his side equated with brigandage. Still, he sympathized with men who could not dedicate themselves to full-time soldiering duties, reasoning that “he who undergoes the task of gathering the corn from the fields and preparing it himself for bread finds little time for military maneuver.”122 Marshall also appreciated the local knowledge such men provided, and he quietly incorporated nonuniformed partisans who could tell him which households to assault.123
Morgan himself saw no need to molest friendly territory (recruitment was one reason for his sweep through the mountains). He and other Rebel commanders used Breathitt as a bivouac for launching attacks on nearby Unionist counties. Near the end of his months-long raid launched from east Tennessee, John Hunt Morgan claimed ownership of Unionist Estill County a few weeks before the battle of Perryville, declaring all its Home Guards “enemies of the government.”124 After “having driven off the families of the Union men in that vicinity,” Confederate colonels Benjamin Caudill (the “Great Mountain Guerrilla Chieftain”) and Andrew Jackson May, both eastern Kentucky natives, took temporary possession of Perry and Owsley counties the following January.125 Clay County to the south, Owsley and Jackson counties to the west, all Unionist bastions, were targets for Breathitt-based raiders, mostly for the forced appropriation of livestock.126 James W. Lindon, the county’s sheriff, provided room, board, and intelligence for local Rebels.127 The southern military presence in Breathitt was so pervasive that Confederate currency was in wide circulation.128 The year 1863 began with Kentucky Unionism at its apex. In more populated areas of the state, practically all dissent against the strictest loyalty had been quelled, either through loyalty oaths or armed intimidation. But in one mountain county, enclosed within ostensibly pro-Union territory, the forces of secession were outperforming many of their comrades in the actual Confederacy.
In early 1863 John Eversole requested that a segment of the Fourteenth Cavalry be returned to the men’s home counties, although records seem to indicate that Unionist “Home Guard” activity, probably under William Strong’s command, had already commenced in Breathitt County.129 Strong and his fellows set about reengineering his county using threats, thefts, and killings to make it more politically consistent with the rest of the Three Forks region. But, as a Confederate officer experienced in eastern Kentucky observed, Strong used a measure of brutality but also a fair amount of cajoling.
Their policy is to organize these mountain counties against us. Taking advantage of our retreat from the State, they are trying to convince the people that we have given the State up. In this way they seduce many into their Home Guard organizations. They threaten others that they shall abandon the State unless they join them and take up arms against the South. In this way they are fast subjugating the people, and, if permitted to pursue their policy undisturbed until spring [1863], that whole country will be organized against us. They have adopted the wise policy of buying up our country, by paying, feeding, and clothing these soldiers and letting them remain in their native hills to hold them against us, and will succeed unless we checkmate them by a similar policy.130
During one raid he and his men “carried away” a slave belonging to a farmer named Jesse Spencer, and then “drove away most of Spencer’s livestock, went into the house, split open the featherbeds with their knives, and poured jugs of ‘sorghum’ molasses into the ‘Feather ticks.’ Hams, middlings, and shoulders were taken from the smokehouse. They also destroyed what other property they could not take with them.”131 Strong understood soldiers’ dependency upon civilians for provisions, intelligence, and succor, the relationship historian Stephen Ash has called the “communal nature of guerrillaism.”132 Food seized from passively aggressive civilians not only fed the raider and robbed his enemy but also demonstrated his political superiority (and, by extension, greater claim to political legitimacy) to his victim.133
When the courthouse in Jackson was destroyed by fire in 1863, it became clear that Breathitt would not remain unscathed.134 By then, the county was “in a deranged and perhaps disorganized condition,” and officers of the court saved whatever records they could and fled to the Bluegrass (as in antebellum days, Breathitt’s officeholders were Bluegrass natives or else maintained property and business interests there). The county court clerk did not return even after the war’s end.135
Later that year the Confederacy’s fortunes changed for the worse after defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg in July 1863. It was time for Breathitt County Confederates to return home, and they used both legitimate and illegitimate means to return.136 When the Confederate Fifth Kentucky Infantry was ordered south to augment Braxton Bragg’s division in southeast Tennessee the following month, John Aikman and as many as a dozen other Breathitt County enlistees (along with other eastern Kentuckians) abandoned their company in Hansonville, Virginia. Desertions from other units peopled by Breathitt County volunteers were
also common.137 Edward Strong, by then a lieutenant in the same company, requested a leave of absence from his position as company quartermaster around the same time to have his family moved to safety. He later procured an appointment in Jackson, returning to the recruitment position he’d held at the war’s beginning.138 The midwar return of Breathitt’s soldiers was a pivotal moment in the county’s history. The rebels realized that their “master cleavage” had become a lost cause and that their priorities were at home.139 Many of those who withdrew from the Fifth Kentucky began fighting a “parochialized” version of the war upon their return, a “people’s war” that brought the battlefront to homes and farms.140 Aikman, compelled by a desire to further the Confederate cause even after shirking its uniform, and also to protect the interests of his landlords’ local regime, was known as one of the Three Forks region’s toughest Confederates, his reputation strengthened by an apocryphal story: after he was shot in the back while fleeing Joseph Eversole’s men, Aikman kept running, pausing only to spit out the lead ball which had traveled to his throat without killing him. He was quoted as saying the Unionists had fed him a “damned hot morsel.”141
John Aikman probably knew the man who fired the shot he miraculously survived. Although disinterested observers often speak of guerrillas as nameless anonyms, within their embattled communities their identities are openly shared with friend and foe. After the war, men like William Strong and John Aikman spoke of their former adversaries by name, with meager reference to their respective political/military positions.142 War within an enclosed community forced combatants to choose between the political and the personal, or somehow accommodate both. It was a condition of violent intimacy, “civil war in its most basic sense,” though eclipsed by the prevailing North/South narrative.143 War among intimately acquainted neighbors, relatives, and friends was a crucible for civil society, one in which all involved weighed the war’s obligations against their memory of antebellum peacetime. One Owsley County partisan left behind a succinct testimonial on the conditions involved: “I knew the man I shot. He had been a friend of mine but I knew we had to kill some of them or they would kill some of us and I had too good a bead on him to let him go.”144
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