Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  It was the first of many times that Kentucky governors would use the idea of feud to depoliticize the violence that rent their state apart for decades to come. Feud suggested violence with primordial causes in the distant past rather than current political events. More important, the word suggested a horizontal conflict between similar (white) people of equal means, lest anyone ask the identity of the initial (or only) aggressors or their politics. Stevenson may well have personally invented a new trope for the southern conservative apologist rhetorical arsenal. For years southern Democrats attributed violence against white Republicans to “family feuds,” even when political motivations were obvious.35 Feuds were understood to be between whites, except for the rare instances when it was useful for it be otherwise; case in point, “the ancient feud between the white man and the black man; a feud as old as Europe, Asia and Africa” that precipitated violent white reaction to black citizenship (to white conservatives, it was only a brief, dangerous moment during Reconstruction when the necessary horizontal equality existed between the races).36 It was a lasting explanation, as shown by one historian’s recent characterization of counterrevolutionary violence in Kentucky as an outcome of “local tribalism.”37 Inherent features like “inborn malevolence” and “tribalism” did not well describe the contingencies of a sectional war’s remains.

  Part of the reason that post-Confederate attackers’ political motives were so easy to minimize was Kentucky’s measure of extralegal Unionist militancy. Union Leagues and Loyal Leagues in other southern states demonstrated their potential for force more often than they actually used it and took up arms, with very few exceptions, only in self-defense.38 In Kentucky they took a more aggressive tack in some areas, conjuring an illusion of even counterbalance between Kentucky’s revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violences even when the latter typically had the greater advantage.39 A “quasi-military” Union League chapter in Lexington and a secret society–style Loyal League in Louisville brought out the Republican vote through public shows of arms and strategic electioneering.40 In mountain counties, Loyal League chapters intimidated Confederate veterans and Democrats during elections, bolstering the already-sturdy mountain Unionist/Republican turnout.41 In the heavily pro-southern western edge of the state, Unionist vigilance committees were organized in 1865 to punish “men formerly identified with the rebellion” upon their return.42 In 1870 and again in 1874, groups unironically labeled “Negro Ku Klux” supposedly harassed black Democrats.43 Consequently, for more than a decade after the war, Democrats could gainsay Republican protests by citing documented persecutions of Confederate veterans. Attacks from either side were more often intraracial than those publicized in the Deep South, “white-on-white” (or, in the case of the dubious “Negro Ku Klux,” “black-on-black”), while the common element of political violence in the Reconstruction era was the oppression of black southerners. Intraracial violence, even when its political motives were plain to contemporaries, was easily depoliticized.

  The Ku Klux Klan, the definitive incarnation of southern political violence, appeared in Kentucky no later than 1868—at least three years before black enfranchisement came to the state.44 Aside from Missouri, it was the only state outside of the former Confederacy where groups bearing the name appeared during the Reconstruction era.45 The distinction between the Kentucky Klan and other preexistent paramilitary groups is imprecise, but this was not unique. All over the South the Klan “was less a formal organization than a rubric,” a name and iconography that described disparate groups throughout the South who shared little more than a dedication to white supremacy, counterrevolution and, unfailingly, the Democratic Party as the means to those ends.46 Democrats with reputable public faces considered them “allies not sought but accepted.”47 State and federal forces stationed in the former Confederacy eventually put an end to the organization with a “politics of force,” but the Klan of un-Reconstructed Kentucky lasted longer there than that of any other state—as did its connections to the Kentucky Democracy.48

  But even “the military arm of the Democratic Party” could be depoliticized, with conservatives often denying that the “genuine” Ku Klux Klan was responsible for political violence.49 The Klan’s own patriarch, Nathan Bedford Forrest, testified to Congress that the organization was for “self-protection” and “had no political purpose,” despite evidence to the contrary.50 Its reign of terror against black and white Republicans in Tennessee and the Deep South between 1868 and 1871 gave the lie to the general’s testimony. However, the Klan’s diffuse organization and its mysterious tactics made it quite possible for southerners and northerners to dismiss its importance, political or otherwise, or even to deny its very existence. By the beginning of the 1870s even some Republicans (primarily white northerners) had begun doubting the Klan was a serious danger to their southern comrades.51

  Kentucky’s relatively small black population, coupled with its de facto Unionism, gave Democrats a better measure of plausible deniability, room to insist that “Ku Klux outrages . . . common to the whole South” were “less serious in Kentucky than elsewhere” and “that politics had little to do with the operations of the Klan.”52 Other southern states’ Klans were an unequivocally political response to northern tyranny (and accordingly had clear links to the southern Democratic Party), said Louisville Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson (who, a former lieutenant under Forrest, claimed some authority on the subject).53 As the white South’s moderate voice, Watterson chided fellow Democrats for their “vacillation and want of celerity” in punishing wrongdoers.54 But the Courier-Journal refused to grant its own state’s record of violent crime the same significance. In Watterson’s estimation, the Kentucky Klan “was not an outgrowth of civil war. Neither was it made up of ex-Confederate soldiers.” Indeed, the editor insisted, Kentucky’s pretenders to the Klan name embarrassed the “actual” organization. “One third bully and two-thirds whisky, a thorough coward and scoundrel, it disgraced the name of KuKlux when it assumed it.”55

  After his appointment to a U.S. Senate seat, former governor Stevenson followed suit, going to great rhetorical lengths to deny that any Klan, Kentucky’s or elsewhere, was “a political organization.”56 Writing in 1875, a northern missionary who wished to defend Kentucky’s continuing loyalty to the Republic despite its internal chaos echoed Governor Stevenson’s language from eight years earlier, insisting that white intraracial violence “mistakenly attributed to the Ku Klux” was simply the outcome of “family feuds.”57 “There was nothing political in the organization, since as many ex-Union as ex-Confederate soldiers belonged to it,” reasoned a former Courier-Journal correspondent—failing to account for the considerable number of white Kentucky Unionists who “defected” during the Johnson administration. The troubles he had recounted in the late 1860s “originated in family or neighborhood feuds” rather than the issues involved in Reconstruction.58 Even Kentucky’s leading Republican newspaper (an esteemed position with few contenders in the 1870s), usually in the habit of connecting all things harmful and disorderly to the Democratic Party, attributed all white intraracial bloodshed to “heated blood, family difficulties, old grudges, intoxication, and inborn malevolence” rather than organized reaction to postwar change.59

  Believable or not, his denial set a precedent and constructed a useful device for conservatives. As late as 1888, years after the Klan “proper” was defunct and replaced by “whitecappers” (who, unlike their predecessors, originated north of the Ohio River), Watterson still insisted that the Klan of old “had little, if any, political significance and varied in its character according to the field of its operations.” Of course, even more than a decade after Reconstruction’s end, he felt it was “more than one could reasonably hope for to expect the truth from any Republican newspaper on such a subject.”60 Decades later, in his defense of Kentucky’s conservative “readjustment,” E. Merton Coulter attributed “ku kluxing,” “feuding,” and other postwar violence to “weakened respect for stat
e authority” rather than attempts to affect or suppress political change.61 Whenever white Kentuckians wished to deny their Reconstruction era injustices and atrocities, feud was perennial, but it was only one of a handful of words white Kentuckians used to deny that theirs was an embattled state.

  Legislation that officially recognized political vigilantism as a punishable crime was delayed for years by debates over whether only the Klan was to be officially addressed in statute or if groups like the Loyal League should also be included.62 The castrated peacekeeping law that was eventually passed allowed the governor to issue rewards for the arrest of members of groups that wore disguises in public and threatened local populations. White Kentuckians were disturbed by the imposition of martial law during the war. Accordingly, laws were passed that allowed Kentucky governors to dispatch the state militia only upon the request of a circuit court judge—this most judges did with hesitancy since it meant admitting their own powerlessness.63 They did not compel local law enforcement to assist in warrants, an important omission since sheriffs and constables were often complicit in extralegal violence. Kentucky’s counties remained “oligopolies of violence,” each with its respective ability to enforce white supremacy and quell political dissent.64 While this was an arrangement structurally identical to that enjoyed by antebellum oligarchs, it had become far more deadly after the Civil War.

  “Although originating not long after the war, it was personal and not political”

  As in Kentucky’s other mountain counties, in Breathitt County the war’s memory changed the political landscape for years afterward. Conservatives who wanted a facsimile of the antebellum order competed with those who either accepted the changes wrought by the war or those who worked to further these changes. Some of the old Jacksonian counties of eastern Kentucky were permanently changed, always after turning out Unionist/Republican majorities; others snapped elastically back to the Democracy. Still others abided somewhere between the two extremes.65 Breathitt County was of the third group.

  There were a number of years in which veterans of both sides of the war made a brave attempt at tense but peaceful coexistence. At least for a time, George Noble reasoned that “the true Union men . . . saved the Nation, and not the abolitionists,” a variation on the reconciliatory depoliticization of the war’s memory that lasted for decades in both North and South.66 This, even after he and fellow Rebels were arrested for foraging livestock and food from Unionist neighbors in November 1865 after other Unionists had promised his parents they would “never law [sue or indict] any of us for what I did.” When he was arrested he was taken to Perry County (“All the jails in the mountain counties were burned except that one”) and locked away for a short time until his father posted bail. By that time Breathitt County judge David K. Butler (apparently one of the vicinity’s only Union Democrats) knew to hire both Union and Confederate deputies—as well as to ignore their shared tendency to drink on duty.67 Reconciliation was difficult but not impossible, and most of Breathitt County’s veterans did not feel a need for vengeance. Even though political rifts remained, they endeavored not to let it remain personal—even after fighting their “intimate” civil war. “I do not call all democrats rebels,” insisted a Breathitt Unionist in 1869, but this with an admission that the Democratic Party itself still represented disunion.68

  Captain William Strong, recently decommissioned from the Three Forks Battalion, experienced his own combination of retribution and forgiveness. He, too, was sued by Breathitt County citizens for the livestock he had commandeered. Unlike Noble, he and other Three Forks veterans Wiley Amis, Wilson Callahan, and Hiram Freeman could all testify that wartime acquisitions were carried out for the purpose of “suppressing the late rebellion” and had the lawsuits transferred to federal courts in Louisville.69 In 1867’s election for circuit court judge, Republicans in surrounding counties outvoted Breathitt’s Democrats to elect former congressman William H. Randall, probably the first Kentucky jurist to admit Negro court testimony (before it became state law in 1872). Strong and other Unionists had an important ally in the “Radical” judge, and that balanced Strong’s sometimes irascible behavior.70 After assaulting one of his plaintiffs, Strong was sued for $500 for assault and battery. George Noble, one of the case’s jurors, remembered how “the war spirit was high” in the courtroom and “it was pretty hard to enforce the civil law.” Still, he persuaded the other jurors (including one “strong Rebel”) to “soften the enemy rather than hardening him” by reducing the fine to $100. The defendant seemed to be somewhat willing to play along; after the trial Strong “treated” the jury at a Jackson grocery store that also served as a tavern. Seeing little threat from the young man he had once captured, Strong also returned Noble’s favor by supporting his nomination for town constable.71 Around the same time the captain, still wearing his dragoon’s knee-high boots and two gun belts, surprised onlookers when he publicly extended his hand to a former enemy.72 It seemed that anything done in public was saturated by the war’s memory.

  This did not mean all was forgiven. After the war Jeremiah South supposedly put a $500 bounty on Strong for the lives of his sons Andrew and Jerry. Strong was sleeping in a Jackson hotel when a knife-wielding assailant attacked him. Strong was able to grab the man’s Bowie knife and repel the attack, but he remained cautious enough to ask others to stay with him when he lodged in Jackson overnight after that.73 There was no proof that this would-be assassin had been doing South’s bidding and, from then on, no more attempts on Strong’s life of that type were attempted. Colonel South had his hands full in the Bluegrass for the remainder of his life, and Captain Strong went on to outlive him by nearly two decades.

  William Strong maintained peaceful relations with his wealthy first cousin, former Confederate officer Edward C. Strong, who returned to the county judge’s bench after David Butler.74 As an estimable landowner himself, William Strong was able to mediate between the area’s black and white poor and elites like his cousin. In fact, the self-described “Republican in principle” (who apparently eschewed the “Radical” label, unlike some compatriots) comported himself peaceably after the war, though with occasional sarcasm. Strong feigned mock deference, refusing to “drink before [his] landlord” after a Democrat of his own social and economic standing tried to cajole him with a dram of brandy.75

  Strong did not protest when Breathitt County’s ex-Confederates voted in 1868 even though the newly ratified Fourteenth Amendment forbade it.76 Instead, he showed up at the polls to cast his own vote. He knew that within two years of his winning the war for the Union, he and the Unionists/Republicans had become the minority, ruefully observing in 1869, “We have two parties in Breathitt County; occasionally they will run a democrat and then a rebel.”77 It was not the behavior of someone who supposedly tried to, according to E. L. Noble, “rid the county of all but republicans.”78

  Although he never made any public pronouncements on enfranchisement, as the “special protector of the colored race,” he personally represented Breathitt County’s greatest extreme of radicalism whether he meant to or not.79 It is especially difficult to explain Strong’s long-lasting association with Breathitt County’s black minority, many of them former Strong family slaves. Though the association probably began as a wartime marriage of convenience, its longevity suggests that Strong’s wartime experience molded his outlook on race and class; in the 1890s he was still considered the “feudal hero” of Breathitt County’s landless and an “arch Republican” who, even in old age, refused to back down from confrontation.80 Henderson Kilburn and Hiram Freeman remained loyal to Strong and bore arms on his behalf numerous times after the war. In turn, his Democratic adversaries grudgingly respected him as a formidable power broker. Postwar attempts at compromise between former enemies suggest that mountaineers in one of Kentucky’s most war-torn counties recognized the complexities of life after war and were willing to react in ways other than overt retribution—at least, it seems, for the first few years.


  This lasted until Kentucky Unionism was split asunder. Aside from Captain Strong, no Federal veteran had played a greater role in punishing Breathitt County’s “secesh” majority than former Union lieutenant Wiley Amis. Still, according to Strong and other Republicans, Amis’s loyalty during the war had been halfhearted. With Andrew Johnson’s 1866 split with Congress, Amis “turned democratic” and, like most other white Kentucky Union veterans, “took the side of the President.”81 During the November 1868 elections Amis served as poll judge in Crockettsville, the county’s most Republican precinct. Soon after voters gathered, he violated the neutrality of his post, first mocking the opposition’s poverty and then threatening Republicans with a club brought, he said, “to break radical heads.” “Amis commenced the difficulty himself with me at the polls, and called me an old abolitionist,” one Republican testified a few months later. “He asked me how I would like to vote with a nigger, and sit by them and smell of them. I told him that I had rather vote with a nigger, sit by him, smell of him, than to vote with a rebel, and smell of and sit by him, and this ended the discourse between us.”82