Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  When Amis saw “the damned radical” William Strong, he verbally menaced his former compatriot until Democratic and Republican bystanders began nervously unbuttoning their holsters. A blood spilling was forestalled at the last minute. “Amis . . . seeing what it would lead to, returned to his seat and the election went on.” Amis’s aims were partially met after “two or three good Union men left and did not vote.” It came to light months later that “good Union people” as well as “cowardly Union men” had stayed home from the polls in other precincts.83 With this coercion, and at least 138 ineligible Rebel votes counted countywide, Democrats carried Breathitt County and the entire eighth congressional district (although Ulysses Grant did quite well in many southeastern counties, his one-third of Breathitt County ballots was only slightly better than his poor showing in Kentucky overall).84 In the end, Amis was inelegantly successful.

  Wiley Amis’s abuse of power became a matter of public record the next year when Republican congressional candidate Sydney Barnes vainly contested his loss to Democrat George M. Adams. Dozens of depositions from Barnes vs. Adams revealed poll cheating and coercion in every Breathitt precinct (as well as the district’s seventeen other counties), apparently more so than in any other county under investigation.85 It stood to reason that the eighth district’s most hidebound Democratic county would go above and beyond the pale to support Adams. However, for the exact same reason, it was the county where graft and intimidation would have, theoretically, been least necessary. Even if Breathitt County was founded by followers of Jackson and an unbroken record of antebellum Democratic majority for nearly twenty years, re-creating this Democratic majority after the war required the same violence and intimidation utilized throughout the South. “A more determined democratic element” had regained the electoral advantage—but not without the threat of force.86 In George Noble’s mind, a man who still persisted in voting Republican did so only “to spite his neighbors.”87 Just as in the rest of Kentucky, “Redemption” came early in Breathitt County. And, just as elsewhere in Kentucky, Democrats employed an increasingly popular term to depoliticize this use of force; during cross-examination Congressman-elect Adams asked a Republican witness if the Election Day affray might have been nothing more than “a very bitter personal feud.” The witness did not attempt to insist otherwise.88

  Wiley Amis may have sympathized with the Confederacy even as he served as a Federal officer. Afterward he blamed his former compatriot William Strong for championing the war’s most important result: black citizenship. (Courtesy of Sherry Lynn Baker via Ray Fox and Kash Eversole descendants)

  No sui generis dispute between mountaineers insulated from the outside world, Wiley Amis’s outburst was one manifestation of a country watching its former slaves becoming citizens during an election that was essentially a national referendum on Reconstruction. The probability of black suffrage, even in a locality in which it would have a negligible electoral impact, was too much to risk. Wiley Amis’s performance demonstrated his lack of confidence in his party’s chances if unaided by violence. William Strong was Breathitt County’s greatest advocate for black rights (granted, with little competition for that distinction) and the one most game to fight for it.

  Under unspecified circumstances, Wiley Amis attempted to kill Strong the following winter. Strong did not immediately retaliate, but he began going armed.89 Thus followed what became known as the “Strong-Amis feud,” between Amis’s “Black Stock” and Strong’s “Red Strings.”90 The name “Black Stock” may well have been Amis’s own ominous creation (he had announced them as his anti-Radical allies during the previous November’s election) for himself, his brothers, his Union compatriot Wilson Callahan (apparently befitting, or despite, his position as the Crockettsville precinct’s election “sheriff,” Callahan maintained quiet during his friend Amis’s disruptive behavior), and their friends—most likely including a number of Confederate veterans.91

  “Red String,” however, had currency elsewhere in the South. The “antiaristocratic” Red String (the name inspired by the book of Joshua), with origins probably in the North Carolina piedmont, was an enigmatic coterie of (mostly) white southern loyalists with connections to the better-known Loyal Leagues and “Heroes of America.”92 For years after the war, Red String denoted “the small farmers, tenants, laborers and rougher classes of the region,” the Reconstruction South’s sansculottes, more willing than most southern Republicans to expose the economic meanings hidden beneath the façade of skin color.93 Despite their general obscurity, one North Carolina Klan klavern duly recognized them as an enemy organization “whose intention is to destroy the rights of the South, or of the States, or of the people, or to elevate the negro to a political equality with [themselves]” in 1871.94 Unlike the Upper South’s mostly conservative (especially in Kentucky) Republican organizations, Democrats considered the Red String an existential threat to white supremacy.95

  Just as Ku Klux Klan lasted longer in Kentucky than in any other state, the Red String, its opposite number, did the same—at least in Breathitt County. Breathitt County’s Red Strings were still a force of interracial dissent and subversion in the 1890s, long after the name had become an obscure footnote of Reconstruction elsewhere in the South.96 And, after that, their class-based political culture outlasted the organization. As late as the New Deal, Breathitt County’s landless still clung to the Republican Party, at least in local elections (of course, by then the local Democracy was still controlled by the wealthy).97 More than seventy years after Strong’s death, the name Red String remained in local memory, providing an obscure reminder that the Bloody Breathitt narrative was not just a bizarre local legend or a manifestation of eastern Kentucky’s alleged feud phenomenon.98 It was, in fact, part and parcel of a much larger struggle for control over the American South.

  Details on what occurred between Strong, Amis, and their respective allies are scant and questionable, but it seems that fighting lasted sporadically until 1872 or 1873, when Strong finally “triumphed over his enemies and exterminated them.”99 In the summer of 1870 reports of “[a] sort of guerilla war” emerged from Breathitt County. “There are about thirty on each side,” one South Carolina paper reported without attribution, “well armed, and on the lookout for each other.”100 The most detailed (and perhaps the least unreliable) sequence of events appeared in the Lexington Herald, but not until 1897, a few days after Strong’s death: in spring 1870 Wiley Amis and his son John ambushed Strong as he was plowing. Strong took cover and returned fire, wounding John Amis in the legs. Wiley Amis waited until the following September (after his son had fully recovered) before attacking again, this time bringing a larger group of gunmen to lay siege to Strong’s house. Hiram Freeman was wounded defending Strong’s wife and children before Strong’s young son Jim was able to slip away to Jackson to summon help. He returned with circuit court clerk Edward Marcum (William Strong’s brother-in-law and his former lieutenant) and more than a dozen others, “nearly all of whom had fought under Cap. Strong” in the war. Marcum’s group dispersed the Amises and rescued Strong. Strong appealed to Judge William Randall but was reportedly told that he would have to defend himself (future events suggest Randall used his courage economically). In October Strong gathered his forces together and confronted the superior-numbered Black Stock. All accounts agree that William Strong was the eventual victor after an indeterminable measure of blood was spilled. Wilson Callahan and at least three members of the Amis family were killed, after which Wiley and the other surviving Amises migrated to Kansas (he died in Arkansas, apparently from natural causes, in 1882).101 However large or small the conflict was in comparison to regulator and Klan violence in other parts of the state, the “Strong-Amis feud” began and ended without state intercession. When someone found a souvenir coin identifying Wiley Amis as an officer in the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry in 1898, no one in Kentucky knew where to send it.102

  What became known as the “Amis-Strong feud” was a manifestation of a
conflict going on throughout the South in the late 1860s, one commenced by the breakdown between the federal government’s executive and legislative branches. Closer to home, it reflected Kentucky’s postwar Unionist fissure over black citizenship, the same rupture that produced Confederate supremacy from the 1870s until the early 1890s. In fact, it was most likely part of a larger concerted effort to punish white Unionism and destroy black freedom in eastern Kentucky. The Ku Klux Klan and other violent political organizations that undermined Union victory materialized in the mountains as soon as they did in the Bluegrass.103 Their onslaught increased in 1870, the first year black Kentuckians cast votes.104 In fall of that year, Klansmen killed nineteen Union veterans and other Republicans, “most of them white men,” in Breathitt and three surrounding counties.105 Estill County’s state senator and local Democratic boss served as the head of a multicounty klavern in the early 1870s and led a barrage of torment against freedpeople who came to work in the county’s iron industry (the Klan’s authority in intensely Unionist Estill speaks to the intensity of “belated Confederate” sentiment Amis shared with other white Kentuckians).106 When federal marshals and cavalrymen captured four wanted Klansmen in Estill and Clay counties in 1871, it was a federal victory rare enough to receive national media attention.107 White mountaineers chose the Klan “rubric” because they saw connections between their own local conflicts and the larger struggle against black enfranchisement and federal authority going on all over the South.108 Even moderate young Democrat George Noble became a Klan “vice-president” after serving as Jackson’s town constable. The former was a position, Noble laconically recalled years later, that “gave a man great power over his neighbor.”109

  Rather than some bizarre, personally motivated abnormality contained within one remote county, the “Strong-Amis feud” was only one battle in an exogenous political war. This, however, is not how it was shared with the outside world. The Herald’s and all other descriptions of the “feud” appeared in print many years later, all ignoring Amis’s confrontation with Strong at the 1868 election. All highlighted the personal over the political while also calling into question their legitimacy as soldiers by emphasizing their sordid motivations for self-gain. They all blamed it on a personal disagreement over the apportionment of confiscated livestock in the last days of the war or shortly afterward. They also grouped the conflict with others that supposedly defined eastern Kentucky’s feud phenomenon.110 Owing to the fact that an earlier generation of Amises, Callahans, and Strongs had all been combatants in the Clay County Cattle War sixty years earlier, and considering that this more recent conflict was ostensibly started over livestock, it was widely assumed later on that this “feud” was nothing more than a continuation of ancient hatreds predating the Civil War (that descendants of both sides of the cattle war were allies during the Civil War was an unfortunate niggling detail).111

  What makes the Amis-Strong conflict strange rather than familiar, if anything, was that it resulted in a bloody Unionist victory, the reverse of most reported southern violence circa 1870.112 Yet, by being remembered as a feud, it was not remembered as a political victory for either side. The political propositions were roundly ignored and perhaps even suppressed, while the conflict’s longevity was stretched to thirty-five years to give it proper feudal longevity.113 “Although originating not long after the war,” J. Stoddard Johnston protested too much in 1899, “it was personal and not political.”114 When the conflict’s Civil War connections were conceded, it was in as confused and misconstrued a manner as possible; in 1909 a Kentucky newspaperman recalled Breathitt’s “two Federal regiments,” which “apparently endeavored to exterminate each other” for no discernible reason.115 A few years later, another feud chronicler dubbed the “Strong-Amis feud” the first evidence that Breathitt County was “more fully imbued with the feudal spirit” than anywhere else in the Kentucky mountains.116 It was a spirit that twentieth-century Kentuckians did not want to remember as associated with the state’s internal divisions half a century prior. Just as it was used to depoliticize lingering violence immediately after the war, the feud remained useful in the 1910s for separating the nastiest memories from what had finally been deemed a “noble mutual experience that in the long run solidified the nation.”117 Short and picayune as it was, the “Strong-Amis feud” challenged this interpretation of the war and what came after it. It was better it be rendered apolitical folklore, if remembered at all.

  William Strong avoided portraying himself as a postwar caudillo. In 1879 he told an interviewer that, after his service in the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry (he omitted his service in the more notorious Three Forks Battalion), he had “returned home to live in peace” and had only gone after the Amises after other Breathitt County citizens had asked him to form a supposedly bipartisan militia to end their postwar depredations. Strong fervently denied that he was the “head of a belligerent faction ever since the war,” even though he was associated with violence numerous times afterward.118 Whether as a Unionist crusader or a “feudist,” his reputation was permanently wedded to Bloody Breathitt.

  “Too much attention to politics and not enough to corn”

  A large part of the reason the “Strong-Amis feud” was easy to depoliticize was its lack of clear consequences. Strong’s victory over the Black Stock did not stymie the Democratic reascendancy that was beginning in 1868. With decade’s end came the expiration of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ban on Confederates holding office (a ban scarcely enforced in Kentucky if the 1868 elections serve as evidence), a bolstering of the Democratic ticket, and the beginning of a long period of Confederate rule.119 Something very much like the antebellum status quo returned, and Breathitt County returned to the speculative purposes for which it had been created.

  With the South family absent and otherwise occupied in the Bluegrass, no one embodied their commercial spirit more than newly elected county judge Edward Strong.120 In 1872 Kentucky’s General Assembly authorized the county to increase the price of “vacant and unappropriated lands” in preparation for public sale.121 After doing so, Judge Strong sold a tract of “wild lands” around Troublesome Creek (a large tributary to the north fork of the Kentucky River) to a land company from outside of the county, unintentionally drawing ire from local farmers, some of whom may have been Red Strings. Farming practices had not changed since before the war, and these “vacant and unappropriated” woods and pastures were still vital to the livelihood of squatters as well as landed farmers with adjacent property. When Judge Strong’s surveyors arrived to draw boundaries near Troublesome Creek, an armed squad dissuaded them. This demonstration of armed force delayed further surveying of the area for years.122 The “wild lands” remained wild regardless of who owned them.

  Speculation was set back again the next year when the courthouse in Jackson burned to the ground, destroying extant land grants and calling into question virtually every land tenure in Breathitt County.123 Those who laid claim to the old eighteenth-century land grants, most notably Jeremiah South and his heirs, were dealt a serious blow by the apparent arson, and they were forced to fight for their ownership claims in court for decades afterward.124 On the other hand, the fire was a boon to those who most depended upon large expanses of unfenced, untitled land, those with little or no land—a population that had notably bucked the county leadership’s pro-Confederate leanings in the previous decade.

  As “republicans of the war element,” William Strong and the Red Strings were implicated, but no indictments were passed down.125 This was not the first time Breathitt County’s courthouse had burned. When it had happened last, in 1864, courthouse fires in Kentucky were practically commonplace. They were not uncommon nine years later during the counterrevolutionary violence precipitating “Redemption,” but by then they were more likely to be caused by sundry local crises of legitimacy; they could no longer be blamed on invaders from the outside world. “Republicans of the war element” or otherwise, anyone who had motive to destroy the lo
cus of state at this late date was probably someone from within the county’s borders.

  The 1873 fire was a sign of discord, but 1874 proved to be the county’s—and perhaps Kentucky’s—most chaotic year since the war. White-on-black killings had increased since 1870, but August and September of 1874 constituted a crescendo of violence. August 1874 marked the first election cycle since the U.S. Senate’s passage of what would become the 1875 Civil Rights Act. In a fevered combination of conservative alarm and new assertions of black rights, local violence erupted throughout Kentucky and the South, most notably a “terrible war between the whites and blacks” in the southern Bluegrass.126 While newspapers gave Kentucky’s disturbances due notice, the northern press was more keenly focused on Louisiana’s White League revolt.127

  William Strong’s first public act of violence in years came soon after the tumultuous state elections, when a white man named David Flinchum allegedly murdered a Negro named William Hargis and was not prosecuted. With Hiram Freeman, Henderson Kilburn, and Freeman’s sons William and Daniel, “Nigger Dick” Strong (a freedman said to have once belonged to Strong’s father) and ten other unnamed men of both races, he performed what one newspaper termed a “coup d’état,” taking possession of the newly rebuilt courthouse and its surroundings.128 Strangely, Strong and the Red Strings seemed to have encountered little resistance, and there is no evidence of anyone in Jackson killed or injured, including Flinchum. By 1874’s standard, it was relatively peaceful, a demonstration of the Unionists’ refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the county’s law enforcement and the men who ran it.

  By mid-September rumors had spread to the Bluegrass that “outlaws, under the command of one Strong . . . have possession of the place and rule the county.”129 Within a few days reports claimed that “200 desperados” had barricaded themselves in Jackson’s courthouse.130 Unknown parties requested Governor Preston H. Leslie to send members of the militia to restore peace. Since his inauguration, Leslie had styled himself an active executive, but had since struggled with a legislature reluctant to punish or prevent mob violence.131 Perhaps more than any other Kentucky governor of the period, Leslie acknowledged the “weakness [and] often venality of county law enforcement officials,” even if most of those officials were his party mates, and he sympathized with citizens “who looked more and more to the authorities at Frankfort, instead of to the local authorities.”132 Still, he had been accused of personal hesitation in dealing with Klan violence, even after dispatching the state militia to two separate trouble spots in August 1874. Alarmed by the exaggerated reports, Leslie dispatched a militia company to Breathitt County and requested that Judge Randall suspend his other court dates in order to schedule a special session in Jackson that would allow no case continuances.133 After false reports that the company had been attacked, Leslie anticipated further requests from Breathitt and sent four more companies. By the end of September more militiamen had been sent to Breathitt County than to any of the counties that had recently requested interventions.134