Bloody Breathitt
Page 13
Considerations of blue and gray notwithstanding, the new arrangement represented a stark divergence from the mentalities and strategies that had dominated Kentucky military life since the war. Most of the harm inflicted upon black and white Kentuckians since 1865 was meted out in rural areas, and it was there that Kentucky’s militia had found itself most often until the mid-1870s. Since then, Klan and regulator violence had ebbed somewhat and white Kentuckians, particularly those of Henry Watterson’s “New Departure” school of thought, were reluctant to believe that violence born of the war (at least when they were willing to admit said causation) could still bedevil the state. The Bluegrass urban middle class recognized that threats to civil order would now more likely emerge from cities, and it was deemed more important that Kentucky use its armed forces to protect commercial interests from further labor disruptions.175 In 1874 William Strong’s courthouse capture, not unlike the actions of White Leagues, Red Shirts, Pale Faces, and Knights of the White Carmelia farther south, made Jackson one among a number of trouble spots in Kentucky. In contrast, Breathitt County in 1878 did not appear to Governor McCreary and other urban Kentuckians to represent a continuation of old problems so much as an unfortunate distraction from newer ones. Too much acknowledgment of the politics behind Breathitt County rioting might have suggested otherwise. After all, Reconstruction was over, and it had never happened in Kentucky anyway.
The deluge of condemnations of the Jackson situation from northern newspapers was stinging. The Republican New York Times, almost as eager to wave the bloody shirt as it had been during the worst years of Reconstruction, reported that “not one man in 10 who commits murder in Kentucky is hanged.”176 “It may, perhaps, occur to Governor McCreary that it is disgraceful to have such scenes of violence and bloodshed enacted in a sovereign state of the Union,” crowed the usually apolitical New York Herald, “but in any case the need of preserving the ‘prominent citizens’ of even so small a place as Jackson should move him to action. The State of the ‘Mill Boy of the Slashes’ [one of the late Henry Clay’s nicknames] has no ‘prominent citizens’ to spare just now.”177 Conscious of criticism from the northern press as well as Kentucky’s papers, and equally conscious of the ramifications of a public official’s violent death, Governor McCreary reluctantly dispatched the Legion to Jackson in early December.178
Soon after the Legion’s arrival, Judge Randall returned and court was reconvened, only to be interrupted by political maneuvering.179 After Randall convicted Jason Little for his wife’s murder, the Republican judge was removed from the bench and replaced by Louisville probate judge William Jackson to try the “conspirators” in John Burnett’s death.180 Randall’s party affiliation, and his flight from the county a month earlier, made him too controversial for the more politically charged cases. Judge Jackson was a former Confederate brigadier general and a more acceptable presence among Breathitt Democrats.181 An out-of-county jury convicted Alfred Gambrel for Burnett’s murder, while Wallace Maguire, the only one of Strong’s allies to be put on trial, was convicted for killing Tom Little.182 Aikman had fled the county on the advice of a Klan collaborator but was later captured and convicted for conspiring to murder Burnett. He was, however, acquitted for killing Daniel Freeman.183 Before his capture, the Kentucky Yeoman printed Aikman’s letters accusing William Strong of using the chaotic situation for material gain.184 The influential South family eventually interceded on Aikman’s and Gambrel’s behalf, and both were pardoned.185 Breathitt County’s old Democratic order was now truly restored, partly due to its own actions but not without help from the Kentucky state government.
Judge John Burnett’s shooting death completely overshadowed those of his would-be defenders, William and Daniel Freeman, the biracial grandchildren of a slave. With this in mind, the shooting of the Freeman brothers looks quite familiar in the 1870s, people of color killed or injured amid a struggle for power by an all-white Democratic Party. As far away as Bloody Breathitt was from the former Confederacy, its incentive for violence in November 1878 was essentially a southern one. The northern press, particularly Republican papers, seemed to recognize this.
This was why it was so important to Kentucky Democrats that the Freeman brothers’ roles as aggressors and victims, the racial/political meanings behind Bloody Breathitt, be minimized. No one played a greater role in doing this than the Louisville Courier-Journal. In 1874, after William Strong’s capture of the courthouse first caught the Louisville paper’s attention, Henry Watterson’s column space was still spent more on terror farther to the South (most notably Louisiana’s White League riots), and news from Breathitt County was relatively commonplace. Since then, Watterson had personally stirred the sectional pot, calling for a Democratic march on Washington, DC, to support presidential candidate Samuel Tilden.186 Even after reestablishing his New Departure stance, he and his editorial staff were still acutely sensitive to Kentucky’s portrayal by the northern press. Initially, Watterson’s task was defending Breathitt County—and, by extension, Kentucky—against their censure, particularly since phrases like “Kentucky KuKluxers” were bandied about in Pennsylvania. “These Kentucky KuKluxers are very much like the Mollie Maguires of this State,” the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “except that the latter were ignorant and poor, while the Kentucky knaves have had the benefit of education and are all in comfortable circumstances.”187 Before long, to counter this northern perspective, Watterson and other Democrats began a long series of propaganda harangues on Breathitt County to prove that its populace actually was as “ignorant and poor” as the Pennsylvania coalfield’s Irish killers, and isolated far from the real Kentucky and the South.
For a while, this involved grudgingly admitting the politics involved, as when the “copperhead” Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer noted that Strong had been “a notorious home guard and bushwhacker during the war” (the Courier-Journal also mislabeled him as a Home Guard).188 After the Louisville Legion was sent eastward, the Republican Cincinnati Gazette announced, “At the last State election [Breathitt] county was Democratic by a vote of nearly three to one.”189 The Courier-Journal defended Breathitt County against northern Republicans’ hypocritical jabs of “race prejudice” and Ku Kluxing and blaming the county’s “Loyal” (that is, Unionist) minority for causing the trouble.190 When news arrived that many of the participants were of the same party of former Unionists that had captured the courthouse in 1874, Watterson countered the Ohio paper’s insinuation with the subheading “Bad News for Deacon [Richard] Smith [the Daily Gazette’s editor]—the Mobs Said to Be Loyal [Unionist] Bushwhackers.” “The whole difficulty appears to be a Family Quarrel Among Republicans,” he disingenuously reported, “who proved their loyalty during the war between the States by bushwhacking and murdering, and are now practicing among themselves.”191 The fact that the riot had multiracial participation did not mean it was racially motivated, reasoned the Courier-Journal, since Breathitt County’s population included only thirty-one black men over the age of twenty-one. “Those figures are sufficient to convince even that truly good and pious man, Deacon Richard Smith that the present trouble is not one of races, though one of the killed and one of the wounded are negroes.”192 Watterson, determined that the latest riot was not to be pointed to as a persistence of rebellion in Kentucky, went to great lengths to see to it that the blame for the riot was placed upon the former Unionists while ignoring the fact that their adversaries were led by Confederate veterans.193 It was they who had ambushed the county judge, but Watterson distorted the facts by saying that Burnett was killed due to “his being a Democrat.”194
After other papers’ interest in Breathitt County began to flag, the Courier-Journal changed its portrayal as the trials began, accentuating the county’s physical isolation and its relationship to exogenous politics—while still defending it to a degree. “Neither the state nor the United States have done anything for Breathitt,” the paper intoned, “and, in turn, Breathitt has ‘done nothing for nobody.’ ”1
95 The same correspondent concluded that he would “sooner live on the western plains and take the chance of being scalped by Sitting Bull, than to live in Breathitt County at the present time.”196 In early 1879, during the rioters’ trials, the Courier-Journal began to sound less sympathetic toward Breathitt County while retaining a portrayal of the community as a country as foreign to the Bluegrass as possible. Rather than rising against the New York Times’s contention that the Ku Klux Klan “were gentle citizens compared with the desperadoes who infest the ravines and hills of Breathitt” (after it had once placed the Klan in Breathitt with no mention of topography), the Courier-Journal described Breathitt County as a savage environment with “meadows that were stripped of all pastoral suggestions” and “a land which did not overflow with honey and where civilization was but a puling strangled infant.”197 This change in tone followed soon after the revelation that (and, to the Courier-Journal’s credit, it was acknowledged) Confederates were the primary aggressors.
Shortly before this description was printed, a Courier-Journal correspondent interviewed William Strong and exonerated him as having acted in a purely defensive manner during the riot.198 Although Strong had been named specifically in 1874’s courthouse capture, the reporter did not press the matter, accepting Strong’s insistence that he had kept the peace since Wiley Amis took flight years beforehand. But by doing so, the paper belied the political and sectional stance it had taken toward the situation just short weeks earlier. The “King Bee” of Breathitt County was no longer a radical Unionist, “a noted Federal freebooter,” as the Courier-Journal had said weeks earlier, but a quasi-Scots “chieftain” with American Indian likenesses, albeit “sans horns, war paint and other paraphernalia.”199 “Instead of looking fierce as the lion in his native jungle, or the tiger in defense of her cub, his face was as calm as the surface of a sleeping lake and reminded me no more of war than do the innocent flowers of May. I felt considerably relieved when I shook hands with him and beheld that springtime smile upon his face, for my memory was just then quite vivid with recollection of the adverse criticisms I had indulged in toward the mountain Captain, and the smile dispelled the thought that he had come to chaw me up.”200 A few days after interview was published, the Kentucky Yeoman complained that the Courier-Journal had handled Strong too “delicately.”201 This was years before Stoddard Johnston learned the subtle craft of depoliticizing violence. In defanging William Strong, the more centrist paper was simply following the subterfuge it had used throughout the 1870s in most of its discussions of killings in Kentucky. Even if Strong was not the monster the correspondent had originally believed him to be (no doubt because of local Democrats’ whispers), his image had gone from Union partisan to quasi-oriental exotic. Although he retained the title of “mountain Captain,” by 1879 the partisanship that had led to his captain’s commission in the previous decade was beginning to fade—thanks partly to papers like the Courier-Journal.
William Strong did not apparently try to counter this portrayal. He acknowledged his controversial position during the war but did not relate it to the 1878 election. He spoke of Burnett, his cousin Edward Strong, and others strictly by name, not by their political affiliation. Like other former guerrillas, Strong knew his enemies as local familiars before any of them chose different sides in the Civil War.202 At odds with John Aikman for more than fifteen years by the time of the 1879 interview, the captain had no need to place anonymous epithets like “Rebel” on a rival whose genealogy he could probably describe in detail.
There were other reasons as well. Captain Strong’s struggle had always been against people he knew intimately, either because of kinship or age-old familiarity. Strong’s actions, both before this interview and afterward, demonstrated unambiguous Republican militancy. But when discussing matters with a representative from the outside world, especially a reporter for one of the United States’ most important Democratic publications, it behooved him to be sketched as a colorful, apolitical rustic. He knew Kentucky’s political tides had turned against him, and describing himself as a impenitent Union partisan would probably not help his interests.
Altina Waller has identified the Louisville Courier-Journal’s coverage of Breathitt County in 1878–79 as the media’s initial “placement of feuding in the mountains.”203 Considering that the paper’s coverage began with a different tone than that with which it ended, and taking into account coverage from other newspapers of differing political stripes, there is room for more elaboration on this point. Even when the fact that violence was born out of competition between political parties could not be denied, the significance of race could be. As the harsh memory of Reconstruction became more distant, even northern members of the media followed suit. One delusional northern newspaper went as far as to explain, without elaboration, “There is no distinction between races up in that country.”204 It was simpler and less troubling to tell this big lie than it would have been to discover why black and white mountaineers would take up arms together, especially with Reconstruction over. It was not long after that black involvement in Bloody Breathitt was forgotten.
In its place, Kentucky’s flagship paper reified the otherness of what would later be called the “mountain whites.” When, just after the Legion departed the mountains, reports of a courthouse riot in Perry County reached Louisville, Henry Watterson curtly remarked: “The people in the mountain counties need civilizing.”205 Watterson’s assessment of the eastern half of the two Kentuckys did not explicitly employ the idea of feud, as he and other observers would later, to describe Breathitt County and its environs.206 It did, however, demonstrate a commonly held determination to depoliticize a blatantly political problem in his state. Political and racial contingencies could be camouflaged by the mountain people’s inherent savagery.
On its way home, the Louisville Legion was welcomed in Frankfort by a brass band and Governor McCreary. The relieved Democrat proclaimed the Legion an embodiment of the Second Amendment’s well-regulated militia clause and commended their defense of the “good name and fame of Kentucky.”207 In his message to the Kentucky General Assembly later in 1879, McCreary declared, “No county is more orderly or peaceable than Breathitt.”208 His pronouncement of success failed to acknowledge that, less than a month after the Louisville Legion withdrew from Jackson, Breathitt County’s log jailhouse had been destroyed by a mob in apparent reaction to the convictions of Little, Gambrel, et al.209 The following May a Confederate veteran named Andrew Carpenter was killed in ambush while working in his field.210 One national publication judged Breathitt County’s troubles to be the outcome of “an imperfect organization [resulting] from the practical isolation of the people, the unlettered authorities, and the absence of schools and moral example” as well as the lack of contact with “more advanced communities,” a summation happily echoed in the Bluegrass’s “advanced communities,” which had only just begun to eye the mountains’ untapped natural wealth.211 Even as death and destruction continued in Breathitt County, Kentucky Democrats’ apolitical interpretation of Bloody Breathitt had taken permanent hold. Within a few years it would determine how the United States thought of the supposedly all-white eastern Kentucky mountains and, by extension, southern Appalachia as a whole.
“A better, healthier public sentiment”
Andrew Carpenter’s end marked a change in tactics for the Red Strings. Strong was never going to legitimately challenge his county’s Democratic cabal. If the deaths that resulted from his support of Judge Burnett had proven anything, it was that his own public displays of force were of limited benefit; in the end, Kentucky’s state government would always support his Democratic enemies. Still, unlike so many other southern Unionists who had already accepted Democratic “home rule,” Strong refused to accede to those with whom he had fought for control of his county.
For this reason, William Strong stepped back to fighting a war of position, one paradoxically more bitterly violent than the war of maneuver he had tried since 1874. Gang
occupations of the Jackson streets gave way to snipers skulking around secluded horse paths miles from the town. Between 1879 and 1884, at least nine men fell in “bushwhacker” killings attributed to Strong and the Red Strings. Strong’s new practice guaranteed that, should he or his followers be indicted, witnesses and juries would fear being the next victims. Violence in Breathitt County was still as intimate as it had been during the Civil War. For the rest of his life Strong was wary of attacks but, for the most part, he strode around his home county without fear.
As horrible as this new state of affairs was, Captain Strong could always claim that, starting with the national rebellion he helped vanquish, his killing was always a response, not a drawing of first blood. He never tried to justify his actions, except perhaps in one apocryphal exchange published just after his death. “On one occasion a citizen of Breathitt county was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary for killing a man. He met Capt. Strong a few minutes after sentence had been passed and asked: ‘How is it, Capt. Strong, that when I kill one man they send me to the penitentiary, and when you kill twenty men you are not even indicted?’ The captain replied: ‘I was right when I killed my men, and you were wrong.’ ”212 Untold numbers of white southerners dissented against their respective communities during the war, and many continued to do so during the Reconstruction years. Few, however, were willing to commit warlike atrocities like Strong did (the bulk of historical scholarship insists Unionists were far more likely to be victims than aggressors). Fewer still kept up after white Democratic “home rule” was complete. It is difficult to imagine that William Strong would go to such great lengths if he did not believe in the righteousness of his actions.