Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  Or that of the Red Strings. Another reason for Strong’s lack of indictments was the plausible deniability his followers’ loyalty afforded him. Henderson Kilburn, broadly estimated the deadliest Red String, supposedly carried out most, if not all, of these ambushes. In January 1884 he and a Negro teenager named Ben Strong (most likely a descendant of Strong family slaves) were arrested for the murder of a purported Klansman named William Thorp. Thorp, before dying, identified Kilburn as his killer but Ben Strong was named as an accomplice for hiding Kilburn and bringing him food. After their arraignment both men were kept in the jailhouse without bail to await the next circuit court session. Sometime after midnight on April 9, approximately fifty masked men, “very orderly in their proceedings” and “under a leader who directed every movement with precision and dispatch,” gathered around the jail and forcibly extracted them. The pair was then hanged side by side from the courthouse portico, both bodies pinned with notes instructing that they not be removed for a day.213 As always, the courthouse, the physical embodiment of the polis, was crucial to those who sought to bring about change, and to those who tried to prevent it. Just as William Strong’s capture of the courthouse ten years earlier represented the Red Strings’ attempt to reaffirm their wartime victory in Breathitt County, the lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong in front of the same structure demonstrated that their crimes violated the commonweal and that deadly justice was meted out in a public setting.214

  The murder of Judge Burnett and the lynchings nearly six years later showed that local Democrats had realized that their own brand of extralegal violence was necessary for the maintenance of their status quo. The double lynching was met with approval both in Breathitt County and in the outside world. Since arriving in Jackson a year earlier, Methodist missionary John J. Dickey had witnessed various small crimes supposedly brought about by alcohol and isolation and, in his judgment, this was no coincidence. After seeing the mob gather, he knew that their deaths reflected “the sentiment of the county” and “a better, healthier public sentiment” to come. Even though he was evidently unsure of their identities, Dickey assured himself that “these regulators [were] of the better class.”215 At least one Bluegrass editor agreed with Dickey. “The war in Breathitt County has ended,” he said shortly after the lynching. “Circuit court is now in session and perfect peace prevails.”216

  Lynching, the “definitive metaphor for racial oppression,” appeared in Breathitt County just as it began to increase in much of the rest of the South—and with the concomitant rituals and procedures associated with lynching for decades to come.217 Its first recorded usage in Breathitt (the first two, according to the most comprehensive survey, of seven lynching victims in Kentucky that year) coincided with eastern Kentucky’s becoming the generally accepted locale for feud violence.218 White Kentuckians considered lynching a more orderly form of violence than anything feud suggested—in fact, this form of majoritarian violence that so many white Kentuckians looked upon with approval might yet have proven to be the cure for feuds and the outlawry they entailed (although some Democrats interpreted the lynching as a renewal of “the old feud”).219 The lynching of the two men at the county’s seat of government indicated not only that their deaths were the will of the county’s population but also that the lynching had been acted out in the interest of law and order, a law and order determined by the wealthier landowners who headed the local Democratic Party.220 A highly ritualized, grisly performance, it was communal in one sense. But, like many other lynchings of the era, it was overtly political as well, since it was directed at those who had challenged the prevailing political party.221

  And it apparently performed its intended function. The lynching of his most brutal compatriot and the black man who shared his surname marked the end of William Strong’s aggression. After rumors circulated that he would avenge their deaths, Strong instead sent a request that their bodies be sent to him so that they could be “both buried in the same grave on his farm among their friends.”222 Until his death in 1897, Strong remained the “chieftain” of the county’s squatters and the dwindling black population (Hiram Freeman and his surviving family apparently left the county not long after his sons’ deaths). Still, Strong would no longer attempt insurrections, act as a public endorser or enforcer during elections, or order the assassinations of his political enemies. Friendship with legitimate authorities was in the past, too, after “staunch Democrat” Robert Riddell replaced William Randall as circuit court judge.223 Any serious challenge to Democratic authority in Breathitt County, at least in the violent form that Strong preferred, had now come to an end. He was nearing sixty at the time of the lynching; his two youngest children—a ten-year-old son and a six-year-old daughter—still lived under his roof.224 Even after his former cavalry commander Henry Clay Lilly was narrowly elected as a Republican circuit judge in 1886, Strong still lay low, and he continued to do so until the last months of his life.225

  In most of its characteristics this lynching was an event inherent to its time and place. Captain William Strong fought the one-party rule that took over the South after Reconstruction came to an end—a rule that had a head start in his home state. Two members of his small fighting force perished in a way identical, almost in minute detail, to that of so many other black and white southerners who skirted its authority. However, the peculiar contingencies of life in Breathitt County gave this lynching its most unusual trait: the races of its victims. Cooperation between a young Negro and a violent white squatter, the very fruition of what white conservatives feared most, represented an obstruction to that commercial order, Breathitt County’s own iteration of what would come to be known as the New South.226 Neither that nor the broader phenomenon of lynching fit easily into the interpretation of violence suggested by feud. The 1884 lynching went on to be the most forgotten recorded incident of violence in Breathitt County’s history.

  Perhaps there were elements of feud in Strong and the Red Strings’ ongoing assaults against Breathitt County Democrats. He was certainly faring better than southern Unionists who might have attempted what he was doing after Redemption. Perhaps in another part of the South he would not have survived his bold ventures of 1874 and 1878; and, since Strong had managed to carry out his quasi-guerrilla actions for so long afterward, did this mean there was some modicum of a horizontal conflict between equals? In a county with a small population, these were people who knew one another’s identities quite well, and indeed there was surely some amount of personal enmity involved. Nevertheless, that he and the Red Strings were identified as “feudists” meant that the differences between them and other southern Unionists were emphasized while their similarities were concealed. Considering the disorder developing in eastern Kentucky in the mid-1880s, his was only one group among many, a developing trend that white Kentuckians preferred be interpreted as, if not “feudal,” then certainly as nonpolitical. “There is much talk of the outlaws in . . . Breathitt, and other counties of Eastern Kentucky, belonging to Democratic or Republican factions,” wrote a western Kentucky Democrat in 1885. “This is all humbug, they are violators of law, and should be spoken of and dealt with as such.”227

  There was far more to the story than feud suggested, a complexity of postbellum politics in a border state combined with the endogenous intricacies of life in Breathitt County. It was in Kentucky Democrats’ interest that this sort of complexity went unexplored. Relying on the idea of feuding performed their task quite effectively, especially as Breathitt County’s economic potential came to the attention of the outside world.

  4

  “THE CIVILIZING AND CHRISTIANIZING EFFECTS OF MATERIAL IMPROVEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT”

  Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.

  —Henry Adams, “The Grammar of Science,” in

  The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

  On Christmas Day 1884, Louisville’s Courier-Journal printed an unsigned letter from Breathitt County touting “the richest und
eveloped timber, coal, and iron district in America.” In the last three years “Northern parties” had bought nearly twenty-five thousand acres of forestland (Breathitt County’s average land value was estimated at 92¢ per acre).1 The long-anticipated Kentucky Union Railway Company (KU) had bought twenty times that amount in and around Breathitt County in order to link its coalfields to the Bluegrass and eventually create a transmontane connection to southwestern Virginia and, by extension, to the Chesapeake Bay.2 A Harvard geologist offered his high expectations of the future rail line’s capabilities in a KU promotional booklet.

  The line of the Kentucky Union Railway has . . . certain especial advantages over any other, in that it crosses the coal and iron belt at its widest part, and where there is the heaviest timber. . . . The distance from the eastern coal field to Louisville by this line would be shorter than by any other. . . . I believe it to be one of the most important roads for the mineral interests of Kentucky that can possibly be built. . . . The mountains of Kentucky, far from being a barrier to the passage of railways, constitute on the whole, a region more fitted for their passage than the Bluegrass Country.3

  The KU’s promoters predicted that theirs would be the Bluegrass’s first direct access to “the only place in America where cannel coal can be successfully mined,” connecting Kentucky’s commercialized center with the Cumberland Gap by railway for the first time, making Jackson “a capital city” and Breathitt “a wealthier county than any in the bluegrass region.”4 Breathitt’s future was looking up, and potential investors in Louisville or the Bluegrass were about to miss out.

  Even this most booster-minded of communiqués was obliged to mention the county’s checkered past, but only to announce its repentance. The chartering of a new school and the growth of Methodist and Presbyterian congregations demonstrated “marked change” in the “minds and purposes of our people”:

  Our county people are not lacking in the qualities that have made mountain people famous in history, if their bottled-up energies in times past have found vent in partisan faction fights and neighborhood broils. With no communication with the outside world and no other way of working off superfluous steams, they must not be wholly blamed. They have had few opportunities for education of any kind. If their past annals have been more akin to those of the Highland Scotch and the boys of Tipperary, please believe that the days of local warfare are past, and nowhere will you find more quiet, earnest thought as to a great future than among some of the leaders of our county, which may yet pay more taxes into the State treasury than any two of the richest Bluegrass counties.5

  The letter, presumably written by a Breathitt native, referenced Kentucky mountaineers’ supposedly Celtic past and seclusion from the outside world with the same metaphors and comparisons used by local-color writers and home-mission workers.6 The writer’s clear intention was that the “bottled-up energies” and “superfluous steams” of his (or her?) less enlightened neighbors be channeled toward more profitable motives. With the Red Strings now at bay (the lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong having taken place just seven months earlier), the political reasons for recent troubles were left unspoken, and for good reason, since potential Bluegrass financiers surely did not need to be reminded of the Civil War. The county’s Democratic majority was sound, and prepared to guide commerce and advancement into its hills.

  This pleading for investment and firm declaration of separating present from past were in keeping with the speculative strategy that had led to Breathitt’s founding forty-five years earlier. Jeremiah South and his associates had a vision of railroads and massive timber and coal extraction, but these plans had not come to fruition in South’s lifetime—instead, the county had become known as an uncivilized containment of chaos (some of which might have been avoided had South et al. not guided the county in favor of the Confederacy).

  Since 1874 the media discourse on Breathitt County violence was intertwined with demands for industrial modernization. For sectional and political reasons, the New York Times preferred to editorialize on Breathitt County as a Kentucky problem rather than a mountain one: “All her best citizens deplore and condemn the violence which has so long disgraced her and made her seem deliberately barbarous. Kentucky is, as everybody knows, a fine State, which needs development.”7 Bluegrass correspondents accompanying the state militia, however, saw things from a different perspective. They exclaimed, as if entering some untouched terra incognita, at the wealth of coal seams and virgin timber in what was, at the time, the physically largest county in Kentucky.8 The county had been geologically surveyed decades earlier, and the findings had long been a matter of public record. A sample of Breathitt cannel coal had won a gold medal at Philadelphia’s Centennial International Exposition in 1876.9 Though the Bluegrass had been collecting the Commonwealth’s revenue and casting its votes for years, now the county and its wealth were “discovered.” Furthermore, the 1878 reawakening of Bloody Breathitt coincided with Democrats’ glacial acceptance of state-funded improvement of the Kentucky River system—no doubt encouraged by coal prices soaring far above “poor men’s prices.”10 Articles stressed economic development’s utility in ending eastern Kentucky’s lawless atmosphere—even by pressmen who traditionally balked at any and all government expenditure. “The late disturbance in Breathitt county is only another argument in favor of improving the navigation of the Kentucky river,” the Bourbon Democratic Kentucky Yeoman opined. “If we had good locks and dams, it would be an easy matter to send troops from Lexington or Frankfort to quell any unlawful outbreak in that remote quarter.”11 And in a later article, the “insurrection against the civil authority” was blamed on “the further want of the civilizing and Christianizing effects of material improvement and development.”12 Even the Courier-Journal correspondent who said he preferred taking his chances with Sitting Bull rather than living in Breathitt hoped that, with proper state funding, “the hills would reverberate with the sound of the woodman’s ax and the whistle of the locomotive and steamboat, and employment would be given to thousands of men.”13 Just a few months before the Christmas Day letter, Harvard professor Nathaniel Shaler predicted “money, avarice, that master passion of the race, will subdue this archaic vice of violence.”14

  The newness of these discoveries was exaggerated to highlight Breathitt County’s isolation from the polis of the Bluegrass. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that the publicity surrounding Judge Burnett’s death and the resultant militia occupation of Jackson accelerated interest in Breathitt County’s coal and timber. In 1885 an Ohio land speculator acquired sixty-seven thousand acres of timber and coal land and published an account of its potential wealth.15 Echoing his report four years later, Charles Dudley Warner estimated that Breathitt County’s untouched cannel coal seams “excel[led] the most celebrated coals of Great Britain, predicting it would “have a market all over the country when the railways reach it.”16 As always, plans for future development were leavened with promises of social uplift: “When railroads are built through these mountains civilization will reach the inhabitants, and the example of thrift and consequent profit will, no doubt, play its full part in inspiring a desire to indulge in habits of industry. Until then there is little chance of their improvement.”17 It was not supposed that railroads and “habits of industry” brought with them complications that could cause violence just as easily as prevent it.

  “Free American citizens who break up courts, and shoot Judges, and carve their political opponents, would not be likely to tolerate missionaries”

  Railroads and coal and timber companies could arrive only at a rate that was physically and economically feasible. Track laying from the Bluegrass to the Cumberland Plateau required tremendous expenditures for even the most well-heeled investment firms. To make matters worse, the KU’s Louisville lawyers were so ignorant of their state’s geography they confused “Breathitt” with “Bourbon,” a Bluegrass county, when giving instructions to land surveyors.18 As was the case in Breathitt
County’s first years of existence, capitalists’ mastery of the local economy depended upon their relative knowledge of the place itself.

  Before that could happen, Breathitt County’s ill repute attracted what Appalachian scholars consider industrialization’s scouts: outside evangelists. As of the late 1870s, eastern Kentucky became a favorite destination for missionaries who had given up on the uplift of the lowland South’s freed-people, and may well have been the original target of eastern Kentucky’s storied missions field.19 “You will be astonished to learn that there is not a single church building in Breathitt county . . . not even at the county seat, not even a schoolhouse in that town,” one missionary reported in 1883. “The true Sabbath is unknown, Sunday being a holiday spent in hunting, fishing, shooting-matches, logging, etc.”20 The eastern Kentucky mountains were “strongholds of cruelty and oppression” ripe to be “invaded” by Protestant enlightenment. Boasting of his recent conversions, one home missionary proclaimed that “people who had been kept under the power of darkness for a century past were brought to see the glorious dawn of a better day.”21 Four years later, it was still generally agreed that Breathitt County was “a type of all that was darkest and most God forsaken in the mountains of [Kentucky].”22

  But Breathitt County had never been so heathen as it was sometimes claimed. Since the very earliest days of white settlement, the Three Forks region had a willing spirit of Christian belief, even though it was hindered by a weak flesh of few churches. The county’s “native” Christian faith was the “Hardshell” or “Iron Jacket” Old Regulars, antinomian Baptists whose only access to corporate worship was the occasional camp meeting organized by an itinerant preacher.23 Antebellum worship services were freewheeling. Occasionally, so recalled George Washington Noble, children initiated their own impromptu prayer meetings without adult guidance.24 Charlatans were met with merciless skepticism. Once an unaffiliated faith healer named Jeremiah Lovelace the Prophet visited the county to publicly walk on water. He failed to perform his miracle only after some young “Doubting Thomases” removed the planks he had placed beneath the rushing river’s surface, causing Lovelace’s near drowning in front of an unsympathetic audience.25