Antebellum religious activity was not always so unorthodox. In the early 1840s wealthy farmer Simon Cockrell sponsored the ministry of “Raccoon John” Smith, an early preacher for the Disciples of Christ (also known as the Christian Church or, more generally, the “Campbellites” after the denomination’s founders, Thomas and Alexander Campbell). Cockrell’s son-in-law Jeremiah W. South and his family were associated with the Bluegrass-centered denomination, and its arrival paralleled their role in connecting Breathitt County with the other side of the two Kentuckys.26 But, lacking church buildings and permanent congregations, the Disciples were as limited to the occasional camp meeting as were the more decentralized Baptists. The 1878 Jackson courthouse riot made Breathitt County appear quite heathen, perhaps redeemable, perhaps not. In reaction to plans for New York missionary societies to send missions to Breathitt County (they reasoned that southern mountaineers’ prior knowledge of English made their souls more winnable than those of Africans or Indians), the Republican Cincinnati Gazette scoffed: “Free American citizens who break up courts, and shoot Judges, and carve their political opponents, would not be likely to tolerate missionaries.”27
Urban sneers could not deter the outpouring of interdenominational zeal flowing in all directions in the years following Reconstruction, especially for the least of these like Bloody Breathitt. While Breathitt County caught northern missionaries’ eyes, Bluegrass evangelists had the most lasting impact upon the county. The anti-Calvinist “Mountain Evangelist” George Owen Barnes visited shortly after Judge Burnett’s murder. Although he found one local boy to be “a young savage, as ignorant as a Hottentot,” he was impressed by his Breathitt congregation’s willingness to include Negroes in “a better looking crowd than the average of court crowds in the Bluegrass.”28 Barnes was enraptured when, at a camp meeting, the notorious John Aikman and other “desperate men . . . who had been at the centre of so many awful fights in Breathitt [came] to Jesus like little children.”29
Barnes was succeeded by John Jay Dickey, a Methodist minister who initially passed through in 1882 out of “curiosity to see the people of Breathitt County because of the feuds.”30 He eventually decided to preach there and expand the county’s meager public education. Finding no church buildings in Jackson, Dickey held services in the courthouse using a pipe organ Barnes had left behind.31 With help from the KU’s president and vice president, Dickey raised money for what was to become the Jackson Academy (later Lees College), Jackson’s first attempt at schooling beyond the primary level.32 In 1886 he augmented the new school with a two-thousand-volume county library, a rare civic treasure in the rural South, let alone the Kentucky mountains.33
Next came Presbyterian minister and physician Edward Guerrant in 1884. Guerrant had last visited the county two decades earlier as a Confederate lieutenant under Humphrey Marshall’s command, at which time he had first developed a jaundiced eye toward the “bitter, prejudiced and ignorant” highlanders.34 Parlaying old wartime acquaintances, he quickly established a congregation, and spent the next seven years attempting to wrest Breathitt County’s religious life away from Dickey (the latter, it seemed, was unaware of there being any competition).35 When Mormon elders arrived at century’s end, their impact on local worship habits was negligible.36
Aside from their denominational differences, the contrasts between Guerrant and Dickey were marked. With an unconcealed prejudice toward mountain society that originated during his Confederate service, Guerrant fit the mold of missionaries who conflated “civilizing” with Gospel spreading. Either was cure for the Kentucky mountains’ inherent proclivity toward deadly violence. His later writings display the common late nineteenth-century explanations of Appalachian otherness that combined racial determinism and spatial isolation. “The law is slow and lax in its administration, and so the people take it into their own hands,” he explained after decades in the mission field. “There is some excuse for this; but the crying cause back of all this violence and bloodshed is the want of religion.”37 So, too, did he propagate other familiar tropes of preindustrial mountain life. “They are today the purest stock of Scotch-Irish and Anglo-Saxon races on the continent. For hundreds of years they have lived isolated from the outside world, with no foreign intermixture. I do not remember seeing a foreigner in the Cumberland mountains. They are not a degenerate people. They are a brave, independent, high-spirited people, whose poverty and location have isolated them from the advantages of education and religion. They have been simply passed by in the march of progress in this great age, because they were out of the way.”38 Guerrant was convinced that many, if not most, Kentucky mountaineers were “as utterly ignorant of the way of salvation as the heathen in China,” and that his ministry was reaching previously untested territory.39 Some mountaineers took issue with his arrogant assumption of their “want of the Gospel” previous to his arrival.40 “We may be mighty ignorant back here,” one of Breathitt County’s “principal men” told another Presbyterian evangelist, “but we’re not such fools as to not know who Jesus Christ is.”41 A few years later a local judge presented Dickey with a similar complaint. “We need no missionaries from the Blue Grass or from any other place . . . we know enough if we would only practice it. We have religion enough if we would only use it.”42 George Barnes, who had personal gripes with the more Calvinist segments of Knox’s church, expressed annoyance at Presbyterians who claimed too much credit for “evangeliz[ing] dear old ‘Bloody Breathitt’ ” and predicted that haughtier preachers like Guerrant might turn tail should “some of [Barnes’s] darling ‘desperadoes’ temporarily resume their abandoned habits.”43
George O. Barnes, the “Mountain Evangelist,” was not the first preacher to preach the Gospel in Breathitt County. He was, however, apparently the first to arrive after the county became known as Bloody Breathitt. (Price, Without Scrip or Purse)
James J. Dickey, Methodist minister, educator, and newspaperman, tried harder than anyone to understand Bloody Breathitt. He spoke for other white Kentuckians when it came to distinguishing justifiable violence from chaos. (Courtesy of the Kentucky Wesleyan College Archives, Owensboro)
Dickey and Guerrant were both Bluegrass natives but, while his competitor portrayed Breathitt County as a far-flung exotic locale, Dickey expressed a kinship with most of the people he met—they were, after all, fellow white Kentuckians with plans to improve their state. Guerrant never seemed to have abandoned his image of a homogenous Anglo-Saxon mountain population, but Dickey recognized early on (just, in fact, after witnessing the lynching of Henderson Kilburn and Ben Strong) that his adopted community was led by a “better class” of white propertied men, and he fashioned his appeals for help in his enterprises in a way amenable to the Three Forks middle class and landed gentry.44 Dickey welcomed local preachers (mostly lay ministers) to his pulpit for ecumenical services. Though he had initially thought Breathitt Countians to be “primitive” before his arrival, he never seemed to have wanted to radically change the environment in which he preached (his connections with the Kentucky Union Railroad notwithstanding). He dedicated countless hours to interviewing locals for information on their pioneer ancestors. He did not consider his new parishioners any sort of pure ethnic “stock” (no purer than his own, anyway), and insisted that “environment and not heredity” (Dickey’s emphasis) was to blame for “the chasm between the people of the Blue Grass and the mountains.”45
Former Confederate officer Reverend Edward O. Guerrant, whose wartime impressions of Breathitt County and his later ministries there shaped public opinion of eastern Kentucky: “The crying cause back of all this violence and bloodshed is the want of religion.” (Courtesy of Aaron Akey)
Denominational tensions in Bloody Breathitt never came to blows, and locals figured that “better times [were] sure to come.”46 Bluegrass observers approved of the Gospel’s propagation, but they also appreciated the economic dividends of pacification. “The preacher in Breathitt saves ammunition to the State and saves money to the
taxpayers while I doubt if all the missionaries who ever went to China have saved a dollar to anybody or cheated the devil out of a single almond-eyed Washee Washee man,” wrote one Lexington commentator.47 A correspondent from the Democratic Hazel Green Herald (the newspaper most local to Breathitt until the 1890s) concurred: “The preaching of Barnes . . . Guerrant, Dickey and others, has saved the State more money than the courts and all the military companies that have been sent among us,” said one who thought the reforming influence of mountain evangelism should be rewarded with state revenue. “And a bad man changed from his evil ways by the gospel becomes an instrument of good instead of evil.”48 Further celebration was made of the conversions of “notable characters” like Aikman, Jerry Little, and one of William Strong’s sons—although the senior Strong was not yet persuaded; Little reportedly offered Guerrant personal protection from the belligerent old captain (“the gospel of peace” having no need of bodyguards, the preacher demurred).49 By 1886 it seemed that Breathitt had become one of “the quietest and most orderly counties in the Commonwealth.”50 As more credit was cast to the Gospel’s civilizing effects and the promise of peace and railroads, fewer questions were asked as to what conflicts had made Breathitt bloody in the first place.
The Reverend Dickey shepherded church growth and public education and capped it off with another sort of civic engagement. In 1891 he leased the two-year old Jackson Hustler, Breathitt’s first newspaper, founded by “a moral, enterprising young Kentuckian . . . whose father [had] vast landed interests” in the county.51 Though he disliked the name “Hustler,” it became his pulpit for preaching a prosperity gospel based upon prognostications of future wealth, owing to the good graces of “wealth and enterprise” that were beginning to take notice of the region’s cannel coal. Like other boosters, Dickey suggested that his adopted home had only recently been “discovered”—even by its own inhabitants.
Eastern Kentucky lay for almost one hundred years after the organization of the State a veritable terra incognita. Her mines of wealth and her illimitable forests were as completely unknown to the world as were the gold and silver of the Sierras and Rockies to the Apaches and Arapahoes. The old hunters roamed over these mountains after the wild game just as the red man did over Pike’s Peak and the Black Hills, and equally as ignorant of the great possibilities around and beneath him. Wealth and enterprise have eyes that see. As soon as the commercial world learned of our great resources, experts were dispatched in haste to see if there was any truth in the reports that they had heard, and in every case the answer was, “the half has not been told.”
In no part of the United States is there such promise to the capitalist as this region to-day offers. Fortunes have been made and the development has only begun. The increase is biblical, “some thirty, some sixty and some a hundred fold.”
The capitalists are following the money gods to these mountain fastnesses and their devotion to this cause will be rewarded with thrones and kingdoms and scepters and crowns.52
This regalia—driven by Christianity, lucre, or both (like many Americans, Dickey saw little distance between the God of Abraham he professed and the “money gods” he prophesied)—would permanently alter the environmental factors that had created Bloody Breathitt. When he went to establish a new mission in London, Kentucky, in 1895, Dickey left behind a county that had become more interconnected with the urban centers of the Bluegrass while still retaining its internal political autonomy—prototypically Kentuckian.53
Still, “the civilizing and Christianizing effects of material improvement and development” did not heal the county’s reputation, even as feud violence appeared in less remote places like northeastern Kentucky’s Rowan County.54 When news of multiple killings in Rowan’s county seat reached the press, immediate reaction was to compare it to the recent “bloody internecine feuds of Breathitt.”55 In fact, Breathitt’s new national attention as the center of the home-missions field may well have increased its notoriety as an inherently vicious place. Even as Dickey (who saw Breathitt’s recent improvement as a positive example for other trouble spots like Rowan) and Guerrant built successful ministries, others considered Breathitt County too dangerous for even the most intrepid.56 One American Missionary Association member warned, “Last fall a friend of ours had occasion to ride through the country; he was assured by the best citizens that it was not safe for a man to be on the [Jackson] streets after dark” (an outrageous circumstance in a community with “no foreign-born residents”).57 The Hazel Green Herald often sprang to its neighbor’s defense, recognizing the subjectivity of “feud” as a descriptor of crime and often pointing out the contemporary rise in urban crime.58 “For some years it has been, it seems, the mission of some of the Louisville daily papers to magnify any murder committed in one of the mountain counties, into a ‘bloody faction or family feud’ and their readers are treated to a most sensational account of an affair, but for its location, would only have been given as an ordinary bit of news. The ordinary killings in Louisville . . . if committed in any of the mountain counties would be heralded by the Louisville papers as ‘mountain lawlessness.’ ”59 Citing the recent construction of “two handsome church edifices and an elegant high school building” in 1885, the Herald declared, “Breathitt county is awakening to the fact that she does not deserve the malignant epithets which in the past have so frequently been bandied around and boosted by the press at large.”60 The paper faintly praised an 1886 political rally said to have numbered between six hundred and eight hundred men, where “everything passed off in the most perfect order.”61 Even after an Election Day stabbing a week later, the Herald insisted that “the fighting [was] not so bad as reported. Bloody Breathitt is not so bad, after all, when she gets justice.”62 When the courthouse burned to the ground two months after that, a Breathitt County correspondent did not draw the intuitive correlations with the 1873 courthouse burning but blandly reasoned that the fire had settled the long-debated question over building a new one.63 Even in Bloody Breathitt fights could be isolated events, crimes could be punished, and accidents could happen.
“The Republican vote of Kentucky is made up very largely, if not almost entirely, of negroes and mountaineers”
If Breathitt County was improving itself under the tutelage of the Reverend Dickey and others like him, it was not recovering only from the county’s local history. It was also rising above traits associated with the Kentucky mountains en masse. By 1880 Americans were coming to believe that “the eastern section of Kentucky [was] almost as foreign to the rest of the State as is Siberia to St. Petersburg.”64 A large part of this development came from popular depictions of upland white southerners that local-color writers were using to great effect in the last years of Reconstruction and afterward.65 Not long after, the idea of the South’s male “white savage,” be he lowland or upland, became an increasingly useful device for convincing northern audiences that white-on-black interracial violence was “a fact of social life, almost a force of nature . . . cultural inheritance so deeply ingrained that it might as well be biologically rooted.”66 And there was also a growing nationwide disdain toward rural America North, South, East, or West; in the 1880s hillbilly was only one of many newly popular scornful names—hayseed, rube, hick—for the yeomanry.67 The othering of eastern Kentucky was integral to Democrats’ marginalizing of the state’s Republican minority—a rhetorical process that “not only legitimized the state’s Confederate identity but made it look like the preferable, more civilized one.”68 Despite electoral evidence to the contrary, eastern Kentucky was assumed to be a one-party section, the better to fence it off from the South’s white mainstream (where white-on-black interracial violence was not necessarily defended but, in the “New Departure” mind, understandable).69
This was more exaggeration than outright falsehood. Kentucky mountaineers were just as attracted to the Republican Party as were upland southerners in other states.70 Voting the same ticket as black southerners made them the target o
f Democratic derision just as in other southern states, although the charge was levied in slightly modified language. “The Republican vote of Kentucky is made up very largely, if not almost entirely, of negroes and mountaineers,” wrote one Democrat in 1889. “As a Union soldier I was fond of the old chestnut about the mountains being cradles of liberty, because our volunteers in Kentucky were mostly recruited from these cradles. It is current belief that the mountains of Kentucky are cradles of illiteracy and lawlessness, and that deadly feuds are rife in these Republican strongholds.”71 For the novelist John Fox Jr., mountain Republicanism encapsulated eastern Kentucky’s paradoxical domesticity and strangeness, and one-party rule was a theme common to most of his novels about eastern Kentucky.72 By 1895 the conflation of Lincoln’s party with mountain isolation and poverty was so complete a western Kentucky editor (who should have known better) counted unfalteringly Democratic Breathitt County among “four Republican pauper counties.”73 Democrats still had use for the exaggeration over the course of the following decade, such as when Senator Joseph Blackburn declared that “lawlessness in Kentucky is confined to the mountains,” surmising (without elaboration) that “many years ago all the escaped convicts from the adjoining States fled into the mountains of Kentucky, and their descendants are now raising the devil.”74
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