Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  Of course many of these “wood denizens”—or their fathers—had also been on the opposite side of the Civil War from Barry South and his brothers. This may have mattered less if they were not still led by one Captain William Strong, “one of the most notorious men in the state” even as late as 1894. Strong maintained his hidden sylvan martial state on and around his farm in the southern part of the county. Although he was no longer a challenge to Breathitt’s post-Confederate Democracy, he still served as the county’s disfranchised and defiant, poor whites, and a small number of former slaves. In describing Strong, the South-sympathetic Hazel Green Herald trotted out all the specious feud associations it had always complained of when they appeared in newspapers from outside the mountains, including the ever-popular medieval analogy. “Strong is a sort of feudal hero,” it read, “exercising over his own neighbors a greater power than ever did landed baron in the days of night-errantry.” It was claimed (no doubt to raise the federal judge’s hackles) that Strong was also the guardian of an unknown number of whiskey stills, and he had supposedly planned to immolate a revenue agent a few years before. Perhaps a far greater slander, the Herald suggested that Strong was to blame for John Burnett’s death in 1878, even though it was public record that Strong had been the young judge’s main defender (this sort of fact reversal being among the tasks feud performed best).8 That Strong had fought to restore the Union years earlier was left unmentioned. From the Herald’s perspective, he was a villainous version of Robin Hood.

  Also unmentioned was Strong’s own claim to a large segment of the same land. In 1891 he and his nephew obtained a grant for 190 acres he claimed through “continuous, notorious and adverse possession.”9 Unlike the Souths, Strong had lived in the vicinity the entire time, depending upon its resources for livelihood and knowing it firsthand in ways simple contractual ownership could not provide.10 It is little wonder that, since the war, the bond between him and the landless remained, even if he was a “legitimate” landowner. As had always been the case in the Three Forks, landed farmers and their unpropertied neighbors had ways of life that were deceptively similar. Ownership was not the latter’s enemy so much as was the absentee ownership of speculators and corporations. His legal defense of his own adverse possession was also a defense of a threatened way of life.

  William Strong’s leadership among the “wood denizens” and his unrepentant Union partisanship were intertwined. But the old man’s mildly subversive existence in the 1890s was a pale reminder of his brazen past. His willingness to go the peaceful route to civil law courts suggested that he had renounced his past aggression, as did his recent decision to begin attending church with his wife. His twilight years would have remained so, were it not for the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in Breathitt County, a development Strong refused to ignore.

  As always, Bloody Breathitt’s mass violence was symptomatic not of isolation but rather of statewide trends, most notably the challenge to Democratic one-party rule. The forty-eight homicides in the summer of 1896 indicated not a concerted counterrevolutionary revolt but a tension roiling all over the South. Even though white supremacy was never truly threatened in Kentucky, growing Republican successes, such as William O. Bradley’s election as governor in 1895, were equated with “Negro domination” by proxy.11 A record-high turnout gave William McKinley a 142-vote advantage over William Jennings Bryan; a Republican presidential candidate carried the state for the first time in its history.12 The results triggered months of mob rule and “whitecapping,” a vigilante tendency that appeared in various corners of rural America during the Gilded Age. In December at least six men, three white and three black, died in Kentucky’s worst onemonth lynching pogrom since 1870. The spate of violence continued well into the winter, inspiring Governor Bradley’s demand for Kentucky’s first antilynching legislation in spring 1897.13 Even Democrats conceded that “inflammatory speeches” made “by the men who stumped the State for Mr. Bryan” were to blame.14

  After “Bad Tom” Smith’s 1895 execution there followed an agitation against whiskey and immorality in the Three Forks region. Unlike in most 1890s whitecapping situations, moonshiners were the targets rather than their constituency, often producing grassroots imitations of the growing temperance movement. In May 1896, fifty rifle-armed “women whitecappers” smashed a moonshiner’s still and barrels in neighboring Knott County.15 One Breathitt grand jury assembled in summer 1896 included five Baptist preachers whose indictments were “making the way of transgressors hard.”16 Bloody Breathitt, it seemed, was expunging its own sins through both legal and extralegal means.17

  While whitecappers emulated the Klan’s tactics in the 1890s, most did so without explicitly adopting the Klan identity (to many former Unionists and other white southern Republicans, the Reconstruction era’s Klan was politically unacceptable even if its tactics were deemed necessary to maintain local interpretations of orderliness).18 In southeastern Kentucky, however, the Klan name of old was still used, particularly by the “band of regulators patterned somewhat after the old Ku-Klux Klan,” made up mostly of newcomers “who had come into Breathitt since the advent of the railroad,” all the while maintaining the old organization’s implicit link with the Democratic Party.19 Even after men of “prominence” were arrested for ku-kluxing in Jackson, and even after citizens of both parties were outraged when a child was shot during one of their raids, the new “modern Kuklux” persisted.20

  In response, William Strong gathered his Red Strings. Just as in the 1870s, the Red Strings were branded “the lawless element,” purportedly counting “nearly all of the illicit whisky sellers and moonshiners of the mountain country” among their ranks.21 This was probably more an exaggeration than falsehood; the Red Strings had never been numerically large but it is likely that many of those that remained by Strong’s side were involved in “blockading.” Still, there was more at work in the winter of 1896–97 than just vigilantism and organized crime. The fact that both sides readopted the old Reconstruction-era names, Kuklux and Red String, showed that they saw their differences as part of a much older battle, a malevolent element of the two-party system that had survived since the 1870s. While the former represented a distinct memory (reawoken less than six years later when novelist Thomas Dixon published the first of his Klan-glorifying trilogy of novels), the more obscure Red Strings were largely forgotten, especially since most mountain Unionists had been long since cowed by the Lost Cause.22

  The nomenclatures were especially significant in an aberrantly Democratic, formerly pro-Confederate, mountain county with a seemingly exceptional history of violence. When the seventy-two-year-old Strong “denounced [the Kuklux] in unmeasured terms” in 1896, he was condemning the same element—if not the same individuals—he had fought since the Civil War.23

  In December 1896 the Breathitt Kuklux killed Thomas Barnett, the brother of a reputed moonshiner and Red String.24 The “copperhead” Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer, a paper that had often taken a sympathetic stance toward white southern conservatives, called Breathitt’s Kuklux “an organization principally of responsible men, who were weary of the continued deviltry throughout that section.”25 Vague reports of violence followed over the next few weeks until moonshiners killed a Democratic deputy federal marshal named William Byrd.26 Byrd had been popular in Jackson, and his friends had to be dissuaded from lynching the two suspects (one of whom died from measles while in custody) before their trial.27 The crime was never traced to Captain Strong, but the shooting death of a material witness in the surviving defendant’s trial, and then an attempted shooting and a store arson, were all blamed on the Red Strings.28

  William Strong next accused Edward Callahan of being the Kuklux ringleader.29 Callahan was the son or grandson of Strong’s former Union army compatriot, the alleged “secret rebel” Wilson Callahan who was killed during the Strong-Amis feud thirty years past. Unlike most of William Strong’s more relentless enemies, Callahan was not from Jackson or the area around the county s
eat. He lived in Crockettsville in southern Breathitt County, the hamlet that had served as a Union mustering ground in 1862. Callahan was one of the wealthiest men in that less developed area and the owner of the only mercantile outside of Jackson. He was chairman of the county’s Democratic central committee, an influential Democratic presence in a part of the county that Strong had otherwise controlled during the 1860s and 1870s.30 By naming Callahan, Strong was asserting the Kuklux’s union with Breathitt’s old political order, as opposed to it being made up entirely of new arrivals, as was reported. Callahan never denied the accusation but he apparently did not welcome the attention.

  In April 1897 Democratic county judge C. B. Day issued warrants against Callahan and Strong and arranged a public rapprochement in Jackson. Perhaps expecting a street confrontation as in 1878, Callahan and Strong each arrived with more than two dozen armed men. However, the two leaders peaceably appeared before Judge Day and assured him that they harbored no personal animosities. Day apparently did not admonish them for arriving with their small armies; rather than addressing their respective Kuklux and Red String leadership roles, and the larger significance these roles might have reflected, the judge accepted their assurances of peace and adjourned court. Their late conflict was considered an elevated personal grievance, and so an orchestrated handshake was assumed to be the end of the matter.31 Mass violence was averted, but without any acknowledgment of the larger problems that the continuing presence of the Red Strings and the Kuklux represented.

  Edward Callahan, purported Ku Klux Klan leader and sheriff. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)

  And neither side seemed to have a problem with this. The same week of Strong’s and Callahan’s appearance before Judge Day, the former’s claim to a large portion of the Thomas Franklin grant was upheld, assuring his family’s financial future.32 While he was in Jackson, a Lexington & Eastern Railroad employee invited him to the Grand Army of the Republic encampment that was to be held the second week of May, and Strong made plans to attend.33 If his “feudal” status had overshadowed his military service, recognition at the fraternal organization’s meeting would soon put it right. Strong told a Cincinnati journalist that “he was at peace with all the world, and hoped his declining years would be free from strife.”34

  On a Sunday morning less than three weeks later, Strong was found shot to death under his mule’s carcass on a roadside ten miles south of Jackson. His wounds and evidence found nearby suggested that he had been waylaid by at least three gunmen hidden by a jury-rigged “blind.” After he and his mount were shot from afar, according to later reports, members of the killing party approached his body and shot him several times more. Strong had grasped his pistol but had not managed to pull it from his holster before he expired. His young grandson, found screaming nearby, was unable to identify any of his killers.35

  In recognition of Strong’s controversial role in a nationally infamous county, newspapers all over Kentucky and beyond recorded the circumstances of his death. Wire copies from Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati papers announcing Strong’s death were reproduced from Boston to Sacramento. A negotiation between differing interpretations of William Strong’s colorful record ensued. “Capt. William Strong, the greatest mountain fighter in Eastern Kentucky, died with his boots on today, after successfully dodging bullets for twenty-five years,” the Lexington Herald announced the following day.36 It and other newspapers maintained his depiction as a “mountain fighter” or “feudist,” also detailing his Federal service (the Boston Globe opining that his “Confederate Neighbors Did Their Worst”) and its connections to his later travails.37 Strong’s expansive Louisville Courier-Journal obituary detailed his war record as a Unionist and Republican as well as his more recent opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and the ensuing trouble he faced against Edward Callahan—although with some confusions in chronology.

  It seems that shortly after the war, and after Capt Strong had gone to work to pay for his home, the Ku Klux began to terrorize the community. It was generally conceded that the clan was composed chiefly of young men who were not old enough to enter the army at the breaking out of hostilities between the States, but who had grown up with a deep-seated prejudice against the Unionists. Capt. Strong was considered a leader among the ex-Federal soldiers and a strong Republican. He was outspoken against the depredations of the Ku Klux, and is credited with having organized an anti-Ku Klux party, which did much toward putting down the clan.38

  The Courier-Journal omitted what the “strong Republican” had done in the 1870s. His audacious publicized actions, the attempted courthouse capture in 1874, and his defense of young Judge Burnett four years later were left unmentioned. The same newspaper that, in 1878, had branded Strong a “Loyal [Unionist] Whangdoodle” who exhibited the “Wonderful Effect of the Firing on Fort Sumter” poignantly lamented the passing of an aged “mountain fighter” who was “one of the most picturesque characters in Breathitt County.”39 Nor did the paper express outrage, surprise, or approval that an organization not heard from for years was active in eastern Kentucky; “Red String” was roundly treated as a sui generis Breathitt County peculiarity.40 The Strong-Amis feud of the 1860s was given lengthy attention in all of Strong’s obituaries, but it was treated as a strictly property-based conflict and suggested to be the original event that led to his death, even though Wiley Amis and the rest of his family were long since departed. Oddly, although it had reported his pact with Callahan weeks earlier, Wolfe County’s Hazel Green Herald did not report his death.41

  The Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune printed a description of Strong’s life and death that differed little from the Courier-Journal’s except for a slightly lengthier account of his military service. The Ohio paper told of Strong’s service in the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry and later the Three Forks Battalion, but skirted the fact that this service had involved terrorizing Breathitt County (by this time the myth of eastern Kentucky’s exclusively Unionist leanings was well entrenched). Strong was portrayed as quite popular among “the most powerful and influential citizens of Breathitt” regardless of his politics.42 The New York Times left out any mention of Strong’s political affiliations but repeated a prediction that “Strong’s friends . . . will never rest until his murder is avenged,” thereby casting his killing as part of an interpersonal feud rather than a factional conflict with origins in wartime politics.43

  When William Strong captured the Breathitt County courthouse and traded bullets with Confederate veterans on the streets of Jackson, these same newspapers had been nominally willing (as shown in the preceding chapter) to use him and his actions as grist for their own political ends. But since the 1870s, the widely circulated newspapers of cities far from the Three Forks region had abandoned their more obvious sectional and political biases and “claimed to be independent of party dictation.”44 To varying degrees they had abandoned party loyalty for human interest. Had Kentucky’s more partisan broadsheets, the dogged party organs printed in almost every county seat (like Wolfe County’s Herald), taken a greater interest, the full implications of his death might have been explored further. As it stood, “Union partisan” and “feudist” were not necessarily mutually exclusive, but the latter was the more satisfyingly colorful and closer to what readers were acclimated to hearing about the Kentucky mountains. And in 1897, no one in Kentucky or anywhere else wanted to acknowledge that there remained deadly political breaches left over from the Civil War.

  The more that was said of the captain’s past, the less was speculated of who was behind his murder. No one apparently called foul when Bradley announced a $300 reward for the capture of Strong’s murderer(s) two weeks after his death (the following July the governor offered $250 for the capture of Thomas Barnett’s killer).45 It was initially assumed that his death resulted from the Kuklux–Red String conflict of late, but suspicion also fell on John Aikman, an enemy of Strong’s since the war.46 Aikman implicated Callahan while other “leading men of the ‘Kuklux’ ” disavowed any kn
owledge of the slayers’ identities.47 Callahan had been in Frankfort at the time of the shooting and denied involvement, mentioning only that Strong “had many enemies in the country around Jackson.”48 Neither he nor Aikman were ever prosecuted.49

  Much of the publicity surrounding Captain Strong’s death acknowledged his bizarre political role in a place where the two-party system had remained somewhat militarized. It is also fairly remarkable that practically no journalists contextualized Strong’s death explicitly within the more recent “feud” violence in southeastern Kentucky. But Strong was to be remembered more as a “feudal hero” than a “strong Republican.” When the newspapers of Louisville, Cincinnati, and New York had first taken notice of Strong in the 1870s, the memory of the war was pervasive, but the idea of the primitive mountain South was in its infancy. Then, feud was only a word used to depoliticize white intraracial violence at a time when it was commonplace in the South. Since that time, the “feuds” of Rowan, Perry, Harlan, and other counties had since been established in the public consciousness as horizontal conflicts fueled by the barbarism and primordial vengeance of the mountain white, rather than as issues of local state power. The conflation of these trends with mountain Republicanism (compounded by the party’s diminished status in the South after the end of Reconstruction) further minimized the role of party politics in these fights. The ensuing attention of evangelists and their bestial portrayals of Kentucky mountaineers encouraged this communal interpretation. Although his own war making predated this reification of the “two Kentuckys,” Strong’s memory fell victim to this mass depoliticization, his most overtly political acts of violence forgotten and veiled by his personal and allegedly familial ones. He died exactly one day before the state Senate’s passage of the antilynching law that Governor William Bradley had demanded, but no one related this to Strong’s death or to the lynching of his Red Strings almost exactly thirteen years beforehand.50 These were deemed different kinds of violence.