Cartoon depiction of a mountain Republican occupying Frankfort in January 1900. The cartoon was published just days before William Goebel was fatally shot. Tucked into the mountaineer’s gun belt is a carte blanche pardon from Republican governor-elect William Taylor. (Louisville Courier-Journal, January 27, 1900)
On the morning of January 30 a hidden rifleman shot Goebel as he and two Democratic friends walked by the statehouse.42 He was carried back to his hotel as premature rumors of his death spread, and armed men prevented the election committee from entering the capitol. Without knowing Goebel’s condition, the committee announced a party-line decision in his favor without publicizing the exact numbers of the returns. Governor Taylor took this as an act of sedition and dismissed the General Assembly with instructions to reassemble in Laurel County. Only the Republican legislators complied, while the others assembled in the hotel where Goebel lay dying and ratified the election committee’s decision.43 While being fed oysters and succumbing to a fatal case of pneumonia, Goebel twice took the oath of office from two friendly judges.44 Even as Taylor presided over a rump General Assembly in the eleventh district, Democrats declared his recumbent opponent the state’s thirty-fourth governor.
Goebel’s death three days later did not settle matters. Democrats had become incensed with the possibility that Taylor had directed Goebel’s assassination through the “ignorant and uncouth” troop of “Republican mountaineers.”45 One Kentucky Democrat combined his suspicion with the preexistent eastern Kentucky feud lore.
The outside world does not know the Kentucky mountaineers, one of whom shot Goebel. They differ from any other mountaineers on earth. They don’t know how to do like other beings. If you give one the lie he doesn’t smack your face like you or I might do, but draws and shoots. They have been raised that way and know no other law. Now, these men are attracted to Frankfort. They could not see the merits of the case, if there were any. All they could see was that one man was keeping up the excitement.
They regarded Goebel merely as a man in their way, and, as they have always done, they rid their path of him. There was no fanatical sentiment or even hatred, as with Booth when he shot Lincoln. They merely said he is in our way; he must get out of it.46
Apparently no one, not even Republicans, publicly entertained the possibility that Goebel may have been laid low by a fellow Democrat.47 After sixteen initial indictments, Republican secretary of state Caleb Powers and two other mountain Republicans were convicted of his murder.48 A jury “made up entirely of Democrats” sentenced Powers to life imprisonment, but years of politically charged trials and appeals eventually led to pardons for all three men (all but one by the state’s next Republican governor, Augustus Willson).49 Two years after his release, the eleventh district voted Powers into Congress.50
Would-be governor Taylor fled to Indiana, where the Republican governor gave him a lifetime asylum (Taylor established a law practice in Indianapolis and never returned to Kentucky).51 After a series of court battles (the U.S. Supreme Court demurred from hearing the case), Goebel’s running mate J. C. W. Beckham ended up governor.52 Perhaps seeing the wages of transgression in Goebel’s death, Beckham avoided his mentor’s controversial reforms and made sure the election law was repealed during a special legislative session in the late summer of 1900. He also became a firm friend of the L&N.53
Kentucky’s 1899 gubernatorial election and the litany of ensuing events created an unparalleled crisis of legitimacy, almost “plunging a state into civil war.”54 His death, however, healed a chronic fracture that had been expanding in the Kentucky Democracy since the 1880s. Even Democrats who had once hated Goebel frequently conjured up the “martyr to [the party’s] cause,” and his memory became “the bloody shirt of Kentucky politics” for nearly a decade.55 The assassination’s aftermath provided Democrats with yet another impetus to conjure feud in eastern Kentucky. Sedate Laurel County became “the center of the so-called feud district,” while the men who came to Frankfort became “regular mountain feudists.”56 The supposed gunman in the Goebel killing, Jim Howard, was said to have agreed to act as sniper in exchange for a pardon for a previous murder charge (this came to light after the sum of all Democrat-imagined fiends, a mulatto “feudist” named “Tallow Dick” Combs, briefly fell under suspicion as the possible triggerman).57 Even the Hazel Green Herald, a mountain paper that had good reason not to sully its own section, held to the party line, while defenses of the mountains were few and far between among timid lowland Republicans.58 Whereas once a “feudist” was someone who fought for apolitical revenge against an equal, intimate enemy, now he was a raw brute whose violence could be directed by higher powers. Goebel’s death, compounded with eastern Kentucky’s wars and rumors of wars, allowed Democrats to make feud mean whatever they wanted it to mean.59 In the process, all of eastern Kentucky was pilloried as never before.
The Goebel affair and the supposed dangers posed by Kentucky mountaineers were entwined for years, providing a means for Kentuckians and other Americans to reconcile (or confuse) political and communal uses of violence and draw boundaries between the two Kentuckys. Novelist John Fox Jr. (for whom the Kentucky mountain feud was a recurrent leitmotif) made a fictionalized retelling of the Goebel affair, and its effects on a fanciful family feud, the subject of The Heart of the Hills (1912). His use of feud was different than that of the Democratic press in 1900, as were his purposes. Rather than claiming that Goebel had died due to the inherent “feudal” tendencies of his slayer, Fox devised a plot in which two families who had fought each other for untold generations finally united in opposition to “the autocrat” in Frankfort; the feud was prepolitical, and political involvement brought its end. After most of his stories had patronized eastern Kentucky for its violence and resistance to change, Fox meant for The Heart of the Hills to be a redeeming portrayal.60 However, like most of his previous writing, it upheld the supposed political chasm between the two Kentuckys, a purely Republican mountain region as the exception to white Democratic Kentucky’s rule. It changed few minds and, for the most part, reaffirmed the otherness of the “mountain white.”
What he omitted was the role mountain Democrats had played in Goebel’s candidacy. Judge David Redwine’s name would always be attached to Goebel’s rise to power, but his and James Hargis’s origins as mountaineers was discussed with decreasing frequency for the next few years until Bloody Breathitt yet again gained national attention. The notion of “feud” worked better if eastern Kentucky’s two-party reality was eclipsed by “mountain feudists, cowardly assassination and things like that, which have become so closely associated with Republican government in Kentucky.”61 Exceptions to that hard-and-fast rule were rarely discussed and, as subsequent events would show, were suppressed when Kentucky Democrats saw fit.
“Breathitt’s debut into political circles in her long robes of state”
James Hargis’s arch role in Kentucky politics began only after his mastery of his home county and his collaboration in building a quintessential Gilded Age courthouse ring. A few months after his nemesis William Strong’s 1897 death, Edward Callahan, chairman of the county’s Democratic Party, came to odds with Hargis over selection of nominees for county school superintendent (a position with immense power over the allotment of local spoils). After Callahan’s favorite seemed to win the initial canvass by six votes, Hargis’s man somehow won the party committee’s endorsement. Still comfortable in using force to meet his ends (even after Breathitt’s Ku Klux had apparently dissolved), Callahan led an armed party into the courthouse, captured the ballot box, and recanvassed the returns, not surprisingly finding in his own candidate’s favor. Hargis knew that he was in no position to confront Callahan directly, so he contacted the chairman of the state party organization, who promptly recognized Hargis as the new county party chairman.62 Callahan was removed as chairman (though he was restored to the position within a year).63 Hargis had led a coup by responding to violence with an appeal to higher authorities, a
clear indication that bureaucratic modernity was surmounting Breathitt County’s history of “rifle rule.”64
Callahan was a product of the Three Forks region’s settler stock, related by blood or marriage to many of the “first families.” James Hargis was a great-nephew of John Hargis, one of the Bluegrass Democrats who had helped engineer the county’s creation in 1839 (his father had briefly served as a state senator). His first cousin was a former state appeals judge, one of the state’s most influential career politicians.65 To turn-of-the-century local-color writers, the growing intraparty dispute between the Hargis and Callahan factions could have been interpreted as the flowering of conflict between two of Breathitt County’s oldest “clans.” But this was not to be the case. Callahan and Hargis (along with circuit court judge David B. Redwine) soon entered into a political partnership based upon their shared interests as merchants (Hargis in Jackson, Callahan in Crockettsville) and a desire to maintain Democratic supremacy.66 Their respective relationships to Breathitt County and its history were key to their alliance’s success. “Hargis still sat high in the councils of his party, while Callahan,” wrote a Cincinnati newspaperman a generation after the pair’s salad years, “always the lesser light, kept his fingers gripped upon county affairs.”67
As a former Klan chief, Callahan bridged the gap between postwar mass violence and legitimate political action. Hargis and Callahan had been young children during the Civil War, and they had little interest in exhuming the county’s old mayhem. With a Republican in the governor’s mansion, their mostly Democratic (the gold standard debate had swelled Breathitt’s Republican ranks slightly, as had in-migration from other mountain counties) home county’s political stock was high in the last five years of the nineteenth century.68 In 1895 Republicans had made a preelection boast that Breathitt would be theirs, but it had not come to pass.69 In 1899 Hargis became the first Breathitt County resident appointed to his party’s state central committee, a position that gave him patronage power over his entire congressional district and a voice in the party’s highest echelons.70 The Hargis-Callahan partnership (with Redwine as a fellow traveler) was recalled as “Breathitt’s debut into political circles in her long robes of state.”71
Camera-shy James Hargis posed for few photographs, and the reading public outside of Breathitt County had to rely on artists’ renderings to know what the mysterious county judge looked like. (Courtesy of the Breathitt County Museum)
The partnership also coincided with William Goebel’s rise, and they saw to it that Breathitt County supported him.72 The Goebel platform potentially benefited them economically and politically. James Hargis had only one other mercantile competitor in Jackson, while Callahan’s store in Crockettsville, far from the closest railroad tracks, was the only store for miles.73 Both men had numerous coal and timber investments but, next to the behemoth holding companies and corporations of the day, they were still small businessmen. Like most southern merchants they favored Goebel’s brand of trust busting.74 The relatively small Lexington & Eastern Railroad had made Jackson a boomtown, and Goebel’s attacks upon the much larger L&N probably appealed to Hargis and Callahan (and very possibly the vast majority of Breathitt County voters as well), since any reduction or regulation of the larger railroad kept freight rates amenable to local gentry. Any enemy of the L&N octopus was obliged to be an ally to Breathitt County’s men of means; even a Democrat accused of turning his party over to “Anarchists, Socialists and Populiste” could support the local status quo.75
However, the Goebel election law may have been their primary enticement. The law established a state board of election commissioners as well as corresponding boards in each county. With a Democratic majority in the General Assembly and the consequent Democratic control over the majority of county boards, Callahan and Hargis could conceivably maintain their party’s power within Breathitt County indefinitely, perhaps without continuing to make their county notorious for gunshots. Their connections to William Goebel and the methods that had been used to win the county for him dictated that a perpetual air of controversy would follow them both.
A mass meeting in the summer of 1899 produced a “a healthy rebuke to McKinleyism, Hannaism [a reference to William McKinley’s campaign manager Mark Hanna], and the Phillipineism” in the next year’s presidential race as well as a supposedly unanimous show of support for Goebel, but the entrance of “fair election Democrat” John Y. Brown represented a more conservative option, especially for Breathitt County’s Confederate veterans.76 “Old line Democrat” county judge J. Wise Hagins endorsed Brown and accused Hargis and Callahan of fraud at every opportunity after the Music Hall Convention.77 It was the first gubernatorial election in which mountain Democratic votes could not be disregarded; Goebel’s majority in the most famously Democratic mountain county was deemed crucial.78
Repeating a smaller version of his gambit from two years earlier, Callahan hired armed men to guard the most heavily Republican precinct’s ballot box and repel Republican election inspectors during the November polling. An armed gang of “Goebel desperadoes” then interrupted the final count, firing pistols in the air, driving all the Republicans from the courthouse and then procuring the ballot box. Even in precincts where Republican inspectors were allowed to remain, all of the accompanying Democrats favored Goebel, with none present for Brown (who, in such a heavily Democratic county, may well have been the greater threat to Goebel). According to the state Republican campaign chairman’s accusations, 400 Breathitt ballots were counterfeit. With “bulldozing never seen in Breathitt County before,” Goebel won the county with 756 votes.79
Jackson, Kentucky, circa 1903, where calculated political violence hid beneath the guise of boomtown raucousness (as well as the town’s “feudal” history). (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)
“Every Republican knows that Redwine is the Circuit Judge and that the Sheriff is a Goebel man,” Jackson’s Republican election commissioner lamented while visiting Lexington a week after the election. “If a Republican resisted any sort of an attack he would be punished to the full limit of the law—if he were killed his murderer would be acquitted. What are you going to do about it?”80 “The Republicans are at the mercy of the Breathitt county Goebel men and they are even afraid to protest,” the New York Sun reported, “as it would mean in many instances certain death.”81 After the election, the only other counties that reported similarly “severe” tactics to secure the Goebel vote were those with large cities where ward organizations made fraud more common and expected.82 With the “strong Republican” William Strong dead for nearly three years, there was no one to match to the Democrats’ extralegal electioneering. Whatever embarrassment Breathitt County’s violence might have caused Bluegrass Democrats was outweighed by the advantage of having a Democratic bastion in the mountains that remained enigmatic (at least one out-of-state editor refused to believe mountain Democrats even existed and refuted Republican claims of wrongdoing thus).83 Governors were still required to await the request of a circuit judge for the militia to be summoned; even if Governor Bradley saw fit to do so, Judge Redwine was hardly inclined to make the petition, since the “bulldozing” benefited his gubernatorial endorsee. Breathitt County, long known for its singular record of violence, had become simply another piece of evidence for the statewide crisis of legitimacy, the most overtly forceful example of “the Goebel methods.”84 As always, Bloody Breathitt was left to its own devices.
“There is no politics in the law”
Once Democrats reunited around Goebel’s martyrdom, there was no demand for indictment, except in places where the “Goebel methods” had the most immediate local effects. In 1901 Hargis and Callahan ran for county judge and sheriff respectively to cement the hold on Breathitt County’s government that they had already established as party heads. It was too much for many of their party mates. As popular as he was with many local Democrats, Callahan had a difficult time escaping his past “feudist” reputation, and his candidacy brought with
it controversies other than his and Hargis’s Goebel connections. Dissident Democrats imitated the recent anti-Democrat southern strategy, forming a fusion with Republicans.85
The fusion was organized by Jackson’s Democratic town marshal Jim Cockrell and attorney James Buchanan Marcum, one of the election inspectors harassed by the “Hargis-Callahan Goebellites” in 1899.86 Despite his namesake, Marcum was a rising star among Kentucky Republicans, an affiliation inherited from his Three Forks Battalion veteran father Edward, and Edward’s brother-in-law-in-arms Captain William Strong. During the 1890s James Marcum made an unsuccessful run for Congress (and later appellate judge) while representing his controversial uncle in court throughout as the older man asserted his legal possession over thousands of timbered acres.87 Though cut from the same political cloth as his uncle, Marcum was not a crusading “war element” Republican.88 A U.S. commissioner (appointed by Benjamin Harrison), university trustee, and counsel for the L&E, he had more in common with Republicans who championed the gold standard and the “McKinley Tariff,” while addressing the “Negro Question” as seldom as possible.89 Rather than crouching in a fortified woodland hermitage with squatters and former slaves, he lived in a white clapboard house in Jackson and had a Democratic law partner, following Atlanta editor Henry Grady’s entreaty to “put business in place of politics.”90
Whatever his kinship or professional affiliations, no one could associate thoroughly modern Marcum with his uncle’s so-called feudal origins in “night-errantry.”91 The closest Marcum came to being involved with “feudists” was acting as counsel for Joseph Eversole’s faction after the French-Eversole feud (he later represented Bad Tom Smith, Fulton French’s primary gunman, in his murder trial) as well as his uncle’s wartime nemesis, John Aikman.92 He did not harbor ancient hatreds, but he was angered by his recent opponents’ dearth of fair play. Democrats had carried Marcum’s home county for most of his life, but their need for violence was an exposed weakness. Moreover, his challenge to the Hargis courthouse constituted a fight between one of Kentucky’s most influential Republicans against one of its most powerful Democrats—this in a county that, a few years earlier, had been a sparsely populated backwater ignored for everything except its nationally known proclivity for violence.
Bloody Breathitt Page 20
