Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  Unlike his uncle William Strong, James Buchanan Marcum challenged his county’s Democratic ringleaders through peaceful means. His 1903 assassination became Bloody Breathitt’s most infamous killing. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)

  With or without Marcum’s credentials, the fusionist campaign was an abortive effort from the beginning. Repudiations of the Democratic Party could not work, and denouncement of the local party leaders could do only so much. Former county judge Wise Hagins released an anti-Hargis circular preposterously accusing him of supporting Republican candidates since the 1880s, jibes Hargis easily dismissed by invoking Goebel and William Jennings Bryan.93 In rebuttal, Hargis accused Hagins of approving the Goebel assassination, implying not only bad moral character but, more important, disloyalty (earning Hagins comparisons to Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold in the Hargis-friendly Hazel Green Herald).94 Hargis then retained Marcum’s law partner, O. H. Pollard.95 In 1901’s fall elections, the fusionists captured every local office except for county attorney and county judge. Hargis, the “alleged chief conspirator,” retained his bench, but only after weathering the first electoral “just rebuke” against Breathitt Democrats in decades.96

  Callahan’s victory was slightly less sure. After Callahan won the office by a mere sixteen votes, his opponent contested the outcome, prompting Judge Redwine to declare the election void.97 Once in office, Judge James Hargis created an uproar by appointing Callahan acting sheriff until a new election could be held. Callahan’s right to the office was challenged in the Kentucky State Court of Appeals in 1903 (which sustained Hargis’s and Redwine’s decisions). By then, Callahan had been serving as sheriff for nearly two years, hiring his and Hargis’s choice of deputies and amassing influence.98 Even during Jeremiah South’s lifetime, so much power had not been contained in so few hands in Breathitt County.

  Sometime in early 1902, a verbal altercation in Marcum and Pollard’s law office led to drawn pistols between them, Hargis, and Callahan. Shooting was avoided, but the police judge (an unstated fusionist supporter) issued a warrant for all four of them. Hargis refused to appear in police court and instead surrendered to a county magistrate he trusted. To allay future confrontations, Marcum moved the case be dismissed, but not before Jim Cockrell and his brother Tom (who was also his deputy) attempted to serve Hargis warrants in the courthouse, leading to another unholstering.99 Within judge’s chamber walls and law offices, the mutual threat of violence was sufficient to maintain self-restraint and an uneasy stalemate, albeit a stalemate that did not stifle Hargis’s and Callahan’s power. A few weeks later Tom Cockrell confronted Hargis’s younger brother Ben at a whiskey wholesaler’s. The two young men initiated a roomwide gunfight, and each was seriously injured. Cockrell recovered under the care of his “guardian” (the Cockrells were both in their twenties and orphans), Dr. Braxton D. Cox. Ben Hargis died in Judge Hargis’s home a day later.100

  Ben Hargis’s death was nothing unusual in its setting: an intensely masculine, alcohol-drenched environment replete with concealed weapons.101 Jackson, a small county seat turned coal and timber boomtown, was undergoing a rapid change in its population and character, as were so many other industrializing towns, and it was well acknowledged that this was a new sort of exogenous violence, even in a county with a nasty past. “These killings recall some old-time days when Breathitt was foremost as a bloody ground; there is a difference between those days and the present,” a Jackson resident wrote to the Hazel Green Herald. “Feuds between factions, which were long and almost unending, were the causes of so many killings then, but recently there were no feuds, but owing to the resulting influence of so many ‘blind tigers’ existing in this county. This does not speak for the general morality of the county, nor for the will of the people, but owing to the lack of execution of the law, such is being carried on.”102 Even if current violence could not be ignored, there was still a need to parse past from present. What the outside world once considered primitively quaint and picturesque was becoming a danger to prosperity and civic morality.103 Ben Hargis’s end was an outcome of social ills common to intemperate communities all over the United States.

  James Hargis saw it differently or, at least, he wanted the world to believe he did. Utilizing Breathitt County’s past history, real and imagined, Judge Hargis pasted together a number of incidents from recent history with local genealogy to portray his brother’s death as part of an ongoing, years-old feud. In 1895 his other brother, John Hargis, had tried to intimidate a black voter on Election Day. Jerry Cardwell, the Republican candidate for Jackson town marshal, came to the voter’s defense and then earned John Hargis’s further hatred by winning the election.104 The two met again the following year aboard an L&E passenger car en route to Jackson when Cardwell was working as the railroad’s “special detective” (probably a temporary title inspired by the L&E’s unease over statewide bloodletting during the McKinley-Bryan presidential race). Under unclear circumstances, Cardwell confronted the unruly Hargis and the men exchanged gunfire, leaving Hargis fatally wounded.105 Cardwell was convicted of manslaughter, only to be pardoned by Governor William Bradley (since the first melee happened during the election in which the Republican Bradley was elected, this would have infuriated the surviving Hargises all the more).106

  Like many other white Kentuckians, James Hargis probably felt victimized by the Republican Party. Cardwell’s shooting of John Hargis had no connection to later events, other than his kinship to men Judge Hargis considered enemies by 1902—and even that connection was circuitous. Jerry Cardwell’s brother was the police judge Hargis had refused to appear before, while Dr. Braxton Cox was married to Cardwell’s sister. Jerry Cardwell himself had not been involved in the ongoing post-Goebel commotion but that did not matter since feuds hid individuals behind their “clans.” Feuds had been associated with Bloody Breathitt since James Hargis’s youth, and he knew how to use the concept to his own ends; if he retaliated, or if his political enemies began to fall mysteriously, Hargis could hide behind his own surname and his loss of two brothers, claiming to be embattled. The declaration of a new feud in Bloody Breathitt would not be met with much skepticism. And it contributed to factual errors in the papers, including moving John Hargis’s death from 1896 to 1902 so that it fit better into his brother’s feud narrative.107 For years, Bloody Breathitt had had feud imposed upon it from the outside world. Now, at least one Breathitt native had found a way to use this contrived narrative to his advantage. By establishing that his family was besieged, he justified any future violence directed at his enemies as retribution, while simultaneously obscuring its political import. Even if Judge Hargis was implicated, an indictment would be unlikely (let alone a conviction), and his motives would remain unclear—in a time and place where “disentangling murder from assassination” was difficult.108 Even though he might be ridiculed as a “feudist,” Hargis would still retain power.

  Braxton Cox’s shooting death the following April seemed to verify this feud’s existence.109 After a late-night telephoned request for a house call turned out to be a false alarm, Cox was walking home on Jackson’s main thoroughfare when he was riddled with buckshot.110 No witnesses ever came forward, but it was rumored that the fatal blast had come from either the courthouse or Judge Hargis’s livery stables. Cox’s eighty-year-old mother-in-law, secure in her age and sex, was the only Jackson resident willing to publicly accuse Judge Hargis.111 Apparently, no one ever expressed suspicion that the initial telephone caller was a conspirator.

  The midnight shooting death of Dr. Braxton Cox initiated a new era of violent death in Jackson, one that reflected Breathitt County’s recent changes. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)

  James Cockrell’s murder that July attracted far more attention.112 This was a midday shooting, and it was widely acknowledged that the rifle shots had come from a second-story courthouse window (the schematic similarities to William Goebel’s killing were palpable). Only days before, he had exchanged gunfire with Curtis Jett, one of Edw
ard Callahan’s deputies, in a hotel dining room, and he was preparing to leave Jackson to avoid more fights.113 Cockrell was trundled onto an L&E railroad car and transported to a Lexington hospital, as notice of his imminent arrival was telegraphed ahead.114 Before he expired from five bullet wounds the next day, the press had already placed his impending death within a feud narrative that swapped facts for plot coherence. One paper announced the young town marshal was the latest “Breathitt County feuds” casualty, and faintly praised him as “superior in every way to Thomas Cockrell, his brother” (whose killing of Ben Hargis was implicitly blamed for beginning the chain of events that had led to the older Cockrell’s imminent demise). An evening edition interchangeably called Ben Hargis Judge James Hargis’s son and brother, foreshadowing future media errors.115 The fact that Ben Hargis was killed via reciprocal-fire manslaughter, while Cox’s and Cockrell’s deaths were obviously premeditated assassination-style first-degree murders, was not addressed. Once the series of deaths was branded (no later than July 1902) the “Hargis and Cockrell feud,” it was far less likely that such nuances would be acknowledged.116 Judge Hargis’s insistence had done its work.

  As circumstantial evidence built against James Hargis and Edward Callahan, their motive(s) became a subject of statewide speculation. Initially, the revenge motif seemed more likely than calculated elimination of political opponents, especially in light of the armed altercation between a Cockrell and a Hargis that had preceded another Cockrell’s murder. The Republican Lexington Leader, the paper that had produced a stirring account of Cockrell’s death the day before, was strangely unaware of Cockrell’s role in the fusionist campaign. “One of the strangest features in connection with the feud is that while it originated in a political contest, and was increased by the killing of Ben Hargis by Tom Cockrell, both factions are Democrats, so that whatever political feeling exists in the feud it is all on one side and in one party.”117 Instead, it was suggested that James Cockrell had been disposed of so that his brother, awaiting trial for murder in another county, would be utterly defenseless. While the Cockrells had been successful in securing a change of venue, Governor J. C. W. Beckham had assigned Judge Hargis’s Bluegrass cousin and fellow Democratic State Committee member, Thomas Hargis, as special judge.118 Thomas Cockrell, the Leader predicted, was “to be left to the tender mercies of his enemies who are now said to be in control of the legal machinery of the county.” As in past interpretations of feud violence in eastern Kentucky, Cockrell’s death was headlined as only “Another Dark Chapter Added to Bloody Breathitt’s Terrible Record That Savors of Middle Age Barbarism.”119

  Wolfe County’s Democratic Hazel Green Herald reported its neighbor’s tribulations with a typical combination of local defensiveness and regional solidarity, but with Breathitt County held at arm’s length. During the weeks leading up to Thomas Cockrell’s trial, it criticized other papers’ factual errors in “the Hargis-Cockrell feud in Breathitt.”120 Shortly after James Cockrell was killed, the paper criticized the Leader’s (and other “outsiders’ ”) sudden interest in Jackson’s internal affairs. Breathitt County’s citizens were having an endogenous “hell of their own,” and “people outside the immediate trouble do not know the cause of any of the parties involved, save as retailed to them, and are apt, therefore, to misjudge.” Without explicitly announcing a feud, the Herald assured readers that the troubles were strictly a “family affair.”121 But weeks later, when Hazel Green was selected as Tom Cockrell’s change of venue (which Redwine attempted to block), the Herald editor crowed that a trial “out of the range of the ‘feud belt’ ” would put an end to the sordid events.122 Judge Hargis was never implicated personally. No doubt noting that heightened exposure of Breathitt County would damage his administration, he stated that he and his adherents “were never in any feud” and elected to abort his pursuit of Tom Cockrell’s conviction a month after James Cockrell’s death (Tom Cockrell was acquitted).123 No one asked Hargis why the three homicide victims happened to all be fusionists. The political elements of the story were already fading.

  The existence, or denial, of an ongoing “family feud” was not enough to misdirect all Kentuckians, especially Republicans who remembered the Breathitt judges’ role in the Goebel campaign. After Judge Hargis withdrew from Tom Cockrell’s prosecution, the Lexington Leader kept up its assault, using William Goebel’s memory as a rhetorical weapon. “There never would have been an hour during the entire trouble when the Circuit Court could not have controlled the situation absolutely, if [Redwine] had injected into it one-hundredth part of the zeal shown on the occasion of the foul assassination of Mr. Goebel at Frankfort when the state was taxed $100,000 and every piece of its constabulary was set in motion to run down the assassins.”124 A few months later, the paper again exhumed Goebel in connection to Breathitt’s judges: “Breathitt county is today the political stink hole of Kentucky, and elections there are nothing more than licensed orgies of brutality and crime. Judge Redwine was the chairman of Goebel’s Music Hall Convention and Judge Hargis was one of the master spirits of the Goebelites on the floor and, under their absolute sway Breathitt County is today the best exemplification of the horrors of Goebelism to be found in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.”125 Only the newspapers that had bitterly opposed Goebel three years earlier called for further investigation of Cox’s and Cockrell’s murders.126

  After James Marcum alerted the Leader of the death threats he had received since Dr. Cox’s death, the Republican paper enhanced its attack, printing letters from Marcum, Hargis, and Callahan but allowing Marcum the lion’s share of column space. He produced an affidavit signed by one of his criminal case clients, Mose Feltner, claiming that Judge Hargis and Sheriff Callahan had once offered him money to kill Marcum (Feltner had a lengthy criminal record and little apparent compunction against trigger pulling).127 Marcum’s claims were reprinted all over the state, while the Leader proclaimed that “murder [in Breathitt County] has been used systematically as a means of intimidation” and that “the processes of the court have a terror only for innocent men.”128

  Hargis and Callahan both responded bitterly, claiming that Marcum had lied for incomprehensible reasons. Hargis cited his own record of shutting down blind tigers as evidence of his county’s lack of troubles.129 Callahan was more candid, acknowledging that Marcum might have reason to be alarmed after the unsolved shooting deaths of “two prominent men.” As sheriff, Callahan had to own up to the county’s civil disorder, but he was quick to deny that it was anything but undirected disorder, and certainly not a “conspiracy.”130 Marcum responded by expressing fear that Callahan’s deputies, Curtis Jett and Tom White, were out to kill him. He also accused Callahan of involvement in the murder of his uncle, William Strong, in 1897.131

  Marcum and the Leader’s most damning accusation was that Breathitt’s courthouse ring was protected by Democrats all over the state. “[Hargis and Callahan] have men employed, newspaper correspondents, to misrepresent the facts,” Marcum asserted, “and Hargis is now trying to arouse political prejudices in order to secure the sympathy of the Democratic press. There is no politics in the law. It was made for all parties and should be obeyed by all, even the ‘leading Democrats in Eastern Kentucky.’ ”132 Hargis directed Breathitt County’s grand jury to indict Marcum for criminal libel, silencing Marcum for the next seven months (the charges were eventually dismissed).133 The year 1903 began with an apparent détente, but with Marcum going into self-imposed isolation.

  In May 1903 Marcum was shot and killed in the doorway of the Breathitt County courthouse.134 A bullet entered his back, apparently fired from inside the building, and a second one was emptied into his head, apparently at very close range, after he had fallen.135 For months he had left his home only in the company of women or while carrying his infant son—his own portable “domestic sphere” was an effective deterrent.136 This noontime foray was said to be his first walk by the courthouse in adult male company since 1902. By dying violently afte
r publicly implicating the courthouse ring, Marcum almost succeeded in his goal: demonstrating that what the United States knew as the “Hargis-Cockrell feud” was not a horizontal “family affair” but instead the outgrowth of a statewide struggle for legitimacy that Kentucky had dealt with for years. The daytime murder of such a prominent figure proved to be the beginning of the end for Jackson’s courthouse ring. Still, James Marcum’s death was forever after misunderstood as part of a feud narrative.

  “This is only one of many similar feuds which have disgraced the State”

  James Marcum’s murder was the most widely publicized “feudal” death in years. Most of the fatalities in the French-Eversole feud and the Rowan County War (or, for that matter, the deaths of Judge Burnett in 1878 and William Strong in 1897) were men unknown outside their respective communities. But this mountain attorney was a leader in Kentucky’s Republican Party, an officer of the federal government, a corporate representative, and the very incarnation of his section’s recent advancement. His death presented a conundrum for Bluegrass Kentuckians who had previously interpreted the eastern third’s feud phenomenon as a sui generis product of isolation or racial (Anglo-Saxon or Celtic) peculiarity. His ally Tom Cockrell’s assertion that Marcum “was never implicated in any feud” motivated many to consider his death an accident of sorts.137 An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal printed soon after his death illustrates the turn in interpretation of what many Kentuckians considered a familiar occurrence presented by the Hargis-Cockrell feud’s latest death.