Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  The feud which took Mr. Marcum’s life has caused, it is said, no less than forty deaths in the last two years. This would be an astounding statement to any one who was a stranger to these mountain vendettas. But this is only one of many similar feuds which have disgraced the State and will continue to disgrace it until the State shows a more resolute purpose and power to uphold the law.

  These feuds have too often been looked upon as romantic episodes of primitive life in our backwoods. That is entirely too charitable a view to take of them. There is nothing romantic or manly about them. Originating in some trivial quarrel, they continue for generations of cowardice, treachery and assassination. The murders which are their outcome are not even committed man to man, in the open, but almost invariably are perpetrated after patient lying-in-wait and ambush extending over months and years.138

  The editorial provided a succinct description of Kentucky’s endemic feud violence as it was understood nationally: series of violent acts employing ambush-style homicides (as the same paper had described the death of William Goebel) taking place deep in the mountains, caused by disagreements of an unknown or unimportant nature, producing an undetermined number of deaths, and lasting over the course of generations by a mutual motivation of vengeance (the editorial notably omitted the family or “clan” as the basis for feud factionalism). But the ways in which the Hargis-Cockrell feud did not fit into this previously formed mold, namely, its chronological brevity and fairly clear political motivations, were generally ignored. The “forty deaths” was a melding of Jackson’s new industrial age harum-scarum and its older postbellum reputation.

  Marcum’s assassination stood out from both, and the men who had engaged him in an editorial-page war of words a few months earlier had clear motive. Judge Hargis’s best tactic was a continuation of feud-related rhetoric, with himself cast as indignant victim (it was not hard to do with his opposition keeping silent, as Hagins and other fusionists were doing). The previous year he had cast James Cockrell’s death within a larger feud narrative that acknowledged enmity between his family (but not necessarily himself) and the Cockrells. Now, Hargis called Marcum one of a number of “Republican leaders” who had “endeavored to run [Hargis] out of the county.” But Hargis still insisted that this was a communal, multigenerational conflict motivated by old, bitter memory, not current party matters. When Hargis was a boy, the judge told one journalist, Marcum’s uncle William Strong had raided the Hargis farm, leaving him and his siblings hungry and shoeless.139 Marcum, he said, had since been “reared in an atmosphere of feuds” and that there was “not a family in Breathitt county some one of whose members has not been slain by Marcum blood” (my emphasis).140 Their local Civil War experience was so defined by intimacy, with the stories of visceral suffering that entailed, that its politics need not be addressed. Breathitt County’s violent past was putty in Hargis’s hands.

  The Lexington Leader remained the only major Kentucky paper eager to examine the killings of 1902 through a political lens, placing Marcum’s death specifically within the lineage of Cox’s and Cockrell’s, referencing Marcum’s accusations from the previous November.141 Republicans had endured more than three years of abuse for their assumed complicity in William Goebel’s death. Now that one of their own had fallen in a similar manner, they were quick to find the beams in their Democratic accusers’ eyes. Maysville’s Public Ledger minced no words a month after Marcum’s death. “When it comes to real-simon-pure-unadulterated18-karat-brand-burned-in-the-barrel feudocracy, the good old rock-ribbed Democratic county of Breathitt can give any ‘Republican mountain county’ hearts and spades and beat it to never-come-back.”142 “Amidst the newspaper illustrations and accounts of the ‘War in Breathitt,’ it should not be forgotten that Breathitt is one of the staunch Democratic counties of Kentucky. All its local officers are Democrats, and the Circuit Judge is a Goebel of Democracy.”143 Even though the circumstances of these “political and feud murders” could not fully challenge the more popular explanation for mountain violence, it did at least temporarily call into question the assumption that eastern Kentucky was a “barbarians’ world beyond the polis.”144

  Some Republicans even accused “the State Democratic machine” of finding “the Hargis outlaws” useful.145 “While the business men of Kentucky are trying to build up,” said one, “the politicians are doing their best to pull down.”146 Feuds existed in the mountains, blasted a Lexington Republican, but a feud proper was motivated by honor or revenge, not material gain. “Time will make a splendid civilization in the mountains of Kentucky, and the feud will be eradicated as it was in Scotland. As for that Breathitt county business—there is the filth of lucre in that, blood shed for money, not for revenge. That is disgraceful, and the mountains will not put up with it.”147 A Republican insistence that contingent/political violence was taking place did not negate the inherent/communal explanations for violence that Americans of all political stripes had been absorbing and believing since the 1880s.

  The Republicans’ Goebel/Marcum comparisons were hardly flawless. “The assassination of Marcum was coldly planned in a business way—not in the heat of excitement,” reasoned one Republican. “Mr. Goebel was shot at the Statehouse door during a period of unsurpassed excitement and tension, and nobody actually saw the man who fired the shot. The case as to Marcum was much simpler than as to Goebel.” Perhaps, he opined, “the Democratic Machine [was] in the official saddle seeking to hide the facts and save the Democratic party,” but it was beyond spurious and unfounded to say Marcum’s killing was any more “coldly planned” than Goebel’s.148 In trying to prove the true nature of Bloody Breathitt’s most renowned crime, Republicans balked at admitting that political violence was a tool available to both parties. Pro-Hargis Democrats could still wave Goebel’s bloody shirt in their faces.

  Of course most Democrats preferred that Breathitt County’s killings be considered “lawlessness” unrelated to party politics.149 Even Democratic papers that had no interest in using the language of feuding insisted on at least acknowledging that, since “murder is murder,” politics aside, Marcum’s slaying “was as bad as the murder of Goebel,” while another disingenuously praised Breathitt County’s “Democratic officials” for “using every effort to bring the guilty to justice,” unlike when Goebel “was assassinated on the capital grounds under Republican rule.”150 Hypocrisy, they said, was thick within any and all Republican censures of Hargis et al., and had Kentucky Democrats rushed to the defense of their malefactors as Republicans had done for Goebel’s accused murderers?151 “There is not a Democratic paper in Kentucky that has stood back from denouncing the feuds and assassins of Breathitt county on account of the political aspect of the case. How different is the picture from that of the assassination of Wm. Goebel, when every cross-roads organ of the Republican party in Kentucky either openly or tacitly excused or defended his murderers.”152 While Republicans had hindered Caleb Powers’s and Jim Howard’s prosecutions, the Democratic press, in contrast, could now claim to be “on the forefront” of nonpartisan justice for Marcum, “the Republican son of Breathitt.”153 Democratic admissions of “the political aspect of the case” were exceptionally rare. At least one Democrat doubted that Marcum’s killer “had any politics.”154

  Louisville’s Courier-Journal continued its generation-old practice of balancing mild party loyalty with an attempt to mollify everyone with apolitical descriptions of violence. “Officers of the law and courts of justice” did not direct the actions of “assassins and anarchists,” but were instead cowed by them.155 The “law officers . . . of the so-called county of Breathitt,” were not so much vicious as inept.156 Well aware of the ever-present danger of libel charges, most other newspapers throughout Kentucky were careful to treat Breathitt County’s violence as the local authorities’ sins of omission rather than their directed violence. In a state with little central oversight over county affairs, Hargis and Callahan could withstand these insults while maintaining their tre
mendous amount of power. As commentators all over Kentucky yammered on, the judge and the sheriff remained in their lofty positions in Jackson. During May 1903, it was often said that the identities of Marcum’s (and Cox’s and Cockrell’s) killer(s) were widely known, and that fears of reprisals kept the populace silent.

  It took someone from outside the political sphere to expose the crimes of James Hargis and Edward Callahan. James Marcum’s widow, Abrelia Hurst Marcum, wasted no time accusing Hargis and Callahan for her husband’s death, not only implicating Hargis’s “clan” in her husband’s homicide but broadly blaming “the administration of Judge Hargis” for leading to a general atmosphere of lawlessness.157

  Judge Hargis and the whole state knows that there have been thirty-eight homicides in Breathitt county during his administration as county judge. What attempt has been made by him as the highest official in the county to have the laws enforced? When he became county judge about two years ago there was no more peaceful county in Kentucky. Our people walked the streets at night in the pursuit of their vocations with absolute safety and no thought of danger.

  Today business men who can are leaving. Our citizens do not dare to express their opinion for fear of assassination. Citizens dare not leave their homes at night for fear of being the mark of men who are immune from punishment. Every man whose life’s blood has stained the soil of Breathitt county during Judge Hargis’s administration of law has bit the dust at the hands of some adherent of their clan, or his identity remains unknown and no strenuous effort has been made to find him.158

  Although Marcum interchangeably blamed Hargis for crimes of malice and of negligence, she notably blamed the entirety of Breathitt County’s violence on him, with no reference to past troubles. If Breathitt County was presently a place where violence was tolerated, it was contingent upon individuals currently in positions of power, not because of the brutal inherencies suggested by the decades-old nickname Bloody Breathitt.

  As a woman and expectant mother (she gave birth the following September), Abrelia Marcum was practically immune to the violence used on the streets of Jackson. Brutality toward women, especially spousal abuse, was not unheard of in Breathitt County any more than elsewhere else in the United States (an uxoricide arrest began the confrontation that led to the death of Judge Burnett in 1878). But deadly violence with clearly political purposes (that is, the vast majority of Bloody Breathitt’s most notorious events) could not be directed at women since they were not recognized as political actors. Even the most ruthless men kept violence, especially politically motivated violence, as far from women as possible. James Marcum’s successful tactic of shielding himself with women and children in the weeks before his assassination demonstrated the sacredness of the “separate sphere.”159 Far from being a motivation for violence, as the narrative of feuds suggested, the women and children that represented family were obstructions to violence. Just as Dr. Braxton Cox’s elderly mother-in-law felt free to speak out against the courthouse ring, Abrelia Marcum was able to do the same. She represented to Breathitt County men communal institutions that had not often been violated by the county’s decades-old cycle of violence.160

  In a time and place in which men were afraid to accuse the Hargis courthouse of murder, only a woman, Abrelia Marcum (pictured with her children), could expose the courthouse ring’s misdeeds. (Washington Times, October 20, 1907)

  Even though she was protected from her husband’s fate, her words could do only so much to implicate the men in power. Just after Governor Beckham offered a $500 reward for James Marcum’s murderer, Curtis Jett was indicted.161 Jett hired Judge Hargis’s business partner Fulton French as his attorney, and went to lengths to see that he was tried in Breathitt County (soon after, deputy Tom White was indicted as well).162 Edward Callahan recused himself from his role in summoning witnesses for the trial, and he and Hargis took a very public role in supporting Jett and White’s defense.163 They and French engaged in an apparent effort to prevent Jett and White from plea-bargaining and implicating them all in a larger conspiracy. Jett was an agent of the county court, but that was minimized somewhat by the rumor that he and James Marcum had “quarreled” publicly shortly before the latter’s death, a rumor that emphasized personal enmity over political calculation.164

  Suspecting that the trial would prove to be politically charged, and chagrined by growing criticism of his relationship with the Hargis courthouse, Governor Beckham sent the state militia to Jackson.165 Beckham announced that the “situation” in Jackson “has been exaggerated” and he was hesitant to send more members of the militia to fortify the ones already sent. Less than four weeks later, the militia unit was ordered back to the Bluegrass to prevent a potential lynching during a highly publicized murder trial of three black men.166

  As national attention surrounded Jett and White’s trial, Harper’s Weekly attacked Breathitt County as an example of a larger problem. “These assassinations in Kentucky are attributed by some observers to the system of county politics in Kentucky,” it announced. “The struggle for the county offices is so intense that rival politicians and their partisans are led to murder to attain their ends, and assassination is further fostered by the spirit of the vendetta which prevails in the mountainous regions of the State.”167 A fire that destroyed a hotel belonging to a witness for the prosecution during the trial prompted members of both political parties to concur.168 Yet circuit court judge Redwine remained aloof from implication. When the trial in Jackson ended with a hung jury (with Redwine on the bench), the Hazel Green Herald surmised it could only mean an end to the “holy alliance of Hargis & Redwine” (Redwine retired from the circuit bench later that summer).169 A change of venue to a presumably neutral county resulted in life sentences for both Jett and White.170 Jett was later found guilty of murdering James Cockrell and sentenced to death, but the sentence was reversed in 1905.171

  Deputies Tom White (left) and Curtis Jett (right) under guard after their arrest for murder. Even though they were officers of the county court, it was difficult to prove that Judge Hargis or Sheriff Callahan had directed them to kill. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)

  Jett’s and White’s convictions convinced many that justice had been served, and for the rest of 1903, Breathitt’s courthouse bosses were free from scrutiny. Throughout it all, Hargis’s position in Kentucky’s Democratic central committee remained safe. Shortly after Jett and White’s change of venue, Democrats feted him at a banquet in Lexington.172 Governor J. C. W. Beckham’s embarrassment was harder to hide. Hargis’s boast that he could get anyone pardoned was enough to make many Kentuckians suspicious, and Beckham’s (he had issued a record number of pardons in his first five months in office) subsequent pardoning of Tom White seemed to confirm this, as did Curtis Jett when he secured a Beckham pardon for an unrelated crime.173 Questions about Beckham’s connections to the Hargis courthouse emerged days after Marcum’s death, and the governor was forced to address the unhappy county at the beginning of his 1903 reelection campaign.174 With rote references to Goebel’s death at Republican hands, Beckham countered that Governor Bradley had issued far more pardons, and cited accused conspirator James Howard (from his prison cell Howard angrily accused Beckham of using him to “distract the public gaze from [Beckham’s] conduct, his political pardons, his trades and unholy alliances”).175 Beckham accused Kentucky Republicans of making “political capital” out of the Breathitt murders, while applauding Democratic papers for condemning them apolitically.176 The governor also parried with northern critics over the relative quantity of violence in his own state compared to theirs. “The calling into service of the entire national guard of one of the northern states to suppress a strike, where hundreds may be slain, does not attract one-half the notice as does the use of one company of Kentucky militia in aiding some Circuit court in trial of a criminal.”177 As the summer months passed, the Breathitt County issue did not go away. At the official opening of the Democratic state campaign, Beckham declared,

&n
bsp; That the Democratic officials have done everything in their power to put an end to the troubles in Breathitt County no one disputes. They were purely local, and not half as serious as the feudal outbreak in Clay County during the [Bradley] administration. If the Republicans had shown the same desire to punish the assassins of William Goebel that the Democrats did to punish Marcum’s assassins, both crimes would now be avenged. Let the past be forgotten, and let us stand together henceforth shoulder to shoulder as Democrats, with our hearts full of devotion for the welfare of our State and Nation.178

  Beckham’s address had multiple insinuations. Even many of his own party mates may not have been convinced that Breathitt County’s killings were rooted only in local conflicts. Breathitt County’s violence had to be, as had always been the case in other eastern locales (especially where Republicans ruled), purely internal and without any greater significance or implication. In addition, his reference to an analogous “feud” situation in Republican Clay County during a Republican administration negated whatever attempts Republicans might make to pillory his party for sanctioning violence. Breathitt County’s recent assassinations and the “Clay County War” were, by virtue of their placement in the state’s (supposedly Republican) primitive mountains, cut from the same cloth, even if they had grown from two separate conflicts and under different regimes.179 Even if local party affiliations were the origin of violence, they were based upon small differences between decidedly local politicians and their henchmen, with no relation to larger issues faced by the state or national parties.