Battles between coal companies and unions had now overshadowed previous atrocities. Less iconic stories from the mountains were even more shrouded in doubt. Cockrell and Marcum were victims’ names remembered only by a dedicated student of Kentucky history, but they could still be used to prove a point. For a structure associated with one of these medieval feuds, the symbol of local state authority that had been at the center of sporadic killings for years, to still be standing was an affront to progress, proof that Breathitt County and the region needed federal assistance to “catch up with the 20th century.” The dilapidated courthouse stood for a time of partisanship and had no place in an era of consensus and prosperity. It was the only remainder of a past that had mostly passed on to legendary status, an especially ugly reminder in that it connected the feud to an emblem of state power. For Breathitt County to achieve the legitimacy of being truly part of Kentucky and the American Republic, the “symbol of the gradual passing of the life of the legends” had to go.
EPILOGUE
When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective government of men and laws which we see.
—Randolph Bourne, “Unfinished Fragment on the State
(Winter, 1918),” in Untimely Papers (1919)
The offending old building was eventually torn down and replaced by the structure that serves as Breathitt County’s court building at this writing (designed by a Lexington architectural firm—fitting, since the men from the relatively distant Bluegrass city had long claimed a shepherding role in Jackson).1 But the source of its infamy was not completely erased. In the twenty-first century a marker near Breathitt County’s present courthouse in Jackson marks the spot of James Marcum’s “feudal” death. Not everyone in Breathitt County wanted history to be relegated to “legend.” Even if no one wished to recount the political details, these events, after all, did happen.
But a larger marker nearby commemorates the county’s other celebrated distinction: its contribution to military service in World War I. Breathitt men had always contributed to American wars, and evidence almost suggests they began preparations for war in Europe years before the rest of the country. As early as 1914, Jackson’s army recruiting station had “more enlistments than at any station south of the Ohio River.”2 When the United States entered into the largest war in human history three years later, Breathitt County’s volunteers exceeded its 182-man quota. As a result, no draft notices were issued. It was not the only county to hold that distinction but, for one reason or another, the county—and “her patriotic ex-feudists”—caught national attention.3
From one perspective, the tremendous outpouring of Breathitt volunteers was political; an ever-Democratic county rallying to a Democratic president’s call to make the world “safe for democracy.” From another, it was the masculine “fighting spirit” that journalist Louis Pilcher had touted a few years earlier, evidenced by Breathitt-native Sergeant Willie Sandlin’s single-handed bayoneting of twenty-four German soldiers at Bois de Forges, France, in 1918 (which earned him the Congressional Medal of Honor).4 From yet another, it was a patriotism born of the county’s natural environment. “The charge of ignorance to which they have been subjected for years is proved libelous by their knowledge of the European situation,” the Christian Science Monitor rhapsodized. “They are natural democrats. They are natural foes of aristocracy and autocracy.”5 Finally, the remarkable record of volunteers may have just as easily revealed a supposition familiar in all American wars: a young male population with few prospects and a collective eagerness to leave their rural home.
The “feud” marker in Jackson near the present-day courthouse. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)
In any case, this new distinction was widely celebrated. The history of intraracial white violence that had segregated Breathitt County from the United States was now balanced by a “sturdy Americanism” that incorporated it into the whole, a call to duty from an exogenous source to replace its damaged and unusable endogenous identity.6 “All honor to Breathitt county, long known to the world as ‘Bloody Breathitt’!” western Kentucky’s Hartford Republican announced in 1917. “All honor to the men there who, though they may sometimes have been guilty of mountain feuds and have sometimes fought with unpardonable fury, have heard the call of civilization to protect the women and children!”7 “Thus,” cheered another Kentuckian a year later, “does the outlaw mountain county of Kentucky vindicate herself in the eyes of the world, mocking those who would shame her with a record more fanciful than true.”8 The “fanciful” agreed; “We’ve killed too many of our own folks,” a short story character lamented. “Now this war gives us a chance to show the outside world that there’s more good than bad in us; that we can leave off fighting each other and use our lead on the Germans.”9
Breathitt County’s World War I Memorial. (Courtesy of Charles Hayes)
The subtext that lurked beneath the praise was that Breathitt County was a vessel of inherent violence that could now be harnessed by the outside world. When “the strange land and peculiar people” of the Kentucky mountains had been “discovered” nearly a half century earlier, their suspected tendency toward killing had been glorified as the prime mover of the American Revolution and westward expansion. Since then, however, present-day violence had cooled Progressive Era Americans’ nostalgia for past violence, and Bloody Breathitt had instead become symptomatic of a social problem that defied education, industrialization, or planning.10 In 1917 the problem had become a solution. The contingencies that had caused so much killing in Breathitt were still ignored, perhaps more than ever.
Though the county’s marked volunteerism for the “call of civilization” involved more killing and dying, it would now be for a cause that Bloody Breathitt could share with the rest of the United States. Unlike feud, the legitimacy of the “War to End All Wars” was a national article of faith. The common use of deadly force had once demonized Breathitt County. When carried out in the name of patriotism, however, deadly force was the key to its redemption.
NOTES
Abbreviations
AAC
Appleton’s Annual Cyclopaedia and Register of Important Events
ACN
Adair County News (Columbia, KY)
AGACK
Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky
AOHP
The New York Times Oral History Project: The Appalachian Oral History Project of Alice Lloyd College, Appalachian State University, Emory and Henry College, and Lees Junior College, Kelly Library, Emory & Henry College, Emory, VA
BCN
Breathitt County News (Jackson, KY)
CDT
Chicago Daily Tribune
CSSUS
Congressional Serial Set
FRA
Frankfort Roundabout
HGH
Hazel Green (KY) Herald
HLSCA
Hutchins Library Special Collections & Archives, Berea College, Berea, KY
HMC
Hickman (KY) Courier
HVK
Hopkinsville Kentuckian
JJDD
John J. Dickey Diary, Margaret I. King Library Special Collections and Archives, University of Kentucky, Lexington
KAGR
Kentucky Adjutant General’s Report: Confederate Kentucky Volunteers, 1861–1865 (Frankfort, KY: State Journal, 1915)
KDLA
Kentucky Department of Libraries and Archives, Frankfort
KHJ
Kentucky House Journal
KHS
Martin F. Schmidt Research Library and Special Collections, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort
KLR
Kentucky Law Reporter
KLSCA
Margaret I. King Library Special Collections and Archives, University of Kentucky, Lexington
KPD
Kentucky Public Docum
ents
KSJ
Kentucky Senate Journal
KTY
Kentucky [Tri-Weekly] Yeoman (Frankfort)
LCJ
Louisville Courier-Journal
LEP
Louisville Evening Post
LRA
Lawyers’ Reports Annotated
MPL
Maysville (KY) Public Ledger
MSA
Mt. Sterling (KY) Advocate
MVB
Maysville (KY) Bulletin
MVS
Mount Vernon (KY) Signal
NYS
New York Sun
NYT
New York Times
RDPCRCSK
Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Kentucky, 1849 (Frankfort, KY: A. G. Hodges, 1849)
SIJ
Semi-Weekly Interior Journal (Stanford, KY)
SWR
The Southwestern Reporter, Containing All the Current Decisions of the Supreme Courts of Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, and Supreme Court, Court of Criminal Appeals, and Courts of Civil Appeals in Texas
TAPR
Tribune Almanac and Political Register
WPA
Workers of the Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of Kentucky
Introduction
1. Kirby, Selected Articles on Criminal Justice, 101. See also Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 354–55, 364–66.
2. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina, 3.
3. James A. Smallwood has made a similar argument about Texas’s Sutton-Taylor feud in the Reconstruction era: “Billed as a great feud by many writers, the Sutton-Taylor affair was anything but, for the word ‘feud’ suggests that two individuals had personal grudges to settle or that two families had differences wherein there was no real right or wrong. Black and white faded to nebulous gray: There was only personality clashes.” Smallwood, The Feud That Wasn’t, xviii (quote), 181–82.
4. Salstrom, “The Agricultural Origins of Economic Dependency,” xvii.
5. Richard B. Drake, A History of Appalachia, 59–79; Perkins, Border Life, 84–85; Perrin, Battle, and Kniffin, Kentucky ,59.
6. McFaul, The Politics of Jacksonian Finance, 172–74; Feller, The Jacksonian Promise, 162–75. See also Otto, “The Decline of Forest Farming in Southern Appalachia,” 18–27.
7. Legitimacy “reflects the vitality of the underlying consensus which endows the state and its officers with whatever authority and power they actually possess, not by virtue of legality, but by the reality of the respect which the citizens pay to the institutions and behavior norms. Legitimacy is earned by the ability of those who conduct the power of the state to represent and reflect a broad consensus.” Nieburg, Political Violence, 54. See also Dahl, Political Oppositions in Western Democracies, particularly 348–402.
The phrase outside world appears in various contexts whenever authors have need of contrast between a remote, insular settlement/community/population and the “general” population. In an Appalachian context it is typically used to convey the popular trope of geographical or cultural isolation. See, for instance, Levi W. Powell, Who Are These Mountain People? 7. For the best deconstruction of Appalachian isolation, both physical and discursive, see Hsiung, Two Worlds in the Tennessee Mountains, especially 1–17, 69–98, 186–88.
8. As historians uncover more and more evidence of southern resistance to secession and the Confederacy, a clearer picture is forming of secession and the formation of the Confederacy as political projects that may have sought basis in the consent of the (white male) governed, but failed to do so. It is quite possible that “the South” lost the Civil War because too few southerners supported its cause. Later chapters reference this new wealth of literature on southern anti-Confederatism. For a broad approach to the Confederacy’s crisis of democratic legitimacy, see McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 38–84; Freehling, The South vs. the South, 141–73. See also Inscoe, introduction, 1–5.
9. Ogg and Ray, Introduction to American Government, 732. See also Gilbertson, The County; Beard, Readings in American Government and Politics, 556–66; Forman, Advanced Civics, 195–202; “Lobbyists and Legislatures,” 197.
10. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 187.
11. Many histories of the postbellum South as a region have excluded Kentucky, primarily because most historical conceptions of the section are based upon the states of the Old Confederacy. However, as demonstrated most prominently by the state’s inclusion in C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South, much of Kentucky’s history was determined by its similarities to, and (albeit complicated) relationship with, the South as a whole before and after the Civil War, especially in terms of politics and economic traits. The legacy of slavery, inherited from the beginnings of its statehood, is principal among many reasons Kentucky should be considered a southern state. For Kentucky state histories that make the state’s southern identity evident, see Tallant, Evil Necessity, 103–4; Harrison and Klotter, A New History of Kentucky, 181–82; Penny M. Miller, Kentucky Politics and Government, 54–56.
12. Violence, when used to meet political ends, can be either revolutionary (attempting to affect change through the overcoming of a present regime or adverse consequences) or, often in response, antirevolutionary (violence enacted, usually by the state or an agent of the state in order to prevent changes that may be or seem detrimental to the status quo). Counterrevolutionary violence is acknowledged as part of American history but discussions of political violence have tended to minimize its presence since it has only rarely appeared in state-sanctioned form and is typically relegated to fringe movements unrelated to state rule such as the Ku Klux Klan (even though the Klan’s original nineteenth-century manifestation had direct links to the southern Democratic Party). Suzanne Ogden, “Inoculation against Terrorism in China,” 245; Mendel, Essential Works of Marxism, 535.
For the connections between the 1860s–70s Ku Klux Klan and the southern Democratic Party, see Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 51–62; Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South, 33; Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, 32–33; Trelease, White Terror, xvi–xvii; Foner, Reconstruction, 425.
For southern political violence outside of warfare, see Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching; Barnes, Who Killed John Clayton? Barnes differentiates “political” violence from “racial” violence in a manner that I do not imitate here. This book also defines “political violence” only in its counterrevolutionary capacity even though it is conceivable that, in the course of the South’s history, violence has been used to effect change as well as to prevent it. See also Brundage, Lynching in the New South.
13. This is not unlike the means by which Reconstruction-era white southerners described other forms of political violence in nonpolitical language. See Parsons, “Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse”; and Fairclough, “ ‘Scalawags,’ Southern Honor, and the Lost Cause.” See also Owens, “Distinctions, Distinctions,” 32; Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina, 1–9.
14. KTY, October 1, 1874.
15. Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 72–78; Waller, Feud, 6–8. These endogenous explanations for violence in rural places are only part of a larger global trend, particularly as used in imperialist or postcolonial rhetoric for justifying the exploitation (via forced modernization) of non-Western places. See Vahabi, The Political Economy of Destructive Power, 44–47; Van Young, The Other Rebellion, 400–401; Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change, 129–32; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 72–80, 331.
16. Gordon McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 91–96, 198–99.
17. Nieburg defines political violence as “acts of disruption, destruction, injury whose purpose, choice of targets or victims, surrounding circumstances, implementation, and/or effects . . . tend to modify the behavior of others in a bargaining situati
on that consequences for the social system” (Political Violence, 13); Foner, Reconstruction, 430.
18. Vahabi, The Political Economy of Destructive Power, xi. See also Fearon and Laitin, “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” 75–90. Although the two are “almost always intertwined and hard to disentangle,” inherency and contingency describe two “antithetical” causal environments for the occurrence of violence. The former suggests omnipresent conditions that make violence likely while the latter involve those that are “not understood without special explanation, happening outside the boundaries of likelihood.” Both are given to a great measure of subjectivity based upon the perceptions of observing “authorities.” Eckstein, “Theoretical Approaches to Explaining Collective Political Violence,” 138–42 (139 quote). Political scientists and anthropologists who study places torn by mass violence have, in recent years, tended to look upon explanations that favor inherency with a skeptical eye. Violence that takes place because of contingencies such as war, famine, or political oppression can be written off as the offspring of a society that is inexplicably inherently violent without need for further explanation. See Deas, “Violent Exchanges.”
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