Bloody Breathitt
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112. Wines and Dwight, Report on the Prisons and Reformatories of the United States and Canada, 260; Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 6–7, 19–29; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 82–83.
113. Norman Barton Wood, The White Side of a Black Subject, 216; Fairbank, Rev. Calvin Fairbank during Slavery Times, 129.
114. LCJ, July 27, 1877, February 10, 1880; Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn, 81.
115. Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 29.
116. McAfee, Kentucky Politicians, 74; Breckinridge News, May 14, 1879; Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 12.
117. KHJ, 1856, 391, 476; McAfee, Kentucky Politicians, 74; Otto, “The Decline of Forest Farming in Southern Appalachia,” 21–22; Verhoeff, The Kentucky Mountains, 100.
118. KHJ, 1850, 203; 1856, 472; 1858, 473, 545, 639, 649, 661; AGACK, 1861 (Frankfort: John B. Major, 1861–63), 48–49; Rice, “History of Education in Breathitt County, Kentucky,” 51; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 104.
119. HGH, April 7, 1886.
120. RDPCRCSK, 396–97, 523–24, 560 (quote). Hargis’s stand for rural supremacy was defeated as other conventioneers allocated new districting to Kentucky’s largest city. While this may have slightly diminished “country” dominance over Kentucky, it increased the Democratic electorate, just as Whig opponents predicted that it would. This apparently did not interest Hargis. Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 79–81.
121. RDPCRCSK, 299–300.
122. Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, 56–57; Ireland, “Aristocrats All,” 368. The secret ballot was instituted for the state in the original 1792 constitution but its 1799 replacement established vive voce as standard in Kentucky for a century. For the role of vive voce as a method of social control and an advantage to eastern Kentucky elites, see Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 25, no. 1 (1905): 125; Waller, Feud, 26; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 106, 374.
123. It is just as likely that Hargis wanted to eliminate illiterates voting. Knowing that he was in the minority, Hargis apparently did not push the issue and submitted his own draft of a proposed constitution that allowed for vive voce. Kentucky did not eliminate it until the 1880s. RDPCRCSK, 43, 336; Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote, 17, 97.
124. RDPCRCSK, 362.
125. Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 82.
126. RDPCRCSK, 362. While the 1849 constitution was supposedly an improvement over its 1799 predecessor (in terms of expanding democracy), many historians agree that its most lasting legacy was a killing blow to the Kentucky Whig Party (a result that Hargis no doubt approved of) and, as a result, the weakening of vigorous two-party competition experienced throughout the South in the 1850s. For a critical approach to Kentucky’s 1849 constitution, see Mathias, “Kentucky’s Third Constitution,” 18.
127. Although the convention ended with new constitutional support for slavery, it had begun with more than fourteen thousand votes for emancipationist delegates. Only two openly antislavery delegates ended up at the convention, but their presence ensured that slavery dominated debate for most of the proceedings. The convention ended with one of the strongest proslavery constitutions in the United States. Bowman, “Kentucky’s ‘Athens of the West,’ ” 56; Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 272–73.
128. RDPCRCSK, 43. Presbyterian minister and dauphin of one of Kentucky’s most lauded families, Robert J. Breckinridge served in Kentucky’s General Assembly in the 1820s, resigning in anger after his pleas for gradual emancipation legislation were roundly rebuffed. Lowell H. Harrison. The Antislavery Movement in Kentucky, 40–41; Klotter, “Central Kentucky’s ‘Athens of the West,’ ” 23.
129. RDPCRCSK, 42–43, 560. In his history of the state in the Civil War era, E. Merton Coulter claimed that Kentuckians held fast to slavery for constitutional rather than economic reasons and supported its continuance out of fear of a free black population. One result of the new state constitution was a seeming “settling” of the slavery issue. While debate over the institution had previously been vigorous, after the new constitution’s passage public argument became permanently stifled. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 7–8; Tallant, Evil Necessity, 159.
130. Hargis may have been influenced by the previous year’s reportedly white-led escape attempted by dozens of slaves from three Bluegrass counties. Tallant, Evil Necessity, 146.
131. Interview with Edward C. Strong, July 21, 1898, JJDD, reel 3, p. 2422. Nat Turner’s revolt alarmed Kentuckians to such a degree that in 1833 the state instituted a slave anti-importation law. The law, popular among all but the wealthiest of planters, remained on the books until it was repealed during the negotiations leading up to the 1849 constitutional convention. Harrold, Border War, 6; Ford, Deliver Us from Evil, 385–86.
132. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 5.
133. Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 120–21, 125, 213; Friend, Kentucke’s Frontiers, 194–95.
134. Breathitt County Slave Schedules, 1860, KHS; For the importance of relationships between slaves and free blacks as resistance networks, see Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet, 57–61.
135. Before the sale, one white teenage boy asked the fair-skinned slave’s mistress (thinking her the slave’s mother), and mutual embarrassment ensued. Trimble, Recollections of Breathitt, 8–9. Such white-appearanced female slaves were particularly popular as “fancy girls” sold at Kentucky slave auctions. Gerald L. Smith, “Slavery and Abolition in Kentucky,” 84–85; Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, 86.
136. For “perpetualism” in Kentucky, see Harrold, Border War, 51.
137. Due to the small numbers involved, slavery’s place in New Appalachia has generally not been a popular historical subject. Historians have begun to study slavery in southern Appalachia in recent years, but have tended to look to areas farther south (notably western North Carolina, northern Georgia, and Alabama), areas in which slavery was marginal compared to the lowlands but not numerically negligible as it was in eastern Kentucky and northwestern Virginia. The only book-length works that have studied slavery as an institution common throughout New Appalachia are Dunaway’s Slavery in the American Mountain South and The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. But although Dunaway acknowledges slavery in the mountainous Upper South, most of her data are gleaned from sources pertaining to Appalachia’s extension into the Deep South states where slavery was more economically viable and slave owners had an even firmer hold over state and local government than in the Upper South.
138. David Chandler, the owner of one of the county’s largest chattel holdings in 1861, owned a total of thirteen slaves valued at $5,500 yet valued his seven-hundred acre farm at only $2,000. Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.
139. Ernest Collins, “Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties,” 40–41.
140. Hardly exceptional, Kentucky is only one good example of a condition common throughout the South: most slave owners (comprising roughly one-third of the white southern population) owned fewer than ten slaves. The owner of five slaves living in a locality with minimal slave ownership would have nevertheless felt a kinship of economic interest with other slave owners more than with slaveless neighbors. Breathitt County’s largest slaveholding in 1861 was only fifteen, while most of the county’s thirty-five slave owners owned fewer than five. In the same year, only seventy Kentuckians owned more than fifty slaves. Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS; Harrold, Border War, 6; Ernest Collins, “Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties,” 9, 13; Sprague, “The Kentucky Pocket Plantation,” 69; Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South, 8–9.
141. Breathitt County Slave Schedules, 1840, 1850, 1860, KHS; Shaffner, The Kentucky State Register for the Year 1847, 53; interview with Edward C. Strong, July 21, 1898, JJDD, reel 3, p. 2422; Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 260–61; Ernest Collins,
“Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties,” 9, 40–41. As a comparison, Woodford County held Kentucky’s largest proportional slave population during the last two decades before the Civil War. For a numerical comparison of slavery between southeastern Kentucky and other parts of the state, see Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, xx.
142. Oakes, The Ruling Race, 144.
143. Harrold, “Violence and Nonviolence in Kentucky Abolitionism,” 16–17.
144. Perrin, Battle, and Kniffin, Kentucky, 973.
145. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 8.
146. In Breathitt County Clay carried 5.9 percent of the vote, a percentage that amounted to fewer than fifty votes. The estimation of the number of votes this would have comprised depends upon Breathitt County’s having a potential vote of 761 in the following year’s presidential election. TAPR, 1852, 47; Mathias and Shannon, “Gubernatorial Politics in Kentucky,” 271; Shannon and McQuown, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 26. Eighteen counties contributed larger percentages of their respective votes to Clay than did Breathitt, with Clay’s native Madison County contributing the highest at 35.2 percent. Of these eighteen, all but four had slave populations proportionally larger than that of Breathitt (and most were considerably larger). These four, Laurel, Owsley, Perry, and Whitley counties, were all in the Three Forks region south of Breathitt County, suggesting that within the slave economy generated by iron and salt mining slavery was not universally accepted. Also, twelve of these counties (including all of the counties in the Three Forks region except for Breathitt) had hosted emancipationist or abolitionist gatherings shortly before 1851, revealing at least a small ferment of native antislavery sentiment and resultant impetus for an emancipationist voting base. Clay’s relative success in these counties was also partly due to his Whig past as well as to the intraparty divisions over the issue of slavery and the Democratic Party’s ability to attract both slaveless yeomen and large-scale planters. Clay accordingly claimed the credit for the ensuing Whig defeat and declared it evidence of slavery’s intractability in Kentucky. In contrast, the counties in which Clay had his poorest showings were ones in which slavery was either a large part of the economy (the northern Bluegrass and the plantation-heavy “Jackson Purchase” area to the far west) or ones where slavery was relatively “out of sight and out of mind” (such as the eastern counties bordering Virginia), most of which were typically Democratic counties. Mathias and Shannon, “Gubernatorial Politics in Kentucky,” 273; Smiley, The Lion of White Hall, 43, 147; Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky, xx; Tallant, Evil Necessity, 249; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 60; Volz, “Party, State and Nation,” 98–100.
147. “William Lincoln to Bro. [William G.] Frost,” October 18, 1909, William E. Lincoln Papers, Founders and Founding Collection, HLSCA. William E. Lincoln, manuscript: “Wellington Rescue”; “Personal Reminiscences with an Account of the Rescue of the Negro Slave,” 1915, Palmer Collection, Western Reserve Historical Society Library.
148. Luntz, Forgotten Turmoil, 36.
149. In fact, considering that he maintained this interpretation in 1909, he was not ready for it as an old man either. “William Lincoln to Bro. [William G.] Frost,” William E. Lincoln Papers, Founders and Founding Collection, HLSCA.
150. Ibid.; Brandt, The Town That Started the Civil War, 8–12 (quotes 11).
151. In 1846 approximately half of Breathitt County’s heads of household reported having no land, this while South owned more than one-third of the county’s acreage. Breathitt County Tax Books, 1846, KHS.
152. HGH, May 10, 1894; Miller v. South &c., Kentucky Court of Appeals, filed September 16, 1890, KLR, vol. 12, no. 1 (July 1, 1890), 351–52; Morse v. South et al., Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, The Federal Reporter, 80:207–8; Sizemore &c. v. Trimble, &c., Kentucky Court of Appeals, May, 4, 1904, KLR, vol. 26, no. 1 (July 1, 1904), 8–10; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:51–52.
153. As was the case with the Sussex “Blacks,” the organized poachers of the royal forests in Hanoverian England; the land’s sheer physicality, especially unimproved forest, places the advantage of physical possession (in contrast to legal ownership) in the hands of the unauthorized inhabitants who have the greater knowledge of the topography. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters, 240. See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, 11–52.
154. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 1:40.
155. H. F. Davis & Co. v. Sizemore et al., Court of Appeals of Kentucky, December 20, 1918, SWR, vol. 207 (January 22–February 12, 1919), 17; SWR, vol. 37 (1896–97), 260; Aikman v. South et al., Court of Appeals of Kentucky, October 31, 1906, SWR, vol. 97 (1906–7), 5; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 158.
156. Aikman v. Commonwealth, filed March 17, 1892, KLR, vol. 13 (July 1, 1891–June 15, 1892), 894–96.
157. BCN, March 16, 1906.
158. Planters farther to the south who chafed at having to fence their crops for protection from drovers while depending on these same drovers’ votes suffered an analogous problem. Hahn, “The Yeomanry of the Nonplantation South,” 40.
159. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:44.
2. “Suppressing the late rebellion”
1. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 7. The 1858 sighting of Donati’s Comet was followed by others in 1860 and 1861. All three were said to foretell an impending war, just as others before and since were popularly interpreted as premonitions of impending strife. S. A. Mitchell, “The Return of Halley’s Comet,” 443.
2. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 7. Unless one had the most fervent political or sectional convictions for either side, most men of fighting age saw no benefit to actively supporting either side in the escalating conflict, except in the defense of their own families and communities. Freehling, The South vs. the South, 69.
3. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 8, 30, 50.
4. The “classical” portrayal of wartime Appalachia has asserted that southern mountaineers were consistently against slave interests and consequently supported Federal authorities during the war, even against the efforts of their respective state governments and the Confederacy as a whole. This interpretation of Civil War-era Appalachia was dominant until the 1970s, when historians began to recognize that the southern Appalachians were a place of considerable wartime division and that slavery was only one factor among many that motivated mountaineers. Literature from recent decades has consistently shown the Appalachian Civil War as defined by internal dissension and close-quartered fighting. Noe, “ ‘Deadening Color and Colder Horror,’ ” 67–68. Historians of the Civil War in Appalachia have been more willing to abandon the traditional military history approach to the war and embrace a social history that attempts to explain how the war affected localities and how individuals made personal decisions to join, support, or ignore the opposing armies. For other “revisionist” accounts of Civil War–era Appalachia, see Sarris, A Separate Civil War; McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia; Gordon McKinney, “The Civil War and Reconstruction”; Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War; Inscoe and McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia; Susan G. Hall, Appalachian Ohio and the Civil War, 1862–1863; O’Brien, Mountain Partisans; Noe and Wilson, The Civil War in Appalachia; Paludan, Victims; Shaffer, Clash of Loyalties; Trotter, Bushwhackers. Although the historiography on the mountain South in the Civil War is diverse, Appalachia’s wartime exceptionalism, or at least its challenge to the dominant paradigms of Civil War history, remain common themes in many of these histories. The majority of these books (with McKnight’s and Shaffer’s being important exceptions) are dedicated to areas within the Confederacy’s official political boundaries.
5. Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 5, 14–24.
6. Quoted from James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 183.
7. War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 32 (1892), 433, 687. Guerrilla suffers from a poverty
of definition in modern discourse, and it was defined almost as loosely in the nineteenth century. During the U.S. Civil War, guerrilla was often interchanged with partisan (positive connotation), bushwhacker (damning), and irregular (somewhat neutral), among others. The only common denominators were the practice of engaging enemies in a manner considered “irregular” by the standards of the time and a proclivity for defending or attacking specific communities (possibly to the detriment of broader goals). I would add that, in many cases, an integral element in guerrillaism was combatants’ mutual knowledge of identity, be it personal, familial, or political. Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 103–6; Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, xi–xiii. See also Robert Mackey, The Uncivil War, 6–10. For “guerrillaism,” see Ash, When the Yankees Came, 47–75.
8. KPD: Annual Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction of Kentucky, 36; Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 14. “Social war” was used often in describing the condition of fighting within communities. Previous to the 1860s the phrase social war generally referred to the war fought within the Athenian Empire in the third century B.C.; like feud, it was a concept nineteenth-century Americans considered temporally foreign, if not culturally alien.
9. Fellman, Inside War, 23.
10. A civil war’s “master cleavage” describes “ideological, ethnic, religious, or class” issues that seem to motivate violence by both sides within one war’s setting (e.g., the American Civil War’s master cleavage[s] was/were the national debate over slavery and the southern states’ subsequent secession from the Union). Within this overarching political context smaller conflicts arise, many with only tenuous connections to the “larger” national issues. It is possible for these smaller conflicts to supersede the official war goals and perhaps even disrupt them, to the point where “the national is often subverted by the local.” Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 364–76 (quote).