82. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 195, 199; KAGR, 1:388; interview with William B. Eversole, January 15, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, p. 2146; Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 251–59; The Union Army, 356.
83. As of 1847, it had the only post office outside of the county seat. It was close enough to towns in other counties for regular commerce so residents of the community and its surroundings had only to visit Jackson on court days. Twenty years after the war, there was a failed proposal to make it county seat for a new county. MVB, January 24, 1884; SIJ, January 25, 1884; KAGR, 2:786–87; The Kentucky State Gazetteer and Business Directory for 1879–1880, microfilm reel S92–68, p. 133, KLSCA; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 91, 93–94.
84. Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 257–58; Cincinnati Press, December 28, 1861; Richmond Climax, August 31, 1898.
85. Although Strong’s grandfather had opposed members of the Amis family decades before during the brief but violent Clay County Cattle War, this apparently had little bearing on his willingness to join forces with members of the family during the war, further suggesting that, just as family loyalty was only one among multiple factors that influenced wartime loyalties, past familial enmities were put aside in the interest of mutual political interests. Nevertheless, those who wished to lessen the war’s apparent impact on mountain society preferred to begin the story of Bloody Breathitt with the miniscule cattle war rather than the American Civil War. Therefore, when William Strong ran afoul of Wiley Amis after the war (as will be shown in the following chapter), their ensuing “feud” was attributed to a conflict that began and ended before their births rather than the political rift that formed between them in their own lifetimes. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 30; Pudup, “Land before Coal,” 292; interview with Anderson Combs, April 26, 1898, JJDD, reel 3, pp. 2267–73; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:37; Strong Family Papers, Breathitt County Public Library; U.S. War Department, Official Army Register of the Volunteer Force of the United States Army, 1236; Perrin, Battle, and Kniffin, Kentucky, 728.
86. Bismarck Daily Tribune, October 18, 1894.
87. AGACK: Passed at December Session, 1845 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1846), 16.
88. E. Polk Johnson, A History of Kentucky and Kentuckians, 368; Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 220.
89. Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 148.
90. Although a local account that was generally sympathetic to Strong’s enemies suggested that he had deserted the Fourteenth Kentucky Cavalry, records show that Strong was given official authorized leave from the unit. His official connection to the Three Forks Battalion bears this out as well. This is an important distinction since many of his actions in the latter part of the war that inspired much of his reputation as a brigand, murderer, and “feudist” were performed under the auspices of the Federal government. Suggestions that Strong had deserted the Union army were one of many attempts to depoliticize his memory. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 195, 199, 630; SIJ, February 16, 1892; HMC, April 1, 1892; KHJ, 1876, 1199; KAGR, 1:388–89; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 23–24.
The Three Forks Battalion was one of ten battalions within the “1st Regiment of Capital Guards” created by the Kentucky legislature in January 1864, and authorized by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton the following May, to suppress the state’s internal “guerrilla evil” once major invasions from the south had trailed off. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 195, 202, 630, 646–47; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 23; KAGR, 1:388–89; Charles C. Wells, 1890 Special Veterans’ Census for Eastern Kentucky, 52, 228; JJDD, reel 92, p. 2146; The Union Army, 360; Burch, Owsley County, 36.
91. Annual Report of the Auditor of the State of Kentucky, 191; AGACK: Passed at December Session, 1865 (Frankfort: A. G. Hodges, 1865), 272; Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 693; The Union Army, 360; Coulter and Connelley, History of Kentucky, 4:276; Burch, Owsley County, 36.
92. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 222–24; Ramage and Watkins, Kentucky Rising, 317–24; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 184–88, 228–38.
93. For “peer pressure” as an analogy for the intimacy of guerrillaism, see Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla, 201.
94. LCJ, December 3, 1878.
95. Quote from “H. Hawkins, Colonel Fifth Kentucky Regiment [Confederate] to Provisional Governor R. Hawes, November 23, 1862,” in War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 20, part 2, CSS, issue 2575 (1889), 451; Burch, Owsley County, 36; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:5–6 (quote).
96. Breathitt County Slave Schedules, 1860, KHS; Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.
97. Morse v. South et al., Circuit Court D of Kentucky, April 15, 1897, The Federal Reporter, 80:208–9.
98. Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside, 27–28. The assumption that belief in “tradition” is shorthand for resistance against market economics as a determinant of border state loyalties during the Civil War is found in Thelen, Paths of Resistance, 59–62. See also Martin Crawford, Ashe County’s Civil War, 125–33.
99. William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 246.
100. “Unionist Highlanders” were said by one historian to have “disliked Negroes as well as slavery.” Paludan, Victims, 59.
101. Slave assistance to regular Unionists was not unheard of in other parts of the South. See McCurry, Confederate Reckoning, 290; Jenkins and Stauffer, The State of Jones, 88–90; Storey, “ ‘I’d Rather Go to Hell,’ ” 70–82; William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 254.
102. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 9; William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 461, 464. This “treachery” apparently did not surprise mountain native George Noble. The mobile nature of mountain agricultural labor afforded slaves a freedom of movement and lack of surveillance, two things rarely enjoyed by slaves in the plantation South. See Sprague, “The Kentucky Pocket Plantation,” 77–79, 84. The county’s 1860 slave schedules reveal a large number of manumitted slaves living alongside those still in bondage, further contributing to their physical mobility and the covert conveyance of information. By 1860, more than half of Breathitt County’s slave-owning households were also home to manumitted slaves. 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.
103. Williams, Appalachia, 109–10.
104. At least one former Strong slave, Sam Strong, “who was with the Captain in all his wars,” was still part of this arrangement at the time of William Strong’s death in 1897. Lexington Herald, May 11, 1897. William Strong’s decades-long bond with his former slaves and their families was indeed unique. However, there is documentation of Unionist slaveholders in other parts of the South employing their chattel as spies and saboteurs against Rebel neighbors. See Storey, Loyalty and Loss, 140–51; Herbert W. Spencer, “Captain Bill’s January Raid.”
105. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:56; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 59.
106. Interview with Samuel Strong Jr., July 1973, AOHP, no. 280, pp. 2–3.
107. Lexington Herald, May 11, 1897.
108. Breathitt County Tax Books, 1861, KHS.
109. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 172, 202, 630.
110. Ibid., 172, 202; KAGR, 1:388; Charles C. Wells, 1890 Special Veterans’ Census for Eastern Kentucky, 223, 228; Kilburn and McIntosh Family Files, Breathitt County Public Library; KAGR, 1:388; Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 257. The act of switching sides was not unheard of, especially in the mountains. However, in most recorded cases, enrollment in either Union or Confederate forces involved the draft but was not as coer
cive as it supposedly was in Kilburn’s case. Williams, Appalachia, 163.
111. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:56, 82.
112. Lincoln, “Memoir,” 13, William E. Lincoln Papers, Founders and Founding Collection, HLSCA. Freeman was a Breathitt County surname long associated with biraciality or racial ambiguity. Years after Hiram dropped off the historical record, a nephew or grandson named Henry Freeman was identified as a “half-breed negro” who, because he “always associated with white people,” was typically identified as white in and around Jackson. Lexington Herald, April 23, 1907. For Freeman’s military service, see KAGR, 1:388; Speed, Pirtle, and Kelly, The Union Regiments of Kentucky, 257; Charles C. Wells, 1890 Special Veterans’ Census for Eastern Kentucky, 239.
113. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line, 43–44; Manual Ray Spencer, The Descendants of Joseph Spencer, 325.
114. Freeman v. Strong and Others, Appeal from Circuit Court, Clay County, April 20, 1838, Records of the Court of Appeals of Kentucky, KDLA. Among the nineteenth-century Kentucky county’s most coercive constitutional powers was the ability to assign orphaned minors into forced apprenticeships, a practice that was used most often with free blacks. Poor children, black and white, were commonly bound to farmers and artisans to learn the “art and mystery” of various trades. Hollingsworth, “ ‘Mrs. Boone, I presume?’ ” 128n.
115. Sharfstein, The Invisible Line, 51.
116. Ninth Census of the United States, 1870, KHS.
117. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 55.
118. Phillip Gosse, The History of Piracy, 1–2; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:56; WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 59.
119. Strong benefited from a sociopolitical dynamic common to all civil wars, in which command positions are extended to the individuals most willing to commit violent acts. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 57–58.
120. Fellman, Inside War, 23.
121. After the possibility of forcibly swaying Kentucky toward the Confederacy proved to be a lost cause after 1862, most of the state’s pro-Confederate resources were concentrated around the Virginia-Tennessee line in the interest of protecting the mines of Saltville, Virginia, and the vital Virginia-Tennessee Railroad from federal capture. Ramsey, The Raid, 147–54.
122. “Marshall to General S. Cooper, January 20, 1862,” in War of the Rebellion, vol. 17, p. 53 (quote); Burch, Owsley County, 37.
123. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 155–56.
124. “To the People of Estelle and Adjoining Counties,” broadside, John Hunt Morgan Papers, 1840–1870, 1890, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina. See also Louisville Daily Journal, January 29, 1863. Morgan had visited Breathitt County at least as early as 1856 to retrieve a lost horse. Lexington Leader, October 7, 1958; Bull, “Writings on Kentucky History, 1958,” 241.
125. Louisville Daily Journal, January 29, 1863; Abingdon Virginian, July 3, 1863 (quote).
126. McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 225–26; Jess D. Wilson, When They Hanged the Fiddler, 75; Preston, The Civil War in the Big Sandy Valley of Kentucky, 24. Jackson County, located just west of the Three Forks region, was the only county in the state said not to have produced a single Confederate recruit while being drained of “every male under sixty years of age, and over fifteen” for the Union. On the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, Jackson County nevertheless became an oft-cited piece of evidence for southern mountain Unionism. It trailed only neighboring Owsley County in the percentage of its military-age population recruited by Federal forces and contributed 25 percent of its votes to Lincoln in the 1860 presidential election, by far the highest county-level margin for Lincoln in the state. In 1864 it was the only Kentucky county Lincoln managed to carry. TAPR, 1867, 59; Fox, “The Southern Mountaineer,” 389; Rossiter, Parties and Politics in America, 85–86; Louisville Daily Journal, April 20, 1863; Storke, A Complete History of the Great American Rebellion, 1575–76; Dalton, “Brig. General Humphrey Marshall,” 192.
127. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, p. 172.
128. Interview with Wood Lyttle, April 13, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, pp. 2242–43; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 14.
129. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, 159–60.
130. “H. Hawkins, Colonel Fifth Kentucky Regiment [Confederate] to Provisional Governor R. Hawes, November 23, 1862,” 451.
131. Herbert W. Spencer, “Captain Bill’s January Raid.”
132. Ash, When the Yankees Came, 64. In guerrilla settings, civilian populations, even those with little or no direct connection to fighting forces, act as a “support system” for partisans in providing provisions, intelligence, or refuge. Wickham-Crowley, “Terror and Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America,” 225.
133. Vahabi, The Political Economy of Destructive Power, 69–70.
134. Though the crime was blamed on “rebel outlaws,” implying a pro-Confederate act, the county’s Confederate identity was well established and notorious, enough so that it could well have been perpetrated by Unionist Kentuckians. AGACK, 1864 (Frankfort: Wm. E. Hughes, 1864), 365–66.
135. Haddix, adm’r, vs Chambers & Little, April 26, 1868, in W. P. D. Bush, reporter, Reports of Selected Civil and Criminal Cases decided in the Court of Appeals of Kentucky, 172–73.
136. As has been the case in many other wars, desertion during the American Civil War was a communal phenomenon. Confederate units with large numbers of soldiers from the same community were more prone to desertion than units made up of men recruited from disparate areas. Bearman, “Desertion as Localism,” 340.
137. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 199–202, 204–6, 211–18, 645–48.
138. KAGR, 210–13; Strong Family Papers, 82, Breathitt County Public Library. Thomas Hargis notably stayed with the Fifth Infantry. He received a captain’s commission and was captured four times. After the war he returned to Kentucky but did not resettle in Breathitt County. McAfee, Kentucky Politicians, 74–75.
139. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 382–87.
140. The “parochialization” of civil war takes place when extensions of a national conflict are acted out in an enclosed location. Local issues come to take precedence over national ones as the basis for conflict such that there is a “shift in meaning from the great to the little tradition” (my emphasis). Aikman’s patrons, the South family, retained their national concerns in fighting for the Confederacy, namely, the upholding of “southern rights,” but they were equally concerned with maintaining order and a modicum of political uniformity within their county. Although Aikman continued to fight under the Souths’ leadership (or at least the leadership of Jerry South Jr.), his return to wage a more localized war against individuals with whom he was probably socially acquainted prior to the war represented a means by which local interests (i.e., the political and economic primacy of his patrons, the South family) came to eclipse abstractions like “southern rights” espoused by the patrons themselves. See James C. Scott, “Protest and Profanation,” 220–22. For “people’s war,” see Cooling, “A People’s War,” 117–18.
141. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 59; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:14–15 (quote).
142. Fellman, Inside War, 254.
143. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 83, 330–36; Ash, When the Yankees Came, 125 (quote).
144. Jess D. Wilson, When They Hanged the Fiddler, 75–76.
145. Lexington Observer and Reporter, April 18, 1863; Louisville Journal, April 20, 1863; Dalton, “Brig. General Humphrey Marshall,” 192; Perry, Jack May’s War, 63–65.
146. Lewis Collins, Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 673; Burch, Owsley County, 35.
147. Washington National Republican, April 27, 1863; Thos. L. Wilson, Sufferings Endured for a Free Government, 98–100. Storke and Brockett, A Complete History of the Great American Rebellion, 15
75–76.
148. Jess D. Wilson, When They Hanged the Fiddler, 75.
149. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 32. Scout, in wartime parlance, described an unenlisted partisan. It was a term just vague enough for Strong to use to justify attacking civilians he suspected of subversive activity. Sutherland, A Savage Conflict, xi.
150. Henry C. Hurst to William L. Hurst, March 2, 1865, in Hurst, Hursts of Shenandoah, 102.
151. KTY, December 22, 1878.
152. Whether or not Barnett’s purported innocence alluded to his being nonpartisan or nonmilitary was not revealed. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 32, 78.
153. Noble’s age and the minimal threat he represented may also have weighed upon Strong’s decision. Ibid., 35–36.
154. Said a Confederate veteran of the “secret rebel” Wilson Callahan: “He always told me he was a mighty good rebel; and whilst I was in the rebel army he gave me all the information he could. He would tell me where the Union forces were, and how many, and directed me how to manage.” After the war, according to a “common rumor in the country . . . [Wiley Amis] was writing backwards and forwards to the rebels whilst he was a lieutenant in the Union army.” Considering his postwar politics, his (as will be covered in the following chapter) collusion with Wilson Callahan, and his eventual violent break with his former ally William Strong, it is highly possible that Amis was himself a “secret rebel.” On the other hand, as shown in the following chapter, Amis’s postwar change in politics was also influenced by his disillusionment over the results of Union victory, a disillusionment shared by many Kentucky Unionists. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, pp. 169 (quote), 191, 195, 198.
155. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 54 (quote); Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 96.
156. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 84.
157. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, p. 200; KTY, January 7, 1879; Trimble et al. v. Spicer et al., October 17, 1900, Court of Appeals of Kentucky, SWR, vol. 58 (August 6–December 3, 1900), 579; Strong Family Papers, 111, Breathitt County Public Library; Ed Porter Thompson, History of the Orphan Brigade, 746; Herbert W. Spencer, “Captain Bill’s January Raid”; McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 225–26.
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