158. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 62; Rolff, Strong Family of Virginia and Other Southern States, 111.
159. Only 95 men voted in favor of Bramlette out of a total 142 votes counted, a fraction of the usual voter turnout in the county but more than enough to give the Union candidate a considerable majority. Over the next two years of the war, the small number of extant returns suggests that Democratic ballots were virtually forbidden from being cast. TAPR, 1862, 61; 1863, 60; 1864, 59; 1866, 59; 1867, 57; Ernest Collins, “Political Behavior in Breathitt, Knott, Perry and Leslie Counties,” 63.
160. Barnes vs. Adams, CSS, vol. 1432, no. 2, 41st Cong., 2nd sess., H. Misc. Doc. 13, p. 195; interview with William B. Eversole, January 15, 1898, JJDD, reel 2, p. 2145; G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 53–54.
161. Wm. M. Combs agst. Capt. William Strong, Wiley Amis and Other Defendants, 1867–1869; Wm. M. Combs agst. Hiram Freeman and Jason Little, 1867–1869; William Strong Sr. vs. Wilson Callahan & comp., May 15, 1867, Breathitt County Circuit Court Records, KDLA.
162. Rhyne, “Rehearsal for Redemption,” 180–95.
163. Blight, Race and Reunion, 381–83.
164. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 38–48.
165. Rolt-Wheeler, The Boy with the U.S. Census, 23; Lewis Franklin Johnson, Famous Kentucky Tragedies and Trials, 320; Clements, History of the First Regiment of Infantry, 147; Haney, The Mountain People of Kentucky, 77.
166. Altsheler, In Circling Camps, 125.
167. Foote, The Civil War, 1002.
168. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 21, 71.
169. As subjective as definitions of guerrillaism may be, the prevailing ideas in military science at the time of the Civil War considered Forrest’s tactics those of a “partisan” rather than a guerrilla. This was a distinction made not by virtue of Forrest’s style of fighting but by his formal relationship to the Confederate war machine; Geiger, Financial Fraud and Guerilla Violence in Missouri’s Civil War, 103–4.
170. Lewis Collins and Collins, Collins’ Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 110.
171. E. Polk Johnson, A History of Kentucky and Kentuckians, 368.
172. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 228–29. Coulter did, however, consider the possibility that the Confederate high command did not look upon guerrillas “with any great degree of aversion.”
173. Stiles, Jesse James, 81–82, 95–97.
174. Lord, The Effect of Secession upon the Commercial Relations between the North and South, 75–76. During the Deep South’s secession in the winter of 1861, another author predicted that mountaineers would stall the Upper South from following suit. “Their interests are more directly opposed than those between the Cotton States and the extreme North, because the wide distance that separates the latter renders them independent of each other, while the Cotton States are seeking, by every possible means, to drag all the Slave States with them, for the purpose of compelling them to share their burdens, and of giving greater strength and dignity to their cause.” “Southern Aids to the North,” 242. This was only partially true. The Bluegrass, the section of the state with the largest number of slaves and slaveholders, had spotty interest in secession. In fact, it was the section of the state that produced the most vocal spokesmen (including Senator Crittenden) for trying to compromise: combining the continuance of slavery with the preservation of the Union. For an example of a historical verification of this exaggeration, see Robert L. Kincaid, “Lincoln Allegiance in the Southern Appalachians,” 164–79.
175. This image was important for comfortable reconciliation between the sections as well as the expansion of (as will be discussed more broadly in a later chapter) the postwar discourse on the region’s supposed Anglo-Saxon purity. Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 143–47; Noe, “ ‘Deadened Color and Colder Horror,’ ” 77–80; Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia, 77.
176. Warner, “Comments on Kentucky,” 263. See also E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 1:270–71.
177. Emma M. Connelly, The Story of Kentucky, 268.
178. Ibid., 266–67.
179. Spaulding, The Men of the Mountains, 47.
180. Brooks, “Back to Dixie, a Hard Trip,” 58.
181. E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 2:11.
182. Shaler, Kentucky, 405.
183. Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner, 133.
184. As will be detailed in the following chapter, after Kentucky’s Unionists had lost control over state government, Jeremiah South was reappointed as penitentiary lessee and remained in that position until just prior to his death in 1880. Rockenbach, “ ‘The Weeds and the Flowers Are Closely Mixed,’ ” 1–2; Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 24, 29.
3. “The war spirit was high”
1. As Brian McKnight has made clear, the finality represented by the surrender at Appomattox was of limited significance in eastern Kentucky. Although news of the Confederacy’s defeat spread quickly, there was no assurance that fighting would end in an area where ties to both sides were often tenuous. McKnight, The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, 231–34.
2. Stealey, Twenty Years in the Press Gallery, 208.
3. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 6. E. Merton Coulter’s The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, the classic yet dated history of the state during the 1860s and 1870s, maintains the essentially pro-Confederate, white supremacist character of Kentucky politics during Reconstruction and suggests that the state’s failure to join other states in secession was essentially a mistake that did not reflect the general will of white Kentuckians. Liberal historians, reacting to Coulter’s neo-Confederate sympathies, later downplayed Kentucky’s postwar conservatism. Ross Webb’s revisionist Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era explains the state’s lack of cooperation with postwar federal policies as resistance to unwelcome federal authority rather than genuine adherence to the Lost Cause. Thomas Connelly (“Neo-Confederatism or Power Vacuum”) also deemphasized the importance of race and the Confederate memory in the years following the war; after 1865 Kentuckians were supposedly more caught up in sectional competition over internal resources and railroad construction than in issues relating to the recent war. By the mid-1870s the “New Departure” school of political thought, favored by the state’s development-minded Democrats, had led the state into an era of relative prosperity unmatched by the rest of the South due to greater cooperation with northern interests. In Connelly’s interpretation, as a state Kentucky was therefore detached from the ravages of Reconstruction disorder. Considering Coulter’s overt Confederate sympathies, both Webb’s and Connelly’s revisions are understandable. But by taking a more local approach, and one that does not depend as heavily upon evidence from the Bluegrass as a supposed “Kentucky writ large,” historians have more recently described a Kentucky countryside rife with counterrevolutionary violence against both blacks and white Unionists, suggesting that Kentucky’s postwar Confederate sympathies have been underestimated since Coulter’s time. Rhyne, “ ‘We Are Mobed and Beat’ ”; Crane, “ ‘The Rebels Are Bold, Defiant, and Unscrupulous in Their Dementions of All Men.’ ” See also Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 55–80.
4. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 20.
5. Slavery was eventually outlawed in the state’s 1890 constitution. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 27.
6. Foner, Reconstruction, 37.
7. Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 199–200.
8. Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 10–16, 255–56.
9. Patrick A. Lewis, “The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril,” 145–47; Berlin et al., “The Destruction of Slavery, 1861–1865,” 4, 66–67, 73–74, 173–74; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 258–61, 316, 420–23; Ross Webb, “Kentucky,” 27.
10. Quoted in Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 22. Since then, historians have placed Kentucky’s political
turn slightly earlier. As conservative historian E. Merton Coulter semifamously wrote in 1926, the state seemingly “seceded in 1865” (The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 334). See also Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 53.
11. Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 143–44.
12. LCJ, December 25, 1868, quoted in Prichard, “Popular Political Movements in Kentucky,” 7.
13. KTY, December 2, 1865.
14. Ibid.; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 10–14; Curry, Radicalism, Racism, and Party Realignment. On the other hand, E. Merton Coulter makes the questionable claim that the true Republican Party was not established in Kentucky until 1871, when the party’s conservative faction wrested control from radicals. This does not take away from the fact that both factions, under one name or another, had existed in the state since 1865 (and, arguably, even before then under the name “Unconditional Unionists”). Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 272–86, 433–34.
15. Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 255–56, 266–67, 271–75.
16. Marshall, “ ‘The Rebel Spirit in Kentucky,’ ” 64.
17. At its inception the Freedmen’s Bureau was limited to the rebellious states. But passage of the Thirteenth Amendment was followed by recognition of the need for the bureau in Kentucky as well. The relatively small African American population in Kentucky and its resultant impact upon the electorate was also a hindrance to the organization. House Executive Document, no. 11, 39th Cong., 1st sess., p. 31, Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 70.
18. Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 29.
19. LCJ, February 10, 1880.
20. Legislative Document No. 18, 9–82; KSJ, 1880, 39–47; AAC 4 (1886): 539–40; Tapp, “Three Decades of Kentucky Politics,” 197–206; Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn, 78 (quote); Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 82–83.
21. FRA, April 17, 1880; HMC, April 23, 1880; Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn, 86–88.
22. The most dramatic change was the adoption of a salaried warden to replace the graft-ridden lessee position. Robert Gunn Crawford, “A History of the Kentucky Penitentiary System,” 59–62, 122–25, 130; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 178–82; Baird, Luke Pryor Blackburn, 88.
23. Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 162–70.
24. Nation, November 1, 1866; AAC 3 (1869): 421–22; Dubois, Black Reconstruction in America, 568; Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 9, 162, 218–19, 280–81; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 359, 361; Ross Webb, Kentucky in the Reconstruction Era, 25.
25. From the 1870s until the 1920s, Kentucky had more white lynching victims than any state east of the Mississippi River. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 307–11. See also Rhyne, “ ‘We Are Mobed and Beat’ ”; Crane, “ ‘The Rebels Are Bold, Defiant, and Unscrupulous in Their Dementions of All Men’ ”; Przybyszewski, “The Dissents of John Marshall Harlan I,” 154–55; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 359, 361; Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 59.
26. Dunaway, African-American Family, 247.
27. McKnight, Contested Borderland, 229.
28. J. W. Alvord to General O. O. Howard, January 29, 31, 1870, in Alvord, Letters from the South, 39.
29. NYT, November 12, 1870. While this may have been intentionally hyperbolic, many historical studies show a record of Reconstruction-era oppression on par with the Deep South, even though the stakes for conservative whites (i.e., the prospect of Negro political domination) were considerably lower. See Pem Davidson Buck, Worked to the Bone; Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky; Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky; Lucas. A History of Blacks in Kentucky.
30. Cincinnati Commercial, May 31, 1867; Sumner, Charles Sumner, 200–202; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 334.
31. McConnelsville Conservative, January 20, 1871.
32. Kentucky’s August 1870 elections were the first statewide balloting in which black men participated. Patrick A. Lewis, “The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril,” 148. In his study of lynching, George C. Wright discovered that one-third of Kentucky’s recorded lynchings happened between 1865 and 1875, preceding the national numerical peak by nearly two decades. The state’s experience with the phenomenon suggests a heightened correlation between lynching and counterrevolutionary attacks on black citizenship (when lynching became far more widespread in the post-Reconstruction South, after black southerners were roundly denied the ballot, victims were most often men accused of murder or rape). Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 8, 309–11.
33. AAC 3 (1867): 422; Emma M. Connelly, The Story of Kentucky, 258–59, 317–21.
34. Lewis Collins and Collins, Collins’ Historical Sketches of Kentucky, 183–84.
35. Foner, Reconstruction, 434. One 1872 testimony to a joint congressional committee illustrates the clear extrapolitical value of the concept of feud and one example of its being used to make the political appear communal. A congressman asked a Cleveland County, North Carolina, resident to explain a series of affrays between two planter brothers he had witnessed in recent months. The witness answered that, even though one brother was a Republican and one a Democrat and their enmity had begun with the close of the war, it was impossible to determine whether their rupture was related to the local “bad feeling” between the parties or was “merely a family feud” (the witness indicated that he considered the latter more likely). It was admitted that the Republican brother had been attacked by a body of men in a clear attempt to dispatch a dissident scalawag, but the witness repeated his invocation of “family feud” twice more. Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, 306–7. See also Fleming, Documentary History of Reconstruction, 690–93; Louisiana Affairs, 384.
36. Thorpe, The Constitutional History of the United States, 323.
37. Cooling, “After the Horror,” 357.
38. Hahn, A Nation under our Feet, 280–82; Rable, But There Was No Peace, 85–86.
39. Tapp, “Three Decades of Kentucky Politics,” 12–13.
40. Albert Deane Richardson and Hanby, The Secret Service, 168; Thomas Louis Owen, “The Formative Years of Kentucky’s Republican Party,” 63.
41. KTY, March 17, 1871.
42. Ibid., January 2, 1866.
43. LCJ, October 9, 1874; Patrick A. Lewis, “The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril,” 150–51.
44. (Columbia, SC) Phoenix, March 26, 1868; J. W. Alvord to General O. O. Howard, January 29, 31, 1870, in Alvord, Letters from the South, 37–39; AAC 10 (1871): 426–27; Rable, But There Was No Peace, 93; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 8–10, 49–50, 381–85; Foner, Reconstruction, 428.
45. Patrick A. Lewis, “The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril,” 146–49; Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 221.
46. Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States, 1278; NYT, August 25, December 10, 1871, April 18, August 11, 1873; Fitzgerald, “Extralegal Violence and the Planter Class,” 155–68; Hahn, A Nation under our Feet, 267 (quote); Trelease, White Terror, 51; Foner, Reconstruction, 425.
47. Coulter, quoted in Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 381. For more on unspoken complicity between the Klan and southern Democrats, see Perman, The Road to Redemption, 34–36, 63–64; Zuczek, State of Rebellion, 51–62.
48. HGH, May 20, 1897; LCJ, May 10, 1897; NYT, September 13, 1897; Severance, Tennessee’s Radical Army, xi; Rable, But There Was No Peace, 111; Patrick A. Lewis, “The Democratic Partisan Militia and the Black Peril,” 147–50; Luntz, Forgotten Turmoil, 20–64; Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 19; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 85–89; Trelease, White Terror, 89. The Ku Klux Klan’s appearance in Breathitt County in the 1890s, at a time when it was virtually nonexistent anywhere else, is covered in a later chapter.
49. NYT, September 10, 1874; Rable, But There Was No Peace, 70 (quote), 95 (quote). For the relationship between the
Democratic Party and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1860s and 1870s, see Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote, 58–59; Foner, Reconstruction, 343–45, 427–42; Trelease, White Terror, 283–84n; Astor, “Rebels on the Border,” 265–66.
50. Blight, Race and Reunion, 122 (quote); Trelease, White Terror, 49–50.
51. Parsons, “Klan Skepticism and Denial in Reconstruction-Era Public Discourse,” 68–71.
52. “Notes on Kentucky and Tennessee,” 134; Shaler, Kentucky, 369. See also LCJ, August 13, 1870; Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky, 361.
53. Henry Watterson was the chief advocate of the southern Democracy’s “New Departure” sect, one that “advocated relinquishing any sectional animosities and racial conservatism that might hinder business and counseled acceptance of the Reconstruction amendments.” Anne E. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 52 (quote)–54.
54. LCJ, August 13, 1870. For Watterson’s conciliatory tone during and after Reconstruction, see Gaston, The New South Creed, 92–99; Sullivan, “Louisville and Her Southern Alliance,” 239–64.
55. LCJ, March 14, December 2, 1870. See also Friedman, The White Savage, 40. Watterson’s opposition to the “Bourbons” of his party was based upon his moderate public pronouncements on race, one of the primary planks of his paper’s “New Departure” platform. However, as a conservative often mistaken for a progressive by white editors farther south, Watterson often preferred that the less said about race the better, especially before the cessation of Reconstruction. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 6; Osthaus, Partisans of the Southern Press, 152–54; Anne E. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 69–71.
56. AAC 11 (1872): 174.
57. Wheatley, “Correspondence,” 26.
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