Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  44. JJDD, entry, April 9, 1884, reel 1, p. 286; Huddle, “Soul Winner,” 58–60.

  45. “I read an article in Harper’s magazine for June 1887 tonight, from the pen of John Mason Brown, in the Kentucky Pioneer’s in which he says, ‘The fair name of the State they founded has sometimes been tarnished by violence and lawlessness and at times has come upon many for the wickedness of very few. But he who will very carefully search out the history of her population and the antecedents of Kentucky wrong doers will discover in them a class different in blood from their pioneers. He will find that the too frequent homicides of certain neighborhoods have an origin (wholly) entirely different, drawn from an originally immoral class, and justifying the law of hereditary. But in those areas where the original and true pionners made their lodgement and held it, the stamp of their qualities may still be observed, modified by the lapse of years but the same in essentials; the badges of a martial, hospitable, truthful and self reliant people.’

  “I am sure that this imputation can be removed from our mountain people and God helping me, will do it. I know that it is environment and not heredity that has made the chasm between the people of the Blue Grass and the mountains. This I can prove by tracing the geneology of these people and I will do it if it requires the rest of my life. My first and greatest desire is to change their environment and thereby change their character but while I am doing this I can write their ‘simple annals’ and show to posterity that Kentuckians have a common ancestry without regard to ‘areas’ they occupy.” Entry, December 21, 1895, JJDD, reel 1, pp. 1594–95.

  46. HGH, July 1, 1885.

  47. Ibid., August 5, 1885.

  48. Ibid., September 16, 1885. The Hazel Green Herald first put type to press in March 1885 under publisher Spencer Cooper, a Union veteran and Bluegrass Democrat. Over the following years, the Herald became eastern Kentucky’s most prominent Democratic newspaper. In the 1890s the Herald veered in favor of Populism, providing the People’s Party with a rare mountain following. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 306; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 323.

  49. HGH, May 6, 1885; MSA, February 26, 1901.

  50. HGH, September 22, 1886.

  51. JJDD, entry, November 22, 1888, reel 1, p. 1185; Richmond Climax, January 9, 23, August 7, 1889; MVB, February 18, 1889, July 24, 1890, October 9, November 20, 1891.

  52. Jackson Hustler, quoted in MVB, December 10, 1890.

  53. MVB, July 30, 1895.

  54. Of all the large-scale white intraracial conflicts counted among the “Kentucky feuds,” the “Martin-Tolliver feud,” (also known as the “Rowan County War”) originated far afield from where most Kentuckians considered their state’s mountainous “feud belt.” Rowan County, situated in the hilly northeast quadrant of the state, was commercially vibrant, with a spur of the immense Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad and relatively simple access to the market of the greater Ohio Valley. Accusations of vote tampering in 1884 resulted in a series of riots pitting the followers of the county’s Republican and Democratic ringleaders. Rowan’s Republican leadership was made up of a business-minded middle class with interest in increasing the economic presence of “outside” investment. Amid the economic giddiness of the 1880s, John Martin, a frequent Republican candidate for various offices, was forced to contend with a Democratic challenge from Craig Tolliver, a recent arrival from a less developed, heavily Democratic mountain county. The Democrats led by Tolliver were mostly a ragtag group of young disadvantaged men whose economic autonomy was threatened by Martin’s railroad-friendly Republicans.

  Fearful of civil unrest but eager to cut another chink in the mountainous Republican stronghold, the Democratically controlled state capital allowed the Tolliver faction to terrorize Rowan County’s electorate for months before acting. When Democratic governor J. Proctor Knott finally intervened, it was as a mediator rather than an executive enforcer of peace. The New York Times complained that Knott “treated the ruffians with all the consideration due from one great nation to another. He had ambassadors appointed by each of the contending factions, received them in Louisville, and after two pleasant ‘conferences’ with the murderers induced them to sign a treaty of peace, and sent them home with his thanks” (NYT, June 27, 1887). As Altina Waller has pointed out, Rowan County was not a particularly isolated part of eastern Kentucky; it’s portrayal as a feud involved stretching the “feud belt” some ways from the mountains in order that it might be included within an increasingly popular media heuristic (Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 358). This was of special importance if the marriage between geography and white intraracial violence were to be sustained; the Rowan County War was probably the single bloodiest affair in Kentucky since the Civil War. “Letters to the [Mt. Sterling, Kentucky] Sentinel-Democrat pertaining to the Rowan County Feud and Other Matters,” 1885–86, KLSCA; HGH, April 8, 1885; NYT, December 11, 1884, July 6, 8, 11, 1885, August 10, 1886; AAC 15 (1891): 474; BCN, November 20, 1903; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 72–74; Klotter, “Feuds in Appalachia,” 298–99.

  Writing of the Martin-Tolliver feud in the first decade of the twentieth century, a Kentucky state militia veteran recalled that “the trouble in the beginning was somewhat connected with politics, but afterwards assumed the form of organized brigandage.” MacPherson, “The Louisville Legion,” 9.

  55. SIJ, March 20 (quote), 1885; HGH, April 8, 1885.

  56. HGH, July 15, 1885.

  57. Myers, “The Mountain Whites of the South,” 19.

  58. G. W. Noble, Behold He Cometh in the Clouds, 306; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 323.

  59. HGH, December 23, 1885.

  60. Ibid., March 11, 1885.

  61. Ibid., August 4, 1886.

  62. Ibid., August 18, 1886.

  63. SIJ, October 15, 1886; HGH, October 13, 1886. See also JJDD, entry, October 24, 1886, reel 1.

  64. Omaha Herald, March 20, 1880.

  65. Harkins, Hillbilly, 40–45.

  66. Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, 8–9, 273–308 (quote 9).

  67. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 134; Ayers, Promise of the New South, 213.

  68. Anne E. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 111–32 (quote).

  69. In the late 1880s, a travel writer remarked that “in all the mountain region of eastern Kentucky I passed through there are few to-day who are politically Democrats.” Decades later, an early twentieth-century visitor who shared the contemporary belief in the strict distinction between the “mountain white” and lowland white southerners noted that eastern Kentucky’s “staunch adherence” to the Republican Party was so well established that “topography has defined the mountain section as one of the political divisions of the State by a kind of common law of both political parties in their conventions and in common parlance.” Warner, “Comments on Kentucky,” 264; Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains,” 611–12.

  Warner and Semple were influenced by local-color writer Will Wallace Harney. Harney did not seriously address mountain politics, but his 1873 article has been credited with beginning the literary movement that established the southern Appalachians as a place distinct from the South and the United States as a whole. Harney, “A Strange Land and a Peculiar People,” 429–38.

  70. As detailed in previous chapters, the strength of the antebellum Whig Party had translated into adamant Unionism in most eastern Kentucky counties during the Civil War and provided a fertile field for the growth of the Republican Party afterward, especially when candidates were willing to ignore the national platform’s emphasis on civil rights for African Americans. Aside from the business-minded Republican coteries in urban areas, by 1900 the party had become almost exclusively peopled by increasingly disfranchised African Americans and white mountain men. After Kentucky’s postwar readjustment, the party found the same source of growth as it did in other economically comparable pockets of the South. For many poor whites (and eastern Kentucky was consistently the state’s poorest area) the Republ
ican Party offered a clear alternative to the Bourbonism that overtook the Democratic Party after Reconstruction. Gordon McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 50–54, 63, 68–69; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 44–45; Richard B. Drake, A History of Appalachia, 160–62; Snay, “Freedom and Progress,” 100–114; Samuel Webb, Two-Party Politics in the One-Party South; Samuel Webb, “From Independents to Populists to Progressive Republicans,” 734–36; Hyman, The Anti-Redeemers, 43, 117–18, 182–86, 217–18.

  71. Letter to the editor from “Mugwump.”

  72. Fox Jr. expressed this politically enmeshed abnormality in The Heart of the Hills (1913), his last best-selling novel. The protagonist and narrator was a plucky young mountain boy who (typical of leading characters in most of his books) prospers by embracing the education afforded to him by the “outside world” (i.e., the ever progressive but largely Democratic Bluegrass) without rejecting his alpine manliness. The young man, now college educated but still a ruggedly masculine Anglo-Saxon, witnessed the beginnings of a political intrigue that threatened to tear Kentucky apart while also heightening his section’s electoral importance. He “knew that at home Republicans ran against Republicans for all offices, and now he learned that his own mountains were the Gibraltar of that party, and that the lines of its fortifications ran from the Big Sandy [River], three hundred miles by public roads, to the line of Tennessee.” In the process, “in spite of the mountaineer’s Blue-grass allies,” the young mountaineer hero “had come to believe that there was a state conspiracy to rob his own people of their rights.” Fox, The Heart of the Hills, 203, 206. I am grateful to Bill Hutton for making me aware of this novel. For another analysis of Fox Jr.’s thematic use of mountain Republicanism, see Anne E. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 123–31.

  73. Hartford Herald, February 27, 1895. In 1900 a Washington, DC, editor made a similar educated mistake. Knowing that eastern Kentucky was “completely Republican,” he figured that Breathitt County was “the last place in the world to look for any attempt to obstruct Republican balloting,” despite evidence to the contrary. Washington Times, November 10, 1900.

  74. Quoted in Berea Citizen, September 24, 1903.

  75. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 320.

  76. Gordon McKinney, Southern Mountain Republicans, 119; Shannon and McQuown, Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 71.

  77. Clark, Kentucky, Land of Contrast, 208–9. In “participant political cultures” citizenship defines social relations and the relationship between individuals and the state and, by extension, the citizen expects the state to serve as a means to preserve, or gain, popular expectations. In opposition, the area of Kentucky that was increasingly referred to as the “feud belt” constituted a “parochial” political culture in which there is an absence of specialization among political roles. Parochial cultures are associated with “tribal” government, political bodies that American citizens generally associated with either their own distant European past or members of races deemed inferior, most notably Africans or Native Americans. For a full contrast between participatory and parochial political cultures, see Almond, “Comparative Political Systems,” 396–97; Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture, 17–20.

  Since its mid-twentieth-century inception, “political culture” has come under tremendous criticism for its conceptual amorphousness and its utility in allowing cultural historians to “evade certain classic considerations of political life, namely, power, and who exercises it” and for “repeat[ing] social history’s earlier slighting of power and policy dimensions.” For this reason, the phrase should be used with care when dealing with violent political conditions since, as Harry Eckstein has remarked, the existence of political cultures suggests a measure of continuity while violence is irrevocably associated with “drastic political change.” I disagree with this only slightly since Eckstein considers violence only within revolutionary usages without addressing counterrevolutionary state violence. However, the concept’s problematic nature should be noted. “Political culture” is used here only within the precise boundaries in which it was originally formulated: a means of understanding individual or group political actions in atmospheres within which basic understandings of “ideology” are not strictly delineated. Political culture covers the “vaguer and more implicit orientations” of political action that ideology cannot explain. For a critique of political culture from which the earlier quotes are taken, see Formisano, “The Concept of Political Culture,” 395. For political culture and violence, see Eckstein, “A Culturalist Theory of Political Change,” 790–92, 797.

  78. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 536.

  79. National Geographic, February 14, 1894, 632; Lexington Herald, December 16, 1900; HGH, August 28, 1902. See also Kansas City Journal, May 3, 1903; NYT, May 30, 1903; MSA, July 1, 1903; Barton, “The Church Militant in the Feud Belt,” 351–52; Decatur Daily News, March 14, 1910, March 24, 1912; Charles Neville Buck, The Call of the Cumberlands, 102; Davenport, Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, 305.

  80. White mountaineers’ Republican loyalty represented to northerners an uncommon patriotism that would be instrumental to sectional reconciliation. But accepting these southern mountaineers as part of the (northern) American political mainstream was difficult when they were simultaneously being portrayed as strange, primitive, and “vastly out of step, culturally and economically, with the progressive trends of industrializing and urbanizing nineteenth-century America.” After white northern self-consciousness about national reunification waned, the significance of mountain Republicanism remained. Eastern Kentucky was proof of “the geological distribution of politics,” but it was a distribution based partly on empirical fact but also upon speculation, faulty anthropology, and colorful mythology. Billings, Pudup, and Waller, “Taking Exception with Exceptionalism,” 1; Coulter and Connelley, History of Kentucky, 2:1047; Anne E. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 119–23; Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 145–46.

  81. The Courier-Journal identified thirty-one different “feuds” in various parts of Kentucky between 1882 and 1893. Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 355–61. See also Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia, 76–79; Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind ix, 63; John A. Williams, Appalachia, 192; Anne E. Marshall, Creating a Confederate Kentucky, 127–32; Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 314.

  82. For the late nineteenth-century cultural explanations for feud violence, see Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia, 76–79; Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind ix, 63; John A. Williams, Appalachia, 192.

  83. Governor-elect Buckner defeated Republican William O. Bradley in 1887 by 16,197 votes, the smallest Democratic margin of victory in a gubernatorial election since the Civil War. Stickles, Simon Bolivar Buckner, 336–44; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 234–36, 246.

  84. Stickles, Simon Bolivar Buckner, 348–55.

  85. Waller, Feud, 162–63, 174–81, 194–210.

  86. Bailey, Matewan before the Massacre, 238–39.

  87. “J. P. Marrs et al to His excellency S. B. Buckner, undated,” “B. W. Combs et al to Governor Buckner and General Hill, November 14, 1888,” “W. W. Baker to G. M. Adams, November 16, 1888,” “G. B. Brandon to Governor Buckner, November 18, 1888,” “J. B. White et al to His Excellency S. B. Buckner, December 4, 1888,” Governor’s Correspondence, November–December, 1888, box 1, folders 18–19, KDLA; “Captain J. M. Sohan to Governor S. B. Buckner, November 14, 1888,” “Legislative Document No. 17: Adjutant General’s Report for the Year 1889,” KPD, vol. 4 (Frankfort: E. Polk Johnson, 1889), 7, 36–56; HMC, June 18, September 3, 1886; SIJ, June 11, July 27, 1886, December 24, 1889, October 10, 1893; MVB, August 26, December 8, 1886, April 18, 1887, November 6, 1888, November 13, 1889, May 16, 1892, September 27, October 17, 1894; HGH, August 4, September 15, 22, November 24, 1886, May 15, 1891, September 27, 1894, January 3, August 22, 1895, May 14, 1896; Hartford Republican, December 14, 1894; NYT, July 31, 1886, November 16, 1886, November 10, 1890; Joseph Atkins et al., Appts.,
v. Commonwealth of Kentucky, January 10, 1896, LRA, 1896, 32:108–13.

  88. Harry Caudill, Their’s Be the Power, 178. See also Pearce, Days of Darkness, 77.

  89. MVB, November 13, 1889; HGH, May 21, 1896; Ireland, Little Kingdoms, 76–77.

  90. HGH, May 21, 1896; various letters, Governor’s Correspondence, November–December, 1888, box 1, folder 18, KDLA.

  91. SIJ, September 24, 1895; MSA, September 24, 1895; Richmond Climax, September 25, 1895; HGH, December 19, 1895; Lexington Herald, January 25, May 26, 1896.

  92. MVB, November 13, 1889; MSA, July 1, 1902; Hartford Republican, February 26, 1904.

  93. “James S. Mahan et al to his Excellency Simon B. Buckner, Governor of the Commonwealth of Ky., November 26, 1888,” “J. B. White et al to His Excellency S. B. Buckner, December 4, 1888,” Governor’s Correspondence, December 1888, box 1, folder 19, KDLA.

  94. HGH, November 24, 1886.

  95. “Will Jennings to Governor S. B. Buckner (Wilson R. Howard cosigned)” (no date but postmarked September 1, 1889), Governor’s Correspondence, March–April 1889, box 2, folder 34, KDLA.

  96. “Wilson Lewis to Governor Buckner, July 24, 1889,” Governor’s Correspondence, March–April 1889, box 2, folder, 31, KDLA.

  97. “T. S. Ward to Governor S. B. Buckner, July 22, 1889,” “Alex A. Arthut to Governor Buckner, July 23rd, 1889,” “Wilson Lewis to Governor Buckner, July 24, 1889,” “J. K. Bailey to Governor Buckner, August 4, 1889,” “Will Jennings to Governor S. B. Buckner (Wilson R. Howard cosigned), postmarked September 1, 1889,” Governor’s Correspondence, March–April 1889, box 2, folders, 31, 34, KDLA.

  98. HMC, October 8, 1886; SIJ, August 9, 13, 1889; Pittsburgh Dispatch, August 7, 1889; Richmond Climax, September 4, 1889; LCJ, September 23, 1889; AAC 14 (1889): 487; “Commonwealth of Barbarians,” 295–97; Tapp and Klotter, Kentucky, 395–96; Waller, Feud, 80.

  99. Portelli, They Say in Harlan County, 58–63 (quote 59).