Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  64. Williams, Appalachia, 305.

  65. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 274n.

  66. Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 383.

  67. Waller counts among the many misconceptions regarding the Hatfield-McCoy feud the assumption that Hatfields and McCoys were only combatants against each other while, as her research has demonstrated, men with both surnames (as well as various other surnames) took divergent sides according to their economic relationships and personal wishes rather than family loyalties. But in retrospect, many later used familial associations to explain their participation in violence. Waller, Feud, 78–85.

  68. LCJ, January 31, 1900.

  69. “Kinship, on the surface one of the most innocent descriptive terms one could imagine, is fraught with temporal connotations. From the early debates on ‘classificatory’ kinship systems to current studies of its continued importance in western society, kinship connoted ‘primordial’ ties and origins, hence the special strength, persistence, and meaning attributed to this type of social relation. Views of kinship relations can easily serve to measure degrees of advancement or modernization. By comparing the relative importance of kinship bonds in different societies or groups one can construct developmental, i.e., temporal scales.” Satterwhite, Dear Appalachia, 62; Fabian, Time and the Other, 75–76 (quote). See also Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 1–16, particularly 2; Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, 49–63; Abner Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man, 18–34; Trachtenburg The Incorporation of America, 35–37.

  70. William G. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” 311.

  71. For the most updated volume on “whiteness studies” as it pertains to Kentucky’s “mountain white,” see Painter, The History of White People, 245–46, 308. See also Williams, Appalachia, 199; Harkins, Hillbilly, 40–45; Silber, The Romance of Reunion, 136–58; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Anderson, Race and Rapprochement, 17 (quote)–25; Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia, 15, 57–63, 77, 81–85; Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine, 87–92.

  72. Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains,” 566.

  73. Westengard et al., “International Tribunals in the Light of the History of the Law,” 833.

  74. Quoted in Painter, The History of White People, 308.

  75. Emma M. Connelly, The Story of Kentucky, 266–67.

  76. Painter, The History of White People, 179–81; Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 201–2; Klotter, “The Black South and White Appalachia,” 838–39n.

  77. Shaler, Kentucky, 406 (quote); Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 107–12; Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine, 258–59; Blaustein, The Thistle and the Brier, 35.

  78. Mutzenburg, Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies, 26; “Notable Episodes in Outlawry,” 318 (quote).

  79. New International Encyclopaedia, 500.

  80. Scribner’s 29 (1901): 563. As noted before, the assertion that “there were feuds before the war” in the Kentucky mountains is not supported with substantial evidence.

  81. Hough, “Burns of the Mountains,” 14.

  82. Chandler et al., The South in the Building of the Nation, 302.

  83. Fox, The Heart of the Hills, 169.

  84. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 345; John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, 114; Clark, Kentucky, Land of Contrasts, 208–9.

  85. The half truth of white Appalachia’s “pure” Celtic identity, and the suggestion of continuity from a premodern past therein, has sustained itself into the twenty-first century and remains a large discursive element in discussions of whiteness. Hague and Sebesta, “Neo-Confederacy, Culture, and Ethnicity,” 120; Blaustein, The Thistle and the Brier, 19–46; Craighead, Scotch and Irish Seeds in American Soil; Painter, The History of White People, 133, 154, 179–81, 223–24; Satterwhite, Dear Appalachia, 68–70, 219–20, 272n; Dennis, “Events of the Month,” 966.

  86. James Webb, Born Fighting, 78–80; Vann, Rediscovering the South’s Cultural Heritage, 46 (quote); Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 252, 628–29, 663, 756, 767; Jordan and Kaups, The American Backwoods Frontier, 252.

  87. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” 6.

  88. Hanna, The Scotch-Irish or the Scot, 61.

  89. Chandler et al., The South in the Building of the Nation, 322.

  90. Waller, Feud, 21.

  91. Warner, “Comments on Kentucky,” 263; E. L. Noble, Bloody Breathitt, 1:270–71.

  92. Fox, Blue Grass and Rhododendron, 45.

  93. Marcosson, “The South in Fiction,” 366.

  94. William Davis and Swentnor, Bluegrass Confederate, 251.

  95. Lloyd, “A Background to Feuding,” 451–52.

  96. Toynbee, A Study of History, 149.

  97. Fox, The Heart of the Hills, 312–13. Fox Jr. had meant for The Heart of the Hills to serve as a penance to eastern Kentucky for the damage he and others had inflicted on the place’s image. To his regret, sales and reviews for the novel were substantial but not as good as for his past novels and short stories. York, John Fox, 244, 257.

  98. Fox, The Heart of the Hills, 349. This was the only part of the book in which William Goebel was explicitly named rather than being called “the autocrat.”

  99. Cawein, Poems, 9; Rothert, The Story of a Poet, 154, 361.

  100. Mutzenburg, Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies, 26. See also NYT, February 13, 1908; “Kentucky Tobacco War,” 3.

  101. Mutzenburg, Kentucky’s Famous Feuds and Tragedies, 26–27.

  102. Summers, The Press Gang, 59–75, 308–13; Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century, 139–48.

  103. Semple, “The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains,” 618.

  104. Litsey, “Kentucky Feuds and Their Causes,” 287. Litsey mostly used information from the Clay County War, a scenario that fit into the feud narrative in that it did seem to be a truly horizontal conflict between elite families owing to political and economic competition allegedly spanning six decades. Still, a thorough examination of the Baker-White feud suggests that isolation and Scottish lineages had less to do with the origins of violence than Litsey suggested; see Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty, 306–15.

  105. McClure, “The Mazes of a Kentucky Feud,” 2217.

  106. John C. Campbell. The Southern Highlander and His Homeland, 113.

  107. Harkins, Hillbilly, 36; Waller, Feud, 221–28, 248–49.

  108. Waller, Feud, 221.

  109. T. C. Crawford, An American Vendetta; Waller, Feud, 221–28.

  110. Native Kentuckian D. W. Griffith produced A Feud in the Kentucky Hills (1912), perhaps the first motion picture treatment of the subject, as a vehicle for ingénue Mary Pickford. But it was Buster Keaton’s Our Hospitality (1923) that brought the subject to the cinema in a more critically significant portrayal. Based loosely on of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, it provides an example of a conflation of the southern feud and the mountain feud, or perhaps evidence of the continuity, rather than rupture, between the two in the public imagination. The “Canfields” and “McKays” live deep within the mountains but, rather than being poor corn hoers, they are big-housed planters with close access to railroads and comically huge gun collections. The origins of the feud are suitably obscured, revenge is the sole motivator, and enemy status is based purely on surname. A wedding uniting the families provides a happy ending. Family is the prime mover in all of the film’s action. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the film is that the plot is placed far back into the 1830s rather than the more accurate 1880s. The railroad, which serves as an important plot device, anachronistically reaches a setting that would not have had access to it in the time it took place. Our Hospitality premiered only two years after the real-life death of William “Devil Anse” Hatfield. Edward McPherson, Buster Keaton, 129–36; J. W. Williamson, Hillbillyland, 270; Schickel, D. W. Griffith, 179; Harkins, Hillbilly, 152.

  111. Altina Waller shows, however, that these beginnings and endings were
only peripheral to larger issues that produced the feud, not to mention that the tumultuous romance between Johnse Hatfield and Roseanna McCoy (and his eventual marriage to her cousin Nancy McCoy) was peripheral to the violence that took place between their relatives. Waller, Feud, 66–69, 78–85.

  112. Kentucky’s governor Simon Buckner and West Virginia’s E. Willis Wilson came to legal blows over the extradition of members of the Hatfield family/faction to the former’s state. However, since both were Democrats from different states, their conflict did not constitute a crisis of state sovereignty or intraparty conflict. Furthermore, it was Kentucky’s only widely reported feud event in the 1880s that did not sanction a militia visit. Waller, Feud, 207–19.

  113. Williamson (WV) Daily News, August 2, 1982, Appalachian Feuds Collection, box 1, series 6, Southern Appalachian Archives, HLSCA.

  114. Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 370.

  115. Banner, “John Ehle and Appalachian Fiction,” 174; Ewen, Social Stratification and Power in America, 130.

  116. Frierson, “The Image of the Hillbilly in Warner Bros. Cartoons of the Thirties,” 86–100; Inge, “Li’l Abner, Snuffy, and Friends,” 3–28; Rodger Lyle Brown, Ghost Dancing on the Cracker Circuit, 80–85; Harkins, Hillbilly, 103–40; Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia, 111, 131.

  117. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice, 256. For a concise narrative of the twentieth-century origins of “pluralism” as an ideal among American intellectuals, see Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 377–408.

  118. Penny M. Miller, Kentucky Politics and Government, 71.

  119. Wray, Not Quite White, 3.

  120. Anglin, “A Question of Loyalty,” 111.

  121. Gladwell, Outliers, 175. I am grateful to Lauren E. Kilgore for making me aware of this book.

  122. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 3.

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

  124. Gladwell, Outliers, 162.

  125. Ibid., 167.

  126. For a concurring criticism of Outliers, see McNay, “Outliers and Hatred against Hillbillies.”

  127. Abner Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man, 89.

  128. Deas, “Violent Exchanges,” 351–53; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 39.

  129. The novelist called Breathitt “almost the first mountain county in the State to inaugurate the terrible feud, and certainly the last to give it up.” Fox, “On the Road to Hell-fer-Sartain,” 350.

  130. Jackson Hustler, April 3, 1891.

  131. HGH, July 15, 1885.

  132. Hubbard, The Fra, xxvii.

  133. LCJ, May 8, 1903.

  134. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 12.

  135. Furman, The Quare Women, 69.

  136. Although the phrase “Bloody Harlan” apparently dates back to at least as early as 1909, it did not gain national currency until the 1930s. Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Constitutional Convention of the United Mine Workers, 92, 169; “Kentucky Feudalism,” 13–14; Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote, 206–12.

  137. Marcosson, “The South in Fiction,” 366.

  138. Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference for Education in the South, 106.

  139. FRA, May 13, 1905; CDT, February 7, 1908.

  140. Washington Post, May 29, 1904; CDT, June 7, 1903. (Perhaps erroneous in many other ways as well, the Tribune’s account of a generations-old feud in Breathitt was notably wrong in mentioning the violent death of young bachelor Judge Burnett’s imaginary wife as among the atrocities of 1878.)

  141. Rolt-Wheeler, The Boy with the U.S. Census, 29.

  142. New York Sun, reprinted in Kansas City Star, June 22, 1903.

  143. Hartford Republican, July 25, 1902; Lexington Leader, November 14, 1902.

  144. LEP, May 13, 29, 1903.

  145. Life, July–December 1903, 8; CDT, June 23, 1903.

  146. American Farmer, October 1909, 5.

  147. “Discouraged,” 12.

  148. “An Elemental Hint,” 5.

  149. Beach, The Net, 33.

  150. Hubbard, The Fra, xxv. The same volume also refers to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s pre–World War saber rattling as “Breathitt County reasoning” (xxv–xxvii).

  151. Furman, Mothering on Perilous.

  152. Tarleton, Bloody Ground. Unlike most feud narratives, this novel is narrated in the present tense.

  153. Fox, A Cumberland Vendetta; Fox, Christmas Eve on Lonesome; Fox, A Mountain Europa.

  154. The song was “recovered” in Texas by a musicologist less than twenty years after Judge Hargis’s death. Supposedly the Texas source singer asked that the song not be published for a number of years further. “The Murder of J. B. Markham (traditional),” Lester McFarland and Robert A. Gardner (Brunswick Balke Collender Company), 78 rpm recording, Assorted Artifacts, Breathitt County Museum; Shearin and Combs, Syllabus of Kentucky Folk-songs, 18–19; Combs, Folk-songs du Midi des Etats-Unis, 183; Mellinger, “Ballads and Songs of the Southern Highlands,” 296–97; Donald Lee Nelson, “The Death of J. B. Marcum,” 17–22; Wolfe, Kentucky Country, 8–9.

  155. Flood Control, 2323–38; Judge Watson, Eastern Kentucky, 147–50; Wray, Not Quite White, 96–132.

  156. Kidd, Farm Security Administration Photography; Blakey, Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky, 131. Impoverished from the depletion of its timber and coal, Breathitt County was of particular interest to New Deal activists and benefited from programs like the Works Progress Administration. The county was still one of the last Democratic bastions in eastern Kentucky; the New Deal caused yet another rupture within the local party, stirring talk of a possible new “feud.” See Day, Bloody Ground, 108–12, 148–60, 173; Lindley and Lindley, A New Deal for Youth, 131; Blakey, Hard Times and New Deal in Kentucky, 64, 68. See also Melvin et al., Rural Poor in the Great Depression, 27, 44, 83–84, 113–14.

  157. Gooch and Keller, “Breathitt County in the Southern Appalachians,” 1011–12.

  158. Shackleford and Weinberg, Our Appalachia, 41–42.

  159. Gooch and Keller, “Breathitt County in the Southern Appalachians,” 1018.

  160. Salstrom, Appalachia’s Path to Dependency, 94–121. Even though New Deal programs that targeted Appalachia specifically were carried out in the interest of alleviating unemployment, Salstrom sees most of these programs as ultimately harmful, considering that they created a dependency upon monetary incomes.

  161. WPA, In the Land of Breathitt, 54, 76.

  162. “Bloody Breathitt,” 19.

  163. Payne, “The Hillman Case,” 1011–58 (quote 1041).

  164. Loyal Jones, “James Jones’ Appalachian Soldier in His World War II Trilogy,” 152–65.

  165. James Jones, The Thin Red Line, 247.

  166. “Poverty”; Sexton and Bellardo, The Public Papers of Governor Louis B. Nunn, 376–79. Howell’s father, Judge Ervine Turner, and his wife, Marie, were the faces of Democratic absolutism in Breathitt County from the Great Depression until the Great Society. Like Breathitt politicos of times past, the Turners exerted a remarkable amount of influence in Frankfort. Ellis, A History of Education in Kentucky, 293; Burch, “The Turner Family of Breathitt County,” 401–17; Burch, Owsley County, 100–101; Pearce, Divide and Dissent, 50–51.

  This followed Nunn’s forwarding of the “Kentucky Un-American Activities Committee” in 1968 to defeat New Left activism in various mountain counties. Kiffmeyer, Reformers to Radicals, 171–72, 179–81, 201–3; Eller, Un
even Ground, 152–54; Whisnant, Modernizing the Mountaineer, 207–8.

  167. Burch, “The Turner Family of Breathitt County,” 404, 409n.

  168. Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown, 128n. See also Cheney, In My Time, 52–53; Eller, Uneven Ground, 155–57; Stephen F. Hayes, Cheney, 58–60.

  169. Coates, Stories of Kentucky Feuds, 3–24, 71–116.

  170. Child, “The Boss of Breathitt,” 15.

  171. The editor’s humorous speculation of the possibility that a recent deadly scuffle in Huntington, West Virginia, “may start a feud” would have been a comfort to eastern Kentuckians weary of hearing of it only in their own county. BCN, September 9, 1904.

  172. LCJ, December 25, 1884.

  173. Ibid., June 3, 1904.

  174. BCN, February 17, 1905.

  175. Harrison and Klotter, A New History of Kentucky, 346.

  176. Quoted in Arthur M. Miller, “The Vote on the Evolution Bill in the Kentucky State Legislature,” 317.

  177. Lexington Leader, March 3, 1900, quoted in “Yesterday’s News,” 236.

  178. Pilcher, The Story of Jackson City, 16. Jaded as he was with feuds, Pilcher once engaged in a bit of gunplay himself when a large city marshal attacked him in his own newspaper office. Pilcher fired two shots and forced the marshal to retreat. FRA, May 19, 1906.

  179. Pilcher, The Story of Jackson City, 33.

  180. Ibid., 49.

  181. Ibid., 101.

  182. Ibid., 42.

  183. Ibid., 44.

  184. Ibid., 58–59; Martin, “Race Cooperation,” 17.

  185. Pilcher, The Story of Jackson City, 50.

  186. Ibid., 57.

  187. Quoted in Bar On, The Subject of Violence, 44.

  188. Earlington Bee, December 15, 1911.

  189. Richmond Climax, April 13, 1910; clipping, St. Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, October 27, 1916; Frankfort State Journal, November 13, 1918, Appalachian Feuds Collection, box 1, series 6, Southern Appalachian Archives, HLSCA; Bourbon News, July 15, 1919; Jett, From Prison to Pulpit, 17–19, 22, 51–52, 68, 75–76.