Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South

1. "To them, it was no-man's land”: Before Breathitt Was Bloody

1 “to them, it was no-man’s land” Before Breathitt Was Bloody Without hazarding any thing, I think, Sir, I may say, more of the happiness of this Commonwealth, depends upon the County Government under which we live, than upon the State or the United States’ Government. —Alexander Campbell, delegate to Virginia’s Second Constitutional Convention (1829) As an old man, George Washington Noble recalled watching a “pitched battle” when he was a child in Breathitt County, Kentucky, in the 1850s. It was a semiofficial Court Day event, a hand-to-hand tussle for money and prestige between various communities’ “champion fighters,” referred to locally as “Tessy Boys.”1 As in a duel, the fights employed seconds to prevent foul play and to give a potential deadly free-for-all a measure of ritualized order; it was, after all, around the same time that another fight with no public supervision had ended in a fatal stabbing.2 In Jackson, Breathitt’s county seat, this display of fisticuffs added entertainment, and an aura of masculine brio, to a staid political and legal event, augmenting the more formal proceedings going on inside the courthouse. It was an inclusive activity , establishing democratic homosocial interactions between men from disparate neighborhoods across a very large county, gathering “high and low into deeply charged, face-to-face, ritualized encounters.”3 A rough, unruly, violent spectacle occurring during a public event that ensured civic order, the Tessy Boys’ fight serves as an allegory for Breathitt County’s social and political existence in the two decades before the Civil War. The incorporation of fighting into a state-ordained ritual like Court Day (an always-boisterous event in the antebellum South) mirrored the state’s marginally successful attempt to bring stability to a chaotic environment.4 11 12 Bloody Breathitt Antebellum Breathitt County was just another representation of southern society re-created in the Kentucky mountains. The Tessy Boys may have had a peculiar local name, but they were a pretty close facsimile to the semiorganized Court Day tussles that were then de rigueur throughout Kentucky and the other slave states.5 Reading about Bloody Breathitt in 1905, one would have been falsely led to believe that it had always been a wooded preserve for antediluvian chaos. Once it had been named “Bloody Breathitt” in the 1870s this relatively peaceful stage of its history, Tessy Boys and all, was mostly forgotten. Long before the homicides and mayhem for which it would later be known, antebellum Breathitt County did contain the potential for turmoil. The 1839 formation of Breathitt County in eastern Kentucky’s Three Forks region (the drainage area of the Kentucky River’s three tributaries) happened out of desire to bring a governmental and commercial order to an inert, untapped wilderness.6 Well to the east of the old Wilderness Road (the main road between Virginia and central Kentucky that provided access to both for portions of southeastern Kentucky’s mountains), it was one of the last areas of Kentucky with a permanent population. Breathitt County’s creation was brought about by landowners who saw the area as a commodity rather than just a living space. It was a governmental entity, like other counties, but it was also a business venture carried out for personal, not public, gain. Moreover, it was a venture that ran counter to the interests of many of the preexistentpopulation.Thiswasmeanttobeaprofitableorderand,likemany other such schemes of the nineteenth century, it had unforeseen outcomes. “These people lived here in seclusion for several years; not knowing [of ]what country or nation they were citizens” The story of early Breathitt County is one of in-state sectionalism, an upland county founded according to mostly lowland interests. The enormously luxuriant rolling hills of the Bluegrass in north-central Kentucky, a cultivator ’s paradise where a facsimile of the Virginia plantation economy could be re-created, was the first section of any economic consequence for white settlers and their slaves.7 “The [non-Indian] population of Kentucky until the separation from Virginia,” wrote one early twentieth-century Kentucky historian, “was practically confined to the Bluegrass.”8 From there Kentuckiansspreadoutwardafter1792statehood ,southtotheGreenRiverValleyand westward to the tobacco-growing Pennyroyal and Jackson Purchase sections. “to them, it was no-man’s land” 13 The Cumberland Plateau, the mountain range that covers most of eastern Kentucky, was always defined in contradistinction to the rest of the state, and it was a...