Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South

2. "Suppressing the late rebellion”: Guerrilla Fighting in a Loyal State

2 “suPPressing the late rebellion” Guerrilla Fighting in a Loyal State As the nation was rent apart, so was the commonwealth; as the state so was the county; as the county, the neighborhood; as the neighborhood, the family; as the family, so brother and brother, father and son. —John Fox Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) He has only one idea: the revolution; and he has broken with all the laws and codes of morals of the educated world. If he lives in it, pretending to be part of it, it is only to destroy it the more surely; everything in it must be equally hateful to him. He must be cold: he must be ready to die, he must train himself to bear torture, and he must be ready to kill in himself any sentiment, including that of honor, the moment it interferes with his purpose. His name remained a bugbear for decades. —Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940) Breathitt County native George Washington Noble became a lifelong believer in divine portent when he was sixteen, not long before he joined the Confederate infantry. One winter night in 1860 or 1861, he saw an enormous comet in the winter sky. His father (no doubt informed by current events) said that it was an omen of impending war between North and South.1 Months later, George felt called to defend his home from northern aggression , especially after hearing rumors that Yankees were “killing women and children and carrying off the negroes” and Kentucky would soon be occupied territory. After the Upper South’s states seceded, most adult male Kentuckians followed a path of least resistance, many taking their families 37 38 Bloody Breathitt and slaves “to the hills” to “lay out” hostilities.2 Others put aside their distaste for Abraham Lincoln and his party and joined the Union army. But Noble figured that the Confederate army “was just as good as the Northern Army” and, against his parents’ wishes, joined a locally organized company in December. When Noble recalled his decision fifty years later, his reasoning remained succinct: “My grandfather came from the South, and I liked the Southern people the best.”3 George Noble’s Confederate service took him to Virginia, where he was captured and sent to a Maryland military prison until he was paroled and returned to Kentucky in 1864. His harshest moments of fear and sadness lay ahead of him even then. Although he initially feared a “foreign” army, he and other Breathitt Countians found that the greatest wartime dangers were not invaders but close neighbors—“Southern people” the young soldier knew personally.4 Years before Breathitt County was called Bloody Breathitt, its violent history began with the Civil War, its conditions determined by Kentucky’s intricate internal sectionalism. To its north and east, between the Big Sandy River and the Kentucky River’s northern fork, lay a pocket of proConfederate mountain Democracy. South and west of the county, between the Kentucky River’s middle and south forks, the eastern edge of the old Whig Gibraltar, was the most consistently pro-Union area in all of Kentucky.5 Like many wealthy Kentuckians, Breathitt’s leaders supported the rebellion, and Breathitt County became a Confederate staging ground for attacks on nearby Unionist counties. There were dissenters within the county; a defiant interracial martial polity “beyond the visible end of the spectrum” took up an intense offensive against their Confederate neighbors.6 Theirs was a campaign against secession and slavery, but it was also an indictment against Breathitt County itself. Nearly surrounded by counties with Unionist leanings, and beset by its own internal divides, Breathitt became a nexus of guerrillaism: a collection of tactics that blurred the distinction between social relations and military strategy.7 The intimacy between combatants, uniformed and otherwise, tempered the way in which they fought, amounting to what nineteenthcentury Americans called a “social war.”8 This was how the American Civil War was won and lost in many places, especially in the border South, although it was not a popular memory after the war. As the story of the “War between the States” was written after 1865, most Americans fancied a distinction between the guerrillaism in places like “Suppressing the late rebellion” 39 Breathitt County and the larger “legitimate” war. The stories of veterans like George Noble were overshadowed by...