Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South

3. "The war spirit was high": Scenes from an Un-Reconstructed County

3 “the war sPirit was high” Scenes from an Un-Reconstructed County Even though we are in full possession of the enemy’s country, the conflict may break out again in the interior or through assistance from his allies. No doubt this may also happen after the peace, but this only shows that wars do not always contain the elements necessary for a complete decision and settlement. —Karl von Clausewitz, On War (1832) By the end of 1865 Breathitt County had been thoroughly chastened for rebelling against the United States. The harsh measures that Union captain WilliamStrongusedagainsthisownneighbors,andthewellspringofsupport he had from Unionists in neighboring counties, ended what was probably already a lost cause: a firm county-sized stronghold of rebellion within the Kentucky mountains. Numerous defections to Union forces further indicted the pro-southern elite’s hold over the populace. The attempt to create a Confederate mountain outpost in a Union state was proven a failure. The war’s last twelve to eighteen months had been the bitterest, and Strong and most of the Three Forks Battalion’s companies remained in uniform until three months after war’s end. Throughout eastern Kentucky, intermittent fighting continued well into 1866.1 Still, by most accounts, sincere efforts to rebuild civil society by veterans of both armies proved their shared willingness to parse the personal from the political. Breathitt County’s war was over, but the county earned its reputation for inherent violence sometime later. In the 1860s and 1870s white Kentuckians revolted fiercely against the war’s results, namely, the transformation of slaves into citizens. The change hardly constituted a revolution in the 73 74 Bloody Breathitt white-majority border state, but the white reaction in Kentucky was still comparable to the riots, raids, and bloodbaths that occurred farther south. White-on-white intraracial attacks may have actually been more common there than in perhaps any other southern state. “By 1865 Kentucky was in a rage because she had not seceded in 1861,” one newspaperman recounted early in the twentieth century, “and she is scarcely in a good humor about it yet.”2 Decades later, C. Vann Woodward concurred: “Despite Kentucky’s failure to secede and join the Confederacy, no state below the Ohio River presented a more solidly Confederate-Democratic front in the decade after Appomattox.”3 Despite its supposed insularity from the outside world, Breathitt County was affected by the absence of Reconstruction in Kentucky. The violence that gave it the name Bloody Breathitt was symptomatic of the crisis of legitimacy suffered by a state that could not reconcile itself to the war’s results, yet at the same time contained a minority insistent that Kentucky be remade with the Union’s renewal. Both sides resorted to types of violence replicated all over the South. Almost every “outrage” committed anywhere in the state was followed by the insistence of white Kentuckians (armed with their state’s tacit loyalty to the Union) that their state’s troubles had nothing to do with the obviously racial/political riots and massacres in places like Colfax, Louisiana, and Edgefield, South Carolina. The cultural South had a reputation for violence long before the political South rebelled, and white southerners often used the former as a smoke screen for the latter. Feud, a word for apolitical violence between equals, was useful for this purpose, especially when the victims of raids and lynchings happened to be white. In the end, the idea of Bloody Breathitt was only one manifestation of white Democrats’ need to depoliticize the violence that helped them maintain control over Kentucky. Breathitt County helped their case since, unlike in most Reconstruction trouble spots, the Unionists ultimately appeared to be just as malicious as the former Rebels. “These disturbances originated from private feuds” As with all wars, the American Civil War’s most dramatic political results became plain only after the fighting had stopped. This was particularly true in the most divided of border states. Although Kentucky remained officially loyal to the Union, many of its citizens felt that their loyalty to the United “the war spirit was high” 75 States had been poorly rewarded. The Federal government’s first and second Confiscation Acts, the presidential suspension of habeas corpus, and the Union army’s manumission and arming of African Americans disillusioned otherwise loyal white Kentuckians and hardened their pro-Confederate neighbors’ resolve (on the other hand, black Kentuckians were quick to claim...