Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South by T. R. C. Hutton (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 92 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY which, Efford argues, made Germans complicit in neglecting black civil rights. Efford describes a host of ethnic interests in the 1870s, such as German-language parochial schooling and Sunday drinking, that further sidelined the needs of African Americans. German Immigrants, Race, and Citizenship in the Civil War Era is imaginative and relentlessly rigorous in analysis and organization. Efford’s prose seamlessly interweaves a diverse and rich cast of mid-nineteenth century German immigrants . Civil War buffs, German enthusiasts, and scholars alike must read this book. Luke Ritter Saint Louis University Bloody Breathitt Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South T. R. C. Hutton In early 1862, a Union officer described the nature of the Civil War in eastern Kentucky, noting that “men who for years were neighbors now hunt each other with guns among the interminable hills.” He predicted that “long after the war is closed…the feudal flames will yet be unquenched; I can see no brighter future for them. A simple declaration of peace…will never do the thing effectual for these simples” (The Wild Life of the Army: Civil War Letters of James A. Garfield [East Lansing: Michigan State University, 1964], 64-66). The officer’s words proved prophetic; lawlessness, vigilantism , and bloody feuds scourged the Kentucky mountains for decades after the conflict. In Bloody Breathitt, T. R. C. Hutton offers the first in-depth study of a county legendary as the “darkest and bloodiest of all the dark and bloody feud counties” (1). Rooted in the guerrilla warfare that ravaged the mountains during the Civil War, political violence and ruthless assassinations troubled Breathitt County into the twentieth century. Hutton contends that journalists, most from outside the region, mischaracterized the turmoil in Breathitt as local clashes between feuding mountaineer clans. The Louisville Courier-Journal, in particular , distorted the picture, in an effort to preserve Kentucky’s national image by “distancing T. R. C. Hutton. Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013. 450 pp. ISBN: 9780813136462 (cloth), $50.00. BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2013 93 Breathitt County from the rest of the state” (97). The author argues that false depictions of “feudal violence” in eastern Kentucky have colored the majority of written accounts that followed, most recently in Malcolm Gladwell’s references to “Bloody Harlan” in his popular 2008 study Outliers: The Story of Success (234-35). A Democratic enclave surrounded by pro-Whig counties during the antebellum era, Breathitt County became an island of Confederate support during the Civil War. Among the county’s pro-Union minority, Captain William Strong emerged as an effective leader and in the postwar era he led Breathitt’s black and white Republicans. Frequent armed clashes between Strong’s Republican “Red Strings” and the pro-Democratic Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s laid the foundations for the county ’s violent reputation. Yet, as Hutton effectively argues, these clashes were far from isolated, personal vendettas carried out by backward people. Rather, Breathitt’s internal political struggles reflected the violence that plagued the South throughout the Reconstruction era. Strong’s 1897 assassination ended the first phase of violence in the region. The years that followed witnessed political conflict in a new guise as a ruthless Democratic courthouse ring employed hired assassins to gun down their Republican rivals. The Courier-Journal and the national press described the violence that erupted in the early twentieth century as yet another episode of endless “mountain feuding,” though the same bitter political climate sparked the 1900 assassination of Kentucky Governor-elect William Goebel in Frankfort. Historian Altina Waller’s Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 18601900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) sparked a new scholarly interest in Kentucky’s mountain feuds. But while Waller downplays the causal role of the Civil War in the legendary Hatfield-McCoy feud, Hutton argues that the character of the wartime conflict in the mountains spawned a climate of violence that fueled decades of political turmoil. In the years after the war, Hutton argues, most veterans “voted the way they shot,” and in “hot spots” like Breathitt, they “shot the way they voted” (www.broadwayworld.com...