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10
Spencer v. Looney
, trial transcript, p. 116.
11
Ibid. “A ‘
buck
nigger' is a term often vulgarly applied to a negro man ... During the discussion preceding the Presidential election, in 1860, one argument against the Republican ticket was, ‘Should you like to have your sister marry a big
buck nigger
?' ”:
Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms
, 4th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1877), p. 71.
12
Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
(1988; reprint, New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), pp. 37-38; Leon Litwack,
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 261-67, 274-82, 517; E. Merton Coulter,
The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), pp. 360-61.
13
Marion B. Lucas,
A History of Blacks in Kentucky
(Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1992), pp. 1:292-93;
Bowlin v. Commonwealth
, 65 Ky. 5 (1867). On violence and rigid racial ideology in the post-Civil War South, see generally Litwack,
Been in the Storm
.
14
Lucas,
Blacks in Kentucky,
pp. 187-88; see also George C. Wright,
Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865-1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and “Legal Lynchings”
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996); 1865-66 Laws,
Public Statutes of the State of Tennessee Since the Year 1858
, 2nd ed. (1872), ch. 40, sec. 1, p. 177; Ariela J. Gross,
What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 116; 1870 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.; 1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County.
15
John W. Keller,
The Game of Draw Poker
(New York: Frederick Stokes & Brother, 1889), p. 56. Keller warns of the player who “loses all patience, becomes enraged at the dire misfortune that so steadily besets him, strives to change affairs by bluffing and playing recklessly otherwise, and finally rushes on headlong to destruction. Cultivate patience if you would succeed at Poker.”
16
“He claimed he strayed from Clay County,” Horn said:
Spencer v. Looney
, trial transcript, p. 64.
17
Manuel Ray Spencer, who is related to Davis, has compiled extensive information about Davis's criminal record and reputation, based on criminal court records in Clay County, Kentucky, and local newspaper accounts. These materials are on file with the author.
18
See generally Altina L. Waller,
Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Noble,
Behold He Cometh
.
19
Hambleton Tapp and James C. Klotter,
Kentucky: Decades of Discord, 1865-1900
(Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 1977), p. 400. One cabin was full of “guns and guns—the deadly Winchesters and shotguns of the vendetta—on the wall and standing in the corners”: Dwight B. Billings and Kathleen M. Blee,
The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 282-85. See also John Ed Pearce,
Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), pp. 32-40.
20
Manuel Ray Spencer materials. Letcher Davis was involved in a 1905 shoot-out when “Hades broke loose in Wolfe County”:
Interior Journal
(Stanford, Ky.), June 9, 1905, p. 2. Years earlier, Davis brawled in the aftermath of a school trustee election: see
Hazel Green (Ky.) Herald
, June 9, 1886, p. 3.
21
Manuel Ray Spencer materials.
22
Spencer v. Looney
, trial transcript, p. 70.
23
Ibid., p. 65. “Some things about the relations between the races had been established quickly after emancipation. Schools, poor houses, orphanages, and hospitals, founded to help people who had once been slaves, were usually separated by race at their inception”: see Edward L. Ayers,
The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 136. “Even the Radical legislatures in which blacks played a prominent role made no concerted effort to force integration on unwilling and resisting whites, especially in the public schools; constitutional or legislative provisions mandating integration were almost impossible to enforce”: see Leon F. Litwack,
Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow
(New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 229-30.
24
Spencer v. Looney
, trial transcript, p. 63.
25
William Roscoe Thomas,
Life Among the Hills and Mountains of Kentucky
(Louisa, Ky.: Big Sandy Valley Historical Society, 1926, 1983), p. 165; Hall,
Johnson County,
pp. 131-32, 135.
26
Wilma A. Dunaway,
Women, Work, and Family in the Antebellum Mountain South
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 204; Jesse Stuart,
Men of the Mountains
(New York: Dutton, 1941), pp. 106-7; James Watt Raine,
The Land of Saddle-Bags
(1924; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), p. 83; Thomas,
Life Among Hills
, pp. 165-66; Hall,
Johnson County
.
27
Spencer v. Looney
, trial transcript, p. 151.
28
Martha Hodes,
White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th-Century South
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 147, 174; George C. Wright, “By the Book: The Legal Execution of Kentucky Blacks,” in
Under Sentence of Death
, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 250. Wright notes that while there were 117 documented lynchings, many bodies were buried or burned. He distinguishes these numbers from “legal lynchings,” in which death sentences were foregone conclusions for blacks tried for serious crimes, regardless of the strength of the evidence against them (p. 251).
29
Hodes,
White Women, Black Men,
p. 149.
30
1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County, Ky.;
Spencer v. Looney
, trial transcript, p. 151.
31
1880 U.S. Census, Johnson County.
32
Schwarzweller, in
Mountain Families,
describes the power of “family and kin” in the Beech Creek neighborhood of Clay County (pp. 43-44). On hog killing in eastern Kentucky as an annual winter rite, see Lynwood Montell, “Hog-Killing in the Kentucky Hill Country: The Initial Phases,”
Kentucky Folklore Record
18 (1972), pp. 61-67.
CHAPTER TWELVE: GIBSON: WASHINGTON, D.C., 1878
1
Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman,
Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War
(New York: Knopf, 1962), p. 392; Frank A. Flower,
Edwin McMasters Stanton: The Autocrat of Rebellion, Emancipation, and Reconstruction
(Akron, Ohio: Saalfield, 1905), p. 79.
2
Randall Lee Gibson to William Preston Johnston, March 26, 1878, box 17, folder 6, Barrett Collection.
3
“Really a Mad. Wells,”
Washington Post
, February 20, 1878, p. 1.
4
Randall Lee Gibson to William Preston Johnston, November 26, 1872, box 15, folder 28, Barrett Collection; Randall Lee Gibson to William Preston Johnston, September 11, 1875, box 16, folder 33, Barrett Collection.
5
Gibson to Johnston, November 26, 1872; Randall Lee Gibson to William Preston Johnston, February 6, 1876, box 17, folder 3, Barrett Collection.
6
Randall Lee Gibson, “Counting the Electoral Vote—Louisiana,” January 25, 1877, in
Select Speeches of the Hon. Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), pp. 5, 30; and “Address of Mr. Sherman of Ohio,”
Memorial Addresses on the Life and Character of Randall Lee Gibson
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), p. 47. One newspaper described Gibson as “the representative of a very large class of the best white people in the Southern States—people who are in perfect sympathy with the best men in the Republican party of the North, and have been kept from joining its ranks only by the Southern policy of the Administration”: see “Gov. Hayes and the South,”
New York Tribune
, December 27, 1876, p. 1. See also
Congressional Record
4 (1876), pp. 2715-16, 2771-72.
7
“Address of Mr. Sherman,” 47; Michael O'Brien,
Henry Adams and the Southern Question
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), p. 69; Matthew Arnold, quoted in Mary Gorton McBride with Ann Mathison McLaurin,
Randall Lee Gibson of Louisiana: Confederate General and New South Reformer
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), p. 191; Arnold was describing to William Gladstone a December 1883 dinner at historian George Bancroft's house.
8
Eric Foner,
Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877
(1988; reprint, New York: Perennial Classics, 2002), pp. 575-80.
9
Congressional Record
4 (1875-76), pp. 206, 720; “Nicholls: Senator R. L. Gibson's Speech at Monroe,”
Daily Picayune
, November 14, 1887, pp. 2, 3.
10
Ella Lonn,
Reconstruction in Louisiana After 1868
(New York: Putnam, 1918), p. 500 and n3; Presidential Election Investigation, House Misc. Doc. 31, 45th Cong., 3d sess. (1879), pp. 1008-9.
11
Lonn,
Reconstruction in Louisiana,
p. 496; Presidential Election Investigation, p. 1009; McBride,
Gibson of Louisiana
, p. 156; “Nicholls: Senator R. L. Gibson's Speech at Monroe,”
Daily Picayune
, November 14, 1887, pp. 2, 3.
12
Gibson, “Counting the Electoral Vote,” pp. 30-31.
13
Ibid., p. 30; Presidential Election Investigation, p. 964; Foner,
Reconstruction,
pp. 580-81; David W. Blight,
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 137-38.
14
“Nicholls: Senator R. L. Gibson's Speech at Monroe,”
Daily Picayune
, November 14, 1887, p. 2. To be sure, the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party remained committed to a Radical Southern policy. See, e.g., Heather Cox Richardson,
The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. xv, 154.
15
Randall Lee Gibson to John McGrath, May 25, 1877, box 1, folder 6, Gibson Papers, Tulane.
16
See generally Walter McGehee Lowrey, “The Political Career of James Madison Wells,”
Louisiana History Quarterly
31 (1948), p. 995.
17
Congressional Record
7 (1878), p. 1031.
18
“The Louisiana Officials,”
New York Times
, February 19, 1878, p. 1.
19
Ibid.; “Instead of being reckless and extremist, as they imagined, ... we were really men of equal moderation and firmness, devoted to the peace, the prosperity, and the honor of our whole country”: see
Congressional Record
7 (1878), p. 1030.
20
“The Louisiana Officials,”
New York Times
, February 19, 1878, p. 1; see also McBride,
Gibson of Louisiana
, pp. 173-74.
21
“Really a Mad. Wells,”
Washington Post
, February 20, 1878, p. 1.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid.
24
Randall Lee Gibson to William Preston Johnston, March 23, 1872, box 15, folder 21, Barrett Collection; Randall Lee Gibson to William Preston Johnston, June 1, 1874, box 16, folder 20, Barrett Collection; Mary Montgomery Gibson to Sarah Gibson Humphreys, February 16, 1877, ser. 5, folder 9, Gibson and Humphreys Papers.
25
Randall Lee Gibson to McKinley Gibson, August 4, 1879, ser. 5, folder 10, Gibson and Humphreys Papers; McBride,
Gibson of Louisiana
, p. 179; Randall Lee Gibson to H. T. Duncan, January 13, 1874, Letterbook 6, p. 71, Weeks Papers; Randolph Hollingsworth,
Lexington: Queen of the Bluegrass
(Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2004), p. 126; Randall Lee Gibson to Sarah Gibson Humphreys, August 20, 1878, ser. 5, folder 9, Gibson and Humphreys Papers; Mary G. McBride and Ann M. McLaurin, “Sarah G. Humphreys: Antebellum Belle to Equal Rights Activist, 1830-1907,”
Filson Club History Quarterly
65 (1991), pp. 231, 241-42.
26
Congressional Record
7 (1878), pp. 1030-31.
27
Randall Lee Gibson to William Preston Johnston, November 26, 1872, box 15, folder 28, Barrett Collection; James K. Hogue,
Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), pp. 116-43; McBride,
Gibson of Louisiana
, pp. 146-47; Randall Lee Gibson to William Preston Johnston, October 21, 1878, box 18, folder 23, Barrett Collection.
28
Editorial,
Washington Post
, February 20, 1878, p. 2;
Eden v. Legare
, 1 S.C.L. (1 Bay) 171 (S.C. Com. Pleas Gen. Sess. 1791);
Boullemet v. Phillips
, 2 Rob. 365 (La. 1842);
Toye v. McMahon
, 21 La. Ann. 308 (1869). On the legal doctrine of racial defamation, see generally Samuel Brenner, “ ‘Negro Blood in his Veins': The Development and Disappearance of the Doctrine of Defamation Per Se by Racial Misidentification in the American South,”
Santa Clara Law Review
50 (2010), p. 233.
29
“Louisiana Legislature,”
Daily Picayune
, February 20, 1857, p. 7. See also Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule,”
Minnesota Law Review
91 (2007), pp. 592, 631, 643;
Richmond Enquirer
, January 3, 1854, and December 31, 1853, quoted in Ira Berlin,
Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South
(New York: Random House, 1974), pp. 365-66.

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