The Graves County Courthouse in Mayfield in 1942. Twenty years before a deputy fatally shot the sheriff and stood trial there. The building was damaged beyond repair in the December 2021 tornado outbreak. Photo by George Goodman (1876-1961) from the Goodman-Paxton Photographic Collection. (University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center)

The Sept. 19 Whitesburg slaying wasn’t the first time one county official was charged with killing another in a Kentucky courthouse.??

Letcher County Sheriff Shawn Stines, 43, is accused of first degree murder for allegedly shooting District Judge Kevin Mullins, 54, in his chambers. So far, the sheriff’s motive is unclear.

On March 6, 1922, Deputy Sam Galloway, 29, gunned down Graves County Sheriff John T. Roach, 30, in the sheriff’s office. Galloway evidently killed Roach after he heard the sheriff planned to fire him.?

Stines, who immediately surrendered to authorities, pleaded not guilty and remains jailed without bond. A preliminary hearing has been set for Oct. 1.

The Whitesburg shooting has attracted state and national media coverage. Likewise, the Mayfield shooting grabbed newspaper headlines across Kentucky and the country. The latter ultimately led to a book, “A Courthouse Tragedy: Politics, Murder and Redemption in a Small Kentucky Town,” written by the late Murray attorney Sid Easley, a Graves County native. Published 10 years ago, it’s still available on Amazon.

Easley wrote that Roach and Galloway had been friends. Both wanted to run for sheriff in the August 1921, Democratic primary. Apparently, the two men struck a deal: Galloway would bow out in favor of Roach, who would appoint him a deputy, a post that often was a stepping stone to sheriff.

After he won the primary and easily defeated a Republican in the general election, Roach kept his word. But trouble brewed when Galloway found out that Roach planned to cut his pay and work hours. Worse, Galloway later learned that his days as a deputy were numbered.?

Galloway confronted Roach in the sheriff’s office on circuit court day. Both became angry; Galloway shot Roach three times with a .45 caliber pistol, according to Easley’s book.

Galloway quickly handed over his weapon and submitted to arrest. Fearing mob violence against the prisoner, authorities transported him to the McCracken County jail in Paducah.?

On March 7, the Graves County grand jury indicted Galloway for willful murder, which carried a maximum sentence of death or life imprisonment. The case against Galloway seemed open and shut. After all, there were multiple witnesses.

Roach’s death resulted in a historical first for Kentucky. His widow, Lois Roach, was named to succeed him. Apparently the state’s first woman sheriff, she was elected in her own right in 1923 and reelected to a second two-year term in 1925.

Galloway’s trial began on June 26. Because he and the late sheriff had many friends in Mayfield and Graves County, Circuit Judge W.H. Hester summoned a jury from adjacent Ballard County.?

Galloway pleaded self-defense, claiming he fired only when he saw Roach reach in his pocket for his pistol. His testimony was disputed; the prosecution characterized the deputy as a cold-blooded murderer.

The jury deliberated for three days and failed to reach a verdict. Hester declared a mistrial and prepared to set a date for a second trial, Easley wrote.?

Hester gaveled the court into session on July 26 with jurors from Carlisle County, which also adjoined Graves. The judge stopped the trial after a juror unexpectedly died on July 28. The judge scheduled a third trial, also with Carlisle countians in the jury box, for Aug. 1.???

In his charge to the jury, Hester said Galloway could be found not guilty, found guilty of murder and sentenced to death or life imprisonment, or found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and imprisoned for “not less than two nor more than twenty-one years,” Easley wrote.

On Aug. 4, the panel convicted Galloway of the lesser charge and sentenced him to seven years. Hester subsequently denied a defense motion for another trial and Galloway’s lawyers gave up on a fourth trial.?

After his release from Eddyville Penitentiary, Galloway moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, with his second wife. His first wife died soon after he was locked up. The couple had two sons; one lived to 72, the other, born while the deputy was jailed and awaiting his first trial, died at age 5.??

Galloway was 74 when his life ended in Tulsa in 1968. He is buried in a Tulsa cemetery.?

Roach and his widow, who died in 1979 at 83, are buried in Mayfield’s old Maplewood Cemetery. A metal plaque recognizes her as the first woman sheriff in Kentucky. Besides his spouse, Roach was survived by their 3-year-old daughter, Ruth, who lived to age 86.

The 1880s vintage red brick courthouse, where Galloway violently ended Roach’s life and was punished for his crime, is gone, a casualty of the deadly Dec. 10, 2021, tornado that devastated much of Mayfield.??

Easley ended his book by quoting the editor of the “Mayfield Weekly Messenger” who, three days after the shooting, urged the citizenry “to be calm, collected and full of the spirit that controls sadness and tears. And yet it is also the time for wise men and those who love the integrity and honor of Mayfield to counsel peace and the law.”

The author concluded, “The voice of that editor eloquently reminded the community that the spirit of redemption was always present, and that the wise among them should reach for the healing offered by its power of restoration.”

In May 1963, civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, demanded the integration of public schools. White authorities ordered them pummeled by fire hoses. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that racial segregation in public education violated the U.S. Constitution. One response in the South was to give white parents vouchers to pay to send their children to all-white private schools. (Photo by Frank Rockstroh/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

The Kentucky State AFL-CIO’s opposition to Amendment 2 shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows labor history. Unions have always championed public schools.

The Republican-backed amendment, which will be on the Nov. 5 ballot, would change the state Constitution to permit the General Assembly to pass laws letting tax dollars go to private schools. You can bet if voters approve the measure, come January, the GOP supermajority House and Senate will lose no time approving a voucher program in which parents and guardians can use those public funds to send their children to private schools.

Just as unions have historically supported public schools, “Republicans, and white conservatives, have long been hostile to public schools,” Brynn Tannehill wrote in the New Republic. “School desegregation drove white evangelicals to become the strongest Republican demographic. Ronald Reagan promised to end the Department of Education in 1980. Trump put Betsy DeVos in charge of the Department of Education, precisely because she was a leading proponent (and funder) of defunding public schools, and funneling it to religious schools.”

Simply put, a voucher program will severely weaken public schools by draining away funds desperately needed to keep schools open. Depending on its size and scope, a voucher program in Kentucky would cost between $1.19 billion and $199 million, the equivalent of employing between 9,869 and 1,645 teachers and other staff, according to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

Supporters of Amendment 2 claim vouchers enable parents or guardians to choose where to send their kids to school. While Amendment 2 proponents maintain that vouchers especially benefit poor families, evidence points the other way, starting with the origin of voucher programs.???

“Vouchers were first created after the Supreme Court banned school segregation with its ruling in Brown v Board of Education,” explains the National Education Association. “School districts used vouchers to enable white students to attend private schools, which could (and still can) limit admission based on race. As a result, the schools that served those white students were closed, and schools that served black students remained chronically underfunded.”??

The NEA points out that “unlike public schools, private schools can (and some do) limit their admission based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and any other number of factors. Furthermore, vouchers rarely cover the full tuition, so families who were promised a better education are left footing the bill.”??

It’s no coincidence that supporters of vouchers are also anti-labor. “They’re against the teachers’ unions,” said Jeff Wiggins, Kentucky AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer. “They want their own private schools so they won’t have any unions.”?

Added Wiggins, “These conservative private schools have their own agendas. They want to teach students what they want them to learn. They don’t want them to learn about unions and the struggles of working people.”?

Writing in HuffPost, Robert J. Elisberg warned that “the less educated the public is, the more it relies on authority figures, rather than question anything. And the more that education is disdained, the less that inconvenient facts will be believed.”

Public schools didn’t become common in the U.S. until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since colonial days, almost all schools had been private and too expensive for working class Americans.

Hence, “the labor movement was instrumental in establishing free public schools,” American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers said in a speech at the National Education Association’s 1916 national convention. He explained that “wage-earners are more vitally interested in…public schools than any other group of citizens” because “public schools are the only educational institutions available for their children and for them.”?

Amendment 2 reflects old-time Social Darwinism, a pseudoscientific theory popular among the rich in Gompers’ time. A perversion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Social Darwinism was an elitist notion that the rich and their apologists in the press and pulpit often cited to justify the brutal exploitation of workers by millionaire industrialists.

In the main, Social Darwinian theorizing held that “the powerful in society are innately better than the weak and that success is proof of their superiority.” Thus, Social Darwinists argued that public schools, unions, worker and safety and health laws — and anything else that helped “inferior” folk — should be resisted as violations of what they claimed was an immutable law of human nature: the strong survive, and the weak don’t.

The self-styled “Captains of Industry” worshiped at the altar of Social Darwinism and sent their kids to posh private schools while cheerily hiring poor kids — the younger the better — to work in their hellish factories, mines and mills. (Today, some right-wing Republicans are talking up rolling back child labor laws.)

In the heyday of Social Darwinism, industrialists stubbornly, and often violently, resisted unions. Wages for industrial workers were so low, their children as young as 10 had to go to work to help their families make ends meet. Precious few families did, even with mom, dad and the kids all working. Unions saw public education as the surest way out of poverty for the children of workers.

Elisberg said conservatives have always wanted “just private schools and homeschooling” which he said will be “the end of an educated nation. …. But for conservatives, that’s okay. The wealthy and privileged will get their children a great education. And the rest of America? You’re on your own.”

He concluded: “Public education is what helped make America the envy of the world. A nation of well-informed citizens. Leading the way in the space race, technology, finance, and medical advances.

“But conservatives? They want to go back to ‘the old fashioned way.’ Like the Dark Ages. Where kings and the aristocracy ruled. And you peasants, obey thy overlord. Make no mistake, this is nothing new. The attack against education is the drug that conservatives have been pushing through history.”

In Kentucky, that drug is Amendment 2. “Power is their drug,” Wiggins said. “They want to control everything, so they’re coming after public schools. My tax money belongs in public schools, not private schools.”?

"A colorful Member with a fiery temper" is how the U.S. House "History, Art & Archives" describes Matthew Lyon "depicted in this infamous print with Roger Griswold of Connecticut." (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

The first sound bite in American political history was recorded more than two centuries ago in Western Kentucky.

First District Congressman Matthew Lyon of Eddyville, a fierce Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican, used his teeth to detach a detractor’s digit.

It was self-defense. The constituent was trying to pop the congressman’s eyeball out.

Lyon was an Irish-born Revolutionary War veteran who’d been a Vermont congressman before he migrated to frontier Western Kentucky and helped found Eddyville on the Cumberland River. (Eddyville is the seat of Lyon County, which was named for his son, Rep. Chittenden Lyon, an Eddyville Democrat who was in Congress from 1827 to 1835.)

Matthew Lyon was elected to the Kentucky legislature in 1802, and he served in Congress from 1803 to 1811.

“The coonskin democracy of southwestern Kentucky idolized the Colonel,” wrote historian Bernard Mayo in an old article in “The North American Review.” “In all Kentucky there was no candidate so energetic, so colorful. Lyon’s bag of electioneering tricks, said seasoned observers, was inexhaustible.”??

Lyon reportedly could “out-shout his rivals, ‘drink grog all day long without getting drunk, & tell pretty rough anecdotes.’”

Lyon said he owed his political success to stationing himself “at a crossroads by which everybody in the district passed from time to time … abusing the sitting member,” according to Mayo’s book, “Henry Clay: Spokesman for the New West.”??

One time, abuse came from a man named Cofield. He tried to embarrass his member of Congress by dredging up the story of Lyon spitting in the face of Congressman Roger Griswold, a Federalist foe, during a 1798 House session. It’s unclear if the great expectoration was saliva or tobacco juice, but it led to a brawl on the House floor between “The Spitting Lyon” and Griswold.

A year later, Lyon was briefly jailed under the Alien and Sedition Acts for printing commentary sharply critical of Federalist President John Adams — whom he hated — in his newspaper, “The Scourge Of Aristocracy and Repository of Important Political Truth.”?

Lyon was still behind bars when his Green Mountain State constituents reelected him. After he was released, he returned to Congress in time to help make Jefferson president over Aaron Burr in 1801. The two tied in the Electoral College after the 1800 presidential election. (The Federalist Adams lost.) So the House had to decide who won.?

Lyon claimed if it hadn’t been for him, Burr might have triumphed. “During that long tie-vote contest ending only with the thirty-sixth ballot, ‘a Lyon grim and bold, for desperate warfare fam’d of old,’ manfully resisted Federalist bribes and cast Vermont’s vote for Jefferson,” Mayo wrote in his article.

He also quoted from a New York Herald account of Lyon’s “lively scuffle” with Cofield: “Mr. Lyon immediately cracked away at Mr. Cofield, but Mr. C so completely defended himself that he parried off the blow, and the scene of action commenced hot and hard.”

Cofield finally knocked Lyon flat and prepared to deliver the coup de grace in a backwoods brawl: gouging out an eye with a deft thumb flick.

“In the attempt, however,” the “Herald” explained, “the honorable gentleman got Mr. C’s thumb in his mouth and completely amputated it at the first joint.”

In his book, Mayo wrote that by chomping off Cofield’s thumb, Lyon helped confirm eastern opinions “that Kentucky was truly a paradise for barbarous Yahoos.”

Lyon died in Arkansas in 1822 and was buried in Eddyville’s Riverview Cemetery. Neither his epitaph ?nor a nearby state historical marker mention “The Spitting Lyon’s” unique form of hand surgery though it truly was a sound bite.

In 1922, the Louisville Herald commemorated the Election Day violence of Bloody Monday, Aug. 6, 1855, when anti-immigrant mobs attacked Irish and German immigrants in Louisville. At least 19 people died. (Public domain)

Donald J. Trump, meet Charles S. Morehead, the guy who was elected governor of Kentucky in 1855 on the anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing” ticket.

“Americans should rule America” was the Know-Nothings’ credo. Translation: white, native-born Protestants like them.?

Officially, the American Party, it was dubbed the “Know-Nothing” party because members were supposed to reply — like Sgt. Schultz on “Hogan’s Heroes” — “I know nothing” to an inquiry about the party from a possibly hostile journalist or suspicious stranger.

The party faithful shrieked that foreigners loyal to an “inflated … despot” were threatening to take over the country. Translation: German and Irish-born Catholics.??

According to the Know-Nothings, these “papist” foreigners were hellbent on foisting their “false religion” and its “anti-Christian” law on America. German and Irish Catholics were “a foe to the very principles we embody in our laws, a foe to all we hold most dear.”?

Too, the party claimed immigrants were “the chief source of crime in this country.” They weren’t. Trump says “illegal immigrants” are boosting the violent crime rate in the U.S. They aren’t.

Multiple “studies by academics and think tanks have shown that immigrants do not commit crime at a higher rate than native-born Americans,” Reuters reported. Other “studies specifically examine criminality among immigrants [who are] in the U.S. illegally and also find that they do not commit crimes at a higher rate.”

Trump has been demagoguing against “illegal immigrants” since he announced his presidential candidacy in 2015. He’s called them “animals.” He said migrants from Haiti and from African nations came from “shithole countries.” He charged that “illegals” are “poisoning the blood”?of the U.S., meaning the blood of white folks. (“The remarks ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ are straight out of Hitler’s 1925 autobiographical manifesto “Mein Kampf” — his blueprint for a ‘pure Aryan’ Germany and the removal of Jews,” wrote Russell Contrearas in Axios.

Trump denies he’s parroting Germany’s Nazi dictator who ordered the murder of six million European Jews.?

If he’s reelected, Trump promises he’ll promptly order “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The “illegals” he wants to kick out are black and brown.

While Trump’s appeal to nativism and xenophobia is rooted in racism, the American Party downplayed white supremacy and elevated anti-Catholic and anti-foreign bigotry over race-baiting. “You didn’t have a substantial enough free Black voting population to make any difference in electoral politics,” said Murray State University historian Brian Clardy.??

Demographically, Trump’s MAGA movement is strikingly similar to the Know-Nothings. Overwhelmingly, it’s composed of conservative whites of American birth, most of whom are evangelical Protestants. In the Trump-tilting Bluegrass State, almost 87% of the population is white. Nearly half ?of Kentuckians who say they are religious identify themselves as Protestant evangelicals, a big chunk of the Trump base.????

Like the Know-Nothings, Trump “appeals to the baser instincts of people who subscribe to nativism and seeks electoral gain at the expense of marginalized populations,” Clardy said.?

In the 1855 spring municipal elections, Know-Nothings took control of city governments in Louisville, Lexington and Covington. In the Aug. 6 state elections, Morehead won the governorship, plus his party notched majorities in both houses of the General Assembly and claimed six of the state’s 10 U.S. House seats, according to the Kentucky Encyclopedia.?

The party’s violently anti-Catholic and anti-foreign rhetoric led to bloodshed in Louisville on Aug. 6. Many blamed the anti-foreign hysteria, at least in part, on editor George D. Prentice of The Louisville Daily Journal. He endorsed the Know-Nothing ticket and authored vicious editorials against “the Pope of Rome, an inflated Italian despot who keeps people kissing his toes all day.”

Know-Nothing mobs rampaged through German and Irish immigrant neighborhoods, murdering, beating, burning and looting. At least 19 men died in the violence which went down in history as “Bloody Monday,” the encyclopedia says.?

Most Know-Nothings had been Whigs before the party collapsed in 1854. Kentucky-born Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, was an ex-Whig. He denounced Know-Nothing nativist bilge in no uncertain terms.

“I am not a Know-Nothing,” he declared in an Aug. 24, 1855, letter to his friend, Joshua F. Speed of Louisville. “That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of Negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid.”?

Ultimately, the? Know-Nothings faded away and ended up on the trash heap of history, where they belong. There’s plenty of room for Trump in history’s landfill, too.

Clardy fears violence if Trump wins and enacts his mass deportation programs aimed at “illegals” of color. He worries that white supremacist groups and individuals, taking their cue from the White House, will “attack immigrants, native-born African Americans, Hispanic Americans and others. Trump is going to embolden racists to do their worst.”?

"Ghosts of a Lost Cause" will be aired Jan. 15, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in Murray.

Murray’s controversial court square Confederate monument “represents a distorted, bloody and awful past that we cannot forget but should not celebrate,” said Murray State University historian Brian Clardy.

The 1917-vintage stone memorial topped by a 5?-foot statue of Robert E. Lee, the Confederacy’s most famous general, is the subject of a new film, “Ghosts of a Lost Cause” by Sherman Neal II and Gerry Seavo James, which will be shown at Murray State’s Wrather Hall at 6 p.m. CST on Jan. 15, Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The film will be followed by a panel discussion. Click here?to purchase tickets and here for more information.

Paid for by a United Daughters of the Confederacy fund-drive, the monument is typical of hundreds of such Confederate memorials — many of them UDC-sponsored. Nearly all of the tributes were erected in public places in the late 19th and early 20th centuries during the Jim Crow Era as powerful symbols of white supremacy in the old Confederate States and in border states like Kentucky.

Dozens of memorials have been removed, including a large bronze equestrian statue of Lee, a Virginia native, in Richmond, Virginia, the Confederate capital for most of the Civil War.

Many white Americans — not just white Southerners — still revere Lee. “On the one hand, it is true that Lee opposed secession in early 1861, before Virginia seceded. On the other hand, there’s everything else,” wrote?The Washington Post’s?Gillian Brockell. “For example, despite what old revisionist history or social media memes claim, Lee owned enslaved people. He drove them hard, and he pursued and punished them when they escaped. He separated families to pay off debts and fought in court to prevent them from being freed.”

After Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, killed?George Floyd, who was Black, in 2020,?protests?against racism and police brutality erupted nationwide. (Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter and sent to prison.) Some of the protests included demands that?Confederate statues and monuments?be taken down.

Neal, then a Murray State football coach,?sent a letter to Murray Mayor Bob Rogers asking that the monument be removed because it was “an affront to all residents who support notions of equality and value the American justice system.” Neal added, “The ‘friendliest small town in America’ must remove this symbol of oppression if the purported friendliness extends to its black residents.” (In 2012, USA Today reported that Murray had been declared “friendliest small town in America” in Rand McNally’s ?Best of the Road contest.)

Film series captures Black communities, struggles, solidarity across Kentucky

The Murray City Council unanimously resolved to?ask the Calloway County Fiscal Court to “expeditiously remove and relocate” the monument. Getting rid of the monument “is the right thing to do, and now is the time,”?said Danny Hudspeth, the council’s sole Black member.

The courthouse and lawn are county property, and the all-white fiscal court has been disinclined to remove the monument. Yet Confederate monuments have been removed in other Kentucky cities, including Louisville, Lexington and Owensboro. A statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a Kentucky native, was taken out of the Capitol rotunda in Frankfort.

Besides?Neal, the Murray council’s resolution was?backed?by Murray State University and former Murray State basketball standout Ja?Morant who is now a?star?for the Memphis Grizzlies of the National Basketball Association.

Also in 2020, as protestors gathered to demand the Murray?monument’s removal, counter-protestors rallied to defend it. Murray became part of the nationwide dispute over Confederate monuments and symbols, notably the Confederate flag.

Monument supporters claim that removing the Confederate iconography erases history. They say the monuments and the flag represent “heritage, not hate.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center says?the “heritage, not hate” claim “ignores the near-universal heritage of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved by the millions in the South. It trivializes their pain, their history and their concerns about racism — whether it’s the racism of the past or that of today. And it conceals the true history of the Confederate States of America and the seven decades of Jim Crow segregation and oppression that followed the Reconstruction era.”

Clardy, who will be part of the panel discussion after the film is shown, said the Murray monument “sends a signal to people of color and others ‘you’re not welcome here.’” Many scholars agree about the message of Confederate monuments.

Harvard University historian Annette Gordon-Reed says ?removing the monuments is not erasing history. “History will still be taught,” she pointed out. “There are far more dangerous threats to history. Defunding the humanities, cutting history classes and departments. Those are the real threats to history.”

In his 2001 book, “Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War,”?historian Charles B. Dew quoted the Confederates themselves on what prompted secession and the creation of the Confederacy.

Davis, the Confederate president, praised slavery as a worthy institution by which “a superior race” had transformed “brutal savages into docile, intelligent and civilized agricultural laborers.”

Dew also quoted from state secession ordinances. Without exception, they said only the formation of a separate Southern nation would save slavery and white supremacy.

In addition, the Confederate constitution explicitly safeguarded slavery and barred the Confederate government from abolishing it.

“Let’s just call Confederate soldiers what they were — traitors,” said Clardy. “They were disloyal to the United States. They shed American blood, and they do not need to be lionized for that.”

Blacksmith's tools. The anvil also has been used in ear- and sometimes bone-splitting celebrations. (Getty Images)

More than a few of our foolhardy forebears rang in the New Year with earth-trembling blasts that threatened — and sometimes claimed — lives and limbs.

Called anvil-firing, the ear-splitting holiday custom was forsaken long ago, possibly because it proved so hazardous. (The custom is preserved — safely — at special events held annually around the country.)?

The revelry started when the firing crew lugged a pair of matched anvils to a field or some other open space. They’d place one anvil atop the other one — the bottom anvil upside down, the top one right side up.

Anvils have little cavities or holes on their undersides. So the crew would pack black powder into the mated cavities, stick in a fuse, light it and stand back, hopefully at a safe distance.

The smoky blast would launch the top anvil, called the “flier,” skyward. Everybody watched the anvil’s flight to lessen the chance of somebody getting hit on its return trip to earth.

But sometimes anvils burst, sending chunks of flying iron in all directions and killing and maiming firing crews and spectators.

No matter, anvil-firing was also popular at Yuletide — so much for “Silent Night” — and on the Fourth of July. Anvils were fired to celebrate election victories, too. (The booming that echoed off Frankfort hills on Dec. 12 was from a cannon salute in honor of Gov. Andy Beshear’s second inauguration.)??

Old Kentucky newspapers reported horror stories of anvil-firing disasters. Readers weren’t spared the gory details.?

For example, on Christmas Day 1888, a Fleming County man decided to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace by disturbing the peace with an anvil firing.?

The blast blew up one or both anvils. He “was terribly mangled,” reported the Maysville Evening Bulletin, and “can not survive.”?

On Christmas Eve, 1895, a Garrard countian “was celebrating Christmas by firing a blacksmith anvil,” according to the Louisville Courier-Journal. “One charge failed to explode promptly, and it went off while he was leaning over it.”

The detonation tore off “his right hand and arm and part of his face and head.” Doctors didn’t expect the “well-known and popular young man” to live.

On Jan. 1, 1896, the Richmond Climax published a slightly different version of what befell the youth, perhaps to deter New Year’s Day anvil-firers. “He was pushing the powder into a hole in the anvil with a large rod of steel, and struck too hard, causing a spark to ignite the powder and explode the anvil.” The paper also said the man would likely die.

An even worse anvil-firing mishap ended as many as four lives — three of them bystanders — in Burkesville, the Cumberland County seat, on the evening of Nov. 6, 1886. Local Republicans were whooping it up over Dr. W. Godfrey Hunter’s election to Congress.

“Contrary to the advice and wishes of many of the citizens, they placed a couple of anvils in the Court-house yard, and commenced firing them,” the Courier Journal informed its readers on Nov. 9.

Some citizens begged the GOP faithful “to carry their anvils somewhere else.” They declined and after “about fifteen or twenty minutes … one of the anvils burst.”

A fragment hit a young man who was watching the show from a drug store doorway. He died instantly. We will spare you the gory description as reported in detail by the C-J.

Other flying debris tore the legs off the county jailer, who was part of the firing crew, and another man. Doctors believed both would perish, according to the Louisville paper.

Too, the county assessor’s son “had little chance to pull through after he was “struck in the side by a piece of the iron and dangerously wounded.”

The rally “was, of course, immediately terminated while the whole town was thrown into gloom,” the paper said.

Though popular in Kentucky of yore, anvil firing is a European import.

Clement is the patron saint of blacksmiths and metalworkers, so they would honor him with drinking, feasting and anvil-firing on St. Clement’s Day,Nov. 23, according to Everything Catholic online, which says the custom persists “in some places to honor St. Clement, but it is also enjoyed as a fun and exciting spectacle.”?

Blacksmiths and their apprentices took the day off and “dressed up in a wig, mask, and cloak to represent ‘Old Clem,'” the website also says. “He led a procession of smiths through the streets, stopping at taverns along the way. Boisterous singing was followed by demands for free beer or money for the ‘Clem feast.’”

The website advises that customary toasts ranged from “True hearts and sound bottoms, check shirts and leather aprons” to “Here’s to old Vulcan, as bold as a lion, A large shop and no iron, A big hearth and no coal, And a large pair of bellowses full of holes.”

Boozing and blasting anvils. What could go wrong?

A few days after the attempted inauguration of a Confederate governor in Frankfort in 1862, the two armies clashed in the Battle of Perryville as depicted in this painting by R.G. McRae. (Post card collection, University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center)

Whatever happens at Gov. Andy Beshear’s second inauguration, odds are federal soldiers won’t run him out of town.

During the Civil War, Confederate troops captured Frankfort, the only capital of a loyal state to fall to the enemy during America’s most lethal conflict. The rebels’ advent forced Unionist Gov. James F. Robinson and the Union-majority General Assembly to escape to Louisville.

In the early afternoon of Oct. 4, 1862, a rainy Saturday, rebel Gens. Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith arranged the inauguration of Bourbon countian Richard Hawes as the state’s Confederate “governor.” His tenure was over by sundown.

Back in the fall of 1861, after the freely-elected pro-Union state legislature abandoned neutrality and embraced war against the Confederacy, some disgruntled secessionists gathered behind rebel lines in Russellville, created a sham Confederate “provisional government” and named George W. Johnson, a Scott countian, as governor.

In early 1862, the rebel “government” abandoned Kentucky with the retreating Confederates. Johnson, fighting as a volunteer private soldier, died of his wounds after the Battle of Shiloh. The government-in-exile named Hawes to replace Johnson.

Bragg and Kirby Smith had attacked Kentucky from Tennessee, hoping for a warm welcome and a rush of enlistments. Relatively few men donned Confederate gray, and border slave state Kentucky stuck by the Stars and Stripes.

No matter, Bragg and Kirby Smith went ahead with inaugural ceremonies at the old Capitol. Spectators included rebel sympathizers and the town’s occupiers in gray uniforms.?

In introducing Hawes, Bragg promised that Confederate forces would “yield appropriate deference to the civil authorities,” and defend Kentucky and Kentuckians “with the discipline and valor for which they have been preeminently distinguished.”

Hawes declared that “the provisional government driven from the State by the overpowering force of Federal arms, has returned under the protection of the Confederate army, and I propose to enter upon my duties as chief magistrate of Kentucky.”

He denounced Abraham Lincoln’s “Abolition war” and his anti-slavery policies — notably the president’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation of Sept. 22, 1862. Though the proclamation didn’t apply to loyal slave states like Kentucky, nearly every white Kentuckian hated it. (The Kentucky-born Lincoln received only 1,366 Kentucky votes in the presidential election of 1860.)

It’s unclear if Hawes was able to take the oath of office because Union troops were fast approaching Frankfort. Hawes, Bragg, Kirby Smith and the Confederate troops beat a hasty retreat.

On Oct. 8, Bragg’s forces collided with the Army of the Ohio led by Gen. Don Carlos Buell (namesake of old Buell Armory on the University of Kentucky campus) at Perryville. Tactically, the bloodiest battle ever fought on Kentucky soil, it was a draw. But after Perryville, the Confederates retreated into Tennessee. Never again were the rebels able to menace Kentucky in such strength, although cavalry raiders and guerrillas plagued the state until the war ended in 1865.

The Louisville Journal, the state’s largest and most influential Unionist newspaper, lampooned the inaugural festivities. “There has never been so broad a farce played upon the world’s stage as the installation of Richard Hawes as the Provisional Governor of Kentucky,” the Journal jabbed. (It seems unlikely Beshear will be so bashed in print after he is sworn in on the steps of the present-day Capitol.)

Editor George D. Prentice, who likely fired the verbal barrage, was fond of Shakespearian allusions. He compared Hawes to Christopher Sly, a drunken tinker in “The Taming of the Shrew.” In the play, a rich nobleman duped the besotted Sly into thinking he was a great lord who had been asleep for 15 years.

“…? What adds to the intensity of the burlesque is that Hawes himself was taken in, and really fancied himself the executive officer of the State, just as his prototype was ‘bestraught’ with the civilities of the sportive lord who played the trick upon him.”

The Journal poured it on “poor maudlin Hawes” who “could not appreciate the mockery of the scene, but took it all for serious earnest. In a few short hours, however, he awoke to a realizing sense of the stupendous humbug, and the tinker Christopher Sly returned to his wallow.”

Prentice’s paper also blasted Bragg who “carried his puppet off with him, and he will be pulling the wires of Dickey Hawes again, if ever an opportunity presents itself.” Yet, should the rebel general reflect “upon the blatant tone of his Frankfort address, a feeling of mortification must come over him, if he is susceptible of such impressions, to think how the bubble he filled with gas and distended before the rebel sympathizers at the State capital collapsed so suddenly.”???

Sen. Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma Republican, is shown holding a printout of the social media post that led him to challenge the head of the Teamsters union to a physical fight at a U.S. Senate hearing Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2023. (U.S. House webcast screenshot)

Bully Mullin, meet Bully Brooks.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla., recently threatened to fight Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien during a Senate hearing on unions. On the Senate floor in 1856, Rep. Preston Brooks, D-S.C., nearly killed Sen. Charles Sumner, R-Mass, with a heavy cane.?

Elected last year, Mullin is all MAGA all the time. He dotes on Donald Trump. Brooks was a pro-slavery hotblood who hated Yankee abolitionists like Sumner.

“The assault on Sumner happened in the mid-19th century, but we are in the first quarter of the 21st century,” said Murray State University historian Brian Clardy. “I’d like to think that we’ve grown up since then, but given what we saw in the Senate a few days ago, we haven’t evolved that much and that’s very scary.”???

Mullin, a former mixed martial arts fighter, must have cracked a history book after he challenged O’Brien to put up his dukes. Mullin suggested caning be resurrected to “keep people from thinking they’re so tough,” according to The Boston Herald’s Rick Sobey. (O’Brien grew up in Medford, near Boston, and joined the union in Charlestown, a Boston neighborhood, when he was 18.)?

When it was his turn to question O’Brien, Mullin started by claiming he’s not anti-union. The senator proceeded to grill O’Brien, ripping him, the Teamsters and union Pipefitters. (During his 10 years in the U.S. House, Mullin voted the union position on legislation just 15 percent of the time, according to the AFL-CIO’s Legislative Scorecard. His score was zero for 2022.)??

After O’Brien defended himself, the senator angrily stood up and challenged the union president to a fight. Panel chairman Bernie Sanders banged his gavel, ordered Bully Mullin to sit down, and no blows were struck.

But Bully Brooks gleefully spilled Sumner’s blood.

In 1856, the long-simmering North-South dispute over slavery and its expansion was coming to a boil. The flashpoint was Kansas territory. In 1856, Democrats, then the pro-slavery party, wanted Kansas admitted to the Union as a slave state. The anti-slavery Republicans favored a free state Kansas.

While lawmakers hotly debated the issue in Congress, “Bleeding Kansas” was torn by civil strife between pro- and anti-slavery settlers. (Kansas was admitted as a free state on Jan. 29, 1861, less than three months before the Civil War started.)

Brooks became enraged over Sumner’s May 19-20, 1856, “Crime Against Kansas” speech, in which the senator name-checked Sen. Andrew Butler, D-S.C., for favoring a slave state Kansas. Brooks was Butler’s cousin.

Sumner said Butler, a pro-slavery fanatic like his kinsman, had taken as a “mistress … the harlot slavery.”

On May 22, Brooks strode into the Senate chamber, surprised the unsuspecting Sumner, who was seated at his desk, and attacked him. Brooks beat him over the head with a metal-topped gutta-percha cane until it splintered. The dazed, blood-spattered Sumner, almost died.?

After a motion to expel him failed, Bully Brooks resigned and went home a hero. Southern newspaper editorials lauded him; a Florida town and a Georgia County were named for him. Admirers sent Brooks canes, one inscribed “Hit Him Again.”

Bully Mullin thinks Sooner State home folks have his back. “The Guardian’s” Martin Pengelly reported that the senator told a sympathetic Sean Hannity of Fox News that if he hadn’t tried to provoke O’Brien to fisticuffs, “people in Oklahoma would be pretty upset at me. I represent Oklahoma values.”??

Mullin doesn’t have to face the voters until 2028. Brooks was soon reelected, but died unexpectedly in 1857. Sumner, who suffered lingering head injuries and what today is called post traumatic stress disorder, was unable to return to the Senate full time until 1859.

“The nation, suffering from the breakdown of reasoned discourse that this event symbolized, tumbled onward toward the catastrophe of civil war,” an official U.S. Senate webpage says.?

Though Mullin didn’t assault O’Brien, Clardy fears physical violence in Congress and elsewhere will follow as Trump becomes more extreme in demonizing his political opponents, whom he recently smeared as “vermin.” President Joe Biden condemned “vermin” as “language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ’30s.”

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said he agreed with the president. Christie, who is challenging Trump for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, told CNN’s Jake Tapper:” “Look, I think that what he’s done with his use of language is to give permission to a lot of people who then believe they can take it even further, and they can actionize the things that that he is saying, weaponize the things that he’s saying, and most people won’t use that type of language, because they know there’s a risk of that.”

“He doesn’t care. He just doesn’t care, Jake. I mean, his view is if it’s good for him at that moment, he’ll do it and then if something bad happens, he’ll disown any responsibility for it.”

After likening Mullin to Brooks, Clardy quoted the second of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “something wicked this way comes.”

A handwritten note on the opposite side reads: "Democratic Barbecue at Winchester, Sept. - 1916, Hughes & Wilson campaign." That year Democrat Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey defeated Republican Charles Evans Hughes of New York for the U.S. presidency. (University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center)

Burgoo is long gone as a Kentucky campaign trail staple.

“Maybe Kentucky is too sophisticated for burgoo these days,” speculated Northern Kentucky Tribune columnist Bill Straub, a Kentucky Journalism Hall of Famer.?

He suspects that many Kentuckians, especially younger folks, have never heard of the famous stew that was served at political events for decades.

?“As a persuader in Kentucky politics and civics, burgoo has been well-nigh as widely used as barbecue,” B.A. Botkin explained in his 1949 book, “A Treasury of Southern Folklore, Kentucky Edition.”???

To be sure, Fancy Farm is famous for barbecue. But our largest and most famous political picnic is sans burgoo.

“A ‘burgoo’ is a cross between a soup and a stew, and into the big iron cooking kettles go, as we sometimes say in Kentucky, a ‘numerosity’ of things – meat, chicken, vegetables, and lots of seasonings,” explained Vice President Alben Barkley of Paducah in “That Reminds Me,” his 1954 memoir.

Botkin detailed an “old-timer’s” tried-and-true “numerosity:” “squirrel, quail, pa’t’idge, pheasant, wild turkey, field corn, barley, tomatoes, flour, celery, turnips, butter, cream, and…a little dash of Bourbon.”

Burgoo — pronounced “BUR-goo” by commoners and “bur-GOO” by the highfalutin — became so synonymous with Bluegrass State politics that a political rally which featured the concoction was called a “burgoo.”

There were big “burgoos” just about everywhere in Kentucky. Mayfield, the Graves County seat, hosted one of the largest on Oct. 17, 1931.?

The fete was for Ruby Laffoon of Madisonville, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate that lean Depression year.

Same as legions of other old-time Kentucky solons, Laffoon believed that the shortest path to voters’ hearts ran through their stomachs.

To feed the Mayfield multitude, more than 800 gallons of burgoo were brewed in 52 iron kettles over smoky blazes that reminded the hometown Messenge newspaper of “Chicago after a certain historic cow had kicked over a lantern and set fire to two thousand acres of property.”

Dr. Bow Reynolds was the “master of affairs and chief cook,” the paper said. (Nearly every Kentucky community of significant size boasted a local “burgooist.”)

Twenty sous chefs assisted the master. They stoked kettle fires and readied the fixin’s: 3,000 pounds of beef, 1,000 pounds of pork, 40 bushels of potatoes, 40 bushels of onions, 480 cans of tomatoes, 40 bushels of carrots, 1,200 roasting ears [of corn, pronounced “rosunears”], 40 gallons of peas, a bushel of red peppers and a gallon of garlic.

Around 7,000 people, evidently from throughout the old western Kentucky First Congressional District, congregated for the free burgoo and to hear stump speeches from Laffoon and his running mate, Albert B. “Happy” Chandler.

Everybody gathered on the old Mayfield High School football field, now Mayfield Middle School’s back campus. But burgoo central was across town at the Jackson Purchase stockyards.

Reynolds and his helpers started cooking the burgoo on the Thursday night before the Saturday rally.

“Down through the middle of a large covered stock pen is a long alley extending from one end to the other,” a “Messenger” reporter explained to readers. “On either side are stalls, formerly occupied by livestock but now inhabited by peelers of potatoes, carrots, onions and various other vegetables. In the alley is a row of forty old-fashioned iron kettles. Some are as large as a barrel in circumference, and others are larger.”

The writer encountered “pots boiling … and they had just sent for a dozen more.” The paper proposed that “no one person probably will ever know how many different things are in a batch of burgoo.” But the Messenger reassured readers that the burgoo contained nothing metallic since “all cans have been removed from around the tomatoes before they were dunked.”?

The correspondent described the stew as “a six-course dinner all boiled in one” and editorialized that “with proper seasoning burgoo can’t be anything but good and nutritious.”

While Dr. Reynold’s recipe called for beef and pork, frontier burgooists used wild game such as deer, elk, squirrels and rabbits. It’s been suggested that the varmint version was palatable only with a whiskey chaser. “Everything goes hand-in-hand with bourbon,” Straub proposed.

Anyway, the Mayfield burgoo was served in cardboard cartons with slaw and bread for sides. It took three hours to feed the multitude, according to the Messenger.

“There was plenty to eat,” the paper said. “Scores of gallons” went begging because Reynolds and his charges made enough burgoo for 10,000. Reportedly, the leftovers were given to a local charity for feeding the hungry.

The Democrats mostly ruled the Kentucky political roost in Laffoon’s day. So on Nov. 3, he easily beat the Republican standard bearer, Louisville Mayor William Benjamin Harrison.?

A footnote: Botkin cited the time in 1892 when a delegation of Philadelphians came to Lexington to help celebrate the centennial of Kentucky statehood. The visitors were told they’d be treated to “a burgoo” but they had no notion what that might be.

The men bedded down in the old Phoenix Hotel where in the wee morning hours, a shrieking peacock awakened one of them. “He nudged his bedfellow and said, ‘That must be the burgoo.’”

On the picket line as the UAW strike began at Ford-owned Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan, the night of Sept. 14, 2023. (Photo by Anna Liz Nichols/Michigan Advance)

I saw on Instagram that the daughter of a 1937 sit-down striker at a Flint, Michigan, General Motors plant recently walked a picket line with United Auto Workers strikers at a GM facility in Swartz Creek, Michigan.

“86 years after the sit down strike, UAW members are standing up!”?uaw.union?posted.

I’m sure Western Kentucky natives Ermon and Lube Harp, both pioneer UAW rank-and-filers, would be standing up for their striking UAW brothers and sisters. Ermon was a sit-down striker in ’37, too, but at the Advance Stamping Co. in Detroit.

Historic 1930s New Deal legislation gave most workers the right to form a union. The result was an unprecedented wave of unionizing especially in industry.

Heretofore, when workers struck, they left their workplaces. To defeat strikes, employers typically brought in strikebreakers.

In a sit-down strike, which the UAW helped pioneer, strikers stayed put in their factories. Employers were reluctant to use police or National Guard troops to evict them for fear of damaging machinery. “When the boss won’t talk, don’t take a walk. Sit down! Sit down!” a poem went. “When the boss sees that, he’ll want a little chat.”

The Harps, Carlisle countians from Milburn, retired to Mayfield in 1963. In a 1982 interview, Ermon told me she was still heart and soul with the UAW. “I always will be, and my husband always was, too.”

Lube was 75 when he died in 1970. Ermon died at age 97 in 1992.

She said that back in the ’30s, opponents of the UAW “called us communists — and just about everything else you could think of. But it didn’t bother me a particle. We were the United Auto Workers. We felt like we were doing right.”

The Harps were part of a mass post-World War I exodus of Kentuckians to the Motor City. Lube owned a tiny, less than profitable sawmill. “There just wasn’t any job for a girl around here back then,” Ermon remembered.

Was Harp scared when she joined the strike? “Goodness, no,” she said. “There was nothing to be scared of.”

There was, of course. UAW organizers and members were fired, blacklisted, jailed and even assaulted. The year Harp struck, Ford Motor Company guards severely beat up union activists, including Walter Reuther, the UAW’s president and guiding spirit for many years.

“I remember Walter Reuther, too,” Harp said. “He was with us, that was for sure. He was down to earth.”

Historians say the sit-down strike tactic helped pave the way for union organizing throughout American industry. The most significant sit-down strike began on Dec. ?30, 1936, at the GM plants in Flint, near Detroit. In January, police tried to evict the strikers. Workers repelled them and held on until Feb. 11, 1937, when GM recognized the UAW.

The Flint sit-down inspired the strike at Advance Stamping, where Harp worked. “I had no idea that what I was doing was making history,” she said.

Harp was among about 25 workers who sat down on March 1 at the factory which produced automotive and radio parts. A dozen were women, according to the?Detroit Free Press.

The strike was successful. On March 10, 1937, the UAW announced that the company agreed to recognize the union as the sole bargaining agency for 100 workers, evidently most of them women. They also got a raise.

Harp had a head full of memories — and a bulging scrapbook — about UAW organizing drives. “Our people were getting beat up all over town. But nobody got hurt where I worked. I guess it was because it was a small plant.”

When Harp sat down, she was working on an assembly line, fitting together distributors for car engines. The strike “went off smooth as you please,” she said. “There was no rough stuff.”

Harp added, “People (Lube among them) brought us hot food, blankets and pillows. We organized a square dance. Some of the men played cards, and we turned the radio on to a church service on Sunday. We found some big barrels, put some boards over them, spread down our blankets and slept pretty well.”

Harp recalled that the strikers included a couple who had just gotten married. The newlyweds spent their honeymoon on strike.

Lube had joined the UAW at a General Motors factory where he worked. Harp said she became “union all the way” at the non-union plant where she worked before landing a job at Advance Stamping and eagerly embracing the sit down strike.

“I’d worked there 11 years, when the boss came in one day and said, ‘Ermon, come pick up your check. You’re through.’ Later, I found out he’d given my job to his girlfriend. That’s why I went union and why Detroit went union. It was because of things like that, that wasn’t fair.”

Rand Paul (Getty Images)

In a fundraising letter boosting Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron for governor, GOP Sen. Rand Paul praised the state’s top cop for suing Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear over “virtually every authoritarian edict” the incumbent “unleashed on Kentucky.”

Paul meant Beshear’s?emergency executive orders that were aimed at keeping Kentuckians out of the hospital and the cemetery during the worst months of the COVID pandemic.

Beshear acted on his own because AG Cameron and the MAGA Republican-majority legislature refused to help him battle the virus which has?killed?more than 18,100 Kentuckians. Untold numbers more would have died had the governor not acted.

“Never before in the history of our Commonwealth have our freedoms been under such an assault,” Paul claimed in his “Dear Kentucky Conservative” letter.

Really, senator?

“That’s?the most ludicrous thing I have ever read,” said Murray State University historian Brian Clardy, suggesting that Paul read some history.

If he did, the prof added, the senator would see that slavery and Jim Crow segregation were by far the most egregious assaults on the freedoms of Kentuckians.

“Slaves were viewed as and treated as subhuman,” Clardy said.

Kentucky law sanctioned the enslavement of Black people from statehood in 1792 to 1865, when the requisite number of states (Kentucky not among them) ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery.

Under state law, enslaved?persons were chattel, or moveable property, the same as livestock or farm equipment.

Slaves had no rights; they could be bought and sold at the whim of slaveholders. The few free Black Kentuckians were unwelcome and denied citizenship rights.

“Slavery was a brutal system,” wrote James C. Klotter and Craig Thompson Friend in “A New History of Kentucky, Second Edition.”

“Slave owners had total control over their lives. Laws like the 1798 slave code empowered all white Kentuckians over [free] black Kentuckians as well.

“Slaves often faced cruel punishments like brandings and ear croppings. Some had metal collars or weights attached to their arms or necks. Whippings were most common. Every town had a whipping post as well as stocks and gallows.”

White Kentuckians continued to attack the freedoms of Black Kentuckians for a century after the Civil War ended. Kentucky enacted Jim Crow laws that unequally separated Blacks from whites, making second-class citizens of Black people.

“By the mid-1920s … Kentucky had segregated [horse] racing, transportation, parks, hotels, theaters, library systems. orphans’ homes, restaurants, funeral parlors, and more,” Klotter and Friend wrote. “Louisville’s police force, firefighters and jail employees had become segregated by 1890. In other areas, such as juries, Blacks were excluded all together.”

Clardy said that as in slavery times, Blacks had to be deferential to whites, “lest you be viewed as ‘uppity,’ and?therefore a threat. And your life can be taken at any moment.”

Lynch mob violence continued well into the 20th century. Between 1865, the year the Civil War ended, through 1940, “at least 353 people died at the hands of lynch mobs,” historian George C. Wright wrote in “A History of Blacks in Kentucky, Volume 2: In Pursuit of Equality, 1890-1980.” Nearly three-quarters of the victims were Black.

Added the author: “Though these figures on the number of people lynched seem high, they are unquestionably very low.”
By characterizing Beshear’s COVID regs as an unprecedented abridgement of freedom in the state, Paul showed woeful ignorance of Kentucky history. Or maybe by “our freedoms,” he means only white lives matter. Or perhaps he chose to ignore 170-or-so years during which whites robbed thousands upon thousands of Black Kentuckians of their freedom under slavery and the Jim Crow system.

Never before or since has the freedom of so many Kentuckians been so flagrantly and violently trampled upon.

Cameron is complicit in Paul’s perversion of history, according to Clardy: “Why Daniel Cameron isn’t offended by what Paul said is a mystery. Thousands of Blacks in Kentucky are descendants of slaves.”

This mural of Abraham Lincoln by artist Eduardo Kobra has overlooked his wife's hometown of Lexington since 2013. (Photo by Tom Eblen)

No son of Kentucky is more famous or more revered than Abraham Lincoln,?who was born on Feb. 12, 1809, near Hodgenville.

His birthplace is a national shrine. His statue stands tall in the Capitol rotunda in Frankfort.

Lincoln was the first Republican president, and today Kentucky is one of the reddest Republican red states. Yet no president was more unpopular in Kentucky than Lincoln, whose party was founded in opposition to slavery in?1854.

“The Great Emancipator” likely wouldn’t fare much better in his native state today, according to Murray State University historian Brian Clardy. “Lincoln would be a RINO (Republican in Name Only) in today’s Republican Party. In no way does the Republican party reflect the principles of Lincoln in regard to inclusion and universal freedom. The GOP is essentially a Donald Trump cult.”

Trump, who Clardy said ran the most overtly racist presidential campaigns since George Wallace in 1968, collected more than 62 percent of the Kentucky vote in 2016 and 2020. Both times, he carried every Kentucky county except Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington).

Lincoln twice lost the Bluegrass State by whopping margins. He managed less than 1% of the Kentucky vote when he won the White House in 1860. He lost every county and failed to tally a single vote in 36 of the state’s 110 counties.

Lincoln did better in 1864. But he got only 30.2 percent of the vote, “the lowest vote (he) received in any of the 25 states which participated in the balloting,” according to “Presidential Politics in Kentucky, 1824 to 1948” by Jasper B. Shannon and Ruth McQuown.

Though Lincoln was one of America’s greatest presidents, most Kentuckians are probably unaware how unloved he was in his native state.

Constitutional Unionist John Bell captured Kentucky’s dozen electoral votes in 1860. Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Lexington, the Southern Democratic candidate, finished second, followed by the Northern Democrat, Sen. Stephen A. Douglas.

Lincoln trailed the field with 1,364 votes, according to “Presidential Politics in Kentucky.” Hodgenville is the seat of Larue County, where Lincoln polled three votes. (Larue was created from southern Hardin County in 1843. Lincoln got six votes in Hardin; Douglas pocketed both counties.)

First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln was from Lexington, the Fayette County seat. The wealthy Todds sent sons to both sides during the Civil War. Her brother, Dr. George Rogers Clark Todd, a rebel army surgeon, called Lincoln “one of the greatest scoundrels?unhung.”

Lincoln notched five votes in Fayette, which favored Bell.

Apparently, no Kentucky newspapers — not even those that supported the Union in the war — endorsed Lincoln. The Lexington Statesman, which backed Breckinridge, characterized “the election of Lincoln and therein the success of the Republican party as the most serious and lamentable calamity which could have befallen our Republic,” according to “Lincoln and the Bluegrass: Slavery and Civil War in Kentucky” by William H. Townsend.

The author also cited a letter from a young Lexingtonian who ridiculed Lincoln as “an infernal old jackass.” The correspondent added, “I should relish his groans and agonies if I could see him put to torture in hell or anywhere else. He has chosen to become the representative of the Republican Party and as such I should like to hang him.”

Predictably, the Statesman panned Lincoln’s inaugural address. The paper, Townsend wrote, dismissed the president’s remarks as “radical, sectional and abhorrent.” The Statesman argued that “Lincoln’s silly speeches, his ill-timed jocularity and his pusillanimous evasion of responsibility and vulgar pettifoggery have no parallel in history, save the crazy capers of (Roman Emperor Caligula), or in the effeminate buffoonery of Henry of Valois (King Henry III of France).”

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in the harbor at Charleston, S.C. Townsend also wrote that the Statesman blamed Lincoln, “the miserable imbecile that now disgraces the Presidential chair” for starting what would become America’s most lethal conflict.

After a brief period of neutrality in 1861, Kentucky, though divided in sentiment, declared for the Union. As many as three times more Kentuckians donned Yankee blue than rebel gray.

But in Kentucky, loyalty to the Union usually didn’t mean loyalty to Lincoln. Almost all white Kentuckians hated the president’s Emancipation Proclamation,?though it didn’t apply to Kentucky. Even the great majority of Kentucky Unionists were pro-slavery and pro-Union.

Lincoln won a second term in 1864, running on the Union ticket. But Democrat George B. McClellan, a Union general, buried him in a landslide in?Kentucky.

Lincoln became popular in Kentucky after he was assassinated just after the war ended in April 1865. “A great transformation seems almost mysteriously to have swept over the people when the word came that Lincoln was dead,” E. Merton Coulter wrote in “The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky.”

“From their customary attitude of condemnation and vilification, they now turned to honoring and praising.”