The Night Riders
~
Sacred Fire & Revolutionary Justice in the Black Patch
First published in the June 2014 issue of History Today magazine
“We are in the cause to win or die…”
Statement of the Night Riders
Deepest night in southern Kentucky. They approach like runnels of smoke, horses’ hooves wrapped in burlap to muffle their step, each man draped in black, black hoods covering their faces. They would have been unseen, even if anyone had been watching for them, until it was too late.
The men surround a darkened farmhouse. A dog barks, and the night is split apart with concussive bursts of gunfire. Flame belches from the muzzles of deer rifles and double-barreled shotguns, windows explode into the interior, wooden framing is cracked and shivered apart. A gutter is severed and slides like the arm of a dying man down the front of the façade.
The shooting ceases as the door tremulously cracks open and a night-gowned figure is seen in the frame. A young woman, her gown bright with blood about the neck and shoulders, staggers weeping into the dirt yard and a man, similarly garbed, follows close behind her, entreating the mob for mercy. A child, sobbing hysterically, his nightclothes stained with his mother’s blood, reels out of the door and falls on his knees to the porch. He watches wide-eyed as the masked men surround his parents.
They are shouting ferociously at the man and woman, cursing in words the child has never encountered. Three of the invaders seize the man and sling him face-first against a tree trunk, one holding each of his arms outstretched in a cruciform position while the third advances with a horsewhip. The child on the porch clamps his hands to his ears and howls in anguish while his father is beaten bloody, the thick leather lash tearing rents in his gown and then his flesh. The woman, blood streaming from a gunshot wound to her neck, cries out and rushes to his aid but is punched heavily in the face by another masked man and falls to the ground, where she is kicked until she curls sobbing within herself.
The beating goes on until the man slumps nerveless between his tenders, blood and rags of cotton and torn skin gleaming in the fading starlight. Satisfied, the men drop him at the foot of the tree and file wordlessly out of the yard and back towards their tethered mounts. Just before reentering the tobacco patch one of the trailing men turns back for a final declaration: “Get out of the county and never come back or you will be killed.”
Across the fields, roosters welcome a new dawn. By nightfall the bullet-riddled farmhouse would stand hushed and empty.
~
The attack on tobacco farmer Robert Hollowell and his wife Mary Lou was only one of the more savage of the many similar events that occurred in an area of southwestern Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee in the first decade of the twentieth century, a region known as the Black Patch for the luxurious dark-fired “plug” (chewing) tobacco that was its main source of revenue. The Black Patch War, like much human conflict, was rooted in economics, specifically the monopolistic buying practices of the American Tobacco Company, a North Carolina-based family corporation that had under the guidance of its founder’s youngest son James Buchanan Duke established itself as an international consortium which could dictate its prices to farmers with little need for negotiation. When you control the means of bringing the crop to the world market you control the lives of those growing that crop, and Duke was well aware of this, having recently abolished the competitive system of bidding for tobacco by simply buying out his rivals.
A driven, relentless businessman, “Buck” Duke possessed an ego outmatched only by his ambition and remains an exemplar what brilliance combined with ruthlessness can achieve in an environment of unrestricted capitalism. Seeking to expand his cartel Duke found inspiration in the monopolizing tactics of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust, and after he’d bought out or otherwise seduced most of the competing tobacco companies he instigated a campaign of underselling the remainders until they cried mercy and were subsumed into what was becoming known and generally despised as the Duke Trust. He then bought the rights to the new machines that created the world’s latest sensation, the cigarette, not ignoring the markets for plug and pipe tobacco. The Trust soon controlled every aspect of tobacco use: buying, transporting, and transforming the long, broad, veiny leaves into addictive products that enchanted the world. By the turn of the century the Duke Trust sold 82 percent of the country’s tobacco products using 400 million pounds of leaf tobacco, and “Buck” Duke, whose father had grown up on a one-mule tobacco farm, was one of the world’s richest men.
~
In 1900 a Black Patch tobacco farmer could expect six to eight cents for a pound of cured leaf; four years later the price had dropped to two or three cents due to the Duke Trust’s near total domination of the market. Many farmers went hungry and banks and businesses that relied on their farming clientele went under. Crime increased as desperation set in. The Black Patch smoldered with helpless rage.
Felix Ewing was a successful Nashville businessman and planter with 3,000 Tennessee acres in dark-leaf tobacco, but like his poorer neighbors he seethed at the pains being inflicted by the Duke Trust. Noting the powerlessness of the Black Patch farmers in the face of consolidated buyers, he hit upon a potentially salvational idea. Duke controlled tobacco prices by having become the sole market; therefore Ewing and his farming brethren would themselves coalesce and demand a fair price for their product. By boycotting the Duke Trust together in one of the first large-scale labor alliance propositions in American history, they could reclaim the freedom and self-reliance that they’d been robbed of.
In the summer of 1904 a call went out across the Black Patch for a gathering in the hamlet of Guthrie, Kentucky, to discuss the formation of an organized resistance to the Duke cabal. 5,000 planters, white and black alike, arrived on cue. Ewing had arranged for barbeque, bourbon and musical entertainment while speech after speech detailed the unholy excesses of the Duke Trust. The Dark Fired Tobacco Planters’ Protection Association was thereby initiated, with Ewing installed as general manager. A line had been drawn in the red clay soil of the Black Patch, and nothing would be the same again.
~
The notion of collective resistance to the Duke Trust spread like wildfire, enlisting farmers from throughout the Black Patch but also drawing professionals, politicians, shopkeepers and clergymen to the fold. Spurred on by fervid stories in the local papers of the righteousness of American populism, in time approximately 70 percent of the region’s farmers joined the Association. A second Guthrie rally took place on September 23, 1905, with an influx three times that of the previous year. But this meeting wasn’t all rousing speeches and bluegrass music. Another year of privation had aggrieved the Association’s poorer members, and there were mutterings of taking the fight to the enemy in a more direct fashion. There continued to be farmers (contemptuously referred to as “hillbillies”) who refused to join the movement and who were selling their tobacco to Duke for a higher rate because of the Association’s boycott.
A few weeks later, at dusk, near the Kentucky border in Robertson County, Tennessee, in a tiny schoolhouse set among the tobacco fields, 32 desperate farmers listened to a declaration written by Felix Ewing and a Kentucky physician and planter named Dr. David Amoss which invoked ancient ideals of liberty and justice and tarred the Duke Trust and all who supported it as heretics to the grand Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman’s sacred freedom and independence. The statement concluded with an ominous pledge to the “hillbillies:”
Be it further proclaimed to the world that any farmer or persons who aid the Trust in any way by selling to it their tobacco at a higher price is an accomplice of the Trust and is in good morals as guilty as the Trust.
The die was thus cast in terms similar to those of the American Revolution: join or die.
~
The conspiracy sprang into action with a leaflet blanketing of those farms recalcitrant to the ideas of the Association, a warning that underscored the divisions that had solidified in the past year throughout the Black Patch. Still the “hillbillies,” enjoying their newfound wealth, refused to toe the line. David Amoss decided that something more was needed to unite the planters against the Duke Trust, and he was willing to commit all to seeing it happen.
As was common among the upper-middle classes in the South at the time, Amoss had been sent as a boy to a military school, where he learned the basics of drill, strategy, and tactics, lessons that would be put to good use as the conspiratorial Night Riders emerged as an underground sect within the Association that would perform the ugly work of persuasion. Secret nighttime meetings were held throughout the Black Patch, with the Night Riders’ underlying purpose delivered by Amoss in firmly Jacobin terminology: “To burn or otherwise destroy the property of growers and to whip them and others who refuse to cooperate with you in winning your fight against the Trust is more than they deserve. There is no reason why a few persons should continue to make the masses suffer when their cooperation would not only be to their benefit, but would increase the earnings and thus improve the conditions of all equally.”
The Night Riders’ oath, sworn by lantern light on bended knees and with one hand on the Bible, was couched in scriptural references to the paramount importance of being one’s brother’s keeper (willingly or no) and to the equally supreme necessity of total secrecy. By the spring of 1906 around two thousand men had taken the oath and, orders in hand, spread out into the countryside to do their work.
From within darkened farmhouses in the deadest hours of night, a long wavering column of horsemen on muffled steeds might be glimpsed processing like phantoms down the dusty roads; erratic torchlight gleaming off gun barrels, faceless in hoods and bandannas they went their way unchallenged and unquestioned, leaving behind them carefully drawn shades and further silence.
~
The Night Riders knew precisely how to inflict the most harm on their victims. They struck the “hillbillies'’” seed beds, where the embryonic tobacco plants were covered with a porous canvas shroud to protect the delicate shoots, too late in the season for the victim to replant, either trampling the shoots into mulch, spraying the canvas with kerosene and igniting it, or, perhaps on the direction of the classically-minded David Amoss, sowing the beds with salt. On the last night of November 1906 the Night Riders upped the ante. Two policemen dozing through the late shift in the small Kentucky town of Princeton were awakened in a most unpleasant manner: staring wide-eyed into the barrels of rifles held by six masked men. Outside, hooded men in squadrons, their boots wrapped in muffling gunnysacks, were jogging silently down the wood-planked sidewalks toward other assignments: some axed the telephone and telegraph cables, others seized the firehouse and cut off its water supply, while a band of 200 mounted Night Riders swept inaudibly into town on a cold black wind, heading calmly toward the JG Orr Tobacco Factory. A few citizens lit lamps and peered apprehensively out their doors, to be answered by gunfire and shattered windows. The lights were quickly extinguished.
At the tobacco warehouse, owned by a prominent “hillbilly” planter, axes smashed open the front door and the cured tobacco heaped inside was soaked with kerosene as sticks of dynamite and then torches were hurled inside. Within moments the entire vast structure was sending towers of flame into the cold starry sky. Explosions rent the building apart as the dynamite detonated. The center of Princeton was a glaring earsplitting holocaust of fire and repeated explosions; the shocked townspeople, awoken from slumber by this awful visitation, must have thought the End had come.
Those residents courageous enough to brave a glance outside would have seen a thin man on horseback blowing three sharp blasts on a horn, summoning his riders to depart. For David Amoss, this spectacle was a thundering blow against tyranny, accomplished with military precision. The Trust would surely get the message – the men of the Association would accept wage slavery no longer, and those willing to work with Duke’s henchmen would pay the price. There would be no turning back.
~
“Buck” Duke thought of the Association, which was now seriously impeding the flow of dark-fired tobacco to his warehouses, as composed of rednecks and “hoe-toters” led on and manipulated by “outside agitators,” communists and anarchists out to subvert the American Way, yet another alarming rent in the fabric of the Republican corporate/industrial domination of the American polity that since the close of the Civil War had aggressively dictated the course of the national saga. Labor unrest was bad enough when confined to the Northern cities with their teeming immigrant shantytowns, but to have it rear its head in the rural South – the very cultural soil from whence the Duke fortune had been wrung – was sacrilege.
And now there was another troublemaker that monopolies like the Duke Trust had to contend with: the new president Theodore Roosevelt’s rabblerousing “trust-busting” campaigns had reawaked the moribund 1890 Sherman Act, a dangerously progressive piece of legislation that flew in the face of everything Duke and his brethren stood for.
The Association would not have looked to a Yankee, much less a Republican, like Roosevelt for help. Given the success of the Princeton raid, Amoss must have felt he had things very much under control. The Dark-Fired Planters’ Protection Association and its Night Riders wing was beginning to make a positive difference in the lives of its members, slowly raising the price of tobacco as more and more pro-Trust warehouses went up in flames. As a member noted at the time, “[The Association] has fed more hungry children, paid off more mortgages, put clothes on more poor children than any other organization that ever existed. I will keep on working for the Association and if need be I will die in the ditches with the boys from the furrows.”
~
Hopkinsville was and is a comparative metropolis in the Black Patch, then a city of 8,000 and the seat of Christian County, Kentucky, and in the winter of 1907 it housed two of the Duke Trust’s biggest warehouses in the state. On the night of December 6, hundreds of masked men from the surrounding countryside converged like a clenching fist on the city of Hopkinsville. As at Princeton, curious civilians were ushered back inside by barrages of buckshot. They waited quaveringly in the darkness until a vast orange glow from downtown signaled the demise of the immense Trust warehouses there. The newspaper office was thoroughly ransacked. Trust sellers were dragged from their homes and viciously beaten. Several men were shot trying to escape but again no one had been killed, something of a miracle given the gunpowder expended that night. In short order, their work completed, the column of masked men rode back into the night, boisterously singing their own version of the state anthem: “The Fires Burn Bright on My Old Kentucky Home.”
The Night Riders were now national news. Vituperative screeds of alarm arose from the normally staid mouthpieces of the Establishment at these savages from wildest Kentucky and their anarchic onslaught on international capitalism. And indeed the Riders’ tactics – their shadowy approach; their terrifying namelessness; their use of guns, fire and heavy explosives; the savage treatment of their enemies – had cast a pall of nightly fear across the entire Black Patch. One New York merchant had been in Hopkinsville during the raid and probably never crossed the Ohio River again. The telegram to his employer the day after ran thusly: “Arrived Hopkinsville midnight – Stop – Checked into hotel at one – Stop – Night Riders filled room with bullets at two – Stop – I quit – Stop.”
~
1907 brought the full measure of the Association’s successes to fruition, with tobacco prices at more than eight cents a pound. The pro-Trust “hillbillies,” chivvied and terrorized into submission, had largely ceased to be a matter of concern. There began to be talk in the confidential meetings of the Night Riders of setting aside the hood and the lash and, the battle won, reassuming a normal life of tilling the soil and curing the baled leaves. And then the Commonwealth elected Augustus E. Willson, an urbane Republican attorney and firm friend of big business.
One of the few Republicans of that era to be elected Governor of Kentucky – where political power had long resided in the wealthy, agrarian, Confederate-sympathizing and largely Democratic flatlands rather than in the hard-luck Republican hills – Willson was further despised in the Black Patch for his corporatist leanings and for being from Louisville, then the state’s only metropolitan area and to this day the object of mutual distrust and contempt by those living “out in the state.” Willson campaigned on a promise to disarm and disband the Night Riders with all available force, something his Democratic predecessor had silkily avoided. Upon his election Willson promptly sent a company of state militiamen to Hopkinsville to replace the conflicted local forces and protect the city from further outrages, and vowed a full pardon for anyone who killed a Night Rider.
The Black Patch became an occupied country, and across the state sentiment was turning against the Association. The question was posed repeatedly: why not declare victory and go home? What’s left to prove? But David Amoss was adamant that pressure must be kept up on the Duke Trust for their hard-won accomplishments to survive. And so the Night Riders set forth again, raiding Russellville, Kentucky, on January 3, 1908, with an unprecedented military exactitude that drew wonder from their victims, before moving westward, 300 strong, across the Black Patch to hit Dycusburg and then the village of View in the depths of winter, torching warehouses and mauling Trust planters at every opportunity. Then Amoss aimed his men at Eddyville, home of the infamous Kentucky State Penitentiary, where his prowess as a commander and the unshakable discipline of his men allowed them to insert themselves into town, throttle its communications, burn and beat and bully the populace, and vanish before dawn leaving only bloodied “hillbillies” and burning warehouses in their wake. Not until February 17, days after the raid, did Willson’s soldiers belatedly march into town.
Despite the presence of the state militia the Night Riders were clearly capable of doing their dirty work in small towns and villages across the region and, as tends to be the case, successful enterprises of this nature will attract the worst sort of men. Brawlers, criminals, bigots, those with simmering grudges and personal hatreds joined the ranks for their own reasons, and in the lawlessness that the Black Riders exuded they went about settling scores and taking personal vengeance. Some of these tensions went back to the Civil War, while others were familial, financial, or political. This tertiary violence, a tragic postlude to the tearing away of societal constraints that the Night Riders’ plundering had encouraged, is a regular occurrence during war, revolution and violent crime, when some view the diminution of civic control as an opportunity rather than something to fear, a welcome chance to vent ancient hatreds and personal vendettas on their neighbors. It is, sadly, a dark thread running throughout the human tapestry.
Partly due to this contamination of the Night Riders by villainous outliers and partly due to the resonating question of what to do with a cause that has run its course, by late 1908 and early 1909 David Amoss began to feel the loss of a substantial percentage of his host. Meanwhile other forces of change were at work far from the Black Patch. In Washington, Representative AO Stanley, who represented that beleaguered district, managed to repeal the six-cent per pound tax on leaf tobacco that had begun as a putative measure to harm Southern farmers during Reconstruction, thus lifting a great financial burden off tobacco planters nationwide. In late 1908 the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the Duke Trust was in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and that it be fragmented into a number of smaller, decentralized, more democratic entities. The state militia had expanded its reach beyond the major cities of the Black Patch and began a successful program of patrols that captured and disarmed several Night Rider bands, while court actions, when moved outside of the Night Riders’ dwindling base of support, returned hearty verdicts against captured members, who were having a hard time paying off steep monetary judgments. The final curtain seemed close at hand.
~
In 1910, with the militia withdrawn and the night riding virtually ceased, Dr. David Amoss was indicted by the Christian County Grand Jury for “willfully and feloniously confederating, conspiring and banding together for the purpose of molesting, injuring and destroying property of other persons,” with a penalty of one to five years in the penitentiary and up to $10,000.00 in damages. But the holy oath of the Night Riders overcame fears of perjury, and none of the plaintiffs’ witnesses culled from former Riders would testify against their leader. The defendant’s attorney railed against the callousness of the Duke Trust and by proxy the “hillbillies” whose refusal to stand united with the Association had spurred the Night Riders into being, while the opposing side emphasized rather staidly the rule of law and the right to the safe enjoyment of one’s property and home, concluding on the conventional note that should Amoss go free, “it was time to tear down the churches and courthouses and homes” and let socialism and anarchy run amok. The rural jury wasn’t buying it. The verdict was unanimous, and Amoss walked out a free man into a Black Patch itself freed from both the tyranny of exploitation and the terror of forced conformity. The Night Riders had done their duty.
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781)
Statement of the Night Riders
Deepest night in southern Kentucky. They approach like runnels of smoke, horses’ hooves wrapped in burlap to muffle their step, each man draped in black, black hoods covering their faces. They would have been unseen, even if anyone had been watching for them, until it was too late.
The men surround a darkened farmhouse. A dog barks, and the night is split apart with concussive bursts of gunfire. Flame belches from the muzzles of deer rifles and double-barreled shotguns, windows explode into the interior, wooden framing is cracked and shivered apart. A gutter is severed and slides like the arm of a dying man down the front of the façade.
The shooting ceases as the door tremulously cracks open and a night-gowned figure is seen in the frame. A young woman, her gown bright with blood about the neck and shoulders, staggers weeping into the dirt yard and a man, similarly garbed, follows close behind her, entreating the mob for mercy. A child, sobbing hysterically, his nightclothes stained with his mother’s blood, reels out of the door and falls on his knees to the porch. He watches wide-eyed as the masked men surround his parents.
They are shouting ferociously at the man and woman, cursing in words the child has never encountered. Three of the invaders seize the man and sling him face-first against a tree trunk, one holding each of his arms outstretched in a cruciform position while the third advances with a horsewhip. The child on the porch clamps his hands to his ears and howls in anguish while his father is beaten bloody, the thick leather lash tearing rents in his gown and then his flesh. The woman, blood streaming from a gunshot wound to her neck, cries out and rushes to his aid but is punched heavily in the face by another masked man and falls to the ground, where she is kicked until she curls sobbing within herself.
The beating goes on until the man slumps nerveless between his tenders, blood and rags of cotton and torn skin gleaming in the fading starlight. Satisfied, the men drop him at the foot of the tree and file wordlessly out of the yard and back towards their tethered mounts. Just before reentering the tobacco patch one of the trailing men turns back for a final declaration: “Get out of the county and never come back or you will be killed.”
Across the fields, roosters welcome a new dawn. By nightfall the bullet-riddled farmhouse would stand hushed and empty.
~
The attack on tobacco farmer Robert Hollowell and his wife Mary Lou was only one of the more savage of the many similar events that occurred in an area of southwestern Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee in the first decade of the twentieth century, a region known as the Black Patch for the luxurious dark-fired “plug” (chewing) tobacco that was its main source of revenue. The Black Patch War, like much human conflict, was rooted in economics, specifically the monopolistic buying practices of the American Tobacco Company, a North Carolina-based family corporation that had under the guidance of its founder’s youngest son James Buchanan Duke established itself as an international consortium which could dictate its prices to farmers with little need for negotiation. When you control the means of bringing the crop to the world market you control the lives of those growing that crop, and Duke was well aware of this, having recently abolished the competitive system of bidding for tobacco by simply buying out his rivals.
A driven, relentless businessman, “Buck” Duke possessed an ego outmatched only by his ambition and remains an exemplar what brilliance combined with ruthlessness can achieve in an environment of unrestricted capitalism. Seeking to expand his cartel Duke found inspiration in the monopolizing tactics of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust, and after he’d bought out or otherwise seduced most of the competing tobacco companies he instigated a campaign of underselling the remainders until they cried mercy and were subsumed into what was becoming known and generally despised as the Duke Trust. He then bought the rights to the new machines that created the world’s latest sensation, the cigarette, not ignoring the markets for plug and pipe tobacco. The Trust soon controlled every aspect of tobacco use: buying, transporting, and transforming the long, broad, veiny leaves into addictive products that enchanted the world. By the turn of the century the Duke Trust sold 82 percent of the country’s tobacco products using 400 million pounds of leaf tobacco, and “Buck” Duke, whose father had grown up on a one-mule tobacco farm, was one of the world’s richest men.
~
In 1900 a Black Patch tobacco farmer could expect six to eight cents for a pound of cured leaf; four years later the price had dropped to two or three cents due to the Duke Trust’s near total domination of the market. Many farmers went hungry and banks and businesses that relied on their farming clientele went under. Crime increased as desperation set in. The Black Patch smoldered with helpless rage.
Felix Ewing was a successful Nashville businessman and planter with 3,000 Tennessee acres in dark-leaf tobacco, but like his poorer neighbors he seethed at the pains being inflicted by the Duke Trust. Noting the powerlessness of the Black Patch farmers in the face of consolidated buyers, he hit upon a potentially salvational idea. Duke controlled tobacco prices by having become the sole market; therefore Ewing and his farming brethren would themselves coalesce and demand a fair price for their product. By boycotting the Duke Trust together in one of the first large-scale labor alliance propositions in American history, they could reclaim the freedom and self-reliance that they’d been robbed of.
In the summer of 1904 a call went out across the Black Patch for a gathering in the hamlet of Guthrie, Kentucky, to discuss the formation of an organized resistance to the Duke cabal. 5,000 planters, white and black alike, arrived on cue. Ewing had arranged for barbeque, bourbon and musical entertainment while speech after speech detailed the unholy excesses of the Duke Trust. The Dark Fired Tobacco Planters’ Protection Association was thereby initiated, with Ewing installed as general manager. A line had been drawn in the red clay soil of the Black Patch, and nothing would be the same again.
~
The notion of collective resistance to the Duke Trust spread like wildfire, enlisting farmers from throughout the Black Patch but also drawing professionals, politicians, shopkeepers and clergymen to the fold. Spurred on by fervid stories in the local papers of the righteousness of American populism, in time approximately 70 percent of the region’s farmers joined the Association. A second Guthrie rally took place on September 23, 1905, with an influx three times that of the previous year. But this meeting wasn’t all rousing speeches and bluegrass music. Another year of privation had aggrieved the Association’s poorer members, and there were mutterings of taking the fight to the enemy in a more direct fashion. There continued to be farmers (contemptuously referred to as “hillbillies”) who refused to join the movement and who were selling their tobacco to Duke for a higher rate because of the Association’s boycott.
A few weeks later, at dusk, near the Kentucky border in Robertson County, Tennessee, in a tiny schoolhouse set among the tobacco fields, 32 desperate farmers listened to a declaration written by Felix Ewing and a Kentucky physician and planter named Dr. David Amoss which invoked ancient ideals of liberty and justice and tarred the Duke Trust and all who supported it as heretics to the grand Jeffersonian ideal of the yeoman’s sacred freedom and independence. The statement concluded with an ominous pledge to the “hillbillies:”
Be it further proclaimed to the world that any farmer or persons who aid the Trust in any way by selling to it their tobacco at a higher price is an accomplice of the Trust and is in good morals as guilty as the Trust.
The die was thus cast in terms similar to those of the American Revolution: join or die.
~
The conspiracy sprang into action with a leaflet blanketing of those farms recalcitrant to the ideas of the Association, a warning that underscored the divisions that had solidified in the past year throughout the Black Patch. Still the “hillbillies,” enjoying their newfound wealth, refused to toe the line. David Amoss decided that something more was needed to unite the planters against the Duke Trust, and he was willing to commit all to seeing it happen.
As was common among the upper-middle classes in the South at the time, Amoss had been sent as a boy to a military school, where he learned the basics of drill, strategy, and tactics, lessons that would be put to good use as the conspiratorial Night Riders emerged as an underground sect within the Association that would perform the ugly work of persuasion. Secret nighttime meetings were held throughout the Black Patch, with the Night Riders’ underlying purpose delivered by Amoss in firmly Jacobin terminology: “To burn or otherwise destroy the property of growers and to whip them and others who refuse to cooperate with you in winning your fight against the Trust is more than they deserve. There is no reason why a few persons should continue to make the masses suffer when their cooperation would not only be to their benefit, but would increase the earnings and thus improve the conditions of all equally.”
The Night Riders’ oath, sworn by lantern light on bended knees and with one hand on the Bible, was couched in scriptural references to the paramount importance of being one’s brother’s keeper (willingly or no) and to the equally supreme necessity of total secrecy. By the spring of 1906 around two thousand men had taken the oath and, orders in hand, spread out into the countryside to do their work.
From within darkened farmhouses in the deadest hours of night, a long wavering column of horsemen on muffled steeds might be glimpsed processing like phantoms down the dusty roads; erratic torchlight gleaming off gun barrels, faceless in hoods and bandannas they went their way unchallenged and unquestioned, leaving behind them carefully drawn shades and further silence.
~
The Night Riders knew precisely how to inflict the most harm on their victims. They struck the “hillbillies'’” seed beds, where the embryonic tobacco plants were covered with a porous canvas shroud to protect the delicate shoots, too late in the season for the victim to replant, either trampling the shoots into mulch, spraying the canvas with kerosene and igniting it, or, perhaps on the direction of the classically-minded David Amoss, sowing the beds with salt. On the last night of November 1906 the Night Riders upped the ante. Two policemen dozing through the late shift in the small Kentucky town of Princeton were awakened in a most unpleasant manner: staring wide-eyed into the barrels of rifles held by six masked men. Outside, hooded men in squadrons, their boots wrapped in muffling gunnysacks, were jogging silently down the wood-planked sidewalks toward other assignments: some axed the telephone and telegraph cables, others seized the firehouse and cut off its water supply, while a band of 200 mounted Night Riders swept inaudibly into town on a cold black wind, heading calmly toward the JG Orr Tobacco Factory. A few citizens lit lamps and peered apprehensively out their doors, to be answered by gunfire and shattered windows. The lights were quickly extinguished.
At the tobacco warehouse, owned by a prominent “hillbilly” planter, axes smashed open the front door and the cured tobacco heaped inside was soaked with kerosene as sticks of dynamite and then torches were hurled inside. Within moments the entire vast structure was sending towers of flame into the cold starry sky. Explosions rent the building apart as the dynamite detonated. The center of Princeton was a glaring earsplitting holocaust of fire and repeated explosions; the shocked townspeople, awoken from slumber by this awful visitation, must have thought the End had come.
Those residents courageous enough to brave a glance outside would have seen a thin man on horseback blowing three sharp blasts on a horn, summoning his riders to depart. For David Amoss, this spectacle was a thundering blow against tyranny, accomplished with military precision. The Trust would surely get the message – the men of the Association would accept wage slavery no longer, and those willing to work with Duke’s henchmen would pay the price. There would be no turning back.
~
“Buck” Duke thought of the Association, which was now seriously impeding the flow of dark-fired tobacco to his warehouses, as composed of rednecks and “hoe-toters” led on and manipulated by “outside agitators,” communists and anarchists out to subvert the American Way, yet another alarming rent in the fabric of the Republican corporate/industrial domination of the American polity that since the close of the Civil War had aggressively dictated the course of the national saga. Labor unrest was bad enough when confined to the Northern cities with their teeming immigrant shantytowns, but to have it rear its head in the rural South – the very cultural soil from whence the Duke fortune had been wrung – was sacrilege.
And now there was another troublemaker that monopolies like the Duke Trust had to contend with: the new president Theodore Roosevelt’s rabblerousing “trust-busting” campaigns had reawaked the moribund 1890 Sherman Act, a dangerously progressive piece of legislation that flew in the face of everything Duke and his brethren stood for.
The Association would not have looked to a Yankee, much less a Republican, like Roosevelt for help. Given the success of the Princeton raid, Amoss must have felt he had things very much under control. The Dark-Fired Planters’ Protection Association and its Night Riders wing was beginning to make a positive difference in the lives of its members, slowly raising the price of tobacco as more and more pro-Trust warehouses went up in flames. As a member noted at the time, “[The Association] has fed more hungry children, paid off more mortgages, put clothes on more poor children than any other organization that ever existed. I will keep on working for the Association and if need be I will die in the ditches with the boys from the furrows.”
~
Hopkinsville was and is a comparative metropolis in the Black Patch, then a city of 8,000 and the seat of Christian County, Kentucky, and in the winter of 1907 it housed two of the Duke Trust’s biggest warehouses in the state. On the night of December 6, hundreds of masked men from the surrounding countryside converged like a clenching fist on the city of Hopkinsville. As at Princeton, curious civilians were ushered back inside by barrages of buckshot. They waited quaveringly in the darkness until a vast orange glow from downtown signaled the demise of the immense Trust warehouses there. The newspaper office was thoroughly ransacked. Trust sellers were dragged from their homes and viciously beaten. Several men were shot trying to escape but again no one had been killed, something of a miracle given the gunpowder expended that night. In short order, their work completed, the column of masked men rode back into the night, boisterously singing their own version of the state anthem: “The Fires Burn Bright on My Old Kentucky Home.”
The Night Riders were now national news. Vituperative screeds of alarm arose from the normally staid mouthpieces of the Establishment at these savages from wildest Kentucky and their anarchic onslaught on international capitalism. And indeed the Riders’ tactics – their shadowy approach; their terrifying namelessness; their use of guns, fire and heavy explosives; the savage treatment of their enemies – had cast a pall of nightly fear across the entire Black Patch. One New York merchant had been in Hopkinsville during the raid and probably never crossed the Ohio River again. The telegram to his employer the day after ran thusly: “Arrived Hopkinsville midnight – Stop – Checked into hotel at one – Stop – Night Riders filled room with bullets at two – Stop – I quit – Stop.”
~
1907 brought the full measure of the Association’s successes to fruition, with tobacco prices at more than eight cents a pound. The pro-Trust “hillbillies,” chivvied and terrorized into submission, had largely ceased to be a matter of concern. There began to be talk in the confidential meetings of the Night Riders of setting aside the hood and the lash and, the battle won, reassuming a normal life of tilling the soil and curing the baled leaves. And then the Commonwealth elected Augustus E. Willson, an urbane Republican attorney and firm friend of big business.
One of the few Republicans of that era to be elected Governor of Kentucky – where political power had long resided in the wealthy, agrarian, Confederate-sympathizing and largely Democratic flatlands rather than in the hard-luck Republican hills – Willson was further despised in the Black Patch for his corporatist leanings and for being from Louisville, then the state’s only metropolitan area and to this day the object of mutual distrust and contempt by those living “out in the state.” Willson campaigned on a promise to disarm and disband the Night Riders with all available force, something his Democratic predecessor had silkily avoided. Upon his election Willson promptly sent a company of state militiamen to Hopkinsville to replace the conflicted local forces and protect the city from further outrages, and vowed a full pardon for anyone who killed a Night Rider.
The Black Patch became an occupied country, and across the state sentiment was turning against the Association. The question was posed repeatedly: why not declare victory and go home? What’s left to prove? But David Amoss was adamant that pressure must be kept up on the Duke Trust for their hard-won accomplishments to survive. And so the Night Riders set forth again, raiding Russellville, Kentucky, on January 3, 1908, with an unprecedented military exactitude that drew wonder from their victims, before moving westward, 300 strong, across the Black Patch to hit Dycusburg and then the village of View in the depths of winter, torching warehouses and mauling Trust planters at every opportunity. Then Amoss aimed his men at Eddyville, home of the infamous Kentucky State Penitentiary, where his prowess as a commander and the unshakable discipline of his men allowed them to insert themselves into town, throttle its communications, burn and beat and bully the populace, and vanish before dawn leaving only bloodied “hillbillies” and burning warehouses in their wake. Not until February 17, days after the raid, did Willson’s soldiers belatedly march into town.
Despite the presence of the state militia the Night Riders were clearly capable of doing their dirty work in small towns and villages across the region and, as tends to be the case, successful enterprises of this nature will attract the worst sort of men. Brawlers, criminals, bigots, those with simmering grudges and personal hatreds joined the ranks for their own reasons, and in the lawlessness that the Black Riders exuded they went about settling scores and taking personal vengeance. Some of these tensions went back to the Civil War, while others were familial, financial, or political. This tertiary violence, a tragic postlude to the tearing away of societal constraints that the Night Riders’ plundering had encouraged, is a regular occurrence during war, revolution and violent crime, when some view the diminution of civic control as an opportunity rather than something to fear, a welcome chance to vent ancient hatreds and personal vendettas on their neighbors. It is, sadly, a dark thread running throughout the human tapestry.
Partly due to this contamination of the Night Riders by villainous outliers and partly due to the resonating question of what to do with a cause that has run its course, by late 1908 and early 1909 David Amoss began to feel the loss of a substantial percentage of his host. Meanwhile other forces of change were at work far from the Black Patch. In Washington, Representative AO Stanley, who represented that beleaguered district, managed to repeal the six-cent per pound tax on leaf tobacco that had begun as a putative measure to harm Southern farmers during Reconstruction, thus lifting a great financial burden off tobacco planters nationwide. In late 1908 the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the Duke Trust was in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and that it be fragmented into a number of smaller, decentralized, more democratic entities. The state militia had expanded its reach beyond the major cities of the Black Patch and began a successful program of patrols that captured and disarmed several Night Rider bands, while court actions, when moved outside of the Night Riders’ dwindling base of support, returned hearty verdicts against captured members, who were having a hard time paying off steep monetary judgments. The final curtain seemed close at hand.
~
In 1910, with the militia withdrawn and the night riding virtually ceased, Dr. David Amoss was indicted by the Christian County Grand Jury for “willfully and feloniously confederating, conspiring and banding together for the purpose of molesting, injuring and destroying property of other persons,” with a penalty of one to five years in the penitentiary and up to $10,000.00 in damages. But the holy oath of the Night Riders overcame fears of perjury, and none of the plaintiffs’ witnesses culled from former Riders would testify against their leader. The defendant’s attorney railed against the callousness of the Duke Trust and by proxy the “hillbillies” whose refusal to stand united with the Association had spurred the Night Riders into being, while the opposing side emphasized rather staidly the rule of law and the right to the safe enjoyment of one’s property and home, concluding on the conventional note that should Amoss go free, “it was time to tear down the churches and courthouses and homes” and let socialism and anarchy run amok. The rural jury wasn’t buying it. The verdict was unanimous, and Amoss walked out a free man into a Black Patch itself freed from both the tyranny of exploitation and the terror of forced conformity. The Night Riders had done their duty.
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1781)
