The “Stainhouse Resolutions” were adopted, vowing loyalty to the PPA and severe penalties to those who cooperated with Duke’s hated ATC trust. No one was injured, and Duke’s ATC lost another $200,000 worth of “hillbilly” tobacco. The town was left silent except for the roar of the flames and the thunder of hooves as the Night Riders departed. October 30, 2020 by Chuck Stanion in Pipe Line. The Princeton raid was not national news but it gave the Night Riders a new image in the Black Patch as a disciplined and powerful force. Hopkinsville was fully intended to be national news. still more violent group in 1906 called the Night Riders. “Night Riders” fought against non-cooperative farmers and businessmen who opposed the dark tobacco pool. Using Ku Klux Klan and Masonic rituals , the Night Riders developed into a secretive organization that soon spread throughout the Black Patch. The wait wasn’t long. Violence was only one method employed by the growers to raise the price of tobacco. Black Patch Tobacco Wars. Now, however, schoolchildren in Christian and other counties in the Patch learn about the nightriders who fought the hated trust. The Night Riders faded back into the community; the mask and the lash no longer ruled the night. Silent Brigade lodges were formed in every Black Patch county, each lodge with a captain, all answerable to Amoss. Riders in small groups struck nightly, burning barns, scraping plant beds, horsewhipping “hillbillies”—then melted back into the population, guerrilla style. Bill Henderson, a Dycusburg, Kentucky, tobacco buyer and businessman, took to openly taunting the PPA. It was over. Many of http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/black-patch-war/, Dark Tobacco District Planters' Protective Association. Amoss, a fatherly mentor at fifty, loved Dunning; Dunning worshipped Amoss. They watered their horses and donned masks and white sashes, waiting for a sign from a modest-looking man in a brown cloth coat and a slouch hat who was consulting a pocket watch. Informers and suspected traitors were “disappeared,” their bodies found in remote swamps or abandoned wells–or not at all. Amoss responded by planting false rumors, which had the militia mobilized, then looking foolish when nothing happened. Dr Amos and Dunning, his dear friend and second in command, were at the defendants’ table, while the courtroom was filled with hundreds, mostly supporters but with Night Rider victims among them, hungry for justice at last. the buyers had formed a trust and were controlling the market. A Southern gentleman to the last, Amoss swore on the Bible to tell the truth; yet he had already sworn, on bended knees, to never betray the operations of the Silent Brigade. Though a supporter of the PPA, Stanley feared vigilantism and denounced what he called the “Night Riders,” and the name stuck. The Nashville Banner warned of a “black exodus” as tenants and sharecroppers were lured away to the more profitable cotton country to the south, or the relative freedom of the northern cities. Tangled Up In Blue: Lessons for Police Reform? There were few Night Rider raids during the Christmas holidays, and the Black Patch was silent, waiting with bated breath. Terry Bisson is an award-winning science fiction writer, mainly known for his short stories, who lives in California. The new Kentucky governor, Augustus Willson, a lawyer who had once worked for the Duke trust, ordered several companies of Kentucky militia into the Black Patch. Orr Tobacco Factory. Barbecue and burgoo, moonshine and fiery speeches were eagerly consumed as thousands lined up to join the new Planters Protective Association (PPA). Some Night Riders were identified but never convicted, as it was impossible to assemble an all-male, all-white jury in the Black Patch that didn’t contain at least a few Night Riders. The end game came a few years later, as an ambitious new prosecutor in Hopkinsville obtained indictment for “conspiracy and destruction of property” against Amoss and other Night Rider leaders. In October 1905 thirty-two members of the Robertson County Branch of the PPA met at the Stainback schoolhouse in the northern part of the county and adopted the “Resolutions of the committee of the Possum Hunters Organization.” The possum hunters outlined their grievances against the Trust and the hillbillies and stated their intention to visit Trust tobacco buyers and hillbillies in groups of no less than five and no more than two thousand and use “peaceful” methods to convince buyers and non-poolers to adhere to the PPA. Agrarian and populist movements sprang up in the Midwest and the West, as farmers resisted by organizing together as Grangers, the Farmers’ Alliance, and the Populist Party. Prof. Waldrep became the Jamie and Phyllis Pasker Professor of History at SFSU in August, 2000. In response, Night Riders burned Henderson’s tobacco barns, destroyed his distillery and lashed him to within an inch of his life. The violence peaked in 1907-9 and diminished over the next few years. How to deal with recalcitrants and scabs? Price Hollowell Black Patch War Hero Friday, September 23, 2016 School Performances* The saga of the Night Riders is not an easy one to tell. The telegraph lines were cut and the railroad depots occupied. At the height of their power, the night riders staged spectacular night raids and captured entire towns. It was a regional struggle to preserve a traditional way of life that many loved and most at least tolerated. A word of warning often sufficed. The growers settled back into their traditional Southern way of life. As a youth, Amoss had attended The Ferrell Military Institute in Hopkinsville, where he had thrilled to the exploits of Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Amoss loved military lore, but he was destined to be a doctor like his father. Amoss had made his point: the Night Riders ruled the Black Patch. As if anyone would dare. Some arrests were made but convictions in the Black Patch courts were never obtained. The same process of capitalist monopoly consolidation was squeezing farmers across the country as prices for wheat, corn, hogs, and cattle all fell under the pressure of the railroads and the hated trusts. Recalcitrant growers, some even PPA members, were selling tobacco “in the barn” for Duke’s temporarily inflated prices. 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Dr. David Amoss This famous Kentuckian, from Lexington, Kentucky was a leader in the women's rights movement becoming president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association in 1912. The small town of Birmingham between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, formed by freed slaves after the war, was torched and those who refused to flee were murdered in cold blood. Their roadblocks and patrols restricted the activities of the Night Riders somewhat, but also increased their popularity, as the militia, mostly “rude mountain boys” from eastern Kentucky, were seen as occupiers. Indian warfare, several regulator and vigilante movements, guerrilla warfare during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and lynching had characterized the Black Patch history long before the onset of the tobacco war. Dunning was a planter whose dozen tenants worked 2500 acres of wheat, corn and dark-fire tobacco. They were to become close allies in a unique and secret enterprise. Violence was only one method employed by the growers to raise the price of tobacco. In the Fall of 1904 (when the tobacco crop was in the barn) Ewing and a few other big planters put out the call for a gathering in Guthrie, Kentucky, right on the Kentucky-Tennessee line. On the night of December 7, hundreds of horsemen gathered at a country church near Hopkinsville. The trial took place in Hopkinsville in 1911. "Night Riders" fought against non-cooperative farmers and businessmen who … The PPA’s first year had exceeded expectations, but the leadership was worried. The planters, while hardly to be compared with industrial workers, found themselves facing the same problem unions faced against giant corporations. Amoss summoned lodges from several counties for a dramatic escalation—a raid on an ATC warehouse in Princeton, a small town south of Hopkinsville. The Silent Brigade raided cities to burn tobacco warehouses and attacked farmers who refused to join an association to sell their tobacco The disappointed and the triumphant left the courtroom together. The PPA spoke for the Black Patch. Dr Amoss peacefully resumed his medical practice until he was diagnosed with a tumor and died in a sanitarium—in New York City, a few blocks from the palatial home of James B. Duke. The primary antagonists were the American Tobacco Company (ATC) (owned by James B. Duke ), historically one of the largest U.S. industrial monopolies, and the Dark Tobacco District Planters' Protective Association of Kentucky and Tennessee (PPA). “Shirt-sleeve” night riders, who no longer answered to Amoss, began to punish personal grudges and terrorize black communities. They were getting tobacco at ridiculously low prices and the farmers were unable to make a living. In January, the Kentucky town of Russelville, home to two ATC warehouses, heard the muffled tramp, the creaking of harness, the “hunters horn” and the dynamite blasts. The armed and hooded vigilantes who participated in these violent acts became known as the tobacco night riders. During the Civil War, western Kentucky was under Union occupation, but its sympathies never altered. Dissenting preachers watched their pews empty out. Under Amoss’s command, strict order was maintained. A worried call to the local telephone switchboard was answered by a gruff male voice: “The Night Riders are here.” Minutes later, a blast rocked the town and a tobacco warehouse went up in flames. Which oath he would honor was never in doubt. Raising a blood-stained hand, he called for calm, and passed off command to his trusted lieutenant, Dunning, who ordered the withdrawal. The Black Patch Tobacco War, as it was called, extended from 1904 to 1909 and pitted a group of vigilante farmers against the American Tobacco Company. After independence climate and tradition established it as the main cash crop in the Upper South—Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and later, west of the Blue Ridge, in Kentucky and Tennessee. If you want to learn the full, true story of the Night Riders, I suggest you buy "On Bended Knee" by Bill Cunningham. Fewer than a hundred gathered in the tiny Stainhouse School which was also, symbolically, right on the Kentucky-Tennessee line. This area, called the Black Patch, centered around Hopkinsville and Clarksville, Tennessee, was plantation country. It seemed like a good example to the Lake County residents. All Rights Reserved. The Louisville Courier Journal called for Law and Order, denouncing the night Riders as the “shame” of Kentucky. The Night Riders, as they were named by local press, resorted to physical intimidation, crop burning, and other tactics to encourage the compliance of all farmers in the stand against Big Tobacco. - James O. Nall, The Tobacco Night Riders of Kentucky and Tennessee. Even “hillbillies” had families and friends. Meanwhile a band of 200 mounted Night Riders swept inaudibly into town on a cold black wind, heading calmly toward the J.G. The Night Riders were a vigilante group operating from about 1906 to 1908 in southwestern Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee that used fear and intimidation against the Duke tobacco monopoly in the area. The PPA intended to withhold tobacco from the market until purchasing companies agreed to pay higher prices. When the Night Riders attacked the Hollowell farm in Caldwell County on the night of May 2, 1907, one of them boasted, "We Night Riders fear no judge or jury!" The Night Riders were led by Dr. David Amoss, a medical doctor from the Cobb community in Caldwell County, Kentucky. It was Duke who changed the game. The eerie sound of a hunter’s horn called the troops to reassemble; it was Amoss blowing across the muzzle of his Army Colt. Twenty-five or thirty partly masked men went to the home of R. H. Hollowell, between Hopson and Lamasco between one and two o clock in the morning, shots were tired into the home. Raids were planned and new members sworn in, “on bended knee,” under cover of night in remote swamps and woods protected by armed sentries. A small army of turncoats had been cultivated and prepared by the prosecution. Late one fall night in 1907, the town awoke to a strange sound: two hundred horses muffled with burlap bags on their hoofs. The Black Patch Tobacco War, as it was called, extended from 1904 to 1909 and pitted a group of vigilante farmers against the American Tobacco Company. 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