By Robert Zwicker, Richmond, Virginia, and Jean Paige, Louisville
Farmers in the Black Patch region of Western Kentucky and Tennessee traditionally have grown the labor-intensive, smoke-cured dark tobacco commonly used for snuff, pipe and chewing tobacco. In 1890, the largest vendor of tobacco products, James B. Duke, convinced his competitors to join him in forming a corporation, the American Tobacco Company, which would have monopolistic powers over tobacco price fixing. The company then lowered the buying price to the point where many farmers could no longer make a profit, and some lost their farms.
The farmers responded by forming the Planters Protective Association in 1904 to withhold their tobacco and convince others to do the same until the company raised the price. When the company refused to negotiate, Association members became more militant and formed a paramilitary organization, generally known as the Night Riders, who attacked and beat noncompliant farmers, ruined their tobacco beds, burned barns and committed other such acts of terror. On Dec. 1, 1906, a group of about 200 Night Riders rode into the town of Princeton, masked and armed, after having captured the police station and telegraph office, and proceeded to dynamite and burn down tobacco warehouses and the tobacco inside. They carried out similar town invasions in Hopkinsville (Dec. 7, 1907), Russellville (Jan. 3, 1908) and Dycusville (Feb. 4, 1908), destroying warehouses and vandalizing other unfavored businesses. During the Hopkinsville raid, an impromptu posse was formed and followed the invaders out of the city, eventually finding an opportunity to kill one Night Rider and wound another. A particularly atrocious Night Rider attack was made on April 9, 1908, on an African American community in Birmingham (Marshall County), where residents were working in the tobacco fields of non-compliant farmers. Two residents were killed in the gunfire.
By 1908, authorities had identified many of the Night Rider leaders, and a Kentucky State Guard unit arrested some of them in April. Although few, if any, Night Riders ever were convicted by a Kentucky jury, the arrests put a damper on their activities. Around the same time, American Tobacco relented and raised the purchase prices somewhat, further easing tensions in the area. Then, in 1911, the Supreme Court declared American Tobacco to be an illegal monopoly and ordered it to disband. This effectively ended price fixing and the tobacco war.
Although Night Rider activities were mainly limited to the dark tobacco counties of Western Kentucky, some sought to bring Night Rider tactics to the burley country of central Kentucky, where prices also were controlled by the tobacco monopoly. Around 1907, George Coy of Nelson County sold his tobacco crop against the wishes of the local Night Riders, neighbors of the Coys. Shortly thereafter, some Night Riders broke into his home, looking for the tobacco money. They expected the house to be empty, but George’s son, Joseph Coy, then about 8 years old, was in the house. He saw the intruders coming and hid under a bed while they ransacked the house. They didn’t find the money, as it had been hidden in a flour barrel, but at one point, one of the Night Riders saw young Joe under the bed but didn’t say anything to the others. Joe related that for some time after this, a certain gentleman in town was especially nice to Joe and his friends, buying them treats and other favors. It was only years later that the man finally admitted that he was the Night Rider who had seen Joe under the bed.
As a young man, Joe joined the urban migration and settled in Louisville’s West End, where he was reasonably safe from Night Riders but not entirely out of danger, as he found a wife there. Joe married Bessie Peake in Louisville in 1922, and the couple raised a large family there on Joe’s distillery wages before he died in 1972.
It is interesting that, although the Black Patch Tobacco War constituted a serious armed uprising supported by a sizable portion of the state’s populace, most Kentuckians today know little or nothing about those events. We might guess that today’s farmers and tobacco companies prefer it that way.