Appalachian Figures
On a June morning in 1914, readers in Barbourville picked up the Mountain Advocate and saw a single large photograph staring back at them from the front page. The headline at the bottom of the image read, in bold capitals, “We are for Caleb Powers.” The paper was endorsing a familiar Whitley County native for Congress, a man whose name had already been splashed across national headlines as a convicted conspirator in a governor’s assassination and the central figure in one of the most bitter legal sagas in Kentucky history.
For the mountain voters who clipped that page and tucked it away in scrapbooks, Caleb Powers was not simply a politician. He was a local boy from the hills near Williamsburg who rose from one room schools to Frankfort and Washington, carried into statewide prominence by the force of Appalachian partisanship and then nearly destroyed by it. His story begins on a Whitley County farm. It winds through an armed “mountain army,” four murder trials, eight years in prison, and finally four terms in the United States Congress. It also reveals how deeply the politics of the eastern Kentucky mountains shaped, and were shaped by, the violence at the turn of the twentieth century.
A mountain boy in the Whitley hills
Caleb Powers was born near Williamsburg in Whitley County on February 1, 1869, the son of farmer Amos Powers and Elizabeth Perkins Powers. Local schools in Knox County provided his first classroom, and like many ambitious young men from the mountain counties he chased education wherever opportunity appeared. He studied at Union College in Barbourville, at the Agricultural and Mechanical College in Lexington, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and finally at Northern Indiana Normal School at Valparaiso, where he finished a law degree in 1894.
West Point did not last. Powers later recalled that eye problems and temporary blindness forced him to leave, one of several setbacks that he would frame in his prison autobiography as early evidence of hardship overcome. Back in Kentucky he taught in mountain schools, read law, and quickly moved into public life. He was elected superintendent of schools in Knox County in 1893 and again in 1897, pushing for better facilities and stricter attendance laws in a system that was still catching up from the ruins of the Civil War.
The work suited his temperament. Powers was a gifted stump speaker who mixed legal training with the plain talk of Whitley and Knox County hollers. The Republican Party noticed. At age thirty he won the statewide race for secretary of state in the stormy 1899 election that pitted Democrat William Goebel against Republican William S. Taylor in what historians still regard as one of Kentucky’s ugliest contests.
The mountain army comes to Frankfort
The 1899 governor’s race did not end on election night. Allegations of fraud flooded in from both parties. The Democratic controlled General Assembly moved to throw out enough Republican precincts to hand the governorship to Goebel. Powers, newly elected as secretary of state and firmly aligned with Taylor, answered by organizing thousands of armed Republican supporters from the eastern Kentucky mountains and bringing them to Frankfort.
In My Own Story, the autobiographical account Powers wrote from prison, he cast this “mountain army” as a band of law abiding citizens who simply meant to protect the ballot and the Taylor administration from a legislative coup. Critics in Goebel’s camp saw something more threatening: mountaineers with rifles filling the streets, a show of force from a region long stereotyped in the Bluegrass as violent, clan ridden, and unruly. James C. Klotter, in his study William Goebel: The Politics of Wrath, notes that both sides were playing with fire. The presence of armed men around the Capitol heightened the sense that political power in Kentucky might be decided by bullets instead of ballots.
Powers’s office in the statehouse complex looked down on the walk where legislators and politicians passed between the Capitol Hotel and the old Capitol building. It was a place where power moved each day in plain sight. It would soon become central to the story of an assassination.
Shots at the statehouse
On January 30, 1900, as the General Assembly weighed the contested governor’s race, William Goebel walked toward the Capitol flanked by two bodyguards. Shots rang out from the direction of the executive building. Goebel fell mortally wounded. He lingered for several days before dying on February 3, after the legislature had certified him as governor.
Investigators quickly focused on the Taylor administration and on the question of who had fired, or arranged, the fatal shot. Trial records and later accounts agree that prosecutors argued the assassin fired from a window connected with the offices of the secretary of state. Powers was not in Frankfort that morning. He was in rural Kentucky, traveling with the “mountain army” and encouraging his supporters to remain in the capital. Yet he was indicted as an accessory before the fact, the alleged mastermind who had brought armed men to the city, supplied the killer with a vantage point, and woven the conspiracy together.
The political world of the mountains seemed to be on trial along with the man. The Goebel assassination scrapbooks kept at the Kentucky Historical Society filled with clippings that paired Powers’s name with that of James Howard, the Clay County marksman accused of pulling the trigger, and with references to the broader “mountain conspiracy” that many Democrats claimed had reached into Frankfort.
Four trials and an angry Commonwealth
Between 1901 and 1908, Powers was tried four times in Scott County after the case was moved out of Franklin County. Three juries convicted him and imposed a life sentence. On each of those convictions, the Kentucky Court of Appeals reversed the verdict because of legal errors, jury problems, or inflammatory conduct in the courtroom.
The first appeal, Powers v. Commonwealth, 110 Kentucky Reports 386, 61 Southwestern 735, criticized the trial judge for refusing to use the existing jury wheel in a case already saturated with partisan feeling and suggested that a more careful selection process was needed in any retrial. Later opinions faulted the prosecution for improper argument and the trial courts for not adequately policing remarks that inflamed the jury. In one decision the appellate judges pointedly observed that “no case was ever tried in Kentucky springing from more exciting causes, or arousing more party passion, than those of James B. Howard and Caleb Powers.”
The record that reached the federal courts painted an equally troubling picture. In 1906, in Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Caleb Powers, 201 United States 1, the United States Supreme Court considered whether federal courts could intervene through habeas corpus or removal when local officials allegedly manipulated the jury to keep Republicans off and Democrats on. The Court acknowledged that the trials showed “such misconduct on the part of administrative officers” and discrimination in jury selection “as may well shock all who love justice,” but it held that federal law gave no authority to remove the case from state courts so long as Kentucky’s statutes were fair on their face.
Legally, those opinions focused on procedure rather than guilt. Morally, they fed the sense among mountain Republicans that Powers was not getting a fair shake from a system dominated by his political enemies. Legal historians who study the case often point to it as an example of how pitched partisanship can erode confidence in even the most formalistic guarantees of due process.
Writing his own story from a cell
Powers spent most of the first decade of the new century behind bars, waiting for retrials and appeals. From his cell he embarked on a publicity and letter writing campaign that tried to turn his personal defense into a broader argument about political justice in Kentucky.
In 1905 he published My Own Story through Bobbs Merrill, a sprawling five hundred page memoir that begins with his childhood in the hills, moves through the 1899 campaign, and devotes hundreds of pages to defending his conduct in the Goebel crisis. It is a partisan book, often self serving, but it remains the most detailed first person account of how a Whitley County Republican in the Taylor camp understood the events that toppled his career. Powers casts himself as a mountain reformer who tried to bring order and education to the hills and who was then targeted by a vindictive Democratic machine when the struggle over the governor’s race turned deadly.
Outside the prison walls, his allies organized a national campaign on his behalf. The Library of Congress preserves a printed circular titled “Caleb Powers’ Defense Fund,” dated April 1906 and mailed from Washington. The broadside shows a portrait of Powers and urges “every one in the country” who believes in justice to contribute toward his defense as he faces a fourth trial. Contributors could send money in any amount, with the promise that their funds would help “restore the noble and persecuted man to light and liberty.”
Archival collections at the University of Kentucky and the Filson Historical Society contain letters from ordinary Kentuckians, local party committees, and national politicians, all weighing in on the case. Some insisted he was guilty but had already suffered enough. Others, particularly in the mountains, wrote in the language of faith and persecution, comparing their “political prisoner” to biblical figures unjustly imprisoned by hostile rulers. The Caleb Powers Papers at UK’s Special Collections Research Center include his own speeches, correspondence, and clippings, saved and organized after his release, that show how carefully he curated his public image.
Pardon from Frankfort and a seat in Washington
The fourth trial, held in 1907 and concluded in early 1908, ended in a hung jury, six for conviction and six for acquittal. At that point the legal stalemate gave way to executive action. In June 1908 Republican governor Augustus E. Willson granted Powers a full pardon, citing the number of reversals, the length of time already served, and the doubts raised about key prosecution witnesses.
Powers walked out of prison a free man after eight years behind bars. Within three years he was on his way to Congress.
In 1910 he won election as a Republican to represent Kentucky’s 11th District, a sprawling region that included many of the counties that had provided his earlier “mountain army.” He served four terms, from March 4, 1911, to March 3, 1919. The Mountain Advocate and other regional papers celebrated his campaigns, sometimes featuring his portrait in proud front page endorsements like the “We are for Caleb Powers” issue that opened this story.
In Washington he was one of several Kentucky Republicans from the mountains who used their seats to push for internal improvements and to secure patronage posts for supporters back home. Congressional records show him serving on committees that dealt with transportation and shipping, work that foreshadowed his later position as assistant counsel for the United States Shipping Board in the early 1920s.
Later years, death, and a grave among governors
Powers declined renomination in 1918, a decision that removed one of the most controversial figures from Kentucky’s congressional delegation. He stayed in Washington as a lawyer for the Shipping Board, part of the apparatus that handled wartime and postwar maritime policy.
On July 25, 1932, he died in Baltimore at the age of sixty three. Contemporary obituaries, including one in the Chicago Tribune, remembered him as both a former political prisoner and a congressman, often summarizing his life in a single sentence that ran from Whitley County farm to Goebel trials to Capitol Hill. He was buried in Barbourville Cemetery in Knox County, a few yards from governors and judges who had navigated more conventional political careers.
Visitors who walk that hillside today can find his stone among those of James D. Black, Flem Sampson, and other state figures. The site has become a regular stop on local ghost walks and history tours, where guides recount the tale of the secretary of state accused of arranging a governor’s murder who later sat in Congress for eight years.
Guilt, innocence, and the historian’s verdict
The law has long since closed the Powers case. The pardon stands. The murder of William Goebel remains officially unsolved. Historians, however, continue to debate how to understand both the crime and the man from Whitley County who spent eight years in prison because of it.
Ron Elliott’s narrative history Assassination at the State House and Francis X. Busch’s legal study They Escaped the Hangman both review the testimony, the conflicting alibis, and the partisan atmosphere that saturated the trials. They emphasize that the appellate reversals focused on due process problems rather than definitive proof of innocence and that some key witnesses against Powers, such as Henry Youtsey, changed their stories over time, leaving future readers to sift motives and credibility for themselves.
James C. Klotter’s William Goebel: The Politics of Wrath and his shorter biographical sketch of Powers in The Kentucky Encyclopedia place the saga within the larger struggle between mountain Republicans and Democratic machine politicians in the Bluegrass. In Klotter’s telling, Powers becomes a symbol of how class, region, and party combined to produce both mob violence and prosecutorial overreach. He notes that mountain voters remained loyal even after multiple convictions, a fact that tells us as much about their distrust of state institutions as it does about the evidence against Powers.
Modern reference works sometimes list Powers among wrongful convictions in American history, pointing to the reversals, the pardon, and the enduring doubts about the fairness of his trials. At the same time, contemporary newspaper accounts and Democratic memoirs still present him as a willing conspirator in a plot to kill a rival and keep Taylor in office. The archival scrapbooks at the Kentucky Historical Society, filled with headlines like “Caleb Powers is convicted; second sentence to life imprisonment,” show how firmly that image took hold outside the mountain counties.
For an Appalachian historian the question of guilt or innocence, though important, is only part of the story. Just as revealing are the ways mountain people claimed Powers as their own. From the armed “mountain army” that followed him to Frankfort to the Barbourville front pages that proclaimed “We are for Caleb Powers” more than a decade after his first conviction, eastern Kentuckians treated him as a champion whose fate was bound up with their own.
He was, in the end, a man who stood at the crossroads of law and violence, mountain loyalty and statewide mistrust. His grave in Barbourville, quiet now among the cedars, belongs not only to a former congressman but to an entire era when the politics of the Kentucky mountains could topple a governor and send a “noted Kentucky political prisoner,” as his defense fund called him, all the way to the halls of Congress.
Sources and Further Reading
Primary sources for Caleb Powers include his own autobiography, My Own Story: An Account of the Conditions in Kentucky Leading to the Assassination of William Goebel and My Indictment and Conviction on the Charge of Complicity in His Murder (Indianapolis, Bobbs Merrill, 1905), written while he was still imprisoned and digitized through the Internet Archive, and the earlier pamphlet Great Speech of Caleb Powers Before the Jury That Sentenced Him to Death, which reproduces his courtroom address and a defense essay by Llewellyn F. Sinclair.Internet Archive
The Caleb Powers Papers, 1900 to 1941, at the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center (collection 51w15), together with the related Goebel family papers and the Goebel assassination scrapbooks at the Kentucky Historical Society, preserve letters, speeches, and clippings from the trials, his prison years, and his later congressional service.University of Kentucky Libraries+1 The broadside “Caleb Powers’ Defense Fund” printed in Washington in April 1906 and held by the Library of Congress offers a vivid example of how his supporters framed him as “the noted Kentucky political prisoner” whose case should stir national concern.
Legal records are essential for understanding the procedural history of the case. These include the Kentucky Court of Appeals opinions in Powers v. Commonwealth, 110 Kentucky Reports 386, 61 Southwestern 735 (1901), 114 Kentucky 237, 70 Southwestern 644 and 71 Southwestern 494 (1902 and 1903), and 139 Kentucky 815, 83 Southwestern 146 (1904), which reversed his convictions on various grounds, along with the United States Supreme Court decision Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Caleb Powers, 201 United States 1 (1906), which reviewed his attempt to remove the case to federal court.vLex+2Court Listener+2
Contemporary newspapers give a sense of how the story played beyond the law reports. California and Georgia papers such as the Los Angeles Herald and the Athens Banner reported each conviction and retrial in detail, while Kentucky papers like the Louisville Courier Journal and the Lexington Herald covered both the political aftermath and his later campaigns.Wikipedia+1 Local titles like the Mountain Advocate in Barbourville show how Whitley and Knox County voters publicly championed him during his congressional runs, including a June 1914 front page endorsement under the banner “We are for Caleb Powers.”
For biography and analysis, James C. Klotter’s William Goebel: The Politics of Wrath (University Press of Kentucky, 1977) remains the foundational scholarly study of the assassination and the political context.Google Books Ron Elliott’s Assassination at the State House: The Murder of Kentucky Governor William Goebel provides a more narrative account that draws heavily on trial transcripts and newspaper coverage, while Francis X. Busch’s They Escaped the Hangman includes a lengthy chapter on the Powers trials within a broader survey of notable American murder cases.Amazon+1 Jim Short’s regional study Caleb Powers and the Mountain Army focuses on the eastern Kentucky supporters who rallied to him in Frankfort and later at the ballot box.eBay+1
Concise reference entries such as James C. Klotter’s “Powers, Caleb” in The Kentucky Encyclopedia, the biographical sketch at Northern Kentucky Views, the Political Graveyard entry on Powers, and the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress all help confirm key dates, offices, and burial information, while online resources like Wikipedia’s “Caleb Powers” article and the “List of wrongful convictions in the United States” summarize modern debates about his guilt and legacy and point back to the primary sources listed above.Wikipedia+3Northern Kentucky Views+3Political Graveyard+3