"James Hargis is shown in this record to have been a savage, cruel
man; that he had a high, vindictive temper, and allowed neither
fear, nor remorse, nor pity to come between him and the objects of
his passionate resentment.... James Hargis was a man of violence
and of blood. He had established in the county of Breathitt a reign
of terror under the influence of which the law was paralyzed and
its ministers overrun. He is pictured as a man of gigantic frame,
savage temper and indomitable courage. He had surrounded himself
with armed mercenaries, whose minds he inflamed with drink, and
who seemed to be willing to do his bidding even to the point of
assassinating his enemies without fear of the consequences of their
crimes and without remorse or pity for the result.
"He had not only broken down the law and terrorized its officers,
but he had made the temple of justice itself the rendezvous for
assassins who, sheltered behind walls, reddened its portals with
the blood of its votaries. _He literally ingrafted upon the
civilization of the twentieth century the savagery of the fifth,
and introduced into a community of law and order the merciless
ferocity of the middle ages._"