Oversimplified, the Night Riders grew out of the Black Patch Tobacco Wars, which took place in the western part of Kentucky from 1904 through 1914 or so.  The American Tobacco Company developed a tobacco trust, or monopoly, and paid farmers less and less for their crop.  Because there was virtually no one else to sell to, “the Trust,” led by James B. Duke (of Duke University and Duke Power fame) came to pay farmers less per pound than what it cost to grow.

 The Black Patch of Kentucky (and Tennessee) does not grow Burley (a.k.a. white burley), but a darker variety of tobacco that requires smoke curing.  The variety was grown almost exclusively in northwestern Tennessee, and the western part of Kentucky, just east of the Land between the lakes.  It's dark green to the point of being nearly black, hence the term "Black Patch."

In response to the Duke Trust, the Black Patch farmers formed their own association – The Dark Tobacco Planters Protective Association – and agreed to simply not raise tobacco, or to raise it and not sell it. Neighbors were encouraged to boycott the trust.  Strongly encouraged.  Social pressures to join were enormous, and vandalism, arson, murder, and other violence was not unheard of.  What few arrests were made were rarely brought to trial, and even more rarely resulted in convictions. 

Night Rider attacks in both Hopkinsville, Ky., and Princeton, Ky. were remarkably well-organized onslaughts of military-like precision as hundreds of Night Riders moved in to town to guard police stations, barricade fire departments, and destroy switchboards before burning down Duke's full warehouses.

 You can read that the Night Riders were simply an outgrowth of the Ku Klux Klan.  That's wrong.  It is true that they adopted many Klan-like tendencies.  They wore sheets, they burned crosses, and they terrorized at night.  But their target was tobacco prices, not racial retribution.  Certainly, there were elements of the Night Riders for whom that was not true.  But as a character in Robert Penn Warren's first novel, Night Riders, noted, "the good Lord never got any thousand or so men together for any purpose without a liberal assortment of sons of bitches thrown in."

 The Night Rider movement spread into the burley growing section of Kentucky, and, in the area covered by Northern Kentucky Views, barns and tobacco warehouses were burned in at least Owen County, Carrollton, Covington, Warsaw, Brooksville, Germantown, Maysville and Augusta.  Burley farmers formed the ASE, the American Society of Equity, to oppose the tobacco trust.   In 1908, the Falmouth Outlook ran a weekly ASE "society" column to keep readers up to date on ASE activities and the Owenton News-Herald ran weekly front page stories for months supporting the ASE. The ASE, or "the Equity," decided to raise no crop in 1908, and was mostly successful in that effort. It's believed that Bracken County in 1908 didn't have a single stalk of tobacco come out of the ground.

It's a fascinating saga and there are several books on the subject. An excellent book on the subject is Bill Cunningham's On Bended Knees.  I recommend you NOT read Suzanne Marshall's Violence in the Black Patch of Kentucky and Tennessee.  Ms. Marshall's book roams far and wide, and seldom comes to terms with David Amos, The Princeton and Hopkinsville Raids, or even James B. Duke.  Mr. Cunningham has done thorough research and is very readable.  The ending will knock you out.  The classic work on the subject is James O. Nall's The Tobacco Night Riders of Kentucky and Tennessee, but it's from 1939, and, while a definitive treatment,  can be hard to find.  Links to Amazon for each are below.

 James B. Duke left a huge part of his fortune to Trinity College, which, out of gratitude, changed its name to Duke University.  So the next time you watch the Kentucky-Duke game remember this: it's just a game.  But if you had an ancestor raising tobacco in Kentucky between 1905 and 1910, Kentucky vrs. Duke could be – literally - life and death.  And Duke was the bad guy.

PS: After James B. Duke became a tobacco czar, he put lots of start up money into a new fangled business called an electric company.  Duke Energy?  Same guy.