Homicide, North and South (1880), a state-by-state quantitative comparison of violent deaths compiled by Cincinnati journalist Horace V. Redfield, is best known for exposing the post-Reconstruction South’s bloody record (many southern states each numbered the same total of killings as up to eight northern states in a year).50 Redfield’s book was also one of the most authoritative pronouncements on white southerners’ inherent appetite for deadly vengeance, regardless of the recent war or other exogenous conditions. Environmental factors were not to blame, Redfield surmised, since expatriated southerners carried it with them even when they left the former war zone—as in Illinois’s “bloody Williamson” County, where “a feud among families or factions of the peculiar southern type” carried out “by population from the old slave States” and “originat[ing] among the [white] population of Southern antecedents . . . was carried on in the Southern shot-gun style.” The only difference was that, it being a northern state, “the ‘feud’ was suppressed, murder was punished,” eventually leaving Williamson “as quiet and orderly as any county in Illinois.”51
Redfield’s Illinois anecdote was consistent with his larger program of depoliticizing southern violence. As a southern correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial, Redfield was keenly aware of the difference between political and extrapolitical violence, especially after witnessing Alabama Democrats’ vicious reaction to 1874’s proposed federal civil rights act.52 While South Carolina’s blatantly political Red Shirts and Louisiana’s White League (as well as the countless Ku Klux Klan blocs across the southern states) seemed to have supplanted the older style of communal violence, white southerners’ “natural” proclivity for bloodletting still seethed beneath national attention. Redfield seemed to concentrate solely on white intraracial assaults at a time when white-on-black interracial killing was more prevalent. In the same vein, he even dismissed white intraracial attacks on southern Republicans. “Although there have been many political murders in the Southern States, yet the great majority of homicides,” said Redfield, “have no more connection with politics than has petit larceny in New York.”53 This included South Carolina’s knife fights and arsons, but oddly not as part of its “great political excitement” of 1876.54 As correspondent for the Queen City’s conservative Republican daily (as opposed to the radical Gazette), Redfield had reason to underestimate “grossly exaggerated accounts of [white-on-black] ‘outrages’ ” and depoliticize those that defied complete dismissal.55 His thesis demanded that white southerners be ferocious with or without politics—thus he could curse the white South without appearing to be a defender of the maligned black electorate. In less than two decades South Carolina’s “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman was using a very similar argument to vindicate lynching.56
“The point of honor, as something to fight about, has pretty well disappeared in Anglo-Saxon countries”
Around the time Homicide, North and South was published, Kentucky’s apparent special relationship to feuding was becoming nationally known. However, its reputation for armed interfamilial antagonism can be traced back to before the war. In 1854 a roguish son of a Mississippi planter published a florid account of his cousin Dr. Hezekiah Evans’s thirty-year grudge with his neighbors, the Hill family (one of whom was a rival physician) in the Bluegrass’s Garrard County. A Hill attacked Evans for abusing a leased slave in 1829—or so the story went. Years later, the neighbor’s son, Dr. Oliver Perry Hill, publicly criticized Evans for being a subpar “steam doctor,” and a series of confrontations between Evans, Hill’s yeoman cousins, and the “rabble” economically attached to both families cost nine lives.57 The conflict demonstrated simmering class tensions among Bluegrass whites (after Oliver Hill turned down Evans’s challenge to a duel, Evans considered the other Hills too far beneath his notice to invite into the ritual) as well as a clash of egos involving medical professionalization.
Other than the sycophantic author’s praising Evans as “a genuine son of Erin,” ethnicity was not made an issue.58 Still, the author self-consciously attempted to frame the story within a European past. The Mississippian, a veteran of the Peruvian navy, originally wanted to write it as a “Spanish romance,” the better to display his knowledge of his favorite language. Even in a nonfiction format that described real, recent events in an American/ southern setting, the blood feud was still a product of the Old World; even an American author trying to vindicate his real-life kinsmen wanted to treat it as a novel (Evans’s reputation meant more to him than his young cousin’s linguistic skills, and he insisted it be written in English).59
Once the locus of the feud narrative was moved from the lowland South to eastern Kentucky (and, by extension, the southern highlands in toto) during the 1880s, continuity with a European past had become more regression than romance.60 It also triggered the question of whether Kentucky’s “feud belt” was due to something inherent in Kentucky society (the oft-cited “pauper counties” problem being a likely culprit) or to various conditions found in southern Appalachia within Kentucky and beyond.61 By the turn of the century the latter interpretation was becoming more popular, with or without documentation; one writer obtusely suggested that unreported feuds must also exist in North Carolina and Tennessee, but Kentucky’s came to light only because of that state’s superior ability to stop them through militia force of arms.62 For most of the twentieth century practically any narrative of violence set in any part of Appalachia was explained as a feud (for instance, Ralph Stanley’s prologue description of a Tennessean’s revenge murder recounted in his recording of “Hills of Roan County”).63 In the 1930s New Deal caseworkers pointed to the very absence of feuds in North Carolina’s westernmost Swain County as a sign of federal-initiated progress. Nothing of the sort had ever taken place there “except in the imagination of writers.”64 But that was beside the point; the narrative of feuds provided New Dealers with a useful counterpoint.
However, this viewpoint went against prevailing evidence and proved unconvincing. The inherency of feuding to eastern Kentucky, or at least a tendency toward factional white intraracial violence scarcely seen elsewhere, was hard to deny. If feud were Kentuckian, defined by containment within a state’s boundaries, it would imply acknowledgment of its political associations. Basing feud upon its mountain environment did the exact opposite. Eastern Kentucky became “a synechdoche for all the southern uplands.”65 In the process there followed a tremendous amount of confusion and misinformation.
Kinship remained the established raison d’être once feuding was decided to be a fixture of the Kentucky mountains rather than the lowland plantations, but with a significant change in syntax. The old antebellum variety of “family feud” could be interfamilial (between either fictive or biological family groups) or intrafamilial (within one family; as Wyatt-Brown mentions in Southern Honor, it was popular for the latter sort to be portrayed as being between brothers).66 In contrast, Kentucky mountain feuds were understood to be ultra-factional with very clear kin-based delineations, taking place between two familial groups who might be related by marriage but suffering no identity crisis as to which side they are on—thus making kinship an even greater motivational factor for killing.67 Presumably, killing became more about eliminating an enemy than about preserving one’s honor, thereby allowing the anonymous (as the Louisville Courier-Journal phrased it when William Goebel was shot) “mountain method of ambush” to replace the more publicly acceptable custom of dueling.68 But most important, their alleged aboriginal predilection with kinship conjured an image of “ ‘tribes’ stuck in the ‘Middle ages,’ ” placing mountaineers on a lower rung of a “temporal hierarchy” than the mass of Anglo-America.69 It was this conceptual turn that helped to validate William Frost’s oxymoronic “contemporary ancestors” title for Kentucky mountaineers.70
Frost’s semifamous quote highlights the trait the lowland feudist and the mountain feudist did share, a special obsession among post-Reconstruction Anglo-Americans, feuds notwithstanding: whiteness. During the advent
of scientific racism and the attendant “cult of Anglo-Saxonism,” elaborations of whiteness relied upon a shaky combination of biology, anthropology, and history.71 From the 1870s until well into the twentieth century, discussions of feuding in the Kentucky mountains included constant citation of the Anglo-Saxon bloodlines or culture (the two were scarcely distinguished from each other), insistence upon preservation of old behaviors through this continuity, and frequent medieval analogies. In a society bent upon white supremacy, one pervaded by interracial violence against nonwhite minorities, absolute whiteness made these Kentucky/mountain feuds appear horizontal and communal. The constant paeans to “the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States” gave their “pure” existence a measure of scientific authority.72 The myth of feudists’ absolute whiteness was imperative to this construction. Their citizenship in the American Republic became secondary to their alleged anthropological traits.
But there were inconsistencies. Many scholars of race were sure that the inherent traits that allowed the greatest of the Nordic races to fill the earth and subdue it could not include violence unmandated by state or commerce. “The point of honor, as something to fight about, has pretty well disappeared in Anglo-Saxon countries,” observed a 1918–19 Harvard Law Review article on international law.73 If Anglo-Saxons ruled the world, how could they also be primitive, even if they were “contemporary ancestors”? Kentucky’s mountain whites were so currish, reasoned eugenicist Madison Grant, that there had to be “other hereditary forces at work there as yet little understood.”74 Anthropologist Emma Connelly’s aforementioned imagined “sallow, gypsy-like people . . . ‘far more incorrigible’ than either the Indian or the negro” (a population whose existence was very difficult to prove) living next door to the “purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United States” (which was, in contrast, impossible to disprove) was not popular, but it demonstrates Connelly’s own difficulty reconciling the orthodoxy of Anglo-Saxon ascendancy with the mountain whites’ wartime bushwhacking and feuding that followed.75 Scholars, especially those who were white Kentuckians and southerners, did not want to be any less racially pure than their more rustic neighbors, but they certainly could not share their regressive tendencies. Consequently, Anglo-Saxonism could not tell the whole story, and so not all racial explanations of feud behavior were the same. Anglo-Saxon determinism was hoisted upon its own shaky petard.
What if, then, Kentucky’s mountain whites were not quite pure Anglo-Saxon but rather Celtic, a racial designator only subtly inferior (although it was a subtlety not lost on firm disciples of racial science)?76 Applying “pure” Celtic, Scottish, or “Scots-Irish” (sometimes “Scotch-Irish”) to the mountain feudist could set the unevolved “mountain white” apart from the mass of the Anglo-Saxon race while preserving his indispensable whiteness. Even if Anglo-Saxon Americans of the New England variety had given up old forms of violence, nineteenth-century feuds had a famous precursor among “the Scotch Highlanders a century ago—the likelihood that most residents of the Kentucky mountains were primarily descendants of Scottish lowlanders was a detail minor enough to ignore.77 Language that nineteenth-century Americans associated with Sir Walter Scott’s odes (such as the aforementioned “clan”) was often accompanied by exaggerations of recent feuds’ historical longevities and obfuscations of their origins, suggesting that the practice continued from Old World to New, “the feud instinct being transplanted with the blood.”78 Feuding, if not racially determined, could also be interpreted as a bygone custom that somehow “survived to the present day.”79 “The feud is an inheritance,” wrote one journalist in 1901. “There were feuds before the war and it is not a wild fancy that the Kentucky mountain feud takes root in Scotland.”80 Without noting that the recent decades’ rash of feud violence was made up of separate conflicts all contained within one state, one journalist took the generalization further in 1912, claiming, “Actually, they are all one feud, and all are products of the old Highland clan spirit.”81
Allusions to medieval Scotland could also be an allegorical disciplining of the feud phenomenon even when writers did not claim there was a direct connection. One southern commentator reasoned that, since “feudal troubles . . . of the Scotch type involved but little loss of life and less of property,” they were relatively harmless and, most important, cast no reflection on statewide, regional, or national political conditions.82 Except when these mountain Scots escaped the mountains (at least in fiction); in John Fox Jr.’s fictionalization of the mountain Republicans’ 1900 Frankfort occupation was an “invasion from those black hills led by the spirit of the Picts and Scots of old . . . aided by and abetted by the . . . best element of the Blue-grass.”83 These metaphors were convincing enough for later Kentucky historians, who remembered Rowan and Breathitt counties’ modern, constitutionally ordained judges and sheriffs as “chieftains” and “feudal lords.”84
Celtic determinism proved to be more enduring than Anglo-Saxonism, and it remains popular in the twenty-first century, emerging as “highland games” and Scottish novelty stores in the southern tourist economy as well as within organized white supremacy.85 Historians continue to casually find undetailed connections across “vast temporal and physical expanses” between post–Civil War “family feuds” and the Scotland or Ulster of previous centuries.86 Nevertheless, when it came to the feud narrative, the Celtic mountain white served the same purposes as the Anglo-Saxon one: the depoliticization of feud violence by thrusting the modern mountain white back to the sceptered isle and far back into (as Eric Hobsbawm put it) “an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity, either by semi-fiction . . . or by forgery.”87 In the final analysis, it was not so much about ethnicity or race as it was about time. Collecting all of the reported Kentucky county wars into “one feud . . . products of the old Highland clan spirit” took each out of its respective context and belied the local cleavages that motivated men to take up arms. Even though evidence that “the family feuds of Kentucky . . . seem[ed] peculiar to families bearing Scottish names” was limited, at best, to anecdote, it proved believable and an effective means of depoliticizing feud.88
The Scottish/Celtic inherency theory stripped these conflicts of whatever modern political import that would have been plain had specific facts been publicized. Ethnicity or race were not only ends but also means to providing a place of detachment between eastern Kentucky’s “survival of Elizabethan days” and Bluegrass Kentuckians, or between the former and the mass of Anglo-Americans.89
Ethnocentric explanations of feud narratives do not match with the historical record of Breathitt County and eastern Kentucky in the nineteenth century. The surnames associated with the Clay County Cattle War, Strong (English and Irish), Callahan (Irish), Eversole (German), and Amis (Huguenot French) reveal a population hardly diverse by twenty-first-century standards, but certainly not homogenous (the Freeman family’s Afro-white biraciality suggests even more complications—not to mention a generous contribution of Native American genes). And by the time eastern Kentucky became associated with feuding, these ethnic identities had become quite meaningless. Early mountain settlers intermarried across pedigree lines with alacrity in the 1700s, and their Civil War–generation descendants carried bloodlines and folkways that spanned nations and (in many cases) continents.90 The obsession with “pure” Anglo-Saxon or Celtic inheritance was a vapid fetish. Still, with outside observers like Frost and Connelly setting the standard of interpretation, the actual heritage of the “mountain whites,” as well as their actual history, was less important than the racial politics of the day. People looking at eastern Kentucky saw what they wanted to see.
Interpretations of feud violence could not be fully explained by race, even by a generation that considered race the transcendent determinant of human affairs. In 1889 Charles Dudley Warner suggested that the origins of the “race of American mountaineers occupying the country from western North Carolina to eastern Kentucky” was “in doubt” and that their “lawlessness” was
nothing inherent to their makeup but just a “relic of the disorganization during the war” (but even if the war started troubles the writer was fairly sure that “politics has little or nothing to do with them now”).91 In Blue Grass and Rhododendron: Outdoors in Old Kentucky (1901), John Fox Jr. relates that a Kentucky mountaineer told him that before the Civil War anyone would have been “druv outen the country” for drawing knives and guns in public (the more public manifestation of what was considered feudlike violence). By the present, however, “now hit’s dirk an Winchester all the time,” a change the interviewee attributed to the war’s introduction of easy killing.92 Sometimes semblances of political/contingency elucidations of mountain life provided a modest challenge to the communal/inherency/racial ones.
For that concern, a discourse of frontier and isolation was needed, the post-Reconstruction imagining of the “two Kentuckys,” a division based more upon space and imagined time than race. “Less than a hundred miles divide[d] the habitat of these wildly different types. Their origin was the same, for their forefathers came West over the Wilderness Road,” wrote one feud chronicler. “The slipping of a linch pin in the mountains kept here and there a family up among the crags, and they remained there nursing their primitive superstitions and hatreds. Their brothers moved on down to the blue grass, became educated and wore broadcloth.”93 As shown in chapter 1, eastern Kentucky was part of “New Appalachia,” settled relatively late, prompting mountaineers to refer to the Bluegrass as their state’s “old settlements.”94 But for the feud to be properly distanced historically, this ineffaceable fact had to be obscured or ignored.
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