It took a British historical journal to finally proclaim in 1952, “The figure of the feuding Hillman . . . is a phenomenon of modern America rather than of pioneer times” (but considering that the same article was subtitled “the scene of family feuds as fierce as any fought, before the Union of the Crowns, on the Anglo-Scottish border,” the tone of temporal confusion was still present).95 And this was only briefly after fellow Briton Arnold Toynbee had declared that Kentucky’s “mountain people . . . acquired civilization and then lost it,” a viewpoint that avoided the issue of temporal hierarchies altogether while still echoing the same implications. For his part, Toynbee saw Appalachian Kentucky as more Celtic than Anglo-Saxon.96
“We’ve been cartooned for the world with a fearsome, half-contemptuous slap on the back”
Picts and Scots aside, John Fox Jr. did not always think of the Kentucky feud phenomenon as something wedged in a frozen past. In The Heart of the Hills (1912), the novelist suggested that historical change could affect a (fictional) feud’s boundaries of conduct. What had once been an honor-based family affair, the Hawn-Honeycutt feud, eventually took on the taint of the outside world and its politics after both families began to see better days financially.
As old Jason Hawn and old Aaron Honeycutt had retired from the leadership, and little Jason and little Aaron had been out of the hills, leadership naturally was assumed by these two business rivals, who revived the old hostility between the factions, but gave vent to it in a secret, underhanded way that disgusted not only old Jason but even old Aaron as well. For now and then a hired Hawn would drop a Honeycutt from the bushes and a hired Honeycutt would drop a Hawn. There was, said old Jason with an oath of contempt, no manhood left in the feud. No principal went gunning for a principal—no hired assassin for another of his kind.97
The egalitarian “manhood,” the primal force that gave the mountain whites their native animus and had once defined the ritualized blood feud, had been polluted by a less valorous form of combat that involved the employment of hired underlings. Not only was the original Hawn-Honeycutt feud apolitical but it was antithetical to politics. Politics, and the violence that it involved, supplanted the communal conflict that the two families had kept going in their locale until forced to deal with the outside world. Now that the feud had resumed, however, it had lost its “manhood” by taking on hierarchies (that is, politics) on each side.
Later in the novel Fox Jr. returned to “manhood” in a soliloquy by Colonel Pendleton, an elderly Bluegrass patrón who mentors a young Jason Hawn Jr. while he attends stately Centre College. On his deathbed the colonel confesses Kentucky’s sins committed between the 1860s and 1910s:
The war started us downhill, but we might have done better—I know I might. The earth was too rich—it made life too easy. The horse, the bottle of whiskey, and the plug of tobacco were all too easily the best—and the pistol all too ready. We’ve been cartooned for the world with a fearsome, half-contemptuous slap on the back. Our living has been made out of luxuries. Agriculturally, socially, politically, we have gone wrong, and but for the American sense of humor the State would be in a just, nation-wide contempt. The Ku-Klux, the burning of toll-gates, the Goebel troubles, and the night-rider are all links in the same chain of lawlessness, and but for the first others might not have been. But we are, in spite of all this, a law-abiding people, and the old manhood of the State is still here. Don’t forget that—the old manhood is here.98
John Fox Jr. peppered his fiction with references to Breathitt County and once interviewed its infamous former sheriff Edward Callahan. His fictional portrayals of eastern Kentucky probably determined Americans’ reading of violence in the county more than any newspaper articles. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-03385)
Fox Jr. temporarily sets the “two Kentuckys” motif aside, suggesting that all of the ugly incidents and types of violence witnessed in the state since before feuding was in flower developed from the same decadent source. But the images conjured were related more to the antebellum Bluegrass, and Colonel Pendleton noticeably left feuding off of his list. These other forms of violence were openly insurrectionary or (in the case of the Ku Klux Klan) politically motivated vigilantism. Feuding and its “manhood,” he implied, was apolitically horizontal and, accordingly, a vestige of a Kentucky before it went “downhill,” a vestige that hearkened back to the old undivided consensus white Kentuckians—and perhaps all white southerners—once shared.
Louisville poet Madison Cawein, “the Keats of Kentucky,” apparently agreed, at least in terms of placing feuds in the past. Between 1887 and 1914 he acknowledged all the recent horrors in verse, and in “Ku Klux,” “The Lynchers,” and “The Feud,” they received their due. While the first two vividly depict the terrors their titles evoke, “The Feud” only describes a dilapidated bullet-riddled cabin, an archeological site bearing proof of a long-ago attack. Lynch mobs were current, but feuds were an event from an irredeemable past even when the shooting continued into the present.99
Journalist Charles Mutzenburg, second only to John Fox Jr. as a popular interpreter of feud violence, used the same anecdotes from Kentucky’s recent history to protect the mountaineers from self-righteous condemnation. All of Kentucky’s violent embarrassments, in Mutzenburg’s view, were from the same source; the “lack of confidence of the people in their courts” conveyed a public atmosphere still suffering from the postbellum crisis of legitimacy. However, violence that was seen as “feudal” did not affect women and children, or impede commerce, as did other outrages.100 Compared to this hateful violence, communal feudists did not upset the status quo beyond their wooded environs.
We believe it germane to the matter under discussion to add that not only feuds, but mobs and the like, are, and ever have been, the direct outgrowth of a lack of confidence of the people in their courts. The shameful nightrider outrages in the western part of Kentucky a few years ago, in a section which had boasted of a civilization superior by far to that of the mountaineers, where schools and churches are to be met with at every corner, were the outcome, so it is claimed, of the failure of the law to deal sternly with the lawless tobacco trust, the “original wrongdoer” in the noted tobacco war. If this were true, if this justified the destruction by incendiaries of millions of dollars’ worth of property, brutal whippings, the indiscriminate slaughter of entire families without regard to age or sex, the butchery of little children (for aiding the tobacco trust, no doubt) then, indeed, is the mountaineer feudist also innocent of wrongdoing; more so, for he, at least, never made war upon suckling infants, nor have women suffered harm, except in one or two instances. Nor is the cultured Blue Grass citizen free to censure him, when he calls to mind the outrages of the toll-gate raids, or takes into account the numerous lynching bees, proceedings from which the mountaineers have always been practically [my emphasis] free.101
The fact that Kentucky’s last purported “feud” climaxed with the assassination of a well-known political figure (James B. Marcum) was left unmentioned; it did not suit Mutzenburg’s thesis.
While Fox Jr. and Mutzenburg established eastern Kentucky as the home of the feud phenomenology, they were only following the lead of countless newspaper stories. Small-circulation Kentucky papers displayed party stripes until well into the twentieth century and, as revealed in preceding chapters, their interpretations of commotions in the eastern third of the state were usually guided by their loyalties (especially before 1880 when the feud narrative served as a political diversion for southern conservatives). But editorial party devotion was a dying trend when national interest in the Kentucky feud was growing. Flourishing national news conglomerates favored human interest and sensationalism over party line toeing. By the middle of the 1890s the scandalous and the grotesque had become the currency of widely read publications as they divested themselves of their old party identities.102 As a result, the party associations that made up most Kentucky feuds wer
e scarcely addressed. A parochial “political rivalry” could be casually included within a list of trivial quarrels over “a horse trade, a gate left open and trespassing cattle, the shooting of a dog . . . or a difficulty over a boundary fence,” according to Ellen Semple.103 Journalists led scholars like Semple and William G. Frost to favor explanations of feuds that dealt with race and spatial isolation. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Kentucky/mountain feudist was considered a social type invariably formed by a combination of geography, breeding, and medieval qualities.
In the mountain counties of [Kentucky’s] eastern border, where the rugged and untaught minds are dominated by a crude and savage idea of the meaning of honor, the deadly vendetta still rages, and no one can say when it will cease. So long as the mountain defiles remain uninvaded by the emigrant; so long as their mountain sides intimidate the prospective railroad line; and above all, so long as their wild, barbaric blood remains uncrossed by a gentler strain—just so long will their internecine wars prevail. For here men are governed by a medieval idea of right and wrong, and each man’s mind is his own court and judge. He acknowledges no other, and by it are his actions governed. And when it has led him to wanton slaughter, as it often does, the endless stretches of forest-clad mountains afford a refuge which it is impossible to lay bare. But it is a rare thing that the slayer of his kind seeks the shelter of the hills. When his enemy is done to death, the victor goes home and tells his friends, and the clansmen gather on either side, as they did in the days of Roderick Dhu [a character from Sir Walter Scott’s six-canto narrative poem The Lady of the Lake].104
Bluegrass optimists had once expected that the civilizing influences of church, dam, bank, and steel track would bring peace to Kentucky’s more restless counties. But by 1900 “men had fallen dead by feudists’ bullets on the doorsteps of the churches” and the arrival of railroads had not ceased the killings.105 The mountain whites’ feudal habits were beginning to appear something irredeemably inherent. In what could have been one of the most open admissions that feud violence might have some internal political import, activist John C. Campbell wrote that the “name commonly applied to the feud in Kentucky is ‘war,’ and the principle upon which it was carried out was the principle of warfare—to do as much harm to the enemy as possible while incurring the least risk oneself.”106 This description was a far cry from the classical feud’s ritualistic practice. But instead of crafting a commentary on how feud had been applied to eastern Kentucky arbitrarily by exogenous observers, Campbell intended for the war analogy to be only an illustration of the hypothetical mountain feudist’s ruthlessness as well as his arrogance in applying the air of legitimacy attendant to war onto his own personal vendettas. However, Campbell inadvertently acknowledged that there had been something at work in eastern Kentucky that did not fit well into the Old World’s feud template.
By the time of Campbell’s writing the associations of feud were making a transition from the Old World to North America. What need did twentieth-century Americans have for Montagues and Capulets (especially as the number of American Shakespearean productions declined) when they had McCoys and Hatfields at their disposal? The “Hatfield-McCoy feud” began to “fire the public imagination” at the end of the 1880s, although the public generally had little interest in the facts surrounding it.107 Long before it became an American English idiom, it was identified as an absurd fight between “Chatfields and McLoys” in Virginia. Between 1878 and 1888 ten men and two children were killed in a series of Election Day confrontations, ambushes, and an arson in the Tug River Valley community straddling the Kentucky–West Virginia border. The feud’s most widely publicized deaths coincided with the French-Eversole feud and the Rowan County War, and might have been lost among eastern Kentucky’s 1880s feud propagation had it not been for New York reporter T. C. Crawford, who made Hatfield-McCoy the newly discovered mountain phenomenon’s epitome. It went on to become the only feud manifestation that the American reading public remembered by name—albeit in simplified, distorted form. Historian Altina Waller believes that Crawford (along with one other reporter) “probably had more to do with the development of the hillbilly stereotype than any other individuals.”108
In choosing this particular atrocity over others, Crawford permanently established how Americans defined feud.109 His rendering was popular as a broad illumination of white intraracial violence in the United States, as were versions of the Hatfield-McCoy feud that followed in print and eventually on film.110 Its origins were murky enough (originally reported as one white family’s absurd attempt to enslave another, it was eventually reported as beginning after a lawsuit filed over a stolen sow) that it was commonly believed that the feud lasted generations rather than a more modest twelve years; the entirety of the violence took place in one of the most remote areas of the Cumberland Plateau; and, in the style of Edmond Rostand’s play Les romanesques (1894), it ended with a supposedly forbidden romance between the combatants’ children.111 The story had charisma that the Rowan County War or the French-Eversole feud lacked because it combined aesthetic elements of European romanticism with frontier color in a satisfying manner. Although it pleased readers not to know its beginnings (or to marvel at how petty they were), it did have an exciting middle and a satisfying end. Above all, it was entertaining, at least as Crawford and his imitators told it.
Perhaps most important, the Hatfields’ conflict with the McCoys, in its factual and fictional versions, was less offensive than others because of its communal rather than political theme. The homicides involved were committed either as impulse or in revenge, befitting a Corsican vendetta. The feud was between families and factions of modest means and did not indict men in high places (even after an extradition conflict between West Virginia and Kentucky, no politicians were unduly embarrassed by the whole thing).112 It was unmistakably horizontal and devoid of class significance, thus sustaining the popular notion of the egalitarian mountain white. It had no definite connection to intimate hostilities created by the war, and therefore did not challenge the promise of a national reunion based upon whiteness. Well into the twentieth century, long after Progressive Era racial determinism faded, it was still believable that the feud had roots in the British Isles; beneath a 1982 article commemorating the centennial of the feud’s cessation, the county seat newspaper in the Hatfields’ and McCoys’ old territory (now Mingo County, West Virginia) expressively printed images of both families’ supposed coats of arms.113 Even after books that strove to treat these “feudists” as historical people were published (notably, Otis Rice’s The Hatfields and McCoys [1982] and Altina Waller’s Feud [1988]), most Americans still prefer the event’s more primordial explanations. It could easily be written off as the product of a strange aboriginal culture rooted in the past rather than an outgrowth of the affairs of state. As close as it was in time and space to Bloody Breathitt, the Hatfield-McCoy feud was everything that Breathitt was not, thus making it far more popular and almost inspiring. “Hatfields and McCoys” had lasting power as an American idiom, even though eastern Kentucky’s most demoralizing episodes of feud violence, the Clay County War and the Hargis-Cockrell feud, were yet to come and would eventually be forgotten on a national scale. In American memory it was the feud’s extrapolitical apotheosis.
As Altina Waller has shown, the Hatfields, McCoys, and people of other surnames who were directly involved in their conflict rarely got the opportunity to tell their own story but were reticent when they did (especially the latter; a 1975 televised drama called The Hatfields and McCoys called every historically based character either “Hatfield” or “McCoy” lest historical fact confuse the pat dramatic dialectic). The majority of interpretations of Kentucky’s feud violence between the 1870s and 1900s did indeed come from the city-dwelling journalists and industrialists who were products of, simply put, a “dominant culture.”114 The Hatfield-McCoy feud’s mythological arrangement was fundamentally a hegemonic device to make way for economic exploitation in th
e Tug River Valley. Along the way, it inadvertently told an oversimplified story about “mountain whites,” irrespective of their relationship to violence. Feuds and “Hatfields and McCoys” became emblems for things with nothing at all to do with their actual historical or linguistic meanings.
As “Hatfields and McCoys” made the transition from human-interest story to idiom, it produced the broader popular culture “hillbilly” image as a cultural codicil.115 By the 1930s, the ever-bearded feudist, native to some unnamed mountain locale, appeared in popular media with little or no contextual elaboration needed—it was something Americans simply knew. These characters were so detached from their intended audience’s points of cultural reference that they approached surrealism, the realm of cartooning rather than literature or dramaturgy. Their prevalence in pre–World War II cartoons, both still and animated, gave them a surreal, timeless quality that further detached mountaineers from objective reality (Paul Webb’s Esquire drawings are considered the characterization’s true quintessence before the more famous Li’l Abner Yokum and Snuffy Smith—both mountaineer caricatures but not necessarily feudists—premiered).116 “Hatfields and McCoys,” a bloody anecdote from nineteenth-century history, had become material for the funny papers in approximately the same half century’s time a similar thing happened for “cowboys and Indians.”
Academics have also blithely employed the feud trope for their own purposes, purposefully or inadvertently, with uncritical abandon. A historian of southern violence wrote in the 1980s that “isolated mountain people” in the years after the Civil War “had no notion of cultural pluralism or moral relativism—only right and wrong,” suggesting that spatial removal from metropolitan areas resulted in a lack of nuanced attitudes toward relationships of power (one wonders how great other nineteenth-century Americans’ perceptions of such decidedly twentieth-century concepts were in comparison).117
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