Blood Feud

by Lisa Alther

  Ranel McCoy, feud patriarch, was said to be “tall, broad-shouldered, with deep-sunken gray eyes and a rugged gray mustache.” Courtesy of Pike County Tourism

  Truda McCoy states that the McCoy family was, on the whole, “tall and lithe and handsome,” often with an olive complexion and dark or auburn hair.40 In one photograph of Ranel McCoy, he is a handsome and hopeful-looking young man in a suit jacket and white shirt, with very dark hair, mustache, and eyebrows. In another, he sports a trimmed white mustache and looks like everyone’s favorite grandfather. His graying hair is short, combed, and parted. He wears a suit jacket and a dress shirt buttoned to the throat. Unsmiling, he has sad eyes that gaze directly into the camera. About sixty years old at the time, he would have already experienced the deaths of three of his sons at the hands of the Hatfields, the seduction and impregnation of his daughter, and the death of her illegitimate child, his granddaughter. He didn’t have much to smile about. A reporter at the end of the feud described him as a “broken-down old man,” but one with an impressive physique: “tall, broad-shouldered, with deep-sunken gray eyes and a rugged gray mustache and beard.”41 In a final photo, he lies in an elaborate casket, finally at peace.

  The only known likeness of Sarah McCoy comes from a newspaper sketch at the time of the trials that ended the feud in 1890. Her hair is drawn back tightly into a bun, and her eyes look pale and blasted. By this time, she had lost seven children to the feud, had been beaten senseless and burned out of her home, and was handicapped for life, needing a cane to walk. In the image, her mouth forms a lowercase n.

  She didn’t have much to smile about either, and in fact she died just a few years later.

  When the Civil War began, Ranel and Sarah McCoy had nine young children living in their small cabin partway up a ridge above a stream in Kentucky. Ranel was thirty-five years old. Many researchers maintain that he served in the Confederate army.42 But his name doesn’t appear on the rolls of any regiment, Confederate or Union, even though those of ten of his relatives do.43 It’s hard to say with any certainty whether Ranel McCoy fought for the Union, the Confederacy, or neither.

  After the war ended, Ranel and his father, Daniel, harvested timber in a neighbor’s forest and were sued for it. Daniel had to sell off his own farm to pay his fine. His wife, Peggy, having had enough of his decades of fecklessness, filed for divorce. It was an unheard-of occurrence at the time for a man and woman in their seventies who had been married for fifty years. She was granted the divorce and ended up working as a domestic servant in Pike County, Kentucky, to support herself. Daniel moved in with a daughter in West Virginia.44

  Meanwhile, Ranel McCoy had more problems of his own. He had developed a reputation as a gossip. Pleasant McCoy—Sarah’s nephew and Ranel’s cousin—brought a court case against them both for spreading a rumor that Pleasant had had intercourse with a cow. The records have been lost, so the outcome of this case is unknown.45 Presumably, with the outraged cow unable to testify, a mistrial must have been declared.

  Apart from spreading hearsay, Ranel McCoy’s nature tended toward gloom.46 People sought reasons to flee when they saw him coming with his litany of complaints. In an even worse record than that of his own father, Daniel, none of Ranel’s eight surviving children named a son of theirs after him. Fourteen years older than Devil Anse Hatfield, Ranel apparently lacked Devil Anse’s charisma. As the feud progressed, though, his gloom seems an appropriate response to unfolding events. Also unlike Devil Anse, Ranel McCoy resorted only to grumbling and lawsuits when he had a grievance, rather than to physical retaliation.

  One researcher describes Ranel McCoy as “a kindly old man, unable to throw off his troubles with jest and jovial raconteuring and, because of advanced age, burdened at times by his sorrows. . . . The fight that came from his side of the Tug was carried on by persons other than himself. His own preference, often spoken, was that the law be allowed to take its course.”47

  Deeply religious, Sarah McCoy appears to have restrained Ranel’s impulses toward retaliation in the face of Hatfield aggression—and this restraint may have led to the deaths of some of their children.48 Watching the feud develop raises the eternal question of the efficacy of nonviolence in the face of fists and boots, knives and guns.

  A common misconception about the feud has it that the Hatfields lived strictly in West Virginia and the McCoys in Kentucky, with the Tug Fork keeping them apart, except when they invaded each other’s territories to murder or arrest one another. However, the Tug Fork, when not in flood, is little more than a large stream strewn with rock shelves and sandbars, and branches of both families lived on both sides of it. The West Virginia Hatfields often rode across the river to attend court sessions and Election Day activities in Kentucky, to visit their numerous relatives, and to sell their moonshine.49

  The Kentuckians and West Virginians living in the Tug Fork Valley had much more in common with one another than they did with those in the inland portions of their own counties. Similarly, residents of the mountainous sections of Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas—not unlike the Kurds of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey—shared, and still share, more culturally with one another than with those in the lowland sections of their own states.

  Just as the Tug Fork boundary between the Hatfields and the McCoys was permeable, so too was family membership. Many Hatfields and McCoys intermarried.50 For instance, Nancy McCoy Staton, Ranel and Sarah McCoy’s first cousin, had two daughters. One married Devil Anse Hatfield’s younger brother Ellison, who was later murdered by three of Ranel McCoy’s sons. The other daughter married Devil Anse’s cousin Floyd Hatfield, accused of stealing one of Ranel McCoy’s hogs in a clash that occurred early in the feud.

  As another example among many, Sarah McCoy’s brother Hiram McCoy (also Ranel McCoy’s first cousin) had a son named Johnson McCoy—not to be confused with the Johnson McCoy who fathered Ava Reed McCoy’s husband, Homer. Johnson McCoy was a close friend of Devil Anse Hatfield and served with him during the Civil War. Johnson McCoy married a sister of Devil Anse’s wife, Levicy Chafin, and Devil Anse and Levicy named their first son Johnson in his honor.51 This son, Johnson “Johnse” Hatfield, later seduced and impregnated Ranel McCoy’s daughter Roseanna, escalating the fury of the feud.

  Struggling to follow these tangled family connections, you can easily imagine how confused the Hatfields and the McCoys themselves must have become when trying to figure out in the heat of a gun battle whom to shoot.

  Another misconception about the feud holds that it involved only Hatfields and McCoys, and many men from each family. In reality, most members of both families tried to stay out of the conflict. Only three of Devil Anse’s thirteen children participated, along with three of his ten siblings. His younger twin brothers explicitly distanced themselves from feud events. A newspaper article cited one as saying that he was ashamed of some of the Hatfields and that he hadn’t been raised to behave as they were behaving.52

  There were about thirty-five Hatfield feudists in all. Three were a nephew and two great-nephews of Ranel McCoy’s wife, Sarah. In addition to Devil Anse’s three sons and three brothers, fifteen more participants were relatives. Jim Vance, his uncle, was widely rumored to be the killer of Harmon McCoy in the episode that ignited the feud. Four of Devil Anse’s nephews took part. Devil Anse’s first cousin Floyd Hatfield joined the feud willy-nilly when Ranel McCoy accused him of having stolen one of his hogs, but Floyd retired to the background after the Hog Trial. The husbands of four of Devil Anse’s nieces signed on, as did three of Devil Anse’s Chafin brothers-in-law and two remote cousins. Most of the rest of Team Hatfield worked on Devil Anse’s timber crew or were otherwise economically beholden to him or his family.53

  Ranel McCoy had twelve siblings, six of them brothers, but none joined the feud at first, despite the murder of their brother Harmon by Jim Vance. In the early years, the McCoy roster li
sted only seven adherents apart from Ranel and Harmon: five of Ranel’s sons and two of his nephews. Ranel’s daughter Roseanna participated inadvertently via her love affair with Johnse Hatfield. By the closing years of the feud, though, Ranel’s ranks had swelled to some forty men, two-thirds of them unrelated to him.54

  Some maintain that the fact that so few of Ranel McCoy’s relatives joined him in his vendetta against Devil Anse Hatfield proves that they disapproved of his behavior.55 But it seems at least as likely that most residents of the Tug Fork Valley wanted to keep their heads down, hoping the violence would pass them by. As a reporter put it toward the end, “The majority of the people here are peaceably inclined, but are overawed and domineered by the bullying element.”56

  It takes a rare and noble person to challenge aggressors on someone else’s behalf, especially if you have a family of your own to protect. But as the outrages escalated, some outsiders appear to have become so appalled that the more courageous among them stepped forward to assist Ranel McCoy, who clearly lacked the leadership skills, financial resources, and supporters that Devil Anse Hatfield enjoyed. But other motives, mostly economic ones, also came into play for these newcomers who eventually rallied to the McCoys’ defense, helping to bring the Hatfields to trial and the feud to an end.

  ** My family owns such a cabin in East Tennessee. It was built by a saddlemaker around 1820, the same period during which the earliest Hatfields and McCoys were settling the Tug Fork Valley. The sons of indentured Irish immigrants to Philadelphia, the saddlemaker and his brothers trekked down the Shenandoah Valley in search of farmland, which was in the process of being wrested from the Cherokee. Our cabin had a floor of packed clay, many layers of ancient newspapers on the walls for insulation, and an outhouse in the backyard. Downstairs were a bedroom and a sitting room with a large stone fireplace. A lean-to kitchen had been added off the sitting room, though originally cooking would have been done in the fireplace. The upstairs was an open sleeping loft. There were windows in only the front and back walls, both to conserve heat and to minimize entry points in the event of native attacks, making the cabin more defensible but very dark inside.

  *** Fitting our family of six comfortably into our cabin on weekends and during school vacations was a major challenge. Living full time in such a space with two or three times that many people is inconceivable to me.

  **** A tradition in my own family maintains that my twice great-grandmother, Nancy Scaggs, was kidnapped by Shawnees and rescued by her future husband, George Reed. The story is suspiciously similar to that of Anne Musick, and the locations are almost the same, so this is perhaps an example of the rural equivalent of an urban legend.

  3

  BORDER STATES

  During the Civil War, the situation in the border states was dire, the population at odds over which side to support. When Tennessee seceded from the Union, East Tennessee tried and failed to secede from Tennessee. Kentucky remained in the Union, but the sympathies of a substantial portion of its citizenry lay with the Confederacy. West Virginia seceded from Virginia in 1863 in order to rejoin the Union. Many West Virginian soldiers who had been fighting for the Confederacy switched sides, while others remained loyal to the South.

  Some West Virginians deserted the Confederate army to form guerrilla bands in their home territories in order to protect their families and farms from Union troops and Home Guards intent on punishing Confederate sympathizers—and from roving bands of draft dodgers, deserters, outlaws, and escaped prisoners who plundered for survival and, in the cases of a few psychopaths, for pleasure. Union sympathizers also formed Home Guards, like Gen. Bill France’s, for the same reason. No one was safe: neither combatants nor noncombatants, pacifists nor partisans, men nor women, adults nor children. No portable property lay off-limits for seizure, and no house or barn was safe from arson.1

  Civil War loyalties in the Tug Fork region were, as a result, very complicated. The four Hatfields who fought in the war and later became feudists served the Confederacy. But over a dozen extended Hatfield kinsmen who didn’t participate in the feud belonged to Union regiments. Of the three McCoys who definitely fought in the war and were involved in the feud, two served the Union. The third McCoy, who became a Hatfield supporter, served the Confederacy.2 But eight more nonfeuding McCoys appear on Confederate muster rolls, and six on Union rolls.

  No documentary evidence places Ranel McCoy on either side.3 His name appears on none of the muster rolls for either Confederate or Union regiments. After his death, he was buried in the family cemetery of Col. John Dils in Pikeville, Kentucky, along with his wife, Sarah, and their daughter Roseanna. Later, one of Ranel’s sons and his wife were also buried there. Dils, a businessman, led Union forces in southeastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia. He hired many free blacks to work in his tannery and allowed 130 of them to be buried in his family cemetery. That he allowed Ranel McCoy and some of his family to be buried there as well could suggest that Ranel’s sympathies had lain with the Union.

  Either way, Ranel McCoy was thirty-five years old at the start of the Civil War, with nine young children living at home. He might have been too old and too overwhelmed with parenthood to enlist in either army. Devil Anse Hatfield, on the other hand, a hale and hearty twenty-one-year-old, had a wife but no children—until his first son, Johnson, arrived two years into the war. Devil Anse’s service with the Confederacy forms a part of his enduring legend.

  Nancy Vance Hatfield maintained that her son Devil Anse could just as well have joined the Union army, except for an unpleasant incident at the start of the war: the Union Home Guard drill episode in which General France accused Devil Anse and his friends of being Confederate spies. After Harmon McCoy lost his fight with Devil Anse, General France’s troops chased Devil Anse and his friends back across the Tug Fork to West Virginia. Devil Anse became a Confederate in a fit of pique, according to his mother. Later in the war he murdered General France, and his uncle Jim Vance killed Harmon McCoy.4

  This is merely one example of the way in which personal antagonisms rather than abstract principles determined loyalties in the border regions during the Civil War. Devil Anse Hatfield was said to have despised the elitist Tidewater oligarchy of eastern Virginia that had helped launch the war. They regarded small farmers in the outer reaches of their state as uncouth and tried to limit their participation in the state legislature.5 Devil Anse didn’t sign up with the Confederacy in order to defend their plantation system. Only 3 percent of the population of his West Virginia county held slaves when the war began,***** and Devil Anse wasn’t among them.6 “We were too poor to own slaves,” one Hatfield descendant explained.7 Devil Anse was fighting, rather, to defend his community from any outside forces that might attempt to curb local autonomy.

  According to conflicting accounts, Devil Anse served in three different Confederate units simultaneously8 and fought in most battles in and around Kentucky and Virginia, as well as at Fort Donelson in Tennessee.9 These admiring anecdotes make him sound like Zorro or Batman, materializing wherever and whenever needed to save the day.

  In reality, Devil Anse Hatfield was a cavalry first lieutenant in a Confederate unit of border guards called the Virginia State Line (VSL) for less than a year. One of their battles concerned some coal barges on the Big Sandy River that the 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry (Union) was trying to seize. Col. John Dils—the Pikeville businessman who later allowed blacks and Ranel McCoy’s family to be buried in his family cemetery—had organized and was commanding the 39th Kentucky Infantry.

  Dils had moved to Pikeville in the 1840s from what later became West Virginia. He expected the little town to morph into a regional hub because of its strategic location on a navigable river. Working as a schoolteacher, he met and married the daughter of a wealthy Pikeville family, soon establishing dry goods stores and a tannery. Although he owned slaves, he claimed to be an abolitionist, and he
employed freedmen for his businesses. Seized by Confederate troops early in the war, he was held at a prison camp near Richmond for a year.10 On his return to Pikeville, he organized the 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, which included thirteen Hatfields and six McCoys.11

  A photo of Colonel Dils taken shortly after the war shows a lean and handsome man with dark hair, eyes, and eyebrows. He has an aquiline nose and thin lips, tightly pursed. He is wearing a suit jacket with a patterned vest, a floppy matching tie, and a white starched shirt with a standing collar.12 His fashionable Victorian attire stands in stark contrast to that of the rugged Tug Fork farmers and lumbermen. His expression looks wary, as though baffled that he has reached a position of such prominence, and worried that it might vanish overnight, like Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage.

  In the battle over the coal barges, Devil Anse Hatfield’s Virginia State Line troops routed Colonel Dils’s infantry, killing or wounding twenty. The VSL also looted a quarter of a million Confederate dollars, as well as hundreds of rifles, overcoats, hats, shoes, underwear, and socks.13 Later, members of the VSL, along with Jim Vance’s guerrilla unit, are believed to have ransacked Colonel Dils’s store and tannery in Pikeville.14