by Lisa Alther
Old Civil War antagonisms played a part in some, but not all, of the feuds. Most who supported the Union became Republicans, and most Confederates became Democrats, so it could be argued that postwar politics merely extended wartime animosities. Political offices were often used for partisan advantage rather than for public service. Prison terms were so mild, and paroles and pardons so readily available, as not to act as a deterrent.
Too much liquor and too many guns held center stage in all the feuds. Insulted honor often acted as a factor, as it did for Little Bob Turner, for instance, when his hair was set on fire. Stupidity also played a major role in most feuds.
Bad Tom Smith, an epileptic, was the villain in the French-Eversole feud. So was the mentally impaired albino Cottontop Mounts in the Hatfield-McCoy feud. Bad Jim Vance, another Hatfield villain, suffered from a condition that made his eyes oscillate uncontrollably. Cap Hatfield carried a hideous wound that emptied the contents of his stomach into his lap. All four men had probably been teased and bullied about their conditions and reacted by becoming bullies themselves. But not all of the many bullies in these feuds had such understandable excuses for their bad behavior.
Each feud had its godfather with a role equivalent to that of Devil Anse Hatfield: Captain Strong, Craig Tolliver, Wilse Howard, Fulton French. Each feud also featured people behaving admirably during horrific circumstances: young Sheriff Hagins, Boone Logan, Sarah McCoy.
Sam Hill, a representative of Governor Buckner, investigated the Craig Tolliver feud. His report laid blame on corrupt county officials, “want of moral sentiment,” domination and intimidation of the law-abiding segment of the population by the criminally inclined, and alcohol.49 That sentence alone probably sums up the causes for all the feuds as succinctly as possible.
But why did these factors, also in operation elsewhere in America, overwhelm the forces of moderation that prevailed elsewhere, resulting in this epidemic of feuding in the southern Appalachians during the last decades of the nineteenth century? And why did the Hatfield-McCoy feud, of all these and the many others not described here, become so iconic, such that most contemporary Americans have heard of it, yet not of the others?
The most important factor to come into play is the role of the media. Regional newspapers covered the events of most feuds, and papers with a broader readership, such as the New York Times, New York World, Cincinnati Enquirer, and Pittsburgh Times, covered the major feuds. But—and this is key—the Hatfield-McCoy feud was the only one about which an entire book was published for a mainstream readership: T. C. Crawford’s An American Vendetta: A Story of Barbarism in the United States. Written by a reporter based in New York City, it reached a wide audience and spawned spin-offs in the form of novels and silent movies. With that one little book, Crawford almost single-handedly shaped the enduring stereotype of the depraved mountaineer.50 Ninety-two silent movies were later filmed, based on this stereotype of feuding hillbillies. Their wide distribution and enormous popularity assured that the stereotype became deeply embedded in the American psyche.
What set the Hatfield-McCoy feud apart from all the others was its built-in plotline. The other feuds appear, on the surface, if not also below it, to be chaotic collections of ludicrous episodes. But the Hatfield-McCoy story possesses an inherent structure: Harmon McCoy’s murder derives from Civil War antagonisms, always a compelling topic for Americans, and especially so in the years immediately following that war. Next comes the Hog Trial, with its potential for comic relief. Then we have the Johnse-Roseanna love affair, a favorite of those with a taste for doomed romances. The Election Day Brawl, the Pawpaw Murders, and the New Year’s Night Massacre provide an escalating triple climax. The Supreme Court case regarding the right of private Kentuckians to haul West Virginians to their state for trial captured the attention of the entire nation with its implications concerning the rights of individuals against the needs of a civil society. It also provided a variation on the question of states’ rights, which had triggered the Civil War. The hanging of Cottontop Mounts closes the feud with a denouement to satisfy those with a need to see justice prevail—or at least a scapegoat punished.
All these events, taken together, partake of a cause-and-effect relationship that other feuds lack. The saga also includes a compelling coda: Devil Anse’s baptism, when Dyke Garrett lowers the elderly brigand into Island Creek. Americans love no plot more than that of a sinner redeemed.
Perhaps the strongest appeal of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, though, was a largely unconscious one. Most other feuds took place, at least partly, in towns. Many participants were middle class or higher: doctors, lawyers, businessmen, merchants, judges, hotel operators, former military officers, county officials, schoolteachers. The idea that upstanding men could participate in such criminal behavior no doubt shocked respectable citizens in other parts of the country. One way in which to deny that they themselves might also be capable of such acts was to focus instead on a feud conducted largely in the wilderness by men who, unlike themselves, were illiterate farmers, herders, lumbermen, and moonshiners. What else could you expect from such shiftless rural savages who lacked the many civilizing advantages of city life? Like Greek tragedy, which has survived the centuries, the Hatfield-McCoy feud became a screen onto which other Americans could project and disavow their own capacity for such irrational violence.
This was also the age of Darwinian survival of the fittest. The grotesque atrocities of the feudists were an exaggerated parody of the ruthless behavior widely admired at that time in robber barons and in those who waged major wars against minor banana republics. Critics could sputter with outrage over the savage excesses of the Hatfield-McCoy feud while secretly thrilling to the feudists’ displays of untrammeled manliness that loudly proclaimed their evolutionary fitness. The Hatfields and the McCoys presaged Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders.
13
THE CORSICA OF AMERICA
Many different theories attempt to explain the Hatfield-McCoy feud, and most apply equally well to all the feuds in the southern Appalachians in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The Hatfield-McCoy feud, as we have seen, was merely one manifestation of a region-wide aberration.
One of the most obvious explanations is that the geography of the Cumberland Plateau preserved an inherited frontier culture. Both the Hatfield and the McCoy feudists descended from the original European settlers in the Tug Fork Valley, who formed their own militias for protection against Native attacks. In the beginning years of settlement, there were no towns or courthouses, judges or jails. Justice was meted out locally. The jury was one’s neighbors, and the verdict was usually eye-for-an-eye retaliation. (There were also frontiers, militias, and attacking Native tribes in the Northern states, but a feud culture didn’t develop there. On the other hand, no one was burned for being a witch on the Cumberland Plateau.)
The fledgling legal system in the Tug Fork region during the first half of the nineteenth century largely yielded to the chaos of the Civil War years. Courthouses and records were burned. Guerrilla bands and bushwhackers ruled the day and dispensed “justice” in accordance with partisan beliefs or personal needs. Devil Anse Hatfield was merely continuing in this wartime tradition by executing the McCoy sons in the pawpaw patch after their murder of his younger brother Ellison. Most of the later murders in the feud resulted from Devil Anse’s attempts to thwart the McCoys in their determination to subject his followers and himself to the Kentucky court system.
When the McCoys appealed to the Kentucky governor in Frankfort for assistance in bringing their Hatfield prisoners to trial, the traditional face-to-face methods of the Tug Fork Valley for dealing with such crimes no longer applied. The Hatfields felt overwhelmed by outside forces they didn’t understand and couldn’t control. This fed their paranoia about being hauled to Kentucky for trial by hostile strangers.1
Devil Anse Hatfield preserved a sinister template in his mind: His great-gra
ndfather Abner Vance had been hanged because he had wrought his own version of frontier justice on a man who had harmed his daughter and humiliated Abner himself. Devil Anse dreaded a similar outcome for himself, as did his sons Johnse and Cap, who had no doubt heard the story of Abner’s hanging throughout their childhoods. For the unfortunate Cottontop Mounts, this grisly childhood tale proved a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Tug Fork Valley hovered midway between a traditional justice system of self-generated retaliation and a modern one. Many citizens interpreted democracy to mean individual autonomy—rather than majority rule combined with institutionalized respect for the rights of individuals and minorities. Although courts and their officials wielded a certain amount of power, most saw their role as one of extending that power to those who could dominate them. Votes were bought and sold, and elected officials often served those who had delivered the votes. (So what else is new?) The concept of blind justice was unfamiliar. When a jury pronounced a verdict unacceptable to one faction, that faction sometimes regressed to the traditional frontier system of personal retribution.
The enduring ramifications of Civil War hostilities cast a long shadow over feud participants. It’s almost impossible to sort out Ranel McCoy’s role or lack of one during the Civil War, so it’s hard to say whether he sided with the Confederates and Devil Anse Hatfield or with the Unionists and Col. John Dils, or first one and then the other, or neither. This much we know: Ranel’s brother Harmon McCoy enlisted as a Union Home Guard and soldier. Jim Vance killed him either simply for being a Union soldier or for acts he had committed, or intended to commit, against Confederate comrades of Devil Anse, and possibly against Devil Anse himself. His murder fed McCoy animosity toward the Hatfield clan. Twelve of Harmon McCoy’s sons and nephews and one son-in-law, once they were old enough to fight, ranked among Ranel McCoy’s most ardent adherents. Five died in the struggle that was, at least in part, an attempt to avenge the killing of Harmon, who was the father to one of the murdered and uncle to four more.
Recent genetic and genealogical research has established that some early settlers in the southern Appalachians were racially mixed—all combinations of European, African, Native American, South Asian, and Middle Eastern. People with darker complexions were trying to escape the racial prejudices of more settled regions to the east and south that would have branded them as African, whatever their actual descent, and would have subjected them to seizure and sale as slaves. One of my own ancestors in the region was said to be Portuguese Indian.2 This research flies in the face of much prior scholarship that portrays the population of the southern Appalachians as “the purest Anglo Saxon stock in all the United States . . . kept free from the tide of foreign immigrants.”3
Daniel Sharfstein’s study The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White carefully documents the life of one such man, Jordan Spencer, who settled in Kentucky some fifty miles northwest of the Tug Fork. His origins were hazy. He had lived farther south in Clay County in the household of a “free person of color” named George Freeman and was perhaps his son or brother, possibly a former slave freed by the same master who had freed George Freeman.
Jordan Spencer married a white woman, and his neighbors largely accepted him as white, despite the fact that the red dye he used on his dark, wavy hair bled down his face when he sweated. Sharfstein makes the point that his neighbors allowed Spencer to maintain the obvious fiction that he was white because many of them also had darker complexions than their “white” neighbors.4 In fact, many would be reclassified as mulattoes or Indians by census takers when racial categorization became more stratified in the decades following the Civil War.5
In colonial days, throughout the eastern portion of what became the United States, invading soldiers, explorers, traders, settlers, and servants of various ethnic origins, the vast majority males, mated freely or forcibly with Native women and with indentured European women. Some of their descendants, depending upon their physical appearances, passed as white, African, or Native American and joined those communities. But many whose appearances were too ambiguous for acceptance by existing communities, or who had no wish to abandon their friends and families, clustered together and moved to unproductive land that European settlers didn’t want, usually swamps or ridgetops, where they kept to themselves, often shunned and stigmatized by their white neighbors for having what appeared to be African ancestry. From farther east and south, dark-skinned racial refugees—escaped slaves and free dark-complexioned people who feared enslavement—joined these communities as the years went by.
Some of these people were labeled “free people of color” in the last decades of the nineteenth century and weren’t allowed to vote, to marry white people, to attend white schools, or to testify against white people in court. Brewton Berry, in his book Almost White, maintains that some two hundred of these groups—with names like the Redbones, Brass Ankles, Moors, Turks—existed well into the twentieth century throughout the eastern United States.6
The Melungeons of East Tennessee and southwest Virginia were one such “little race,” as a prominent sociologist labels these communities.7 Splinter groups left the Melungeon settlements to migrate across the Cumberland Plateau, through Kentucky to Ohio and points north and west, leaving behind pockets of relatives along the way.8 These people, accustomed to prejudice and rejection, were braced for confrontations and prepared to fight for their right to live in freedom.
In the Tug Fork Valley itself, Tom Wallace, a farmhand who was hired by Devil Anse Hatfield’s son Cap and who helped Cap whip Mary Daniels with a cow’s tail, was said to be “half Hatfield and half Indian.”9 Devil Anse’s nephew, the murdered Ellison’s son Elliot, was nicknamed “Indian.” Devil Anse’s close friend Mose Christian claimed Shawnee ancestry.10 Several Hatfields were described as “swarthy”—Black Elias,11 Good Elias,12 and Levicy.13 Johnse was said to have a dark complexion.14
Among the McCoy ranks, Frank Phillips was also described as “dark-complexioned.”15 Truda McCoy remarked that many McCoys were olive-skinned, often with dark or auburn hair. In the earliest years of settlement, the population of the Tug Fork Valley had included the remnants of Native tribes who had previously occupied the area, and it would be unrealistic to think that some mixing didn’t occur among the former and current inhabitants. The descendants from such unions would possibly have absorbed cultural traditions from their Native relatives, including eye-for-an-eye justice.
All the Tug Forkers lived on farms, so complexions that appeared so dark to urban reporters may have been nothing more than the result of lives lived outdoors. But it is also likely that some inhabitants of the Tug Fork Valley questioned their own racial identities. Belligerent facades allowed racially ambiguous people to fend off challenges to their right to enjoy the same freedoms as their white neighbors. But the price of these freedoms was the various personality disorders that can result from not knowing who you are—or from knowing and concealing it.
Ranel McCoy’s forebears are believed to have been Lowland Scots, perhaps mixed with Highland Celts.16 Lowland Scots were themselves a mixture of Picts, Gaels, Norsemen, Angles, Saxons, Normans, and Romans from all corners of their empire, including Africa. Roman troops stationed at Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall on what is now the English-Scottish border mixed with local women, and some remained in the area when they retired or when the troubled empire recalled its legions to defend the mainland. As a result, some born and bred Englishmen have African Y chromosomes,17 as do two of my cousins in the Appalachians who always believed themselves to be of British heritage.******** Devil Anse Hatfield’s Y chromosome falls into the same haplogroup as that of Napoleon. One researcher proposes that it was brought to the British borderlands by Roman troops from the Balkans.18
Such Scotch-Irish people, immigrants and the descendants of immigrants from the borderlands between England and Scotland and from Ulster in Ir
eland, make up by far the largest population group that settled the mountains of Kentucky and Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina. Both English armies from the south and Scottish armies from the north regularly attacked these Border Reivers, as they had been called in Britain. Their crops and homes had been destroyed time after time, their herds seized or slaughtered, their women raped, their families murdered. In response, they banded together in extended kinship groups and wrought havoc on one another, rustling from and blackmailing the borderland families to whom they were not related or otherwise allied.
A quarter of a million of these people immigrated to America in the eighteenth century, searching for an alternative to the high rents, low wages, heavy taxes, short leases, and deadly famine that most had endured in their homeland. Many traveled down the Shenandoah Valley from the seaports in Philadelphia to follow the rivers and passes into the Allegheny and Cumberland Mountains, the Blue Ridge and the Smokies. The original Hatfields are thought to have immigrated from the English borderlands,19 and the McCoys from the Scottish borderlands.20
This overall migration pattern resulted in a volatile mix of touchy people in the mountains of Kentucky and southwestern Virginia, which the Tug Fork bisected. Most of the men hunted for game and therefore had knives and guns, and knew how to use them. Most participated in militias designed to provide defense against Native attacks and knew how to fight. Many had chips on their shoulders and trigger-quick tempers.
David Fischer, in his brilliant study Albion’s Seed, describes cultural features of this American backcountry that derive directly from the British borderlands, such as place names, vocabulary and accents, wedding and funeral customs, cooking and clothing styles, architecture, and attitudes toward work, sex, sports, and religion.21 He contends, not that these cultural dispositions were somehow genetic (which of course they couldn’t be), but rather that these folkways, as he calls them, developed in the British borderlands over the course of centuries in response to the atmosphere of threat and insecurity that reigned there.
