Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (24 page)

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,
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and the McCoys from the Scottish borderlands.
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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.
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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.

The folkways came to America with those who immigrated from the British borderlands. Because the conditions of danger and threat in the backcountry mirrored those in the borderlands, the transplanted folkways took root and flourished in the new locale. Interestingly, the Tug Fork Valley became a borderland itself during the Civil War, caught between Union and Confederate armies, both sides assaulting the residents and stealing their supplies and livestock—the exact same scenario as in the British borderlands with regard to the English and Scottish armies.

One of these folkways especially relevant to the feud concerns the borderland system of “tanistry.”
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Because the British borderlands were so strife ridden, the people trying to live there needed strong leaders to organize their protection. A tradition evolved in which the eldest and toughest male within the span of four living generations emerged to head each extended family. He received great respect and deference because he represented the entire family’s bulwark against destruction and death. Men who challenged his leadership and lost the contest were treated with contempt and cast out, or barely tolerated. In ancient days they had been killed.

Devil Anse Hatfield was such a figure for the Tug Fork Valley. His forebears had defended it against Native attacks. His father was widely known as the strongman of the valley and had served as a justice of the peace for many years. Devil Anse himself had defended the valley against Federal troops and guerrillas during the Civil War. In the years that followed, he provided jobs and land for many residents on his timber crews.

Ranel McCoy, filing suits against Devil Anse Hatfield and his supporters after the Civil War and pursuing indictments against them after the Pawpaw Murders, was tweaking the tail of a panther. Because he didn’t challenge Devil Anse more directly, even after Devil Anse had killed three of his sons, Ranel took on the role, at a subconscious level at least, of one of the defeated old men in the still-lingering borderland system of tanistry. People feared and respected Devil Anse, but they felt a certain amount of impatience with Ranel McCoy, however justified his litany of complaints. In the end, Devil Anse tried to kill off his failed rival in the New Year’s night attack on his cabin—but this time he, also, failed.

Psychologists Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen maintain that immigrants from the British borderlands were primarily herders and that herding cultures all over the world display high levels of violence.
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In Corsica, for instance, the rocky mountainous birthplace of Napoleon, where sheep, goats, and hogs have been raised for centuries, an estimated thirty thousand people, a quarter of the population, died in the heyday of vendettas between 1683 and 1715.
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A herd is easily stolen, so a herder’s livelihood depends upon his ability to defend his livestock. Affronts to his reputation for strength, toughness, cunning, and violence must be squelched immediately and forcefully. An unanswered insult announces that its target is weak and can be bullied out of his animals.
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These herders from the British borderlands settled primarily in the southern highlands, such as the Cumberland Plateau of Kentucky, where the Tug Fork Valley is located, a mountainous terrain that favors herding over farming. We have already seen the role played in the feud by a wandering hog and in other feuds by stolen horses and cattle. One possible explanation for the idiom “to get one’s goat,” meaning to anger someone, is that it stems from herding cultures. To steal someone’s goat would deprive him of its milk and meat, and would no doubt trigger furious retaliation.

Such engrained cultural traits can persist indefinitely, maintain Nisbett and Cohen, even after the herds that inspired them no longer exist. In various experiments on young men from both the northern and southern United States, they found that, when insulted, those from the South exhibited elevated levels of the stress hormone cortisol and of testosterone, the hormone mediating aggression. The young men from the North tended to defuse with humor or indifference situations that those from the South interpreted as humiliating, the Northerners experiencing no such elevation of their cortisol or testosterone levels.
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Between 1865 and 1915, the Cumberland Plateau had a homicide rate more than ten times the national homicide rate today and twice as high as that of our most violent cities.
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In those rural regions, even as recently as 1996, the homicide rate among white males registered over four times higher than that for the same group in rural New England, the Middle Atlantic states, and the nonindustrial western Midwest.
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Accordingly, Nisbett and Cohen label the social system of the American backcountry a “culture of honor.”
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Their findings lend statistical support to the name given the region in 1878 by the
New York Times
: “the Corsica of America.”
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According to the rules of conduct in a culture of honor, the McCoys, by not retaliating in kind to the Hatfields’ murder of Harmon McCoy and the later murders of Ranel’s three sons, were signaling weakness and setting themselves up for further attacks.
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As the eminent sociologist of the South, John Shelton Reed (my older brother) says, “Sometimes people are violent, even when they don’t want to be, because there will be penalties (disgrace is a very effective one) for
not
being violent.”
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By honoring the Christian-based wishes of his wife, Sarah, to turn the other cheek, Ranel McCoy broke another rule of conduct in cultures of honor, in which women are expected to be silent and submissive helpmeets to their warrior husbands and sons. It would have been a difficult myth to sustain in the Tug Fork Valley since the women were doing most of the work to keep their households and farms functioning while their menfolk were out sowing terror and havoc.

Some of the McCoy women, as we’ve seen, displayed an assertiveness that undercuts this code of submission expected from warrior wives. Fed up with his abusive and neglectful treatment, Peggy McCoy divorced her husband, Daniel, after fifty years of unhappy marriage. Sarah McCoy restrained Ranel’s fury against the Hatfields at various points during the feud. Against the wishes of her father, Roseanna McCoy took Johnse Hatfield as her lover. Nancy McCoy later henpecked Johnse and then abandoned him in favor of Bad Frank Phillips. On the Hatfield side, Levicy Chafin Hatfield perhaps persuaded her son Bob to quit the patrol that committed the New Year’s Night Massacre, and Devil Anse’s mother, Nancy Vance Hatfield, kept some of her sons from joining the feud in the first place.

Many other warrior wives of the Cumberland Plateau may never have been as submissive as their husbands would have preferred. One Hatfield woman said, “You couldn’t kill one of them with a hammer. . . . You didn’t have to be around them very long until you found out who crowed and who laid the eggs.”
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These women left their female descendants a legacy of fierceness that prevails even today: 58 percent of all American homicides in which a wife kills her husband occur in the South.
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Recently I saw written on a women’s bathroom wall in a gas station near Cumberland Gap, “Always fight back, and never let them take you alive!”

Some have proposed the lack of schools and churches in the Tug Fork Valley as a factor in the feud. But there were churches for those who wanted to attend. Preacher Anse Hatfield ran the Old Pond Creek Baptist Church on the Kentucky side of the river. Ellison Hatfield and his family attended a Baptist church on the West Virginia side. Dyke Garrett, who eventually baptized Devil Anse, had a Church of Christ congregation in the valley.

Ranel and Sarah McCoy were said to be devout Christians, and they certainly behaved that way more than most in the feud. But Devil Anse Hatfield, before his baptism, had no interest in church. “I belong to no Church,” he was quoted as saying, “unless you say that I belong to the one great Church of the world. If you like you can say that it is the devil’s Church that I belong to.”
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Many in the southern Appalachians at that time associated churches with stifling rules and oppressive hierarchy, such as their ancestors had suffered in Britain. They felt that a personal experience of the divine was what mattered and not the real estate or authority figures involved in organized religion. With their intense relationships to nature, many may have felt no need for other spiritual outlets.

But a lack of schooling did likely contribute to the feud mentality. During the 1880s and ’90s, there were four schools in the Tug Fork Valley.
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But in such rural areas only about a quarter of the children attended on a regular basis, and the school term lasted just three months each year, in the quiet winter season after crops had been harvested and the livestock slaughtered and butchered. The winter weather in the mountains would have prevented many children from attending regularly even during those three months.

Devil Anse and Elias Hatfield and Elliott Rutherford set up a school in their West Virginia neighborhood around 1870. Charlie Carpenter, who composed the document authorizing vigilante justice against the McCoy sons before the Pawpaw Murders, had taught in this school. But it had been abandoned, and the McCoy sons were imprisoned there while waiting to learn if Ellison Hatfield would live or die. Devil Anse was illiterate, as was his son Cap, who learned to read and write from his wife, Nancy, in his twenties. But perhaps Charlie Carpenter’s role in the Pawpaw Murders proves that education doesn’t necessarily provide an inoculation against cruelty and violence.

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century in the southern Appalachians, as elsewhere in America, there were no radios, movies, television, telephones, or theaters; there was little access to books or magazines for the few who could read; and people didn’t travel for pleasure as we do today. Playing music, clog dancing, singing ballads and hymns, and telling tall tales were the primary forms of entertainment. But there is little mention in the feud literature of those activities having occurred in the Tug Fork Valley.

So, like participants in modern-day reality shows, feudists composed real-life soap operas for their own entertainment, in which they were the stars—at least in their own eyes. They acted out deadly impulses that people in more sophisticated cultures might have been able to experience and exorcise through various art forms with no loss of life or limbs. Elsewhere in the southern Appalachians, such impulses were being expressed and digested by way of the gory ballads of love and war brought by early settlers from Britain, such as “Lord Thomas and Fair Eleanor” and “The Banks of the Yarrow.”