Blood Feud: The Hatfields & The McCoys (6 page)

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.
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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.
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But eight more nonfeuding McCoys appear on Confederate muster rolls, and six on Union rolls.

No documentary evidence places Ranel McCoy on either side.
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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.
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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.
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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,
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and Devil Anse wasn’t among them.
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“We were too poor to own slaves,” one Hatfield descendant explained.
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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 simultaneously
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and fought in most battles in and around Kentucky and Virginia, as well as at Fort Donelson in Tennessee.
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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.
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On his return to Pikeville, he organized the 39th Kentucky Mounted Infantry, which included thirteen Hatfields and six McCoys.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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In 1863, when its commander was charged with embezzling government funds intended for supplies and soldiers’ pay, the VSL disbanded. Devil Anse Hatfield next joined the 45th Battalion Infantry (Confederate), quickly rising to the rank of first lieutenant, then captain. Ten McCoys were under his command, one later joining his side in the feud. His younger brother Ellison served as his second lieutenant, and fourteen other Hatfields served under them. Their assignment was to guard the salt mines at Saltville, Virginia, from Union attacks, the Confederacy needing the salt to produce gunpowder. At least forty-five men in this battalion hailed from Pikeville and knew their Union nemesis, Colonel Dils, as a popular merchant during more peaceful days.
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Meanwhile, back in the Tug Fork Valley, Colonel Dils’s troops destroyed the crops and burned down the houses of Devil Anse Hatfield and his superior. Devil Anse’s family was also subjected to unspecified “indignities” during this raid. Some of Colonel Dils’s troops had served with Devil Anse in the VSL before turning coats to join the Union army, so their ravages may have involved personal grudges. Devil Anse’s company, in turn, attacked Colonel Dils’s troops in the midst of their assault on his neighborhood, killing six and chasing the rest away.
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Devil Anse and fifty-four other soldiers abandoned their Confederate regiment in 1864 and headed home, galloping away on stolen horses reportedly provided by Devil Anse’s raider uncle, Jim Vance. Legend has it that Devil Anse was ordered to execute an uncle and one of his uncle’s friends, who had taken leave without permission in order to visit the friend’s dying wife. Devil Anse deserted rather than carry out this order. Others speculate that he and his men, realizing after the defeat at Gettysburg that the Confederacy was doomed, deserted in order to go back home and protect their families and farms from attacks such as the one Devil Anse’s household had recently suffered at the hands of Colonel Dils and his Union soldiers.
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Once back home, Devil Anse led a partisan unit called the Logan Wildcats, loosely affiliated with a famous Confederate guerrilla leader, Rebel Bill Smith.
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Rebel Bill commanded a force of six hundred men in the Tug Fork Valley. Union officers, probably including Colonel Dils, had placed a $9,000 bounty on his head (almost $125,000 in today’s currency).
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Rebel Bill Smith and Devil Anse Hatfield mounted some round bee gums (sections of hollow logs in which bees had made hives) on carts and painted them black to look like cannons. Threatening a Yankee steamboat captain on the Big Sandy River with destruction, they forced him to moor his boat. They and their fellow guerrillas boarded the boat and looted its supplies. Rebel Bill Smith also gets credit for donning the uniform of a Yankee officer and boarding another steamboat ferrying laborers to a Union saltworks. The boat mysteriously went up in flames as the fake Yankee officer swam to shore amid the chaos.
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The Logan Wildcats conducted many other less whimsical raids. They seized supplies valued at $700 (close to $10,000 today) from a dry goods store in Peach Orchard, Kentucky, owned by none other than Col. John Dils.
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Much more than just lofty ideals concerning the preservation of the Union and the demolition of slavery fueled these skirmishes between Union and Confederate forces on the Cumberland Plateau. Personal vendettas were rife, and several flashpoints ignited between those who eventually became Hatfield or McCoy feudists, setting the stage for the murder of Unionist Harmon McCoy in January 1865.

There wasn’t enough evidence to charge anyone with Harmon McCoy’s murder, but most in the area believed that Bad Jim Vance had committed it. Devil Anse denied involvement, claiming to be sick in bed at the time.
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Throughout the feud Devil Anse was usually sick in bed whenever his followers committed deeds that might get them murdered by McCoys.

Bad Jim Vance went back home to his farm in Russell County, Virginia, to plow his fields and plant his crops. While he was there, a cousin from whom he had “requisitioned” horses during the war planned a retaliatory ambush. Learning about it, Bad Jim organized a counter-ambush and killed one of his would-be attackers, Harmon Artrip (a distant ancestor of the author). Artrip’s friends came after Bad Jim, so he moved permanently to the Tug Fork Valley.
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Meanwhile, back in the Tug Fork Valley, residents were frozen with horror over the murder of Harmon McCoy, like a drawing room
tableau vivant.
No one did anything. Some claim that Harmon McCoy had been unpopular because of his Union affiliation, so that no one was inclined to avenge his death.
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But over a dozen Hatfields and half a dozen other McCoys from his region were also on Union troop rosters, as were many others with different surnames. So it doesn’t seem likely that Harmon’s relatives and neighbors would have found his choice to support the Union uniquely objectionable. Truda McCoy maintains that Ranel McCoy didn’t seek revenge or justice for his brother’s death because he was in a Union prison camp farther south at the time,
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though of course no evidence exists to prove that Ranel was in prison—or even in anyone’s army, Confederate or Union.