Feud

Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900

Altina L. Waller

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781469609713
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The Hatfield-McCoy feud, the entertaining subject of comic strips, popular songs, movies, and television, has long been a part of American folklore and legend. Ironically, the extraordinary endurance of the myth that has grown up around the Hatfields and McCoys has obscured the consideration of the feud as a serious historical event. In this study, Altina Waller tells the real story of the Hatfields and McCoys and the Tug Valley of West Virginia and Kentucky, placing the feud in the context of community and regional change in the era of industrialization. Waller argues that the legendary feud was not an outgrowth of an inherently violent mountain culture but rather one manifestation of a contest for social and economic control between local people and outside industrial capitalists -- the Hatfields were defending community autonomy while the McCoys were allied with the forces of industrial capitalism. Profiling the colorful feudists "Devil Anse" Hatfield, "Old Ranel" McCoy, "Bad" Frank Phillips, and the ill-fated lovers Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield, Waller illustrates how Appalachians both shaped and responded to the new economic and social order.

Part One
The Feud as Community Conflict

1 Prologue: The Death of Asa Harmon McCoy

Most accounts of the Hatfield-McCoy feud begin with the death of Asa Harmon McCoy on 7 January 1865. McCoy had served in the Union army during the Civil War and had returned home to the Tug Valley in mountainous eastern Kentucky only a short time before he was killed by a Confederate guerrilla unit known as the Logan Wildcats. The guerrillas were led by William Anderson (“Devil Anse”) Hatfield, who later became the McCoys’ nemesis in the famous feud.¹ Because of this connection a folk tradition emerged which assumed that the feud was a continuation of Civil War hostilities.

This explanation, however, has serious flaws. Although Asa Harmon McCoy had indeed served in the Union army, most of his family—and especially his brother Randolph, the future leader of the McCoy feudists—were, like the Hatfields, loyal to the Confederacy. Many of the McCoys, including the notorious Randolph himself, even served with Devil Anse Hatfield in the Confederate guerrilla unit responsible for the death of Asa Harmon. Not only the Hatfields and the McCoys, but most residents of this remote border community supported the Confederacy.² It is likely that Asa Harmon’s killing was not the result of divided loyalties within the community but was, instead, the expression of a consensus which branded him an outcast and a traitor. After his death, there was no attempt at retaliation, public or private—strong evidence that even Asa Harmon’s family was not prepared to defend his behavior.

Despite evidence to the contrary, most students of the feud have continued to insist that a Civil War “legacy” was at the root of the feud. They have argued that, despite Asa Harmon’s traitorous behavior, his family resented his killing by the Hatfields and bode their time for twenty years until a chance arose for revenge. The specific incident of Asa Harmon’s murder, the argument continues, was not so important as the lawlessness and violence unleashed by the war. Because local courts and county governments were disrupted by the war, social disorder fostered habits of private violence and revenge that persisted into the postwar period, naturally leading to the feud outbreaks of the 1880s and 1890s. Thus the Civil War “legacy,” for the feud, was less a specific incident than the general condition of social chaos bequeathed by the war.³

This second argument is just as flawed as the first. Although military activity, both regular and irregular, did prevent the normal functioning of the county courts during the war, this did not become a chronic condition. By 1866–67 county governments had been reinstituted in both Pike and Logan counties and were making an effort to catch up on business that had been neglected during the war—predominantly road building and tax collecting.⁴ They also attempted to deal with damages to property caused by both Confederate and Union troops. Numerous cases were brought to the courts seeking damages for livestock, equipment, and foodstuffs that had been confiscated by the guerrillas.⁵ Although it is unclear how some of these cases were settled, the main point is that, once the emergency was over, Tug Valley citizens reverted to the normal channels of authority. Even more significant, the crime rate returned to its almost negligible prewar levels.

Ironically, what the death of Asa Harmon McCoy reveals about the Tug Valley community is not disharmony and social chaos but a remarkable consensus and solidarity in the face of wartime disruption—a consensus that provided the foundation for successful reestablishment of local government once the war had ended. It was shattered only by the outbreak of the feud twenty years later. If we are to understand this famous conflict, then, we must begin by probing the nature of the Tug Valley community during the half century before the feud erupted.

The Tug River Valley home of the Hatfields and the McCoys contains some of the most beautiful terrain in the eastern United States. Today the scars of a hundred years of coal mining have all but destroyed the rugged grandeur of its narrow valleys, rocky streams, and precipitous slopes. But when the feudists were growing up the land was pristine and protectively sheltering of its inhabitants even as it challenged their ability to survive. Towering mountains obliterated the sun for many hours a day and impeded travel except along creek beds and rivers. The Tug River itself is shallow and rocky, making navigation perilous even for small boats; traversing the region was almost as difficult as living in it. Before white settlement, Indians frequently hunted the area for its abundant game and fish but avoided it as a site for permanent villages.⁶

Not until the early nineteenth century, almost two hundred years after the first British settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts, did the first white settlers, including the progenitors of the feudists, arrive in the Tug Valley. Most were part of a new wave of immigrants from Germany and Ireland, who had arrived in the colonies at a time when affordable land on the eastern seaboard was no longer available.⁷ Their migration down the great Valley of Virginia was gradual; they often settled in one place for a period of seven to ten years before moving on.⁸ Finally, around 1800, the migrants from such southwestern Virginia counties as Tazewell, Russell, and Montgomery—including William McCoy, Randolph’s grandfather, and Valentine Hatfield, Anderson’s grandfather—moved northwest into the eastern extremity of the new state of Kentucky.⁹

Both the Hatfields and the McCoys settled on the southern bank of the Tug River in what was soon to become Pike County, Kentucky. They had come for land and they found an abundance of it, not only available but inexpensive—2.5 cents an acre from the county court. However, the near-vertical nature of the mountain slopes rendered almost two-thirds of the land useless for farming; the only tillable land, the narrow strips along river and creek bottoms, was quickly claimed.¹⁰ Less than thirty years later, crowded conditions caused the children of the original settlers to covet the still-vacant lands across the Tug River in Logan County, Virginia. Daniel McCoy, father of Randolph, and several of his brothers were among the first to move, obtaining property assessed as some of the most valuable in the county because of its proximity to the river. Here, on the Virginia side of the Tug, Randolph, his brother Harmon, and eleven siblings grew up.¹¹ Valentine Hatfield, Anderson’s grandfather, followed in the mid–1830s; with twelve children, nine of them sons, Valentine needed plenty of land, and he found it on Horsepen and Gilbert creeks in northeastern Logan County.¹² Migration, for these families, was finally at an end. A century later their descendants could be found living along the very same hollows and creeks.

Indeed, the most striking characteristic of the Tug Valley community, especially in the half century before the feud, was its social stability. It was not just the Hatfields and McCoys who provided social continuity. Other families who later became famous for their role in the feud were also early settlers. Peter Cline and his five children settled on both sides of the Tug near a tributary still called Peter Creek.¹³ Jesse Phillips obtained land on Johns Creek, where his grandson, “Bad” Frank Phillips, one of the most famous feudists, died and was buried in the Phillips cemetery in 1898.¹⁴ Abner Vance, grandfather of Anderson Hatfield’s mother and prominent feudist Jim Vance, as well as Nathan Chafin, father of Anderson’s wife, were all among the original inhabitants of the valley.¹⁵ In fact, families of virtually all the feudists were present from the earliest settlement period.¹⁶

Social cohesiveness was enhanced even further once the great migration of the early nineteenth century was over and newcomers slowed to a trickle. After 1840 westward migration bypassed the mountains as easterners rushed headlong beyond the Appalachians to obtain flat and fertile land in Ohio, Indiana, or Illinois. As wagons and foot travelers poured west on the National Road to the north or through the Cumberland Gap to the south, roads through and into the Tug Valley fell into disrepair. Apart from an occasional peddler, cattle drover, or circuit preacher, few outsiders visited the mountain hollows. The original families proliferated, intermarried extensively, watched each other’s children grow up, and established complex kinship networks that defy the outsider’s comprehension. Outside the valley the forces of market capitalism and industrialization transformed America, but geography and the more easily exploitable resources available elsewhere protected the valley’s inhabitants from the disruption associated with economic development. They gradually created an insular society that supported an interlocking network of political, religious, and social activities. Although not unaware of events taking place outside the mountains, Tug Valley residents identified with their local, immediate environment of sheltering mountain ridges and narrow creek beds and their comfortably familiar set of family, friends, and neighbors. Indeed there was little reason to fear—or to hope for—any change in the physical, economic, or social environment.¹⁷

In the antebellum period a remarkable homogeneity developed from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Settlers were of different national origins—English, Scotch-Irish, and German, with a scattering of French Huguenots and others. Three families who later became prominent in the feud symbolize this diversity: the Hatfields were English, the McCoys were Scotch-Irish, and the Clines were German. All these families had relatives who moved on to become part of the mainstream migration to the Midwest and West, undermining the theory that the Scotch-Irish or Welsh chose to settle in the mountains for genetic or temperamental reasons. The imperatives of the mountain environment blended all cultural groups together, so that by the time of the Civil War their differences in house styles, farming, dress, religious worship, and even political allegiances were almost imperceptible.

The settlers had come to find land, and land was at the root of their society and culture. As the basis for economic survival as well as social status within the community, the importance of land-holding reflected an eighteenth-century cultural heritage. The early migrants were not destitute deviants who sought escape from the responsibilities of farm work, family, or community activities—“squatters,” as they became popularly known in history textbooks. Judging from the meticulous care with which the early land records of both Logan and Pike counties were kept, Tug Valley families placed immense importance on obtaining as secure a title as possible to as much land as they could afford. This proved no easy task in a region governed by Virginia laws, which had allowed tracts encompassing millions of acres, with no clear, fixed boundaries, to go to speculators for two cents an acre.¹⁸ Still, the residents of the valley eagerly purchased tracts from speculators or applied for grants of “vacant and unappropriated” land from the county courts. An early Logan County surveyor’s book, still on display at the county courthouse, with its exquisite three-color, hand-drawn maps, bears silent testimony to the significance of the land to Logan families. In addition to the surveyors’ books, deed books from antebellum Pike and Logan counties demonstrate the care with which even minor land transactions between family members were recorded.

If the importance of land was an eighteenth-century heritage, the Tug Valley social structure, although based on hierarchical values, was much more egalitarian in practice than that of tidewater Virginia. In the mountainous terrain it was not possible to imitate the plantation system and its polarized society, and small farms predominated. In 1850 more that two-thirds of Pike and Logan County households owned their own farms.¹⁹ But even the one-third of household heads who reported no landholdings do not represent a pauper class. Many such households consisted of young families like that of Randolph McCoy, who in 1850 was listed in the census schedules without property, although in fact he was living on his father’s farm. Such households were part of the parents’ domestic economy until such time as the children obtained their own land.²⁰ Thus most residents owned or could soon expect to own small, self-sufficient farms of 30 to 35 cultivated acres and 300 acres of “unimproved” land, often mountainsides too steep for anything but hunting or perhaps grazing cattle.²¹ Although a few absentee speculators claimed thousands of acres, it was rare for actual residents to possess more than 1,000 acres. Jacob Cline, father of feudist Perry Cline, became an exception when he purchased 5,000 acres along Grapevine Creek in the 1830s. Devil Anse’s father Ephraim, with 181 acres, and Daniel McCoy, with 200 acres, were more typical.²² Still, some families, like that of Jacob Cline, were better off economically and therefore acquired the superior social status usually associated with large landholdings. Men such as Cline were identified in the census records with the title “esquire,” indicating their position of esteem and respect in the community. Even though the social structure was egalitarian compared to more economically developed regions, residents observed a status hierarchy based on social distinction and landholding.

Nevertheless, whatever social differentiation ex...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Feud
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One The Feud as Community Conflict
• Part Two The Politics of Feuding
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index