This is the second post on Altina L. Waller’s Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900. As always, if you’d like to support Bullfish Hole, become a subscriber at the link below, or leave a tip in the Tip Jar.
The last installment ended with Devil Anse Hatfield avenging his brother Ellison by executing the three young men who killed him. These three were all sons of Old Ranel McCoy.
Had the violence ended there we could classify it as a lynching — an extralegal execution by an informally organized group. But there was more violence to come.
Because while the boys were almost certainly guilty, their father wasn’t going to stand for their being executed without trial by a man he already hated. So, following the ancient code of the feud, Old Ranel responded to the murder of his sons by . . .
. . . going to the law. He went to the district court and sought an arrest warrant for Devil Anse.
Waller contrasts his resort to the courts with the notion that violent retribution and cycles of vengeance were the default in Tug Valley culture. But in this case, Old Ranel found the law ineffective.
Part of the problem was state lines: The warrant was taken out in Pike County, Kentucky, where the killings happened. But Devil Anse and his supporters resided across the river in Logan County, West Virginia.
Still, it appears that there wasn’t even an attempt to serve the warrant or request that West Virginia extradite Devil Anse for trial. Waller suggests the issue of jurisdiction was merely a pretext for legal officials to ignore something the community as a whole wished to ignore:
“In 1882 Ranel’s neighbors urged him to let the matter rest. A crude sort of justice, after all, had been done. To antagonize Devil Anse further would be to invite violence of frightening proportions. The Tug Valley community was making the best adjustment it knew how to a volatile situation.”
One gets the sense Waller isn’t too sympathetic to Ranel’s “shrill demands for retaliation” — though as a father myself I find it hard to imagine just quietly tolerating the killing of three sons. But still, she might be right that the will of the community, including many of Ranel’s kin, was against further escalation. People wanted the lynching of the McCoy boys to remain a lynching, and not to turn into something bigger.
Perhaps the best evidence for this is that, for more than four years after, nothing much happened.
The Devil Falling
The conflict didn’t flare up again until 1886.
By this time, Devil Anse’s fortunes were waning. Indeed, Waller thinks the start of his economic and political decline came just before the McCoy boys killed his brother. By that time he had gone from winning court cases to losing them, and the state was threatening to seize much of his land for back taxes owed. Waller suggests that this downward mobility contributed to his violent reaction.
Devil Anse faced even more challenges after killing the McCoys.
The economic development of the Tug Valley allowed Devil Anse to rise, but soon undermined him. By the 1880s, coal companies, railroads, and other big businesses had their eyes on southern West Virginia. The elites in the county seat of Logan were increasingly businessmen with ties to these companies, and thus to the larger national economy. With these business relationships to the outside world came cultural and political ties. The county elite of the 1880s were growing more socially distant from the people of Tug Valley.
Devil Anse’s influence with county officials thus declined. When he applied for permission to expand his timber operation by building a dam and sawmill, the newly organized county commission refused. Meanwhile, a former sheriff and business partner had allied himself with a New Jersey land developer, and was hammering Devil Anse and his landholding neighbors with lawsuits. Presumably the aim was to faciliate the cheap aquisition of their land — something of a live by the sword, die by the sword situation for Devil Anse, who had acquired much of his land through litigation.
Gossip, Whipping, Killing
This turn of fortune could explain why, in 1886, his sons were worried that Ranel’s long-dormant legal case against them might still be a threat.
At this point Devil Anse’s son, Johnse, was still married to Ranel’s niece Nancy. But Johnse tended to go off tomcatting for days at a time, leaving her home alone. This led the lonely Nancy to spend a lot of time at her sister Mary’s house on the Kentucky side of the Tug River.
Sisters gossip. Through Nancy, Johnse and his brother Cap learned that Old Ranel was still trying to pursue legal action against them. Having given up on the district courts, he made repeated trips to Pikeville to press the court there.
Given their family’s recent loss of influence, perhaps Johnse and Cap were worried Old Ranel would eventually succeed. For soon after learning this they took increasingly aggressive steps to intimidate Ranel into dropping the case. At one point, they and several supporters even surrounded the McCoy home in a show of force.
They also realized that gossip is a two-way street: If Nancy was telling them things about Ranel, then her sister Mary must be telling Ranel things about them.
Waller doesn’t get into exactly what information could have been so sensitive, and she acknowledges there’s different stories about what happened next. But supposedly Cap Hatfield and his farmhand Tom Wallace “whipped both the women with cows’ tails, admonishing them not to ‘gossip’ further.”
At this time Mary and Nancy’s brother Jeff McCoy was on the run for an unrelated murder charge. When he got wind of his sisters being whipped, he set out for revenge. He went to Cap Hatfield’s house and, finding him gone, settled for threatening his wife. Then he ran into Tom Wallace and the two exchanged gunfire, though neither was hurt.
When Cap learned of this, he went to the justice of the peace and obtained a warrant for Jeff’s arrest. Then he and Wallace personally set out to do the arresting. They found Jeff and took him prisoner but, as they tell it, he escaped and tried to swim across the river, back to the safety of Kentucky. So, they shot him to death.
Old Ranel now had three sons and a nephew killed by the Hatfields. Of course, as a grizzled old mountaineer who lives by the code of the feud, he . . . . further pressed his case with the law. Particularly, he beseeched his friend Perry Cline, who had just become sheriff of Pike County.
Cline’s Revenge
Recall that Cline, having lost his family land to Devil Anse in a lawsuit, had moved across the river and settled in the county seat of Pikeville.
Pikeville, like Logan, was rapidly integrating with the national economy, and its elite were also diverging from the poorer folks in Tug Valley. But Pikeville had started diverging earlier, and apparently Cline did a good job surfing the new currents. He’d integrated himself with the local elite and even made connections in the state capital. One result was that in 1887 he obtained the lucrative and influential position of sheriff. And after years of staying out of the conflict between the McCoys and the Hatfields, he was finally ready to strike a blow against his old enemy.
Devil Anse, for his part, was well aware that this could happen. Which is why his response to the killing of Jeff McCoy was to write a letter to Perry Cline, desperately attempting to diffuse the situation. Writes Waller:
“The fact that this letter was addressed to Cline rather than to Ranel McCoy indicates that Anse was well aware that without Cline’s support Old Ranel was powerless. ‘We are very sorry,’ Anse writes to Cline, ‘that the trouble occurred…but under somewhat aggravated circumstances it happened. But I know and solemnly affirm that if such could have been prevented by me I would have stopped…the Trouble.”
The attempt at conciliation didn’t work, and Cline set his sights on Anse.
State Power
Though it seems like the death of Jeff McCoy triggered Cline’s intervention, he didn’t bother pursuing a warrant against Cap Hatfield and Tom Wallace. Instead, he focused on the old warrant for Devil Anse for the killings five years before.
No one of importance had been willing to press the issue before now. But Cline went straight to the governor. He’d campaigned for the governor and could probably call in a favor. But he also had the luck that his report about Hatfield “desperados” came just at the time Kentucky’s leadership was increasingly concerned with pacifying and civilizing the mountaineers.
The outside world was waking up to the value of Appalachian coal, and the statehouse buzzed with talk of developing Pike County. Yet the independent-minded mountaineers had stubbornly refused to cooperate with railroads and developers, and their reputation for feuding was becoming embarrassing on the national stage.
That this particular conflict crossed state lines gave it additional public relations significance:
“The deciding argument, however, may have been that these feudists—the ‘worst marauders ever,’ in the words of Perry Cline—were not Kentuckians but West Virginians! The publicity engendered by a crackdown on the Hatfields would put Kentucky in a favorable light, for a change, as champion of law and order while deflecting the stigma of feuding onto West Virginia. Subsequent events and the ‘war’ between Kentucky and West Virginia newspapers over which state was to blame for the Hatfield-McCoy feud proved the strategy a viable one.”
The governor agreed to hire a special deputy and put in a request to West Virginia to have the Hatfields extradited. Old Ranel, who up until now “had never been able to garner more than a handful of supporters against Devil Anse,” was suddenly “backed by the full judicial authority of the state of Kentucky.”
Invaders
Ironically, the state of Kentucky’s commitment to ending the conflict would spark the next big spasm of violence. For Devil Anse soon learned of Cline’s visit to the governor and responded by sending Cline another letter. The previous one had been apologetic; this one was threatening:
“We have been told by men from your county that you and your men are fixing to invade this country for the purpose of taking Hatfield boys, and now sire, we, forty-nine in number at present, do notify you that if you come into this country to take or bother any of the Hatfields, we will follow you to hell or take your hide, and if any of the Hatfields are killed or bothered in any way, we will charge it up to you, and your hide will pay the penalty.”
Aside from their obvious self-interest, Devil Anse and his friends were so committed to local autonomy that they had once formed a Confederate guerilla force. It may have been more than just bluster when he signed the letter “President and Secretary” of the “Logan County Regulators,” with is supporters signing as members.
The threat of organized resistance didn’t deter Perry Cline. But he soon ran up against the problem that West Virginia was in no hurry to comply with Kentucky’s extradition request. Though Hatfields’s influence was waning, he still had one friend who could get his version of events to the governor’s ear. And West Virginia’s populist governor was sympathetic to the notion that the Hatfields were getting treated unfairly.
With the governor dragging his feet, Cline decided to move unilaterally. He had hired a colorful and dangerous man known as “Bad” Frank Phillips to be his special deputy. In December of 1887 he and Phillips led an armed posse across the Tug Fork and into West Virginia.
Their expedition was a mild success, managing to take prisoner the only “Hatfield” they could find — Selkirk McCoy, Old Ranel’s nephew. It’s notable he was by now so identified with the Hatfield side that a posse aiming to capture Hatfields was content to capture him.
Shortly after Selkirk’s capture, Bad Frank led two more expeditions into West Virginia. These expeditions produced outrage in the Tug community, and not just on the West Virginia side. Many in Pike County also objected, especially to the notorious Bad Frank leading a posse under the flag of the law.
Cline made a show of bowing to public opinion by sacking Bad Frank from the deputy position — then the two of them carried on just as before.
“The rules of the game had changed dramatically. Local opinion, community protocol, even Devil Anse’s social prestige and reputation, counted for very little….the state of Kentucky had taken action that essentially destroyed the operation of the local system of social authority.”
Devil Anse’s first response to this development was to bribe Cline. Cline accepted $225 with the promise to knock it off and try to smooth things over with the governor — and then continued raiding into West Virginia with Bad Frank.
The New Year’s Massacre
Supposedly it was Devil Anse’s son Cap — the one who whipped the McCoy women and shot Jeff McCoy — who proposed killing everyone. After all, if Old Ranel and his immediate family were all gone, who’d be left to testify against them? And with no witnesses, Cline wouldn’t have a case!
If that was actually the argument, it makes little sense. Supposedly Devil Anse was against it. But whatever the logic, Cap was able to convince eight of the Hatfield “boys” to go along with him on a raid of the McCoy home. Devil Anse and his brothers sat out the raid, but his uncle Jim Vance went along to lead the younger men.
The raiding party struck in the early morning of January 1, 1888, in what became known as the New Year’s Massacre. It was a botch job. Despite Vance’s orders to wait for his signal, the undisciplined boys opened fire early. Then Vance rushed to set the McCoy home on fire before Ranel and his sons could organize a response.
The McCoy family fled the burning house. As the came out, the Hatfield party shot at them. Ranel’s 26-year-old son Calvin and 30-year-old daughter Alifair were gunned down. When Aunt Sally tried to reach the dying Alifair, Vance clubbed and beat her. Ranel hid in the pigpen. Without finishing the job of executing all their enemies, the Hatfields retreated down the mountain.
After they crossed the river, one of the raiders, Ellison Mounts, told another, Charlie Gillespie, “Well, we killed the boy and girl, and I am sorry of it….We have made a bad job of it…There will be trouble over this.”
The Battle of Grapevine Creek
For those keeping score, we have three McCoys executed for killing Ellison Hatfield, then five years later another McCoy killed, then next year two more McCoys killed. This doesn’t match our definition of the classic blood feud as an even exchange of killings. And indeed, despite being known as the head of a feuding family, most of Ranel McCoy’s actions amount to beseeching the legal system.
Only now Ranel was supported by Cline, Bad Frank, and their posse. They continued their raids into West Virginia. On one of these, their posse came across Jim Vance, Vance’s wife Mary, and Cap Hatfield, walking down a mountain trail. In the ensuing gunfight Vance was wounded while Mary and Cap fled. Bad Frank had Vance at his mercy, and gave none: He executed him on the spot.
Emboldened by this success, Bad Frank led a “half-dozen” more raids over the next ten days and managed to capture seven more Hatfield supporters.
The New Year’s Massacre had made the news as far afield as Louisville, where papers told sensational stories of the Hatfield desperadoes, and painted mountaineer in general as reckless and violent. It may have swayed public opinion even within the Tug Valley. Surely even many former Hatfield sympathizer though they had gone too far. All of which might be why Devil Anse’s brother Valentine wrote to Cline and Phillips announcing his intention to surrender and stand trial in Pikeville.
Devil Anse, for his part, contacted the governor of West Virginia about the killing of his uncle Jim, and sought out Logan County officials upset about the “invasion” from Kentucky. The Logan County court produced warrants for the arrest of Bad Frank and his posse. They directed constable John Thompson to lead his own posse in patrol of the Tug River for these invaders.
This situation was now something like New Mexico’s infamous Lincoln County War, where each faction could claim to be a legally constituted posse with a warrant for the other faction’s arrest.
On January 19, 1888, the two posses came into contact in what’s called the Battle of Grapevine Creek. There they exchanged fire, resulting in a wounded McCoy and a slain Hatfield. This “Hatfield” was actually Bill Dempsey, a man with no prior connection to the conflict who had been deputized by constable Thompson as part of his court-ordered posse. As with the killing of Jim Vance, Dempsey was first wounded, and then Bad Frank finished him off despite his pleas for mercy.
Denouement
Soon after that, Devil Anse met his defeat not at the end of a gun, or even at the end of a criminal case stemming from his actions in the feud. Rather, it was a matter of his business and political adversaries winning a series of court judgments over unpaid debts. To pay the settlement, he had to sell off much of his property to a coal agent from Philadelphia. With what money remained he purchased land twenty miles North of the Tug Valley and moved his family away to live in a secluded, fortified home.
The actual feud was now over — there would be no more raids, ambushes, or fights. But the legend of the feud was just beginning.
There were nine Hatfield supporters jailed in Pikeville. Their criminal trials became a media circus. Newspapers in Kentucky and West Virginia ignored the unity of the Tug Valley community and recast the feud as a state-versus-state conflict, each laying blame on the other side of river. And it soon became an actual conflict of states as disputes over jurisdiction went all the way to the Supreme Court.
Eventually eight of the men went to trial. Seven, including Valentine and Johnse, received life sentences for their part in the killings. One — Ellison Mounts — was hanged. Valentine soon died in prison.
Cline died young, just two years after the trial of the Hatfields. Old Ranel moved to Pikeville and became a ferry operator. He lived a fairly quite life until dying from an accidental fire in 1914.
Devil Anse was later baptized and founded a Church of Christ congregation. He died in 1921. One of his nephews became governor and then senator. Another was the political kingpin, Don Chafin, who played a prominent role in the Mine Wars.
Partisanship
In his theory of the blood feud, sociologist Donald Black proposed that — compared to other ways of handling conflict, including other forms of violence — blood feuds are more likely to occur between groups that are culturally homogeneous and relatively equal in size, resources, and other forms of social stature.
The Tug Valley in the mid-1800s was certainly a place of homogeneous equals. But Waller emphasizes that the feud broke out exactly when modernization was beginning to change that.
By the time the McCoy sons killed his brother, Devil Anse was definitely a man of greater means than Ranel McCoy. And he also attracted more supporters, an attracted them more quickly. As Waller classifies them, the Hatfield side was much larger throughout most of the feud. This is consistent with Black’s idea that partisans gravitate toward higher status parties against lower status parties.
Black also proposed that social closeness breeds partisanship, and considered interdependence a form of closeness. And Anse’s business ties certainly provided much of his support. Indeed, Waller emphasizes how many “Hatfields” were not actually Hatfields — not part of Devil Anse’s close kin. But family or not, many of his supporters were bound to him because he was their source of employment and land.
Fast forward to the Battle of Grapevine Creek, and slightly greater proportion of Devil Anse’s active partisans were kinsmen. This reflected four of his sons or nephews growing old enough to take part in the violence. As the conflict escalated and his economic fortunes waned, there was perhaps also some winnowing down of his partisans to those with family as well as economic ties.
On the other side, the situation was reversed: Early on, Old Ranel’s only supporters were his five sons and two nephews. But by the time of Grapevine Creek two thirds of the men fighting on the “McCoy” side weren’t McCoys by name. Furthermore, only 30 percent of these new supporters even lived in the Tug Valley!
Many of the men who rode with Cline’s posse were from Pikeville, across the mountain ridge. Most knew of Devil Anse only by reputation, and had no ties to Ranel, either. Their involvement was less a matter of them siding with McCoy than their siding with Perry Cline — a man who had his own bone to pick with Devil Anse and who was quite well-networked in Pikeville.
Notably, many of the Cline supporters were wealthy and — Bad Frank aside — respectable. Waller suspects they skewed toward men who supported the Union during the war. All of these things might have made them more moralistic toward a former Confederate guerilla leader in the rustic Tug Valley. That they were nominally on the side of another Tug Valley Confederate veteran was incidental.
Cap Hatfield’s reckless behavior also helped draw partisans. The extralegal execution of three murderers was one thing — for nearly five years, no one sought vengeance. It was Cap’s whipping of Mary that caused her brother Jeff to seek revenge. Cap and Tom’s killing of Jeff then caused his brother Bud, thus far uninvolved in the conflict, to swear vengeance as well. He went on to ride with the Cline and Phillips posse.
Likewise, by raiding across state lines and killing Jim Vance, the posse caused the Logan court to assign a constable to take part in the violence, leading to the death of his deputy at Grapevine Creek.
It’s a pattern we can see elsewhere. As conflicts grow more severe, they provide fresh outrages that can draw more people into their vortex.
Where’s the Law?
A major idea in the sociology of conflict is that violence crops up where law is weak or absent. This is both because law deters violence and because it offers an alternative to aggression — one can take an adversary to court. Indeed, people who study conflict refer to unilateral aggression as self-help, because it involves taking matters into one’s own hands rather than relying on authorities.
Historic lawlessness, from the Scottish borderlands to the American frontier, can explain the strength of honor norms — fighting, boasting, and the rest — in Appalachian culture. But the Tug Valley in 1880 did not lack for courts, and Waller repeatedly emphasizes the willingness of residents to use them.
Indeed, the weirdest thing about classifying Old Ranel McCoy as a “feudist” is that it doesn’t seem like he fired a shot in anger during this whole affair. Nor is it clear that he ordered or even suggested that any be fired. His actions against the Hatfields were always a matter of legal charges, or else griping and grumbling.
Devil Anse, of course, did take violent action. But he was a man of many conflicts, and most of these were also handled in court. He’d won much of his fortune in lawsuits and lost much of it the same way, all without resorting to armed force.
It’s thus worth asking why this conflict in particular didn’t remain a legal contest. Waller attempts to answer this by looking at changes in the Tug Valley courts over the period.
At mid-century, the Valley was divided into six districts, each of 150-400 households:
“The small size of these districts insured that everyone not only knew the local justice but was acquainted with his idiosyncracies and biases. Each justice handled cases in his own district and several times a year might be called upon to sit on the county court in the town of Logan or Pikeville.”
When people went to court in Tug Valley, they took their case before someone who was part of their community, someone they personally knew, and someone who knew them in return. Any jurors called upon to decide a case would have similar levels of intimacy with the litigants. And all shared the same culture.
Donald Black proposes that such social closeness encourages settlement that is relatively non-authoritative — not very punitive, one-sided, rule-bound, or coercive.
Waller’s description is consistent with this, as it seems settlement by a justice of the peace involved “a balancing of formalities with commonsense justice.” Given everyone’s intimacy with everyone else, “no single case could be separated from common knowledge of the participants’ reputations, any previous crimes, and the surrounding circumstances.”
Courts thus tended to mete out what locals would view as substantive justice, even if it deviated from the letter or spirit of the law. More formalistic than settlement by the elders of a tribal society, Tug Valley courts did follow set rules of procedure. But they had a great talent for stretching the law to match local norms and beliefs.
For instance, if the defendant was factually guilty of something locals didn’t consider a serious offense, the court would duly find him guilty and then impose an extremely light fine. In many assault and battery cases the guilty party was fined a single cent. Some of these were likely due to the violence being seen as excusable — perhaps because the other party “had it coming.” But oftentimes, writes Waller, the “assault and battery” wasn’t serious violence, “but rather cursing, shoving, and pushing, or otherwise inflicting humiliation.” The courts were acting as peacemakers sensitive to local notions of honor.
The courts may have been effective as a system for keeping the peace — at least, in keeping the region less violent than it would have been otherwise. But after the 1870s the forces of modernization disrupted this system. One trend was the centralization of authority. After 1881, local district courts lost much of their former power in West Virginia:
“The new structure mandated in 1881 by the legislature brought about nearly revolutionary changes in the local political structure. Judicial powers were removed from the county court and thus from the web of kinship and personal relations. Justices of the peace still heard minor cases at the district level, but the next level of appeal above the justices was no longer the county court but the circuit court….
Because circuit courts in the new system were presided over by a single justice who was elected from a judicial district containing several counties . . . there was only a small chance that the circuit court judge would be a resident of Logan County . . . . The changes meant a significant loss of local autonomy and of the community sense that most decisions were being made at the local level . . .”
Waller notes that these circuit court judges were educated professionals, more sympathetic to the values of the urban middle class than to those of mountaineers.
Thus, for any serious issue, the people of Tug Valley were likely to face settlement at the hands of people more relationally, culturally, and vertically distant than their own justices of the peace. Such settlement was less prone to recognizing local norms or making compromise decisions or otherwise enforcing the will of the community.
For Devil Anse, Logan Court wasn’t home, but it would have least be more familiar ground. Pikeville was stranger to him, and those that had influence there — most especially Perry Cline — were enemies. This helps explain why he wouldn’t tolerate Johnse being taken to Pikeville jail when Tolbert McCoy arrested him. And it was this incident that first led him to rally supporters and use naked force rather than law.
Distrust of the Pikeville court can likewise explain why he wouldn’t trust it to try the McCoy brothers after their killing of Ellison. Notably Valentine, supposedly against the killings, also objected to the McCoys being taken to Pikeville. And the constables charged with taking the McCoys to Pikeville bowed to his argument. It seems that Tug Valley residents thought justice should be local.
If settlement options were confined to local courts, perhaps escalation to force could have been avoided at several turns in the conflict.
Of course, depending on the turn in question, one might debate whether the outcome was actually just. Would it have been right to expect Old Ranel to tolerate the killing of his three sons, much as his family tolerated the killing of his brother twenty years before?
In any case, once Cline and the Pikeville men got involved, the force of law was seen as invasive and openly partisan. And that is when the violence got more warlike, with raids and battles and several more fatalities. As Waller puts it, state officials recreated the feud in order to suppress it.
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