Books: Feud (Part 2)

Law, partisanship, and violence in Appalachia

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.