Books: Feud
Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900
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Sociologist Donald Black defines the classic blood feud as “a precise, extended, and open exchange of killings, usually one death at a time.”
You can see this pattern behavior, or something approaching it, in many parts of the world, from the Balkans to Brazil. But as anthropologist Keith Otterbein argues, the feuds fought by Appalachians, and by their ancestors in the English-Scottish borderlands, rarely match the classic pattern closely. Casualties are often lopsided, with more unreciprocated killings on one side than the other. And rather than trading assassinations, both sides sometimes clash in open battles or massacres.
This is one thing that sticks out in Altina Waller’s account Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900. The conflict between the Hatfields and McCoys is easily America’s most famous feud, but the violence is surprisingly unfeudlike. The killings were lopsided, and through large stretches of the conflict vengeance was less common than appeals to the legal system.
According to Waller, the attempts at lawfare rather than violence are only one way in which the feud differs from popular image. Rather than a clear-cut division between two rival families, we see a community of complex cross-cutting ties. This led most people bearing the Hatfield and McCoy names to stay neutral, and some to side with the other family. And rather than being an ancient custom, the violence was more a symptom of social change, as economic and political development created new rivalries and broke down older systems of conflict management.
The Belligerents
Sources differ on the length of the feud and the number of casualties. Both depend on which incidents they count as part of the feud versus a related but distinct conflict. If we keep to our narrow definition of feuding as a cycle of vengeance killings, the most feudlike part of the conflict lasted for about eight years and killed nine people.
Like other American and British feuds, the two sides are known by family name, even though many people who weren’t in either family eventually got involved on one side or the other.
The Hatfields were led by William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield. The origin of the nickname isn’t clear, but it probably referred less to wickedness than to being a formidable person — someone who was a devil to fight with, or who (in another version) wouldn’t be scared of the Devil himself. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in mountaineer culture.
Devil Anse’s core supporters for most of the conflict were his sons, nephews, and the employees at his timber operation. Three of his brothers got involved in various ways, though two more kept their distance from the whole affair. His uncle Jim Vance also played a prominent role.
On the other side were the McCoys, led by Randolph “Old Ranel” McCoy. For much of the conflict his only support was from his sons and two nephews, with others in his family either staying neutral or siding with the Hatfields.
But in the later phase of the conflict, McCoy’s cause was taken up by Perry Cline, a sheriff with his own personal grievance against Devil Anse. Cline formed a posse of men who were mostly unrelated to the McCoy family. A local troublemaker named Bad Frank Phillips took prominent role in Cline’s group.
Again, keep in mind that lots of people with the last names Hatfield and McCoy didn’t get involved in the conflict at all. Indeed, McCoy and Cline’s grievances were focused on Devil Anse and his circle of supporters — there was a whole other branch of the Hatfield family, cousins to Devil Anse, who they mostly got along with.
The Battleground
Both families lived in the Tug Valley, situated on the banks of the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River. This valley straddles the border of West Virginia and Kentucky.
The first white settlers arrived in Tug Valley around 1800. These included the ancestors of the major participants in the feud: McCoy, Hatfield, Cline, Vance, and Phillips. Indeed, as in other parts of Appalachia, the initial wave of settlers was the last. Later waves heading westward took easier routes to bypass the rugged mountains for the flat land beyond.
The small and isolated population of Tug Valley quickly converged on a homogeneous culture:
“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.”
All were semi-subsistence farmers who supplemented their crops with wild game and fish. Though some families had more land or livestock than others, there wasn’t much vertical distance between them. None were rich, none were destitute, and all did hard physical labor.
Internally homogeneous, the community was socially distant from the outside world. It had little integration into the wider national economy. It had a distinctive style of religion: A denomination known as “Primitive” or “hardshell” Baptists that, unlike Baptists elsewhere, rejected evangelism. The locals recognized their autonomy and distinctiveness:
“By the 1850s, Tug Valley residents self-consciously perceived themselves as a separate community, independent from and diametrically opposed to an evangelical/commercial worldview.”
The Tug Valley also had an honor culture, in which men cultivated toughness and bravado:
“Their culture was raw, boisterous, and rowdy. Young men especially bragged, swaggered, and regaled listeners with tall tales of their hunting and shooting feats. Drinking, swearing, and fisticuffs abounded, especially on festive occasions such as court and election days.”
Waller has no statistics on the matter, but her impression is that this fighting was rarely serious before the 1880s. It’s around that time that violence and “dangerous men” become a big concern for the community. And though some paint the feud as a normal part of hillbilly culture, she suggests the people of the Tug Valley were shocked by the degree of violence.
The Tug Valley was a single, unified community. But it was split between two different states. The west side of the Tug Fork was part of Pike County, Kentucky. The east side was part of Logan County, West Virginia (before 1863, still part of Virginia).
This division mattered for how the feud played out, as it created jurisdictional issues. And those issues help explain why the feud became so famous, as it eventually turned the conflict into a dispute between state governments.
But to most locals in the mid-1800s, the more important political division was the court district. There were six of these — three on the Kentucky side and three on the West Virginia side. Each district had its own court and its own justice of the peace, a legal official with wide ranging powers.
And each court acted as a center of social life, a place for families to gather for occasions like election day. For these events weren’t just about politics or trials, but chances for people to mix and socialize, and for the young men to show off to the young women and to one another. Also, maybe, a chance to confront enemies and settle scores.
I would date the start of the feud proper to a murder on the election day of 1882. But there had already been simmering conflict between the families for years. Some trace the bad blood back to the Civil War.
The Civil War in Tug Valley
The family conflict likely started with the killing of Old Ranel McCoy’s brother, Asa Harmon McCoy, in 1865.
The killing was an extension of the Civil War. For Asa was a Union soldier, and the Tug Valley was a Confederate community.
This might seem odd to those who know that West Virginia was a Union state — in fact, it became a state exactly because the mountainous western parts of Virginia declined to join the Confederacy.
Only the mountaineers weren’t unified. Pro-Confederate sentiment was strong in the central and southern counties of what would become West Virginia. When the convention on statehood happened in the city of Wheeling, Logan County refused to send delegates.
Likewise, though Kentucky joined the Union, Pike County supported the Confederacy.
The divisions of the Civil War were more granular than many think, especially in border states and Appalachia.
Like the mountaineers, the barrier islanders of Virginia refused to join the Confederacy. Too small to form their own state, they still held a meeting and voted to pledge their loyalty to the Union, with Chincoteague Island later requesting naval protection from Lincoln. And in Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, many mountain communities remained strongly pro-Union.
The islanders and mountaineers had similar reasons: They mostly lacked plantations and slaves, and so weren’t wed to the economic system and culture that came with them. Which raises the question of why the mountaineers of Pike and Logan Counties nonetheless supported the South.
Waller suggests that they took sides based on which they viewed as the biggest threat to local autonomy. For the people in the Tug Valley, the Union was the domineering outside force, enforcing its will on states and locales. The Confederacy, on the other hand, was the side promising to uphold the Republican ideals of independent local communities.
Ironically, the lack of interaction with southern planters might have encouraged this view. Waller suggests that mountaineers elsewhere in the South had just enough integration with the lowland economy to accumulate grievances against the planter aristocracy, and to view them as the main threat to their independence.
Slavery was such a non-issue in Logan and Pike that the national pattern was reversed: The rare slave owners in this region tended to support the Union! This might be an artifact of them being wealthier and more cosmopolitan than their neighbors. In any case, one of those slave-owning pro-Union men in the Tug Valley was Asa Harmon McCoy, who joined the Union army, becoming a member the Kentucky Home Guard.
This put him at odds with most of his neighbors, including the Hatfields. Like other Tug Valley men, Devil Anse, along with his brothers Ellison and Elias, joined the Confederate Army. They soon deserted, however, to form their own irregular unit — a band of Confederate guerrillas called the Logan Wildcats. Their uncle Jim Vance also joined. Devil Anse emerged as leader.
The reason for turning guerilla was the presence of Union forces near their home. The Union army had recently burned the Logan courthouse, and the Kentucky Home Guard was active in Pike County. Here again, the Tug Valley men were less concerned with southern nationhood than protecting their community from the depredations of outsiders. And since their community was low priority to the Confederate leadership, guerillas they became.
The Wildcats had a few skirmishes with the Home Guard. But set piece battles were for Lee and Grant: The irregular forces fought by trading ambushes and assassinations. One of these involved the Home Guard cornering and shooting Devil Anse’s friend, Mose Cline. In retaliation, Devil Anse personally assassinated the leader of the Home Guard, Bill Francis, shooting him at his home early one morning.
If the last phase of the feud was somewhat warlike, then the Civil War in the Tug Valley was somewhat feudlike.
Asa Harmon McCoy was assassinated in 1865. There are different versions of the story floating around, but the version Waller gives is that the killing happened near Asa’s home. Devil Anse was then sick at his own home, and most believe the killing was carried out by his uncle, Jim Vance.
Waller doesn’t dwell on whether Devil Anse, as leader of the Wildcats, would have given the order. In any case, some people say the feud began with this killing. Some even say the feud itself was an extension of the Civil War.
Waller dismisses the latter: Most McCoys were Confederate supporters as well. Even Old Ranel fought in the Confederate Army. And the Logan Wildcats included a Johnson McCoy. You can’t parse the Hatfield-McCoy feud as Confederacy versus Union.
As for Asa’s death being the start of the feud: While they were on opposite sides of the war, it’s hard to imagine Ranel McCoy would take the murder of his brother lightly. It seems likely he bore a grudge over it. All the same, the death went unavenged. There is not even any record of legal action over it. Whatever anyone felt subjectively, behaviorally the McCoys tolerated the killing.
Waller thinks this was the will of the community. Given that most of his neighbors and kinsmen sided with the Confederacy, Asa was likely viewed a traitor. Thus, the killing was widely seen as legitimate, or at least understandable. Even those who mourned his death might have found his actions embarrassing and hard to defend. Community consensus was to let it slide. And many who bore the McCoy name continued to have peaceful dealings with Devil Anse Hatfield over the next decade.
The Devil Rises
After the Civil War, modernity began to catch up with the Tug Valley. The population nearly doubled in the latter half of the 19th century, and the old semi-subsistence economy could no longer sustain their numbers. Land and game were harder to come by.
But the market economy was making new inroads. The timber industry was booming, with timber crews cutting down the big trees and using horses and mules to drag them to the river, where they were floated to lumber mills downstream.
One of the earliest and most successful entrants to this new industry was Devil Anse. A sharp and aggressive businessman, his timber operation rapidly expanded. He became wealthy and influential. By the late 1870s he owned much land and employed a big timber crew. This stature, and the economic ties it created, helped him attract partisans during the feud.
But his rise also bred enemies. Some of this might simply be a consequence of what sociologist Donald Black calls “the crime of doing too well” — a man who rises above former equals puts a target on his back. But there was also the fact that Devil Anse was litigious.
Much of his newfound land wealth came from a lawsuit against Perry Cline, the brother of Asa Harmon McCoy’s widow. The details of the case aren’t clear, but the eventual settlment saw Cline lose his entire family inheritance: 5,000 acres along Grapevine Creek. The sudden loss of so much wealth surely embittered Cline, who left West Virginia and moved to the county seat of Pikeville.
For Devil Anse, the new land increased his ability to reward kin, friends, and other supporters. Indeed, Devil Anse was a river to his people:
“During the 1880s, when the number of landless households for the county as a whole remained static at 45 percent, the figure for the Hatfields shrank to only 23 percent, reflecting the dissemination of the Grapevine land among Anse’s supporters.”
Old Ranel McCoy, on the other hand, remained a farmer of lesser means. Waller thinks he might also have lacked respect, even among his kin. His father had garnered a bad reputation — partly because his wife divorced him after fifty years of marriage in a case that involved airing many complaints about his foolishness and irresponsibility. Some might have thought Ranel was drifting in a similar direction as he aged. And Waller — who seems to dislike him — paints the man as a morose drama queen, prone to complaining to all who would listen.
His complaint in 1878 was that Floyd Hatfield had stolen his hogs.
The Hog Dispute
Floyd Hatfield was actually from a different branch of the Hatfields than Devil Anse. This branch dwelt on the Kentucky side of the river, and included Devil Anse’s cousin, Preacher Anse. Such nicknames are important in small communities where everyone names children after living friends and relatives. Floyd had just named his newborn son Anse as well.
At the time of the hog dispute Floyd still lived in Kentucky, where he was married to Ranel’s cousin Nancy. Thus he had family ties to Ranel and was part of a family that even Ranel seemed to get along with.
On the other hand, Floyd worked for Devil Anse. And Devil Anse had just sold him a nice lot of land in West Virginia — at the time of the dispute Floyd was preparing to move himself and Nancy across the river to live there. One might wonder whether little baby Anse was named after Preacher or Devil.
The ties are important to consider, because Old Ranel appears to come out of this conflict sorer than ever toward Devil Anse and his circle. It could be the hog case began as a separate conflict, but Ranel extended blame to Floyd’s patron across the river, adding to his existing grudge. Or it could be the opposite, with Floyd’s growing ties to Devil Anse making him an object of suspicion for Old Ranel. And either might have been exacerbated by Ranel starting to spend time with Perry Cline, who’d moved to Kentucky after losing his land to Devil Anse.
In any case, Old Ranel took the matter before the law. Which, given how the courts worked at the time, meant he took the case before his local district’s justice of the peace: Preacher Anse Hatfield.
That McCoy was willing to bring his case before him suggests that he didn’t mistrust all Hatfields, and that Preacher Anse was expected to render impartial justice despite his kinship to Floyd.
Of course, as Waller points out, the court districts were so small that any justice was bound to have ties to one side or another in just about any dispute. The system simply wouldn’t be workable if these ties required the justice to recuse himself. The ties were taken for granted, as was the justice’s intimate knowledge of all the parties involved, and the wider community’s detailed knowledge of the case.
For all that, Preacher Anse felt concerned enough about neutrality to select a jury that had equal numbers of Hatfields and McCoys on it.
The jury decided in favor of Floyd. Key to this outcome were two things that Old Ranel probably viewed as betrayals.
The first is that Bill Staton, the son of Ranel’s cousin, testified on behalf of Floyd. Staton might have had a family connection to the McCoys, but he also had connections to the Hatfields, two of whom had married his sisters. Notably, he had settled on the West Virginia side, among his brothers-in-law.
The second betrayal was that one McCoy juror, Ranel’s own nephew Selkirk, broke ranks and voted against his uncle.
Notably, Selkirk and his sons both worked on Devil Anse’s timber crew. The association was profitable. Though he owned nothing in 1870, a few years after the trial the census recorded him having large landholdings on the West Virginia side of the river, where he lived next door to Devil Anse’s brother.
Hotheads
Old Ranel grumbled and griped about the outcome of the case but took no action himself. Instead, it was younger men who escalated things. Old Ranel’s nephews Sam and Paris acted on their uncle’s grudge against Bill Staton and Selkirk McCoy, repeatedly getting into arguments and fights with the two “traitors.” In June of 1880, the fight escalated and Staton was killed.
The killing happened in West Virginia, in a district where another Hatfield was justice of the peace — Devil Anse’s brother Valentine.
When Staton was found dead in the woods, everyone assumed the McCoy nephews did it. Valentine appointed two special constables to find Sam and Paris. One of these was his brother Elias, who was good friends with Staton. Writes Waller: “No one was surprised by this integration of personal and public interest; it was not only unavoidable but, from the perspective of local residents, desirable in such situations.”
The McCoys were found and brought to trial. Given that the victim had business ties to one of Valentine’s brothers and was good friends with another, one might expect the court to be biased against the McCoys. And Sam and Paris even lacked strong partisanship from their own kin. The young men were recognized as hotheads, and Sam perhaps something of a weirdo. Several McCoys from both sides of the river testified against them at trial. Despite that, both were acquitted on grounds of self-defense.
The hog dispute is another incident some people will give as the start of the feud. True, it did involve a conflict with a Hatfield leading to a fatality at the hands of McCoys. But the person killed was a Staton, and his death was never avenged. And Devil Anse’s brother presided over the trial that acquitted the McCoys.
Local legend holds that Devil Anse himself pressed his brother Valentine for acquittal, as by this time he had problems enough without giving the McCoys more cause for anger.
Waller suggests rather that the acquittal was the will of the community. Staton and his brother were also seen as hotheads and deemed equally guilty of escalating the conflict with threats, fights, and challenges. Perhaps it was a case of play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And whether anyone actually thought the killing was self-defense in the narrow legal sense, the acquittal may have seemed the best way to keep the peace.
If such was the intent of anyone involved, it didn’t work as planned.
Deputy McCoy Versus Romeo
The death of Staton and acquittal of Sam and Paris didn’t solve anything. Old Ranel and his sons still held a grudge against Devil Anse.
Thus Ranel wasn’t happy when, around this time, his daughter Roseanna started shacking up with Devil Anse’s son, Johnse.
Cohabitation without formal marriage wasn’t that unusual in those parts and wouldn’t have been scandalous. The two lived together for six months on the West Virginia side. After that, Roseanna left Johnse and moved back to Kentucky.
It seems like her problem was getting Johnse to settle down and stop chasing other women. One of those other women might have been her cousin, Nancy McCoy. A few months after she left, Johnse wound up marrying Nancy — who would eventually have similar problems with his tomcatting.
People since have tried to romanticize Johnse’s relationships with McCoy women as something like Romeo and Juliet. But Waller argues there’s nothing to suggest the conflict between their families had much impact on the relationships. If anything, they show that the McCoy women were largely free to court who they wished, regardless of what Old Ranel felt. And apparently their other kin weren’t strong enough partisans of Ranel to give them much grief about it.
Old Ranel was a different story. It’s hard to sort how much of his grudge was due to the killing of Asa, or to the hogs, or to his friendship with Perry Cline, or to general resentment of Devil Anse’s wealth and influence. But it seems that by this point the grudge was intense. For it would have been normal for Roseanna to move back in with her father after leaving Johnse, but she never went home again. She remained estranged from her father the rest of their lives. In her older years she supposedly said she couldn’t stand the look of hate in her father’s eyes when he saw her.
His sons shared his ire. Which helps explain why, when his son Tolbert became a special deputy in Pike County in the fall of 1880, one of his first actions was to enlist his brother Bud to help him arrest Johnse Hatfield.
Waller writes that the charge was carrying a concealed weapon — a trumped-up charge, given that the men of the Tug Valley frequently went about armed in some wise. Wiki gives a different version of this, saying the charge was for bootlegging. Either way, they planned to take Johnse to the county seat of Pikeville for trial.
Roseanna had left him by this time. But she retained enough affection for him to go warn Devil Anse that his son was in trouble.
Devil Anse might have tolerated a local trial, but he had no intention of letting his son go to Pikeville. It was a relatively distant place where he had no allies, and one major enemy in the form of Perry Cline. He quickly gathered a group of supporters to ride to the rescue:
“Tolbert himself described the incident to the sheriff of Pike County this way: Anse and his gang ‘came altogether upon them armed by force and…took from them custody of…Johnson Hatfield, released him, and took the…McCoys into custody as prisoners, kept them as prisoners for a long time, cursed and abused them.’”
After his release, Tolbert hurried to the justice of the peace and obtained arrest warrants for Anse and all his men. Three months later Elias and Floyd Hatfield were arrested in Pike County. But it seemed as if few were on Tolbert’s side, perhaps because they too were worried about the conflict escalating. Two of his own cousins testified in support of the Hatfields, and they were released.
Blood Vengeance
It’s not until 1882 that we get a clear case of a killing followed by blood vengeance. It started with a fight on Election Day.
Tolbert McCoy was likely still smarting from his failed arrest of Johnse and the failed prosecution of Elias and Floyd. But he, like a lot of other young men in a community where land was now in short supply, also had economic concerns. And the election day fight began with a conflict over money.
Tolbert had been badgering “Bad Lias” Hatfield all day, claiming that Bad Lias owed him money for a fiddle. Bad Lias kept insisting he had already long ago paid.
Bad Lias was part of the Kentucky branch of Hatfields, who remained on good terms with the McCoys, and he wasn’t part of Devil Anse’s circle. It’s likely this was a separate conflict, unrelated to the grudge against Devil Anse. Only it didn’t stay that way, for as the argument escalated, Devil Anse’s brother Ellison waded in, shouting “I’m the best goddamn man on earth!”
If his plan was to distract Tolbert from badgering Bad Lias, it went horribly right. Tolbert flew into a rage and stabbed Ellison at least a dozen times. Despite the wounds, Ellison manage to pick up a large rock. He was a big man and might have managed to brain Tolbert if Tolbert’s brothers Pharmer and Bud hadn’t jumped in. Bud also stabbed Ellison, and Pharmer shot him.
Waller argues that up to this point, Devil Anse had been fairly restrained in his response to the McCoy boys. He’d let Staton go unavenged and his killers be acquitted, had taken Johnse from custody by force but without harming his captors, and had allowed Elias and Floyd to face trial for their part in it. But, says Waller, everyone in the community must have anticipated he would resort to violence now.
The killing happened in the district where Preacher Anse Hatfield was justice of the peace. He enlisted two Pike County constables to take the McCoys away to Pikeville to await trial.
Meanwhile, Ellison was mortally wounded but still alive. His brother Elias took charge of him and sent word to Devil Anse and Valentine that their brother was at death’s door. It was evening by this point, and Devil Anse and Valentine didn’t arrive until morning.
But the constables taking the McCoy boys to Pikeville had tarried overnight, dining and sleeping at Floyd McCoy’s nearby home. Thus, the next morning they hadn’t gone far down the road when Elias and Valantine Hatfield caught up with them. Valentine, himself a justice of the peace, made his case to the constables that the boys ought not be taken to relatively distant Pikeville, but should be held in the district where the crime occurred.
“Nothing illustrates the dilemma of all the participants in this strange drama more than their responses to this difficult situation. The guards and constables had been instructed by such a respected authority figure as Preacher Anse Hatfield, the justice of the peace, to take the boys to Pikeville Jail, but now they were being told by another justice, one just as respected in age and position, to cancel that order and return to the Tug Valley. Not only that, but his argument made good sense. Pikeville was not really a part of their community … consequently, the constables made no resistance and decided to return with Valentine and their prisoners to the Tug River.”
They took the prisoners to the home of Preacher Anse, where Devil Anse was waiting with a group of twenty or thirty supporters. It was now evening again, and most of the supporters milled around outside while Preacher Anse, Devil Anse, and the constables argued over how to handle the situation.
Apparently Devil Anse lost his patience with the arguments, for he marched out, assumed a military bearing, and told his supporters to “fall into line.” They then tied the three McCoys to a corn-hauling sledge so they could take them across the river to West Virginia.
There Devil Anse held the McCoys prisoner while waiting to see if Ellison would recover. At one point the young McCoy men’s Aunt Sally and Tolbert’s wife Mary came to plead for their lives. Devil Anse was firm: He’d allow the McCoys to go to trial in Pike County only if Ellison survived. If not, he was going to kill them himself.
Waller claims Valentine and Elias counseled against this. Perhaps suspecting his counsel was in vain, Valentine, in a nod to his role of justice of the peace, tried for some facsimile of legal process. He questioned the McCoys and witnesses to establish their guilt. He was especially concerned with finding out if the youngest of them, 18-year-old Bud, had actually stabbed Ellison.
When Ellison finally expired, Devil Anse had foresight enough to do the deed in another jurisdiction. He and twenty or so of his supporters took the three McCoys — Tolbert, Pharmer and Bud — back across the river, to the Kentucky side. And there, on the banks of the Tug Fork, they tied them to some paw paw trees, blindfolded them, asked them for their last words, and shot them to death.
And now, Dear Reader, the post grows overlong. To find out what happens next, check out Part 2.
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