The Hatfields and the McCoys (2 page)

The forefather of the McCoy family, William, lived for a time, according to family tradition, in Maryland on the site of the battlefield at Antietam. Later McCoy resided in Montgomery County, Virginia, and in 1804 he and his family settled on Johns Creek, in Kentucky, at present Gulnare. His son Daniel married Margaret Taylor in Floyd County, Kentucky, probably in the part that in 1821 became Pike County. Among the thirteen children of Daniel and Margaret was Randolph, the leader of the McCoy side of the famous feud. In 1840 Daniel McCoy and his wife moved to Logan County, (West) Virginia, where they lived until their deaths.

Randolph McCoy, usually called Randall or Ran'l, was born October 30, 1825, in Pike County. On December 9, 1849, he married Sarah, better known as Sally, McCoy, his first cousin. For a time the couple resided in Logan County, but they later returned to Pike County. They made their home on Blackberry Fork of Pond Creek, a tributary of Tug Fork, on property that was willed to Sarah by her father in 1855. Randolph and Sarah became the parents of sixteen children, including Josephine, James H., Floyd, Tolbert, Samuel, Lilburn, Ali-fair, Rose Anna, Calvin, Pharmer, Randolph, Jr., or Bud, William, Trinvilla, Adelaide, Fanny, and an unnamed child.
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The Hatfields, more numerous in West Virginia than in Kentucky, probably constituted the largest clan in the Tug Valley. One political rally in the Tug region in the 1880s attracted over three hundred persons who either bore the name of Hatfield or had Hatfield blood in their veins.
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The McCoys also lived on both sides of the Tug Fork, but most of them resided in Pike County, Kentucky. Both families were extensively related to other residents of the Tug Valley.

In their physical attributes and their attitudes the Hatfields and the McCoys showed striking similarities. The McCoys have been described as “in general tall and lithe and handsome.” Possibly of Lowland Scottish stock, but intermarried with the Highland Celtic strain, some of them had a slightly olive complexion and either dark or auburn hair.
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The Hatfields tended to be large and to possess great physical strength. One contemporary writer described the Hatfields of the late nineteenth century as “a high spirited family, but … kind, neighborly, and just to all who treat them justly.” He went on, however, to declare that “an enemy … might as well kick over a bee-gum in warm weather, and expect to escape the sting of the insect, as to tramp on the toes of one of these spirited, tall sons of the mountains, and not expect to be knocked down.”
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His words applied equally well to the McCoys.

The Hatfield and McCoy families belonged to the southern yeoman class. Devil Anse Hatfield and Randolph McCoy both owned considerable land and livestock.
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They and their relatives lived chiefly by farming and hunting, and in later years many of the menfolk engaged in logging operations. Like many dwellers in the hills, some members of the two families carried on the agriculturally related business of making whiskey, which they considered a legitimate way of marketing grain crops. They put up a stiff resistance to the law of 1862 which made illicit distilling a federal offense and which appeared to them a gross violation of individual rights and an unwarranted infringement upon the economic prerogatives of self-sustaining citizens. In this respect, their attitudes were precisely those which in 1794 had spurred Pennsylvania farmers to armed resistance of the whiskey tax imposed by the federal government as part of Alexander Hamilton's financial plans.
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Casual visitors sometimes had difficulty in reconciling the independent economic circumstances of families of the Tug Valley, such as the Hatfields and the McCoys, with the crude-ness of their dwellings. In 1888 T. C. Crawford, a reporter for the
New York World,
visited Devil Anse at his house on Island Creek, a tributary of the Guyandotte River. The clan leader had recently moved there after disposing of five thousand acres of land on the Tug River. The correspondent described Hatfields residence, which was similar to the one which he had left, as a two-room dwelling, one room of which served as a kitchen and dining area and the other as sleeping quarters. A narrow passageway between the two rooms was lined with beds and the loft provided additional sleeping space. The McCoy dwelling on Blackberry Fork was also a double log house, with the two parts connected by a roofed passageway. The main part of the house, commonly called the big house, was a story and a half high, and the other, used as a kitchen and bedroom, was but one story.
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The isolation of the Tug Valley fostered a prolongation of frontier conditions in which education and organized religion suffered. In 1881 Logan County, which included present Mingo County, had seventy-eight schoolhouses, mostly one-room log structures, but as late as 1890 only 44 percent of the children of school age were enrolled in a primary school. A mere 24 percent of those enumerated were in average daily attendance.
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In an effort to provide an opportunity for learning, the Hatfields built a small log schoolhouse on Mate Creek. Its teacher, Charles Carpenter, was a staunch Hatfield partisan in their feud with the McCoys. Boasting that he had been shot at at least once a year for seventeen years, Carpenter impressed others more with his penetrating stare and eternal watchfulness than with devotion to learning.
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Similar conditions prevailed in Pike County, where the superintendent of schools reported in 1884 that “the greatest part” of the schoolhouses had been condemned under recent legislation and that the best teachers had left the county because of inadequate pay. Most of the Pike County school buildings, like those of Logan County, were constructed of logs.
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School terms in both counties lasted about three months each year, which was about average for the Appalachian sections of their respective states. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the leaders of the Hatfield and McCoy clans and many of their supporters used their marks on legal documents, a forceful reminder of the high rate of illiteracy in the mountains.

The weakness of the common school in Pike and Logan counties was matched by that of another civilizing influence, organized religion. Most of the Hatfields and McCoys appear to have leaned toward the Primitive, or Hardshell, Baptist Church. The Reverend Anderson (“Deacon Arise”) Hatfield, a Kentucky cousin of the feud leader of the same name, pastured a church near the junction of Hatfield Branch and

Blackberry Creek in Pike County. At the time of the feud, however, neither of the clan leaders showed much interest in religion. The
New York World
correspondent who visited Devil Anse in 1888 asked his host about his religious views. Devil Anse allegedly replied, “I belong to no Church unless you say that I belong to the one great Church of the world. If you like you can say it is the devil's Church that I belong to.”
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Randolph McCoy, according to a recent chronicler of the McCoy family, believed in God and was certain that no man in his right mind could doubt the existence of the devil, especially if he had lived near the Hatfields.
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The weaknesses of the school and the church in the Tug Valley contrasted sharply with the strong bonds that united families. Where the first two languished, family solidarity and loyalty to the clan assumed a special importance in the hearts of isolated mountaineers. The Hatfields and the McCoys exhibited many of the qualities of family life commonly associated with the southern Appalachians. Both families were large, and children were welcome additions. “Seems like a body ought to have at least twelve,” a statement attributed to an unidentified mountain woman, might very well have been uttered by Levicy Hatfield or Sarah McCoy.
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Equally applicable to the feudists was the observation of one writer, “There is always a welcome for the new little son or daughter, while the affection of the older members of the family for the Teast one' is beautiful and touching.”
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At the same time there existed a profound deference to the aged. Hatfields, for example, referred to Sarah McCoy as “Aunt Sally” and to James McCoy, her eldest son, as “Uncle Jim,” while the McCoys spoke of Valentine Hatfield, the brother of Devil Anse, as “Uncle Wall.”

The upbringing of the mountain boy requires special notice. He often grew up untempered by strong parental or social discipline and with “neither training nor example in self-control.” Sometimes his father, in furious temper, whipped him, and at times his exasperated mother carried out an oft-made threat to “wear him out with a hickory,” but most of the time he remained free to follow his own impulses. His diversions, such as hunting and fishing, were essentially solitary in nature, and his opportunities for acquiring self-control in social situations were limited.

In many mountain neighborhoods a “gang” spirit differentiated the boys “up the branch,” for instance, from those “down the creek.” Lacking constructive outlets for expression, this gang spirit often degenerated into a lawless independence and rural insularity manifested in “rocking” individuals and objects that met with disfavor, burning property, robbing orchards, and similar offenses. The mountain youth, sensitive and quick to take umbrage, passionately desired to be the victor in any difference with others. As one observer noted, “Ridicule or the suspicion that someone is ‘throwing off on him' he cannot bear, and he is quicker with a knife, or, when he is older, with the pistol, than with his fists.”
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In their national backgrounds, religious outlook, educational attainments or lack of them, concerns for family unity, and concepts of child rearing, the Hatfields and the McCoys did not differ substantially from other southern Appalachian families. It is futile, therefore, to seek the origins of the feud in characteristics that were as common to families who did not resort to bloodshed as to those who did. The intense family loyalties, generally regarded as contributing to the dimensions of the feud, for example, may have been offset to an extent by connections of the two clans with each other and with other families of the Tug Valley. Although the prevailing characteristics of Tug Valley society may not explain the reasons for the Hatfield-McCoy vendetta, they nevertheless provide an essential backdrop for any understanding of the circumstances which did produce it.

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THE LEGACY OF
THE CIVIL WAR

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OST WRITERS on the Hatfield-McCoy feud, regardless of their conclusions about its origins, agree that it did not begin before the Civil War. Some claim has indeed been made that the vendetta had its beginnings in the English civil strife of the seventeenth century, when the Hatfields allegedly supported Oliver Cromwell and the McCoys defended the rights of the Stuarts and Charles II. If any such division between the two families ever existed, it had totally subsided by the time they settled in Kentucky and West Virginia. For nearly half a century, in fact, they lived at peace with each other in the Tug Valley.

Before the outbreak of violence between their families, Hatfields and McCoys had occasionally intermarried. Two marriages that closely linked them before the end of the Civil War were those of Ephraim Hatfield and Elizabeth McCoy in 1859 and Ellison Hatfield and Sarah Ann Staton in 1865. Ephraim was a cousin of Devil Anse Hatfield, and Elizabeth bore the same relationship to Randolph McCoy. A closer connection between the two families appeared in the marriage of Ellison Hatfield, the brother of Devil Anse, and Sarah Ann Staton, a first cousin once removed of Randolph.
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Both the Hatfields and the McCoys had intermarried with other prominent families of the Tug Valley, including the Whitts, Wed dingtons, Scotts, Blackburns, Justices, Clines, Staffords, Blankenships, Charleses, and Chafins. Many residents of Logan and Pike counties had relatives in both camps during the feud.

Despite the close relationships among the families living there, the Tug Valley experienced the same depth of division and bitterness commonly found in the border states in the Civil War period. The Hatfields favored the Confederacy, as did the majority of the McCoys, but a few of the latter supported the Union. The oft-repeated assertion that the immediate families of Devil Anse Hatfield and Randolph McCoy fought on opposite sides in the war and emerged from the conflict with enduring enmity has no foundation in fact.

About a week after he married Levicy Chafin, Anderson Hatfield joined a local militia company. Although some accounts state that in 1862 he enlisted as a first lieutenant in Company A, Forty-fifth Battalion, Virginia Infantry, and rose to the rank of captain, extant records show that he served as a private in Company D and took unofficial leave on February 1, 1863. In late August of that year, however, he was a first lieutenant in Company B, which was then stationed at Saltville, Virginia.
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Devil Anse apparently deserted the Confederate service before the end of 1863. One explanation offered for his departure is that he refused to carry out an order of a court-martial to execute two soldiers, his cousin George Hatfield and Philip Lambert, for taking unofficial leave. Another version is that he lost interest in the Confederate cause after the death of his friend Brigadier General John B. Floyd, who was removed from his command by President Jefferson Davis following the Union capture of Fort Donelson. Floyd later became a major general in the Virginia forces and served in the Big Sandy Valley, where he suffered an extreme exposure that may have contributed to his death on August 26, 1863. Either reason appears to be in keeping with the temperament and character of Devil Anse.

The desertion of Devil Anse, nevertheless, may also be viewed in a broader context. The entry of West Virginia into the Union on June 20, 1863, left Confederate sympathizers within its borders in a precarious position. They had much to lose, both in political rights and property confiscations, by open opposition to the new state in which they resided. By the latter part of 1863 Union forces clearly had the upper hand in most of West Virginia and in eastern Kentucky as well. Moreover, the tide of war had turned against the Confederacy on nearly every major battlefront. Recognizing that their families and property at home were in grave jeopardy and having no desire to become martyrs to a lost cause, numerous Hatfields and McCoys, as well as members of other Tug Valley clans, began to desert the Confederate ranks in the autumn and winter of 1863. The Hatfield deserters included not only Devil Anse but also two of his brothers, Ellison, a second lieutenant, and Elias, a private, and his cousin Ephraim in Company B of the Forty-fifth Battalion. Among the McCoys who left Confederate service was Selkirk, who resided in Logan County. Randolph McCoy also apparently took unofficial leave in 1863, although some accounts maintain that he spent the last years of the conflict as a prisoner of war.
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