Days of Darkness by John Ed Ed Pearce

Technology. The most unusual—and thorough—survey of the feud is Feud: Hatfields, McCoys and Economic Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900, by Altina Waller of the State University of New York. Her work is more a study of the economic transition of the remote valley where the feud occurred than of the feud itself, but perhaps that puts the feud into a more logical context. If it hadn’t happened when and where it happened, probably few people would have paid much attention. As it was, the killing associated with the feud was almost over before the press began its sensational coverage, which was usually full of error. And the latter half of what is called the Hatfield-McCoy feud was actually a battle between other men trying to use the feud to further their political and economic ambitions.
    Waller’s view of the feudists is more charitable than most, depicting both Hatfields and McCoys as solid mountain folk caught in economic and social changes brought about by the advent of industrialism in the form of railroads and mining. She sees Randolph (Ranel or Randal) McCoy as a moping failure who resented Anderson (“DevilAnse”) Hatfield for his greater entrepreneurial success more than for the Hatfields’ murder of his family. Tolbert McCoy stabbed Ellison Hatfield because of his feelings of inferiority, not because he was a mean drunk. And so on.
    Waller may be right. Certainly hers is the most painstaking study of the feud. But the layman, lacking psychological or sociological expertise, might be forgiven for seeing the feudists as two groups of basically backward, mean-tempered people, by no stretch of the imagination mountain aristocracy. It is true that descendants of Devil Anse Hatfield, like the offspring of many of our frontier thugs and robber barons, rose to positions of prominence, as did some McCoys. But, again, it is hard to see Anse himself as much more than an illiterate, selfish killer and a rather cowardly one at that, a frontier Godfather who sent his minions out to kill off his enemies, and who let them go to prison and the gallows for it while he sat back and profited from the killings.
    How did it start in the first place? Was it because of a hog, as some have claimed? Emotional holdovers from the Civil War? A romance shattered by family hatred? Was it a clash of modernism with mountain tradition? As Kentucky historian James C. Klotter has written, it is unlikely that there was one single cause. “In their time,” he says, “the Hatfields and McCoys fought for justice as they envisioned it.” And Otis Rice probably puts it succinctly when he says in his study of the trouble between the two families, “The conflict grew out of an accumulation of honest grievances and imagined wrongs” rather than a specific incident.
    Whatever its causes, the bad blood between the families burst into open violence on August 7, 1882, at the Blackberry Creek precinct polling place in Pike County, Kentucky. Though they lived across the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, in Logan (now Mingo) County, West Virginia, the Hatfields ordinarily came over for the day, since election day was a social as well as a political occasion. The women cooked a lot of food, the men brought a lot of whiskey, and there was a great deal of visiting and talking, and flirting among the young.
    The Tug was more a geographic than a social boundary. Many Hatfields lived on the Kentucky side of the river, some McCoys or their relatives lived on the West Virginia side. There was quite a bit of social interplay between the two families; McCoy boys referred to Valentine (“Wall”) Hatfield as “Uncle Wall,” and two of the men who later helped beat her almost to death and burned her home called Sarah McCoy “Aunt Sally.” A Hatfield was sheriff of Pike County,Kentucky, and several were magistrates when the feud was in full cry. Trouble-making Johnse Hatfield married Nancy McCoy. And so on.