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Photos courtesy of Pike County KY Tourism Commission ("Devil Anse" Hatfield photo courtesy West Virginia State Archives)
Pictured from left to right: Randolph "Ole Ran'l" McCoy, Johnse Hatfield, Roseanna McCoy and Capt. William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield.
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Contributed by Ron G. Blackburn
Anse Hatfield Letter
This letter was dictated by Anse Hatfield and sent to Perry Cline after Cap Hatfield, his son, killed, or was involved in killing, Jeff McCoy. In later years, the letter was given by the Cline family to the family of Preacher Anse Hatfield, leading to the idea that Preacher Anse Hatfield wrote the letter.
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Contributed by Ron G. Blackburn
Anse Hatfield Letter
This letter was dictated by Anse Hatfield and sent to Perry Cline after Cap Hatfield, his son, killed, or was involved in killing, Jeff McCoy. In later years, the letter was given by the Cline family to the family of Preacher Anse Hatfield, leading to the idea that Preacher Anse Hatfield wrote the letter.
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Contributed by Clifford New.
Johnse and Nancy Marriage 1
Marriage record of Johnse Hatfield (son of Devil Anse) and Nancy McCoy (daughter of Asa Harmon McCoy). They were married at the home of Nancy's mother Martha, with Perry Cline as witness. This record contradicts claims that the two eloped to Pikeville to marry over the vehement protest of Nancy's mother.
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Contributed by Ron G. Blackburn
Johnse and Nancy Marriage 2
Marriage record of Johnse Hatfield (son of Devil Anse) and Nancy McCoy (daughter of Asa Harmon McCoy). They were married at the home of Nancy's mother Martha, with Perry Cline as witness. This record contradicts claims that the two eloped to Pikeville to marry over the vehement protest of Nancy's mother.
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Contributed by Barbara Vance Cherup.
Paw Paw indictment.
This is the original Pike County indictment for the men believed to be involved in the killing of the three McCoy brothers in 1882. It is unclear who gave this list of names to the Pike County prosecutor.
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Contributed by Barbara Vance Cherup.
Preacher Anse testimony
A portion of the testimony of Preacher Anse Hatfield against the West Virginia Hatfields in the trial against Valentine "Wall" Hatfield. The testimony of Preacher Anse is important, since it shows that he strongly advised Randolph McCoy to get his three sons to Pikeville that night, since he feared, rightly, that Devil Anse would come after them. Randolph and his sons decided not to go that night but to wait until the following day. This miscalculation ultimately resulted in the deaths of the three boys.
By Altina Waller, author of "Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900 (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)"
I am not native to Appalachia; I grew up in New England and earned a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Massachusetts. I became intrigued by the Hatfield McCoy Feud when I took a job at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Was this famous feud just a legend or an actual historical event? As I began to read up I realized it was indeed a very real historical event. And not only that, it had received very little attention from historians. For such a famous, even iconic event in American history and culture this was quite astonishing. To be sure, a number of books purported to explain the feud but with the exception of one, all had been written by journalists and novelists who had relied primarily and almost exclusively on newspaper accounts that are notoriously inaccurate. The one historian, Otis Rice, who had written about the feud did do some research in court and county records, but he too relied on newspaper stories. This led to grievous errors in identifying the cause of the feud. The cause, according to all these authors was the woeful absence of “civilizing” institutions such as churches, schools and courts. They seemed to agree with historian Arnold Toynbee who wrote that Appalachians were an example of a people who had once possessed civilization and then lost it! Ignorance and blood thirst were the result.
I did not buy it. As a social historian committed to telling the stories of the underdogs of history – Indians, African-Americans, women, working people to name a few – I did not believe the derogatory assumptions made by almost all those who had written about the feud. Were mountain people really some lower form of humanity? And could it be true I asked myself that there was no documentary record other than newspaper accounts? Even my academic colleagues seemed to make that assumption. You won’t be able to do historical research, they insisted, because Appalachians were illiterate and kept no written records. "They shot first and asked questions later,” was a refrain I heard over and over again. I had to find out! My first foray to Logan County, WV and Pike County, KY revealed very quickly that a strong and vibrant judicial system had existed, even surviving the devastation of the Civil War. Waiting to be brought to light were pages upon pages of the judicial proceedings of county courts, extensive records of land transactions and extensive listings of vital records, that is births, marriages and deaths. In addition there were the census records taken every ten years that revealed family relationships, even listings of the value of real estate, farm animals, crops grown and personal property. I could not wait to immerse myself in the documents and find out what really led to the famous feud!
Very quickly it became obvious that there were several puzzling problems with the feud story as it had been conventionally told and is still being told in the recent History Channel mini-series. I will list them here as the issues that first perplexed me and drove me to the documentary record in order to resolve. And it is these issues that these blog posts by myself, Ryan Hardesty, Tom Dotson and Randy Marcum will attempt to thresh out in this series. Here we go:
1. Legend has it that the feud lasted a very long time, even a hundred years or more. That indeed is the definition of a feud – a very long running dispute between two families that can’t themselves identify the original cause. But the documentary record showed quite clearly that the violence and conflict lasted from the legendary dispute over a hog in 1878 to the hanging of one of the participants, Ellison Mounts, in 1890, only 12 years. Furthermore, between 1882 and 1887, five of those 12 years, there were no incidents that can be connected to the feud. Thus, if you count the 5 year hiatus, there seems to be only 7 years of real conflict! Could this really be called a “feud?”
2. Legend holds that dozens, even hundreds, were slaughtered during the course of the feud. I could identify no more than 12 victims of the conflict and that number includes at least one person who probably was not a feud victim. It is undeniably tragic and shocking when 12 people are killed but it is hardly the hundreds of feud mythology.
3. Legend would have us believe that all the Hatfields banded together to battle (usually through ambush and other nefarious methods) all McCoys. It was a conflict in which no one with the Hatfield or McCoy name was neutral. But even a cursory perusal of the documents shows that only a small percentage of either Hatfields or McCoys were involved in any aspect of the feud. Most members of those families as well as most of their neighbors, shocked and terrified by the violence, distanced themselves as much as possible from the conflict. Even more striking, there were McCoys in the Hatfield group and Hatfields in the McCoy group! What is going on here? This is another fact that does not fit the definition of a feud!
These are the questions and inconsistencies that I hoped to understand by diving into the written documentary records that everyone had told me did not exist. What I and others have found by taking a serious historical approach is both unexpected and fascinating. More fascinating, I would add, than the story perpetrated by the legend.