My favorite books about the Hatfield–McCoy feud

Having grown up in an industrial town in East Tennessee, I read this 1962 classic by a Kentucky lawyer and legislator and first realized that my homeland was regarded as disadvantaged by the rest of the country. Caudill summarized the history of our Appalachian region, depicting the poverty and poor health of its inhabitants and the degradation of its natural environment. He described how extractive industries had removed the region’s coal and timber and funneled the profits into the pockets of distant shareholders. He also discussed the feuds at the end of the nineteenth century, as subsistence farmers fought to maintain their way of life against the encroaching forces of capitalism.

As a child, I always heard that the Hatfield-McCoy feud started because someone left a gate open and a hog escaped. Later, I read versions that portrayed the feud as a swashbuckling adventure story of murder and retribution, with a Romeo and Juliet romance thrown in. But Waller’s study treats the feud as a serious historical event with grave political and economic consequences. She outlines the genesis of the ugly and insulting stereotype of the Depraved Savages of the Southern Appalachians (popping up most recently in the bestselling Hillbilly Elegy) and the ways it was deployed to justify the region’s exploitation by timber and coal companies.

This well-researched book is the most authoritative account yet of the Hatfield-McCoy feud and its ramifications for the subsequent economic and environmental destruction of Appalachia.

In researching Blood Feud, I discovered that some of my ancestors were Union guerrillas who operated near the future feud area. Devil Anse Hatfield led a unit of Confederate home guards in that same region. Hatfield’s uncle, who is widely believed to have murdered Harmon McCoy in the opening salvo of the feud, was said subsequently to have killed a cousin of my father’s uncle during a guerrilla skirmish. I had always understood the Civil War to entail vast battalions of uniformed soldiers mowing each other down as they marched toward enemy lines. A Savage Conflict made me realize that the brutal depredations of guerrillas played a major role in the war and left a legacy of bitter factional hatred that factored into the subsequent feuds.

This book by a Kentucky journalist, based on the sparse court records and on interviews with descendants of the feudists, helped me understand that the Hatfield-McCoy feud was not an isolated occurrence. In addition to the Hatfield-McCoy feud, it describes five other feuds being conducted in Kentucky at the same time. There appear to be similar patterns governing the combustion and ferocity of all these feuds, having to do with a struggle for control over the shifting social, economic, and political hierarchies following the upheavals of the Civil War and the invasions launched by lumber and coal companies.

Studying the Appalachian feuds, I started wondering if this level of violence were normal human behavior. This book assured me that the feud region during those years had a homicide rate more than ten times the national homicide rate today. A newspaper at the time labeled the area “The Corsica of America.” The authors explain that many Europeans who settled in the Appalachians were from the British borderlands. Both locations hosted herding economies and produced herders who prided themselves on possessing the strength, cunning, and violence to protect their livestock and fend off potential rustlers. Stolen hogs, horses, and cattle played key roles in several guerrilla raids during the Civil War and in the feuds afterward.