Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  “People who live lonely lives and have few neighbors”

  Perhaps not surprisingly, the word feud “made a comparatively late appearance” in the English lexicon and is “of unsolved etymology.”10 The Oxford English Dictionary records its appearance in relation to enmity and violence no earlier than the thirteenth century.11 At least as late as the 1820s, scholars of medieval legal history used feud interchangeably with fief, a word for land tenure, not ritualistic bloodshed.12 By the time Noah Webster got around to providing his own American definition, it was requisitely treated as a vestigial British concept, “irrelevant or impossible” in an American context and, almost by definition, “consigned to the past.”13

  Nineteenth-century Americans deemed the blood feud a social mechanism carried out through pathos but motivated by ethos—at least the obscure ethos of certain erstwhile societies. Its tendency toward reciprocity for wrongs done to an individual or group were carried out in the conservative interest of maintaining a mutually accommodating status quo.14 Neither insurrectionary nor counterinsurrectionary, blood feuds were motivated by “strong feelings of justice and moral order” that traversed the possibility of chaos presented by a weak state.15 Nineteenth-century sociologists Émile Durkheim and Max Weber each considered the blood feud a phenomenon exclusive to less developed societies. But Durkheim did not give violence as much credit for sustaining social order as did Weber. For Weber, the arrangements involved in a blood feud comprised a prototypical state; Durkheim instead cast the blood feud in a condition of prepolitical statelessness.16 Despite their divergent interpretations of feuds, there was a clear consensus: it was a specific kind of retributive violence with no direct relationship to modernity, and was only acceptable (if at all) in societies that had not achieved the occidental world’s level of social and political rationalization.17

  But most Civil War–era Americans got their blood feuds from novels and plays rather than encyclopedia or history books. Proper storybook feuds contained abrupt, impetuous acts of brutality instigated by hot blood and passion, not circuitous, studied schemes devised by politicians or generals and carried out by henchmen or soldiers. As Romeo and Juliet’s opening scene demonstrates, underlings could act as violent proxies for their masters, but they did so for the same purposes of defending honor rather than over issues of state power. Fictional feuds, almost by definition, were more farcical than catastrophic at their points of departure, like Lilliput’s factional division over breaking eggs. Their narratives invariably cautioned the listener as to the triviality and frivolity of the feud’s point of origin as well the needlessness of the ensuing violence. Questions of justice or injustice were not addressed, lest one party seem too much the protagonist. Both sides must be at fault so that, through the equanimity of mutual violence, neither was at fault. Therefore, feud came to represent conflicts whose genesis was unworthy of serious inquiry.

  Verona’s doomed lovers and their feuding clans were more than familiar to Shakespeare-obsessed Americans. But more recent writers also played a major hand in popularizing the theme. Novelist Sir Walter Scott used feud motifs, skirting the boundary between myth and political history in late medieval Scotland; Scott always made a clear-cut distinction between the contingent/exogenous struggle against English oppression and the inherent/ endogenous Highland feuds, the latter always originating “in some quarrel of little importance.”18 Notably, Scott’s most avid readers were white southerners, and his indirect influence on their mores and behavior was a subject of snickering commentary on their society’s belligerent inclinations. “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war,” Mark Twain quipped shortly before the release of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a novel featuring one of the most noted feud narratives in American letters.19

  Scott’s seventeenth-century Scotland was most antebellum Americans’ point of reference for feuds, but by midcentury, Sicily and Corsica became equally well known for reciprocal “clan” violence.20 Vendetta, a more recent, Italian import to the English vocabulary, and one more explicitly specific to revenge, became almost synonymous with feud, and in Corsica the practice’s rudiments were recorded in supposedly unbroken forms since the sixteenth century (with suggestions that it actually stretched back at least three centuries before that). In “regions not easily accessible to culture” used by Italian city-states and Ottomans as tokens of empire, vendettas were understandable outcomes of political stresses, according to one sympathetic Prussian. “In a state of nature, and in a society rent asunder by prevailing war and insecurity, the family becomes a state in itself; its members cleave fast to each other; if one is injured, the entire little state is wronged. The family exercises justice only through itself, and the form this exercise takes, is revenge.”21 Most readers looking at the island from the outside world, however, preferred to think of the inherency suggested by the “primitive character” that “survived so many obsolete institutions” of government imposed by other nations over the centuries.22 It was a simpler explanation.

  The Mediterranean model allowed Anglo-Americans to transfer their feud discourse from a temporal other (that is, their own British past) to a geographic, cultural other that persisted into the present. In the mid-eighteenth century, Corsica had formed a republic but was then bloodlessly absorbed by France, a consoling demonstration to sentimental Euro-Americans that political and economic change did not necessarily destroy sturdy folkways.23 This provided a historical correlation with the South that was probably not lost on hopeful postbellum industrialists. After the Civil War the North viewed the white South, lowland or highland, as civilization’s outskirt, just as Corsica was to Europe. White southerners were a fiercely democratic people who could be easily integrated into a larger economy. But most, if not all, accounts of Corsican or southern feuds failed to delve into the material causes of conflict, demonstrating a preference for them to be shrouded in obscurity rather than be brought to the light of day. There was sufficient evidence to show that these feuds did not involve only kinship, but it was a concession that observers made reluctantly.24 When the 1878 courthouse riot on the streets of Jackson, Kentucky, prompted the New York Times to name the state “the Corsica of America,” the editorial growled that “the Kentucky vendetta is worse than that of Corsica, since it includes not near relatives merely, but remote kindred and friends of the parties involved, and is carried on more openly and defiantly.”25 The differences between Kentucky and Corsica could not make the two different, but instead only make the former “worse.” In any case, the Corsican metaphor required little elaboration.

  Narrators of American “feuds,” Jeffrey Guy Johnson has succinctly observed, “have shown little obligation to veracity even when claiming to tell the truth.”26 The interpretation of feud violence among American scholars and lay readers suffered from a liberal conflation of history, current events, and fiction. When the idea of feud violence came to be applied within the United States’ confines, it was to describe events that were “not a discrete social practice with an accepted form, defined historical origins, or customary rules” as were their British or European analogues.27 If nonfictional feuds took place in America, they did so in a new, strange manner in which no one ever declared an “official” customary condition of mutual enmity and attack. In all correctness, the feud in America was little more than an analogy or metaphor. Still, the word persisted.

  Some of the first uses of feud to describe factual deadly violence in North America came from a decidedly non-European subject: white descriptions of Native Americans in the era of removal. During an 1832 trip west of the Mississippi, Washington Irving complained of how difficult it was “to get at the right story” as to the origins of “these feuds between the White & red man.”28 Some years after Cherokee relocation to the Indian Territory, the Polk administration became alarmed by what appeared to be the continuation of preexistent blood feuds among a native population thought to
be pacified and “civilized.”29 In fact, feud scarcely described the reality: a nation thrown into civil war by the conditions of forced removal and competition for power over its new domain. Once Cherokee emissaries arrived in Washington in 1846 to appeal for a brokered peace, it should have been abundantly clear that this was a political fight caused by new exogenously imposed conditions (that is, the previous decade’s federally enforced exile), not the exercising of old hatreds. A Confederate officer’s description of their Civil War partisanship sixteen years later (“the [most] serious feud ever existing among the Cherokee Indians”) suggested that their demonstration was not well remembered.30 Even if the Cherokee Nation was ruptured by civil war as the United States was, the narrative of feud suggested that it was, nevertheless, not part of the “proper” war from a white perspective.

  Reports of blood feuds among the Cherokee provided a precursor to the strange fusion of racial determinism and southernness that would be used to explain feuds among the “pure” Anglo-Saxon/Celtic mountain whites decades later, and it inspired the same debates over “native” populations’ innate depravity versus ability to assimilate.31 The association stuck even after American varieties of feuding had become associated exclusively with eastern Kentucky, where ostensibly Anglo-Saxon “fighters of the fiercest kind” killed without compunction because of the “Indian blood in their veins.”32

  This, however, was not the prevalent racial association. Whiteness in its purest form (a valuable nineteenth-century commodity) was a more popular link to feuds, and familial feuds were said to be most common among a lowland South’s aristocracy “resigned to [violence’s] necessity.”33 The lack of any “strong extra-familial institutions,” such as a state that effectively monopolized legitimate violence, augmented the social significance of kinship beyond the normal boundaries of civil society.34 Even when the divergence began over “manifestations of public life,” it always ultimately shrunk “to the sphere of the family.”35 As Bertram Wyatt-Brown observed in Southern Honor, prolonged violent feuds between individuals or families often prevented the more ordered practice of dueling; duels were a procedural safety valve for masculine passions, while feuds seemed to be passion unfettered.36 This may be why such protracted conflicts appear in the historical record only through a glass darkly. Most accounts of Old South feuds, in fiction (more often) or nonfiction, were published in the North after “the fomenters of the great southern feud” [that is, the Civil War] were finally “out of sight and out of mind.” All, like Twain, used the narrative of feud to underscore the obsolescence of white southern society.37

  Real-life occurrences that resembled the feud narrative were rare, such as when novelist William Faulkner’s great-grandfather William C. Falkner began a personal vendetta against an entire family in 1849. Falkner’s feud with this Hindman family seemed to be an outgrowth of his status anxiety (he began initially stabbing and shooting after he blackballed a newcomer from a Mississippi temperance club) as he rose through the ranks of local society, with the Hindmans opposing his ascension at every turn. The “feuds” in which he took part were probably not ritualized and given to particular codes of behavior, but were called feuds only because of the length of time Falkner dedicated to his various fracases and because he earned the hatred of multiple males in the same family. More than likely, Falkner was simply a belligerent who attracted others like him. After he became “one of the richest men in his county,” a former business partner killed him, sans façons, in 1889.38

  Most southern feuds were understood to be between entire families and, through fact or embellishment, they followed the European model of ordered equal reciprocity over long periods of time. In 1863 a Union soldier observed an ongoing “family feud . . . quite ‘Corsican’ in its character” between neighboring Tennessee families even as the Chattanooga campaign was fought around them.39 The end of a twenty-one-year “domestic war” in eastern Tennessee’s Carter County (begun “about a very trifling affair”) ended in 1867 when the last male members of the respective families shot each other to death on the streets of the county seat (the possibility that this might somehow relate to the dozens of other white intraracial homicides all over eastern Tennessee that year was not suggested).40

  Scott, Honoré de Balzac, and other authors of feud narratives fascinated antebellum American readers, but the theme took on added significance after Appomattox. A feud was an “ideology-free conflict between evenly matched families,” a perfect allegory to white northerners and southerners bent upon reuniting their nation-state and separating past from present without dealing with the political issues (race and slavery) that precipitated the war.41 But even before the novels that fixed feuding indelibly on the American scene, namely, George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880) and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, the language of feud had already entered into the debate over Reconstruction. The “actual” Darnell-Watson feud Mark Twain reported in his 1883 Life on the Mississippi (and the basis for the feud between the Grangerfords and Shepherdons in the next year’s Huckleberry Finn) began at an undisclosed time over “a horse or a cow” between two well-fixed families on the Kentucky-Tennessee border near the Mississippi River (Twain also used a pretend blood feud between white southern belligerents in the unfinished Simon Wheeler, Detective).42 Recalling his hearing of the family feud before the war. Twain proclaimed that in “no part of the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families” than in the Mississippi backwaters.43 Befitting his jaundiced eye toward white southern society (and toward Sir Walter Scott), Twain made the bond between honor and deadly violence a lampoon, but one derived more from Shakespeare than from verifiable southern history.44

  During the 1870s war of words between northern and southern newspapers, feud took on an unprecedented hyperbolic dimension. For southern conservatives, as demonstrated in an earlier chapter, it framed violence without any racial (therefore political) significance. It denoted locally endogenous causes for violence, suggesting that it would be appreciated if the North minded its own business.45 The North, on the other hand, could use a southern feud to exemplify not only white southerners’ irredeemable affinity for needless violence, but also the region’s continuing sustenance of a useless, premodern aristocracy fed upon the labor of others and, consequently, self-destructive.46 In both cases, the narrative of feud focused on the rock-ribbed inherencies of culture rather than the plastic contingencies of politics. It served the purposes of northern Republicans as they began giving up on the South and, therefore, inadvertently empowered white southerners as well.

  As long as feuds seemed to be a habit of the white southern gentry—purely communal and fought over personal or local trivialities, strictly horizontal (as well as inherent to a society given to honor-based violence), and not concentrated in one discrete area of the region—hardly any criticism was projected in their direction. As indicated by the New York Times’s 1872 prediction of an oncoming “good old fashioned southern feud” in Virginia, they were rare enough to be thought of more as quaint than threatening even as southern Republicans were harassed and killed throughout the former Confederacy.47 The concept of feud was instrumental for discouraged northern idealists expressing their cynicism and disillusionment after Reconstruction’s failure. In 1883 former Radical Republican Carl Schurz included white-on-white “family feuds” among the categories of directionless violence he knew to be rampant after Reconstruction’s end. It was a condemnation of the white South but one without racial or political significance; more than anything else it suggested Schurz’s rejection of his own past zeal.48 The Nation kept the radical faith for years after Schurz abandoned it, denouncing the southern Democracy at every turn, yet nevertheless deduced in 1879 that violence in the rebellious states was “not a Democratic disease simply” and that even if “every Southern white voted the Republican ticket . . . there would still be plenty of outrages and assaults and batteries.” Southern politics, it said, w
as afflicted not by race hatred and aristocratic rule but rather “by the family feuds which fill up the time and thoughts of people who live lonely lives and have few neighbors.”49 That this was a variation on the same excuse for violence used by southern conservatives since 1865 was unmentioned. Schurz and Nation editors had lost any stomach for their postwar fight to reform the rebellious states. The idea of feuds helped them continue to criticize the white South while simultaneously disguising their resignation.