Bloody Breathitt

by T. R. C. Hutton

  19. Mamdani, “Making Sense of Political Violence in Postcolonial Africa,” 72. See also Blok, Honour and Violence, 112–13.

  20. The negotiation between inherency and contingency has been at the center of most historical approaches to violence in the American South. Some of the most lauded examinations of white southerners’ uses and interpretations of violence limited their respective examinations to the years before the Civil War (i.e., the “Old South”). These studies limited themselves to white southerners, albeit with the understanding that antebellum modes of violence contributed to a racial status quo based upon white supremacy and black slavery. Therefore, while cultural qualities dictated inherent (usually white male) southern attitudes toward violence beforehand, the contingency of the war, it is implied, brought an abrupt end to the society that sustained these qualities.

  While not suggesting that the war was a unique precedent for killing in the South, others have tended to attach the issue of violence to the political discord that followed it, most notably involving white resistance to black emancipation and citizenship, and focus primarily on “white-on-black” interracial violence. Postwar “white-on-white” intraracial violence, a subject that has gotten less scholarly attention, has been said to have differed from Old South to New. C. Vann Woodward identified the New South’s “gunplay, knifing, manslaughter, and murder” as the successor to the Old South’s more ordered “traditional expression of violence,” the “code duello.” W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, the work that is otherwise credited with placing the greatest emphasis on the continuity of traits in southern history, recognized a change in the frequency of southern violence and the types of violence used after the Civil War. To Cash, what had once been an expression of frontier individualism became a means of enforcing conformity to a “savage ideal” among white southerners and reactionary fear of black increases in power (adamant in keeping up the portrayal of trait continuity into his own time, Cash dismissed this difference as a “contradiction [that] is not so great as it sounds at the first hearing”).

  If inherency suggests the continuity of traits irrespective of political change brought about by war and statecraft, it would seem that neither it nor the interpretation based upon contingency has become absolutely dominant in southern historiography. See Franklin, The Militant South; Bruce, Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South; Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor (originally published in 1982); Lemann, Redemption; Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence; Nieman, Black Freedom/White Violence; Herbert Shapiro, White Violence and Black Response; Rable, But There Was No Peace; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 158; Cash, The Mind of the South, 114–23, 138–41 (quotes 115, 138).

  For other works that assert nonpolitical currents stretching from before the war to after in shaping southern violence, see Hackney, “Southern Violence” and “Southern Violence,” in Graham and Gurr, Violence in America, 393–410; Gastil, “Homicide and a Regional Culture of Violence,” 412–27; Albert C. Smith, “ ‘Southern Violence’ Reconsidered,” 527–64; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice; John Hammond Moore, Carnival of Blood. Recently, one historian has suggested that during Reconstruction, “traditional honor killing” (i.e., communal/inherent violence) and political violence (political/contingent) became “intertwined,” and that neither extreme is fully satisfactory for explaining postbellum white intraracial violence (Fairclough, “ ‘Scalawags,’ Southern Honor, and the Lost Cause,” 826).

  As a Deep South community, Edgefield, South Carolina, was typically allowed to be interpreted, for better or worse, as an exemplar of the South as a whole (and, therefore, part of the outside world, at least on a regional basis). However, it is generally acknowledged that, from Reconstruction until the twentieth century, Edgefield’s history of violence outdid the rest of the state, perhaps because there the political stakes were especially high for both black and white South Carolinians. Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions, 4–6; Brown, Strain of Violence, 67–90; Ford, “Origins of the Edgefield Tradition,” 328–48.

  21. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, 98–99. Most of Pinker’s observations about southern violence are based upon experiments in behavioral psychology performed by Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen that demonstrate a heightened tendency toward honor-based behavior among male college students from the American South in the late twentieth century. Nisbett and Cohen, Culture of Honor.

  22. Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence, 18.

  23. Brundage, Lynching in the New South, 17–48.

  24. Americans are loath to admit political violence between their own shores. However, Anglophone scholars have produced a bumper crop of literature on the concept of depoliticized political violence in the developing world; Elaine Thomas, “Muting Inter-ethnic Conflict in Post-imperial Britain,” 436–39; Beardsworth, Derrida and the Political, 95; Cohen, “Crime and Politics,” 242–46; Feldman, Formations of Violence, 259; Schlichte, “State Formation and the Economy of Intra-state Wars,” 27–44; Savenije and Van der Borgh, “Youth Gangs, Social Exclusion and the Transformation of Violence in El Salvador,” 155–71; Edwards, “The People’s Sovereignty and the Law,” 11, 28n; Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion, 13–24. Of these, not all use the term depoliticization. They do discuss the portrayal of political violence as something outside of the political realm as it is understood by Western observers.

  It should be noted that I do not use depoliticization in the same way Joel Williamson uses it to describe the disfranchisement of black southerners in the late nineteenth century. The Crucible of Race, 224–58.

  25. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 24–53.

  26. Quoted from Khan, “Speaking Violence,” 106–7; Abner Cohen, Two-Dimensional Man, 89. See also Das, “Sexual Violence, Discursive Formations, and the State,” 422; and Conteh-Morgan, Collective Political Violence, 87–88. Since one of my main precepts in this project is the subjectivity with which feud is used to describe violence, I do not offer an a priori definition of the word. However, objectively existent feuds, as they are portrayed by historians and anthropologists, are defined by their strictly horizontal realm of conflict (i.e., between “equals”) and by their origination from “small differences” that have little to no bearing on transcendent issues of ideology or state power. Historians and anthropologists habitually use the word feud exclusively for conflicts between individuals or groups of equal standing. This is demonstrated most pointedly in studies of societies in which factional violence became, or has become, institutionalized and accepted as a normal course of action on a strictly horizontal basis. Furthermore, it seems that scholars are more comfortable with speaking of feuds in a setting defined by spatial, cultural, or (perhaps most important) temporal distance. See Michael S. Drake, Problematics of Military Power, 81–84; William Ian Miller, Bloodtaking and Peacemaking, 179–220; Lamley, “Lineage Feuding,” 71, 99, 367 (quote). See also James C. Scott, “Corruption, Machine Politics and Political Change,” 1146n.

  27. For horizontal relationships of violence, see Heidbuchel, The West Papua Conflict in Indonesia, 142–52, 161–88, 400–401; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 330, 370.

  28. Keane, Violence and Democracy, 38–39. The concept of communal, as opposed to political, violence comes from the field of subaltern studies and has, since the 1990s, been used to describe incidents of religious and ethnic violence in the Indian subcontinent. Singh, Communal Violence; Kaur, “Mythology of Communal Violence,” 23. See also Pandey, Routine Violence; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, 71–72. Another examination of violent geographical spaces uses “direct violence” and “cultural violence” to make a similar distinction. MacGregor and Correa, “Rejoinder to the Theory of Structural Violence,” 52. See also Cynthia Brown and Karim, Playing the “Communal Card,” vii.

  29. Fabian, Time and the Other, 11–21, 75–79, 81–82 (I am grateful to Helmut Smith for introducing me to this important book). F
or another description of the same anthropological phenomenon, see Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, 8–9, 18–19.

  30. Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 52.

  31. Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy, 8 (quote)–9, 308–9. See also Friedman, The White Savage.

  32. Black-Michaud, Cohesive Force, 1.

  33. Hudson, “Feud, Vengeance and Violence in England,” 33, 48.

  34. Hayden White, Metahistory, 36–38; Jeffrey Guy Johnson, “Feud, Society, Family,” 42.

  35. (Carmel, NY) Putnam County Courier, January 8, 1937; Fish, Tragic Deception, xxv.

  36. Television references to a feud, historical or fictional, convey an inability to conform to modern norms of behavior and therefore a diminished right to exist in the modern world and an irredeemable role as an outsider (and, notably, always a white outsider). For instance, a fictional presidential adviser’s frustrated observation on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a 2004 West Wing episode: “It’s tribal, it can’t be solved, it’s Hatfield and McCoy [my emphasis] and there is no end.” In 2008 a cellular phone commercial portrayed a nuclear Hatfield family (oddly housed in an expensive-looking cul-de-sac neighborhood) calling an end to their feud with the McCoys because of finally being able to reach them by cellular phone (calling to mind the late nineteenth-century hope that communication and technology would end feud violence). The song “Shenandoah” plays lightly and what appear to be daguerreotypes hang on the wall in the background, subtly evoking a past century. But the product advertised in the commercial and the teenager and his parents are undeniably products of the twenty-first century, dressed in the costume of the suburban upper middle class. The punch line: “Who will we feud with now?” (A follow-up commercial depicted the Montagues and Capulets reconciling for similar reasons but they, in contrast, were still in Elizabethan garb, unlike American feudists trapped forever in a literary past—but armed with cellular phones.) Even amid the trappings of twenty-first century consumerism the pathological urge endures. In the same year, a character in the sitcom 30 Rock, an unsophisticated naïf typically portrayed as an overly religious refugee from superannuated southern poverty (and called a “hillbilly” by other characters) declared that before his move to the big city he had “promised my mother that if I ran into any Mackenzies, I would kill them.” The quip suggests that this feud is ongoing and permanent and potentially enactable outside its place of origin. Moreover, even though a possible act of violence is referenced, it is for purposes archaic and primitive and therefore not to be taken seriously by a sophisticated urban audience.

  A more recent series based on stories by crime novelist Elmore Leonard, Justified, has revisited the theme of the feud. Set in a heavily baroque “alternate South” version of Harlan County, Kentucky, a 2011 story line depicted the renewal of a waning blood feud between men whose ancestors first came to blows over rival distillery interests during Prohibition. It is quite possibly the first popular media representation of a Kentucky feud with no association with the nineteenth century. See NYT, January 5, 2012.

  In 2012 cable television’s History Channel broadcast a six-hour theatrical miniseries about the Hatfield and McCoy feud with a relative dedication to factual accuracy. During the airing the program’s sponsor, Government Employees Insurance Company, aired a farcical commercial about a latent twenty-first-century Cro-Magnon acting as a human resources executive trying to mediate an alleged dispute between descendants of the Hatfield and McCoy families. As an abiding vestige of the past himself, the “caveman” is unable to accept that the two coworkers have put their families’ conflict behind them and become friends. “Hatfields and McCoys” remained a pathetically risible name for deadly violence but, unlike in the earlier commercials mentioned, descendants are allowed to put their past behind them.

  37. Waller, Feud, 249.

  38. Foner, “The Education of Richard Hofstadter,” 597. For legitimate violence and the state, see Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 78.

  39. Foner, Reconstruction, 346 (quote); Hofstadter, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,” 4 (quote); David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter, 214–18. Altina Waller criticizes Hofstadter’s relative inattention to feud violence. Waller, Feud, 6–7.

  40. Gurr, Why Men Rebel, 13; Skolnick, The Politics of Protest; Nieburg, Political Violence; Rubenstein, Rebels in Eden; Havens, Leiden, and Schmitt, The Politics of Assassination; Graham and Rudoy, Violence; Short and Wolfgang, Collective Violence; Graham and Gurr, Violence in America.

  41. A thorough effort at revisionist treatments of the history of the Appalachian region and its image had its beginnings with Henry Shapiro’s Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920. For a brief description and critique of 1970s Appalachian studies, see Cunningham, “Appalachian Studies among the Posts,” 377–86.

  The idea of white southerners in the Appalachians, particularly eastern Kentucky, being different from whites of the lowland South, culturally or otherwise, is most concisely exemplified by William G. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains,” 311.

  42. Gordon McKinney, “Industrialization and Violence in Appalachia in the 1890’s,” 131–44; Klotter, “Feuds in Appalachia,” 290–317; Waller, Feud; Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 347–76; Billings and Blee, The Road to Poverty; Billings and Blee, “Where ‘Bloodshed Is a Pastime’: Mountain Feuds and Appalachian Stereotyping,” in Billings, Norman, and Ledford, Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes, 119–37.

  For histories that inspired these interpretations of Appalachian history, see Wiebe, The Search for Order; Trachtenburg, The Incorporation of America; Thelen, Paths of Resistance. For a very good summation of Appalachian history’s “revisionist” generation, see Banker, Appalachians All, 2–5.

  43. Orend, “War”; Orend, War and International Justice, 7 (quote); Henry Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind, 102–7. Like descriptions of “feuds,” primordial explanations of violence “[invoke] the centuries of ‘accumulated hatreds’ between ‘nations’ with primordial origins. . . . The argument suggests that the illiberal politics of identity, with its claims of collective exclusivity, and tendencies toward xenophobia and intolerance are more natural to human societies than liberal politics of interest.” Primordial explanations are more widely referred to as reports of communal violence, acts of destruction that represent an “outside threat” originating “outside the social frame.” Communal violence is action that takes place without the authority, or beyond the supervision, of the modern state and, consequently, beyond its responsibility as well. It is believed to be “the product of ‘deep-seated hatreds’ or ‘ancient animosities’ ” that “[take] on the appearance of a natural phenomenon which outsiders have no right to condemn and no hope to prevent” or is portrayed as such so that “presiding governments” can distance themselves from blame. Communal violence originates over issues that have nothing to do with the modern state and therefore do not offer a viable censure of its ability to rule, and for that reason cannot be deemed political by the state’s standards or those of metropolitan observers. Emotional descriptors like “hatred” and temporal descriptors like “ancient” suggest that violence taking place in the present has very little to do with the “real” present as it is seen by outside observers. Beverly Crawford, “The Causes of Cultural Conflict,” 10–13 (quote 10–11). See also Laitin, Nations, States, and Violence, 26–27. For “dominant culture,” see Waller, “Feuding in Appalachia,” 370.

  44. Ching and Creed, “Recognizing Rusticity,” 14.

  45. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 309. Andrew L. Slap has recently made a similar point about politics in Appalachia. See Slap, “Introduction: Appalachia, 1865–1900,” 16–17.

  46. E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, 12.

  47. The “classical” model of revisionist Appalachian history tends to, at the risk of exaggeration, tr
eat case study localities as relatively inert bodies that were and are acted upon, exploited, and changed from outside, typically by the late nineteenth-century arrival of railroads and large-scale extractive industries. In these works, conflicts that took the form of anything from feuds to labor-related violence were attributed solely to these types of familiar “imperialist” events. Recently, a small number of monographs have delved into the economic and political activities of Appalachian communities before the period of incorporation and discovered a series of societies given to vigorous internal activity and hardly isolated from the outside world. In these “postrevisionist” studies, communities in what came to be known as Appalachia generated their own origins of conflict, often from early in the history of white settlement. Wiese, Grasping at Independence; Burch, Owsley County; Bailey, Matewan before the Massacre.

  48. The echoes of the feud narrative were made even more explicit during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq when President George W. Bush identified Saddam Hussein as someone “who tried to kill my dad [former president George Herbert Walker Bush] at one time.” By invoking kinship and a son’s duty to right a wrong committed against a father, Bush gained popular sympathy for the war he was preparing to fight by (if only momentarily), suggesting an attack on Iraq might have apolitical, visceral purposes to which all Americans with families might relate. The “redemptive narrative” of familial vengeance helped deflect doubt over the paucity of evidence justifying the impending invasion’s actual geopolitical purpose: the prevention of Iraq’s use of “weapons of mass destruction.” Jeff Zeleny, “For Bush, Joy of Capture Muted at the End,” NYT, December 30, 2006; McAdams, “Redemptive Narratives in the Life and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” 150.

  49. Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” 173.

  50. A good example of this spurious argument is Tobin, “Why Nothing Can Be Done about Shootings.”