Blood Feud: The Hatfields and the McCoys: The Epic Story of
Murder and Vengeance, by Lisa Alther, is a generally acceptable account of the
famous feud - despite the embarrassing subtitle. Having never read a
narrative of this famous struggle, I found that this book, despite its title,
spent little time on the actual feud, and more on the place and times which
surrounded it.
Alther dispels many myths.
Not all Hatfields and McCoys participated in the feud. Only a small branch of each family. Often, Hatfields and McCoys testified against
members of their extended family in court.
Other, non-family members were also involved. Hatfields and McCoys fought on both sides of
the Civil War, which in their area of West Virginia and Kentucky took on a
brutal, neighbor vs. neighbor tone. But
we can’t pin the cause of the feud as an extension of the Civil War.
Alther seeks to show that the feud had no one cause, but
many. She convincingly shows that the
people who settled in the feud area were descended from mix raced groups who
fled into the mountains west of the original thirteen states to avoid racial
classification (she credits a book called “Almost White” with much of this
history). This created a culture of suspicion and insularity. Yet even this explanation is not wholly sufficient,
as very many people in the area never raised a hand against a neighbor in
anger.
Much of the dispute came down to personalities with less
than socially responsible impulses. The
other elements contributed somewhat to the
conflict.
A good book, I am sure there are more comprehensive works on
the Hatfield McCoy feud than this, somewhat light and glancing treatment.
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