Death of Fan McCoy, The

DESCRIPTION: "On her death bed lay Fan McCoy, Her child standing near." She reminds her son, "The Hatfields got your pappy, Jed," and tells the history of the feud, bidding him carry it on. Judge and jury are urged not to treat him harshly because of his history
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1939 (Thomas)
KEYWORDS: feud death mother children revenge
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
c. 1880 - Beginning of the Hatfield/McCoy feud
FOUND IN: US(Ap)
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Thomas-BalladMakingInMountainsOfKentucky, pp. 12-13, "The Death of Fan McCoy" (1 text) (OakEd, pp. 25-26)
Burt-AmericanMurderBallads, p. 248, "(The Death of Fan McCoy)" (1 excerpt)
ST ThBdM012 (Partial)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Jim Hatfield's Boy" (subject)
NOTES [1833 words]: Something I once read -- I can't remember where it was -- claimed the Hatfields of West Virginia were a clan mostly of Democrats and Confederate sympathizers; the McCoys, from just across the Kentucky line, were Unionist Republicans. (Compare Williams, p. 98).Their feud began in 1880, and some have claimed that 200 people died in the eight years before Kentucky police suppressed the Hatfields and functionally ended the conflict. Very little of this seems to be true.
KentuckyEncyclopedia, pp. 417-418, has an article on the feud which mentions none of this (except that it placed the McCoys in Pike County, Kentucky and the Hatfields in Logan County, now Mingo County, West Virginia). Kleber points to a girl wronged in 1880, a murder in 1882, a handful of other murders after that, and some court cases which ended the whole thing in 1890. According to Williams, p. 100, the last murders took place in 1888.
"Taken out of its social context, the Hatfield-McCoy feud still makes a rousing good story -- there are violence and humor and sex enough -- but certain features of the conflict are harder to explain, such as when it started, why it stopped, and why it attracted so much attention. There were not only powerful emotions and personalities involved in the feuds; there were also powerful social forces. It is no coincidence that the feud broke out at the turning point from preindustrial to industrial society in this part of West Virginia. The wider ramifications of the feud reached back to the Civil War... Much later, memebrs of both families were involved in the industrial violence that drew national attention again to the Tug Fork Valley during the twentieth century" (Williams, pp. 97-98).
The Hatfields and McCoys were in many ways similar; both were large extended families, and both were your stereotypical backwoodsmen, even though Ephraim "Big Eaf" Hatfield married Nancy Vance, the sister of fancy lawyer and eventual North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance (Rice, p. 3). The leaders of the feuding families, William Anderson "Devil Anse" Hatfield and Randolph McCoy, both had substantial properties and livestock, and lived by farming and hunting. They lived in rather primitive homes despite their relative wealth. Many of them were illiterate. And although their religious affiliations, insofar as they had any, were with the Primitive Baptists, they did not do much to practice their faith (Rice, pp. 5-7). Apparently both families counted moonshiners among their members; some of them were tried for making alcohol, though apparently few if any were convicted (Williams, p. 104).
There was no history of antipathy between the two clans; Rice, p. 9, mentions at least three marriages between the extended families, although not in the immediate kin of those involved in the feud. The claim that their feud was the result of Civil War politics seems to be false; according to Rice, p. 10, the Hatfields were all pro-Confederacy -- but most though not all the McCoys were, too. Several Hatfields served in the Confederate army, although they also had a bad tendency to desert, especially after it became clear that both Kentucky and what became West Virginia would remain Union territory. They also engaged as partisans, and Devil Anse Hatfield claimed that he actually had McCoys under his command in their partisan unit! (Rice, p. 11).
The Civil War did see a certain amount of stock-raiding between the two clans, some of which landed them in court, but this sounds like a symptom of the disturbed conditions in the are; there was no particular animosity between the two clans (Rice, p. 12). The one exception was the lynching, on January 7, 1865, of Harmon McCoy, the younger brother of Randolph McCoy. "Devil Anse" Harmon may well have been involved, but a lot of others were as well (Rice, p. 13).
Rice doesn't think the lynching soured the relationship between the clans; it was the hog-stealing that did. But even the theft didn't start the feud. The first event directly linked to the feud was in 1878, when Floyd Hatfield gathered up his free-range hogs -- and Randolph McCoy saw a hog in Hatfield's possession which he believed was his. Randolph McCoy went to a justice of the peace, the Rev. Anderson Hatfield, to try to get satisfaction. Justice Hatfield, rather than try to settle it himself, decided to use a jury -- but a jury of six Hatfields and six McCoys rather than a jury of neutrals. Apparently the decision went 7-5 in favor of Hatfield, with Selkirk McCoy considering the evidence insufficient to convict (Rice, pp. 13-14).
There still wasn't explicit clan fighting; the first person killed was actually an unrelated witness in the trial, Bill Staton, murdered by a couple of McCoys; Sam McCoy was tried for the murder but acquitted (Rice, pp. 16-17). It is noteworthy, however, that the Hatfields by this time were traveling in armed bands (Rice, p. 19); in effect, they had become their own militia.
The precipitating event of the feud came at a gathering for a West Virginia election. 18-year-old Johnson "Johnse" Hatfield, who seems to have been the fashion plate of the family, encountered 20-year-old Rose Anna McCoy, one of the great beauties of the region (Rice, p. 20). Details of what followed are sketchy, but it seems that, after they went off to some secluded place, Johnse brought Rose Anna to his father "Devil Anse's" house and said he would marry her. She stayed with the Hatfields for months -- but he made no moves to proceed with the marriage (Rice, p. 21). It is possible she got pregnant, but the records are not certain on this point. And Johnse kept visiting her even after she went back to the McCoys. On one of these visits, Jim McCoy told Johnse that he would be arrested. Rose Anna apparently thought her family meant to kill Johnse -- and rode off to tell the Hatfields (Rice, p. 22)..
(Rose Anna's reward for all this was to be abandoned by both houses; Johnse -- who apparently liked to sow his wild oats -- abandoned her, and the McCoys would not take her back; Rice, p. 23. Ironically, although Johnse gave up on Rose Anna, he married another McCoy, Nancy, who was said to have henpecked him; Rice, p. 32.)
This still didn't start a feud (Williams, p. 98, in fact argues that "the sexual angle seems to have been less important to the two families than the hog"), but obviously the tensions were sky-high. Rice, p. 24, dates the actual start to 1882, with a dispute over whether Elias Hatfield, brother of "Devil Anse," owed money (less than $2!) for a fiddle. At an election where many were somewhat the worse for liquor, Ellison Hatfield made remarks to Tolbert McCoy, and McCoy attacked him with a knife. Not everyone pitched into the fight -- in fact, several of the older ones tried to stop it. But Pharmer McCoy shot Ellison Hatfield in the back. The McCoys then fled. But Hatfield parties captured several, including those who had attacked Ellison McCoy. When Elllison died on August 9, 1882, the Hatfields executed the three McCoys who were implicated: Tolbert, Pharmer, and Randolph Jr., tying them to bushes and riddling them with shots (Rice, p. 27, says that some fifty shots were fired at the three).
There were some attempts by law enforcement to stop the vigilante justice, but nothing came of them (Rice, pp. 28-29; Williams, pp. 99-100, says that nothing serious was done until 1887). The feud was on -- although, ironically, the next person to die was neither a Hatfield nor a McCoy but a mail carried, Fred Wolford, killed at a dance by Jeff McCoy (Rice, p. 33). I can't help but think that the real feud was not between the Hatfields and the McCoys but between these mountain imbeciles and the civilized world. There is some reason to think that "Devil" Anse Hatfield, and some of the other older men, tried to keep things from spinning out of control (Rice, p. 37), but the young hotheads wouldn't listen. Rice, p. 38, thinks it was the situation in Kentucky at the time that kept everyone stirred up; it is noteworthy that this was a period of clan feuds.
There wasn't a specific event that one can point to to say that it was "the end" of the feud, but "the Hatfield and McCoy families by 1890 showed signs of becoming weary of the feud" (Rice, p. 113). In 1891, Cap Hatfield wrote to a letter wrote that "a general amnesty has been declared in the famous Hatfield and McCoy feud" (Rice, p. 115). And the whole area welcomed the end, since the feud made West Virginia seem like a bad place for business development (Rice, p. 117).
The Hatfield family, at least, does not seem to have suffered much reputational damage. Henry D. Hatfield, the second son of Elias the brother of "Devil Anse," became West Virginia's governor (a fairly liberal Republican, despite that claim that the Hatfields were Democrats) after the election of 1912. He was the one of the state's youngest governors, and the first to be born after West Virginia became a state during the Civil War (Williams, pp. 127-128). One of his first acts was to pack up his medical gear (he was a physicians by training) and head out to treat miners striking in the West Virginia coal fields (Williams, pp. 130-133; according to p. 133, one of those he treated was the famous "Mother" Jones). In 1928, he was elected Senator (Williams, p. 146).
Rice, p. 4, has only one mention of a person who might have been Fan McCoy: Fanny McCoy was one of the sixteen children of Randolph McCoy (born 1925) and his first cousin Sarah "Sally" McCoy, whom he married in 1849. But, of course, if her maiden name was McCoy, she wouldn't have had a child whose name was Jed McCoy!
Nor does Rice mention a "Jed McCoy"; the closest I find is Jeff McCoy, the brother of Nancy McCoy (Rice, p. 23), who did commit a murder, but it was of a mail carrier, Fred Wolford (Rice, p. 33). I am inclined to believe that this song is fiction, either direct (that is, the songwriter made up the story) or indirect (i.e. lifted from a fictionalized book or newspaper article).
Books about the Hatfields and McCoys are numerous but, I suspect, mostly unreliable. Rice, who wrote the first book on the subject from an academic press, says that as of 1982 there were no good books at all. Kleber, p. 418, mentions two, which I would presume are more valuable: Rice's, and Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900, 1988.
The Hatfield/McCoy feud doesn't really seem to have left much mark on tradition; the only songs I know about it are this one, "Jim Hatfield's Boy," and the Red Brush Rowdies song "Hatflied-McCoy Feud," all somewhat dubious and none of them very well-known. Other feud songs, such as "J. B. Marcum" (A Kentucky Feud Song) [Laws E19], are far better known. But Hatfield/McCoy feud became so famous that it likely inspired songs like Carson Robison's "Zeb Tourney's Girl" [Laws E18], which almost sounds like a city slicker's attempt to portray the circumstances of a feud which he did not understand. - RBW
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