Infamous America - HATFIELDS & MCCOYS Ep. 1 | “Blood Feud”

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

The most iconic family feud in American history begins in the heart of southern Appalachia. Tensions rise during the years before the Civil War, and then an attack near the end of the war raises the stakes to a fatal level. At that point, there is no turning back. Thanks to our sponsor, Simplisafe. Get 20% off your entire new system and your first month of monitoring service free when you enroll in Interactive Monitoring at SimpliSafe.com/infamous Join Black Barrel+ for early access and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin’s World, Once Upon A Crime, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Snow crunched under Harmon McCoy's boots as he approached the water well. A biting wind whistled through the trees. It was early January 1865, and he'd been home from the Civil War for less than two weeks. Harmon had followed his older brother Randolph into the fight. Here in eastern Kentucky, most men fought for the Confederacy. Randolph McCoy was one of them, but Harmon McCoy was not. Harmon went against the grain and fought for the Union. Harmon had been discharged about two weeks ago, right before Christmas, but the war had followed him home.

He was warned there would be hell to pay for his service to the union, but he ignored the warning. He was six foot three, and he didn't scare easy, especially after a year of combat. Now he was home at his cabin with his wife Patty and their five children. He walked out of his home and tramped toward the well with a bucket in one hand. Then he paused and scanned the tree line. He thought he heard a branch snap. His sense of danger spiked. Then a bullet whizzed past his ear.

The crack of a rifle echoed through the trees at nearly the same time. Harmon dropped the bucket and dove for cover. He waited, but the bushwhackers did not follow up their attempt to kill him. The attempt proved the threats were serious. Someone intended to visit hell upon Harmon McCoy, and the culprit was probably a Hatfield. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer,

and this is a six-part series on the most infamous family feud in American history, The Hatfields and McCoys. It certainly wasn't the only feud in American history, and it wasn't even the bloodiest, but it captured the nation's attention like no other, and it's evolved into legend like no other. Like all good legends,

it's full of fact, fiction, rumor, speculation, and innuendo. We'll tell the true story to the best of our abilities. So here it is. Episode 1, Blood Feud. There's no definitive beginning to the feud. There wasn't an event that launched the whole thing and then it raged back and forth like a recognizable battle.

It's far more nuanced and complex than that. It was rooted in the land and the times and the people, and those things changed throughout the second half of the 1800s. And the label, The Feud, is deceiving. It can't be thought of as a singular, definable thing. It was a series of events that often ended in tragedy, and nearly all were sensationalized like crazy by the newspapers of the day. But it's an American legend, without a doubt.

The Tug River Valley is in the heart of Appalachia. Like all areas of America, it was originally inhabited by Native American tribes, but they were pushed out by Anglo settlers. Many of those were of rugged stock from Scotland and Ireland. They brought their dialect and their music and their sense of kinship and clanship. The Tug River is an offshoot of the Big Sandy River, and it cuts through land that is now the states of Kentucky and West Virginia. But West Virginia was a designation that didn't happen until halfway through the Civil War.

Until 1863, the modern states of Virginia and West Virginia were just Virginia. But in that solitary state of Virginia, the supporters of the Union were mostly on the western side. Most folks over there had been talking about seceding from Virginia since the 1830s. In June of 1863, they made it official. The state of West Virginia entered the Union, and on the surface, it supported the northern side of the Civil War. But like many states, there was conflict within its borders. It was similar to Missouri in that it raised military. units that supported both sides of the fight. So that was the general situation on the eastern side of

the Tug River. On the western side, the state of Kentucky was in a similar scenario. It tried to remain neutral early in the war, but it eventually entered on the side of the Union. As a border state, its ground was hotly contested, and like West Virginia, the men of Kentucky formed units that fought on both sides of the war. Union General Ulysses S. Gris, Grant won his first major battle at Fort Donaldson in northern Tennessee. The battle forced the Confederacy to give up control of Southern Kentucky. Grant told the Confederates in the Fort that he would accept no terms except unconditional surrender.

Afterward, people thought they knew what the U.S. in U.S. Grant stood for when he signed his name. But the families in the feud story drifted into the region long before U.S. Grant was born, and long before a civil war tore the country apart. When the Hatfields and McCoys arrived in the Tug River Valley, the country had only been a country for a generation. It was still grammatically referred to as a collection of states. The United States are, instead of a single body like we say today, the United States is. In the early 1800s, the Hatfields and McCoys moved into the hills and hollers and woods of southern Appalachia.

Two generations later, their descendants engaged. in a fight that spanned decades and earned them everlasting infamy. The grandfathers of the two men who became central to the feud story crossed the Tug River and settled in eastern Kentucky. But this land was full of steep hills and heavy woods. It was tough to farm. So the sons of the first Hatfields and McCoys moved back across the river to Virginia. They set up farms and also began to dabble in the growing timber industry

that was moving into the area. And that's when some of the early problems started. Daniel McCoy, the son of the man who brought the clan to the Tug River Valley, was considered lazy and disagreeable. He alienated most of his family by trying the timber business instead of just sticking to farming. And then he got into trouble for he legally cutting down his neighbor's trees. He was forced to sell much of his land to pay the debt to his neighbor. That left his 13 children in tough situations. It was an old world system in the Tug River Valley.

Land was passed from father to son, and each son received a piece of the whole. Daniel McCoy's children suffered because of their father's problems. Most lived in poverty and could not afford to buy land of their own. But two escaped that fate, Randolph and Asa. They both married young ladies who inherited land in Kentucky from their fathers. Randolph came to be called Old Ranel, and Asa was known by his middle name, Harmon. Rannell and Harmon moved their growing families back to the Kentucky side of the Tug River. There, they firmly established the McCoy clan that would be part of the feud.

Rannell was the older of the two, and he became the head of the clan, but he didn't inspire a lot of loyalty. He was said to have had a gloomy attitude, and it only got worse as events spiraled downward. He and his wife, who was referred to as Aunt Sally, gained reputations for spreading malicious gossip, as some people called it. They were accused of slander by one of their cousins and taken to court. Protecting your reputation was a big deal in the area, and people were quick to sue over the slightest thing. After Ranel witnessed the mess caused by his father's attempt to strike it rich in the timber industry,

he shunned the industry for the rest of his life. He preferred to live in the old way of subsistence farming. You grew what your family needed, and that was it. But that was tough in this part of Kentucky. The land his wife had inherited was mountainous woodlands. It wasn't meant for farming, but he found a way to scratch out a living for himself, his wife, and their 16 children. And then the Civil War engulfed the nation in the first half of the 1860s.

Rannel volunteered to fight for the Confederacy in a Virginia militia unit, and then in the Virginia in the Virginia infantry. Rannell was captured in 1863 and held prisoner until July of 1865. During that time, his younger brother Harmon joined the fight, but he fought for the Union. That made him an outcast to many people in the Tug River Valley, especially some of the Hatfields, who were staunch Confederates. Rannel was sitting in a Union prison camp when Harmon was attacked in eastern Kentucky, possibly by the man who became the head of the Hatfield. Field clan. William Anderson Hatfield's clan followed some of the same roads as Rannell McCoy's clan, but the two men had very different personal journeys. Like Rannell, Anderson's grandfather

moved his family from western Virginia to eastern Kentucky. Also like Randall, Anderson's father moved his own family back to Virginia, and that's where Anderson's branch of the Hatfield clan remained. Though it's important to remember that both families moved back and forth, They intermingled and intermarried. The Tug River was not a firm dividing line. The McCoys were mostly on the Kentucky side, and the Hatfields were mostly on the Virginia side, soon to be the West Virginia side,

but it wasn't a hard and fast rule. While there was some similarities in the early stages of the Hatfield and McCoy clans, the differences became stark with Rannell's father and Anderson's father. Rannell's father lost his land and left the family destitute. Anderson's father was a respected man in Logan County, Virginia, and he became the justice of the peace.

Rannell didn't like the timber industry that made profits by cutting down the trees in the area, but Anderson embraced it. Rannell stuck to his own land and farmed what he could. Anderson constantly acquired more land for his various enterprises, and not all of these acquisitions were honest. But the business that really made a name for the Hatfield, and made them some serious money, was the whiskey business.

The hatfields were known throughout the area on both sides of the Tug River for their Apple Jack Moonshine Whiskey. Sometimes their business ran afoul of the law, and when it did, they paid fines or appeared in court. But on the whole, it was their most profitable venture, until the timber industry really picked up after the Civil War. In the years that led up to the war, Anderson was appointed deputy sheriff of Logan County.

He and his brother secured land for a school and built the structure and hired a school teacher. But all these things didn't mean Anderson was a choir boy. When Civil War erupted in 1861, he joined a militia company in the Confederate Army. Two years later, the western portion of Virginia formed its own state called West Virginia, and it was loyal to the union. Anderson's family now lived in a union. in state. He left the Confederate Army and returned home to form a guerrilla outfit called the Logan County Wildcats. They were an unofficial unit that protected Confederate sympathizers.

Anderson gained a reputation as a ruthless leader during the war, and the experience only enhanced the status he'd achieved before the war. It was entirely possible that he became the captain of the Logan County Wildcats, while everyone called him Devil Ants Hatfield. Ants was an abbreviation of his middle name, Anderson, and there are several stories about how devil was added to the front. In one, his mother claimed he'd fought a mountain lion, and that he wasn't afraid of the devil himself. In another, Anderson had an even-tempered cousin nicknamed Preacher Ants,

so the more hot-tempered Anderson had been nicknamed Devil Ants. Devil Ants was a great marksman and rider, and legend has it that he used to train Bear Cubs. One story said that he was out hunting when he was 15 years old, and he found a bear cub. He didn't have any bullets left in his gun, so he kicked the stuffings out of the bear. The bear climbed 30 feet up into a tree to escape young Anderson. Anderson waited all night, and the next day, and the next night for the bear to come down. He refused to leave without his prize.

Eventually, his father and brothers found him near the tree, still waiting for the bear to come down. They asked him if he was hurt, and he replied, Hurt, the devil. Then they gave him some bullets, and he shot the bear and took it home. So maybe Devil Ants Hatfield earned his nickname before the war. Maybe he earned it during the war. And maybe he earned it during the bloody years of the feud.

But many claim it was his gorilla outfit, the Logan County Wildcats, that brought hell to Harmon McCoy in January of 1865. The mountaineers of the Tug River Valley were fiercely independent. They weren't overly concerned with protecting or abolishing slavery, but they were concerned with keeping the federal government out of their business. In general, they were ardent supporters of local government. Many believe that the way to support local government over federal government

was to support the Confederacy. So, most men in eastern Kentucky and western Virginia joined the Confederate Army or Confederate militia groups. Devil Ants Hatfield and Rannell McCoy were two of those men. Rannell's younger brother Harmon was not. More than anything, the 1862 Revenue Act drove Devil Ants Hatfield and many more Hatfields into the war on the side of the Confederacy. The Revenue Act made it illegal. to distill whiskey without a federal license. It placed a tax on the sale of alcohol.

At that point, it was clear that the federal government was not going to stay out of the Tug Valley, and it directly threatened a major source of income for the Hatfields. There were no official battles in the Tug Valley during the war, but there were plenty of fights. Unofficial guerrilla outfits that supported both armies, raided farms and stole livestock on both sides of the Tug River, and they fought each other continuously.

One such story might have led to the attack on Harmon McCoy. Early in the war, Harmon rode with a Kentucky Unionist militia company. That company frequently fought Devil Ants Hatfield's Virginia Militia Company. In a skirmish early in Harmon's service, he was shot in the chest and nearly died. There was talk that Devil Ants fired the near-fatal shot. It was said that Harmon's militia unit harassed a friend of Devil Ants. The Union Militia drove off the man's livestock, and then they shot the man. According to tradition, Devil Anz visited his friend.

The man was badly wounded, and Devil Ants thought he would die. Devil Ants swore to hunt down every man who was connected with the attack. The friend eventually recovered from his wound, but it was said that Devil Anz kept his word. The captain of Harmon's militia unit was a prominent man in eastern Kentucky. Devil Ants Hatfield hid near the captain's home and studied the man's daily routine. One morning, the captain walked outside to relieve himself, and Devil Ants shot him dead. Like many episodes in the feud saga, it's impossible to know the full truth of the attack on the militia captain. Just like it's impossible to know the full truth of the upcoming attack on Harmon McCoy. Maybe Devil

Ants had a hit list. Maybe Harmon was targeted simply because he fought for the union. It was a sad fact of the war that families fought families and friends fought friends. A union staff officer wrote about the region of Southern Appalachia in 1862 before the major bloodshed began. His words were prophetic. He said, men who for years were neighbors now hunt one another. Men will bear the old grudge toward each other. The bitter gall of hatred will still course in their veins and futile flames will yet be unquenched. After Harmon McCoy had been shot in the chest while serving with a Kentucky militia group, he was captured at his home, by Devil Ants Hatfield. Harmon spent the winter of 1862 in a Confederate prison in Richmond.

He was paroled in the spring of 1863 and immediately joined the 39th Kentucky Infantry. His service in the infantry ended on Christmas Eve, 1864. Then Harmon made the 100-mile trek to his home at Peter Creek in eastern Kentucky. He settled back into his cabin with his wife Patty and their five children. Patty was pregnant with child number six. Harmon was surely happy to be back with his family, but his home was also a dangerous place to be, because he was easy to find.

Harmon had been warned that there would be hell to pay for his loyalty to the unit. Not long after he returned home, he got his first taste of it. He walked outside to get a bucket of water from the well, and someone fired a shot at him. He took cover and waited for a full assault, but it never happened. After the encounter, he decided he needed to be more careful. He moved out into the woods near his house and lived in a makeshift shelter.

In the area, they called the practice laying out. While Harmon laid out in the woods, he covered his tracks. He walked in wide circles and doubled back and took indirect routes to and from his destinations. His wife and kids brought him food and other supplies. and one night his 13-year-old daughter Mary brought him a warning. She said guerrilla fighters had been spotted in the area. Harmon's attempts to hide didn't work. Bushwhackers were still able to follow his tracks in the snow

or the tracks of his family as they tried to help him. On January 7, 1865, they found him near his shelter and shot him in the head. He might have had enough warning to take off running. but the deep snow prevented an escape. It took three days for his wife to find his body. The most common theories about the killers placed the blame on Devil Ants Hatfield or his cousin who was referred to as Uncle Jim Vance.

Some believe that it was Devil Ants's guerrilla unit, the Logan County Wildcats, the track down Herman McCoy and killed him. And Devil Ants himself might have pulled the trigger. 30 years after the murder, stories began to surface that Jim Vance was the real killer. Some thought he was responsible for the brief attack on Harmon's home, and then he finished the job a week later.

But military records seemed to indicate that he was nowhere near Harmon's home at the time of the murder. When Harmon's wife filed a claim for his pension, she would only say that he was killed by rebels. Whoever was responsible, The murder of Harmon McCoy took the relationship between the two families to a whole new place. Whatever tensions might have arisen over the years because of business dealings or family squabbles, now began to turn into hatred.

It was now a blood feud, and it would only get worse for the next 25 years. Next time on Infamous America, a bizarre moment takes center stage. The two families go to trial over a hog, And though it might seem like a small issue, it's very serious to Rannell McCoy. To make matters worse, his daughter falls in love with the son of his arch enemy, Devil Ants Hatfield. And there's more bloodshed when two McCoys confront a man who's married to a Hatfield. All that is next week on Infamous America. And members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week.

They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercial. Sign up now through the link in our show notes or on our website, Black Barrel Media. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This season was researched and written by Jen Labyrinths, script editing by Christopher Marcaquis, audio editing and sound designed by Dave Harrison, original music by Rob Valier. I'm your co-writer, host, and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media. channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can

stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for infamous America podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, Once Upon a Crime, and many more. Thanks for listening.