THE BLOOD-FEUD
In Corsica, when a man is wronged by another, public sentiment requires
that he redress his own grievance, and that his family and friends shall
share the consequences.
"Before the law made us citizens, great Nature made us men."
"When one has an enemy, one must choose between the three
S's--_schiopetto, stiletto, strada_: the rifle, the dagger, or
flight."
"There are two presents to be made to an enemy--_palla calda o ferro
freddo_: hot shot or cold steel."
The Corsican code of honor does not require that vengeance be taken in
fair fight. Rather should there be a sudden thrust of the knife, or a
pistol fired point-blank into the enemy's breast, or a rifle-shot from
some ambush picked in advance.
The assassin is not conscious of any cowardice in such act. If the
trouble between him and his foe had been strictly a personal matter, to
be settled forever by one man's fall, then he might have welcomed a
duel with all the punctilios. But his blood is not his alone--it belongs
to his clan. Whenever a Corsican is slain his family takes up the feud.
A vendetta ensues--a war of extermination by clan against clan.
Now, the chief object of war, as all strategists agree, is to inflict
the greatest loss upon the enemy with the least loss to one's own side.
Hence we have hostilities without declaration of war; we have the
ambush, the night attack, masked batteries, mines and submarines. Thus
we murder hundreds asleep or unshriven. This is war.
Moreover, while a soldier must be brave in any extremity, it is no less
his duty to save himself unharmed as long as he can, so that he may help
his own side and kill more and more of the enemy. Therefore it is proper
and military for him to "snipe" his foes by deliberate sharpshooting
from behind any lurking-place that he can find. This is war.
And the vendetta, says our Corsican, is nothing else than war.
When Matteo has been slain by an enemy, his friends carry his body home
and swear vengeance over the corpse, while his wife soaks her
handkerchief in his wounds to keep as a token whereby she will incite
her children, as they grow up, to war against all kinsmen of their
father's murderer.
Then a son or brother of Matteo slips forth into the night, full-armed
to slay like a dog any member of the rival faction whom he may find at a
disadvantage. The deed done, he flies to the _maquis_, the mountain
thicket, and there he will hide, dodging the gendarmes, fighting off his
enemies--an outlaw with a price upon his head, but pitied or admired by
all Corsicans outside the feud, and succored by his clan.
It is a far cry from the Mediterranean to our own Appalachia: so why
this prelude? Our mountaineers never heard of Corsica. Not a drop of
South European blood flows in their veins. Few of them ever heard one
word of a foreign tongue. True. And yet we shall mark some strange
analogies between Corsican vendettas and Appalachian feuds, Corsican
clannishness and Appalachian clannishness, Corsican women and our
mountain women--before this chapter ends.
Long, long ago, in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, Dr. Abner Baker
married a Miss White. Daniel Bates married Baker's sister, but separated
from her in 1844. Baker charged Bates with undue intimacy with his wife,
and killed him. The Whites, defending their kinswoman, prosecuted the
Doctor, but he was acquitted, and moved to Cuba.
Afterwards Baker returned. In flat violation of the Constitution of the
United States, he was tried a second time for the murder of Bates, was
convicted, and was hanged. Thenceforth there was "bad blood" between the
Bakers and the Whites, involving the Garrards on one side and the
Howards on the other, as allies to the respective clans.
In 1898, Tom Baker, reputed to be the best shot in the Kentucky
mountains, bought a note given by A. B. Howard, for whom he was cutting
timber. Howard became furious, a fight ensued, one of the Howard boys
and Burt Stores were killed from ambush, and the elder Howard was
wounded.
Thereupon Jim Howard, son of the clan chief, sought out Tom Baker's
father, who was county attorney, compelled the unarmed old man to fall
upon his knees, shot him twenty-five times with careful aim to avoid a
vital spot, and so killed him by inches. Howard was tried and convicted
of murder, but it is said that a pardon was offered him if he would go
to the State Capitol at Frankfort and assassinate Governor Goebel, which
he is charged with having done.
In Clay County, where this feud waged, the judge, clerk, sheriff, and
jailer were of the White clan. Tom Baker killed a brother of the sheriff
and took to the hills rather than give himself up to a court ruled by
his foemen. Then Albert Garrard was fired upon from ambush while riding
with his wife to a religious meeting. He removed to Pineville, in
another county, under guard of two armed men, both of whom were shot
dead "from the bresh."
Governor Bradley sent State troops into Clay County, and Tom Baker
surrendered to them. Baker was tried in the Knox Circuit Court, on a
change of venue, and was sentenced to the penitentiary for life. On
appeal his attorneys secured a reversal of the verdict, and Baker was
released on bail. The new trial was set for June, 1899. Governor Bradley
again sent a company of State militia, with a Gatling gun, to Manchester
where the trial was to be held. Baker was put in a guard-tent surrounded
by a squad of soldiers. A hundred yards or so from this tent stood the
unoccupied residence of the sheriff, at the foot of a wooded mountain.
An assassin hidden in this house spied upon the guard-tent, and, when
Baker appeared, shot him dead with a rifle, then took to the woods and
escaped.
I quote now from a history of this feud published in _Munsey's Magazine_
of November, 1903.--
"Captain John Bryan, of the 2d Kentucky, said to the widow of the
murdered Tom Baker, after they returned from the funeral:
"'Mrs. Baker, why don't you leave this miserable country and escape
from these terrible feuds? Move away, and teach your children to
forget.'
"'Captain Bryan,' said the widow, and she spoke evenly and quietly,
'I have twelve sons. It will be the chief aim of my life to bring
them up to avenge their father's death. Each day I shall show my
boys _the handkerchief stained with his blood_, and tell them who
murdered him.'"
Corsican vendetta or Kentucky feud--what are language and race against
age-long isolation and an environment that keeps humanity feral to the
core?
Shortly after Baker's death, four Griffins, of the White-Howard faction,
ambushed Big John Philpotts and his cousin, wounding the former severely
and the latter mortally. Big John fought them from behind a log and
killed all four.
On July 17, 1899, four of the Philpotts were attacked by four Morrises,
of the Howard side. Three men were killed, three mortally wounded, and
the other two were severely injured. No arrests were made.
Finally, in 1901, the two clans fought a pitched battle in front of the
court-house in Manchester. At its conclusion they formally signed a
truce.
This is a mere scenario of a feud in the wealthiest and best-schooled
county of eastern Kentucky. Two of the families involved were of
distinguished lineage, counting in their ranks a governor, three
generals, a member of Congress, and a prohibition candidate for the
Presidency.
In reviewing this feud, Governor Bradley stated:
"The whole fault in Clay County is a vitiated public sentiment and
a failure of the civil authorities to do their duty. The laws are
insufficient for the Governor to apply a remedy. Such feuds have
been in progress more or less for years, and no Governor of the
State has ever been able to quell them. They have terminated only
when their force was spent by one side or the other being killed or
moving out of the country."
"The laws are insufficient for the Governor to apply a remedy." One
naturally asks, "How so?" The answer is that the Governor cannot send
troops into a county except upon request of the civil authorities, and
they must go as a posse to civil officers. In most feuds these officers
are partisans (in fact, it is a favorite ruse for one clan to win or
usurp the county offices before making war). Hence the State troops
would only serve as a reinforcement to one of the contending factions.
To show how this works out, we will sketch briefly the course of another
feud.--
In Rowan County, Kentucky, in 1884, there was an election quarrel
between two members of the Martin and Toliver families. The Logans sided
with the Martins and the Youngs with the Tolivers. The Logan-Martin
faction elected their candidate for sheriff by a margin of twelve votes.
Then there was an affray in which one Logan was killed and three were
wounded.
As usual, in feuds, no immediate redress was attempted, but the injured
clan plotted its vengeance with deadly deliberation. After five months,
Dick Martin killed Floyd Toliver. His own people worked the trick of
arresting him themselves and sent him to Winchester for safe-keeping.
The Tolivers succeeded in having him brought back on a forged order and
killed him when he was bound and helpless.
The leader of the Young-Toliver faction was a notorious bravo named
Craig Toliver. To strengthen his power he became candidate for town
marshal of Morehead, and he won the office by intimidation at the polls.
Then, for two years, a bushwhacking war went on. Three times the
Governor sent troops into Rowan County, but each time they found nothing
but creeks and thickets to fight. Then he prevailed upon the clans to
sign a truce and expatriate their chiefs for one year in distant States.
Craig Toliver obeyed the order by going to Missouri, but returned
several months before the expiration of his term, _resumed office_, and
renewed his atrocities. In the warfare that ensued all the county
officers were involved, from the judge down.
In 1887, Proctor Knott, Governor of Kentucky, said in his message, of
the Logan-Toliver feud:
"Though composed of only a small portion of the community, these
factions have succeeded by their violence in overawing and
silencing the voice of the peaceful element, and in intimidating
the officers of the law. Having their origin partly in party
rancor, they have ceased to have any political significance, and
have become contests of personal ambition and revenge; each party
seeking apparently to possess itself of the machinery of justice in
order that it may, under the forms of law, seek the gratification
of personal animosities.
"During the present year the local leader of one of these factions
came in possession of the office of police judge of the town of
Morehead. Under color of the authority of that office, and
sustained by an armed band of adherents, he exercised despotic sway
over the town and its vicinage. He banished citizens who were
obnoxious to him; and, in one instance, after arresting two
citizens who seem to have been guilty of no offense, he and his
party, attended by a deputy sheriff of the county, murdered them in
cold blood.
"This act of atrocity fully aroused the community. A posse acting
under the authority of a warrant from the county judge attacked the
police judge and his adherents on the 22d of June last, killed
several of their number, and put the rest to flight, and
temporarily restored something like tranquility to the community.
"The proceedings of the Circuit Court, which was held in August,
were not calculated to inspire the citizens with confidence in
securing justice. The report of the Adjutant General on this
subject shows, from information derived 'from representative men
without reference to party affiliations,' that the judge of the
Circuit Court seems so far under the influence of the reputed
leader of one of the factions as to permit such an organization of
the grand juries as will effectually prevent the indictment of
members of that faction for the most flagrant crimes."
The posse here mentioned was organized by Daniel Boone Logan, a cousin
of the two young men who had been murdered, a college graduate, and a
lawyer of good standing. With the assent of the Governor, he gathered
fifty to seventy-five picked men and armed them with the best modern
rifles and revolvers. Some of the men were of his own clan; others he
hired. His plan was to end the war by exterminating the Tolivers.
[Illustration: Photo by U. S. Forest Service
"Dense forest luxuriant undergrowth."--Mixed hardwoods, Jackson Co., N. C.]
The posse, led by Logan and the sheriff, suddenly surrounded the town of
Morehead. Everybody gave in except Craig Toliver, Jay Toliver, Bud
Toliver, and Hiram Cook, who barricaded themselves in the railroad
station, where all of them were shot dead by the posse.
Boone Logan was indicted for murder. At the trial he admitted the
killings; but he showed that the feud had cost the lives of not less
than twenty-three men, that not one person had been legally punished for
these murders, and that he had acted for the good of the public in
ending this infamous struggle. The court accepted this view of the case,
the community sustained it, and the "war" was closed.
A feud, in the restricted sense here used, is an armed conflict between
families, each endeavoring to exterminate or drive out the other. It
spreads swiftly not only to blood-kin and relatives by marriage, but to
friends and retainers as well. It may lie dormant for a time, perhaps
for a generation, and then burst forth with recruited strength long
after its original cause has ceased to interest anyone, or maybe after
it has been forgotten.
Such feuds are by no means prevalent throughout the length and breadth
of Appalachia, but are restricted mostly to certain well defined
districts, of which the chief, in extent of territory as well as in the
number and ferocity of its "wars," is the country round the upper waters
of the Kentucky, Licking, Big Sandy, Tug, and Cumberland rivers,
embracing many of the mountain counties of eastern Kentucky and
adjoining parts of West Virginia, Old Virginia, and Tennessee. In this
thinly settled region probably five hundred men have been slain in feuds
since our centennial year, and only three of the murderers, so far as I
know, have been executed by law.
The active feudists, as a rule, include only a small part of the
community; but public sentiment, in feud districts, approves or at least
tolerates the vendetta, just as it does in Corsica or the Balkans. Those
citizens who are not directly implicated take pains to hear little and
see less. They keep their mouths shut. They can neither be persuaded,
bribed, nor coerced into informing or testifying against either side,
but, on the contrary, will throw dust in the eyes of an investigator or
try to stare him down. A jury composed of such men will not convict
anybody.
When a feud is raging, nobody outside the warring clans is in any danger
at all. A stranger is safer in the heart of Feuddom than he would be in
Chicago or New York, so long as he attends strictly to his own business,
asks no questions, and tells no "tales." If, on the contrary, he should
express horror or curiosity, he is regarded as a busybody or suspected
as a spy, and is likely to be run out of the country or even "laywayed"
and silenced forever.
What causes feuds?
Some of them start in mere drunken rows or in a dispute over a game of
cards; others in quarrels over land boundaries or other property. The
Hatfield-McCoy feud started because Randolph McCoy penned up two wild
hogs that were claimed by Floyd Hatfield. The spite over these hogs
broke out two years later, and one partisan was killed from ambush. The
feud itself began in 1882 over a debt of $1.75, with the hogs and the
bushwhacking brought up in recrimination. Love of women is the primary
cause, or the secondary aggravation, of many a feud. Some of the most
widespread and deadliest vendettas have originated in political strifes.
It should be understood that national and state politics cut little or
no figure in these "wars." Local politics in most of the mountain
counties is merely a factional fight, in which family matters and
business interests are involved, and the contest becomes bitterly
personal on that account. This explains most of the collusion or
partisanship of county officers and their remissness in enforcing the
law in murder cases. Family ties or political alliances override even
the oath of office.
Within the past year I have heard a deputy sheriff admit nonchalantly,
on the stand, that when a homicide was committed near him, and he was
the only officer in the vicinity, he advised the slayer to take to the
mountains and "hide out." The judge questioned him sharply on this
point, was reassured by the witness that it was so, and then--offered no
comment at all. Within the same period, in another but not distant
court, a desperado from the Shelton Laurel, on trial for murder,
admitted that he had shot six men since he moved over from Tennessee to
North Carolina, and swore that while he was being held in jail pending
trial for this last offense the sheriff permitted him to "keep a gun in
his cell, drink whiskey in the jail, and eat at table with the family of
the sheriff."
Feuds spread not only through clan fealty but also because they offer
excellent chances to pay off old scores. The mountaineer has a long
memory. The average highlander is fiery and combative by nature, but at
the same time cunning and vindictive. If publicly insulted he will
strike at once, but if he feels wronged by some act that does not demand
instant retaliation he will brood over it and plot patiently to get his
enemy at a disadvantage. Some mountaineers always fight fair; but many
of them prefer to wait and watch quietly until the foe gets drunk and
unwary, or until he is engaged in some illegal or scandalous act, or
until he is known to be carrying a concealed weapon, whereupon he can be
shot down unexpectedly and his assailant can "prove" by friendly
witnesses that he acted in self-defense. So, if a man be involved in
feud, he may be assassinated from ambush by someone who is not concerned
in the clan trouble, but who has hated him for years on another account,
and who knows that his death now will be charged up to the opposing
faction.
From the earliest times it has been customary for our highlanders to go
armed most of the time. This was a necessity in the old Indian-fighting
days, and throughout the kukluxing and white-capping era following the
Civil War. Such a habit, once formed, is hard to eradicate. Even to-day,
in all parts of Appalachia that I am familiar with, most of the young
men, I judge, and many of the older ones, carry concealed weapons.
Among them I have never seen a stand-up and knock-down fight according
to the rules of the ring. They have many rough-and-tumble brawls, in
which they slug, wrestle, kick, bite, strangle, until one gets the other
down, whereat the one on top continues to maul his victim until he cries
"Enough!" Oftener a club or stone will be used in mad endeavor to knock
the opponent senseless at a blow. There is no compunction about striking
foul and very little about "double-teaming." Let us pause long enough to
admit that this was the British and American way of man-handling,
universal among the common people, until well into the nineteenth
century--and the mountaineers are still ignorant of any other, except
fighting with weapons.
Many of the young men carry home-made billies or "brass knucks." Every
man and boy has at least a pocket-knife with serviceable blade. Fights
with such crude weapons are frequent. There are few spectacles more
sickening than two powerful but awkward men slashing each other with
common jack-knives, though the fatalities are much less frequent than in
gun-fighting. I have known two old mountain preachers to draw knives on
each other at the close of a sermon.
The typical highland bravo always carries a revolver or an automatic
pistol. This is likely to be a weapon of large bore and good
stopping-power that is worn in a shoulder-holster concealed under the
coat or vest or shirt. Most mountaineers are good shots with such arms,
though not so deadly quick as the frontiersmen of our old-time West--in
fact, they cannot be so quick without wearing the weapon exposed. When a
highlander has time, he prefers to hold his pistol in both hands (left
clasped over right) and aims it as he would a rifle. To a Westerner such
gun practice looks absurd; but it is accurate, beyond question. Few
mountain gun-fights fail to score at least one victim.
The average mountain woman is as combative in spirit as her menfolk. She
would despise any man who took insult or injury without showing fight.
In fact, the woman, in many cases, deliberately stirs up trouble out of
vanity, or for the sheer excitement of it. Some of the older women
display the ferocity of she-wolves. The mother of a large family said in
my presence, with the calm earnestness of one fully experienced: "If a
feller 'd treated me the way ------ did ------ I'd git me a
forty-some-odd and shoot enough meat off o' his bones to feed a
hound-dog a week." Three of this woman's brothers had been shot dead in
frays. One of them killed the first husband of her sister, who married
again, and whose second husband was killed by a man with whom she then
tried a third matrimonial venture. Such matters may not be interesting
in themselves, but they give one pause when he learns, in addition, that
these people are received as friends and on a footing of equality by
everybody in their community.
That the mountaineers are fierce and relentless in their feuds is beyond
denial. A warfare of bushwhacking and assassination knows no
refinements. Quarter is neither given nor expected. Property, however,
is not violated, and women are not often injured. There have been some
atrocious exceptions. In the Hatfield-McCoy feud, Cap Hatfield and Tom
Wallace attacked the latter's wife and her mother at night, dragged both
women from bed, and Cap beat the old woman with a cow's tail that he had
clipped off "jes' to see 'er jump." He broke two of the woman's ribs,
leaving her injured for life, while Tom beat his wife. Later, on New
Year's night, 1888, a gang of the Hatfields surrounded the home of
Randolph McCoy, killed the eldest daughter, Allaphare, broke her
mother's ribs and knocked her senseless with their guns, and killed a
son, Calvin. In several instances women who fought in defense of their
homes have been killed, as in the case of Mrs. Charles Daniels and her
16-year-old daughter, in Pike County, Kentucky, in November, 1909.
The mountain women do not shrink from feuds, but on the contrary excite
and cheer their men to desperate deeds, and sometimes fight by their
side. In the French-Eversole feud, a woman, learning that her unarmed
husband was besieged by his foes, seized his rifle, filled her apron
with cartridges, rushed past the firing-line, and stood by her "old man"
until he beat his assailants off. When men are "hiding out" in the
laurel, it is the women's part, which they never shirk, to carry them
food and information.
In every feud each clan has a leader, a man of prominence either on
account of his wealth or his political influence or his shrewdness or
his physical prowess. This leader's orders are obeyed, while hostilities
last, with the same unquestioning loyalty that the old Scotch retainer
showed to his chieftain. Either the leader or someone acting for him
supplies the men with food, with weapons if they need them, with
ammunition, and with money. Sometimes mercenaries are hired. Mr. Fox
says that "In one local war, I remember, four dollars per day were the
wages of the fighting man, and the leader on one occasion, while
besieging his enemies--in the county court-house--tried to purchase a
cannon, and from no other place than the State arsenal, and from no
other personage than the Governor himself." In some of the feuds
professional bravos have been employed who would assassinate, for a few
dollars, anybody who was pointed out to them, provided he was alien to
their own clans.
The character of the highland bravo is precisely that of the western
"bad man" as pictured by Jed Parker in Stewart Edward White's _Arizona
Nights_:
"'There's a good deal of romance been written about the "bad man,"
and there's about the same amount of nonsense. The bad man is just
a plain murderer, neither more nor less. He never does get into a
real, good, plain, stand-up gun-fight if he can possibly help it.
His killin's are done from behind a door, or when he's got his man
dead to rights. There's Sam Cook. You've all heard of him. He had
nerve, of course, and when he was backed into a corner he made
good; and he was sure sudden death with a gun. But when he went out
for a man deliberate, he didn't take no special chances....
"'The point is that these yere bad men are a low-down, miserable
proposition, and plain, cold-blooded murderers, willin' to wait for
a sure thing, and without no compunctions whatever. The bad man
takes you unawares, when you're sleepin', or talkin', or drinkin',
or lookin' to see what for a day it's goin' to be, anyway. He don't
give you no show, and sooner or later he's goin' to get you in the
safest and easiest way for himself. There ain't no romance about
that.'"
And there is no romance about a real mountain feud. It is marked by
suave treachery, "double-teaming," "laywaying," "blind-shooting," and
general heartlessness and brutality. If one side refuses to assassinate
but seeks open, honorable combat, as has happened in several feuds, it
is sure to be beaten. Whoever appeals to the law is sure to be beaten.
In either case he is considered a fool or a coward by most of the
countryside. Our highlander, untouched by the culture of the world about
him, has never been taught the meaning of fair play. Magnanimity to a
fallen foe he would regard as sure proof of an addled brain. The motive
of one who forgives his enemy is utterly beyond his comprehension. As
for bushwhacking, "Hit's as fa'r for one as 'tis for t'other. You can't
fight a man fa'r and squar who'll shoot you in the back. A pore man
can't fight money in the courts." In this he is simply his ancient
Scotch or English ancestor born over again. Such was the code of
Jacobite Scotland and Tudor England. And _back there_ is where our
mountaineer belongs in the scale of human evolution.
The feud, as Miss Miles puts it, is an outbreak of _perverted_ family
affection. Its mainspring is an honorable clan loyalty. It is a direct
consequence of the clan organization that our mountaineers preserve as
it was handed down to them by their forefathers. The implacability of
their vengeance, the treacheries they practice, the murders from ambush,
are invariable features of clan warfare wherever and by whomsoever it is
waged. They are not vices or crimes peculiar to the Kentuckian or the
Corsican or the Sicilian or the Albanian or the Arab, but natural
results of clan government, which in turn is a result of isolation, of
physical environment, of geographical position unfavorable to free
intercourse and commerce with the world at large.
The most hideous feature of the feud is the shooting down of unarmed or
unwarned men. Assassination, in our modern eyes, is the last and lowest
infamy of a coward. Such it truly is, when committed in the civilized
society of our day. But in studying primitive races, or in going back
along the line of our own ancestry to the civilized society of two
centuries ago, we must face and acknowledge the strange paradox of a
valorous and honorable people (according to their lights) who, in
certain cases, practiced assassination without compunction and, in fact,
with pride. History is red with it in those very "richest ages of our
race" that Professor Shaler cited. Until a century or two ago,
throughout Christendom, the secret murder of enemies was committed
unblushingly by nobles and kings and prelates, often with a pious "Thus
sayeth the Lord!" It was practiced by men valiant in open battle, and by
those wise in the counsels of the realm. Take Scotland, for example, as
pictured by a native writer.--
"No tenet nor practice, no influence nor power nor principality in
the Scotland of the past has outvied assassination in ascendancy or
in moment. Not theoretically, indeed, but practically, it occupied
for centuries a distinct, almost a supreme, place in her political
constitution--was, in fact, the understood if not recognized
expedient always in reserve should other milder and more hallowed
methods fail of accomplishing the desired political or, it might
be, religious consummation....
"For centuries such justice as was exercised was haphazard and
rude, and practically there was no law but the will of the
stronger. Few, if any, of the great families but had their special
feud; and feuds once originated survived for ages; to forget them
would have been treason to the dead, and wild purposes of revenge
were handed down from generation to generation as a sacred legacy.
"To take an enemy at a disadvantage was not deemed mean and
contemptible, but--
'Of all the arts in which the wise excel
Nature's chief masterpiece.'
To do it boldly and adroitly was to win a peculiar halo of renown;
and thus assassination ceased to be the weapon of the avowed
desperado, and came to be wielded unblushingly not only by
so-called men of honor, but by the so-called religious as well. A
noble did not scruple to use it against his king, and the king
himself felt no dishonor in resorting to it against a dangerous
noble. James I. was hacked to death in the night by Sir Robert
Graham; and James I. rid himself of the imperious and intriguing
Douglas by suddenly stabbing him while within his own royal palace
under protection of a safe conduct.
"The leaders of the Reformation discerned in assassination (that of
their enemies) the special 'work and judgment of God.'... When the
assassination of Cardinal Beaton took place in 1546, all the savage
details of it were set down by Knox with unbridled gusto. 'These
things we wreat mearlie,' is his own ingenuous comment on his
performance.
"The burden of George Buchanan's _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_ is the
lawfulness or righteousness of the removal--by assassination or any
other fitting or convenient means--of incompetent kings, whether
heinously wicked and tyrannical or merely unwise and weak of
purpose; and he cites as a case in point and an 'example in time
coming,' the murder of James III., which, if it were only on
account of the assassin's hideous travesty of the last offices of
the Church, would deserve to be held in unique and everlasting
detestation."--(Henderson, _Old-world Scotland_, 182-186.)
Yet the Scots have always been a notably warlike and fearless race. So,
too, are our southern mountaineers: in the Civil War and the Spanish War
they sent a larger proportion of their men into the service than almost
any other section of our country.
Let us not overlook the fact that it demands courage of a high order for
one to stay in a feud-infested district, conscious of being marked for
slaughter--stay there month in and month out, year in and year out, not
knowing at what moment he may be beset by overpowering numbers, from
what laurel thicket he may be shot, or at what hour of the night he may
be called to his door and struck dead before his family. On the credit
side of their valor, then, be it entered that few mountaineers will
shrink from such ordeal when, even from no fault of their own, it is
thrust upon them.
The blood-feud is simply a horrible survival of medievalism. It is the
highlander's misfortune to be stranded far out of the course of
civilization. He is no worse than that bygone age that he really belongs
to. In some ways he is better. He is far less cruel than his ancestors
were--than our ancestors were. He does not torture with the tumbril,
the stocks, the ducking-stool, the pillory, the branding-irons, the
ear-pruners and nostril-shears and tongue-branks that were in everyday
use under the old criminal code. He does not tie a woman to the cart's
tail and publicly lash her bare back until it streams with blood, nor
does he hang a man for picking somebody's pocket of twelve pence and a
farthing. He does not go slumming in bedlam, paying tuppence for the
sport of mocking the maniacs until they rattle their chains in rage or
horror. He does not turn executions of criminals into public festivals.
He never has been known to burn a condemned one at the stake. If he
hangs a man, he does not first draw his entrails and burn them before
his eyes, with a mob crowding about to jeer the poor devil's flinching
or to compliment him on his "nerve." Yet all these pleasantries were
proper and legal in Christian Britain two centuries ago.
This isolated and belated people who still carry on the blood-feud are
not half so much to blame for such a savage survival as the rich,
powerful, educated, twentieth-century nation that abandons them as if
they were hopelessly derelict or wrecked. It took but a few decades to
civilize Scotland. How much swifter and surer and easier are our means
of enlightenment to-day! Let us not forget that these highlanders are
blood of our blood and bone of our bone; for they are old-time Americans
to a man, proud of their nationality, and passionately loyal to the flag
that they, more than any other of us, according to their strength, have
fought and suffered for.