Kentucky's Famous Feuds and Tragedies: Authentic History of the World Renowned Vendettas of the Dark and Bloody GroundMutzenberg, Charles Gustavus
History
Kentucky's Famous Feuds and Tragedies: Authentic History of the World Renowned Vendettas of the Dark and Bloody Ground
Mutzenberg, Charles Gustavus
Crime -- Kentucky; Vendetta -- Kentucky
We believe it germane to the matter under discussion to add that not
only feuds, but mobs and the like, are, and ever have been, the direct
outgrowth of a lack of confidence of the people in their courts. The
shameful nightrider outrages in the western part of Kentucky a few
years ago, in a section which had boasted of a civilization superior by
far to that of the mountaineers, where schools and churches are to be
met with at every corner, were the outcome, so it is claimed, of the
failure of the law to deal sternly with the lawless tobacco trust, the
"original wrongdoer" in the noted tobacco war. If this were true, if
this justified the destruction by incendiaries of millions of dollars'
worth of property, brutal whippings, the indiscriminate slaughter of
entire families without regard to age or sex, the butchery of little
children (for aiding the tobacco trust, no doubt) then, indeed, is the
mountaineer feudist also innocent of wrongdoing; more so, for he, at
least, never made war upon suckling infants, nor have women suffered
harm, except in one or two instances. Nor is the cultured Blue Grass
citizen free to censure him, when he calls to mind the outrages of the
toll-gate raids, or takes into account the numerous lynching bees,
proceedings from which the mountains have always been practically free.
In view of all this we cannot go far from wrong when we say that the
law's delay, the failure to punish promptly, impartially and severely
its infractions, must shoulder the responsibility for all social
disturbances, and this is true in New York, in the West, as well as in
Kentucky.
Kentucky's Famous Feuds and Tragedies
THE GREAT HATFIELD-McCOY FEUD.
Perhaps no section in the whole United States has ever been the
scene of more crime and long-continued defiance of the law than that
contiguous to the Tug Fork, one of the tributaries of the Big Sandy
river, and which forms the boundary line between West Virginia and
Kentucky, separating Logan County, W. Va., from Pike County, Ky.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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