Who started the feud between the Hatfields and McCoys?

Answer 1

The Hatefield-McCoy feud began with the murder of Asa Harmon McCoy on January 7, 1865. Jim Vance, the uncle of Devil Anse Hatfield, despised Harmon because he had joined the Union Army during the American Civil War. When Harmon returned home from the war, he was warned that Devil Anse's Wildcats (Hatfields) were going to kill him. Frightened, Harmon hid in a nearby cave, but the Wildcats discovered Harmon and shot him fatally. Further violence occurred between the two families throughout the following years.

Answer 2

This is obviously being precipitated by the recent History Channel miniseries. And, the History channel actually did a pretty good job illustrating the situation.

There were a number of elements and it cannot be nailed down to one or any specific set of events. The best information we have comes from verbal histories from both families.

First, it is important to recognize that the families that settled in this region were immigrants from rural Ireland and Scotland. The West Virginia/Kentucky border area looks a lot like Ireland and parts of Scotland, so attracted the settlers to the area. With this in mind, it is critical to understand just how clannish these people were, and to large part still are. They do not trust outsiders, and outsiders are those not directly or peripherally related to them.

So, to begin, we have very clannish groups, combined with the stress of the Civil War. During the war, families were destroyed by the separation of ideas. Brothers fought against each other, and families who came from the same regions continued the war after the surrender was signed. There are places in the south where the Civil War is still being fought in words, and this is nearly 150 years after the fact, so immediately after the war, the shooting was still going on.

Mix into this the potential tension that the History Channel illustrated that may have existed between William Anderson "Cap" Hatfield and Randal "Ole Ran'l" McCoy. The story goes that the two men grew up friends who fought side by side for the Confederates. The HC picks up on the story of Cap calling it quits and returning home early from the war, while Ran'l continued to fight and was captured and put into a Union POW camp. There would naturally be some anger on the part of Randal.

Mix all of this together along with a continuing frontier ideal of justice, and a stolen pig and disagreement over land, the shooting started. Once begun, it became a matter of who was paying for who shot last.