Immigration into these remote mountain regions was almost nil and intermarriage between the settlers became the rule. In this wise the population of any county comprised but very few distinct families. Everybody was of kin to everybody else, and therein we find the key to the difficulties encountered by courts in dealing with crime.
The murderer, if a member of a prominent family, was certain to have kinsmen among the officers. (We may as well use the present tense in speaking of this, for the same conditions exist to-day, though less pronounced.) His “family,” man, woman and child, stand by him, aid his escape or his defence in the court house. If the criminal, conscious of the supporting influence surrounding him, disdains flight and boldly faces trial, the next move is to secure a jury which will acquit him. It often happens that those interested in the prosecution secretly come to an agreement with the accused and his friends to cease prosecution provided he and his in their turn would do the same to them in cases of their own. It is merely a case of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” Citizens who love peace are loath to antagonize an outlaw clan so long as they or theirs are not directly concerned. They have no desire to assist officers in doing their duty, should these wish to do it. To indict men for crime is often a risky thing.
The criminal who has succeeded in defeating justice grows more bold, continues to pursue his career with an enhanced contempt of the law, until, at last, the cup runs over, and men, good and true, rise above self, and for country’s and humanity’s sake take upon themselves the task of restoring peace and order, and summarily cut short the life cycle of the outlaw.
How far such organized bands of murderers have succeeded in overawing the constituted authorities, is illustrated by instances recorded in this volume, where the law, the government itself, actually compromised with the outlaws, promised, yea, granted them immunity from past crimes, only exacting a pledge of better behavior in the future. If a man had committed but one little murder, he was in some danger of a short term in the penitentiary. If he understood his business, instead of stopping at one assassination, he simply continued his murder mill in operation and the authorities would send special ministers and envoys to “treat” with him as a power entitled to respect. Exaggeration? No![3]
Officers of the law have actually aided in assassinations, or stood idly by while murders were committed in their presence. Investigation has proven that in every feud-ridden section the entire legal machinery was rotten to the core, perverted to the end and purpose of protecting particular men and of punishing their enemies. Is it any wonder, then, that in such times and under such conditions preaching respect for law is breath wasted?
Sifting the matter down, we find that the chief contributing causes of these feudal troubles, wherever they have occurred, or may again occur, are due directly:—to inefficient, corrupt and depraved officials; to a want of a healthy moral public sentiment, through lack of proper education and religious training; to the fact that the law-abiding element of the feud-ridden counties had so long been domineered over by the criminal class and their parasites and supporters in secret, that they are incapable of rendering any valuable assistance in maintaining the law save in few exceptions, and these few so much in the minority that a reformation is not to be hoped for if left to their own resources; that during all the social chaos attending feudal wars the promiscuous, unrestrained and illegal sale of whiskey added fury, fire and venom to the minds and hearts of murderers. It dragged into the terrible vortex of bloody crime many not directly connected with the feud, but who took advantage of the disturbed social conditions, the state of anarchy, to satisfy their own vicious propensities without fear of interruption and punishment.[4]
The clannishness of the mountaineer has been the subject of much comment. The student of sociology must, therefore, be interested in learning that in a great measure the people of the Kentucky mountains descended from the same stock that formed the noted Scottish clans of old. One need only run over the names of the principal mountain families to recognize their Scot origin. The Scots love the highlands, and to the “highlands” of Kentucky many of them drifted. Scotland had her feuds—those of the Kentucky mountains are nothing more nor less than transplanted Scottish feuds, their continuation having been made possible by the reasons heretofore given.
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.