When the wilderness came to be settled by white men, courts were feeble to puerility, and every man was a law unto himself. Many hard characters came in with the pioneers—bad neighbors, arrogant, thievish, bold. As society was not organized for mutual protection, it was inevitable that cousin should look to cousin for help in time of trouble. So arose the clan, the family league, and, as things change very slowly in the mountains, we still have clan loyalty outside of and superior to the law. “My family right or wrong!” is a slogan to which every highlander will rise, with money or arms in hand, and for it he will lay down his last dollar, the last drop of his blood. There is scarce any limit to which this fealty will not go. Your brother or cousin may have committed a crime that shocks you as it does all other decent citizens; but will you give him up to the officers and testify against him? Not if you are a mountaineer. You will hide him out in the laurel, carry him food, keep him posted, help him to break jail, perjure yourself for him in court—anything, everything, to get him clear.
We see here a survival, very real and widespread, in this twentieth-century Appalachia, of a condition that was general throughout the Scotch Highlands in the far past. “The great virtue of the Highlander,” says Lecky, “was his fidelity to his chief and to his clan. It took the place of patriotism and of loyalty to his sovereign.... In the reign of James V., an insurrection of Clan Chattan having been suppressed by Murray, two hundred of the insurgents were condemned to death. Each one as he was led to the gallows was offered a pardon if he would reveal the hiding-place of his chief, but they all answered that, were they acquainted with it, no sort of punishment could induce them to be guilty of treachery to their leader.... In 1745 the house of Macpherson of Cluny was burnt to the ground by the King’s troops. A reward of £1,000 was offered for his apprehension. A large body of soldiers was stationed in the district and a step of promotion was promised to any officer who should secure him. Yet for nine years the chief was able to live concealed on his own property in a cave which his clansmen dug for him during the night, and, though upwards of one hundred persons knew of his place of retreat, no bribe or menace could extort the secret.”
The same chivalrous, self-sacrificing fidelity to family and to clan leader is still shown by our own highlanders, as scores of feuds and hundreds of criminal trials attest. All this is openly and unblushingly “above the law”; but let us remember that the law itself, in many of these localities, is but a feeble, dilatory thing that offers practically no protection to those who would obey its letter. So, in an imperfectly organized society, it is good to have blood-ties that are faithful unto death. And none knows it better than he who has missed it—he who has lived strange and alone in some wild, lawless region where everyone else had a clan to back him.
So far as primitive society is concerned, we may admit with the Scotch historian Henderson that “the clan system of government was in its way an ideally perfect one—probably the only perfect one that has ever existed.... The clansman was not the subject—a term implying some sort of conquest—but the kinsman of his chief.... Obedience became rather a privilege than a task, and no possible bribery or menace could shake his fidelity. Towards the Sassenach or the members of clans at feud with him he might act meanly, treacherously, and cruelly without check and without compunction, for there he recognized no moral obligations whatever. But as a clansman to his clan he was courteous, truthful, virtuous, benevolent, with notions of honor as punctilious as those of the ancient knight.”
The trouble with clan government was, as this same writer has pointed out, that “it was the very thoroughness of its adaptation to early needs that made it so hard to adjust to new necessities. In its principles and motives it was essentially opposed to the bent of modern influences. Its appeal was to sentiment rather than to law or even reason: it was a system not of the letter but of the spirit.... The clan system was efficient only within a narrow area; it gave rise to interminable feuds; and it was inapplicable to the circumstances created by the rise of modern industry and trade.”
Everywhere throughout Highland Dixie to-day we can observe how clan loyalty interferes with the administration of justice. When a case involving some strong family comes up in the courts, immediately a cloud of false witnesses arises, men who should testify on the other side are bribed or run out of the country before subpoenas can be served, and every juror knows that his peace and prosperity in future depend largely upon which side he espouses.
To what lengths the hostility of a clan may go in defying justice was shown recently in the massacre of almost a whole court by the Allen clan at Hillsville, Virginia. The news of that atrocity swept like wildfire throughout all Appalachia, its history is being reviewed to-day in thousands of mountain cabins, and it is deeply significant that, away out here in western Carolina, where no Allen blood relationship prejudices men’s minds, the prevailing judgment of our backwoodsmen is that the State of Virginia did wrong in executing any of the offenders. “There was something back of it—you mark my words,” say the country folk. And the drummers, cattle-buyers, and others who pass this way from southwestern Virginia tell us, “Everybody up our way sympathizes with the Allens.”
In some measure this morbid sentiment is due to the spectacular features of the Hillsville tragedy. If there be one human quality that the mountaineer admires above all others, it is “nerve.” And what greater display of nerve has been made in this generation than for a few clansmen to shoot down a judge at the bench, the public prosecutor, the sheriff, the clerk of the court, and two jurymen, then take to the mountain laurel like Corsicans to the maquis, and defy the armed power of the country? The cause does not matter, to a mountaineer. Our Highlanders are anything but robbers, for instance, and yet the only outsider who has ballads sung in his memory throughout Appalachia is Jesse James!—unless Jack Donohue was one—I do not know.—
Come all ye bold undaunted men
And outlaws of the day,
Who’d rather wear the ball and chain
Than work in slavery!
····
Said Donohue to his comrades,
“If you’ll prove true to me,
This day I’ll fight with all my might,
I’ll fight for liberty;
Be of good courage, be bold and strong,
Be galliant and be true;
This day I’ll fight with all my might,”
Says bold Jack Donohue.
····
Six policemen he shot down
Before the fatal ball
Pierced the heart of Donohue
And ’casioned him to fall;
And then he closed his struggling eyes,
And bid this world adieu.
Come all ye boys that fear no noise,
And pray for Donohue!
No doubt the mountain minstrels are already composing ballads in honor of the Allens; for it is a fact we cannot blink at that the outlaw is the popular hero of Appalachia to-day, as Rob Roy and Robin Hood were in the Britain of long ago. This is not due to any ingrained hostility to law and order as such, but simply to admiration for any men who fight desperately against overwhelming odds. There is a glamour about bold and lawless adventure that fascinates mature men and women who have never outgrown youthful habits of mind. Whoever has the reputation of being a dangerous man to cross—the “marked” man, who carries his life upon his sleeve, but bears himself as a smiling cavalier—he is the only true aristocrat among a valorous but primitive people.