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.)