THE SON OF THE DEVIL: CAP HATFIELD By Thomas Dotson

THE SON OF THE DEVIL: CAP HATFIELD

By Thomas Dotson

I have always had a little soft spot in my heart for Cap Hatfield, because beginning with his letter to the Wayne County newspaper in 1891 he showed evidence of a conscience, which is a rare attribute among the really “Bad” men of his era. He had many bouts with his conscience during the last half of his life, but, unfortunately Cap seems to have won most of them.

Cap Hatfield was very much his father’s son, even though he tried to separate himself from the old man later in his life, and refused to be buried in Devil Anse’s shrine on Island Creek. Raised illiterate, he occupied his growing up years in hunting, fishing, riding and according to one unfriendly source, dissecting live frogs and torturing chickens.

At the age of 18, he received his baptism by fire on the bank of Tug River, as he joined the execution squad that riddled the bodies of the three McCoys with lead.

At 22, he shot Jeff McCoy in the back, killing him. In this case he did have the Rooster Cogburn justification in that he was “stopping a felon in flight.”

At 24, he participated in the New Years raid on the McCoy home, where, if you believe the sworn testimony of an eyewitness (I don’t), he shot and killed Allifair McCoy.

These might all be written off as youthful indiscretions, but his depredations continued when, at 32, he killed either two or three men (his step-son might have killed one of the victims) at the election in Matewan, compounding the felonies by also voting for McKinley the same day.

Then, at age 44, when he definitely should have known better, he became a lawyer. The one redeeming feature in Cap’s notorious career is that he rarely practiced that black art.

He ended his career by spending his twilight years as a deputy sheriff under his infamous cousin, Don Chafin, who led the army of deputies, coal company gun thugs and vigilantes that killed dozens of striking miners in 1920 and 21.

Cap Hatfield was at the top of the literary stack among the feudists. In 1891, only a few years after his wife taught him to read, he says in a letter to the editor: “The war spirit in me has abated…..I sincerely rejoice at the prospect of peace….We being, like Adam, not the first transgressors….” 

That is incredible phraseology for a man who couldn’t even read five years earlier. Wouldn’t it be something to hear the thirty minute closing plea he made to the jury on behalf of his brother, Willis, two decades later? That must have been some speech that Cap made to that jury. Willis was charged with first degree murder for pumping six slugs into the town doctor and he got off with involuntary manslaughter.

Uncle Jeff Davis, a justice of the peace and store proprietor on Blackberry Creek when I was young, spent a considerable amount of time in Cap Hatfield’s house, while reading the law. 

Uncle Jeff was a nephew of Joe Davis, a friend of the Hatfields who was a major witness in the 1889 trials. Uncle Jeff said that Cap Hatfield could quote lengthy passages from the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the Longfellow poem, Evangeline from start to finish. Altina Waller makes a similar statement about Cap.

The major figures of the “feud period” in Tug Valley were not the one-dimensional barbarians presented in the yellow journalism of that day. They were complex personalities, with Cap Hatfield being the most intriguing of all. The claims by the yellow journalists of yesteryear and the sensationalist writers of today that the feudists were moral and mental dwarfs are libels.

Cap died at 66, possibly from the lingering effects of a gunshot wound.

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— Repost; This article was penned and submitted to the Hatfield and McCoy Feud page in August 2013 by author Thomas Dotson.

— Thank you, Tom. Excellent column.

— SCOWLING CAP HATFIELD: The drawing is of William Anderson “Cap” Hatfield, Jr., with its excellent likeness of the second son of feud patriarch Devil Anse Hatfield. At the time, Cap was known as a skilled gunslinger, entrepreneur, and outdoorsman.