Does anyone know what caused the feuds that left Kentucky with a reputation for violence? Who were the people causing the feuds and what factors caused the conflicts? John Ed Pearce has interview individuals of the feuding families and studied court records to uncover what really happen and why. His book brings to life new evidence, questions, and popular beliefs about the feuds. His story conquers the misconceptions and legends. A chain of feuds flew through the hills of eastern Kentucky ten years before and fifty years after the Civil War. Local governments called it quits and law enforcement was nearly impossible. State troopers were frequently called in to save and protect the lives. It was said that interactions with nearby West Virginia became so hostile that it was feared the two states would fight. Everyone has tried to explain why the feuds were restricted to such a small part of Eastern Kentucky. Some say it was the Civil War and the fact that many families were slip and fought against each other. I believe these …show more content…
folks who have been raised in such an isolated part of the state for so many generations, have developed their own cultures and ways of doing things. I believe this to be a strength in John Ed Pearce's Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky. Pearce wrote this book in such a way that made it relatable. My family came from an area that was very isolated and underdeveloped. There were times when I was reading Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky that I nodded because I knew exactly what he was referring to. No one seems to know for sure exactly what started the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
Some say it was a blend of an on-going boundary disagreement that brought Kentucky and West Virginia to the point of going before the Supreme Court. According to some accounts, the Baker-White feud or The Hundred-Year war started with one calling the other’s dog a yellow cur. The Turner-Howard feud in Harlan County supposedly started when one of the Howards accused a Turner of “speaking badly to Mama.” Again, no one really seems to know the reasons behind their beginnings. Whatever the reason be, the feuds caused a lot of damage. Hundreds were killed and businesses were destroyed. I believe this to also be a strength in John Ed Pearce's Days of Darkness: The Feuds of Eastern Kentucky. Pearce wrote but also illustrated in a way that made the story come to life. As a reader you feel like you were walking back into history and meeting the feuding families face to
face. Things began to change very quickly after the Civil War. Eastern Kentucky land companies began purchasing huge plots of land for timber. Coal mines were open for business and railroads started to tear through the heart of the mountains. This brought in new people with new custom, behaviors and traditions. The combination of these social and economic factors mixed with the weakness of law enforcement, the lack of churches and schools and the families cultures born of their isolated, lead to a place where the likelihood for possible violence over seemingly insignificant problems were great. Eastern Kentuckians were rejected even by other Kentuckians. The stereo-typical hillbilly that is backward, bearded, barefoot mountaineer, sucking on his corncob pipe, drinking a jug of moonshine was deeply instilled into a country’s memory and has been passed down from one family member to the next. There are many parts of Eastern Kentucky that still show the effects of isolation but it is slowly being destroyed as education and determination pay off. We do not have the power to erase the violence that is in our past. The only things we can do is to learn from it and move forward towards our true potential as Kentuckians. John Ed Pearce said it the best. “Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to."
The archives show how Augusta, Virginia and Franklin, Pennsylvania, and the South and North, shared many characteristics before the war, which Ayers points out well. One main point he makes when writing about their similarities is noting that both counties had people who supported slavery. Augusta, in the South, had slavery as their main economic system, and Franklin, in the North, had whites who believed in and supported slavery. There was also an abundance of racial discrimination still in the Franklin. These similarities didn’t matter much when it came to the issue of secession.
Dr. James and Freda Klotter are both noted educators in the state of Kentucky. Dr. Klotter is the Kentucky state historian and professor of history at Georgetown College while his wife is an educational consultant with the Kentucky Collaborative for Teaching and Learning, with many years of experience in the classroom. They outline major influences and developments of the frontier to statehood, Civil War, post-Civil War, and modern times. Throughout the book, anecdotes of the lives of well-known and anonymous Kentuckians to shed light on economic, social, and cultural subjects. A Concise History of Kentucky will be useful to many readers wishing to learn more about the state.
Tempers raged and arguments started because of the Missouri Compromise. The simple act caused many fatal events because of what was changed within the United States. It may not seem like a big thing now, but before slavery had been abolished, the topic of slavery was an idea that could set off fights. The Missouri Compromise all started in late in 1819 when the Missouri Territory applied to the Union to become a slave state. The problem Congress had with accepting Missouri as a slave state was the new uneven count of free states and slave states. With proslavery states and antislavery states already getting into arguments, having a dominant number of either slave or free states would just ignite the flame even more. Many representatives from the north, such as James Tallmadge of New York, had already tried to pass another amendment that would abolish slavery everywhere. Along with other tries to eliminate slavery, his effort was soon shot down. The fact that people couldn’t agree on whether or not slavery should be legalized made trying to compose and pass a law nearly impossible.
Bergeron, Paul H, Stephen V. Ash, and Jeanette Keith. Tennesseans and Their History. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Print.
In the book Storm Over Texas, by Joel H. Silbey the critical controversy of North vs. South is displayed. The book goes into great detail of the wild moments leading into the Civil War, the political dysfunction that ran throughout Texas, and many reasons the American Civil War sparked up in the first place. This book truly captives great Texas history and has valid information and points of our states different point of views on history.
Since the beginning of their new nation, the United States had many differences between the Northern and Southern states. During the Constitutional Convention they disagreed on how to determine their representation in the house based on population; the Southerners wanted to count their slaves and the Northerners did not, which lead to the three-fifths compromise. Later in the Convention there were concessions given to the South, which left the Northerners feeling uneasy, such as: a guarantee that the slave trade would not be interfered with by Congress until 1808 and slave owners were given the right to recover refugee slaves from anywhere in the United States. While many Northern delegates were disappointed with the rights given to the South, they felt it was necessary for the good of the Nation. This was necessary to form a strong central government and union between the states.
Kentucky was a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, where two warring families fought each other to the death during the early 19th century. Harlan wasn’t the only town in the Appalachian Mountains that grew restless, but several others as well were erupting in bloodshed. The explanation for this behavior is tied back to something called “the culture of honor”. It was in their culture, that if a person kills one person from the family, the member of this family must kill the killer of their family member. Their culture legacy affects them negatively, and they are retaliating up to now, and killing each other. All this bad situation is the cause of their negative cultural legacies. Imagine how tough culture, it was, that a mother told for his injured son “go fight and die like a man like your brother did”. They were able to change their negative culture in a positive one, to have a save society, but they didn’t do that, and That’s how lots of people lost and losing their life cause of a negative culture in Harlan
Before the mid 1800s, the north and south dealt with a lot of disagreements that involved economic differences. The differences dealt with slavery, representation, states’ rights, and tariffs. There was a conflict with states wanting to balance the freedom of slaves in the states. Another cause was the tariffs which dealt with the taxation of imported goods, the Northern states supported protective tariffs, but the South did not. Consequently, the conflicts began to grow and this increased the differences between the North and South. During the early to mid 1800s sectional differences forced the north and south farther and farther apart. The differences that affected the North and South involved the missouri compromise of 1820, the cotton gin invention, and the Uncle Tom’s novel.
To own land, that is the privilege of whom? To Andrew Jackson the Cherokees current homesteads where on his country’s land. For whatever reason at that time some people living in America weren’t treated as good as there white counterparts. Meanwhile the Cherokees principal chief John Ross felt like that land belonged to his people. If you want to get technical he was speaking on the behalf of a tribe that made up a mere one-eighth of his ancestry. Not exactly a full blooded leader. He also was one of the main reason the “trail of tears” was as hostile and brutal as it was on his people. Its ironic, even as hard as Jackson pushed and deceived the Cherokee, the Cherokee people in turn pushed back, but past the point of being rational.
In the years leading up to the Civil War, there was great conflict throughout the United States. The North and South had come to a crossroads at which there was no turning back. The Secession Crisis is what ultimately led to the Civil War. The North and the South disagreed on slavery and what states would be free states. The South despised Lincoln 's election and rose up in revolt by forming the Confederate States of America. Both the North and the South were responsible for the crisis, but the election of Lincoln had the most impact. All of these factors are what began the war in which brother fought brother.
In order to understand the real cause of conflict that existed between the State of Georgia and Cherokee Nation, one needs to find the background information into the history of the Cherokee Nation. The Cherokee Nation was a native of the US covering an approximate of 140,000 square kilometers. It bordered southeastern states like North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee as well as Georgia along its boundaries. They were first discovered by Hernando de Soto in the year 1542, and several years later, the immigrants of the English origin begun trading with the Cherokee Nation with the hope they would find help from them against the Tuscarora in the war that was upcoming against the Tuscarora tribe (Carlson, 2002). After the war, the trade that existed between the Cherokee and the English immigrants who occupied the South Carolina territory begun to grow and this led to the growth of the State of Georgia. The need for settlement among the English immigrants resulting from the growth that was evident from the trade led to a war between the Cherokee and the English colonists. This was because of the unwillingness of the Cherokee people to give away their lands to the English immigrants. Resultantly, a peace treaty was made between the two, bringing the war to an end. The peace treaty is referred to as the Treaty of Holston.
...om’s Cabin in 1852, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, and the outcome of the Presidential Election of 1860—created conditions where Southerners felt the need to secede from the United States (they felt that their “way of life” was being threatened), as well as created conditions where the Northerners decided to go to war against the Southern Confederacy in order to maintain the Union. It is not surprising, however, that the Civil War occurred; since the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial North had always been different than the Agricultural South. If each region paid more attention to resolving the issues that separated them, instead of trying to prove themselves right, they could have stopped the bloodiest battle in American history (even though this is using hindsight knowledge).
and the frontier war was already going on. Also, there were sayings that Indians were also doing witchcraft, which because of this, it was believed that the Indians caused both wars, the witchcraft chaos, and the frontier. I understand why historians would link the two together, it is reasonable that it was because of the war chaos going around and mostly of the Maine
The Civil War was the first war Americans fought on their land and between themselves. Many events led up to the beginning of the Civil War, but the one thing both north and south wanted was equal territory. North wanted the same amount of land, if not more, for the free states while the south wanted the same thing for the slave states. During the 1800s, the free states and slave states began to dispute over new territories. The government attempted to end disputes by making the territories either free or slave depending on the territory previously added to equal out the free and slave states; however, this led to sectionalism between the north and south causing the Civil War.
The name Civil War is misleading because the war was not a class struggle, but a sectional combat, having its roots in political, economic, social, and psychological elements. It has been characterized, in the words of William H. Seward, as the “irrepressible conflict.” In another judgment the Civil War was viewed as criminally stupid, an unnecessary bloodletting brought on by arrogant extremists and blundering politicians. Both views accept the fact that in 1861 there existed a situation that, rightly or wrongly, had come to be regarded as insoluble by peaceful means.