The Legend of Abner Vance

(Photo of the Clinch River, near Abingdon, VA, where Abner Vance was hanged.)

I. The Things That Aren’t True

Let me tell you a story. It's a story of betrayal and revenge, a tragedy that claimed the lives of two men and destroyed the lives of many others. I am going to tell you the legend of Abner Vance, which begins in 1817 near Abingdon, Virginia.

According to the legend, Abner Vance was a Baptist preacher who had a daughter named Betty. Betty eloped with one Daniel Horton. Horton was a Virginia doctor and he took Betty off to Baltimore, had his way with her for two weeks, then brought her back to her father's house and dumped her unceremoniously in the front yard, saying something to the effect of “Here's your heifer back.”

In a fit of rage, Abner Vance pulled down his shotgun and killed Lewis Horton, Daniel's brother, though he may have been aiming at Daniel, as he tried to cross the Clinch River. Abner, now a murderer, fled into the wilds of Virginia, away from the habitations of men, and came into the Tug Valley. He stayed there for two years, in the process procuring land for his children, some say thousands of acres. At the end of two years, however, Abner tired of living alone in the wilderness and came back to Abingdon to meet his fate, whatever it might be.

While in jail awaiting trial, Abner composed a song, which has been preserved to us as “The Abner Vance Song” and which is considered by musicologists to be the first song written west of the Allegheny Mountains. Eventually, in 1819, Abner Vance was tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang. On the day of his hanging, he reputedly sang his song and delivered a final speech that lasted nearly two hours, captivating the gathered crowd. In a final note of irony, soon after his hanging a message arrived saying that he had been given a pardon by the governor. Betty, still unmarried, and now without a father, came to the Tug Valley in later years, where she lived with her children, I assume on some of the land purchased by her father. Her daughter Nancy was the mother of Devil Anse Hatfield. Her son James Vance is a central figure in many feud tales.

I'll grant that this is an excellent tale. It's so good, in fact, that almost no writer about the feud can fail to make use of it. Two of the most recent best selling books on the feud, Dean King's “The Feud: The Hatfield and McCoys: The True Story” and Lisa Alther's “Blood Feud” write about Abner Vance, repeating the basic elements of the tale and then drawing conclusions about the people of the Tug Valley based upon their reading of it.

For Lisa Alther, the story of Abner Vance gives her insight into the character of Devil Anse Hatfield. Since Betty Vance was his grandmother, Alther assumes, probably correctly, that Devil Anse must have heard the tale of his great grandfather Abner throughout his childhood. She is certain that “this story haunted Devil Anse throughout his life and influenced some of his more unfortunate decisions during the feud. The lesson for him may have well have been that when the government gets involved, injustice occurs, and that a man should seek his own justice, unaided and unhindered by legal institutions.”

For Dean King, the Abner Vance story is but the opening act in a long cycle of violence and retribution worthy of Greek tragedy. King finds his irony in the notion that Vance, who bought land in the Tug Valley, hoped to send his children to a more peaceful place. King writes: “Vance, a violent man who hoped for better for his family, had thus directed them to a place where...peace did not dwell. In fact, it was a place of reduction and abstraction, and violence was as much a part of life as childbirth and homemade spirits.”

For both King and Alther, the story of Abner Vance sets into play themes that will become increasingly important in their respective books. For both writers, the Vance legend points to an essential element of violence in the nature of the Tug Valley people, something they carried with them into the wilderness like original sin. Something dark lurked in the hearts of those mountaineers, and from time to time it just had to come out until it was tamed by the calm, reasonable violence of the legal system and the men who killed not for primitive passion but for cold hard cash.

Here's the problem with the assessments of both of these writers: the Abner Vance story, as both of them persist in telling it, just isn't true!

II. The Things That Are True

Tall tales sometimes have a tenacity that defies the work of the historian. When it comes to feud tales, created over the years and polished into a glossy perfection, big-screen-ready, the task of deflating them, of correcting the record and restoring actual historical detail is definitely an uphill battle. The tales themselves have become a kind of raw material, like timber or coal, that outside interests can mine for profit. Many of these writers seem to feel, rightly or wrongly, that the truth is a kind of fool's gold, shiny enough but worthless, and only the manufactured feud tales can muscle their way into the marketplace and onto the top of the bestseller lists. So they ignore the evidence where they can and build better and better forgeries, souped-up feud tales that have a sophisticated surface of “research” and a massive advertising budget, but which are designed to deceive. Their mantra seems to be “never let the truth get in the way of telling a good story.”

That being said, let me tell you the true story (or at least as true as we can get at this point) of Abner Vance. This information comes from the actual documents - court records, letters, newspaper accounts - uncovered by Barbara Vance Cherep and Tom and Janice Vance - and from original work done by Grace Dotson (see here). All of what follows derives from their work, which was freely available and easily accessible years before either Dean King or Lisa Alther started work on their books. If you go to Google and type in "Abner Vance Story", one of the top links that comes up is a link to some of Barbara's work, titled “Abner Vance: Two Sides To Every Story.” So it actually takes more work these days to find the untrue Abner Vance legend than the true Abner Vance story.

So here it is. On September 22, 1817 Abner Vance did in fact shoot Lewis Horton in the back as he crossed the Clinch River. Lewis did not drown, as Lisa Alther suggested was possible, but was taken home where he lingered for several days and finally died on September 27th. He managed to write his will before his death. At this point, Abner Vance was arrested. He did not flee to the Tug Valley but went to jail, where he remained for the entire two years until his execution. He was tried and found guilty on April 17, 1818 but appealed the case, claiming that he had not been able to argue insanity at his trial. One of his daughters (not Betty) was willing to testify that he was insane in the weeks leading up to the shooting, but since she had not seen him for several days before the shooting, she could not testify that he was insane at that moment. A judge granted Vance a second trial, and after some wrangling over where it would take place and whether or not the potential jury was prejudiced against him, he was tried again in May of 1819, found guilty again, and sentenced to death a second time. On Friday, July 16th, 1819, he was executed by hanging. It is apparently true, according to newspaper accounts at the time, that he addressed the crowd for over and hour and a half and exhibited a total contempt for death. There is no mention in the records of his singing a song.

As for his reasons for shooting Lewis Horton in 1817, there is no mention in the records. Tantalizing pieces of information suggest legal suits over land. He was involved in a Chancery suit with the Hortons, which Barbara Vance Cherep says often involved land title disputes and other non-criminal offenses, but there is no clear indication that this lead to the shooting of Horton. An interesting document from 1813 (transcribed here: http://files.usgwarchives.net/va/tazewell/court/horton01.txt) shows that local people considered Daniel Horton to be a man who used every legal means possible to get his hands on the land of his neighbors. It seems far more likely, to me, that Vance was involved in some sort of legal squabble with the Hortons over land ownership. There is no mention anywhere in the records of either Daniel Horton's elopement with Betty Vance, and, in fact, in 1817 Betty already had two daughters, Nancy and Sarah, and was quite possibly pregnant with a third. So while the actual cause of the animosity between Vance and the Hortons is not clear, an elopement with Abner's daughter Betty almost certainly doesn't play a role.

So Abner Vance never came into the Tug Valley. He never purchased land there. He never sent his children there to live. And Devil Anse never heard his grandmother Betty tell the story of how her father killed a man to save her honor. I have no idea whether or not any of them knew about the song.

III. The Things That Might Be True

We know one more fact about Betty Vance that makes her involvement in the Horton affair unlikely. DNA research on the part of various Vance descendants, coupled with local knowledge passed down through the families, has shown conclusively that some, perhaps all, of Betty Vance's children were fathered by John Ferrell. John Ferrell was an early settler in the Tug Valley (his family was closely connected with the Hatfield family). He owned a mill near the current town of Matewan, West Virginia, and it was he, not her father Abner, who apparently bought (or helped buy) land for Betty and their children on the Kentucky side of the river (we've seen copies of the deeds). So it was John Ferrell who brought Betty and her children to the Tug Valley, who set them up on land just up the river from his own home, and who continued to take care of her, as far as we can tell, until her death. 

So if Devil Anse, on visiting his grandmother in her home on the banks of the Tug River, heard stories about his great grandfather Abner, they were very different stories than the ones Dean King and Lisa Alther think he heard. The story of Abner Vance would more likely have been told as a cautionary tale, the story of a man who let passion destroy his family. For whatever reason, in a moment of rage he killed a man, left his wife a widow, left his children fatherless, and left them all adrift in a difficult and sometimes dangerous world to make their way as best they could. He valued his own outrage more than the safety and security of his family, and they suffered for his act of taking justice into his own hands. And for a final irony, Abner killed the wrong man!

I simply cannot imagine as this story was told there along the Tug River, with the young Devil Anse listening, perhaps leaning forward in the darkness to hear his grandmother more clearly, that it was a tale about the need to take up arms against the law, to take the law into one's own hands. On the contrary, it was almost certainly a tale about the danger of such an action and the devastating consequences of letting passion control one's life. As my grandmother, herself a Hatfield (with McCoy ancestry as well) often said, you don't cut off your nose to spite your face. That was the kind of lesson I heard as a child, told by the oldest people in the community, some of whom were alive as the feud was winding down. You don't let your momentary passions destroy your life or anger wreck your family. Abner's rash act, punished in full by the civil authorities, placed him outside the bonds of community, beyond the reach of women and men. It turned him from a husband and a father and a grandfather into a criminal and, ultimately, a corpse.

And when Devil Anse had the McCoy boys tied to those infamous paw paw bushes, he was not, as King and Alther would have you believe, acting out the lessons he learned from the tale of Abner Vance, he was acting against them. In this case, the stories he learned as a boy were unable to cool his head and stay his hand. Sometimes the stories that we tell cannot save us from ourselves. We tell them anyway, and hope for the best. What else can we do?

Coda: I first heard this story a couple of years ago. It is not, really, a common story among people in the Tug Valley. In fact, I found a mention of it in an old book of musicology, and in this book, a local man, D.K. Vance, a Tug Valley resident and direct descendant of Betty and Abner Vance, told the story in a way that hewed very close to the truth. He didn't seem to know anything about Abner coming to the Tug Valley, buying land, hiding out from the law. A second person, a lawyer from the Abingdon area, told it like the legend. So perhaps the legend of Abner Vance was born on the Virginia side of the mountain, and was created by other parties altogether. On the Kentucky side of the mountain, in the home of Betty Vance and in the homes of her descendants, another, truer tale was told.

One interesting note. Helen Hatfield Harmon, a descendant of the river Hatfields, two of whom (Valentine and Ephraim) married daughters of Betty Vance, once used the phrase, in passing, “Sneaky as a Horton.” I don't know whether or not she knew the Abner Vance story to which it referred, but I do know that she remembered hearing the phrase when she was growing up along the river, not two miles from where we now know that Betty and her children lived. For me, that one phrase, held within the family for nearly two hundred years, is worth more than the legend. It connects the present with the past in a vital, almost mysterious way. It shows that the past runs through the present like an underground stream, clear and cold and strong, surfacing here or there, unpredictably, to make a spring.

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