Devil Anse Hatfield

William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield was a West Virginia timberman and family patriarch best known for his role in the Hatfield–McCoy feud. Born in 1839 in what was then western Virginia, he served the Confederate cause during the Civil War and later built substantial local influence through land and timber interests. His household became the centre of an extended kinship network along the Tug Fork on the Kentucky–West Virginia border.

The feud with the McCoys grew from a mixture of personal grievances, court disputes, retaliatory violence and regional politics rather than a single cause. Hatfield was associated with the retaliatory killing of three McCoy brothers in 1882, and later violence brought national attention and prosecutions. By the 1890s the feud had largely subsided. Hatfield converted to Christianity in 1911 and helped establish a Church of Christ congregation before his death in 1921.

Ann Rinaldi’s The Coffin Quilt presents Devil Anse Hatfield as the dominant Hatfield patriarch within the feud seen through young Fanny McCoy’s eyes. His family’s rivalry with Randolph McCoy frames the violence along the Tug Fork, while the romance between Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield briefly suggests a way across the divide before becoming another cause of resentment. The novel therefore places Anse at the centre of the family loyalties that make reconciliation increasingly difficult.