The Battle of Blair Mountain

ACCORDING TO THE official record, the murder trial to punish the wrongdoers in the gun battle at Matewan Station pitted the Mingo County prosecutor against Sid Hatfield and the twenty-two miners charged with the killing of Albert Felts. That was the heading on the trial papers when the legal proceedings began, January 26, 1921. But in truth that particular confrontation was overshadowed by the long and bitter conflict between the mine owners and the mine workers’ union.

At the heart of the courtroom battle was not the guilt or innocence of the defendants. The mine owners knew from the start that the odds were heavily against any Mingo County jury convicting their friends and neighbors of a murder charge when the victims were Baldwin-Felts detectives. For the coal operators, the real objective of the trial was not legal but political—not to gain a verdict from the twelve good men and true in the jury box but rather to build support among the public for their campaign to destroy the union. This reality was well understood by the leaders of the union, who were just as determined to convert the trial into a rallying point for their drive to organize.

Neither side was shy in stating its stake in the proceedings. “This trial is a direct result of the barbarous warfare waged on members of the United Mine Workers by the coal operators of Mingo County,” William Green, the UMW’s national secretary, declared. The UMW, Green pledged, would give the defendants “full moral and material support.” Indeed in January 1921 the UMW levied a $1-a-month assessment on its 500,000 members to support the strike in Mingo County, and a similar battle for union recognition in Alabama, adding to the $1.3 million already spent on behalf of the southern West Virginia miners.

As for the mine owners, the Williamson operators association issued a statement branding the UMW as “the most tyrannical of all labor unions.” The union sought not only to enlist new members, the operators charged, but more ominously “to so organize the coal mines that they will control the production of coal and make it impossible to operate a mine without their sanction.”

Bearing out the rhetoric was the dominant role each side played in the courtroom contest. The union assumed the responsibility for the defense of Hatfield and the miners, hiring John J. Conniff, one of West Virginia’s canniest criminal lawyers to serve as chief counsel for the defense and assigning Harold W. Houston, the general counsel of the UMW’s District 17, to back him up. For their part the mine owners, carrying the load for the prosecution, recruited a pair of former judges, not only the recently resigned Judge James Damron but also former state supreme court Justice Joseph M. Sanders, and supported them with S. B. Avis, a longtime counselor to the Williamson Coal Operators Association, and John Marcum, a veteran criminal lawyer. If the mine owners needed any help in making ends meet, Tom Felts, seeking revenge for his brothers, had offered to pay a share of the costs.

Within the borders of this broad struggle for economic power, the trial touched off another and more personal conflict, something close to a civil war within the town of Matewan, which pitted miner against shopkeeper, neighbor against neighbor, and in some cases children against their parents. At the center of this storm was Matewan’s police chief, Sid Hatfield, whose dramatic personality dominated the public perception of the trial. His principal role in the Matewan Massacre had by itself made him a national figure, a hero to the miners, a villain to union foes and many other Americans who considered themselves law abiding. But other events that followed in the wake of the May 19 shoot-out added to the police chief’s notoriety, hardening and intensifying the feelings about him on both sides.

On June 1, 1920, only twelve days after the Matewan battle, Hatfield and Jessie Testerman, widow of the late mayor of Matewan, quietly slipped into Huntington, more than 120 miles north of Matewan, and got a marriage license. Their plan, as they explained later, was to wed that evening, but no minister was available. So they took a room in Huntington’s Florentine Hotel, figuring they would be protected from discovery by Huntington’s distance from Mingo County and its considerable size; its population of 75,000 made it the largest city in the state.

They failed to reckon with the relentless Tom Felts. Determined to avenge the death of his two brothers and the other agents who made up the cream of his detective corps, Felts kept Hatfield and Jessie Testerman under constant surveillance. No sooner had the couple checked into their hotel than Felts was on the phone to his friends on the Huntington police force. Within less than an hour two Huntington officers were knocking on the door of the Hatfields’ hotel room. Both Hatfield and his bride-to-be were unceremoniously taken off to city jail, where they were booked on a charge of “improper relations” and locked in separate cells.

Determined to assure that the hapless couple got the attention he felt they deserved, Tom Felts called a press conference in another part of the town to reveal what he claimed was the real truth behind the Matewan shootings. “Hatfield and the late mayor’s wife had been having an affair,” Felts asserted. “Hatfield shot Testerman to get him out of the way. The charge that Albert Felts killed Testerman is a dirty vicious lie.”

If the reporters who then rushed to the Huntington jail expected to find a penitent Hatfield they were mistaken. Eager as ever to improve upon the truth, Hatfield at first claimed that he and Jessie were already wed. At any rate, he contended, they had known each other for a long time and had done nothing improper. As the reporters must have realized, even if the star-crossed pair wanted to indulge their passion in their hotel room, Tom Felts’s alacrity had probably deprived them of the chance. As for Felts’s accusation that it was Hatfield who had shot the mayor, the police chief trampled that notion into the dust. Albert Felts was the one who had done that deed. “Felts shot from the hip,” Hatfield said. “He carried two guns. Any other statement is foolish.”

His inamorata was more forthcoming. No, they were not married, the widow Testerman acknowledged, but soon would be. That was their reason for coming to Huntington. After all, the musty old Florentine Hotel was not the sort of place for a romantic fling. The truth was, she said, her husband, the late mayor, had always considered Sid Hatfield a good friend to them both and had even advised his wife that if anything happened to him, she should feel free to marry Hatfield.

When Hatfield and his fiancée appeared before the local magistrate, he imposed a $10 fine, which would be remitted if the couple married that day. Hatfield submitted his marriage license, dated the day before and His Honor did the honors. Sid and Jessie left town as husband and wife.

Another contretemps that entangled Hatfield was more difficult to shrug off. This was directly linked to the forthcoming trial and involved Anse Hatfield, the keeper of the Urias Hotel. Anse had always been a good friend to the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, so it was no great surprise that he testified before the grand jury investigating the May 19 shooting, offering evidence, it was widely said, that was particularly damaging to Sid Hatfield and his cohorts. The prosecutors made no secret of their dependence on Anse’s account of events that day to help make their case.

But this was never to happen. One hot August night, about three months after the Matewan shooting, while the innkeeper was on the porch of his hotel, a bullet ripped through his chest, came out his back and lodged in the jaw of Dr. Edward Simpkins, a local dentist with whom he was chatting. Hatfield claimed to be sitting outside the late Mayor Testerman’s store, a hundred feet away, when he heard the shot. He ran to the hotel, Hatfield claimed, to search for the assailant.

Anse Hatfield’s slaying heightened tension in the county as the trial approached. Concerned about the possibility of other attacks on prosecution witnesses, the V Corps commander, General Read, asked War Secretary Baker to persuade the White House to proclaim martial law, strengthening the legal hand of the Federal troops in Mingo. But by now Baker was under continuing pressure from organized labor and its supporters, who objected to the presence of the Army. Running out of patience with West Virginia’s governor and with its local officials for their failure to keep order, Baker turned Read down.

In explaining that decision, Baker cited the constitutional basis of the legal framework that had governed Federal intervention in state affairs until he, Baker, disrupted that process. “The rule to be followed,” he reminded Read, “is that the public military power of the United States should in no case be permitted to be substituted for the ordinary powers of the states, and should be called into service only when the state, having summoned its entire police power, is still unable to deal with the disorder.” To be sure, “the rule to be followed” cited by Baker was exactly the proposition that he had undermined at the start of the war with his direct access policy. Read was scarcely in a position to point this out to the Secretary of War, and Baker himself chose to ignore the contradiction. Instead he took this opportunity, two years after the end of the war to rescind his own policy of direct access occasioned by the wartime emergency and reaffirmed the prewar strictures governing requests for Federal troops. These required that appeals for military intervention should be made through the War Department to the president himself. And while he was at it, Baker ordered Read to pull the Army out of West Virginia.

For Governor Cornwell this was shattering news. He knew the withdrawal of the troops would mean he would have to face the outrage of the mine owners. In some desperation, he pleaded with Baker to change his mind, or at least delay his decision. With the Matewan shooting trial coming up, Cornwell warned Baker, the danger of violence was greater than ever. He pointed out that at the start of January, Federal troops had been fired upon from the Kentucky Mountains, apparently a protest against the reopening of two nearby mines. If the soldiers would stay through the trial, the governor pledged he would get the legislature to reestablish West Virginia’s National Guard so that the state could keep order in its own house.

So the Army was much in evidence when heavyset, florid-faced Judge R. D. Bailey, who was Damron’s successor, gaveled the crowd that filled the rustic wooden courtroom overlooking the Tug to order. Colonel Hall was seated behind the judge while in an adjoining chamber a sergeant of Company G, 19th Infantry was on alert. All it would take would be a signal from him to bring a squad of armed regulars into that hall of justice. Outside, troops kept a path clear through a throng of curiosity seekers for those who had official business before Judge Bailey.

But even the U.S. Army could not steal the spotlight from Sid Hatfield, who remained the cynosure of all eyes. With a new mayor running Matewan in place of Cabell Testerman, Hatfield lost his job as police chief but had been promptly elected as constable of Magnolia District, the largest of Mingo County’s six districts. With his new badge, Hatfield continued to provide good copy for the journalists from papers all over the nation who crowded the courtroom. On the first day the normally rumpled constable looked almost dapper in a new brown suit. His new wife was by his side, wearing a jaunty air and a rope of pearls around her neck. But Hatfield spoiled the overall effect by carrying a gun in each pocket, something that might have gone unnoticed except for the presence in the courtroom of the man who had become Hatfield’s most dedicated enemy on earth, Tom Felts. Spotting the telltale bulge in Hatfield’s pocket, Felts informed Judge Bailey, who issued a stern warning that firearms were strictly prohibited. From then on deputies searched everyone who entered. Hatfield continued to bring his weapons, but obediently checked them at the door.

The constable scored well with the press by making himself readily accessible and answering questions freely. “I reckon you thought I had horns,” he told one reporter with a grin. “It’s the limit what I read about myself.” To satisfy the media, “Two Gun Sid,” as he had been dubbed after the May 19 shoot-out, patiently posed for pictures brandishing his two pistols, but always smiling. Indeed the papers began to call him “Smiling Sid.” As for the bloodshed in Matewan that was the reason for the trial, Matewan’s police chief dismissed that “as just a little free-for-all.”

Judge Bailey took away some of the merriment when on the first day of trial he abruptly suspended the bonds of the defendants. At the end of each session, instead of going to their homes, they were confined to the small jail behind the courthouse. But this turned out to be less than an ordeal.

The wife of the jailer took Jessie Hatfield into her home, so the bride could be close to her new husband. The jailer brought in new mattresses and allowed the defendants to go back and forth between each other’s cells, while they played dominoes and visited with their families. “This ain’t a jail,” Hatfield told the reporters. “This is the Matewan Hotel.”

The trial had been in session only three days when violence threatened to interfere as a result of local resentment against the Baldwin-Felts detectives who were much in evidence in the town. A report reached the judge that 1,000 armed union men were planning to march on Williamson to protect the prisoners from the Baldwin-Felts “thugs,” as many of the miners called the detectives. After a conference with attorneys for both sides and representatives of the union and the companies, Bailey arranged for the detective agency to withdraw its men and relative calm returned to Williamson.

Still a more fundamental problem remained—getting a jury. The interlocking family relationships made it difficult to find veniremen who were not related to any of the defendants. When the name “Anse Hatfield” was called from the list of veniremen, a lawyer declared, “He’s dead, your honor.” But two men in the courtroom, each bearing the name of the slain hotel keeper, stepped forward.

Ties to the union and resentment of the Baldwin-Felts agents also complicated matters. The prosecution had underlined this difficulty at the start by getting Judge Bailey to strike all union men from the jury panel. One earnest citizen, striving to show his lack of bias, announced: “I am not a union man nor a Baldwin-Felts thug.” To his apparent surprise he was excused. By February 5, ten days after the start of the trial more than one thousand men had been called, one hundred questioned, and not a single juror had been selected.

This impasse stirred talk of allowing women to serve on the jury. After all, the 18th amendment had just given female citizens the right to vote. “The only hope I can see is in the enactment of a law by the legislature next month that will permit women to serve as jurors,” one jury commissioner told the New York Times. But no one really wanted to wait a month, and there was little enthusiasm among legislators for such a break with custom.

Yet another possibility was allowing Negroes to serve on the jury. After all, this was not Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, but West Virginia, which had broken away from the Old Dominion at the start of the Civil War. But when it came to race, the mores of the Deep South still prevailed. Judge Bailey himself put an end to the idea of an interracial jury.

The defense spread the word that prosecution was deliberately stalling on jury selection in the hope that the legislature would act on proposed legislation to permit juries in murder trials to be selected from other counties. A jury chosen anywhere but in Mingo County would certainly improve the prosecution’s chances of getting a conviction.

The foremost casualty of the ensuing courtroom conflict was the truth. Witnesses for each side swore to versions of events that flatly contradicted each other. In most cases it was difficult to tell who was lying. But it was clear that for as long as the trial lasted, mendacity ruled the day.

That soon became apparent when the prosecution called as witnesses the Matewan phone operators, Elsie Chambers, the daughter of defendant Reece Chambers, and Mae Chafin, Logan Sheriff Don Chafin’s seventeen-year-old niece, who had overheard the phone call from Hatfield and Mayor Testerman to deputy sheriff “Toney” Webb, seeking warrants for the arrest of the detectives.

For the defense the most troubling part of their testimony, sworn to by both women, was that in talking to Webb, Hatfield was supposed to have vowed: “We’ll kill those sons of bitches before they get out of Matewan.” On cross-examination defense counsel Conniff sought to undermine Elsie Chambers’s credibility by getting her to concede she had fallen out with her father, Reece, one of the defendants, and that she had not lived at home for the past four years. And he tried to suggest that Mae Chafin was confused about what she had heard. But a measure of damage had been done.

The prosecution then moved its case right to the spot of the initial shots with the testimony of Joe C. Jack, a coal company guard. Jack claimed to have arrived in Matewan shortly after four P.M., just before the shooting started. He headed for Chambers Hardware store, where he encountered Reece Chambers and Sid Hatfield and sheriff’s deputy Hugh Combs, among several hangers-on. Hatfield was talking about the evictions of the Stone Mountain miners and mentioned that he expected warrants for the arrest of the detectives on the next train from Williams.

Both Combs and Hatfield spoke ominously about their expected encounter with the detectives. Combs said if he could not get the detectives “lined up” for arrest, he would “get a gun and kill half dozen of them” himself. Reece Chambers, slapping the rifle he was holding, said: “This here will get them.” But it was Sid Hatfield who was the most ferocious, Jack testified. Even if the warrants “Toney” Webb sought were not issued, the police chief supposedly vowed, “we will go out and kill the last damned one of them.”

Jack left town on No. 16, the same train the detectives had hoped to take to Bluefield, and returned on Friday, May 21, two days after the shooting. One of the first people he encountered was Chief Hatfield, who asked Jack if he knew anything about the shooting. No, Jack told him, he knew nothing about it.

In his cross-examination, defense attorney Conniff did everything but call Jack an outright liar. First he got the witness to acknowledge that he had not testified before the grand jury or told anyone about what he had now claimed to have seen on May 19 until he met with the prosecutors shortly before the trial. “I was telling them tales all along,” Jack said of his conversations with Hatfield and the miners. He kept his knowledge to himself, he claimed because, if he spoke out, “I was told I would be did the way Anse Hatfield went.”

Soon after, Conniff completed the rout of Jack by calling to the stand Stella Scales, the woman Jack had claimed had passed on the threatening message from Hatfield. Not only did Scales deny passing on any such message, she claimed she did not even know Hatfield. She finished off her few minutes in the limelight, with a flourish, asking to be introduced to Hatfield. She then marched into the ranks of the defendants and made a display of shaking hands with the police chief, who introduced her to his wife, sitting nearby.

The atmosphere of fear and intimidation in Matewan in the wake of Anse Hatfield’s murder had kept some people from coming forward. Most of the key witnesses seemed flawed in one way or another. Elsie Chambers had turned against her father; Mae Chafin was suspect because she was kin to Sheriff Chafin; Joe Jack had come across as little better than a buffoon.

But the prosecution and the mine owners were not without resources, notably money and power, and both were brought to bear on the trial. To strengthen its case against Hatfield and his cohorts, the coal operators’ lawyers fell back on one of the favored strategies for prosecuting a conspiracy case—getting one of the alleged conspirators to switch sides. In this instance they offered a twofold incentive—not only would the charges be dropped against any of the defendants willing to transfer his loyalties, but he would also get a reward of $1,000. After taking informal soundings among the defendants, the prosecutors found a logical target in Isaac Brewer, who conveniently was related to two of their number, James Damron and James Marcum. The deal was closed during a weekend recess, and immediately after Brewer stunned his erstwhile comrades by taking the stand against them.

For the prosecution the importance of Brewer’s testimony was the double burden of guilt it imposed on Sid Hatfield. Not only did Brewer claim that he had seen Hatfield shoot Albert Felts, but he also contended that the police chief had voiced threats directed against Mayor Testerman. According to Brewer, Hatfield was angry because the mayor had been unwilling himself to issue a warrant against the detectives, forcing Hatfield to get the warrants from the sheriff’s office in Williamson. Indeed the chief was so furious that he told Brewer he “would cut the mayor in two with a bullet” if Testerman “messed around” in Hatfield’s dealings with the detectives. Claiming to be in Chambers Hardware store on the afternoon of the battle, Brewer swore that Hatfield whispered to him, just before the first shots were fired, “Let’s kill every damn one of them.”

Hatfield shot Albert Felts, as Brewer told the story. Then Brewer himself was shot in the hand and chest by detective Cunningham. As the wounded Brewer lay on the ground he saw another defendant, William C. Bowman, stand over the fallen Felts, aim his pistol and fire. “Now I guess you’ll die,” Brewer remembered Bowman snarling at the mortally wounded Albert Felts.

One question Brewer did not answer: Who shot Testerman? He conceded he did not see that happen. But the prosecution found another way to deal with that issue when it played its trump card, by calling C. E. Lively, who had wined and dined the union faithful at his Matewan eatery, all the while earning his pay as a Baldwin-Felts informer.

Calling Lively represented something of a gamble; like their other star witnesses he was tarnished. If Joe Jacks was an oaf and Isaac Brewer a turncoat, Lively was a professional charlatan and his testimony about the confidences he had heard from the defendants while posing as a union sympathizer was derived from treachery and deceit.

All he could impart in the courtroom was hearsay, the stories that the defendants had told him, well after the smoke had cleared. Was the value of this tainted secondhand testimony worth the damage Lively’s underhanded tactics might do to the prosecution’s case?

The fact that the prosecution decided that the gain outweighed the cost underlined the struggle for public opinion, which was the mine owners’ true concern in the trial. Whatever the jurors believed about Lively, his version of events would be transmitted by the press and would gain the attention of newspaper readers in the state and around the country.

Williams supposedly told Lively how he had emptied a .32 caliber Smith and Wesson at Lee Felts, missing with every shot, then shouted at Reece Chambers, who was armed with a rifle: “There, shoot that God-damned son of a bitch, I want one of his guns.” Chambers did as he was told and having better aim than Williams hit Lee Felts, who fell to the ground. Williams raced over to where Felts lay and picked up a gun lying nearby. But it was empty of shells. He then tried to pull another gun out of Felts’s hand, finally kicking it free. With that Williams ran down the street, saw one of the detectives leaving a house, pressed his gun against the man’s head and shot him dead. Blood spurted on the gun, Williams recalled for Lively’s benefit, and he had to clean off the weapon when he went home.

Fred Burgraff told Lively of slaying another detective in an alley. “Did he die game?” Lively wanted to know. No, Burgraff, told him, the detective begged for his life. But Burgraff concluded that the victim was too far gone. “The god damned son of a bitch, he had to die.”

Bill Bowman had been at work on the day of the shooting but arrived back in town just as the trouble started, Lively testified Bowman told him. He ran to the corner of the post office and saw a detective running down the street and fired at him. He aimed to hit him on the side and the man seemed to jump two or three feet up in the air, then fell to the ground. Then the detective jumped up and Bowman fired again. “And it was his last jump.”

Reece Chambers “never said very much,” as Lively recalled. But Lively did hear him say that he had shot Lee Felts, “and that he had a right to do it,” since Felts had just shot Reece’s brother, Hallie Chambers, another of the defendants. “Lee put up a game fight and was about the only one who stood toe to toe and fought,” Chambers supposedly told Lively. “The others tried to run.”

Lively’s most important testimony from the prosecution’s point of view had to do with Sid Hatfield. Lively said that before the shoot-out during a conversation about the possibility that the detectives might come to Matewan to evict miners, Hatfield had said: “They better not come down here and try anything like that, they would all get killed.”

After the shooting Hatfield told Lively that he himself had shot Testerman, right after shooting Albert Felts, giving the reason that the mayor was “getting too well lined up with those Baldwin men.” But the prosecution was not satisfied with that answer. They knew that Lively had a more intriguing explanation for Hatfield’s shooting the mayor.

Remarkably, the defense failed to object at this outpouring of surmise piled upon hearsay. So Lively plowed ahead. “Well at one time before this Sid and I were talking. I asked him if he was married and he said, ‘No,’ and a poor chance to get married. Another man had the woman that he wanted.”

In his cross-examination Conniff did all he could to emphasize the Judas-like aspects of Lively’s role. Questioning Lively’s attitude toward the United Mine Workers, which he had joined in 1902, about ten years before going to work for the Baldwin-Felts agency, Conniff asked: “You took the obligation of a union man, didn’t you? You took an obligation you never intended to keep?”

Time and again Conniff used the words “deceit” and “falsehood” as he hammered away at the witness. “With a union card in your pocket you were working against the union, weren’t you?” he challenged Lively, who was shielded by the prosecutor’s objection from having to answer.

Lively hemmed and hawed until finally the judge directed him to answer. “In order to be more able to associate with and have the confidence of the people, of the defendants, that had been in the Matewan murder, massacres or whatever you might term to call it,” he said. “I realized that no man can make an investigation of a case as serious as that unless they have the absolute confidence of those concerned.”

The restaurant he had opened in Matewan in July of 1920 paid its own way, without any help from Baldwin-Felts, Lively claimed. But he acknowledged that all that time he was on salary from the agency—$225 a month, plus expenses. “Your purpose was to give Baldwin-Felts value received for what they were paying?” Conniff remarked, in what was more of a statement than a question.

Next Conniff targeted Lively’s recounting of his conversations with Sid Hatfield about the shootings, pressing Lively to repeat the reason Hatfield had given for supposedly shooting Testerman, that the mayor was “too well lined up” with Baldwin-Felts and the mine owners. “What did he say that Testerman had done that indicated that?”

Conniff asked Lively whether Hatfield had ever mentioned that the Baldwin-Felts agents had offered the mayor $1,000 to allow them to put a machine gun in town. No, Lively said, that had never been mentioned to him directly, though he had heard Hatfield talk about it to others.

He reminded him that Testerman and Hatfield had both confronted Albert Felts at the evictions and warned him he was breaking the law, that Testerman had later called the county prosecutor to alert him to the evictions, that Testerman had recommended to Hatfield that he get the prosecutor to draw up the warrants for the arrest of the detectives. And as the day neared its bloody crisis, Testerman had come to the Matewan Depot, late that afternoon, to inspect the warrant Albert Felts had for Hatfield’s arrest, he had asked Felts to accept a bond in lieu of the arrest, and that after looking over the warrant, he pronounced it “bogus,” almost his last words before he was shot to death.

In the defense’s version, it was not Sid Hatfield who fired the first shot but rather Albert Felts. And it was not Felts who was the first victim but rather Mayor Testerman. This was the story told by Dan Chambers, three of whose blood relatives were on trial. Reece Chambers, one of the principal villains according to the prosecution’s script, was Dan Chambers’s great uncle, and Hallie and Ed Chambers were his second cousins. Still another defendant, Clare Overstreet, was his brother-in-law.

Dan Chambers had a good vantage point on the afternoon of the shooting. He was in Chambers Hardware store, standing “a couple of feet” from Sid Hatfield, when Albert Felts attempted to arrest the constable with the warrant that Testerman had pronounced “bogus.” No sooner had that word been spoken, Chambers remembered, than Albert Felts “jerked a gun from his right hip and fired,” mortally wounding the mayor. “He grabbed himself and staggered back.”

More shots were fired, “a roar of shots,” Chambers remembered, and he prudently ducked out of the way, obscuring his view. But he did see Sid Hatfield pull his own gun from under his belt. Under fierce cross-examination from the prosecution, including an elaborate attempt to reconstruct the shooting by using attorneys from both sides to impersonate the principals, Dan Chambers stuck to his story. Ultimately attorney Avis in his exasperation resorted to the same tactic used by his counterpart on the defense, simply calling the obdurate witness a liar in everything but name only.

Along with contradicting the prosecution’s version of the shooting, Conniff’s witnesses also challenged the claim that Hatfield and his cohorts had been planning to massacre the detectives. Sheriff’s deputy “Toney” Webb testified about his conversation with Hatfield on the afternoon of May 19, during which two prosecution witnesses, Elsie Chambers and Mae Chafin, had testified that the police chief had vowed: “We’ll kill those sons of bitches before they get out of Matewan.”

Instead of Hatfield, Webb testified, it was Albert Felts who had exhibited murderous intent. Three weeks before the Matewan shoot-out, Webb was dispatched to the Burnwell Coal company’s housing, where Felts and his men were evicting miners from their homes. “What the hell are you doing here?” Felts demanded.

“I am an officer and go where I damned please,” Webb replied. Webb then called the county prosecutor, Wade Bronson, who told him the evictions were illegal. When Webb informed Felts, the detective asked him to come into the office of the coal company. A desk inside was covered with guns, one of which Albert Felts patted.

Felts then suggested to Webb that he was making a mistake by not coming to the agency’s headquarters in Bluefield to discuss Webb’s future. “He said that he wanted to talk to me for sometime; that I was a young man, and was pursuing the wrong course, and I was a damned fool to take the course I was taking.”

Summing up, Conniff made a point of confronting the controversy over Sid Hatfield’s marriage to Cabell Testerman’s widow, condemning “the dragging of Mrs. Sid Hatfield’s name in to this case.” The lawyer scoffed at Lively’s accusation. “It is ridiculous to believe that Sid Hatfield killed Testerman because he married the mayor’s widow two weeks after his death,” he said. “Would Sid have gone out alone and precipitated a fight with 13 men armed to the teeth, merely to gain his prize?”

Testerman himself deserved better treatment, Conniff told the jury. “A monument should be erected to this man who died a martyr to his duty.” Conniff recalled testimony that, before he went to the depot that fateful afternoon, Felts told Testerman, “Mayor, I hope there is no hard feelings between us.” Speaking directly to his opponent, Joseph Sanders, who would make the final argument for the prosecution, Conniff said: “Judge Sanders, when you close this case, let me remind you that just before Judas Iscariot betrayed his savior for 30 pieces of silver he affectionately kissed him. So did Felts affectionately shake hands with Testerman.”

In his closing Sanders spoke for four hours, reminding the jurors of the damning testimony presented against the defendants, making particular point of Lively’s testimony about Hatfield’s yen for the former Jessie Testerman. But the former supreme court justice must have known he was waging a losing battle.

It was dinnertime Saturday, March 19, ten months to the day from the Matewan shoot-out, when Sanders finished and Judge Bailey gave his instructions to members of the jury. They deliberated for a few hours that night, got the day off Sunday and resumed their discussions on Monday. In Thunder in the Mountains, Lon Savage recounts the story that as the talks reached a decisive point, one of the jurors, a farmer from the remote little town of Gilbert, pointed out the window at the mountains, where the foliage was just beginning to green. When the trial began in January, the farmer recalled, the mountains had been sere and brown. He was prepared to sit there, he said, until the mountains turned brown again, and then green once more, before he would vote to convict any Matewan boy. While that much-repeated tale may be apocryphal, the reality it reflected was soon made evident. After forty-six dreary days in court, no one on that panel was ready to stay longer in the interest of gaining a conviction. Before lunch on March 21, 1921, the jurors delivered their verdict, acquitting all the defendants.

A special train took Hatfield and the others back to Matewan, where they were greeted, reported the New York Times, “like heroes.” It took Hatfield an hour to make his way through the admiring throng the 100 yards from the Matewan depot to his home and when he got there his hand was swollen from being shaken. “This is the happiest day Matewan ever knew,” someone in the crowd cried out.

The sense of relaxation would not last for very long, however. For while the union and its supporters had triumphed in the courtroom, they had, only a few months earlier, suffered a major blow on another battlefield, the political arena, and now they braced for the grievous consequences of that defeat.