[Granville-Hough] 27 Jun 2009 - Violence

[Trustees for Granville W. Hough]

Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:04:35 -0700
From: Granville W Hough <gwhough at oakapple.net>
Subject: Violence - 27 Jun 2009

Law and Justice (Chester Sullivan, p 32):
ôIn the Hollow, and throughout the frontier for that matter, murder was 
considered to be an ignoble, tragic, and pitiable act. Murder combined 
such quintessential elements û intrigue, high adventure, violence, and 
death û that stories of murders were told and retold until they 
sometimes assumed nearly mythic proportions. Almost everyone abhorred 
killing, yet many people recognized killings as the one thing that a man 
could do to obtain immediate personal justice. Murder was, in that 
sense, separate from law. Although law was a force to be reckoned with, 
it had little to do with justice, and the process of law was regarded as 
a struggle in which justice might not, in the end, be obtained.ö Sounds 
like the Taliban, more or less. It was Andrew Jackson's dying mother who 
instructed him, "If someone insults you personally, you do not go to 
court or to any church, you go handle those things personally." And that 
is the way President Andrew Jackson did it, dueling and killing when he 
received a personal insult.

GWH: When violence broke out among Sullivan descendants, it was not 
because of inbreeding, as some have suggested. Consider the 21 children 
we know about of Pappy Tom. Not a single one married a relative, so far 
as we know. Every single one married into some neighboring pioneer 
family. So the grandchildren were all from typical unions, with MaudeÆs 
grand-children being only half first cousins to the children of Polly 
and PollyÆs mother. The relationship of grandchildren of Polly to 
grandchildren of her half-brother Lod was not full first cousins, but 
rather half first cousin, plus half first cousin, once removed. When 
violence first became a feature of life in SullivanÆs Hollow among Pappy 
TomÆs grandchildren, it was among normal people. The only common blood 
among them was that each had a single line back to Pappy Tom. So, that 
may be the source. He carried whatever problem there was in his genes, 
and some of his descendants got it.