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We share the same Toney Line....Hazel Kimbrell, e-mail: maverick42@bellsouth.net
In case you haven't ever seen this:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
WEDNESDAY EVENING, AUGUST 14, 1878
“Strong” Government and Local Disturbance
The telegraph this morning brings a shocking account of an affray that took place in the town of Edgefield, S. C., in which three men were killed, one mortally wounded and six others more or less seriously hurt. The occasion for the fight was a political meeting but the real actuating cause was social and not political. Indeed the political gathering was shocked to find that during the council the bloody affair had been taking place a short distance away, and that the absence of so many at the gathering had rendered the fight possible. The combatants were of two families, between whom for ten years, a bitter feud had been kept up. The Booth brothers and the Toney brothers succeeded very nearly in wiping one another out, and as they appear to have been constitutionally disorderly persons, the issue of the contest may be regarded as a not unmixed evil. Earlier history shows that in 1869, or thereabouts, four of the Booth brothers and three of the Toney family joined forces to kill one Jones, in the neighborhood. Jones was prepared to receive them hotly, and they forbore to molest him. During the preliminaries, however, Luther Toney was shot and killed by one of the Booths, who though he maintained that the killing was accidental, was arrested and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. From this homicide dates the feud between the families. The political meeting brought the two factions together near Edgefield, and as both were spoiling for a fight a collision was imminent. At least once an exchange of shoots between the parties was prevented by orderly citizens, but at last the hostile parties met. Brooker Toney killed two of the Booths, and was killed himself by a third one. Marc Toney was severely wounded, a third Booth was mortally hurt , and the fourth probably disabled for ife. This would have been entirely satisfactory, but for the fact the spectators who endeavored to prevent bloodshed were ruthlessly fired upon and four of them were more or less badly hurt.
The picture is not a pleasant one in any aspect. That a feud of so deadly a character, having so shocking an origin and so sanguinary a termination, should exist, is not creditable to the state of society in which it existed,. At the same time to judge it as a specimen of Southern life would be a monstrous absurdity. In sparsely settled distracts like that in which the fray took place, there will always be a tendency to violence, and the records of the West team with just as savage encounters. It is rather the fashion here to attach a political significance to such massacres when they take place at the South, while the West they are attributed simply to lawlessness. That the Booth and Toney’s were ruffians is unquestionable, but that such ruffians are to be found latent in every community and remain latent only so long as the pressure of law and population restrain them in equally true. Our own country is so large and the greater part of it is so sparsely inhabited that ruffianism has in some districts a wilder field for exhibition, and hence a national candor leads us to believe that we enjoy a monopoly of this sort of thing. In reality we do not. Timorous and uninformed people looking no farther than their own boarders, lose sight of the fact even our neighbors of Canada are not exempt fro trouble. In many years we have not been threatened with such an outbreak as seemed inevitable in Montreal a year ago, and the report of the fiendish performance of the Young Britons of Canada, published side by side with the account of the South Carolina vendetta which terminated yesterday at Edgefield, leaves us away behind our peaceable Canadian friends in the discredit which lawlessness throws upon a government.
Indeed, those treasonable cowards who are willing to fly to a “strong government” for a protection against the well grounded complaints of the laboring classes, and, who rather that meat the issue which is coming…………………
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