Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  25. Ibid., 34.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains (1905; rept., Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1972), 82.

  28. Ibid., 71–72.

  29. On the stronger Confederate sentiment in the Chattanooga area than elsewhere in East Tennessee, see W. Todd Groce, Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860–1870 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 39. Groce reports that 89 percent of the city’s voters supported secession in the referendum of June 8, 1861, the highest concentration in the region. On Confederate enlistment in Chattanooga and elsewhere in East Tennessee, see John D. Fowler, Mountaineers in Gray: The Nineteenth Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, C.S.A. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 18–22.

  30. David Whisnant, introduction to the University of Tennessee Press’s reprint edition, xv. Other scholarly work on Miles includes Grace Toney Edwards, “Emma Bell Miles: Feminist Crusader in Appalachia,” in Appalachia Inside Out, ed. Robert J. Higgs, Ambrose N. Manning, and Jim Wayne Miller, vol. 2 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 709–12; and Kay Baker Gaston, Emma Bell Miles (Signal Mountain, Tenn.: Walden Ridge Historical Society, 1985). For a particularly favorable assessment of The Spirit of the Mountains and of Miles’s treatment of her subjects, see the introduction to McNeil, Appalachian Images, 3–4.

  31. Foreword to Margaret W. Morley, The Carolina Mountains (1913; rept., Fairview, N.C: Historical Images, 2006), xix. In 1926, the Grove Park Inn in Asheville commissioned a special deluxe edition of The Carolina Mountains and placed it in each guest room.

  32. “About Margaret W. Morley,” in ibid., xi–xiv.

  33. Ibid., 12–13.

  34. Ibid., 13. Morley’s other significant reference to the war is a chapter on the history of Asheville, in which she states, “Deserters from both sides took refuge in the mountains. Desperadoes of the worst sort lived in caves and raided the country” (102). While this is one of very few acknowledgments of guerrilla warfare in any of the works under discussion, Morley fails to mention that Asheville was a center of Confederate recruitment and armament production, a target of Stoneman’s Raid at war’s end, or the home base of Zebulon B. Vance, North Carolina’s Civil War governor.

  35. Miles, Spirit of the Mountains, chap. 10, quote on 190.

  36. Morley, Carolina Mountains, 123; see also 292–95.

  37. Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 89; Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers (New York: Macmillan, 1913, 1922), 29. The book was much expanded in 1922, when the subtitle was added. That edition is the one cited here.

  38. The fullest biographical treatment of Kephart is George Ellison’s introduction to a 1972 reprint of Our Southern Highlanders, ix–xlvi.

  39. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 29–30. More recent editions of Kephart’s other books included Camping and Woodcraft: A Handbook for Vacation Campers and for Travelers in the Wilderness (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988); and Camp Cookery (New York: Macmillan, 1924).

  40. “Horce Kephart by Himself,” North Carolina Library Bulletin 5 (June 1922): 52, quoted in Ellison, xxxvii.

  41. Batteau, Invention of Appalachia, 90.

  42. Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders, 429, 443–45. Nearly half of Kephart’s coverage of the war consists of lengthy block quotes from John Fox and William Frost, discussed earlier in this chapter.

  43. Ibid., 447, 449–50.

  44. Ibid., 40–51.

  45. Biographical information about Campbell remains surprisingly thin. Among the most thorough accounts of his life are found in the inventory to the John C. Campbell and Olive Dame Campbell Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC–Chapel Hill, and in David Whisnant, All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 106–7, although Whisnant focuses more fully on Mrs. Campbell’s work after her husband’s death.

  46. Williams, Appalachia, 207–8.

  47. Campbell, Southern Highlander, 90.

  48. Ibid., 90–91.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Ibid., 96–97.

  51. Wilson, “Lincoln’s Sons and Daughters,” 244.

  52. Frost, “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” 99.

  53. Campbell, Southern Highlander, 95. For more on how several of these authors dealt with race in their work, see “Race and Racism in Nineteenth-Century Appalachia,” chap. 1 in this volume.

  13

  Unionists in the Attic

  The Shelton Laurel Massacre Dramatized

  Rarely, if ever, have southern Unionists been incorporated into the public memory or commemoration of the Civil War. For all of the many ways in which Tony Horwitz found interest in the war alive and thriving throughout the southern states, the quirkiest and most offbeat of which he described so colorfully in Confederates in the Attic, not once does the term “Unionist” appear in his text. Nor would one ever know of internal dissent or divided loyalties from watching Ken Burns’s epic documentary treatment of the war.1 While scholars over the past decade have made southern Unionism an increasingly significant part of Civil War studies,2 that trend has not found its way into more popular perceptions of the war. The plight of those southerners who chose not to give their allegiance to the Confederacy or to in any way support its war of independence has been all too easily erased from the ways in which Americans collectively look back on the war and its legacy.

  That is, until 2005, when an extraordinary play, commissioned and produced by the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre, debuted on the campus of Mars Hill College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. This dramatization of the infamous Shelton Laurel massacre, which occurred only twenty miles away, represented a significant new development in the war’s public commemoration. Not only did it bring the Unionist experience fully into the spotlight, but it allowed—or forced?—descendants of both the victims and the perpetrators of that tragedy to confront that past in a very public forum. If Unionism and guerrilla warfare have been stored far more deeply in the attic where Tony Horwitz found so many Confederates, at least one particularly painful incident has been removed from storage and put on display in an unusual venue for wrestling with the complex issues it raises: the theater.

  In mid-January 1863, two columns of the 64th North Carolina Regiment moved into the remote Shelton Laurel valley in the remote mountains of Madison County, North Carolina, seeking the men there who had been part of a raid on the county seat of Marshall two weeks earlier. Led by Colonel Lawrence Allen and Colonel James Keith, first cousins who were among Marshall’s more prominent citizens, the troops sought retribution for the havoc wreaked by some fifty-odd men, many of them from Shelton Laurel and many of them deserters from the 64th. With somewhat ambiguous orders from General Henry Heth, the soldiers harassed—even tortured—local women and girls into giving up the hiding places of the men they sought. Over the course of two days, they arrested and held fifteen men and boys, with the stated intent of taking them to Knoxville, Tennessee, to be either imprisoned or conscripted into Confederate service. But on the morning of January 19, only a mile or two after their forced march began (and after two prisoners had escaped), either Keith or Allen—which one remains in doubt—ordered the thirteen prisoners into a nearby clearing, forced them into groups of five and three, and executed them all. Seven of the thirteen were named Shelton; both the oldest, sixty-five, and the youngest, twelve, were named David Shelton.3

  The story is a familiar and oft-told one. It is as well documented as any single incident in the South’s irregular war, and certainly as well known as any other event that occurred in wartime North Carolina. News of the massacre appeared in a Memphis newspaper in June 1863, which led to coverage soon thereafter in several northern papers, including the New York Times. Tennessee Union scout Daniel Ellis, in perhaps the most widely read memoir
by a guerrilla warrior, devoted several pages to Shelton Laurel and its Unionist martyrs in his Thrilling Adventures, published in 1867. By century’s end, Confederate participants in the massacre had had their say. In 1894, the commander of the 64th, then living in Arkansas, published a self-serving pamphlet titled Partisan Campaigns of Col. Lawrence M. Allen, followed in 1901 by a regimental history of the 64th by one of its officers, Captain B. T. Morris, who defended the actions of Allen and Keith and the men under their command.4 The massacre received brief acknowledgment in regional histories by John Preston Arthur and Ora Blackmun, and rated a chapter in Manly Wade Wellman’s lively and somewhat unorthodox county history, The Kingdom of Madison.5

  In 1981, established Civil War scholar Philip Paludan produced a masterful book-length study of the massacre, entitled simply Victims. It remains the fullest account of the incident and the circumstances surrounding it, but it was by no means the last word.6 No fewer than three chapters of William R. Trotter’s Bushwhackers (1988) focus on Shelton Laurel, and Sean O’Brien devotes both his prologue and first chapter to the incident in Mountain Partisans (1999), a broad-based study of guerrilla warfare in Southern Appalachia. Gordon McKinney and I added nothing new, but we provided a full account drawing on all of the above in our study The Heart of Confederate North Carolina (2000).7 Even fiction writers have embraced the massacre in recent years. Two of region’s most prominent novelists, Sharon Mc-Crumb and Ron Rash, have incorporated the incident into their most recent works.8

  Even without reference to any of the above, the story has held a firm place in the oral tradition over several generations of the Shelton family and other residents of the Shelton Laurel community. In 1989, Jim Taylor added significant details to the written record in a regimental newsletter, through interviews with Rena Shelton, a descendant of several of the massacre’s victims and widely regarded as the family’s matriarch and guardian of its historical legacy. She told Taylor that much of her information on the massacre was based on stories told her years earlier by a hundred-year-old woman who had witnessed much of what she related.9

  Despite this oral legacy and the extensive scholarly record, probably few Shelton Laurel residents were ready to confront the most infamous event in their community’s past in the far more public and pronounced rendition that faced them in 2005—the play produced at Mars Hill. Founded in 1975, the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre (SART) had long made a part of its mission “produce new plays, especially those that reflect the rich cultural heritage of the region.”10 Commissioned works focused on the story of Frankie Silvers, a notorious 1831 murder case that led to the first execution of a woman in North Carolina, and on geologist Elisha Mitchell’s exploration of the nearby peak that bears his name. Both met with critical acclaim and local enthusiasm, but taking on the Shelton Laurel massacre raised the stakes considerably. The incident still carries considerable emotional baggage, with some residents—Rena Shelton among them—understandably leery of how outsiders might choose to interpret and dramatize a tragedy to which they lay such a personal claim. Complicating that issue was the fact that the perpetrators as well as the victims of the massacre were Madison County residents, and their descendants would likely scrutinize any dramatic treatment of the incident as fully as would those who counted Shelton Laurel residents among their ancestors.

  SART’s leadership—president Rick Morgan and artistic director Bill Gregg—took a significant first step in meeting these challenges by hiring playwright Sean O’Leary to write the play in the spring of 2004. O’Leary’s credentials made him a natural choice for the task. Two of his previous plays had focused on historical subjects—one on Ezra Pound, the other on the Spanish Civil War—and had much impressed Morgan and Gregg.11 O’Leary, who lives in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, accepted the challenge of taking on Shelton Laurel; he researched deeply in the historical literature and made a close consultant of Dan Slagle, a Madison County native whose interest and expertise derived from genealogical research into his own background. (Slagle has traced at least three ancestors who served in the 64th.)

  O’Leary came to Mars Hill in the spring of 2005 for a reading of an early draft of the play, then called Beneath Shelton Laurel. It was at that point that I became involved, having been invited to serve as a historical consultant, along with Slagle. I was very impressed with what O’Leary had done, and I offered only minor suggestions, as did several others in attendance. Much of the concern among the group revolved around the perspective to be taken—and how well the play represented the viewpoints of both Confederates and Unionists; all involved were conscious that the major players would have descendants, and thus partisans, in attendance at the performances. Most agreed that O’Leary had done a masterful job in keeping those very different perspectives in play; the primary sticking point was how to resolve the historical confusion as to which officer—Allen or Keith—actually gave the orders to execute their prisoners.12

  The final version of Shelton Laurel, as produced by SART in August 2005, works on a number of levels—dramatically, emotionally, and historically. The basic situation around which the play is structured may seem contrived and stilted, and yet any such first impressions are quickly displaced by the dramatic repercussions of the setup unfolding on stage. O’Leary created a fictional scenario in which three key players in the massacre—Lawrence Allen, James Keith, and Patsy Shelton—come together in a Baptist church in Marshall in 1894 (the last year all three were still alive) to confront each other over the tragedy that still haunted them to one degree or another more than thirty years later. (Allen made a return visit to Madison County in 1892, to settle a land dispute, but there is no evidence that either Keith, who also lived in Arkansas, or Patsy Shelton, who had moved to East Tennessee, ever did so.)13

  In O’Leary’s play, Keith is particularly remorseful over his part in the massacre and has returned home to Marshall, sensing that he’s close to the end of his life. He seeks penance, and perhaps some solace from the torment of “ghosts” from the past, by meeting with Mrs. Shelton, whose husband and two sons were among the thirteen victims. She arrives with no intention of offering either forgiveness or comfort to the man she holds responsible for the unjustified and meaningless murder of her family, and she insists that she is there merely to learn about their final hours and what, if anything, they had said before they were killed. Allen, like Keith, had moved to Arkansas shortly after the war’s end, and he returns to this “haunted” place out of concern for his friend, explaining that Keith’s wife had asked him to retrieve her husband from this place that could mean only trouble for him. (There’s a hint that Keith may have been contemplating suicide.) Unlike Keith, Allen expresses no regrets and offers no condolences to Mrs. Shelton, and he fully defends his actions and the rationale behind the massacre.

  O’Leary’s decision to make Keith the conscience-torn penitent and Allen the hard-line defender of their actions works well dramatically, even if the historical record does not necessarily support that version of events. He knew that Keith became an active lay leader in the Baptist Church after moving to Arkansas, so it makes sense that he is wracked with guilt about his part in the massacre. Given the tone of Allen’s 1894 memoir, O’Leary is on surer ground in making Allen unrepentant.

  Much of the emotional and narrative power in O’Leary’s play lies in the fact that it takes Keith’s “haunting” literally. The voices of four of his three victims—Patsy Shelton’s husband and two sons and a young girl whom he ordered to be flogged for refusing to reveal their location—disturb his conscience and his state of mind. They appear on stage as well, witnessing this meeting of their wife and mother with their murderers, seen and heard by the audience but not by the three principals (except being heard on occasion by Keith). As Patsy Shelton confronts Keith and Allen about not only what happened but why, these ghosts provide impassioned commentary on what they’re hearing, and occasionally reenact that fateful day in effectively staged flashback scenes.

&nbs
p; It is through the confrontation among the living characters in the 1890s that the circumstances surrounding the 1863 incident gradually emerge. Allen stubbornly insists that the thirteen executed prisoners were “traitors, criminals, deserters,” men who had “murdered, raided our homes, stole from our children,” whose actions invited—even demanded—Confederate retribution. When Mrs. Shelton insists that none of that justified the shooting of “mere boys—her boys,” Allen is quick to dismiss their age. “And some of our men were boys. And some of the Yankees were boys. It was terrible. The war was terrible.” She accuses him of being cold-blooded and having no feelings. Allen responds, “Despair—that’s what I feel . . . despair because they made us stoop to their level.”14

  The earlier raid on Marshall was the immediate impetus for the 64th’s retaliatory action. Mrs. Shelton is quick to explain the necessity behind that raid: not simply that those in the community were hungry, but that they were intentionally kept so by local authorities who, in carefully rationing salt, so vital to preserving hog meat, denied it to those families who failed to demonstrate adequate support of the Confederate war effort. The “crime” of which her family and others really stood accused, she insisted, was simply their neutrality—their desire to be left alone. Their desperation for salt, along with their resentment of its denial by Marshall authorities, led to the raid: “If our men weren’t willin’ to die in your army on the battlefield,” she asks Keith and Allen, “did y’all think they were gonna be willin’ to die o’ starvation in them hills along with their families?” When Keith suggests that “your men could have joined the effort,” Mrs. Shelton responds: “All we knew was the Yankees weren’t doin’ nothin’ to us, but them folks in Marshall were.” (O’Leary adds a crucial fact that Phillip Paludan curiously overlooked in his book—that the raid was “organized” and led by an outsider, a Union lieutenant from Tennessee, John Kirk, whose brother George would later conduct several raids at Confederate targets elsewhere in western North Carolina.)15