Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South
Page 37
It is left to Keith, in confessional mode, to acknowledge that he—like Allen, a resident of Marshall—sought authorization from General Henry Heth to put down this “insurrection.” Heth had only recently taken command of the Department of East Tennessee, which one scholar has called “the most eagerly avoided command in the entire Confederacy,”16 and issued orders that the Madison County insurrectionists be taken. The terms of how that order was executed were vague enough to add fuel to the later controversy over the executions. Keith explains to Mrs. Shelton: “He didn’t think your men could ever be made into soldiers and he didn’t want to be bothered with prisoners.”17 In a key flashback scene, Allen, Keith, and a Captain Nelson debate the fate of the prisoners they’ve taken and, in so doing, articulate the moral and practical dilemmas posed by this—or any other—guerrilla war. When Keith expresses qualms about executing the prisoners, feeling that they have not done enough to determine the guilt or innocence of those they so arbitrarily rounded up, Allen counters that Keith was “the one who went to Heth . . . who wanted two companies of men to finish off these damn savages.” Nelson adds, “These people, if that’s what you want to call them, threaten our towns, steal our supplies, harbor deserters and Union spies, and deplete our resources by diverting whole regiments to deal with them. My God! Half the generals in the Yankee army haven’t accomplished as much.”
Allen argues that their job is not to determine who was or was not part of the raid, and that this extreme punishment sends a signal to others who think they can act with impunity, that there will be consequences to pay, “if not by them, then by others, the ones who harbor them. If they put our families at risk, they put their own at risk as well.” He also expresses his contempt for their effort to claim neutrality, and for hiding behind their civilian status while waging unconventional warfare: “There’s no power on heaven or earth that will persuade me that we should treat some ragtag bunch of savages whose only concern is their own selfish interests better than we treat our own soldiers who fight and die to protect our families—our way of life.” When Keith argues that war doesn’t give them license to execute civilians for any crime, however awful, and asks “where do we draw the line?” Allen responds, “The line is drawn for us. We have orders,” and reiterates: “I won’t grieve as much as when it’s our own men we have to execute or a Yankee for that matter. Even they’re to be respected for having the courage to put on the uniform and accept the consequences.”
The harshness of Allen’s views are put into somewhat different focus when Keith reveals to Mrs. Shelton how the raid on Marshall inflicted a very personal loss on the Allen family. In looting stores and homes for far more than salt, the raiders ransacked Allen’s home and took the blankets and sheets from the beds of his two children, who lay sick with scarlet fever. On the day before the Confederate assault on Shelton Laurel, Allen received word that both his son and daughter, ages six and four, had died, and he had returned to deal with the prisoners just after their funerals.18 That revelation, held off until midway through the play, suddenly serves to humanize Allen, and to provide an even more understandable explanation for the bitterness he feels toward the prisoners and those they represent. Even Mrs. Shelton seems momentarily sympathetic, though she is quick to turn on Keith, saying, “But you knew what you were doing to my children was wrong.” Keith answers simply, “I knew what duty demanded.”
As Allen’s language suggests, O’Leary is very much attuned to the class distinctions that played such an integral role in the war waged in North Carolina’s mountain counties. The “county seat elite” represented by both Keith and Allen were indeed contemptuous of those more remotely situated residents of the county—for their insularity and backward ways as much as for their efforts to keep at arm’s length the war and the ideological issues behind it. Those deep-rooted prejudices made it much easier for Allen, Keith, and their men to dehumanize the Sheltons and the other captives; it not only rationalized their right to put to them to death but also enabled them to do so.
Shelton Laurel residents were fully aware of that contempt. O’Leary constructs a particularly poignant scene in which, just after their capture, Jim Shelton and his sons speculate on their future. It becomes obvious that they underestimate the extent of the hatred directed toward them. Young Jim protests his innocence, insisting they tell their captors that they played no part in the raid, to which his father responds, “You done somethin’ worse’n that.” “What?” Young Jim inquires, and is told, “You was born, boy—born a barefoot, ridge-runnin’, heathen savage. Ain’t worthy o’ the life the Lord give you.”
But in response to the boys’ worries over rumors that they were to be shot, Shelton assures them that being viewed in such terms does not make them worthy of slaughter, and that their common humanity will overcome any class differences. They won’t kill us, he insists, “cuz they’re flesh and blood and heart and soul just like you and me. Besides, they got orders to take us to Knoxville.” Pushing the point even harder, he says that it isn’t easy to kill a man in cold blood, and that soldiers only do so out of fear that “the other feller’s trying to kill him.” To fire point-blank at a man who poses no threat is beyond the capacity of most men, he insists. “Them soldiers ain’t no different than us—even the ones like that Keith. He may think he can, but if that time ever came, he’d find out he’s just like us.”
Keith overhears this conversation and acknowledges both the basic truth of Jim Shelton’s words and the irony in how naïve that statement proved to be. The climax of the play comes with a skillful staging of the execution itself, which shocks audiences even though they are fully aware of what’s to come. The use of flashbacks and the constant presence of the Shelton “ghosts” adds to the ghastliness of seeing bodies crumple and fall even as they plead for their lives until bullets silence their pleas. (The last moments are based on details conveyed in the first newspaper accounts of the massacre.)
Much of the power of O’Leary’s play comes from the complexities and moral ambiguities that he builds into his retelling of the slaughter. While audiences never lose sympathy for Patsy Shelton and fully accept her tragedy as one compounded by the innocence of all three Shelton victims, the playwright’s far more impressive achievement is that they are made to understand—if not condone—the frustration, anger, and even righteousness of the two Confederate leaders, at least one of whom feels justified in having taken such drastic action.
The play’s critical success and sold-out performances in the summer of 2005 led SART to present the play again in September 2006, in a tightened version, in order to accommodate school groups and the post-play discussions in which Dan Slagle and I participated, along with Bill Gregg and Michael Mattison, the actor who so powerfully portrayed Colonel Allen. It was through those discussions that the current relevance of the issues debated in that Baptist church in 1894 came through loud and clear, issues that easily transcend the local context of O’Leary’s play and would—or should—resonate as fully with any American audience as they do with those in and around Madison County.
This was not the first time that the Shelton Laurel story had been imbued with contemporary parallels. A number of commentators drew parallels between Shelton Laurel and the equally notorious My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, in which Lieutenant William Calley led an American force to slaughter an entire village whose inhabitants were suspected of shielding and supplying the Viet Cong. When Paludan’s book appeared in 1981, only six years after the Vietnam War era’s end, he acknowledged that he was interested in Shelton Laurel “because I am concerned with My Lai and the Holocaust, in the tragic capacity that humans have shown throughout history—the capacity to commit atrocity.”19
The war in Iraq now resonates in much the same way. In fact, it was during the play’s run in early September 2006 that the debate over the use of torture in interrogating terrorist prisoners raged in Washington, and audiences easily recognized and eagerly discussed the parallels: how an occupying
force controls insurgency; how one defines civilian combatants and to what extent they are subject to military justice when taken prisoner; where the chain of command stops and starts; at what point an individual soldier has the right to question orders that he sees as immoral or unauthorized; the accountability for such actions after the fact (although the play stops short of dealing with the charges made against Keith and Allen); and finally, what right one has to remain neutral, or merely disengaged, when one’s country is at war.
Even in a civil war involving, for the most part, white men fighting each other, the basic contempt and/or prejudice an occupying army feels toward the civilian populace it seeks to control is as relevant in Madison County in 1863 as it was in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Iraq today. In O’Leary’s script, Colonel Allen defends both their actions to Keith by noting that it was all a matter of survival, the survival of “our men, our boys.” He adds, “Every day they’re out there fighting, sacrificing for the Confederacy, for our cause. There’s no power on heaven or earth that will persuade me that we should treat some ragtag bunch of savages whose only concern is their own selfish interests better than we treat our own soldiers who fight and die to protect our families—our way of life.” How much different was the mind-set of William Calley toward the villagers at My Lai, or that of at least some American troops toward the Iraqis in whose midst they find themselves so vulnerably situated?
In post-performance forums, audiences recognized and jumped at the opportunity to discuss the timeliness of the questions raised by O’Leary’s play. And yet its local context was never lost on them; just as many questions and comments focused on particularities of the war in Madison County, the massacre itself, and the fate of those participants who survived. In addition to the public performances at Mars Hill, and one in Asheville, some twenty miles to the south, generous support from the North Carolina Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Arts allowed for two special performances for Madison County middle and high school students, nearly four hundred of whom attended with their teachers. For many, not only was it their first exposure to live theater, but it also served as their introduction to the incident that so defined the nature of the Civil War for their ancestors in their home county.
The highlight of the play’s second-season run was a performance in Shelton Laurel itself. On Saturday night, September 16, 2006, the cast and crew moved the production to the gymnasium of the Laurel Elementary School. Some residents had seen the play the year before at Mars Hill, but the community remains relatively isolated, and many had not crossed the county to attend. With the encouragement of the school principal and support from the PTA, the volunteer fire department, and school staff, the dramatized version of this very local tragedy finally came home.
There was some uncertainty about how the play would be received there. Over the years, Shelton Laurel residents—so many of whom can trace their ancestry to one or more of the victims—had demonstrated considerable ambivalence regarding the massacre. Some seemed especially cautious, even suspicious, as to its commemoration, unsure that they wanted that painful past exposed in too visible or public a way. Some were most likely mistrustful of O’Leary, who had consciously resisted their offers of “help” in “getting it right” when they learned that he was taking on their story.20
While the oral tradition is remarkably strong, and a number of residents, including Rena Shelton, have been willing to share what they know with scholars and journalists, they have done very little to draw attention to the site of the massacre, and they intentionally downplay any physical reminders of it. The only tangible reminder in the area is a state historical marker at a highway juncture well before one enters the community itself. It states simply, “Shelton Laurel Massacre: Thirteen men and boys, suspected of Unionism, were killed by Confederate soldiers in early 1863. Graves 8 mi. E.” There are no signs or directions to the obscure cemetery on a wooded knoll in which the victims are buried—most likely in a mass grave (though a large and well-maintained marble slab has marked the site since the 1970s). As the Civil War Trails project is rapidly being implemented in many counties throughout North Carolina, an inquiry about focusing one of Madison County’s three such displays on the massacre and placing it in Shelton Laurel was quietly declined by one or more community leaders.21 Jim Taylor’s summation of the community’s attitude in 1989 holds true even now. “To this day,” he wrote, “the story is still told to the children in the area, and the older folks will tell it as if it happened yesterday. Some will refuse to speak of it because of the strong emotions it kindles, while others use a hushed tone out of a sense of grief that is still felt, even after all these years.”22
But concerns about community response to having O’Leary’s play brought into their midst proved unfounded. About 120 people attended the performance at Laurel Elementary. The emotional impact of the play’s climax was particularly acute—for the actors as well as the audience. Yet, at the end of the performance, something unexpected happened. After hearty applause and an announcement that the panel discussion would begin momentarily, people rose from their seats; some left the gymnasium with tears streaming down their cheeks, but most moved forward to confront the actors, the crew, and those of us who would have made up the panel, eager to engage in one-on-one conversations about what they had just seen, and the memories or associations it triggered.
Actress Marlene Earp was quickly surrounded by local residents eager to thank her for her beautifully moving—and for them, quite authentic—performance as Patsy Shelton, certainly the play’s pivotal character from their perspective. The rest of us heard family stories full of details about the massacre and its impact on the community as they had heard it over the years. One woman identified herself as a descendant of Judy Shelton (Patsy’s sister-in-law); she told me that Judy had been one of the women who discovered the bodies of the massacred men and boys, and then described the route by which they were moved for a proper burial near Judy’s house. An elderly man told me that he counted among his ancestors Pete McCoy, one of the two prisoners who managed to escape his captors the night before the rest met their common fate. Others talked in more general terms about their genealogical linkages to the victims, about various properties in the valley, and how they’d changed hands over the years, which in turn led to other stories about earlier and later incidents in the long life of the community.
The effect, in short, was cathartic, at both an individual and a collective level. Much of the reaction must have been relief that nothing in their own understandings of the story had been challenged or contradicted—rather it broadened, deepened, and added new levels of meaning to what they already knew and felt about it. Rena Shelton, ninety-two years old, had not been sure she had wanted to see the play because, according to her daughters, it might not tell the story the same way she had told it for so long. Thus all associated with the production were much relieved with her pronouncement at its end: “It’s as good as it could be to have been written by someone not from here.” Yet another elderly resident reiterated that judgment when he commented, “Well, it’s not exactly the way I’ve always heard the story, but it’s not wrong.”
For all of the scholarship on the Shelton Laurel massacre, much of which Mrs. Shelton and her family and neighbors are familiar with, there must have been some sense of satisfaction in seeing a dramatization that spoke even more eloquently and movingly about the tragic plight of their ancestors. Certainly little in the public memory of the war beyond their own community had ever acknowledged or validated that reality. Within the shared belief system that emerged in the South in the years after the Civil War, there was no place for divided loyalties, for internal dissent, or for guerrilla warfare. Such ambivalence or complexity in southern wartime behavior would have seriously undermined the basic, clear-cut interpretation of regional solidarity to the cause in which white southerners so wanted, indeed needed, to believe. For most of them, the Civil War era became, to paraphrase a quote by Harold Pi
nter, “a past that they remembered, imagined they remembered, convinced themselves that they remembered, or pretended to remember.”23
Shelton Laurel was not the only Appalachian community that sought to sidestep the traumas of the guerrilla warfare that had so divided them for that brief period. Recent studies of the war in north Georgia indicate that within a decade or so after the war’s end, communal memory began to find no place for the divisiveness in that region, and created instead a public myth of Confederate southern solidarity throughout the conflict, fully embracing the “Lost Cause” ideology.24 A similar study of Haywood County’s postwar legacy suggests similarly sanitized versions of its part in the war perpetuated by local veterans groups, historical societies, and county histories, in which, according to historian Richard Starnes, “unpleasant topics such as desertion, internal dissent, and outright disloyalty were replaced by images of Confederate solidarity, bravery in battle, and devotion to duty.”25
Such claims of Confederate solidarity and the neglect of less pleasant realities continue into our own time, and they are often based on similar sentiments. In a recent study of tourism and historical memory in Southern Appalachia, Brenden Martin notes that during and after the civil rights movement, “symbols of Dixie”—most notably the Confederate flag—at tourist attractions such as Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge became as prominent as the hillbilly/redneck image in terms of memorabilia sold and the image projected to a vastly white clientele. Martin notes the presentism in these marketing ploys, as well as the irony: Tennessee’s Sevier County was among the most solidly Unionist of any in the state during the sectional crisis and the war itself, but visitors would find no sign of that reality conveyed in anything offered for their consumption.26
Yet perhaps the closest parallel to the Shelton Laurel incident and how it was remembered lay at the far end of the Confederacy. In a wave of hysteria in and around Cooke County, Texas, in the fall of 1862, more than two hundred Unionists were arrested and tried by local and state Confederate authorities; forty-four were executed in the county seat of Gainesville over several days, after conviction by a “citizen’s court.” Quite understandably, that event, which came to be known as “the Great Hanging,” inspired protests and repercussions even greater than those that followed the Shelton Laurel massacre. After the war, it led to increasing reticence on the part of local citizens, who preferred to remember it more privately than publicly. Thomas Barrett, a former minister who had actually participated in the trials and the hangings, published a full account of it all in pamphlet form in 1885. In attempting to generate interest and sales in the area, he found little interest. According to Richard McCaslin’s definitive history of the Great Hanging, Barrett “encountered opposition based on the enduring animosities between Unionists and ex-Confederates and the desire of many people to let the past lie undisturbed.” The reaction led him to become “close-mouthed” about the incident, and even in the 1890s, when asked about it, he said that it was still unsafe to reveal all that he knew.27