Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

by John C. Inscoe

  If the messiness of guerrilla warfare and its tragic consequences were both an embarrassment and counterproductive to the New South aims of postwar elites in the mountains, and thus was erased from the cleaner and less ambivalent public memories shaped by that elite, it was left to individual families and households to preserve the painful legacy of the internal strife they experienced through much more private and obscure venues. It is obvious that the Shelton Laurel community, particularly the Shelton family, have perpetuated but also carefully guarded its own version of the particular tragedy that has so “haunted” their Civil War history.

  This then is why O’Leary’s play has proved to be such a landmark event. Not only is it one of the only visible and public commemorations of the Unionist experience anywhere within the bounds of the former Confederacy; it also represents a serious and factually accurate re-creation and explanation of a profound tragedy in the very county where it for so long was so divisive, and where it has been remembered in personal terms and hushed tones.

  This public commemoration of so controversial and unsavory a piece of local history suggests parallels with other such events in the southern past. What C. Vann Woodward termed the “burden of southern history” continues to haunt other communities. Not surprisingly, those dealing with race are among the most subject to communal negligence, either intentional or unintentional. The “collective amnesia” of white residents of Wilmington, North Carolina, and Atlanta in writing out of their history the brutal race riots those cities experienced in 1898 and 1906, respectively, are prime examples of the deniability of the historical record. City leaders quickly wiped them from collective or institutional memory, and local historians for much of the twentieth century complied in ignoring these “unpleasantries” in their celebratory chronicles of those cities, especially in Atlanta, that most self-conscious and boosterish of southern cities.28 By the same token, whites in many other communities, North and South, have long suppressed any collective memories of racial violence, particularly lynchings, leaving it to the private and more informal oral traditions of black communities to keep those traumatic memories alive among themselves.

  The Shelton Laurel legacy differs from that of lynchings and race riots in that it has been the victimized community itself that has sought to keep the memory of the massacre alive, but only on its own terms and within its own bounds. For much of the nearly century and a half since the Civil War, it did not have to work particularly hard at doing so. While scholars over the past couple of decades have certainly acknowledged and treated the incident seriously, those within the region seemed content to let its memorialization remain the responsibility of the victims’ descendants. It does not seem to have been a major component of the historical consciousness of people elsewhere in Madison County, much less the rest of the region. I’ve sensed this myself: in giving lectures or doing book signings in adjacent Asheville and even elsewhere in western North Carolina, audiences frequently ask about the Battle of Asheville, a rather insignificant skirmish with no casualties and no discernible effects. Yet the same audiences seem surprised to learn that only a few miles and one county away, one of the war’s most notorious atrocities took place—one that reflects far more accurately the nature of the conflict in this region and many other parts of Southern Appalachia than does the botched raid that was so easily beaten back in Asheville.29

  Yet if the tensions that so characterized southern race relations for much of the past century render at least more understandable the reasons behind the suppression of riots and lynchings from local white histories, similar agendas, on a rather grander scale, led to the initial suppression of Civil War realities such as Shelton Laurel by southern whites: for political and racial reasons, they depicted the Confederate cause as far more united and honorable than it actually was. To have celebrated or even acknowledged what happened at Shelton Laurel would have seriously contradicted that consciously devised and perpetuated image.

  Sometimes it takes unorthodox methods and more creative genres to overcome long-standing popular perceptions and to bring the reality of the stories back into public consciousness. In reviewing Charles Frazier’s second novel Thirteen Moons in 2005, novelist Adam Goodheart began by stating: “There’s a certain kind of history that’s made in out-of-the-way places: the swamps, the borderlands, the barren mountain ranges that no one claims. No grand political gestures, or even any memorable battles, unfold here. It’s the terrain, rather, of squalid little deals, nasty skirmishes and forgotten massacres—where the reverberations of great events wreak distant havoc on singular, unchronicled lives.” Goodheart goes on to suggest that “this is territory where historical novelists, not historians sometimes make the truest guides.” This, he claims, is perhaps the one thing historical fiction is good for: “the reconstruction of . . . what went unrecorded, the countless vanished moments and ordinary gestures that constitute the past.”30

  If that indeed is what Charles Frazier has done in both Thirteen Moons and Cold Mountain, it also describes Sean O’Leary’s accomplishment in documenting another aspect of western North Carolina’s Civil War. He is meticulously faithful to almost all the facts of the massacre as we know them. It is in the imagined framework of an 1894 reunion of three key players that he becomes at least as true a guide as we historians have been in making meaningful and all too human the “reverberations of great events wreaking distant havoc” on a decidedly out-of-the-way place. In so doing, he brings into a very public forum not only the dilemma and tragedy suffered by southern Unionists there and elsewhere, but also the inhumanity of civil war imposed on all of those caught up in its throes.

  Notes

  1. Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Geoffrey C. Ward with Ric and Ken Burns, The Civil War: An Illustrated History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).

  2. A selective list of the growing literature on Unionism includes Richard N. Current, Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992); Jon L. Wakelyn, ed., Southern Unionist Pamphlets and the Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); Daniel E. Sutherland, ed., Guerrillas, Unionists, and Violence on the Confederate Home Front (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999); John C. Inscoe and Robert C. Kenzer, eds., Enemies of the Country: New Perspectives on Unionists in the Civil War South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); and William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

  Local and regional studies include Thomas G. Dyer, Secret Yankees: The Unionist Circle in Confederate Atlanta (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Margaret M. Storey, Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2004); and Robert Tracy McKenzie, Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  3. Jim Taylor, “The Killings on the Shelton Laurel,” Company Front (August/September 1989): 5–12.

  4. Lawrence M. Allen, Partisan Campaigns of Col. Lawrence M. Allen (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards and Broughton, 1894); and B. T. Morris, “Sixty-fourth Regiment,” in Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War, 1861–1865, ed. Walter Clark (Greensboro, N.C.: Nash Bros., 1901), 3:659–71.

  5. John Preston Arthur, Western North Carolina: A History (Raleigh, N.C.: Edwards and Broughton, 1914), 603; Ora Blackmun, Western North Carolina: Its Mountains and Its People in 1880 (Boone, N.C.: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1977), 345–46; Manly Wade Wellman, The Kingdom of Madison: A Southern Mountain Fastness and Its People (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 81–83.

  6. Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984).

  7. William R. Trotter, Bushwhackers! The Civil War in North Carolina, vol. 2: The Mountains (
Greensboro, N.C.: Signal Research, 1988), 209–32; Sean Michael O’Brien, Mountain Partisans: Guerrilla Warfare in the Southern Appalachians, 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1999), ix–x, 3–14; John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 117–20.

  8. Sharon McCrumb, Ghost Riders (New York: Dutton, 2003), and Ron Rash, The World Made Straight (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).

  9. Taylor, “Killings on the Shelton Laurel,” 5–12.

  10. Statement by SART artistic director William Gregg. See its Web site, www.sartheatre.com.

  11. See O’Leary’s Web site, www.olearyonstage.com.

  12. Paludan maintains that Keith was the only one of the two on-site and thus in command on the day of the massacre, citing the earliest newspaper reports at the time, and official military reports. Jim Taylor, whose account differs from Paludan’s on several significant points, agrees that Keith was in command. O’Leary chooses to put Allen on the spot, with Keith momentarily absent, but attributes the actual order to fire on the prisoners to a Captain Nelson, who had led his company on an earlier expedition to put down the resistance in the Laurel valley. Paludan, Victims, 89, 96–97; Taylor, “Killings on the Shelton Laurel,” 9–10.

  13. Paludan, Victims, 121.

  14. All quotes come from the working script of Beneath Shelton Laurel as produced in 2005. It differs slightly from a tightened 2006 version of the play, also produced by SART, and from an expanded version by O’Leary to be performed in workshop in New York City.

  15. Kirk’s role is laid out in Inscoe and McKinney, Heart of Confederate Appalachia, 118, where we cite Lawrence Allen’s Partisan Campaign as our source.

  16. Taylor, “Killings on the Shelton Laurel,” 8. See also Paludan, Victims, 55.

  17. Keith and Heth gave slightly differing versions of the exact language Heth used to order Keith to move his troops into Shelton Laurel. O’Leary provides an accurate version of what Keith claimed he’d been told. Both sources admitted that Heth had said that there was no need to take prisoners because “these men had forfeited their right to be treated according to the rules of war.” Paludan, Victims, 87–88.

  18. The timing of that revelation in relation to the massacre is one point of discrepancy among the various historical accounts.

  19. Paludan, Victims, x.

  20. O’Leary explained his decision in an e-mail message to me, December 5, 2006: “I felt justified in declining their assistance because even ‘historical plays’ are at their core works of fiction and in a case such as this in which no living person personally knew any of the characters, their ‘memories’ would have been at best unreliable and from a dramatic standpoint probably not useful. The other problem was that some folks clearly had axes to grind, so I thought it better to insulate myself and SART from charges of favoritism.”

  21. The three markers installed in Madison County in December 2006 for the North Carolina Civil War Trails project are located at Mars Hill, Marshall, and Warm Springs. Each refers to events that took place at those locations, but each also makes reference to the Shelton Laurel incident. For the text of those markers, written by Dan Slagle, see www.civilwartrails.com.

  22. Taylor, “Killings on the Shelton Laurel,” 11.

  23. Harold Pinter’s actual statement was “The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember,” quoted in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 4. The recent scholarship on memory and the Civil War has also neglected any mention of Unionism or guerrilla warfare: David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001); Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic; David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

  24. Jonathan D. Sarris, “The Lost Cause in Appalachia: (Re)constructing Memories of the Civil War in the Southern Mountains, 1865–1900,” paper delivered at Southern Historical Association annual meeting, November 2004; Rod Andrew, “Martial Spirit, Christian Virtue, and the Lost Cause: Military Education at North Georgia College, 1871–1915,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 80 (Fall 1996): 486–505; and Sarris, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), chap. 5.

  25. Richard D. Starnes, “ ‘The Stirring Strains of Dixie’: The Civil War and Southern Identity in Haywood County, North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 74 (July 1997): 237–59; quotes on 257 and 259.

  26. C. Brenden Martin, “To Keep the Spirit of Mountain Culture Alive: Tourism and Historical Memory in the Southern Highlands,” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 259–60.

  27. Richard B. McCaslin, Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, 1862 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1994), 190–93; quote on 190.

  28. Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 86–88; and Brundage, Southern Past, 47. Both cities used the centennials of the riots, in 1998 and 2006 respectively, to compensate for those long years of neglect through scholarly conferences and public forums.

  29. The definitive account of the Battle of Asheville, which took place April 5, 1865, is a pamphlet by George W. McCoy, “The Battle of Asheville” (Asheville, N.C.: Buncombe County Confederate Centennial Commission, 1965), and Trotter, Bushwhackers! chap. 25. Trotter stated that it was “as close to bloodless as a five-hour firefight can get,” with both sides “just going through the motions” (294).

  30. Adam Goodheart, “Trail of Tears,” a review of Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons, in the New York Times Book Review, October 29, 2006, p. 14.

  14

  Appalachian Odysseus

  Love, War, and Best-sellerdom in the Blue Ridge

  Late in the summer of 1997, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain hit the top of the New York Times best seller list in fiction, a remarkable achievement for any first-time novelist, but particularly so for a book set in Civil War Appalachia. Not since John Jakes’s North and South has a Civil War novel ever made its way into that top spot; the only other novel set in the southern highlands to have appeared on the list was Deliverance, more than a quarter of a century earlier.1 Cold Mountain enjoyed widespread praise and much media attention upon its publication.2

  What is it about Frazier’s book that accounts for its remarkable success? Why did Frazier, a western North Carolina native, suddenly attract more readers than Patricia Cornwall, Danielle Steele, or John Grisham? Independent booksellers, with an extraordinary boost from local stores in Raleigh, where Frazier then lived, claimed much of the credit, as they did with The Bridges of Madison County and Snow Falling on Cedars. The book fully warrants its success. It is a sensitive, delicately wrought romance between two complex and memorable characters and an intimate wartime epic that conveys, in unconventional ways, the impact of the Civil War both on its hero and on its heroine. If it drags in places (and I for one think it does), it also builds toward so powerful and surprising a climax in its last forty or so pages that readers were left both satisfied and dazzled. Word-of-mouth was perhaps the most potent sales pitch of all.

  Can the tale’s Appalachian setting take any claim for the book’s appeal? Alas, probably not. This is no reason to think that the same story, as beautifully told but set in some other part of the war-torn South, would not have been equally popular. And yet the Blue Ridge Mountains are an integral part of the novel, and Frazier’s treatment of the region and his characters’ relationship to it are among the narrative’s most in
triguing and enriching aspects.

  Frazier based his story on the experience of his own great-great uncle, Confederate enlistee W. P. Inman, who in late 1864 escaped from an Illinois prison camp and made the trek home—on foot!—to his North Carolina home near Cold Mountain, a high but fairly nondescript peak some twenty miles southwest of Asheville, where the Blue Ridge mountains merge with the Great Smokies. He was within three miles of home when he met his death in a skirmish at the hands of a particularly notorious Home Guard unit that had plagued local residents for much of the war.3

  In fictional form, Inman (the only name given to him) does much the same, though Frazier places him in a Confederate hospital in Raleigh in the summer of 1864, having been wounded in the neck during the siege of Petersburg. Fearful that he will be sent back into the hellish fray that the Virginia theater had become, Inman deserts and begins a long cross-state trek, moving toward home and a mountain that “soared in his mind as a place where all his scattered forces might gather” (17). Also drawing him home is his fiancée, Ada Monroe, though he is wracked with doubts as to whether she will want the demoralized shell of a man the war has made of him. He is a loner, a stolid, introspective man whose sensitivity and virtue would render him a rather one-dimensional character were it not for the self-doubt and urgent sense of despair and survival that humanize him and assure our continued interest in his fate.