Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South

13. Unionists in the Attic: The Shelton Laurel Massacre Dramatized

Unionists in the Attic 282 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 13 The Shelton Laurel Massacre Dramatized 283 Unionists in the Attic 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 selfserving pamphlet titled Partisan Campaigns of Col. Lawrence M. Allen, followed in 1901 by a regimental history of the 64th by one of 284 Race, War, and Remembrance 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...