Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War

The Shelton Laurel Massacre occurred in January 1863. A posse from the Confederate 64th North Carolina infantry arrested fifteen mountain men they suspected of being raiders and/or Unionists. These ragged men were supposed to be herded to Knoxville for trial. Instead, Lieutenant Colonel James Keith stopped along the way, commanded five of the mountain men to kneel, and then ordered his Confederate infantrymen to shoot. They hesitated, then Keith repeated the order and they shot. The oldest captive, Joe Woods, asked for a moment to pray and he was shot next. Keith commanded five more of the mountain men to kneel and ordered his men to shoot. By this time, 13-year old David Shelton, a boy from the mountains, was pleading with Keith for mercy saying that his father and three brothers had already been shot. Young Shelton, who was wounded in both arms, begged to be allowed to go home to his mother and sisters. He was shot to death next.

Keith blamed his commander, General Harry Heth, for the massacre claiming that Heth had ordered him to capture the mountain men suspected in a recent raid and advised him to take no prisoners.In Victims, Paludan detailed the backgrounds of Keith and Heth. Keith lived in the affluent town of Madison County. He was a wealthy and successful man who joined the 64th to lend prestige to his name (31-34). By all accounts, Keith was a cruel man. He did not hesitate to torture mountain women when demanding information about their husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers. According to reports, Keith and his troops hung women by their thumbs, tied them to trees, and whipped them.

Paludan wrote that Heth had been sent to West Point with high expectations but he did poorly there. According to Paludan, Heath earned low grades and excelled only at being an incorrigible prankster (36). During Heth's military career, he served in Mexico in 1848, in Kansas in 1851, and in Utah in 1858. He was a frustrated man who wanted to be in the middle of bigger military action. Heth was moved to the 64th after having been defeated in Virginia and Kentucky in 1862 (54-55).

The Shelton Laurel Massacre was investigated as soon as North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance heard about it. By the next month, he had a full report about torture and murder under the command of Keith. Vance contacted Secretary of War James Seddon requesting punitive action be taken against Keith. Keith was court-martialed, found not guilty, and resigned. Vance was incensed and demanded a copy of the court-martial proceedings.

Ultimately, Keith was not convicted because in the Articles of War guerrillas were not protected as were official servicemen who wore uniforms. Loyalties and prejudices were so firmly in place in the South that they did not convict Keith even for executing prisoners. After the Shelton Laurel Massacre guerilla-style attacks on Confederates grew stronger. Men of the 64th who had taken part in the massacre left the area in fear for their lives and the lives of their family members.

Hostilities and loyalties from this period dated back to the early 1800s when the northern parts of the country were concerned with industry and tariffs. In the south, the focus had been on crops. In general, southerners defended slavery. An assortment of conflicts regarding slavery occurred when southerners wanted to move West with their slaves. Northerners and westerners protested against slavery in the West. Congress became a combat zone for sectional opposition and pacts. The changes amid the sections became more pronounced over time because of inter-state slavery restrictions. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 Presidential election, some southern states seceded and that marked the beginning of the US Civil War.

Sectional identity and patriotism in North Carolina during the Civil War were varied. In North Carolina one-third of the entire population were slaves. One-quarter of the population owned all of the slaves. There were rural and urban confederates but most of the mountain people were Unionists. Confederate tendencies lay mostly with wealthy slave-owning farmers and “poor whites, profoundly hostile to blacks and most vulnerable to any change in the social and economic structure," (63).

Mountain people dwelt in Appalachia and had done so for many generations. As is usual with people on the periphery they adapted laws and customs suited to themselves that had nothing to do with the laws and customs of North Carolina. Mountain people were very much a part of the land. People in the North Carolina mountains were isolated. Their loyalties were to their families and other mountain people. It would have been unusual for them to own slaves. Because of their anti-slavery opinions, they were subject to suspicion by regular North Carolina Confederates. However, because they were located in the south they were also held to be suspicious by Northern Unionists.

The Shelton Laurel Massacre and the accompanying guerilla warfare may seem like a minor conflict in the larger context of the Civil War. Paludan's motivation for reviewing this subject was "...the chance to tie the social history of the Civil War era to a concern about the relationship between the grand events that are the focus of the most historical investigation and the daily experience of ordinary life" (p xi). Another motive for his book is to explain the sectionalism that existed within the south.

Paludan wanted to elucidate for readers how people on the periphery manage their own affairs. In the mountains “juries in county seats could and did ignore the law and evidence to acquit or convict people they liked or disliked, people whose values or whose kin they did or did not respect" (Paludan, 24). The mountain people routinely used intra-social political methods in order to achieve personal revenge. When the Civil War started mountain people’s allegiance was based no so much on devotion to the Union per se, then it was a disdain for the wealthy southerners who were causing all the problems to be visited on North Caroline.

Thirteen people shot may seem like a small number when compared to mass murders of other periods and places. However, Paludan's makes his point about the importance of southern troops murdering southerners using memoirs, census data, newspaper articles, court cases, and other private and government documents. The history reveals this to have been a shocking deviation from what was expected in southern men of the 64th. Mountain people in North Carolina have had Unionist leanings due to “class hostility, rural suspicions of more urban places, and a feeling that the wealthy and influential slave owners were threatening hard-working common people" (61). However, the fact that southerners would treat their own constituents in such a ruthless manner indicates that in places the Civil War was an occasion for people like Keith to use their authority to wreak havoc and revenge against their impoverished neighbors.

Unionists were poor whites and poor farmers who viewed succession as treason. Mountain people were appalled that southern confederates chosen to commit what amounted to treason by trying to separate from the rest of the United States. By doing so, those confederates had started a rebellion guaranteed to bring the wrath of the highly equipped northern armies down on their heads. To mountain people, there was an existing argument between the north and south about slavery. Southern confederates had escalated that fight into a war by their acts of secession.

As far as guerilla-style attacks by mountain men that were a way of fighting off Confederates who came to take away their friends and relatives and force them to fight in a war they did not believe in. Additionally, the mountain terrain lent itself to running and shooting. According to Paludan the "locals had a saying that in these mountains a person could shoot a squirrel fifty feet away and have to walk a mile to fetch it.” (68). A side effect of the Civil War was that mountain people used the "opportunity that the war brought to revenge old debts and to loot, plunder, and terrorize" (77). The looting and plundering part may have been largely because the people of Appalachia were largely starving.

The sectionalism and bitterness between the haves and have-nots in North Carolina increased as winter arrived. Some people there accused of being Unionist are more aptly described as anti-confederate. Mountain people and small-time subsistent backcountry farmers mainly wanted to avoid being dragged into the war either by union army attacks or by conscription efforts led by confederate officers.

In Shelton Laurel, the Shelton family did not care for the Confederate cause. As the war continued the scarcity of food and salt became a factor. The merchants in town did not want to sell salt and other provisions to the poor whites from the mountains when they could obtain and much better price from the confederate army and government. The raid that prompted the eventual massacre occurred when a combination of Union sympathizers and Confederate deserters attacked the supplies at Marshall North Carolina taking salt and other supplies.

The main disadvantage of guerilla-style tactics by mountain people was revealed by Shelton Laurel Massacre when Keith and his fellow confederates did not respect the mountain people as much as they presumably would have respected army regulars. Rules of engagement did not demand that Confederates try to take mountain people as prisoners of war. Therefore mountain people were killed while in the midst of surrender (87-88).

In Chapter 4: The Killing, Paludan wrote about one aim of his book, which was to engage readers’ hearts and minds by invoking emotions that include empathy for the victims and the murderers. The author attempts to inspire pity for the murderers by explaining how approximately fifty mountain people had stolen salt and clothing from raided Marshall, North Carolina and other locations. Children of the murdering 64th suffered when their children died from scarlet fever for example. However, it is hard to feel sympathy for army soldiers who killed almost an entire family plus their neighbors, most of whom were innocent of raiding Marshall.

North Carolina had been the last state to secede from the union and join the confederacy. North Carolina did not readily agree to secede from the union until its citizens were convinced that war was upon them. In the original vote to secede North Carolina unionists triumphed over their confederate counterparts. Even though North Carolina’s secession candidates had existed in North Carolina for a decade before the Civil War they had not won many offices.

However, these confederate advocates, primarily wealthy white slave-owners, were a loud and vigorous minority. The pro-Union and pro-secession politicians in North Carolina battled to lay claim to North Carolina’s patriotism. That left entire regions where the people were not committed to the confederacy. This created a grim and lethal environment.

Once the pro-secessionists took charge, North Carolina plunged into the war. Eventually, that state earned the dubious distinction of being the state with the most casualties in the south. North Carolina was one of many states that promptly repealed the articles of secession and approved the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery. In 1869 North Carolina approved the 14th amendment and was admitted back into the Union.

James Keith escaped from prison while awaiting his next trial and disappeared. Harry Heth went into business in Washington DC and before his death worked for the Office of Indian Affairs. Zebulon Vance, who ironically had opposed secession, was arrested after the Civil War for his part in the Confederacy. He was later pardoned. James Seddon retired to his country estate after the Civil War. The Shelton familial still lives in North Carolina.

Bibliography

Phillip Shaw Paludan, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1981.

McPherson, James M. What They Fought for 1861-1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994.