Elegy for Shelton Laurel

What Justice overlooked in that cold season

No monument hath since seen fit to label,

Though thirteen men and boys were marched and fallen

In Carolina snow without a claim.

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They were not soldiers ranked beneath a banner,

Not officers enrolled in any list,

But men of Shelton Laurel, farmers, fathers,

Whose names the formal record scarce hath kissed.

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Keith led his column up that frozen valley,

His orders drawn from somewhere far below,

And what he did among those ridge-born people

Hath left a stain that two long centuries know.

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They were bound and marched through their own country,

Past every field their families had cleared,

Past every cove that held their fathers’ labor,

And shot beside the ground they had always feared.

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The youngest had not yet come into manhood,

Had barely known the measure of the plow,

Yet fell the same as those of fuller seasons,

And no man living answered fully how.

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The women came and found them in the morning,

Disposed upon the slope without a rite,

Their blood gone dark upon the Carolina hillside,

Their mouths still holding what they meant to cite.

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No trial preceded what was done among them.

No evidence was laid, no judgment read.

The accusation served as its own verdict,

And Keith's ambition served instead of dread.

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What manner of republic sends its colonel

To silence hunger with a volley's breath,

To mistake the desperation of the mountain

For treason worthy of a blindfold death?

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They wanted salt. They wanted corn for living.

They took what they could find to see them through.

And for that sin against the Confederacy,

Thirteen were marched out and the thirteen slew.

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Hath Providence no reckoning for this moment?

Hath history no page that holds this still?

The courthouse records what the courthouse chooses.

The rest lies buried somewhere on that hill.

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Two centuries have not dissolved the matter,

Though laurel long hath softened overall.

The mountains hold what Carolina history

Hath trained itself deliberately to call.

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A minor incident, a wartime footnote,

A thing best left to settle and subside.

But thirteen men went out and did not return,

And someone must remember and abide.

Author's Note:

The Shelton Laurel Massacre was a Civil War–era killing of civilians that took place in January 1863 in the mountains of western North Carolina, near the Tennessee border and is a true story and I grew up two miles from where this took place.

In that winter, the region was suffering from extreme shortages. A group of local residents, many of them poor farmers, raided Confederate supply stores to get basic necessities like salt. In response, Confederate authorities sent troops into the Shelton Laurel valley under the command of Colonel James A. Keith.

Today, it is remembered as one of the clearest examples of internal conflict and brutality within the Confederacy, where civilians, not just soldiers, became victims of wartime retaliation.