While the massacre destroyed the military career and reputation of Lieutenant-Colonel James A. Keith, the adjunct commander who ordered the executions, he was never brought to justice for the incident.
[1] The events leading up to the massacre began in January 1863 when an armed band of Madison County citizens ransacked salt stores in Marshall and looted the home of Confederate Colonel Lawrence Allen, commander of the 64th North Carolina Regiment who was away from home, guarding stockpiles of salt elsewhere.
Upon hearing of the events, Governor Vance (who grew up in nearby Weaverville) sent orders not to harm the captured Unionists and dispatched Solicitor Merrimon to monitor the situation.
[1] Despite the governor's orders, Keith, believing a rumor that the Unionist force was much larger than in reality, began frantically combing the valley for Union supporters.
Keith rounded up several Shelton Laurel women and began torturing them to force them to give up their sons' and husbands' whereabouts.
[2] The Memphis Bulletin reports: "Old Mrs. Sallie Moore, seventy years of age, was whipped with hickory rods till the blood ran in streams down her back to the ground.
After several days of rounding up alleged supporters, Keith began marching the captives toward East Tennessee, which was occupied by a substantial Confederate army at the time.
After spending two years in jail awaiting trial, he escaped just days before a state supreme court decision would have provided him with vindication.
[5] Massacre at Shelton Laurel, a short film written and directed by Jay Stone, was shot in the fall of 2001 in Rutherfordton, North Carolina.
[6] Events of the Shelton Laurel massacre are described in The World Made Straight, by Ron Rash, a fiction book about western North Carolina during the 1970s.
[8] Charles Frazier, the author of Cold Mountain, studied the Shelton Laurel massacre in depth during research for the book and paralleled many of the events therein.
During the massacre, one soldier tied a woman to a tree while her baby was disrobed and left exposed to the snow unless she gave up information.
When the Confederates initially raided the Laurel Valley, they arrested fifteen men, two escaped, and thirteen were executed in the woods.
In Cold Mountain, Frazier recreates the horror, ""A captive boy, not much older than twelve, fell to his knees and commenced crying.
When the soldiers were forced to execute the elderly and children at Shelton Laurel many of them initially refused and were threatened with death by their superiors.
Frazier's Cold Mountain details one soldier's opinion on the matter, "I didn't sign on to kill grandpaws and little boys."
After the horrific events at Shelton Laurel family members discovered the shallow grave of their relatives was being exhumed and eaten by wild hogs.