The Ballad of Tom Dooley

ZEBULON VANCE





How did I come to be mixed up in the trial of Tom Dula in the first place?

He was a stranger to me, and his part of the Carolina mountains lay a hundred miles from the part in which I grew up. In my explanation I will attempt to be truthful, but I am sure there are those among my opponents who will deem my honesty arrogance. Honesty has very little to recommend it. Mostly, it gets you into trouble, even faster than liquor; and, though I have no personal weakness for the latter, I do find the former well-nigh irresistible.

“Tell the truth and shame the devil,” people say. Well, I’m not entirely sure that it would. I think Old Scratch might positively delight in watching us engineer our own downfall by practicing a trait universally acclaimed to be a virtue.

So let me tempt fate with the truth: I needed the work, and those Wilkes County lawyers who asked the judge to appoint me to spearhead the defense wanted to be spared the local notoriety of having championed an unpopular defendant. It is required that lawyers accept a certain number of cases pro bono in order to keep their license to practice, and since I had been politicking for most of the previous decade, I had some catching up to do with my legal obligations. A paying case would have been an even greater kindness, but I cannot pretend that I did not need the pro bono credit even more. I also needed a much-talked-about trial to bring my name before the public—favorably I hoped. At least in Charlotte, where I had set up shop with Clement Dowd, public sentiment would not run so high against my client as in Wilkes County.

That’s why the two local attorneys, Allison and Armfield, were willing to let me lead the defense. They were both able men, with more trial experience that I had, but Wilkes is a sparsely populated place, and practically everybody there was kin to either the accused killers or the victim. There can’t be any joy for a local lawyer in bearing the brunt of the strong feelings such a case was bound to stir up. But since I lived far away, in Charlotte, they reasoned that I could represent an unpopular defendant and come out unscathed, because nobody where I’m from knew or cared about the particulars in this little backcountry case. I don’t suppose anybody even much cared if I won or lost it, so long as the letter of the law had been carried out to the satisfaction of the court. And I needed the practice in front of a jury—how better to accomplish that than by taking an obscure case among strangers?

I don’t suppose anybody gave much thought to the poor accused man when they were making these plans for their own convenience and for my professional advancement.

Hard lines on him.

* * *

Those fine upstanding gentlemen who had undertaken the defense of Thomas P. Dula were conscientious attorneys, and they made every effort to be cordial to me, but I do not think they were overly concerned about the outcome of the trial, which they seemed to think was a foregone conclusion anyhow, as they believed him to be guilty. The accused man could not afford to pay them to think otherwise, so their thoughts turned on observing the rituals of justice, rather than on justice itself. They kept meticulous records, with particular attention to their own expense forms, and they passed the time at trial courteously amongst their fellows in the law, and for both sides the defendant was simply a “situation,” the reason for the ritual they all observed, but otherwise not a part of it. Such a procedural charade is easier to bear if the wretch is guilty. You tell yourself that a loss in court may be the means by which true justice will be served, and, if you should happen to win, why then it sweetens the victory to know that the credit is all yours and not owing to any virtue or merit on the part of the defendant.

I did not take capital cases in my youth, in the little stint in the circuit court up around Asheville. Always for me, the law was a means to an end, an apprenticeship through which I must pass in order to reach public office. It worked, too: Congressman, Governor … I had gone far in three short decades of life, but I was honest enough not to risk some poor devil’s life while I was putting in my time as a practicing attorney. Let me get some horse thief acquitted or take sides in a land squabble—that was momentous enough for my blood.

Times had changed for me though. I had applied for parole from the United States government, for my part in the lately defeated Confederate government. They ought to have taken into consideration how long and hard I argued to dissuade my home state from seceding in the first place, but of course that carried no weight with them.

* * *

One of the attorneys assigned ( just as well) to sit second chair to me for the trial was Captain Richard M. Allison, who was a cavalry officer in the War before he was invalided out in ’64, and then, like the rest of us, he had gone back to the tamer business of fighting battles with fine words and stacks of paper. I suppose that Allison will be called “captain” for the rest of his life, even if he lives half a century past that four-year madness of a war, but I aim to leave off the courtesy title of “governor,” just as soon as I am allowed to get myself elected to some new office again—“senator” would be favorite.

When the good captain told me of the incident in Wilkes County, my first thought was how improvident it had been of this Dula fellow to indulge in an act of private violence in such perilous times as these. Surely we had troubles enough in the land, with bushwhackers marauding the country roads, carpetbaggers infesting the new state government, and all manner of profiteering and petty scoundrels at work picking at the carcass of the Old North State for the spoils of war, without some callow young veteran adding a senseless murder to the burden of the populace.

The young woman’s death occurred in May of 1866—we were then only a year past that war that had brought enough carnage to the states comprising the Confederacy to put one in mind of the End of Days. And the accused is a veteran of the 42nd infantry—not one of mine, thank heaven, though I have heard it said that I spent little time with my regiment while I had it, so that I might not even recognize a staff officer, much less a humble private. Still, everywhere I go I am beset by men who claim to have served with me in the War, and I hear them out, smiling and clasping their hands, but mostly I am thinking that if all those who claimed to have fought with the 26th North Carolina had really done so, we could have beaten the Yankees and Napoleon besides.

Captain Allison interviewed the two prisoners when they were first brought in to custody, and so when I arrived in Wilkes County to take nominal charge of the case, I sat down with him on that fine October afternoon, savoring the sunshine and a basket of mountain apples that some well-wisher had bestowed upon me outside the courthouse. Another comrade in arms, no doubt.

I had seen the prisoner for a short while that day, just to introduce myself and to assure him that I would do what I could for him. Do what I could for him. How often that phrase has come to my lips these past five years! When I was Governor, every day’s post brought a heartrending letter from some poor wife or mother, pleading with the all-powerful Governor of North Carolina to release her only son from his regiment, or to let him come home to be tended until his wounds healed. I sent them back what sympathy I could, but the truth was that even governors cannot tell the army what to do, and they would have paid no attention to me had I tried.

Usually the appeals on behalf of soldiers came from poor people in the mountain counties, because they are proud to claim me as one of their own. I know what swallowing of pride it took for these stoic and self-reliant people to ask for help from a powerful stranger, and I shared in their shame—theirs for asking and mine for being powerless to help them. Save a poor enlisted man with no influential family connections? Why, that’s exactly who does die in a war, and everybody knows it—except, I suppose, the friends and family of the poor boy trapped in the thick of it. I doubt that even an emperor could change that fact of life—much less a governor.

That feeling of helplessness in the face of a poor young soldier came back to me as I stood there in the jail in Wilkesboro, echoing that threadbare phrase for the thousandth time. I wonder how many of the grieving wives and mothers actually believed that I could perform a miracle on their behalf. Judging by the polite but wary look on the face of the prisoner, he had no such illusions about my ability to cheat death. I felt sorry for him. Illusions make life bearable.

He was polite to me, a little in awe perhaps of having the former governor come to see him, but he seemed to take no comfort from my empty phrases. Perhaps that would make it easier for both of us when the inevitable verdict came in.

“Why did he do it then?” I asked Captain Allison. I was paring the apple with my little silver knife, but I was no less attentive for that. If I cannot pace, then I think better when I focus on some small task at hand. I could tell by the expression on that careful lawyer face of his what reply was forthcoming, and I held up my hand to forestall it.

“Yes, Allison, I know. Dula is presumed innocent until those twelve scoundrels that comprise the jury say otherwise. We’ll take that as read. But we are not in court now, and there is no one in earshot of this porch to make mischief with our conversation, so just tell me why he is thought to have done it—if that phrasing suits you better.”

I do believe the captain blushed, either at my plain speaking or in contemplation of the answer he would be forced to give to my question. He hemmed and hawed for a bit, looked away, and finally mumbled, “It is woman trouble, Governor.”

I sighed. “We have a new governor in Raleigh now. It might be best to leave off calling me that before the Federals take a notion to haul me back to Capitol Prison for presumptuousness.” I wouldn’t put it past them. “Woman trouble, is it?”

He nodded unhappily. “The accused has a sordid reputation for being unchaste.”

I was glad that my mustache hid the smile I could not quite suppress. “Well, he was a soldier, Allison.”

“So were we all, Gov—er, Mr. Vance. I hope that military service did not cause us to lose the honorable principles we were taught in church and in childhood.”

“Perhaps our client did not acquire those same principles, and surely the women he associated with were not the gentle ladies we are accustomed to.”

Allison shuddered. “I should say they are not. Some of the details of this case … we shall have to clear the court of all female spectators—though why they would wish to attend in the first place, I cannot imagine.”

Well, I could. But I let that pass. “Now what exactly do you mean by woman troubles?”

Captain Allison leaned forward, hand cupped above his lips, and hissed at me, “He has the pox, sir!”

I have the honor to be married to a preacher’s daughter, who was raised in the genteel society of the Morganton planter class, so perhaps he thought I would be as easily shocked as my Harriette by such news, but I grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of the Carolina backcountry, and, after my father died, my family ran a way station for the cattle drovers who passed through Madison County. Between my association with these colorful specimens of humanity, my early career as a country lawyer, and my later years in Congress, I was quite inured to the specter of human iniquity in all its many forms.

I cannot say that I understood the impulse, though.

You might think otherwise, for, as I said, I grew up in the mountains that form Carolina’s border with Tennessee, and many of the frontier folk up there had little use for the social conventions, and I do confess that for a year or two I enjoyed the drinking and the dancing of rough-and-ready Asheville, and I’ll even admit to brawling a time or two, before I came down with the fever of ambition and went to bettering myself through education and mingling in polite society. In those days I lived up to the light I had, but it wouldn’t have been bright enough to read by.

Despite my youthful escapades, the one snare that I never got caught in was a dalliance with unsuitable women. I never let my youth and high spirits blind me to that extent to the road that lay ahead. I was intent on bettering myself, and the road to privilege is best traveled alone until you are almost there.

As pretty and winsome as a frontier girl might be at seventeen, she would have proven a millstone around my neck if I had tried to marry her and drag her, unlettered and unrefined, up to the seats of the mighty, where I was bound and determined to go. I knew better than to risk my future for the momentary pleasure of a youthful romance. I waited until I was accepted to read law with the Woodfin brothers, two prominent attorneys in Asheville, and then I began in earnest the hunt for a suitable bride.

Do not misunderstand me. I was no fortune hunter in search of an heiress, nor did I marry one. Birth and breeding were what mattered to me. My Harriette was the orphaned daughter of a Presbyterian preacher—but she was raised by a gilt-edged family of the plantation aristocracy in Morganton. It was not money that I was after. I needed a well-born young woman, cultured and socially acceptable to the frontier Brahmin. She would see my potential to make something of myself, and I would honor her for her gentility, and aspire to live up to her standards. She would be my guide and my mentor among those “quality folks,” whose ranks I had been determined to join since my days as a clerk at the resort hotel in Warm Springs.

I came from a good family myself—it was only the poverty caused by father’s early death that put me at a disadvantage. But my mother meant for her seven children to succeed in life, and so when I was nearly twenty, she sold our drovers’ inn in Lapland, and moved us to a modest frame house in Asheville. The town of Asheville had been built upon land purchased from Mother’s family, the Bairds, and from my paternal grandfather David Vance, who had fought in the Revolution. In Asheville, if nowhere else on earth, I could count myself a prince.

I think John Woodfin took me on as a pupil to read law on account of that pedigree. I do not know what else he could have seen in a raw-boned youth from the hills. In addition to the Bairds and Grandfather Vance, the war hero, I was kin to the Erwins of Morganton through my mother’s mother Hannah Erwin. Woodfin set a store by that, because he and his brother Nicholas had married two McDowell sisters from Morganton, and kinship with the Erwins and the McDowells connected you to everybody who was anybody west of Raleigh. I knew that my association with the Woodfin family would give me an entrée into that frontier aristocracy, and it was there that I proposed to seek a wife. Morganton is forty miles east of Asheville and outside the mountains. Like water, money and power seem to flow downhill, so the closer one gets to the flatlands, the more of it there is.

Presentable young men with prospects are at a premium in the Carolina backcountry, and so a few months after I began my association with the Woodfins, I was invited to a formal party at Quaker Meadows, the McDowells’ elegant home in Morganton. It was there that my fellow law student Augustus Merrimon introduced me to the McDowells’ ward, Miss Harriette Espy, orphaned in infancy, and raised by the McDowells, so that, while she was not an heiress, her social connections were like threads of spun gold. The tiny young lady standing by the punch bowl, silver ladle in hand, was auburn-haired with earnest gray eyes and a kind face.

“You are reading the law?” she said, after the introductions had been effected. “Oh, what a noble calling!”

“Well, that doesn’t relieve the tedium too awful much,” I said, trying to balance a plate in one hand and a cup of punch in the other. I felt like a mule in a choir loft.

She ignored the jest. “I do so admire a learned man, sir. My own dear, departed father studied at the Princeton Theological Seminary. I shall pray for your success, Mr. Vance.”

I had recently decided to leave the Woodfins’ tutelage and attend the University of North Carolina, and so I played on the heartstrings of this pious young lady, telling her that I should soon be far from home and friendless, and assuring her that entering into a correspondence with my unworthy self would be an act of Christian charity.

The courtship wasn’t all smooth sailing, for Miss Espy ran a tight ship when it came to piety, decorum, and, most especially, absolute fidelity. Why, before we had exchanged no more than a handshake and a sheaf of letters, I nearly lost her, when that infernal stick-insect Merrimon told her that I had been paying addresses to another young lady—an incident that occurred months before I even met Miss Espy, mind you, but she wrote me a letter that would have frozen a bonfire, telling me that our association was at an end, but that she would pray for me. Well, I deserved a law degree just for being able to talk my way out of that one, for it was the hardest case for the defense I ever had. (At least until the matter of Thomas Dula.) But in the end I carried the day with Miss Harriette, and on August 2, 1853, in the Presbyterian Church in Morganton, Miss Espy became Mrs. Zebulon Baird Vance, before God and a host of frontier gentry, whose approval at last I had won.

Forever after, folks said that Harriette was the apple of my eye, and so she was, for like that apple in the Garden of Eden that imparted wisdom to our first parents, so my Harriette bestowed the wisdom of civilization upon me—the gift of powerful friends and the wit to use our connections to advance my career. Indeed I treasured her—but to return to the metaphor of Eden, I am mindful that any apple from that fabled tree would have conferred those self-same gifts.

* * *

So I sat there on a porch in Wilkesboro, peeling an unmetaphorical apple, and listening to Captain Allison stammer through an explanation of the behavior of our client. I was not shocked, though I would have never repeated a word of our conversation to my sainted wife. She would have been horrified beyond the power of speech. She’d have expected me to give up the case on the spot, I suppose, and since I was not being paid a red cent to conduct the defense, it would be hard to argue to the contrary. But, after all, somebody had to defend the poor boy.

I put down the apple. “So you are telling me that this Dula fellow had seduced the victim, Laura Foster, and promised to marry her, but that he was also in an adulterous relationship with his codefendant, Mrs. Ann Melton? And the state’s witness, the servant girl, Pauline Foster … she also claims that the accused has had—”

Allison nodded unhappily. “Carnal knowledge. Yes. So she alleges.”

I let out my breath in a long whistle. “I see what you mean about requiring that all ladies be barred from the court when all this testimony goes into the record.”

I was thinking what a waste his life had been, if he had chosen only to spend it on idle pleasures that led nowhere. Life is a gold coin—but you can only spend it once. How sad that a likely-looking fellow should throw away his one chance for so little of lasting value. I hoped he enjoyed himself, though. How sad if it had all been for nothing.

“I spoke with him briefly, you know,” I told Captain Allison. “He did not strike me as a dissolute fellow.”

My colleague ventured a tight smile. “Well, sir, they keep him sober in the jail, you know.”

“Even so…” I shook my head. “He is quite young.… I perceive weakness … laziness covered by a facile charm, perhaps.… He struck me as the sort of amiable fellow who would go along with anything a comrade suggested, provided the task was not too onerous, or if agreeing was less troublesome than saying no.”

“That may be, sir, but it won’t save him.”

“No. I hadn’t got to the point of thinking about ways to get him off, Allison. I was just indulging in a bit of speculation. I always want to know why people do things.”

He shook his head. “You know, Mr. Vance, I’ll bet you that sometimes they wish they knew.”

After a moment of companionable silence, I said, “Well, you know, I also met the other defendant today.”

Perhaps it was a trick of the sunlight, but I could swear that Captain Allison was blushing again. “Oh—er—did you?”

My mind was still on biblical metaphors. I remembered an apocryphal story that—as the husband of a rock-ribbed Presbyterian—I was not encouraged to believe in: the tale of Lilith, Adam’s “other woman.” They say she wasn’t human—a demon, perhaps, or one of the fairy folk they talk of in the old country. Dula’s codefendant Ann Melton brought that old story to mind.

When I asked to see her at the jail, I was mindful of doing my bounden duty as her attorney, but I dreaded the encounter, for I imagined some poor weeping wretch, too frightened to speak, clinging to my coat sleeve and begging to be saved from the gallows.

But when the jailer brought her into the interview room, I found that I had done Mrs. Melton the grave injustice of underestimating her. My first impression—which I was careful not to show—was sheer admiration of her beauty, which affected me as I might stand back and appreciate a waterfall or a sunset, without having any desire to possess it. She was beautiful—not in the robust country way of an ordinary farm girl, for that is merely the bloom of youth and animal spirits, and it fades as fast as summer lightning. Ann Melton’s face had the sculpted perfection of Pygmalion’s marble goddess made mortal. Her alabaster skin was offset by smoldering dark eyes and a cloud of black hair that fell in waves about her shoulders. And she carried herself like a duchess, who had, by some error, fallen among ignorant rustics who had rudely imprisoned her. How extraordinary that such a rare creature should have come from an illiterate and shiftless family living in a primitive backwoods cabin in the middle of nowhere. Had she been more fortunate in her circumstances, she could have married a prince, I should think. All those thoughts passed through my mind in the time it took her to enter the room and sit in the chair opposite me across the little pine table in the interview room. No doubt she had been studying me, too, for her glance at me was one of cool appraisal. Here was no weeping wretch, in fear of her life, but rather a cool and disdainful beauty, who took men’s admiration in stride, and who took it for granted that her perfection would spare her the indignities visited upon lesser beings.

“I am sure this is most bewildering to you,” I said, attempting to put her at her ease.

She rolled her eyes and permitted herself a small mocking smile. “I understand it all right. People have been talking all summer, and they figure one of us killed Laura Foster.”

“Or that you did it together.”

“Well, we didn’t.”

“Do you know how Miss Foster met her death?”

She shrugged and looked away. “It’s nothing to do with me—or Tom.”

“Well, there’s no percentage in trying the two of you together, in any case. I intend to request severance in this case. That means that you will each have your own trial.”

She nodded. “Different juries?”

“Yes.”

“And in his trial, you’ll say I did it, and in my trial you’ll say he did it, and we’ll both walk free.”

I blinked. I had expected her to demand that I discover the real killer. “Well, I hope that we may see both of you acquitted of this terrible deed, but I would be remiss in my duty as your lawyer if I did not warn you that if you are convicted, you would be hanged.”

She gave me a pitying smile. “They’ll never put a rope around this pretty neck.”