The Ballad of Tom Dooley

ZEBULON VANCE





Tom Dula and Ann Melton … what a long time ago that was. A brief interlude in my life, really, when I practiced law in order to feed my family while I waited to be let back into politics. As soon as the government permitted Confederate officials to reenter the political fray, I went back into the election business, and ended up in the Senate, where I mean to die in harness. I have not represented a defendant in court in decades, and I never will again, but from time to time my memory summons up those two star-crossed clients of mine, and I see them as they were in 1866—young, handsome, and indifferent to the opinion of the world in general. I did not understand them at the time, and I believe I thought that when I had attained age and wisdom, I would come to know what it was that motivated them, what was in their hearts. But as I sit drowsing by this fire in a Washington parlor, I know that I am as far from comprehending them as ever.

We are bound for different heavens, those two rustic souls and I.

They loved each other, I suppose, or what passes for love with young and passionate people, whose impulses are not tempered by education or moral guidance. Their lives were without purpose or direction, and so perhaps they became each other’s purpose.

But Ann Melton was married to another. I recall that well enough, for that is the one thing in this matter that I do understand. She was born to a drunken slut of a mother, and by some wondrous chance she grew up to be a beauty—that was her one chance to escape the squalor of her mother’s life, and it is no wonder that she took it. A prosperous man with a house and land and the means to put food on the table offered her a home and marriage, and at the age of fifteen she took it. I find no wonder in that. It is the best thing I know of Ann Melton.

I would have done the same. Perhaps I did, in fact. I would like instead to think that in marrying my Harriette I was fortunate to have fallen in love with a gentlewoman whose breeding and social connections were so perfectly suited to advance my own ambitions. I hope I made her a good husband. I meant to, and she never uttered a word of complaint, bless her, but she was worth her weight in gold for a man with political and social aspirations well beyond his personal means. So in my youth I let my head rule my heart, so that my choice of a partner should further my ends, for I had much to accomplish.

How then to explain my second marriage? My dear Harriette, delicate soul that she was, passed away in 1878, and by then I was forty-eight years old, well past the giddiness of youth, and serving in the United States Senate. Having established myself as a respected and prosperous statesman, I no longer had need of anyone’s assistance to make my way in the world. I was never a ladies’ man, nor one who had any interest in dalliances with the fair sex. Like a plow horse with blinders on, I saw only the furrow that I must plod along, and no amiable distractions ever kept me from my duty.

I suppose when I became a widower, I could have indulged myself in sensuality at last: married some fair-haired beauty, and eased into my dotage with a pretty doll to amuse me as the fires of ambition burned low. Or I could have dispensed with matrimony altogether, and immersed myself in the neverending duties of a serving senator.

But I did neither of those things.

Ah, Flossie Martin. What will they say of you in the sonorous biographies that are sure to be written when I finally take leave of this world?

Precious little, I’ll warrant. My Harriette was beloved in my home state, for its aristocrats counted her as one of their own, and she stood by me through all the tribulations of the early years, braving the dangers of war in the Governor’s Palace, never leaving my side until I sent her away in those last frenzied weeks of the conflict. To the North Carolinians who elected me Governor twice over, and sent me back to Congress to represent them before the nation, Harriette Espy will forever be Mrs. Vance.

But in 1880 I married again.

Mrs. Florence Steele Martin was a prosperous widow from Kentucky, well past the bloom of youth, just as I was. There would be no second family of young Vances from this union—and the grown sons I already had were scrupulously polite to her, but they plainly thought the family would be better off without her. In their calculations, though, they reckoned without the War.

When I was hauled away to prison on my birthday, three weeks after Appomattox, Federal soldiers swarmed through our little house in Statesville and took all our belongings. We never got them back. After that, I earned little enough as a lawyer, because in those days of Reconstruction, no one had much money to spend on litigation. And the pay of a Senator is modest, because it is supposed that those who hold the office come from rich and powerful families, which, by and large, they do. But I did not. I was looking at the declining years of my life with precious little fortune to shore up the cares and vicissitudes of old age. Florence Martin was wealthy, and I was democracy’s answer to an earl: a United States Senator. It was a sensible and satisfactory alliance, and we were neither the poorer for it.

We summered in the mountains near Asheville in our stately mansion Gombroon—named for the Persian pottery of that name, for I was a cultured man of the world by that time, still close to Asheville in my heart, but in other ways very far from it indeed, and my last home was proof of my success. Gombroon was the most modern style of estate, three stories high, with a turret and sprawling porches, and all the accoutrements of a fiefdom: an orchard, a vineyard, a dairy, and formal gardens. I felt that I had earned such prosperity, but it was the wealth of Florence Martin that made it happen, and I was grateful for that.

But would I have died for her? Assuredly not. I never felt such reckless passion for any human being, and it was the thought of that devotion that brought Tom Dula and Ann Melton to my mind, even after so much time had passed. I tell myself that they were still caught up in the madness of youth—just past twenty, both of them, though war and hardship had made them old beyond their years. Whatever they felt for one another, that lust that made everything else in the world fade to insignificance: I never felt that. Never did. And I could never quite figure out whether I envied them their transports of sentiment or whether I pitied them, as one would a madman whose delusions blind him to the realities of life.

But they died young, and I lived on for decades, ending up revered and prosperous in a mountain mansion, safe from the riptides of emotion that sweep lesser men away to their deaths.