The Ballad of Tom Dooley

ZEBULON VANCE





“Our client’s husband served with you in the 26th,” Captain Allison told me.

“Melton … Melton…” I shook my head. “I cannot place him. There were so many.…”

I joined the army early in the War—on May 4, 1861, only weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter—when there was a carnival atmosphere to the enterprise, with much flag-waving and cheering crowds, gold braid and shining swords, but I did not stay in the ranks to the bitter end. As a man of substance in Asheville, I was expected to raise a company of soldiers and to lead those men off to war in defense of our home state. I had no more military experience than a blind mule, but in those heady days in 1861, that was a commonplace. Suddenly a country that had one well-trained army split into two countries, with much of that original army going over to the newly formed Confederacy. This schism left vacancies on both sides of the conflict, and so the officers’ ranks were filled with amateurs—like myself.

In order to become a colonel, you needed to round up five hundred men who would agree to serve in your command, and you needed the means to buy yourself a horse, a sword, and an officer’s uniform. That was considered qualification enough for command. For the sake of the common soldier, I can only hope that Providence parceled out the fools equally to both sides—and I hope I was not one of those fools. I do not think I was. Anyhow, I was seldom anywhere important enough to do much harm.

I suppose I could have wrangled a desk job for myself if I had tried. My Harriette would have been overjoyed had I done so, but I wasn’t much past thirty, and I had no desire to sit at a desk in Raleigh, firing paper salvos and dodging requisition forms while the War whirled on without me. That was in 1861—early days. We were all fools back then.

They assigned us to the 14th Regiment of North Carolina to begin with, and by the middle of June we had settled in at Camp Bragg, some two and a half miles from the town of Suffolk, Virginia. Twenty-six miles away, in Newport News, the enemy had landed a large force, and, since Camp Bragg straddled the junction of two railroad lines (the Petersburg & Norfolk and the Roanoke & Seaboard), we thought ourselves in some danger of attack. Every night pickets were posted a mile and a half from camp, and the rest of us slept with our weapons at hand. The battle passed us by, though, that time, in favor of another railroad town: Manassas Junction, in proximity to Washington.

A few weeks after that, the government mustered new regiments, some of them comprising troops from the mountain counties. I was gratified, but not entirely surprised, to receive a letter from the Adjutant General of North Carolina’s troops, saying that I had been elected colonel of the 26th Regiment, and would I accept the commission?

I delayed just long enough to transfer my old command to another Asheville lawyer, Philetus Roberts, and then I hightailed it down to Raleigh, where I wasted some time trying to persuade the bureaucrats to transfer my original troops, the Rough & Ready Guards, to my newly formed regiment. They thought not, of course, so I had to leave my boys in the 14th, and, after a few weeks’ leave at home, I made my way over to Camp Burgwyn, on the Atlantic coast near Morehead City, where we whiled away the waning days of summer watching Yankee sailing ships cruising past, without bothering to waste a shell on our fortifications.

I chafed at the idleness of waiting for the War to find me. I declined an offer to run for the Confederate congress, because I had been so loath to leave the Union in the first place. Then I proposed to go on a recruiting trip back to the mountains to garner more troops, but my deliverance from that seaside monotony came from another quarter: in February 1862, I was ordered to take my regiment to New Bern, where on March 14, the Union forces, under General Ambrose Burnside, attacked.

Was James Melton there in the swamp with us?

If he was an enlisted man, I would have no way of remembering him, but I’ll wager that we’d have the same nightmares about that day. My regiment was stationed on the right wing, caught between the woods, through which enemy forces were advancing, and a swamp.

About midday we fell back, the last Confederate troops to retreat. When we got within sight of the River Trent, I saw that the railroad bridge was in flames. The other regiments, having made good their escape, had fired the bridge after them—leaving us trapped.

The river itself was impassable, but, fortunately, I knew something of the terrain thereabouts, so I led my men to nearby Briers Creek, seventy-five yards wide and too deep to wade, but it was our only hope of escape. The only boat to be had was a wooden boat that would hold three men at a time—and we had hundreds of soldiers to ferry across the water.

With the enemy less than a mile away and closing, I spurred my horse into the creek, but midway across he refused to carry me further, and so I was forced to swim for it. One of my men brought the horse ashore, and there I mounted him again, and, accompanied by some of my officers, I rode to the nearest house, where we commandeered three more small boats to effect the evacuation of my troops.

We had to carry the boats back to the creek on our shoulders, and then, amidst shell fire, and clouds of acrid smoke, we set back across the water to rescue the soldiers, a handful at a time. It took all of four hours to get my regiment translated to safety on the other side of Briers Creek, but, except for three poor fellows who were drowned, and those who fell in the redans holding off the enemy, we got the soldiers across.

That was my baptism by fire, and, while I hope I acquitted myself well and did my best for my men, the futility and haphazardness of war were impressed upon me.

The commanding officer in the Battle of New Bern had been my fellow congressman Lawrence Branch. He had taken the rank of colonel about the same time I did, but he had recently been promoted to Brigadier General, though I cannot say I was impressed with his performance in that position. I thought I could do at least as well, and so shortly after the battle, I set about trying to raise a legion—that is: to add twenty additional companies to the ten I already had, plus a complement of cavalry and artillery. If I could amass that number of troops willing to serve under me, I would be promoted to Brigadier General as well.

This venture went nowhere, for shortly after I began my campaign, the Adjutant General informed me that the newly passed Conscription Act had furnished enough soldiers to meet the quota for North Carolina. I am not a lawyer for nothing, though, and I spent a few more weeks trying to find a loophole in the recruiting laws, and thinking up ways to raise my legion in spite of the bureaucrats’ efforts to thwart me. It was like trying to swim in molasses. No sooner would I enlist recruits than the generals would assign those men to other people’s commands. I could see that they meant to keep me a colonel in perpetuity, so I abandoned the idea of trying to work in the military hierarchy, in favor of going back to the game I could actually play: politics.

The election for governor was coming in August, and the Raleigh Standard newspaper was endorsing my candidacy—if I should choose to run. Why, I’d have run for the governorship of purgatory, if the alternative was being outranked by the likes of General Branch and suffering the whims of pettifogging bureaucrats. I had one ace in my hand in this venture: my opponent was not in the military, and soldiers could vote.

The election was not until August, though, and meanwhile I had to soldier on as colonel of the 26th North Carolina, and try to remember that the enemy was the Union army, and not those graven fools in the government back home.

June found me back in Virginia, to join my regiment to Ransom’s Brigade for the Seven Days Battle. The Union forces, under the command of General George B. McClellan, had landed on the Virginia peninsula, with the intention of advancing west and taking Richmond. When you are well below the exalted rank of general, you have very little idea what is going on in the campaign, even if you are in the forefront of the fighting. Seen up close, war is all noise and smoke, shouting men, and belching cannons, and through it all the stench of blood and gunpowder. There may have been some grand design conceived by General Lee and his advisors, but it wasn’t apparent to those of us in the thick of it. Orders failed to reach the commanders. Reinforcements did not arrive. The fighting seemed sporadic and uncoordinated.

The War was prolonged mainly by the fact that General McClellan was just as bewildered as the rest of us. He didn’t seem to know that his army outnumbered the Confederate forces two to one. He didn’t realize that he was closer to Richmond than the defending army was. And he hadn’t grasped the fact that he was winning.

Instead of pushing on to Richmond and to victory, he pulled his troops back to the James River, planning to load them back on the ships they came in and sail away to safety. We should have given him a parade, but instead we chased him on his way, and at the last piece of high ground before the river, he decided to stand and make a fight of it—at a place called Malvern Hill.

He lined up his artillery on the top of that hill, and he stationed his infantry forces at the ready to engage us in the intervals between bursts of cannon fire.

Our orders were to take that hill.

If I had occasion to meet James Melton, we would not slap each other on the back and reminisce about Malvern Hill. It had none of the golden glory that Shakespeare attributed to Agincourt. It had all the filth and squalor of a hog-killing.

Our orders were to charge that hill and take out McClellan’s cannons. To that end, soldiers would charge across the open field, trying to ascend the slope, and a whistling shell would spiral down and blow them to pieces as they ran.

If I am remembered at all for my part in that sorry spectacle, it is for a jest I made in hopes of boosting the morale of my poor beleaguered men. Once when we were pinned down in a hail of bullets, a startled rabbit jumped out of the nearby underbrush and streaked across the field. Seeing this, I shouted, “Run, you sorry rabbit! If I wasn’t the governor of North Carolina, I’d run, too!”

Well, I was two months shy of getting elected, but at least I stood my ground at Malvern Hill, and when the time came to cast the ballots, the troops remembered me favorably, so that I won the election by a margin of two to one.

In September I headed back to North Carolina on furlough, for I would take the oath of office before a judge in mid-September. The 26th North Carolina fought on without me, at Antietam Creek in western Maryland, where they say the very air turned red from all the blood shed in that terrible battle. By the end of the fighting, the dead lay stacked like cordwood, a dozen feet deep in the roadbed. General Lee lost a quarter of his army in that one battle, and with it all hope of foreign alliances that might have equipped us to withstand the onslaught of the Union forces.

I was gone from the army for good before Antietam, ensconced in the Governor’s Palace in Raleigh, where the battles were fought with forms, and requisitions, and letters couched in diplomatic insolence.

But James Melton had no such escape. He would have staggered on in rags and tattered boots, living on hardtack and homesickness, until the bitter end—which came for him in a Union prison camp many miles from home.

No, I would not reminisce about the War with this veteran of the 26th North Carolina. There was nothing either of us wanted to remember.