The Ballad of Tom Dooley - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,1

and fought alongside him at Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth. I am proudest, though, of the fact that he fought closer to home—at King’s Mountain on the South Carolina border, just west of Charlotte. In 1780 a group of backcountry volunteers, calling themselves The Overmountain Men, engaged the British forces there, and defeated them in an hour, killing their commander, and proving that untrained colonials could defeat the mighty British army. George Washington’s troops were losing the War to the north, and that little victory on a Carolina hillside proved to the rest of the country that winning was possible. It was the turning point of the War, and I was proud that my family had been part of it.

On that little mountain farm where I grew up, we plowed furrows, and slopped hogs, and hewed firewood, but we were never allowed to forget that we were destined for greater things. My grandfather had left a library of five hundred books, and my mother read to us each night when the chores were done. My father died young, though, and so the way to prosperity was a steep and thorny path for us. I got some schooling over in Tennessee at Washington College, so that I had the rudiments of Latin, and composition, debate, and ancient history, but my father’s death ended that idyll, and before long I was clerking in a fine resort hotel in Warm Springs. That, too, was an education, though. It was a zoo for the aristocracy, and I learned to pass muster as one of them.

I read law in Asheville, and then begged and borrowed the funds to take me to the University of North Carolina for the formal study of law. I meant to get elected to something before long, and so I did, but for a few years in my youth I practiced law on the circuit court out of Asheville. There was little in those experiences worth mentioning in a senator’s memoirs.

But this Wilkes County case … That came later in my career, and in it, I was defending a man on trial for his life. I had thought of including the tale in my memoirs, because it became quite a celebrated trial. The New York Herald even sent a reporter down to cover it. But the public finds it hard to recognize success or skill if one ultimately loses the case, so perhaps I will not include it, after all. I have had enough adventures for two lifetimes, without telling that sad little tale.

That Wilkes County court case constituted my brief hiatus from public life, falling in 1866, when, having been the Confederate Governor of North Carolina, I was barred from running for public office yet awhile, so, when they let me out of Capitol Prison with the rest of the Rebel governors, I bided my time and supported Harriette and the boys by returning to the practice of law. Perhaps I thought that my renown and popularity would make up for any deficiencies I might have in my long-disused courtroom skills.

The law was never much more than a means to an end for me, anyhow. I was always happy to help people escape what was coming to them, which is mostly what a defense attorney does, but from the very beginning I was only marking time until I got elected to something. But for the War, I would have never looked back.

* * *

A frail girl was stabbed to death in the foothills of Wilkes County, and nigh on everybody there knows who did it. Well, I didn’t know. I was practicing law in Charlotte, some ninety miles away, and I was only called in to defend the man they had arrested, a complete stranger to me, despite what people have said to the contrary over the years. He was a Confederate veteran, as was I, but we never served together, and would not have been acquainted even if we had, for I began and ended my military service as a colonel, and he stayed a sickly private and a drummer boy. We were worlds apart, except perhaps to people who looked at our lives on paper.

This twenty-two-year-old former soldier got himself arrested, and I in my infinite wisdom got the trial moved to the next county, where nobody knew any more about it than I did. My intentions were good. And I suppose I could not have done otherwise, even if I had been more in possession of the facts.