The Ballad of Frankie Silver (51 page)

In a sense, I had been researching this story all my life, because I knew from the tales of my mountain kinfolk that my family had a tenuous connection to this story. In 1790 my ancestors settled in what is now Mitchell County, North Carolina, home of the Stewarts and the Silvers. My great-great-grandmother’s first cousin Sarah Honeycutt married Swinfield Howell, the brother-in-law of Frankie’s elder brother Jackson Stewart. In Southern parlance, Frankie Silver and I are “connected”; to call us related would be overdoing it.

My inspiration for the novel came on a spring day in 1992, when I was driving around Mitchell County with two writer friends, Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese, looking at the landscapes I intended to include in
She Walks These Hills
. They took me up to the little country church at the top of the mountain of State Route 80 and showed me the three graves of Charlie Silver, telling me that his wife had been executed for his murder. “How old was she?” I asked. “Only eighteen years old,” said Jack. “Really? Then who did it?” I knew that no woman younger than thirty had ever been known to dismember the body of someone she murdered. If that was true—and all subsequent research, aided by everyone from the FBI to Scotland Yard, says that it is—then the story of Frankie Silver was more complicated than the legends would have it. That realization began four years of research looking into the circumstances of that old case.

I discovered that the Silver descendants in Kona knew very little about 1830s Morganton, or the trial itself, and that the people of Morganton knew virtually nothing about the people who lived forty miles up the mountain near the Tennessee line. In order to tell the complete story of Frankie Silver, I had to talk to descendants of both groups—the Morganton gentry and the Kona frontiersmen—and I had to read all the documents in the North Carolina archives and beyond that would pertain to the case.

I soon found that Frankie Silver’s father had been present at her execution, and that when she stepped forward and started to speak her last words, he called out “Die with it in you, Frankie!” I knew that Isaiah Stewart had been away on a long hunt at the time of Charlie Silver’s murder, so
what did he not want his daughter to say
?

I wanted to know the correct answer to that historical riddle; I did not want to merely fabricate one. In order to get the truth, it was important that I not add or invent anything in this story and that I reproduce the people and places as faithfully as I could. I consulted experts in many fields in order to reach the answer. I verified my original assumption that no woman younger than thirty had been known to dismember a body: still true, as of this writing.

During the course of my research I reconstructed the events of Charlie Silver’s death in discussions with many experts, each consulted separately. The deputy sheriff, the district attorney, the legal historian, the British police official, the FBI profiler, the Silver descendant, the Morganton descendants, and the psychic who is the model for Nora Bonesteel
all arrived at the same conclusion concerning the death of Charlie Silver,
although they spoke only to me and never met one another. The consensus of so many experts, working independently, convinced me that I knew why Isaiah Stewart had told his daughter
“Die with it in you!”
and that we had correctly worked out what had happened in the little cabin in Kona in December 1831.

Because North Carolina was still under English common law in 1832, I spoke with British barrister Sarah Cockburn (the novelist Sarah Caudwell) in order to understand the trial procedures. Contrary to the legends, Frankie Silver was not forbidden to testify because she was a woman; no defendant was permitted to testify under English common law because violating their oath to tell the truth (i.e., lying to God) was considered a greater sin than whatever crime they may have committed.

Further research contradicted two errors perpetrated by several so-called “nonfiction” accounts of the story of Frankie Silver: 1) Who defended Frankie Silver? 2) By what method was she hanged? These other accounts claim that Frankie was defended solely by Thomas Wilson, based on his letter to Governor Swain claiming that he did so. However, the late Senator Sam Ervin, a Morganton native and a relative of Thomas Wilson, wrote in
A History of the Burke County Courthouse
that Frankie Silver was defended by Asheville attorney Nicholas Woodfin. Senator Ervin ought to know. Alamance County, North Carolina, district attorney Robert F. Johnson resolved the difficulty for me by explaining that when one is charged with a capital crime in North Carolina, one must be represented by
two
members of counsel. The legal representation of Frankie Silver as depicted in the novel is the most sensible resolution of the facts concerning the claims of Thomas Wilson and Senator Ervin: they were both correct.

Those who claimed that Frankie Silver was hanged on a gallows with a trapdoor were mistaken. They had collected stories from elderly residents of the area, but no one in the 1990s was likely to remember the details of an 1833 hanging. What I did was parallel research. I looked at three well-documented hangings that took place in the region before 1870: the hanging of Nat Turner in Virginia in 1833, the hanging of John Brown in Charles Town (then Virginia, now West Virginia) in 1859, and the hanging of Thomas Dula (aka Tom Dooley) in Statesville, North Carolina in 1866. The 1859 hanging of abolitionist John Brown did involve a formal scaffold and trapdoor; however, that execution was carried out by the U.S. Army, whose Corps of Engineers had ample time, money, and man power to effect an elaborate structure. In the Turner case and the Dula case, the executions were a foregone conclusion. The authorities had weeks to build a complex trapdoor scaffold for the hanging, but they did not. Nat Turner was set on a ladder, with the rope tied to a tree branch. Tom Dula was hanged on a T-shaped gallows from the back of a horse-drawn cart at the railroad depot in Statesville, only about thirty miles away and thirty-three years
later
than the hanging of Frankie Silver. Surely Dula’s hanging should have been more “mechanized” than the earlier execution of Frankie Silver, because it was three decades later and because Frankie Silver was expected to be pardoned, so that all the effort of building an elaborate scaffold would have been considered a waste. Both the Dula and Silver executions were carried out by one-term North Carolina county sheriffs, who had probably never before presided over a hanging, and I doubted whether these sheriffs would have had the resources or the expertise to construct a trapdoor gallows. I thought the Dula case was the closest we could come to determining how Frankie Silver was hanged: standing on a cart, beneath a post or tree branch.

The story of Frankie Silver has a greater meaning than the mere unraveling of the historical details behind the incident. What began as an exercise in curiosity, attempting to make sense of the puzzle of a death in a frontier cabin evolved into a study of much greater issues than that of two doomed frontier youngsters. It is these greater issues that have given the book such a wide following and made it a staple in many varied classrooms. Law schools in four states have devoted seminars to
The Ballad of Frankie Silver
because of the issues it raises about equal justice under the law. Appalachian schools and colleges from Georgia to New Hampshire have taught it for its picture of frontier life and for its clear demonstration of the differences between Mountain South and Flatland South.

The case of Frankie Silver illuminated important cultural distinctions. In Colonial times the eastern seaboard of the United States was settled primarily by the English, and their notions of society prevailed in law and in custom. The eastern mountain region, which stretches from north Alabama to New Brunswick, Canada, (you can trace it via the Appalachian Trail) was initially settled by those other residents of the United Kingdom: the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, and the Cornishmen. If you want to learn about the Flatland South, you can watch
Gone with the Wind, Roots,
or
Steel Magnolias
. But if you want to understand the Mountain South of Frankie Silver, then the movie to watch is
Braveheart,
because that’s who settled here, and that dissonance of culture between the English and the mountain-dwelling Celts came to the New World with the colonists, and in some ways it still persists to this day.

When Frankie Silver was arrested at Kona, she was taken to the courthouse in the county seat, forty miles east and down the mountain. That journey took her across the border into the other South. The Scots/Irish frontier girl was imprisoned and tried by the authorities in the Flatland South: the world of the plantation aristocracy, the colonial descendants of the English gentry. Their attitudes toward the Celts on the fringe of civilization was an echo of the attitudes one sees in
Braveheart.
They thought Frankie Silver was a savage, capable of anything. They made no attempt to understand her life or to determine what really happened in that little frontier cabin the night that Charlie Silver died. If Frankie Silver were to be tried today, the nearest courthouse is only ten miles from Kona, because new counties were formed since her 1832 trial, and I think the outcome of the trial would be different, because she would truly be judged by her peers.

I came to see the story as a cultural warning light for the two Souths. The Frankie Silver case revealed a deep cultural divide between the mountaineers and the flatlanders, and it served as a warning that these two societies did not understand each other. If that situation were not remedied, the consequences would be dire—and so they were. The situation was not remedied, the two cultures never breached the divide, and twenty-eight years after the hanging of Frankie Silver, North Carolina seceded from the union at the outset of the Civil War. By and large, the slaveholding flatland portion of the state favored the Confederacy, but the mountain dwellers wanted to stay with the Union. It is this ideological impasse that led to the creation of all those new counties in western North Carolina. In 1832 Burke County, whose county seat is Morganton, went all the way to the Tennessee line; today Frankie Silver’s cabin in Kona is located in Mitchell County—founded in 1861. During the Civil War that cultural dissonance between mountain and flatland fueled a far greater tragedy than the death of one young woman: the hostilities between the two cultures involved everyone and resulted in thousands of deaths. One of the most striking incidents is the Sodom Laurel Massacre, which took place only a few miles from Nicholas Woodfin’s hometown of Asheville. In that incident, some mountain farmers stole salt from the Confederate storehouse in Marshall. The salt, necessary for survival through the winter, was being stockpiled by the government and given out only to families who would furnish a soldier to the Confederacy. The Sodom Laurel men stole only enough salt for their community. In retaliation, the Confederate army sent troops over the mountain from Knoxville and seized a dozen men and boys taken at random from the Sodom Laurel community, marched them five miles down the creek to the French Broad River, and summarily executed them in the meadow without a trial. I saw the seeds of all this sectional violence in the story of Frankie Silver: two societies without respect or understanding of each other on a collision course to sorrow.

I still see traces of this cultural dissonance today: in hillbilly jokes, “redneck” reality shows, and in the general stereotyping of the region. I see it when cities are judged by their richest inhabitants and rural areas are judged by their poorest.

It is because of this ongoing cultural divide that I included the contemporary story of Fate Harkryder in the novel. I visited Tennessee’s maximum security prison, Riverbend in Nashville, sat in Tennessee’s electric chair, and spoke to prison officials and to an inmate on death row, so that I could accurately describe Fate Harkryder’s situation in a modern prison. Fate’s story, a poor mountain youth charged with murder and receiving inadequate legal representation, is an echo of Frankie Silver’s situation. When people read stories that take place in the past, it is easy for them to say, “Oh, that is very sad, but things are different
now
.” Are they? The parallel stories of two condemned defendants, set a century and a half apart, force the reader to consider, “Are we more civilized now than we were in Frankie Silver’s time, or are we simply more
mechanized
?”

I am grateful to all the readers who wrote to me in anguish and sympathy for the plight of that poor, friendless mountain girl, hanged among strangers in 1833. I felt that few people cared much about her fate during her lifetime; it is heartening to know that at last people do care. She matters, not only for the tragedy of her short life, but also for all the issues that she has come to symbolize: the plight of poor defendants versus rich people as officers of the court; Celtic values versus English mores in developing America; and mountain people versus the “flatlander” in any culture, for it is worth noting that in every country that has mountains, there is a word for “hillbilly.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I have several hundred pages of source material on the case, on the individuals involved, and on nineteenth-century law. Below is a list of the more useful volumes, and some more accessible to the reader.

Abbott, Geoffrey.
Lords of the Scaffold: A History of Execution.
London: Headline, 1992.

Avery, Clifton K.
Official Court Record of the Trial, Conviction and Execution of Francis Silvers, First Woman Hanged in North Carolina.
Booklet reprinted from articles appearing in the Morganton
News Herald
, 1944.

Bailey, Lloyd Richard, Sr., ed.
Toe River Valley Heritage
. Marceline, MO: Walsworth Publishing, 1994.

Cotton, J. Randall, Suzanne Pickens Wylie, and Millie M. Barbee.
Historic Burke: An Architectural Sites Inventory of Burke County.
Morganton, NC: Historic Burke Foundation, 1987.