The Ballad of Tom Dooley

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I do understand and sympathize with the reader’s reaction to any novel based on a true story: What in this book is true? And the answer is: As much as I could possibly verify. Where I differed from traditional accounts of the case, it is because I chose to place weight on certain statements in the trial record that other people had dismissed-but the evidence for my version is there.

The first thing to discount in the study of this incident is the catchy but irrelevant Kingston Trio version of the folk song, “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley.” The young man’s name was Dula, not Dooley. He was not hanged in a lonesome valley from a white oak tree, but from a specially constructed T-shaped post in a field beside the train depot in Statesville, North Carolina. The song mentions someone named Grayson-“If it hadn’t been for Grayson, I’d a been in Tennessee.” That is true enough, but Grayson was simply the farmer who hired Tom as a laborer when he fled in June 1866. A more authentic version of the song, made famous by North Carolina mountain musician Doc Watson, is more faithful to the facts of the story, although it, too, supposes that Tom Dula is guilty. Most people who are familiar with the case think otherwise.

When a story has become as steeped in legend as the Tom Dula incident, the first thing a writer has to do is question all the assumptions that have become attached to the narrative over the years, because rumor, conjecture, and wishful thinking taint the story. Over the years dozens of people have offered to tell me the “real story” of Tom Dooley-the one their grandmother heard from the storekeeper/the postman/the doctor, etc. No two are the same. The story as it is generally told did not ring true to me. When I worked on an article about “Tom Dooley” for Blue Ridge Country magazine, my travel companion and I went through all the possibilities inherent in the love triangle. None of them worked.

• Tom killed Laura Foster because she gave him syphilis. There is no evidence that she did. Patient Zero was Pauline Foster, with whom Tom had sexual relations. It is more likely that he gave the disease to Laura instead of vice versa.

• Tom killed Laura Foster because she was pregnant. There is no evidence that she was. Dr. Carter did not note the presence of fetal bones in the autopsy. Besides, Laura had a reputation for promiscuity. Judging by the example of Ann’s mother, who had five children and no husband, pregnancy in that place and time would not have made marriage compulsory. If Tom had dallied with a planter’s daughter or a lawyer’s sister-sure. But not with an unchaste tenant farmer’s daughter.

• Ann Foster Melton killed Laura Foster because Tom loved her and was planning to elope with her. Tom said more than once that he “had no use for Laura Foster,” and I believe him. If Ann had killed the woman he truly loved, would he have written a confession exonerating Ann on the eve of his execution?

• Tom and Ann killed Laura Foster. Motive unspecified. Why? She had no money, no hold over them, and apparently no malice toward them.

• James Melton or Pauline Foster killed Laura Foster. Neither was ever suspected of involvement in the death of Laura Foster, and neither of them had the slightest motive to dispense with her. Besides, if either of them had done it, Tom Dula and Ann Melton would certainly have saved themselves by denouncing the real killer. They did not.

I concluded that there was a missing piece of the puzzle, because one could not construct a plausible scenario with the traditional collection of facts.

When I read the trial transcripts and the newspaper coverage of Dula’s execution, I found three references to a black man, a detail roundly ignored in other studies of the case-but he was real, and he was there.

• As depicted in the novel, when Laura Foster went missing, Pauline Foster says to Wilson Foster: “Maybe she ran off with a black man.” You might dismiss this as a taunt, except that instead of becoming angry Laura’s father agreed that this might be so. In the 1866 Reconstruction South, Wilson Foster’s reaction is astounding. He should have been enraged by that suggestion. Why wasn’t he?

• When Eliza Anderson, Wash Anderson’s sister, takes the stand in the second trial, a defense attorney asks her if she is kin to a man of color named John Anderson. She says no. Census records show that John Anderson had been a slave of her family, and that in 1866, he was still working on their farm. John Foster West interprets the kinship question at the trial as an attempt to discredit the witness, a young, unmarried white woman. This question is too volatile to be used in 1868 on an unimportant witness, especially if the witness is an unmarried girl who is suspected of nothing. Why was John Anderson mentioned at all? I considered this for a while, and then I asked Wilkes Community College research librarian Christy Earp to find out where the Andersons lived in 1866. We found them-living on property adjoining the Bates’ place, where Laura Foster was killed.

• When a New York newspaper reporter came to Statesville to cover Tom Dula’s trial, he dismissed the state’s chief witness, Pauline Foster, as a depraved woman, commenting that she had recently married a white man and had given birth to a black child. Whose child was it? We will probably never know for sure, because the name of Pauline’s husband is never given, and she vanishes from history after the second trial. But she worked as a servant girl on a farm within sight of the Andersons’ place, where John Anderson lived and worked. This is not proof of their involvement, but it is a plausible theory.

• Pauline’s suggestion-that Laura Foster ran off with a black man-makes more sense than speculating that she was eloping with Tom. Both Tom and Laura were of legal age and unmarried: there was no reason for them to elope. No sneaking around was required. Laura’s father, who had caught her in bed with Tom, would have been relieved. If Laura really was sneaking off to get married, what bridegroom would require such subterfuge? Not Tom.

• But if Laura wanted to plight her troth to a man of color, they would be forced to go elsewhere. I think that John Anderson, who was listed on the census records as mulatto, was light-skinned enough to pass for white in an area where he was not known-in other words, anywhere but Wilkes County. The elopement of John Anderson and Laura Foster makes perfect sense.

• And another thing-if you were running away with Tom Dula, would you arrange to meet him a mile away from his house and five miles from your house, but within sight of the home of his jealous married lover? But John Anderson lived right beside the Bates’ place. It was the logical place to meet him.

Most romanticized versions of the Tom Dula legend make a dewy heroine of Laura Foster. I don’t see any evidence for that. When she went missing, her father declared that he didn’t care if he ever saw her again or not, but he did want his horse back. Tom Dula said he had no use for Laura Foster. The people who searched for her seemed to be disinterested community members who were inspired by the thought of an unmarried young girl who had come to harm. Within days of her disappearance, the real Laura Foster vanished into a moonlit haze of sentimentality, in which she remains to this day. I saw her more as a situation than a person: a springe to catch woodcocks. Inciting jealousy over the casual sexual relationship of Tom and Laura would be the perfect weapon for someone intent upon destroying Ann Melton.

Pauline Foster is generally dismissed as “the servant girl,” and some people I talked to thought that she might have been mentally deficient, but-since she managed to bring about the deaths of three people, and to emerge unscathed from the incident and the trials-I decided to take her seriously. If Pauline had intended to harm those people, she succeeded admirably. If she had been a malicious and scheming malcontent, she could easily have manipulated the vain and passionate Ann into precipitating the downfall of everyone. After months spent studying the heartless Pauline, who brought venereal disease and tragedy to Wilkes County, and the cold narcissist Ann Melton, who cared for nothing but herself, I ended up feeling deeply sorry for Tom Dula, and I wish his sacrifice could have been made for a more deserving person.

One of the most underestimated characters in the story is James Melton, the husband of Ann. Because he seemed indifferent to his wife’s affair with Tom Dula, storytellers have cast him as an elderly man, a mere farmer who was no match for Tom the soldier. The facts indicate otherwise. As I noted in this novel, James Melton was only six years older than Tom and Ann-still in his twenties at the time of the murder. His war record was far more impressive than that of Tom, the malingering musician. James Melton did, indeed, carry the colors of the 26th North Carolina at Gettysburg, where he was wounded. He did spend the waning weeks of the War in a prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland, and, as I said in the novel, he was incarcerated there at the same time as Tom Dula. Here is a synopsis of the war record of James Melton. (Note that in 1866 he would have been only twenty-eight.)

James Melton, of Wilkes County, NC, enlisted at the age of 23 on June 12, 1861, mustered in as a private in Company C, 26th North Carolina Troops. Present or accounted for until wounded in the left shoulder and right leg with the colors of the regiment at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1, 1863. Melton returned to duty sometime between July and December 1864. Present or accounted for until wounded in the right leg at Hatcher’s Run, Virginia, March 30, 1865.

He was hospitalized in Richmond, Virginia, where he was captured by the enemy on April 3, 1865. Transferred to Point Lookout, Maryland, May 2, 1865. Released at Point Lookout on June 26, 1865, after taking the Oath of Allegiance.

Once I began to study it in depth, one of the most striking facets of this story was its close parallel to Emily Bronte’s classic English novel Wuthering Heights, set in a similar remote and rugged place. In my construction of the paradigm, Heathcliff and Catherine, the star-crossed lovers of Wuthering Heights, are Tom Dula and Ann Foster Melton, so that James Melton is cast as the gentle and patient Edgar Linton, and Laura most closely corresponds to Isabella Linton, whom Heathcliff wooed and tormented (to punish Catherine for marrying Edgar), but did not care for. The narrators, the servant girl Nellie Dean and the aristocratic tenant Mr. Lockwood are, of course, Pauline Foster and Zebulon Vance. Alert readers will find echoes of Emily Bronte’s prose, deliberately inserted here and there in The Ballad of Tom Dooley.

Zebulon Vance was exactly who he said he was: a poor mountain boy who became Governor of North Carolina, fought in the Civil War as Colonel of the 26th North Carolina regiment, and ended his days in Washington, representing his home state as one of its most beloved Senators. When the funeral train brought his body back to Asheville in 1894, a detachment of National Guard troops was needed just to unload the accompanying funeral wreaths. In his brief hiatus from public service in 1866-68, when he practiced law in Charlotte with Clement Dowd, Vance did indeed spearhead the defense of Tom Dula and Ann Foster Melton. It was the inspiration of Vance’s meteoric rise from poverty, his success as a statesman, and his wisdom and humanity that made me decide to write this story. For those cynics who characterize Appalachia as a land peopled only by the likes of Tom and Ann, I offer the remarkable life of Zebulon Baird Vance as evidence to the contrary.

I’m sure that a great many superficial readers will see this work as a crime story and spout a lot of nonsense about “solving the case,” as if it were an episode of CSI, but I wish they wouldn’t. It can hardly be a mystery when practically anybody in Wilkes County will tell you on first acquaintance that “Ann did it.” I agree. So there was no case to solve. My concerns lay elsewhere.

While I wanted to understand the motivation for the tragedy, I was more interested in the characters of the persons involved, and in re-creating the world of the post-War mountain South. As a writer, I relished the challenge of crafting a novel in which the principal narrator is a sociopath-one who feels nothing-and the beautiful heroine is a narcissist linked with an amiable ne’er-do-well. If the resulting narrative appears effortless, I assure you that it was not.

I did want to know what really happened in Wilkes County, North Carolina, in 1866, and, although my version of the events can never be proven, I am satisfied with the answers I got. Whether or not you agree with my findings, I want you to understand that I did not invent anything: every conclusion I made stems from a fact in the original trial transcript, which is on file at the North Carolina Archives in Raleigh.