Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

“The document may distress you,” I said.

Miss Mary smiled. “Why, Mr. Gaither,” she said, “I knew that she had killed him. I merely wish to know why.”

Without another word, I handed over the paper and watched as she read my summary of Mrs. Silver’s declaration. Her expression did not change. “I thought it must be something like this,” she said at last. “A simple girl like that could hardly have been roused to murder for anything less. It is not murder, though, is it, Mr. Gaither?”

“Mr. Wilson says that it was clearly a case of manslaughter, if not justifiable homicide. The law realizes that people must defend themselves. Or it should.”

“Yet she was sentenced to death for it.”

“That is so. However, we believe that justice was not served in this case, and we are doing everything in our power to have the judgment set aside.”

I could see from Miss Mary’s expression that she had no doubt that they would carry the day. The Erwins are people of power and influence. They know how to go about these things. They know all the right people in Raleigh, and elsewhere. I was a new member of the family, and I had not the confidence of my new kinsmen.

“People wonder why I have never married,” Miss Mary said, taking another sip of her brandy. “There is too much risk in the venture. A woman is quite at the mercy of a fool or a brute, and one can never know the bargain one has made until it is too late.”

“We are not all such bad lots,” I protested.

Miss Mary smiled. “Not all snakes are poisonous,” she said, “but I leave them all alone just the same.” She took another quill from the pewter pot on the writing table. “Have you many more copies to make? I write a fair hand. Let me help you.”

We spoke very little after that, but sat side by side until the fire burned low, copying the cold words of Frankie Silver’s confession until we knew the phrases by heart.

A few days later, I arrived at Belvidere just before the dinner hour, having escaped the premises for most of the afternoon because an afternoon tea was taking place in the great hall. I had no sooner shaken the dust from my boots than Miss Mary appeared, brisk as ever, and thrust several sheets of paper into my hands. “Just the person I wanted to see,” she informed me. “Read this and tell me what you think.”

I arranged the sheets of paper in order and began to read.

June 29, 1833

To His Excellency David L. Swain:

Governor of the State of North Carolina

Your petitioners are fully sensible of the Delicacy of presenting to you this petition. Yet they Justify themselves by claiming as a duty peculiar to the Sex to be all-ways on the side of Mercy towards their fellow beings and to the female more particularly.

The subject of this petition is an unfortunate creation of our Sex, Mrs. Francis silvers who was Sentenced by our court to be executed on the last Friday in June, but by your goodness respited until the second Friday in July. We do not expect to refer you to any information in this that you are not already familiarly acquainted with, only it be the treatment the unfortunate creature received during the life of her husband.

We do not refer you to this with a cause of Justification but wish to reiterate the various unfortunate events which have taken place in the world in consequence of the woman’s abuse, indecorous, and insupportable treatment in which the creature now before your Excellency for God’s mercy has, contrary to the law of God & the country, yet so consistent with our nature, been her own avenger.

Hear her own wrongs.

The husband of the unfortunate creature now before you we are informed, Gov., was one of that cast of mankind who are wholly destitute of any of the feelings that is necessary to make a good husband or parent. The neighborhood people are convinced that his treatment of her was both unbecoming and cruel verry often and at the time too when female Delicacy would most forbid it he treated her with personal violence.

He was said by all the neighborhood to have been a man who never made use of any exertions to support either his wife or child, which terminated, as is frequently the case, that those dutys nature ordered and intended the husband to perform are thrown to her.

His own relations admit of his having been a lazy, lady-trifling man.

It is admitted by them also that she was an industrious woman, but for the want of Grace, Religion, and Refinement she had committed an act that she herself would have given a world to be able to call back.

We refer you to the child who is an infant and needs the child’s mother. We hope that your Excellency will extend to the unfortunate female all the help you can, even to a pardon, & wipe from the character of the female in this community the Stigma, namely of a woman being hung under the gallows.

Yours sincerely, Mary E. Erwin

Appended to this carefully wrought document were the signatures of nearly every gentlewoman in the county. I traced my finger down the list: the attorneys’ families were well represented. Thomas Wilson’s wife, Catherine Caldwell Wilson, who is the Erwins’ niece, and Mr. Wilson’s mother, Eunice Worth Wilson, had signed the petition also. The name of my own dear wife Elizabeth was there, as was that of her sisters Delia Erwin and Catherine Gaither, my brother Alfred’s widow. My mother-in-law, Matilda Sharpe Erwin, and her sister Ceceilia Sharpe Erwin had signed the document. There was Martha McEntire Walton, daughter of the innkeeper and wife of Thomas Walton, a landowner and former justice of the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions. I saw the name of Jane Tate, a relative of our former sheriff Will Butler, and Goodwin Bousehell, of the Methodist minister’s family. Eliza Grace McDowell, granddaughter of a general and a colonel of the Revolution, had signed the petition, as had her cousins Matilda and Elvira Carson, who are McDowells on their mother’s side, like their cousin Annie Maria McKesson, also listed. Catherine Carson, the young bride of our United States congressman Sam Carson, had added her name and influence to the petition. I fancied that I could feel the paper growing warm in my hands, and I wondered if the governor would be similarly affected. It is true that women do not vote or hold elected office, but if the old adage is true, that “the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” then there were enough imperial hands represented here to turn the firmament upside down. The daughters and granddaughters of governors, and generals, and congressmen, and wealthy landowners, and lawyers, and signers of the Constitution were all arrayed in a force that made me think of ancient Britain’s Queen Boadicea in her war chariot leading the charge against a Roman legion. The respectful request for a political favor was nothing less than a demand, for all its careful phrasing. I did not envy David Lowry Swain his office or his duties that day, or on any day since.

“Well, what do you think?” Miss Mary asked me, when I had set the document aside.

“I hardly know,” I said. “Are there no ordinary women who wish to see the prisoner reprieved? No miller’s wife, or tailor’s daughter?”

Miss Mary had the grace to blush. “Certainly there are,” she replied. “I would hope that every woman in the county and indeed the whole state would wish to see this poor creature saved from an undeserved fate, but time is short, and we had no time to spare for collecting signatures far and wide. Besides, I think these names will carry weight with the governor.”

I nodded. “The names will be familiar to him, to say the least. It reads like an index of North Carolina history.”

“Mr. Bevins has promised to write a letter accompanying the petition. You see his wife’s name there among the others. Surely this will prove to the governor that all the county desires a pardon for that poor wretched woman.”