The Ballad of Frankie Silver

and the circumstances of their lives and kinships are faithfully recorded.

My research on Frankie Silver really began when I was a child. In 1790 my ancestors settled what is now Mitchell County, home of the Silvers and the Stewarts. My great-great-grandmother’s first cousin Sarah Honeycutt married Swinfield Howell, who was the brother-in-law of Jackson Stewart, the older brother of Frankie Silver. I say that Frankie and I are “connected”; to call us related would be overdoing it.

I became interested in the case as a topic for a novel in 1992, when I went to Mitchell County to researchShe Walks These Hills. Jack Pyle and Taylor Reese, two fellow writers who live near Bakersville, took me all over the county. We went up to Kona and saw Charlie Silver’s three graves, and I photographed it. I referred to the case of Frankie Silver in that novel (on page 438 of the paperback edition [Dutton, 1995] ofShe Walks These Hills, Nora Bonesteel says to Jeremy, “The next time you come down the trail, you want to go to Kona…”). This reference to Kona inShe Walks These Hills was understood by a number of North Carolina readers who were familiar with the story. Carolyn Sakowski, president of Blair Press and a native of Morganton, wrote to me quoting the line about Kona. “So you’re going to do Frankie, are you?” she said. I owe a great debt of thanks to Carolyn, who was enormously helpful in the research into the case. She accompanied me to Morganton, and we visited the hill where the hanging took place; we interviewed a descendant of Sheriff Boone, who hanged Frankie; and we found the grave of Frankie Silver near the site of the old Buckhorn Tavern (long gone). I am deeply grateful to attorney Robert Byrd of Morganton for making his files on the case available to me, and for all his insight into the Morganton side of the story.

I have made several visits to Mitchell County, talking to Wayne Silver, who is the Silver family curator, visiting the cabin site, and discussing the case at the Silver family reunion and with various acquaintances/cousins in the area. My cousin Professor Lloyd Bailey of Duke University has been arguing back and forth with me about the legal aspects of the case in letters for years. (We each remain unconverted by the other’s logic.)

My research into the documents of the case led me to old census records, microfilm copies of old newspapers, collections of the private papers of North Carolina statesmen, and written accounts of the case by people like Manly Wade Wellman, Muriel Early Sheppard, and Perry Deane Young. Mr. Young did much of the research into the documents in the case, and he sent me a copy of his recent efforts to secure a posthumous pardon for Frankie Silver. Filmmaker Tom Davenport and Professor Daniel Patterson of the University of North Carolina recently completed a documentary on the legend of Frankie Silver, and they very kindly sent me a copy.

Dean Williams, the Appalachian Studies Collection librarian at Appalachian State University in Boone, was very generous with his time, and most helpful in locating census records and biographical information about the lawyers and governors concerned in the case. Rob Neufeld, of the Pack Library in Asheville, was my source for much of the information on Nicholas Woodfin. Tonia Moxley, of Virginia Tech’s University Library (Newman), borrowed microfilm and documents from the North Carolina State Archives in Raleigh, from the University of Alabama law library, and from repositories of documents in half a dozen other states. Dr. Frank Steely, a law professor at Northern Kentucky University, diligently searched Kentucky’s Supreme Court records in an attempt to verify the hanging of Blackston Stewart. We were unable to document his hanging, but given the incomplete nature of nineteenth-century Kentucky court records, we are not prepared to say that the story is false. The search goes on.

To understand the intricacies of 1830s North Carolina law (based on English common law), I consulted many lawyers, all of whom were extraordinarily patient and helpful in trying to make sense of a system of law no longer used in this country. Jay Brandon, a fellow author and a former district attorney of San Antonio, considered the case as if he were prosecuting it, and walked me through everything from grand jury selection to the appeals process. He even accompanied me to Seguin, Texas, where we consulted tax rolls, census records, and old newspapers, trying to figure out why Thomas Wilson would have given up a twenty-year law practice to relocate to a small town a thousand miles from home. (We concluded that whyever Wilson did it, the result was a disaster for him.)

Robert F. Johnson, district attorney of Burlington, North Carolina, enabled me to see the 1832 Morganton attorneys in the Silver case as real people, working together behind the scenes to solve a public relations dilemma without damage to their own reputations. Mr. Johnson solved to my satisfaction a key question among scholars in the Frankie Silver case: Who represented her at the trial? Senator Sam Ervin of Morganton, whose father was a friend of Burgess Gaither’s, said that Nicholas Woodfin defended Frankie Silver, but in letters to the governor asking for clemency, Thomas Wilson clearly states, “I defended Frankie Silver.” The record of the trial does not name her attorney. Rob Johnson’s explanation, based on current North Carolina law in capital cases, is the one I have used in the novel.

British barrister Sarah Cockburn (a.k.a. author Sarah Caudwell), Virginia attorney H. Gregory Campbell, and James G. McAdams III of the U.S. attorney general’s office, all considered various aspects of the legal side of the case, and I thank them for all their help.

Becky Councill of Boone lives in a log cabin that dates from the same era as Frankie’s cabin, and it was built only ten miles away from Kona. She allowed me in to photograph it, turn off the electricity, pace the floor, peer up into her fireplace. This was most helpful in allowing me to visualize the crime scene. I learned that even on the brightest day, the interior of a log cabin is extremely dark: bloodstains would be difficult to spot.

For various psychological insights into the case, I am indebted to Charlotte Ross, Sergeant J. A. Niehaus, Laura Wilson Ford, and Becky Huddleston for hearing me out and sharing their wisdom with me; and to Appalachian scholar Loyal Jones for providing me with a copy of the Bascom Lamar Lunsford recording of “The Ballad of Frankie Silver.”

The modern component of this novel centered on Riverbend, the maximum- security prison in Nashville. I am grateful to my fellow author Steve Womack for arranging a tour of the prison, and for going with me. Warden Ricky J. Bell, Assistant Warden Thomas A. Joplin, and Bill Smith, who escorted us on our tour of Riverbend, were all generous with their time and information. William Groseclose, who is an inmate on death row in Riverbend, helped me with the characterization of Fate Harkryder, and very graciously provided me with information about prison routine and other details concerning Riverbend and its surroundings. Tennessee attorney Michael McMahan was my guide to modern Tennessee law concerning the court system and the death penalty, and he provided me with excellent material pertaining to Tennessee law. Author David Hunter, a former Knox County deputy sheriff, advised me on police procedure, patiently listening and offering suggestions through many months of planning as I worked my way through the case of Fate Harkryder.

When I began researching the life and death of Frankie Silver, I thought I was looking into a fascinating riddle concerning a long-ago murder on the frontier, a tragic incident but only a minor curiosity in North Carolina’s pioneer history. As I delved deeper into the story, I began to think that the case was really about poor people as defendants and rich people as officers of the court, about Celt versus English values in developing America, about mountain people versus the “flatlanders” in any culture. This is why I was careful to include all of the names in the Morganton story-to show the ties of blood and common interest that bound all the town folk and the plantation gentry-a world in which Frankie and her frontier community had no connections at all. I concluded that Frankie Silver had much to tell us about equal justice under the law, and that not much has changed since she went to her death on a bright July afternoon 164 years ago.

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