ZEBULON VANCE
How did I come to be mixed up in the trial of Tom Dula in the first place?
He was a stranger to me, and his part of the Carolina mountains lay a hundred miles from the part in which I grew up. In my explanation I will attempt to be truthful, but I am sure there are those among my opponents who will deem my honesty
So let me tempt fate with the truth: I needed the work, and those Wilkes County lawyers who asked the judge to appoint me to spearhead the defense wanted to be spared the local notoriety of having championed an unpopular defendant. It is required that lawyers accept a certain number of cases pro bono in order to keep their license to practice, and since I had been politicking for most of the previous decade, I had some catching up to do with my legal obligations. A paying case would have been an even greater kindness, but I cannot pretend that I did not need the pro bono credit even more. I also needed a much-talked-about trial to bring my name before the public- favorably I hoped. At least in Charlotte, where I had set up shop with Clement Dowd, public sentiment would not run so high against my client as in Wilkes County.
That’s why the two local attorneys, Allison and Armfield, were willing to let me lead the defense. They were both able men, with more trial experience that I had, but Wilkes is a sparsely populated place, and practically everybody there was kin to either the accused killers or the victim. There can’t be any joy for a local lawyer in bearing the brunt of the strong feelings such a case was bound to stir up. But since I lived far away, in Charlotte, they reasoned that I could represent an unpopular defendant and come out unscathed, because nobody where I’m from knew or cared about the particulars in this little backcountry case. I don’t suppose anybody even much cared if I won or lost it, so long as the letter of the law had been carried out to the satisfaction of the court. And I needed the practice in front of a jury-how better to accomplish that than by taking an obscure case among strangers?
I don’t suppose anybody gave much thought to the poor accused man when they were making these plans for their own convenience and for my professional advancement.
Hard lines on him.
Those fine upstanding gentlemen who had undertaken the defense of Thomas P. Dula were conscientious attorneys, and they made every effort to be cordial to me, but I do not think they were overly concerned about the outcome of the trial, which they seemed to think was a foregone conclusion anyhow, as they believed him to be guilty. The accused man could not afford to pay them to think otherwise, so their thoughts turned on observing the rituals of justice, rather than on justice itself. They kept meticulous records, with particular attention to their own expense forms, and they passed the time at trial courteously amongst their fellows in the law, and for both sides the defendant was simply a “situation,” the reason for the ritual they all observed, but otherwise not a part of it. Such a procedural charade is easier to bear if the wretch is guilty. You tell yourself that a loss in court may be the means by which true justice will be served, and, if you should happen to win, why then it sweetens the victory to know that the credit is all yours and not owing to any virtue or merit on the part of the defendant.
I did not take capital cases in my youth, in the little stint in the circuit court up around Asheville. Always for me, the law was a means to an end, an apprenticeship through which I must pass in order to reach public office. It worked, too: Congressman, Governor… I had gone far in three short decades of life, but I was honest enough not to risk some poor devil’s life while I was putting in my time as a practicing attorney. Let me get some horse thief acquitted or take sides in a land squabble-that was momentous enough for my blood.
Times had changed for me though. I had applied for parole from the United States government, for my part in the lately defeated Confederate government. They ought to have taken into consideration how long and hard I argued to dissuade my home state from seceding in the first place, but of course that carried no weight with them.
One of the attorneys assigned (just as well) to sit second chair to me for the trial was Captain Richard M. Allison, who was a cavalry officer in the War before he was invalided out in ’64, and then, like the rest of us, he had gone back to the tamer business of fighting battles with fine words and stacks of paper. I suppose that Allison will be called “captain” for the rest of his life, even if he lives half a century past that four-year madness of a war, but I aim to leave off the courtesy title of “governor,” just as soon as I am allowed to get myself elected to some new office again-“senator” would be favorite.
When the good captain told me of the incident in Wilkes County, my first thought was how improvident it had been of this Dula fellow to indulge in an act of private violence in such perilous times as these. Surely we had troubles enough in the land, with bushwhackers marauding the country roads, carpetbaggers infesting the new state government, and all manner of profiteering and petty scoundrels at work picking at the carcass of the Old North State for the spoils of war, without some callow young veteran adding a senseless murder to the burden of the populace.
The young woman’s death occurred in May of 1866-we were then only a year past that war that had brought enough carnage to the states comprising the Confederacy to put one in mind of the End of Days. And the accused is a veteran of the 42nd infantry-not one of mine, thank heaven, though I have heard it said that I spent little time with my regiment while I had it, so that I might not even recognize a staff officer, much less a humble private. Still, everywhere I go I am beset by men who claim to have served with me in the War, and I hear them out, smiling and clasping their hands, but mostly I am thinking that if all those who claimed to have fought with the 26th North Carolina had really done so, we could have beaten the Yankees and Napoleon besides.
Captain Allison interviewed the two prisoners when they were first brought in to custody, and so when I arrived in Wilkes County to take nominal charge of the case, I sat down with him on that fine October afternoon, savoring the sunshine and a basket of mountain apples that some well-wisher had bestowed upon me outside the courthouse. Another comrade in arms, no doubt.
I had seen the prisoner for a short while that day, just to introduce myself and to assure him that I would do what I could for him.
Usually the appeals on behalf of soldiers came from poor people in the mountain counties, because they are proud to claim me as one of their own. I know what swallowing of pride it took for these stoic and self-reliant people to ask for help from a powerful stranger, and I shared in their shame-theirs for asking and mine for being powerless to help them. Save a poor enlisted man with no influential family connections? Why, that’s exactly who does die in a war, and everybody knows it-except, I suppose, the friends and family of the poor boy trapped in the thick of it. I doubt that even an emperor could change that fact of life-much less a governor.
That feeling of helplessness in the face of a poor young soldier came back to me as I stood there in the jail in Wilkesboro, echoing that threadbare phrase for the thousandth time. I wonder how many of the grieving wives and mothers actually believed that I could perform a miracle on their behalf. Judging by the polite but wary look on the face of the prisoner, he had no such illusions about my ability to cheat death. I felt sorry for him. Illusions make life bearable.
