The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,126

the ladies’ petition: your wife, and her mother Mrs. Sharpe, Miss Mary, and Mrs. Sam Carson, and all the other gentlewomen in Morganton.”

“Ladies cannot vote. What does it matter what they think?”

“But the governor is acquainted with all of them socially. How can he say no to them without seeming like a brute?”

“That is just what I have been asking myself, Burgess. It is what interests me most about the whole affair. He will have to be very clever about it, to be sure.”

“There has never been a woman hanged before in the state of North Carolina,” I said.

“I daresay that if she were a slave woman you could save her, by pleading that her death would constitute the loss of valuable property to her owner. Then she might be let off with a good flogging. But Frankie Silver is a white woman of no breeding, wealth, or influence. She is of no use to anybody.” The squire turned his back on the mountains and the setting sun. “Time to head for home, I think,” he said. “Unless you’d care to have a look at James’s bull?”

The letters and petitions were duly sent off to Raleigh, and then all Morganton waited anxiously for the official reply, although very few of us doubted that the governor would grant a request so universally favored among the constituency, particularly since a number of prominent people had championed Mrs. Silver’s cause. But the days stretched into weeks, and it came time for preparations to be made for the execution, and still there was no word of reprieve from Raleigh.

“The governor is waiting until the last moment,” people said. “He wants to make a dramatic flourish of his benevolence.” Then they began to worry that he would misjudge the speed of the stagecoach mail delivery, and that the good news would arrive too late to save the prisoner.

At last, though, on Thursday, the eleventh of July, W. C. Bevins received the long-awaited letter. He brought it to me at the courthouse, where I was going over the material pertaining to the duties of a clerk of court in the event of an execution. I had obtained a copy of the death warrant, and I was trying to determine whether there was any set formula by which I should report to the state government that the sentence had been carried out. I have the honor to inform you . . .did not seem quite apt under the circumstances.

Bevins gave me a stiff bow of greeting and set the letter on the table atop my law books without a word.

Executive Department Raleigh 9th July 1833

Dear Sir:

I have received your letter without date but postmarked in the 3rd Ins., together with the accompanying Petition of a number of the most respectable ladies of your Vicinity in behalf of the unfortunate Mrs. Silvers, who before this communication can reach you will in all human probability have passed the boundarys which separate us alike from the reproaches of enemies and the sympathies of friends. All that it is now in my power to do, is to unite in the anxious wish, which doubtless pervades the whole community to which she belongs, that she may find mercy in Heaven, which seemed to be necessarily denied upon earth, a free pardon for all the offenses of her life.

I beg you to spare the fair Petitioners, with the most of whom I have the pleasure of acquaintance, that the kindest motives which influenced their memorial in behalf of the unfortunate convict, are duly appreciated and that no one can participate more deeply than I do in their sympathy for her melancholy fate.

I am, Sir, very respectfully your obt. Servt.

D. L. Swain To: W. C. Bevins, Esq.

I set down the letter, hardly trusting myself to speak. “The governor appears to think that Mrs. Silver has already been executed,” I said at last.

“So it would seem,” said Bevins.

“But how can he think that? David Swain himself ordered that stay of execution not three weeks ago. He himself postponed the date of her death from the twenty-eighth of June until the twelfth of July, acting upon a request from Thomas Wilson. I saw the letter myself. How can he write now and say that the sentence has already been carried out?”

“Perhaps he has other things on his mind,” Bevins suggested, but I thought I detected a sneer in his voice.

“Very well, let us apprise him of his mistake,” I said. “We will go directly to the