A plea of temporary insanity was a new feature in American law, having been successfully used just four years before in a sensational trial of the famous Tammany politician and congressman Daniel Sickles. Sickles was a notorious philanderer, but when his wife took a lover, Congressman Sickles shot him dead on a Washington street. The plea in this murder trial was that he had been driven “temporarily” insane by the outrage of this man being his wife’s lover—and Sickles was acquitted. And his life had gone on. In fact, Sickles, the temporarily insane murderer of his wife’s paramour, was now serving as a general in the Union army, a political general serving as a corps commander on the staff of “Fighting Joe” Hooker.
So: Dr. Wright was temporarily insane? Bowden and Chandler had material about his state of mind on the day of the shooting, and midway through the trial they made an effort to get some of it included, but the military commission did not let them introduce it. They asked for a half-hour recess to consult—and then Bowden and Chandler withdrew from the trial. They moved their attention to a perhaps more promising level at which to make their argument: an appeal to the president of the United States for a pardon.
Meanwhile, their client had to sail on through the choppy waters of the rest of the trial without counsel. He himself would use that metaphor, in a poetic and sympathetic moment in his closing remarks. “I feel like a man in a small boat on a tremendous sea at night,” he would say, “with no friendly star to guide him.” When he was offered the opportunity to speak before the court retired for decision, he hesitated; the court obliged him with a postponement, after which he spoke. A friendly star would have said, No, no, don’t. But he did.
As he began to speak to the court, he said, “My friends have advised me not to make an address, and I fear that I am not able to explain myself as I would wish.” But, unfortunately, he explained himself all too well. His own reasons for acting were deeply rooted in the ethos of the racist and slave-holding South, and in the end, as his rather rambling remarks proceeded and his passions mounted, he would plainly reveal that root.
He tried at the outset to echo some of the arguments his lawyers had made. He said that his making remarks did not imply that he accepted the jurisdiction of the court. He used the word “madman” four times in the early part of his remarks. He said that unless his act was done in self-defense, it would have been the act of a madman and asked rhetorically, “What motive appears in this case? What cause can be given for my act?” Unfortunately for his own case, before he was through, he would give an answer to his own question.
“I did not intend to say anything, Mr. President,” he said in the midst of his ramble, addressing the president of the court, “but from the fullness of my heart I have spoken.”
A friendly star, or a lawyer, would have guided him away from the revealing outburst that came suddenly in the midst of his remarks.
“May I be permitted to ask why that colored company was brought over from Portsmouth?”
“Was it not known that great feeling and fear would be excited in Norfolk?”
“Who in this city has forgotten the Southampton massacre?”
No Southerners in the room needed to have it explained that he was referring to the Nat Turner affair at Southampton, only thirty-two years in the past and less than one hundred miles from Norfolk, in which some fifty-five white persons had been killed. And why was he calling up that event in this context? The answer came in Dr. Wright’s worst sentence: “Who does not know that these creatures, the Negroes, when restraint is removed, become unmanageable savages?”
That sentence was heard now in the court by the Union army officers who composed the court, then would be read into the record by the commanding general who appointed the commission, and then would from there be read by Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt in Washington when he prepared his recommendation to the president. And then it was there on the page for the president himself to read when he considered a pardon.
Dr. Wright, the fullness of his heart having broken through the wary constraints of the earlier part of his remarks, now spilled out the feelings that did indeed motivate him and was carried away into his own explanation of the whole event.
It seems to me that there was a purpose in bringing this colored company into this city. It was not enough to march them through the streets. More than that was to be accomplished. Difficulty was to be provoked and the sidewalks were appropriated and old men and women were driven from the sidewalks into the streets and into the stores.
The Lieutenant of that company hearing some one of the remarks that were of course made chose to appropriate it to himself and thus his end was accomplished, and he said to himself “Now I’ll have recruits in abundance. I’ll march this old secesh [slang for secessionist] through the streets and will have an abundance of recruits.” What else could have been the motive of the Lieutenant?
Dr. Wright implicitly granted that he himself made one of the remarks that were “of course” made—what else could one expect?—and he later granted that the remark was “offensive.” But he implicitly suggested that it was not necessarily directed at Sanborn, or at Sanborn exclusively—perhaps at the whole company and its sidewalk marching?—because he indicated that Sanborn chose to take it as addressed to him personally. And then Wright, bordering on sarcasm, suggested that Sanborn’s response to this offensive remark was not itself tame and gentle: “You cannot believe that he appropriated to himself an offensive remark…and then came round as peaceful as a dove and merely said ‘consider yourself under arrest.’”
No, Sanborn’s response to Wright’s offensive remark, including the proposal to arrest him, presumably was not made in the accents of the harmless dove. And now Dr. Wright uttered another passage—a rhetorical question, followed by bedrock personal resolution—that reveals again, as in the “unmanageable savages” passage, the depth of the moral gulf between the nation’s institutions and the ethos that had shaped him: “And is it to be supposed that a citizen of Norfolk, himself an owner of slaves, not knowing but what some one of my slaves was in that company, would submit to be arrested by Negroes, and marched off to the guard house? No, sir, I would not submit to that.”
Passion mounting, he shifted from the third person “citizen-of-Norfolk-himself” to the first person “my slaves—I would not submit.” And he pictured the stark humiliation of the prospect that provoked his act: to be arrested by Negroes. To be marched through the streets to the guardhouse by three Negroes, among whom there might even be his own former slaves. No, it was an indignity too deep to be borne. In a sentence that echoes all that code of a Southern gentleman’s “honor,” he insisted that he would not submit to it. And so, having all too conveniently brought with him his loaded five-chambered revolver, he raised it and promptly vindicated his honor. Twice. And an hour later Lieutenant Sanborn lay dead in his own blood on the floor of Foster and Moore’s store.
AS HE WOUND DOWN his remarks to the military commission, Dr. Wright seems to have cooled, to have remembered (too late) the cautions of his friends and lawyers, and to have regretted what he had said.
“Mr. President, I did not intend when I arose to make any remarks except to thank the Court for giving me a day to prepare an address. I meant to have left my case just where it was left by my counsel, and I should be glad not to have what I have said made any part of the proceedings of this Court.”
But of course it was made a part of the proceedings and was referred to in two key papers as the case worked its way upward through the system. In the trial itself, before the military commission in Norfolk, the judge advocate (the prosecutor, in effect) noted that “there is…in the statement of the accused a motive apparent, and the court cannot mistake the nature of the emotion, the passion excited in his mind, he a slaveholder and secessionist, by the sight of colored troops in the service of the Union.”
And after the three members of the military commission had unanimously found Wright guilty of murder and sentenced him to han
g, and the general commanding the Union army in the district had concurred in the verdict, and the papers in this capital case had been sent to Washington for consideration by the president, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt in his presentation to Lincoln also referred to Wright’s remarks:
He [Wright] then proceeds to intimate what his motive really was, and finds it in his determination not to be arrested and marched off under a guard of “Negroes”—an indignity which he represents as having been threatened by the deceased…and which he asserts he “would not submit to.” He further alleges a provocation for his act in the presence of the colored troops, whom he deems to have been brought into Norfolk to provoke and insult the inhabitants.
So now the case came to Lincoln himself. The system of trials by military commissions during the Civil War did provide, in addition to a certain level of procedural protection, the possibility of “mercy as well as military justice.” Capital cases were always referred to the president; there were good records for him to examine, and “their quantity was limited enough to allow Lincoln to examine a substantial percentage of the cases.” Not surprisingly, in a majority of cases Lincoln did accept the recommendation of his judge advocate general, Joseph Holt. “But when Lincoln defied Holt’s advice, it was most often to indulge mercy.” And when, in accord with Holt’s recommendation, he went against the commanding general’s position, it was also most often to mitigate punishment.
In the midst of all his other duties, Lincoln surely did give serious consideration to this case coming up from Norfolk in August 1863. Before the final decision down at Fort Monroe, he had already received a letter addressed to “his excellency A. Lincoln, President of the United States, from Attorney Lemuel J. Bowden.” Bowden summarized the case, explained why he and his partner Chandler had withdrawn from it, insisted that “the fact of Dr. Wright’s being insane could have been established” if they had been allowed to do it, and explained that “affidavits which are not in the record well show such a state of mental unsoundness in the accused as would make manifest the impropriety of holding him to criminal accountability for any act that he may have committed.”
Sickles, seeing his wife’s lover on the Washington street, went “temporarily” insane and shot him dead; he was acquitted and now commands Union army corps. So—Dr. Wright? He went “temporarily” insane when he saw “colored” Union army troops—should he not now be pardoned for “any act that he may have committed”?
President Lincoln with his conscientiousness gave this argument more attention than you may think it deserves. He granted an interview in the executive mansion to Chandler and promised to give the case a full examination. He sent an order to “Major General Foster, or whoever may be in command of the military department, with headquarters in Fort Monroe, Virginia,” that if Dr. Wright had been convicted, to stop the execution and send Lincoln the papers.
So there was Lincoln in August 1863 reading through the material summarized above, including Dr. Wright’s own self-damning testimony. He sent telegrams, as he had promised to do, to Chandler and Bowden that he had read the record and was ready to hear them, with what they called this “mass of testimony which has been taken to prove the insanity of Dr. Wright.”
It would appear that Lincoln on reading through the papers and Holt’s summary and recommendation rejected any other argument for a pardon for Wright; he would eventually write that he was “satisfied that no proper questions remained open” except the insanity question. The petitions that poured into the White House from multitudes of “respectable” citizens—including, it was pointed out, many “Union men”—testified to Wright’s character and worthy personal qualities. But all of that would not expunge the deed and in fact might seem to stand in some tension with the argument that he was “insane.” Wright himself in his remarks, and his wife in a plea she would later write to a woman friend of Mary Lincoln and some of the petitioners, made a considerable point that he had no “malice” and no “pre-meditation.” He had never known, had never met or heard of Sanborn before that fateful afternoon; he had had no prior intentions to harm him, and in shooting him no intention to kill him.
But none of this, we may say, would serve to exculpate him or merit pardon. David Wright, an all too fully respectable Southern gentleman, had in him two elements of the ethos of the slaveholding South that, in the terrible chemistry of a passionate moment, led to his undoing and Sanborn’s death: “racism,” as it would come to be called, and the Southern code of “honor.” He was sufficiently agitated by the sight of the “unmanageable savages” in Union army uniforms marching beneath his window to rush—we assume he rushed—down to Main Street with his five-chambered Colt revolver, loaded. Why do that? Not premeditation, exactly, but a fateful decision. He was then imbued with a deep racial feeling sufficient to call out “offensive” remarks, including the word “cowardly”—this gentleman and professional man—as the troops marched by on the sidewalk on Main Street. And then when the young Yankee lieutenant halted the troops and sent a (“colored”) soldier to the provost marshal and came round to tell Wright, standing there in the doorway of Foster and Moore, that he was under arrest, an absolutely intolerable picture flashed into Wright’s mind: being marched off to the guardhouse by some of these black men in uniform, maybe including his own former slaves. It would be an intolerable insult to his honor.*52 So he promptly lifted his pistol and shot Sanborn. And promptly shot him again.
Secretary Seddon’s description of the deed, no doubt reflecting an interpretation in Confederate Richmond of these events in Union-controlled Norfolk, captured an ethos succinctly in a phrase, every word loaded: “A prompt vindication of his honor.” If only Wright had been a little less prompt.
LINCOLN CONSIDERED only one possible basis of pardon, the claim that Wright in that moment was so mentally unsound as not to be accountable. He did not decide that claim on the basis of Chandler and Bowden’s affidavits but sought independent expert testimony. Lincoln thought of calling on the head of the Government Asylum for the Insane to examine Wright, but Secretary of State William Seward—who back in his days as a lawyer had a worthy record of using the insanity plea in the defense of accused black men—proposed another “alienist,” one John P. Gray of Utica, a leading specialist in mental health. Lincoln wrote to Dr. Gray engaging him to “serve the government for a month or less.” He gave Dr. Gray a rather extraordinary assignment, going to much trouble, one might say, about one particular pardon case, in the midst of the events of the fall of 1863. He asked Dr. Gray to go to Fort Monroe and to “take in writing all evidence…on behalf of Dr. Wright and against him…directed to the question of Dr. Wright’s sanity or insanity.” Chandler and Bowden were notified. A judge advocate was appointed on the other side. Witnesses were called. If proper, said Lincoln to Dr. Gray, “examine Dr. Wright personally.” It would be an extraordinary hearing on Dr. Wright’s sanity, set up by the president of the United States.
So Dr. Gray went to Fort Monroe and conducted, at the behest of the president, this second, nonmilitary “trial” of Dr. Wright, directed exclusively to the question of his sanity. Dr. Gray, editor of the American Journal of Insanity, was now presiding. He called thirteen witnesses for Wright and thirteen for the prosecution, and interviewed Wright himself for two hours. He found no previous symptoms of insanity and no current symptoms. A suddenly appearing insanity, Dr. Gray said, would not utterly disappear after one action. So he made his report, after his thorough hearing, to the conscientious president.
When one is reading through the papers on this case in the National Archives, almost 150 years after the fact, one is startled to come upon a single sheet of lined paper, brown and deteriorating around the edges, with quite neat handwriting filling the whole page and the signature at the bottom, “Abraham Lincoln”: Lincoln’s decision in this case—there it is—on the paper he wrote it on, in his own hand.
Dr. Gray had reported, and President Lincoln now gave his decision:
[B]ei
ng satisfied that no proper question remained open except as to the insanity of the accused, I caused a very full examination to be made on that question, upon a great amount of evidence, including all offered by counsel of accused, by an expert of high reputation in that professional department, who thereupon reports to me, as his opinion, that the accused Dr. David M. Wright, was not insane prior to or on the 11th day of July, 1863, the date of the homicide of Lieutenant Sanborn; that he has not been insane since, and is not insane now (October 7, 1863).
Very thorough: Dr. Wright was sane before the deed, sane during it, sane after it, and he is sane now.
The ending of the story was not “prompt.” There were multiple appeals, pressures, petitions. Once again, as with Nathaniel Gordon, Lincoln ordered the postponement of the scheduled execution for a week to provide Wright time for “his preparation.” Although Dr. Wright had not been a church member, he had read prayers regularly to his family, and now in prison he was baptized and received into a church. Major General John G. Foster at Fort Monroe, who said that although it was his rule not to allow anyone to leave the department who was not willing to take the oath of allegiance, nevertheless, because Lincoln had postponed the execution, did pass on the request from Chandler that Mrs. Wright and a companion be allowed to visit Lincoln to plead in her husband’s behalf. The president, notoriously susceptible to such pleas in general, especially from women, in this case said no: “It would be useless for Mrs. Dr. Wright to come here. The subject is a very painful one, but the case is settled.”
An attempt to escape was made and thwarted. An attempted bribe was indignantly rejected. A proposal by the lawyers to exchange Dr. Wright for a specific prisoner held by the Confederates was denied. On the day of the execution hope remained for a pardon, but in this case no last-minute presidential telegram arrived. On October 23, 1863, Dr. Wright was hanged at Fort Monroe. His reported last words on the scaffold suggest that he still interpreted the event in entirely individualistic terms, as only between himself and this young white man, Anson Sanborn, whom he had never met before the terrible moment. “Gentlemen, the act which I committed was done without the slightest malice.” But there are different sorts of “malice.” And also of “honor.”
President Lincoln- The Duty of a Statesman Page 36
