We Is Got Him

by Carrie Hagen

  p. 223 “violent language”: Ibid.

  p. 223 Walling disputed both charges: Ibid.

  p. 223 If it did not, then he faced: Ibid.

  p. 223 the two men had met more than fifty times: NYH, January 22, 1881.

  p. 224 “renowned excitement in police circles”: NYH, December 21, 1874.

  p. 224 McKean went to New York: TW, 58.

  p. 224 McKean took Westervelt to the Fifth Avenue: PI, September 15, 1875.

  p. 225 During one hour-long meeting: TW, 99.

  p. 225 McKean had called Westervelt: Ibid.

  p. 225 Westervelt told Walling to stop: TW, 49.

  p. 225 Walling found Westervelt a job: Ibid.

  p. 225 He also slipped him: TW, 46.

  p. 225 On February 12, soon after: TW, 75.

  p. 225 he planned to return at 3:00 P.M.: Ibid.

  p. 225 Captain Heins met Westervelt: PI, September 2, 1875.

  p. 226 “Did you ever hear of” and following quotes: TW, 38.

  p. 226 Frequently after listening to Westervelt’s: PI, September 15, 1875.

  p. 226 Westervelt never heard the full: Ibid.

  p. 226 He spent that night at the State House: Ibid.

  p. 226 “Now yesterday afternoon”: Ibid.

  p. 227 Before lunch, Heins informed: Ibid.

  p. 227 Heins took him to a station: Ibid.

  p. 227 Westervelt accused them of inhuman: Ibid.

  p. 227 Chief Jones transferred him: Ibid.

  We do right to pity Charley Ross

  p. 230 “[…] provided, that this shall not apply: EB, February 26, 1875.

  p. 231 When officers in Camden, New Jersey: EB, May 6, 1875.

  p. 231 Because of Italy’s recent history of: Ibid.

  p. 231 By 6:00 P.M., when Christian: Ibid.

  p. 231 Citizens of Savannah, Georgia: PI, June 3, 9 and 11, 1875.

  p. 231 “We do right to pity Charley Ross”: EB, December 21, 1874.

  p. 232 “from four to eight years old”: Ibid.

  p. 232 Christian told the press he believed: PI, February 22, 1875.

  is my child dead?

  p. 233 Outside of the three designated: EB, January 4, 1875.

  p. 233 steady successions of sleet, snow, rain: EB, January 4 and 19, 1875.

  p. 233 Dozens of sparrows lay dead: EB, February 10, 1875.

  p. 233 wind chills contributed to 373 deaths: PI, January 28, 1875.

  p. 233 an ice block threatened the residents: PI, February 27, 1875.

  p. 233 The gorge sat just above the Fairmount dam: Ibid.

  p. 234 Water had flooded the Manayunk mills: Ibid.

  p. 234 water looked as brown as lager: PI, March 30, 1875.

  p. 234 if the ice blocks broke too quickly: PI, March 31, 1875.

  p. 234 Mayor Stokley supervised: Ibid.

  p. 234 Engineers drilled holes in the ice: PI, March 3, 1875.

  p. 234 city council would not allot enough money: PI, March 6, 1875.

  p. 234 A new town ordinance threatened: Ibid.

  p. 234 Chief Jones cited the danger: PI, August 10, 1875.

  p. 234 “[The] commodious, well-paved”: EB, January 19, 1875.

  p. 235 “All the visitors from foreign countries”: NYH, January 30, 1875.

  p. 235 local critics worried about the: PL, May 6, 1875.

  p. 235 When more than five thousand visitors: PI, June 25, 1875.

  p. 235 Ignoring city ordinances and fire codes: Ibid.

  p. 235 “Nearly everybody is ‘coming home’”: May 6, 1875.

  p. 235 one disgruntled man struck: PI, January 19, 1875.

  p. 235 another sliced his wife from her: EB, February 26, 1875.

  p. 235 a third man responded to his wife’s: EB, March 9, 1875.

  p. 235 his drunkenness by throwing their: PI, July 19, 1875.

  p. 235 one young newlywed took a stand: PI, July 5,10, and 13, 1875.

  p. 236 One South Philadelphia man stumbled: PI, August 10, 1875.

  p. 236 neighbors contacted the police with: PI, August 2, 1875.

  p. 236 “So little that seemed availing”: PI, April 24, 1874.

  she is a city

  p. 237 “Some days ago, Westervelt”: PI, April 24. 1875.

  p. 239 Visitors journeyed to the Centennial: PI, April 14, 1875.

  p. 239 donned their spring best: PL, April 28, 1875.

  p. 239 freshly-constructed custom houses: PI, May 3, 1875.

  p. 239 the gardeners preparing flower beds and pruning: PL, May 17, 1875.

  p. 239 the head contractor had insisted: EB, April 23, 1875.

  p. 239 men had continued erecting Memorial Hall: EB, April 23, 1875.

  p. 239 the city held a week-long: NYT, June 1, 1875.

  p. 239 artisans and caterers sold: EB, April 23, 1875.

  p. 239 The Centennial Commission solicited: Ibid.

  p. 239 planners were frustrated that European: PL, May 25, 1875.

  p. 239 local businessmen organized: PL, May 12, 1875.

  p. 239 They were especially pleased to: Ibid.

  p. 239 three thousand school children: PI, July 6, 1875.

  p. 240 Twenty-two thousand parents: Ibid.

  p. 240 “Those who have been accustomed”: PI, August 21, 1875.

  you need not ask more questions

  p. 241 Walling said she was ignorant: PI, September 3, 1875; PI, December 19, 1874.

  p. 241 Through tired tears, she had begged: PI, September 15, 1875.

  p. 241 Once, he even began crying with her: Ibid.

  p. 241 there was room for all of the onlookers: NYH, September 10, 1875; PI, weekday reports, August 30 – September 16.

  p. 242 Every day but Sundays, the crowd sat: Ibid.

  p. 242 They watched Westervelt take notes: Ibid.

  p. 242 What thrilled the audience most: NYH, September 10, 1875.

  p. 242 After Christian finished his dinner, he walked: PI, September 20, 1875.

  p. 242 the Ross family had received twenty addititional ransom letters: Ibid.

  p. 242 “I knew Mosher and Douglas”: Ibid.

  p. 242 “ros your boy is alive and”: Ibid.

  p. 243 “If Superintendent Walling had followed”: Ibid.

  p. 243 District Attorney Furman Sheppard began: PI, September 16, 1875.

  p. 243 “What relations of perfect”: PI, Friday, September 17.

  p. 243 Joseph Ford, attorney for the defense: TW, 108.

  p. 244 “The Commonwealth asks you to convict”: PI, Friday, September 17.

  p. 244 “Review the testimony with”: TW, 112.

  p. 244 His fate rested with two manufacturers: EB, August 31, 1875.

  p. 244 Westervelt’s children stopped playing quietly: PI, Friday, September 17.

  p. 244 While the jurors filed out of the courtroom: Ibid.

  p. 244 The jurors’ debates continued throughout: PI, September 20, 1875.

  p. 244 Journalists waiting inside the: Ibid.

  p. 245 a large crowd gathered in Independence Square: Ibid.

  p. 245 By the time the State House bell tolled: Ibid.

  p. 245 the crowd huddled against the courthouse: Ibid.

  p. 245 arms and elbows pushed: Ibid.

  p. 245 Children, storekeepers, reporters: Ibid.

  p. 245 At 10:00 A.M., the judge arrived: Ibid.

  p. 245 Westervelt walked to the dock: Ibid.

  p. 245 Reporters read despair: Ibid.

  p. 245 Westervelt pushed his head into his hands: Ibid.

  p. 245 On October 9, he appeared one last time: TW, 112.

  p. 245 “I had hoped ere this I should have been”: Ibid.

  p. 246 Westervelt breathed deeply: TW, 112.

  p. 246 Leaning forward, he put his head: Ibid.

  we fear being traped in our own game

  p. 247 Thirty-foot stone walls surrounded: Johnston, 63.

  p. 247 Philadelphia’s Quaker fathers: Johnston, 21.

  p. 247 the Walnut Street penitentiary had
served: Shearer, 11.

  p. 247 male and female inmates intermingled and: Johnston, 26.

  p. 247 for the next forty years, they petitioned: Johnston, 26.

  p. 247 In 1821, after receiving a $100,000 grant: Johnston, 44.

  p. 248 for the world’s first prison entirely given: Johnston, 45.

  p. 248 The winning proposal belonged: Johnston, 34.

  p. 248 many people disagreed: Johnston, 24, 29, 44.

  p. 248 No prison had ever fully practiced solitary: Johnston, 27.

  p. 248 tourists praised Haviland’s work: Johnston, 57.

  p. 248 the “prison at Cherry Hill”: Johnston, 31.

  p. 248 would influence more than three hundred prisons: General Overview, Eastern State Penitentiary Website, http://easternstate.org/learn/research-library/history.

  p. 249 1056 inmates shared 585 cells: Report of the Inspectors of the Eastern State Penitentiary for 1875. February, 1876. This number differs from Penitentiary Papers, IIIB. 2. Governance, 1870-1923, 2a. Inmate population and number of cells, obtainable from the ESP archives. On page 178, it states that 801 prisoners shared 585 cells. After intense study, I am inclined to side with the inspectorss report.

  p. 249 wardens over the years had complained: Johnston, 43.

  p. 249 The walls surrounding each exercise: Johnston, 43.

  p. 249 state commissioners had demanded: Johnston, 180.

  p. 249 As a result, these four blocks had two: Johnston, 40.

  p. 249 Guards escorted him: This scene is reconstructed from information in Norman Johnston’s Crucible of Good Intentions, pages 43 and 49.

  p. 249 At the physician’s office: Johnston, 48.

  p. 249 8082: Eastern State Penitentiary Commutation books. Microfilm. Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg.

  p. 249 and reviewed the rules posted: Teeters, 137, 176.

  p. 249 The whale-oil lamp attached: Johnston, 44.

  p. 249 he could ask for a Bible: Ibid.

  the whole gang

  p. 254 “I think [Charley Ross] is”: Walling, 208.

  East Washington Lane, Present Day

  p. 258 Westervelt was released: Eastern State Penitentiary Commutation Books, Microfilm. Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, PA.

  p. 258 at least one interview to the: New York Tribune, January 22, 1881.

  p. 258 his obituary appeared in 1890:

  p. 258 His sister Martha Mosher and at least: NYT, November 27, 1890.

  p. 258 In 1897, Gil Mosher’s son Ellsworth: Everly 387.

  p. 258 “scandal breeding” as a: NYT, May 13, 1893; Bell, 204.

  p. 258 Refusing audits, the Commission: Ibid.

  p. 258 City Hall cost 12 million dollars to: Ibid.

  p. 259 More than one in five Americans: Foner, 564.

  p. 259 paying particular attention to: Rydell, Fair America, 16; Foner, 564.

  p. 259 visionaries who organized six major: Rydell, Fair America, 25.

  p. 259 Christian Ross met with George Walling:

  p. 259 Walling said the case of Charley Ross: Walling, 198.

  p. 259 following the advice of friends: Ross, 17.

  p. 260 Throughout the first half of the twentieth century…: ** Thomas Everly, in his article “Searching for Charley Ross,” discusses twentieth century claims on Charley’s identity. Both Everly and I cite Paula Fass’s fascinating work, Kidnapping in America (1997). Fass devotes her first chapter to Charley Ross; her work discusses how the case embodies Victorian characterizations of innocence and propriety, and it suggests how the kidnapping served as a prototype for twentieth-century abductions.

  bibliography

  Government Publications. 1875 Annual Report of the Chief of Police. The Philadelphia Free Library.

  Adams, Peter. The Bowery Boys: Street Corner Radicals and the Politics of Rebellion. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005.

  Ade, George. The Old-Time Saloon, Not Wet—Not Dry, Just History. New York: Long and Smith, 1931.

  The Life, Trial and Conviction of William H. Westervelt, for the Abduction of Little Charley Ross: the Tragic Death of the Burglars Mosher and Douglass (on Long Island, N.Y.), Who Were Implicated in Abducting the Poor Little Fellow: the Confession, the Whole Case, the Trial in Full. Philadelphia: Barclay & Co, 1875.

  Asbury, Herbert. The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld. New York: Knopf, 1927, 1928.

  Beers, Dorothy Gondos. “The Centennial City: 1865–1876.” In Philadelphia: A 300-Year History. Russell F. Weigley, ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982.

  Bell, Marion L. Crusade in the City: Revivalism in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1977.

  Beckert, Sven. The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeosie, 1850–1896. New York: University of Cambridge Press, 2001.

  Berman, Jay Stuart. Police Administration and Progressive Reform: Theodore Roosevelt as Police Commissioner of New York. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

  Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes of New York. New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872.

  Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

  Brown, Dee Alexander. The Year of the Century: 1876. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966.

  Callard, Judith and Germantown Historical Society. Germantown, Mount Airy, and Chestnut Hill. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2000.

  Carp, E. Wayne. Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

  Chambers, Julius. “The River-Thief.” In Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art. (December 7, 1872) Vol. 8, No. 193: 638, New York: D. Appleton, 1869–1876. APS Online.

  Clemens, Thomas E. East Germantown: A New Name for Ancient Villages. Philadelphia: Germantown Press, 1936. LaSalle University Library Collection.

  ———Quaint Old Landmarks in East Germantown. Philadelphia: Germantown Press, 1939. LaSalle University Library Collection.

  Coffin, Elizabeth W. A Girl’s Life in Germantown. Boston: Sherman, French, 1916. La Salle University Library Collection.

  Collis, Charles H. T. File, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. July 25, 1862; October 12, 1862.

  Costello, Augustine E. Our Police Protectors. Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972.

  Countryman, Matthew J. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

  Cox, Robert S. Body and Soul. A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

  Davis, Allen F., Frederic M. Miler and Morris J. Vogel. Philadelphia Stories: A Photographic History, 1920–1960. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1988.

  Dilworth, Richardson, ed. “Credit Unions and Social Capital in Philadelphia.” In Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. 25–40.

  Edwards, Rebecca. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  Egle, William., and A. S. Dudley, Harry I. Huber, and R. R. Schively, eds. Commemorative Biographical Encyclopedia of Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. Chambersburg, PA: J. M. Runk.

  Everly, Thomas. “Searching for Charley Ross.” Pennsylvania History. (Summer 2000) Vol. 67, No. 3: 376–396.

  Fabian, Ann. Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth–Century America. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990.

  Fass, Paula S. Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

  Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008.

  Foner, Eric. Reconstruction, America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

  Fox, Kenneth. Better City Government: Innovation in American Urban Politics, 1850–1937.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977

  Gilfoyle, Timothy J. A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

  Greenwood, Janette Thomas. The Gilded Age: A History in Documents. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

  Grimsted, David. American Mobbing, 1828–1861, Toward Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

  Gutman, Herbert. “Work, culture and society in industrializing America between 1815 and 1843.” In Essays in Comparative History: Economy, Politics and Society in Britain and America. Clive Emsley, ed. Philadelphia: Open University Press/Milton Keynes, 1984.

  Haines, Ella Wister. Reminiscences of a Victorian Child. Philadelphia: E. W. Haines, September 1953. La Salle University Library Wister Collection.

  Harring, Sidney L. Policing a Class Society: The Experience of American Cities, 1865–1915. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983.

  Harris, Neil, ed. The Land of Contrasts: 1880–1901. New York: Doubleday, 1970.

  Harrison, George L., Jr. File, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Letter to Mayor Stokley; Correspondence between Harrison and Christian Ross.

  Hendrickson, David. Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate Over International Relations, 1789–1941. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009.

  Henkin, David M. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Ninteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

  Hepp, John Henry IV. The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia, 1876-1926. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

  Hessinger, Rodney. Seduced, Abandoned and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1750–1850. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.

  Hilkey, Judy. Character is Capital: Success Manuals and Manhood in Gilded Age America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

  “History of Chestnut Street.” Sunday Dispatch. 1870. Philadelphia Public Library–Photo Archives, Chestnut Street – General History Box.

  Hoogenboom, Ari and Philip S. Klein. A History of Pennsylvania. City Archives.

  Hopkins, Griffith Morgan. Atlas of the Late Borough of Germantown, Twenty-second Ward, City of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: G. M. Hopkins, 1871.

  Hotchkin, Samuel Fitch. Ancient and Modern Germantown, Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill. Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler, 1889. Art Museum Reference, La Salle University Library.