Death in the Haymarket

by James Green

  When Gage learned from Springfield that the governor would commute the sentences of at least four defendants if the most influential men in Chicago asked him to do so, the banker quickly organized a gathering of fifty of the city’s most powerful financiers, merchants and industrialists. Henry Demarest Lloyd was asked to represent the Amnesty Association. Gage opened the meeting by bluntly stating the question at hand to his fellow businessmen: Should they see the convicts “choked” or should they ask the governor to show leniency? He then made a well-prepared case for clemency, arguing that the law had been vindicated by the highest courts and need not be reaffirmed by executing the men. In any case, the anarchists were more dangerous as martyrs than as “hostages” the state could hold against further anarchist threats. Even Joe Medill, whose Tribune had tried and sentenced the anarchists the day after the bomb exploded, now wrote to the governor that commutation was the best course, so that “no martyrs will be made.” Finally, Gage drew upon his unusual understanding of the city’s labor movement, explaining that since working people generally believed the capitalists wanted the anarchists executed, a request for clemency would be seen as a generous act that would relieve some of the class hatred poisoning city life.

  Gage’s arguments seemed to be well received by the businessmen gathered at his bank, particularly by some of the industrialists in the room who would have welcomed a relaxation of the tense relations they endured with their workers. But before a decision was reached, the most powerful businessman in the city, Marshall Field, intervened. He made his own opposition to clemency clear and then, unexpectedly, turned the floor over to a guest he had invited to the meeting. State’s Attorney Julius Grinnell rose and held forth at great length. He reiterated his closing arguments to the jury in the Haymarket case and concluded by saying that, since law and order hung in the balance in this case, the death penalty must be imposed.28 Grinnell’s powerful speech won hearty applause and the mood of the meeting shifted. No clemency appeal would be made by the city’s leading men. The anarchists would choke.

  Henry Lloyd left the meeting dismayed but not devastated. After all, the leaders of the amnesty movement expected no mercy from men like Marshall Field, Philip Armour and Cyrus McCormick, Jr. They were counting instead upon increasing the tide of popular sentiment in favor of saving the anarchists’ lives. And that tide was running stronger than ever as petitions of all kinds continued to pour into the Amnesty Association offices. Chief Inspector Bonfield told the press he was disgusted that so many cowardly citizens signed these appeals, and he now feared that none of the men would hang.29

  The organizers of the mercy campaign held out the hope that Governor Richard Oglesby would find a way to stay the executions of the unrepentant anarchists. These expectations were not unreasonable, said Medill of the Tribune, because the governor was a “humane and sympathetic man averse to the shedding of blood,” a man who had shown himself more than once to be “the warm friend of the working class.” Oglesby was also one of the last Lincoln men in public life, one of the last Radical Republicans holding major office. Moreover, it was rumored that Oglesby was troubled by the conspiracy case made against the anarchists. When he came to Chicago to dedicate Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s impressive statue of the martyred president in Lincoln Park, the governor told one amnesty supporter, “If that had been the law during the anti-slavery agitation all of us abolitionists would have been hanged a long time ago.”30

  As all eyes turned to Oglesby, a stunning incident occurred that dashed the petitioners’ hopes: four bombs were discovered in Louis Lingg’s jail cell. The news of this shocking discovery spread far and wide on November 7, when Sheriff Matson shouted to reporters, “Merciful God! We have been on the brink of a volcano!” The bombs were quite small, but their sheer presence inside a county jail was what counted. “What a revolution in public opinion this will produce,” the sheriff exclaimed. Indeed, the discovery immediately put the clemency campaign in jeopardy. Everyone sympathetic to the anarchists assumed the police had placed the bombs under Lingg’s bed, but no proof could be found that they were planted there or that they had been sneaked in with the food and gifts prisoners received through the bars. In any case, the shocking news discouraged the leaders of the defense. The Tribune’s headline on November 8 said it all: COMMUTATION UNLIKELY. FINDING BOMBS IN LINGG’S CELL CHANGES CASE.31

  Nevertheless, a large party of Chicagoans assembled at Union Depot the next evening to head for Springfield to plead the anarchists’ case before the governor. “It was a heterogeneous committee,” according to one reporter, consisting of men and women of many backgrounds. Captain and Mrs. Black were present, along with Attorney Salomon and General Trumbull and Amnesty Association leaders Dr. Salter and Samuel McConnell. A large labor delegation led by George Schilling included many Knights and Federation leaders who opposed the anarchists, as well as Germans of the Central Labor Union who called them brothers. The senior member of the trade union contingent, the battle-worn A. C. Cameron, was also there. The Scotsman had seen the whole pageant unfold, beginning in the years after the Civil War, when he inspired the first eight-hour movement and engineered the first eight-hour law in the land, only to see it defied by employers on May 1, 1867. Now, after the hopes of a second May Day movement had been crushed, it had come to this—a desperate plea for the lives of four workers driven to extremes by two decades of struggle and defeat. Several wives of the defendants, as well as Spies’s mother, sister and two brothers, also boarded the train. Even Chicago’s famous spiritualist, Cora Richmond, joined the traveling party. In the same article that reported the delegation’s departure, the Tribune pointed out that the carpenters would begin work on the scaffold outside the jail that night.32

  Governor Oglesby was overwhelmed by his task of reviewing the 8,000-page record of the trial as well as the hundreds of letters and telegrams that arrived every day from all points. On November 9 alone he received 500 messages, half of them for commutation and half of them for execution. For example, the Republican editor of Chicago’s leading German daily, Staats-Zeitung, wrote a letter that concluded with the comment that the only good anarchist was a dead one. The Tribune editorialized sympathetically on Oglesby’s dilemma, saying no other amnesty campaign had ever subjected a governor to such an ordeal.33

  Governor Richard J. Oglesby

  On November 9, the delegation of appellants had swollen to nearly 300 with the arrival of a large contingent from New York City and smaller ones from Detroit and Quincy, Illinois. At 9:30 a.m., with everyone seated in the statehouse and the press gallery filled, Captain Black opened with a legal address. The governor listened judiciously, giving no sign of his feelings. General Trumbull spoke next and appealed to Oglesby “as an old soldier, who has fought with you on the battlefields of the Republic.” Then Cora Richmond, speaking for the Amnesty Association, invoked the forgiving spirit of the “martyred Abraham Lincoln.” Both petitioners knew, of course, that the governor had been at Lincoln’s bedside as he lay dying, that he had been on the funeral train that brought the president’s body home to Illinois and that Oglesby was considered “a high priest ex-officio in the cult of Lincoln” that flourished in the mid-1880s when several of the late president’s associates published affectionate reminiscences. The governor was then presented with an additional petition from the Amnesty Association with 41,000 names of Chicagoans who had signed during the past week, and others from groups in Cleveland, Kansas City and New York City, where 150,000 people signed.34

  After a short recess, a much larger gathering convened at a nearby hotel, where George Schilling organized a cavalcade of speakers, none more impressive, in the Tribune’s view, than Samuel Gompers of New York City’s Central Labor Union and the new American Federation of Labor. A Jewish immigrant of small stature, this cigar maker had in less than two decades mastered English in the American idiom and acquired a sophisticated understanding of U.S. history and politics. Although he differed with the condemned men in theory and
in practice, Gompers told the governor that they had nevertheless been “fighting for labor from different sides of the house.” These condemned men had been done an injustice and should be saved from the gallows as a matter of principle, but, as usual, Gompers assessed the real politics of the situation as well. “If these men are executed it would simply be an impetus to this so-called revolutionary movement which no other on earth can give,” he explained. “These men would . . . be looked upon as martyrs. Thousands and thousands of labor men all over the world would consider that these men had been executed because they were standing for free speech and free press.” Therefore, Gompers pleaded with Oglesby to use his power to avoid such a calamity. He concluded by saying that if this country could be great and magnanimous enough to grant amnesty to Jefferson Davis, who had committed treason and led a rebellion against the government that cost countless lives, then surely the State of Illinois could do as much for the anarchists.35

  The governor listened to many other speakers that afternoon and met privately with the overwrought wives and siblings of the defendants; then, after all this, Oglesby responded to a request from the radical editor Joseph Buchanan, who asked for a private meeting. The labor leader requested permission to read letters he carried that had been written by Spies and Parsons. The governor agreed, and behind closed doors Buchanan opened and read Spies’s letter first. Spies explained that Engel, Parsons, Fischer and Lingg had not asked for clemency because they could not, in their innocence, accept commutation to a life sentence; and so, they would now die for their stand. Spies hoped to save them with a heroic act of self-sacrifice, saying he was ready to die in their place if it would allow the governor to spare the others. Buchanan, who found the letter difficult to get through, finished by reading these words from Spies: “In the name of the traditions of this country I beg you to prevent a seven-fold murder upon men whose only crime is that they are idealists. If legal murder there must be, let mine suffice.” After he finished reading Spies’s letter, Buchanan noticed “a deep look of sorrow” on the governor’s face and “his eyes were full of tears.”36

  Buchanan then read a letter to the governor from Parsons, which he may have hoped would contain the legally required plea for clemency that Schwab and Fielden had made. Instead, the letter offered a parting shot, an ironic comment on the whole affair. Parsons wrote sarcastically that since his wife and children were also present at the Haymarket the night of the bombing, his own execution should be delayed so that they too could be arrested, tried and executed with him. Hearing this, Oglesby brought his hands to his face and cried, “Oh my God, this is terrible!” Buchanan, who knew how bitter Parsons had become, was nonetheless thunderstruck and nearly burst into tears.37

  After this long emotional day, unprecedented in appeals process history, the delegations headed home, and Oglesby retired to ponder his decision. On the afternoon of November 10, while he deliberated over the case, the governor received the stunning news from Chicago that Louis Lingg had exploded a dynamite cap in his mouth that morning and lay dying in the county jail. Wild speculation circulated through the city that the police had assassinated Lingg. After all, the prisoner had been removed from the others after the jailers discovered bombs in his cell. Who knew what really happened to Lingg? With his face blown apart, the victim could not utter a word of explanation in his last hours. Since the police were certain that one of Lingg’s bombs slaughtered their fellow officers on May 4, they certainly had motive to seek revenge against the “anarchist tiger.”

  However, most people, including many anarchists, believed that Lingg desperately wanted to take his own life before the state he hated could do it. But if the police did not assassinate Lingg, how did he kill himself? The mystery of how the prisoner got hold of a cigar with a fulminating cap inside remained unsolved. Later on, a story circulated indicating that the explosive had been passed to him by a comrade, the anarchist Dyer Lum, who said so in a letter that became known after his death. Lum had expressed a deep admiration for his young German comrade as a devoted and fearless anarchist who never allowed himself the false hope of salvation from the death that awaited him. And so Lum would have endorsed the Tribune’s comment that Louis Lingg had “eluded the disgrace of the hangman’s noose and the ignominy of a public execution.” Fischer, Engel and Parsons told reporters they envied him.38

  Two hours after receiving the shocking news of the explosion in Lingg’s cell, Oglesby announced his decision. The governor commuted to life imprisonment the sentences of Fielden and Schwab, who had requested this in writing, and he upheld the death sentences for Parsons, Spies, Fischer and Engel, who had not begged for mercy. After he received the news from the governor, Captain Black sent a doleful telegraph message back to his office in Chicago, where the anarchists’ loved ones had gathered together to share their desperate hopes and their worst fears.

  Louis Lingg

  THE FOUR CONDEMNED MEN on death row in Chicago were not surprised by the governor’s decision; they had long expected it and prepared for it. Parsons even chose poems to recite for the occasion, one being John Greenleaf Whittier’s “The Reformer,” in which the writer proclaimed that whether a man died “on the gallows high” or on the battlefield, the noblest place a man could die was a place where he died for his fellow man.39

  A few women were allowed to visit the jail on the afternoon of November 10: Engel’s daughter Mary, Nina Van Zandt Spies and Adolph Fischer’s “delicate little wife,” Johanna, now evoked pity from onlookers, according to one reporter. But Lucy Parsons was denied entry to see Albert because she had reportedly acted deranged. Unable to see his loved ones for the last time, Parsons wrote Albert, Jr., and Lulu a letter to be read on the first anniversary of his death. In it, he implored them to love, honor and obey their mother, “the grandest noblest of women,” and to read his message each recurring year in “remembrance of he who dies not alone for you but for the children yet unborn.”40

  After the night shift arrived for the death watch, Lingg’s body was packed in ice and placed in a coffin. A clergyman made the rounds. The Protestant minister heard no confessions, although Spies freely talked with him about life and death. Then the lamps went down and death row was dark and silent. All remained quiet until midnight, when Parsons began to sing one of his favorite songs, “Annie Laurie.” The jailers reported “there was in his tone a lonesome melancholy” as he sang the first stanza with the Scottish inflection:

  Max Welton’s braes are bonnie,

  Where early fa’s the dew,

  And ’twas there that Annie Laurie

  Gave me her promise true,

  Gave me her promise true,

  That ne’er forgot shall be:

  And for Bonnie Annie Laurie

  I’d lay me doon and dee.41

  In the second verse, Albert Parsons’s voice wavered and broke, the jailers said, and he seemed “cast down.” After regaining his composure, he talked with them through the midnight hour. He told them how affected he felt about Spies leaving his new wife a widow and how worried Fischer was about the fate of his young and feeble wife. Parsons told his guards that he rejoiced that the wife he left behind was lionhearted and that his children were too young to “keenly feel bereavement.” And then, at about one o’clock, he said to his guards, “I will sing you a song, one born as a battle cry in France and now accepted as the hymn of revolution the world over.” As if to give them some encouragement, he sang in a low voice the English words of “La Marseillaise,” “which the guards commended as both inspiring and well performed.” Parsons slept little the rest of the night. Instead, “he chatted with the guards on the death watch and furnished them each with his autograph.” 42

  The next morning at eight o’clock Parsons penned a letter to his friend Dyer Lum. “The guard has just awakened me. I have washed my face and drank a cup of coffee. The doctor asked me if I wanted stimulants. I said no. The dear boys, Engel, Fischer and Spies, saluted me with firm voices. Well, my dear old com
rade, the hour draws near. Caesar kept me awake last night with the noise, the music of the hammer and saw erecting his throne—my scaffold.” Yet Parsons had learned one good thing from the sheriff: the state would not dispose of his body secretly. Sheriff Matson had assured him that his remains would be sent to Lucy at the home address he gave to his jailers.43

  On the eve of hanging day “an unbearable anxiety gripped Chicago,” because citizens believed the execution would provoke an all-out anarchist attack on the courthouse and other targets. Newspaper men arrived from far and wide to file reports from the tension-packed city. When November 11 dawned, hundreds of reporters shivered in the dim morning air waiting to enter the courthouse. “To the spectacle that on the morning of that 11th of November Chicago presented, there has been no parallel in any American city in the time of peace,” wrote New York World reporter Charles Edward Russell as he re-created the scene many years later. Ropes extended for one block around the courthouse and all traffic was blocked. “The jail itself was guarded like a precarious outpost in a critical battle. Around it lines of policemen were drawn; from every window policemen looked forth, rifles in hand; the roof was black with policemen. The display of force was overpowering.”44

  At six o’clock in the morning the reporters were admitted. They stood in one room, all 200 of them, cooped up while disturbing rumors played on their nerves. One morning extra edition was passed around reporting that the jail had been mined by the anarchists, who had buried great stores of dynamite beneath it, and that, at the moment of the hanging, the whole building would explode. The nervous tension rose to such a pitch that two of the reporters, tried and experienced men, turned sick and faint and had to be assisted to leave the room. “In all my experience this was the only occasion on which a reporter flinched from duty, however trying; but it is hard now,” Russell wrote in 1914, “to understand the tremendous infectional panic that had seized upon the city and had its storm center at that jail.” 45