Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  The rest was largely as the prosecution had described it: the burning of the head and some limbs in the furnace, the disposal or temporary hiding of other parts in the privy and the tea chest. Parkman’s watch was at the bottom of the Charles River. The stab wound in the thorax was simply a slip of the knife during the carving up of the dead body; and as for the package Webster had told his wife not to open, that was merely some household acid that needed to be kept closed.

  “I wrote but one of the anonymous letters produced at the trial,” he added. The “Civis” letters were his, as was the letter suggesting a search of neighboring basements; but the one allegedly sent from aboard the Herculean was someone else’s idea of a joke.

  And he had one more mystery to dispel: his convulsions on the night of his arrest.

  “When I found that we went over Craigie’s Bridge,” the minister read out, “I thought the arrest was probable. When I found that the carriage was stopping at the jail, I was sure of my fate; and before leaving the carriage, I took a dose of strychnine from my pocket and swallowed it.”

  But the dose was wrong: instead of dying, he’d gone into wild convulsions and sweating and foaming, feeling that he was dying even as he was carried by policemen to confront the body parts in his laboratory. After a delirious night racked with pain, he’d come to his senses the next morning to find himself—miserably—still alive.

  “I never had a thought of injuring Dr. Parkman,” Webster had insisted to the minister after finishing his confession.

  I believe him, Putnam added, addressing the council. After the confession, he’d advised Webster to withdraw his initial pardon request, since he knew in his heart that he was not an innocent man. And that, Putnam revealed, was why Webster had then withdrawn it. Instead, the professor now came to them to plead for his life as a guilty man—but guilty of a terrible crime of a moment, not of premeditated murder.

  It would now be up to the governor and his Executive Council to decide whether the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would, with a noose and scaffold, finish the job that Professor John Webster had already failed at on the night of his arrest.

  IN A State House antechamber, Governor Briggs faced a row of weeping women: Mrs. Harriet Webster, dressed in black mourning clothes—“the very picture of distress and sorrow,” one observer wrote—and her daughters, each wearing a modest pink dress, their faces hidden beneath veils. Their father was still back in his jail cell, waiting for the governor’s decision.

  The Webster women hadn’t known of his confession until shortly before the Executive Council did. Up until that point, they’d refused visitors who even spoke of the possibility of his guilt. “How could I believe my husband to be guilty,” Mrs. Webster had explained to one friend, “when he frequently said, in coming in from the garden with the knife in his hand, ‘They are searching the Medical College’?” He’d been perfectly calm handling knives, in talking with policemen and neighbors, in reading out the “MISSING” posters to them on their outings. Now they faced the realization that his apparent calmness had hidden a crime from even his closest family members.

  Our petition for a pardon was a sincere one, her daughters explained. We truly believed him to be innocent.

  “We feel assured of that,” Governor Briggs sympathized. “No one doubts your sincerity.”

  “I feel that he must have committed the deed in a moment of great provocation,” Mrs. Webster pleaded. “He doted upon his children—he was a good, kind, husband—and oh, sir, we earnestly hope and pray that you may find it consistent with justice and humanity, to save him and our whole family.”

  The lieutenant governor, sitting closest to Mrs. Webster, spoke blandly about their duties and the limits of the office, and Mrs. Webster burst out crying.

  “Did you say, Sir, it is impossible to commute his sentence?”

  “Oh!” the official fumbled. “I can’t tell you that, Madam—the subject is before the committee. All I can say is we will try most conscientiously to serve you and save your husband. It is a most painful duty.”

  It was also becoming a most prolonged duty. Though the councilors had initially hoped to reach their decision by July 6, they called additional meetings and moved that date to July 16, as now they would have to consider the claims Webster made in his confession. At the next hearing, three doctors testified that people could indeed die of a single blow to the head, and sometimes in as little as ten minutes. Jeffries Wyman, the Harvard colleague who’d carefully cataloged Parkman’s bones for the trial, now helped come to Webster’s defense. Just like other bones, Wyman explained, the skulls of the elderly could become thin and brittle—some were “not thicker than cartridge paper, and would yield to the pressure of the thumb.” In handling the fragments of Parkman’s skull from the furnace, he’d found the old doctor’s “slightly below average” in thickness.

  Other signs hinted that Webster was perhaps not guilty of the most cold-blooded sort of murder. A local physician testified that Webster had, in years past, been known to be quick-tempered. Once, when among several doctors engaging in the young gents’ pastime of knocking one another’s top hats off, Webster had become so angered that he’d tried to land a blow on the head of Dr. Charles Homans; only a lucky block had saved the surgeon. On another occasion, while Dr. Webster sat in a barber’s chair, his fellow physician Dr. Thomas Blatchford passed by and joked, “Did you ever see a man shave a monkey?” Webster seized the barber’s knife and narrowly missed stabbing Blatchford.

  A procession of supplicants begged the governor and the council for mercy. They received petitions from across the country totaling over eighteen hundred signatures; a letter from Benjamin Greene, the juror who’d initially held out on the premeditation charge and now regretted changing his mind; and a hasty Cambridge petition signed by Webster’s neighbors, the town mayor, President Sparks of Harvard, and numerous professors—even the skeptical Benjamin Peirce.

  Not everyone was convinced. While the Cambridge petition featured prominent names from the undergraduate college, there was a notable silence from Webster’s colleagues on the Boston medical college campus. Three physicians quietly informed the council that the actual likelihood of death in ten minutes was “adverse to the confession.” One of them, the young Dr. Henry Bigelow, was blunt in his assessment of the confession: an immediately fatal blow from the wood club was “in the highest degree improbable.” Bemis reported later to the attorney general that “Bigelow says that if a man falls off a building & jams his head all to pieces he will generally survive for hours.” Nor did it help that in however much of panic he’d killed and carved up Parkman, Webster had been utterly calculating in his months of false insinuations against Ephraim Littlefield.

  By July 8, Governor Briggs had heard the professor’s confession, pleas from the prisoner’s family and spiritual adviser, and statements from medical experts and neighbors alike. Another delay would seem inconceivable—except that the following day, Boston would be convulsed anew—by another dead body.

  THIS TIME the deceased was neither a Boston Brahmin nor an ancient Egyptian princess; it was, in fact, someone whose fame far outshone either at the moment. The Herald was one of the first to receive the news, and quickly set it into large type:

  Telegraphic to Boston Herald.

  Morse’s Line.

  THE DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT.

  ACTION OF THE CABINET.

  THE LAST MOMENTS OF THE OLD HERO.

  &C., &C.

  “Zachary Taylor is dead!” came the cry. The old general had been cut down not by muskets and sabers but by milk and cherries: he’d fallen terribly ill after eating at a Fourth of July reception at the half-built Washington Monument. With Taylor’s sudden death and the hasty swearing in of Millard Fillmore, there would be days of mourning to plan around.

  Boston’s government offices came to a standstill. The flags were lowered to half-mast, the church bells muffled and set to toll hauntingly for an hour at noon, and Boston’s courts and St
ate House closed. Newspapers followed the old tradition of laying out their pages with thickly inked borders, as if the very type itself were draped in black.

  The committee’s recommendation to Briggs would have to wait. The governor’s ceremonial work took priority now—and no sooner was that done than Harvard would come calling for its ceremonies. Somehow, amid the mourning duties, the college was still to administer its incoming exams on July 15 and 16, and then its graduation procession on July 17. The ritual played out all over again: the calling of names and fathers’ professions for sixty-one hopefuls; the exam in Latin; the sweltering summer heat; the anxious wait outside University Hall for the results. With the future Class of 1854 selected, the newly graduating Class of 1850 took over the campus the next day, caps and pages of senior orations in hand.

  This year, Professor Webster would be notably missing from the faculty ranks.

  The governor, lieutenant governor, and most of the Executive Council made the journey to Cambridge, as always; Harvard was a veritable branch of the state government. The program showed a graduating class well-stocked with the names of the local gentry—Cabot, Channing, Gould, Higginson, Lathrop, Lowell, Quincy—and council members sipped lemonade and sat politely through senior disquisitions on Shakespeare and Milton. Across the river in Boston, though, work continued through the day. Though additional petitions meant one more public hearing the following morning, a subcommittee reviewing the pardon request had already reached its recommendation.

  “Friend Clifford,” a member wrote confidentially to the attorney general. “The Committee will recommend Friday, August 30th for the Council to have Prof. Webster executed.”

  24

  CLOSING HOURS

  “IS HIS EXCELLENCY THE GOVERNOR OF THE COMMON wealth in?” the envoy demanded.

  The petitioner in the governor’s antechamber was so prepossessing and splendidly attired that some wondered whether he could be from the Prussian court; others guessed he might be “some Hungarian or Polish patriot of distinction, come to throw himself on the hospitalities of our patriotic state.”

  “Is he engaged?” the fellow pressed. “As I have a message for him if he is not particularly engaged.”

  “I believe he is engaged now, sir,” apologized the attendant. But if the visitor might be willing to wait for an appointment at a later—

  “Tell His Excellency,” the envoy declared. “Tell him to PARDON DOCTOR WEBSTER. Tell him from me, Antonio Emanuel Knight. Tell him,” he concluded, “that I and the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company consent that he should be pardoned.”

  And with that, he bowed deeply, turned on his heel, and departed. “From what mad-house he escaped is not known,” sniped a Daily Mail reporter. In fact, unknown to the newspaper, the man had indeed been in an asylum—and also in Webster’s Class of 1815 at Harvard Medical School.

  The hearings by the Executive Council had now dragged on for weeks; its July 18 hearing would be the last chance for final appeals. When the hearing commenced that morning, the panel found itself facing two familiar figures: Reverend John Spear and his brother Charles Spear, the latter a founder of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment. Charles published the Prisoners’ Friend and was a zealous speaker at reformist meetings of every variety. After one particularly hectoring peace-rally speech, his fellow pacifist Thoreau drily remarked to Emerson, “Ought he not to be beaten into a plowshare?”

  A pardons hearing without the Spear brothers was inconceivable, and this time they were at their most ardent.

  I have more petitions for clemency for Dr. Webster, Charles began. These were in addition to the pile of petitions he’d brought to the last meeting. Also: Was the council aware that Michigan had abolished the death penalty four years ago, with excellent results? And that Webster’s family, more than Webster himself, would also be made to suffer by this punishment? And that a living Dr. Webster would have greater opportunity for true repentance?

  I also have a letter regarding Daniel Pearson, Spears continued.

  The lieutenant governor cut him off: That’s not in the purview of this hearing.

  It was worth the try; Pearson, who’d murdered his wife and two children, was due to go to the scaffold in a matter of days. His defense claimed insanity—and, in fact, the Spear brothers had often prevailed at such hearings in the past. Before the execution of Washington Goode, three death sentences in a row had been commuted, and still others had been narrowly avoided in court through the innovative use of a sleepwalking defense. Webster’s case was less promising, though, as somnambulism was a less felicitous argument when there were promissory notes and a week of dismemberment involved.

  Above all, time was the enemy in death sentence appeals. The irrevocable nature of the punishment meant that neither new evidence nor succeeding governors could undo the mischief of their predecessors. A law had already been proposed in the Massachusetts Senate that all death sentences first be preceded by a year of hard labor—a proposal that, one observer noted, was “presumed to have reference to Professor Webster’s case.” But it hadn’t come to a vote yet.

  A few more petitions were put forward; another helpful local brought in a grapevine club, to show that it, and not the missing sledgehammer, could indeed have inadvertently inflicted a deadly blow. “The weapon was knotty and substantial,” an Evening Transcript reporter admitted, “and altogether had a murderous look.”

  But all of this was not enough.

  When Sheriff Eveleth brought the death warrant to the jail cell, the professor had already heard the news: he’d read it, just like everyone else, in the evening newspaper. His fellow condemned prisoner, Pearson, was led onto the scaffold the following week, and asked if he had any final message for Dr. Webster.

  “Yes,” he said. “Tell him to prepare to meet his God, as I trust I have done.”

  AND SO the preparations began. A few days after Pearson’s body was cut down, jailer Andrews led a new visitor into Webster’s cell—someone the professor had been asking to see. The prisoner, occupied in no small part these days by his Bible, leapt up and warmly grabbed the visitor’s hand.

  Mr. Littlefield, he said earnestly. I have done you a great injustice.

  “I forgive you, Dr. Webster, with all my heart,” Ephraim replied. “And I pity and sympathize with you.”

  The Parkman reward had not brought the janitor much happiness. With the usual summer ravages of illness and mortality afoot, he’d lost a child recently. And his own reputation would never quite recover; after the Boston Daily Atlas revealed that he’d been offered $500 to tour with a Parkman and Webster waxworks exhibit, papers across the country repeated the figure as $5,000, attacking him as if he’d already taken the offer.

  But Dr. Webster was no longer one of his detractors.

  “Mr. Littlefield, all that you said was true—you have misrepresented nothing,” the professor assured him. One thing from the trial that still bothered Webster, though: the hint by the prosecution that the missing sledgehammer was the murder weapon. “As a dying man,” he insisted, “I have no recollection in regard to the sledgehammer.”

  If Webster and Littlefield had found forgiveness in their hearts for each other, the same was not true for Parkman’s family. Webster quietly wrote the Reverend Francis Parkman a letter expressing “sincere contrition and penitence” and explaining that “I had never, until the last two or three interviews with your brother, felt towards him anything but gratitude for his many acts of kindness and friendship.” Parkman spurned the condemned man. Fanny Longfellow, well familiar with both, had predicted as much to her father months earlier: “This is asking for more magnanimity than they possess, as the Reverend is very savage, for a reverend.” Reverend Parkman had once been a great advocate of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, yet his voice was now conspicuously missing from the cause. Was abolition only for other people’s losses? For a man of the cloth who had once baptized Webster’s grandson, there was something uns
eemly in both his readiness to see the professor executed and his unwillingness to even acknowledge the possibility of forgiveness. Public sympathy for Reverend Parkman curdled. “The response was not what, under the circumstances, it should have been,” one newspaper remonstrated, citing its “exhibiting a spirit of unforgiveness.”

  Such criticism paled, though, beside that of correspondents angry at Governor George Briggs’s refusal to commute the death sentence. Each day’s mail seemed to bring more abuse, more invective, more unsettling weirdness. Breaking the wax seal on an envelope had become a fraught task in the governor’s office.

  “The feet of those who have just carried out the President of the United States, are at thy door, thou Governor of Massachusetts, and shall carry thee out,” promised one letter, which also accused Briggs of “murder, legalized to be sure, but the none the less murder.” And then, a few lines later: “Yes,” it helpfully reminded him, “murderer thou art.” Now that Briggs had executed Washington Goode and Daniel Pearson, and because of the impending execution of Webster, God would speak to the governor in thunder: “It shall be thy death-bed music (if thou art permitted to die in bed) unless thou shalt repent.”

  God had been in urgent communication with a number of the governor’s correspondents; another informed Briggs that “I Rite to inform you that they Had taught me to shut up Webster who killed Parkman but not Hang Him For God has told Me so I left home the 15th of July to Come up and se you And I walked the Most of the way to Springfield when I got there they told Me you was yet to Home.”

  Some letters had traveled even farther; the missive of a “Launcelot English” of New Orleans dubbed Governor Briggs “a hypocrite . . . aye a most oppressive scoundrel.” But local writers were the most worrisome: one explained that he personally commanded a band of avengers, and that on August 25 they would “burn your dwelling to the ground and put an end to your damnable life . . . you are a God damned, miserable, lying, thieving, villainous rascal, a sick man for Governor. If Professor Webster is hung there will be a funeral from your dwelling.” The letter was signed “Bambazilla Frothingham.”