Snow-Storm in August

by Jefferson Morley

  On Monday, Anna sent Bayard Smith to see Mr. Key at City Hall and ask about the possibility of selling Arthur off before his trial. Bayard returned with discouraging news. Mr. Key had said, “Nothing can be done but to let him stay and take his trial.”

  Anna wanted the district attorney to speak with her lawyer, Walter Jones, before making a decision. Jones, a good friend of her late husband, was one of the leading attorneys in Washington, as well as the head of the militia. He had also been a friend and colleague of Key’s for many years. The general, however, was not in the office; he had been summoned to Baltimore to defend the former officers of the failed Bank of Maryland, who faced another mob, this one consisting of working-class white people who had lost all hope of recovering their savings.

  There was another knock on the door. A constable said that Maria Bowen was wanted at City Hall to answer questions “about some suspected persons.” With misgivings, Maria went. When she did not return within a few hours, Anna became worried, and she sent George with the carriage to pick her up. Back in the house Maria recounted the urgency of her interrogators. The grand jury was looking for some free black men and suspecting the worst, she said.

  “Great excitement with thinking there is some plot among the Negroes,” Anna wrote in her diary that night.

  . . .

  At City Hall, Key was determined to choke off the incendiary publications that had apparently provoked Arthur. He called in some former neighbors who had been keeping an eye on Reuben Crandall in Georgetown. The district attorney wanted the grand jury to hear what they knew. William Robinson, a gentleman of means, told Key he had seen a pamphlet of “the most incendiary and insurrectionary character” inscribed with the words “read and circulate.” Robinson had compared the notation to Crandall’s handwritten prospectus for a botany lecture and concluded they were written by the same person.

  That sufficed for the grand jury. By the afternoon, Key had issued an order for Constables Jeffers and Robertson, commanding them to bring in Reuben Crandall “to answer to the charge of exhibiting and circulating dangerous and insurrectionary writings and thereby attempting to excite an insurrection.” Key also authorized the constables to search Crandall’s residence.

  As the constables descended the steps in front of City Hall with the warrant in hand, they found the crowd of last night had reassembled and grown. There were now hundreds of mechanics clamoring for the head of Arthur Bowen, but the Marines had not budged. Hoping to do something that might appease the rage of the crowd, Jeffers and Robertson climbed into a carriage and set off to Georgetown in search of Reuben Crandall.

  27

  REUBEN CRANDALL RESIDED on a respectable block at the north end of High Street, a hard-packed dirt road that passed between tree-lined rows of brick buildings and wood-frame houses. His neighbors included a music master and a portrait painter, as well as a bricklayer, a currier of leather goods, a clerk, and a butcher. There was nothing to distinguish Crandall’s quarters from his neighbors’, no sign of his business in the windows.

  After Jeffers rapped on the door and received no answer, Henry Robertson struck up a conversation with George Oyster, Reuben’s landlord. Oyster was sitting on his porch, not surprised that the constables were hunting for the New Yorker. It was about time, he thought. Soon enough James Gettys, a magistrate for the city of Georgetown, came out of his office and asked Jeffers the nature of his business. It didn’t take long for the word to get around. It was late afternoon when Crandall finally came striding down High Street. As he entered his office the two constables stepped up to him.

  “Are you Crandall?” Robertson asked.

  The rapid approach of two strangers did not unduly ruffle Crandall. He acknowledged that he was. Robertson showed him the warrant, and Crandall bade the men enter his office. Jeffers locked the door behind them.

  “Where’s the printing press?” Robertson asked, looking about the messy office. There was a desk, several wooden boxes, and a table covered with dried plants and newspapers.

  “I don’t understand,” Crandall said. “Can you explain?”

  He was playing for time. He knew what had happened to Ben Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison when they tried to raise the flag of liberty in the National Metropolis. The fact that a local jury had acquitted Lundy’s printer, William Greer, was small cause for comfort. He might have also heard of the charges against Thomas Cary and John Prout.

  “Where are the pamphlets?” Jeffers demanded.

  “What pamphlets?”

  “The abolition pamphlets,” said Robertson. “We want all of them.”

  “Look and see,” Crandall said. “I will give you any satisfaction in my power.”

  The constables began to paw through the newspapers on the table. There were a number of Telegraphs, as well as papers from Baltimore, New York, and Boston. In the pile, Jeffers found a copy of The Emancipator. Crandall knew it well. His friend Charles Denison edited it, but he did not say that.

  Jeffers showed the sheet to Robertson, who stuffed it in his pocket. Jeffers pulled a box away from the wall. It was open at the back, filled with a bundle of copies of The Anti-Slavery Reporter, all the same issue.

  “How did you come by these?” Jeffers asked.

  “They were sent around,” Crandall said, shrugging.

  Robertson bundled them up.

  “Can we go up to your lodgings?” Jeffers said, growing more confident that he had bagged his prey. “Do you have more there?”

  “A few,” Crandall acknowledged.

  They went up the stairs to his room. There was the big trunk he had brought from New York. Jeffers nodded at it, and Crandall opened it. There were more bundles of a sheet called Human Rights. The constables riffled through them. The copies appeared quite new.

  “Where did you get these?”

  Crandall knew what they were thinking. He had read the stories about the Anti-Slavery Society’s pamphlet campaign that was disturbing the city and the South.

  “I did not get them in the mail,” he assured them.

  “You are charged with distributing this material,” Robertson reminded him.

  “I haven’t distributed any,” Crandall objected, pointing to a copy of Human Rights. “I was taking The Emancipator, but they had stopped it and sent this instead.”

  Outside on High Street, the sun was setting. The constables could not see in the dimming light of the room, so Jeffers left to get a torch. Outside he was besieged by people who wanted to know what he had found.

  “More than I expected,” Jeffers said, as he headed for Linthicum’s store. “We found a hundred fifty, maybe a hundred and sixty pamphlets.”

  The men lounging around the counter at Linthicum’s gasped in excitement as those numbers made the rounds. Torch in hand, Jeffers went back up the street and pushed his way through the crowd around Crandall’s office. He reentered the building and locked the door again.

  He and Robertson finished searching the room by torchlight as the clamor of voices outside mounted.

  “We can take you to a magistrate here in Georgetown,” Jeffers said to Crandall, “or go to the jail.”

  “Let’s leave these people here,” Crandall said. “The jail is fine.”

  When the three men stepped out of the front door, a chorus of oaths, insults, and imprecations greeted them. The constables, carrying the bundles of pamphlets, pushed their way through the crowd.

  “We ought to take the damned rascal and hang him up on one of those trees,” someone shouted.

  Inside the carriage, Robertson said he did not want to risk taking the main streets. The choice proved wise, as Robertson later learned that a gang of men had stationed themselves on the main road and would have waylaid the carriage and killed Crandall on the spot.

  Like Arthur Bowen two days before, Crandall sat between Jeffers and Robertson. The bundles of publications rode on the seat beside them.

  “What were you doing with so many of them, all of the same number?” Jef
fers asked.

  “I got them for information monthly,” Crandall replied.

  “Why did you want so many of the same number?” Jeffers persisted.

  Crandall would not be intimidated.

  “I don’t mean to deny my principles,” he said. “I’m an anti-slavery man.”

  “Would not colonization be the better plan?” Jeffers demanded.

  “No,” Crandall said. “I’m in favor of the immediate emancipation.”

  Jeffers was appalled.

  “Don’t you think it very dangerous, at the present time, to set all the slaves free?”

  “I’m in favor of it,” Crandall said with a shrug. “The slaves ought to be all free. They have as much right to be free as we do.”

  The constables were aghast. This New Yorker sounded just like the Bowen boy the other day. One says, I have a right to be free, and the other says, They have as much right to be free as we do. Why did they incriminate themselves?

  “Don’t say too much or speak too freely,” Robertson warned him. “We might be witnesses against you.”

  When the carriage arrived at the jail in Judiciary Square, night had fallen. The constables handed Crandall off to the guards. They led him down the dark central corridor of the jail’s first floor and locked him into an eight-foot-square cell.

  Nine blocks to the east on the F Street ridge, Anna Thornton and Maria Bowen had no comfort either. Walter Jones had just returned from Baltimore, saying he had consulted with Mr. Key but “nothing can be done at present but to keep quiet and wait til time of trial.” Anna was dismayed. The circuit court’s fall session would not begin for three months.

  “O my God,” she wrote in her diary that night. “I hope some method may be found in the time come (November) to release him.”

  28

  ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 1835, Washington City went crazy, or at least a good portion of it did. As a result, not many people of color were seen on the streets. The bondsmen sat tight in the company of their owners. The free Negroes went to visit kin in the country. The president was on vacation, and the white man was running wild.

  The crowd in Judiciary Square was now immense, numbering three thousand people in one estimate and united in its determination to see both Arthur Bowen and Reuben Crandall hanged. Inside City Hall, Frank Key had assembled a group of witnesses in his office. But there was no way to bring Crandall over from the jail without endangering his life.

  “An alarming crisis,” one visitor to Washington wrote to a friend. “. . . The public indignation is rising high, and the general impression is the culprit will not go unpunished. It is seriously feared he will meet the same fate as those in Mississippi.”

  The jeering assemblage only grew jollier when drenched by a passing rainstorm. Perhaps the loudest voice in the tumult belonged to a young man named Andrew Laub, not thirty years old. Laub proclaimed himself leader of the mob and demanded the authorities hand over Bowen and Crandall. Laub scorned appeals for peace and calm.

  Not everyone agreed. “Our hearts grew sick within us when we hear the determination to ‘Lynch him’ ferociously expressed and applauded by the crowd,” wrote eyewitness John O’Sullivan, editor of the Metropolitan, the Georgetown newspaper.

  Andrew Laub represented that sizable segment of the white population who were not rich and not gentlemen. The son of John Laub, a career clerk in the First Comptroller’s Office of the Treasury Department, he was married with three children and owned two female slaves. Roger Taney certainly knew Laub’s father and might have even known him. The younger Laub had also worked as a clerk at the Treasury Department but did not last. In the wake of the fire that destroyed the department’s offices in 1833, authorities suspected him of financial irregularities, of which he was eventually cleared. He then found work as a groundskeeper on Mason’s Island in the middle of the Potomac River; he sold tickets when a balloon ascent was held there in the summer of 1834. Yet Laub was short of money. He had owned two lots of property on New York Avenue near Fourteenth Street but had recently lost them for failure to pay taxes. Laub was not poor, but he was on a losing streak.

  With coy malevolence, he roused the crowd against Arthur Bowen. The correspondent for the Richmond Enquirer was probably referring to Laub when he reported that “one of the men who seemed most anxious and resolute in raising the mob said they only intended to cut off both his ears and give him a good coat of tar,” adding, “I don’t think anything short of his life will satisfy them.”

  For the most part poor, the men and the boys clamoring in the streets found support from respectable gentlemen around town. Moore Galway, an editor at the Telegraph who was running the paper in the absence of the traveling Duff Green, had no objection to the lynching. “There was a great disposition manifested to exercise summary justice on him, which would have been by far the best course,” he editorialized. “It would have put a stop to the matter.”

  At noon the cloudy skies dropped more torrential rain, unaccompanied by lightning or thunder. The cascade, one of the severest in memory, drenched the men crowding the square but did not drive them away. The water ran downhill toward Pennsylvania Avenue. The whole of Sixth Street between Gadsby’s Hotel and the Epicurean Eating House resembled a broad river.

  Beverly Snow was nowhere to be seen.

  After the rain stopped, Mr. Key and his witnesses pushed their way through the crowd around the jailhouse door and gathered in Reuben Crandall’s cell. The scene inside the jail scarcely improved on the scene outside. In 1825, a congressional committee had condemned the jail’s “gloomy dominions” as unfit for the safekeeping of the unfortunates within its walls. A decade of neglect had just made things worse. Below the rotting beams in the ceiling, Key began the examination of the prisoner.

  Reuben Crandall felt panicky. The noise of the mob, the heat of the jail, and the arrival of his interrogators oppressed him. One witness described Crandall as “greatly agitated” by “the great collection outside the jail, which naturally caused a great excitement within.” With good reason Crandall feared he might soon go the way of a Vicksburg gambler.

  Two magistrates listened as the district attorney presented his witnesses. Dr. King of Georgetown said that he had seen a pamphlet endorsed with the words “please to read and circulate” in Crandall’s office. William King, a flour merchant, confirmed the story.

  Crandall struggled to keep his composure. When Key grilled him about the pamphlets, he answered evasively. At several points, he choked up in fear. Key felt that the magistrates had heard enough to charge the prisoner and completed the examination. The men left his cell.

  As Crandall collapsed, Key rallied. He exited the jail to address the infuriated and soggy crowd outside.

  “Crandall will be punished if you let the trial progress,” he declared to the throng. The crowd now occupied most of the plaza between Fourth and Sixth streets. Key knew how to project his voice without straining himself. He strove to be calm. He told the men that he sympathized with their anger and asked for their patience in letting the law take its course. The district attorney’s appeal, along with that of Mayor Bradley, finally succeeded in restoring quiet. The mechanics began to disperse into the night, still angry and resentful. Key walked to his house on C Street.

  Once again Key found himself at the center of a cataclysm. In 1814 he had faced the overwhelming British force at Bladensburg. Now he faced the unruly mobs of mechanics without adequate defenses. Mayor Bradley knew the city could not expect more U.S. government soldiers. All available troops were tied down in Baltimore, where the mobs had destroyed the homes of two leading bankers before order was restored. As backup, Bradley contacted Walter Jones, nominal leader of the city’s much-ridiculed militia. Bradley asked Jones to organize a force to restrain the crowds, protect public buildings, and preserve the peace. Expecting trouble, Bradley arranged for the Ordnance Office of the army to supply Jones’s men with fifty-five carbines, as many pistols, and fifteen hundred rounds of ball cartri
dges.

  29

  THE NEXT MORNING, the mob had a new target: Beverly Snow. The Epicurean Eating House was now surrounded by a crowd of mechanics led by the outspoken Andrew Laub, who shared a shocking rumor about the colored restaurateur: that he had dared to speak coarsely about white women. No one agreed on exactly what he had said. By one account, Snow had visited a butcher’s stall in the Centre Market and made “a remark derogatory to the character of the ladies of Washington.”

  The story gained detail as it spread. “Snow was reported to have made some very gross reflections on the mechanics of the city, as also on their wives and daughters,” the Telegraph reported.

  “He had used very indecent and disrespectful language concerning the wives and daughter of Mechanics,” reported the Mirror, adding he made an “infamous boast … in speaking of a respectable white woman.”

  Snow’s enemies may have invented the story with malicious intent. Beverly was a hospitable man by nature who had not cultivated a prosperous white clientele for his restaurant by dispensing coarse insults. No butcher, or any other man, white or colored, ever came forward to say he had heard Snow utter such sentiments, not even when there was great advantage to be gained from doing so. As for Washington society, Julia Seaton said she knew no one who believed the accusation. Michael Shiner, probably the best-informed black man about town, was less certain. “God knows whether he said those things or not,” he wrote.

  Given Beverly’s wit, it is possible the rumor had some basis in truth. He might have tossed off a cutting remark about the mob then running rampant in the streets. Many white people were appalled by the disorder too. Perhaps Snow was shopping for venison when his butcher mentioned the mob. The amiable chef might have responded by joking that while the mechanics waited around the jail to lynch poor Crandall, their wives and the daughters might be getting lonely at home. Such barroom banter would have been in keeping with Beverly’s irreverent character without intending to offend.