Snow-Storm in August

by Jefferson Morley

  What do you recall about the room before you left it?

  “When I left the room,” Anna said, “his mother was rushing up toward him.”

  From the gallery, Maria Bowen was watching her mistress; no doubt her boy’s life depended on every word.

  What happened next?

  “When I returned he was making a great noise at the back door. He seemed to be intoxicated. He was not much used to drinking.”

  The district attorney yielded to General Jones. Anna’s attorney was, as one friend described him, “a small spare man of insignificant appearance with plain features” except his eyes, which showed “piercing intelligence and shrewdness of expression.” Jones’s voice was thin and high-pitched, his questions gentle.

  Do you think that the prisoner intended to harm you that night?

  “I do not believe he had any malice toward me,” Anna said.

  Did he say anything when he came in the room?

  “I did not hear him speak a word.”

  Jones sought to plant some doubt about the district attorney’s witnesses.

  When you returned to the house with Dr. Huntt, what did you see?

  “When Dr. Huntt arrived, the prisoner’s mother had gotten him out of the room, and out of the house.”

  Jones stopped. He wanted to leave the jury with this fact: Dr. Huntt didn’t get there until it was all over. He had no firsthand knowledge of Arthur’s actions inside the room.

  Key countered by calling Dr. Huntt.

  “I was lying at home in bed on the fourth of August when I was, at about one o’clock in the morning, awakened and alarmed by the screams of a female voice,” he began. “It was Mrs. Thornton, crying, ‘Don’t put on your clothes—come directly—she’s killed.’ ”

  With a glance, the district attorney begged for explanation.

  “I took her meaning to be that Mrs. Thornton’s mother, who was left in the house, was killed,” Huntt explained. “I ran to the mother’s room. The prisoner’s mother—an old woman living with Mrs. Thornton—had got him out of the house. She said, ‘I’ve got him out, he’s crazy. He came with an uplifted axe.’ ”

  Key hoped the jury would absorb the witness’s point. Dr. Huntt was saying that Maria Bowen had said her son came into the room with an uplifted axe.

  “The prisoner was quite violent after he was got out,” Huntt went on. “He struck the door with the axe repeatedly crying out, ‘I’ll have the hearts’ blood of you all.’ ”

  Did he threaten you?

  “I must say that he did not use any threat towards me or any particular individual,” the doctor allowed. “It was a general threat. ‘He would be free, he would have his freedom.’ He made use of some such expression as this. He said that ‘if Philo Parker and some others had not been put in jail, he would have made them all smell hell.’ ”

  That satisfied the district attorney, who sat down. General Jones immediately asked Anna to return to the stand.

  Do you recall the prisoner’s mother saying that the axe was uplifted?

  Anna was in a difficult position. She did not want to question the veracity of her friend Dr. Huntt. But the fact was that Maria had never said anything about an uplifted axe. Thinking quickly, Anna took responsibility for the phrase, the better to refute it.

  “I’m not certain whether I said it was an uplifted axe,” Anna said. “I do not think that I saw it uplifted. I believe he blundered into our room, not knowing where he was going, that he was intoxicated.”

  Nevertheless, the damage was done. By attributing the uplifted axe to Maria Bowen, Dr. Huntt made his version of events unquestionable. Only Maria could corroborate Anna’s story that the boy had not raised the axe against her. Key knew what Maria Bowen would say if called. She had told her story to the grand jury several times. General Jones wanted her to testify at the trial of her son, and her name appeared on the witness list for U.S. v. John Arthur Bowen.

  Yet Maria Bowen was never called. By law an enslaved person could testify in cases involving other slaves or free colored people but not in cases involving whites. By attributing the uplifted axe comment to Maria, not Mrs. Thornton, Dr. Huntt ensured that Maria could not testify lest she impeach a white man’s testimony. Instead, he attributed to her words that condemned her son. His testimony was central to Key’s effort to overcome Anna’s insistence that Arthur had never raised the axe.

  Key built his case by calling General Gibson. He told the story of being awakened in the middle of the night and going to the house where Arthur “was on the outside thundering at the door, and using very threatening language. I felt glad I was inside the house.”

  Key called Madison Jeffers, who was even more hostile to Arthur.

  Did you ever speak with the prisoner?

  “As I was conducting him to jail in the hack,” Jeffers replied, “I asked him what could have possessed him to make the desperate attack upon Mrs. Thornton. He said he had a right to be free, and until the colored people were free, there would be so much confusion and bloodshed as would astonish the whole earth.”

  Key let that idea hang in the air for the jurors.

  Anything else?

  “He seemed quite sober then,” Jeffers said.

  Against this onslaught, General Jones called William Costin, one of the most respected colored men in Washington City.

  Did you see the prisoner on the night of August fourth?

  “He was present that evening at a meeting of a debating society,” said Costin. “He talked very strongly on that occasion.”

  Key wanted to know more: Whose debating society was that?

  “He belonged to John Cook’s debating society,” Costin replied.

  General Jones called Cook. Blacks could, and often did, testify in court cases—if the defendant was also black. The schoolteacher had taken a big chance coming back from Pennsylvania to speak for Arthur, a risk he was willing to take for the sake of explaining his efforts to educate the boy.

  What was the purpose of your Philomathean debating society?

  “It was a debating society,” Cook said. “He was a member and I was a member.”

  Cook probably knew better than to talk about the Philomathean, the abolition of slavery, or the rights of man in this venue. The white jurors would probably not appreciate hearing a colored man explain to them that “Philomathean” meant “love of learning” in Latin. Cook probably said more, but the only newspaper account of the trial did not record it.

  There were no more questions. All that remained was the instruction of the jury.

  The district attorney spoke first. Key asked Judge Cranch to instruct the jury that “if they believe from the evidence that the Prisoner took the axe, and entered with it, into his mistress’s room with the intent to murder her, and was prevented by the awakening of his mistress and her servant and by the noise, and his being seized, and forced out of the room, from executing his intention, then the prisoner is guilty.

  “Second,” Key went on, “if the jury believes, from the evidence, that the prisoner was drunk when he formed and attempted to execute the above intention, it does not excuse the prisoner.”

  When it was Jones’s turn to speak, he countered by asking that the intoxication of the prisoner be “considered by the Jury as accounting for his misconduct and inferring the absence of malicious and felonious interest.”

  “Refused,” said Judge Cranch.

  “The intoxication of the prisoner is proper to be considered by the jury,” Cranch ruled. It should inform “their opinion as to the intent with which the prisoner took the axe and entered his mistress’ chamber.”

  Key had outwitted Jones and ended the trial on a note favorable to his case.

  The jurors filed out of the courtroom and went upstairs to the jury room. Anna was still sitting in the gallery. She ached that Maria had not been allowed to testify. The courtroom fell quiet. The spectators contemplated the awesome silence of justice. Arthur waited, Maria waited. Anna went outside. Fiftee
n minutes later, the foreman returned to say the jury had reached a verdict. The jurors returned and the spectators stilled themselves.

  “We find the prisoner guilty,” announced the foreman.

  Conversations started everywhere save the dock, where Arthur sat alone and condemned.

  “Your Honor,” General Jones shouted to Judge Cranch over the din, “I hereby give notice of my intention to move for a new trial.”

  36

  A VERDICT OF GUILTY has been returned in the Washington Circuit Court against Bowen (negro) for attempting the life of his mistress Mrs. Thornton, widow of the late Wm. Thornton of the Patent Office,” Edgar Snowden reported in the Alexandria Gazette that week. “It will be recollected that he entered her bed room at night with an axe, and was prevented from committing the murder by his mother.”

  This was the essence of what people knew about Anna Maria Thornton and Arthur Bowen, thanks to the newspapers. The jury’s verdict obscured Anna’s account of what had actually happened. Not that everyone was interested. Francis Blair at the Globe did not carry the news of Arthur Bowen’s conviction. Nor did Seaton and Gales at the Intelligencer. Duff Green never mentioned it in the Telegraph. They presumably did not want to give inspiration to other black rebels or remind whites that they might be vulnerable to attack. So the real story of August 4—that Arthur had stumbled into her room, not to kill her, but because he was drunk—spread more by word of mouth.

  Satisfied that justice had been done, Key turned his attention to prosecuting the rioters of the Snow-Storm. He sympathized with their anger about the infamies of Bowen and Crandall. He was prepared to show leniency. The abolitionist provocations threatened the safety of all white people. But he also thought it important to uphold the rule of law. Twenty-six men had been charged during the August disorder. In the court’s winter session, Key resolved the cases of nineteen. He obtained convictions of ten, usually resulting in fines of up to fifty dollars but no jail time. The most important Snow-Storm case, U.S. v. Fenwick et al., which involved Andrew Laub and six other leaders of the mob outside the Epicurean Eating House, was postponed until the court’s spring term.

  Key’s prosecution of Arthur Bowen and the rioters served him well in the councils of the Jackson administration. Months before, when President Jackson was considering appointing Roger Taney to fill an opening on the Supreme Court, Key had the foresight to help his brother-in-law’s cause by coaxing an endorsement from his longtime friend Chief Justice John Marshall, who was living out his life as the most venerated judge in the new republic. After Marshall died in July 1835, Jackson decided to nominate Taney to succeed him, and on December 28, 1835, he announced the appointment publicly. It had been less than five years since Key had helped lift Taney from Maryland state politics to the presidential cabinet.

  In that short span of time Taney had transformed himself. From small-town lawyer in Frederick, where he felt inferior to the more gifted Key, Taney now stood atop the American legal profession. The former treasury secretary who championed the Bank War was a provocative but unsurprising choice for Jackson. In the words of historian Page Smith, Taney shared the president’s “democratic aspirations and sometimes misplaced faith in the people.” He was sympathetic to “the rights of states and suspicious of the moneyed interests,” meaning his legal thinking defended the southern slave masters and mistrusted eastern banks and corporations. According to biographer Victor Weybright, Key worked “day and night” to secure approval for Taney’s ascension to the high court.

  Arthur Bowen, of course, had not gone anywhere. He sat in his cell on the second floor of the City Jail with nothing to think about except whether he would die. People urged him to repent, but how could he repent for something he did not remember? He could only blame his deed on what he called “the madness of intoxication.” He swore to visitors that he had not intended to harm Mrs. Thornton. “He persists, as he has uniformly done, in denying it,” said John O’Sullivan in the Metropolitan, “and expresses kind feelings towards his mistress, and gratitude for her exertions in his behalf.”

  Newspapers then circulated in the jail, so Arthur probably knew what was happening up on Capitol Hill. Indeed, if Arthur’s cell sat on the east side of the building, then he could see Dr. Thornton’s most famous building from his window. The issue of slavery was disrupting the work of the Congress. The pamphlet campaign, which had stoked the fears of whites and somehow instigated the Snow-Storm in Washington and anti-abolitionist riots elsewhere, had also pricked the American conscience. The issue was slavery and could not be suppressed. The aftermath of rioting inspired tens of thousands to sign petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. Arthur’s neighbor on F Street, John Quincy Adams, and other northern congressmen were introducing new antislavery petitions almost every day on the floor of the House of Representatives while enraged southern congressmen shouted objections. As historian William Lee Miller has noted, the congressional debate that erupted in December 1835 proved to be “the first explicit and extended struggle” over slavery, which forced “a national fork-in-the-road choice between inherited despotism and developing democracy.” For the first time, the question of the abolition of slavery dominated the deliberations of the U.S. Congress.

  Not that it would do Arthur Bowen any good.

  One floor below, in another dank brick-lined eight-by-eight-foot cell, Reuben Crandall sat on the bench writing a letter to his father. Like Arthur, Reuben had lived in the confines of the City Jail since August. Key had not held a bond hearing or even filed charges. From his room in the jail, Crandall too might have been able to see the Capitol as well. He certainly kept track of the fierce debate growing in Congress, where the angry southerners demanded a gag rule to prevent the northerners from even raising the issue of slavery in the District. The passions in Congress were affecting his case.

  After Rueben’s arrest his family had retained Richard Coxe, a respected attorney, to defend him. The son of a congressman from New Jersey, Coxe had argued both in the local courts and in the U.S. Supreme Court and knew Francis Scott Key quite well. Coxe brought on as co-counsel a thirty-four-year-old lawyer named Joseph Bradley, a cousin of Mayor William Bradley. Coxe and Bradley had originally demanded Mr. Key charge Crandall or release him. As the angry debate in Congress continued in the winter of 1835 with insults and death threats abounding, they changed their minds. They asked for a delay, fearing popular passions might inflame a jury.

  “The debate in Congress on the abolition question has kept up the prejudice against me so much that it was thought unsafe to go to trial at this term,” Crandall wrote to his father.

  When the district attorney finally charged Reuben in early January 1836, the tone of the five-count indictment was harsh. Crandall, Key wrote, was “a malicious, seditious and evil disposed person disaffected to the law and government of the United States.” He had “most unlawfully, mischievously and seditiously” contrived “to traduce, vilify and bring into hatred and contempt among the good Citizens of the United States, the laws and government of the United States … and to … excite the good people of the United States to resist and oppose and disregard the laws and government … and the rights of the said proprietors of slaves … and to inflame and incite to violence against the said proprietors of said Slaves.”

  Key asked for a bond of fifteen thousand dollars for Crandall’s pretrial release, a sum that was triple the president’s annual salary. Judge Cranch reduced the bond to five thousand dollars, still far more than the Crandall family could afford.

  Reuben remained in his eight-foot cell. The place smelled awful, and the smoke from the fireplaces could not entirely dispel it. Sitting here day after day, with only an occasional walk outside, was the price Reuben had to pay for believing in immediate emancipation. He waxed bitter about the district attorney in another letter to his father.

  “Mr. Key takes very unwarrantable grounds against me for nothing, only to bully the people into the belief
that he is with them in this affair, hook and line,” he wrote. “He is very distrustful of the people, as well as they of him. He had once been a preacher of the gospel, and then turned politician and lawyer.”

  Crandall alluded to Key’s faded reputation as a humanitarian.

  “He has been called heretofore, ‘the Blacks Lawyer,’ as he took up their cases for them when they sued for their freedom.…By his former conduct the people are distrustful of his honesty of motive.”

  Crandall cut off the thought as if he did not wish to complain. He had to be patient, to endure this trial with Christian stoicism.

  “Please remember me to all our old neighbors,” he said in closing to his father. “I should be delighted to be there among you if it were possible.”

  Arthur’s conviction left the house on F Street gloomy. As the days dragged on, Anna Thornton all but collapsed into catatonic misery. She could think of nothing but Arthur’s fate. On Christmas Day, Anna opened a note from her friend Margaret Smith, who understood her misery. Margaret told Anna that she was not going to bother wishing her a Merry Christmas. “I do not consider merriment & happiness as synonymous,” she said.

  Instead, Margaret said she wished that Anna would stop thinking about Arthur.

  “It is your positive duty to take care of your own health on which so entirely depends your ability to support the declining days of your mother,” she wrote. Margaret insisted that Anna take “more exercise to divert your thoughts from the painful object on which they are continually fixed.”

  “I repeat,” she wrote, “do not think so much of one subject.”

  They were going to kill Arthur. Anna tried to stem the thought. She sought cheer by attending Margaret’s annual New Year’s Eve party at her house on Fifteenth Street and wound up feeling worse than ever. In her diary, Anna welcomed the end of “a most disagreeable and painful year.”

  She also wrote a note to Mr. Key beseeching him to drop the charges. She would sell Arthur away. Key did not respond.