Snow-Storm in August

by Jefferson Morley

  She could only think of friends who had endured the premature deaths of their children. She recalled the story of a friend whose eldest daughter died on a steamboat the day before she was to join her parents. She thought of the son of another acquaintance who drowned in the Ohio River while returning from a family visit. It was as if Arthur were her child. In two days, he would be hanged with the approval of respectable white men whom she and Dr. Thornton had regarded as friends.

  Attorney General Butler delivered a four-page memo to President Jackson in his office on Thursday morning. The president’s pardon power was absolute, not conditional, Butler explained. The president could remove Arthur Bowen’s death penalty, but he could not modify it. Butler suggested the president could delay the sentence of execution by a series of reprieves and then issue a pardon. Jackson decided to do just that. This course would gratify Mrs. Thornton, whom he had come to admire for her candor and her courage. And it would not alienate those who wanted firmness in dealing with the Negroes. He reached for his pen.

  “Let the execution of the sentence in the case of Negro John Arthur Bowen be respited to the first Friday in June next,” he wrote on the court papers.

  A messenger took the package from the President’s House to City Hall, where it was delivered to the marshal. Preparing to serve as hangman in less than twenty-four hours, the marshal was more than relieved to receive Jackson’s order. (“Almost as grateful as the prisoner himself,” quipped John O’Sullivan.) Around three o’clock on Thursday afternoon, with the preparations of the gallows well under way, the marshal went to Arthur’s cell on the second floor to read the president’s order. One can imagine Arthur’s joy at being spared and the reaction of his fellow inmates. Even the reticent Reuben Crandall might have smiled at Arthur’s good fortune.

  At around ten o’clock that night big dry flakes of snow started falling from a cold sky and did not stop until dawn. By daylight, ten inches of snow covered the city of Washington. The carriages plowed through white dunes on the Avenue, but the sidewalks were deserted. On F Street Anna read about the respite in the Globe.

  The next day Arthur Bowen, warmed by the fireplace in his jail cell and the simple fact that he was alive, wrote a letter to Mrs. Thornton. If his language was extravagant, his emotions were too.

  “Respected Mistress,” he began. “It is with unspeakable gratitude that I embrace this opportunity of tending you my heartfelt, unfeigned thanks for your zealous noble deportment in my unfortunate case.” He wrote that he had heard that Mrs. Brodeau was indisposed and wished her good health. He asked Mrs. Thornton to “tender his obligation” to General Gibson and her other friends who had taken up his cause. He thanked her for believing him when he said he would never hurt her.

  “The idea is preposterous,” he wrote, “that I, in my right mind, would attempt to perpetrate…[the] murderous deed on you, my generous, noble-hearted, benefactor and mistress.…No indeed, it was the diabolical consequences of brutal intemperance, that infernal demon who is the provocateur and author of every villainous deed done by the unfortunate Sons of Man,” he said, sounding more than a little like John Cook. “This is my plea in extenuation of my implied transgression.”

  When Anna read the letter she was impressed. “Well written and worded,” she said. Indeed, the sophistication of Arthur’s heartfelt letter raises unprovable suspicions that someone else might have had a role in its composition, someone who knew the ways of Washington, how to combine candor and calculation. Or maybe Arthur just had some of the blitheness of Dr. Thornton. Would a young enslaved African American in 1836 presume to flatter the president of the United States? Arthur Bowen did.

  “Be kind enough, Respected Mistress,” he wrote to Anna, “to tend to President Jackson the homage of my grateful heart for his truly philanthropic deportment in my case. And I hope that he will yet live many years, an honor and boast as he is of the American nation.”

  What Francis Scott Key thought of Jackson’s respite for Arthur Bowen he kept to himself. He was not one to second-guess the general in the presidential mansion. Mr. Key might have recognized too that capital punishment was not popular in Washington and that, in this case, it no longer enjoyed the favor of public feeling, if it ever did.

  Mrs. Thornton had not only saved Arthur Bowen’s life. She had, with her own stubborn love, changed the mood of the city by changing how they saw Arthur. Said the Metropolitan, “This tempering of justice with mercy will, we are well assured, be highly grateful to the whole community of the District.”

  PART VI

  A DARK AND MYSTERIOUS PROVIDENCE

  “Slave Market of America,” a popular 1836 broadside about the capital’s role in the slave system, published by the American Anti-Slavery Society, needled District Attorney Francis Scott Key with its caustic headline: LAND OF THE FREE … HOME OF THE OPPRESSED. (illustration credit p.6)

  40

  AT THE CORNER of Sixth and Pennsylvania, the Epicurean Eating House was no more. Beverly Snow had not been seen in months. But his landlord, John Withers, refused to be chased off by hooligans. He and William Walker cleaned up the premises, and Walker opened a new restaurant in the same space, which he called the National Eating House.

  Walker sought to emulate Beverly’s style but not quite so provocatively. Like his former partner, Walker sought out the freshest in fish and fowl. Like Snow, he extolled his finds with hyperbole. “Oysters from Deep Creek, rich and plump,” he boasted in one newspaper announcement. “None like them have been seen nor will any more like them be seen until I advertise them again.” Walker was a good businessman. In time he would become the wealthiest black man in Washington City. But in the kitchen, William Walker was no Beverly.

  Nearby in his house on C Street, Francis Scott Key did not express any regret at the attack on the colored restaurateur or his restaurant. His vision of justice remained intact, his political ambitions large, though not for himself. When not fulfilling his duties as district attorney, he dedicated himself to securing the Senate approval of his brother-in-law Roger Taney as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

  In the effort to achieve confirmation, Key acted as Taney’s campaign manager. The problem was Taney’s actions around the Baltimore bank riots. That spring Taney had come out in favor of a bill in the Maryland legislature to indemnify two prominent Baltimore bankers—both friends of his—whose houses had been destroyed by the rioters. Taney felt bound to support them because their banks had failed as a result of the irresponsible speculations of his friend Thomas Ellicott.

  In an effort to divide Taney and Jackson, his opponents in the Senate floated the story that the president opposed the indemnity bill. That seemed plausible. In his war with Nicholas Biddle and the Bank of the United States, Jackson had often justified his controversial actions by invoking the interests of the common man against the depredations of bankers. To many Americans it hardly seemed fair that the working-class depositors had lost their savings because of the bank’s failure, while the bankers responsible for the failure were made whole.

  That’s not how Taney and Key saw it. On the morning of March 14, 1836, Key went to the President’s House on behalf of Taney and put the question to Jackson in person: Did he oppose the indemnity bill for the Baltimore bankers?

  “No! Positively no!” Jackson barked. “Those whose homes were destroyed ought to be paid in full.”

  That was the answer Key and Taney were hoping for. Key wrote a note to Taney telling him the president’s views. He added that the Senate would vote on Taney’s nomination the next day.

  On March 15, 1836, the Senate approved Taney as the fifth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. When Taney received the news in Baltimore, he wrote to Jackson, expressing thanks for the position, “the only one under the government that I have wished to obtain.”

  Two weeks later, on a mild spring day in Baltimore, he was sworn in. Key’s brother-in-law would serve as the nation’s senior judicial magistrate for the next twenty-eight y
ears as the struggle for universal emancipation evolved toward civil war.

  When the Washington circuit court opened for its spring term at the end of March 1836, Key resumed his busy life as prosecutor. He was living in the big house on C Street with Polly and the children and walking up Four and a Half Street daily to the courthouse. In his second-floor office, he worked long hours, punctuated by regular visits to Judge Cranch’s courtroom downstairs.

  In one of the season’s first cases, he won a guilty verdict against Poll Robinson, the most successful of the city’s black madams. It was a rare victory in his now-dwindling campaign against the bawdy houses. As Robinson was led away to serve a one-month sentence, Key moved to his next case, U.S. v. Fenwick et al. These were the charges of rioting brought against Andrew Laub and six of his friends who led the mob during the Snow-Storm.

  For the district attorney, this case was about sending a message to the disaffected white men of the city. In Key’s view, the offense of Laub and his friends was in no way as serious as those of Arthur Bowen or Reuben Crandall, but still the law had to be upheld. Key didn’t give a damn that Snow’s place had been trashed and the obnoxious mulatto run off. He wanted to send a clear message to Laub and company and to the people of the city: Rioting was not permissible.

  After hearing a day of testimony and arguments about the events of the previous August, the jury returned a split verdict, finding Laub and four friends guilty as charged, while acquitting two others. The jurors recommended the guilty men to the mercy of the court, a sign of their sympathies. Key shared that compassion and had no objection.

  The jury’s decision gave Judge Cranch considerable leeway in sentencing.

  Cranch, who had served as Washington’s chief jurist for close to three decades, had already thought the matter through. He had come to the city as a young man, married into a prominent family, and become a judge at an early age. He had lived in the District for nearly forty years. He remembered August 1814, when the British ran riot. He remembered last August and the incredible sight of the city’s ladies and gentlemen cowering before a drunken rabble that ravaged public buildings, schools, and houses of worship.

  Cranch spoke without notes from the bench, as Laub and his confederates listened in the dock.

  “No voluntary association of individuals, unknown to the constitution, has a right to make or execute the laws, or to judge, condemn, or punish those whom they may deem to be offenders … however pure or holy may be their motive,” he said.

  If the jurors thought Judge Cranch would be lenient because the defendants felt provoked by the deeds of Arthur Bowen or the flamboyance of Beverly Snow, they were unfamiliar with Judge Cranch’s rule of law.

  “When a mob is once raised,” he said, “no one can tell where it will end, and all who assisted in raising it are guilty of all the consequences.”

  Cranch considered the young white men whose fate he was deciding. These were not mere mechanics on a drunken bender. They were Andrew Laub, the son of a senior clerk at the Treasury Department; Alexander Beedle, a former constable; and John Clarke, who had served as a justice of the peace.

  “The more respectable the persons engaged in it, and the more desirable the end to be obtained, the more dangerous is the example,” Cranch emphasized. “If good men may use unlawful means to accomplish a good end, how can wicked men be restrained from using like means for an unlawful end?”

  Cranch let the convicted men ponder that question before passing his final judgment. “All good ends must be pursued by lawful means,” he said. “The supremacy of the law is the only security for life, liberty, and property.”

  Cranch sentenced the five men to the maximum possible punishment under law: six months in the penitentiary. He also ordered each to pay a fine of fifty dollars. That was certainly not the mercy that the defendants or the jurors or the district attorney had expected. There was rather less tolerance for the Mobocracy in Washington City than they had imagined.

  41

  THE LONG-AWAITED MATTER of U.S. v. Reuben Crandall began on a cloudy Friday morning, April 15, 1836. The setting was Judiciary Square. City Hall was thronged with spectators filing into the courtroom, with congressmen jockeying for seats along with national newspaper correspondents and many other people never seen before in the circuit court. Not since the House of Representatives tried Sam Houston for the clubbing of Congressman Stanbery back in April 1832 had so many people flocked to see the workings of justice in Washington City. And they came for much the same reason: to witness a legal struggle to define the nature of democracy in the nation’s capital.

  Once again Mr. Key’s reputation was at stake. People wanted to hear Key’s response to the challenge posed by the rise of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the abolitionist movement. He would not compromise. Just as the slaveholders’ representatives on Capitol Hill sought a gag rule to prevent debate over slavery on the floor of Congress, so did Key seek to silence those who would agitate for freedom on the streets of Washington City. In the trial of Reuben Crandall, he hoped to defeat the antislavery men in the court of public opinion.

  The district attorney arrived in the courtroom and, with an assistant, took his place at the government’s table. The defendant, dressed simply in a black suit and white shirt, sat with his lawyers Coxe and Bradley. Coxe was a temperance man, thin and precise. Bradley was young and good-looking, almost brash. Rueben Crandall looked “quite pale,” reported the Metropolitan, “owing to long confinement in our close and noisome prison.”

  When Judge Cranch asked Reuben how he pleaded to the five-count indictment, Reuben said quietly, “Not guilty.”

  Key rose at once and addressed the jurors. He read the five counts of the indictment, stressing that the first three were the most important. He said that Crandall had “published” various libels—meaning that he had made them available to others—including statements like this: “Then we are not to meddle with the subject of slavery in any manner; neither by appeals to the patriotism, by exhortation to humanity, by application of truth to the conscience.”

  This, said the district attorney, unlawfully challenged the right of white men to own property in black people.

  A second charge said Crandall had “published” another libelous passage, which Key read: “Our plan of emancipation is simply this—to promulgate the doctrine of human rights in high places and low places, and all places where there are human beings—to whisper it in chimney corners, and to proclaim it from the housetops.” For the district attorney such sentiments were patently illegal.

  A third count charged Crandall with possession of a dozen copies of publications that exhibited “disgusting prints and pictures of white men in the act of inflicting, with whips, cruel and inhuman beatings and stripes upon young and helpless and unresisting black children.” Such pictures, Key said, sought to incite slaves to attack their masters.

  There was no issue of freedom of speech, he added.

  “Such publications are always indictable,” he insisted. The publications that Crandall possessed in his Georgetown office were intended “to produce excitement, tumult, and insurrection among slaves, and among the free colored people; and among those white men who differ with most of us … upon the question of slavery.”

  There were three threats to the city, in Key’s view. The first was the enslaved Negroes of the city, like Arthur Bowen, whose alleged murderousness had been encouraged by these pamphlets. The second was the free people of color like Beverly Snow and Isaac Cary and John Cook, who deluded themselves with dreams of citizenship; and the third was their fanatical white friends like Ben Lundy and Reuben Crandall, who sought to impose their northern philosophies on the South. This was what Key wanted the white men of the jury to understand: They were the city’s first line of defense against this triple danger.

  “There is nothing,” he emphasized, “more calculated to excite sedition and insurrection in a community situated as ours is, than publications of such a character. It w
ill be my duty to read some of these publications; and there can be but one opinion about their character.”

  Richard Coxe rose before Key’s words could settle. Coxe was forty-three years old and far less eloquent than his opponent. But twenty-three years of practicing law gave him an understated style that was easy to underestimate.

  “I differ from the District Attorney, in supposing that the fact that the prisoner had such papers in his possession is conclusive … evidence of a criminal intent,” Coxe said. The publications might be very dangerous, he said, “yet the individual may have them in his possession with perfect innocence; because he is criminal only according to the use he makes of them.”

  Coxe offered a homely metaphor.

  “Consider poisons, such as arsenic or sulfur, which may be dangerous in the hands of some persons,” he said. “In others, such as apothecaries, physicians and discreet heads of families, it is harmless and innocent.

  “Gunpowder,” Coxe went on. “In improper hands, it might destroy a whole city. Properly kept, under necessary restrictions, [it] may be perfectly harmless and innocent.…

  “My object, principally,” he concluded, “is to announce to the gentleman”—a nod to his friend the district attorney—“that evidence to show merely that the prisoner had such papers as he describes in his possession, is not competent evidence of the malicious intent charged in the indictment. I will oppose the admission of any such testimony.”

  With that warning, the trial began.

  Mr. Key called his witnesses. He summoned to the stand Reuben’s neighbors in Georgetown, Dr. King and Mr. Robinson, who testified that they had each borrowed a copy of The Anti-Slavery Reporter from Reuben.