Читать книгу Black Rage Confronts the Law - Paul Harris - Страница 11

The sword comes into the world because of justice delayed and justice denied.

—The Talmud, Pirkei; Avot 5:11

The first recorded black rage defense took place in 1846. The parties involved included the son of an ex-slave and the wealthiest family in Cayuga County, New York. The prosecutor was the son of a U.S. president, and the defense lawyer was a former governor of New York. The trial was described as “one of the most interesting and extraordinary criminal trials that ever occurred in our country.”¹ It is a story of oppression and blood. It is a story of race and America.

William Freeman was born in a little settlement called New Guinea, a half mile from the town of Auburn, New York, in the year 1824. His father, James, a former slave, had been able to purchase his freedom in 1815. His mother, Sally, was part Native American, part African American, and was said to have some French blood. Therefore, William, or Bill as he was called, was considered a “quadroon of Tartar and African descent with a visage strongly marked with the distinctive features of the North American Indian.”

Sally’s tribe was virtually wiped out in the area near Berkshire, Massachusetts. She was a house servant and was sent to work in Auburn in 1817. There she and James were married, and William was born. Just three years after Bill was born, his father fell off the dock where he was working in Albany and died from the injuries. As was the custom with black children, Bill was sent to work as a servant boy for a white family when he was only seven years old. When he was nine he was transferred to the family of Ethan Warden, but he was fired because “of an uncontrollable disposition for play with other colored boys, which rendered his services valueless.”

Bill was then sent to work in the home of a judge. But he often left the estate to play in the countryside. He was so good at figuring out how to get away that this skill was blamed on his Indian heritage.

In the winter he worked doing household chores for a family named Lynch. When he was truant in his duties, Mrs. Lynch would whip him. Finally, unable to bear these whippings, the little boy escaped from the house and in his night clothes, in the freezing New York winter, fled home to his mother.

As Bill grew up he worked many places in and around Auburn, sometimes in private homes, sometimes as a waiter in local hotels. He was an intelligent, friendly, honest teenager who occasionally drank, as did his mother. When he was sixteen, however, an event took place that changed his life forever.

A woman named Martha Godfrey, in a town five miles from Auburn, had one of her horses stolen. Bill, who had been in the area, was arrested. After an examination by the magistrate, however, he was released. Weeks later the horse was found in a nearby county. It had been sold by a black man named Jack Furman. Furman knew that Bill had been a suspect and blamed the theft on him. Bill was again arrested. After a month in jail, frightened and desperate, he managed to break the lock of his cell, and he and another prisoner escaped. His cellmate was captured almost immediately, but Bill reached the woods and for two weeks was able to avoid the search parties. Finally, he was caught in a nearby town and returned to jail. Two months later he went on trial for larceny and breaking jail.

There were only three witnesses for the prosecution. Mrs. Godfrey testified to the loss and recovery of her horse. Mr. Doty, a neighbor, testified that he saw a Negro on the horse the night it was stolen. Jack Furman said that he went to the stable with Bill and saw him steal it. Bill testified that he was innocent and that he had only broken out of jail because he had heard Furman was going to lie about him in order to avoid prosecution.

The jury convicted Bill, and he was sentenced to five years at one of two large penitentiaries in New York, the State Prison at Auburn. Charges against Furman were dismissed. Evidence was later discovered that placed Bill at a different location on the night the horse was stolen. Furman, in the meantime, was arrested for another horse theft and was tried and sentenced to prison. But it was too late for Bill; he had been shipped off to what would become a nightmare of tragic proportions.

When sixteen-year-old Bill arrived at the prison he began to weep. Every person has a little place in his or her soul where hope is kept alive. Even though Bill had lived under an unjust system, some small part of him believed in justice. He was aware that new evidence had been found proving he was nowhere near the stable of the stolen horse, so Bill waited to be set free, but no relief came. The eyes of justice were indeed, in the words of the poet Langston Hughes, “two festering sores.”² How long can a man—or a sixteen-year-old boy—be in a prison cell wondering why he has been locked away for a crime he did not commit, without terrible changes taking place in his psyche?

Bill had been sentenced to hard labor. The prison had many shops where convicts worked under the supervision of private contractors. For two years Bill worked, mainly filing iron for plating. As time went on Bill became less intimidated and more angry. He resolved to struggle for the justice he felt he deserved. He told his bosses he should not have to work because he had done nothing to deserve being locked up in prison. The response he received was threats of punishment. So Bill worked less and less, which created hostility among his bosses, who viewed him as ignorant and incorrigible.

The keeper of the shop where Bill worked most of the time was a man named James Tyler. Tyler did not like Bill’s attitude and felt he was not doing enough work. He repeatedly threatened Bill with punishment. One day Tyler told Bill he didn’t want to hear any more excuses about being imprisoned. He said he was done trying to talk to him and was going to flog him. He ordered Bill to take off his clothes, and then turned around to get a cat-o’-nine-tails. Tyler later claimed that at this point Bill attacked him, and that during the fight Bill got hold of a knife. This was never confirmed by any other witnesses. But one thing was clear: Tyler hit Bill on the left side of his head with a large board that broke into pieces from the force of the blow. Tyler denied that the blow could have hurt Bill. Years later, however, a medical examination confirmed that the force of the board on Bill’s left ear had broken the ear drum and permanently damaged his left temporal bone.

Bill was now deaf in his left ear. His spirit seemed broken. He worked carrying yarn to and from the dye shop. He became sullen, morose, and easily provoked. He had two fights with other convicts over minor disputes, and both times Bill was flogged. The second time, the whipping was so bad that he could put his fingers into the hole that had been cut between his ribs.

His mental condition deteriorated. Prison rules did not allow conversation between inmates, and prisoners were supposed to talk to their bosses and guards only when it was necessary in performing their duties. With such disciplinary rules, no one recognized Bill’s worsening condition. They stereotyped him as a stupid, childlike Negro with a bad attitude. His brother-in-law, John Depuy, came to the prison five times to visit Bill. He was shocked at Bill’s state. He came home to tell Bill’s mother that her son had become deranged. The mother was so pained by what had happened to her son that she was unable to bring herself to go to the prison and face Bill.

After five years of prison, the day of Bill’s release arrived. The prison chaplain offered him a Bible, but Bill couldn’t read. Then the clerk told him to sign a voucher to receive two dollars. Bill looked at the voucher and said, “I have been in prison five years unjustly, and ain’t going to settle so.” The prison officers and the chaplain laughed.

John Depuy took him from the cold, foreboding halls of Auburn State Prison. Bill hardly recognized his brother-in-law. As they traveled home, Bill said he had accidently broken a dinner knife while eating and the guards had threatened to give him five more years in prison. He was afraid and asked John if they could do that to him. Over and over he said he needed to find the people who had caused him to be imprisoned and to make them pay him for the injustice he had suffered.

For months he lived with John. The people who had known him, both black and white, were stunned by the changes in him. He rarely talked, and when he did he often made little sense. People had described him as “a lad of good understanding and of kind and gentle disposition.” Now he seemed stupid, angry, and prone to break out in loud laughter for no reason.

One day, Bill walked the five miles to Mrs. Godfrey’s house and told her that he was innocent of stealing her horse and that he wanted her to pay him a settlement. She felt sorry for him and gave him some cakes. He left quietly.

Bill then went to a lawyer and asked for a warrant for the man whose testimony had put him in prison, saying that he wanted to get damages. The lawyer’s clerk told him to go to the justice of the peace’s office. A few days later he went to see a lawyer named Lyman Paine, who was a justice of the peace. Bill said he wanted “a warrant for the man who put me to State Prison.” Paine told him that the only warrant he could make out would be for perjury, and that he would need detailed facts to issue such a warrant. But Bill could not understand and just kept repeating himself. Finally, Bill threw a quarter on the table and said, “Sir, I demand a warrant.” He soon left the office but returned in the afternoon and gave Paine the names of Mr. Doty and Mrs. Godfrey. Paine would not issue a warrant and sent him away again. Refused a warrant, but unwilling to give up, Bill went to another justice two days later. Again he was denied a warrant and was informed that there was no legal remedy for his problem.

During the same period of time, Bill went to the John Van Nest farm, on Owasco Lake, four miles from Auburn. The Van Nests were a very wealthy and well-respected family. They had no previous relationship with Bill and had never seen him before. He asked for a job, was politely refused, and left the farm.

After being refused a warrant and visiting the Van Nest farm, Bill became more and more agitated. He bought two knives and, while showing them to John Depuy, started to threaten him. After John calmed him down, Bill said that he had found the folks that had put him in prison—“they were Mr. Van Nest”—and that he was going to kill them.

On the night of March 12, 1846, twenty-two-year-old William Freeman left the settlement at New Guinea with his knives, drank a pint of liquor, and walked to the Van Nest farm. He walked back and forth outside the yard, until after a long wait he saw Mrs. Van Nest open the back door and step outside. He ran toward her and began stabbing her. Her husband, John Van Nest, heard her screams and opened the door. Bill jumped on him and quickly killed him. He then ran upstairs and into a room where George, their two-year-old son, was sleeping, stabbing the boy so hard the knife pierced the bed. One of the men in the house, Cornelius Van Arsdale, confronted Bill and was also stabbed, but he managed to hit Bill with a candlestick and knock him down the stairs. As Bill left the house he ran into Mrs. Wyckoff, the mother-in-law, who attacked him with a carving knife and severed the tendons in his wrist. In the struggle, he stabbed her in the stomach. She too would die, two days later. Bill ran to the stable, took an old horse, and fled.

After some miles the horse gave out and fell. Bill killed the horse and stole another from a nearby barn. By the next day he was forty miles away in another village. When he tried to sell the horse, people became suspicious and called the authorities. A Mr. Alonzo Taylor found Bill in Gregg’s Tavern and arrested him. He accused Bill of the murder. When Bill denied, Taylor said, “You black rascal, you do know about it,” and raised his cane to hit him. He was stopped from striking Bill, but he then allowed two men to take Bill into another room “to get something out of him.” The two men beat Bill. He was then taken back to the Van Nest farm, where he was identified by Van Arsdale. He was continually interrogated and gave many different responses, from denials to statements that he wanted to get paid for being in prison, to sentences that just made no sense. One sentence, however, did make sense. Bill said: “You know there is no law for me.”

As word of the murders spread, people from all over the countryside gathered at the Van Nest farm. When Bill was brought there to be identified the crowd screamed for his death. They called out that he should be put on a rack, or burned at the stake. Some people had brought ropes and called for a lynching. However, the officers “by a diversion artfully contrived” escaped from the mob and managed to get Bill safely into the county jail. The mood in Auburn and Cayuga County was ugly. People were outraged when anyone even raised the idea that Bill might have been insane. The funeral services acted as a platform for Reverend A. B. Win-field, who used the sad occasion to stir up hatred against the “assassin” and to lobby for the death penally. Winfield’s speech is one that could be given today by proponents of capital punishment, as it criticized lawyers, judges, and the appeals process.

Winfield warned against “adroit counsel” who would use confusion and sympathy to pervert the law. He raised the specter of judges infected with sympathy who would thereby charge the jury in favor of the criminal. And he warned that the appeals process might put off the trial so long that witnesses would die. He railed against “false sympathy,” which would lead the murderer to be acquitted. He concluded by appealing to the assembly “to maintain the laws of their country inviolate” and put the murderer to death.

Given the atmosphere of the day, and the fact that the jurors would be drawn from the same county in which Winfield spoke, the reverend’s tirade served to inflame people even more against Bill and a possible insanity defense. His sermon was published and thousands of copies were given away free throughout the state of New York. The public was characterized by one of Bill’s attorneys as having “a demon thirst for blood, and unchristian thirst for revenge.” The Albany Argus observed: “It was with the utmost difficulty that the people of Auburn could be prevented from executing summary justice upon the fiend in human shape.”³

Bill, meanwhile, sat in his stone cell, chained at all times, as people from the community came and peered through the bars of the cell and doctors, law officers, and even the district attorney were allowed to question him.

As William Freeman lay chained in his cell, William Seward, the former governor of New York and one of America’s most prestigious lawyers, was talking with friends and associates from Auburn. A few of them pleaded with him to take up Bill’s defense. What kind of man was William Henry Seward, and why would he defend such an unpopular case? Seward was born in the farm country of New York State in 1801. His parents were of English, Welsh, and Irish extraction, leaving Seward with an affinity for Irish independence from Great Britain. His father, a Jeffersonian Republican, was a doctor, merchant, land speculator, and county judge. His mother was a compassionate woman, well respected in the community. Over the years his father amassed a fortune, and Henry (as he was then called) and his four siblings grew up in comfortable surroundings. In accordance with his father’s wishes, Henry went to college and then took up the study of law. He studied in school for one year and apprenticed in a law office for another year. At the age of twenty-two Henry passed his bar examination. He went to Auburn and began to practice law in the same firm as Judge Elijah Miller, a fortuitous move both professionally and socially. He met the judge’s daughter, Frances, and two years later they were married. Frances was an intelligent, strong, empathetic woman with a liberal Quaker background.

In 1830, Seward was elected to the state senate on the freedom and social equality program of the Anti-Mason party. He developed a reputation as a man who could forge idealism with political pragmatism. In 1838 he was elected governor of New York on the Whig party platform. An effective and respected politician, Seward advocated for penal reform, education for women, and schools for immigrants. When his term ended he returned to private law practice in Auburn, and no one doubted that at the propitious time he would again hold public office.

When William Freeman was captured and taken to jail, Frances Seward stood looking out the window of her house and watched the mob parading along South Street yelling for Bill’s death. She was quite shaken by the hate and thirst for vengeance she witnessed. She was also shaken by the murders. She had known the Van Nest family, and indeed, her husband had done legal work for them. She wrote to Henry in Albany, describing what she had seen and expressing concern for the prisoner.

Seward had developed an interest in the insane. His expertise was so great that social reformer Dorothea Dix visited him in Auburn in 1843 to get advice on how to improve conditions for the mentally ill. Months before Bill killed the Van Nest family, Seward represented another man accused of murder. The trial of that man, a black convict named Henry Wyatt, had taken place in Auburn. Seward defended Wyatt, who had killed another convict, on the grounds of insanity and obtained a hung jury. Retrial was set for June. Seward was encouraged to take Bill’s case and thereby increase his knowledge and skill in the defense of the criminally insane. He hoped that, through his defense of the case, the law of insanity would be developed to a more scientific and, in Seward’s mind, more humanistic level.

Seward was also drawn to Bill’s case due to his sympathy for the black race and his hatred of slavery and racism. Although he believed that whites were a “superior race” to blacks, he also believed and fought for the right of all men to vote. In 1846 he had declared that he would “give the ballot to every man, learned or unlearned, bound or free.”⁴

Along with his genuine humanitarianism, Seward also took Freeman’s case for pragmatic political reasons. Seward was a member of the Whig party. Its opposition, the Democratic party, was controlled by the proslav-ery forces of the South. The Democratic party had shown signs of growing strength in the North. At the same time, the antislavery Liberty party was gaining adherents in the North. Seward was afraid that the Liberty party would take votes away from the Whig party, resulting in a Democratic party victory in New York and in the nation. Seward and other influential Whigs pushed their compatriots to adopt positions against slavery and for Negro suffrage. He hoped his defenses of Wyatt and Freeman would gain publicity for the Whig program and expose the horrors of the existing racist system.

When Seward returned to his home and law office in Auburn and people heard that he was preparing to take Bill’s case, he began to receive hate mail and some of his friends urged him to reconsider. His father-in-law told him to “abandon the nigger.” But Frances encouraged her husband to defend Bill. He agreed with her, and ultimately Frances became active in the defense, doing research on mental illness. Seward’s strong feelings are evident in a letter he wrote to his best friend, Thurlow Weed.

There is a busy war around me, to drive me from defending and securing a fair trial for the negro Freeman. People now rejoice that they did not lynch him; but they have all things prepared for ... a mock trial He is deaf, deserted, ignorant, and his conduct is unexplainable on any principle of sanity. It is natural that he should turn to me to defend him. If he does, I shall do so.

Seward met with Freeman, who agreed that Seward and two other lawyers would defend him. There were almost no black lawyers in the entire United States. Two years earlier, in 1844, Macon B. Allen, the first African American attorney in America, was first allowed to practice law in Maine.

The preliminary hearing began in Auburn on June 1, 1846, after a motion to change venue to a location where the public was not as enraged and potentially prejudiced was denied. Judge Bowen Whiting presided over the trial, and State Attorney General John Van Buren, son of former president Martin Van Buren, was sent from Albany to prosecute the case.

Under the law as it now exists, a judge determines whether a defendant is sane enough to stand trial. The rule is that a person has to be able to understand the nature of the proceeding and to help his lawyer prepare a defense by providing facts, witnesses, and potential evidence. If a defendant cannot do these things because of a mental illness, he is considered incompetent to stand trial. Such a person is kept in custody until he regains, if ever, enough sanity to go through a trial. The requirements of the law were generally the same in 1846, except that a jury decided the issue of competency to stand trial.

In Freeman’s case, the jury decided by a vote of eleven to one that he was “sufficiently sane” to go through a trial. There was a strong feeling among those sympathetic to Bill that the jury was prejudiced against him and that the judge was making every ruling against him. Seward also was upset and wrote to his friend Weed, “I am crushed between the nether millstones of judicial tyranny and popular anger. But there will be a consoling reflection by and by that I was not guilty of hanging the poor wretches whom the State Prison tormentors drive to madness.”

After the preliminary hearing, Seward was forced to retry the case of the convict. Wyatt was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. Seward then had only a few weeks to prepare Freeman’s trial, which began on July 10, after a motion for a continuance was denied.

The jury consisted of twelve white men; at that time, women were not allowed to serve as jurors. Among the twelve were three abolitionists. The prosecutor asked them the following question: “Suppose it should be proved that the prisoner is a poor demented negro, would you think society ought to be punished and not the negro?” Juror Norman Peters replied, “I should hold him responsible the same as any other man.” The prosecutor was satisfied with the answers the men gave and left them on the jury.

The state presented its case, calling seventy-two witnesses. As in most insanity cases, the prosecution attempted to elicit evidence that showed a rational planning and execution of the crime, from which the jury could infer that the defendant knew what he was doing was wrong and that he was in control of his actions. The testimony showed that a week before the murders Bill bought two knives, that he hid the knives, and that he wanted to get the persons who caused him to be sent to prison. The evidence showed that he waited outside the Van Nest farm before trying to enter, and that after the murders he attempted an escape and lied when captured. In addition to the lay witnesses, eight physicians testified to their opinions that Bill was not insane. Dr. Bigelow, a leading witness for the state, summed up their medical case when he testified: “I believe him to be a dull, stupid, moody, morose, depraved, degraded negro, but not insane.”

Bill sat at the counsel table and watched the proceedings, which would likely have been even more traumatic for him had he been able to comprehend what was taking place. He sat quietly, his small body (five-foot-seven, 115 pounds) slumped over. He laughed for no reason. He continually smiled, seemingly unaware of the hate directed at him in the crowded courtroom.⁵

After the prosecution finished, Seward began his defense. He called thirty-six witnesses, among them nine doctors who testified that William Freeman was insane at the time he committed the murders. The essence of the psychiatric defense was that he suffered from a delusion that the Van Nest family had caused him to be put in prison for stealing a horse. Obviously, claimed Seward, this was a delusion because the Van Nest family had nothing to do with the horse-stealing case. This delusion was so strong that it overwhelmed Freeman’s rational thought; the criminal act he committed was “an immediate, unqualified offspring of the delusion.”

There was a great deal of testimony regarding mental disease, but the heart of Seward’s defense was to explain how social conditions caused the insanity. He would not have called his strategy a black rage defense. The very words “black rage” would have conjured up a strong, black man acting in rebellion against his oppression. Seward, limited by his own racial prejudices, felt more comfortable describing Bill as a “child” and a “wretch.” The implications of a black man so enraged at his condition that he would strike out against white people were not only terrifying, but threatened the entire social construct of blacks as a docile, weak, subservient race. So Seward did not talk about black rage; he probably did not even consider it. He did understand, however, that blacks lived under an unfair, oppressive system. He recognized that such a system had driven Freeman mad and was willing to put the system of racism on trial.

Seward’s two-day-long closing argument gives flavor and political context to the case. He showed no hesitation in putting forward the theme of racial injustice, arguing that if a white man or white woman had exhibited the signs of mental disease that Freeman exhibited, his or her case would have been dismissed.

Seward argued that prejudice infected the standards by which his client was judged. The symptoms of Freeman’s mental disorder were being misinterpreted simply as the normal behavior of an inferior race. He pleaded with the jury to look deeper than this stereotype and to treat Freeman as a man.

An inferior standard of intelligence has been set up here as the standard of the Negro race, and a false one as the standard of the Asiatic race. This Prisoner traces a divided lineage. On the paternal side his ancestry is lost among the tiger hunters on the Gold Coast of Africa, while his mother constitutes a portion of the small remnant of the Narragansett tribe. Hence it is held that the Prisoner’s intellect is to be compared with the depreciating standard of the African, and his passions with the violent and ferocious character erroneously imputed to the Aborigines. Indications of manifest derangement, or at least of imbecility, approaching to Idiocy, are, therefore set aside, on the ground that they harmonize with the legitimate but degraded characteristics of the races from which he is descended. You, gentlemen, have, or ought to have, lifted up your souls above the bondage of prejudices so narrow and so mean as these.

At this point, Seward pursued a strategy quite common in the nineteenth century: he brought religion into his argument. He reminded the jurors that all men, including black men, were created by God. He attempted to reach through their prejudice and feelings of superiority, to their shared Christian beliefs that all men are brothers.

The color of the Prisoner’s skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual, immortal mind which works beneath. In spite of human pride, he is still your brother, and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father, and yours and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race—the image of our Maker. Hold him then to be MAN. Exact of him all the responsibilities which should be exacted under like circumstances if he belonged to the Anglo-Saxon race, and make for him all the allowances which, under like circumstances, you would expect for yourselves.

Seward sought to demonstrate that Bill went insane by describing his life. Although he mentioned hereditary insanity as a predisposing cause, pointing out that Bill’s aunt died in a lunatic asylum and that his uncle was considered a lunatic, he focused primarily on the social conditions under which blacks suffered.

If neglect of education produces crimes, it equally produces Insanity. Here was a bright, cheerful, happy child, destined to become a member of the social state, entitled by the principles of our Government to equal advantages for perfecting himself in intelligence, and even in political rights, with each of the three millions of our citizens, and blessed by our religion with equal hopes.... [But] there was no school for him ... there has been no school here for children of his caste. A school for colored children was never established here, and all the common schools were closed against them.

Seward explained that when he tried to send colored children who worked for him to school with his own children, they were sent back to him with a message that black children could not go to the school.

He described how Bill was “subjected, in his tender years, to severe and undeserved oppression,” recounting how Bill was whipped by the family he worked for, beaten at another house because he forgot to return an umbrella, falsely convicted of stealing a horse, and at only sixteen years old sent to a state prison instead of a house of refuge. Seward railed against the prison, saying that “mere imprisonment is often a cause of insanity.” In Bill’s experience prison was a terrible nightmare, filled with beatings. The result was a descent into madness. Seward described it thus: “Such a life, so filled with neglect, injustice and severity, with anxiety, pain, disappointment, solicitude and grief, would have its fitting conclusion in a madhouse.”

An understanding of racial oppression was at the heart of Seward’s masterful closing arguments as he attempted to illustrate the consequences of Bill’s treatment at the hands of a prejudiced legal and penal system. One of the most powerful expressions of this injustice was articulated in John Depuy’s testimony, repeated by Seward in his closing argument: “They have made William Freeman what he is, a brute beast; they don’t make anything else of any of our people but brute beasts.”

In the cross-examination of the black witnessess, Hiram Depuy’s common-law wife, Deborah, was attacked for not being legally married, and Bill’s mother, Sally Freeman, was characterized by the prosecution as a drunk. Seward’s defense of these witnesses is interesting because it provides us with a window into the philosophical views of a racist nineteenth-century America and exposes the paternalism and notions of superiority of William Seward himself, one of the country’s leading white liberals.

Deborah De Puy is also assailed as unworthy of credit. She calls herself the wife of Hiram De Puy, with whom she has lived ostensibly in the relations of seven years, in, I believe, unquestioned fidelity to him and her children. But it appears that she has not been married with the proper legal solemnities. If she were a white woman, I should regard her testimony with caution, but the securities of marriage are denied to the African race over more than half this country. It is within our own memory that the master’s cupidity could divorce husband and wife within this State, and sell their children into perpetual bondage. Since the Act of Emancipation here, what has been done by the white man to lift up the race from the debasement into which he has plunged it? Let us impart to Negroes the knowledge and spirit of Christianity, and share with them the privileges, dignity and hopes of citizens and Christians, before we expect of them purity and self respect.

But, gentlemen, even in a slave State, the testimony of this witness would receive credit in such a cause, for Negroes may be witnesses there for and against persons of their own caste. It is only when the life, liberty or property of the white man is invaded, that the Negro is disqualified. Let us not be too severe. There was once upon the earth a Divine Teacher who shall come again to judge the work in righteousness. They brought to him a woman taken in adultery, and said to him that the law of Moses directed that such should be stoned to death, and he answered: “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.”

Seward’s defense of Sally Freeman shows his heartfelt compassion and his shame for what the white man did to Africans and Indians. Yet even here, the disease of superiority seeps through his oratory.

The testimony of Sally Freeman, the mother of the Prisoner, is questioned. She utters the voice of nature. She is the guardian whom God assigned to study, to watch, to learn, to know what the Prisoner was, and is, and to cherish the memory of it forever. She could not forget it if she would. There is not a blemish on the person of any one of us, born with us or coming from disease or accident, nor have we committed a right or wrong action, that has not been treasured up in the memory of a mother. Juror! roll up the sleeve from your manly arm, and you will find a scar there of which you know nothing. Your mother will give you the detail of every day’s progress of the preventive disease. Sally Freeman has the mingled blood of the African and Indian races. She is nevertheless a woman, and a mother, and nature bears witness in every climate and every country, to the singleness and uniformity of those characters. I have known and proved them in the hovel of the slave, and in the wigwam of the Chippewa. But Sally Freeman has been intemperate. The white man enslaved her ancestors of the one race, exiled and destroyed those of the other, and debased them all by corrupting their natural and healthful appetites. She comes honestly by her only vice. Yet when she comes here to testify for a life that is dearer to her than her own, to say she knows her own son, the white man says she is a drunkard! May Heaven forgive the white man for adding this last, this cruel injury to the wrongs of such a mother! Fortunately, gentlemen, her character and conduct are before you. NO woman has ever appeared with more decency, modesty, and propriety than she has exhibited here. No witness has dared to say or think that Sally Freeman is not a woman of truth. Dr. Clary, a witness for the prosection, who knows her well, says, that with all her infirmities of temper and of habit, Sally “was always a truthful woman.”

Seward finished his two-day-long closing argument with a rhetorical flourish and poetic language rarely found in today’s courtrooms.

The Prisoner, though in the greenness of youth, is withered, decayed, senseless, almost lifeless. He has no father here. The descendant of slaves, that father died a victim to the vices of a superior race. There is no mother here, for her child is stained and polluted with the blood of mothers and of a sleeping infant; and “he looks and laughs so that she cannot bear to look upon him.” There is no brother, or sister, or friend here. Popular rage against the accused has driven them hence, and scattered his kindred and people...

I must say to you that we live in a Christian and not in a Savage State, and that the affliction which has fallen upon these mourners and us, were sent to teach them and us mercy and not retaliation; that although we may send this Maniac to the scaffold, it will not recall to life the manly form of Van Nest, nor reanimate the exhausted frame of the aged matron, nor restore to life, and grace, and beauty, the murdered mother, nor call back the infant boy from the arms of his Savior. Such a verdict can do no good to the living, and carry no joy to the dead. If your judgment shall be swayed at all by sympathies so wrong, although so natural, you will find the saddest hour of your life to be that in which you will look down upon the grave of your victim, and “mourn with compunctious sorrow” that you should have done so great injustice to the “poor handful of earth that will lie mouldering before you.”

John Van Buren did not have the oratorical skills of William Seward, but his presentation was a model of logic and persuasiveness. Van Buren, like most prosecutors faced with a political trial, tried to deny the politics of the case, defining it solely as “a criminal case.” When confronted with racial issues the typical prosecutor will reject the idea that racial oppression can lead to a crime, stressing instead the criminal nature of the defendant and commending the law for its equal treatment of different races and classes. Van Buren’s argument is an early example of this traditional response of the state’s representatives. He praised the “impartial administration of justice” and told the jury that the trial had taken place in an atmosphere of “calm and dispassionate examination.” His opening words describe Bill as a member of an inferior race, a criminal personality who is fortunate to have the benefit of a great lawyer and distinguished witnesses.

It is a gratifying feature in our institutions, that an ignorant and degraded criminal like the prisoner, who has spent a large portion of his life in prison; vicious and intemperate of his habits; of a race socially and politically debased; having confessedly slaughtered a husband, wife, son and mother-in-law, composing one of the first families of the State; and arrested with but one cent in his pocket, can enlist in his defense the most eminent counsel in the country, bring upon the witness’ stand Professors of the highest distinction in their departments of science, members and trustees of churches, and even pious divines. It is particularly gratifying to those whose official duty requires them to participate in this prosecution, because it assures them that there is no danger that the slightest injustice can be done to the prisoner from an inability to secure friends and testimony, at any distance or at any cost.

Van Buren’s argument contains within it the contradiction of a system of justice built on democratic rules in a society that reeked of racial and class inequality. He correctly praised the system for securing the finest defense for a man with no financial or social resources. But he avoided the reality that even with such a fine defense William Freeman could not find justice in front of an all-white jury sitting in the same county in which the murders had taken place. Van Buren was also correct when he suggested that the law, on its face, applies to all races equally. But in reality the application of the law was warped by racism. That is why Bill was convicted of horse stealing and sent him to state prison at the age of sixteen, even though he was innocent.

With regard to the medical testimony, Van Buren made the same argument prosecutors are making today—doctors don’t decide the case, jurors do. He accurately stated the law: “had the prisoner, when he killed John G. Van Nest, sufficient capacity to judge whether it was right or wrong so to do? And if he had, did any disease divest him of control over his actions?” He then spent six hours going over all the evidence in support of his argument that Bill planned the murders in a rational, legally sane manner, and had control over his behavior when he committed them.

I hope I have satisfied you that this Prisoner is clearly responsible for his acts. He is not an idiot. This is not pretended. He has not dementia. His attention, coherence, memory of events, ancient and recent, keen and steady glance, healthy appearance—all triumphantly repel the idea of dementia. He had no disease when these murders were committed, nor has he now. He has never had an insane delusion.

Van Buren was afraid that testimony linking racial oppression to mental illness might have found a sympathetic ear among some of the jurors, so he tried to scare them by implying that civilized society will be destroyed if these theories are accepted.

Doctrines have been advanced by counsel and witnesses in the course of this trial, dangerous to the peace of society and fatal to good government. The laws and institutions under which we live have been assailed. The maxims of law which have emanated from the wisest and most humane jurist that ever lived—maxims of which the security of liberty, property, and life have reposed for ages; which the successive wisdom of centuries has confirmed, and under which the safety of Prisoners, as well as of society, has been protected—are now openly derided and defied.

In many ways Van Buren’s closing argument foreshadows the arguments of twentieth-century prosecutors. He raised theories that find support today when he suggested that acquittal would cause other criminals to excuse their behavior by pleading insanity. He informed the jury that Freeman attended Henry Wyatt’s first insanity trial, which ended in a hung jury, suggesting that Bill got the idea from the defense that he could commit a murder and get away with it by pleading insanity like Wyatt.

Now, is there not reason to fear that this depraved criminal may have caught from the theories broached on Wyatt’s trial, and from the result, an impression that he could commit this crime with impunity? Far be it from me to suggest that the distinguished Counsel or witnesses on that occasion ever imagined or contemplated such a frightful consequence. But is it beyond the range of possibilities?

It is hard to take such an argument seriously, particularly when we recall that a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity would cause Bill to be locked up for the rest of his life in the state lunatic asylum.

Van Buren attempted to frighten the jury by raising the image of cunning individuals committing crimes all over the state and using the defense of insanity as a justification for their acts.

Is it not the imperative duty of those charged in any way with the faithful execution of the laws, to remember that the audience who throng a Criminal Court Room, are not exclusively composed of the upright, the intelligent or the humane, and when theories are advanced in such a presence, which strike at the root of Law and Order, and furnish a perfect license for Crime, by rendering its detection impossible, to sift them thoroughly, and if as unsound as they are dangerous, to condemn them publicly and boldly? It needed not the fearful conjectures as to the origin of this crime, to induce courts, juries and public prosecutors, by very just means, to extinguish sparks which threaten such wide-spread conflagration.

Van Buren’s arguments were not foolish attempts to manipulate the jurors’ prejudices. His closing argument is a fascinating historical document precisely because it represents the same values prevalent in the law today, 150 years and one Civil War later. Van Buren viewed Seward’s attempt to tie together the concepts of racial oppression, mental illness, and criminal responsibility as an attack “at the root of Law and Order.” The fears and responses of government to this argument in our day have been strikingly similar. The law of insanity has been changed in every federal jurisdiction so that it is now the same conservative rule that it was in 1846. Three states have abolished the insanity defense altogether. Numerous states are passing laws restricting insanity defenses. And commentators are suggesting, like Van Buren, that insanity defenses based on the oppressive nature of social conditions are “a perfect license for Crime.”

In Van Buren’s argument we find the myth of an impartial system of equal justice that is still the prevalent ideological underpinning of American law. We also find the deeply ingrained fear of allowing social reality into the courtroom. A defense which contends that there is a link between social conditions such as racial oppression and antisocial acts is interpreted as a threat to law and order and to America’s institutions.

Identifying with the forces of law and order, Van Buren closed by appealing to the patriotism and fears of the jurors.

The danger to the peace of this community only affects me, as a lover of good order. If crimes of this magnitude are to go unpunished, and thus to invite imitation, it is your hearth-stones, not mine, that may be drenched in blood. But I do confess to a feeling of pride at the administration of justice in our State. Elsewhere, the murderer may go at large as a Somnambulist, an Insane Man, or a Justifiable Homicide. But in New York, thus far, the steady good sense and integrity of our Juries, and the enlightened wisdom of our Judges, have saved our Jurisprudence from ridicule, and firmly upheld Law and Order. Thus may it ever be; and I feel entire confidence, not withstanding the extraordinary appeals that have been made to you in this case, that your verdict will be in keeping with the high character our tribunals have thus acquired, and will prove that the Jurors of Cayuga fully equal their fellow citizens of other counties, in intelligence to perceive, and independence to declare the guilt of a criminal.

The jury deliberated for only one hour and found William Freeman guilty.

By the day of the sentencing Bill’s mental condition had worsened. He either did not understand or did not care that he was going to be hanged. When the Judge asked him if he understood he was going to be sentenced to die, he simply responded, “I don’t know.”

One reason the legal system in the United States and England has been so successful in protecting existing institutions and power relations is that the participants actually believe the fictitious stories embedded in the legal culture. Judges in particular accept the myth of equal justice for all people. The Honorable Bowen Whiting was no exception. He was preparing to send William Freeman to his death. To make that act palatable and legitimate, both to himself and to the public, in what was considered the most important criminal trial in America in the first half of the nineteenth century, Judge Whiting needed to choose the right myths to express in the sentencing. He needed to talk of equal justice and to praise the law as the protector of all citizens, and he did so.

“Let it not be said that the administration of justice is partial or prejudiced by reason of his color, his social degradation, or his monstrous crimes. Slow and tedious as these proceedings have been, the Court are certain that in the minds of all reflecting men, a confidence will arise in the power of the laws to protect the rights of our fellow citizens, and that the result will reflect honor upon the institutions and law of the country.

There is one particularly revealing section in the judge’s sentencing speech. He says that the most important lesson to be drawn from the case is the recognition of “a duty upon society to see to the moral cultivation of the colored youth, now being educated for good or evil in the midst of us.” Judge Whiting was warning the public that if they did not educate young blacks to respect law and white institutions, then the same kind of violence expressed by Freeman would be visited upon the entire society. In a warped way, the judge recognized the black rage that filled the African American community.

Having set out the facts of the case as he interpreted them, having praised the fairness and justice of the law, and having warned the public about colored youth, Judge Whiting then pronounced sentence:

The Judgment of the law is, that the prisoner at the bar, William Freeman, be taken from this place to the place from whence he came, there to remain until Friday, the eighteenth day of September next, and that on that day, between the hours of one and four in the afternoon, he be taken from thence to the place of execution appointed by law, and there BE HUNG BY THE NECK UNTIL HE SHALL BE DEAD.

Bill’s hanging was delayed after William Seward obtained a stay of execution in order to appeal. During that time Frances Seward went to visit Bill. She described her visit in a letter to her sister: “I was affected to tears by his helpless condition—I pray God that he may be insensible to the inhumanity of his relentless keepers—He stood upon the cold stone floor with bare feet, a cot bedstead with nothing but the sacking underneath, and a small filthy blanket to cover him.”⁶

Four months after the trial, oral argument on the appeal was heard by the three judges constituting the New York Supreme Court. In the Bill of Exceptions filed by the defense attorneys, twenty-seven errors of law were alleged. The court, well aware that this case was being watched by the public and the country’s entire legal community, wrote a thoughtful and well-reasoned opinion.⁷ The decision, written by Judge Beardsley, found four errors of law, reversed the conviction, and ordered a new trial.

The first error the court found was made at the preliminary hearing. The judge incorrectly instructed the jury that if the prisoner knew the difference between right and wrong he was sane. The correct rule of law was that the defendant had to know the difference between right and wrong at the time he committed the crime. The difference is important, as a person can generally know what is right and wrong but can act under an insane delusion, as Bill did.

The second error also took place at the preliminary hearing. The jury found that Bill was “sufficiently sane, in mind and memory, to distinguish between right and wrong.” The court considered this verdict to be argumentative and evasive, like saying someone is a little bit pregnant.

The third error of law was at the trial. One of the jurors, a man named Taylor, had a general and fairly strong opinion that Bill was guilty. Today, if lawyers object to a juror, the trial judge rules on the objection. In Bill’s trial the procedure was to have two neutral lawyers called “triors” rule on objections to jurors. The judge, however, was to give the triors the law that controlled their decision. In Bill’s case, the judge incorrectly told the triors that a juror could not be found prejudiced on the grounds that he had already formed a hypothetical opinion of guilt. The appeal court stated that the judge should have allowed the triors to weigh the strength of the juror’s opinion of guilt and then determine whether he could be impartial.

The final legal mistake the trial judge made in his haste to ensure Bill’s conviction was to restrict the testimony of the defense doctors. The judge had ruled that they could not testify to the results of the examinations they performed after the preliminary hearing. The judge reasoned that the verdict at the preliminary hearing had already found Bill sane. But that was not correct. The preliminary verdict was only to determine if Bill was competent to stand trial; it did not determine the issue at trial, which was whether or not he was sane when he committed the murders. Therefore, if the doctors felt their examinations after the preliminary hearing were relevant to their expert opinions as to Bill’s sanity at the time of the crime, their testimony should have been allowed. Based on all of the above errors, the conviction was reversed.

Meanwhile, Bill lay in manacles on the stone floor of his cell, his mind shattered, his spirit listless. The circuit judge visited the cell and verbally examined Bill, concluding that the prisoner was mentally unfit to be tried again. Approximately eighteen months after he was arrested, still chained in that same stone-walled cell, twenty-three-year-old William Freeman died of complications from a cold, his lungs failing him.

William Henry Seward went on to a distinguished career as secretary of state for Abraham Lincoln, becoming known as the man who persuaded the government to purchase Alaska. William Freeman’s case was considered so important that the U.S. Congress passed an Act in 1848 entering the report of the proceedings into the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Northern District of New York.

Seward had brought the reality of racism into the courtroom. For the next 110 years African Americans struggled to win their constitutional right to equal protection of the law. But during those years Seward’s theme that white supremacy causes black violence was rarely debated in criminal courtrooms. The anger of African Americans was as yet too threatening to acknowledge. Society had to be shaken by the civil rights sit-ins and black power movement of the sixties before white Americans would open their eyes to the rage of black America.

By the end of the sixties the country had been forced to confront its racist institutions. The stage was set for black rage to enter the courtroom without the burden of nineteenth-century paternalism and without the fear of a jury’s blind rejection. In the midst of these changes two cases evolved that would lay the groundwork for what is now know as the black rage defense.