The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 48, October, 1861. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ may easily suppose that at this moment the unfortunate man first realized the fearful nature of the circumstances which surrounded him, and perceived the abyss which had yawned so suddenly at his feet. And no wonder that he shrank back from the prospect, overwhelmed for the moment with consternation and despair,—not the prospect of death, but of a degradation far worse to the proud spirit of the Kentucky gentleman, on whose good name even political hatred had never been able to fix a stain.

      The terrified negroes carried the alarm to the nearest neighbors, and soon the report of this appalling occurrence was flying like lightning toward the utmost bounds of the county. The first stranger who reached the scene of death was Mr. Summers, formerly an intimate friend of Captain Wilde. When he entered the room, he found the poor gentleman on his knees beside the body of his child, with his face buried in the bed-clothes. At the sound of footsteps he raised his wild, tearless eyes, exclaiming, "My God! my God! Mr. Summers, my wife has been murdered here, in my own room, and it will be laid on me!" Shocked by the almost insane excitement of his old friend, and sensible of the imprudence of his words, Summers begged him to compose himself, pointing out the danger of such language. But the terrible thought had mastered his mind with a monomaniacal power, and to every effort at consolation from those who successively came in the only reply was, "Oh, my God, it will all be laid upon me!" Fortunately, those who heard these expressions were old friends, who, although they had been long unfamiliar, knew the native uprightness of the man, and still felt kindly toward one whose estrangement they knew was the effect of weak submission to the dictation of his wife, not the result of any change in his own feelings. They regarded his wild words as only the incoherent utterances of a mind bewildered by horror, and were anxious to put an end to the harrowing scene, and remove the stricken man as soon as possible from the observation of a mixed crowd that was now rapidly assembling from all directions, many of whom knew Captain Wilde only in his unpopular capacity of exciseman, and would therefore be apt to suspect a darker explanation of his strange behavior.

      So shocking had been the sight presented to their eyes, on entering the room, that hitherto no one had had sufficient presence of mind to examine the bodies closely; but at last Mr. Summers, cooler than the rest, approached to raise that of Mrs. Wilde, and then, for the first time, perceived the bandage about her neck. It proved to be a white silk neckerchief, which Summers removed and began to examine. As he did so, his face was seen to grow suddenly pale as death. All pressed anxiously forward to see, and a silent, but fearfully significant look passed round the circle; for in one corner, embroidered in large letters, was the name of Cyril Wilde. As silently every eye sought the devoted man, and on many countenances the look of doubt settled at once into one of conviction, when they saw that he wore no cravat; and to many ears the heart-broken moan of the wretched husband and father, which a moment before seemed only the foreboding of over-sensitive innocence, now sounded like the voice of self-accusing guilt. So great is the power of imagination in modifying our beliefs!

      After such a discovery an arrest followed as a matter of course; and a popular feeling adverse to the accused quickly manifested itself in the community. But it is pleasant to know, that, in spite of all appearances, many of Captain Wilde's old friends never lost faith in his innocence, or hesitated to renew in his hour of adversity the kindly relations that had existed before his marriage; while his own kindred stood by him and bravely fought his hopeless battle to the last,—employing as his advocate the celebrated John Breckenridge, who was then almost without a rival at the Kentucky bar. But, on the other hand, his wife's family pursued their unfortunate relative with a savageness of hatred hardly to be paralleled. Having hunted him to the very foot of the scaffold, their persevering malice seemed unsated even by the sight of their victim suspended as a felon before their very eyes; for it was reported, at the time, that two of the murdered woman's brothers were seen upon the ground during the execution.

      And now it was that the unpopularity resulting from Captain Wilde's official employment manifested its most baleful effects. Had he possessed at this crisis the same general good-will he had enjoyed four years before, he might have bid defiance to the rage of his enemies, and have escaped, in spite of all the suspicious circumstances by which he stood environed. For the general drift of sentiment in the West has always been against capital penalties, and it is next to impossible to carry such penalties into effect against a popular favorite. In a country like this we might as soon expect to see the hands of a clock move in a direction contrary to the machinery by which it is governed, as a jury to run counter to plainly declared popular feelings. There may now and then be instances of their acquitting contrary to the general sentiment, where that sentiment is unimpassioned; but we much doubt whether there has ever occurred a single example of a jury convicting a person in whose favor the sympathy of a whole community was warmly and earnestly expressed. Of such sympathy Captain Wilde had none; for to the great majority he was known only as the exciseman, and as such was an object of hostility. Not that this hostility at any time took the form of insult and abuse,—for we are proud to say that outside of the large towns such disgraceful exhibitions of feeling are unknown,—but it left the minds of the general mass liable to be operated on by all the suspicious circumstances of the case, and by the slanders of the personal enemies of the accused.

      On the 23d of November, an immense crowd of people, both men and women, were assembled in the court-house at – to witness a trial which was to fix a dark stain on the judicial annals of Kentucky, and in which, for the thousandth time, a court of justice was to be led fatally astray by the accursed thing called Circumstantial Evidence, and made the instrument of that most deplorable of all human tragedies, a formal, legalized murder. It is one of the most glaring inconsistencies of our law, that it admits, in a trial where the life of a citizen is at stake, a species of testimony which it regards as too inconclusive and too liable to misconstruction to be allowed in a civil suit involving, it may be, less than the value of a single dollar. True, it is a favorite maxim of prosecutors, that "circumstances will not lie"; but it requires little acquaintance with the history of criminal trials to prove that circumstantial evidence has murdered more innocent men than all the false witnesses and informers who ever disgraced courts of justice by their presence; and the slightest reflection will convince us that this shallow sophism contains even less practical truth than the general mass of proverbs and maxims, proverbially false though they be. For not only is the chance of falsehood, on the part of the witness who details the circumstances, greater,—since a false impression can be conveyed with far less risk of detection by distortion and exaggeration of a fact than by the invention of a direct lie,—but there is the additional danger of an honest misconception on his part; and every lawyer knows how hard it is for a dull witness to distinguish between the facts and his impressions of them, and how impossible it often is to make a witness detail the former without interpolating the latter. But the greatest risk of all is that the jury themselves may misconstrue the circumstances, and draw unwarranted conclusions therefrom. It is an awful assumption of responsibility to leap to conclusions in such cases, and the leap too often proves to have been made in the dark. God help the wretch who is arraigned on suspicious appearances before a jury who believe that "circumstances won't lie"! for the Justice that presides at such a trial is apt to prove as blind and capricious as Chance herself. In reviewing the present trial in particular, one may well feel puzzled to decide which of these deities presided over its conduct. A Greek or Roman would have said, Neither,—but a greater than either,—Fate; and we might almost adopt the old heathen notion, as we watch the downward course of the doomed gentleman from this point, and note how invariably every attempt to ward off destruction is defeated, as if by the persevering malice of some superior power. We shall soon see the most popular and influential attorney of the State driven from the case by an awkward misunderstanding; another, hardly inferior, expire almost in the very act of pleading it; and, finally, when the real criminal comes forward, at the last moment, to avert the ruin which she has involuntarily drawn down upon the head of her beloved master, and take his place upon the scaffold, we shall behold her heroic offer of self-sacrifice frustrated by influences the most unexpected,—political influences which—with shame be it told—were sufficient to induce a governor of Kentucky to withhold the exercise of executive clemency, the most glorious prerogative intrusted to our chief magistrates, and which it ought to have been a most pleasing privilege to grant: for, incredible as it may seem, Governor – knew, when he signed the death-warrant, СКАЧАТЬ