Black Rage Confronts the Law. Paul Harris

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ