Black Rage Confronts the Law. Paul Harris

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ