The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  The courthouse in Napa, California, built in 1856, where Muybridge’s murder trial took place in 1875 (Illustration Credit c12.1)

  At 11:00 a.m. on Monday, February 3, 1875, Judge William C. Wallace made the call to order. Wallace had presided over the Seventh District Court for five years. He was married, with three children. (In the case of People vs. Edward J. Muybridge, which involved a cuckolded husband, family status seems relevant.) Everyone knew everyone in the courtroom, or so it seemed, everyone but the defendant—Edward Muybridge looked like the single outsider. But in keeping with the California paradox, no one was truly local. Judge Wallace came from Missouri, Muybridge from England, his chief lawyer had been born in Kentucky, and the prosecutor came from South Carolina. In different ways, all had washed up in the West.5

  Muybridge wore a light woolen suit, “the same that he has worn since his arrest,” said a reporter. He showed “nervousness,” at the same time that “he strived to appear cool and collected.” At Muybridge’s table sat three lawyers, two from Napa and one from San Francisco. His lead counsel was the very composed Wirt Pendegast. Next to Pendegast sat his law partner, F. E. Johnston, with whom he practiced in Napa, and Cameron King, the San Francisco lawyer and nephew of a former governor.6

  At the prosecutor’s table sat Daniel Spencer, the district attorney, and, next to him, Thomas P. Stoney, age forty, a native of Charleston, South Carolina. Stoney, who in his usual role served as a county judge, was new to the case. Judge Wallace seems to have felt that Spencer had gotten in over his head, so Wallace had assigned Stoney to lead the prosecution. Because of his day job, everyone called him Judge Stoney, a fact that led to some confusion with the presiding judge.

  As soon as Judge Wallace made the call to order, Judge Stoney of the prosecution moved to ask for a continuance to a later date because two witnesses had not turned up, both of them being sick. The first was eighteen-year-old George Wolf, who had driven Muybridge in a hired buggy from Calistoga to the scene of the murder. Wolf had submitted an affidavit, but the eighteen-year-old was said to be in bed with the measles. James McArthur, the other man, had not only witnessed the shooting but had taken the gun away from Muybridge. The presiding judge said the witnesses might show up in the afternoon, and the case must go ahead without them. He ruled that a jury be impaneled in the meantime.

  From a box full of slips of paper, a bailiff pulled the names, and as each was called, a man emerged from the crowded courtroom and stepped into the witness box to be examined. The defense wanted jurors who empathized with Muybridge—a married man who had a runaway wife, on the one hand, and a man who confronted a sexual rival, on the other. The prosecution wanted jurors who neither put themselves in Muybridge’s place nor objected to the death penalty.

  As each prospective juror took a seat, each answered a question about capital punishment. Did he have scruples about hanging a man? If so, would he be willing to render a guilty verdict? In the first draft of the jury, two men out of twelve said they objected to the death penalty. A farmer called D. O. Hunt “had conscientious scruples about hanging a man,” and another named A. F. Rony “objected to hanging a man, growing out of human sympathy.” Both were excused.

  The prosecution and the defense each challenged six prospects, but a jury came together in two hours, after three drafts. Their names—Pratt, Garfield, Hallet, Greenwood, Klam, Sterling, Chapson, Newcomer, Connery, Smith, Forester, and Kruze—showed a mix of Irish, German, and English ancestry. (The law excluded Chinese and Mexicans from serving.) A newswriter called the jury “with two exceptions, bronzed and sturdy farmers of middle age.” The exceptions were both carpenters. The defense got the better of the pre-selection: eleven of the jurors had wives, which made them perhaps more likely to sympathize with Muybridge, the enraged husband. On the other hand, farmers and carpenters might have found it hard to identify with Muybridge, the artist.

  A bailiff read the indictment for the jury, and the trial began at 4:00 p.m., when Judge Stoney made the opening address for the prosecution.

  “I feel as though I should say, in the language of the old law, with regard to the prisoner, if he is innocent, then may God give him good deliverance,” said Stoney in his coastal Carolina dialect, with its long vowels. “But there is no doubt in this case. There is no doubt that on the 17th day of October Harry Larkyns, who was unarmed, was shot down and murdered without cause. There is no question that Muybridge killed Larkyns, that he assassinated him.”

  Stoney turned away from the circumstances of the crime, toward the shooting itself.

  “Larkyns is dead, and his voice cannot be heard. And so now there are just two parties involved in the question of guilt—the people and the prisoner. In this case there is no question of the rights or wrongs of the two men with regard to their relations with one another,” he said. Stoney wanted to push the idea that it did not matter what Harry Larkyns had gotten up to—the affair with Flora meant nothing, set next to the killing.

  “The question is this,” Stoney went on, “has the defendant violated the law? Larkyns’s blood was not demanded at the hands of the prisoner, whatever Larkyns might have done.” Several reporters commented on the feeling in the room of sympathy for the defendant. From the start the prosecutor had to oppose a strain of favor for Muybridge, emerging from the idea that what Harry Larkyns had done mattered very much. Nevertheless, Stoney did not want conviction on a lesser charge, saying that he and the district attorney wanted the case to end with the gallows or with nothing at all. “The prosecution holds that this man is guilty of murder in the first degree, or he is guilty of nothing.” He read aloud the statute for murder, and concluded, “The defendant is just as guilty as possible!” He then took aim at the arguments he knew were coming. “Nothing but actual self-defense authorizes a man to take the life of another—no other provocation justifies such an act.” Infidelity, in other words, does not constitute provocation. Stoney sat down.

  Muybridge’s defense lawyers opened with an argument by attorney Cameron King. At thirty, King was the youngest lawyer in the room. He opened with the provocation angle, testing Judge Wallace to see if he would let the argument out into the open. “We will prove that Harry Larkyns was a man of bad character,” King said. “We will prove that he pursued the wife of the prisoner, and that he rented rooms on Montgomery Street by representing himself as a married man, that he induced her to accompany him there, and that he boasted of the fact to his friends.” King turned to the madness explanation. “We will also prove insanity,” he went on. “The circumstances that aroused the defendant’s suspicions were ones that drove him to mania. When Mr. Muybridge discovered the photograph with the name of the man whom he had forbidden his wife to speak to, and when he then learned everything about her adultery—from that moment, he was not himself. Strung up to the pitch of insanity, the defendant made up his mind that he must slay the destroyer of his happiness, the man who had debauched his home! The prisoner went to kill that man. He would have followed him to the ends of the earth for that purpose!” Insanity, the argument Muybridge detested, was a fallback claim. The defendant, seated stiffly at the table, let his eyes shift left and right.

  “We claim a verdict of not guilty both on the grounds of justifiable homicide, and on the grounds of insanity! We shall prove that years ago the prisoner was thrown from a stagecoach, receiving a concussion of the brain, which turned his hair from black to gray, and that he has never been the same since. We shall show you the depth of his impassioned love of his wife—that he was wrapped up in her and lived only for her. Having shown all this, we shall ask you, as the law does, to look upon his acts with mercy.”

  Having brought in insanity and mixed it up with provocation, Muybridge’s lawyer finished with a set of rhetorical questions.

  “I ask you, if these facts be so, was this man guilty of a crime? I do not believe he could be. Who is the man, even though he be of the soundest mind, that can say he would have acted differently? I assert that he who wo
uld not shoot the seducer of his wife, even if he were to suffer ten thousand deaths, is a coward and a cur. Better—far better, death!—than that the seducer should boast his conquest and a wife’s dishonor with drunken companions over the flowing bowl, and point out the wretched man who walks the streets, a cuckold.”

  A vindication, even a celebration of the killing—this was the way Muybridge hoped to get off.

  What Leland Stanford thought of all this remains an enigma. His papers are silent on the subject, and he never spoke of it—at least in public. We can imagine he spoke about it plenty of times, maybe at home, with his wife, Jenny. Maybe, in one or another of their gilded rooms, he spoke about Muybridge with the railroad associates, who could not fathom how Stanford had gotten involved with such a morally dubious character.

  THE GROCER

  His parents named him Amasa, after his mother’s father. An Old Testament name popular among devout people. Amasa Leland Stanford. His mother was a Presbyterian from church people, New England ministers going back to the 1600s, but his father followed no flock. His father had little feeling for divines; he was a work-for-money man.

  Amasa Stanford was born 150 miles north of New York City in a tavern on a dirt road in farm country, in March 1824. When he was about sixteen, Amasa threw in his lot with his worldly father, dropping his first name and its pious trappings. He started signing his letters “Leland”—his middle name, the family name of a great-grandmother.

  Leland Stanford’s parents had eight children in seventeen years. The first was a girl, dead when she was born, and the eighth was a boy who would die at age nine. (Parents expected a sifting of this kind—at that time, one in four children died before age ten.) The Stanford couple did not own their place, the Bull’s Head Tavern, but leased it. Albany, the capital of New York, lay six miles south of the tavern. The road that passed directly in front of the Bull’s Head took carriages ten miles west to the next town, Schenectady—thus a good place for an inn. Crops and meadows spread in most directions, woods in the near distance. The rattling of wagons and the shouts of drivers rushing their animals must have risen from the road much of the day. The Stanford couple sold beer and food and a bed to the team drivers on the wagons, the truckers of the era.

  Leland Stanford as a boy would have seen the teamsters boot into the house, reeking of horse. A nickel and his father tied up and watered the animals, two bits and his mother changed the sheets and filled a bowl of stew. The Bull’s Head Tavern stood on a farm where the Stanfords also grew things to eat and to feed their customers. This was a family that pieced together income. They bought and sold livestock, and most winters they sold firewood that the Stanford sons cut from forests near the farm.1

  Leland’s father, Josiah Stanford, was a big man. More income arrived when Josiah got contracts from road builders to cut through old forest, to dig ditches and drain the route, and to grade the beds for the carriage traffic.

  When Leland was fourteen, his nine-year-old brother Jerome died of some disease (no records specify it). Leland would have seen his brother on his deathbed, his body in the casket. As a teenager, Leland wrote letters to his younger siblings, preaching to them the rewards of self-possession and control over their feelings. In his writings and interviews from decades later, the ones that survive, he does not mention any trouble during his childhood. Instead, Leland would paint a rose-tinted picture of toil and comradeship, hard work and moneymaking with his brothers. He was one of the boys who fitted a carapace over himself so as not to feel too much.

  The Stanfords had six children who lived, all boys—Leland was fourth in line. One of his brothers said that Leland was built like a barrel, just under six feet, and reluctant to talk. Throughout his life, whoever met him commented that he was genial but silent. He seems to have kept his desires in retreat. When he was twenty-five and starting work as a lawyer, Leland wrote his seventeen-year-old brother, Thomas, with advice about how to carry himself. “Do not be too ready to speak,” he said. “Everyone is most inclined to hear himself talk. Everyone loves a good listener in conversation.”2

  The wagon traffic out of Albany was in decline, which meant the Stanford tavern saw dwindling business. The Erie Canal had opened the year Leland was born, and on its run from the Hudson River at Albany and northwest across the state, the canal cut through fields a few miles from the Stanford place, taking much of the freight traffic that used to run on the roads and guaranteeing a slow economic death for innkeepers. The Stanfords compensated using the muscles of their sons. One of Leland’s brothers remembered how their father used to buy timberland in hundred-acre lots and make his sons cut tons of firewood to sell into the fireplaces of Albany. With his two hundred pounds, Leland in his teens could certainly swing an ax, although whether he did so remained a point of family dispute. When he was old and rich, Leland told newspaper reporters a story. His father had gotten a contract to provide firewood to a dealer in Albany—2,500 cords. (A cord was a stack of wood eight feet long and four feet high and wide, enough to heat a house for a winter.) The contract meant that five men chopped trees full time for two years, and the teenage Leland got the assignment to execute it. He told reporters he hired day workers, showed them what to do, and made $2,500 profit.

  Another version of the story paints Leland as an indolent woodcutter. “I never called Leland a good worker,” said Josiah Stanford Jr., one of his brothers. Josiah remembered that Leland used to disappear at key times. “While we would be fixing our teams and tools, he would go around a corner, and when the time came to go to work, we would have to call him.”

  Another run-in between Leland and his brothers had to do with manure. Leland and the other Stanford boys often went to a slaughterhouse to collect manure for the farm. They put on aprons down to their shins, stuffed their pants into their boots, and shoveled the shit. “We hauled manure when there was nothing else of importance going on,” said Josiah, who added that the manure was full of water and piss. “Leland used to dislike hauling the slaughterhouse manure because it was so slushy, and because we left a horrible smell all along the road.” This was a big, reticent boy—pleasant, but restrained about hard work.

  A photograph of Leland at age twenty-four shows a long-faced and fine-complexioned man with a wave of black hair and with plump, sensuous lips. He looks sullen, but sends a sexual pulse. People often remarked on his uncomfortable style of friendliness—people said it seemed made up and awkward. Leland’s body, strongly masculine, failed him in some ways. He was said (years later, by a person who remembered Stanford in his twenties) to have had difficulty with speech—not an impediment, but a halting manner. It caused social trouble and made him bashful.

  Leland Stanford in 1848, at age twenty-four, after he had apprenticed as an attorney for three years at a law firm in Albany, New York (Illustration Credit c13.1)

  The silent Leland must have given at least an impression of seriousness, because his parents chose him alone from among their many sons for extra schooling. At sixteen Stanford left home and went one hundred miles west to enroll in the Oneida Institute, a private school in the village of Whitesboro, New York. (His brothers had finished their education after basic reading and writing, having studied in public schools. When the Stanford boys came of age to attend, free common public schools had lately opened in New York State.) To get to his boarding school, Leland would have taken a steamship from Albany and up the Erie Canal to the town of Utica, a daylong trip. The day after he arrived, he wrote his parents to describe what he had seen.

  “I landed at whitesbouroug [sic] on wednesday evening. I proceeded to the institute immediately and saw one of the teachers, And he informed me that it was a thorough abolition school.”3

  The fact that his school tended toward abolition at a time when most of the country remained in favor of slavery, or indifferent to it, was a bit much. So was the shocking discovery that the Oneida Institute was integrated.

  “One of the teachers … said that the whites and blacks all
ate at one table,” he wrote home.

  One of the students at Oneida, at this point, was an escaped slave from Tennessee named Jermain Loguen. In later life, Loguen published an autobiography about his flight from slavery; he also founded schools for black students in upstate New York. Leland thought the Oneida Institute was not right for him. Even at sixteen he understood that a school where whites and former slaves sat together to eat was a subversive place, and the laconic, obedient Leland did not consider himself a subversive.

  After spending one day at the “thorough abolition school,” Stanford went seven miles southwest, stopped, and enrolled at the Clinton Liberal Institute, an academy run by the Universalist Church. The Universalists were liberal in a way different from the Oneida group: rather than admitting whites with blacks, the Clinton school admitted only whites, but both sexes. At a time when women were educated separately, if at all, the idea of bringing together men with women in a classroom felt intoxicatingly strange.4

  Stanford might not have known it, but his choice of schools in Oneida County in upper New York State was limited to radical experiments in curriculum and dissident principles. This was because Oneida County lay within the “burned-over district,” a swath of the Northeast crisscrossed by traveling preachers, many of whom sprayed fire and brimstone rhetoric from beneath their giant revival tents. Like many, Leland felt pressure to go to revivals, which seemed constant and ubiquitous. He wrote home about one religious meeting where students were expected to come forward to be saved. “I was a hard prospect for that preacher,” he said, admitting his godlessness. Ministers in Stanford’s corner of America pushed radical causes like the abolition of slavery. Some even advocated “complex marriage,” or mass adultery. Upper New York State was as radical as anyplace in America. A few years after Leland left, a few hundred utopian followers of Christ set up the Oneida Community, a proto-communist village that abolished private property and called for anytime, anywhere sex.