by Paul Collins
Sohier walked quickly and with a habitual stoop, hands thrust into his pockets. In his preoccupied way, he asked the jury to think deeply upon just what the case meant.
“A serious duty has devolved upon all of us, in this more than mortal struggle. Whether Professor Webster shall go hence to his family, and there remain what he has ever been to them—the very center of their purest and holiest affections, the very object of their idolatry—or, whether he shall go hence to the scaffold. Whether the fire upon his hearth-stone shall henceforth beam brightly, and its light be shed on happy faces, beaming kindly upon his; or whether your breath, Mr. Foreman, when you pronounce the verdict, shall extinguish that fire.”
The gaze of the crowd produced an unwelcome moment of attention for Mr. Byram, the foreman; normally he’d be working in the comfortable anonymity of his locksmith job at this hour. He hadn’t even wanted to be jury foreman.
“Now,” Sohier continued, “speaking in all frankness, am I to forget the excitement in this city, when it was first bruited about that George Parkman was missing? How men quitted their avocations? How they clustered together on the exchange, in the workshops, at the corners of the streets, in the porches of the church? Can you, or I, forget that burst of indignation when it was announced that George Parkman’s body had been found in the laboratory of the Medical College? They are burned into our memories, we cannot forget them.”
Sohier then turned the tables on the men in the jury box, asking, What if the object of that outrage and attention had been one of them? There were technical objections to the case, of course: the difference between the government’s charge of premeditated murder, as opposed to an inadvertent manslaughter. But there was also the simpler question of whether Webster had done nothing wrong at all.
“Any one of you may be charged with an offence,” the lawyer warned, “committed by another, at a time when you were alone, or in company only with your wife. Witnesses may be mistaken, and honestly so, as to your identity. You cannot prove the negative, that you did not commit the offence. And what is your protection? You prove your previous character—a character perfectly inconsistent with the possibility of your having committed the crime in question. And you rely upon this rule of law, touching reasonable doubt. This, then, is your only protection. This reasonable doubt is intended by the law as a shield for the innocent.”
And for that, he reminded them of one of the oldest concepts in the law, one that stretched back to Abraham’s plea to save the city of Sodom and was now enshrined in what every lawyer knew as Black-stone’s ratio. “Although guilty men sometimes take shelter behind it,” Sohier urged the jury, “the humane maxim of the law is that it is better that a hundred guilty men should escape, rather than one innocent man be convicted.”
The question now was this: Could the defense establish that reasonable doubt?
JARED SPARKS wasn’t just the president of Harvard; he was also a public figure in his own right. Along with editing and publishing the North American Review, the country’s highest perch for public intellectuals, he’d written major works on the Founding Fathers that drew on his correspondence with such eminences as Madison and Jefferson themselves. Sparks was one of the country’s great historians—but, until today, not a man in the habit of participating in history.
“I reside in Cambridge,” he testified, and “am the President of Harvard University. I have been intimately acquainted as a neighbor there with Professor Webster for seventeen years.”
He may have been a neighbor for seventeen years, but he’d followed Webster a good deal longer than that. As early as 1824, he’d sat in on Webster’s lectures and admired his work—impressed, he wrote privately, with “his lucid manner of communicating the more difficult topics of the Science, and the happy & successful manner of performing the experiments.”
“From my own observation of him,” Sparks now assured the court, “I have never known anything of him but as a kind and amiable man.” This was the best sort of character reference Webster might hope for from his employer, if a carefully phrased one. The professor, on the other hand, in a fight for his life, felt little compunction about hurting his old school. “No delicacy as to the college ought to interfere if any thing can be done for my benefit,” he’d quietly instructed his lawyers.
The defense called dozens of character witnesses—the mayor of Cambridge, the town’s marshal, Webster’s neighbors and fellow Harvard men—at one point running through ten of them in a single hour. A second day of witnesses attested to Webster’s calm demeanor in the week after the murder, though it was with the appearance of the professor’s three daughters at the stand that spectators fell into a fascinated hush.
“On Friday the 23rd, Father was home at tea a little before six o’clock,” Marianne explained. “He remained at home till eight o’clock and then went to a neighbor’s house with us.” The Webster women, though desperately pressed for money, had mustered their most charming clothing for their court appearance, and Marianne’s purple dress and dark green scarf made a striking contrast to the usual drab woolen coat favored by her father’s lawyer. “He accompanied Mother, my two sisters, and myself to a friend’s house to a small party, and left us at the gate,” she testified. “When we returned at half-past twelve, he opened the door for us.”
In the interim, Webster had spent an utterly unremarkable evening visiting his old medical coeditor Daniel Treadwell, at whose home he chatted with his colleague Dr. Morrill Wyman and other Cambridge worthies—though about what, scarcely anyone could recall. “I think one subject broached with Dr. Wyman was in regard to recent improvements or discoveries in ventilation,” a local judge remembered.
If Webster’s character and his conduct were not that of a guilty man, the defense team argued, then what of the claim that the body was Parkman’s? The prominent dentist William Morton—a onetime collaborator of Nathan Keep’s, and now his rival in claiming the discovery of anesthetic ether—was brought out to scoff at Keep’s claim of being able to recognize any one tooth, jaw, or denture as Parkman’s. Pressed by the prosecution, though, Morton admitted that all of them fitting together would be an extraordinarily unlikely coincidence.
More promising were the witnesses who’d seen George Parkman on the streets of Boston after he was alleged to have been murdered in Webster’s quarters. A neighbor recalled spotting the old doctor, with his inimitable quick stride, his chin high and haughty in the air, on Cambridge Street at one-fifty that afternoon—about five or ten minutes after he’d last been seen entering the Medical College.
“I mentioned it to my sister, to cheer her up and make her smile, as she was rather gloomy. I told my sister that I had met Chin in the street,” she explained, to the guffaws in the courtroom.
Other locals placed Parkman in front of Mrs. Kidder’s drugstore at two-thirty; on Washington Street at three-fifteen; and by yet another apothecary shop, this one on Green Street, at four forty-five. There was just one problem: each witness had only seen Parkman—or thought they had—and none had spoken with him. For the identification to really stick, the defense needed someone who knew Parkman’s face well. And for that, they had their perfect witness: William Thompson.
“I am a clerk in the Registry of Deeds,” he explained. As someone who worked with real estate transactions, he certainly knew Parkman—and, crucially, had seen him a half hour after he was supposed to have died at Webster’s hands.
“I had seen him very frequently during the past five years. I saw him last on Friday the 23rd of November, in Causeway Street. I should think it was ten or fifteen minutes past two that afternoon,” the clerk explained. They’d met in the middle of a block, just in front of a carpenter’s shop, and though they hadn’t spoken, the doctor’s appearance was unmistakable: “When I saw him, he had his hands behind him, and appeared excited, as if angry about some matter.”
Yes, the clerk had surely seen Parkman, plain as day.
Use spectacles, do you? the prosecutor asked.
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br /> “I never use spectacles. I don’t think that I am near-sighted,” Thompson assured him. Then the clerk immediately contradicted himself: “Some parts of the day, my eyes are weak, and I use glasses which are slightly colored.”
A murmur of laughter began to run through the crowd. And did the witness also have to carry a magnifying glass?
“I do not carry a magnifying glass for my own use,” Thompson announced. Wait—he did not, except for the one that was currently in his pocket.
As the laughter built, Bemis pounced.
“Have you never told anyone,” he asked grandly, “that you could write in the mesmeric state?”
“No sir!” the clerk snapped as the courtroom burst out in merriment.
“You never said anything?” Bemis pressed on delightedly.
“I never used the term mesmeric,” Thompson struggled to explain. “I may have said something about the biological state. I sometimes lecture on biology.”
Now even the attending doctors were hooting with derisive laughter. Boston had been swept that year by a fad for “electro-biology,” chiefly through the concept’s promotion by competing and immensely popular quack shows run by former phrenologist “Reverend” Theophilus Fiske and the mesmerist “Professor” J. S. Grimes. These were really just mesmerism shows, but trendily renamed and using zinc-plated copper coins that mysteriously conducted spiritual electricity across crowds of hundreds or even thousands. Both men had been hauled into court and fined “for exhibiting for the public amusement, without license,” but not before leaving local acolytes who set up shop and claimed that electro-biology could cure “Rheumatism, Neuralgia, Deafness, Dimness of Sight, Stammering, and all such diseases as have their origin in derangement of the nervous system.”
That had nothing to do with his spectacles, Thompson insisted, or with the magnifying glass he carried with him. “I simply carried the glass for others to use,” he explained. “I do not pretend to say that I can see better in the biological state than in the natural.”
As far as the crowd was concerned, Thompson couldn’t say he saw much of anything at all; the hapless clerk “appeared to be regularly purblind,” one Herald reporter snorted. The defense team frantically tried to call out the manner of the cross-examination itself.
Objection! Sohier called out as their witness’s credibility hopelessly dissolved in a wave of laughter. But it was too late: one of the Webster camp’s best hopes for the defense had just been destroyed before their very eyes.
Part VI
THE VERDICT
21
TWELVE MEN IN MASSACHUSETTS
EVEN AS WILLIAM THOMPSON WAS PREPARING TO TESTIFY on his “biological” eyesight, a slim envelope arrived at a warren of law offices on Court Street, bearing a Boston postmark and addressed to “E. D. Sohier, Esq., Member of the Bar, Boston, Mass.” When opened it revealed a remarkable message—and in a curiously familiar hand:
MR. E. D. SOHIER:
I am very desirous to inform you, that there has been a great mistake made in the testimony of some of the witnesses with regard to that “Civis” letter. Now, I must inform you that I wrote that letter, myself. I first saw that letter published in the “Herald” of this evening. . . . You can compare this writing with that of the “Civis” letter, and see if it does not exactly resemble it.
The correspondent obligingly wrote out all the upper-and lowercase letters of the alphabet, the numbers 0 through 9, and a few phrases they recalled using, including “Dr. Parkman” and “cut in small pieces.” “When I wrote that letter, I did not think so much notice would be taken of it,” the writer apologized.
It looked remarkably like the first Civis letter—so much that Sohier, now knowing which newspaper his correspondent read, placed a notice in the Herald, to run atop its coverage on Friday, March 29:
Important Notice.
If the writer of the letter signed “Civis,” received by the counsel of Dr. Webster from the Boston Post Office on Thursday at half past 12 o’clock, wishes to be of any service in the case on trial, let him call in person on the counsel immediately.
IN THE courtroom that morning, Webster looked revived, even hopeful.
“Did you hear what they said about that letter?” he asked a court officer.
“No,” the guard responded. “What letter do you mean?”
“Why, the Civis letter,” Dr. Webster responded triumphantly. “They say they have received a letter, in the same handwriting, from the man who wrote it.”
Alas, no more mail was forthcoming—none, at least, save for a not particularly helpful letter to Merrick from one of Dr. Webster’s old students, who recalled the professor as a milquetoast who might snap under bullying. “It was the regular practice to throw things about Dr. W’s lecture room, drop his minerals on the floor, &c. &c.,” sometimes bringing the professor to tears, the writer confided. “We actually almost despised his want of spirit.”
Prosecutors had their own new torments waiting for the hapless Webster. While calling on four dentists to attest that Nathan Keep could indeed recognize his own handiwork—a strategy only slightly disrupted when one fumbled the evidence box and broke one of Parkman’s teeth—Bemis lobbed out a question that landed in the courtroom like a grenade.
“Suppose,” he asked the chief justice between dentists, “that there was an individual who had certain great peculiarities.” Such peculiarities, say, that might cause him to be mistaken for Dr. Parkman, and for several people to have approached him and discovered their mistake. And what if the prosecutors had five witnesses who had seen and spoken to him? “Would not these last persons be introduced in a case like this?”
Objection! The defense rose. The notion of a George Parkman look-alike walking the streets of Boston was altogether speculative; why was an error by these five would-be prosecution witnesses necessarily pertinent to the defense’s own witnesses?
The chief justice agreed—maybe if you brought in the look-alike himself, he conceded—but the damage was already done. A rumor went out that Parkman’s uncanny double was “a gentleman distinguished in railroad enterprises.” Even if the fellow was never introduced into the courtroom, his possible existence now cast a shadow over the defense team’s best chance to save their client: the closing argument.
THE VISITORS pouring through the gallery had mounted with each passing day. Even though the gallery accommodated only a fraction of the room’s capacity of five hundred, by moving the crowds in quickly, in brief shifts, the police had marched more than seven thousand spectators through on the first day alone. Court officers now worked the entrances as smoothly as the ushers for a Jenny Lind concert, though the crowds themselves hadn’t become any more polite—one man was spotted walking down the exit stairs with a bloody nose for his attempts to better see the trial. But when Merrick took to the floor to deliver his closing argument, even the rowdies fell silent.
Not one witness, Merrick charged, could provide an absolute proof of the body’s identity, of Webster committing murder, or a confessed motive. It was all supposition. Yet the defense had five people who’d seen Parkman alive after his meeting with Webster.
“They may indeed be mistaken,” the attorney admitted, “but is it certain that they are? Contrast this direct and decisive evidence with the mangled remains of the human, whoever he was, which were found in the Medical College. The Attorney General is asking you to believe that these remains are but the mutilated parts of the body of Dr. Parkman. He is also asking you to believe that responsible and intelligent men and women were mistaken, not in the naked leg, but respecting the open face, the erect form, the attitude, the movements, and the peculiarities of the living man.”
Nor, he argued, could the remains adequately show a cause of death; aside from the notions put forth by Drs. Wyman and Strong, nobody had offered any theory of injury to the body parts prior to death. The mutilations after death hardly offered any guide: “To take off a man’s head with a saw, undoubtedly kills him—to te
ar out his breast-bone, and remove all the inwards parts of his body, kills him—cut off his arms, his leg, and his thighs, and he will die—hold his head in the fire till it is burnt to cinders, and he will perish. All these things manifestly occurred to the several parts of this body. But when did they occur? Was the head or were the limbs of the living man thrust into that narrow and contracted assay-furnace, of ten inches in circumference, and forcibly held there, until life was extinct?” Were the jurors to believe that in a building whose entire history spoke to the likelihood of a body being a graveyard cadaver, Parkman had met a violent end?
“The proposition is too absurd,” the defense attorney scoffed.
And, Merrick added, what if Webster had killed Parkman? After all, he admitted, “the parties did meet under most untoward circumstances.” But were they to believe that a professor deliberately planned in cold blood to kill his school’s biggest donor, in the building he’d helped create, even as a lecture was being given in the floor above them? A charge of manslaughter was at least conceivable, as was the panicked hiding of a body. But the prosecution’s claim of premeditated murder was absurd. “Men of such character,” Merrick averred, “and in such a position as his, do not, at a single effort, leap away from all the influences of education, social life, and religious instruction, and commit at once the highest and worst crime which can be perpetrated against their fellow-beings.”