Blood & Ivy

by Paul Collins

  Day’s account of a briefly split vote excited little controversy; more unexpectedly, the prayer did. Bostonians were not ones to boast or to make an overly public show of faith, and Day’s revelation played upon the worst memories and caricatures of the old colony. One critic compared it to “the prayers of devout Puritans, while burning witches and hanging Quakers to the greater glory of God.” Day found himself stoutly denying any puritanical fervor.

  “I am no fanatic—no bigot,” he vowed.

  Professor Webster, by contrast, was becoming markedly more pious. Local minister George Putnam started visiting Webster, despite scarcely knowing him; the doctor chose him, it was said, precisely because he wanted to talk to someone unassociated with his own past. Webster began promising to say grace over family meals once he was released. His daughters especially encouraged the newfound religion of their innocent father, with Marianne carefully praying over every jar of preserves and other gifts of food they sent to him.

  Not everyone around Dr. Webster was convinced. His sister-in-law quietly believed him guilty, and his new faith a sham—and even his Harvard colleague Benjamin Peirce had come to the same conclusion. Writing to a friend in Philadelphia, he deflated the fashion for circulating petitions. “We are quite astonished in Boston that there should be any hesitation as to the justice of the verdict in Webster’s case,” he remarked. “His staunchest friend here admits it, and believes the murder to have been premeditated.”

  Almost as unsettling, Professor Peirce wrote, was how he’d found Webster becoming utterly fixated on eating: “In the course of the trial, Prof Treadwell told him that he should see his family in Cambridge, and asked if he had any messages to send. ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘ask them to send me some custards.’ On the morning of the sentence, he asked the jailer for a piece of paper on which he wrote in his most eager and excited manner an order for Parker to send him some cream cakes for dinner.” Indeed, it wasn’t just “some” cream cakes; Webster had ordered a dozen for his dinner.

  “There is a very faint hope,” Peirce added in his letter, “that he might prove to be insane.”

  IT WAS just about then that the Websters’ son-in-law arrived.

  Harriet and her daughters had no notion that John Dabney would be coming out from Fayal to visit; when he reached shore on April 30th, the solid ground of Boston still rolling under his feet “after a stormy and most tedious passage,” he found a household in shock. Word of the verdict hadn’t reached across the Atlantic when he’d departed, and as he settled into a guest room in the gloomy Webster house, he gingerly set a daguerreotype of his wife and their toddler, Carl, by the head of his bed and penned a letter back to Fayal. As much as his wife, he fretted over their child.

  “You will have heard dearest Sally ere this reaches you of the result of the trial,” he wrote. “Recollect that the life of another depends upon your calmness.” There were still petitions afoot, he reassured her. “All yet may go well,” he promised, and added, “I found your dear mother much better than I expect[ed].”

  In the Webster home, Dabney was nearly as confined as he had been on the high seas; Mrs. Webster and her daughters never went out anymore, he observed, except to take a carriage for their Tuesday and Friday visits to their father in jail. There was not much for them to see there, either. Dabney found Webster physically barred from visitors; he could speak to his unseen father-in-law only through the outer grates of a cell window. Smuggling letters out of the jail had come back to haunt Webster; it was even rumored that the guards had run a needle through the paper and envelopes they gave him, and that the second “Civis” letter bore the telltale pinprick. But if little could get out, food was still allowed in. The bohemian writer George Thompson, imprisoned in the next cell for shooting a pistol during a theater brawl, was the fortunate recipient of the professor’s excess windfall of books, newspapers, sardines, jam, and wine. He particularly appreciated the wine—and, like most Bostonians, quietly thought his generous neighbor was guilty of murder anyway.

  The Webster women absolutely refused to entertain such notions.

  “He is the victim of circumstances, a deeply injured man,” his daughter Hattie insisted. “That he is innocent, we his family know, and nothing on earth will ever take from us this conviction.”

  The family didn’t just want a guilty man’s commutation—they wanted an innocent man’s full pardon. On April 24, Dr. Webster had filed a pardon request with the governor; and this time, he’d been careful to acknowledge Parkman as well, claiming that “I never entertained any other than the kindest feelings towards him; and that I never had any inducement to injure, in any way, him whom I have long numbered among my best friends.” He again put forward the idea of a conspiracy, or perhaps the nefarious work of “an individual.”

  After a month of stony silence from the governor’s office, Webster quietly withdrew the letter.

  Instead, Sohier and Merrick crafted a writ of error—an attack on the trial on technical grounds for “certain errors in the proceeding and judgment of the court.” In this claim of a faulty trial, Webster’s defense team found inadvertent allies, though some were error-prone themselves. An entire pamphlet—A Review of the Webster Case, by a Member of the New York Bar—had excoriated the defense team for its “silence and timidity of cross-examination.” Written anonymously by future New York mayor A. Oakey Hall, the pamphlet was effective in its rhetoric but careless in its reading of the case; working from Dr. Stone’s inexact transcript, he’d skimmed through an entire day of cross-examination of Littlefield and apparently hadn’t bothered to read the defense’s more aggressive closing arguments. There were also more convincing grounds to argue for a faulty trial; an article in the local Monthly Law Reporter had already given a drubbing to Judge Shaw’s jury instructions, and another pamphlet had attacked his novel explanation of “beyond a reasonable doubt” as “law manufactured for the occasion.”

  But before the principals could meet in court again to argue the writ, they first had to gather to view a dead body—and it was not Dr. Parkman’s.

  23

  A MAN IN ERROR

  BODIES WERE NOW TURNING UP ALL OVER BOSTON.

  No sooner had Webster been sentenced than the Boston Daily Mail ran a headline shouting, “DR. PARKMAN FOUND!” Children playing near a storage shed had looked inside and found the mangled remains of an old man; it proved to be an ordinary cadaver in an undeclared workshop kept by medical students. Days later, merely a block or two from the courthouse, construction revealed more remains. Three skeletons, all thrown down an old privy, and all complete except for the unnerving absence from each of a spinal column. The building eventually proved to be the old residence of a Harvard professor, where he and his medical students had been in the habit of practicing their dissections.

  But most mysterious of all was a woman identified only as Asch-ph*****. The asterisks were part of the mystery—for Asch-ph***** was an Egyptian mummy, brought to delighted Bostonians by former Cairo diplomat George Gliddon. Part of the mummy’s name was obliterated on her sarcophagus; but it was indeed known, Gliddon announced, that she was the daughter of a high priest of Thebes. The newspapers were abuzz over Gliddon’s promise to saw into “the intact coffin, unopened for 30 centuries,” and to strip away her wrappings that June at the city’s Tremont Temple—and to reveal, for perhaps the first time in America, a wondrously preserved three-thousand-year-old woman.

  “She may have witnessed the ten plagues of Egypt,” the Evening Transcript rhapsodized, “or mourned the loss of brothers, sons, or cousins, drowned in the Red Sea.”

  Boston’s elite snapped up five-dollar subscriptions for the unveiling. Chief Justice Shaw subscribed; so did President Sparks of Harvard, Governor Briggs, soon-to-be senator Charles Sumner, Professors Longfellow and Peirce, and indeed most of the Harvard medical school faculty. An array of doctors, including Holmes and Bigelow—the dean and the new hire, the latter fresh from completing an article on Phineas Gage and the inf
amous bar through his head—would be onstage to carefully observe Gliddon’s actions. So would the university’s famed naturalist Louis Agassiz. After the miseries of the Webster trial, here was a forensic examination that promised history instead of scandal, enlightened knowledge of the past instead of uneasy revelations about the present.

  At long last, on the night of Friday, June 7, the unveiling arrived. After carefully sawing through a bitumen-sealed sycamore inner coffin, Gliddon lifted the lid; the crowd burst into applause when the light of the nineteenth century dawned inside to reveal a mummy “in beautiful condition, as if it had been deposited in its case but yesterday instead of 1500 years before the birth of Christ.” She lacked the jewels and treasures they might have hoped for, but who knew what surprises lay beneath the bandages themselves? Professor Agassiz warmed up the crowd by unwrapping a mummified ibis; and then George Gliddon began the final unveiling to the world of this noble daughter of Egypt. The wrappings had been soaked in tree resin by their makers; and now with each stiffened strip pulled away, ancient dust kicked up into the crowd and set Boston’s gentry sneezing. As Gliddon drew the final strips away from about the hips, he revealed her ancient—what?

  A roar of laughter burst out from the crowd.

  “The daughter of the high priest of Thebes,” Longfellow noted in his journal, “turns out to be a man!” His fellow author Donald Mitchell, known to the public as “Ik Marvel,” recorded the more science-minded reaction of the medical faculty: “Dr. Bigelow blushed, and Professor Agassiz put his hands into his pockets.”

  Gliddon stammered out an explanation—he’d read the hieroglyphics correctly, but ancient Egyptian mortuaries had handled a great many dead, and surely someone had placed the wrong body in the coffin. The crowd clapped politely at his theory, but for newspapers the story produced weeks of fun, from poems that dutifully rhymed “mummy” with “dummy” to a faux account that concluded with the wrappings unscrolling to reveal these words:

  SUPPOSE

  YOUR AUNT

  SHOULD BE

  YOUR UNCLE!

  A FEW days later, when the principals of Webster’s trial reconvened in court on June 12, it was for a considerably more melancholy variety of human fallibility. This time all five state supreme court justices were present, and the defense table was also more crowded than before; another attorney, Charles Bishop Goodrich, sat with Pliny Merrick and Edward Sohier. As the prosecution team of George Bemis and Attorney General Clifford looked on, Merrick stood up and addressed the court.

  “May it please Your Honors, it is the wish of the petitioner that Charles B. Goodrich, Esquire, should participate in the argument upon the present application for a writ of error, in connection with his previous counsel. Mr. Goodrich is now present, and prepared, with the leave of the court, to render that service in his behalf.”

  Proceed.

  Webster had complained loudly in his trial speech and in his initial pardon request about his lawyers, and the new attorney seemed an implicit criticism. But Goodrich was well known in Boston—he’d unsuccessfully run for mayor in 1847—and he was a talented lawyer in his own right. Though not fond of jury trials, he excelled in “chamber practice” behind the scenes; arguing on fine technical grounds was his forte.

  Proper jurisdiction hadn’t been established, he argued; the case hadn’t been properly transferred from municipal court to the supreme court. Furthermore, the law said that a place of execution was to be stated, and it hadn’t been. The list continued, but Webster’s writ was really something of a scarecrow made of lots of little straws bound together to appear frightful; on closer inspection, it was still merely . . . straw.

  After hours of learned argument, the attorney general rose to address the court.

  “My experience in the courts has failed to teach me a most important lesson, if I could be surprised by this application, or by the ingenuity and subtlety with which it has been urged in the argument,” Clifford said drily.

  The court was not surprised, either: the writ was denied.

  Webster’s only hope now was to plead to the state’s governor and his Executive Counsel for a commutation. But when the State House hearing for Webster’s appeal arrived, on July 2, it was not Sohier, or Merrick, or even Goodrich who rose to address the governor’s committee. Instead, at noon, the councilors responded to a request that they first meet with Webster’s jailhouse minister, the Reverend George Putnam.

  He had a document to read to them, the minister explained.

  “The human remains found in the Medical College in November last were those of the late Dr. George Parkman,” Putnam announced. “I am enabled to present, from Dr. Webster’s own lips, a statement of facts connected with the homicide.”

  PUTNAM HAD done the impossible and, to Webster’s own family, the inconceivable: he’d landed a confession.

  That hadn’t been his goal, the reverend quickly explained, as he’d hardly been a confidant of Webster’s before. “My acquaintance with Dr. Webster before his trial had been of the slightest and most casual kind,” he told the council. But nor had they been unknown to each other. The minister had delivered the election sermon to the state legislature—a profound mark of honor in the commonwealth—and he’d very narrowly missed being appointed to Harvard’s Board of Overseers. It had been only a few years since the university had offered him its Hollis Chair in Divinity—though, in the end, he’d turned it down to focus on his ministry.

  Now that same ministry had brought him back to Harvard in its darkest hour. After weeks of praying with Webster, and nearly two months after the jury had delivered its verdict, he’d finally broached the topic that weighed on them both.

  “On the 23rd of May, I had made up my mind to address him in a wholly new strain, and to demand of him a full statement of the facts,” the minister explained. “He said immediately, ‘I am ready to tell you all. It will be a relief to me.’ He then proceeded to relate the facts which I have since embodied in the statement now to be presented.”

  Dr. Parkman’s death, Putnam explained, had been a hideous mistake. He began to read carefully from Webster’s statement to the court. It had all started, just as the prosecution claimed, with Webster’s terrible debts and Parkman’s visit to the college on the afternoon of November 23, 1849—in the very classroom where Webster taught.

  “He came in at the lecture-room door,” the minister read out. “I was engaged in removing some glasses from my lecture-room table into the room in the rear, called the upper laboratory. He came very rapidly down the steps and followed me into the laboratory. He immediately addressed me with great energy: ‘Are you ready for me, sir? Have you got the money?’ I replied, ‘No, Dr. Parkman;’ and was beginning to state my condition, and make my appeal to him.

  “He would not listen to me, but interrupted me with much vehemence. He called me ‘scoundrel’ and ‘liar,’ and went on heaping upon me the most bitter taunts and opprobrious epithets. While he was talking, he drew a handful of papers from his pocket, and took from among them my two notes, and also an old letter from Dr. Hosack, written many years ago, and congratulating him (Dr. P.) on his success in getting me appointed professor of chemistry. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I got you into your office, and now I will get you out of it.’

  “I cannot tell how long the torrent of threats and invectives continued. At first I kept interposing, trying to pacify him. But I could not stop him, and soon my own temper was up. I forgot everything. While he was thrusting the letter and his fist into my face, in my fury I seized whatever thing was handiest—it was a stick of wood—and dealt him an instantaneous blow with all the force that passion could give it. I did not know, nor think, nor care where I should hit him, nor how hard, nor what the effect would be.”

  The effect, Putnam read on, was the worst possible: struck at full force on the side of the head, with nothing to break the blow, Dr. Parkman fell instantly to the floor, a trickle of blood flowing out of his open mouth. Professor Webster dropped his
weapon—a thick, tough length of grapevine wood—and grabbed some ammonia and applied it under Dr. Parkman’s nose, trying to revive him. “Perhaps I spent some ten minutes in attempts to resuscitate him,” Webster explained, “but I found he was absolutely dead. In my horror and consternation I ran instinctively to the doors and bolted them—the doors of the lecture room, and the laboratory below. And then, what was I to do?”

  In that moment, Webster revealed, he made three fateful decisions. He decided not to go to the police, he decided to grab the promissory notes from Parkman’s dead fingers, and then . . . he decided to dispose of the body. Even as he dragged Dr. Parkman’s cooling body down the stairs and into his lower laboratory, just above him Dr. Holmes’s afternoon lecture was proceeding; he had to work quickly.

  “My next move,” the confession continued, “was to get the body into the sink which stands in the small private room—setting up the body partially erect against the corner, and getting up into the sink myself. There it was entirely dismembered. It was quickly done, as a work of terrible and desperate necessity. The only instrument used was the knife found by the officers in the tea-chest, and which I had kept for cutting corks.”

  The showy Turkish knife, he explained, was just that—something he kept for show; he’d brought it into town merely to have its hilt repaired. The sledgehammer that Littlefield hadn’t been able to find, and which some had suspected of being the weapon, also played no role in the crime; Webster didn’t know where it was either. The acid spots in the stairwell were simply that—ordinary lab spatters. The filed keys discovered in a drawer really were just a curiosity he’d found in the street one day. And the sealable tin box and fish hooks hadn’t been bought to dispose of the body—the former was for mailing plants to Fayal, and the latter for lowering experiments in and out of a vault—but he had indeed decided to then use them, after the search died down, to fetch and permanently dispose of Parkman’s remains.