by Paul Collins
Others told the governor, without explanation, to simply drop everything. “You must return to your capital with all speed. The case is urgent,” ordered a telegram arriving at his Springfield home on August 28. The correspondent was none other than his “Ancient and Honorable” envoy, Antonio Emanuel Knight.
When, at last, the governor received an envelope that was clearly an ordinary invitation, it might have been a relief. Then he read it:
Dear Sir,
The undersigned begs the pleasure of your company on Friday morning Aug 30 at No. 5 Leverett St to witness a Murder. A dish of tea will be taken after the awful ceremony.
Yours with suffocation,
Jackus Netebebus
N.B. Please to send an answer or a substitute, if you can find one.
In truth, the arrangements for the execution were troublesome. Sheriff Eveleth, upon quietly announcing that he was taking applications for witnesses to the event, was deluged with more than five hundred requests in the first few days alone. The attention created problems for the prisoner and the jail’s staff, as they’d done everything they could to hide the date and time from Mrs. Webster and her daughters. The Webster women had long stopped reading the newspapers, and their few visitors were not to mention the August 30 execution date. Although they were aware that it was coming someday, Dr. Webster and his family both felt that the shock of knowing exactly when would be too much for them.
His wife and their daughters made their usual visit to his cell on Thursday, August 29, but found their good-byes a little hurried: visiting hours ended a half hour early. Perhaps that made sense; with the end of summer, soon the days would shorten, with darkness settling over the jail earlier each night.
“Will this be your hour for closing in the future?” Mrs. Webster innocently asked the jailer.
Gustavus Andrews was at a loss for an answer as he showed her out. The jailer couldn’t explain the real reason, and nor could her husband: to get them out of the building before they could see the prison yard prepared for the scaffold.
Yes, he finally told Mrs. Webster. These will be the new closing hours.
A JAIL clerk and a guard sat watching Dr. Webster’s fingers carefully follow the curve of a seashell, working at it with a piece of fabric and water until it gained a beautiful shine in the light of his jail cell. It was curious, the comfort to be had cleaning and polishing a shell in some of his final hours on earth; after his decades as a mineralogist, he had reverted back to that most innocent childhood pastime of simply picking something off the ground and treasuring it.
He’d been trying to read, though some books served the occasion better than others. He’d perused Mountford’s Euthanasy, or Happy Talks Towards the End of Life, a pious young narrator’s consolation dialogues with his aging uncle. The youngster’s response to the uncle’s fear that “death was not meant to be altogether pleasant to us” was itself not altogether reassuring: “No; a skeleton is a skeleton. And a death’s head is a death’s head; ugly in itself, and without eyes; but then through the eye-sockets there shines the light of God.” Webster turned to his other volumes. There was Samuel Longfellow’s Hymns, by the younger brother of his good neighbor Henry—he’d once nearly landed Samuel a job back in Fayal, come to think of it—and there was Sir John Bowring’s Matins and Vespers. The professor marked off some particularly fine passages in both, noting which friend they were to be sent to afterward.
And then, at last, he turned to his Bible. The two guards were on a tacit suicide watch, though none called it that; they kept Dr. Webster genial but largely quiet company as he read Scripture—“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” The doctor occasionally stopped to pray, or to simply put his head in his hands, deep in thought. Then, as midnight passed, he lay back in his iron prison-issue bedstead, and tried to close his eyes even as the guards continued their watch on him.
The doctor slumbered only awhile, and awoke before dawn. As the sun rose, an insistent noise echoed over the yard outside: tap, tap, tap. Mr. Dunbar, the prison’s occasional carpenter, led a team in piecing together the scaffold. It was a new spruce one, handily constructed by Dunbar himself according to the latest methods. The crowd already gathering outside the prison walls did not sound very appreciative.
“Stop your infernal clack!” one of them catcalled. “It disturbs the prisoner in his prayers.”
In fact, praying sounded like a fine idea to Webster right about now.
May I come in?
It was his confessor, the Reverend Putnam. The two prayed together as a new morning shift of guards stood nearby. Then Webster turned to more immediate practicalities: two cups of tea, breakfast, and a last smoke. He still had some more cigars left, and he wouldn’t need them anymore.
Gentlemen, please, he told his keepers. Take my cigars.
The doctor was in a philosophical mood. The arriving jail staff had passed through a gauntlet of spectators on Leverett and the surrounding streets—perhaps a thousand were already outside the gates—and more than a hundred police officers and constables were posted to keep the masses at bay. Yet here, in Cell 5, the scene was improbably calm.
Do you know, the prisoner mused to his guards, that I used to experiment on the bodies from this execution ground? I’d apply galvanic batteries to them.
He’d seen a great many executions, in fact. During his residency training in London, back when he’d served alongside John Keats, Dr. Webster had been known for his regular attendance at local hangings. He was something of an enthusiast, and classmates could still remember his jaunty invitation each time: “Hang at eight; breakfast at nine!”
He had, of late, become less enthusiastic—and the hour was approaching.
THEY ENTERED the prison yard with countless eyes upon them. Reverend Putnam, walking alongside the prisoner, kept his gaze directed at the middle of the field.
“Do not regard any thing about you,” he murmured to Webster. “Do not look.”
“I do not look,” the professor repeated. “My thoughts are elsewhere.”
A great mass of Bostonians stretched before them, with boys trying to scale the prison fence to sneak in—a rather novel issue in prison security. A cordon of policemen caught the boys and tossed them back like wriggling fish into a swelling sea of men and women. Enterprising locals charged fifty cents, and then a full dollar, for a spot on their rooftops; at 3 Lowell Street, the residents even fashioned some crude benches out of planks, until there were one hundred spectators perched atop their building alone.
“At every possible point (with a few exceptions) from which the gallows or any part of the yard could be seen, might be seen a human face,” marveled a Journal reporter.
There were some principled holdouts. Sightseers arriving at one building found a simple note posted on its door: “NOT AT HOME, OPPOSED TO CAPITAL PUNISHMENT.” Such protestations were promptly ignored as men shinned up the drainpipes to enjoy a prime unoccupied rooftop.
John Webster did not look: he kept his eyes on the scaffold before him, and he mounted the high platform step by step with the sheriff, the deputies, and the minister. Below them in the yard were gathered more than one hundred witnesses invited by the sheriff; in accordance with the state law, he’d asked the “District Attorney, Clerk or Clerks of the County, and twelve respectable citizens,” along with the defense team, a surgeon, a minister, and the prison guards. Joining them was Boston’s press corps and a contingent of New York reporters that had arrived the night before, poised to telegraph the appalling details back to the eager readers at the Herald and the Sun.
The professor reached the cross-arm, the August sun bearing down upon his black outfit; up on the rooftops, ladies opened their parasols. The whole affair was running late—it was now going on nine-thirty—for the new gallows had taken a while to erect. It was of a clever design, with a spring-loaded trap door activated by a mere tap of the sheriff’s foot.
“It is a very ingenious contrivance,” one observ
er allowed.
Sheriff Eveleth drew out the governor’s death warrant, and the crowd fell silent.
“Whereas, at the term of the Supreme Judicial Court, begun and holden at Boston, within the county of Suffolk, and for the counties of Suffolk and Nantucket, on the first Tuesday of March, being the fifth day of said month, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty,” he droned, reading the preamble, “JOHN W. WEBSTER, of Cambridge, in the county of Middlesex, was convicted of the crime of murder, and was thereupon by our said Court sentenced to suffer the pains of death, by being hanged by the neck, until he shall be dead . . .”
As the Sheriff read on, Reverend Putnam turned to Dr. Webster and earnestly drew him into discussion, ignoring the sheriff. They’d heard the warrant before; they already knew what was coming. What the prisoner needed was prayer.
“. . . agreeably to the provisions of the one hundredth and thirty-ninth chapter of the Revised Statutes, you cause the execution of the said sentence upon our said court, in all respects to be done and performed upon him, the said John W. Webster . . .”
The deputies drew out the leather straps that would bind his feet and hands. Webster had seen enough executions that he’d gone out of his way to ask for the smooth straps, wishing to avoid the coarser ropes that were sometimes used for these jobs.
“. . . whereof fail not at your peril, and make return of this warrant, with your doings thereon, into our Secretary’s office . . .”
The doctor shook the reverend’s hand warmly; then his arms were pinioned.
“. . . our seal hereunto affixed, the nineteenth day of July, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and fifty, and of the Independence of the United States of America, the Seventy-Fifth.”
Did the prisoner, the sheriff asked, have any final words?
He did, but not for the sheriff or for the crowd.
“Father,” Dr. Webster prayed aloud, “into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
He had nothing more to add. The sheriff gently removed the doctor’s hat, and as he drew a black cambric hood over his head, Webster turned to look at the Reverend Putnam. His confessor’s face would be the last he saw.
“In the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Sheriff Eveleth called out after the noose was procured, “and in accordance with the Warrant of the Chief Executive, I now proceed to execute the law upon John W. Webster, convicted at the March term of the Supreme Judicial Court, of the murder of Dr. George Parkman.”
There was a long, terrible pause; then the sheriff’s foot pressed down on the catch.
The trap door sprang open, and Dr. Webster dropped eight feet, with a sudden snap to break his neck. After a minute, involuntary spasms passed through his body that made his shoulders shrug, as if the learned professor had been posed a question that even he could not answer.
Epilogue
WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T SEE HIM?
The woman stood in the Websters’ doorway, uncomprehending and indignant. Her two daughters were still in the carriage on Garden Street, waiting to join the funeral viewing. They were strangers to the Webster family, true. But that hardly mattered now, did it? Dr. Webster was famous, and they were curious, and that meant they had a right to see the man—to see what was left of him.
We came all the way up from New York. The door, as politely as possible, was closed in her face. Why can’t we see him?
The Websters and their neighbors closed ranks as the streets filled with strange carriages. Sightseers from out of town wheeled around and around, vulturously circling the blocks, hoping to see something, anything, of the infamous Dr. Webster’s body. “There has been a morbid curiosity, marked by feelings almost inhuman on the part of some of the populace,” observed Harvard librarian John Sibley that weekend.
Inside the parlor, the doctor lay carefully arranged, his features as fully restored as Mr. Peak’s mortuary could achieve. Once the crowd outside the prison wall had dispersed, Webster’s body had been loaded not into an undertaker’s fine polished vehicle, which onlookers would have identified and tailed, but instead into the nondescript lawyer’s carriage that his defense counsel had loaned for the trip over the Craigie Bridge and back home. The coffin itself was a regrettable affair, a cheap black-painted pine box from the jail. The professor had wanted mahogany, but the cost was simply too dear. The family remained desperately short of money. They’d quietly sold peaches and pears from their back garden; a friend had taken the fruit into town for sale to buyers unaware of their provenance. Such earnest efforts were, however, nowhere near enough, and now the family was permanently deprived of the doctor’s already insufficient Harvard salary.
Working behind the scenes, Longfellow’s cousin-in-law, William Appleton, had been quietly arranging matters for Harriet Webster and her daughters. Both Appleton and merchant John Perkins Cushing had pledged $500 to the Webster family as a first step toward a lifetime loan that would revert to the contributors upon the death of the last member of the Webster family. But though Appleton found quick success in raising an initial $5,000 toward the family’s crushing debts and future estate, further contributions proved scarce.
“Mr. Appleton tried to raise $20,000 for them,” confided Mrs. Webster’s sister in a letter, “but he could find no one to second his views.”
An auction of the doctor’s effects also proved surprisingly unprofitable. His labware sold poorly, and the proceeds from the sale of his library were even more melancholy. The Webster women had naïvely erased the doctor’s name from his books, as if removing a stain to clean them for auction; but his name was perhaps the most valuable feature for a collector. As ordinary books, they now held the rather more limited appeal typical of any retiring professor’s collection. “It was quite valuable,” one visitor commented, “containing many good books in chemistry and medicine, but was more complete in the works of twenty years since than those of the present day.”
Still, the efforts did not go entirely for naught. In the end, between the auctions and Appleton’s quiet entreaties with friends and creditors, the Websters were left with $450, as well as lodging in a new though smaller home, and the daughters’ keepsakes were spared from the auctioneer’s hammer. The trusts left by the daughters’ grandfather, too, still had some money in them. Of the rest of their learned prosperity—the fine home they had once built, the tasteful library and musical acquisitions, the scientific collections, and the quietly crushing debts and subterfuge that undergirded these attainments—all vanished into the closed ledger of the past. Young Hattie, despite her fortunes being much reduced, was married months later to a man who refused to hear of breaking the engagement, but her mother never really recovered. After Mrs. Webster’s death in October 1853, the two remaining daughters, Catherine and Marianne, left town within days, on the next ship for their prosperous in-laws in Fayal—fully intending, a local newspaper reported, “never to return.”
Visiting the Azores in 1867, a young Mark Twain was astonished to find the Webster daughters thriving on the island. “I did not recognize them in the fine, matronly, dignified ladies we saw today,” he marveled. “Their exile was well chosen. In no civilized land could they have found so complete a retirement from the busy, prying world.” They’d even reconciled themselves, if a bit ruefully, to their father’s place in history.
“Well,” they said, introducing themselves to their American visitors, “I suppose you know who we are!”
FOR OVER six months, George Bemis’s life had been a perfect blank.
“The longest gap perhaps in my journal for ten years,” he wrote in its pages in November 1850, “and for reason of the hardest task of ‘The Report of the Trial of John W. Webster,’ as my title-page now reads.”
For a case that Bemis hadn’t wanted to get involved with in the first place, Webster’s had nearly taken over his life. The associate prosecutor had, in the end, gone forward with editing a transcript for the publisher Little, Brown, and as the task stretched out into
months, he repeatedly decided to give up—“four or five times,” he recalled—before invariably being drawn back in. “Why has it taken so long?—I have asked myself time and again, & cannot find a satisfactory answer,” Bemis admitted in his long-neglected journal.
His care was justified: the case would have an outsized role in American legal history, both for its innovative use of forensic evidence and for Chief Justice Shaw’s instructions to the jury on the definition of reasonable doubt. Shaw’s formulation became standard usage and a staple of law school instruction across the country; by 1866, the California Supreme Court had deemed it “probably the most satisfactory definition ever given.” Though often criticized as law made up on the spot, Shaw’s language might be more fairly described as an effective and remarkably durable fusing of existing precedents. Examining the “Webster charge” in 1994, even the U.S. Supreme Court seemed unable to come up with anything better to replace it. “It was commendable for Chief Justice Shaw to pen an instruction that survived more than a century,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in bemused exasperation. Even as other states did eventually update the wording of their jury instructions, the “Webster charge” preserved in Bemis’s transcript persisted in Massachusetts until 2015, when the state supreme court ruled that “a modernized version of the Webster charge must [now] be given” in criminal trials.
Chronicling the trial did hold some small professional pleasure for Bemis; no longer an adversary, he now interviewed Shaw and the defense attorneys as colleagues, as well as his fellow prosecutor John Clifford, working with each to make sure the wording of their arguments was memorialized correctly. Sometimes his work went beyond correction: Bemis also quietly erased Chief Justice Shaw’s careless speculation about whether Webster might have used chloroform on Parkman. Nevertheless, the resulting publication in November 1850 would be the definitive record of the case. As a figure at the sidelines of Transcendentalism, George Bemis might have preferred to write on theology, and to be remembered for that, but he was a busy lawyer, and a trial transcript would be his enduring literary accomplishment.