by Bill James
There was a remarkable collection of men in Massachusetts at that time, men (and a few women) who had convinced not only themselves but generations of scholars yet to be born that they were smarter than the rest of us, braver, and purer in spirit. Henry David Thoreau, according to F. B. Sanborn, was one of a group of Harvard undergraduates disciplined by the college for setting off (inside a building) a giant sulphur-based stink bomb they had built with chemicals given them by Dr. Webster. Emily Dickinson was nearby, out in Amherst, Hawthorne in Concord (The Scarlet Letter was first published in Boston in 1850, by Ticknor, Reed, and Fields). The Abolitionist movement was center stage in America then, and many of the leading abolitionists lived in Boston—William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, Abby Kelley Foster. It was this that really drove the coverage of the crime: that much of the nation was taking unbridled delight in the fact that a petty and vicious crime had occurred in the very center of this group of high-bred citizens who lived on ether and farted perfume. Perhaps it was Edgar Allan Poe’s celestial revenge. Poe, who died the month before Parkman’s murder, had been born in Boston, and had published his first poem anonymously under the name “A Bostonian.” Rejected by the Boston literary elite, Poe had grown to detest these people (particularly Longfellow) and had tried to commit suicide in Boston in 1848. He would have been—or perhaps was—absolutely delighted by the Webster/Parkman furor.
The murder divided Cambridge from Boston, Cambridge almost unanimously believing Webster to be innocent, and Boston unanimously convinced of his guilt. Oliver Holmes, who was close friends with both Webster and Parkman but closer to Parkman, danced around the issue but was probably an exception. Holmes knew Webster well enough to know his faults. But most of Harvard was determined to see Webster acquitted, denying his guilt even after his conviction—and, in their fervor, married themselves ever closer in the public mind to a sinking scoundrel.
There is a small wren called Parkman’s wren. Audubon gave it that name, after George Parkman. Charles Dickens visited Boston in 1868, his first trip to Boston since the 1840s. He was greeted by a party of old friends. “What would you like to do in Boston?” they asked. Dickens asked if he could see the room where Webster murdered Parkman. Oliver Holmes gritted his teeth and conducted the tour, Dickens beaming and almost beside himself with excitement.
A great deal had happened by then, of course; an ocean had moved under the bridge before 1868. America during the Civil War—and during the run-up to the Civil War, and during the cooling-off period after the Civil War—had too much crime to take much of an interest in any of it.
When I was a young student, our professors would periodically implore us to ponder deeply why the crime rate in America was so dramatically worse than the crime rate in most of Europe. Any complex phenomenon can be explained in multiple ways, each as true as the others. But one of the true explanations is this: that murder rates in America shot up so fantastically, in the years between 1840 and 1885, that even though they have been generally going down for most of the last 125 years, they remain high today.
The human race is involved in a long, long battle to eliminate murder from our midst, as we are involved in equally long and torturous struggles to eliminate war, famine, slavery, disease and underarm wetness. We will ultimately succeed in this struggle; murder will eventually be all but entirely eliminated, but our gains are so slow and irregular that progress can only be seen by staring back across the centuries.
Murder rates in America even in 1840 were almost certainly significantly higher than they were in England. Between 1840 and 1885, however, four factors combined to drive the murder rate in America sharply higher, at least relative to Europe. First, firearms became cheap. In 1840 relatively few Americans and few citizens of any other country owned a firearm. Between 1835 and 1870, due to the inventiveness of a group of merchants centered in New England—Samuel Colt, Horace Smith, Daniel Wesson, Oliver Winchester, Eli Whitney Jr. and Richard Gatling, to name a few—firearms became dramatically cheaper, better built, easier to use, and more deadly. Second, the American Civil War led to a widespread breakdown of law, order and justice, which allowed crime to flourish, as it always does in all countries in all civil wars. Third, there was a circle of legitimized violence that surrounded the Civil War, which coarsened the culture. In Lawrence, Kansas, more people were murdered on one day—August 21, 1863—than during all of the twentieth century. There were numerous other murderous raids on Lawrence—and raids by people from Lawrence on other cities, particularly in western Missouri—dating back to the mid-1850s.
One of the most famous bank robbers of the late 1800s was Cole Younger. By the time he was 21 years old, Younger had personally witnessed violent death dozens of times—first, in a series of violent incidents involving his family, second, in the murderous “raids” or rampages of which I spoke earlier, and third, as a soldier during the Civil War. It is not too surprising that he became a violent criminal. He was capable of violence as he was capable of decency. After twenty years as a criminal he spent fifteen years in prison, was released, lived peaceably another fifteen years, and died a Christian. The Civil War set loose in our society an epidemic of rage and violence, and this epidemic scarred the life of Cole Younger as it did the lives of hundreds of thousands of other people.
And fourth, the very rapid expansion of America through the frontier created an impossible problem for the law enforcement community. If you take 10,000 people and put them in one square mile, you can police them effectively with ten cops. If you take 10,000 people and spread them out over an area the size of Nebraska or Kansas or South Dakota or Arizona, you can’t begin to police them with 200 cops.
IV
C. R. R.—Money is ready. How shall I know your agent?
—PERSONAL ADVERTISEMENT IN PHILADELPHIA LEDGER, JULY 22, 1874
The explosive combination of these four punches—the invention of cheap firearms, the disruption of law and order during the Civil War, the coarsening of the culture surrounding the Civil War, and the rapid expansion of the frontier—sent the American crime rate spiraling so high that a century since has not been enough to flog it back into complete remission. In late 19th century America there are two entirely different sets of crime stories. On the one hand, you have the “Wild West” stories of Billy the Kid, Jesse James, The Wild Bunch, the gunfight at the OK Corral, and a thousand others, many of which remain famous today, but which I will pass over as being essentially outside the tradition of popular crime, which centers on villainy, rather than lawlessness.
On the other hand you have the modern urban crime stories, and so I will resume my narrative with a story which is neither of these, neither fish nor fowl, and which actually was never all that famous, apart from a few weeks in 1868. On April 6, 1868, a wooden transport ship named the Arran sailed from Greenock, on the west coast of Scotland, near Glasgow. It was a mid-sized ship, with a crew of 22 men and two officers, bound for Quebec. As soon as the ship was clear of the port a young boy crawled out of hiding; he had stowed away on the ship, looking for adventure at sea, or, that failing, sustenance. He had no shoes, no coat and only a flimsy pair of trousers.
This was unexpected but not all that unusual, and the ship continued across the Atlantic—but then a second small boy crawled out of the woodwork, and then another, and another. You couldn’t open a cupboard on the Arran without pulling out an urchin. They weren’t all that small and some of them had shoes, but by the time the ship was four days at sea the crew had been joined by the remarkable total of seven uninvited guests. Three of them were boys of 11, one was 12, two were 16, one 22.
The captain of the ship was Robert Watt, aged 28, and the mate was his brother-in-law, James Kerr, aged 31. They were large, bearded men who had never raised families, and had neither the inclination nor the time to provide childcare. They had sufficient provisions to make America even with the extras, however, and so they continued on. Watt appears to have been a decent enough soul, but he wasn’t strong enough to
stand up to Kerr, and Kerr was a bit of a monster. Seasick, the youngsters vomited up their meat. Kerr responded by ordering that they be given no more meat. He assigned them work to do on the icy deck, barefoot and without coats in the wind and rain of the North Atlantic, and when they snuck below deck to get warm he would have them beaten. They slept in filth and were beaten because they were filthy; they stole food to stave off hunger, and were beaten then as thieves.
For several days in early May the Arran dodged ice floes, and, on May 10, found herself lodged firmly in an ice pack off the coast of Newfoundland. The officers climbed off the ship and walked around the ice, surveying their situation. The stowaways took the opportunity to grab some food. When Kerr and Watt returned to the ship they were enraged, and ordered the stowaways off the ship.
Although Kerr had been chiefly in charge of the barbarities up to this point, it was Watt, the Captain, who actually ordered the boys onto the ice. Some of the youths, fearing that to be put off the ship barefoot on an iceberg was near certain death, cried and pleaded to be allowed to remain on board. To this, the Captain was said to have replied that they could as well die on the ice as on board, but they weren’t going to get any more of the ship’s food. Others were by now so desperate that they were ready to take their chances on the ice. They stood on the ice and begged for a little food to take with them. Some biscuits were thrown overboard, one biscuit apiece.
The officers, when finally they came to trial, claimed that they had never intended for the stowaways to perish. There were houses that could be seen in the distance, at least through a spyglass. They pointed the boys toward these unseen structures, five to ten miles away—or, if they preferred, toward another ship, also stuck in the ice, which was perhaps within a mile or two. Two witnesses claimed that the Captain had told the boys that they could return to the ship if they were unable to reach safety.
As luck would have it, five of the seven stowaways were able to reach land. Two of the eleven-year-olds perished, one abandoning hope and sitting down to await death, the other falling into the icy water while attempting to jump from one ice floe to another. The others walked for about twelve hours, eventually reaching a place where they could see houses across a stretch of water. They tried to ferry across the water on a chunk of ice, using a stick as a paddle. They were spotted from the land, and a boat was sent to rescue them.
When the Arran returned to Greenock in July a mob of men stormed the ship, trapping the captain and mate in their quarters, where they defended themselves with firearms for several hours until rescued by the police. The surviving stowaways, who had spread quickly around Newfoundland in search of work and shelter, were rounded up and brought back to Greenock, crossing the Atlantic the second time in comfort and leisure.
Kerr and Watt stood trial in Edinburgh in November 1868. Kerr pled guilty to assault, and the charge against him of culpable homicide was dropped. He was sentenced to four months in prison, which was the time he had served awaiting trial. Watt was found guilty of culpable homicide, but with a recommendation of mercy based on his previous good record. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison. The courtroom rocked with boos and hisses. Watt, released from prison in mid-1870, went back to work as the captain of another ship, and continued to command ships into the 20th century. Kerr also went back to work as a first mate, but died suddenly just a few years later.
The story of the Boys on the Ice is an unusual crime story, but it is in a certain sense an archetype: that crime stories very often center on entirely remarkable circumstances. It was an amazing thing, to have all of those stowaways on one ship, and it led to a peculiar dynamic on the ship. The two-sided drama of officers and crew became a three-sided conflict—officers, crew and stowaways—and, whereas a single stowaway might have been adopted by the crew almost as a pet, a whole assembly of them presented an entirely different problem. This led, ultimately, to a fantastic loss of judgment on the part of the officers.
A definition of a news story, of course, is Man Bites Dog. Run-of-the-mill crimes involve, as a rule, people who never had any good judgment to begin with. Crime Stories, on the other hand, often involve people whose judgment appears sound enough and whose lives appear to be on a successful track, but who for one reason or another lose their moral compass and do things that are frankly difficult to believe. All murders are tragedies in the common sense of the word, but Crime Stories are often tragedies almost as Aristotle defined tragedy—an action which is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, in which a person of substance is reduced to ruin by a flaw in his/her character revealed under the tensions of the stage. Robert Watt would never have imagined himself to be a murderer; he was a ship’s captain, for Christ’s sake. Harvard could not imagine Dr. Webster as a murderer. Fall River could not imagine Lizzie Borden as a murderess.
The two biggest American crime stories of the post-war years were Jesse James and the kidnapping of Charlie Ross. The press never resolved whether it was Charlie or Charley, by the way. A search of newspapers from the era finds almost equal frequency of each spelling, with a sprinkling of Charly.
This fact is an appropriate place to begin the Ross story, as the story of Charlie Ross is perhaps America’s most confusing crime story. I will do my best to get the story straight, but there are multiple published accounts of many different parts of the story, and there is no authoritative after-the-fact source that satisfactorily ties up the loose ends. On July 1, 1874, four-year-old Charles Brewster Ross and his six-year-old brother Walter were playing in the front yard of their house in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in the Philadelphia area. Their father was half-watching them while running his business; their mother was in Atlantic City, recuperating from an illness. The Ross family had once been quite wealthy, and their “house” was a mansion on a hilltop. Sometime in the early afternoon two men pulled up in a buggy, and offered to take the boys to buy some fireworks. The two men had been hanging around for several days, giving the boys candy and toys. They were seen by a number of witnesses taking the boys away.
Within a few miles, young Charles was screaming that he wanted to be taken home. His abductors stopped at a store in Philadelphia, and gave Walter a quarter to go in and pick out some fireworks; they said that they were going to try to calm down Charlie. When Walter came out of the store the carriage was gone.
The boys’ father, Christian Ross, searched the neighborhood and then went to the police. He asked the police to keep the search quiet, trying to keep word from reaching his wife in Atlantic City; she was not well. He placed personal ads in local newspapers, asking for information and offering to pay for the safe return of his sons. A friend in Atlantic City spotted one of the ads, however, and Mrs. Ross was alerted to the disappearance.
The older boy, Walter Ross, was located in Philadelphia and returned to the family. Asked to describe his abductors, he described a wiry man with a low forehead, a dark tan and an old broad-brimmed straw hat, and his partner, a man with a misshapen red nose, what he called a “monkey nose.” Within days Ross had received a nearly illiterate letter from someone claiming to hold Charly; the letter repeatedly misspelled the word “you” but came within one “n” of correctly spelling “annihilation.” A later letter from the same source specified an amount to be paid for Charlie’s safe return: $20,000.
The pieces of the story now assembled, the abduction of Charlie Ross captured the attention of the nation. The mayor of Philadelphia was recalled from his vacation in California. Negotiations between Ross’ parents and the supposed kidnappers continued, eventually reaching 23 ransom notes and some unknown number of cryptic personal ads posted in response. Children who were supposed to be Charlie Ross kept popping up all over the country. This happened so often that it developed its own protocol, with conditions that must be met before the Ross family would dispatch a relative to see whether the child in question was in fact Charlie.
This was the first high-profile kidnapping for ransom in American history, a new crime as
far as most Americans were concerned. Copycat crimes now began to appear—in Brooklyn, in Boston, once more in Philadelphia. Christian Ross was assailed in newspaper editorials for his bad judgment in offering to pay for his son’s return. This, said the newspapers, was fueling the spate of kidnappings. (In reality, of course, it was the newspapers themselves that were feeding the problem.) One article in the Reading Eagle was so vicious, and so clearly untrue, that the Ross family sued for libel—and won an $1800 judgment against the paper in late September, 1874. When Philadelphia citizens learned that Christian Ross was bankrupt and unable to pay the $20,000, a fund drive was organized to raise the money—and a competing fund was organized to advertise a $20,000 reward for the arrest of the kidnappers, specifying that not a penny was to go to the culprits. Police turned Philadelphia upside down, breaking down doors and searching houses without warrant. The Pinkerton agency circulated literally millions of fliers with Charlie’s picture and descriptions of the kidnappers, asking for information. People were arrested all over the country on suspicion of involvement in the crime. Two men and a woman were arrested in Odell, Illinois, with a little boy dressed as a girl. The dramatic story of how a private investigator chased this party across the country and finally got the police to make an arrest in Odell was printed in newspapers across the nation before it could be determined whether the boy was in fact Charlie. He wasn’t; one of the men involved was from Philadelphia, and the boy had been secretly taken in a domestic dispute, but he wasn’t Charlie. Another young boy dressed as a girl turned out, on doctor’s examination, to be a girl after all. The Keffer Sheet Music Company of Boston published a song, “Bring Back Our Darling,” words by Dexter Smith, music by W. H. Brockway. The song sold in the hundreds of thousands, and copies of the music still exist.