by Linda Wolfe
From that moment forward Lucretia would be viewed by many of her contemporaries as a criminal, for the common psychological thinking of the time held that criminality was an inherited trait, and if one member of a family was a lawbreaker, chances were that the rest of the family was also felonious. In the 1840s this idea would become, in the hands of pseudo-scientists like Orson Squire Fowler, editor of the American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, an argument for eugenics, the improvement of a population by genetic control. Fowler, who was convinced that “the disposition and mental powers of mankind are innate—are born, not created by education,” believed that just about every human trait could be passed down from one generation to the next. People of African descent inherited their unique “mode of moving … tone of voice, manner of laughing, form of nose and mouth, color of eyes and teeth, and other peculiarities.” People of Jewish descent inherited “intellectual superiority,” but also such traits as “acquisitiveness” and “destructiveness.” The English inherited “conscientiousness” and “benevolence.” One day Fowler would use the fact that there were counterfeiters in Lucretia Chapman’s family to advance his theory that criminality could be stemmed if people avoided marrying into tainted families like hers. In the meantime, Lucretia was throwing herself on the mercy of that family.
She was at the Cape, begging her relatives to help her find a way to avoid being located by the police. She didn’t stay with any of her kin, assuming that to do so might be dangerous either for herself or for them. Instead, indifferent to comfort, she boarded in the rundown house of a stranger. And whenever she went out of doors she wore her disguise, the frock coat and trousers she had packed. With her long torso and tall legs the costume seemed to suit her. She was sure she would not be taken for a woman.
Upon their arrival in Philadelphia, Blayney delivered Lino to the jail in Doylestown, the governmental seat of Bucks County. It was here that the county’s courts sat, here that the deputy attorney general had his office. The courthouse, a handsome cupola-crowned brick edifice, and the jail, which had high prison walls, an exercise yard, and two wings of double-tiered cells, had been erected in 1812 at the astronomical cost of thirty-eight thousand dollars. Both structures were, the Bucks County Intelligencer bragged, built with such fine materials that they were “unequalled by any County Court House and jail in the state.” Nevertheless, jailbreaks had been a problem virtually from the start. Two prisoners had bolted in 1816, four in 1827, two more in 1830. Lino began thinking about how to escape as soon as Blayney handed him over to the warden.
At first it seemed impossible. He was loaded down with heavy iron chains. His wrists and ankles were shackled, and a chain went from the ankle shackles to the floor of his cell, allowing him to move only in a four-foot radius. The chain was so constricting that he could barely reach his low mattress, or its trunk of ragged bedding, or the rough wooden bench that sat alongside the hearth. He dragged himself to the bench from time to time and perfunctorily turned the pages of the Spanish Bible that lay upon it. But for the most part he prowled the cell, seeking its secrets and its hidden possibilities, and taking careful note of the barred windows, the hooked inner door, the padlocked outer door, and the fact that when he was brought food, it was already all cut up.
But the jail was smaller and cozier than the Philadelphia penitentiary. And the warden, Bucks County’s High Sheriff Benjamin Morris, a plump, good-natured Episcopalian, was not a bad sort. Lino kept to his best behavior, and after a few days Morris unlocked his wrist chains so that he could keep himself clean, and even agreed to let him cut his own meat.
The next time Lino received his food, there was a blunt pocket-size knife alongside his tin plate. Lino eyed the knife excitedly. Might he be able to cause the warden to forget to remove it someday?
One evening he got sick on jail food. Morris sent for a doctor in the village, who agreed that he wasn’t well, gave him some medicine, and suggested that a fellow prisoner be assigned to sleep in his cell and nurse him until he was better. That’s how he came to meet William Brown, a thickset man with rippling imposing muscles, who’d been jailed for larceny.
Brown watched over him, and by the time Lino recovered from his food poisoning, he and Brown had compared notes on the layout of the jail. They’d also hatched a few escape plans and agreed that if one of them managed to get out of his cell first, he would free the other. The plans were rudimentary. They needed to be talked over some more. But when Lino tried to get Brown into his cell by once again complaining of sickness, the doctor said this time he was faking; there was nothing wrong with him.
So be it, Lino decided. He didn’t require Brown for planning; he had imagination enough for the two of them. He required Brown for labor. All he really needed just now was to get possession of his dinner knife.
One afternoon he succeeded. Chatting and spinning stories with Sheriff Morris, he managed to so distract the man that when Morris removed his food tray, he didn’t notice that the knife was no longer on it.
Lino concealed the knife in his mattress and that night, after scraping it into a tiny saw on the stone walls of his cell, forced his new tool into a rivet on his ankle shackle and sawed the chain open. To conceal what he’d done, he ripped strips of cloth from his bedding and wound them over and under the iron links.
In the morning, when Morris brought Lino his breakfast, he noticed the bandage. But Lino explained to him that he’d had to put a dressing on his ankle because the chain was tearing at his flesh.
Morris nodded understandingly. He knew that chains often did that.
Two nights later, after Morris had finished his ten o’clock cell check and retired to his house across the yard, Lino took a thin log from his hearth and with the tip of it burned a hole in his floor. That was one of the plans he and Brown had hatched: burn a hole in the cell floor and tunnel out. But although he held the end of the burning log to the oaken floor until it penetrated the thick boards, he discovered to his disappointment that underneath the oak was a second floor, this one made of stone. He tossed the log back in the fireplace and set his trunk over the hole he’d made.
A few nights after that frustrating first try, he tied a chip of wood to a piece of string, extricated another small brand from his hearth, burned a hole over the latch of his inner cell door with its glowing point, and passed the woodchip-weighted string through the hole. He dangled the string until he heard the chip hit the floor. Then slowly, patiently—he had never in his life been so patient—he worked the string along the far side of the door until he felt certain it was just below the latch and tried to jerk the wood up so forcefully that it would spring open the door hook. He tried many times. He was like a fisherman casting his line into an empty sea. But at last he gave one fierce jerk, and the hook flew open. He heard it give, and when he pushed on the door, the wooden portal swung wide.
There was, of course, still the outer door, the iron door, to get through. But he needed no contrivance for that. Just his hand. And the knife. He pulled on the bit of grating in the center of the metal, made a space wide enough for his fingers to go through and, using the handle of his knife, wrenched off the outer padlock. Then he ran to free Brown.
It took him just a few minutes to get his friend out of his cell, but longer to free him of his shackles. The handcuffs he was wearing came off readily enough, but his leg chains were stubborn. Lino’s little knife made but slow and incomplete progress against the metal, and at last Lino told Brown they shouldn’t waste precious time by trying any further. After all, he pointed out, Brown could move now, if somewhat slowly, and he’d be able to conceal the irons under his pants once they got away from the jail. If they got away. But how to accomplish that? Lino’s first idea was that they make a breach in the floor in the day room, the chamber where prisoners, not kept the Philadelphia way and prevented from socialization, were sometimes permitted to gather and warm themselves in front of a big iron stove. He’d heard there was a cellar, not a stone floor, beneath that room. If they cou
ld get into the cellar, he told Brown, they could reach the yard, and if they reached the yard, they could scale the prison wall.
How? Brown asked.
He’d make a rope, Lino said.
They threw themselves into action. In the day room, Brown yanked some rods from the stove and began trying to pry up the floorboards. In his cell, Lino ripped up the bedclothes and twisted them into a sturdy rope. Then it occurred to him that he’d best make himself some kind of pack so that once he was over the walls he’d have a disguise, look like a peddler, not a prisoner. He flung the clothes from his trunk onto the floor, packed them into a bundle, cut armholes in the outer cloth so he could carry the bundle on his back, and stuffed his creation with mattress ticking to make it look fuller. Then he ran to the day room to assist Brown with the floorboards.
They were hours trying to lift them. But finally they succeeded. They made a breach, tumbled down into the cellar, and a moment later unlocked the cellar door and piled outside into the yard.
It was pitch-black out there. The night was like a princely cloak that swirled about them. The prison wall loomed like a ghastly monster. Lino threw his rope high over it and began to climb. But the rope hadn’t caught well and he came tumbling down. Then Brown tried, but he, too, couldn’t get over the wall. They took off their shoes and tried again. They tried again and then again. The blackness of the sky faded to gray. Birds began to twitter. Still, they were having no luck.
What was to be done? Lino wondered. In a short while the sun would be up. The warden would be rising from his bed. It wasn’t fair. They’d done so much, worked so hard, and soon it would be all up with them. Or would it? In the shadows near the cellar door, he spotted an axe, and his heart leaped. Brown could break the great lock with which the yard door was fastened! It would make a terrible noise. It would awaken Sheriff Morris instantly. But it was their only chance. They would have to take it.
He shoved the axe at Brown, and his robust companion began swinging at the huge iron lock. With each blow his muscles bulged and the air reverberated with a thundering noise. At once, from behind the barred windows of the jail, prisoners roused from their sleep began cheering. Then there was another sound, a cry of command. Morris was racing across the yard and yelling at Brown and Lino to stand still. Brown swung again, with redoubled energy. The lock gave way and the door swung open a crack. It wasn’t all the way open. There was another lock barring the door from the outside. But the crack was wide enough for Brown and Lino to squeeze through. Not wide enough for Morris, though. As Lino and his comrade skittered crazily into the fields beyond the wall, the portly warden got stuck in the crack. Lino abandoned his pack, shouted to Brown that they’d best separate, and, doubling his speed, began sprinting in the direction of what he hoped was Philadelphia.
A posse of public-minded citizens answered the warden’s call for help and fanned out over the countryside, combing through every fall-fallow field and beneath every sparsely leafed tree. At around nine in the morning they found the chain-impeded Brown crouching in a pile of bark about a mile from town. Lino was farther away, but not as far as he’d hoped to be. The trouble was his feet. In his haste he’d left his shoes back in the prison yard, and now his feet were sore and bloody. He needed shoes. He needed them desperately, especially if he was going to make better progress.
At a quarry about seven miles out of Doylestown he spotted some workmen and, deciding to take a chance, came out from hiding and asked where he could buy an old pair of shoes. He said he was Chinese, figuring, he later explained, that this would account for his being barefoot. The few Chinese he’d seen in America were always dirt poor, too poor to own shoes.
The workmen seemed not to doubt his story. They asked him no questions and one of them even pointed to a nearby house and suggested that its occupants might be able to sell him some shoes. Lino, struggling forward on his ravaged soles, went into the house.
It was a mistake. He knew it as soon as he got inside. “You’re Mina, aren’t you?” someone said to him as soon as he stepped through the door. The inquirer looked athletic, and he was wearing the uniform of a major in the American army.
He’s probably got a weapon, Lino reckoned. But maybe I can fool him. “No, I’m not Mina.” He beamed a wide, sincere smile and, not knowing that handbills offering a reward for his capture had already been printed and distributed throughout the county, added, “If you don’t believe me, you can take me right over to Doylestown, where you’ll soon see you’re mistaken.”
A friend of the major’s walked in just then, and the major smiled back and said he had in mind doing just that. Lino didn’t try to run away. There were two of them now, to his shoeless one, plus the gang of workmen outside. He let the major and his friend tie his hands behind his back and put him into their wagon. He’d find some way, he figured, to trick his way free.
“Mina,” he began as the wagon bumped along. “I’m not him. But I’ve met the man.”
His captors looked interested. “That’s not his real name, you know,” Lino went on. “It’s an assumed name.”
The men wanted to know what else he knew of Mina. He threw them a few tidbits, said the newspapers had printed all sorts of falsehoods about the poor fellow, said Mina wasn’t a bad sort at all.
The major and his friend seemed to believe he wasn’t Mina. At least they said they believed him. But they refused to untie him and let him out of the wagon. “When we get into Doylestown,” the major promised, “we’ll stop at a tavern and see if we’ve made a mistake. If we have, we’ll let you go.”
Lino put his head down. He was out of ideas for once, exhausted from his long night’s efforts and his foot-bloodying march that morning. “You may as well drive to the jail,” he murmured in defeat. “I am Mina.”
The major and his friend nodded and drove him right to the high-walled stone edifice. Scores of people were milling around it. They welcomed Lino, called out to him. Overnight, it appeared, he’d become famous, become someone everyone wanted to greet. It made him feel good. His mood lifted, and he laughed and talked with the crowd.
Then the warden took him inside and returned him to the same cell from which he’d fled just a few short hours ago. Only now both his bed and his bench had been removed, and when he was shackled to the floor again, the chain was so short he could no longer reach the paltry fire burning in his hearth.
Lucretia was in Greenfield, Pennsylvania, a small town in Erie County. With the help of her Cape Cod relatives, she’d obtained a position in Greenfield in the home of a well-to-do couple named Newton. The Newtons had three children, and unaware of Lucretia’s situation, they’d hired her as their governess.
She began her duties with trepidation, frightened at every moment that her whereabouts might be discovered, and on November 11, 1831, three weeks after she had come to live with the Newtons, her fears came true. She was in the schoolroom with the children when the sheriff of Erie County, accompanied by a postmaster, arrived at the Newtons’ sprawling mansion and demanded to speak to her. She shooed the children away and asked the men what they wanted with her. But she knew, and she put up no struggle when the sheriff told her he had a warrant for her arrest. She simply gathered her belongings and let the men escort her to the Erie jail.
It was a dreary place, but she tried to keep her spirits up. She asked for books and spent time reading. She asked for pens and paper and wrote to her children, with whom she’d been out of contact since her flight from Andalusia. She also wrote to her friends. To Colonel Cuesta, the Mexican consul who had once been so kind to her, she wrote requesting that he please visit her lawyer Campbell and ask him if she should hire “an able Advocate … to aid him in pleading her cause.” To Elijah Cobb, who had known her since girlhood and who had entertained Lino at the Cape because of her recommendation, she wrote, “Ah! From what a height have I fallen! But yesterday I had and enjoyed all that heart could wish; blest with competence, surrounded with a lovely family.”
The l
etter to Cobb was lengthy. In it she romanticized William, saying he had been “the kindest and best of husbands,” and she excoriated Lino, condemning him as a “demon” and “cruel spoiler,” a term of opprobrium right out of Charlotte Temple, that poignant tale of seduction and betrayal she used to love. She also told Cobb that Lino was so mean that once, when her little son John offended him, he said to the toddler that he would never again hug him because he never forgave injuries, and quite terrified the child by warning him that he “delighted in revenge.”
Additionally, she assured Cobb that although she was guilty of having become infatuated with “a mysterious stranger—a base impostor” and guilty of having “precipitately married the cruel monster,” she was innocent of William’s murder and could explain why she had married so “imprudently.” It was because she had been decoyed and duped. The impostor had tricked her into marriage. Why? “Ah! It was that he might better accomplish his diabolical designs to rob me and my children of our personal property.”
She may have taken comfort in writing, in pouring out her side of the story. She may also have hoped that some of her words would be leaked to the press. Certainly the press got wind of them. Cobb, or someone to whom Cobb showed her letter, talked about it to a journalist, and on December l, 1831, the Boston Morning Post published a brief, sympathetic article saying that the accused Mrs. Chapman was a “very wellbred and intelligent woman” who had conducted herself “imprudently”—her very own word. The Post also urged the public not to be too hasty in condemning her.
Several days later, when she had been in jail in Erie for three weeks, she was told to ready herself for a journey. She was to be taken under armed guard to Doylestown, five hundred miles away. There she would be put in a second jail, the same jail in which Lino was being held, to await trial on the unbailable charge of murder.
On the morning of December 10, 1831, David Paul Brown’s renowned concentration was interrupted by a knock on his office door and the appearance at the threshold of a tall woman, accompanied by a warder. The woman’s figure was striking, slender, and, he couldn’t help but notice, well-proportioned. “What service can I render you, Madam?” he asked, and offered his visitor a seat. She lowered herself into a chair and sat still, like a marble figure, nothing but the restlessness of her eyes showing any animation whatsoever. Then at last she spoke, in a groan that seemed to Brown to come not from her throat but from her innermost soul. “Mrs. Chapman?” she said, as if those two words alone would be sufficient to explain her entire lamentable story. Which in fact they were. He hadn’t recognized her—she was haggard from her exhausting trip—but he knew all about her case, had even read in some unreliable public journal that he himself was going to defend her, though who could have put such an idea into the editor’s head, he, David Paul Brown, had no idea. It wasn’t true. The woman hadn’t even written to him, let alone come to see him.