by Linda Wolfe
Now, however, at the recommendation of her family lawyer, she was here, under guard and en route to jail and indictment in Doylestown. Delicately, oh as delicately as possible, he proceeded to question her, asking her the precise nature of the accusation against her and what kind of defense she hoped could be mounted on her behalf.
The conversation was long and painful. She gave him a thousand details. Told him about the death of her husband, Chapman; about the impostor Mina; about her flight from the police; and about her five fatherless—and soon to be motherless, if the deputy attorney general had his way—children. He heard her out without rushing her, and thought about his own children and the advice he intended to give his sons should they one day follow in his footsteps and enter the practice of criminal law. It was that before they ventured to undertake a capital case they must be absolutely certain they were competent for the hazards of such a case. Remember, he intended to tell them, if you perform your task feebly, the blood of the defendant may be upon you. Do not, therefore, allow a feverish desire for notoriety blind you to the difficulties and dangers by which you will inevitably be surrounded, for the trumpet of fame cannot drown the small still voice of remorse.
Mrs. Chapman was coming to the end of her long tangled tale. She was begging him to represent her. It would cause him, Brown realized, no end of personal and professional inconvenience. The woman had waited until the eleventh hour to ask for his services. Her trial—it was to be a joint trial, with her and Mina standing together before the bench—was due to start in just a few short days. Worse, it was to be held not in Philadelphia, but out in Doylestown, where, if he agreed to handle the case, he would no doubt have to stay in some uncomfortable inn. He’d be deprived for who knew how long of the refinements of his pleasant home, that capacious Washington Square house which Mrs. Royall had called, in that book of hers, “a splendid mansion, in which wealth and taste are alike diffused.” Still, he would take Mrs. Chapman on, Brown concluded. He would stand by her and see to it that she got a fair and impartial trial. Indeed, he would be like the commander of a ship in a storm. The cordage might snap, the masts go by the board, the bulwarks get carried away, the hull spring a leak, but he, the gallant commander, would stay by his helm to the last, determined either to steer his battered vessel into port, or to perish gloriously in the faithful discharge of his duty.
Soberly, he told the poor woman his decision, and before she was removed by her caretaker to finish her trip to the common jail in which the state had decided to consign her, he had the pleasure of seeing how happy he had made her. As to himself, he could not remember a more disagreeable sensation than that which he experienced upon bidding her goodbye. He had assumed, he told his friends, the responsibility of a cause upon whose outcome depended not only the life of an individual, but the hopes and happiness of all who belonged to her.
Nine
Pennsylvania v. Lucretia Chapman, Part One
Mid-December 1831–Mid-February 1832
BROWN WAS IN A temper on December thirteenth, the day before Lucretia’s trial was scheduled to begin. On the shortest of notice, he’d managed to hire an assistant, a talented young lawyer named Peter McCall, and the two of them had taken a coach out to Doylestown. But the county seat was jammed with gawkers and journalists from all over the country, not to mention a horde of prosecution witnesses. It was so crowded that even though the town had six hotels and numerous smaller lodging places, Brown and McCall weren’t able to find accommodations. Were he and his new assistant to be like Noah’s dove, with no resting place for their feet? he wondered as they traipsed from one inn to the next. Then finally, quite late at night, they succeeded in finding quarters and were able to set about preparing for the next day’s work—work that promised, Brown feared, to be a most awful and embarrassing business. Because he had no witnesses lined up, or even any idea if his client had witnesses. Not yet. The whole thing was happening too quickly.
In the morning, fighting a wintry wind that sent a chill through his bones, he and McCall hunched to the jail to confer with Lucretia. Brown was still edgy. His short stay in Doylestown had convinced him that not only did the prosecution have a veritable army of witnesses, but public prejudice was running high against his client. When he and his junior colleague passed through the prison’s front door, the grated portal seemed almost to groan as it swung open, and the eerie sound gave him a momentary and uncharacteristic lapse of confidence. What could he do against so much prejudice and proof, he fretted. He needed helping hands.
Nevertheless, when he spoke to Lucretia, he tried to assume an optimistic air, for he didn’t want her to know how worried he was. Who can help us? he asked in as cheerful a manner as he could muster. Who should we call to testify on your behalf?
She named all sorts of people. But many of them—like her first lawyer, Campbell, who’d gone off to sit with the legislature in Harrisburg, or her husband’s speech student, John Bishop, who resided in Vermont, or her own student, Ben Ash, who lived in New York—were hundreds of miles away. Brown wasn’t at all sure he’d be able to round up all the witnesses she was proposing, let alone these remote ones. Concerned, he said a hasty goodbye to Lucretia, and he and McCall hurried over to the courthouse next door, where they began furiously making out subpoenas. They wrote them with their own hands and hired court hangers-on to deliver them, paying the men right from their own purses. And as they dispatched the process servers they perversely hoped that if the trial actually began that day as docketed, the evidence against their client would take up a great deal of time; that way their servers would be able to locate and bring to Doylestown at least the nearest of Lucretia’s witnesses. Then when it was their turn to present evidence, Brown and McCall vowed, they’d examine those first witnesses so lengthily that they’d give their emissaries time to search out and produce the more distant individuals. It was a forlorn hope, but it was almost all they had. Unless, of course, they could win a postponement.
That afternoon Lucretia and Lino were led into a courtroom in the cupola-crowned courthouse and placed, as was customary, not at a table alongside their lawyers but in an elevated dock in the front of the room. Lucretia, her face drawn, was dressed in her dusty traveling outfit, its sturdy cinnamon-colored fabric and even its trim of black braid showing faded patches. Lino was wearing the black frock coat Watkinson had long ago tailored for him, and he kept trying to improve his appearance by running his fingers through his cloud of curly hair. Neither eyed the other as the court’s clerk began to read aloud the indictment against them that had been handed down two days earlier by a grand jury. “Lucretia Espos y Mina,” the clerk boomed out, “and Lino Amalia Espos y Mina, not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil, did mix and mingle certain deadly poison, called arsenic, in certain chicken soup, which had been prepared for the use of a certain William Chapman and by these means did feloniously, willfully and of their malice aforethought kill and murder him, contrary to the form of the Act of the General Assembly and against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
One avid listener was the man who’d gotten the grand jury to indict, Deputy Attorney General Ross, a serious young lawyer whose long jaw, narrow nose, and purse of tight lips gave his face a stern and brooding expression. Ross had never before tried a case of this importance. Indeed, he had been admitted to the Bucks County bar only two years earlier. But within a year he’d been appointed the county’s chief prosecutor. It had helped that he’d gone to Princeton, where he’d learned a bit about the law as part of his general curriculum; in the absence of law schools as such, attending college or apprenticing oneself to another lawyer was all that was required to enter the profession. It had helped even more that his father was John Ross, now sitting on the Supreme Court and for thirty years before that a circuit court judge with a great deal of political clout. Still, Judge Ross, for all his prestige, wasn’t entirely popular in Bucks County. “Iago�
� and “old Judas,” some newspapers called him. And when twenty-four-year-old Thomas took over as deputy attorney general, he’d had to put up with being dubbed “a stripling of old Judas.” But Thomas admired his father and hoped to make him proud. This would be no easy task, for John Ross was a difficult man. Once, when Thomas had offered to assist him on one of his cases, his father had written him a note saying, “Dear Tom: When I require your advice it will be time enough to give it to me, and then, and not till then, will it be acceptable.” But Thomas expected that if he could win a conviction in the Chapman case, his father would be pleased with him. So, too, his mother, an upstanding woman who had decided despite a fine education to devote her life to caring for his brain-damaged brother, John. His mother, Thomas may have reflected as he listened to the clerk read the indictment, was cut from a different cloth from the female defendant. That woman, he intended soon to tell a jury, was wanton, devoid of all moral scruples.
The clerk was addressing her now. “How do you plead?” he asked.
“Not guilty,” she replied.
“How would you be tried?”
“By God and my country,” she murmured, giving the ritual answer.
When the clerk finished questioning the woman, he directed his attention to the male defendant. “How do you plead?” the clerk asked him.
“Not guilty,” Mina said.
Like the woman, he, too, was being represented by two lawyers, the highly experienced Eleazar T. McDowell, and McDowell’s apprentice, Samuel Rush. McDowell hadn’t been hired by the defendant. The heavyset, doughy-faced lawyer, so sociable and witty that on the rare occasions when jurors voted against him they felt constrained to apologize, commanded high fees. But the first American Congress had made it possible for the courts to appoint attorneys to indigent defendants facing capital punishment, and McDowell had been assigned to handle Lino’s defense. He wouldn’t be receiving his customary fee, but he’d agreed to take the case on, no doubt because the trial promised other rewards, augured attention and publicity.
“How would you be tried?” Ross heard the clerk ask the male defendant.
“By God and my country.”
But was it his country? Ross thought it was. But the man’s own counselor, McDowell, seemed not altogether sure of this. He’d gone on record saying that in order to ensure his client a fair trial he might make the unorthodox request that at least half the jury be composed of foreigners. Ross wasn’t certain that McDowell would actually proceed with the request, but he couldn’t afford to worry about the matter. It was time for him to speak. Rising, he looked hard at the defendant. “Are you ready for trial?” he asked.
“Yes.”
And was the woman ready for trial?
She didn’t answer. Instead, Peter McCall jumped up, waved an affidavit in his hand, and asked for a postponement. His client, he declared, had witnesses who lived in New York; in northern New Jersey; in Vermont. They’d all been sent for, but it was doubtful they could be procured before the next court session in February. “To urge an immediate trial under such circumstances would be in the highest degree unjust,” McCall called out, and requested that the case be put over until February.
Ross sat down and let his assistant, William B. Reed, handle this first argument. The two of them were the same age, but Reed was more experienced. He’d been admitted to the bar nearly six years ago, and since that time he’d not only practiced law in Philadelphia but done diplomatic work in Central America. Ross expected that Reed would skillfully present the prosecution’s view that delaying the trial would cause their witnesses great inconvenience. And indeed Reed did. “We are ready to go to trial,” he countered McCall. “Many of our witnesses have been brought to Doylestown from a distance, at a great sacrifice of convenience on their part and a considerable expense to the county. Many of them are females, unaccustomed to travel in an inclement season. Several are professional gentleman, whose time is valuable. I don’t want to press harshly or unkindly upon the prisoners, but I think we should set an earlier trial date than February.”
“January ninth?” the presiding judge, John Fox, suggested. As was customary in Pennsylvania at trials of capital crimes, he was one of a panel of three judges hearing the case. But he was the principal adjudicator, a solemn and aristocratic man who had himself once been the deputy attorney general of Bucks County. That had been years ago, before he got on the bench. Since then he had become an intimate of Andrew Jackson, had helped the president select his secretary of the treasury, had even served as Jackson’s confidential adviser during his cabinet troubles. Since then he’d also become an enemy of Ross’s father. But his animosity toward the father didn’t seem to be affecting his treatment of the son. Rather, he was trying hard to go along with the state’s desire to get the trial off to an early start. “January thirtieth?” Ross heard him offer when the defense attorneys declined the ninth.
But Brown and McCall were determined to get the matter put over until February, and in the end they prevailed. “Case continued,” Judge Fox said, “until Monday, February thirteenth.”
Lucretia’s lawyers had won their first battle and during the next two months they devoted themselves to preparing for the trial. They spoke with potential witnesses, explored possible defense strategies, and decided that the most pressing requirement of the case was to get Lucretia’s trial separated from Lino’s, for the defense of one was likely to interfere with the rights of the other. To defend Lucretia, they would have to attack Lino; to defend Lino, his lawyers would have to attack Lucretia. It was a prospect that would put them all in an untenable situation. Well before February, Brown and McCall presented this view to Lino’s team, persuaded them that severance was essential, and obtained their agreement to demand it as soon as the case was called.
Brown had been feeling out of sorts ever since the trip to Doylestown. But with the crucial issue of severance virtually resolved, he began to feel his health and stamina return, and along with them the confident feeling that “if life was to be lost, it would not be without a [valiant] struggle” on his part.
He had no idea that part of that struggle would be just getting back to Doylestown. Yet so it turned out. Early on the morning of February thirteenth, 1832, he and McCall left Philadelphia for Doylestown, expecting to get to the provincial courthouse in plenty of time for the start of the trial. But when they were still several miles from the town their carriage broke down.
The driver tried to repair the damage. He fiddled and fumbled with the broken vehicle while they stood at the side of the road. Time passed, the sun grew high, the driver kept fiddling. Then at last he announced that it was hopeless. The carriage was totally disabled.
Brown and McCall had no choice but to heft their boxes of clothing and law books and proceed on foot to Doylestown. It was slow going, and they didn’t reach town until late in the afternoon. Once they did, Brown realized there was no way they could start to try the case that day. Not in their soiled clothes, not with their dirt-streaked faces and aching feet. He sent word to McDowell to tell the judge of their mishap and implore him to postpone the trial’s opening until the next morning, the fourteenth.
McDowell did as he was bid, and luckily for Brown and McCall, Judge Fox acquiesced.
Attending trials was a major form of entertainment in a society that lacked our modern diversions; on the morning of February fourteenth, when word spread that Lucretia’s trial was at last actually going to commence, not hundreds but thousands of people gathered around the steps in front of Doylestown’s courthouse. Enormous changes were brewing all over the country. In South Carolina planters were demanding that because of tariffs that protected northern manufacturing but neglected southern agriculture, their state should secede from the Union. In Virginia a legislator was speculating that the federal government had in mind outlawing slavery and thundering, “Mr. Speaker! Who can bear the thought of seeing a black speaker occupying that chair in which you are now seated.” Everywhere, doctors were p
redicting that cholera, which had arrived in England and was spreading there like wildfire, might shortly decimate the United States. But to the crowd at the courthouse steps none of these harbingers of the momentous events that would soon alter both America’s history and their own personal lives seemed to matter. They were focused on one thing and one thing only: getting into the courthouse. Jostling, shoving, trampling one another, they rushed the sheriffs and constables assigned to limit entry, crushing the ribs of one guard who barred the way, and poured into the small brick building. Some even pressed into the courtroom into which Sheriff Morris had just led Lucretia and Lino and, unable to obtain seats, massed themselves against the walls.
Lucretia, a journalist from the Germantown Telegraph noted, seemed determined to ignore the unruly spectators. She held her head straight and tried to adopt a firm and becoming expression. But she couldn’t keep her lips and nostrils from twitching nervously.