The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Lino’s moods swung drastically in his final hours. The day before the execution he twice attempted to kill himself. The first time he smashed his ink bottle, pounded the glass until it was powdery, then sprinkled the finely ground shards over his food. The second time he extricated a nail from a piece of his cell’s wooden furnishings, sharpened it on the irregular stone walls, and plunged the point into a vein in his arm. Neither attempt proved fatal, however, and by nighttime, with a jailer stationed right in his cell so that he couldn’t cheat the state of Pennsylvania out of doing away with him, he was claiming that he had not actually intended to commit suicide but simply to weaken himself in the hopes that this would make hanging easier to endure.

  Doylestown was aswarm with military men, foot soldiers and cavalrymen decked out in their blue tunics and stiff-brimmed varnished hats. Lino had gossiped that he was such an important citizen in his home country that his government would be sending an armed force to rescue him. The rumor had spread widely and wildly, and Governor Wolf had ordered up for execution day the largest body of uniformed men Bucks County had seen since the Revolution.

  The town was also overrun by ordinary citizens. Lino’s hanging was to be the county’s first since 1693, and all day the prurient, as well as peddlers, promoters, and pickpockets, had been flooding into the county seat. They’d filled the six hotels, jammed the inns and boardinghouses, imposed on friends and distant relatives, and even persuaded reluctant farmers to rent them sleeping space in their sheds and barns. Nevertheless, there weren’t enough quarters to go around, and visitors who’d been unable to find any sort of indoor accommodations were camped out on the winding streets, so many of them that the little town resembled, said the Germantown Telegraph’s reporter, Philadelphia on the Fourth of July.

  The reporter had, like everyone else, come to town to witness the execution. But he was hoping to get an interview with Lino on this inauspicious night. By ten o’clock he had succeeded in arranging one, and Sheriff Morris let him into Lino’s cell.

  The prisoner looked unusually pale, the reporter thought when he saw Lino. But aside from his pallor, he seemed well enough, seemed, in fact, quite cheerful and animated. He asked the reporter how he was feeling, and talked gaily and even proudly about the troops and military bands that were turning the town into a veritable battlefield, with him as the sole enemy.

  “I myself used to be a soldier,” he bragged. “And I gloried in the profession. I was in active service for five months in succession, fought almost every day, received several severe bullet wounds! One in particular nearly proved fatal.”

  The Telegraph’s man spent an hour with Lino, then went to his inn and wrote, “My own reflections after the interview were by no means pleasant or agreeable. [The prisoner’s] total unconcern about his end, now so near at hand, seems more than extraordinary, and his levity in speaking of his death not less. A similar instance, I believe, can scarcely be found on record.”

  Lino stayed up the whole night, nibbling on cakes and candy, and in the morning ate a big breakfast. Then he put on his still-chic frock coat and a pair of striped pants and spoke at length with a bilingual Catholic priest named Father Tuljeaux, who had come to hear his confession.

  “I am innocent of murder,” he told Tuljeaux. “But I am penitent and ready to die.”

  When the priest finished hearing his confession, Sheriff Morris added to Lino’s smart appearance the accessory that was deemed essential to a condemned man’s final excursion—a rope—and positioned it loosely around his neck.

  Not wanting to look disheveled, Lino smoothed down his shirt collar where the rope had rumpled it. “It’s cruel of you to hang me up like a dog,” he said to Morris. “But I’m determined to die without flinching, like a soldier.”

  At nine-thirty, Morris placed him, with the rope dangling from his neck, in an open carriage and, accompanied by a troop of cavalrymen, escorted him a couple of miles out of Doylestown to a grassy field alongside the Neshaminy Creek. Morris had chosen the site by default. He’d hoped to find a spot close to the jail, one that wouldn’t require him to drive the prisoner a long distance and thus prolong his anticipation of hanging, but none of the owners of nearby fields had wanted the crowds and chaos of an execution, not in their backyards. So Morris had had to settle for the field near the Neshaminy. It wasn’t private property the way the farmers’ fields were; it was town property, part of the land allotted to the almshouse.

  Throughout most of the drive through the early summer morning, Lino was silent, and Morris hoped he was making his peace with God. But as the carriage neared the site and they saw the thousands of soldiers and civilians gathered there—ten thousand people, according to the newspapers—Lino reverted to his usual bravado. The military men, he told Morris, were lacking in spit and polish.

  A few moments later Lino spotted the gallows. It was on a small rise in the center of the field, and it was surrounded by another detachment of cavalry and a phalanx of infantrymen. He let Morris hand him down from the carriage, and walked resolutely to the scaffold.

  From up there, Lino could see the river, a thin band of silver that glistened in the boisterous golden sunlight. He could also see faces. Unsmiling faces. Mostly men, though here and there he spotted a female face looking up at him with curiosity. He could see the tops of trees, too, trees bursting with June leaves and swaying in a breeze that was like a whisper from on high.

  Sheriff Morris was whispering, too. He was saying that it would be he himself who would be pulling the rope. Then Morris read out his death warrant and asked if he had anything to say.

  “I do,” Lino answered, and directed Father Tuljeaux to translate what he had to say. “Americanos!” he yelled. “Mira una víctima inocente!”

  “People of America,” Tuljeaux echoed him in English. “Behold an innocent victim!”

  Lino went on speaking in Spanish and Tuljeaux went on translating. “You thirst for my blood,” he heard the priest say after he had shouted out the phrase in his native tongue. “And you shall have it. But you chastise a poor innocent. To whom have I done wrong? If I have done wrong, let all pardon me. If I ever did wrong to any, let him forgive me, because I forgive myself to all my enemies, in order that God may pardon me, and grant me everlasting life in heaven. I do not fear death. I am not a feeble, but a courageous man. I am able to show that I am strong and not feeble.”

  His own words, sailing back to him in the language he understood but had never fully mastered, made him feel every bit as brave as he had just declared himself in Spanish to be. He was a strong man. A hero not a scoundrel. There must be people in the crowd who recognized this, people who might like to touch him, to take him by the hand before he died. He thrust out his fingers and asked if anybody wanted to ascend the scaffold and shake his hand to bid him farewell.

  Several men rushed forward and climbed the stairs. He clasped their hands gratefully, clasped them firmly. He didn’t tremble. Then he knelt on the scaffold, bowed his head, and prayed.

  When Morris fixed the rope over the beam and drew a cap over his head, Lino turned in the direction he thought the crowd had been thickest, bowed twice, and, his voice muffled now, called out in English, “Farewell, my friends. Farewell, poor Mina, poor Mina. He die innocent. He die innocent.”

  It was the end. The trap was knocked away and he swung up into the sky.

  Lino was the penultimate prisoner to be publicly executed on state charges in Pennsylvania. By 1834 the legislature had passed a law forbidding such execution. But in June 1832, not only was hanging considered a fit and proper sight for the public to view, but all its grisly details were considered a fit and proper subject for newspapermen to dwell on. They described in full how Lino’s body had convulsed in the breeze, his chest heaving and his limbs flailing, and how the convulsions had lasted a good ten minutes because the amount of rope used had turned out to be insufficient to break his neck at once. They described, too, how dry-eyed the crowd had been, and how after be
ing exhibited for a full half hour, the body had finally been cut down and handed over to a group of Philadelphia physicians.

  The physicians had come to conduct an experiment on Lino’s dead body—common practice in those days, when medical students routinely dissected the organs of executed prisoners and doctors tutorially displayed their skeletons in their offices. The experimenters had with them a large battery. They intended to use it to deliver an electric shock to the dead man, to see if he could be revived. They attached their device to the corpse and pressed down on the lever. But nothing happened. The battery had malfunctioned, the doctors concluded. Either that or they’d been made to wait too long after the strangulation to try out their device. Next time, they assured the public, the experiment of raising the dead with electricity would most likely work.

  Lucretia, hiding away in the big stone house in Andalusia, read about Lino’s demise with eyes as dry as those of any who had witnessed the hanging. Lino’s death was like something that had already happened to her. He had died, for her, months ago, back when she had first realized that he intended to abandon her.

  Since then she had felt empty and diminished, she who had once dreamed of uncommon love and untold wealth. Since then she had become not just a pariah but a nobody, no longer the proprietress of a prosperous school, no longer the wife of an acclaimed scientist let alone of a rich grandee, no longer even so much as a schoolteacher. Nor likely ever to be one again, she suspected, for who would entrust their children to her care?

  The house was silent, the play yard no longer ringing with the cries of students, the big classroom empty not just of pupils but of the grammars and globes and slates she had long ago so enthusiastically purchased. She had sold them to make ends meet. She had sold, too, her cherished piano, the extra beds with which she had furnished the slate-roofed mansion’s many bedrooms, and whatever had remained, after Lino’s predations, of William’s valuable scientific tomes. She was subsisting, she and her children, on handouts from the few local people who still felt some Christian charity toward her.

  But there must be a way out, she reasoned, a better way out than living on alms or even of returning to Massachusetts and burdening her aged mother. After all, she was an educated woman, good at reading and recitation. Surely such a woman didn’t need to take charity or live off a parent; surely such a woman didn’t even need to be a schoolteacher. Perhaps she could find other work, go into the theater the way other educated women were doing, women like Fanny Trollope, who launched dramatic productions; women like Frances Wright, who got up on the stage and gave lectures.

  The idea revived Lucretia. She began picturing herself on a stage and imagining herself applauded and appreciated, a breadwinner for her children and a woman of substance once again.

  Soon after Lino’s death, she closed up her house in Bucks County and, with her children in tow, lit out for the West and there embarked on a second career as an actress.

  Epilogue

  LUCRETIA’S THEATRICAL CAREER WAS only partially a success. She joined a troupe of strolling players and toured in various parts of the country, but from time to time theatergoers realized who she was and shunned her performances. In Cincinnati, in November 1834, she was hissed and booed off a stage. “How she has fallen!” a Philadelphia man wrote to one of his brothers after reading of the incident, and went on to marvel at the fact that “degraded as her present occupation is, even [out West] the finger of scorn is pointed at her and she is greeted with hisses and general disaffection.”

  Did she deserve such scorn? Was she as lacking in guilt as her acquittal had implied, or was she in fact a woman upon whose lips an enigmatic smile sometimes played as she slipped into her costumes or fashioned her hair, the smile of a woman who has gotten away with murder? Her neighbors thought this might be the case, so did many of her former friends, and in time in Bucks County she came to be viewed as having been every bit as evil as the well-known poisoner whose Christian name she shared, the infamous Lucretia Borgia.

  I myself see her differently, see her as a woman maligned by Lino and consequently by history, for Lino has had the last word till now.

  I don’t think she participated in William’s murder. But I do suspect she was an accomplice after the fact. It’s my belief that the secret things Lino told her the last time he set foot in Andalusia were that he had killed William, that if he was apprehended he would blame the murder on her, and that if she knew what was good for her she’d get him out of her way by recommending him to her relatives at the Cape and keeping her mouth shut about both his revelations and where he was going. As we know, she recommended him to her relatives and kept silent about that last conversation.

  I could find no solid clues to what became of Lucretia after her abortive performance in Cincinnati in 1834, although one 1909 commentator on the case said she worked for a time as a silhouettist, drawing and cutting out the black profiles that were so popular in her day. But he also said she died in 1841 in Florida, and Florida’s archives contain no record of the death in that year of either a Lucretia Chapman or a Lucretia Winslow.

  Perhaps she changed her name to hide her identity. “Quite likely,” said a Tallahassee archivist who helped me in my search. “Probably a lot of the people who came to Florida in the early 1840s were trying to hide something. Otherwise why come here? The state was mostly a mosquito-infested swamp.”

  Whether or not she changed her name, and wherever it was that she died, Lucretia did die in 1841. She was fifty-three years old. After her death, her remaining property was sold at auction, and each of the children received a one-fifth share of the proceeds. They were all still minors, except for Mary. Little is known about what became of the children except that William Jr., who apparently inherited his father’s scientific bent, attended college, graduated, and became a dentist and that Mary went to live in Massachusetts with her Winslow relatives.

  The Chapman house itself, situated as it was just off the turnpike, struck its first buyer as an ideal spot for a tavern. He turned it into one, the Old Union, and it remained a tavern until being bought in 1861 by a Reverend Doctor Horatio Thomas Wells, who turned it back into a school, first a school for boys seeking “moral, religious and intellectual training,” then a college he founded and named Andalusia College. Today none of the original house remains, and a Catholic church, the Church of St. Charles Borromeo, occupies the corner of Lucretia’s land that faced the turnpike, which still exists, albeit jammed now with automobiles. But across the way from the church there’s a dilapidated old brick-and-stucco structure. “That building was standing at the time of the murder you’re writing about,” said an expert on the early architecture of Bucks County who was helping me locate sites mentioned in my research.

  I imagine it might have been the Boutchers’ farmhouse.

  As to William, he was as unfortunate in the manner in which his name lived on after his death as he was in the manner of that death itself. His scientific work faded into oblivion. And the inscription on his tombstone seems to have done so, too. According to the records of All Saints Episcopal Church in Hulmeville, where he was buried, William is still interred in the church’s graveyard. But although when I visited the graveyard I saw in the oldest part of the yard the tombstones of quite a few Chapmans who were buried there in the first years of the nineteenth century, I saw no stone for William—at least no stone with his name. Most of the tombstones in this antiquated section of the graveyard are sturdy gray slabs with clearly legible inscriptions. But one stone is different from all the others. It is so bubbly and disintegrated that it looks as if it is made of melted sugar, and whatever inscription it may once have borne is totally indecipherable.

  I suspect it’s William’s, and that Lucretia, out of bitterness or distraction, never put up a proper tablet.

  After the Chapman case was over, some of the people who had played roles in the affair lived lives bright with achievement.

  The pharmacist Elias Durand became the second vice
president of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, where his portrait still hangs.

  David Paul Brown became even more famous than he was at the time of Lucretia’s trial and wrote a fascinating book about his career, The Forum, or Forty Years of Practice at the Philadelphia Bar.

  Thomas Ross not only got elected to Congress but gained a national reputation by making a speech welcoming California into the Union.

  The two men participated in another important trial besides that of Lucretia Chapman, but this time they were allies, not adversaries. In 1838 they were hired by a black abolitionist to help prevent an escaped slave named Basil Dorsey from being reclaimed by his Maryland owner. Brown did the talking for his and Ross’s side, arguing that the slave owner from whom Dorsey had fled had offered no evidence to show that under the laws of Maryland he was entitled to own a fellow man.

  His client didn’t have to introduce such evidence, said his lawyer. “Everybody knows that Maryland is a Slave State.”

  Brown thundered, “Everybody is nobody! Common report does not pass before a court of justice.” Then, arguing that he couldn’t believe Maryland’s laws would allow such an egregious offense as slave owning, he demanded that a copy of the laws be produced, but insisted it be a certified copy.

  The slave owner’s counsel didn’t have a certified copy of Maryland’s laws with him, and asked for time to get one.

  Brown and Ross maintained that until such time as he produced the document, the case ought to be dismissed.

  It was dismissed, at least temporarily, and while the court was in recess, Dorsey was hurriedly spirited off to New England. The judge who dismissed the case was John Fox—“a man,” said the abolitionist who’d hired Brown and Ross, “with human feelings [even] if he was a judge.”

  Some of the other figures in the book had more troubled, checkered, or even tragic lives.