Snow-Storm in August

by Jefferson Morley

  He wanted to be very clear.

  “Dear Sirs, I am innocent of the charges preferred against me,” he wrote. “I do swear before my God, this Sabbath day, within the solemn walls of this prison that I am as innocent as the child unborn of having excited any White man, or men, against me.”

  Snow requested an investigation of himself, daring his accusers to identify themselves.

  “I would ask if there is a White man of any sort or kind, in any population, who is so divested of feeling and resentment, as to have brooked so great an insult. Sirs, I will answer the question myself: I do not believe there is such a White man to be found anywhere.”

  That was bold, but it also implied that any white man who came forward to impugn Snow would be humiliating himself for having not spoken up earlier. And that preemptive strike was followed by a reminder that Snow had associated with many a white man who never complained about his cooking or his conduct.

  “Sirs, the most diligent research has been made by my enemies and friends, and no other but this untrue charge can be found… ,” he complained. “Sirs, do me the honor to look back at my past conduct, as a citizen, for the last six or seven years. If anything can be produced against me, let the world know it. If within your own knowledge you can say any thing for me in justice, you would oblige your humble servant.”

  The Intelligencer published the letter two days later with an editor’s note, stating, “We cannot better serve the ends of justice than by publishing this individual’s plea in his own words.”

  No one came forward to corroborate the rumor that Snow had spoken improperly of white women. Within a few days, the white men of the Fredericksburg Mechanics Association held yet another meeting and resolved that Snow should be permitted to depart in peace. The editors of the Virginia Herald held him blameless. “The sufferings of the poor fellow, in mind, body, and property, we think, have been sufficient to allay any excitement on the part of our citizens,” they wrote.

  In Washington, Snow got less consideration, at least from the newspapers.

  “He had better stay where he is,” warned John O’Sullivan in the Metropolitan, “for as the old adage says, ‘he may go farther and fare worse.’ ”

  “The public has had enough of this epicurean mulatto,” said one anonymous letter writer in the Intelligencer. “Let him not flatter himself that any disclaimers will enable him to shine in Washington.”

  Beverly had lost everything he had built up over the last five years, so he probably did not flatter himself about much. The truth was that he had believed too much: too much in his own ability to live within the slave system and prosper on his own terms; too much in the benevolence of the average white man; too much in the hospitality of Washington City; and too much in the possibilities of the United States of America. It must have been a bitter reckoning, but it was not one that would destroy him. Beverly left the Fredericksburg jail at a time of his choosing in pursuit of a destination unknown. He would treat the unfriendly advice of white men who warned him not to come back to Washington City with characteristic tact. He would ignore it.

  PART V

  THE TRIALS OF ARTHUR BOWEN

  City Hall in Washington’s Judiciary Square, where Francis Scott Key prosecuted Arthur Bowen for the attempted murder of Anna Maria Thornton in November 1835. (illustration credit p.5)

  34

  FRANCIS SCOTT KEY retreated to Terra Rubra that fall for a welcome vacation. He probably brooded over the breakdown of order in Washington at the same time he pondered a sad news story in the Intelligencer. His dear friend Sarah Gayle was no more. The newspaper reported that the wife of the governor of Alabama had died suddenly and painfully of lockjaw over the summer. She was thirty-one years old. Key never took death well. He sank into melancholy for months after the passing of his close friend John Randolph in 1833. Now his soul mate in poetry was gone. What a delight she was, as hostess, friend, and mother. As always, Key consoled himself with his enduring belief that God’s way, while sometimes mysterious and painful, was best.

  Likewise, the mood and morale of Washington took a while to recover from the trauma of the Snow-Storm. Even the return of President Jackson did not prevent violence from flaring several more times in the last indolent days of summer. A mob of white men attacked the AME church on Capitol Hill again, leaving the worship space in ruins. A Negro schoolhouse near the Navy Yard was attacked. So was a bawdy house on G Street between Sixth and Seventh. Ever since the rioting, hostility toward the free people of color had taken on a new vehemence. In the words of historian Constance McLaughlin Green, “The white men’s shame over the lawless violence of the Snow-Storm intensified rather than lessened their resentment at the mere presence of free blacks in Washington.”

  Black people found themselves facing a new wave of legal harassment and social ostracism. “We have already too many free negroes and mulattoes in this city,” said an anonymous letter writer in the Intelligencer. “The policy of our corporate authorities should tend to the diminution of this insolent class. A motion is now before the Common Council for prohibiting shop-licenses henceforth to this class of people. If they wish to live here, let them become subordinates and laborers, as nature has designed.” The common council passed the new ordinance barring blacks from shop licenses.

  It was a time for the leaders of the blacks to lie low. Beverly Snow came back to town briefly to dissolve his partnership with William Walker. William Wormley and William Thomas Lee returned to the city only after a personal assurance of safety from President Jackson. John Cook did not return from Pennsylvania at all. The philosophically inclined schoolteacher had no taste for physical confrontation. He had taken refuge in the town of Columbia, where he taught at the school of a friend.

  The pamphlet campaign of the American Anti-Slavery Society had achieved its goal of forcing public discussion everywhere. The society reaped sympathy and money, just as the entrepreneurial mind of Arthur Tappan had anticipated. But the price was high. Niles’ Weekly Register reported that the United States had experienced fifty-three riots in 1835, more than double the year before, and more than thirteen times the four that were reported in 1833. Most of these riots involved attacks on antislavery speakers and free blacks. But the popularity of the antislavery message only grew. Robert Williams, publications manager for the society and a friend of Reuben Crandall, reported picking up fifteen thousand new subscribers in less than a year.

  The South’s violent reaction, said the society’s director, Elizur Wright, “has done more than could have been done by the arguments of a thousand lecturers to convince the sober and disinterested, that slavery is a crime.” The rationalization of lawlessness brought home to northerners how Negro slavery posed a threat to their own democracy. As the South demanded the northern states suppress abolitionist speech, publications, and petitions, northerners rejected the idea. “The despotism of [the] laws would … far exceed any in Russia or Turkey,” declared the delegates to a meeting in Utica, New York.

  The violence of the summer of 1835 forged a new notion in American life: that defending the republic required opposing the slave masters. Across the northern tier of the country from Michigan to Maine, people rushed to support the cause of abolishing slavery. At the beginning of the year, there were 200 antislavery societies around the United States. At the end of the year, there were 527. By 1837, there would be a thousand. The abolitionists were still a minority in the nation and the Congress, but no one could doubt their ranks were growing.

  South of the Potomac, the results of the pamphlet campaign were very different. The idea of human rights had not taken root in the civil society of the South. The educated middle class was small and culturally weak, especially compared to the slave-owning elite. Those Virginians who had spoken up against slavery after Southampton had not achieved any legislative results. With the white man’s property rights now under siege from the North, there would be no more tolerance of antislavery opinion in the South. Southerners who spoke ou
t against slavery had to shut up or leave.

  Anna Thornton could not stop thinking of Arthur in his jail cell. Her conviction that he had not meant to harm had hardened into a personal truth that others would find hard to believe. She did not think him guilty of anything other than inebriation. But it was the worst possible time for a white woman to be seeking leniency for a Negro accused of a capital crime. All of Washington City believed a black man attacked her in her bedroom, and she was defending him, minimizing his actions. It was almost unthinkable, but to the disbelief of her friends, she persisted.

  Hoping for ideas about how to free Arthur, she invited General Jones for dinner, “but he has put me quite out of Spirits again,” she wrote. She stayed that way for weeks. She made the rounds of her lady friends and shopped in the market with Maria. She read her books and played chess. Nothing helped, not even the spectacle of Halley’s Comet, seen only once every seventy-six years. “I am in very bad spirits,” she wrote in her diary.

  In October, Anna wrote a letter to President Jackson begging him to let Arthur be released. She would sell him to someone who would take him away from Washington, she said. Jackson’s response was disappointing. He told her that he did not know if he had the power (or right) to do what she wanted and said he needed “authority from the Court.”

  Anna went to Judge Cranch’s home on Delaware Avenue to ask him what could be done. He too disappointed.

  “He says the judges cannot take cognizance of the affair til brought before them judicially,” Anna wrote in her diary. “And then the matter rests entirely with the President to pardon him if he pleases.”

  Anna wrote a note to presidential secretary Andrew Donelson asking for a meeting. He sent back word that Jackson would not honor her request. Anna realized she had to stop; she was making a pest of herself. But then she wrote another letter to Jackson. He did not respond.

  As Anna’s spirits waned, a new season in Washington was beginning up on Meridian Hill. The Jockey Club’s fall races, said the Intelligencer, “will surpass in interest and brilliancy any meeting for many years past.” Opening day attendance was “unusually large,” the newspaper reported. “There are more strangers in the city at present—drawn hither by the races and other causes—than have ever assembled here before, except during the sessions of Congress or at an Inauguration.”

  When the circuit court opened in November 1835, Anna received a summons to appear before the grand jury, and she felt sick at the prospect. But when the day came, she went to City Hall and discovered she could talk about the horrid night of August 4.

  “I answered as favorably towards Arthur as I possibly could and got thro’ very well,” she said proudly. “Anticipation is often more awful than reality.”

  Maria Bowen was also summoned to testify, only to be humiliated by the white men of the grand jury, who had her wait outside the jury room all day without being called. She had to go again the next day. Anna missed her help about the house and felt her sorrow when she returned home. As the fall season began, Anna withdrew from her usual rounds of social calls.

  The hotels and the boardinghouses and the restaurants along the Avenue were starting to fill up, as congressmen and senators arrived for the opening of the Twenty-Fourth Congress. The next day, President Jackson delivered his annual message to Congress. In his long letter, written with the help of Francis Blair, he boasted of the country’s recovery from the panic of 1833 and 1834. Jackson extolled “the unexampled growth and prosperity of our country.…Every branch of labor we see crowned with the most abundant rewards. In every element of national resources and wealth and of individual comfort we witness the most rapid and solid improvements.” There were no domestic problems, he suggested, that which “would not yield to the spirit of harmony and good will that so strikingly pervades the mass of the people in every quarter.”

  Jackson acknowledged “the painful excitement produced in the South by attempts to circulate through the mails inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of the slave, in prints and various sorts of publications, calculated to stimulate them to insurrection and produce all the horrors of a servile war.”

  The antislavery-cause activity would not be tolerated, he stated.

  “Our happiness and prosperity essentially depend upon peace within our borders—and peace depends on the maintenance of good faith of those compromises of the constitution upon which the Union is founded. It is fortunate for the country that the good sense, the generous feeling, and deep-rooted attachment of the people of the non-slaveholding States to the Union and to their fellow-citizens of the same blood in the South, have given so strong and impressive a tone to the sentiments entertained against the proceedings of the misguided persons who have engaged in those unconstitutional and wicked attempts, and especially against the emissaries from foreign parts who have dared to interfere in the matter.…

  “But if these expressions of the public will shall not be sufficient to effect so desirable a result,” Jackson went on, “not a doubt can be entertained that the non-slaveholding States, so far from countenancing the slightest interference with the constitutional rights of the South, will be prompt to exercise their authority in suppressing, so far as in them lies, whatever is calculated to produce this evil.”

  The president urged Congress “to take such measures as will prevent the Post-Office Department, which was designed to foster an amicable intercourse and correspondence between all the members of the Confederacy, from being used as an instrument of an opposite character. I would therefore call the special attention of Congress to the subject and respectfully suggest the propriety of passing such a law as will prohibit under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.”

  It was a radical proposal. The refusal of the Post Office to deliver abolitionist material to the South, said historian Daniel Walker Howe, “may well have been the largest peacetime violation of civil liberty in U.S. history.” President Jackson wanted to write it into law. (The legislation eventually died in the Senate because southerners thought it infringed on states’ rights. Local postmasters continued to rely on Amos Kendall’s directive granting them the power to block delivery of antislavery publications.)

  That week Anna was reading in the Intelligencer about Jackson’s message to Congress when Maria brought in a note from General Jones. It contained the disagreeable news that Arthur’s trial would begin the day after tomorrow.

  35

  ANNA ASKED HER friend Margaret Smith to accompany her to Arthur’s trial and Margaret agreed. Smith was a loyal friend and a tireless storyteller who did not let any Washington drama go unobserved. George Plant drove them down to City Hall in the carriage. The weather was mild and Anna felt sick again, as if she could not bring herself to testify about Arthur.

  The courtroom filled slowly. Anna, Margaret, and General Jones were joined by Maria Bowen and a colored friend of hers named Mary. John Cook was there. He had risked the long trip down from Pennsylvania just to testify. William Costin, the bank porter, was also there. They had insisted on testifying as to Arthur’s intelligence and good character. Mr. Key sat at the government’s table. On the bench, Judge Cranch sat with his longtime associates James S. Morsell and Buckner Thruston. The judges were a diverse bunch. Cranch was an independent thinker, Morsell bland, and Thruston eccentric. In the words of John Quincy Adams, Thruston was “partially insane but knows it and avows it.”

  Arthur sat in the dock, the prisoner’s box behind the spectators, wearing a fine suit, which made an impression. He was “extremely well-dressed,” noted the Metropolitan. Margaret Smith thought he “looked quite like a young gentleman.” Having had three months in jail to think about this day, Arthur had his feelings under control. Margaret Smith studied his face “but could discern no trace of strong emotion.”

  Anna, seated next to her, choked up with fear.

  “To me it was simply a very i
nteresting scene,” Smith wrote, almost surprised, “but to Mrs. Thornton a very affecting one. She could hardly stand it.”

  The district attorney rose to address the men of the jury, most of whom he knew in one way or another. Joel Brown was a gentleman from Georgetown; Richard Kerr came from one of the wealthiest landowning families in the district. Richard Jones was a blacksmith and wheelwright in Georgetown. Archibald Cheshire was a wood measurer. Samuel Wimsatt, a coal measurer. Adam Lindsey, who lived near the Navy Yard, represented the Sixth Ward on the common council. Some of these men owned slaves, some did not.

  “It will be proved that the prisoner made a deliberate attempt upon the life of his mistress, under the influence of excitement of a certain kind that will be described by the witnesses,” Key said without drama. “I will contend that if the prisoner had entered into his mistress’s room to make the attempt charged in the indictment, it would amount to burglary, even though he was an inmate in the family, and had not forced the outer door.…

  “As for being drunk at the time he committed the outrage,” he said, “I submit there is no legal excuse for the offense.”

  Key called Anna Thornton. She came to the stand, the eyes of the rapt spectators focusing on her plain dress, alert eyes, and worried look. Mr. Key, her old friend turned haughty public servant, was waiting for her. He asked her about the night of August 4.

  “I was awakened by the opening of the chamber door,” Anna began. “I saw the boy approaching me with an axe in his hand.”

  What was position of the axe?

  “I couldn’t tell,” Anna replied. “I could not say it was uplifted. I don’t think he knew where he was going. He appeared to be”—she wanted to emphasize the point—“much intoxicated.”