Snow-Storm in August

by Jefferson Morley

  Anna was not alone in her troubles. As Arthur awaited sentencing, her mother, Mrs. Brodeau, started to succumb to fits of nervous hysteria. To Anna, it seemed like her mother had been cursed, and perhaps she had. Like her daughter, Mrs. Brodeau had a family secret, and as Arthur awaited sentencing, her memory was stirred.

  The secret was Anna’s father. Years before, Mrs. Brodeau had admitted to Dr. Thornton, her son-in-law, that there was no Mr. Brodeau. Anna’s father was actually the Reverend William Dodd, a name William Thornton would have recognized. Dodd had gained notoriety in London in the 1770s as a clergyman who preached in some of London’s poshest parishes while rescuing young maidens from the clutches of prostitution in the slums. Dodd’s fondness for fine carriages, silk clothes, and the company of young women delighted the scandalmongers of the London press, who dubbed him “the Macaroni parson” and catalogued his hypocrisies with circulation-boosting glee. As a young woman, Ann Brodeau had succumbed to Reverend Dodd’s spiritual appeals and become his lover. After she became pregnant with his child, she moved from London to Philadelphia to start a new life, with her baby girl, Anna. Aided by a recommendation from Benjamin Franklin, a friend of Reverend Dodd’s, she opened a boarding school for girls.

  In one scholar’s account Reverend Dodd promised to follow his mistress to America to start a new life. To fund his escape, he forged a letter from an acquaintance, the wealthy earl of Chesterfield, to secure a bond for more than four thousand pounds, a small fortune. Because of the accident of an inkblot, the bond was shown to the earl, who repudiated it. Dodd confessed right away and returned the money. He was charged with forgery nonetheless. Under England’s savage criminal code at that time, the only penalty for forgery was death. Indeed, two forgers had been hanged the year before. Dodd admitted his guilt and begged the court for mercy. He was sentenced to hang. The plight of Reverend Dodd became a cause célèbre among the London intelligentsia, and thousands signed petitions calling for a pardon, all to no avail. On June 27, 1777, Reverend Dodd was hanged before a vast crowd outside London. Ann read about the death of her lover in the newspaper.

  The revelation of Mrs. Brodeau’s past did not seem to disturb Dr. Thornton. But the memory perhaps stirred Mrs. Brodeau in her dementia. She might have recalled something of the clamor and the crowds that engulfed her lover in London and sent her fleeing to America. The father of her only child had gone to the gallows, and she came to America to leave that dreadful life behind. Now, decades later, John Arthur, the little boy whom she had educated and adored, would die the same way as Anna’s father: on the gallows.

  On January 23, 1836, Anna Thornton was startled to learn that Judge Cranch would sentence Arthur that day. General Jones, it seems, had never filed his motion for a new trial. Once more, Arthur was brought in chains from the jail to the courtroom. He was losing hope. Anna was not in attendance.

  “Have you anything to say why this court should not now proceed to pass sentence of death upon you for that offense?” Judge Cranch asked him when he was in the dock.

  “I have nothing to say, sir,” Arthur said.

  “In preparing you for the awful sentence which it is my painful duty to pronounce,” Judge Cranch went on, “I shall not attempt to call your recollection to the reckless fury with which you entered the bed chamber of your confiding unsuspecting mistress in the dead hour of the night with the uplifted axe ready to strike the fatal blow, which was only prevented by the sudden and spirited resistance of her faithful servant, your mother. Nor will I harrow up your conscience with awful forebodings. It is now a month since you were found guilty by the jury and you have had time to reflect upon the past and anticipate the future. You have had time to begin the work of repentance.”

  Arthur had heard that before.

  “The remorse of a guilty conscience—the worm that never dies, and which may be one of the principal means of punishment in the world to come—may have already begun its work to prepare you for that dream tribunal before which we must all appear, to answer not only for the works done in the body but for every evil imagination and every unexecuted wish—where no discrimination will be made between the act and the intention, and where he who had intended to murder will be adjudged a murderer.”

  The words rang in Arthur’s ears.

  “If this divine agent has already begun to operate upon your heart, I beseech you not to resist its holy efforts. It wounds to cure, and you may yet attain that state of unfeigned repentance which may save you from the torments of another state of being. By all your hopes, therefore, of obtaining the favor the Almighty, by all your fears of the unutterable anguish of the future state of the wicked, I beseech you to devote the short remnant of your life to prayer and repentance.

  “It only remains for me now to pronounce the awful sentence which the law has affixed to your crime.”

  “The judgment of the Court is, that you be taken hence from the place from whence you came and from thence to the place of public execution, and that you be there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God Almighty bless your soul!”

  Judge Cranch directed the marshal to carry out the sentence on February 26, between the hours of one and four o’clock in the afternoon.

  The guards took Arthur back to his cell, where they fastened on the heavy leg irons awarded to prisoners facing capital punishment. Now Arthur knew how long he had to live: thirty-four days.

  37

  IN A GRASSY field adjoining the jail, workmen began to construct a wooden platform that resembled a gallows. The stench of a neighborhood pigsty lingered. Inside the jail, on the second floor, Arthur was now almost anchored to floor of his cell by the massive leg irons locked around his feet. If he moved, the steel clasps tight around his ankles would cut his legs, lacerating the skin. It was better to sit still.

  The newspapermen and the slave owners may have wanted to ignore Arthur Bowen’s imminent execution but the people of Washington, black and white, discussed it constantly. Mrs. Thornton’s story, discounted by Mr. Key and unmentioned in the newspapers, had gotten around. Arthur had never tried to hit her with an axe. He had never even raised it. There was no “murderous assault.” Yes, he had held an axe, but he was drunk. He was not in his right mind. A lot of people agreed the boy should not die for that, even if he was a slave. Capital punishment was quite rare in Washington and by no means popular. It had been eight years since the last execution in the District of Columbia, and that had not been carried out in Washington City. In 1828, a white man who murdered a neighbor whose son had stolen some blackberries from his garden was sentenced to die by Judge Cranch and was hanged in Alexandria.

  Yet Anna could tell that among the people who mattered, no one cared to defend Arthur. General Jones was in Annapolis and did not respond to her notes. Mr. Key did not answer her last letter. She appealed to Judge Cranch again but “could not prevail on him to recommend the Boy to Mercy!” she told her diary incredulously. The law had been applied correctly, the judge explained. It was not his place to do more.

  In almost physical panic, Anna roused herself from her stupefied misery and set out to act. There was only one hope. She drew up a petition to President Jackson and enlisted signatories to “most early and sincerely recommend … the pardon of her Slave Arthur.” A total of thirty-five people signed, including loyal friends such as Margaret Smith and Benjamin Tayloe, influential editors such as Joseph Gales of the Intelligencer and Francis Blair of the Globe, and even neighbors General Gibson and Dr. Huntt, who had testified so damagingly about the “uplifted axe.”

  Even as Anna attracted support, she endured hard looks and turned faces. Seeking a pardon for an enslaved mulatto convicted of a violent crime tested the tolerance of some of her neighbors. People had to think about their own slaves and what conclusions they might draw if the authorities treated Arthur with leniency. When Anna asked one neighbor on F Street to take her petition around to neighbors, he came back with only one signature and a warning: her petition might well
“induce a counter-petition to be got up.”

  There was talk among white people that Arthur Bowen was blithe about his actions, even reckless in the face of death. Madison Jeffers’s testimony at the trial had not been forgotten. He said he had a right to be free, and until the colored people were free, there would be so much confusion and bloodshed as would astonish the whole earth. But John O’Sullivan, editor of the Metropolitan, visited with Arthur and thought it “more than doubtful” whether Arthur’s act was “connected with any abolition excitement.” In any case, it didn’t matter, O’Sullivan said. That an intelligent young man would have strong feelings about his condition in slavery, O’Sullivan said, “was to be expected.”

  Anna and Maria began to hope they might prevail on the president. In one of her visits to the jail, Maria told her son of all that Anna had been doing, and he took hope too. He felt like he was going to live. And if he lived he could repent. Said O’Sullivan: “He does not at all realize the awful truth of his actual position.”

  Anna Thornton realized that awful truth. She had no other thought. When Arthur’s execution was little more than a week away, she sent a note to President Jackson requesting a meeting. Then she sat down to write, as precisely as she could, what exactly had happened on the night of August 4. She wanted to go back to the beginning, to explain who John Arthur Bowen was and what had happened. Before she stopped writing, Anna had composed eighteen pages.

  On the morning of Friday, February 19, George drove Anna to the President’s House. It was a cold, dry, and dusky day, with the thermometer reaching only twenty degrees by nine in the morning. There was snow in the air. Anna entered through the north portico and went up to President Jackson’s office on the second floor.

  Her arrival did not catch Jackson by surprise. He liked Anna Thornton, liked her willpower and her indifference to what the ladies in society were saying behind her back. Jackson ushered her in and helped her to a seat. He took her letter but did not read it, then scanned her petition.

  Jackson was a man attuned to strong women, especially those wronged by respectable society. He still wore a miniature of his late wife, Rachel, and would never forgive Adams and the others for traducing her name. Jackson had staked his whole cabinet on Margaret Eaton’s honor, against the biddies of Washington.

  He was not opposed to mercy for the boy, he told Anna. He just wanted to be sure all concerned agreed, particularly Mr. Key. Jackson handed the petition back to her.

  “Get the recommendation of the judge and District Attorney,” he said.

  Anna was crushed. Of course she had tried and failed to do just that. Mr. Key was unrelenting, silent, merciless. She left the President’s House with more work to do and no better prospects for saving Arthur.

  Undeterred, on Sunday—five days before the execution—she wrote a note to Vice President Van Buren. He was President Jackson’s heir apparent, already nominated as the Democratic Republican Party’s candidate for president in the November election.

  “I write to ask and entreat you to use a little of your good influence with the President to pardon my poor Slave Arthur,” she said. “I think he appears inclined to do so and you can considerably strengthen this inclination by seconding it. The time is now.”

  She would shame the man if she had to.

  “There are a great many alleviating circumstances which are not generally known—his mother’s worth + goodness ought to be considered too,” she wrote, underlining her words.

  “The 26th is the fatal day,” she reminded him. Van Buren did not respond.

  While Anna wrote more notes, Maria Bowen’s hopes vanished. Maria had grown up in the Thornton household and lived all her life thinking good conduct and the reputation of William and Anna provided protection to her and her son. It did not. Her persecutors were beyond belief. Mr. Key had no feeling. The president was known for his brutality to his property in people, known for inflicting a hundred lashes on a runaway. And, what was worse, she had played a part. By bringing her son in to face justice last August, she had done exactly what the law and Mrs. Thornton required. If Arthur had been white, his drunken folly would have been laughed off. Instead, he was going to die for it.

  On Monday, Maria left the house on F Street without a word and was gone all day, not that Anna complained. “She is miserable,” Anna wrote in her diary. “Poor soul.”

  Arthur would be executed on Friday.

  38

  IN HIS CELL, Arthur Bowen searched for a way to quell the fear of death. He hoped for a pardon from the president, but he had to be ready if it did not happen. He had to admit the truth of what John Cook had said all along. Yes, he had a right to be free, and, yes, liquor would destroy that freedom. Arthur’s protestations that he never intended to harm Mrs. Thornton suddenly failed to persuade even himself. Of course, he had no intention. The drink gave him that intention, unleashed the sinner within.

  “By drinking the sudden passion of the murderer is sharpened,” John Cook had intoned. “He is made ready to plunge the instrument of death into the bosom of the object of his hate, perhaps his own mother, father.”

  Arthur had condemned himself and for that he had to take responsibility. He decided to write a poem about this feeling of repentance that he had so long resisted. Or perhaps one of his sympathetic visitors—John Cook or John O’Sullivan—encouraged him to write something, not in his own defense, but to dispel what some people were saying about him—and perhaps to justify a presidential pardon.

  With pen and paper in hand, Arthur sat in the dim light, thinking of his friends from the racetrack and President’s Square. Like William Thornton, he had some talent for writing:

  Farewell, farewell my young friends dear;

  Oh! View my dreadful state,

  Each flying moment brings me near

  Unto my awful fate.

  He made a curious reference to his family:

  Brought up I was by parents nice

  Whose commands I would not obey

  But plunged ahead foremost into vice

  And into temptation’s dreadful way.

  He admitted his folly in scorning the teachings of his elders:

  Nothing did I ever drink

  But liquor very strong

  Alas I never used to think

  That I was doing wrong.

  To me was read the awful sentence

  Oh dreadful in my ears it rang

  They gave me time for my repentance

  And then I must be hanged.

  Good bye, good bye, my friends so dear

  May God Almighty please you all

  Do, if you please, shed but a tear

  At Arthur Bowen’s unhappy fall.

  Copies of Arthur’s poem soon circulated. The Intelligencer published it. Metropolitan editor John O’Sullivan pronounced it “very creditable.” Everyone in Washington City seemed to know that Mrs. Thornton’s personal petition for clemency for Arthur had been presented to President Jackson. It asked him to exercise “that mercy which is in his power alone.”

  The people awaited Jackson’s response, said O’Sullivan, “with the deepest anxiety.”

  In his office, the president read Anna Thornton’s letter, all eighteen pages of it.

  “Your Petitioner hopes to be excused for asking your attention to such facts as were and are within her own knowledge,” Anna began, “and which she is about to recapitulate, under all the moral sanctions of the remembered oath upon which she testified in court.”

  Jackson was impressed. In precise unfailing handwriting, Anna recounted Arthur’s “good and docile disposition” as a child. He was “brought up in the family with all the care and tenderness compatible with his condition and perhaps much overindulged,” she wrote. As a young man, she admitted he had fallen in with free people of color advocating abolition of slavery. “In the ardor and inexperience of youth,” she said, “he had his mind a good deal inflamed by such notions.”

  Anna wanted to put the president there in
the room on August 4 so that he might understand what she saw when she awoke to see Arthur entering the doorway.

  “Nothing was easier than for him, if he had come with any settled purpose of murder, to have reached her by a single step … but he stood motionless.” He was insensibly drunk, not murderous, not in the least. After searching her memory “to the utmost,” Anna said she was certain she did not see “anything of an uplifted axe.”

  Anna declared the hanging of Arthur would punish both her and her mother. They were “deeply imbued in their utmost consciences with an unqualified belief in the boy’s innocence,” she wrote. They were both “overwhelmed with the thought of his execution, and can never behold it but with grief and horror unutterable.”

  She begged Jackson to act before Friday.

  “The execution itself,” she said, “would be more horrible than the offense.”

  The president was almost convinced. He asked for the advice of his attorney general, a trusted New York lawyer (and future Union Army general) named Benjamin Butler. What exactly did presidential power of pardon allow him to do, the president wanted to know. Could he commute Arthur Bowen’s death sentence to something milder? Butler replied he would get back to him in the morning.

  In the jail, Arthur told visitors he was resolved “to meet my fate with resignation and fortitude.” His words echoed what the Intelligencer had said about Dr. William Thornton’s final days in March 1828. Back then Arthur was a twelve-year-old boy who was watching the only father figure he ever knew slowly expire from consumption. The eccentric genius was said to have met the approach of death “with unruffled resignation.”

  Arthur would try to do the same.

  39

  THE TWENTY-FIFTH OF February was a cold cloudy day with temperatures falling despite occasional sunshine. Anna, sitting at the writing table in her parlor on F Street, felt doomed. She discounted a prediction from Judge Thruston that Arthur would get a respite. She no longer believed any of the many people involved. “They have brought it to the dreadful Day,” she wrote in her diary. “Oh how much we can bear when we cannot help it.”