Coxe objected to letting the jury see it; Judge Cranch overruled him.
The constables Madison Jeffers and Henry Robertson came on to testify about their search of Reuben’s quarters in Georgetown and what they found. Coxe objected. Until the district attorney proved malicious intent, he told the three judges, the publications did not constitute evidence of anything. Exasperated, Key replied that the jurors had to decide the question of intent. Judge Cranch overrode Coxe’s objection. The defense attorney’s mild-mannered obstructionism was draining the drama from the courtroom and from Key’s efforts to portray Reuben as a fiend. The questions droned on.
The high windows of the ramshackle City Hall failed to ventilate and the chamber grew steamy. The congressmen were first to flee, pleading business on the Hill. The newspaper correspondents ducked out to visit the outhouse or an ordinary. In the dock, jurors saw Reuben Crandall, the alleged abolitionist, looking placid. If found guilty of sedition, Reuben might be hanged. Yet the Metropolitan observed that “he listens to the discussion with patience, and betrays no particular anxiety of countenance, gesture or manner. There is no appearance of fear as to the result of the trial.”
Crandall’s courage impressed even those who disliked his politics. His landlord George Oyster, openly hostile to Reuben’s New York ways, had to acknowledge he was “a correct man in all his habits…a very steady man in every respect.”
Before long, Key was floundering. The district attorney could produce only one solid piece of evidence that Reuben ever intended to distribute the pamphlets in Washington: the inscription “please to read and circulate” scrawled on one of the copies.
Coxe denied the words proved anything. In the chaos of his jailhouse arraignment, Reuben had said he wrote those words long ago and that he merely used the antislavery pamphlets to wrap his plants. But Key did not pursue the point. Crandall could not be compelled to testify, and, in any case, Key did not want to give him a platform to denounce slavery. The district attorney did not call any of the free people of color, like Isaac Cary and John Cook, who he knew trafficked in antislavery publications.
Instead, Key read long passages from the fiery rhetoric of the pamphlets, oblivious to the fact that the jurors were not so offended by their denunciation of slavery. One of the jurors, a grocer named George Crandle, had even signed one of Ben Lundy’s petitions calling for the abolition of slavery in the District just a few years before.
Key gave way to the defense. Richard Coxe’s junior counsel, Joseph Bradley, rose. Without introduction, he started reading from another pamphlet lamenting the cruelties of the slave trade. When Judge Cranch interrupted to ask him about the relevance, Bradley replied that the words actually came from the lips of the district attorney. He was quoting, he said, from Key’s address to the American Colonization Society in 1827 in which Key cited the abuses inherent in slavery as justification for helping blacks move to Africa.
At the other table, Mr. Key was not amused.
Yet, Bradley went on, Mr. Key charged Crandall with libel for publications that used virtually the same language about slavery. Judges Cranch and Thruston laughed out loud at his cleverness. Key was on his feet spluttering that advocates of African colonization did not favor emancipation and did not incite the slaves to rebel, but the damage had been done.
Key’s lack of preparation, his chief weakness as a lawyer, was showing. He focused on the language of the pamphlets, overlooking what Reuben had actually done. The district attorney managed to elicit testimony from Ralsaman Austin, the husband of one of Crandall’s patients, that Reuben had once accepted shipment of a trunk full of antislavery pamphlets in New York from a “Mr. Denison.”
Key did not seem to know that Denison was Charles Denison, the editor of the infamous antislavery broadsheet The Emancipator and a leader in the New York headquarters of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Austin’s testimony suggested Reuben had previously acted in concert with leaders of the abolitionists, raising the possibility that he might have done so again when he brought pamphlets to the capital. The abolitionist press always said that Crandall had been railroaded. But it was also possible that Reuben had not only delivered pamphlets to the Post Office but had also passed copies to antislavery allies like John Cook and Isaac Cary for wider distribution. In any case, Key had missed an opportunity to bolster his case.
The newspapermen watching the trial found Key’s argument weak, noting Key presented no evidence that Crandall sought to instigate rebellion or even circulate his publications among enslaved people. Whether or not the judges and jury had any sympathy for Crandall’s antislavery views, the correspondents observed that they seemed to respect his right to hold them. Early on, a writer for the Charleston Courier said he would not be surprised if Crandall was acquitted. The three judges, he reported, wanted “to show their independence of these popular excitements.” A New York correspondent said he expected the trial to end soon “in the acquittal of the accused.”
As the proceedings wore on, Crandall took heart. Each day after the trial’s session ended, he was walked across Judiciary Square by a guard and returned to his jail cell. He was comforted by Mr. Key’s disarray.
“The evidence for the prosecution,” he wrote in a letter to his brother, “is the most confused mess you ever saw.”
42
IN THE FINAL two days of U.S. v. Reuben Crandall, Francis Scott Key and Richard Coxe addressed the jurors for the last time. Their debate in many ways crystallized how new ideas of rights introduced by the free people of color and their white allies had galvanized popular thinking in the mid-1830s. These same views divided Americans into broad political tendencies that would endure. Coxe and Key were exemplars of what would become known as blue and red politics.
The blues of the 1830s were the liberals of the day, the opponents of slavery, concentrated in the Midwest and Northeast. They had a presence in Congress, led by former president John Quincy Adams. They had made themselves known in Washington City, thanks to the efforts of Ben Lundy, William Lloyd Garrison, John Cook, Isaac Cary, and Reuben Crandall. The abolitionists had brought three radical ideas into the realm of American politics: no property in people; multiracial citizenship; and the freedom to advocate both.
These ideals still animate the American liberal tradition nearly two centuries later. Like the antislavery men and women of yore, twenty-first-century liberals believe that property rights can be limited for the common good; that American citizenship should be as inclusive as possible; and that freedom of expression is a prerequisite of a free society. Richard Coxe was no abolitionist and he did not argue in court for Negro equality in U.S. v. Crandall or discuss property rights. But he did lay out a “true blue” case for freedom of expression to protect those who wanted to advance such ideas.
In response, Key denounced Coxe on all counts. He dismissed his defense of the emancipationist fanatics and those who questioned the slave owners’ expansive definition of property rights. Compared to the blue Coxe, the red Key had a much narrower idea of freedom of speech. He argued that the antislavery publications could be suppressed in the name of public safety since they might incite violent rebellion. Key insisted that white men did have a constitutional right to own property in people. And he defended a narrower conception of American citizenship—that it was reserved for the native born and whites only.
This general set of ideas still animates American conservatism against the country’s liberal tendencies. Conservatives no longer believe in slavery, but they retain a maximal definition of property rights (embodied in freedom from taxation and regulation); a narrower conception of citizenship (to be reserved for native-born Americans); and a belief that threats to public safety may justify limitations on civil liberties. In U.S. v. Crandall, Francis Scott Key argued the red agenda of the day.
Richard Coxe spoke first in closing arguments. Never, he said, had the performance of his professional duties aroused “feelings of more intense anxiety.” Never, he went on, had h
e felt a deeper interest in the outcome. The issues decided here, he told the jurors, “may be brought to bear upon each member of this community, and upon our children’s children.…Great principles are to be settled.”
As for himself, Coxe said he felt a sense of duty to “the principles of liberty and of the constitution.” He said that if any individual in the District of Columbia could, like Reuben Crandall, be arrested, have his personal papers seized and his most confidential correspondence exposed to public gaze, “then I say, this District is no place for me.”
Coxe spoke of Reuben’s plight: arrested and charged, held for eight months and denounced before the community. Coxe wanted to make clear that his position was very different from that of his friend Mr. Key.
“This process, thus illegally issued, thus illegally executed, has been justified by the District Attorney. He avows his participation in it, and avows himself ready, whenever required, to prove that it is lawful.”
Coxe wanted to interpose himself forcefully.
“On the other hand, I pledge myself on all occasions, and whenever the question shall be presented for judicial decision, to brand it as tyrannical, oppressive, illegal, and unconstitutional.”
Coxe denounced Mr. Key’s case against Reuben Crandall.
“It is, gentlemen, preposterous. It is monstrous,” he slashed. “It has no foundation in any principle of law—it can find no support in any dictate of reason. It is a reproach to our community—it is a slander upon our institutions, that an intelligent and highly accomplished individual should, under such circumstances and upon such grounds, have suffered what has already been inflicted upon him.”
Coxe looked to Reuben in the dock.
“His books and papers were harmlessly reposing in his trunk and his office, neither injuring nor calculated to injure any one. From this quiet repose, both have been snatched by the lawless violence which has characterized the proceedings against him: language imputed to him which he never uttered, and bruited forth to rouse into action, and to stimulate to deeds of ferocity, a ruthless mob.”
Coxe knew when to stop. He thanked the jury on behalf of his client.
“I submit him and his fate with entire confidence into your hands,” he said. He sat down.
It was half past five o’clock and Judge Cranch called for the court to adjourn for the evening.
Washington City was heating up. The next day Anna Thornton, still worried about Arthur languishing in jail, reported that the thermometer rose thirteen Fahrenheit degrees between breakfast and dinner. In that same interval, Francis Scott Key summed up the U.S. government’s case against Reuben Crandall.
“I consider this one of the most important cases ever tried here,” he began. It presented a conflict of rights, he said: the white man’s property rights versus the free-speech rights of an antislavery man who sought not only to deprive white men but also to degrade them with the notice that black and white were equal.
“We are to give up our slaves—not for compensation—not gradually as we may be enabled to substitute other labour … but absolutely, unconditionally, immediately,” Key said. “Nor is this all. They are to remain among us—to be admitted immediately to a full and equal participation in all civil and social privileges. Then, if we do not like our new condition, we can go away—and the friends of human rights and amalgamation can come and take our places.”
So the most important question facing the jurors, the district attorney said, was whether the pamphlets seized from Crandall’s house were “libelous.”
“They declare that every law which sanctions slavery is null and void… ,” Key reminded them, “that we have no more rights over our slaves than they have over us. Does not this bring the constitution and the laws under which we live into contempt? Is it not a plain invitation to resist them?”
Key cited the sorry story of Arthur Bowen as evidence.
“Mr. Crandall was told shortly after his arrival here with these publications that the attempt on the life of his mistress by Mrs. Thornton’s slave, for which he has been since convicted, was instigated by the New York abolition pamphlets, passages from which he had been heard to repeat.”
Implacable in his desire to see Crandall hanged, Key asked the jurors to understand the threat to their own honor posed by the antislavery cause.
“Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?”
Key waxed sarcastic in summing up.
“If he is an innocent man, cruelly imprisoned under an illegal warrant, and these vile, calumnatory libels, are actually this innocent, persecuted gentleman’s property—stolen from him—then gentlemen return him his property and let him go free.”
The district attorney’s last words quieted the courtroom.
“It is with you, gentlemen,” he said. “I ask of you but to do your conscientious duty.”
The jury went into a separate room to deliberate. The attorneys, the crowds, the clerks, and the pensive defendant could only wait and wonder. Outside it was a beautiful spring day.
Less than three hours later, the jury foreman reappeared. The spectators stilled themselves. The judges entered. Cranch asked the foreman for the verdict on Reuben Crandall.
“Not guilty!”
43
ON THE ADVICE of Mr. Coxe, Reuben Crandall returned to his jail cell after the trial. He could have walked out the door into Judiciary Square anytime, but he and his friends worried there might be another mob lurking. So Reuben sat where he had sat for eight months. He was a free man, now self-imprisoned.
William Jackson, an antislavery congressman from Massachusetts, came to see Reuben in his cell to congratulate and comfort him. Once it was dark outside, Jackson proposed that Reuben come with him to his boardinghouse. At nine o’clock they walked out of the jail. For the first time since the evening of August 10, more than eight months before, Reuben had his liberty.
Spring nights in Washington come with a gentle embrace that even visitors appreciate as unique. As Crandall walked along with his friend, he faced the disorienting sight of normal life. The shopkeepers were sweeping the macadam dust from their doorsteps. The taverns were coming alive with conversation. Lobbyists were returning to the hotels. The hack drivers spat into the gutter and conferred noisily.
No one paid much attention as they walked along. Reuben had a new appreciation of freedom. In Jackson’s room they rested, talked some more, and prepared their next move. At one o’clock in the morning, they set out again into the now-empty streets. Jackson accompanied Crandall to the stagecoach station outside of Gadsby’s Hotel at the corner of Sixth and Pennsylvania. The National Eating House was open for business on the opposite corner. Crandall boarded the night mail coach headed north to Baltimore and then Philadelphia. He would reach his parents’ home in Connecticut by nightfall the next day.
As Congressman Jackson saw him off, he thought it was a sad story. “Thus an amiable and respectable young man’s prospects are all overturned, his property sacrificed and his health greatly injured by long imprisonment,” he said to a friend. “And after full proof of his innocence, he is compelled to flee from the capital of his country for his life, like a felon in the dark.”
The next day Crandall’s acquittal made headlines across the nation. “Crandall the Abolition Botanist has been acquitted,” the acidic Duff Green wrote in the Telegraph, his italics signaling his suspicion of Reuben’s true profession. “We never expected anything else.
“There is not an individual in the city who does not think he was an agent of the Abolitionists,” Green went on. While many deprecated the antislavery movement as a tiny minority with no prospects of success, this experienced editor did not make that
mistake. Crandall’s acquittal, he noted, demonstrated the growing influence of the antislavery men. “The whole power of the Abolitionists, here and abroad, [was] exerted to save him,” he wrote, “and they succeeded, as we predicted at the time they would do.”
What Green, in his hatred of the abolitionists, could not imagine was that a jury of white men in Washington City could both believe that Reuben Crandall was an abolitionist and that he should go free. What Key could not imagine is that people would doubt his integrity.
Yet that was the case, according to a correspondent for the Boston Courier.
“I believe there is a feeling of sympathy for him and regret for his eight months imprisonment,” the correspondent wrote. “There is much to answer for somewhere. Mr. Key, the Van Buren Attorney of the District, did his best against him.”
“He has suffered for the public good,” wrote a correspondent for the Philadelphia-based Gazette of the United States, “and must find his reward in the reflection that he will be placed by the side of the multitude of martyrs to political expediency.”
In Boston, William Lloyd Garrison hailed the acquittal of “this excellent but suffering man.” In the pages of The Liberator, he denounced Key, who, he said, “cherished a deep malignity of purpose toward Dr. C. and spared no effort to procure his conviction.” Garrison noted that when the district attorney failed to prove that Crandall had circulated antislavery publications, “he offered to prove that the prisoner was a manager of the American Anti-Slavery Society!” Here the abolitionist editor poured on the sarcasm. “What a horrible crime, if true! And how richly would Dr. C. deserve to be gibbeted, could the charge have been sustained.…
“And this in a free country!” Garrison concluded in disgusted wonder. “At the seat of government!! In the city of Washington!!”
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