Sometime in the autumn of 1943, a refined actor had a family of Vilna/Vilnius Jews summarily hanged on a public gallows.
Vilna* was one of the major Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.
Noted for its rich cultural life, the Vilna Ghetto, which at its peak contained approximately 40,000 people, lasted from September 6, 1941 to September 24, 1943. By the end of its existence, however, through starvation, overwork, disease, and bullets, the ghetto’s population had been reduced by three-quarters.
In late September 1943, the ghetto was liquidated. Most of the inhabitants were taken to the nearby forest in Ponar and shot, or sent to extermination camps in Poland or work camps in Estonia, where almost all of them died.
The convivial Bruno Kittel
The liquidation was supervised by German Oberscharführer Bruno Kittel. (He is not to be confused with Otto “Bruno” Kittel, the Luftwaffe flying ace.)
Kittel was an actor. He graduated from the theater school in Berlin and from the plundering school in Frankfurt. On Sundays he played songs on his saxophone at the Vilna radio station. Kittel was not only the youngest of his colleagues; he was the most zealous … [His] reputation extended from Riga to Lodz to Warsaw.
At first glance, you would never guess that Kittel was an executioner. Constantly smiling with his dazzling white teeth, he was perfumed, elegant, polite, and refined.
After the ghetto was no more, a few skilled craftsmen and artisans whose work was essential to the war effort remained within the city at one of three labor camps.
Karl Plagge, a German major in charge of the HKP 562 camp, was sympathetic to the plight of his workers and worked to save their lives, albeit without much success. For this, he would later be honored as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem.
During the liquidation, in an attempt to avoid capture, many of the Vilna Jews concealed themselves in hiding places and bunkers, called “malines” or “malinas”. Sadly, the Nazis caught almost all of them, but a few were able to wait out the carnage and then escape.
The Zalkind family were among the fortunate people who were able to remain in hiding throughout the liquidation.
But they did not survive for very long afterwards.
Their final days are described in The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, a collection of accounts of atrocities in the Soviet Union from which the observation about Kittel above is also drawn.
Journalists and historians began gathering eyewitness statements before the war was even over, and Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman assembled and edited the accounts and finished the Black Book in 1946. It was the first major documentary work on the Holocaust. However, Stalin refused to allow its publication and had the type-plates and galley proofs destroyed in 1948.
A few copies survived, and the book was finally published in Russian in 1993. The English translation came out in 2002.
The full names of the Mr. and Mrs. Zalkind and their son are not recorded. Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names lists a Masha Zalkind, age 34, a store manager who was married to Moshe, and Hone Khona Zalkind, 2, whose parents were Masha and Moshe. Both lived in Vilna during the war and were killed in 1943; they might well be the mother and son from this story.
There are several Moshe Zalkinds listed. One, a tailor who was born in 1907, lived in Vilna and was married to Masha. He’s the closest match, but it says he was in Estonia during the war and was killed in 1944.
In any case, the Zalkinds were on the Aryan side of Vilna, probably posing as Christians with forged identity papers, when they were spotted in the street by Bruno Kittel. The Black Book records::
Suspecting they were Jews, Kittel stopped them and had them sent to the concentration camp [at 37 Suboch Street], where he determined that their name was Zalkind and that up until now they had been hiding in a malina. He ordered a gallows to be erected in the middle of the yard and summoned sixty SS men from the Gestapo. When everything was ready and the yard was full of SS surrounding the doomed Zalkinds — husband, wife and child — Kittel said:
“For having violated my order and hiding in the city, you will now be hanged in front of everyone.”
Kittel went over to the gallows to be sure that the rope was strong; then he began the execution process. The child was the first to be hanged. Then the mother. When the noose was tightened around the father’s neck, the rope broke.
Kittel ordered a new noose to be made. But as soon as Zalkind was hanging from it, the rope broke again.
Kittel was simply amused by it all.
“If the rope should break a hundred times, I’ll hang you a hundred times,” he said. And he ordered the hangman to prepare another rope.
Following the rule of collective responsibility, after Mr. Zalkind finally died, Kittel randomly selected fifty inmates of the camp, loaded them into a van and hauled them off to their deaths at Ponar.
Only a few hundred of the Vilna Ghetto’s Jews, mostly those assisted by Major Plagge, survived the Nazi era. Some of the Germans who helped wipe out this city’s once-vibrant Jewish community were apprehended after the war and prosecuted.
Bruno Kittel, however, disappeared without a trace and was never found at all.
* At the time, Vilna was part of Poland. Vilna was its Yiddish name; the Polish name was Wilnow. The city is now the capital of Lithuania and called Vilnius.
On this date in 1858, youthful delinquent James Rodgers was hanged in New York City.
The 19-year-old Irish immigrant Rodgers, according to the New York Herald‘s Nov. 13 post-hanging review, was one of a gaggle of ne’er-do-wells “well known to the police of the Sixteenth precinct as loungers about the corners.”
Corner-loungers evidently share behavioral DNA with the common high school meathead, for Rodgers (drunk on rum) precipitated his trouble by carrying “his arms a-kimbo, so that one elbow hit [John] Swanston violently as he went by him.” Swanston, a respectable burgher returning from market with his wife, didn’t take kindly to this territory-marking, and exchanged words with Rodgers until the punk terminated the conversation by planting a knife between Swanston’s ribs. The unfortunate gentleman, perhaps second-guessing his decision to make such a big deal over the elbow, expired painfully in the street as witnesses rushed to the scene.
If the Herald is to be believed, a concerted clemency push (including author Caroline Kirkland, who called personally on Gov. John King) went begging owing to a general public outcry against corner-lounging Irish hoodlums and their a-kimbo elbows.
Even though Rodgers was hanged in private in the Tombs, New Yorkers strained the roofs of nearby buildings (at ten to fifty cents per head) just to get a glimpse of him being walked to the gallows with the rope picturesquely around his neck and whatever else they could peep over the walls.
Reportedly contrite (he slept on the stone floor of his cell and ate bread and water by way of self-mortification), prayerful, handsome, and at the gallows unflinching, the youthful Rodgers died game … and also harrowingly.
The Tombs was already by this point employing a gallows that jerked the condemned upward rather than dropping him through a trap: the idea was that this method would humanely kill the wretch on the first strike of the knot.
That was not the case for James Rodgers.
By the time the executioners axed through the rope restraining the counterbalance and the fall of a 250-pound lead weight yanked Rodgers into the air, the noose’s knot had slipped to the nape of the culprit’s neck where it would fail to deliver a lethal fracture. The killer twisted and fought horribly for some eight minutes as he strangled to death, even freeing his right hand from its restraint and with it tearing at his heart. “Sickening to behold,” reported the New York Times.
So, that was James Rodgers. Like many murderers of the time, and especially those who could be constructed as sympathetic people led astray by drink, the man got himself a hanging ballad, “The Lamentation of James Rodgers.”
This ditty appears to have been appropriated, meter and lyrics alike, a generation later for the ballad “Charles Guiteau” — whose subject is the nutter assassin of President James Garfield. Guiteau hanged in 1882.
It’s pretty striking, really, even if not unusual for the genre; the lyrics show a line-for-line lift.
Lamentation of James Rodgers
Come all you tender Christians,
I hope you will draw near,
And likewise pay attention
To those few lines I have here:
For the murder of Mr. Swanston
I am condemned to die,
On the twelfth day of November
Upon the gallows high.
My name is James Rodgers
The same I ne’er denied,
Which leaves my aged parents
In sorrow for to cry,
It’s little ever they thought
All in my youth and bloom,
I came into New York
For to meet my fatal doom.
Charles Guiteau
Come all you tender Christians
Wherever you may be
And likewise pay attention
To these few lines from me.
For the murder of James A. Garfield
I am condemned to die
On the thirtieth day of June
Upon the scaffold high.
My name is Charles Guiteau
My name I’ll never deny,
To leave my aged parents
To sorrow and to die.
But little did I think
While in my youthful bloom
I’d be carried to the scaffold
To meet my fatal doom.
Here’s the Garfield version … as the guilt-ridden young tough James Rodgers is not much remembered on YouTube.
Though executioners don’t quite bat 1.000 — who does, at any human endeavor? — the field on the whole succeeds more often than not.
On this date in 1864, the Confederate guerrilla John S. Mosby had seven Union prisoners executed, but he only managed to kill three of them — an efficiency very well below the Mendoza Line for the executioner’s trade.
It was a rare competence gap for the brilliant cavalryman.
The irregulars Mosby commanded in the Shenandoah Valley had frustrated for six months the consolidation of rampant northern armies, thereby preserving the Confederate capital of Richmond and extending the Civil War.
The situation had quick become intolerable for the Union, and Gen. Ulysses Grant emphasized (pdf) to Gen. Phil Sheridan the cruel anti-insurgent tactics he would countenance for “the necessity of clearing out the country so that it would not support Mosby’s gang. So long as the war lasts they must be prevented from raising another crop.”
Incensed, the Confederate “gray ghost” began stockpiling blue bodies from the offending command of George Armstrong Custer — yes, the Little Bighorn guy; he was perceived by Mosby to be responsible for the atrocity, although the actual paper trail on the execution order seems to be a little sketchy.
Mosby, who fancied himself the genteel sort who would closely abide the laws of war when fighting for the right to maintain human chattel, sent a lawlerly appeal up the chain of command seeking permission “to hang an equal number of Custer’s men.” General Robert E. Lee and Confederate Secretary of War James Sedden granted it.
The preparations began innocently enough on a quiet Sunday morning (November 6, 1864) when 27 Union prisoners of war were ushered with no explanation about what was happening out of a brick storehouse located in Rectortown, Virginia …
[They] were then marched to the banks of Goose Creek, about half a mile away. some, but definitely not all, of this specially selected pool of 27 prisoners belonged to Custer’s commands both past and present … [but] of the seven men eventually selected to die on Mosby’s orders only two were actually members of the Michigan Cavalry Brigade.
All 27 of the prisoners were lined up along Goose Creek and then made to draw slips of paper from a hat. Twenty of those slips of paper which were part of the macabre lottery were simply that, blank pieces of paper. The other seven — one for each of Mosby’s men executed at Front Royal and in Rappahanock County — were marked with a number …
Of the men who were forced to draw those slips of paper, some of them simply stared into space. Others, once they understood what was happening, prayed. There were a few of them who simply broke down.
Among the prisoners was a young drummer boy … who broke down completely, sobbing … He drew a blank slip and immediately proclaimed: “Damn it, ain’t I lucky!” When a second drummer boy was found to be unlucky enough to have drawn one of the marked slips of paper, upon the request of the men who had been spared, Mosby personally ordered the boy to be released from the seven condemned prisoners and the 18 remaining prisoners (excluding the first drummer boy) drew from the slips of paper for a second time.
Then one of the seven adults also got himself swapped out of the scrap by flashing a Masonic sign at a Confederate lodge member. The things that stand between life and death.
Out of the nine to come under death’s pall and the seven who were actually marched overnight to the place of execution (as close to Custer’s camp as Mosby dared) only three were there successfully ushered past death’s threshold.
At 4 a.m. on Monday, November 7, 1864 (the day before the election which would give Abraham Lincoln his second term in the White House and would therefore become the signature on the death warrant of the Confederacy), the Rangers and their prisoners reached the execution site in Beemer’s Woods, a mile west of Berryville, and the executions were carried forward. However, everything did not go exactly according to plan.
In the pre-dawn darkness and confusion (either through carelessness or lack of caring for their orders, since none of the prisoners had actually been involved in depredations against Confederate civilians) the Rangers allowed two of the seven prisoners (one of whom, G.H. Soule, 5th Michigan Cavalry Regiment, punched out a guard) to escape outright. Two other prisoners were apparently shot in the head, but surviving, having only been grazed, also escaped since they pretended, and were apparently believed, to be dead. The remaining three prisoners were hanged. The identities and whether or not these three prisoners were members of either Custer or Powell’s commands are unknown. Lt. Thompson, in accordance with his orders attached a placard to one of the hanged men (just as similar placards had been attached to the bodies of all three of Mosby’s hanged men). Mosby’s placard read: “These men have been hung in retaliation for an equal number of Colonel Mosby’s men hung by order of General Custer at Front Royal. Measure for Measure.”
Believing his purpose accomplished, or at any rate close enough for rebel government work, Mosby then wrote to Union General Sheridan justifying the action and assuring him that future “prisoners falling into my hands will be treated with the kindness due to their condition, unless some new act of barbarity shall compel me, reluctantly, to adopt a line of policy repugnant to humanity.”
The letter, and the 3-out-of-7 reprisal, actually worked — with no further measures exacted for measure or tits given for tat. For the waning months of the war the rival forces confined themselves to killing one another on the battlefield, and not in the stockade.
Well, mostly: one of the conspirators in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln in April 1865 — which did assassinate Lincoln, but was really a wider attempt to decapitate the entire northern government — was a former Mosby’s ranger named Lewis Powell aka Payne. Lincoln killer John Wilkes Booth also seemed to flee in Mosby’s direction (Mosby’s units were still in the field, not covered by the April 9 Appomattox surrender.) There exists an unproven but delicious speculative hypothesis that the hand of John Mosby was among those behind an exponentially more ambitious “line of policy repugnant to humanity.”
Be that as it may, Mosby actually became a Republican after the war — for which he received some Southern death threats — and lived fifty eventful years. Among other things, the aged Mosby regaled the young George Patton (whose father Mosby knew) with Civil War stories.
On this date in 1858, a slave named Henry — property* of a local farmer named William Jackson — was hanged in Decatur, Georgia for attempted rape.
We have of this occasion a first-person account from a 16-year-old white neighbor of the Jackson farm, Catherine Hewes, and the impressions she recorded of it that evening are reprinted by John C. Edwards in “Slave Justice in Four Middle Georgia Counties” in the Summer 1973 Georgia Historical Quarterly. A few additional paragraph breaks have been added for readability, and [sic] notations where necessary either by myself or by Edwards; however, there are many other minor language irregularities not worth individually noting, and simply presented as-is.
The Execution of Henry Jackson a slave of William Jackson at Decatur Ga. at an early hour this morning I dressed myself and prepared to accompany my brother and Sister to Decatur, a beautiful village an [sic] the County site of DeKalb county Ga. As we lived four miles south of Decatur we crossed the Georgia R Road in sight of the village, where we stopped a few moments to enquire where the gallows had been located and were infomed that it was situated one mile north of the Court-house on the Shallow ford road.
By ten Oclock a great many people throned the streets, and clustered around the old weather beaten jail. Our little company had beome quite a respectable crowd before we reached the Public Square where we drove slowly through the immense mass of living beings. All along the way form the Court-house to the gallows Carriages, Wagons and carts were seen bearing on their living freight to the scene of the execution. The high and low the rich and the poor the free and the bond alike pressing forward to the gallows their desires of seeing the law enforced and crime meet its own reward.
After a slow tedious drive we arrived at the appointd place where the rough benches had been erected in an old field whos [sic surroundings were on the amphitheater order. For several hours I had been pleasantly situated and with good company which caused thime [sic] to pass by almost imperceptibly but when I was confronted by a “gallows,” the simple construction of which was two upright posts and a cross beam from the top of the posts I viewed it with horror.
My reflections gushed forth when my eye took in the surroundings. On one side of the gallows were the colored people and on the other side the white people who had gathered on the little hillock. It was quite gratifying to the feelings to see the willingness of slave owners to teach their Slaves an important lesson by sending them here to day. The gallows, yes here on this gallows ill-fated Henry, will have to give up his life for crime and go to his long home with God in eternity.
In the midst of my reflections I saw a vast crowd of people coming from Town toward the gallows[.] It was announced that “They are a coming.” and I looked and saw on [sic] Ox-cart coming on which rode the unfortunate Henry dressed in a suit of white sitting by the coffn which was to incase his lifeless form. They drove the Ox-cart near the gallows, then the drive unhitched the Sturdy oxen and proceeded to direct the cart by hand.
The Sheriff plased [sic] his guard and when the cart stopped under the gallows by the platform a negro man ascended the stand and sang Hymns. Many joined in singing aloud the praises of God, while I stood gazing on in amazement. At the conclusion of the Hymn he offered a very appropriate prayer which seemed to affect a great many. When he raised up from prayer he began exhorting the people from Acts 6-23 — “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.” [sic — she means Romans 6:23] When he had ended his discourse, the Rev. Jns. W. Yarbough got up and made a short, but very appropriate exhortation.
They closed the religious services, but the convict desired to speak to the people. His discourse was very affecting, so much so that some of the black women shouted praises to their immortal King. The mother of Henry screamed aloud and shouted with vehemence while her son stood on the platform speaking to the auditory. At the conclusion of his remarks the Officers began to fix for his execution. The Sheriff, Capt John Jones, a capital man, was very much affected during the Scene. They first tied his feet together, then his hands, and then adjusted his clothing. The Sherff then permitted him to look over the vast multitude which surrounded him for a few moments and then tied a white handkerchief over his face which excluded it from view.
The hangmans Knot was adjusted around his neck then the rope was passed over the cross-bar of the gallows[.]
All things read at 12 N the Sheriff descended the steps to the ground and with help drew the Cart on which the Convict stood from under him — leaving the dangling form of the poor victim suspended in the air by a rope. When the form dropped from the Cart, a loud groan went up from the people and then they people [sic] began to disperse.
After the untwisting of the rope and the shrugging of the shoulder had ceased the Dr. E N Calhoun (I believ [sic]) approached and took hold of the hand and after a few moments announced that life was extinct. We came back to town and staid [sic] a few hours, and while at the Old Washington Hotel Kept by Mr. Banks George, I saw the Sheriff Mr Jones bring the corps [sic] back and carry the coffin up a flight of rickety steps to the door of the second story of the jail and deposit it therein. Doubtlessly the Doctors will take advantage of this subject for anatomical investigation, and be found with sleeves rolled up chatting over the mortal remains of this deluded victim. We left town with Mrs Parker, masters Bob and Miss Betsy, and got home before night.
Cottage House DeKalb Ga.
Catherine M. Hewey
November 3, 1858
* Henry was William Jackson’s only slave, and the latter was not compensated by the state for Henry’s execution: it was a substantial loss to the master.
On this date in 1801, 73-year-old James Legg(e) was hanged for murdering his mate William Lamb(e) at Chelsea Hospital.
Both men were pensioned ensigns from His Majesty’s service. According to the trial transcript, Legg was sinking into obvious depression. A nurse of long acquaintance remarked on
a lowness, a melancholy and deranged state; knowing him so long, I took the opportunity of asking him what was the matter with him, and the reason of his melancholy; he told me his mind was confused; that he had no rest night or day; that he was hurried from place to place, and could not tell what he was doing; and I really was afraid he would make away with himself; I was always unhappy when he was out of my sight, for fear he should do himself an injury; I never mentioned it to the doctor, because he was harmless … sometimes when I spoke to him, he would start like a person surprized out of a sleep; sometimes he would give me an answer, and sometimes only just a bow; I still observed that lowness and melancholy, and that his head was always confused down to the time of this unfortunate event.
Ah. The “unfortunate event.” Legg took it to mind that Lamb was “a tyrannical tempered man” who gave him “repeated insults” and challenged him to a duel. (Lamb’s widow, the only witness to the murder, said her husband had no beef with his killer.)
When Lamb quizzically (or scornfully) discarded the pistol that the irate Legg had forced into his hand, Legg just shot him dead.
He probably had no expectation that he’d just punched his ticket to artistic immortality.
Legg hanged exactly a month after the homicide. During the interval, three Royal Academy of Arts members — sculptor Thomas Banks and painters Benjamin West and Richard Cosway — pulled some strings with the Chelsea Hospital surgeon Joseph Carpue to get Legg’s body after death.
These gentlemen had an idea that centuries of artistic representation of Christ’s crucifixion were nonsense from a physiological point of view.
It was a natural outgrowth of Europe’s long fascination with anatomical accuracy — a fascination that made liberal use of executed bodies.
Despite the centrality of Christ’s crucifixion to western culture, nobody had seen an actual crucifixion — not for centuries. So, sure, you can make the guy on the cross look like a proportioned, three-dimensional human being …
… but is this really what a proportioned, three-dimensional human being would look like when nailed to a cross?
That Chelsea surgeon Carpue and his artist friends had the best way to find out. (Well … the second-best.)
“A building was erected near the place of the execution; a cross provided,” Carpue recorded. After hanging, “the subject was nailed on the cross; the cross suspended … the body, being warm, fell into the position that a dead body must fall into … When cool, a cast was made, under the direction of Mr. Banks, and when the mob was dispersed it was removed to my theatre.” West supposedly exclaimed that he had “never before seen the human hand” until he saw James Legg’s nailed and stretched.
Carpue proceeded to flay the cadaver and make a second cast from the grisly skin-less ecorche … an artistic/anatomical practice of the age whose best-known product is Smugglerius, also cast from a hanged man.
On this date in 1912, investigative reporter Emile Gauvreau saw George Redding hanged at the Connecticut State Prison in Wethersfield.
“When I left the prison to write my story,” Gauvreau later wrote in his memoir My Last Million Readers,* “I found out why newspapermen drank and I had my first half tumbler of cognac.”
Gauvreau was 21 years old, and he wasn’t a pup any longer.
This hard-charging journo from a rough-and-tumbler age would later make a name for himself pioneering the lowbrow Big Apple tabloid style with his New York Graphic. (“The PornoGraphic”, it was nicknamed.)
And he made his bones for that classic career in newsprint — from high school dropout to cub reporter to the heights of the profession — by making bones of George Redding.
The case was the mysterious February 1912 murder of a Hamden produce peddler by the name of Morris Greenberg. Greenberg was lured to a wooded area en route to buy from a local farmer and shot dead there for his cash. Police were stumped.
Gauvreau at the time was busting hard at the police desk of the New Haven Journal-Courier (since merged into the New Haven Register). He took a page from Sherlock Holmes and went to work on the sensational case freelance … painstakingly eliminating Hamden residents until he was left with George Redding.
Redding was a young man on the make himself, a charming 21-year-old playwright who’d been throwing a lot of money around lately and was known to carry a sidearm.
Circling his friends and paramours, Gauvreau sealed the young man’s fate by laying hands on a damning confessional that Redding had sent a friend. Gauvreau even stage-managed the arrest so that he could shock rival papers and police detectives by breaking the whole story in his paper. All that was left for police was extracting Redding’s confession.
On this date in 1907* an audacious would-be suicide bomber was executed by tsarist Russia.
Thousands of Russians immersed themselves in the late 1900s in revolutionary struggle after the Romanovs bloodily stopped the 1905 revolution. So many of them were executed that the gallows became known as “Stolypin’s Necktie”, after the sitting Prime Minister.
Twenty-one-year-old conservatory pianist and singer Evstolia Ragozinnikova got involved in a plot to assassinate the said Stolypin. (It was only one among several such plots, one of which finally succeeded in 1911.)
But “Tolia” feigned madness and then escaped the psychiatric hospital where she’d been confined. She rejoined her Socialist-Revolutionary conspirators, some of whom tried to get her to flee to Milan to further her musical studies.
Instead of concert houses, Ragozinnikova raised the curtain on her magnum opus on October 28* with a bid to land a Guy Fawkes-like blow against the autocracy.
Communist-turned-anticommunist Whittaker Chambers would, much later, remember in his correspondence with William F. Buckley the power that deeds like Ragozinnikova’s had to inspire, notwithstanding Lenin’s eventually-orthodox disavowal of terrorism. For Chambers, it was not material immiseration but spiritual disinheritance, existential despair — the sort that made artists into suicide bombers — that was the true midwife of Communism.
I may presume in supposing that the name of Ragozinikova is unknown to you. But the facts are these. In 1907, the Russian government instituted a policy of systematically beating its political prisoners. One night, a fashionably dressed young woman called at the Central Prison in Petersburg and asked to speak with the commandant, Maximovsky. This was Ragozinikova, who had come to protest the government’s policy. Inside the bodice of her dress were sewed thirteen pounds of dynamite and a detonator. When Maximovsky appeared, she shot him with her revolver and killed him. The dynamite was for another purpose. After the murder of Maximovsky, Ragozinikova asked the police to interrogate her at the headquarters of the Okhrana. She meant to blow it up together with herself; she had not known any other way to penetrate it. But she was searched and the dynamite discovered. She was sentenced to be hanged.
Awaiting execution., she wrote her family: ‘Death itself is nothing, … Frightful only is the thought of dying without having achieved what I could have done How good it is to love people. How much strength one gains from such love.’
Chambers aside, she’s not so well attested on the English-lanuage Internet; there’s a bit about her in Russian here and here, as well as some references to both Ragozinnikova and her peers in an academic pdf, “Women in the World of Gender Stereotypes: The Case of the Russian Female Terrorists at the Beginning of the 20th Century” by Nadezda Petrusenko in International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, April 2011.
* Gregorian dates. By the local Julian calendar in Russia, she committed her murder on October 15, and was hanged on October 18.
This date in 1885 saw the hanging in Grand Forks, North Dakota* of 19-year-old farmhand George Miller for butchering his employer’s wife and child in order to loot the farmhouse while the patriarch was away.
For this terrible American Gothic crime, we turn to the American Press.
Miller was the first person hanged in North Dakota and the local Grand Forks Herald marked the date with a voluptuous recounting (occupying an entire page, plus two more columns on the next page) of the late scandal all the way to the felon’s scaffold accusation. Here it is, in its entirety …
In the middle of last January when all the earth was wrapped in a mantle of purity, an esteemed minister of the gospel, the father of a bright family of children and a devoted husband with a loving wife, resided on his prosperous farm in the township of Inkster, this county, surrounded with the 320 broad and fertile acres, horses and cattle and improved farming implements he called his own. His earthly possessions he had acquired by industry, thrift and economy, with the wifely assistance and the aid of the little boys and girl that had blessed their union. This gentleman was Rev. C. Y. Snell at one time minister of the Baptist church in Grand Forks, but who had, like nearly all settlers in Dakota taken advantage of his rights and acquired a farm, which had brought a handsome return. His summer’s work done, his grain garnered, he had sent three of his children to Grand Forks to acquire a good education in her public schools, and remaining at the farm, was his wife Abbie and little son Herbie, aged eleven, and the hired man George Miller, a young man of quiet demeanor, aged about 19 years, who had helped to garner the summer’s fruits and whom both Mr. and Mrs. Snell had implicitly trusted.
Thus situated on the 16th of January, Rev. Snell bade his wife and son good-be, little dreaming that the
SHADOW OF THE DEMON
was in his door and before another fortnight his loved ones would be prone, stark and mangled in the icy embrace of blood and horrid death. He went on his errand of good will to Mayville where he was engaged in missionary labor for his Lord and Master. On the 31st of January, two weeks after his absence, he received a telegram informing him of the doleful event — the murder of his wife and boy, and he hastened with bowed form and bleeding heart to the spot where the light of his joy had been ruthlessly extinguished.
OH RUEFUL SCENE!
The demon had done his worst! Have not the details of that heartless butchery been told again and again? Why not draw the veil upon the foul deed? The ghastly corpses of the innocent and unsuspecting sleepers — mother and son, hurled into eternity in a moment while taking the repose of the righteous — as found there by the neighbors a week after the tragedy — divulged the heartlessness of the assassin whoever he might be, and the thorough depravity of the soul that could impel the ruthless ax to deeds of death.
THE VILLAINOUS SHREWDNESS
with which the murderer had avoided suspicion was manifest in the fact that so long a time had elapsed before the discovery of the crime, and will be further apparent as the story progresses. He had been a companion of Henry Rutherford and to avoid immediate discovery, Miller the confessed criminal, had told the nearest neighbors that he intended to give Mrs. Snell a drive on Sunday and that he would haul wood the following week. Thus no suspicion was aroused until late in the week. Friday, Rutherford a simple, untutored laborer who lived alone at Bennett’s place about 60 rods from the Snell residence, thought it strange that there was no stir or animation about the place, and after finding the stock nearly famished, and watering it, alarmed the neighbors and the dreadful truth was discovered. The neighbors H.P. Reiton, Simeon, Miller, C.G. Gordon, Mr. Vietch, Henry Blakely and others found the dead bodies undisturbed and the rifled trunk with its empty money box and the robbed children’s bank just as the murderer had left them. Thus it was plain
THE MOTIVE WAS MONEY —
the sordid lust for gold that causes men to imperil their souls and makes of earth a probationary sheol for evil minds. Mr. Snell had sold considerable grain and when he left he took $300 with him, leaving some money, together with some keep-sakes and the children’s savings in the cash-box in the trunk. After he had gone, Miller sold more wheat and received from agent Holden $205, which he may have turned over to Mrs. Snell or not. But that the robbery of Mr. Snell in some way, was in his mind for a week before the crime was committed is shown by the testimony of Mr. Holden to the fact that Miller asked him a week before, whether he could deliver a load of wheat unknown to Mr. Snell and it further shows that the idea of robbery did not originated with Rutherford at a dance on the 20th of January, only four days before the murder as Miller claimed in his statement before the judge. It shows that the robbery was in contemplation by him without an accomplice and, being ignorant of the fact that Mr. Snell had taken $300 with him to Mayville, he doubtless committed the crime for more money that he received —
FLEEING FROM JUSTICE
After committing the crime, he hastily placed the ax beneath the bed, threw up the bedclothes over the faces of the dead, robbed the trunk of its keep-sakes, harnessed the best pair of horses in the stable, took Snell’s driving gloves and drove forty miles over the cold bleak prairie with the thermometer at 30 degrees below zero, arrived in Grand Forks at break of day Sunday morning in front of the Northwestern Hotel and ordered the team put away and his breakfast prepared. In the sled-box was an overcoat of the boy he had murdered which had probably been left there when the unsuspecting youth last accompanied him in the delivery of the wheat the proceeds of which he contemplated stealing. There was also left there the overalls which Miller had worn and upon which bright specks of blood had been discovered and whose dumb voices cry out testimony against the last black lie of the series which the obdurate murderer coined in the cell against poor simple Rutherford. With the team was Snell’s faithful dog, which followed the fleeing assassin. Upon his arrival here, he commenced a series of ingenious but
BASE COINAGES TO EVADE PURSUIT.
He told Powery, the clerk at the Northwestern Hotel, that he had come to meet his brother at the train and he might go to Winnipeg for a week. He also exhibited some gold pieces which he wanted changed, but the clerk had no change. The design of this story was too evidently to direct pursuit towards Winnipeg, if the team were soon identified as Snell’s. He soon walked off seemingly unconscious of any obligation to pay for his breakfast and next called at the Chicago clothing house, rousing Mr. Ephraim out of his late Sabbath repose. He told Mr. Ephraim a different tale. He was thrown of[f] his guard by the sharp questioning of Ephraim, while selling him the buffalo overcoat, black valise, pocket book, and other out-fit that later led to the capture and identification. He explained the possesion of his roll of bills, amounting to several hundred dollars by saying that he had sold a team of horses receiving $275 for it and intended to go to Turtle Mountain, thus evading the true objective point. He also got rid here of the tell-tale keep-sakes, the gold dollars which Mr. Snell had treasured for years, and the nickles, dimes and quarters which the little Snells had perhaps been years in gathering. Being shown the way to the barbershop of Mr. Kruger by Mr. Ephraim, after he had bought his disguise, he further changed his apperance by getting his hair cut close and his face shaved. Here he left the only clue to the direction in which he was intending to go, by inquiring whether a train left for Crookston, and up to the discovery of this fact by a HERALD representative, the officers seemed to be impressed with the fact that he had really gone to Winnipeg to which point as well as others they telegraphed as soon as it was learned that the team was left in this city. It must be remembered that it was not until the following Saturday that the tragedy was made known and in that time the murderer might have left the country, if he had not been paralyzed by his own wickedness and depravity. Learning at the barbershop that no train left for Crookston on Sunday, he walked to the station on the railroad track and bought a ticket for Fargo, displaying the new red pocket book to the agent. After spending a few days at Fargo among variety women, and having had his picture taken by a photographer, he went to Brainerd, Minn., where he stopped at the house of Malcolm McLaren for a few days more.
I’d be very surprised if our suspect was from Brainerd.
While at Brainerd, he associated with women of loose character and spent considerable money lavishing presents upon them. It seems that he met a female there whom he had formerly known in Iowa. At first he talked to Mr. McLaren about going into business. He wanted to do chores, when he learned that his money was nearly all gone. The St. Paul papers on Sunday morning following the discovery contain accounts of the murder with description of the hired man of Snells, but imperfect, as his disguise was not known, but when the statement of the Northwestern clerk about the gold pieces was published, Mr. Ephraim at once reported the Sunday morning transaction and it was thus that
HIS SIN FOUND HIM OUT.
His new outfit together with the way he had disguised himself were immediately telegraphed to the associated press by the HERALD and with it a statement of the reward offered. When the papers arrived at Brainerd, Miller had quietly decamped, realizing that he was too near the scene of the tragedy. But McLaren, an old detective immediately concluded that the fellow who had staid [sic] at his house was the person sought, and securing a deputization from the sheriff, he drew money for an indefinite trip, learned that Miller had boarded the train with a ticket for Anoka, and followed him up. On the same train went Hartley and another, bent on the same errand and watching McLaren. At Anoka, McLaren happened to strike the bus for the very hotel at which Miller was stopping and he now felt certain of
ARRESTING HIS MAN.
Miller was in his room and armed. McLaren knew the character of the brute better than the inexperienced who put any faith in his pretences during his last days. He concluded to wait till Miller came down, and while McLaren was at breakfast, he heard the murderer’s foot-falls on the stairs and entering the washroom. McLaren immediately left the table and coming up behind Miller with his pistol cocked arrested him, but as he did so, Miller laid his hand on the revolver in his hip-pocket, but the gun of the sheriff had the desired effect and he was disarmed. His attempt to get away from McLaren on various pertexts [sic] and his denial of all knowledge at the start are remembered. It was not until they were in the cars and coming back to Brainerd, that he
CONFESSED HE DID IT ALONE.
The way he happened to weaken was this, McLaren said to him, “Now you may as well tell all about it. I can tell you of a place in the forests where you will never be found, if you get away at the next station.” Miller then told his first story about how he was crazed with drink after being chid by Mrs. Snell, and killed her and the boy, and after getting over his stupor, and seeing what he had done, he stole the money and tried to get away. He reiterated this oft-told tale to Sheriff Jenks and others at Brainerd and again to reporters of Fargo papers, who managed to get up a considerable maudlin sentimentality for him. For prudential reasons, there having been a great deal of feeling that he should be given short shrift and a stout rope, he was kept at Fargo for several days, and finally brought here very quietly and lodged in jail. When it was known that he was in jail and likely to be tried speedily and executed according to law, popular excitement over the enormity of the crime subsided. The Rev. J.T. Davis and Rev. Snell, at an early day obtained an interview with Miller, and he reiterated the intoxication story as before in their presence, calling upon God to strike him dead if his story was not true. He also as positively stated to the gentelemen that he alone did the crime and no one was concerned with him in it.
It was not until after the Grand Jury had found a bill that this mild, child-like and bland assassin,
CHANGED BASE.
He then asserted that Henry Rutherford was with him, concocted the idea of robbery and urged it against his wishes, until he was finally persuaded to connive and assist, although Rutherford he said, actually did the horrible deed, while he did the running away to South America. In the face of his former statements this story only seemed to aggravate his villainy. However, able counsel, Judge C.B. Pratt, was assigned him and every thing that legal subtlety and experience could avail, was rallied to save his neck from the law’s penalty. The people, however, were fortunate in having so learned and able a coadjutor as District Attorney W.A. Selby and so just and firm a judge as Hon. W.B. McConnell; for, notwithstanding the able, artful and persistent defense made by Judge Pratt, justice was vindicated. Upon the defendant’s own plea of “guilty,” ascertained, verified and corroborated by all the witnesses, who fully and completely exonerated Rutherford from the suspicions cast upon him, and satisfied the conscience of the court, sentence of death was passed upon him and his appeal to the higher court sent back with an approval of the action of the District Court. His statement to the Judge, when informed of this action, suggesting some new matters not before mentioned, is still fresh in the recollection of everybody.
The last few days of his life seemed to have passed by him in a happy, careless, indifferent and easy frame of mind. He talked freely about his own execution, expressed no great sorrow or penitence for, at least the part he played in the atrocious crime, but pretended that he was glad the end was so near. His spiritual advisor, Rev. F. Doran conversed and prayed with him and did all in his power to turn his thoughts towards that awful Judge who hath decreed that “whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”
HIS LAST NIGHT
on earth was uneventful. About eight o’clock he was left alone for a time in his cell and was seen from Bruce avenue to perform various antics, rising suddenly from his chair and jesticulating wildly with his arms as if again swinging the baleful ax which brained his helpless victims. He was restless and this has been observed that when left to himself and his thoughts, he was not the calm, self-possessed person he appeared to be when in the presence of visitors. During the evening, Rev. Snell had an interview with him for about an hour and a half. The prisoner claimed to others that he had succeeded in persuading Mr. Snell of the correctness of his last story. He was set up with by Deputy Sheriff Ackerman and others until after midnight. At one o’clock he retired and at 7:30 this morning he arose apparently refreshed. He ate a hearty breakfast consisting of beefsteak, potato, cake, etc. His cell has a window pane out and the wind being in the south, Miller was cold and was brought down into the office where he smoked a cigar, one of a number left him some days ago by some women who called upon him and were recognized by the prisoner as old acquaintances. The district attorney was present and inquired further about portions of Miller’s statement made to Rev. Doran. Presently Sheriff Pierce of Nelson county and friends came in, also County Commissioner Steele, Henry Rutherford and Mr. Vietch. Rutherford was told that Miller still insisted upon his story and was asked what he thought of it. He said, “then Miller lies. That is all.” Soon after an interview was had between
MILLER AND RUTHERFORD
in the presence of District Attorney. Miller said to Rutherford: “You know you had a hand in this thing as I have said.” Rutherford, without any trepidation replied: “It is a lie and you know it. I don’t like to be lied about.” Subsequently the statement in the nature of a history of his career and the crime was read in the presence of Rutherford who said nothing. When asked about it, he said it was “no such thing. It was all a dang’d lie!” When asked about the part in which Miller alludes to the false mustache, Rutherford said he had such a mustache but did not think Miller had ever seen it. He said he kept it in his trunk and described it to the district attorney corresponding with the description given by Miller. This circumstance and one in respect to changing wagon boxes, also a statement now made that the Snell stock was not famished, although the witnesses testified that it was, were industriously emplyoed [sic] last night and this morning to weaken the district attorney and cause him to apply for the respite of Miller. Mr. Snell himself after his interview with Miller last night seemed to have been influenced by his story and urged and begged the district attorney to intercede for Miller. Mr. Selby said he could do nothing unless Mr. Snell or some one on his behalf, would swear that Rutherford was an accomplice, when he would take such action as was proper in the cause of justice. Up to noon, Snell had done nothing of the kind. There was also pressure brought to bear from various sources to effect the same purpose, but none were willing to assume any responsibility.
THE LAST HOUR
was spent in the parlor of Sheriff Jenks with Revs. Currie and Doran who administered all the Christian consolation the solemnity of the occasion could afford. They talked to him, prayed for him and he himself made a fervid prayer. His nerve maintained his head erect to the end, which did not seem to fear.
ASCEND THE SCAFFOLD.
At 1:30 accompanied by Sheriff Jenks, he ascended the scaffold. The Sheriff suggested that if he had anything to say he should speak. Miller stood with the rope almost danging in his face, his hands clasped, and his body slightly bent. About two feet in front of him stood Henry Rutherford who, during Miller’s 15 minute talk, kept his gaze firmly fixed on Miller’s face. Rutherford looked like a person suffering great mental strain and slightly changed color at times while Miller was speaking, but his eyes never flinched. Rev. Mr. Snell occupied a position to the left of Rutherford, almost touching him and when Miller alluded to Rutherford’s alleged connection with the murder, Mr. Snell gazed almost fiercely into Rutherford’s face, Rutherford meanwhile keeping his eyes fixed on the doomed man. C.B. Pratt, Miller’s counsel, during the recital of the murderer’s statement, watched Rutherford closely.
Miller spoke with apparent effort and several times during the recital of his story had occasion to put his handkerchief to his eyes.
HIS LAST WORDS.
Gentlemen: — I am accused of the crime of murder which I did not commit. I have not committed murder. I was in company with the party and gave my consent, but gentlemen, I never committed the murder myself.
On the 30th day of January I was in Inkster with Mr. Rutherford. He and I sold 100 bushels of Mr. Snell’s wheat and we divided the money. That night we got home between eight and nine o’clock and Rutherford asked me how much wheat Mr. Snell had and I told him over 200 bushels besides a few loads which I had drawn. He wanted to know how much money was in the house and I told him as near as I could. He wanted to know how we could get it and I told him we could chloroform the folks and get it and he said he would do it. The 22nd, 23rd and 24th we were hauling grain to town and we talked again about getting the money. That night I went down to his house to supper and Mr. Blakely came in and that stopped our talk there. I went to Mr. Snells and that night I had a long conversation with Mrs. Snell and when it got about bed time I went to my room with my lantern and sat down on the bed and pulled off my rubbers when I heard a knock at the back door and went and opened it and Rutherford sad, George are you ready to do that? I said no, I hae had a long talk with Mrs. Snell and she is so good and kind to me that I cannot do it. He says you said you would do it and now you got to do it. He said dead folks tell no tales. He said he would do it and handed me a mustache to put on so folks would not know him and took the axe and went in and I went to the barn and harnessed one horse and was just putting one collar on the other when he came out and said, hurry up George I have done it. I tied the horse and I went in and found them dead. He says hurry up let us get away before anyone happens to catch us moving around so he hurried and got the team hitched up and I went to the house and got the money and gave him an even $100 and took $115 mysel and got what clothes I wanted. I wanted to change my clothes and put on a white shirt, but he said hurry up for I could get what clothes I wanted at Grand Forks. He brought the team up and tied them and I got what things I wanted and he helped me fasten up the storm door. He wanted me to go direct to South America and go right through. Said for me to write him when I got there and he would write me the circumstances here. At this ponit Miller was overcome with emotion and stopped a while.
Now gentlemen, every word hat I have told you is true and now as dear as that family was to me, I never could have consented to murder them as I was used there as their son. I was always treated well; they thought the world of me and I did of them but by the hands of another man’s deed I am to be hung and I am going to my grave and I am thankful that I can trust in God and feel that my sins have been pardoned.
And now I feel that the other party shall receive the same punishment that I have. It is not because I am down on him and it is not for malice but it is just what should be done. As dear and as good as that family was to me I could not go in and murder them. But thank heaven I am willing to die. This world would be no pleasure to me after this and I do not want to go to penitentiary. I am better satisfied to go to my grave. I am fully satisfied and feel that what has been done is just, as that family always used me like a son, always good, always dear in every shape, never refused me money, never refused me anything.
Now, gentlemen, I want you all to remember that this is the truth and nothing else. I won’t meet you any more in this world face to face but I hope we can all meet in the world to come.
When Miller had finished Henry Rutherford turned to District Attorney Selby and asked that he might make a statement of denial.
ADJUSTING THE ROPE.
Sheriff Jenks, who occupied a position on the scaffold just behind Miller, then approached and commenced binding the wretche’s [sic] hands and limbs with straps, and while placing the cap, which was of brown worsted, Miler again commenced to speak, and even while the sheriff was placing the noose around his neck Miller asked his executioner to say “good bye” for him to his friends.
THE DROP.
Barely a second’s time had elapsed from the moment the noose was adjusted before the trap was sprung, so adroitly and neatly did Sheriff Jenks do his work. Miller’s body shot down at 1:45 o’clock with a sickening thud, his neck being broken by the fall. A few moments after the drop the body quivered and the legs were slightly drawn up several times. Life was pronounced extinct 15 minutes after the fall by Coroner Roundwell and at 2:10 the body was cut down and carried into an adjoining cell, where the straps were removed. Shortly afterwards undertaker Caswell took charge of his remains which were interred this afternoon in the cemetery among the unknown sleepers. Thus ends this chapter of the bloodiest and most heartless murder in the annals of Dakota and the murder’s just doom, should be a warning to all evil-doers that there is no mercy for the slayers of the innocent.
MILLER’S STATEMENT.
Following is a statement prepared by Miller and given to Rev. Doran several days since. He swore to it this forenoon before Judge Cochrane, in presence of several gentlemen.
TERRITORY OF DAK.
GRAND FORKS, Oct. 30, 1885.
The last statement and confession of Geo Miller, before his execution in Grand Forks, Oct. 30, 1886.
TERRITORY OF DAK.,
COUNTY OF GRAND FORKS.
I, George Miller, was born in Toledo, Ohio February 17, 1866. My father and mother are both dead; about 12 years ago my mother died and my father 2 years later; have one brother, four years older than myself named Frank, two sisters both younger than I, two and four years; father was Bohemian; mother French; came from Iowa to Casselton last June, 1884, remained there 2 days; from Casselton to Larimore, arriving about the 13th of July, 1884, left there on the 11th, arriving at Mr. Snell’s that evening; at the expiration of four months hired to him for $30.00 a month; never refused to pay me; liked the family; first got acquainted with Henry Rutherford in Mr. Snell’s harvest field. He and I thrashed wheat together in August, 1884; often I met him at Mr. Bennet’s place in the evenings and was with him all through thrashing. Had hauled wheat once or twice before the dance by Brothrs [sic?] Bogs and also by Rutherford; went from Rutherford’s house; I furnished the cutter and he the horse; went together; he and I began to drink together; on the 1st of January took four or five drinks together that day in three different saloons and each took a pint of liquor home with us. The next day Rutherford went to Inkster; came back to “Vietches” where Mrs. Vietch was doctoring him, when Mrs. Snell and Essa Vickery saw him and told me that he was drunk; drank almost every time we went to Inkster; on the 20th of January, 1885, we sold five sacks of Mr. Snell’s wheat; I had 35 sacks of Mr. Snell’s wheat; Rutherford had 20 sacks of his own, we called it 10 bushels; spent most of it for liquor and cigars; changed sacks between the livery stable and saloon; he gave me half the money.
The dance was on Tuesday, the 20th of January; got to the dance about 8 or 9 o’clock, left about 3:30 a.m.; Rutherford asked me how much wheat I had hauled off; told him over 2000 bushels; he asked how much money there was about the house; I told him 6, 7, 8 or 9 hundred dollars; he said can’t we get it; I did not think we could, the trunk was too near the bed; he said we could kill the folks and get it; I did not want to do that, I said wait until we go to town and get some chloroform; Rutherford did not want to do this for fear we would be caught; nothing more was said about it for two days; coming from town I rode with him; he asked me what I thought about what we had talked about; told him it was not right to kill them for a little money;
And for what? A little bit of money.
he said we must work some plan to get it; I told him nothing must be done at this time. Nothing more was said until the Saturday it was done; we went to town together and on returning, when about to separate to go to our homes he asked me to come over that afternoon and help him sack up wheat, I told him I would; he said we would talk over this other thing, referring to the money of Snell’s.
In the afternoon I went over and we worked at the wheat and made all the arrangements to kill the folks; I was to leave with the team either for Larimore or Grand Forks and then take the first train for South America, we were both to go in and do the killing, I stayed at Rutherfords for supper, Harry Blakely came to call on Rutherford, we stayed and talked until eight or nine o’clock, then I started hom and Rutherford and Blakely started to go to Abner Veitches. I went to Mr. Snell’s and did the chores, Mrs. Snell was pleasant and talked pleasant, the last thing I did was to bed the horses and nail up the granary, that was about ten o’clock at night, I then went to the house and whittled my shavings and left them by the stove, pulled my rubbers off my felts and went into my room and set down on the front side of my bed, and was just going to pull of[f] my felts when Rutherford knocked at the kitchen door, I went to let him in, he says are you ready to do that, I told him no I was not, he said it had to be done, you gave your consent at the granary, “dead folks tell no tales.” I said if you want to do it you can, I won’t, he says all right, get me the ax, I went out and got it and when I gave it to him he pulled a false mustache out of his pocket and told me to put it on him, it was black and fastened in the nose with two wires, he had on woolen mittens. I think I got my coat, cap and mittens from the dining room and went to the barn while he did it and had one horse harnessed when he came out and said hurry up I have killed both of them, let us [get out of] the place before anyone sees us moving around, he led out one horse and took the other and hitched on to the sleigh, drove to the front door to hitch both horses, we both went in the house, I went into the bed room and got the money and took it into the dining room and divided it. He had $100, two $20, one $10 and one $50 bill, I had one hundred and fifteen dollars, he put his in his pocket and I put mine in my coat pocket, then I went into the bed room and changed coat and vest, then I got my overcoat and scarf and a large pair of mittens, fine boots and overshoes and handed them to him to carry to the sleigh for me. I took two or three blankets off my bed and took them with me. I got the key and locked up the door, he held up the storm door while I put the blocks against it, we got into the sled and rode up to his corner, he told me to go to South America, I told him I would, when he got to the corner we stopped and bid each other good-bye by shaking hands, he said as soon as I got there I was to write to him and he would let me know how things were, I told him I would.
GEO. MILLER.
Signed in the presence of
JAMES A. JENKS.
GEO. B. WINSHIP
TERRITORY OF DAK.,
COUNTY OF GRAND FORKS.
I, George Miller being first duly sworn on his oath says that I have heard read the foregoing statement by me subscribed and know the contents thereof and the whole thereof and that the statements therein made are true of my own knowledge.
GEO. MILLER.
Subscribed and sworn to before me this 30th day of October, 1885.
J. M. Cochrane,
Judge of Probate.
* At the time, not North Dakota but the Dakota Territory; North and South Dakota would attain statehood four years later.
On this date in 1865, Baptist deacon Paul Bogle was hanged at the Morant Bay courthouse for his part in that locale’s eponymous rebellion.
Third World’s “1865 (96 degrees in the shade)” celebrates Paul Bogle: “Today I stand here a victim the truth is I’ll never die”
Bogle helped lead of the protests-cum-riots that became that rebellion.
Baptists played an essential role in the affair, which has led some to call it the “Native Baptist War”. And indeed, Baptism had long intertwined with underclass resistance: Jamaica’s most famous slave rebel, Samuel Sharpe, was also a Baptist deacon. A previous royal governor in Jamaica had once warned that “the worst evil which hangs with a menacing aspect over the destinies of this island is the influence exercised with baneful effect by the majority of Baptist missionaries.”
From the standpoint of the powerful in Jamaica and Britain, 1865 would vindicate that warning.
A (white) Baptist missionary named Edward Underhill had penned a January 1865 letter bemoaning the miserable condition of most Jamaicans and starkly disputing received wisdom that blacks were just too lazy to work: “The simple fact is, there is not sufficient employment for the people; there is neither work for them, nor the capital to employ them.” (Underhill later wrote a book on the events, The tragedy of Morant Bay, a narrative of the distrubances in the Island of Jamaica in 1865.)
Underhill’s letter got into public circulation and as a result there were a number of “Underhill meetings” perhaps comprising an “Underhill movement” on the island in 1865 — essentially a going social campaign that rooted deeply in Jamaica’s native Baptist communities. Though “native Baptists” is a vague term, it distinguishes not only black from white but, in the words of Mary Turner, a whole “proliferation of sects in which the slaves developed religious forms, more or less Christian in content that reflected their needs more closely than the orthodox churches, black or white.”
William Gordon had switched his religious allegiance to native Baptist and was known to speak at Underhill meetings: that’s part of what got him hanged.
Likewise, our day’s focus, Paul Bogle, was a native Baptist minister, in the St. Thomas-in-the-East parish — and it was the protest of Bogle and his supporters against an unjust prosecution that started the whole rebellion off.
Statue of a militant Paul Bogle (that’s a sword in his hands) outside the Morant Bay courthouse where all the trouble started. (cc) image from dubdem sound systems.
There was, accordingly, an immediate reward out on Bogle’s head, and an immediate demonization in the respectable English press. There, he was “the notorious Paul Bogle,” in the words of one letter to the editor (London Times, Nov. 18 1865), in whose Baptist chapel rebellious “panthers” wantonly “drank rum mixed with gunpowder and the brains of their victims.”
By the time that letter had been dispatched, Bogle’s purported orgies had long since been interrupted: captured by Maroons, he was delivered to custody, instantly tried, an hanged that very day in a batch of 18 rebels.
A horror to Victorian planters, Bogle has won the reverence of posterity as a freedom fighter and national hero.
Paul Bogle on the (now out-of-circulation) Jamaican two-dollar bill.
“No incident of the dreadful story” of Morant Bay, wrote Edward Underhill, “produced a more painful impression than the arrest, trial, and execution of Mr. G.W. Gordon” this date in 1865.
The son of a white planter and a mulatto slave, George William Gordon was an able businessman and became a Jamaican assemblyman.
In that capacity, he was a vocal critic of British colonial maladministration, an advocate for blacks, and a political foe of Jamaica’s governor, Edward John Eyre. He’d already had government commissions canceled because of his politics.
Gordon had nothing to do with the Morant Bay outbreak. He was away from the disturbance altogether, in Kingston, when it broke out.
But he was regarded by many white elites as a class enemy, and Eyre did not intend to miss this opportunity to eliminate him. A few years later, a French tribunal would express the rationale as it cracked down on the Paris Commune: guilty or no, “a prudent and wise Government must rid itself [of troublemakers] when it finds a legitimate occasion to do so.”
Accordingly, Gordon was arrested by civil authorities in Kingston — he actually turned himself in when he heard there was a warrant out on him — and then transferred into the hands of the drumhead military tribunals that were operating in the conflict zone, obviously with the intent of terminating a gadfly.
[Kingston authorities] were not the ministers or apparitors of the martial authority, and did not possess the power to take up Mr. Gordon for the purpose of handing him over to the martial law. Nevertheless, they did it. They did it by the exercise of the strong hand of power, because it was thought that a conviction could not be got at Kingston. It was altogether unlawful and unjustifiable. To Mr. Gordon it made the difference of life or death.
Gordon, in his last letter to his wife, took it all in an understandably contemptuous stride:
General Nelson has just been kind enough to inform me that the court-martial on Saturday last has ordered me to be hung, and that the sentence is to be expected in a hour hence, so that I shall be gone from this world of sin and sorrow.
I regret that my worldly affairs are so derranged: but it cannot be helped … I never advised or took part in any insurrection. All I ever did was to recommend the people who complained to seek redress in a legitimate way … It is however the will of my heavenly Father that I should thus suffer in obeying His command, to relieve the poor and needy, and to protect, as far as I was able, the oppressed …
do not be ashamed of the death your poor husband will have suffered. The judges seemed against me; and from the rigid manner of the Court, I could not get in all the explanations I intended. … It seemed that I was to be sacrificed.
Much of what Governor Eyre did in those desperate days skirted, at best, the edges of what might be legally colorable. But at least those instances, in the main, were directed at people alleged to have been actual rebels or rioters. Eyre could safely expect wide latitude where the security of the realm was at stake.
In Gordon, however, there was a man whose crime was nothing other than to have sympathized with the real and crushing plight of the lower orders and advanced their cause politically. Eyre’s magistrates made that fact alone into sedition, and twisted the rules of their own courts-martial to pin it on Gordon.
Given the exceptionally lawless nature of this scenario — and Gordon’s own visibility as a colonial elite — his became the lightning-rod case for English liberals incensed at Eyre’s behavior. John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and others demanded Eyre’s prosecution for the affair, Thomas Huxley writing for the faction,
the killing of Mr. Gordon can only be defended on the ground that he was a bad and troublesome man; in short, that although he might not be guilty, it served him right.
I entertain so deeply-rooted an objection to this method of killing people — the act itself appears to me to be so frightful a precedent, that I desire to see it stigmatised by the highest authority as a crime.
It can hardly surprise the reader, versed as we are by this late date in official impunity, that not Eyre nor any lieutenant was ever thus stigmatised.
While Eyre evaded due punishment, Gordon could not escape the plaudits of posterity. He’s been honored as a Jamaican National Hero, and the very building where the present-day parliament sits is called the Gordon House in his honor.
In the middle of last January when all the earth was wrapped in a mantle of purity, an esteemed minister of the gospel, the father of a bright family of children and a devoted husband with a loving wife, resided on his prosperous farm in the township of 
The son of a white planter and a mulatto slave,