The story behind this stunning photograph of Alexander Anderson and Henry Richards on their Lancaster, Pa., gallows on April 9, 1858 we’re going to outsource to our friend (and occasional guest-blogger) Robert Wilhelm at Murder by Gaslight.
The only official witnesses were the twenty-four jurymen who convicted them, the sheriff, two deputies, two clergymen and state senator Cobb — a proponent of the death penalty who attended all Pennsylvania hangings.
Outside the prison walls, the public found other ways to witness the execution. People in surrounding houses could see inside the prison yard from their roofs. One entrepreneur erected a scaffolding on a hill outside the prison and charged a dollar a seat. Those without a view stood outside the prison walls waiting to cheer when the execution was confirmed.
Peter Williams and Abraham (or Abram) Cox were hanged on this date in 1858* in Auburn, Maine, for the maritime murder of the crew of the Albion Cooper.
They’ll tell you all about it in a lyrical “last words” that would have you believe they did a musical number on the scaffold, to the air of the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem “Old Ironsides”. A couple of fine gentlemen have done us the favor of making a shanty of the poem on YouTube, if this helps put you in the mood, although, since “Williams and Cox” imitate Holmes’s meter and nautical theme but not his brevity, you’ll need to run it back a few times if you mean to make it to the end.
And a one and a two …
* The Espy file of U.S. executions erroneously attributes the double hanging to August 27, 1860.
Maniram was a young man going on 20 when the British wrested control from Burma of the eastern province Assam, and he carved himself a successful career in the empire.
But without doubt his lasting service to the Union Jack and the world was discovering to the British the existence of a theretofore unknown varietal of the tea plant, cultivated in Assam’s monsoon-drenched jungles by the Singhpo people* — a fact of geopolitical significance since it augured a means to crack the Chinese stranglehold on tea supply so taxing to the current accounts.** Today, rich Assam tea is one of the world’s largest tea crops, yielding 1.5 million pounds annually.
Maniram himself was among its earliest commercial cultivators (in fact, the first native Indian cultivator), setting up with an estate at the village of Chenimora in the 1840s, but the next decade found him increasingly irritated by the injuries British avarice to the extent that he began intriguing to restore the lately dispossessed kings.
With the outbreak of rebellion in 1857, Maniram and the like-minded made their move to restore the Ahom heir Kandarpeswar Singha but the plot was betrayed and landed its authors in irons.
Although he suffered the law’s last extremity for his plot, Maniram’s name lives on in honor in modern India. A trade center in Assam’s largest city bears his name, for instance; and, when India declared tea its official drink in 2013, it timed the announcement to fall on Maniram’s birthday (April 17, 1806).
* It goes without saying that imperial recognition of their secret produce did not redound to the benefit of the Singhpo. Although Singhpo assembled the very first export crop, much of their land was soon gobbled up by tea plantations, and when they rebelled in 1843 the East India Company annexed it outright. “Now it is said that where the tea grows, that is yours, but when we make sacrifices we require tea for our funerals,” a Singhpo chief wrote the Company, mournfully. “We therefore perceive that you have taken all the country, and we, the old and respectable, cannot get tea to drink.” (Source)
** China required payments in specie for tea, an imbalance which London tried to redress by foisting an undesirable import upon China — resulting in the Opium War.
The city of Charleston, Virginia — soon to become Charleston, West Virginia — hosted the unctuously ceremonious public hanging of a killer preacher on this date in 1858.
Perhaps your correspondent is merely cynical having seen in these pages a thousand small-minded murderers lay their misdeeds to liquor and claim their redemptive shortcut to heaven. After all, hypocrisies great and small light each one of us through our days; Preston Turley no less than any man is surely entitled to his.
But we do incline with the fellow in the posse who arrested Turley after his missing wife Mary Susan was discovered at the bottom of a river, a rope fixing her neck to a stone and bludgeon bruises visible about her head, who had this exchange with Mr. Turley:
Turley: Whisky has brought me to this.
Mr. Webb: Don’t lay it all to whisky, as a man might have a deed in his breast, but not the courage to perform it, until he drank whisky.
Turley: That is about the fact.
Betweentimes Turley had posted a phony reward for his “missing” wife, slated her for unfaithfulness by way of palliating his crime, and briefly escaped his cell a few weeks before the execution. All of this is no more than any murderer might do to avoid the terrors of execution, but also does seem a bit difficult to square with the lamblike sacrificial Turley who presented on the scaffold September 17, preaching his last sermon to a throng five thousand strong or larger. Turley on this occasion was able to report that he had but a few days prior undergone a third and this time definitive conversion and that now, now, he had conquered death in Christ and become entitled to harangue the crowd and lead it in hymns. (And also that whisky was still the culprit.) He even got the murdered woman’s brothers to come out of the crowd and give him a tearful parting; “the whole scene was more that of an excited protracted [revival] meeting, than that of an execution.” If nothing else we have a compelling instance of the continuation of that ancient spirit of public execution reconciling the criminal to his community through his sacrifice.
We’ve been quoting from one of those books someone churned out to monetize all that pathos, suitably entitled “The trial, conviction, sentence, confession, and execution of Preston S. Turley: for the murder of his wife, Mary Susan Turley, in Kanawha County, Virginia.” We present it here for whomever might judge Turley’s character:
Thomas P. Lewis, master of the ship Adelaide, loading guano at Elide Island, off the coast of Lower California, was killed there on the 12th ult. by Wm. Williams, colored cook off that vessel. Three other vessels happened to be there at the time, and the officers united to hold a court, taking six sailors as part of the jury, and tried Williams, convicted him of murder, and then hanged him on the island.
Elide Island is a “naked rock, one mile in circumference” off the coast of Mexico’s Baja California which for a few years in the mid-19th century was heavily exploited for its guano supplies. 28,000 tons of bird crap later, the supply was tapped out.
On this date in 1858, a slave named Lucy was hanged in Galveston for killing her mistress.
The innkeeper Maria Dougherty was chagrined in 1857 when her slave voiced disgruntlement by torching her Columbia Hotel. (The fire was detected in time and put out.) So, she stacked additional punishments on the dissatisfied Lucy, who in her turn escalated her revenge. In the first days of the new year, Mrs. Dougherty disappeared — next seen several days onward afloat in a cistern, skull mangled by a furious bludgeon.
“Yes, I killed her, and I would do it again!” Lucy allegedly exulted.
On this date in 1858, Charlotte Jones and Henry Fife hanged side by side in Pittsburgh for murdering Jones’s elderly aunt and uncle the year before. But their dying confessions insistently exonerating their death-sentenced co-accused led the governor to pardon Monroe Stewart ahead of the latter’s scheduled hanging later that February.
Fife, Jones, and Stewart had been tried and convicted together in the so-called “McKeesport Murder” or “Wilson Tragedy”. The reader will infer that it entailed the murder of a man named Wilson in the city of McKeesport.
George Wilson, an elderly farmer, was Charlotte’s uncle: resident in a McKeepsort log cabin with his sister Elizabeth McMasters. He had a tightfisted reputation and a consequent stash of gold and silver coins and paper bills, amounting altogether to several hundred dollars.*
“Maddened by a thirst for gold and stimulated by drink I gave them the fatal blow that robbed them of life and sent their souls, without warning, to the bar of God,” Fife lamented in his scaffold confession. George Wilson had been stabbed to death; Elizabeth McMasters bludgeoned with a poker until her brains spattered the room.
Their 27-year-old niece, our Charlotte Jones, was the one who reported the murder but it would soon become painfully apparent that she had lacked the poise for this high-stakes bluff. She had already the reputation of a woman of low morals, and her suspicious eagerness to leave the vicinity brought her in for close questioning. It was not long before Jones served up a confession.
In her initial iterations of this statement, Jones implicated not only her lover, 22-year-old Irish shoemaker Henry Fife, but Fife’s friend Monroe Stewart. It seems that this was a bit of panicked vindictiveness on the part of Mrs. Jones, for Stewart had often counseled his friend to kick Jones to the curb.
This denunciation was enough to see all three condemned in an 11-day trial in July of 1857. Post-conviction, Fife would join Jones in admitting guilt, but both exculpated Stewart of any part in the crime. And in the subsequent odyssey of appeals and clemency petitions, it was really only Stewart’s fate that remained at issue.
When Pennsylvania’s high court squelched the trio’s last legal avenue, reported the Baltimore sun (Nov. 26, 1857), Stewart, “who had always displayed the most astonishing self-possession and calmness, appeared overwhelmed by the news, and betrayed a degree of emotion that he never before manifested.”
His whole hope centered on the Supreme Court. He believed firmly that there would be a reversal of the judgment of the court below in his case, and when he found the hope which had buoyed him up suddenly destroyed, his self-possession deserted him, and he gave himself up to a degree of anguish that surprised while it pained his fellow-prisoners. He still proclaims his innocence, and maintains that, though a thousand courts held otherwise, he is guiltless of the blood of the Wilson family.
Fortunately for him, Stewart did not hang with Fife and Jones but was slated to die a fortnight later.
By execution day, Jones was in a state of near-collapse — “utterly broken down and bewildered,” according to the Pittsburgh Gazette‘s report (as reprinted in the Harrisburg Patriot and Union, Feb. 17, 1858). “She cried bitterly, and every now and then uttered incoherent sentences — now stating that she desired to die, and again declaring that she was afraid of death and wished to live.” The lengthy execution prelude on the scaffold, as she multiplied over and over the terrors of her imminent death while Fife tried to console her through interminable prayers, statements, and other ceremonial niceties, must have been agony.
Jones’s statement (read by a spiritual counselor) and Fife’s (which he delivered himself) both owned the murder while insisting that Monroe Stewart had no part in it. Outgoing Gov. James Pollock* had had no time for this ploy in issuing Stewart’s death warrant, and even in the hours after the hanging newsmen speculated that this exculpation carried little credibility. But a new man, William Packer, had taken office between the death warrant and the executions, and Packer thought better than his predecessor of Stewart’s protestations. He pardoned Monroe Stewart days before his February 26 execution.
* In the hours after the crime, Fife buried sacks of $20 gold coins and silver half-dollars and dollars along the bank of the Youghiogheny River. He only had one chance to recover the money later and couldn’t find the hole; neither could the authorities when he later described the hiding place from his condemned cell.
Finally, in 1880, two boys accidentally ran across the cache … only to have a passing stranger with “a heavy red beard and red hair” immediately relieve them of the treasure and hurry off into the mists of history.
** Pollock later directed the Philadelphia mint and helped spearhead the first introduction of the “In God We Trust” motto on U.S. currency.
Murderer Owen McQueen(e)y was hanged on this date in 1858 at Gallows Flat down the road from Old Geelong Gaol.
McQueeney, a wandering Irish robber with one distinctively sightless eye, committed something called the “Green Tent Murder” which consisted of the slaying of the pretty proprietress of a structure that went by that name.
The Green Tent was a grocery and tavern serving Australia’s ample population of itinerant gold-hunters in the environs of Meredith, Victoria — specifically the environs of present-day Green Tent Road.
Fresh off a jail term for horse-rustling, McQueeney turned up at the ‘Tent in July 1858 and began creepily haunting the pleasing mistress with the well-proportioned stock shelves.
Until, for no known provocation save plunder, McQueeney murdered the widow owner Elizabeth Lowe and fled.
The poor woman’s body was chanced upon soon thereafter and travelers’ reports of a dead-eyed and overladen swag-man making tracks for Geelong soon zeroed the search in on the desperado, still carrying Ms. Lowe’s incriminatingly distinctive property.
McQueeney, who was noted for his obnoxious bravado from the moment of his first police examination all the way to condemnation, evidently labored until almost the very last “under the infatuation that he would yet be reprieved … on the ground of the great aversion entertained by a large class of people to capital punishment under any circumstances. This belief of his in the morbid sympathies of his fellow-creatures, there can be no doubt, induced him to the last to disown his crime” even though he admitted to many other ones. Nevertheless, he continued his irascible act all the way to the noose, griping at the executioner for holding him too tight and pulling the hood down too soon.
Modeled on London’s Pentonville Prison, Old Geelong Gaol — officially HMS Prison Geelong — hosted six executions in its initial incarnation from the 1850s to the 1860s. Two occurred within its walls; McQueeney’s and three others took place in a paddock a few hundred meters away.
Old Geelong Gaol was converted in 1865 to an “industrial school” for street urchins, and 12 years after that into a prison-hospital. The dusty old place, famous for is spartan amenities, resumed life as a working gaol after World War II and only closed in 1991 — but never had another hanging after the 1860s. Today it is open for public tours, complete with gallows exhibit.
“Land agents” — the rent-squeezing fist of distant landlords — were not popular people in Ireland. These bill collectors literally ran people out of house and home: one late 19th century land agent in Ireland recalled in his memoirs having received over a hundred threatening letters and, in November 1884, having his house in Kerry dynamited.
So the 1857 murder of Tipperary land agent John Ellis drew little surprise (his life had been attempted at least twice before, when he evicted people to prospective starvation during the Great Famine), and drew scarcely any mourning.
“He had been earning this for many a year, if any man however bad could be said to earn such an end, by turning people out in the road,” an observer noted. That observer was the Archbishop … talk about a tough crowd.
Since £90 had been left undisturbed in the murdered man’s pockets, authorities were pretty sure it was no passing robber that got the best of John Ellis but someone who targeted the hated land agent. However, the only witness — and the word applies only in the loosest sense — was the teenage cart-driver who had been ferrying Ellis home near midnight when his passenger had been shot by ambush from the bushes. Young Thomas Burke hadn’t seen anything useful.
Still, within only days, police had zeroed in on their suspects — with classic tunnel vision.
In fine, the working official hypothesis was that Ellis had been shot over a personal grudge, and not because of his distasteful profession. William and Daniel Cormack had a sister who had just given birth out of wedlock in the poorhouse; they had another sister who was known to be carrying on with John Ellis, who was a notorious cad during his downtime between evictions. The idea was that the brothers shot Ellis to preserve their one sister from the other sister’s fate.
With no actual evidence to buttress this just-so story, John Law got to twisting arms. An 11-year-old girl was parked in solitary confinement for two months to try to get her to incriminate the Cormacks.
The child, to her glory, stubbornly refused to do so. But Thomas Burke, the cart-driver, could not equal her steel. After initially deposing that he had seen nothing — it was very dark, after all — he managed to “remember” that he actually had seen the Cormacks on the scene after all. Another man also “verified” this testimony.
On the strength of these eminently impeachable eyewitnesses the Cormacks were doomed to die. Burke would later admit that he lied, and 2,000-plus people signed a petition pleading for a pardon.
None was forthcoming.
Mounting a public scaffold at Nenagh for a crowd welling with pity, Daniel Cormack made a dying declaration that everyone believed: “Lord have mercy on me, for you know, Jesus, that I neither had hand, act, nor part in that for which I am about to die. Good people, pray for me.”
This rank injustice only rankled more* as years passed.
Fifty-two years later the hanged boys were exhumed from their graves in Nenagh Gaol and given a long honorary procession to their native town of Loughmore, where they were laid to rest in a prominent white mausoleum that can still be visited today.
The plaque at that structure records the closest thing to the verdict of history upon the case:
By the Irish Race in memory of the brothers DANIEL and WILLIAM CORMACK who for the murder of a land agent named ELLIS were hanged at NENAGH after solemn protestation by each on the scaffold of absolute and entire innocence of that crime, the 11th day of May 1858. The tragedy of the brothers occurred through false testimony procured through GOLD and terror, the action in their trial of JUDGE KEOGH, a man who considered personally, politically, religiously and officially was one of the monsters of mankind, and the verdict of a prejudiced, partisan packed perjured jury. Clear proof of the innocence of the brothers afforded by ARCHBISHOP LEAHY to the VICEROY of the day but he nevertheless gratified the appetite of a bigoted, exterminating and ascendancy caste by a judicial murder of the kind which lives bitterly and perpetually in a nation’s remembrance.
* A later ballad (just one of several) ramps up the nationalist-confrontation factor for the age of Fenianism … and fabricates the detail of an exculpatory thunderstorm.
In the year of fifty eight, my boys, that was the troublesome time
When cruel landlords and their agents were rulers of our isle.
It was then that Ellis was shot down by an unknown hand.
When the news spread round Killara that Trent’s agent he was shot,
The police were then informed and assembled on the spot.
They searched every field and garden, every lane and every shed,
Until they came to McCormack’s house where two boys were in bed.
They accused these boys of murder from information they had got
From the coachman who was driving at the time that Ellis was shot.
They said that they were innocent, but ’twas all of no avail.
They were handcuffed and made prisoners and conveyed to County Gaol.
At the Spring Assizes these two young men stood their trial in Nenagh town.
By a packed jury of Orangemen, they were guilty found.
The judge addressed the prisoners. He asked what they had to say
Before he signed their execution for eleventh day of May.
“In Mill Killara we were reared, between Thurles and Templemore,
Well known by all inhabitants around the parish of Loughmore.
We’re as innocent of shooting Ellis as the child in the cradle do lie,
And can’t see the reason, for another man’s crime, we are condemned to die.”
The execution it took place, by their holy priest reconciled, their maker for to face.
Such thunder, rain and lightning has ne’er been witnessed since
As the Lord sent down on that day, as a token of their innocence,
That their sould may rest in heaven above as their remains rest in Loughmore.
Maniram was a young man going on 20 when the British 
Perhaps your correspondent is merely cynical having seen in 