Tag Archives: october 12

1888: Pauline McCoy

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The Daily Picayune, October 13, 1888 (page 3).

ALABAMA.

MONTGOMERY.

Execution of Pauline McCoy, the First Woman Hanged in Alabama Since the War — She Murdered a Little Girl for Her Clothes.

MONTGOMERY, Oct. 12 — [Special.] — Pauline McCoy, colored, who was hanged at Union Springs at 1 o’clock for the murder of Annie Jordan, white, last February, was the third woman hanged in Alabama since its incorporation as a state and the first since the war.

On the scaffold the woman broke down completely and had to be supported on the trap by two deputy sheriffs. She had not eaten anything for a day or two and was kept up by the use of stimulants. She admitted having killed the girl in her last speech, but denied that her motive was robbery.

The crime for which the woman was hanged had not its equal in the whole criminal history of Alabama. Her victim had strayed away from her home in this city, being demented, and meeting Pauline down the railroad asked her to accompany her.

That was the last seen of Annie, the 14-year-old child, until her dead body was discovered in a plum thicket near the roadside several days after. Pauline was seen in Union Springs a few days later wearing the shoes, hat and jacket belonging to her victim. She was arrested and said under oath that her father, Jake McCoy, killed the girl and brought the clothes home. At the preliminary trial Jake was discharged and Pauline committed. On her third trial in August she was found guilty and sentenced to be hung, which sentence was faithfully carried out to-day.

Indefatigable crime blogger Laura James has some unanswered — unanswerable — questions about the case. The Daily Picayune had supplied a scanty few additional details from Pauline’s supposed jailhouse confession a few weeks before (September 5, 1888):

Pauline McCoy, the young negro woman who was recently convicted in the circuit court of Bullock county of the murder of Miss Annie Jordan, a demented young white woman who wandered from her home in Montgomery county last spring, has made a full confession of the crime to the jail physician at Union Springs. The murder was committed near [indistinguishable]. Pauline says she and Annie Jordan had a quarrel, and that she choked the young woman to death and concealed the dead body in the bushes. The murderess is sentenced to death on the scaffold on the 18th [sic?] of October.

According to the Espy file (pdf) of American historical executions, Alabama had last executed a woman in 1864 — she was a slave — and would not do so again until Silena Gilmore rode the lightning for murder on January 24, 1930. Over 250 men were put to death during the 41-year span between the two milestone murderesses.

(Only three additional women have been executed in the Yellowhammer State since Gilmore.)

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1915: Nurse Edith Cavell, “patriotism is not enough”

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Early this morning in 1915, the German military occupying Belgium shot aid worker Edith Cavell at Brussels for aiding the British war effort.

The matronly nurse had been condemned only the day before by a German military court for helping Allied soldiers escape from behind German lines — charges Cavell readily admitted. The British chaplain who attended her the night before her death reported her saying (not actually her last words, but recalled as her parting sentiment, as it were):

But this I would say, standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness toward any one.

So naturally, she immediately became the Entente’s bloody banner of the barbarous Hun, helping dramatically ramp up recruitment for the other team’s set of moral cretins.

The thing is, the Germans actually had a point. Cavell ran a nursing school in Brussels, and courageously stuck around when the Germans smashed through Belgium as World War I opened. She’s sometimes remembered as getting in hot water for treating the wounded regardless of nationality, but she did a lot more than that: she got involved with an underground railroad funneling Allied soldiers back to enemy countries.

It was one of those impossible trials of conscience that wartime brings: Cavell, whose hospital was subsumed by the Red Cross during the war, should technically have remained neutral; her actions did bring material aid to Germany’s foes.

However, Belgian, French and English troops caught behind lines by the Germans’ lightning advance were in danger themselves of summary execution, as were civilians who harbored them. Neutrally treating them and handing them over as POWs might have been tantamount to killing many of them, especially in the first few months of the war. Though Edith Cavell said that “I am happy to die for my country,” her actions look more humanitarian than nationalistic — the best choice to be made when no good ones are available. Patriotism of a higher order, if you like.

Probably Cavell’s was a case tailor-made for executive clemency, but Germany was keen to send one of those proverbial messages: civilians in occupied countries had best stay out of the war. Despite the frantic lobbying of England’s ambassadors (and, ominously for Germany, those of the United States), the sentence was carried out on both Cavell and a fellow-traveler in her network, Belgian Philippe Baucq.

Clumsy propagandists, the Kaiser’s boys badly misjudged the message so sent.

In the face of intense international outcry, Germany soon found itself defending its actions (.pdf), and then commuting the sentences (.pdf again) of Cavell’s other collaborators.

None of this abated Cavell’s stupendous propaganda value to Germany’s enemies. And — holy wow, the graying 49-year-old gets made over into quite the heartbreaker in most of these.

The nurse’s repute — and she was said to have struck a Joan of Arc-like chord in those parts — caused a renaissance for the name “Edith” among French and Belgian newborns, most notably singer Edith Piaf (born in December 1915). While Cavell’s sacrifice did nothing to stem her name’s declining Anglo (or at least American) popularity, there is a Mount Edith Cavell named for her in Canada, and a plethora of monuments and public spaces dedicated to her throughout the Allied powers’ lands. (Here are just a handful.) And she still packs enough symbolic punch for the current British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to deploy her in the propagandist’s subtler modern arts.

There’s plenty more about her online, but world headquarters (with information about the Cavell Festival) is edithcavell.org.uk. There’s also a stupendous collection of text and images (several already used in this post) at the sometimes slow-loading but endlessly fascinating site The Great War in a Different Light.

Dutch speakers might enjoy this podcast:

[audio:http://veertienachttien.web-log.nl/mijn_weblog/files/068_va_edith_cavell.mp3]

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