 Section 15 of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 15. Lead Penitrates Steel. Four months of the combined efforts of Charles Hathaway, Sheriff Green Moore, and his deputy Osmond Steel, had failed to subdue the tenants of Delaware County. Even the threat of Sing Sing was ineffectual. The landlords had been unable to conduct a sale since March. Still hopeful that resistance would break down if they could once force a rent payment, Hathaway turned to Andes, which was anti-rent to a man, and selected Moses Earl for his victim. A less likely candidate for anti-rent heroics could hardly have been found than old Moses Earl whose farm sprawled across the shoulder of Dingle Hill. He was known as a sober man who would step out of his way to avoid trouble. He had lived on Dingle Hill since he was nine years old, for it was about 1790 when his father, a revolutionary war veteran, had settled at the foot of the Western Slope. As a boy Moses took his place beside his father, helping to clear the land and plant and harvest crops. After he grew up and chose Sarah Washburn for his wife, he leased and cleared new land nearer to the summit of Dingle Hill, where his house commanded a wide sweep of the Trimper-Skill Valley. He could look down across his own broad meadows and wooded slopes and see new clearings beyond. His father, long dead, slept in a rocky field at the foot of the hill. In a few years Moses would join him there. In the meantime, the spare, hard-working old man wanted to be left alone with his wife Sarah, a thin-faced woman twenty years his senior, and their foster children, Parthenia and Henry Davis, whom they had taken into their home in 1826, to take the place of their only child who had died in infancy. Moses had managed to get clear title to one hundred of the two hundred and sixty hard-scrabble acres he tilled, but on the rest he paid an annual rent of thirty-two dollars to Charlotte D. Verplank. In the years of his life he had paid over and over again what the farm was worth. But he was an old-school Baptist fatalist, who all his life had lived too close to wind and rain, storm and sun, to believe that God's design could be changed. He did not like the feudal economy which shackled him as the hobblebush tangled Catskill farms, but he would have gone on uncomplainingly paying rent the rest of his life. Had it not been for Parthenia, a young woman of strong will who wanted him to take up the gun that his father had laid down, pressed by Parthenia and his anti-rent neighbors, Moses had withheld his rent, until he owed sixty-four dollars. Once in July Sheriff Green Moore came to sell some of his cattle for back rent, but nobody made any bid. Fifty Calico warriors waited in the woods above the barn, but their services were not needed, and the sale was adjourned to the first Thursday in August. As the first shafts of mourning slanted down Dingle Hill, on August 7, 1845, the very day when Bowton and other anti-rent leaders were meeting in Albany to discuss the coming elections, young Edward O'Connor led a band of disguised bovine of farmers to Moses Earl's Farm. While he stopped at the house for breakfast, other men in Calico were arriving by the score, from Andes, Shavertown, Roxbury, Wolf Hollow, Cabin Hill, Bloomville, Courtright, they gathered near a spring in the woods beyond the upland clearing. It was eleven o'clock when Sheriff Green Moore and Peter P. Wright, land agent for Charles Hathaway and lawyer for Charlotte DeVair Plank, turned up Dingle Hill. They expected difficulties, for on the way they had been told that a wagon load of firearms had gone up the hill the night before. Nevertheless they found Moses Earl calmly gazing down the valley, where men were working in the fields. Confident that the farmer could be persuaded, Moore greeted him affably. Did you sign this letter, saying you were ready to pay, he asked? Moses nodded, but added that he had changed his mind. You'll have to make the rent out of the property, he said. Moore and Wright urged him to reconsider, warning him that there might be trouble as they had seen Indians in the vicinity. Moses wavered and went into the house. He picked up his pocket-book and was about to step outside, but Parthenia Davis stopped him. When he admitted that he had decided to avoid trouble, the young woman snatched the purse from him and triumphantly secreted it in the bosom of her dress. Fixed in his philosophy of never-resisting fate, Moses went back to the sheriff. You'll have to sell, he said. Behind the sheltering screen of Maple and Birch on the hill, two hundred masked men were organizing the band. Warren Scudder, the deacon's son, was elected chief. He sent forty crack riflemen down the hill to a spot near the home of Richard Morse, the justice of the peace. They were to lie in ambush for Deputy Sheriff Osmond Steele, who was reported on his way from Delhi. If he comes with a posse, Scudder instructed them, turn him back, shoot the horses from under them, let him pass if he comes alone. The Indians were anxious to avoid a direct clash. There was to be no attempt to block the sale, since this would mean manhandling the sheriff, but as soon as any cow was sold it was to be shot. This strategy was covered by a mutual insurance plan worked out by the Delaware anti-rentors. When cattle and horses sold by the sheriff for rent were killed, the tenant became entitled to indemnity for the loss, the value being fixed by a committee. When the sun moved overhead and beat down hotly on the west slope of Dingle Hill, Sarah Earl sent mutton, potatoes, and bread and butter into the woods. Just before one o'clock Warren Scudder led the Indians out, single-file, and lined them in formidable array in front of the house. Moses lugged a pail of whiskey from the house and handed it to the first Indian. He watched as it passed along the ranks. Peter Wright, the landlord's agent, stood it as long as he could, then rode down the line, peering into the masked faces. When he reached Warren Scudder, standing in the center, in a flaming scarlet disguise, the Indian chief stepped forward and thrust his broad sword against Wright's breast. Stand back, twenty feet, he commanded. Angered and astonished, Wright whipped out a pistol. Withdraw your sword, or I'll make a hole through you, he snapped. You are breaking the law. I'll not stand back an inch for you or your tribe. Damn the law, Scudder retorted, we mean to break it. Keeping his sword pressed against Wright's doublet, he reached a free hand under the folds of his Calico costume and drew a pistol from his pantaloons pocket. I've got a gun as well as you, he said. Calico warriors closed in, and as Wright later testified, commenced black-guarding him. Have you come to bid, Scudder demanded? I've come unlawful business, parried the agent. I'll bid if the property is offered. If you bid a voice threatened from the long line of masked faces, you'll go home in a wagon feet foremost. Then Osmond Steele and Erastus Edgerton were cited, approaching on horseback, Wright backed away, pocketing his gun. A blast from one of the horns notified the ambushers down the hill to let the two horsemen pass. As they drew near, Sheriff Moore asked a bystander to go with him to the upper pasture to drive the cattle down. The man said he did not want to go. Moore turned to two other spectators who agreed to accompany him. When the three started off to the pasture, Scudder sent a dozen Indians after them. Presently Moore came back, driving the cattle before him with the help of the men in Calico, his two aides were missing. The last I saw of them, he said, they were close pressed by Indians with swords drawn. I understand they got pricked some. As the Sheriff drove the cattle into the lower pasture, Scudder's tribesmen quickly formed a crescent behind him. There were solid ranks of Indians all the way back to the pasture bars, so that Wright, Steele, and Edgerton were excluded from the field and also from the opportunity to bid. On the way to Dingle Hill, Steele and Edgerton had stopped at Hunting's Tavern in Andes. Ephraim Hunting had urged them not to go to the sale, warning them that Indians were already there in full war-dress and in menacing numbers, and that their hatred of Steele was at a fighting pitch. The red-headed deputy made a scornful boast. Lead can't penetrate Steele. On his arrival at Earl's he was in such an ugly mood that the farmers said he must have sweetened his brandy with gunpowder, the legendary potion of Catskill Warriors. Now enraged at being shot out of the pasture, he and Edgerton pressed their mounts up to the gate. Safely barricaded between them, Peter Wright stepped up and demanded that the cattle be driven into the road for the sale. At this moment William Brisbane drove up. The young Scott had been to Andes to have his horses shod, but he knew his brother Robert was somewhere in the pasture wearing calico. Overhearing Wright's demand, he asked, has the sheriff a right to draw the cattle off the premises and sell them anywhere else? Do you want to dictate to the sheriff, Wright growled? Brisbane modestly explained that he was not a lawyer, but the notice of the sale called for the bids on the premises. Wright sent Osmond Steele to the barn where the notice was posted, only to learn that Brisbane was right. In the meantime Brisbane turned to sheriff more. Do not attempt to drive the cattle out of that lot, I beseech you, if you value the public peace, he said earnestly. But I will do what lies in my power to protect you in the discharge of your duty. Yes, agreed the masked Warren Scudder, we will not molest the sheriff in the discharge of his duty. But Peter Wright insisted on forcing the issue, the horse's hoofs clattered against the bars as Steele and Edgerton urged them into the pasture, and Wright, hat in one hand and cane in the other, hurried a little ahead. Edgerton called upon all present to render assistance. The first man who offers to stop me from driving up the cattle, I will shoot dead, he cried. He drew his pistol in a circle as if he were bringing it to bear upon some of the Indians and fired. Immediately a farmer sprang from the line and fired back. Blood spouted from the breast of Edgerton's horse. Brisbane gave a graphic description of the events that followed, in a letter to Joseph Hogue, a Vermonter who had come to Delaware County to teach school and had been discharged when he expressed anti-rent sympathies. I then said to myself, I've been here long enough and I ran out at the bar-way. If I should judge from the motions of Steele's fingers he fired twice and was in the act of firing the third time when he fell. As I was running toward the road I heard a volley by the Indians. I felt it is no use to run further for the balls could fly faster than I. During the volley Steele's horse was shot, it turned its breast toward the fence, and as it was falling on its neck an Indian ran along the line, raised his rifle and fired. Steele fell over his horse's neck, mortally wounded. As he fell a pistol ball passed through an Indian's dress. Sheriff Moore rushed up to the fallen deputy pleading with the masked men. For God's sake men, desist, you have done enough. The tumult died to a whisper. Brisbane ran to the house and told the women to get a bed ready. Sarah Earl sprang from her chair, clasping her hands in distress. With the help of Dr. John C. Calhoun, an unbending anti-renter, Brisbane carried the wounded man into the house. There he bathed Steele's temples with vinegar while Dr. Calhoun treated the wound. Peter Wright knelt beside the bed, trying to stem the blood with finger and thumb, but he was weeping so that he could render little assistance. The sheriff sat down at the bedside, gazing with mingled pity and astonishment at the wounded man. If it had not been for the rashness of Edgerton this would not have happened, he said. Steele suffered stoically, though once he cried out to Peter Wright, oh, cut my throat and put me out of pain. Someone in the room inquired who fired first, to which some replied it was the Indians. No, said others, it was Steele. Steele, did you fire first? asked Wright. The wounded man gave a faint cry of pain. Wright repeated, Steele, did you fire? Steele answered plainly and distinctly. Yes, I fired. A moment later he murmured, Lord, have mercy on my soul. Once he looked up and exclaimed earnestly, oh, my poor wife. Your wife will be cared and provided for, Wright promised. At another point Steele looked up at Moses Earl standing over him with face impassive. Old man, if you had paid your rent, he said, there would have been none of this, I wouldn't have been shot. If you'd stayed home and minded your own business, corrected Moses gravely, you would not have been shot. I have paid rent long enough. Until I know what I pay it for I shall pay no more if I can help it. If they will show me their title I will pay every cent of the rent, but if they mean to bully me out of it I will not pay it if it costs forty lives. A former resident of Delhi who was back for a visit stopped by the bed. Steele asked him to take his hand. This isn't the way we'd done business when you left Delhi, he said. No, and little did I expect to find Delhi in this fix. Sheriff Moore was standing at the foot of the bed with one of the wounded man's feet resting on his shoulder to ease the pain. Steele asked the other man to take the other foot. I wish I had been at the bars, said the sheriff. I think I could have prevented all this. It was most reckless of Edgerton to rush into the Indians. Shaken by his own imprudent part in the tragedy, Wright said to Brisbane and Dr. Calhoun, I think there would have been no difficulty if Edgerton had not acted as he did. For some time the Indians remained in the field by the fallen horses, although many begged Scudder to disband them, several of them had already retreated to the woods. I'll be damned if I go until Sunset Scudder declared they may yet return to the sale. Many of the warriors remained with him, milling about the pasture, until word came that Steele was dying. Then they fled to the woods, many to pre-arranged hiding-places in the Dingles of Dingle Hill. Dr. Edward McKenzie, another anti-rent physician, was called into the woods to treat a wounded Indian, but he said later that he did not know the man. The Indian said he was Edward O'Connor, but an admission by O'Connor would have convicted him of being at the sale in disguise. When told that Edgerton claimed neither he nor Steele had fired, O'Connor said dryly, a fellow about my size has two bullet holes through his clothes. Steele weakened rapidly. About seven in the evening, his wife, a sister, and an uncle, Dr. Ebenezer Steele, arrived from Delhi. Soon after the last shafts of sunlight had withdrawn from Dingle Hill, and the sun had dropped behind the western Catskills, leaving the sky a blaze of dry summer red, Osmond Steele died. Moses Earl's face did not change expression. We are born to a world of trouble, he said. It is the Lord's will that it should be so. As Mrs. Steele sobbed over her husband's body, Moses Earl walked up to the dead man's uncle and offered his hand. It is a very hard case, said Dr. Steele. I do not know, answered Moses. He was created for the very course he has taken. He was ordained to die that way. You must be a fatalist, the doctor said curiously. The Almighty makes no mistakes, replied the old man. Immediately after the death of Steele the Indians scattered. Some left the state. Others secreted themselves in wild and remote parts of the country, where they slept in caves and under the shelter of the rocks. Some hid closer to home. Many an anti-rentor's barn had a comfortable chamber in the belly of the hay-mow, reached by a narrow tunnel through the hay, which could be found only by someone who knew which two boards to remove from the side wall. Once inside a hunted man could conceal the entrance by stuffing the tunnel with hay. Women carried food to the fugitives at night, or left provisions at a specified place in the forest. Meanwhile the press ground out page upon page of vilification. The newspapers reported that Steele's friends would not leave his body on Dingle Hill even for the night among savage men and women in whose marble bosoms the ravings of his almost distracted wife failed to awaken one kindred emotion. A correspondent for Thurlow Weed's Evening Journal wrote that Moses Earl, who had the coolness and inhumanity of a fiend, had far better be dead than live as he must dying every day. Oh, if there is justice in heaven may we not hope and expect that these murderers will be punished. Another said, Steele could not have found a more glorious grave on any field where glory was ever won. When Horace Greeley failed to join in the clamour, pointing out that the farmers had grievances, his own party turned on him. His espousal of free soil and anti-rentism made him guilty in the opinion of the Whig New York Express, of Fourierism, agrarianism and infidelity, meaning denial of God. There is more gratification in the camp of our enemies than among the anti-renters, observed the Albany Freeholder. The Delaware Express, edited by Charles Hathaway's brother-in-law, called for suppression of all anti-rent newspapers. Liberty of the press is a sacred right, but when it is perverted to such base uses and heaven-daring purposes, it should be at once staid. Law and order meetings in non-leasehold towns of the county passed resolutions, some reputedly drawn up by John Van Buren, calling on the governor to bring the anti-renters to justice. Uprent Delhi was making a hero of Osmond Steele, a brave and unfortunate man. While the anti-renters were singing, Steele is dead and gone to hell, the up-renters produced a dirge of their own. Lamented Steele, well may we weep, or thy untimely grave, an angel's round shall vigil keep, thou fearless one and brave. Clergymen of several denominations joined with the rector of the Episcopal Church in the Funeral Service, and the largest church in the village was too small. Three preachers spoke from the piazza, extolling the man whose only crime, they said, had been the faithful discharge of his duty, and exhorting the people to eternal vigilance until the murderers were brought to justice and the majesty of the law was satisfied. At a meeting in the Presbyterian Church, Charles Hathaway proposed a monument to Steele's memory, but in spite of the pressure the two dollar subscriptions failed to come in. In the end some influential citizens paid for the tall shaft that was raised over his grave, giving Delhi something worthy of the man and those noble virtues it is designed to commemorate. Sheriff Green Moore made the rounds of the law and order meetings, enlisting citizens to march against the tenants. Within a week five hundred men were under arms in Delhi. Steele was scarcely buried before possies were down on the farmers like packs to the hunt. Crowds leaving the funeral turned away to see three anti-renters being brought into Delhi in irons, and many a Delhi man incited by the funeral orations took up his gun. The scaremongering methods that had succeeded in Hudson were used again. The villagers were told that the farmers were massing to destroy the town. Frederick Steele got leave from the United States Army to lead a posse to avenge his brother's death. James Howe, a brother-in-law, and Timothy Corbyn, who had not forgotten the coat of tar and feathers he had received the preceding summer, both went up into the hills with armed deputies. The free-holder saw but two ways of preventing such outbreaks as the one at the Earl's sale. Either an organic change of usages of law not founded in justice, or a suppression of schools and annihilation of the press, choose ye between them. The ignorant are ever debased and humble, and the partially informed, too much inspired by abstract patriotism to clearly discern the intricacy of the social machine, or to be submissive to the law's delicacy. Wounded or not, Edward O'Connor had fled across Dingle Hill with another Indian, planning to seek refuge in Pennsylvania. Within a few miles Edward turned back to visit his sweetheart, Janet Scott, whose father's farm was on the Platte Kill. After seeing her he decided to work his way south to Baltimore, establish himself there as a singing teacher, and then send for Janet. He got as far as the Neversink Valley, where he had meant to join his friend, but by that time he was tired of sleeping under God's blanket, and so went to work near Palin's factory, repairing clocks. There a posse caught up with him. He was taken to Delhi jail, where, as he reported in a letter, guards with bayonets fixed, forced me through the grief-hole, and swore bitterly if it were not for a merry Friday soon they would come in and stab us. Warren Scudder did not at first see the need for going into hiding. He returned to his home in West Settlement near Roxbury, and the next day was working in a field when a friend raced over the mountain to warn him that a posse was on the way. Jotham Scudder, the old school Baptist deacon, persuaded his son to go to friends on Blenheim Hill. But just as the young man was about to leave the posse appeared. Warren hid in the haymow until the next night, and then made his escape to Scoherry County. Timothy Corbin swooped down on Roxbury with one hundred men, and re-arrested Daniel Squires, who had not even been at the sale. From Squires's farm the posse went clattering up hard scrabble road, flourishing swords and muskets. Terrified Chauncey boroughs fled over the hill before them, taking refuge at Grandfather Kelly's. There he crawled under a bed, but he left his feet sticking out and the posse found him. A neighbour claimed he had heard Chauncey say that if the posse came he would shoulder his old musket and help the Indians. But when it happened Chauncey insisted that the most he had ever done was to attend anti-rent meetings. One more led another posse to Dingle Hill, took Moses Earl prisoner, and sent him on to Andes with some of the men, while he and the rest went after William Brisbane, who wrote to his friend Hogue. Just as the sun was dipping behind the hills I heard the clattering of horses feet coming up a stony bray from the woods. I said to my wife, who was working in the hayfield with me, there comes the posse, the next moment their bayonets glittered in the setting sun, and in two minutes more I was a prisoner. They mounted me upon a tumbled down kind of a machine called a horse, which was so extremely lame in one leg that every step he took I thought he would pitch me over his head. In fact, if it had not been for a fancy I took, that the up and down sort of motion which he had resembled the words down with the rent, down with the rent, pretty quickly uttered, I don't believe I could have sat on him. At Andes the two parties reunited, and a wagon was procured, to convey Earl and Brisbane to Delhi. The justice of the peace, Richard Morse, and another neighbor followed in a second wagon to arrange bail. When Morse stopped the posse to raid a house along the way, Morse asked if they might go on ahead. I'll be damned if you shall, Morre replied. When Morse protested that he could not see how they could be detained on the highway, Morre pressed a pistol against his breast. I'll blow you through if you attempt to stir an inch further, he said. Needless to say, the two men were compelled to follow in the wake of this almighty posse as Brisbane termed it. When Morse reached Delhi he began to prepare for the next day's legal battle, but instead he found himself in jail, charged with conspiracy. He had to admit on oath that he was the treasurer of the anti-rent association, and was standing by when steel was shot, and so although he was a justice of the peace, the captain of a rifle-core, and a man of affluence and good standing, he was held a prisoner and later indicted for conspiracy. William Brisbane wrote a vivid account of the arrival at the jail. When he and Earl were led inside, Sheriff Green Moore and District Attorney Jonas Houston were there to welcome them. Here is the two old chaps the jailer said to the sheriff, speaking with a marked brogue, we've got them at last. As the night air had somewhat chilled them Brisbane asked permission to warm themselves. No, said the District Attorney unpleasantly, let them die and be damned to them. Turning to the sheriff he asked, is this the man, pointing to Brisbane, that has got steel's pistol in his possession? The sheriff nodded, but Brisbane spoke up. Sir, he said, I have not got steel's pistol, I never possessed arms of any description in my life, bought, borrowed or stolen. You are a damned liar, said Houston, I can prove it by some of your neighbours in less than three days. The door of the cell clanged shut and the two men were prisoners indeed. Presently a voice which they recognized as that of Sheriff Moore called up through the stove-pipe below. When do you expect to be hung, it inquired. I don't expect to be hung at all, the young man replied. Well, said the voice, there is one thing I can tell you, I am pretty well. And here, throughout Brisbane, he used such a coarse expression that it is not fit for repetition, upon which I named him and asked if he did not feel shame for himself. We heard no more of him, so I laid myself down upon bare planks without covering of any sort. In due time Brisbane was summoned before the coroner's inquest, which in Spain would have been called the Inquisition. District Attorney Houston struck the table with his hand and greeted Brisbane with an accusation. Damn you, you was at Earl's sale. Yes, sir. Immediately Houston and five or six others put questions to him at the same time, so that he became confused. Once he made the mistake of saying he supposed something or other. No, God damn you, yay or nay, no supposing about it, said Houston roughly. Then he wanted to know whether this one or that one were in Indian or not. Then told him he could not swear they were. You're a damned liar, said the District Attorney. He wanted to know who Brisbane thought the masked men were. If you won't take suppositionary evidence on the one side, retorted Brisbane, you shan't have it on the other. God damn you for a liar, a damned perjured villain. All I ask, gentlemen, is simple justice. No mistake you'll get justice, said Colonel Amasa Parker, an uncle of the circuit judge, in a sarcastic tone. Yes, said one of the others, if there is a rope in Delhi. Then they taunted Brisbane with the influence he possessed with the anti-rentors. If you had only wagged your little finger that day, one of them said, steel would not have been shot. I never knew before that I was somebody, wrote Brisbane. I was astonished when I saw that by some strange sort of ledger domain I had become an American Robin Hood. Colonel Parker, then with a sort of mock gravity, for I cannot bring myself to believe that he actually believed what he himself said, told me that by my eloquence I had acquired more influence than any other man in the county, and that if I had not been checked I might have subverted the state itself. The District Attorney again wanted to know who Brisbane supposed the Indians were. I know nothing about the Indians, Brisbane insisted, and would drag no man from his farm upon mere supposition. At these words his inquisitors raged and shouted at him. The District Attorney, by his extreme violence, seemed more like a madman than anything else, but seeing I am but an unlearned man, and knowing but little of such matters, maybe it is the way that men of talent take to prove to the world that they are really such and know impostors. The storm of abuse had such an effect upon my feelings that I burst into tears. "'You are getting excited, Mr. Brisbane,' said Colonel Parker rather mildly, "'you are getting excited.' Then he tried very persuasively to get Brisbane to tell who the Indians were. "'Since this is the way you use your witnesses,' said the young man violently, "'God knows how you mean to use your prisoners. You have had my answer, you will get no other.' "'Take the damned old curse to a dungeon,' Houston told the jailer, and let him lay ten years till he rots if he won't tell. Brisbane's own account follows. I was doomed to a far severer ordeal than that. If they had sent me there, they would not have seen my agony. There the tears that I shed would not have nourished their revenge. There some ministering angel on his errand of mercy and love might have soothed my sorrow-stricken heart and asswaged my grief. But no such comfort awaited me. I was taken from the jury-room up into the courtroom where the guard abused me in a most brutal manner. Once he made a pass at me with a fixed bayonet and damned me as a foreigner. By he would run me through, and he wished to God that every ship might sink that came over with old country people. During the enacting of this scene some five or six people came into the room. One of them spoke kindly to me, but still his very kindness was mixed with gall and wormwood that sank deeply and bitterly into my soul. Among other things he told me that my character was gone, and that the jury was dissatisfied with my evidence, and that the only chance I had of saving myself was to go down and throw myself upon the mercy of the court and tell them all I knew. I told him I was innocent of the charges brought against me, and that I did not beg for mercy I demanded justice, that I had told the court the truth and asked no favors. Then they let me alone. I walked to the window and saw Dr. Calhoun upon the square with Peter P. Wright, Edgerton, and some others, talking apparently very angrily to him. I called to him and told him to tell my wife to employ counsel for me, for I had seen by that time that the prejudice that existed against me would compel me to stand trial. While I was talking to the doctor, a guard came into the room, raised his musket, and swore he would shoot me down if I did not quit talking. I told him to blaze away for I was desperate, that he had heard all I was saying, and I would take the opportunity I had of sending my message to my wife. In the evening I was again removed to the jail. So complete was the disappearance of the Indians that a month after the Earl's sale, harvests remained ungathered. Hey, heaped together on that morning lies rotting in the meadow, unmade and unshacked, one newspaper reported. Fields of grain have ripened and fallen down, because the reapers are fugitives from justice. Posse's road roughshod over the farms, pillaging and destroying. They go to the people's houses at night, take the men, if they find any, load them with chains, fling them into a wagon, some of them without hats, coats or shoes, and they will drag them around in that condition in the hot sun all next day, wrote one letter writer. If they don't find them in their beds they drive their bayonets through everything in the house. If they are anti-rentors that is sufficient. They destroy their property, they go to the milk-sellers, upset the milk and destroy their vitals, ride through the fields of grain and do all such lawful things. Innocent people were arrested and clapped into jail merely because they were politically opposed to the upper-enters. William K. Jocelyn, taken to Delhi through a soaking rain, and locked up without a fire to dry his clothes or a bed to rest on, was told he had been arrested on the statement of a man whom he had opposed as a candidate for the legislature. He was told it would be proved that he was at the Earl's sale in disguise, even though he had never been an Indian, and he would hang for it. Others were punished for having too much influence among the farmers. On August 20th Dr. Jonathan Alaben was arrested, though he had nothing to do with the Earl case, having just returned from the Industrial Congress in New York, where he and Devere had carried the message of anti-rentism to a notable gathering of radical leaders. Although District Attorney Houston told him he would not be indicted if he would vote the law-and-order ticket, Dr. Alaben wrote a letter to Devere, making it clear that he would not compromise. Today I find myself incarcerated within the walls of the Delhi Bastille, surrounded by the vigilance of the keen-eyed aristocracy. I am not gagged, bound, or handcuffed. Yet though I have been more than once threatened, I ask no sympathy from tyrants, nor do I expect any favors shown by their tribunals. I only regret that my voice is confined. Imprisonment was no real hindrance to a man like Alaben so long as he could get letters out of the jail. His metaphors may have been confusing, but his sentiments were plain. The tenants would win, he said, in spite of the strong arm and shaggy mane of aristocracy. Anti-rentism is moving swiftly, and every jog it receives from its opponents gives new impulse to the accelerated motion of its massive wheels. Rest assured that the friends of democracy are only to be up air-morning breaks and the shadows flee away, tugging at the helm, and we shall be able to bring our little crafts alongside, casting our anchor, suffrage, into the ballot-box, and pouring into the old, worm-eaten, copper-corroded patroonery the contents of our well-charged basilisks, and send her, mass-less, sail-less, rudder-less to the bottom. Some of the most graphic descriptions of the terrorist campaign in Delaware County were contained in the letters of Joseph Hogue, the schoolteacher, which were published in anti-rent papers. A few weeks after one letter described a drunken raid by a posse led by James Howe, another man named Hogue happened upon an up-renter who mistook him for the author of the letter. He was seized by the throat and shamefully misused before the law and order gentlemen realized his error. He may bless his stars that he was mistaken, wrote the real Hogue. I can assure him I would be the last Yankee, the last vermonter that he would wish to abuse. Later, when Sheriff Moore refused to admit him to the Delhi jail to visit his anti-rent friends, Hogue said firmly, my mouth shall not be padlocked, my hand shall not be fettered easily. As the number of anti-renters in the jail increased, Dr. John Calhoun organized a meeting of witnesses to the shooting of Osmond Steele in order to give the public a correct statement of the facts. A posse raided the meeting, arrested the secretary, and confiscated all the affidavits. One of their first objects observed the Albany Free Holder has been the arresting of every spectator who would cause an impartial account of the deplorable tragedy to be published. Gradually though the truth about the Delhi reign of terror did get out and there was a reaction, even the Whig Press revolted, although politics and an unparalleled opportunity to destroy Silas Wright may have had something to do with their change of heart. Weed's Evening Journal began to publish articles condemning the crusade as bordering on barbarous revenge. Shall our fellow men continue to be hunted like wild beasts in the forest, by self-constituted avengers of violated law, the journal demanded, dragged upon mere suspicion before a tribunal, exercising, it is said, the powers of the Spanish Inquisition, the county of Delaware cannot be dragooned into quietness unless a war of extermination be commenced and prosecuted. James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald dispatched a reporter to Delhi for a first hand account. The same man he had sent to interview Dr. Bouton in the Hudson Jail earlier in the year. Bennett explained to his readers that the ignorant farmers had been duped by outside agitators, including Horace Greeley, who had preached radical agrarianism and made Delaware County the abode of anarchy, confusion, and murder. Men with minds imbued with the spirit of a fiend have marched forth in battalions and resisted officers in the execution of their duty, in mere wantonness put to death an innocent and harmless individual for the gratification of evil passions and base desires, the offspring of cupidity, meanness, and avarice. Having taken this uncompromising position against the farmers, Bennett must have been as shocked as he was enlightened when his reporter began to file stories actually favouring the tenants. One of the first sites to confront him in Delhi was a tall, raw-boned youth with an ear-piercing fife to his mouth, marching up and down one of the village's three hotel stoops playing patriotic strains to awaken the surrounding country to the alarms of war. All the three hotels were as hard at work making money as their fellows at Saratoga. Mounted soldiers galloped through the streets in clouds of dust, flourishing swords and muskets, squads of armed men marched before the jail. The reporter surveyed the fine houses of the landlord's agents and the politicians, and then went to the little jail, which he found neat outside but far from particular within, more like a dirty emigrant boarding-house than a county jail. He admitted that perhaps these conditions were not easy to avoid, with prisoners being brought in by the fives and tens, but they might afford to pay some old woman for sweeping the floors, the stairs, and the hall, which are extremely filthy, and in strong and discreditable contrast to the outside of the building, all white and spruce as it is just as if turned out of a great big band-box. This cleaning of the outside of the cup and platter I detest. There is, he continued, a terrible earnestness in the thoughts, actions, and manners of almost all I have met on either side, which forbids anything like dispassionateness and impartiality, either from the down-renters or the up-renters. When he looked for anti-rent farmers, he could find none, they were all in hiding. I might indeed have had long talks with the women, he wrote, but the females are so excited and abusive, I know their remarks would be sound and fury. He described one old woman who rushed from her house near Andes to confront a passing troop of horsemen, with violent gesticulations and the whole recourse of her billings-gate. When the posse continued on their way, ignoring her, she yelled after them, �Hello, spies! Have you bub-steal with you? If you have, I'd like to see him, that's all.� It was with great difficulty, wrote the reporter, that the men could keep their tempers at this last insult to the dead. To the old men, he found, the anti-rent question was as clear as the sun at noon. The man who lives on, labours and rears a family on the soil, is the true and rightful owner thereof, until a better title is shown. Until a good title, honestly, fairly and constitutionally acquired, is shown by the landlords, they are usurpers. If the present tenants, fathers and grandfathers, were fools enough to enter into any compact with such men, it is preposterous that such should bind or be precedent for them. Even their own payment of rent in a moment of incautious simplicity is a precious bad reason why they should always do so with their eyes open. It is foul, cruel and oppressive to protect and encourage a lazy, worthless, immoral and bastard aristocracy to ride roughshod over the pith and marrow of the country, the laborious husband-men. Say what you will, continued the herald-writer, paraphrasing the old men's words, there was a time when these lands belonged to the state, and so they do still, unless it had in exchange good and lawful consideration, show us what that was. If you cannot do this, you, authorities, you would betray your trust by interposing your power to supplant honest men who are willing to treat with you but not with base and ambitious interlopers in the person of landlords. The old men told the reporter that it was visionary and hopeless to expect reform from the legislature, and therefore they had no alternative but to right the wrong themselves. As for the use of disguises, they will not be tempted to forfeit any advantage derived from cunning, the arms of the weak, until their adversaries meet them on equal terms. After his visit to the infected countryside, the reporter became an outright anti-rent apologist. In contradiction to the herald's previous statement, that the tenants were rich in the world's goods, worth twelve thousand dollars, the profits of their least land, he was ready to state that the tenants were of inferior circumstances, many of them poor. He saw the evil effects of the leasehold tenures in the neglected condition of their farms, dwellings, and appurtenances. He would be of a strange temper indeed, he wrote, who would cherish and enrich land and accumulate property and improvements on it, while he knew that he could not dispose of it at his decease, nor sell, nor convey by deed or mortgage, nor in any way alienate it. He who suffers from these oppressive conditions is bound hand and foot, and he would be more than a man if he did not feel his energies prostrated and his courage daunted by their pressure. When the reporter went down from the Delhi jail to see the men who had been dragged from their homes to the filthy prison, he found nearly all of them cheerful and anything but despondent. In meeting Dr. Bouton earlier in the year he had been struck by the total absence of any of the qualities needed to direct and control a fierce mob, and he found the present prisoners equally gentle. He described Brisbane as a man of great natural abilities, possessed of extraordinary influence with the masses, and reported that he and Moses Earl were made the butt for the untempered brutality of the authorities. Earl's demeanor bespoke a grave and discreet individual, he wrote, but the old man had become eminently the object of antipathy. More than three or four times the newspaper man had heard persons swear that the damned old villain, pointing to Earl, was sure to get the rope and would have got it sooner only for respect for law and order. All this and ten times as much in the same spirit the bold fellow listens to with thorough sound foie. He is a tough subject, otherwise he could not stand it for one day. Brisbane, too, was impressed by Moses Earl's stoicism. In one of his many letters he wrote, only one in the jail came in for a greater share of abuse than myself, and that was Earl, but he seemed to receive it with perfect coolness. I thought sometimes with indifference. They would come and damn me for a foreign bee, bring him out and hang him up without judge or jury. I remember while I was one day brooding over my misfortune, but it is like drawing a file across my heart to think of it, a voice at the door called me by name. I thought it might be someone come to give me a little consolation. I went to the door and there stood a well-dressed man, but a strange sort of malice seemed to flash from his eyes. I felt my heart tremble. Brisbane said he, you are poor and we will scatter your family to the four winds of heaven. He said no more, at least I heard no more, for my blood seemed arrested in its course. I thought my very heart would burst. John Latham, one of my fellow prisoners, tried to calm me. But when I again thought of the dark, unfeeling revenge that seemed to be let loose upon my helpless family, my spirits would again sink within me. But then I would say, surely the ear of heaven will never listen to such a prayer. And it did not. The abuse became so intolerable that as a last recourse I appealed to Sheriff Moore, and hoped he would do what lay in his power to put a stop to it. They were not so bad after that. I must accept Jim Howe, however, for whether it was to give him an appetite for his breakfast or to help his digestion I cannot say, but most every morning after breakfast time he would come and give us a round or two of abuse. We had become so used to his tirades that we actually felt lonesome if he happened not to come. I often wondered where he got such a stock of slang phrases, seeing he lived in the quiet village of Delhi. Surely he must have possessed a Billings Gate glossary and studied it well. Time passed heavily and slowly with us. Having few books to read we resorted to various petty expedience to beguile the time, such as pitching scents into an old shoe. Those among our visitors who were most civil and polite I would sometimes ask the favour of lending me a book. A Mr. Ronalds supplied me with several numbers of Blackwood's magazine, and we would sometimes amuse ourselves by contrasting the liberal sentiments expressed in that Tory journal with the rude and barbarous slang and bloody expression of those feudal Republicans of Delhi. A Captain Webster was among the most civil of our visitors. We were always glad to see his honest-looking face at the diamond hole in the door. I always thought he looked too honest to be a real up-renter. Mr. Shepard, too, was a most pleasant and agreeable visitor. Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay him is that I believe he was a Christian in every sense of the word. I yet remember, but I shudder when I think of it, some of the prisoners requested of the sheriff the privilege of hearing a sermon, so upon the Sunday following we were taken down into the hall to hear, as we thought, the gospel preached. But to our astonishment we had to listen to our funeral sermon, for a more bloody hang-them-all discourse could not have fallen from the lips of Jack Ketch himself. There seemed to be no hope, either in time or in eternity, to be an anti-renter was to commit the unpardonable sin. What a relief it was when Shepard closed the exercise with a prayer. As he fervently addressed the throne of Grace he seemed to feel that he himself was a sinner, while his countenance brightened as he contemplated that ransom whereby the chief of sinners can be saved. For that bloodthirsty preacher to kneel by the side of Shepard was to commit an act of the very blackest impiety. You may readily conceive we asked for no more up-rent sermons. It is astonishing to me how we kept our health as well as we did. During the period of nine weeks I was only once allowed about one hour of outdoor exercise, and there we were surrounded by a fence of bayonets. I stepped forward to the line to shake hands with Dr. Alaben, but a couple of guards immediately made their muskets clash between us. To shake hands with a friend was a luxury I was not allowed to indulge in. Our cell was, I think, about twelve feet square, and for the most part of the time there were six of us confined together in that narrow space. On the heels of Osmond Steele's death Governor Silas Wright had urged an end put forever to this perpetual relation of landlord and tenant, a relation already so fruitful of anything but peace and prosperity. Now he seemed to feel that the proper method of achieving that end was indeed the extermination of the tenants. On August 27th, 1845, twenty days after the sale, with the Indians in complete route and nearly one hundred anti-rentors in jail, including the most effective leaders, Wright declared Delaware County to be in a state of rebellion and sent three hundred troops to the already armed village. As soon as the new troops arrived, Charles Hathaway, with the state treasury at his disposal, ordered all tenants to pay their rent within three days, or the distress warrant shall settle it. A writer for the free holder visited the farmers and reported that dejection sat upon their faces, but they were silent. Governor Wright's move, declared Thurlow Weed in the Evening Journal, made the state the aggressor, adding fuel instead of dampening the flame. That odious instrument of despotic power, the distress warrant, as a kind of retaliatory measure, certainly will not in a very high degree help bring about harmony. Horace Greeley said that instead of dispatching troops, Wright should have investigated the influence of large estates, on the moral, intellectual, and general well-being of their inhabitants. Building prisons to hold all the anti-rentors and poor houses for all the ejected families would be rather expensive, he prophesied. The absentee landlords of Delaware County were delighted to use Silas Wright's troops as rent collectors. This will add heavily to the burden already upon the tenants, was the sanctimonious comment of the Atlas, Wright's mouthpiece in Albany, and there is little doubt that more than a thousand, two years ago, happy and prosperous people in this county, are ruined, or are on the road that must end in ruin, and too, too many with their property will lose their character. How true that the way of the transgressor is hard! Former Governor William H. Seward took note of the situation, in a letter dated August 30th, Governor Wright and his friends despair of weathering the anti-rent storm. How bloody instructions returned to torment their inventors, his proclamation would have been needless now had mine commanded the support it deserved. When September frosts brought the first color to the Western cat skills, farmers were still being dragged to jail for the Earl riot, sometimes as many as twenty a day. When every room in the prison and the courthouse was filled, state troops shouldered axes and went to the woods to cut logs for three emergency buildings, two for the prisoners and one for the pitchfork guard. The log pens, as they were called, were finished on September 6th, and the courtroom was cleared to make way for the trials. End of Section 15, recording by Maria Casper. Section 16 of Tin Horns and Calico by Henry Christman. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Section 16 Brim Full of Wrath and Cabbage. Word had reached Blenheim Hill, Scowhury County, as early as July 1845, that it was important to anti-rentism to make a decisive stand in adjoining Delaware County the next time the sheriff tried to hold a sale at Moses Earl's. The Indians of Blenheim Hill were anxious to make good their failure to send help in March, and fully aware that a successful sale in Andes would mean redoubled efforts by the landlords in all the counties, they held a series of special drills in Hilton's Woods. On August 4th, three days before time to go to Dingle Hill, the Calico warriors were unexpectedly kept busy at home. The authorities had got wind of the plan for joint action, and in compliance with urgent appeals from Sheriff Green Moore across the county line, while John S. Brown, the sheriff of Scowhury County, invaded the backbone, he had heard that the Indians were armed and ready, brim full of wrath and cabbage, and he too was anxious for a fight. Armed to the teeth, and ferocious enough to eat a biled engine, he and under-sheriff Tobias Boke set out with warrants for the arrest of Dr. John Cornell, Benjamin Curtis, Thomas Peasley, John Mayhem, and Thomas Roman, the strong men of the Scowhury County Anti-Rent Association. They were most eager to get Dr. Cornell, a worthy and respected gentleman and a skilled physician, because the old news carrier, as they called him, relayed messages and took the latest word into all the remote farms he visited. All the way up the valley Sheriff Brown pressed men into service with him. By the time he reached North Blenheim Village under the hill, he had a four-wagon train of armed deputies. He had hoped to sneak his men up the hill through the dangerous rocks under cover of darkness, but as he began the ascent he found a masked band waiting to seize the arms in ammunition. Horns sounded and his posse, most of them inexperienced and many unwillingly enlisted, hugged their guns and looked uneasy. The sheriff prudently ordered a retreat to Fink's Tavern to await the daylight. The next morning an anti-rent scout was watching from a small clearing along the Scowhury Creek when the invading force again moved toward the backbone. He sent up a coil of smoke as a warning. A second scout stationed at John Mayhem's log cabin caught the signal and relayed it over the mountain top. The posse moved cautiously up the steep narrows and stopped to arrest John Mayhem, one of the best anti-rent speakers in the county. Naturally Mayhem was gone, but the sheriff's men opened fire on his brother Stephen as he made a dash for the woods where the Indians were gathering. Luckily for him the bullets fell short. The posse's horses were turned loose to trample Mayhem's sixteen acres of rye, just as they later destroyed Isaac Bakers and Thomas Peasley's fields of oats. At the Peasley Farm they opened fire on Nathan Peasley, who was racing toward the woods with a basket of food. Though the shot caught him in the back he kept on running. He was not in disguise, but the posse could not make out who he was. They badgered one of the little Peasley boys to tell them, but Mrs. Peasley stepped between them and threatened the men with a stick of wood. Nathan did not stop until he reached the shelter of the Indian camp. Then he fell exhausted, blood trickling from his side. Several men reached for their guns. They've commenced the shooting, they said. We'll give them all they want. But Thomas and Sheldon Peasley restrained them. If they come to attack us here, shoot to kill, said Thomas sagely. Let them alone now. We'll have the state troops here and the devil to pay if we aren't careful. Nathan agreed. Leave the work to me. If I ever find the man who shot me I'll shoot him like a dog. Unable to find any of his quarry the sheriff moved into Blenheim Hill, making the Brimstone Church his headquarters. From there raiding parties were dispatched to the homes of all the anti-rent leaders. At Dr. Cornell's home they found a small anti-rent flag hanging from the corner of the corn crib, and the commander sent six men to take it down. By all means, mocked Mrs. Cornell, send six of your best men. Two of my little children made the flag and put it up themselves. The deputies tramped through the house until they came to a bedroom where the frightened children were hiding. Get those damned brats off the bed, barked the leader. You've got them there to conceal the old man. Mrs. Cornell faced them down. Call off your men and get them sober, she said. The commander repeated that she was hiding the doctor. There's one building down yonder you've missed, she said. Nobody noticed her acid tone, without thinking four of the men rushed off in the direction she indicated. They came back swearing, took the older Cornell boys into custody, and marched them off to the Brimstone Church. During this series of raids at least twenty boys were seized on nearby farms. Sixty years later, in a letter to a descendant of John Mayhem, Mrs. N. K. Hoagland vividly recreated the occupation of the backbone. I was then at my father's house, John J. Warner, a young girl in my teens. A large number of up-rent men came to my father's house. Mother talked to them kindly and told them what the war was for and how unjust the rent was. Father was a prisoner in the Brimstone Church on this day. It seems they did not know what they were making war over. One of the men said to my mother, Is that what we were sent here for? I pay rent myself and do not believe it is right to do so. Several others expressed the same sentiment and said they had been warned out to fight and thought that they had to. The Brimstone Church at the time was full of men they had made prisoners. They captured every man they could find who would not say up-rent. They captured also my brother John and made him a prisoner. Upon mother learning of this she started for the church with some bread and a pie. The scene at the church brought tears to her eyes and it also roiled her dutch blood. John, she demanded, you come home with me. A man by the name of Jake Allen spoke and said, No, he can't go home with you. Do you think we are going to be affected by the tears of women and children? Taking the boy by the hand, saying, John, you come home with me, she bade her dear husband good-bye and returned home. All of the boys were released the next day and with about fifteen adult captives taken without warrants Sheriff Brown moved to Ira Rose's tavern in Gilboa. When the anti-rentors re-entered the Brimstone Church they found the interior in near Shambles. James Van Dusen hammered out new iron bands for the anti-rent pole. An early Saturday morning, August 9th, the men in Calico raised a new standard. The Indians and the farmers gathered at the church to determine on a plan to release the prisoners held in Gilboa in as much as they had been taken without warrants, none had been in disguise, and they had offered no resistance. The young men wanted to shoulder muskets and storm the tavern, but the cautious majority wanted to try legal steps first. In the midst of the discussion a horseman rode up breathlessly with the news that Osmond Steele had just been shot at the Earl's sale in Delaware County. Under the sobering impact of that report even the most reckless abandoned any idea of marching to Gilboa. That afternoon Thomas Vroman went down to Moorsville with his sorrel horses, riding one and leading the other. An hour later he returned with Warren Scudder riding the second horse. Late that night Amos Loper of the Ridge took Scudder to Lyman Roots, where the fugitive had his boots resold by candlelight, while he gave them the details of the Moses Earl's sale and its tragic aftermath. When rumours reached Delhi that Scudder was on Blenheim Hill, Colonel Cook and General Griffin led a posse of one hundred and fifty armed men on an illegal expedition to the backbone which was beyond the borders of their county. Sheriff Brown joined them with a posse from Gilboa, and another armed unit came over the hill from Jefferson, making five hundred men in all. We have come to fight, Colonel Cook grimly told the sheriff. Shoot the anti-rentors, they are all accessories to the death of Steele. Brown reoccupied the Brimstone Church, and Cook preempted one of the peasley farms. Hay and grain were taken from the farmer's barns to feed the horses, and sellers were raided to feed the five hundred men. This time Sheriff Brown's men succeeded in capturing Dr. John Cornell and a number of others, but only after creating chaos on Blenheim Hill. Non-offending, peaceable and unfortunate citizens were fired upon, reported the Albany Freeholder. Sally Ann Champlin was fired upon while picking berries. Three bullets were hurled at her for gathering the fruits of the fields. Jeffrey Champlin was driven into the woods, where for two nights he lived on blackberries. Even up-rentors went into hiding. Handbills offering a large reward for Warren Scudder's arrest were scattered all over Blenheim, but before the posse could locate him, Jay Tompkins, who lived up the mountain road toward Kobelskill, helped him across the mountains to Westerlough, Albany County. The prisoners locked up in the tavern at Gilboa refused to become subdued. Bill Roman was infuriated when he found the preacher helping the sheriff's men. You black leg, he stormed. Stand here and load guns to shoot the very men who have put food in your mouth and clothes upon your back. Let the report of what you are doing get back to Blenheim Hill, and the men will hang you from the high box pulpit where you have so often preached to them about the hell you will go to. Dr. Cornell had a chance for either deliberate or inadvertent revenge when he was asked to treat a large portion of Brown's army, who were sick with a common August ailment. The doctor administered a thorough cleansing, and more than fifty of the posse lived a strenuous life for a few days. Gilbert R. Cumming, an up-rent Gilboa lawyer, set up an illegal self-constituted court and began an inquisition of the prisoners. When the farmers sent a sympathetic lawyer to stop it, he too was arrested. As the anti-rentors were reluctant to appear on any of the main roads, they persuaded Alonzo Morehouse, a carpenter who later became a famous clergyman in the Catskills in New York City, to go to J. Tompkins and ask him to get Thomas Smith, one of the ablest lawyers in the county. As I had never been implicated with them, with the exception of warm sympathy, I consented Morehouse wrote in his autobiography, It was night and dark, and as I was unacquainted with the way to Tompkins's, I was compelled to inquire at every cross-road. No man could be seen until I was known to be a friend of the anti- renters, and then the husband or brother would put his head out of the window, give me directions, and say God bless you. When Morehouse found the house on the mountain road, J. Tompkins was already on his way to Westerlow with Warren Scudder, and the only other man on the place was his father, who was too old to go and fetch the lawyer. Exchange your horse and take our best one, the old man told Morehouse. Do not spare him, nothing is too good for this work. The next day Thomas Smith arrived in Gilboa. He went directly to the sheriff and demanded immediate release of the prisoners, reminding him that every civil right had been violated, and that the sheriff had encouraged mob rule by permitting Cummings's self-constituted court to function. Smith threatened to go at once to the courts and swear out warrants against Sheriff Brown, his entire posse, and the invading force from Delaware County. Since Smith was too prominent both in his profession and in the Whig Party, to be given the summary treatment accorded to the tenant's first counsel, the sheriff was thoroughly upset, and Colonel Cook promptly returned to Delaware County. It was deemed advisable by the authorities and the people of Gilboa to make a proposition to the anti-rentors, this Go-Harry Republican reported, John Mayhem and George Badgley were called in by Sheriff Brown for a peace conference. The sheriff promised to release all prisoners and put an end to the raids if the influential men among the anti-rentors would use that influence to make the farmers surrender all disguises, to prevent any person from appearing in disguise, and to restore peace, order, and proper respect for the law. When the two anti-rentors agreed to those terms, Sheriff Brown went at once to the jail, liberated the prisoners, and proclaimed a general amnesty. The up-rentors were outraged. It is a hard pill to swallow, the Albany-Argus correspondent wrote. The investigation, as far as it had preceded, had begun to develop important facts. And had it been pursued, it would, it is believed, have unfolded in detail a foul conspiracy against the government. A general resistance and rebellion were calculated on. The murder of Steele was to be the signal for the commencement of operations. Enough has been disclosed, and indeed the resolutions passed at the meeting today are sufficient to show, that the Indian combinations are identified with the general anti-rent associations however much they deny it. In the next paragraph the correspondent betrayed the true reason for his alarm. There will be a hard struggle for the political ascendancy, whether the Whigs will fall in with them or not, is not known. Since the tenant's lawyer Thomas Smith was a Whig, he was accused of becoming an anti-renter for political objects and of throwing every obstacle in the way of the sheriff. The politicians in Delhi were shocked by the wretched compromise made by the authorities of Sco-Harry. They demanded the immediate removal of Sheriff Brown. This very act will give the cause of rebellion and insurrection more character than it has ever found, wrote the Argus Correspondent. It is admitting that these men have a distinct legal or political character equal with the government. CHAPTER 17 PACKED COURT Another result of the shooting of Osmond Steele was the recall of Dr. Smith A. Bouton for a second trial. The affair in Delaware County caused Governor Wright to declare that I being the principal leader must be made an example of, he wrote in his memoirs. The reopening of the case came as a surprise to him, for empty pocket-books had taught many Columbia County up-rentors to say down-rent, and he did not expect the businessmen to risk another boycott. Nevertheless, on September 1st, 1845, he found himself back in Hudson and filled with forebodings. He knew a hard fight lay ahead. Money had been unsparingly used by the feudal lords and he had reason to believe that some of it might reach the bench or the jury, in spite of the vigilance of Ambrose L. Jordan, who was to defend him again. John Van Buren, again sent to Hudson by Silas Wright to supersede local authorities, was already there, insisting on immediate trial. Aside from his partisanship and the political necessity of vindicating the policy which he himself had helped to formulate, the younger Van Buren had a personal stake in the outcome of the Bouton trial. Tall and handsome, a likable Hale fellow well met, Prince John had a strong following among the younger Democrats, but he was still anxious to justify his appointment as Attorney General. Bouton's second trial afforded an ideal opportunity for Prince John to establish himself, especially since Judge John Worth Edmonds had come up from New York City to try the case. Edmonds was an unshakable Democrat and a close, personal, and political friend of both Silas Wright and Martin Van Buren. He had started his law practice in the Van Buren office, and in the spring of 1845 had been appointed by Wright to the circuit bench in New York. His pretext for leaving his own jurisdiction now was a sentimental wish to return to his old home for a circuit, but political and personal incentives were obviously stronger. Making no pretense of impartiality, Judge Edmonds boasted that he would convict Big Thunder in short order, though it had taken Judge Parker three weeks to try him in the spring without getting a conviction. The landlords had finally succeeded in finding a judge devoted to their interests, and Bouton realized it. When the trial opened on September 3rd, friends of Prince John and Judge Edmonds packed the courtroom. Few of the farmers who thronged the city could find seats, and many milled in the courthouse square waiting eagerly for news. Their fear that the judge was packed was soon confirmed. Edmonds ruled that no person was competent to serve as a juror who had lived in any infected district or who believed the tenure's unwholesome. The tenants observed bitterly that the court had nothing to say about the ferocious hate of those who lived in up-rent towns. Alvin Beauvais stopping on his way back to New York from his tour of the anti-rent counties found the judge is all on one side, and there is a crushing official force bearing down to effect conviction. At the beginning of the trial Judge Edmonds demonstrated how effective a landlord agent he could be. He was paying his political debts by closing his eyes to the evils of the semi-feudal tenures, evils with which he was thoroughly familiar and which he was capable of describing in graphic terms after the trial was over. He knew almost everybody in the county and used this knowledge freely to help Prince John hand-pick the jury. With question after question John hammered away trying to break down one Tailsman's claim to impartiality, and in the end he appeared convinced, but the judge recessed the court and called the young prosecutor into his chambers. I have known that man for a long time, he said. He never saw a dog fight without taking sides. He lives on the border of the manor and within half a mile of the tavern where the anti-rentors gather. His story of indifference cannot be true. The man's wife, children, and neighbors were summoned for questioning. And the next day Prince John elicited testimony that the veneer man was one of the most radical anti-rentors, that once when a deputy sheriff had been shot at he had declared that the fellow should have been killed, that he had worked for anti-rentism at the polls, and had said no man not an anti-renter ought to be allowed to vote, and that although he was penurious he had contributed toward the cost of defending Dr. Bouton. The meaning of the jury was slow and tedious, and the only excitement was when sharp-tongued aquafortis tangled with Judge Van Buren. Judge Edmunds called Jordan's deportment offensive and disrespectful, and said the lawyer tried his irascible temper quite severely, but the spectators liked the relief from the tedium. Coming late one morning Jordan found that the court had convened without him over the protest of his assistant, James Storms. With eyes flashing he strode down the courtroom, brusquely interrupted Storms in the midst of examining a juror, and took over the questioning himself. The atmosphere was electric a few moments later when he challenged the admissibility of some of Van Buren's evidence. There was an angry exchange between the two men, and Jordan finally turned on Van Buren. Mr. Attorney General he snapped, I will not submit to this offensive language any longer. I give you fair notice, you have been trying to provoke me by your insolence. Speaking directly to the jurors already impaneled he continued angrily. The Attorney General does not care for the condition of these men. He has not contended for right or justice, but to make an exhibition of himself, to pander to the miserable ambition which was the curse of his father. Though the father had brains to temper his wild ambition in some degree, the son has none to temper his, and it breaks out everywhere in puerility and slush. The entire courtroom gasped. John Van Buren addressed the court, his voice cold. The council opposed has informed your honour of the cause of my presence here. I shall not stoop to deny his course assertions, but allow me to add it is quite out of place for a man who stands here with the contributions of murder and arson in his pockets to criticise me for any cause. You lie, roared Jordan. John Van Buren swung and caught Jordan full on the face. Agile, despite his grey hair in fifty-six years, Jordan lunged back, striking Prince John on the head. His younger opponent tried to ward off the blows, and Dr. Bouton ducked as fists thudded over his body. The courtroom was in it tumult. Officers separated the two men, while Judge Edmunds pounded for order, and then directed that they be confined for twenty-four hours for contempt. Van Buren immediately apologised and asked the court to fine him instead. But Jordan did not. As this offence has happened here in a court of justice I regret it, Jordan said. I have, however, no whining apology to make, nor any favours to ask, except this, that the court will do me the favour to confine us both in the same room. Jordan was sent to the sheriff's parlours and Prince John to the sheriff's office. There the young attorney general, shame vying with anxiety as to the possible effect on his political future, wrote a letter of resignation to Governor Wright. When Judge Edmunds learned of it he rushed a message urging the governor to ignore that resignation, as he did not see how a man of honour could have done otherwise than resent so gross an insult. Evidence of advancing civilisation in America, the British press commented on this altercation. The next morning the crowded courtroom was expectant, but Jordan and Van Buren took their seats without a word. Toward noon John Van Buren strolled to the bench and spoke quietly to Judge Edmunds. I hope the court slept well last night. Yes, the judge answered, the court was not aware of anything to disturb its slumbers. I didn't know that its conscience under the circumstances would permit it. Van Buren then added in a confidential tone, I trust our arrangement to spend Sunday with the old man holds good. Yes, so far as I am concerned, the judge replied. Well, the old man will be right glad to see you now. Judge Edmunds subsequently decided against the weekend junket to Lindenwald. He was afraid that it might be misconstrued. After two vexatious weeks the jury box was finally filled, and the examination of witnesses brought a new set of spectators, a new York Herald correspondent reported, Judge Edmunds, who is renowned for his courtesy to the fair sex, has generally invited the ladies of this place to attend the trial of the doctor who so terrified them last winter, and we have, in addition to our known bells, the bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked and languishing Miss W. of Jersey City, the charming and captivating Miss J. of New York, the beautiful and fair complexioned Miss Mick of Greenport. A few days later an equally rapturous reporter for the same paper wrote, Our courthouse for the past week has assumed a rather rescherche appearance, and the somber walls and cold formality of a criminal court turned into a heaven of sunshine by the smiles and beauty of our pretty women. Oh, for a pen dipped in the golden rays of the setting sun to describe them! It would be wrong to individualize, but to correct the mistake of one of your correspondence I will state that the bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked and languishing Miss W. is not from Jersey City, but the interesting and accomplished daughter of General W., and Madam Rumor reports her to be engaged to the Prince of Lindenwald. In this socially festive atmosphere the trial proceeded. On the whole the testimony followed that of the first trial. Sheriff Miller, who was the star witness for the state, identified Dr. Bouton as the masked big thunder who had taken his papers and burned them at Copac. Under cross-examination he denied uncomfortably that he had boasted of a Livingston offer of five hundred dollars for Bouton's arrest. Jordan led him along with reassuringly gentle questions, then suddenly turned on him and roared, "'Didn't you tell the Indians that you were as good an anti-renter as they were?' The Sheriff's eyes swept the courtroom and then fell as he denied the accusation. Didn't you promise the Indians that you would never fight them, they were your friends, that they put you in office?' Again Miller denied courting Indian favour. The defence contended that the Sheriff had given up his papers willingly, and therefore a charge of highway robbery could not be supported. But Miller swore that he had told Big Thunder that he would not give them up except to prevent violence. While he was telling his story Sheriff Edmonds interrupted, "'Were you armed?' "'No,' replied the Sheriff. "'You should have been snapped, the judge, and shot the scoundrel dead.' Farmers called by Jordan testified that on several occasions Henry Miller had said, I'm as good an anti-renter as you are.' Stephen Decker, on whose farm Miller was to have conducted the sale, halted by the copake Indians, repeated his conversation with the Sheriff on the ride to Sweets Tavern. John Lape, a waiter at the tavern, testified that the Sheriff did not pay for his dinner. I told him the natives said they would pay for it, and he said, well. Later the Sheriff went upstairs and sent for some brandy. He didn't pay for it. He told me he was a good anti-renter. Elijah Finkel told how the Sheriff and Big Thunder had a drink together, and the Calico chief drank to his health. For the prosecution Colonel Ambrose Root stated positively that Bouton was Big Thunder. Both had the same voice and used the same terms in talking about the manner leases, he said. He added that at the smoky hollow meeting he had asked Dr. Bouton why he came armed. The anti-rent leader replied, he said, that he had heard that the Sheriff was coming with a posse of Irishmen and Ruffians to arrest Big Thunder. In the four months since the first trial Sheriff Miller had discovered new witnesses. He produced a shoemaker who testified that at smoky hollow he had noticed peculiar half-soles on Big Thunder's boots, which corresponded to the ones Dr. Bouton wore when arrested. The prosecution put much of its reliance in Abram Carl, a former anti-renter who had fled to Connecticut during the disturbances. Tiring of exile Carl had returned to give himself up, and also the anti-rinters said to collect one hundred and ten green acres and five hundred dollars from the landlord for lying himself out of jail and Dr. Bouton into it. Carl told the jury he had been in the room at Copaque when Dr. Bouton put on his Big Thunder disguise, and he had helped to remove it after the burning of the papers. In fact, said Carl, he had loaned Dr. Bouton his own cap and mask and his brother's calico dress. Ambrose Jordan countered by calling Carl's wife and mother to the stand. His mother explained that, as a child, her boy had been hit in the head with a nine-pin ball and had never been right since. He thinks that one of our horses has an extra joint in all her legs, she testified solemnly, and we can't make him think otherwise. Carl's wife, between sobs, said poor Abe was crazy, and that once he had interrupted the Methodist preacher in the midst of a prayer by jumping up and shouting down with the rent. When Abrams' wife finished her testimony, the court adjourned for lunch. The anti-rent leaders decided, as they put it with elaborate innocence, that they could not permit Prince John to abuse the women on cross-examination, and so they brought up a team of horses, put Abe's mother and wife in the carriage, and galloped across the Connecticut line just ahead of the sheriff. Both sides knew that Dr. Bouton was Big Thunder. But to prove it, in a court of law, the prosecution was obliged to purge her witnesses, so the defense countered in kind. They produced a peddler who said he was present at Copaic and talking to Dr. Bouton in the tavern at the very moment when Big Thunder was burning the papers, and therefore Dr. Bouton and Big Thunder could not be one and the same. A Negro supported the alibi, testifying that he had helped Big Thunder remove his costume and that the chief was not Dr. Bouton. At this stage the anti-rentors realized that the prosecution had throughout the trial anticipated every move they made. The mystery was later unblushingly clarified by Judge Edmonds in a full report of the trial, a report that was an unparalleled confession of judicial conspiracy. It read, There was, at that time in Hudson, a journeyman printer, a dissipated chap who had been an orderly sergeant in the uniform company of which I had been captain, and who was warmly attached to me. Early in the trial he came to my lodgings and told me he was determined that I should not be cheated as Judge Parker had been in the former trial, and he had therefore joined the anti-rentors and was one of their committee on arrangements for the trial. They met every evening, and about eleven o'clock he would come and tell me all their proceedings. There seems no reason to credit Judge Edmonds' statement regarding the printer's concern lest he be cheated. The report suggests rather conclusively that he himself put the espionage proposal to the man. Thanks to his spy the Judge learned many useful facts about the anti-rent witnesses. Why did you say you saw Big Thunder in the tavern, and anti-renter was reported to have asked one of the witnesses? You told me you were going to say you saw him crossing the public square. So I did, but the peddler got him in the house and I couldn't get him out again. Soon after the Negro witness had testified in Bouton's behalf, Judge Edmund issued a warrant for his arrest for perjury. He had been informed, he said, that on the day the Negro claimed he helped Big Thunder unmask the witness was actually twelve miles from the scene of the riot. The judge dispatched the sheriff with the warrant, but the anti-rent scouts outran him, and by the time the officer reached the Negro's home yet another witness was out of reach in Connecticut. In his summation on Saturday, September 27th, Ambrose Jordan made one of his ableist speeches. He told the jury that Dr. Bouton was an educated man who was being persecuted because he had thrown his whole heart and feelings into a legitimate crusade. Jordan denied that Bouton had expressed contempt for law and courts, an allegation designed to confuse the issue and prejudice the judge and jury. It was true, he said, that when Bouton was asked why the tenants did not resort to the courts, he had used strong language and said that a thousand dollars in this or that lawyer's or judge's pocket would blind justice, but whatever his opinion of the courts it was not evidence of guilt. Jordan ridiculed Sheriff Miller's pretended terror of Big Thunder and reminded the jury that the sheriff drank, dined, and gested with the mighty monster of Hydrahead in fantastic costume. The sheriff must have been looking for an excuse to yield when he told the Indians, I want you to understand that I will not give up my papers until threatened. This was not the conduct of a man robbed, Jordan said. All the evidence indicated some arrangement between the sheriff and Big Thunder. Miller knew that there would be resistance, yet he went to copake alone and unarmed, against the advice of his friends. Dr. Bouton had been falsely represented as a foul fiend stirring up innocent men, upon whose head revenge for all the outrages charged to the Indians was to be visited, Jordan said, and the jury was being asked to convict him right or wrong. On this impassioned note Jordan closed his defense at six p.m. Soon after John Van Buren began his summation, the court recessed for the weekend. On Monday Martin Van Buren arrived to lend his son the prestige of his presence. Older down-rent farmers watched with angry suspicion as he entered the courthouse. The poor boy they had helped to the White House, the man who had once deplored landlord domination at the polls. Now the poor man's president had come to smile on a jury in order to help convict the poor man's champion. Radiating charm and brotherly love the great man took a conspicuous seat in the front of the courtroom. According to the Herald, John Van Buren made an able speech about eight hours long to a house full of the fair and beautiful of our city and neighboring towns, who encouraged the young widower by their smiles and made him brave and eloquent in their presence. All eyes beamed with love and enthusiasm. In his plea to the jury, Van Buren characterized Dr. Bouton as a man without any evidence of good character, and the farmers who took the stand in his defense as utterly worthless and degraded. He described the Negro witness as a monstrous black man, a characterization which some said would make political capital for both Van Buren's in the south. He defended Sheriff Miller's drinking with the Indians by saying, In that situation, surrounded by a band of Negroes and disguised and intoxicated Ruffians, I should be very ready to comply with any request they might make. If they wanted me to drink, I would drink. If they wanted me to turn anti-rentor, I would do it. He himself had no feeling in the matter, except to see the laws maintained. But anti-rent activity, he said, demands serious attention, because it comes home to your occupation, stames all your relations in life, and is in excitement attended with immense expense, enormous taxes. These very trials alone add heavily to the burdens of taxation, and create a necessity for additional courts, judges, all involving great expenditure of money. He had no doubt of Dr. Bouton's guilt, but he felt that the jury had a far deeper interest in that matter. With you, he finally concluded, in late afternoon, I will leave the case. Judge Edmonds then charged the jury to be vigilant and firm in bringing the guilty to justice. The tenants, he said, could not look to the legislature to pass laws impairing the obligations of contracts. They should instead rely upon the action of a sound public opinion in bringing about voluntary arrangements between themselves and their landlords. Moreover, no relief of any kind could be expected, he warned, until the base and the guilty were denounced and punished. He wanted the jury to remember that circumstantial evidence was often more reliable than positive evidence. It was eight o'clock that night when he closed and the jury retired to deliberate. Word that the case had gone to the jury brought farm wagons clattering into Hudson, and as the night wore on without a verdict, hope rose among the farmers who clustered about the sputtering whale oil lights in the square. Soon after daybreak, the jury sent a message to Judge Edmonds at his hotel, asking to be discharged. They could not agree. The farmers were jubilant, and Amasa Bailey, Bouton's father-in-law, at once set about arranging bail. But Judge Edmonds was determined to convict. He arose, dressed, ate a leisurely breakfast, and then went to the courthouse to tell the jury that he would not discharge them. "'This case has been twice tried,' he said, and the interest of public justice imperatively demands that it should now be finally closed. He did not, however, mean to extort a verdict from their suffering or starve them into agreement. On his way to court he had ordered breakfast for them. You will have your dinner and your supper at the usual hours,' he said. "'Tonight you will have beds. I must insist on your agreeing on a verdict.' He soon showed them that he meant what he said. As he reported with some complacency, the jurors looked out the window and saw him mount his horse and ride off, leading another horse with a side saddle on it. I then took a ride of two or three hours his account continued, accompanied by a lady who was a stranger in those parts. In order to show her the beautiful scenery in the locality I took her to many by-roads, and thus it happened that when I struck the main road on my return I met one of the sheriff's officers who told me the jury had agreed upon a verdict more than an hour ago, and the sheriff had sent his officers in all directions to find me. The spectators were silent as the jury filed into the court. We find the defendant, guilty, as charged, announced the foreman. The news swept over Hudson. Judge Edmunds postponed sentencing until two o'clock in the afternoon, but long before the scheduled hour the courtroom was filled and a throng of five thousand grim farmers jammed the square. The trial had dragged on for four long weeks and it was the last day of September. On all sides autumn had hung the day with brilliant colors as though to mock the tenant's defeat. Below Hudson Mount Merino was a heap of gold. To the west the cat skills rose as bright as the Calico dress of big thunder. Judge Edmunds went immediately to his hotel and summoned the sentencing court of Columbia County, five judges, the mayor, the recorder, and four alderman. One of the judges, apparently an anti-rent sympathizer, refused to be a party to the proceedings, but the others were ready to serve. Dr. Bouton had been convicted of robbery, a charge that allowed a wide range of punishments, from a minor sentence to life imprisonment. Judge Edmunds told the court that he favoured the maximum, to put an end to the whole disturbance, and do away with the necessity of trying any more of the indicted men. Only the mayor of Hudson, a friend of Joseph de Manel, agreed with the judge. No one of the others was willing to stand for more than a twenty-year imprisonment, and some wanted only a minor sentence. Judge Edmunds reported, After a long discussion, without much appearance of any agreement, the first judge proposed to let me pronounce what judgment I pleased, and to that all agreed. I told them no. The discussion resumed again, and with as little prospect of agreement as ever, when the dinner bell rang. The first judge turned to one of the county judges and said, Come, judge, there's the dinner bell. You go for life, and I will. Thus the sentence was fixed. It was the old story the judge observed, quoting Pope, Wretches must hang that jury men may dine. When Judge Edmunds returned to the courthouse, he was scarcely able to press through the crowd. He ordered the farmers to let him pass, but they would open a passage for only a few feet and then block the way again, damning and abusing him to their heart's content. As Dr. Bouton was led in, Mary Bouton was already in her seat. All eyes were on the man standing before the bench, his blue eyes steady in his white-crowned face. Judge Edmunds began sternly, Your offense, in fact, is high treason, rebellion against your government, and armed insurrection. Until you came among them, the tenantry of the manor were a quiet, orderly, law-abiding people, yourself suffering none of the evils of tenure of which you complained, a man of education, you well understood your duty to your country. Yet when remonstrated with, on the impropriety of your course, you admitted that you knew it to be wrong, yet you avowed your intention to persist in your measures of resistance. Because thus alone could you attain your end. Possessed of a species of popular eloquence, you made your appeals to the interest of the tenants, by holding out to them the prospect of exemption from the payment of rent. You thus enlisted in your service several hundred men whom you publicly paraded, armed, and disguised. You have been the leader, the active instigator, the principal fomenter of all these disturbances. You have made yourself an example of disorder and violence, and you have caused many erring and misguided men to follow it, to their ruin and to the disturbance of the public peace. The sentence of the court is that you be confined to prison for the term of your natural life. The harshness of the sentence staggered Bouton, and he had to agree with Jordan that it would be useless to appeal, for the governor had the power of appointment over all the judges. As long as Silas Wright occupied the executive chair, the judiciary would reflect his own prejudice. The only course for a man of courage was to try to see in his plight some perspective. By submitting to my fate, Dr. Bouton said resolutely, I will win public opinion to help our cause. The people throughout the state will consider that my trial was an outrage on justice. Once more, word spread up and down the Hudson that thousands of farmers were preparing to sack the jail and carry away their condemned leader. But at midnight, when Dr. Bouton was led up the gangplank of a northbound steamer, heavily ironed and escorted by sixty soldiers, the stars were bright in the clear October sky, and the only sound was the slapping of the restless water against the dock. Mrs. Bouton was allowed to walk as far as the boat with her husband, and there they parted. Don't be discouraged, she whispered, thinking ahead to elections, when the tenants would have their chance to register a torrential protest, you will be released in less than two years. She stood watching as the boat slid into the deep channel and merged like a ghost with the night up the river. There were strength and beauty in Mary Bouton's spirit, which stood her well in this crisis. The hatred of injustice that burned with a white heat in Dr. Bouton had seared her own life. She had adhered to me in all my troubles and vicissitudes of fortune, the doctor summed it up later. It was a hard trial for a woman to see her husband suffer a punishment next to the halter. In the early hours of morning, when the steamer edged into the dock at Albany, Sheriff Miller saw with alarm that the river front was crowded with the stalwart yeomanry of the Helderbergs. He ordered the boat put about in mid-channel, where Dr. Bouton was transferred to a barge and hurried to Troy seven miles up the river. Troy, too, proved to be full of anti-rentors, and the doctor was taken secretly to the jail for a stopover. A few of his Rensselaer county friends were permitted to see him, among them Sheriff Gideon Reynolds, always a tenant partisan. When the time came to lead Dr. Bouton to the train, there were so many farmers outside the jail that Sheriff Miller refused to leave. But Sheriff Reynolds knew his people. Brushing aside all protests, he took Bouton by the arm and walked with him to the street. At the sight of their leader the crowd was in a ferment of excitement. Their shouts were a welcome and a threat that seemed to justify Miller's alarms. Let's take him, someone shouted. Hundreds of voices picked up the cry. But when Dr. Bouton raised his hands in the gesture that had always meant Big Thunder was ready to speak, they all fell silent, waiting. I have made up my mind to go peaceably, he told them. It is for the benefit of our cause that I do so. The farmers were speechless a moment or two, unable to believe him. Then a murmur of assent ran through the crowd. A cheer was raised, and they fell back in good order. Reassured by this demonstration of Dr. Bouton's power over the men, Sheriff Miller joined the prisoner in the street. His appearance was greeted by angry comment that grew to abusive threats and a menacing surge of the crowd. But Dr. Bouton gravely asked his fellow anti-rentors not to harm his captor, and Miller was permitted to pass. Some of the doctor's friends were allowed to accompany him as far as Saratoga, but there they took their leave. A reporter for the White Hall Democrat said Bouton conversed freely on his way through the village, insisting that he had acted an honourable part and that he represented two hundred thousand honourable men. A writer for the Plattsburg Whig, who rode across Lake Champlain with him, found him a man of good information, possessing talent of the finest order. He passed his jokes and smoked his cigar with as much independence as the greatest gentleman on board, he wrote. Dr. Bouton's courage failed him when he entered the new Clinton prison at Danimora, and he gave way to tears and deep dejection. He soon learned, however, that he was to be treated more as a political prisoner than as a criminal. He was straight away placed in charge of the prison hospital. No idle post, since the iron mines and foundries for which the prison had been established earlier in 1845, were full of hazards to the convict laborers, and he was allowed almost as much independence as the prison officials. A measure of the public's interest in the Bouton case is the fact that blackface minstrels, then just coming into popularity, made jokes about it. Why is Judge Edmunds greater than Ben Franklin? Because Franklin bottled lightning, but Judge Edmunds jugged thunder. The press was almost unanimous in its approval of the life term for Dr. Bouton. But the New York Herald correspondent wrote, This is the most extraordinary case I have ever heard of. All whose minds have not been poisoned with prejudice are astonished and angered at the verdict. History furnishes no parallel. Ten witnesses swearing positively to an alibi and still the jury convicting the prisoner. What accounts for this strange procedure? Was it evidence? Common sense tells us no. Was it the address of the Attorney General? Those who listened to his remarks cannot attribute it to that. Was it Judge Edmunds' charge? Ah, there's the rub. Did he not tell the jury that circumstantial evidence was more reliable than positive? In Albany Thomas Devere reminded the farmers that there never was a great reform but demanded its victim. Let that not deter or appall you, he wrote in the anti-renter. Keep within the bounds of the law, but up and onward the despotism of the press is complete. Down the river in New York City the national reformers held a special meeting in Croton Hall to form the Big Thunder Company for the liberation of Dr. Bouton. Alvin Bovey, who had been a guest at the doctor's house only a few weeks earlier, was the principal speaker, and Evans's Young America gave a full report of the meeting. Though Bouton was not the father of the anti-rent movement, Bovey said, he had been active in promoting the dark. He found an agitation without form in void, and he organized it. He took it up in an enlarged and philanthropic sense. From the first the landlords determined to make him a victim and pursued him until at last he wore the chains. The circumstances are more alarming than can be described to those who watch the progress of American tyranny. There was not a doubt but that the whole force of the administration was brought to bear to secure the conviction. Bovey commented at considerable length on the trial, the transfer of the judge from New York City to Hudson, the character of the judge, and his extraordinary directions to the triers respecting the qualifications of jurors. He dared not speak all he thought on these points, he said, because he might be prosecuted and persecuted as Dr. Bouton was, but he felt confident that taken in connection with recent exposures respecting the corruption of saints in ermine and political intrigues, the sentence of Dr. Bouton would be the means of revolutionizing the state. I am, said he, about to raise a banner which I hope will be carried in daylight and torchlight processions throughout the state by all men of liberty and progress, until its object shall be accomplished. Bovey then unfolded and suspended in front of the platform a handsome banner on which appeared the words, Liberation of Dr. Bouton. It was received by the audience with deafening applause which continued several minutes. George Evans followed Bovey to the platform. No matter what is said of Dr. Bouton he will rank in history with Lafayette and other great names, he said. Dr. Bouton is a true friend of the people's rights and whether big thunder or not he has committed no sin against morality or the principles of the American Revolution. Evans promised that from that day on young America would fight for the liberation of Dr. Bouton and the next issue of the paper carried a line of bold-faced type in its mass-head, the slogan raised by Alvin Bovey, Liberation of Dr. Bouton. A prophetic political note was struck by John Cumberford, a veteran labor leader, first president of the New York City General Trades Union, who told the audience that no stronger evidence than the trial could be adduced to show the need for a new state constitution providing for election of judges. He warned, under the present circumstances no poor man is safe who contends for a reform that shall remove the oppressions of the laborer. Officers, even judges, are no longer appointed for their honesty and capability but to reward political villainy. It is my deliberate opinion that if Dr. Bouton should not be liberated and reform-affected it will be but a short time before there will be anti-rentism in New York. Dr. Bouton has been victimized by the Democratic Party and no governor can withstand the torrent of public indignation while Dr. Bouton remains in prison. Unmoved by the adverse criticism of the liberal elements and the unmuscled press, Judge John Worth Edmonds was congratulating himself that he had successfully concluded the Bouton case. Before leaving Hudson he called up the rest of the anti-rent prisoners and told them he did not propose to try them. I believe enough has been done to answer the ends of justice, he said benevolently, enough to show the mischief and folly of your conduct. With Dr. Bouton out of the way, and the landlord's will faithfully executed, the judge could now salve his own conscience and perhaps put the released tenants in a better mood for voting the Democratic ticket and cultivating their land to pay new rents. He told the prisoners he was as fully aware as they of the injurious effects of the manorial tenures, but that they must look to the law and the sure will of time for redress. He continued their bail and told them that if they showed just appreciation of this forbearance toward them, in a year's time he would advise the Attorney General to discharge them all from further prosecution.