Haymarket (44 page)

Lucy

P.S. Does Captain Black have any prediction as to how much longer the State Supreme Court will take before delivering its opinion?

Cook County Jail, Chicago
March 10, 1887

Dear Jailbird,

Well, congratulations on your first night in jail. I know you did it solely to compete with me, but I need to point out that one night is hardly in a league with those of us entering our tenth month of confinement. I know: you’re only a woman, doing the best you can with your limited resources!

If your prison record doesn’t put me in awe, your prescience in regard to Henry George most assuredly does. No sooner do you predict his defection, than it comes to pass. He’s now saying in his newspaper that on “rereading the trial transcript” he’s forced to conclude, contrary to his earlier view, that the anarchists
were
condemned on sufficient evidence. With his talent for backtracking, my guess is that he’ll make an excellent run for Mayor.

As for Hortensia and Captain Black, I think your intuition has failed you. None of us can entirely scour from our souls the vile class and race prejudices bred into us as children, but surely the Blacks have gone as far as anyone. It’s typical of you, dear, to hold out for 100 percent, but by that standard the entire world would be held “unsuitable” as comrades … No, the Captain hasn’t offered a prediction as to the length of the Supreme Court’s deliberations. The tedium and tension of this endless waiting is taking its toll—with the usual exception of Fischer, Engel, and
Lingg, who are superhuman in their ability to remain at least outwardly calm, even indifferent. The story William told you about Fischer is integral to his character. In the corridor the other day he told me how much he resents the criticism he’s read against your “inflammatory” speeches. He defended you passionately and expressed utter contempt for those who would modify their words and principles simply because the capitalists have managed to get a few of us behind bars. “The true battle,” he says, “is for the future, not for a piddling seven lives!” Your exact sentiments. Mine, too, except as one of the piddling seven, my conviction comes wrapped in the deepest melancholy. I’m only human. I want to see my children grow up and watch my Lucy continue to storm across the landscape. My mood is best when I keep busy. I’ve begun to write both a reminiscence and a history of Anarchism.

Some of our other comrades are not bearing up well. When Fielden and Schwab say good-bye to their wives and children after a visit, they often burst into tears. (By the way, you should see the way Lingg happily romps with the children; his essential sweetness emerges and he plays like an innocent child himself—hardly the ogre created by the press.) Spies keeps himself busy working with Nina on his autobiography, but his pale complexion and sad eyes give away the truth of his condition. The worst news of all I save for last: Meta Neebe has just this week succumbed to her illness, leaving poor Neebe a wreck of a man.

All of us get at least a brief lift in spirits from the mounting volume of mail that pours in, and also from the variety of visitors who come from all over, including a few from Europe. You’ll be amazed to hear that none other than Wilhelm Liebknecht, the great German socialist, visited us, accompanied by Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor, and her husband, Edward Aveling! We had to talk through the iron grating, of course, but Mrs. Aveling could not have been more staunch in her support. She and her husband have been addressing mass meetings in New York and elsewhere ardently insisting that we’re being condemned not for what we’ve done, but for what we’ve believed. In New York, she told me, she quoted her father’s words during the massacre of the Paris Communards: the executioners “are already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them.”

As thrilling as her visit was, I’ve had one visitor who moved me even more: my old friend Ollie Canby from Texas! Can you believe it?! I
haven’t laid eyes on him, nor exchanged a word of correspondence since we left Waco nearly fifteen years ago. As far as I can remember, he was away on cattle drives for such long stretches that you never met him, but I’ve spoken of him often. A more decent man, and a more profane one, never lived. He now has a belly as large as his heart, and a wife and three children. He never got the ranch he dreamed of owning one day—he mostly does menial labor—but he has no bitterness about it, and dreams on. I don’t know how he managed to afford the trip, but he came all the way from Waco just to see me. We talked about the old days through the grating. Even as teenagers during the War, he was always protective of me, always afraid I’d get myself killed.

“And now,” he told me, his eyes clouding over, “you’ve gone and done it … Never shoulda let you outta my sight … It’s the damn Feds! We shoulda won that war!”

After Ollie left, I sat down and had myself a good cry.

This will probably be my last letter before you return. I count the days …

Your loving husband,
Albert

The attorneys on both sides presented their arguments before the Illinois Supreme Court for three days. The defense detailed the legal errors and personal biases that in its view had disfigured the trial from start to finish. The prosecution insisted on the validity of its previously detailed definitions of
conspiracy, incitement
, and
accessory
. On March 16th, the six elderly judges of the court, sitting in Ottawa, a town due west of Chicago, retired to conduct their deliberations.

Days passed into weeks. Weeks into months. Yet the justices failed to reappear. A quick decision had been expected, and as spring gave way to summer, concern and puzzlement over the protracted delay grew throughout the land. As autumn approached, the country was still standing on one foot, and the prisoners, stifling in the heat and monotony of their daily routines, came fully to agree with the declaration Neebe had made during the trial that he preferred to die at once rather than by inches. Captain Black became so incensed at the delay that he again invoked to a reporter the imagery of Jesus suffering on the cross—which created such an outcry that he (at Hortensia’s urging) issued a statement claiming that he’d been misquoted. “Given the stockpile of perjury already accumulated on the other side,” he bitterly confided to Hortensia, “the Lord will forgive a thimbleful from us.”

Then suddenly, on September 13th, Justice Schofield sent word from the chambers that at ten o’clock the following morning, the Supreme Court would announce its decision. The cramped, packed courtroom filled to overflowing hours before the justices filed in on the morning of the 14th. Speaking for the full court, Justice Magruder, looking notably frail but firm of voice, slowly read the opinion, page after page of it,
aloud. In nearly every particular, the opinion sustained the rulings and verdict of the lower court. Only Justice Mulkey suggested even the slightest degree of dissent, writing that he did “not wish to be understood as holding that the record is free from error, for I do not think it is,” but without specifying what errors he had in mind and while emphasizing that he was “fully satisfied with the conclusion reached.” The court refused to order a new trial and fixed the date of execution for November 11th. The State had won.

The mainstream press hailed the decision, and the country’s “respectable elements” drew a collective sigh of relief. The defendants themselves tried to appear stoic. “I never expected anything else,” Fischer told one reporter, and Spies sarcastically told another that “if the people of this great country are satisfied that free speech should be strangled, then what use for me to complain?” Albert had earlier predicted the result, telling a labor reporter that the propertied classes would “bulldoze” the supreme court into ratifying Judge Gary’s verdict: “What a spectacle for ‘free America’ ” he told the journalist, “Men put to death only because they made speeches that were offensive to the ruling class.” Now that his prediction had been confirmed, Albert tried, in his public statements, to take the high ground: “I have done my duty to myself and the people, and I shall fearlessly stand the consequences. How can I do otherwise when I know that I have not committed a single crime against my fellow men or violated one clause of the Constitution?”

Captain Black had been shocked at the decision, but he was far from alone in believing that despite the setback, the sentence of execution would never be carried out. There were, Black insisted, still real grounds for hope. Two options remained: taking the case to the United States Supreme Court and, should it fail there, making a direct appeal to Governor Richard Oglesby for a commutation or pardon.

Backed by a strong team of prominent attorneys—ex-Confederate general Roger A. Pryor, ex-Union General Benjamin Butler, and the widely respected John Randolph Tucker of Virginia—Captain Black appeared before the United States Supreme Court on October 27th and for two days argued for a writ of error. On November 2nd, the Court gave its unanimous answer. Chief Justice Waite announced that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction, since “no federal issues” were involved in the case. The Court’s critics were quick to point out that among the federal
issues in question are the rights of free speech and assembly, and due process of law. The legal battle, in any case, had reached a dead end; no avenue of appeal remained open through the courts.

That same night, Oscar Neebe, the only one of the eight defendants who had not been condemned to death, was removed from the Cook County jail and taken to the state prison at Joliet to begin his fifteen years of hard labor.

Nine days remained before the scheduled executions. All eyes and efforts turned toward Governor Richard Oglesby.

The Defense Committee had already launched a petition drive for commutation of the sentences. Hundreds of people now stepped forward in a burst of sympathy to help distribute the petitions. Nina Van Zandt and her mother were frequently recognized by their disapproving peers as they stood on street corners soliciting signatures, and garnering curses. Lucy had to contend with the police. It was a rare day when a patrolman didn’t poke his club in her ribs and order her to move on. Finally, one afternoon, she was arrested. The judge who heard the case—having expected, from all the negative publicity, an unmanageable tigress—was unpredictably moved at Lucy’s wan, exhausted appearance, gave her a minimal five-dollar fine, and ordered her released at once.

Petitions, telegrams, letters and resolutions poured into Oglesby’s office. They came from around the world, from the eminent and the unknown, from George Bernard Shaw and mill workers in Rhode Island. “In the name of humanity …” many of them began, and often closed with variants of “return them to their families, leave them, we implore you, to the judgment of history.” There was reason to believe that Oglesby might prove responsive. In the prewar period he’d been an active abolitionist, deeply sympathetic to the sufferings of the slave. “I’m told by many,” Captain Black reported to Lucy, “that the governor has a good heart.” Lucy said she was delighted to hear it, “but hearts are notoriously fickle.” She was putting her hopes, she said, in the recent unmistakable shift in public opinion. “To that, the governor might respond.”

Though Oglesby thought of himself as “a decent sort,” he was decidedly a politician, and one particularly reliant on the good opinion of the business and professional communities. Ideally he would have liked for the heart lobe that pumped sympathy for the oppressed to be consonant with the lobe that pumped hands for votes, lest an electrical cross-current create
a dangerous arrhythmia. And he was glad that some of the voices being raised in behalf of clemency came from prominent citizens. Among the forty thousand signatures on the petitions were those of William Goudy, head of the city’s bar association, and Marvin Hughitt, president of the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad. No less a figure than Potter Palmer was known to have spoken up in favor of commutation at a secret meeting of some fifty members of the city’s elite, though the strong opposition of Marshall Field had prevented any additional support from materializing. Other powerful business leaders, including George Pullman, Cyrus McCormick, Jr., and Philip Armour, let it be known that they considered the carrying out of the death penalty essential to the future preservation of law and order.

The signals were mixed, public opinion passionate and divided. Governor Oglesby hunkered down in his office, pondering the tangle of charges and disclaimers, hoping for a thunderstruck inspiration worthy of Solomon.