Haymarket (46 page)

The Captain deliberately paused for effect. Then he solemnly turned his gaze on Albert. “But Spies is wrong. And that is what I’ve come to tell you tonight: he, Engel, Fischer, and Lingg will hang, they will most assuredly hang. There is no chance whatsoever at this late date of saving them.”

Albert showed no sign of surprise or alarm. “I believe you’re right,” he said quietly. “But why do you omit my name from that list?”

“For a very good reason. Because I believe strongly that
you
can be saved.”

Albert shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “If, you mean, I agree to meet certain requirements.”

“Yes. Even State’s Attorney Grinnell and Judge Gary have hinted they could accept commutation in your case, so long as
you
request it. After all, you’re American-born, you surrendered yourself voluntarily, and your speech in court, the depth of your sincerity, made a strong impression. The governor has let it be known to me—the hint was unmistakable—that he believes you are entitled to some special consideration.”

“If I agree to sign an appeal to him.”

“I urge you to do so. I beg of you to do so. If for nothing else, than for the sake of your wife and children.”

“Lucy is not urging me to sign.”

“Is she urging you not to?”

“She’s refused to offer an opinion, to say a single word on the subject.”

“But she’s denounced Fielden, Schwab, and Spies for signing. I heard her as I was coming down the corridor.”

“Yes, but I’m her husband!” Albert’s laughter eased the tension. “She’s rather fond of me, you know, much as she enjoys trying to out-radicalize me. She doesn’t want me to die. And you know something, Captain? I don’t want to die, either. I’m a young man still. I’m only thirty-eight. I’m not at all tired of life.”

“Then
live
, Parsons!” Captain Black burst out. “It is within your power.”

“William and Lizzie Holmes don’t agree with you. They believe Oglesby and his masters are playing a clever game, holding out the possibility of amnesty in order to make me crawl. They’re not satisfied with murdering me; they also want to disgrace me. And once they’ve done that, they’ll murder me anyway.”

“William and Lizzie are wrong! They could not be more wrong! Do you think I would for a moment suggest that you sign an appeal if I didn’t believe Oglesby was sincere in his offer?”

“Of course not, Captain,” Albert said gently. “I’ve always known you to be a man of absolute integrity. I feel certain that William and Lizzie are mistaken and that you are right: that if I sign an application for pardon, my sentence will be commuted.”

Captain Black sighed deeply. “I’m at a loss, Parsons. I cannot understand your reluctance. I’m at a loss what to say further that might bring you round.” Black’s face was full of pain. There was a brief silence between the two men, then Albert spoke, his voice eerily calm.

“I’ll tell you what the real secret of my position is. But I do so in utmost confidence. Can I have your word that you’ll say nothing of it until after November 11th?”

“Yes, of course,” Black answered, leaning forward intently. His stomach turned over at the casual way Parsons referred to the date.

“It’s like this, Captain. I have the faint hope—the odds are a thousand to one—that in refusing to apply for executive clemency I may yet save the lives of the four comrades who also reject it. If I were to separate myself from Lingg, Fischer, Engel, and Spies and petition the governor, I’m certain that would spell their doom. If there’s any chance of saving
them it’s by my standing firmly at their side, making their cause my own. That way Oglesby cannot pardon me without pardoning them as well.”

“But he’ll never do that!” Captain Black cried out. “In refusing to sign, you’re not cornering the State into pardoning the others, but rather giving it a legal reason for putting you to death. After all, they’re not that eager to keep you alive!”

“Yes, you’re almost certainly right. I expect my strategy will fail to free them, and instead I’ll end up sharing their fate on the gallows. But I’m at peace about that. I’m ready.”

There was nothing more Captain Black felt he could say. He knew that Parsons’s refusal to apply for clemency was in fact the only chance the other four men had to escape the gallows. And he realized that Parsons was immovable in his determination to give them that chance, even as he fully recognized it would almost certainly cost him his life. Captain Black took Parsons by the hand and, with tears in his eyes, simply said, “Your action is worthy of you.”

On the morning of November 6th, the prisoners were suddenly told that they must vacate their cells at once. They were swiftly moved into the small area at the end of the corridor. The guards then began a methodical search of the cells. Within a short time, a shout went up from the two guards rummaging through Lingg’s bedding. In a wooden box under his bed they’d found four narrow pipe bombs hidden beneath layers of newspaper.

The discovery, immediately released to the press, caused a sensation. The mainstream papers highlighted the most melodramatic interpretation: that the bombs had been intended to destroy the prison, perhaps to facilitate an escape, perhaps to allow the prisoners to take down as many of the “enemy” as possible with them. Rumors were already flying in the city that the anarchists were conducting secret drills and planned to free the prisoners by force on the eve of their execution.

The Citizens Association at once donated supplementary arms to the police: four hundred Springfield rifles and bayonets, twelve thousand rounds of cartridges, and a Gatling gun. The state militia was put on alert and two companies of the United States Sixth Infantry Regiment in Salt
Lake City were ordered aboard trains headed directly for Chicago. In the next few days, Captain Schaack and Superintendent Ebersold fanned the flames with fabricated announcements of the discovery of a cache of dynamite here, a hidden store of Remingtons there. Only Bonfield found amusement in the feverish alarm: “There is no reason to fear a disturbance,” he told a
Tribune
reporter, “anarchists are natural cowards. After all, when the police opened fire at Haymarket, they ran away instead of standing their ground like men.”

Captain Black and the Defense Committee were deeply upset at the discovery of the bombs, fearful it would reverse the mounting sympathetic trend in public opinion and cripple the effort to win commutation. They moved quickly to counteract the negative publicity. The four bombs, Captain Black pointed out to reporters, were far too small to cause serious damage, and yet too large to be passed through the narrow wire meshing of the cells; in other words, Lingg could only have meant to employ them for self-destruction—a theory Lingg refused to corroborate. He denied any knowledge of the bombs.

That, in turn, fed speculation that the police had themselves planted the bombs in Lingg’s cell in a deliberate effort to discredit the growing movement for clemency. That was the view taken by Albert and Lucy, among others, and Lucy publicly mocked the police for their ineptness. “More intelligent men,” she told a reporter, “would have placed a bomb in one cell, a fuse in another, dynamite in a third and percussion caps in a fourth—thereby plausibly making the case that some sort of genuine conspiracy existed.”

Unlike Lucy and Albert, Spies was convinced that Lingg was aware of the bombs, having persuaded some friend to smuggle them in. Spies had never much liked Lingg, and the two men had barely spoken in the preceding nine months. Spies now lashed out publicly at Lingg, writing a letter to the Chicago press (which Fielden and Schwab also signed) that characterized Lingg as a “monomaniac,” a man willing to sacrifice the lives of his fellow prisoners for a cause he did not even understand and—reversing the theory that Lucy and Albert had put forth—accusing him of putting the bombs in his cell in a deliberate attempt to thwart the growing momentum for clemency. A furious Lucy refused ever to speak to Spies again. Which prompted an equally furious Nina to cut off all communication with Lucy.

The big question now was what effect the discovery of the bombs would have on Governor Oglesby. On the very next morning, November 7th, Oglesby announced that he was setting aside November 9th to receive at the Statehouse all those who desired to present appeals for clemency.

On that same morning of November 7th, John Brown, Jr., the eldest child of the Hero of Harper’s Ferry, sent a box of Catawba grapes to each of the condemned prisoners, along with a note that asked them to accept the grapes “as a slight token of my sympathy for you, and for the cause which you represent. Four days before his execution, my father wrote to a friend the following: ‘It is a great comfort to feel assured that I am permitted to die for a cause, not merely to pay the debt of nature, as all must.’ ”

On November 8th, when Lucy appeared at the jail for her daily visit, she was for the first time subjected to a thorough body search, as were all the other wives, and although nothing suspicious was found, they were told there would be no visits that day. Lucy wheeled angrily on the guards and accused them of deliberate humiliation. “Someday,” she spat out, “the men you keep in dungeons will turn the key on
you
—and leave you there!” She swept out.

That evening chartered railroad cars left from Chicago for the State Capitol at Springfield. They carried the attorneys, many of the family members, and the leading supporters of the prisoners. But not Lucy, nor Lizzie and William, who announced that they would refuse to “demean” themselves. Some three hundred other sympathizers, many from outside the state, arrived at Springfield throughout the evening and into the early morning hours.

At nine-thirty the next morning, Governor Oglesby seated himself at a table in the back of the gilded “audience room” in the Capitol and announced to the hundreds of people assembled before him that he was prepared to hear appeals in the Haymarket case. Captain Black, with his wife, Hortensia, seated at his side, opened the proceedings with a lengthy and eloquent plea for clemency. The governor periodically interrupted to ask that a point be clarified or an argument repeated. Throughout the day Oglesby listened to every presentation with an unwandering eye and the keenest attention.

And for more than eight hours, with only a short recess in the early afternoon, the parade of petitioners wound on. Notables such as Henry Demarest Lloyd and Samuel Gompers joined their voices to those of
spiritualists, housewives, relatives, farmers, and labor organizers to urge the governor, in the name of humanity and common justice, to be merciful.

Though many spoke with passionate fluency or, more effective still, with hesitant, touching grace, little was said, after so many months of public debate, that could be considered new or surprising. That is, until the very end of the day, when Captain Black announced that he had in his possession letters from August Spies and Albert Parsons to the governor, and requested a private audience confined to a small number of people, at which he could read them aloud. The governor immediately granted the request, and some dozen people retired to his private chambers.

The Spies letter was the one—only now actually delivered to the governor—in which he requested that he alone be executed and his comrades spared. Hearing it, the literal-minded Oglesby seemed visibly moved, perhaps far more so than Spies had been when writing it, since everyone recognized the suggestion couldn’t possibly be implemented.

Albert’s letter, on the other hand, had been earlier seen by no one but Lucy, Captain Black having pledged not to open it until he was facing the governor. The letter’s contents, brief and shocking, shattered the Captain’s hope that it contained a plea for clemency. Parsons requested—with a harrowing irony apparent to everyone but the governor himself—that since he was to be hanged for being at Haymarket the night the bomb was thrown, he felt the governor ought to know that his wife, two children, and Lizzie Holmes had also been present. Accordingly, Parsons requested a reprieve long enough to enable the other four to be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, so that they might all go hand in hand into the Great Beyond. “My God!” the governor burst out, his face suffused with agony, “this is terrible!”

After a resonant pause, Oglesby recovered his wits long enough to announce that he would render his decision on clemency the following day. Less than forty-eight hours remained before the executions were scheduled to take place.

That night in his prison cell, Parsons took out his pen to compose another letter, this one to his two children. “As I write these words,” it began, “I blot your names with a tear. We will never meet again. Oh my children, how deeply, dearly your Papa loves you. Of my life and the cause
of my unnatural and cruel death, you will learn from others. To you I leave the legacy of an honest name and duty done. Preserve it, emulate it. My children, my precious ones, I request you to read this parting message on each recurring anniversary of my death in remembrance of him who dies not alone for you, but for the children yet unborn. Bless you, my darlings. Farewell.”