John Arthur Bowen's trial, on charges of attempted murder and burglary, began first, in late November 1835.
Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton testified that John Arthur Bowen had been a docile boy, perhaps spoiled, who had succumbed to drink as he got older. She said that she did not believe he had intended to kill her.
Wait a second... spoiled?
Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton said that John Arthur Bowen was "spoiled" because he refused to take orders from any woman.
First of all, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton should not have even had slaves to begin with, because first of all, it's just wrong, but even more importantly, because William Thornton's will stated that he wanted his slaves freed. But Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton & her mother wanted to keep their property for their free labor.
Had Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton had honored William Thornton's wishes, John Arthur Bowen would have never been caught up in this mess. It wasn't that John Arthur Bowen was spoiled. It was that Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton was spoiled, and she had been illegally holding slaves, even by the standards of her own time. But she got away with her crimes.
But Anna Maria Thornton calling John Arthur Bowen, a young man who had been enslaved his whole life... "spoiled"? That's fucked up.
In fact, that's what Henry Clay would say about one of his slaves too, and George Washington too. That they were spoiled.
A house servant of Henry Clay's, a mulatto boy, ran away from Henry Clay's violently oppressive wife & Henry Clay offered a $50 reward for his capture and he made a remark that betrayed his true feelings about kindness to slaves.
“We have spoiled him,” Henry Clay said, “by good treatment.”
Spoiled him? By good treatment?
Henry Clay owned up to 60 slaves at one point, and he was sued by an ex-slave, Charlotte Dupuy in 1829. Eventually Henry Clay would put Charlotte Dupuy in her place, by dragging her back, kicking and screaming, back into the slave life she hated. One of Henry Clay's slaves told about the heinous treatment Henry Clay executed against his slaves. The slave, a man who escaped to Canada, said that Henry Clay had once had him stripped and whipped with 150 lashes on his naked back for a trifling offense.
George Washington called one of his runaway slaves "spoiled" too. Oney Judge Staines would to freedom in 1796 and she lived as a fugitive slave in New Hampshire for the rest of her life. When she was asked why she left, especially she was one of George Washington's "spoiled" house negroes, Oney Judge Staines had told Joseph Whipple in 1796 that said that she had "a thirst for compleat freedom".
Complete freedom. That's what Oney Judge Staines wanted. That's what Charlotte Dupuy wanted. And that's what John Arthur Bowen had wanted too.
But Anna Maria Brodeau didn't want to feel any guilt about John Arthur Bowen getting lynched by the court system, so she defended him, and said that he didn't intend on hurting anybody.
Her neighbor, Henry Huntt, however, told a different story. Henry Cunt... uh, I mean, Huntt, was roused in the night by Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, and Huntt said that Anna had said that Arthur had come into the room "with upraised ax." Huntt described Arthur shouting abolitionist slogans while slamming his ax into the door and calling for blood.
On December 10, 1835, John Arthur Bowen appeared in court to hear the verdict. The jury deliberated for only 15 minutes before returning a guilty verdict, which meant that John Arthur Bowen was to be "hanged by the neck until he be dead."
Later on, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton pleaded to President Andrew Jackson to spare John Arthur Bowen's life. "The bloody execution" of the court's sentence, she told the president, "would be more horrible than the offense."
She explained that John Arthur Bowen was just a "boy", even though he was 18 years old at the time, drunk on that "demon rum" and that he had never raised the ax. Anna Maria suggested mob passions had driven Francis Scott Key's prosecution.
"The recent alarms & agitations [meaning the Snow White race riot of 1835] may have had an unconscious influence in determining the expediency of seizing the first occasion to make a severe and terrifying example," she wrote in the letter, which is now located in the National Archives in College Park.
Eventually Andrew Jackson grants Arthur a stay, meaning the hanging would happen later... and then he issued another stay... and then ultimately, Andrew Jackson gave John Arthur Bowen a full Presidential pardon.
On July 4, 1836, John Arthur Bowen would be freed out of prison.
Anna attended to the necessary final details to secure Arthur's safety. In return for the pardon, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton agreed to sell John Arthur Bowen to John Henry Eaton, a friend of the president who promised to get Arthur training to become a servant on a steamship, or a flatboat in Florida. Even though Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton wanted to be paid $800 for Arthur, she reluctantly settled for $750.
"I never intended to sell him for life, but could not now avoid & hope & pray that he may lead a new life and be happy" wrote Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton in her diary.
A few days later, John Arthur Bowen left Washington DC and embarked on his future in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Now for the Trial of the Century:
The United States of America versus Dr. Reuben Crandall.
Ol Frank Key didn't really care so much about John Arthur Bowen anyways. Ol Frank Key spent incredible amounts of time on the prosecution of Dr. Reuben Crandall. It was clear that the Francis Scott Key, the district attorney of Washington DC, believed that Dr Reuben Crandall was the real culprit in the Snow Riot debacle. John Arthur Bowen was a mere slave. But clearly Dr. Reuben Crandall's efforts to stoke the slaves' desire for freedom in America, Key declared as the trial began in April 1836, was nothing less than a "base and demonical" effort to incite slaves, free Negroes and others to "stir up against slave owners." Dr. Reuben Crandall, in Francis Scott Key's view, was guilty of sedition and should pay a heavy price.
The US versus Dr. Reuben Crandall show trial lasted 10 days.
One of President Andrew Jackson's motivation for appointing Francis Scott Key, was so he would put down the antislavery movement and to enforce the legality of slavery in the District of Columbia.
Key secured an indictment for "seditious libel" after 3 Constables, who were slave catchers in their off hours, found that Dr. Reuben Crandall had a trunk full of anti-slavery publications in his Georgetown residence, five days after the Snow Riot, which was caused by rumors that a mentally ill slave had attempted to kill an elderly white woman.
Slave catchers are one of the origins of the police... to make sure Black slaves abidded by the law, and get back on their plantation, and know their place. as being subordinate to their Massuhs, and to white people in general. The police also have their origins as strike breakers, such as the Pinkertons, who slaughtered white folks because they wanted to unionize.
Dr. Reuben Crandall had the abolitionist papers innocently, meaning, he only possessed them. He didn't distribute any.
One of the pamphlets found in Dr Reuben Crandall's lockbox inside the privacy of his own home, said this:
"Our plan of emancipation is simply this--to promulgate the doctrine of human rights in high places & low places, and all places where there are human beings--to whisper it in chimney corners, and to proclaim it from the house tops, yea, from the mountain tops--to pour it out like water from the pulpit and the press--to raise it up with all the force of the inner man from infancy to grey hairs--to give line upon line, precept upon precept, till it forms one of the foundation principles and parts indestructible of the public soul."
The U.S. v. Reuben Crandall trial was the most sensational trial in Washington DC in years. The newspaper coverage was extensive. The courtroom in City Hall was crowded. Several congressmen took front-row seats. Dr. Reuben Crandall was defended by two of Washington's most skillful attorneys, Richard Coxe and Joseph Bradley.
Joseph Bradley handled the courtroom theatrics. Joseph Bradley read aloud a statement on the evils of slavery. When the court demanded to know its relevance, Joseph Bradley revealed that the words had come from the mouth of Francis Scott Key himself years earlier.
Though Crandall’s offense was nothing more than possessing abolitionist literature, Francis Scott Key felt that abolitionists’ free speech rights were so dangerous that he sought, unsuccessfully, to have Crandall hanged. Key made national headlines by asking whether the property rights of slaveholders outweighed the free speech rights of those arguing for slavery’s abolishment. Key hoped to silence abolitionists, who, he charged, wished to “associate and amalgamate with the negro.”
In the April 1836 trial that attracted nationwide attention, Key charged that Reuben Crandall's actions instigated slaves to rebel. Crandall's attorneys acknowledged he opposed slavery, but denied any intent or actions to encourage rebellion.
Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner, aka the 1814 "Defense of Fort McHenry" poem, in his final address to the jury said that U.S. v. Reuben Crandall was "one of the most important cases ever tried" in the nation's capital. The issue, he said, according to the trial transcript, was "whether our institutions have any means of legal defense against a set of men of most horrid principles, whose means of attack upon us are insurrection, tumult and violence."
Key appealed to the all-white jury's sense of supremacy.
"Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?"
Joseph Bradley replied that Key's case was based on a tissue of supposition and that punishing Reuben Crandall for sedition would set a dangerous precedent that would endanger every American's constitutional rights.
A Jury deliberated for 1-3 hours and ultimately acquitted Crandall.
The sad truth was that Reuben Crandall, even though acquitted, already had been condemned to die, if only inadvertently. During his incarceration in the squalid city jail, he had contracted tuberculosis. After his release, he set sail for Kingston, Jamaica, to recuperate. It was no use. As he grew sicker, he welcomed God's grace. He never mentioned Key in final fond letters to his family. He would die on January 17, 1838 while he was in Jamaica. January 17, 1838 was 11 days after Dr Reuben Crandall turned 32 years old. So even tho Francis Key didn't get a convicted, or get Reuben executed by hanging, he was able to impose a death sentence on him.
Over a bullshit show trial.
There's the author of your beloved national anthem Amerika!
That wasn't the only time Francis Scott Key pressed charges against publishers for their abolitionist literature.
He did the same in 1833, several years prior to the US v Dr Reuben Crandall. In 1833, Key secured a grand jury indictment against Benjamin Lundy, editor of the anti-slavery publication, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, and his printer, William Greer, for libel after Lundy published an article that declared, "There is neither mercy nor justice for colored people in this district [of Columbia]". Lundy's article, Key said in the indictment, "was intended to injure, oppress, aggrieve, and vilify the good name, fame, credit & reputation of the Magistrates and constables" of Washington. Lundy left town rather than face trial; Greer was acquitted.
So even though Key wasn't able to win a conviction, he was able to get Benjamin Lundy to leave Washington DC. Perhaps that was his motivation for Dr. Reuben Crandall too.
The Civil War was a 30-year conflict that had five years of armed conflict at the end of it.
So ol Frank Key was the one who organized for the slave catcher's to raid Dr. Reuben Crandall's house, and he was the one who pushed for his prosecution, including pushing to have Dr. Reuben Crandall's body to be swinging from the gallows for some pamplets Dr. Reuben Crandall had in one of his personal lockboxes, in his trunk.
ol Frank Key wanted to lynch Dr. Reuben Crandall for his anti-slavery, abolitionist views.
The division between the pro- and the antislavery forces crystallized in these years, and it emerges in Congress really in 1835, right after the riot. If you look at our electoral map today, those [divisions] correspond roughly to the divisions between our red states and blue states.
Colson Whitehead wrote a book called "Underground Railroad" & he said: "And America too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all," says a character in the book near the end. "The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians, Make war, Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are."
Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton testified that John Arthur Bowen had been a docile boy, perhaps spoiled, who had succumbed to drink as he got older. She said that she did not believe he had intended to kill her.
Wait a second... spoiled?
Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton said that John Arthur Bowen was "spoiled" because he refused to take orders from any woman.
First of all, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton should not have even had slaves to begin with, because first of all, it's just wrong, but even more importantly, because William Thornton's will stated that he wanted his slaves freed. But Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton & her mother wanted to keep their property for their free labor.
Had Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton had honored William Thornton's wishes, John Arthur Bowen would have never been caught up in this mess. It wasn't that John Arthur Bowen was spoiled. It was that Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton was spoiled, and she had been illegally holding slaves, even by the standards of her own time. But she got away with her crimes.
But Anna Maria Thornton calling John Arthur Bowen, a young man who had been enslaved his whole life... "spoiled"? That's fucked up.
In fact, that's what Henry Clay would say about one of his slaves too, and George Washington too. That they were spoiled.
A house servant of Henry Clay's, a mulatto boy, ran away from Henry Clay's violently oppressive wife & Henry Clay offered a $50 reward for his capture and he made a remark that betrayed his true feelings about kindness to slaves.
“We have spoiled him,” Henry Clay said, “by good treatment.”
Spoiled him? By good treatment?
Henry Clay owned up to 60 slaves at one point, and he was sued by an ex-slave, Charlotte Dupuy in 1829. Eventually Henry Clay would put Charlotte Dupuy in her place, by dragging her back, kicking and screaming, back into the slave life she hated. One of Henry Clay's slaves told about the heinous treatment Henry Clay executed against his slaves. The slave, a man who escaped to Canada, said that Henry Clay had once had him stripped and whipped with 150 lashes on his naked back for a trifling offense.
George Washington called one of his runaway slaves "spoiled" too. Oney Judge Staines would to freedom in 1796 and she lived as a fugitive slave in New Hampshire for the rest of her life. When she was asked why she left, especially she was one of George Washington's "spoiled" house negroes, Oney Judge Staines had told Joseph Whipple in 1796 that said that she had "a thirst for compleat freedom".
Complete freedom. That's what Oney Judge Staines wanted. That's what Charlotte Dupuy wanted. And that's what John Arthur Bowen had wanted too.
But Anna Maria Brodeau didn't want to feel any guilt about John Arthur Bowen getting lynched by the court system, so she defended him, and said that he didn't intend on hurting anybody.
Her neighbor, Henry Huntt, however, told a different story. Henry Cunt... uh, I mean, Huntt, was roused in the night by Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, and Huntt said that Anna had said that Arthur had come into the room "with upraised ax." Huntt described Arthur shouting abolitionist slogans while slamming his ax into the door and calling for blood.
On December 10, 1835, John Arthur Bowen appeared in court to hear the verdict. The jury deliberated for only 15 minutes before returning a guilty verdict, which meant that John Arthur Bowen was to be "hanged by the neck until he be dead."
Later on, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton pleaded to President Andrew Jackson to spare John Arthur Bowen's life. "The bloody execution" of the court's sentence, she told the president, "would be more horrible than the offense."
She explained that John Arthur Bowen was just a "boy", even though he was 18 years old at the time, drunk on that "demon rum" and that he had never raised the ax. Anna Maria suggested mob passions had driven Francis Scott Key's prosecution.
"The recent alarms & agitations [meaning the Snow White race riot of 1835] may have had an unconscious influence in determining the expediency of seizing the first occasion to make a severe and terrifying example," she wrote in the letter, which is now located in the National Archives in College Park.
Eventually Andrew Jackson grants Arthur a stay, meaning the hanging would happen later... and then he issued another stay... and then ultimately, Andrew Jackson gave John Arthur Bowen a full Presidential pardon.
On July 4, 1836, John Arthur Bowen would be freed out of prison.
Anna attended to the necessary final details to secure Arthur's safety. In return for the pardon, Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton agreed to sell John Arthur Bowen to John Henry Eaton, a friend of the president who promised to get Arthur training to become a servant on a steamship, or a flatboat in Florida. Even though Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton wanted to be paid $800 for Arthur, she reluctantly settled for $750.
"I never intended to sell him for life, but could not now avoid & hope & pray that he may lead a new life and be happy" wrote Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton in her diary.
A few days later, John Arthur Bowen left Washington DC and embarked on his future in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Now for the Trial of the Century:
The United States of America versus Dr. Reuben Crandall.
Ol Frank Key didn't really care so much about John Arthur Bowen anyways. Ol Frank Key spent incredible amounts of time on the prosecution of Dr. Reuben Crandall. It was clear that the Francis Scott Key, the district attorney of Washington DC, believed that Dr Reuben Crandall was the real culprit in the Snow Riot debacle. John Arthur Bowen was a mere slave. But clearly Dr. Reuben Crandall's efforts to stoke the slaves' desire for freedom in America, Key declared as the trial began in April 1836, was nothing less than a "base and demonical" effort to incite slaves, free Negroes and others to "stir up against slave owners." Dr. Reuben Crandall, in Francis Scott Key's view, was guilty of sedition and should pay a heavy price.
The US versus Dr. Reuben Crandall show trial lasted 10 days.
One of President Andrew Jackson's motivation for appointing Francis Scott Key, was so he would put down the antislavery movement and to enforce the legality of slavery in the District of Columbia.
Key secured an indictment for "seditious libel" after 3 Constables, who were slave catchers in their off hours, found that Dr. Reuben Crandall had a trunk full of anti-slavery publications in his Georgetown residence, five days after the Snow Riot, which was caused by rumors that a mentally ill slave had attempted to kill an elderly white woman.
Slave catchers are one of the origins of the police... to make sure Black slaves abidded by the law, and get back on their plantation, and know their place. as being subordinate to their Massuhs, and to white people in general. The police also have their origins as strike breakers, such as the Pinkertons, who slaughtered white folks because they wanted to unionize.
Dr. Reuben Crandall had the abolitionist papers innocently, meaning, he only possessed them. He didn't distribute any.
One of the pamphlets found in Dr Reuben Crandall's lockbox inside the privacy of his own home, said this:
"Our plan of emancipation is simply this--to promulgate the doctrine of human rights in high places & low places, and all places where there are human beings--to whisper it in chimney corners, and to proclaim it from the house tops, yea, from the mountain tops--to pour it out like water from the pulpit and the press--to raise it up with all the force of the inner man from infancy to grey hairs--to give line upon line, precept upon precept, till it forms one of the foundation principles and parts indestructible of the public soul."
The U.S. v. Reuben Crandall trial was the most sensational trial in Washington DC in years. The newspaper coverage was extensive. The courtroom in City Hall was crowded. Several congressmen took front-row seats. Dr. Reuben Crandall was defended by two of Washington's most skillful attorneys, Richard Coxe and Joseph Bradley.
Joseph Bradley handled the courtroom theatrics. Joseph Bradley read aloud a statement on the evils of slavery. When the court demanded to know its relevance, Joseph Bradley revealed that the words had come from the mouth of Francis Scott Key himself years earlier.
Though Crandall’s offense was nothing more than possessing abolitionist literature, Francis Scott Key felt that abolitionists’ free speech rights were so dangerous that he sought, unsuccessfully, to have Crandall hanged. Key made national headlines by asking whether the property rights of slaveholders outweighed the free speech rights of those arguing for slavery’s abolishment. Key hoped to silence abolitionists, who, he charged, wished to “associate and amalgamate with the negro.”
In the April 1836 trial that attracted nationwide attention, Key charged that Reuben Crandall's actions instigated slaves to rebel. Crandall's attorneys acknowledged he opposed slavery, but denied any intent or actions to encourage rebellion.
Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner, aka the 1814 "Defense of Fort McHenry" poem, in his final address to the jury said that U.S. v. Reuben Crandall was "one of the most important cases ever tried" in the nation's capital. The issue, he said, according to the trial transcript, was "whether our institutions have any means of legal defense against a set of men of most horrid principles, whose means of attack upon us are insurrection, tumult and violence."
Key appealed to the all-white jury's sense of supremacy.
"Are you willing, gentlemen, to abandon your country, to permit it to be taken from you, and occupied by the abolitionist, according to whose taste it is to associate and amalgamate with the negro? Or, gentlemen, on the other hand, are there laws in this community to defend you from the immediate abolitionist, who would open upon you the floodgates of such extensive wickedness and mischief?"
Joseph Bradley replied that Key's case was based on a tissue of supposition and that punishing Reuben Crandall for sedition would set a dangerous precedent that would endanger every American's constitutional rights.
A Jury deliberated for 1-3 hours and ultimately acquitted Crandall.
The sad truth was that Reuben Crandall, even though acquitted, already had been condemned to die, if only inadvertently. During his incarceration in the squalid city jail, he had contracted tuberculosis. After his release, he set sail for Kingston, Jamaica, to recuperate. It was no use. As he grew sicker, he welcomed God's grace. He never mentioned Key in final fond letters to his family. He would die on January 17, 1838 while he was in Jamaica. January 17, 1838 was 11 days after Dr Reuben Crandall turned 32 years old. So even tho Francis Key didn't get a convicted, or get Reuben executed by hanging, he was able to impose a death sentence on him.
Over a bullshit show trial.
There's the author of your beloved national anthem Amerika!
That wasn't the only time Francis Scott Key pressed charges against publishers for their abolitionist literature.
He did the same in 1833, several years prior to the US v Dr Reuben Crandall. In 1833, Key secured a grand jury indictment against Benjamin Lundy, editor of the anti-slavery publication, the Genius of Universal Emancipation, and his printer, William Greer, for libel after Lundy published an article that declared, "There is neither mercy nor justice for colored people in this district [of Columbia]". Lundy's article, Key said in the indictment, "was intended to injure, oppress, aggrieve, and vilify the good name, fame, credit & reputation of the Magistrates and constables" of Washington. Lundy left town rather than face trial; Greer was acquitted.
So even though Key wasn't able to win a conviction, he was able to get Benjamin Lundy to leave Washington DC. Perhaps that was his motivation for Dr. Reuben Crandall too.
The Civil War was a 30-year conflict that had five years of armed conflict at the end of it.
So ol Frank Key was the one who organized for the slave catcher's to raid Dr. Reuben Crandall's house, and he was the one who pushed for his prosecution, including pushing to have Dr. Reuben Crandall's body to be swinging from the gallows for some pamplets Dr. Reuben Crandall had in one of his personal lockboxes, in his trunk.
ol Frank Key wanted to lynch Dr. Reuben Crandall for his anti-slavery, abolitionist views.
The division between the pro- and the antislavery forces crystallized in these years, and it emerges in Congress really in 1835, right after the riot. If you look at our electoral map today, those [divisions] correspond roughly to the divisions between our red states and blue states.
Colson Whitehead wrote a book called "Underground Railroad" & he said: "And America too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all," says a character in the book near the end. "The white race believes--believes with all its heart--that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians, Make war, Enslave their brothers. This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are."
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