THROUGH THE WOMAN'S EYES
Matthews knew nothing and suspected nothing about the worst part of
the plot against him until Albert's lawyer, Mr. Truesdale, nearly four
years later, was called upon to testify in the suit Matthews brought
for damages against the Vacuum people. This suit was to recover from
them for having enticed Albert away, and having persecuted Matthews
with false and malicious suits; but Truesdale's evidence at once
revealed that there had been a deeper damnation still in the conspiracy
against him. Mr. Matthews, one day on the street in Buffalo, ran across
Albert, who had just come back from California.
"No man ever used another meaner than I have you," said the now
repentant man to him, volunteering all the information he had,
and agreeing to testify if called on. This revelation made the
farmer-refiner a reformer. This was the public's business. If such
things could be plotted and done with impunity by one man against
another, there was an end forthwith of every liberty the republic
boasted. Especially menacing was such a conspiracy when concerted by
the rich fanatic of business against the poorer citizen to prevent
the latter from disputing the claim that a great market was a private
preserve, and that the right to trade in it is a privilege which
"belongs to us."[470] Matthews could have used his discovery as an
irresistible weapon to force his enemy to his knees, but he laid his
evidence before the district attorney. This official presented it to
the grand-jury, which found that the facts warranted indictments.
When the first indictment was quashed on technical grounds a second
grand-jury, sifting the facts, agreed with the first that the accused
should be held to answer in the criminal courts. This was six years
after the crime. The five persons indicted were the two former owners
of the Vacuum, now the resident managers of it for the combination,
and the three members of the oil trust, as the combination then called
itself, who had bought the Vacuum for it, and had been elected by the
trustees directors to manage it for them, and had so managed it even
to the most picayune details. The case caught the ears of the world,
not because crime was charged against men who had dazzled even the
gold-filmed eyes of their epoch by the meteor-like flash of their
flight from poverty into a larger share of "property"--the property
of others--than any other group of millionaires had assimilated in an
equal period; not for that, but because the charges of crime against
these quickest-richest men were to be brought to trial. Members of the
combination had been often accused; they had been indicted. This was
the first time, as District Attorney Quinby said in his speech to the
jury, that they had found a citizen honest enough and brave enough to
stand up against them--the only one. "There is no man," he said, "so
respected to-day in Buffalo as he for the method he has used to bring
these men to justice." He succeeded in doing alone what the united
producers of the oil regions failed to do, although their resources
were infinitely greater. The people of the entire oil country failed
utterly to do so much as get the members of the oil combination, when
indicted for conspiracy in 1879, to come into court to be tried. All
its principal men were indicted--the president, the vice-president,
the secretary, the cashier, and others. They could not even be got to
give bail. One of them had said when the indictments were found, that
the case would never be tried, and it never has been. The Governor
would not move to have those of the accused who were non-residents
extradited, as he would have done, does daily, in the case of poor
men, and the courts so tangled up the questions of procedure that the
people withdrew, and left the indictments, as they remain to this day,
on file in the Clarion County court, swinging like the body of some
martyr on a road-side gibbet in the pagan days, polluting the air and
mocking justice.[471]
That the trust was thoroughly alarmed, and saw the necessity of
rallying all its resources to save itself, was apparent from the
formidable display with which it appeared in the court-room. Present
with the five defendants, as if also on trial--a solid phalanx--were
its president, the vice-president, the manager of its pipe-line system,
the principal representatives of the trust in Buffalo, and many others.
Their regular attorney of New York was present with two of the leading
lawyers of Buffalo. Besides these there was a distinguished man from
Rochester, reputed the ablest lawyer in western New York, whose voice
is often heard in the Supreme Court at Washington. He had two important
members of the Rochester bar as assistants, one of them in the summing
up unmercifully scored by the District Attorney for fixing witnesses;
and, not least, a well-known United States District Attorney, who made
the convention speeches by which a distinguished citizen of Buffalo
was nominated, successively and successfully, for Sheriff, Mayor,
Governor, and President. The defendants come here, said the people's
attorney, with the best legal talent the country affords, the best
the profession can furnish; for the trust--"they are practically the
defendants in this action--with its great wealth, has the choice of
legal talent." Other eminent lawyers were also consulted, but were not
present. Never was a weak defence made the most of with more skill
than these gentlemen exhibited upon the trial.... But great as was the
ability of the defence, Mr. George T. Quinby, the District Attorney,
and his assistant, William L. Marcy, proved a match for them. Every
political and moneyed influence that could be brought to bear was used
to mislead the District Attorney, but all to no purpose. The jury
could see that the complainant, Charles B. Matthews, did not get the
indictment to sell out, otherwise he would have sold it out and not
have insisted upon a trial. The fact that the case was on trial, at a
cost of many thousands of dollars to the defendants, was conclusive
upon that point. An emissary, trying to get Matthews to call off the
District Attorney and to hush up this criminal prosecution, said the
oil trust could "give him anything, even to being governor of a Western
territory."[472] "You will have a chance," Matthews told the District
Attorney, "to line the street from your house to the City Hall with
gold bricks." But this public prosecutor had no price. He grasped the
full scope of this extraordinary case, which involved not only a crime
against persons and against the people, but against that true commerce
of reciprocal and equal service on which alone the new civilization of
humanity can rest.
The room in the Buffalo court-house, where the case was being heard,
was bright with the sunshine of a May day, putting out the shadows of
indictments and verdicts lurking in corners and pigeon-holes. Although
it was a criminal case, the on-looker saw, strange as it seemed, that
whatever strain there was in the situation appeared to be felt least
by the accused, and most by the public and the jury. The nearer the
eyes of the on-looker travelled towards the prisoners, the lighter
and brighter was the scene. Close to the accused sat a bench full of
notables, evidently friends lending moral support. That the bench was
occupied by men of importance was evident. They were supported by
platoons of eminent counsel and detectives. Only the judge betrayed
no consciousness of the presence of the herd of millionaires. The
whisperings and pointings and namings by one spectator to another
showed that the people's curiosity was greatly excited by the
sight of the richest men in the country, if not in the world, with
attendant millionaire esquires in or about the dock of a criminal
court. On this particular day the notables and their suite had come
in specially good-humor. Nods of kindly recognition went about and
smiles rippled everywhere as, settled into their seats, they listened
to the recital by the witnesses. It had been as good as a play to hear
the working-man, Albert, tell on the stand how he had been bribed and
threatened with ruin until he yielded to the suggestion that he should
"bust up" the works of his friends, partners, and employers, and run
away. There had been nothing funny to Albert in those threats: "We will
ruin you," "We will crush you," "You will lose what little you have got
left."[473]
"Then the compensation you got was $300 and the pleasure of selling
out your friends?" Albert was asked by one of the great lawyers.[474]
Albert did not smile, but "they seemed to enjoy hugely," reported
the press, "the idea that men could be bought so cheap." The eminent
counsel of the prisoners took the cue from their clients, and treated
the proceedings as a farce. When the State's Attorney was questioning
his witnesses, they objected to his questions with laughs and sneers
until he became indignant, and asked, with considerable emphasis, to
have the joke explained to him--a need the jury also felt, as their
verdict showed. When the Boston agent of the trust told that his
instructions from headquarters were that if there was to be any selling
at a loss to let the new competitor have the loss,[475] they all
laughed again.
So all the morning there had been fine sport in the court-room, and
the good-humor had risen higher with every fresh incident in the
entertainment until Albert's wife took her place in the witness-box.
She, too, raised a laugh, but it was not she who laughed. Serious
enough she was when taking her place on the witness-stand. She had to
face these gentlemen, before whose hundreds of millions her husband's
little venture had withered, but, as she herself afterwards said: "I
wasn't afraid of them, but I was nervous. But as soon as I got talking
I didn't care anything for them, although they all sat there in front,
in a row, looking straight at me."
The wife's story to the jury showed how such an adventure appeared
when looked at and experienced from the woman's stand-point--the
home-maker's and the home-keeper's--which the smiling row before her
were as little able to grasp as the participants in a pigeon-shooting
match to look upon that vision of flames, demons, and death-dealing
thunder from the point of view of the hapless birds. A bright-faced,
brown-eyed, pleasant-looking woman, as she took the stand she looked
what she was--an artisan's honest wife. "My husband," she said, "had
been employed in the Vacuum oil works at Rochester thirteen or fourteen
years, and we had accumulated some property--mortgages and money
and real estate. We moved to Buffalo, April 5, 1881, where he was
superintending the building of the Buffalo works."[476] After Albert
had yielded to the threats and the temptation, and had fixed the stills
and the fires for an explosion, he fled without a word to his wife
or his associates, hid, under an assumed name, in Boston, and then
travelled over the continent for a year--from Buffalo to Boston, to
Rochester, to San Francisco.
"When you left Buffalo did you leave any word with Matthews where you
were going?"
"No, sir."
"Or your wife?"
"No, sir."
While the wife was in Buffalo wondering what had become of her husband,
he was in New York with his venerable ex-employer, getting lessons
like the following in the secrets of building up a great commercial
enterprise:
"The best thing you can do, Albert," said the latter, "is to go and
write a telegram, and tell your wife to go back to Rochester."
"You'd better write it; I am a poor writer," said Albert.
"No," he said; "I do not want to appear in this case at all. Write it
so," he continued, "that she can move on the Fourth of July, and they
can't attach her things."[477]
The first word she got from her husband was this telegram to move
between two days, and back to Rochester the dutiful woman packed
herself and her things.
"It was two or three weeks before I heard from him direct or knew just
where he was," she said.
"I asked Charles"--one of the two managers--"how Al was, and he said Al
was all right."
"Would he tell you where he was?" the State's Attorney asked.
"No, sir; when I wrote to my husband I left the direction blank, and
gave the letter to Charley. I got an answer through Charley."[478]
For three weeks they would not let her know where her husband was.
"Think of that," said the District Attorney. "She had to go and take
her poor little letter to her husband, thinking, perhaps, if he was
away from her tender care he might get to drinking, because he does
drink some; but when with his wife they lived year in and year out
without his tasting a drop; ... afraid that he might get to drinking,
and that she could not watch over him.... It was a cruel thing to do."
"C. told me to go to the real-estate agents," Albert's wife continued,
"and try to sell our property and get it into money. He made out a list
of real-estate agents from the city directory. I guess that is all he
did about assisting me in the sale of the property."
"I asked C. if my husband could not come home from Boston. I was sick.
He said 'Yes.' Al came home and stayed a week or two. Then he went back
to Boston. C. told me they did not want the Buffalo company to know
where Al was."[479]
Albert was a man infirm under temptation. The employer knew, by
fourteen years' acquaintance, the weakness this man had acquired in his
service in the army. He gave him idleness, money, temptation, and an
assumed name to go to the devil with, if that agent of the trust was to
be found in Boston.
"You want to take good care of Al," said the good old man to his clerk
in Boston, "and not let him get homesick. If he wants any money, let
him have it." Albert travelled the broad way made smooth for him.
"Of course I never went around with him," said the clerk, in a
deposition; "a porter that I had was the party that went around with
him in the evening. I would hear what was going on, and I could judge
about the size of Al's head when he came around in the morning."
With all Albert's faults he kept one dignity to the end which makes
him tower above his seducers--the dignity of the laborer. A life's
discipline in daily toil had made his whole fibre too honest to enjoy
idleness, even at the rate of $1500 a year. He was free to come and go
amid the gaudy joys of a great city, as irresponsible under the assumed
name given him as if he wore the ring of Gyges. He had money for the
asking, and boon companions. But the habit of a lifetime of honest,
hard manual work was too deeply ingrained into the very substance of
his nature for him to become a cheap American Faust, revelling in
a pinchbeck paradise. This simple son of poverty had all his life
handled only real things, and had at every point had the mind's native
wantonness and riot checked by the hard surface which had calloused
his hands, and the outer air which had cooled him as he worked. His
were dreams of honest rest earned by honest work, and of family joys.
The self-indulgence that was revealed by the "size of his head in the
morning" was an animal exuberance that, as the result showed, did but
stain the "rose-mesh of his flesh," and went no deeper. Albert could
not stand the idleness of his Boston life. He went back to Rochester.
"I want something to do."
"What brings you here?" said his employer. "Go back."
After hanging around the office in Boston a few weeks longer, the
workman's nature reasserted itself again. He went back again to
Rochester. "I want something to do." "We have not got anything for you
to do just now," he was told. "You are all right."[480]
Months of idleness were interrupted only by odd jobs, like
superintending the digging of a ditch or the sinking of a salt-well.
Time and again, though he was drawing his pay of $125 a month, he went,
as he told the story in court, to repeat the plea for "something to
do." Finally, the elder of the managers, who was in California, sent
for him. He was to be made "an independent man," the new promise ran,
but really, as the sequel showed, was, if possible, to be kept out of
the way of too inquisitive juries and prosecuting attorneys. The wife,
treated as a mere pawn in the game, protested vehemently. "I went down
to the Vacuum Oil Company's office, and asked C. to give Al something
else to do. I didn't want him to go to California. He said that there
was not anything that he knew that he could do."
"I don't want Al to go. I won't go. Give him something else to do."
"I have nothing else."[481]
She had to yield, and her husband left her to go to California. His
employer persuaded Albert to buy a piece of land in California. "He
seemed to be very anxious to locate me there."[482] Albert sent to
his wife for the money, but the shrewd little woman sent only half.
"I thought I would let him pay it out of his pay." With the same good
sense the wife had not sold all the property when sent out alone among
the real-estate men. "I did not sell the real estate," she said; "I
thought there was too much expense."[483] She was not with her husband
when the rupture came in California. The first news the anxious wife
had of a change in her husband's affairs was when "Charley" came to
her, as she was sitting one summer evening on the porch of a neighbor's
house, and told her "Al" had quit them. "I do not know what to make of
it," he continued: "I think he must be crazy or something."[484]
It was not until his return that she learned the details of the painful
experience he had been through. When it was heard that Albert, upon
his return from California, had made restitution as far as he was able,
by telling what he knew to the authorities, to aid them in bringing
the principals in the crime to justice, there was consternation in the
trust. One of its detectives had been captain of the company Albert
was in during the Civil War. The captain now presented himself before
Albert as he went to his work in Corry, Pennsylvania, where he had
gone after his return from California, and became sociable rapidly.
He had great plans for Albert, and came to the house to discuss them
confidentially. Albert and his wife had been simple folks to start
with, but they had learned a thing or two by this time. The captain's
desire for confidential talk with his old comrade was so intense that
it would have been rude in Albert's wife to thwart it. She packed off
her daughter on an errand, and announced that she had a call up the
street, and would leave them to themselves; but she did not add, as she
might have done, that during her absence she would be represented by
the Chief of Police, whose appetite for confidential communications was
as keen as the captain's, but whose retiring disposition kept him in
the dark seclusion of an adjoining room, with his ear to the crack of
the door.
"Wouldn't Albert like to go to Russia?" the captain asked his dear
friend the private, whose existence he had never personally recognized
when they were so close together during the Civil War. "If the Court
will allow me to show by this witness," said the prosecuting attorney,
"that the captain came there as a detective for the oil trust, and made
a proposition, after the indictments were found, to Albert to flee the
country, and go with him to Russia." One of the army of trust lawyers
was instantly on his feet with "I object." The judge sustained him, and
the testimony was shut out.
Albert's wife kept close to his side, and held him steady. No, Albert
did not care to go to Russia. Advertisements of an alum-mine in Corry
then began to appear in newspapers where Albert's attention could
be called to them. By a lucky chance the captain happened to know
the capitalists whose boundless powers of enterprise could find
full outlet only by developing the hitherto unsuspected resources of
Corry for supplying the nations of the earth with alum. By a joyful
coincidence, these capitalists wanted for superintendent of their
bottomless alum-mines just such a man as the captain knew his dear
Albert to be. Would Albert like to go to Italy to learn the true
science of alum manufacture, and to show the effete monarchies how
an American could disembowel the earth of its alum? Salary, $5000
and expenses. No, Albert had no unslaked ambition to go to Italy as
superintendent of mines of alum, or green cheese, or any other lunar
commodity.
At least, Albert would take a drink? That poor Albert would do; and
when he failed to come home at night his wife went up and down the
streets seeking him. "A persistent effort had been made" by the trust,
Mr. Matthews testified, "to get Albert out of the country. I was afraid
they would get him away, as he might not be used in this case. Men
had been sent there to get him drunk, and had debauched him."[485]
Money was potent enough to persuade lawyers to make it a part of their
professional duty to help in this. One of the trust's lawyers sat with
Albert and its detective in the stall of a cheap saloon, and plied him
with liquor to get from him some letters of Matthews' they wanted.
"There they sat," said the keeper of the saloon; " ... they got what
they called for, probably.... I couldn't tell how many drinks they got
into Albert on that occasion; I think they drank there."[486]
While this courtship was in progress with Albert in Pennsylvania, wires
were being pulled to get him indicted in New York. The grand-jury of
Rochester was asked to indict him for receiving stolen property in a
watch trade he had made seven years before. This would have ruined him
as a witness in the forthcoming criminal case against the members of
the oil trust, but the grand-jury decided that there was no evidence
on which to indict. When Adam Cleber, a stolid-looking German laborer,
who worked in the same place with Albert in Corry, took the stand for
the State at the close, an eager excitement filled the court-room.
The State's Attorney was known to have his darkest sensation still in
reserve. What it was he would not, of course, disclose in advance, but
those hardly less familiar than he with the evidence hinted that the
fertile genius of the captain, having exhausted itself in the ideas
of the trips to Russia and Italy, had fallen back upon the genius of
his superiors, and had arranged to have Albert go a-hunting, and get
a "bust-up" as much as possible like the one he had been induced to
attempt upon his employers and partners.
"Did the captain tell you what he wanted you to do to Albert?" Cleber
was asked.
"Yes--" That was as far as Cleber got.
"I object!" screamed one of the lawyers.
"I propose to show that the captain made a request of this witness in
regard to what he should do to Albert, and what he should come and
swear to about Albert, there being no truth in the matter he wanted
Cleber to swear to," the State's Attorney urged to the Court. The judge
took the matter home for consideration over-night, and announced in the
morning that he would not admit the evidence. It was acknowledged by
one of the lawyers for the members of the trust on trial that he had
employed the captain to get evidence for them; but the judge, instead
of admitting Cleber's testimony, and leaving the question of its value
to be settled by the jury, excluded it.
In his closing speech District Attorney Quinby said: "Why, in Heaven's
name, my friends, didn't you place the captain on this witness-stand?
He would have been a feast for you and a feast for me. His ways
have been curious and sinuous, his methods have been peculiar and
corrupting, and they did not dare to put him on the stand because if
they did he would have left it to go to prison. That is the reason.
They know it."
The brave and steadfast woman told her part of this story on the
witness-stand. Her home had been broken up again and again. As she
herself said afterwards: "I had to live with my carpets packed, and
moved around like a gypsy." Her husband had been tempted to commit a
crime which compelled him to lead the life of a fugitive. He had been
spirited away and secreted; she had not been allowed to know where
he was, and could communicate with him only through a third person;
they had moved around, in her expressive phrase, until they had moved
into two rooms; the savings of fifteen years' hard work were all gone,
and the independent business, in which her husband had just got his
footing, swept away. He and she faced the world with no other assets
than their child and the palms of their hard-working hands.
"Well, it's taken all we had," she says; "we've lost it all, but I'd
rather it would be so than to have the money they have, and go about
hiding and sneaking. I'd like money, but not so well as that. When I
said to 'Charley,' 'I shall have to sell all my furniture'--'Oh, that's
nothing.' And when I told him it had cost us $100 to pay the expenses
of selling real estate--'That isn't much.' It wasn't much to them, but
it was to us, who had made every dollar by hard work. Well, we'll have
to do without the money, and just live along by honest work. We can
live that way. We have had all this trouble and lost our money, and
haven't made money enough to buy a calico dress."
All the good that had come of this loss of savings and home and honor
had gone to those at the bar of justice and their associates sitting
in the tickled row before her. On the cross-examination, which was
to crush the witness and her damaging testimony, the distinguished
counsel, not content with all the suffering and loss already inflicted
on this wife, tried to humiliate her still further, but the woman's wit
of truth was too much for the lawyer's wit of wile.
"Don't you recollect," the lawyer asked, "that you went to the house
of the manager of the Vacuum, and that you saw him in the parlor, and
that you asked him to take your husband back?"
"I never asked him to take my husband back."
"Then you did not ask him at the time and place I spoke of?"
"I never asked him anywhere to take him back."
"Don't you recollect upon that occasion being considerably affected,
and asking him to take your husband back, and his speaking of the way
in which he had left the company, which he characterized as shameful,
and that you cried--shed tears?"
"I never asked him to take him back. I recollect going there. I
recollect I felt bad, because I was talked to so much about it. I had
reason to feel bad. I am trying to tell the truth as near as I can."
"Then what was the occasion of your bad feeling?"
"It was because I thought we were going to lose everything, and would
not have nothing left. That is what I felt bad for--was shedding tears
for, if I did. I don't know as I did."[487]
Then came the laugh. From millionaire to lesser millionaire went
the enlarging laugh. The mighty cortege of the retained ex-judges,
famous constitutional and criminal lawyers, detectives, camp-followers
laughed. It was the laugh of hundreds of millions, and it clinked and
tinkled and rang. As if every mouth were a bagful of gold, and as if
every bag had burst, the golden notes of mirth filled the air, and
struck the ceiling, and rolled over the floor, rebounded and fell and
rose in mellow chimes of sound, and the golden rain dripped everywhere.
Millions on millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of the
coin of the republic, and in every coin a cackle.
"Yes, they all laughed at me," the little woman told her friends; "it
looked like such a great joke to them. Perhaps I did not tell it very
well, but I told the truth."
In closing the case the State's Attorney said to the jury: "A sorrow
was placed on that woman's heart that can never be removed. One of the
pathetic things in this case was that when this woman was on the stand,
telling her little story, how they were afraid they might lose the
few thousand dollars they had saved, the $6000 or $7000 they had been
struggling for for fifteen years, these New York gentlemen with their
millions laughed in her face at the idea of her being sorry to lose the
pittance of $6000 or $7000. It was the only time in the case, really, I
felt that these gentlemen were outraging common decency."[488]
Some time after the trial was over, and sentence passed and satisfied,
these men sent for Albert to come to Rochester. He went with witnesses.
There in the office of a leading lawyer he was tempted with desperate
propositions to do something or say something that would break the
force with which these disclosures must act on public opinion. "They
need not think," he replied, "that they can get me to make a false
oath to let them out of a hole. I would not do it for all the combined
wealth of the trust. When my wife was on the stand they laughed her
in the face when she told about losing all we had. Do you suppose any
man with a particle of American blood could have any love for them? I
think as much of my wife and daughter as any of them of theirs, and I
will do nothing to disgrace them." This hard-working and hard-living
laborer and his wife had, by thirteen or fourteen years of toil and
stinting, saved $6000. The laughers had in the same time saved about
$300,000,000, and somebody else had done all the work. The poor man and
his wife had been afraid that the $300,000,000 would devour the $6000.
It said it would, and it had. Shall not they laugh who win?