It was not in any one of Mr. Howells’s novels or essays, except
inferentially, that I learned this, but among some musty documents the
worms were eating up away down in the foundations of the State House.
My work in the office of the secretary of state involved the care of
the state’s archives. The oldest of these were stored in a vault in
the cellar of the huge pile, and the discovery had just been made that
some kind of insect, which the state entomologist knew all about,
was riddling those records with little holes,--piercing them through
and through. In consequence a new vault was prepared, and steel
filing cases were set up in it, and the records removed to this safer
sanctuary.
It was a tedious and stupid task, until we came one day to file what
were called the papers in the anarchist case. Officially they related
to the application for the commutation of the sentences of the four
men, Spies, Engel, Fischer, and Parsons, who had been hanged, and for
the pardon of the three who were then confined in the penitentiary
at Joliet, Fielden and Schwab for life, and old Oscar Neebe for
fifteen years. Fielden and Schwab had been sentenced to death with
the four who had been killed, but Governor Oglesby had commuted their
sentences to imprisonment for life; Neebe’s original sentence had
been for the fifteen years he was then serving. The papers consisted
of communications to the governor, great petitions, and letters and
telegrams, many sent in mercy, and some in the spirit of reason, asking
for clemency, many in a wild hysteria of fear, and the hideous hate
that is born of fear, begging the governor to let “justice” take its
course.
There were the names of many prominent men and women signed to these
communications; among them was a request signed by many authors in
England requesting clemency, but there was no appeal stronger, and no
protest braver, than that in the letter which Mr. Howells had written
to a New York newspaper analyzing the case and showing the amazing
injustice of the whole proceeding. Mr. Howells had first gone, so
he told me in after years, to the aged poet Whittier, whose gentle
philosophy might have moved him to a mood against that public wrong,
and then to George William Curtis, but they had advised him to write
the protest himself, and he had done so, and he had done it better
and more bravely than either of them could have done out of the great
conscience and the great heart that have always been on the side of
the weak and the oppressed, with a mercy which when it is practised
by mankind is always so much nearer the right and the divine than our
crude and generally cruel attempts at justice can ever be.
But all these prayers had fallen on official ears that--to use a
grotesque figure--were so closely pressed to the ground that they could
not hear; and there was nothing to do, since they were so many and so
bulky that no latest-improved and patented steel filing-case could hold
them, but to have a big box made and lock them up in that for all time,
forgotten, like so many other records of injustice, out of the minds of
men.
But not entirely; injustice was never for long out of the mind of John
P. Altgeld, and during all those first months of his administration he
had been brooding over this notable instance of injustice, and he had
come to his decision. He knew the cost to him; he had just come to the
governorship of his state, and to the leadership of his party, after
its thirty years of defeat, and he realized what powerful interests
would be frightened and offended if he were to turn three forgotten men
out of prison; he understood how partizanship would turn the action to
its advantage.
It mattered not that most of the thoughtful men in Illinois would tell
you that the “anarchists” had been improperly convicted, that they
were not only entirely innocent of the murder of which they had been
accused, but were not even anarchists; it was simply that the mob had
convicted them in one of the strangest frenzies of fear that ever
distracted a whole community, a case which all the psychologists of all
the universities in the world might have tried, without getting at the
truth of it--much less a jury in a criminal court.
And so, one morning in June, very early, I was called to the governor’s
office, and told to make out pardons for Fielden, Neebe, and Schwab.
“And do it yourself,” said the governor’s secretary, “and don’t say
anything about it to anybody.”
I cannot tell in what surprise, in what a haze, or with what emotions
I went about that task. I got the blanks and the records, and, before
the executive clerk, whose work it was, had come down, I made out those
three pardons, in the largest, roundest hand I could command, impressed
them with the Great Seal of State, had the secretary of state sign
them, and took them over to the governor’s office. I was admitted to
his private room, and there he sat, at his great flat desk. The only
other person in the room was Dreier, a Chicago banker, who had never
wearied, it seems, in his efforts to have those men pardoned. He was
standing, and was very nervous; the moment evidently meant much to him.
The Governor took the big sheets of imitation parchment, glanced over
them, signed his name to each, laid down the pen, and handed the papers
across the table to Dreier. The banker took them, and began to say
something. But he only got as far as----
“Governor, I hardly”--when he broke down and wept. Altgeld made an
impatient gesture; he was gazing out of the window in silence, on the
elm-trees in the yard. He took out his watch, told Dreier he would miss
his train--Dreier was to take the Alton to Joliet, deliver the pardons
to the men in person, and go on into Chicago with them that night--and
Dreier nervously rolled up the pardons, took up a little valise, shook
hands, and was gone.
On the table was a high pile of proofs of the document in which
Governor Altgeld gave the reasons for his action. It was an able paper;
one might well rank it among state papers, and I suppose no one now, in
these days, when so many of Altgeld’s democratic theories are popular,
would deny that his grounds were just and reasonable, or that he had
done what he could to right a great wrong; though he would regret that
so great a soul should have permitted itself to mar the document by
expressions of hatred of the judge who tried the case. But perhaps it
is not so easy to be calm and impersonal in the midst of the moving
event, as it is given to others to be long afterward.
But whatever feelings he may have had, he was calm and serene ever
after. I saw him as I was walking down to the Capitol the next morning.
It was another of those June days which now and then are so perfect
on the prairies. The Governor was riding his horse--he was a gallant
horseman--and he bowed and smiled that faint, wan smile of his, and
drew up to the curb a moment. There was, of course, but one subject
then, and I said:
“Well, the storm will break now.”
“Oh, yes,” he replied, with a not wholly convincing air of throwing off
a care, “I was prepared for that. It was merely doing right.”
I said something to him then to express my satisfaction in the great
deed that was to be so wilfully, recklessly, and cruelly misunderstood.
I did not say all I might have said, for I felt that my opinions could
mean so little to him. I have wished since that I had said more,--said
something, if that might have been my good fortune, that could perhaps
have made a great burden a little easier for that brave and tortured
soul. But he rode away with that wan, persistent smile. And the storm
did break, and the abuse it rained upon him broke his heart; but I
never again heard him mention the anarchist case.