XIII
It was not in any one of Mr. Howells’s novels or essays, except inferentially, that I learned this, butamong 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 thosefirst 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 theGreat 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 havepermitted 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.