Bloody Williamson (16 page)

But no one in the courtroom attracted as much attention as Samuel T. Brush. Those who expected to find in this dogged opponent of union labor a man of decisive manner and commanding presence were quickly disillusioned. Instead they saw a man of medium height, so thin that he hardly weighed 125
pounds. Brush was fifty-seven years of age, and many observers, noting his stooped form and rounded shoulders, would have guessed that he was older. Short, red-brown whiskers covered his chin, and his eyesight was so poor that he wore glasses constantly. The most noticeable feature of his face was a blue-black birthmark directly below his left eye. His appearance was not prepossessing, yet his gray eyes were kindly and often twinkled with humor. When he spoke he drew on a large vocabulary without affectation. His voice was well modulated, his manner pleasant and affable.

At nine o’clock on the morning of December 4 the nine men charged with the murder of Anna Karr were formally arraigned. The defense moved that the case be dismissed, alleging a defective indictment, but Judge Vickers overruled the motion. Court then recessed until the following morning.

On the 5th the process of selecting a jury began. That day and the next, sixty-three men were examined, and not one was acceptable to both sides. Hour after hour the lawyers questioned talesmen, trying to ascertain their attitudes toward union labor, capital punishment, and the Negro; probing for indications of intelligence and open-mindedness. Occasionally a solemn, nervous countryman broke the tedium with an answer that sent even the defendants into laughter. One old man tried hard to keep from answering the question:

“What was your wife’s name before you married her?”

Finally, in desperation, the prospective juror appealed to the judge:

“Wall, now, Jedge, hain’t thet pushin’ a feller too fur? You see, it’s thisaway: I’ve bin married so long I clean forgot what Sal’s name was before I guv her mine.”

Another shattered the decorum of the court when he defined his attitude toward capital punishment:

“No, sir: I don’t believe in no capital punishment, and I’ll tell you right here that any man who does ought to be hung!”

Many in the courtroom laughed at the answer a farmer gave
to the lawyer who tried to find out whether he was prejudiced against Negroes:

“Wall, sir, I don’t believe in hangin’ nobody for nothin’, and I reckon I never could hang a white man for killin’ a nigger, but if one nigger kills another, and it was right down awful murder, I reckon as how I could send him to the penitentiary.”

Thirteen days passed before twelve men, selected from nearly five hundred talesmen, sat in the jury box. All were farmers, and most of them owned the land they worked. Only one had ever been a miner.

During the first days of the trial the state offered numerous witnesses to identify the defendants as members of the armed mob that had ambushed the Illinois Central train at Lauder station on the morning of June 30. None compared in effectiveness with Alfred Karr, the husband of the woman for whose murder the miners were on trial. As the tall, light-colored Negro with the reddish mustache and goatee took the stand, the spectators stiffened with expectancy, and a strained hush replaced the usual undercurrent of whispering and shuffling feet. In a calm voice Karr told how the bullets cut through the hair of the little child he held on his knee. Suddenly he stood, pointed to the dark face of George Durden, one of the defendants, and cried with passion:

“There is the man that killed my wife! I am sure of it. He shot her through the heart, and as she fell on the floor beside me and I called her by name, a stream of blood as big as this here cane [shaking the stick he held] burst from her bosom and soaked the floor where she fell.”

From the defendants charged directly with murder the state turned to Thomas Jeremiah, one of the two white men on trial. The prosecution admitted that Jeremiah had not even been near the scene of the riot, but contended that he was its principal inciter, and procured the arms and ammunition the attackers had used.

To prove its case the state presented two private detectives
whom Brush had hired several weeks before the outbreak. Both testified that Jeremiah, with John Paretti (indicted but never apprehended), had stored guns and ammunition in the boardinghouse in Carterville where all four men had lived, and that the weapons and cartridges had been removed on the early morning of June 30. The boardinghouse proprietor corroborated their testimony.

The state concluded its case dramatically. From the beginning Brush had taken an active part in the trial. He had filled several notebooks with abstracts of testimony, and had conferred repeatedly, in whispers, with the attorneys for the prosecution. Each night in his hotel rooms he had held a council of war, reviewing what had just happened and planning the next day’s strategy. Now he was called as the state’s last witness. Quietly and without perceptible emotion he told his story.

As the train stopped at Lauder, Brush related, he was sitting at an open window in a coach ahead of the one in which the Negroes were riding. Angry voices drew his attention. Looking out he saw Paretti, whom he knew, and heard him say to the conductor:

“I want to get to those Negroes.”

The conductor asked Brush whether Paretti, and several others on the platform, were his men. Brush replied that they were not, and told the conductor to pull out. Looking Paretti in the eye, he warned him not to shoot. The conductor signaled the engineer, and the train jerked into motion.

“If you don’t stop that train I’ll shoot you!” Paretti yelled.

Instead of complying, the conductor jumped for the rear platform, and the train gained speed.

“Immediately,” Brush said, “the Italian and the Negro behind him fired their guns.… Someone, whom I could not see, fired into the car, up toward the front end. Immediately after the two men fired at the conductor they fired at me. By this time there was a great deal of firing all around.”

The quiet voice continued.

“I opened the valise which was on the seat in front of me, and, taking my revolver out, reached out of the window to return the fire. I was almost ready to shoot, and was looking for the men when I heard someone fall or jump on the ground near the depot platform, about the length of a car from the depot. I looked that way and saw a Negro firing wildly toward the train.… I fired at him that instant, and thought I hit him as he fell. I then turned and fired at the Italian and the Negro.”

Brush concluded his testimony by describing the finding of the dead Negress and the removal of her body from the train at the mine.

The strategy of the defense was simple: to establish alibis for those defendants charged with participation in the riot, and to show that Thomas Jeremiah was not a conspirator.

To this end, witness after witness took the stand to testify that one or more of the defendants was somewhere else than at Lauder station when the train was fired on. Others, including the wife of the Carterville boardinghouse proprietor, swore that the ammunition Jeremiah was said to have stored up before the riot was inconsequential in amount. Still others testified to Jeremiah’s good reputation and character, and impugned Brush’s detectives.

With the testimony all in, Vienna prepared for an oratorical field day. Interest in the case had, if anything, been heightened by the testimony, and new spectators poured in to hear the closing arguments of the attorneys. These, it was evident, would take several days, for none of the fourteen lawyers had any intention of surrendering his right to make a speech.

On the afternoon of January 3, 1900, State’s Attorney George B. Gillespie opened for the prosecution, taking three hours to expound the law and analyze the testimony of the witnesses for the defense. On the following day L. O. Whitnet, Gillespie’s partner in private practice, consumed the entire morning on behalf of the defense. For the remainder of that day, and the two days that followed, the lawyers picked apart the stories of the
witnesses and attacked or defended the miners’ union and Sam T. Brush. One even read the Biblical accounts of the fall of man and Cain’s slaying of Abel, and from them drew precedents for the application of the death penalty. The spectators, crowding the courtroom from 8.30 in the morning until 9.00 each night, sat enthralled.

The climax came on Saturday, January 6, when “Governor” Johnson made the final argument for the defense and “Judge” Youngblood closed for the prosecution. “This,” wrote Jewell H. Aubere, reporting the trial for the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
, “was the day for the battle royal.… Today the old court house in Vienna was turned into an arena, and there before breathless hundreds these venerable men struggled for the mastery.”

Johnson began quietly and disarmingly by reminiscing about his boyhood in southern Illinois. He spoke of the jury as an instrument of justice, stressing the seriousness of each juror’s responsibility, and emphasizing the fact that guilt must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Turning to a defense of the miners’ union as an organization, he unleashed the eloquence that hundreds had come to hear. With a lump of coal in his hands he described the hardships and dangers faced by the men who dug the black mineral from the depths of the earth, and implored the jurymen to deal simple justice to his clients.

Following Johnson’s example, Youngblood traced the trials of his own boyhood, and challenged any man to show that his attitude toward the laboring classes had ever been anything but friendly and sympathetic. But a crime had been committed, a foul crime, and justice demanded that the penalty of the law be applied. With a severity approaching passion he assailed Jeremiah and Durden as leaders of a conspiracy that had led to murder, and sarcasm gave a cutting edge to his voice as he reviewed the arguments of the lawyers who had asked that these men go unpunished. Then he dropped oratory, and closed with a cool and logical discussion of the evidence.

After Youngblood finished, Judge Vickers read his instructions to the jury, and put the case in its hands.

As dawn broke on Sunday morning, the bailiff in charge of the jurors left the courthouse to summon the judge and the lawyers. The defendants were brought in from the jail. To the audience, which included half a dozen sleepy spectators, the judge read the verdict:

“We, the jurors sworn to inquire into this cause, find the defendants not guilty of the crime charged.”

There was no demonstration.

That afternoon the lawyers, the defendants (except four who had been held for violating an injunction issued by the United States Court), and their friends and families started for their homes. At every station crowds prevented the train from proceeding until hundreds had shaken the hand of “Governor” Johnson, whom all credited with the acquittal. Nowhere did the celebration approach that at Carterville, where at least a thousand people, accompanied by a band, had assembled. There, from the platform of his car, Johnson made a short speech. On the 30th day of June, he said, Sam T. Brush looked from a car window at Carterville and saw his enemies. “On the 7th day of January,” he continued, “we look out of a car window and see our friends. Brush and the attorneys for the prosecution tried to make the people of Vienna believe that the people of Carterville are all cut-throats and anarchists. But we convinced them that you are law-abiding and good citizens of this state.”

After the Lauder case, the trial of the Carterville rioters was an anticlimax, in spite of the fact that the second riot far exceeded the first in seriousness. Everyone knew what the outcome would be. If a Johnson County jury would not convict Negroes for killing Negroes, could there be any real possibility that white men would be punished for the same offense?

The trial, which began at Vienna on January 23, 1900, followed the pattern of the earlier case. Once again strangers filled the county seat and crowded the courtroom from morning until
night. The same lawyers were on hand, with the defense banking heavily on Johnson. Once again weeks were consumed in examining almost six hundred talesmen before a jury was selected. As before, the jury consisted mainly of farmers, all fairly young.

On February 13, Youngblood opened for the prosecution. In a speech of an hour and a half he expounded the law and outlined the state’s case against the twelve prisoners, all charged with the murder of the Negro, Sim Cummins. In reply, W. W. Duncan indicated that the defense would be an alibi for some of the defendants, justifiable homicide for others.

The state took seven days to present its witnesses. Altogether, fifty-two testified. Some had seen old man Shadowens, his two sons, and Elmer James, all carrying guns, on their way to the Carterville railroad station just before the riot. Some had seen Willis Carney, or Robert Hatfield, or Mat Walker, fire at the Negroes as they ran down the tracks in terror. Others testified that the colored men had been anything but provocative in their behavior, and that the riot was precipitated by the white miners who had ordered them out of town. In all, nine of the defendants were positively identified as having taken part in the shooting. In order not to weaken its case, the state dismissed the indictments against the other three defendants, and yielded to the defense.

The defense introduced a number of witnesses, some of them colored, who swore that the Negroes had come to Carterville on September 17 looking for trouble, and that their actions at the Italian saloon early that morning, and at the railroad station later in the day, had precipitated it. Three of the prisoners—Matthew Walker, Willis Carney, and Lem Shadowens—admitted frankly that they had taken part in the riot, but all swore that Sim Cummins had begun the shooting and that they had fired only in self-defense.
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Other defendants were located at points distant from
the station at the time of the riot. A succession of witnesses, principally Carterville businessmen, testified to the good character of the nine men standing trial.

On March 1, after six weeks had been spent in selecting a jury and taking testimony, the lawyers began their closing arguments. For three days the old courtroom rang with sententious oratory. The testimony of witnesses was emphasized or torn apart, prejudice was charged and disavowed, the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution were cited, and the shades of Jefferson and Lincoln appealed to.