CONCLUDING SKETCH OF THE TRIAL.
Not in populous cities—not in the centres of accumulated wealth and misdirected intelligence that integrity and the administration of justice can be found. The highest functionaries of States have to bend to these rings and cliques. Honor scorned, justice mocked, and shame departed, what is there left to purify the national streams? Clans who live by plunder and murder can, with their ill-gotten gains, find plenty of law protection. Above all things, the Bench should be kept pure and independent, so that the criminal, though rich, cannot escape; and the poor and humble, if honest, can receive protection. Not as now, when judicial decisions are measured according to political numbers and the varied influences of wealth. If mercy is shown at all, let it be on the side of the unfortunate and those who have had few opportunities for improvement; and never on the side of those who have had all the advantages of wealth and education, and who should set an example to the subordinate classes of the community. Let the lessons cease to be taught and children cease to learn that because a man is rich no crime can hurt him; and if poor, though honest, he can be victimized by a snap of the finger from some influential person at any time. Is it any wonder at the increasing centralization of power? It is a necessary consequence under present circumstances. The corruptions and abominations have nearly reached the maximum height, and are at present of such a frightful magnitude that some remedy, ere long, must be adopted. Liberty abused must bring on reaction, sometimes for the better, but oftener for evils as great as those desired to be remedied.
And now, in concluding this sketch of the trial, which was carried on with so much absorbing interest and excitement, a brief recapitulation of its paramount features may be of some utility in bringing within our immediate view those incidents of it which are the most pregnant of meaning as to the future consequences.
In reviewing the conduct of the then Governor of Mississippi, McWillie, it is not charity, nor warranted by correct inductive reasoning, to suppose that he intended to assist the Wages and Copeland Clan by giving his approval for the rendition of the defendant as a “fugitive from justice,” at the time he was an acting Sheriff for one of the counties of the State. It is, perhaps, better to suspect the Governor’s ignorance or want of the proper information, than to charge him with evil designs. Had he known at the time the desperate character of Shoemake, one of the clan, and the authorized agent to make the arrest; had he known that the defendant knew nothing of the names prior to the confessions, and, of course, could have had no interest nor malicious motive to misrepresent, with the fact of locating the Three Distinguished at the risk of protracted trouble and a ruinous expense, furnishing a strong inference of the truth of all as to the names inserted; had he known that Copeland himself, on the scaffold in the last moments of earthly existence, acknowledged publicly and before living witnesses the truth of the whole of his confessions; had he known and reflected that the full publication of them must have, not only a direct and powerful tendency to disorganize the remnant of the clan, but also to prevent future associations of a similar character; had he known the full extent of the horrors, for years, perpetrated by this clan, and that numbers still living, from experience, can vouch for many of the facts as narrated in the confessions; had he known that an offense committed in one State or county, and the injury sustained inflicted in another State or county, the case may be tried in either, which gave him the right to use his discretion; had he known and reflected that the conflict must be between prosecutors—revengeful and experienced, wealthy and powerful, from another State, against youth—against an humble but honest citizen of his own State; had he known all these circumstances and maturely considered them, censure could not be too severely applied for his approving the rendition of the defendant as “a fugitive from justice.” Who ever before heard of any person being dragged from one State to another as a malefactor on a charge of libel?
However, if he, without design, gave assistance to the clan in the shape of an unmerited expense and injury to the defendant, it is nevertheless true that he also, without design, was instrumental in laying the foundation for a more distant triumph in behalf of justice.
Many of the last observations are strictly applicable to the presiding Judge, McKinstry. We cannot believe that he had any affiliation with the clan, nor any sympathy for its continuance; but his reprehensible conduct on the trial can be better accounted for in the language of the competent gentleman who sat on the jury, and who had an opportunity of seeing and hearing and witnessing all, thus: “His strenuous ruling, strongly indicated to my mind, was to retain and maintain political influence with powerful cliques.”
The changing of this Judge’s charges, the veering about first from one side to the other, his expressed determination to force a verdict against the better informed and more respectable of those who formed a great majority of the jury, if it required an indefinite period of confinement to do it; and then, in the last hours of torture, came squarely out and told the jury it was bound, from the law and evidence before it, to find a verdict of guilty; and all this while knowing the awful character of Shoemake, one of the main witnesses, as proven on the trial; and while knowing that G. Y. Overall had no right to prosecute in the name of G. Overall, when there were more of the same name in the place, and to which the jury believed the confessions applied as intended by Copeland; and more, after conviction, anticipating something righteously in favor of the defendant, this partial Judge declared his intention before hand not to sign any petition for the release of the defendant from the prison; all these incidents taken together are too strongly stamped to be explained away. The refusal of the defendant’s application against the strongest of reasons in contrast with his unreasonable granting the prosecution all it wanted for several years afterwards, is also something which will not soon be forgotten.
But it may be said that Judge McKinstry did no more than is fashionable in the present day—that of consulting political interest in preference to the eternal laws of justice. This is but too true. It is a deplorable fact that, from the most inferior to the highest of courts and officers, measures are gauged according to political considerations and wealthy favorites. Truth is sometimes very disagreeable, but it is nevertheless indisputable that when the progress is rapidly onward to idolize vast possessions under a system which rather favors than checks the spread of those evils which sap the very foundations of strength and national vitality, and at the same time, and in the same ratio, to dishonor the real sources of wealth—honest labor—the nation’s decline and fall will follow in the wake of consequences under excessive government, no matter whether of Republican or Democratic. The baneful effects from either will be pretty much the same, as long as there are lacking the will and the power to restrain or repress excesses as they spring up. When general means of subsistence are easy, with plenty everywhere abounding, there is not much danger of convulsive change; but a prodigious increase of population with proportionally narrower resources to command, together with extensive disaffection and oppressive burdens from previous wars, then is the time for the exercise of prudence and a strict administration of justice in every department to maintain the life of the nation.
Granted that G. Y. Overall proved satisfactorily enough an alibi, that is, that he was not present at the time referred to; but it is again asked what was he doing associated with such men as Shoemake and Bentonville Taylor? Was he the tool of more designing men? What right—what necessity had he to turn prosecutor, when, as plainly elicited on trial, it was another Overall that Copeland referred to in his confessions?
The trial succeeded in nothing against the defendant only in crippling his pecuniary resources, and harrassing him in other ways. It rather strengthened than weakened the authenticity of the work. These circumstances, with the war, interrupted the sale for some years; but as might have been reasonably expected, truth can only be temporarily crushed to burst forth again with renewed vigor. Persecution only adds fuel to the flames.
Sick of the career of life which he had led, it was but natural for Copeland to repine against those who had shared his plunder and goaded him on to crime with ample promises of protection, and then deserted him in the last hours of his affliction.
The defendant could have had no conceivable motive to forge names—not knowing before Copeland gave them, that such persons were in existence; therefore, where there is no possible motive, there can be no crime or intentional wrong. So much then for the “wicked and malicious intentions,” as charged in the affidavit of Shoemake.
The foregoing observations close the narrations of the trial with the circumstances of connection belonging; and now for particulars, as reasonably presumed, of another attempt on the life of the defendant in 1862.
Throughout the proceedings of the trial Dr. Pitts has been properly referred to as the “defendant.” Hereafter his own proper name will be given.