HON. JAMES G. BLAINE,
American Secretary of State, 1889-1892.
“Department of State, Washington,
“March 7, 1892.
“My dear Mr. Lincoln: As Mrs. Maybrick lost her American citizenship by her English marriage, and as I fear she does not resume it by her widowhood, I can not instruct you officially as to the course you should pursue toward her.
“But her American and Southern birth, her connection with many families of the highest respectability and even of prominence in the country’s service, have attracted much attention to her fate.
“I have no other interest in her than an interest which you and I share in common with all our countrymen—the desire to help an American woman in distress. That she may have been influenced by the foolish ambition of too many American girls for a foreign marriage, and have descended from her own rank to that of her husband’s family, which seems to have been somewhat vulgar, must be forgiven to her youth, since she was only eighteen at the time of her marriage.
“There is a wide and widening belief in this country that she is legally innocent and illegally imprisoned. The official charge of the judge that murder must be proved and the official announcement of the Home Secretary that the evidence leaves a ‘reasonable doubt’ of murder are the premises of but one conclusion—the discharge of the prisoner.
“The fact that she was never indicted or tried by a jury of her peers on a specific count of felonious attempt to administer arsenic, yet is condemned to penal servitude for life on the Home Secretary’s statement that she evidently made such an attempt, can never be reconciled to the English principle that an accused person shall be tried by a jury of his peers. Lawyers here are among the strongest believers in the illegality of her imprisonment. Indeed, the sense of injustice is developing and deepening into horror.