I was quite a small boy, at school, when my chum and model, Bill Everett, dragged me off to Wayland's Mill, to see old Mrs. Kitty White suspended. She was a very infamous old woman, who had been in the habit of kidnapping black children, and running them by night from the Eastern shore across the bay to Virginia, where they were sold. If they became noisy and obstreperous before they left her house, and suspicion fell upon her, she clove their skulls with a hatchet, and buried them in her garden. When finally discovered, the remains of nearly a score marked how wholesale had been her wickedness.
This old woman was very drunk when she came to be hanged, and so was the sheriff who assisted her. She called him impolite names, and carried a pipe in her mouth, and went off smoking and cursing. I remember that I cried very loudly, so that Bill Everett had to choke me, and saw ghosts for so many nights succeeding, that Crouch, our maid of all work, had to sit at my bedside till I fell asleep.
The atrocity of a crime makes great difference in one's desire to see its after tragedy; and the next hanging I attended was almost world-famed. Four men were suspended for shooting down an entire family in cold blood. They had embarked on a raid of robbery, and emerging from the barren scrub of Delaware Forest, fell upon a snug and secluded Maryland farm-house, where the farmer's family were taking their supper. They fired through the ruddy windows, and brought the man down at his wife's feet; she, in turn, fell upon her threshold, rushing forth into the darkness, and the remnant of the family perished except two boys, who slipped away and gave the alarm.
The jailer's boys of Chestertown went to school with me, and I was invited by the least of them to visit the jail,—a tumble-down old structure with goggly windows, and so unsafe that the felons had to be ironed to almost their own weight. And into the cell where the four fiends were lying, the jailer's big boy, for a big joke, pushed me, and locked the door upon me.
I was alone with the same bloody-handed men who had so recently, and for a trifle of gold, made the fireside a shamble, and the night a howling terror.
They appreciated the joke, and drew me to them, while their chains clanked, and pressed to my face their wild and prickly beards. There was one of them, named Drummond, who swore he would cut my heart out, and they executed a sort of death-tune on the floor with their balls and links. I lost all knowledge and perception in my fright, and cannot, at this interval, remember anything succeeding, but the execution. They were put to death upon a single long scaffold, the counterpart of that erected for the Booth conspirators, and the rope attached to the neck of the least guilty, broke when the drop fell, and cast him upon the ground, lacerated, but conscious, to be picked up and again suspended, while he begged for life, like a child.
The sixth miscreant murdered from revenge, which is just a trifle better than avarice: his girl preferred another, and the disappointed man, Bowen, went to sea. Returning, he found the united lovers in the exultation of happiness; a child had just been born to them, and, touched by their content, Bowen gave the old rival his hand, and asked him out to accept a bumper. They drank again and again,—the spirits burning their blood to fire, and reviving again the bitter story of Bowen's love and shame. Within the hour, the husband lay at the jilted man's feet! He was condemned to death, and I undertook to describe his exit for a weekly newspaper.
Still I see him, broad and muscular, climbing the gallows stair with his peaked cap, deathly white, and looking up at the sun as if he dreaded its eye. There was the muttering of prayers, the spasm of one spectator taken sick at the crisis, and the dull thump of the scaffold falling in.
The preacher Harden, who fondled his wife on his knee, and fed her the while with poison, passed away so recently, that I need not revive the scene into which all his bad life should have been prolonged.
The death of Armstrong, expiating a hypocrite's life at Philadelphia, is not so well remembered: he killed an old man in the heart of the city, riding in a wagon, and dumped him out when he reached the suburbs. His life, to the end, was marked by all insolence and infamy, and on the day of the execution, he made a pretended confession, inculpating two innocent persons. One hour after this, he made the following speech:—