Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

"No man ever used another meaner than I have you," said the now repentant man to him, volunteering all the information he had, and agreeing to testify if called on. This revelation made the farmer-refiner a reformer. This was the public's business. If such things could be plotted and done with impunity by one man against another, there was an end forthwith of every liberty the republic boasted. Especially menacing was such a conspiracy when concerted by the rich fanatic of business against the poorer citizen to prevent the latter from disputing the claim that a great market was a private preserve, and that the right to trade in it is a privilege which "belongs to us."[470] Matthews could have used his discovery as an irresistible weapon to force his enemy to his knees, but he laid his evidence before the district attorney. This official presented it to the grand-jury, which found that the facts warranted indictments. When the first indictment was quashed on technical grounds a second grand-jury, sifting the facts, agreed with the first that the accused should be held to answer in the criminal courts. This was six years after the crime. The five persons indicted were the two former owners of the Vacuum, now the resident managers of it for the combination, and the three members of the oil trust, as the combination then called itself, who had bought the Vacuum for it, and had been elected by the trustees directors to manage it for them, and had so managed it even to the most picayune details. The case caught the ears of the world, not because crime was charged against men who had dazzled even the gold-filmed eyes of their epoch by the meteor-like flash of their flight from poverty into a larger share of "property"—the property of others—than any other group of millionaires had assimilated in an equal period; not for that, but because the charges of crime against these quickest-richest men were to be brought to trial. Members of the combination had been often accused; they had been indicted. This was the first time, as District Attorney Quinby said in his speech to the jury, that they had found a citizen honest enough and brave enough to stand up against them—the only one. "There is no man," he said, "so respected to-day in Buffalo as he for the method he has used to bring these men to justice." He succeeded in doing alone what the united producers of the oil regions failed to do, although their resources were infinitely greater. The people of the entire oil country failed utterly to do so much as get the members of the oil combination, when indicted for conspiracy in 1879, to come into court to be tried. All its principal men were indicted—the president, the vice-president, the secretary, the cashier, and others. They could not even be got to give bail. One of them had said when the indictments were found, that the case would never be tried, and it never has been. The Governor would not move to have those of the accused who were non-residents extradited, as he would have done, does daily, in the case of poor men, and the courts so tangled up the questions of procedure that the people withdrew, and left the indictments, as they remain to this day, on file in the Clarion County court, swinging like the body of some martyr on a road-side gibbet in the pagan days, polluting the air and mocking justice.[471]

That the trust was thoroughly alarmed, and saw the necessity of rallying all its resources to save itself, was apparent from the formidable display with which it appeared in the court-room. Present with the five defendants, as if also on trial—a solid phalanx—were its president, the vice-president, the manager of its pipe-line system, the principal representatives of the trust in Buffalo, and many others. Their regular attorney of New York was present with two of the leading lawyers of Buffalo. Besides these there was a distinguished man from Rochester, reputed the ablest lawyer in western New York, whose voice is often heard in the Supreme Court at Washington. He had two important members of the Rochester bar as assistants, one of them in the summing up unmercifully scored by the District Attorney for fixing witnesses; and, not least, a well-known United States District Attorney, who made the convention speeches by which a distinguished citizen of Buffalo was nominated, successively and successfully, for Sheriff, Mayor, Governor, and President. The defendants come here, said the people's attorney, with the best legal talent the country affords, the best the profession can furnish; for the trust—"they are practically the defendants in this action—with its great wealth, has the choice of legal talent." Other eminent lawyers were also consulted, but were not present. Never was a weak defence made the most of with more skill than these gentlemen exhibited upon the trial.... But great as was the ability of the defence, Mr. George T. Quinby, the District Attorney, and his assistant, William L. Marcy, proved a match for them. Every political and moneyed influence that could be brought to bear was used to mislead the District Attorney, but all to no purpose. The jury could see that the complainant, Charles B. Matthews, did not get the indictment to sell out, otherwise he would have sold it out and not have insisted upon a trial. The fact that the case was on trial, at a cost of many thousands of dollars to the defendants, was conclusive upon that point. An emissary, trying to get Matthews to call off the District Attorney and to hush up this criminal prosecution, said the oil trust could "give him anything, even to being governor of a Western territory."[472] "You will have a chance," Matthews told the District Attorney, "to line the street from your house to the City Hall with gold bricks." But this public prosecutor had no price. He grasped the full scope of this extraordinary case, which involved not only a crime against persons and against the people, but against that true commerce of reciprocal and equal service on which alone the new civilization of humanity can rest.

The room in the Buffalo court-house, where the case was being heard, was bright with the sunshine of a May day, putting out the shadows of indictments and verdicts lurking in corners and pigeon-holes. Although it was a criminal case, the on-looker saw, strange as it seemed, that whatever strain there was in the situation appeared to be felt least by the accused, and most by the public and the jury. The nearer the eyes of the on-looker travelled towards the prisoners, the lighter and brighter was the scene. Close to the accused sat a bench full of notables, evidently friends lending moral support. That the bench was occupied by men of importance was evident. They were supported by platoons of eminent counsel and detectives. Only the judge betrayed no consciousness of the presence of the herd of millionaires. The whisperings and pointings and namings by one spectator to another showed that the people's curiosity was greatly excited by the sight of the richest men in the country, if not in the world, with attendant millionaire esquires in or about the dock of a criminal court. On this particular day the notables and their suite had come in specially good-humor. Nods of kindly recognition went about and smiles rippled everywhere as, settled into their seats, they listened to the recital by the witnesses. It had been as good as a play to hear the working-man, Albert, tell on the stand how he had been bribed and threatened with ruin until he yielded to the suggestion that he should "bust up" the works of his friends, partners, and employers, and run away. There had been nothing funny to Albert in those threats: "We will ruin you," "We will crush you," "You will lose what little you have got left."[473]

"Then the compensation you got was $300 and the pleasure of selling out your friends?" Albert was asked by one of the great lawyers.[474] Albert did not smile, but "they seemed to enjoy hugely," reported the press, "the idea that men could be bought so cheap." The eminent counsel of the prisoners took the cue from their clients, and treated the proceedings as a farce. When the State's Attorney was questioning his witnesses, they objected to his questions with laughs and sneers until he became indignant, and asked, with considerable emphasis, to have the joke explained to him—a need the jury also felt, as their verdict showed. When the Boston agent of the trust told that his instructions from headquarters were that if there was to be any selling at a loss to let the new competitor have the loss,[475] they all laughed again.

So all the morning there had been fine sport in the court-room, and the good-humor had risen higher with every fresh incident in the entertainment until Albert's wife took her place in the witness-box. She, too, raised a laugh, but it was not she who laughed. Serious enough she was when taking her place on the witness-stand. She had to face these gentlemen, before whose hundreds of millions her husband's little venture had withered, but, as she herself afterwards said: "I wasn't afraid of them, but I was nervous. But as soon as I got talking I didn't care anything for them, although they all sat there in front, in a row, looking straight at me."

The wife's story to the jury showed how such an adventure appeared when looked at and experienced from the woman's stand-point—the home-maker's and the home-keeper's—which the smiling row before her were as little able to grasp as the participants in a pigeon-shooting match to look upon that vision of flames, demons, and death-dealing thunder from the point of view of the hapless birds. A bright-faced, brown-eyed, pleasant-looking woman, as she took the stand she looked what she was—an artisan's honest wife. "My husband," she said, "had been employed in the Vacuum oil works at Rochester thirteen or fourteen years, and we had accumulated some property—mortgages and money and real estate. We moved to Buffalo, April 5, 1881, where he was superintending the building of the Buffalo works."[476] After Albert had yielded to the threats and the temptation, and had fixed the stills and the fires for an explosion, he fled without a word to his wife or his associates, hid, under an assumed name, in Boston, and then travelled over the continent for a year—from Buffalo to Boston, to Rochester, to San Francisco.

"When you left Buffalo did you leave any word with Matthews where you were going?"

"No, sir."

"Or your wife?"

"No, sir."