the frugality of Croesus, and should pour it all at my feet, I would not stand an hour between him and the Avenger. But for the innocent, it is my right, my duty, to speak. If this sea of blood was innocently shed, then it is my duty to stand beside him until his steps lose their hold upon the scaffold. I am arraigned before you for undue manifestations of zeal and excitement. My answer to all such charges shall be brief. When this cause shall have been committed to you, I shall be happy indeed if it shall appear that my only error has been, that I have felt too much, thought too intensely, or acted too faithfully. I plead not for a murderer. I have no inducement, no motive, to do so. I have addressed my fellow-citizens in many various relations, when rewards of wealth and fame awaited me. I have been cheered, on other occasions, by manifestations of popular approbation and sympathy; and where there was no such encouragement, I had at least the gratitude of him whose cause I defended. But I speak now in the hearing of a people who have prejudged the prisoner, and condemned me for pleading in his behalf. He is a convict, a pauper, a negro, without intellect, sense, or emotion. My child, with an affectionate smile, disarms my care-worn face of its frown whenever I cross my threshold. The beggar in the street obliges me to give, because he says "God bless you," as I pass. My dog caresses me with fondness if I will but smile on him. My horse recognizes me when I fill his manger. But what reward, what gratitude, what sympathy and affection can I expect here? There the prisoner sits. Look at him. Look at the assemblage around you. Listen to their ill-suppressed censures and their excited fears, and tell me where among my neighbors or my fellow men, where even in his heart, I can expect to find the sentiment, the thought, not to say of reward or of acknowledgment, but even of recognition. I sat here two weeks during the preliminary trial. I stood here between the prisoner and the Jury nine hours, and pleaded for the wretch that he was insane and did not even know he was on trial and when all was done, the Jury thought, at least eleven of them thought, that I had been deceiving them, or was self-deceived. They read signs of intelligence in his idiotic smile, and of cunning and malice in his stolid insensibility. They rendered a verdict that he was sane enough to be tried, a contemptible compromise verdict in a capital case; and then they looked on, with what emotions God and they only know, upon his arraignment. The district attorney, speaking in his adder ear, bade him rise, and reading to him one indictment, asked him whether he wanted a trial, and the poor fool answered, No. Have you Counsel? No. And they went through the same mockery, the prisoner giving the same answers, until a third indictment was thundered in his ears; and he stood before the Court, silent, motionless, and bewildered. Gentlemen, you may think of this evidence what you please, bring in what verdict you can, but I asseverate before Heaven and you, that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the prisoner at the bar does not at this moment know why it is that my shadow falls on you instead of his own. I speak with all sincerity and earnestness; not because I expect my opinion to have weight, but I would disarm the injurious impression that I am speaking merely as a lawyer speaks for his client. I am not the prisoner's lawyer. I am indeed a volunteer in his behalf; but society and mankind have the deepest interests at stake. I AM THE LAWYER FOR SOCIETY, FOR MANKIND, shocked beyond the power of expression, at the scene I have witnessed here of trying a maniac as a malefactor. (The circumstances under which the question of sanity was tried are thus described:-) That Jury was selected without peremptory challenge. Many of the jurors entered the panel with settled opinions that the prisoner was not only guilty of the homicide, but sane, and all might have entertained such opinions for all that the prisoner could do. It was a verdict founded on such evidence as could be hastily collected in a community where it required moral courage to testify for the accused. Testimony was excluded upon frivolous and unjust pretences. The cause was submitted to the jury on the fourth of July, and under circumstances calculated to convey a malicious and unjust spirit into the jury box. It was a strange celebration. The dawn of the Day of Independence was not greeted with cannon or bells. No lengthened procession was seen in our streets, nor were the voices of orators heard in our public halls. An intense excitement brought a vast multitude here, complaining of the delay and the expense of what was deemed an unnecessary trial, and demanding the sacrifice of a victim, who had been spared too long already. For hours that assemblage was roused and excited by denunciations of the prisoner, and ridicule of his deafness, his ignorance, and his imbecility. Before the jury retired, the Court was informed that they were ready to render the verdict required. One juror, however, hesitated. The next day was the Sabbath. The jury were called, and the Court remonstrated with the dissentient, and pressed the necessity of a verdict. That juror gave way at last, and the bell which summoned our citizens to Church for the evening service, was the signal for the discharge of the jury, because they had agreed. Even thus a legal verdict could not be extorted. The eleven jurors, doubtless under an intimation from the Court, compromised with the twelfth, and a verdict was rendered, not in the language of the law, that the prisoner was "not insane," but that he was "sufficiently sane, in mind and memory, to distinguish between right and wrong;" a verdict which implied that the prisoner was at least partially insane, was diseased in other faculties besides the memory, and partially diseased in that, and that, although he had mind and memory to distinguish between right and wrong in the abstract, he had not reason and understanding and will to regulate his conduct according to that distinction; in short, a verdict by which the jury unworthily evaded the question submitted to them, and cast upon the court a responsibility which it had no right to assume, but which it did nevertheless assume, in violation of the law. That twelfth juror was afterwards drawn as a juror in this cause, and was challenged by the Counsel for the people for partiality to the prisoner, and the challenge was sustained by the Court, because, although he had, as the Court say, pronounced by his verdict that the prisoner was sane, he then declared that he believed the prisoner insane, and would die in the jury box before he would render a verdict that he was sane. Last and chief of all objections to that verdict now, it has been neither pleaded nor proved here, and therefore is not in evidence before you. I trust then that you will dismiss to the contempt of mankind that jury and their verdict, thus equivocating upon law and science, health and disease, crime and innocence. Again: an inferior standard of intelligence has been set up here as the standard of the Negro race, and a false one as the standard of the Asiatic race. This prisoner traces a divided lineage. On the paternal side his ancestry is lost among the tiger hunters on the Gold Coast of Africa, while his mother constitutes a portion of the small remnant of the Narragansett tribe. Hence it is held that the prisoner's intellect is to be compared with the depreciating standard of the African, and his passions with the violent and ferocious character erroneously imputed to the aborigines. Indications of manifest derangement, or at least of imbecility approaching to idiocy, are, therefore, set aside, on the ground that they harmonize with the legitimate but degraded characteristics of the races from which he is descended. You, gentlemen, have, or ought to have, lifted up your souls above the bondage of prejudices so narrow and so mean as these. The colour of the prisoner's skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual, immortal mind which works beneath. In spite of human pride, he is still your brother, and mine, in form and colour accepted and approved by his Father, and yours, and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race-the image of our Maker. Hold him then to be a MAN. Exact of him all the responsibilities which should be exacted under like circumstances if he belonged to the Anglo-Saxon race, and make for him all the allowances, and deal with him with all the tenderness which, under like circumstances, you would expect for yourselves. ease. Although my definition would not perhaps be strictly accurate, I should pronounce insanity to be a derangement of the mind, character and conduct, resulting from bodily disIf derangement, which is insanity, mean only what we have assumed, how absurd is it to be looking to detect whether memory, hope, joy, fear, hunger, thirst, reason, understanding, wit, and other faculties remain! So long as life lasts they never cease to abide with man, whether he pursue his straight and natural way, or the crooked and unnatural course of the lunatic. If he be diseased his faculties will not cease to act. They will only act differently. It is contended here that the prisoner is not deranged because he performed his daily task in the state prison, and his occasional labour afterwards; because he grinds his knives, fits his weapons, and handles the file, the axe and the saw, as he was instructed, and as he was wont to do. Now the lunatic asylum at Utica has not an idle person in it, except the victims of absolute and incurable dementia, the last and worst stage of all insanity. Lunatics are almost the busiest people in the world. They have their prototypes only in children. One lunatic will make a garden, another drive the plough, another gather flowers. One writes poetry, another essays, another orations. In short, lunatics eat, drink, sleep, work, fear, love, hate, laugh, weep, mourn, die. They do all things that sane men do, but do them in some peculiar way. It is said, however, that this prisoner has hatred and anger, that he has remembered his wrongs, and nursed and cherished revenge; wherefore, he cannot be insane. Cowper, a moralist who had tasted the bitter cup of insanity, reasoned otherwise : "But violence can never longer sleep, Than Human Passions please. In ev'ry heart Melancholy springs oftenest from recalling and brooding over wrong and suffering. Melancholy is the first stage of madness, and it is only recently that the less accurate name of monomania has been substituted in the place of melancholy. Melancholy is the foster mother of anger and reUntil 1830, our statutory definition of lunatics was disorderly persons, who, if left at large, might endanger the lives of others." Our laws now regard them as merely disorderly and dangerous, and society acquiesces, unless madness rise so high that the madman slays his imaginary enemy, and then he is pronounced sane. venge. in the terms 66 The learned gentlemen who conduct this prosecution have attempted to show that the prisoner attended the trial of Henry Wyatt, whom I defended against an indictment for murder, in this Court, in February last; that he listened to me on that occasion in regard to the impunity of crime, and that he went out a ripe and a complete scholar. So far as these reflections affect me alone, they are unworthy of an answer. I pleaded for Wyatt then, as it was my right and my duty to do. Let the counsel for the people prove the words I spoke, before they charge me with Freeman's crimes. I am not unwilling those words should be recalled. I am not unwilling that any words I ever spoke in any responsible relation should be remembered. Since they will not recall those words, I will do so for them. They were words like those I speak now, demanding cautious and impartial justice; words appealing to the reason, to the consciences, to the humanity of my fellow men; words calculated to make mankind know and love each other better, and adopt the benign principles of Christianity, instead of the longcherished maxims of retaliation and revenge. Regardless as I have been of the unkind construction of my words and actions by my cotemporaries, I can say in all humility of |