Hanging Day

I

THE beat of a hammer sounded out of the mist that covered the valley flats east of Cooperstown on the dawn of July 19, 1805. Early risers on the river side of town peered curiously from their bedroom windows across the wide dull gleam of the Susquehanna, for they knew that the gallows for the hanging of Stephen Arnold had been set up the day before. Only a few strangers who had chosen to camp all night beside that grim right angle saw two boys at work and heard them tell they were building a platform for Granny to sit on so that she could see the hanging ‘easy and comfortable.’

By seven o’clock the sun had burned the mists out of the valley and off Otsego Lake, and the town was crowded. The taverns, the Red Lion and the Blue Anchor, had been filled long before the previous night’s bedtime. That moment had hardly existed, for William Cook, host at the latter, in his usual holiday costume, — drab coat of the style of 1776 with buttons the size of dollars, knee breeches, striped stockings, buckles so big they covered half his shoes, and a cocked hat ‘large enough to extinguishhim,’ — had served up hour after hour such punches and flips as only a former steward on a British East Indiaman knew how to mix. There was talk of a knife fight around midnight over on Pig Alley, and some folks said that in a ‘wrastlin” down in Frog Hollow a ‘half-horse, half-man’ from the wild town of Canistco beyond the Steuben County mountains had put a slick Onondaga Indian on his back.

By eight, o’clock streams of carriages were rolling along Pink Street and Mosquito Road. From the Jams, round-topped hills above Milford, and the Twelve Thousand, steeper heights east of Schuyler Lake, from Hell Town and Dogtown and Butternuts, strings of wagons, men on horseback, and men on foot converged on Cooperstown. At the head of Otsego Lake rowboats and canoes slipped out of the shadow of Sleeping Lion Mountain and caught up with others from Hurry Harry and Muskrat Castle to make a scattered flotilla steadily advancing toward the shelving beach where Front Street rims the water. Groups of curious countrymen strolled by Otsego Hall, manor house of Judge William Cooper, whose hell-raising son Jim had been sent home from Yale College that spring, by Apple Hill, the home of Richard Fenimore Cooper, by Henry Bowers’s just-completed Lakelands, by the new stone house (the only one in the region) which Judge Cooper had had built on the southwest corner of Water and Second Streets for his daughter and her husband George Pomeroy.

Although the parade was not announced to start until noon, the yard across from the jail at Main and Second Streets was spang full by nine o’clock. Folks tried out the stocks, looked respectfully at the whipping post, and stared across the street at the door which was soon to swing open for a murderer on his way to his fitting and proper doom. They said that Stephen Arnold ought to hang, all right. He had whipped his six-year-old ward Betsey Van Amburgh so hard that she died, ‘and him an educated man and a school-teacher.’ All because the poor child could not help pronouncing the word ‘gig’ as ‘jig’ he had taken off her clothes and seven times he had driven her outdoors, where ho had whipped her until the bitter cold of the night had made him go back to his fire. The crowd got so excited talking that hardly any of them noticed when Jacob Ford of Burlington galloped up on a tired horse, dismounted, and ran into the jail. A few remembered afterward that he came out in a moment with the sheriff, who was frowning over what seemed to be a letter, and that the two went off in the direction of the centre of town.

By eleven, when the sheriff came back to the jail, Cooperstown, with only five hundred inhabitants, was host to eight thousand, according to the best estimators. Suddenly there was a blare of brass and a tattoo of drums, and Lieutenant Commandant Mason’s company of artillery and Lieutenant Commandant Tanner’s company of light infantry marched up to take their places as guards to the wagon on which Stephen Arnold would ride to the gallows. Governor Morgan Lewis’s love of military pomp was already losing him votes throughout the state, but nobody would kick at his detailing soldiers in full dress for so extraordinary an occasion as this.

Now the civilians who were to take part in the ceremonies were arriving at the jail door. In the little knot about the step stood the Reverend Mr. Williams of Worcester, imported to deliver the invocation at the exercises, and the Reverend Isaac Lewis, Presbyterian pastor whose flock were finishing up the first church in the township. Here was the loved dean of the town’s physicians, Dr. Fuller, and, in old-fashioned knee breeches, the eccentric Dr. Nathaniel Gott, recently succeeded to some of the unpopularity of Dr. Charles Powers, who had been run out of town a few years before for putting an emetic into the punch at the Red Lion’s New Year ball. Dr. Gott’s offense had been an attempt to collect his bills by writing and sending to his debtors a poem: —

Elaborately indifferent to each other in the small group were Dr. Gott and Mr. Elihu Phinney, bookseller and editor of the Otsego Herald or Western Advertiser, whose pen was soon to describe the remarkable events of this day. Ever since a jovial evening when they had engaged in the dangerous game of suggesting epitaphs for each other’s gravestones there had been a coldness between these two. Gott thought he had scored when he intimated that Phinney’s soul was so small that ten thousand like it could dance on the point of a cambric needle. But Phinney had replied: —

They did not speak to each other after that. Gott was the more annoyed since Phinney, founder of Phinney’s Calendar or Western Almanack, had won fame as a prophet when, through a typographical error in that popular journal, he had foretold snow for the Fourth of July, only to find on that day, to his own secret amazement and the loud-mouthed astonishment of his neighbors, that nature was heartily cooperating by fulfilling his prediction.

II

At almost the stroke of noon the big jail door swung open. The sheriff strode out first, mounted his horse, and waited for his aides to assist the pale, heavily chained prisoner into an open wagon. Then he rode ahead. Behind him walked the ministers, the lawyers, the doctors, and a few other important citizens. The band struck up a dirge as the infantry and artillery companies formed in front of it and began to march forward with the rolling wagon in their midst. As the slow procession moved along Second Street and turned down Main, the crowds that lined the way fell in behind and followed. Along the aisle of witch trees, ‘tall and lanky — pressing toward the east,’ past the Main Street stores they went. Soon the boards of the Susquehanna bridge were complaining beneath the wagon’s wheels. The gallows were in sight on the river flats a little below the red brick house that stood near the east end of the bridge. High above them in the distance rose the Vision, the peak which marks the termination of the mountains that form the eastern rim of the valley. At the foot of the gallows lay a wooden coffin, and in front of both, on a tiny platform of her own, sat an old woman rocking as she knitted and waited.

Elihu Phinney’s Otsego Herald a few days later described the scene as the wagon drew up to the place of execution and the condemned man, his chains removed, dismounted to sit forlornly on his coffin: —

Unconnected with the solemn occasion the appearance of such an extraordinary collection of the sexes was beautiful in the extreme. The ground at a small distance from the place of execution, which was a small flat, arose towards the cast in such manner as to afford every beholder an uninterrupted view of the interesting spectacle. It seemed when viewed from the high western banks of the river, a vast natural amphitheatre filled with all classes and gradations of citizens from the opulent landlord to the humble laborer. The display of about 600 umbrellas, of various colors; the undulating appearance of silks and muslins of different hues; the vibrations of thousands of fans in playful fancy; the elevated background of the landscape interspersed with carriages of various construction and filled with people; the roofs of the buildings, which commanded a view, covered with spectators; the windows crowded with faces, every surrounding point of view occupied, and the gleam of swords, bayonets &c. in the centre afforded, whenever the mind was detached from the occasion, real satisfaction to the contemplative mind; but on reversing the picture, and reflecting that all those blooming nymphs, jolly swains, delicate ladies, and spruce gentlemen, fond mothers and affectionate sisters, prattling children and hoary sages, servile slaves and imperious masters would be, in all probability, incorporated with their native dust in 100 years, it strongly enforced the truth and pertinence of a maxim of one of the ancient sages, that pride was not made for man. A recurrence to the occasion increased our humility.

The Reverend Mr. Williams of Worcester opened the formal programme. He climbed the steps of the platform, lifted a hand, and prayed for God’s mercy on all present and particularly upon their unfortunate brother whose life must soon be forfeit to justice. Then the Reverend Isaac Lewis stepped forward. The crowd was still as he read his simple text: —

‘And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.

‘And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.’

Pastor Lewis preached his sermon, a ‘pathetic, concise, and excellently adapted discourse.’ When it was over, at a signal from the sheriff, Stephen Arnold rose from his seat on the coffin and spoke. He was a man of learning, he was penitent, and he spoke well, ending his remarks with the sentence: —

‘It appears to me that if you will not take warning at this affecting scene, you would not be warned though one should arise from the dead.’

Granny, sitting on her little platform in front of the poor man, was obviously much moved by his words. While he was speaking, her needles flashed more and more swiftly in the sunlight and she rocked back and forth more and more violently. A strained silence encompassed the crowd now. The sheriff’s boots sounded loud on the platform as he brought forward the rope and adjusted its noose about the neck of Stephen Arnold. There was a single warning cry. It came too late. A feeble scream, a crack of splintering wood, and Granny had rocked off the platform and broken her neck!

The old lady’s death caused only a slight delay in the proceedings. The frail wizened body had been lifted and carried away before many of the crowd realized what had happened. The crescendo of questioning voices soon died out. Once more there was silence and the sheriff, standing beside the doomed man, spoke the last words the miserable fellow expected ever to hear, exhorting him to make his peace with God and bidding the spectators take warning from his fate.

Now, at the moment when nothing was left to be done save the suspension and strangling to death of Stephen Arnold, the sheriff took a few steps forward, drew from his pocket an official-looking paper, and read it aloud. It was a reprieve from Governor Morgan Lewis. While the crowd were still quiet, unable to grasp its meaning, the reader hastily explained that he had received the Governor’s message that morning around nine o’clock, but, after conference with several leading citizens, had decided that he could not disappoint the thousands of visitors who had come from far and near to witness the day’s spectacle. Possibly he did not think it necessary to add that the sudden departure of all these people in the early morning would not have allowed Cooperstown merchants to garner all the rewards which the day’s brisk trading had given them. Simply out of respect for the town’s guests, he said, he had allowed the scheduled exercises to continue thus far. Obviously they could not continue further.

III

The purport of the sheriff’s words reached the minds of the crowd and of Stephen Arnold at the same time, but their separate reactions to it varied widely. Arnold slumped to the floor at the foot of the gallows. The crowd roared its wrath. ‘Some swore, others laughed, but all were dissatisfied.’ Many had come a long way, lost at least two days’ time, been put to considerable expense for which they felt they had had no corresponding return. ‘They acted and talked as if they must have a substitute.’ They seemed to think that either the sheriff or the absent governor would do nicely. Toward Stephen Arnold, however, they exhibited little animosity. He had done his part well and in good faith. For a few moments a riot was incipient, but the sheriff avoided it. He ordered the band to play a quickstep, the soldiers to fall in, and he headed a noisy parade back through town. It drew the whole throng into its wake.

When it had reached the jail, the sheriff held up his hand for silence and granted Stephen Arnold’s request that he be allowed to make the last speech of the day. From the wagon, before the jail received him, Arnold said he wished to thank Jacob Ford, who had brought the good news from Albany, and other friends who had worked for his reprieve. Again he warned the multitude that had followed him on his joyful return from the gallows that they must control their passions. Anger, he said, had brought him to his shameful condition. Then he entered upon an incarceration which was to last the rest of his days, for his sentence was commuted the following year to life imprisonment.

Still enraged, shouting that they had been duped, damning the sheriff and his advisers for their cruelty in not telling Arnold of the reprieve until after his neck had felt the rope, the visitors who had swelled the number of Cooperstown’s inhabitants to almost twenty times its usual size turned their faces toward home. They left behind a dazed group of villagers who did not know quite what to think. In a few days, however, they had made up their minds. The astute Elihu Phinney expressed their sentiments in the next issue of the Otsego Herald or Western Advertiser; —

The proceedings of the day were opened, progressed, and closed in a manner which reflected honor on the judiciary, the executive, the clergy, the military, and the citizens of the county.