1826. MORGAN KIDNAPPED. 111 picked up near by, and balls of cotton and whisps of straw soaked with turpentine were found under the stairways. Meantime early in the morning of this same Sunday Nicholas G. Chesebro, of Canandaigua, a hatter by trade, and one of the coroners of Ontario County, obtained from Jeffrey Chipman, justice of the peace, a warrant for the arrest of Morgan on a charge of stealing a shirt and cravat from an innkeeper named Kingsley. Armed with this, and attended by the constable and a small posse, Chesebro repaired to Batavia, and on Monday, September eleventh, Morgan was apprehended. The prisoner had been arrested for debt in July, was at that time on the limits of the jail, and could not lawfully be taken without them. But it mattered not, and in utter defiance of law he was carried to Canandaigua, and there discharged by the justice when it was proved that the shirt and cravat were borrowed and not stolen. The next minute he was rearrested for an old debt of two dollars and sixty-five cents due an innkeeper, confessed judgment, and, stripping off his coat, asked the constable to levy on it. The request was refused, and Morgan was sent to the common jail. There he remained till about nine o'clock on the night of September twelfth, when a man named Loton Lawson appeared at the jail, paid the debt, persuaded the jailer's wife, who was in charge in her husband's absence, to liberate the prisoner, and came out of the jail with Morgan on his arm. When a few yards from the door, Morgan was seized by a number of men, and, despite his struggles and cries of murder, was hurried into a carriage. Many persons living near heard his cries, and one man, hurrying from his house to ascertain the cause, met Edward Sawyer and Nicholas G. Chesebro, who were standing by quiet spectators of the scene, and asked what was the matter. Chesebro answered, 'Nothing, only a man has been let out of jail and has been taken on a warrant and is going to be tried." Thus assured, he did not interfere, and the carriage was driven to Rochester. Just beyond the town a change of carriage, horses, and driver was made, after which Morgan was taken westward along the ridge road toward Lewiston. As the journey proceeded the utmost secrecy is said to have been observed. Public houses were avoided as much as possible, the blinds of the carriage were always pulled down, and horses furnished by Masons living along the road were exchanged in secluded places. When Niagara County was reached, Eli Bruce, the high sheriff, took the party in charge, and went with the carriage to Lewiston. There, in the dead of night, Morgan was put into another carriage, which was driven by way of Youngstown to Fort Niagara, about a mile beyond the town. The fort had been unoccupied since the troops left it in May, 1826, but was in charge of a keeper. Save this man and his wife and a Mr. Giddins, who kept the ferry and lived directly on the bank of the river, no human beings dwelt near the fort, into the stone magazine of which Morgan is said to have been hurried. near dawn on the morning of September fourteenth. At this place all trace of him disappears, and what then became of him has never been revealed to this day. When Morgan was arrested at Batavia, and in defiance of law was taken to Canandaigua, one of the witnesses to the proceedings was David C. Miller, who protested vigorously against the outrage. For this and for his connection with Morgan and the book, it was now determined to quiet Miller. On Tuesday, September twelfth, accordingly, about noon a band of some sixty men, armed with cudgels, appeared in Batavia and put up at one of the taverns, while Jesse French, a constable, went off armed with the process sworn out by Daniel Johns four days before, arrested Miller at the printing office, and brought him to the house where the mob was gathered. After some delay, he was placed in a wagon guarded by armed men and taken to Le Roy, where, about nine at night, he succeeded in forcing his captors to bring him before the justice who issued the warrant. But as neither constable, warrant, nor plaintiff appeared, he was discharged, and made his way back to Batavia. Burning with indignation, Miller now published a long account of his treatment by the Masons and of the abduction and probable murder of Morgan, and appealed to the public to vindicate the majesty of the law. His friends quickly responded, an investigation was begun, and an agent * sent to *Miller's account taken from his newspaper of September 18, 1826, is reprinted in the second edition of Illustrations of Masonry. 1827. TRIAL OF THE KIDNAPPERS. 113 Canandaigua, where sworn statements were secured from the wife of the jailer, from a prisoner, from some people who resided near the jail, and finally from Mrs. Morgan. The publicity given to this testimony was followed by great excitement and by a series of public meetings, at one of which a committee was chosen to gather information. By its authority a short statement of the facts was written and published, with the request that every newspaper editor would give the notice a few insertions, and that anybody having information regarding Morgan's fate or present whereabouts would send it to the committee. The Governor was next appealed to, and went through the idle form of issuing a proclamation calling on the civil authorities to spare no pains to arrest the offenders and to prevent such outrages in future. As time passed and the mystery remained as impenetrable as ever, the excitement spread to other counties, and committees of investigation were soon at work in Livingston, Ontario, Monroe, and Niagara. By these the Governor was again appealed to, and late in October he offered a reward of three hundred dollars for the discovery of the offenders and one hundred dollars for the discovery of each and every one of them, and two hundred dollars for authentic information of the place where Morgan had been conveyed. Still the mystery was not solved, and when the November session of the Court of General Sessions was held at Canandaigua the grand jury could do nothing more than find two indictments against Chesebro, Lawson, Sawyer, and John Sheldon. The trial began on the first of January, 1827, in the Court of Oyer and Terminer, before Judge Throop, and aroused intense interest in all the western counties of the State. For days before the court met the taverns at Canandaigua and the nearby towns were crowded to excess by counsel, witnesses, and those drawn thither by curiosity. Seventy applicants for lodgings were turned away from one tavern during one day. The charges against the defendants were two in numberconspiracy to seize Morgan, and conspiracy to carry him to foreign parts and there secrete and confine him. Chesebro, Sawyer, and Lawson plead guilty, and were sentenced, Lawson to two years, Chesebro to one year, and Sawyer to one month imprisonment in the common jail of Ontario County. Sheldon stood trial, was found guilty, and was confined in the jail for three months. Had the men been acquitted, the disgust and indignation of that part of the community which owed no allegiance to masonry could not have been greater. In its opinion the whole masonic fraternity was now in league to shield the murderers of Morgan. The sentence of the court was described as an insult to an enlightened people; the newspapers were accused of suppressing facts, of holding back information, and of taking no notice of any public proceeding concerning Morgan. At Seneca the people, in mass meeting assembled, resolved that all secret societies were dangerous to freedom; that masonry was especially so, as Masons had now shown themselves ready to murder their fellow-men in the interests of their order; that no Mason should be supported for any public office; and that every newspaper which did not publish full accounts of Morgan meetings must be proscribed. The committees appointed by the towns, convinced that the trial had been a farce, that the pleas of guilty were to stop investigation, and that the affidavits of Chesebro, Sawyer, and Lawson did not begin to disclose all they knew, called for a convention at Lewiston for the purpose of determining what steps should be taken to restore Morgan to his country, his freedom, and his family; to discover and punish those who had by violence and fraud deprived him of his liberty and perhaps of his life; to disclose the extent of the conspiracy; and to make known to the public the motives which prompted the conspirators to acts ruinous to our free institutions. While the Lewiston committee was gathering information, all manner of guesses as to the fate of Morgan were made. One newspaper asserted that he was kept at Fort Niagara a few days and then put to death. Another maintained that three men took him into Canada; that Captain Brant, a son of the Mohawk chief whose name is forever joined with the massacres in Wyoming and Cherry Valley, was asked to send him to the northwest coast; that when Brant refused, some British officers were urged to take him down the St. Lawrence, and that when they declined Morgan was killed and his body flung into the river. Yet another version represents him as 1827. POLITICAL ANTIMASONRY. 115 led, bound and blindfolded, to Newark, Upper Canada, only to be brought back to the fort and executed. So firm was the belief that Morgan had at one time at least been taken over the border, that the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada offered a reward of fifty pounds for information as to his whereabouts,* and Brant publicly denied that he had ever been asked to dispose of Morgan.† At the request of the Lewiston committee, Governor Clinton now issued a third proclamation, offering one thousand dollars for the discovery of Morgan if alive, and, if dead, two thousand dollars for the discovery of the murderers. ‡ When the spring local elections came on, the excitement against the Masons took on a political form. It was now not uncommon to find five, six, even seven columns of a newspaper filled with accounts of Morgan meetings, and the assertions and counter-assertions of private citizens. The people of one town resolved not to support a Mason for any office, State, county, or town; those of a second declared that they deemed "Freemasons unfit for any office of confidence"; those of a third dismissed their minister because he belonged to the fraternity; the resolution adopted at Poultney reads: "We will not hear any person preach unless the said preacher should refuse to meet with any lodge of Freemasons, and openly declare that masonry is bad"; at Middlebury a town meeting was warned "for the purpose of taking into consideration the late masonic outrages and to make nominations to fill the different offices in this town." To such a height had the popular feeling been raised that the county committees, finding that sometimes, as in the case of Niagara County, the grand juries were packed and would not indict, and at others, as in Monroe County, the grand juries could secure no direct testimony, though much circumstantial evidence, and so failed to return a hill, appealed by petitions to the Legislature. These early in March were laid before the Assembly, and sent to the Committee on Courts. of Justice. But finding that a majority of the members were * American Daily Advertiser, February 19, 1827. + York Observer, February 26, 1827. VOL. V. March 19, 1827. |