CHAPTER VIII.

THE same year in which Mr. Webster gained his forensic laurels in the Senate of the United States, secured him also a great professional triumph. All of New England, at that time of sufficient age and capacity to have comprehended it, will recollect the deep, intense sensation produced throughout the community that year by the extraordinary murder of Joseph White, in Salem, Massachusetts, on the night of the 6th of April. The respectability, wealth, and advanced age of the murdered man, the mysterious nature of the midnight murder, the strange and romantic details connected with its perpetration, the relationship of one of the assassins to the victim, and other circumstances of almost equal interest, produced an excitement at the time, which was as deep as it was general, and which has dwelt upon the mind ever since with nearly all the distinctness of its first impres

sion.

A few weeks after the murder, Richard Crowningshield, George Crowningshield, brothers, Joseph J. Knapp, who had married a daughter of the neice of the murdered man, and John Francis Knapp, also brothers, were arrested, on a charge

of having perpetrated the murder, and committed for trial. Joseph J. Knapp, soon after his arrest, under promise of favor from the government, was induced to make a full confession of the crime, and of the circumstances attending it. A few days after his disclosure had been made and become known, Richard Crowningshield, who was supposed to have been the principal assassin, committed suicide.

By act of the Legislature, a special session of the Supreme Court was holden at Salem, in July, for the trial of the prisoners. In the ordinary arrangement of the courts, but one week in a year, was allotted for the whole court to sit in that county; and, as in the trial of all capital offences, a majority of the court were required to be present, and as weeks would in all probability be consumed in this trial, but for such interposition of the Legislature, three years would not have been sufficient for the purpose. It was for this reason and not on account of the excitement in the community, and the interest felt in the result, that the special session was ordered.

Before this court, John Francis Knapp was arraigned as principal in the murder, and George Crowningshield and Joseph J. Knapp, accessories.

If the suicide of Richard Crowningshield before the commencement of the trial, added to the already excited state of the public feeling, the unexpected withdrawal of his confession by Joseph J. Knapp, and his refusal, on being called upon, to testify, had no tendency to allay it.

Mr. Webster, upon the request of the prosecuting officers

of the government, appeared as counsel and assisted in the trial.

In the earlier part of his argument to the jury, Mr. Webster said "Gentlemen, this is a most extraordinary case. In some respects, it has hardly a precedent anywhere; certainly none in our New England history This bloody drama exhibited no suddenly excited ungovernable rage. The actors in it were not surprised by any lion-like temptation springing upon their virtue and overcoming it, before resistance could begin. Nor did they do the deed, to glut savage vengeance, or satiate long settled and deadly hate. It was a cool, calculating, money-making murder. It was all hire and salary, not revenge.' It was the weighing of money against life; the counting out of so many pieces of silver, against so many ounces of blood."

In speaking of the supposed self-congratulation of the murderer, as he escapes, unseen by human eye, after the perpetration of the deed, Mr. Webster describes the danger of a fatal secret in language that makes the reader almost feel the consciousness of guilt himself. "It is accomplished. The deed is done. The assassin retreats; retraces his steps to the window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes. He has done the murder. No eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The secret is his own, and it is safe!

"Ah! gentlemen, that was a dreadful mistake. Such a secret can be safe nowhere. The whole creation of God has

neither nook nor corner where the guilty can bestow it, and

say it is safe. Not to speak of that eye which glances through all disguises, and beholds everything as in the splendor of noon, such secrets of guilt are never safe from detection, even by men. True it is, generally speaking, that 'murder will out.' True it is, that Providence hath so ordained, and doth so govern things, that those who break the law of heaven, by shedding man's blood, seldom succeed in avoiding discovery. A thousand eyes turn at once to explore every man, every thing, every circumstance, connected with the time and place; a thousand ears catch every whisper; a thousand excited minds intensely dwell on the scene, shedding all their light, and ready to kindle the slightest circumstance into a blaze of discovery. Meanwhile the guilty soul cannot keep its own secret. It is false to itself; or rather, it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to itself. It labors under its guilty possession, and knows not what to do with it. The human heart was not made for the residence of such an inhabitant. It finds itself preyed upon by a torment which it does not acknowledge to God nor man. A vulture is devouring it, and it can ask no sympathy or assistance, either from heaven or earth. The secret which the murderer possesses soon comes to possess him; and, like the evil spirits of which we read, it overcomes him, and leads him whithersoever it will. He feels it beating at his heart, rising to his throat, and demanding disclosure: He thinks the whole world sees it in his face, reads it in his eyes, and almost hears its workings in the very silence of his thoughts. It has become his master.

It betrays his discretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers his prudence. When suspicions, from without, begin to embarrass him, and the net of circumstance to entangle him, the fatal secret struggles with still greater violence to burst forth. It must be confessed; it will be confessed; there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”

The great difficulty Mr. Webster had to surmount in the case was, the doubt in the minds of the jury, that John Francis Knapp was present in the vicinity at the time of the murder, for the purpose of aiding and abetting it. Richard Crowningshield was the actual perpetrator of the murder; he alone entered the house, and gave the old man his deathwounds. But, by his own act, he was placed beyond the reach of an earthly tribunal; and, unless it was demonstrated to the satisfaction of the jury, that, on the night of the murder, John Francis Knapp was aiding, in constructive presence, the accomplishment of the deed, and thus proved a principal to it, the three prisoners, however guilty in public opinion and in fact, must have been discharged, since the one indicted as principal being pronounced innocent, the accessories could not of course have been convicted.

The admirable ingenuity of argument by which Mr. Webster led the minds of the jury to this conclusion, is equal to anything of the kind in the annals of the profession. The interpretation he gave to the various and somewhat contradictory evidence upon the subject; the manner in which he combined circumstances at first seemingly independent, dove-tail