The Life Of Walter Q. Gresham
Chapter 5
The Brandenburg Affair
WALTER Q. GRESHAM
S LAW BUSINESS
THE BRANDENBURG AFFAIR -HEROISM
OF HORACE BELL
ADJUSTMENT OF THE CONTROVERSY WHICH PROMISED TO
END IN WAR
STATUS OF SLAVEHOLDERS AS TO WAR - STANLEY YOUNG
KILLS COLONEL MARSH.
Slaughter and Gresham were the
attorneys for the New Albany &
Corydon Plank Road Company, the only corporation operating in the
county. In 1859 the firm of Slaughter and Gresham was dissolved. This
became necessary because Mr. Slaughter was commissioner in so many
partition suits and administrator of so many estates, that he could not
attend to his share of the firm's business. My husband continued alone
in the practice. He had all kinds of litigation, and much of it in
volume. He had suits on notes, foreclosures of mortgages, mandamus
proceedings, and was employed to assist the Democratic prosecuting
attorney in much of the criminal business. He succeeded in convicting
one defendant who feigned sickness and was brought into court on a cot.
He defended successfully another defendant under indictment for murder.
In the Crawford Circuit Court, representing some creditors, after a
long contest he got a judgment on a verdict of jury for $30,000 against
the silent partners of a firm which owned a line of steamboats; but
during his absence in the army it was reversed by the Indiana Supreme
Court and the claim was lost. There were Kentuckians on both sides of
that lawsuit. In those days there were scarcely any business
corporations. The steamboats on the Ohio River were owned and operated
almost entirely by individuals. During the special session of the
legislature in the Spring of 1861, my
husband came home long enough to bring a number of lawsuits, all of
which he turned over to Mr. Slaughter. During the first year of the war
Mr. Slaughter sent him a statement of his business, from which it
appears he had two score Kentucky clients scattered along the river as
far down as Cloverport and back into the country to Elizabethtown and
Hardinsburg, the county seats respectively of Hardin and
Breckenridge counties.
His most dramatic case was one which grew out of the ever present
slavery question, which was known as the "Brandenburg Affair." It was
an extreme example of the peculiar conditions then existing along the
border, and was so serious that for a time fear existed that it might
bring on war. It was so notorious that it was subsequently dramatized
and staged. That it was finally settled without bloodshed was largely
owing to the conciliatory spirit in which Walter Q. Gresham conducted
his client's case.
This client, Horace Bell, the hero of the "Brandenburg Affair," was the
son of David J. Bell, who in 1839 had purchased the "Brandenburg
ferry" and the farm in Harrison County, Indiana, on the Ohio River
opposite Brandenburg, the county seat of Meade County, Kentucky. From
the earliest times there had been a ferry at this point and a highway
thence via Mauckport to Corydon. Most of the people of the southern
part of Harrison County, as the saying was, "did their trading" at
Brandenburg.
David J. Bell and his wife were of good Revolutionary War stock and
were born and raised in Washington town, then a part of Virginia but
thrown into Pennsylvania by the final location of the Mason and Dixon
line. The operation of the constitution and laws of Pennsylvania freed
the slaves of Mrs. Bell's father, who was a Wright. Another of the
daughters, Julia Wright, became the wife of Doctor Jones of Corydon,
and the mother of Doctor Mitchell Jones, my husband's most
intimate friend. David J.
Bell left Pennsylvania and settled first at Wheeling;
thence in 1829
he moved to
New Albany, where in 1830 Horace was born. Oswald Wright, one of the
former slaves of the father of Mrs. Jones, followed "Miss Julia" to
Corydon and became one of the free negroes of the town. He lived in a
small house that belonged to the elder Doctor Jones. The Bell children,
better educated than was the custom of that time, went to school in
Brandenburg, except the youngest boy, Charles. He had lived most of his
life with his Aunt Julia. By 1857 Charles Bell's head was completely
turned by the anti-slavery agitation of the time and by the stories his
Aunt Julia told him about what the boys had dared in the early '50's.
Had "Aunt Julia" lived in these days, she would have been a "
militant." And her sister, Mrs. David J. Bell, was certainly a Spartan
if ever a woman was one.
In 1851, when Horace Bell was twenty years of
age, his father sold a negro boy he had "indentured," to a relative
in Meade County, Kentucky, and with the purchase price, five hundred
dollars, equipped Horace for migration to California, where John, the
senior brother, had gone with the "forty-niners." Up to this time the
elder Bell was not an Abolitionist, and he never afterwards admitted
that he was one; neither did Horace Bell, although he lived right in
the midst of the greatest activities of the Underground Railroad
in the late '40's and early 'so's. I use the term Abolitionist in
the technical sense of that time, an advocate of forcible resistance of
the law. From California, Horace went to Nicaragua with the Walker
Expedition. He served under Walker for two years, rising to the rank of
major. Reports came back of his gallantry in battle, of his affairs of
honor and of the heart. The fact that Walker's purpose was to establish
slavery in Nicaragua satisfied some of the Kentuckians that the Bells
were not Abolitionists, and they were not without friends and partisans
among the best people and largest land and slave owners in Meade
County. But many of the Kentuckians in 1858 believed and claimed that
the Bells not only assisted but had even encouraged the Kentucky
slaves to leave their masters. I still share some of the prejudices of
that time against the Bells. On the Indiana side it was the belief that
no runaway negro was ever denied assistance by the Bells. David J. Bell
had aided in capturing Levi Sipes after he had murdered my
husband's father, and Horace Bell knew the Gresham boys, especially
Walter.
At this time there lived in Brandenburg a negro blacksmith named
Charles, who was the property of Dr. C. H. Ditto, a large slave holder
who lived in Meade County nine miles back from the river. Charles had a
wife, Mary Ann, who belonged to A. J. Alexander, one of the merchants
of Brandenburg. The pair lived near the river in a small house
belonging to Alexander. Charles was a skillful workman, a valuable
slave, and so trusted that he was permitted to have a skiff in which he
was allowed to cross the river to fish and to shoe horses for people on
the Indiana side.
On Friday evening, the 26th day of September, 1857, Charles Bell, a
seventeen-year-old boy, and the negro Charles were seen in Brandenburg
at the blacksmith shop. Later, about ten o'clock, Charles Bell started
from the Brandenburg wharf boat in a skiff for the Indiana side. Early
the next morning, Saturday, the slave gave it out he was going to the
Indiana side to fish. This was the last ever seen of him in
Brandenburg. On the Monday following, as he was not in the
blacksmith shop in Brandenburg, the cry was raised that he had run
away. It happened that on the same Saturday, starting early, the elder
Bell rode on horseback across the country to New Albany, and thence by
ferry to Louisville, for the purpose of cashing a draft Horace Bell had
sent him from California. Returning home, he remained over Sunday
in New Albany. On his journey back on Monday, when near home late in
the afternoon, he was met by a party of Kentuckians, or "slave
hunters," as the Bells afterwards called them, hunting for the missing
blacksmith. They stopped the old man and proceeded to
ask him where he had been and for what. He returned the
curt answer, "It is none of your business."
One night two weeks later,
a party of Kentuckians sur¬rounded the Bell house, which stood just
above high-water mark facing south towards the river, and by force
removed the father, Charles Bell, and the free negro, Oswald Wright, to
the ferry boat that lay at the Bell landing. Before the boat swung out
into the river a Kentucky constable read a warrant, charging the Bells
with having stolen the negro, Charles, and commanding that they be
brought forthwith before a magistrate in Brandenburg. Kentucky had
always claimed jurisdiction over the Ohio River to low-water mark on
the Indiana side, and as the river was then low and the boat lay below
the low-water line, the pretext was afterwards made that the
apprehension was under the warrant. From the Brandenburg wharf the
Bells and Wright were taken direct to the Brandenburg jail. The next
day there was a preliminary heariijg before the magistrate who issued
the warrant. At this hearing it developed from the testimony of C. B.
Johnson of Brownstown, Jackson County, Indiana, and Mrs. Withers of the
same place, that after Johnson saw a reward offered in the newspapers
for the return of the negro, Charles, he visited Corydon and the Bells
at their farm under the guise of a horse trader; that Wright confided
in him that he had conveyed the negro, Charles, from the Bell farm to
Brownstown on the Cincinnati & St. Louis Railroad; that Charles
Bell told him that they had planned the escape of the negro, as Wright
said he had done, and that Wright had loaned his free papers to Charles
to help him along, should his right to freedom be questioned, and that
they proposed next to carry off Mary Ann. But Mary Ann lived and died
in Brandenburg. Charles escaped to Canada. Mrs. Withers identified
Wright as a negro who came to her house in Brownstown on Monday
morning, the 2Qth day of September, 1857, and said he had left a negro
named Charles Ditto at the depot; and upon her agreeing to give them
breakfast, Wright left and returned with the
other, and she then gave them breakfast. That Wright should make this
statement to a stranger—Mrs. Withers—as she admitted she was, the Bell
attorneys afterwards claimed was most improbable. Wright denied he ever
made such a statement. Both David and Charles Bell denied all
complicity in the escape of the negro. They were remanded to the jail,
and on the 25th of November the grand jury of Meade County returned six
indictments against them.1
The elder Dr. Mitchell Jones was greatly excited when he heard of the
arrest. He employed Judge Porter and Samuel Keen to defend the Bells
and Oswald Wright. Judge Porter and Mr. Keen in turn employed T. B.
Farleigh and John Coale of the Brandenburg bar to appear in court. This
the Kentucky lawyers did with fidelity and ability. They took advantage
of all the technicalities that due process of law afforded in
defending their clients.
Horace and John Bell immediately started for home from California when
they heard of the kidnapping of their father and brother. They came
back by way of Panama and the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. John got off
the boat at Tobacco Landing, the first landing above Brandenburg
on the Indiana side, and went to his mother, who had remained in the
meanwhile on the farm. This was in May, 1858. Horace went on to New
Albany, then to Corydon, where he walked into Mr. Gresham's office and
insisted that his boyhood friend should be his
lawyer. At this time Horace Bell was
a tall, handsome man. Stories told of
him, many, no doubt, the product of the imagination, did much to
excite the popular mind. One was that he had twice appeared on the
field of honor, and that while he had lived to tell the tale it was not
so with his opponents, for he was a dead shot.
Colonel William C. Marsh, soon after the kidnapping, raised a large
force of armed men with the intention of crossing the river and
releasing the prisoners. But the expedition miscarried because the
boats that were to transport Colonel Marsh's forces failed to reach
Leavenworth, the meeting point, at the appointed time, There were on
guard in Brandenburg, the Meade County Rangers, a company of militia,
and several companies of the Kentucky Legion ordered there by the
Governor of Kentucky to prevent the release of the prisoners. All were
under the command of Captain Jack Armstrong, who had served with Horace
Bell in Nicaragua. At first the return of Horace and John Bell added to
the excitement. They were tendered the aid of five hundred men to
invade Brandenburg. But acting on the advice of my husband, they
publicly declined this offer. Then Horace Bell, although notified by
letter that he would be promptly shot if he came to Brandenburg, went
there with my husband and endeavored to secure a release of his father
and brother on bonds. Alanson Moreman and Olie C. Richardson, both
slave holders and two of the largest landowners in Meade County,
offered
to become sureties for the Bells in any reasonable amount, but the
penalties named were so high that they refused to qualify. Bell was
taunted on the streets of Brandenburg with being a coward. He
afterwards claimed that but for the advice of his counsel, he could not
have borne this. One day after an adjournment of court a crowd followed
them to the hotel. Here Bell made a short speech. He said he did not
propose to involve the States in a border warfare; that he had declined
the aid of armed men; that he had come to Kentucky to get justice in
the courts and, failing in that, he and his
brother alone would come there in daylight, break the jail, and take
the prisoners out. This, contrary to my husband's fears, the crowd
regarded as a joke, and said that a man who talked as big as Horace
Bell did would not attempt anything.
Two weeks later my husband came home from Brandenburg greatly
distressed. He had gone there about the Bell matter and while he,
Horace Bell, and Colonel Marsh were standing in front of the
Brandenburg Hotel talking, Stanley Young, from a balcony above, shot
Marsh dead. They stood so close together that some of Marsh's lifeblood
spurted on my husband's clothes. Colonel Posey was greatly excited and
thought it strange that Stanley Young would risk shooting his own
lawyer and friend in order to kill an enemy. Stanley Young was my
husband's schoolmate and one of his first clients. In my first
chapter I described him and how Colonel Marsh killed his father. It was
erroneously supposed that this was an incident of the Brandenburg
affair, but it was not, Stanley Young merely took advantage of the
excitement of the Bell kidnapping to kill the slayer of his father. He
immediately escaped. He was indicted by the Meade County grand jury,
but was never apprehended. His lawyer settled his father's estate and
remitted to him his portion of it. He came back to Brandenburg and
Corydon in 1863 with Morgan's Raiders, and died in southern Illinois a
much respected and prosperous citizen, but under another name.
Among the efforts my husband made looking to the release of the Bells,
he led a party to Governor Willard and demanded that he, as Governor of
Indiana, demand of the State of Kentucky the return of the abducted
men. But Willard refused to interfere.
One day at noon Horace Bell walked into the office of Walter Q.
Gresham. He had just ridden up from the Bell farm. My
husband and his client were alone. Bell told Mr. Gresham his plan was to
disappear and have the rumor go
out
that he and his brother John had gone back to California. The quiet
that would follow, he said, he thought would cause the Kentucky
authorities to decrease the number of guards and relax their vigilance.
Then, when the excitement was allayed, Horace Bell said, "My plan is
for John and me to cross the river, surprise the jailer, release
father and Charles, arm them and get back to the Indiana side without
firing a shot, if possible; otherwise, to fight." The only answer
received was, "The audacity of your plan will almost warrant its
success." Without another word Bell left the office and went back
to the river.
There was to be a picnic up the river, and Horace and John Bell
calculated that many of the Brandenburg men would attend it. Meanwhile
the report had gone forth that they had left for California. Horace,
although the younger, was the leader. John doubted the success of the
plan, but Mrs. Bell, who was at home sick, sided with Horace.
On the 27th of July, 1858, just before noon, Horace and John strapped
on their revolvers, and with a carpet bag loaded with six-shooters and
ammunition, got into a skiff, with a fourteen-year-old mulatto boy as
oarsman, and rowed over to Brandenburg. The boy was indentured to the
elder Bell. He was the son of a distinguished Kentucky lawyer.
In order to attract as little attention as possible, Horace took one
street and John the other, south to the jail, which stood on the south
side of the public square about one-quarter mile back from the river.
Between the jail and the river, on the north side of the square facing
south, was the court house in which were the arms and ammunition of the
guards or minute men, who were the county officers, the lawyers, and
the merchants of the town. The lawyers' offices lined the west side of
the square. On the east side were the stores. As the Bell
boys had calculated, most of the people of the town were at their
noonday meal and the surprise was
perfect. Horace reached the jail first. The jailer and his wife and two
guards were at the dinner table. At the point of the revolver the
dinner party was driven into one corner of the room; but not soon
enough to prevent one of the guards from jumping out of a rear window
and giving the alarm, which created an awful din. Meanwhile John came
in, got the jail keys from the bureau drawer, sprang upstairs, unlocked
the jail doors, armed his father and Charles and locked the other
prisoners in. Temporarily Oswald Wright had been removed from the
jail. Years afterwards I asked Horace Bell what he would have done with
Oswald Wright had he found him in the jail with his father and brother.
His answer was, "I don't know, he was no kin of mine." As the three
came downstairs, Horace ran to the court house where the arms were
stacked, before the minute men could assemble, and held them off as the
others retreated to the river. The mulatto boy had proved faithful and
was there with the skiff. As the Bells were descending to the levee,
the crowd opened fire on them, but as the firing was from an elevation,
the bullets passed over them. They returned the fire, purposely
shooting high, which was enough to cause their pursuers to retreat.
Then they rushed to their boat and without further molestation,
except a few straggling shots, crossed safely to the Indiana
side. No one was hurt.
Horace Bell was the hero of the hour, and, as he himself afterwards
said, did too much exulting and drank too much "John Barleycorn." On
October 25, 1858, while quietly walking the streets of New Albany
during the State fair, he was seized by three men, who pounced upon him
from behind and rushed him to one of the ferry boats of the New Albany
and Portland ferry, which, as had been previously arranged,
immediately put off to the Kentucky side. That night he was driven
under strong guard to Brandenburg, and there locked up on the
charge of having broken jail. Upon the report that expeditions were
organizing at New Albany
and Corydon to release him, he was removed next morning to Big Springs,
a small town ten miles south of the river. Here, under guard, he was
kept in the hotel until the next night. Meanwhile a large body of men
from New Albany came down the river on a steamboat with two cannons on
its deck, and anchored in front of Brandenburg. Part of the men from
the steamboat joined a party from Corydon, who landed on the Kentucky
side and camped upon the farm of Alonzo Norman above Brandenburg. The
next night Bell was removed farther back into the interior to a
schoolhouse.
Meantime, as Captain J. M. Phillips, afterwards a successful member of
the Chicago Board of Trade, then a merchant in Brandenburg, put
it, "
Walter Q. Gresham made overtures for a settlement, which was promptly
sanctioned by the leading slave holders of Meade County, as they
deprecated the actions of the hotheads on their side and feared the
complications that might ensue if Bell was detained too long. ... At
that time Judge Gresham, although a young man, was well known and
popular on the Kentucky side of the river, and when he came
campaigning through the river townships of Harrison County, many
Kentuckians always went over to his meetings."
The agreement was that Bell was to have a preliminary hearing before
the town magistrate of Brandenburg and be held to bail to appear at the
November term of the Meade County Circuit Court, in bonds of $750. From
the school-house, still under an armed escort, Bell was taken to the
farm of Olie C. Richardson, where a sumptuous breakfast was served, and
thence by a guard and escort of three hundred men to Brandenburg, where
after a semblance of a hearing before two justices of the peace, he was
released. Alanson Moreman and J. M. Phillips of Meade County, both
slave owners, and John R. Conners of New Albany, were accepted as
sureties on his bond. But instead of appearing at the
November term of the Meade County Circuit Court, as it was
understood he would, Horace Bell returned to California. The bond was
declared forfeited, and at the May term in 1859, a judgment was
rendered against the sureties. This judgment was subsequently satisfied
by the executive branch of the Kentucky government in accordance
with the understanding had at the time that they would never be
required to pay anything by reason of being Horace Bell's
bondsmen. "But," said Captain Phillips, "we could not get the
prosecuting attorney to remit his fees and we had to pay him."
The indictments against David and Charles Bell were stricken off the
Kentucky dockets, but were never dismissed. A civil suit in
attachment, which had been begun on the 27th day of October, 1857, in
the Meade County Circuit Court under a pretense of jurisdiction
against David and Charles Bell and Oswald Wright, to recover the value
of the slave, and had passed into a judgment by default against the
Bells and Wright In the sum of $2,000 and $100 respectively, was
never attempted to be enforced in Indiana. Of course, in those days of
discrimination in every State in the Union against the freedman, it was
a difficult task for the Kentucky lawyers to free Oswald Wright. But
"Tom" Farleigh, my husband's friend, whom we will meet again in a great
emergency, came up to the best traditions of the American bar. It was
agreed in advance it would not do for any lawyer from the north side of
the river to appear for Wright. At the May term, 1859, Oswald Wright
was placed on trial for stealing the negro Charles, and although the
jurisdiction of the court was properly questioned, he was convicted and
sentenced to the Kentucky penitentiary for five years. But so well had
Farleigh and Coale done their work in their objections to the
jurisdiction of the trial court, that Wright was soon released and
returned to Corydon, where he lived until his death. He was a good
negro, industrious, and saved his earnings. By his
last will he left his property, which consisted of two houses and lots,
to Mrs.
Julia Jones.
Soon the Bell farm was sold, and David and Mrs. Bell went to Ohio and
then to Missouri to live. John followed Horace back to California.
"Charlie" Bell returned to Cory don and remained there until he
enlisted early in 1861 in the 20th Indiana Volunteers. He was killed
before Petersburg in 1864, being then a captain but in command of his
regiment. Seven regimental commanders ahead of him had met his fate. He
was a gallant soldier, and the commission which would have still
further promoted him never reached him.
It was the belief in Corydon that David J. Bell knew nothing of the
plan to "run off" the negroes Charles and Mary Ann, but there never was
any doubt in the minds of the people that Charlie Bell planned and
executed the escape. Horace Bell said he never inquired as to exactly
what had happened before he returned from California. My husband
uniformly said he was not called on to express an opinion, except that
Kentucky had not acquired jurisdiction over the persons of the Bells
and Oswald Wright. Considerate and deferential as he was, when the time
came to act he never hesitated. In 1886 Horace Bell entered the
newspaper field at Los Angeles. It was not long until he was sued
for $300,000 damages for libel by "Lucky" Baldwin. In the prosecution
of the suit, Baldwin assailed Bell on account of his record in the
Brandenburg Affair. Bell appealed to United States Circuit Judge W. Q.
Gresham at Chicago. The answer was: '' Your conduct from beginning
to end in the Brandenburg Affair was praiseworthy and honorable."
There was great exultation among the anti-slavery people along the
border over the Brandenburg Affair. This my husband deprecated all he
could. On the other hand some of the good people of Meade and adjoining
counties in Kentucky approved the action of Horace and John Bell,
and rejoiced in their successes. Doctor Ditto's brother, himself a
slave holder by inheritance, publicly commended Horace Bell for his
gallantry. Captain Phillips afterwards told me: "I admired Horace
Bell's nerve and was glad to go on his bond. Besides," he said, " I
never was much of a 'nigger man.' My father left me a few slaves; I
could not free them under the Kentucky law without giving a bond for
their support. It was cheaper for me to keep them and support them than
to enter into a bond with the State of Kentucky which might involve
liabilities I could not foresee."
Captain Phillips was a fine type of Kentuckian, as well as a man of
means and a far-sighted, clear-headed business man. When he was an
operator on the Board of Trade the big men could not lower or raise the
market too fast to catch him. He, as other men in 1861, saw the
economic if not the moral side of slavery. At that time there were only
100,000 slave holders in the United States. Ten years later, under the
workings of the system their numbers would have been less. "The
proposition to arm the slaves never found favor with the rich men of
the South," as an old ex-Confederate once said to me. "A young
able-bodied negro was too valuable an animal to be made the target for
Yankee bullets." "A rich man's war and a poor man's fight," is a
misnomer. It was not the large slave holders who rushed Mississippi
into
secession, and it was the large slave holders who helped to hold
Kentucky back.
