between the nether millstones of judicial tyranny and popular anger. But there will be a consoling reflection by and by that I was not guilty of hanging the poor wretches whom the State Prison tormentors drive to madness.”
After the preliminary hearing, Seward was forced to retry the case of the convict. Wyatt was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. Seward then had only a few weeks to prepare Freeman’s trial, which began on July 10, after a motion for a continuance was denied.
The jury consisted of twelve white men; at that time, women were not allowed to serve as jurors. Among the twelve were three abolitionists. The prosecutor asked them the following question: “Suppose it should be proved that the prisoner is a poor demented negro, would you think society ought to be punished and not the negro?” Juror Norman Peters replied, “I should hold him responsible the same as any other man.” The prosecutor was satisfied with the answers the men gave and left them on the jury.
The state presented its case, calling seventy-two witnesses. As in most insanity cases, the prosecution attempted to elicit evidence that showed a rational planning and execution of the crime, from which the jury could infer that the defendant knew what he was doing was wrong and that he was in control of his actions. The testimony showed that a week before the murders Bill bought two knives, that he hid the knives, and that he wanted to get the persons who caused him to be sent to prison. The evidence showed that he waited outside the Van Nest farm before trying to enter, and that after the murders he attempted an escape and lied when captured. In addition to the lay witnesses, eight physicians testified to their opinions that Bill was not insane. Dr. Bigelow, a leading witness for the state, summed up their medical case when he testified: “I believe him to be a dull, stupid, moody, morose, depraved, degraded negro, but not insane.”
Bill sat at the counsel table and watched the proceedings, which would likely have been even more traumatic for him had he been able to comprehend what was taking place. He sat quietly, his small body (five-foot-seven, 115 pounds) slumped over. He laughed for no reason. He continually smiled, seemingly unaware of the hate directed at him in the crowded courtroom.5
After the prosecution finished, Seward began his defense. He called thirty-six witnesses, among them nine doctors who testified that William Freeman was insane at the time he committed the murders. The essence of the psychiatric defense was that he suffered from a delusion that the Van Nest family had caused him to be put in prison for stealing a horse. Obviously, claimed Seward, this was a delusion because the Van Nest family had nothing to do with the horse-stealing case. This delusion was so strong that it overwhelmed Freeman’s rational thought; the criminal act he committed was “an immediate, unqualified offspring of the delusion.”
There was a great deal of testimony regarding mental disease, but the heart of Seward’s defense was to explain how social conditions caused the insanity. He would not have called his strategy a black rage defense. The very words “black rage” would have conjured up a strong, black man acting in rebellion against his oppression. Seward, limited by his own racial prejudices, felt more comfortable describing Bill as a “child” and a “wretch.” The implications of a black man so enraged at his condition that he would strike out against white people were not only terrifying, but threatened the entire social construct of blacks as a docile, weak, subservient race. So Seward did not talk about black rage; he probably did not even consider it. He did understand, however, that blacks lived under an unfair, oppressive system. He recognized that such a system had driven Freeman mad and was willing to put the system of racism on trial.
Seward’s two-day-long closing argument gives flavor and political context to the case. He showed no hesitation in putting forward the theme of racial injustice, arguing that if a white man or white woman had exhibited the signs of mental disease that Freeman exhibited, his or her case would have been dismissed.
Seward argued that prejudice infected the standards by which his client was judged. The symptoms of Freeman’s mental disorder were being misinterpreted simply as the normal behavior of an inferior race. He pleaded with the jury to look deeper than this stereotype and to treat Freeman as a man.
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.
At this point, Seward pursued a strategy quite common in the nineteenth century: he brought religion into his argument. He reminded the jurors that all men, including black men, were created by God. He attempted to reach through their prejudice and feelings of superiority, to their shared Christian beliefs that all men are brothers.
The color 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 color 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 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 which, under like circumstances, you would expect for yourselves.
Seward sought to demonstrate that Bill went insane by describing his life. Although he mentioned hereditary insanity as a predisposing cause, pointing out that Bill’s aunt died in a lunatic asylum and that his uncle was considered a lunatic, he focused primarily on the social conditions under which blacks suffered.
If neglect of education produces crimes, it equally produces Insanity. Here was a bright, cheerful, happy child, destined to become a member of the social state, entitled by the principles of our Government to equal advantages for perfecting himself in intelligence, and even in political rights, with each of the three millions of our citizens, and blessed by our religion with equal hopes.... [But] there was no school for him ... there has been no school here for children of his caste. A school for colored children was never established here, and all the common schools were closed against them.
Seward explained that when he tried to send colored children who worked for him to school with his own children, they were sent back to him with a message that black children could not go to the school.
He described how Bill was “subjected, in his tender years, to severe and undeserved oppression,” recounting how Bill was whipped by the family he worked for, beaten at another house because he forgot to return an umbrella, falsely convicted of stealing a horse, and at only sixteen years old sent to a state prison instead of a house of refuge. Seward railed against the prison, saying that “mere imprisonment is often a cause of insanity.” In Bill’s experience prison was a terrible nightmare, filled with beatings. The result was a descent into madness. Seward described it thus: “Such a life, so filled with neglect, injustice and severity, with anxiety, pain, disappointment, solicitude and grief, would have its fitting conclusion in a madhouse.”
An understanding of racial oppression was at the heart of Seward’s masterful closing arguments as he attempted to illustrate the consequences of Bill’s treatment at the hands of a prejudiced legal and penal system. One of the most powerful expressions of this injustice was articulated in John Depuy’s testimony, repeated by Seward in his closing argument: “They have made William
