It is also possible that Ann Brodeau and Anna Thornton recognized in Arthur's features and headstrong ways some of the traits of the late William Thornton. Arthur was mulatto. Nothing is known of his white father, but Maria Bowen had been serving as a young woman in the Thornton household in 1816, the year before Arthur was born. There is no evidence that William Thornton had impregnated Maria Bowen via seduction or rape. But if he had, the young man about to go to the city gallows was Ann Brodeau's step-grandson. And, in a ghastly twist of family fate, he was about to die the same way Anna's father had. Anna wrote in her diary that she could not summon the nerve to tell her mother Arthur had been condemned.
Arthur's execution was scheduled for February 26, 1836. Two weeks before that dreaded day, Anna finally acted. She drew up a petition asking for a presidential pardon and obtained the signatures of 34 friends. She wrote a note to Vice President Martin Van Buren, a social acquaintance, asking him to intervene on Arthur's behalf with President Jackson. Anna may have thought that Jackson, as a slave owner and staunch defender of white supremacy, was not likely to look with favor on her wishes. But she also might have intuited that the president had qualities that offered some hope. Jackson was just a few years older than she. Like her, he had lost a beloved spouse. Jackson always thought his wife's death in 1832 had been hastened by the abusive language hurled her way by political foes. "This made him the sworn and unyielding foe of all slanderers of women," wrote Ben Perley.
Anna Maria Thornton as painted by her friend Gilbert Stuart in 1804. In August 1835 Thornton was reportedly assaulted by a young ax-wielding Negro slave in her F Street home in August 1835. The incident set off Washington's first race riot.
(Courtesy National Gallery of Art)
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Anna composed a 17-page letter to Jackson. In elegant and unfaltering handwriting, she described what she had seen that fateful night. She explained that Arthur was drunk and had never raised the ax. She tactfully suggested mob passions had driven Key's prosecution.
"The recent alarms & agitations . . . may have had an unconscious influence in determining the expediency of seizing the first occasion to make a severe and terrifying example," she wrote in the letter, now in the National Archives in College Park.
She pleaded for Jackson to spare Arthur's life. "The bloody execution" of the court's sentence, she told the president, "would be more horrible than the offense."
In the city jail, Arthur resigned himself to his fate. He wrote a poem, later published in the Globe, to his pals, whom he would not see again.
Farewell, farewell, my young friends dear; / Oh! View my dreadful state, / Each flying moment brings me near / Unto my awful fate.
He blamed liquor, not slavery, for his impending doom.
Brought up I was by parents nice, / Whose commands I would not obey, / But plunged ahead foremost into vice, / And into temptation's dreadful way.
And he concluded with this sad rhyme.
Good bye, good bye, my friends so dear, / May God Almighty please you all, / Do, if you please, but shed a tear / At Arthur Bowen's unhappy fall.
In his second-floor office in the executive mansion, Jackson read Anna's final appeal, her signed petition and the legal opinion of his attorney general.
On the night of February 25, a heavy snowfall enveloped the city. The next day, Arthur Bowen woke up expecting to go to his death. Instead, the prison marshal informed him that the president had granted a respite. His execution had been postponed until June. Anna, the putative victim of his crime, had spared his life.
If Key was bothered by Jackson's act of mercy, he did not record his views in any way that has survived. Key had other business to attend to. He was prosecuting the miscreants who had led the Mechanics on their spree. And he was preparing for what he saw as his most important case, U.S. v. Reuben Crandall.
In Key's prosecution of Crandall, it became clear that the district attorney believed Crandall was the real culprit in the Snow Riot story. Arthur was a mere slave. But Crandall's efforts to stoke the slaves' desire for freedom in America, Key declared as the trial began in April 1836, was nothing less than a "base and demonical" effort to incite slaves, free Negroes and others to "stir up against slave owners." Crandall, in Key's view, was guilty of sedition and should pay a heavy price.
U.S. v. Reuben Crandall was the most sensational trial in Washington in years. The newspaper coverage was extensive. The courtroom in City Hall was crowded. Several congressmen took front-row seats. Crandall was defended by two of Washington's most skillful attorneys, Richard Coxe and Joseph Bradley. These crafty barristers blocked Key at every turn. After the district attorney called a witness who said he had borrowed a copy of the Anti-Slavery Reporter from Crandall, Coxe produced half a dozen witnesses who swore Crandall had no interest in the anti-slavery cause. Bradley handled the courtroom theatrics. He read aloud a statement on the evils of slavery. When the court demanded to know its relevance, Bradley revealed that the words had come from the mouth of Key himself years earlier.
In final arguments, Key declared that U.S. v. Reuben Crandall was "one of the most important cases ever tried" in the nation's capital. The issue, he said, according to the trial transcript, was "whether our institutions have any means of legal defense against a set of men of most horrid principles, whose means of attack upon us are insurrection, tumult and violence."
Key appealed to the all-white jury's sense of supremacy.
