Lawyers and Slavery -- Part Three

One of the greatest trial lawyers of the Nineteenth Century was Daniel W. Voorhees, who first rose to prominence when he defended one of John Brown’s raiders.  Although he was from Indiana, Voorhees was an ardently pro-slavery Democrat, and he attempted to save his client from the gallows by claiming that the Harper’s Ferry insurrection had actually strengthened the institution of slavery.

John Brown and six others were arrested in the aftermath of the Harper’s Ferry raid (ten of his raiders were killed and five other escaped).  One of the prisoners was John E. Cook, who had lived as a spy in Harper’s Ferry for over a year before the insurrection.  Cook had briefly attended Yale and then apprenticed in a Brooklyn law office, before heading to Bleeding Kansas where he met John Brown and joined the Free State militia.  He was from a close-knit and relatively affluent family.  One of his brothers in law was a wealthy needle merchant (an important commodity in those days) and another was Ashbel Willard, a Democrat then serving as governor of Indiana.   Willard rushed to Cook’s assistance, recruiting Daniel Voorhees as defense counsel.  Although only in his early thirties, Voorhees was already the U.S. attorney for Indiana.  He was locally renowned, but he had yet to make a name on the national stage.  His defense of Cook would make him nationally famous, eventually leading to his election to Congress.  As a "peace Democrat," he would be one of Lincoln's most ardent antagonists during the Civil War.  In November 1858, however, his immediate goal was to save the life of his client.

 Arriving in Charles Town, Virginia, where the trials were to be held, Voorhees immediately advised Cook that he could be saved from hanging only if he made a “full confession” implicating northern abolitionists.  Henry Wise, the governor of Virginia, wanted to use the Harper’s Ferry trials to accumulate evidence against Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, Thaddeus Stevens, Joshua Giddings and others.  Voorhees and Willard believed that Cook could avoid the death penalty by providing that information, and Cook complied as far as he was able.  In modern terms, he “flipped,” producing a 25 page document that named as many names as he could, although in truth he said very little that was incriminating.

When the trial began, Voorhees believed he had made a deal for clemency.  He admitted Cook’s role in the insurrection and did not object to the offer of the confession.  Voorhees’s argument to the jury was a masterful attempt to evoke sympathy.    Pure emotion was Voorhees’s métier, and he would provide three compelling reasons for the jury to show mercy to Cook.  First, was the character of the defendant himself.  John Cook was the child of a fine family.  His grandfather had fought in the revolution, as his father did in the War of 1812.  His brother-in-law was the esteemed (and pro-slavery) governor of Indiana.  Yes, Cook had participated in a great crime, but he was at heart “a poor deluded boy,” a “wayward misled child” who was “young and new to the rough ways of life.”  He had a kind heart and “a cheerful, obliging, though visionary mind.”  The jurors needed only to look at Cook to see that he had been nothing more than an innocent naïf.  “Never did I plead for a face that I was more willing to show,” said Voorhees.  “If evil is there, I have not seen it [because] it is a face for a mother to love.”

Next, Voorhees explained that Cook had fallen prey to the malign influence of John Brown and other sinful abolitionists.  He was an innocent youth who had been “thrown into contact with the pirate and robber of civil warfare.”  Dreamer that he was, Cook had not recognized that “grim-visaged war, civil commotion, pillage and death, disunion and universal desolation thronged through the mind of John Brown.”  Indeed, Brown was a “despotic leader and John E. Cook was an ill-fated follower of an enterprise whose horror he now realizes and deplores.”  There was a vast moral distance between Brown and Cook, claimed Voorhees, and they should not be punished alike.  “Can it be that a jury of Christian men will find no discrimination should be made between them?  Are the tempter and tempted the same in your eyes?  Is the beguiled youth to die the same as the old offender who has pondered his crimes for thirty years?”   

Finally, Voorhees turned to an outright defense of slavery itself.  Because of Brown’s raid, he said, “the institution of domestic slavery to-day stands before the world more fully justified than ever before in the history of this or, indeed, perhaps, of any other country.”  After all, the slaves had not heeded Brown’s call to join the rebellion, thus proving that they were happy in their lives.  “The bondsman refuses to be free; drops the implements of war from his hands; is deaf to the call of freedom; turns against his liberators; and, by instinct, obeys the injunction of Paul by returning to his master.”  Slavery, thus, was the black man’s fate, “assigned to him . . . by the law of his being, by the law which governs his relation to a white man wherever the contact exists.”

The many journalists in attendance were almost unanimous in praise of Voorhees’s efforts.  The Indiana State Sentinel commended the speech to its readers, “not merely because of its great merit as a forensic effort of unusual brilliancy, but [also] for the scathing denunciation which it contains of those who planned, and those who instigated and encouraged the insurrection at Harper’s Ferry.”  The Chicago Herald called it “the great plea of one of the most gifted minds of the West” and “a truthful exposition of the infernal spirit in which the insurrection originated.”

The most important audience, of course, was in the jury box, and it appeared that Voorhees’s plea had made a noticeable impact there.  Most of the jurors were seen to be in tears, and even the “sternest had their hearts so opened that they wept like women.”  One southern newspaper observed that “men who had gone into the court-room strongly prejudiced against Cook, now favored commutation of the prisoner.”

In an era before the existence of plea bargaining, Daniel Voorhees had attempted to save Cook’s life by betraying his comrades, and he saw three means to that end.  An outright acquittal would be best, or failing that a recommendation of mercy from the jury.  And as a final alternative, there was the prospect of an executive pardon, especially given the political connections between governors Wise and Willard.  You can read the rest of the story in John Brown’s Spy: The Adventurous Life and Tragic Confession of John E. Cook.