The Trial of Lizzie Borden(74)
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Over the weekend, the reporters were at loose ends. The judges, except for Dewey, were out of town; the lawyers were working and inaccessible; and the jurors were, as always, under guard. The only news of the prisoner, according to Julian Ralph, “was that she has slept well and eaten well and been visited by ex-Gov. Robinson.” Elizabeth Jordan took the opportunity of the pause in action to debunk the popular image of Lizzie Borden as a “human sphinx.” In an extended profile, entitled “This Is the Real Lizzie Borden,” she contrasted the “very real and very wretched woman . . . on trial for her life in the little courthouse at New Bedford, Mass.” with the “journalistic creation,” which she termed “a thing without heart or soul . . . large, coarse, and heavy.” Jordan offered herself as the unbiased observer of the “real” Lizzie. “From the top of her head to the broad sensible soles of her French kid boots,” Jordan averred, “she is a gentlewoman . . . a ‘lady.’?” Far from a “sphinx,” Lizzie was a “terrified woman, entirely conscious of the horror of her position, but bearing herself with the dignity which is her own.” She was also, warned Jordan, “on the verge of collapse.”
While the lawyers polished their closing arguments, nearby, in her cell, Lizzie Borden read. Her long confinement had given her the leisure to work her way through most of the novels of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. On this last weekend of her trial, she turned to slighter fare, the “summer novels” Robinson had given her. Joe Howard wondered whether the chimes of the church bells prompted “memories of the past . . . or did anxiety for the future prevail?” She had no callers—except Andrew Jennings, who permitted himself only a brief visit, presenting her with a large red rose “with his little boy’s compliments.” For everyone involved in the trial, Sunday was “a dull day of anxious waiting.”
Chapter 10
LAST WORDS IN THE GREAT TRIAL
Early-morning scene about the New Bedford courthouse, Boston Globe
On its editorial page, the New York Times lauded “the conduct of the Borden trial” as “a model proceeding” and “a credit alike to the bench and the bar of Massachusetts.” Joe Howard singled out the professionalism of the lawyers for special praise: “Another interesting and striking feature is the cordial courtesy that obtains among the counsel. There seems to be a perfect understanding on both sides . . . an interplay of fraternity, most charming to witness. Sometimes I think it almost too good to be genuine, too millennial, as it were, but I am convinced by daily observation and some knowledge of the men that it is honest and truly comradic.” To Ralph, accustomed to the rough-and-tumble New York City practice, “The temper of the lawyers is peculiar. They work in almost unbroken harmony, each side treating the other side in a friendly, polite, and respectful manner.” Robinson himself made a point of exempting the prosecuting lawyers from his criticism of the underlying case. Knowlton, he declared, “has only one duty . . . and he walks into this Court room only as the representative of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that is yours and mine and his . . . He is not here for blood, neither is he helped to such dishonorable work, if it were attempted, by our excellent friend, the District Attorney from the great county of Essex, one of our best and most reliable lawyers. So you will see no small play; you will see no mean tactics on the part of the Commonwealth here.”
MONDAY, JUNE 19, 1893
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On Monday morning, the police contingent assigned to control the expected spectators was doubled. But it was not enough. Julian Ralph declared: “The mob that besieged the Court house was the greatest that was ever seen around that Ancient Temple of Justice.” The crowd was even rowdier than usual, “more like a surging mob trying to gain admittance to some big show, than to a courtroom where a miserable woman is on trial for her life.” As on the other days, there were more women than men, a mix of “women in silks, and women in calicoes.” Elizabeth Jordan reported: “If the women were frantic to get in before, they were frenzied to-day.” They blocked the front and formed an equivalent human barrier at the rear. Joe Howard noted “hundreds standing for hours outside, in the vain hope of making their way to the courtroom, where every available inch of space was utilized.” It was, as Ralph observed, “packed as only a clever stevedore knows how to load a ship.” Even the corridors were filled. Little wonder, then, that as she entered the courthouse, Lizzie Borden seemed “visibly affected by the great crowd and the great silence that greeted her, and her startled look at the upturned gazing faces indicated how thoroughly her nervous system is strained.” She did not look well, her face “swollen and colored slightly purple.” Joe Howard struggled to imagine her state of mind as she “was brought a third Monday to confront the commonwealth, listen a while to the pleasurable talk of her senior counsel, endure the impertinent starings of people dressed like women and individuals garbed like men, and lay bare her bosom to the barbed arrows, well aimed and thoroughly poisoned, from the bow in the strong and stalwart hands of the brawny district attorney.”
Ex-governor Robinson delivering his argument, Boston Globe
George Robinson rose to her defense. Dressed in his usual plain black suit, he spoke for almost four hours in a “low, earnest voice,” his speech “almost bare of eloquence.” Julian Ralph would deride it as “commonplace.” But Robinson’s folksy manner masked a serious purpose, for it was perfectly attuned to “the farmer instinct in the jurymen.” Robinson, said Ralph, “twanged his voice, he yaw yawed his last two vowels, he said ‘agin’ for against, and ‘warn’t’ for was it not.” (Elizabeth Jordan observed that he instructed the stenographer to correct his speech for the official record.) While he spoke, Lizzie watched him “intently, now and then fanning herself, occasionally tapping her rather pretty foot on the lower portion of the rail, now and then putting a bouquet to her nose, never taking her eyes from the face of the man upon whom much of her fate, she thinks, depends.”