RICK GRUNDER – BOOKS

Established 1981 – Member, Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America.
International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, Ephemera Society of America.

UPDATED  February 4 , 2012

 

listed May 25, 2011 . . .

[BLACK HISTORY - CRIME] Day-by-day reports regarding a mass murder in a small town of south-central New York State. With expected histrionics, and an unexpected woodcut of the accused man rendered from a drawing done in his Auburn jail cell . . .

 

ROCHESTER DAILY ADVERTISER (newspaper, Rochester, New York). Five complete issues from March 1846 [New Series XXI]. Folio, [4] pp. each. Disbound with some wear, toning, creases, or clean tears without loss (not affecting the articles described below).

$ 600

VERY RARE IF NOT UNIQUE: OCLC locates NO HOLDINGS of these five issues in any institutuion.

(Of the smaller Auburn Daily Advertiser, from which several of these articles were taken, only one copy is located by OCLC for the appropriate month, held by the University of Rochester - except for one additional located copy of a March 18, 1846 issue held by the Western Reserve Historical Society.)

 

— Saturday morning, March 14, 1846: Page 2, column 4. 8½ col. inches of text taken from the Auburn Daily Advertiser, titled, "HORRID MURDER." In the town of Fleming, just south of Auburn, former supervisor John G. Van Ness, his wife, and two-year-old child were stabbed in or near their beds after 9:00 p.m. in their home by an intruder, and "must have died almost instantly. Another man and woman in the house were also stabbed, but survive. The surviving man "describes the murderer as about 5 feet 6 inches high – thick set – and either a negro or disguised as a black man." Horses were stolen, and nearby witnesses heard the commotion and saw someone riding away from the scene. There is great excitement and "every thing is being done to arrest the assassin."

 

— Monday morning, March 16: Page 2, column 3. 7½ column inches. "Further Particulars of the Murder in Cayuga County. From the Auburn Daily Advertiser." Lurid details (pregnant wife Sarah collapsing to die on a bed after being stabbed; the other stabbed woman running 100 yards with her intestines protruding, etc.). The murderer is identified by the Coroner's Jury as William Freeman, about 21 years of age, a former convict at the Auburn prison. A follow-up blurb at the end announces that Freeman has been arrested in Phoenix, Onondaga County,

. . . and has CONFESSED that he committed the deed!

He also says that he would have killed the WHOLE FAMILY, but from the fact that he wounded himself.

A clean tear into the text of both leaves just touches the article, but without loss.

 

— Wednesday morning, March 18: Page 2, column 3. 3½ column inches. "Freeman the Murderer." Quoting the Syracuse Daily Star which reports particulars of Freeman's previous crimes, including threatening a young woman's life. He had been imprisoned for horse theft, and once threatened a young woman with a knife. He gave no reason during the confession for the murders of the Van Ness family or the choice of victims, saying only that "the world rolled him there." The funeral was attended by some 3,000 people.

 

— Monday morning, March 23: Page 2, column 2. 4 column inches. "Freeman the Murderer. From the Auburn Daily Advertiser." Casual reporting of callous gawking once tolerated even in one of the nation's most progressive-minded regions in regard to penal systems - De Tocqueville once interviewed prisoners in Auburn and published his findings to the world with great approval. The local jail, however, was evidently more colloquial . . .

I have just visited his cell. The cells of the jail are of the same construction as those of the State Prison; that is, are of stone and iron, and open into a hall or corridor—and are quite as secure as those of the State Prison. In one of those stood Freeman, in the same dress in which he committed the monstrous butchery, his back to the whitened wall, by which his whole person was strongly relieved [contrasted],—his wounded arm in a sling,—and his right ancle clasped by a massive chain of about two feet in length, riveted to the stone floor.— . . . It is not strange that multitudes of every class and sex, go to the jail to look upon a being in human shape, who has, in this day and region of civilization, been capable of perpetrating acts of such savage atrocity.

The jailer is aggravated (if "not altogether destitute of wit") by all the spectators whom he must accommodate . . .

He had been so much annoyed . . . , that he declared that he would hire some negro to stand chained outside the jail, to personate Freeman, for the people to come and look at. "But, said he, "I am afraid they would Lynch the n[*****]!"

 

— Tuesday morning, March 24: Page 2, columns 4-5. 6½ col. inches of text, plus WOODCUT PORTRAIT of the accused murderer, entitled, "LIKENESS OF WILLIAM FREEMAN, The Murderer of the Van Nest Family . . . His Life and Character--Incidents of the Murder." The most interesting of the issues, with an engraving from a drawing supplied "our friends of the Cayuga Tocsin."

 

What became of William Freeman?  The following startling sequel is taken here from an Internet summary of the life of William Henry SEWARD (Governor of New York, Senator, and Secretary of State under Lincoln, who gave us, among other things, Alaska) . . .

In 1846 Seward became the center of controversy in his hometown when he defended, in separate cases, two convicts accused of murder. Henry Wyatt, a white man, was charged in the stabbing death of a fellow prison inmate; William Freeman, of African American and Native American ancestry, was accused of breaking into a home and stabbing four people to death. In both cases the defendants were mentally ill and had been severely abused while in prison. Seward, having long been an advocate of prison reform and better treatment for the insane, sought to prevent both men from being executed by using a relatively new defense of insanity. In a case involving mental illness with heavy racial overtones Seward argued, "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 a Man."

Later, Seward quoted Freeman’s brother-in-law, praising his eloquence: "They have made William Freeman what he is, a brute beast; they don’t make anything else of any of our people but brute beasts; but when we violate their laws, then they want to punish us as if we were men." In the end both men were convicted. Although Wyatt was executed, Freeman, whose conviction was reversed on Seward's successful appeal to the New York Supreme Court, died in his cell of tuberculosis.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Seward, accessed May 25, 2011]

 

 

Click Here to view the NEXT-MOST RECENT ADDITIONS, fresh from this page.

 

MORMON LIST 67

posted Tuesday, February 22, 2011 as a .pdf (Adobe Reader) document:

CLICK HERE for the complete ILLUSTRATED CATALOG (large file, 18 megabytes)

Or click here for dial-up version
(no illustrations or working links, small file, Microsoft Word document)

LIST OF ITEMS NOW SOLD from Mormon List 67
Check this frequently-updated list to avoid unnecessary frustration when ordering.

 

 

---

Set deep in the woods of Upstate New York, RICK GRUNDER - BOOKS is not a walk-in book store, but an original source for the origins of Mormonism. Think of this as a safe retreat in a dense forest where words like "rare" and "fine" are too often used without discrimination or expertise. As the first Chairman of the Brigham Young University Library Bibliographic Department until 1981, then an antiquarian bookseller for thirty years, I have worked full-time as a specialist in this field for more than a third of a century. I am located an hour's drive from both Palmyra, New York, and Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, places where Mormonism began. In such a place, of course, there is also much that comes my way which has nothing to do with Mormonism, so you will find a variety of material here.