Deliberate Evil Page 2
Among the first on the scene were Captain White’s twenty-year-old assistant William Ward and the aforementioned Stephen White along with physician Johnson. The elderly Dr. Johnson tried his best to judge the time of death by measuring the temperature of the corpse, saying he guessed White had been dead for something like four hours—which put the time of the murder at approximately 3:30 AM. “I went to Captain White’s chamber,” Johnson recalled, “and found him lying on his right side, or nearly so, and nearly diagonal to the bed. There was a mark of considerable violence on his left temple. I noticed that the bedclothes were laid slantwise, square across the body, and diagonally to the bed.” The captain lay with his feet toward the left lower post of the bed, and his head toward the right headpost. “On throwing off the bedclothes, I saw that the back of his left hand was under his left hip, and there was considerable blood on the bed. He also bled a little from the nose.”
White’s assistant and clerk Ward surprised the others when he bent down, retrieved a large chest from under White’s bed, and opened it to reveal an abundance of cash and gold coins. It was also noticed that a rouleau of Spanish doubloons, easily worth at least $1,000, had been left untouched on the captain’s bureau. Thus, theft seemed eliminated as a motive for the crime. The only thing that might be missing from the chest, said Ward, was a sworn copy of Captain White’s latest will—but he could be mistaken as to where the captain had kept it stored. The matter seemed unimportant. The original of the will, as both Stephen White and Ward knew, was safe in the hands of Captain White’s attorney, Joseph G. Waters. In turn, Stephen White, after touring the house—with which he was very familiar—said no other valuables appeared to be missing.
As it happened, Captain White’s niece and housekeeper, Mary Beckford, had been away on the night of the crime. She’d been visiting her daughter, another Mary, and Mary’s husband, Joseph “Joe” Jenkins Knapp Jr., on the farm where the couple lived in Wenham, six miles to the north of Salem. (The farm was one that Beckford had purchased a year before, now managed by Beckford’s son-in-law, John Davis, the husband of Mary Beckford Knapp’s sister.)3 Knapp had been to White’s mansion on the sixth, at about noon, to give his mother-in-law a ride to the farm. Young Knapp had previously been the master on one of White’s ships, and his Mary had once worked and lived in Captain White’s mansion under the supervision of her mother.
* * *
Shortly after the discovery of the murder, Stephen White instructed one of his servants to go to Wenham, inform Mrs. Beckford of what had occurred, and bring her back to Salem. He instructed another to go to Captain White’s attorney, Joseph Waters, and secure the original of the captain’s latest will.
White also summoned the town coroner, Thomas Needham—a member of the city council and, by trade, a prominent cabinetmaker.4 Needham, in turn, assembled a jury of inquest from among the curious onlookers who had already begun to gather around the house, swore them as witnesses, and led them upstairs into Captain White’s bedroom. This group then witnessed a more systematic study of the body by Dr. Johnson than he had done previously, assisted by Salem’s Dr. Oliver Hubbard.
Johnson explained each step to the laymen as he and Hubbard drew back Captain White’s bloody bedclothes and then cut away the captain’s blood-drenched nightshirt to reveal what seemed like more than a dozen knife wounds. Using a probe, Johnson identified five stabs to the heart, five to the side, and three to the chest. Johnson also pointed out the grievous wound to the skull—a profound indentation but one that, strangely, revealed no breakage of the skin.
As to the direct cause of death, Johnson said he could make no precise determination. It could have been the blow to the head. Or it could have been one or several of the knife wounds. There was no sign of a struggle, which indicated that the blow to the head had come first, knocking out the sleeping victim, and then the knife stabs. (A few illustrations for some newspaper accounts would later show, quite inaccurately, Captain White cowering with eyes open in his bed while his murderer approached. No such thing appears to have happened.)
The front door of the Joseph White mansion, photographed circa 1900. Photo by Frank Cousins from the Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
After Johnson’s examination of the corpse, the coroner supervised several men who lifted the now-shrouded body, carried it downstairs, loaded it onto a cart, and headed off in the direction of the Salem Jail, where the corpse would be stored until a more formal autopsy could be arranged. While this went on, Benjamin White and Lydia Kimball watched out the window of the mansion’s front parlor.
Stephen White was to recall much later that Kimball was a frail little thing, a slight wisp of a girl both physically and, it seemed, emotionally. She’d twelve years earlier been put out to service in the White household by her parents who lived in Gloucester, her mother a seamstress and her father a fisherman. As she spoke to White on the morning after the murder, her body shivered—not from cold, but from sheer nervous agitation and exhaustion. She’d retired only a little after Captain White went up, once she’d finished cleaning the kitchen and banking the fire in the parlor. She said she’d bolted the door to her room from the inside but did not elaborate as to why. Kimball’s room, on the third floor, sat immediately above and in earshot of Captain White’s. “I could generally tell when he was awake,” she was to recall, “if I myself was so, by a kind of cough or hem which he had when awake, which was usually in the latter part of the night.” But she heard no such sounds on the night of the murder.
Of that morning she recalled Benjamin coming to her door and informing her that there had been a break-in. “I went down into the front room to see if anything had been stolen, [then told Benjamin] to go up and tell Mr. White. He came down and told me to be calm, that Mr. White had gone to the eternal world.” She told Stephen White she thanked God she’d been spared, and she wondered out loud who could have transacted such a foul deed. One person whom White could not imagine doing this evil was the diminutive, delicate eggshell of a girl who sat before him. She did not seem at all the type that could swing a hammer down onto the head of a sleeping octogenarian, let alone pound his chest repeatedly with a dagger. Captain White, she said, was not always a nice man, but still it was a pity what had happened to him. Kimball impressed White as an innocent in more ways than one. As for Benjamin, Stephen White simply did not think the man, as a practical matter, capable of the deed. In the final analysis, Benjamin had neither the imagination nor the courage.
* * *
The Whites had a long history in the region of Salem. Captain White’s father, Joseph White Sr., had been born there in 1724—the son of Captain John White Sr., who’d been born in Gloucester in 1698. Captain White’s mother, Abigail Mutchemore, hailed from another place altogether: the southernmost island of the Isles of Shoals on the New Hampshire–Maine border, to which Joseph Sr. relocated briefly after his marriage before returning home to Salem.5 Abigail’s husband died young, in 1751, at the age of twenty-seven, leaving her with three small children: Mary (age five), Joseph (three), and Henry (a newborn). Abigail and her children were thereafter supported by Captain John White Sr. and his wife Rebecca (the children’s grandparents), and Captain John White Jr. (the children’s uncle). In time, Joseph and his brother Henry were brought into the family business, learning to become merchantmen and skippers. John White Sr. died in 1781, and John White Jr. in 1792. As the elder between himself and his brother Henry, Captain Joseph White inherited the business and the family wharf, the latter of which he set about expanding in 1798.
Joseph White, it was generally agreed, had been a contrary character—quick to argue, take offense, even scores, and go to war in both personal and professional life. At the time of the Revolution, he’d at first remained loyal to the Crown. Only after the British began raiding his ships did he change course. After purchasing a vessel named Come Along Paddy from one of the Derby clan, he had her refitte
d with cannon and renamed her. Then he took his newly christened Revenge to sea and became the first—and arguably most successful—privateer sailing out of Salem, raiding any civilian British vessel he could find.
The action highlighted a key element of his character. When punched but once, White could be counted upon to return the blow a dozen times or more. He held grudges, and he acted upon them. He was not a man to be trifled with. He made enemies easily. And apparently one of them had decided to deliver a final blow.
3 Wharves and Decline
“He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.”
—George Herbert
Salem’s waterfront would have been nothing without its wharves—massive arms of sand, gravel, and dirt projecting out into the harbor, receiving and hosting the dozens of Salem vessels that came and went every day.
The making of Salem’s wharves represented Herculean efforts, staggering investments, and the most painstaking attention to engineering detail. The greatest of the wharves took years to complete, with workers laying timber walls on mud flats at periods of low tide, filling these with dirt and stone hauled from inland, then finally replacing the timber walls with enormous blocks of granite. While completed sections of a wharf were already in use for shipping, the work of extending its length might go on for another decade or more.
The most prominent of the wharves—the one built, appropriately it would seem, by a family that at one time had been the city’s richest clan, the Derbys—shot a full half mile into the harbor. With its sheer size, the Derby Wharf seemed to bely any hint of frailty or impermanence. Indeed, even now in the twenty-first century, the Derby Wharf remains as one of only four such structures still evident on the Salem shoreline. But today even the substantial Derby edifice seems as if it shall eventually vanish. There is no escape from sea rise. Storm surges at high tide regularly swamp the outer reach of this vast manmade peninsula.
Ironically, the Derby Wharf has long outlasted the Derby fortune. The founding father of the short-lived Derby shipping dynasty, Elias Hasket “King” Derby, died in 1799. By that time King Derby had made himself into America’s very first millionaire. But two intransigent and improvident sons, combined with competition from the influential Crowninshield clan (some of whom had married Derby women), saw the Derbys ruined by the start of the second decade of the nineteenth century.
These days, three of Salem’s four remaining quays (the Derby and Central Wharves, along with Hatch’s Wharf) lay open and barren, while the Tucker Wharf, supplemented by additional landfill, accommodates stores and eateries. But at the time with which we are concerned, all four of these wharves, not to mention in excess of fifty more, hosted numerous warehouses and other buildings. In its heyday, the Derby Wharf alone incorporated no less than three warehouses (each three stories high) for the storage of imported goods from the Far East: teas, spices, silk cloth, porcelain, gold dust, ivory, and Calcutta cottons. There was also hemp from Luzon, duck and raw iron from the Baltic, and rubber and wool and molasses from South America. Outbound products included whale oil, rum, salted beef, and such iron products as nails.
Salem Custom House, built 1819, photographed circa 1900. The Custom House sits at the foot of the Derby Wharf and is today a part of the Salem Maritime National Historic Site. Photo by Frank Cousins from the Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
In addition to its three warehouses, the Derby Wharf accommodated seventeen more buildings, one of them a large counting house. At the foot of the Derby Wharf stood (and still stands today) the ornate Salem Custom House—built 1819—with its wide front steps, its high brick walls, its cupola towering in sight of virtually every corner of the commercial waterfront, and its elaborate golden eagle perched atop the pointed roof.
The Custom House reigned as Salem’s most prominent architectural landmark for a mere six years before being supplanted by the grand edifice of the East India Marine Hall, home to the East India Marine Society. Founded in 1779, at the peak of Salem’s dominance as a port, the East India Marine Society existed “to assist the widows and children of deceased members, to collect such facts and observations as tended to the improvement and security of navigation, and to form a Museum of natural and artificial curiosities, particularly such as are to be found beyond the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn.” Membership was open to any person “who shall have actually navigated seas near the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, either as master or commander or as factor or supercargo in any vessel belonging to Salem.”1
For a time, Salem native Nathaniel Bowditch—widely considered the most brilliant mathematician and astronomer anywhere in the Americas—served as president of the organization. Under his stewardship, and afterward, the collections of the society grew at a rapid rate as energetic members returned from their voyages carrying all sorts of exotic materials meant for display: stuffed tropical birds, oriental swords and armor, shrunken heads, and other oddments. The collections also included models of famed Salem clippers, paintings of same, and items as random as a coffee cup and saucer once owned by Napoleon Bonaparte and used by him during his exile on the isle of St. Helena.2 By 1824 the collections of the society contained more than three thousand items. Thus, there arose the need for the society’s new permanent home—one grand and extensive enough to match both the society’s practical needs and, almost more important, Salem’s dignity as a city to rival others.
Built largely with funds provided by Stephen White, the massive granite, two-story East India Marine Hall stood complete on Essex Street by October 1825. No less a personage than President John Quincy Adams spoke at the October 14 dedication, as did Boston Mayor Josiah Quincy and Associate Justice Story.
The prominence of the speakers and the solemnity of the occasion signaled—or at least, was meant to signal—the prominence of Salem as a seat of commerce and culture. The event received nationwide publicity. Salem, the town fathers seemed to say, perhaps a bit too eagerly and a bit too urgently, was a city and a port to be reckoned with. Left unsaid was the fact that Salem was a port and a city on the way down, rather than up, in importance, power, and profitability. The city’s best days lay behind it.
Listening to all the exuberant, bellicose speeches at the Marine Hall dedication, and gazing at the majestic structure, the uninformed observer would never have realized that Salem’s status as a world-class economic center had already begun to decline. No longer was Salem a port second to none, and no more was it by far the wealthiest city in the entire country, outstripping even New York, as had been the case two decades earlier.
Yes, Salem’s waterfront still buzzed with activity. Commerce continued. Accounting books showed healthy profits. The polished brass of the fine homes remained polished. And town fathers still congratulated themselves on their industry and trade. (“In all probability,” wrote Caleb Foote, editor of the Salem Gazette, “there has never been a time in which our shipping was in so good order, or so well built and found, or our [ship] masters possessed of so much skill in navigation and trade. No insurance company has as yet suffered diminution of capital, and all, if dissolved, would return at least par.”)3
But Boston and New York, with their much larger waterfronts and many advantages in the way of expanding railroad connections for the movement of goods, now attracted far more trade than Salem could ever hope for. Rails would not come to Salem until 1838, and even then they would only connect through to Boston. There was also another problem: Salem’s harbor was simply not deep enough to accommodate the latest, largest, and most profitable vessels built in recent years. Add to this the fact that after the War of 1812, numerous other ships flying under foreign flags began to engage in the trade formerly dominated by Salem, bringing the riches of the East to ports in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal—and the United States.
Salem had 198 ships registered to its port in 1825; there would only be 119 registered in 1833. This trend was to continue. By 1830, eve
n Salem’s own ruling maritime families had begun to run some of their vessels out of Boston and New York rather than from the Salem waterfront. Many families diversified beyond maritime enterprises, among them the Crowninshields, who built an ironworks. Other manufactories sprang up—one being a pencil factory—to employ seamen who could no longer find work on ships. At the same time, a number of prosperous merchant families began to look inland, to the flowing rivers of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine, for sites to build textile mills. What could no longer be imported profitably could instead be made domestically.
East India Marine Hall on Essex Street, photographed circa 1900. Photo by Frank Cousins from the Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
An additional—but generally unspoken—reason for the shrinking of Salem’s economic base was the town’s loss of income from the slave trade, which had previously flooded in throughout the 1780s, ’90s, and first two decades of the nineteenth century, when men like Captain White routinely dispatched ships full of worthless trinkets to the Ivory Coast, trading these for human beings that they in turn delivered to the Caribbean, making a rich profit on every head. This aspect of Salem’s commerce had always been somewhat subterranean—hardly noticeable, save for the gold it brought to the coffers of Salem’s elites. Always, Salem’s participation in the grim business of the “peculiar institution” remained opaque. The people of Salem were never made to directly encounter or confront the stark reality of Salem’s slaving economy, even though its truth was generally known to all. Thousands of miles protected the townsmen from actually witnessing the trade as practiced.