favour from government, made a full confession of the crime. and the circumstances attending it. Within a few days after this disclosure was made, Richard Crowninshield, who was supposed to have been the principal assassin, committed suicide...

A special session of the Supreme Court was ordered by the legislature for the trial of the prisoners at Salem, in July. At that time John F. Knapp was indicted as principal in the murder, and George Crowninshield and Joseph J. Knapp as accessories.

On account of the death of Chief Justice Parker, which occurred on the 26th July, the Court adjourned to Tuesday, the 3d of August, when it proceeded in the trial of John F. Knapp. Joseph J. Knapp, being called upon, refused to give evidence, and the pledge of the government was withdrawn.

At the request of the prosecuting officers of the government, Mr. Webster appeared as counsel, and assisted in the trial.

Mr. Dexter addressed the jury on behalf of the prisoner, and was succeeded by Mr. Webster in the following speech:-

"I am little accustomed, gentlemen, to the part which I am now attempting to perform. Hardly more than once or twice has it. happened to me to be concerned, on the side of the government, in any criminal prosecution whatever; and never, until the present occasion, in any case affecting life.

"But I very much regret that it should have been thought necessary to suggest to you that I am brought here to hurry you against the law, and beyond the evidence.' I hope I have too much regard for justice, and too much respect for my own character, to attempt either; and were I to make such attempt, I am sure that, in this Court, nothing can be carried against the law, and that gentlemen, intelligent and just as you are, are not by any power to be hurried beyond the evidence. Though I could well have wished to shun this occasion, I have not felt at liberty to withhold my professional assistance when it is supposed that I might be in some degree useful in investigating and discussing the truth respecting this most extraordinary murder. It has seemed to be a duty incumbent on me, as on every other citizen, to do my best, and my utmost to bring to light the perpetrators of this crime. Against the prisoner at the bar, as an individual, I cannot have the slightest prejudice. I would not do him the smallest injury or in

justice. But I do not affect to be indifferent to the discovery and the punishment of this deep guilt. I cheerfully share in the opprobrium, how much soever it may be, which is cast on those who 1 feel and manifest an anxious concern that all who had a part in planning, or a hand in executing, this deed of midnight assassinal tion, may be brought to answer for their enormous crime at the bar of public justice. Gentlemen, it is a most extraordinary case. In some respects it has hardly a precedent any where, certainly none in our New England history. This bloody drama exhibited no suddenly excited ungovernable rage. The actors in it were not surprised by any lion-like temptation springing upon their virtue, and overcoming it before resistance could begin. Nor did they do the deed to glut savage vengeance, or satiate long settled and deadly hate. It was a cool, calculating, money-making murder. It was all hire and salary, not revenge.' It was the weighing of money against life, the counting out of so many pieces of silver against so many ounces of blood.

"An aged man, without an enemy in the world, in his own house, and in his own bed, is made the victim of a butcherly murder, for mere pay. Truly, here is a new lesson for painters and poets. Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited in an example, where such example was last to have been looked for, in the very bosom of our New England society, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate, and the blood-shot eye emitting living fires of malice. Let him draw rather a decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon; a picture in repose rather than in action; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity, and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal nature, a fiend in the ordinary display and developement of his character.

"The deed was executed with a degree of self-possession and steadiness, equal to the wickedness with which it was planned. The circumstances, now clearly in evidence, spread out the whole scene before us. Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, the first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace. The assassin enters through the window already prepared, into an unoccupied apartment. With noiseless foot he paces the lonely hall, half lighted by the moon, he winds up the ascent of the stairs, and reaches the door of the chamber. Of this he moves the lock, by soft and continued pressure, till it turns on its hinges, and he enters, and beholds his victim before

him. The room was uncommonly open to the admission of light. The face of the innocent sleeper was turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, showed him where to strike. The fatal blow is given! and the victim passes, without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he yet plies the dagger, though it was obvious that life had been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard? To finish the picture he explores the wrist for the pulse! he feels it, and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is accomplished. The deed is done. He retreats, retraces his steps to the window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes. He has done the murder-no eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The secret is his own, and it is safe!

"Ah! gentlemen, that was a dreadful mistake. Such a secret can be safe nowhere. The whole creation of God has neither nook nor corner, where the guilty can bestow it, and say it is safe. Not to speak of that eye which glances through all disguises, and beholds every thing as in the splendour of noon, such secrets of guilt are never safe from detection, even by men. True it is, generally speaking, that murder will out.' True it is that Providence hath so ordained, and doth so govern things, that those who break the great law of heaven, by shedding man's blood, seldom succeed in avoiding discovery. Especially, in a case exciting so much attention as this, discovery must come, and will come sooner or later. A thousand eyes turn at once to explore every man, every thing, every circumstance connected with the time and place; a thousand ears catch every whisper; a thousand excited minds intensely dwell on the scene, shedding all their light, and ready to kindle the slightest circumstance into a blaze of discovery. Meantime the guilty soul cannot keep its own secret. It is false to itself; or rather it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true to itself. It labours under its guilty possession, and knows not what to do with it. The human heart was not made for the residence of such an inhabitant. It finds itself preyed on by a torment, which it does not acknowledge to God nor man. A vulture is devouring it, and it can ask no sympathy or assistance, either from heaven or earth. The secret which the murderer pos sesses soon comes to possess him; and, like the evil spirits of which we read, it overcomes him, and leads him whithersoever it will. He feels it beating at his heart, rising to his throat, and de

manding disclosure. face, reads it in his eyes, and almos thears its workings in the very silence of his thoughts. It has become his master. It betrays his discretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers his prudence. When suspicions from without begin to embarrass him, and the net of circumstance to entangle him, the fatal secret struggles with still greater violence to burst forth. It must be confessed, it will be confessed, there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession."

He thinks the whole world sees it in his

Our readers may remember the extraordinary degree of sympathy excited for Thurtell, in consequence of his bold bearing at his trial and execution, though no reasonable doubt of his guilt was entertained by any one. The same principle in human nature seems to have been at work in favour of the yet unknown assassins of Mr. White; and Mr. Webster thus applies himself to clear away the prejudice:

"Such is human nature that some persons lose their abhorrence of crime, in their admiration of its magnificent exhibitions. Ordinary vice is reprobated by them, but extraordinary guilt, exquisite wickedness, the high flights and poetry of crime, seize on the imagination, and lead them to forget the depths of the guilt in admiration of the excellence of the performance or the unequalled atrocity of the purpose. There are those in our day who have made great use of this infirmity of our nature, and by means of it done infinite injury to the cause of good morals. They have affected not only the taste, but I fear also the principles of the young, the heedless, and the imaginative, by the exhibition of interesting and beautiful monsters. They render depravity attractive, sometimes by the polish of its manners, and sometimes by its very extravagance; and study to show off crime under all the advantages of cleverness and dexterity. Gentlemen, this is an extraordinary murder-but it is still a murder. We are not to lose ourselves in wonder at its origin, or in gazing on its cool and skilful execution. We are to detect and to punish it: and while we proceed with caution against the prisoner, and are to be sure that we do not visit on his head the offences of others, we are yet to consider that we are dealing with a case of most atrocious crime, which has not the slightest circumstance about it to soften its enormity. It is murder, deliberate, concerted, malicious murder."

Thurtell complained of the public indignation stirred up against him: Mr. Knapp's counsel had loudly reiterated a

somewhat similar complaint. Our next quotations form part of Mr. Webster's reply to it:

.1

"Complaint is made that rewards were offered in this case, and temptations held out to obtain testimony. Are not rewards always offered when great and secret offences are committed? Rewards were offered in the case to which I alluded; and every other means taken to discover the offenders that ingenuity, or the most persevering vigilance could suggest. The learned counsel have suffered their zeal to lead them into a strain of complaint at the manner in which the perpetrators of this crime were detected, almost indicating that they regard it as a positive injury to them to have found out their guilt. Since no man witnessed it, since they do not now confess it, attempts to discover it are half esteemed as officious, intermeddling and impertinent inquiry.

"It is said that here even a committee of vigilance was appointed. This is a subject of reiterated remark. This committee are pointed at, as though they had been officiously intermeddling with the administration of justice. They are said to have been labouring for months' against the prisoner. Gentlemen, what must we do in such a case? Are people to be dumb and still through fear of overdoing? Is it come to this, that an effort cannot be made, a hand cannot be lifted, to discover the guilty, without its being said there is a combination to overwhelm innocence? Has the community lost all moral sense? Certainly, a community that would not be roused to action upon an occasion such as this was,—a community which should not deny sleep to their eyes, and slumber to their eyelids, till they had exhausted all the means of discovery and detection, must indeed be lost to all moral sense, and would scarcely deserve protection from the laws."

"But the learned counsel for the defendant take a somewhat loftier flight still. They are more concerned, they assure us, for the law itself than even for their client. Your decision in this case they say will stand as a precedent. Gentlemen, we hope it will. We hope it will be a precedent, both of candour and intelligence, of fairness and of firmness; a precedent of good sense and honest purpose, pursuing their investigation discreetly, rejecting loose generalities, exploring all the circumstances, weighing each in search of truth, and embracing and declaring the truth when found.

"It is said that laws are made, not for the punishment of the guilty, but for the protection of the innocent.' This is not quite accurate, perhaps, but if so we hope they will be so administered