THE ISOLATED GREENHORN

“Our bodies must always be wherever that struggle and the moment we forget that, the moment we become lazy, the moment we sit back, then the evil ones do their ordained tasks to us.”- William Kunstler, 1995 

Sworn: Jack Penney (jailer)

By Atty. Gen. Martin Van Buren:

Q. "Mr. Penney are you often scolded regarding you duties at the jail?"

A. "Seems I can't do nothing right."

By Mr. Duer: 

Q. How long has Jack been in the lower gaol?

A. Eight or ten days.

Q. Has he had any bed to sleep on there?

A. He has.

Q. What part of the time?

A. I gave him a bed at the request of the sheriff night before last.

Ainzi Ball sworn

By Mr. Duer:

Q. Did not Jack request you remove him from the room where Dunning was confined?

A. He did. He said that he was so harassed by him that he had no time for reflection.   

      This is not a who done it. Not exactly. The crucial question in evidence was not of guilt or innocence in legal terms, as that had already been established. Jack Hodges had confessed to the men on the boat, Doc. Seward, the coroner, the magistrates and anyone else who would listen. He said he shot old Dick Jennings with Dave Conklin’s shotgun, loaded with birdshot…..… as anybody knows not a good load to kill a man. He regretted that fact, and felt terrible about the whole mess, but he also swore he wasn’t the one who put that big hole in Dick’s skull. He swore he didn’t kill him……only shot him. The law didn’t care. Jack would hang.

      But, in Jack Hodges’ view, it was one thing to scare Dick Jennings, blast the old man’s ear off and set him down, gasping for air in the snow, teach him a lesson so to speak…….It was another to turn a rich white man’s musket to splinters beating that poor old man to death like a rabid dog. According to Jack that was all on David Dunning, and he would have none of it. Pure and simple, Dunning killed Dick Jennings for no good reason and Dunning broke the gun…..period. In Jack’s view he didn’t care if he had to hang but, he was at the very least, taking Dunning with him to the gallows.  

    Jack Hodges was that curious anomaly common in small town NY, a kind of “adoptive,” able to cut across cultural boundaries, remain respected amongst his peers, as well as get along with the power structure through cleverness, brawn, and congeniality, regardless of race. No town can afford too many knaves or malcontents, but a few harmless drunks or a couple of hardworking men or women with real mental issues are always tolerated, if not celebrated. The hard to pin down misanthrope Richard Jennings was another, just like Jack, a colorful patch on a little town that already had a Big Ick, a Ray Enright, a Shorty Reynolds.

     Usually Jack could avoid random acts of mistreatment at the hands of the whites with extra hard work, mutual heavy drinking, and amiability. He more than got along, he thrived. He may have been a “drunken negro,” but he was Sugar Loaf’s “drunken negro,” and as such he garnered a certain amount of good will across the board. Everybody liked Jack.  As a free man and a sailor, Hodges attended the same white Presbyterian church as the Conklins, Teeds and Jennings and had never known the chains and shackles of slavery. In fact he sailed on slavers and court testimony shows he paid “$50 for a negro wench,” purchased from David Conklin’s father Ezra, technically making him a slaveowner as well. How well, or cruelly Jack Hodges treated his female slave we'll never know. She could have been loved and treated “just like family,” or abused and treated like a farm animal. Other than the one court reference, she’s never mentioned again.

     Due to his life on the sea, Hodges was by far more worldly and knowledgable of interactions between cultural opposites than the sheltered, white citizens of Sugar Loaf.  He was not naive. These Orange County citizens were one generation removed from what Ulysses S. Grant referred to as a “class”; people who shunned contact with others; people who when the country began to settle up around them, they would push out farther from civilization…and if anything was left over from the proceeds of a sale, more whisky.” But Jack knew better than to underestimate those around him. No matter how backward these freeholders seemed, he needed help. He had to get himself a lawyer.  Somehow he found that lawyer in 42 year old Henry G. Wisner.         

      There was no mistaking the social standing of the Wisners. They were of Orange County’s powerful elite. American royalty. Like his neighbors (both tory and rebel), the Clintons, Mathews, Bulls, Dennistons and Coldens, Henry G Wisner’s grandfather, Henry, sr. was involved in amassing huge wealth and power, while simultaneously attempting to steer the course of political history to his, and the infant America’s, favor. At the core of all of it was money, land ownership and political control. The illusion of egalitarianism that the founders like Wisner, Washington, and the Clintons held up to the “negroes and rabble,” as proof of their cause against the crown, could quite easily be deconstructed. All privilege rested in one narrow, yet brutally simplistic identity- male yeoman, rich, white property owner. Capitalism at its core. So when Henry G. took Jack’s pro-bono case the prisoner was accorded some sense of equality by default.

      Not all the citizenry of Orange County was uneducated, unworldly, or the pampered rich. In fact this little corner of NY was home to Noah Webster’s prestigious Farmers Hall Academy and if you had the money….well. Jack’s lawyer, Henry G. Wisner esq. was a Farmers Hall alum, valedictorian at Princeton, class of 1799, and knew a little something about the world, history, ancestry, and family feuds over land. Henry had learned from the inside how the entire crooked system worked. His grandfather, Henry Wisner, sr., was the rich gunpowder manufacturer, member of the Continental Congress and close confidante of Gen. George Washington during the Revolution. Without the elder Wisner's money, powder and shot, supplied to the Continental Army and extensive manipulation and effort in support of the American Revolution, we could all very well be speaking with a Brit accent. Young Henry Gabriel had grown up on his grandfather’s knee after his father Gabriel Wisner was killed at the Battle of Minisink in 1779. Henry was only two years old when his father was killed. He learned much at the grieving  patriarch’s knee.

   But Henry G. Wisner, apart from being privileged, as well as having a brilliant legal mind, also had a social conscience. He not only had the respect and “esteem of his brethren of the Bar….” he was also a social radical and abolitionist. He looked for cases like Jack Hodges. Wisner family member G. Franklin Wisner wrote in 1918, “As a citizen he was spirited and enterprising, always willing to contribute of his time, talents, and means to the advancement of the public interest and to the good of his fellow man…….To the indigent he was, indeed, a friend and counselor, whose aid was never invoked in vain.” Henry Gabriel Wisner was the Fay Stender or William Kunstler of his time. Jack Hodges had no idea how lucky he was in retaining Henry G. Wisner as his mighty mouthpiece.