CHAPTER SIX- THE ALL SEEING EYE OF THE LAWLESS BANDITTI

“By Babel’s stream the captives sate

And wept for Zion’s hapless fate:

Useless their harps on willows hung,

Wile foes required a sacred song.”- Merot’s French Psalms

      William Henry Seward’s words are carved deeply in the national tree, while even his uncle’s accused killer Jack Hodges, is quoted with varying degrees of accuracy in courtroom testimony, as well as a Christian tract published by a white upstate New York minister, Rev. Ansel Doane Eddy. But there is not one single word spoken by Richard Jennings for us to read. For Dick, it’s all second hand information. Nothing is left but a broken plate, his brother’s bible and a faded signature on a questionable land deed, hidden deep within the Goshen clerk’s office.

      By early April the Seward family was having a crisis of its own. Out in the apple orchard, (a mile south of the village of Goshen) a grand, public execution was being meticulously produced, while the doctor and Mrs. Seward’s son, seventeen year old William H. Seward, had been missing for months. Nobody had heard a word from William Henry since New Year’s Day. His mother’s brother had disappeared and turned up dead. Now her son had vanished a week later. Mary Jennings Seward was beside herself with worry. 

      

     Henry Seward had gone off to college at fifteen and “found religion” in the personage of Union College president Rev. Eliphalet Nott. Nott was one of those cosmopolitan, vocal, religious opponents of capital punishment that were gaining devotees in the northeast. When Henry arrived at Union, the college President took the brilliant young student under his wing. His temperance, pacifism, and paternalistic demeanor, was having a great effect on the impressionable young man.

       There was good reason for Henry Seward to be impressed with Eliphalet Nott. Along with being a theologian, and an orator, the college president was also an inventor on the side. Nott recognized the inevitable growth of northern academia, and the difficulties inherent in heating large spaces, (filled with paying students) during the winter months. Nott preached in drafty churches, that faced the heating dilemma only once a week. This got Nott thinking. If a stove could be designed to be loaded and banked enough to get through more than Sunday services, large classrooms could be heated everyday. Primary schools and now colleges were cropping up everywhere in the Northeast. They had to be warmed enough through the winter months to keep their students in class. Fireplaces and standard wood stoves were costly, inefficient, and labor intensive. Nott saw a solution—a large, modern coal stove— that looked like a grand European cathedral.  

    Rev. Nott preached the gospel of the workshop, a partnership between the marketplace and science; a radical fusion of theology, modern thought and invention. In 1816 (that year without a summer) the Rev. began his coal stove design experiments. By 1829 he held over twenty-five patents for efficient, anthracite coal burning stoves. Eliphalet Nott, more than any other individual, is responsible for warming America’s large communal spaces cheaply and effectively. His designs are the crude basics for all coal burning turbines in operation today, thereby being personably responsible for air pollution, climate change, and global warming. No good deed goes unpunished.

      

     Lets go back to December 1818— right before Dick’s murder. Henry Seward had returned to the family farm in Florida for winter break, weeks before his uncle was bludgeoned to death in that gully. He’d spent his entire Christmas vacation at home, witnessing the slow roll of concern over Dick’s disappearance. No Seward biography, or auto-biography mentions it. For some reason Seward historians overlook the Richard Jennings murder entirely. Why? 

    Seward biographer Walter Stahr, instead, focuses on “money issues” between father and son, as the reason Henry dropped out of school and disappeared into the deep south without a word. What would Dr. Samuel Seward be discussing around the Florida dinner table in December, petty allowances, or the mysterious disappearance of his wife’s brother? If we are to believe Stahr, Henry was forced by his father to return to Schenectady for the next semester, rebelled over finances, and randomly fled to Putnam County , Georgia. Why south? Henry Seward already had shown an interest in the law. Why leave the state, when a crime was suddenly unfolding right before his eyes? And why go to Putnam County, Georgia? I admit, this may be a red herring. But, maybe not. 

    “He [Nott] has introduced us to a new sphere,” Henry penned his father from Union College, “and every observation that drops from his lips confirms his greatness.” This passage shows Henry’s obvious fondest and awe, in regard to Nott. But there wouldn’t be any other correspondence between father and son, from January 1st, until late February. These letters are tucked away in the New York State Library in Albany. I’ve yet to read them. It’s turkey season and I’m busy.

    All the verdicts were in and Henry’s mother hadn’t heard directly from her son in months. Then a letter arrived for Mary Jennings Seward, postmarked Eatonton, Georgia, March 11, 1819; the day after Dunning’s guilty verdict came down. It was impossible for Henry Seward to have known of this development in the Jennings trials, a thousand miles away. That is, unless, his father had been keeping him apprized, through secondary communication of the other guilty verdicts the whole time. There are no surviving letters from father to son in Georgia. In part, William H. Seward’s letter to his mother reads:

 “Knowing that your maternal breast is distressed by my unexpected absence permit me to assure you that I have taken all necessary means in my power to shorten my length of residence in this place…..Suspense I know to all is dreadful- - But the horror of suspense on my part shall be dissipated in some measure by hope let not your susciptible (sic) feelings be distressed.” 

    This is a letter from a brilliant, articulate, homesick, seventeen year old to his mother, not a mature rector who had just started a new school in a foreign land, and was prepared to see it through. Henry may have realized he was ill-equipped for his position as rector of a private school, or just pined for home and hearth. Had Seward had a change of heart in taking on his teaching responsibilities, or somehow received word that the coast was clear to return to Orange County? Mary Seward breathed a sigh of relief. At least her son was alive. He’d never make it back in time for the hangings.