DEAD SNAKE IN YOUR LAP

  

“……when I discovered that I had become, for some cause, the object of of sneering remark and contemptuous laughter among the promiscuous crowd, of both sexes who occupied the opposite of the gallery. As I looked immediately around me to see what could be the cause, a negro man of middle age, black as the ace of spades, but gentle of speech, approached me meekly and said, “Guess young master don’t know that he’s got into the colored folk’s part of the gallery.” I thanked him, repaired to my proper position, and the jibes and laughter ceased…..the immediate effect of the incident was to awaken my distrust of my ability to begin the world alone.”- Autobiography of William H. Seward

    I don’t know exactly when classes resumed for spring session at Union or if Henry Seward actually returned to Schenectady. The college’s records are incomplete. The admissions department at Union College sent me a note, with an encyclopedic article of schedules attached. It helps a little.

“A calendar revision in 1802 ended the first term about two weeks earlier, on the second Wednesday of September…. and increased the Christmas vacation from one week to three…..the College typically had a summer vacation of nearly eight weeks, a thirteen-week first term (reduced to twelve from 1819) and a second and third term of twelve weeks. Instead of both lasting three weeks, at least one of the term breaks, and sometimes both, were four weeks long.”

        How long would it take to get from Goshen to Schenectady in 1819? A 1931 article published in The Quarterly Journal of the New York Historical Association by Supreme Court Justice and history buff, Oliver Wendell Holmes, states, ” … December 1803 shows that it [the stage] started from Hoboken every Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and ran “through Hackensack, Goshen, Wardsbridge [Montgomery], Kingston, Catskill and Cooksakie [Cocksackie]” to Albany…The fare was eight dollars.” The route up the Albany-Post Road changed in 1814 to run through Newburgh, taking on average (depending on the weather) “57 hours” between New York and Albany. Although Seward writes of his first steamboat ride up the Hudson two years earlier, a steamboat ride up the river in late December would have been impossible. 

     The stage coach period after the War of 1812 in New York was referred to as the “step lively” era, due to big changes in rapid transit. Now the stages were taking a faster, more direct route up the Hudson. “On the western side of the Hudson,” the Justice wrote, “a daily stage now passed from Albany through Catskill, Kingston, Newburgh and Goshen, performing the trip to New York in two days.” Conservatively adding a half day for the Albany-Schenectady Line, Henry Seward would’ve had to have left Florida right after Christmas in order to travel by stage to Union College and immediately turned around, returning “through Newburgh” on January 1st.   

       Working backwards, the Union College vacation schedule puts Henry Seward in Florida, New York at least three weeks prior to New Year’s Day; witnessing everything that transpired surrounding his uncle’s disappearance, until sometime just before January 1st. Four days after Christmas, a day after Richard Jennings’ body was discovered, C. B. Durland left Goshen with three other men, hot on Jack Hodges’ trail. On Thursday Dec. 31st Durland’s posse took Jack Hodges into custody, alongside the wood sloop in New York City, and returned with their prisoner, through Haverstraw on Friday Jan. 1st. That same day, as Jack sat in the bridewell jail in the morning, and on the ferry to Haverstraw in the afternoon, Henry Seward claims to have left Union College, by stage coach, headed through Newburgh for New York City; unbeknownst to anyone. Could Henry have remained at home in Florida the whole time, and the stage coach story been a well-crafted alibi concocted between father and son?

      The night before the schooner’s departure, Henry Seward, now in New York City, “avoiding discovery on shore,” takes in Richard III at the Old Park. Back in Florida, two days earlier, the county coroner John Curtice, and magistrates Sam Hopkins and Sam Wilken were the first to take down in writing Jack’s confession, “….the prisoner’s voluntary statements, made without either promises or threats.” By this time, according to Seward’s autobiography, nobody but Alvah Wilson knows that William Henry Seward is in the wind. I guess that’s possible. Or, did his father know exactly where his son was all this time? Did Henry Seward witness something he shouldn’t have? Was he somehow involved in his cousin’s plot to murder his uncle? Had Hannah Teed cast an even wider net than anyone imagined? My sources on Henry’s whereabouts during this week are the Old Park theatre program, Union College’s admissions, Walter Stahr’s book, and William H. Seward, himself. Alvah Wilson left no diary. Nobody else is talking.

    All families have secrets; skeletons buried deep in the closet. It wouldn’t have been unusual for the Seward and Jennings families to want to keep their children as far removed from this scandal as possible. The rich and powerful have the means to control the narrative better than most. Even though, at the time, the Sewards were not well known outside of New York State, the phantoms remain locally contained. But, these days, with the democratization of information, history is not just written by the winners and never stays local. The “dead snake” in your lap is the transmitter, employing galvanic telepathy—asking questions centuries old—even if nobody is receiving.