VICKSBURG Chapter Seventy - Seven

The Hoosier pickets were not the best the Federal army had to offer, merely average. But after 2 ½ years of war, the level of average had been raised. These members of the 60^th Indiana Volunteer regiment, were veterans of Shiloh and Champion Hill. And in the early morning dark of Sunday, 31 May, 1863, when Texans in overwhelming numbers waded across the Bayou Vidal, Louisiana (above), these Hoosiers did not panic. 

The pickets sent word back to their captain, and then picked their shots. They forced the rebels to take shelter, expend their ammunition and energy. And then the Yankees fell back hundred yards or so, to repeat the exercise.

The Texans were brave, eager and well trained. But this was their first taste of real combat, and the man who had molded their corporate personality for 8 months was 46 year old Brigadier General Henry Eustace McCulloch. The McCulloch family were distant ancestors of George Washington's.  The revolutionary war had wiped out the McCulloch family fortune, leaving them, like most Americans along the frontier, constantly being herded west by creditors. 

In 1835, when Mexican General Santa Ana ordered slavery finally ended in the state of Tejas, Henry's older brother Ben had followed their Tennessee neighbor, David Crockett, south, to defend slavery.  Only a case of measles prevented Ben from dying romantically at the Alamo with his hero. But in 1837 both Ben and Henry McCulloch sought and found new lives and fortunes in the Lone Star state as supporters of slavery and then succession.

General Ben McCulloch (above)  would die in March of 1862, at the Battle of Pea Ridge in Arkansas. General Henry McCulloch was then given command of green troops dispatched to Arkansas. 

Not until November of 1862 did Henry (above)  relinquished the division to Major General Walker. Henry then resumed command of the division's 3^rd Brigade - 4 regiments of infantry and 1 of dismounted cavalry, supported by a 4 gun battery of light artillery, under Captain William Edgar. After some 700 miles of marching and steaming back and forth across Arkansas and Louisiana, these eager men who were seeking to slice the jugular of Grant's army.

About a half mile behind the skirmish line, at a wooden dock called Somerset Landing, was a company detachment of the 60^th Indiana. They had been sent here in the tradition of Roman Legionaries, to listen and look for the enemy where the enemy were not supposed to be. Finding them the Yankees were to report and retreat. By circumstance the Yankees were also protecting some 300 runaway slaves, who had come into their lines seeking refuge. And a refugee was the third reincarnation of Somerset Landing in the last six weeks - since General Grant had made this stretch of Old Man River the fulcrum of the American Civil War.

People still called it Somerset Landing, even after it fell into the hands of Judge John Perkins, who already owned a plantation across the river from Natchez, Mississippi. With the addition of Somerset's 17,500 acres, and its 250 slaves, Perkins became one of the richest and most influential men in the slave states. His eldest son, John Perkins junior, eventually became a United States Congressman, and was the “oldest and best friend” of Jefferson Davis, eventually to be the Confederate President, and whose plantation was just across the Mississippi. Then in 1858, Perkins junior was deeded Somerset by his then 68 year old father.

So it was no small sacrifice when John junior burned the mansion and buildings of Somerset, before they were captured by Grant's army. But Grant was snaking his way down the levees of Tansas County, on his way to Hard Times Landing. He had no interest nor ability to confiscate any cotton. But that did not stop Perkins from burning 2,000 bales to spite the hated Yankees. Perkins also destroyed barns and out houses, denying their use to the abandoned human beings used as slaves who were now left to fend for themselves.

While advancing toward Somerset Landing that morning, one member of the rebel 3^rd Battalion recalled, “...we passed by farm after farm all deserted and the buildings going to decay.” Between the patriotic zeal of owners like John Perkins, and the careless destructiveness of the passing Yankees, by 31 May almost all the great river front plantation homes of Louisiana had been burned to the ground.

The country had been picked clean and would not support human life for at least another year.

Alerted by their pickets, the Yankees quickly abandoned their camp, retreating to the levee along the river. There, with the help of the liberated slaves, they hastily began a breastwork of scattered cotton bales. While the rebel infantry paused to loot the Yankee camp, Captain Edgar brought his four 6 pound cannon and began to blast away at the barricade. But before Edgar's guns do do much damage there appeared on the river the USS Carondelet (above)  –a 512 ton twin stern wheel ironclad, 175 feet long, carrying seven 8 and 9 inch smooth bore cannon, crewed by 251 men, and ably commanded by 36 year old acting Naval Lieutenant John McLeod Murphy.

The Carondelet exchanged shots with the rebel cannon, killing McCulloch's staff officer Gallatin Smith, and forcing the rebels to take cover. And under that protective fire civilian Captain C. Dan Conway ran his steamboat “The Forest Queen” up to the dock and evacuated the threatened slaves and soldiers. By 10:00 am, the prey had been snatched right out from under General McCulloch's nose. Within a few minutes, Generals Walker and Taylor arrived, with more troops, only to find their noose empty.

The engagement – such as it was – had cost the Yankees one soldier taken prisoner. Five abandoned slaves were also captured. It was enough to boost the confidence of the still green Texans. Captain Eljiah Petty, of the 17^th infantry wrote, “If this is all the fear, I don’t mind a battle.” But the Generals knew better. As one rebel had noted before the move across Bayou Vidal, “...there was supposed to be...(a) heavy force” -  at Somerset Landing. But there was not.

There were supposed to be long trains of wagons filled with food and ammunition, crawling along the levee - the supply line feeding Grant's 45,000 men in Mississippi. Instead there was only the desolation of burned out plantation houses and cotton fields going to weed. Walker and Taylor must have  realized what the lack of Yankees meant. There was no jugular vein on the Louisiana bank of the Mississippi River to cut. As Taylor had warned theater commander General Kirby Smith a week before, Grant had shifted his supply line. 

There should have been a system of mounted spies, gathering information of Yankee movements on the Louisiana shore. But so desperate was the Trans-Mississippi for men and horses, no such web of spies had ever been established. So General Walker's next move was into the dark - to strike north toward New Carthage. Perhaps in that town Grant would be vulnerable.

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STARK RAVING SANE

I judge it a victory for the legal process that no one answered the exhausted, exasperated plea of a spectator who responded to the umpteenth outburst by defendant Charles Julius Guiteau (pronounced “Gitto”, above) by begging, “Just shoot him, now.”  There is no doubt Charles was funny in the head. But if he had murdered some random schmuck on the street , he would have been locked safely away in an insane asylum, where he could die quietly of tuberculous like most of the 19^th century mentally ill.  If that had happened, then with time he would have been considered “ha, ha” funny.  As it was the children who grew up with Charles noted his “offensive egotism”, thirty years before he shot President James Garfield in the back.  Because of that murder, Charles was not, as Sarah Vowell suggested, “the funniest man in American History”. But he still comes close.

Just after nine on 2 July, 1881, as he got out of the cab in front of the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station (above), his ex-girl friend, Pauline Smolens, asked, “What are you plotting now, Charles dear?” He was plotting to gun down President Garfield inside the station. But her asking the question raises the question why Miss Smolens got in a carriage with dear Charles after showing the common sense to break up with this lunatic exhibitionist.  Fifteen years earlier Charles' long suffering wife Anne Bunn had divorced him only after he re-gifted her the syphilis he had received from one of the prostitutes he frequented. The judge who granted Anne's divorce ordered Charles to never marry again.  Legally the judge couldn't do that, but that was the effect Charles Guiteau eventually had on everybody who knew him - they were all driven to extremes.

Having shot the President, Charles was run to a nearby police station by officer Patrick Kearney.  All the way there Charles kept shouting, “I have killed Garfield!...I have a letter that will tell you all about it!” Charles' note read, “I have just shot the President. I shot him several times as I wished him to go as easily as possible...I am a lawyer, theologian, and politician.... Very respectfully, Charles Guiteau” Almost nothing in that note was true.

First, Charles was a no theologian. As a teenager he joined the free love cult of John Humphrey Noyes.  But Charles' groundless arrogance offended so many members, he literally couldn't get laid in a free love commune.  After five years of celibacy “Charles Git Out”, as his fellow cult members called him, tried suing Noyes, and failing that, then plagiarized two of the leaders' books. Then Charles became an itinerant preacher (above). One newspaper described a typical performance by the self described “Little Giant of the West”, “...The impudent scoundrel talked only 15 minutes.” Charles then ran out the back with the ticket receipts in his pocket.  According to one member, the abandoned audience, “had a conference and all came to the conclusion that he was crazy.”

Charles was also not really a lawyer.  His bar exam was four questions long, and a passing grade was just 50%....so he did get his law degree.  But he only used it to make himself a bill collector, keeping whatever he collected whenever he felt like it.. Oh, and President Garfield was not dead – yet - and would not die easily. And Charles was never respectful of anybody. The only truth in the note was that being an egomaniac Charles did fit the working definition of a politician. He decided Garfield owed him an ambassadorship, and when he did not receive it, Charles bought a gun and began stalking President Garfield.  But that was just the latest in a life time of arrogant fantasies.  It seemed as if before he shot the President,  everybody in Chicago, Boston and New York thought Charles ought be hanged. So after he pulled the trigger, he set out to convince everybody in Washington, D.C., as well.   

While James Garfield was slowly dying of septicemia, Charles Guiteau was writing his autobiography and planning his lecture tour. From his prison cell Charles offered the suit he wore while shooting Garfield, for sale, as well as photographs of himself. Again, after only a few weeks, most of the people in the closest contact with Charles, his jailers, wanted to kill him..

On 11 September, Sargent William Mason, of the 4^th Artillery regiment, got so fed up with “coming to work every day to protect a dog like Guiteau.”  that Mason shoved a pistol through the grate in Charles' cell door and ordered the assassin to “Get up and meet your death like a man.” Instead Charles began screaming and running back and forth in his tiny cell, while Mason kept firing and missing him. In desperation Mason yelled “Stay still, you rotten shit!” just before the gun was knocked from his hand by another guard.  Despite widespread public acclaim, and funds raised for his family, Sargent Mason was sentenced to eight years in jail, perhaps because he missed.

After James Garfield finally died on 19 September, 1881, Charles was charged with murder and hate mail began to flood the new jail at 19th and B Streets, SE (above). Typical was the opinion of one writer who called Charles a “dirty, lousy, lying rebel traitor”, adding, “hanging is too good for you, you stinking cuss... You damn old mildewed assassin. You ought to be burned alive and let rot. You savage cannibal dog.”

Perhaps the most inventive suggestion was that Charles be forced to eat two ounces of his own cooked flesh every day, as long as he lasted.. About this time, another guard was driven to attack Charles with a knife. Again, Charles' screams brought help. But none of this seemed to shake Charles' reality, or lack thereof.  He assured courtroom spectators, “I've had plenty of visitors...everybody was glad to see me...they all expressed the opinion without one dissenting voice that I will be acquitted.”  He sounded  only slightly more sure of himself than Donald Trump!

The serialization of Charles' arrogant autobiography in the newspapers would have poisoned the jury pool if those waters were not already putrid with hate. Worse, Charles complained that while a fund had been set up to support the newly widowed Mrs. Garfield, he still needed money for his expected dream team lawyers. 

The trial began on Monday, 14 November, 1881, in the courtroom of Walter Smith Cox (above), a longtime D.C. attorney, who had only been on the bench for two years. Fearing any verdict might be appealed, Judge Cox allowed Charles to to act as one of his own attorneys. 

“I came here...as an agent of the Deity,” asserted Charles, “and I am going to assert my right in this case.” As a practical matter this meant Charles kept springing up whenever he was inspired to, to argue or spew insults and obscenities on witnesses and his own “blunderbuss lawyers”, ordering his brother-in-law to “Get off the case, you consummate ass!”, telling Judge Cox, “I would rather have some ten-year-old boy try this case than you!”, and often spitting and foaming at the mouth while he did so.

Meanwhile the search for an impartial jury eliminated 175 on grounds they wanted Charles dead. Prospective juror John Lynch suggested that Charles “ought to be hung or burnt”, adding, “I don't think there is any evidence in the United States to convince me any other way”. Potential juror John Judd said Charles ought to be hung – not for murdering Garfield, but because he had once cheated Judd out of $50. A writer to the New York Times suggested, “it would be best to execute him first and try the question of his sanity afterward.”  After three days, Charles' great objection to the chosen twelve was that one of them, Ralph Wormley, was black.

On Saturday the doctors offered their account of the President's injuries, introducing a preserved section of Garfield's spine (above).  It was passed among the hushed jury, and was eventually handed to Charles, who looked it over and handed it back without comment. Much to everyone's relief.

According to the papers, that night, “a wild and reckless youth” named Bill Jones - who was actually 29 and had been drinking heavily - rode up next to the carriage returning Charles to jail, and let loose a shot. “The Avenger” then lead police on a high speed (one horsepower) chase, south to the outskirts of Fredricksburg, Virginia, where he was arrested. Worse, in most estimations, was that, like every body else,  Jones had missed.

“People will learn after awhile”, said Charles, “ that the Lord is with me and will not allow me to be killed!” The Washington Times labeled young Jones a hero, despite his record for impersonating police officers and threatening strangers with arrest. Several thousand dollars were raised by “The Evening Star” to support Jones' wife and child and hire attorneys while he sat in jail for two years. In 1884, a jury quickly acquitted Bill Jones of the assault, which must have made Sargent Mason, who was still in jail,  feel like a complete fool.

On Monday, 21 November – the first court date after the Bill Jones assault - the only actual criminal lawyer working for Charles Guiteau, Mr. Leigh Robinson, resigned from the case. The 49 year old Confederate veteran had only taken the thankless job at the request of Judge Cox. 

But Robinson was now clashing with Charles' brother-in-law, George Scoville (above), whose legal career had focused on property rights. George wanted to plead Charles temporary  insane.

But Charles refused to admit he was insane, shouting at George in open court, “You are no criminal lawyer! I can get two or three first-class criminal lawyers in America to manage this case for me.!” 

Where those lawyers were hiding was unclear, so Judge Cox finally had the lunatic handcuffed in his chair. As the bailiffs struggled with him, Charles kept shouting, “Mind your own business. Mind your own business!” Once restrained, Charles sulked, and Robinson was released from his painful duties.

George Scoville put Charles' older brother John (above left)on the stand, who said of Charles, “His life is a wreck and worthless."   When John wrote to ask when he could expect repayment of a loan, Charles wrote back, “Find $7 enclosed. Stick it up your bung hole and wipe your nose on it...” However there was no money in the letter. Charles' big sister Francis (above, right) testified Charles had “gone daft” without warning and chased her with an ax. And then Charles spent a week on the stand, driving his legal defense six feet under ground.

Charles insisted medical malpractice had killed Garfield, not him.  Besides,  he was not crazy in the moral sense, because “The Deity” had ordered him to kill Garfield, but he was definitely insane in the legal sense, in that the jury should not convict him.  Twenty psychiatrists (called alienists) watched this performance, one telling a newspaper that Charles was the most fascinating psychotic he had ever seen.  District Attorney George Corkhill, disagreed, asserting that Charles was “no more insane than I am...he's a cool, calculating blackguard, a polished ruffian... He wanted excitement..and notoriety, and he got it.”

Corkhill asked, “Who bought the pistol, the Deity or you?” Charles (above) responded, “The Deity furnished the money...I was the agent.” Corkhill asked directly, “Are you insane at all?” To this, Charles tried a clever answer. “A good many people think I am badly insane”, he told the jury, ”My father thought so, and my relatives thought so and still think so.” And that was when Corkhill sprung his  trap. “You told the jury you were not insane,.” he reminded Charles. The madman smirked, certain of his own cleverness. “I am not an expert," he said. "Let the experts and the jury decide whether I am insane.” At least half the people in the courtroom, the jury included, were probably willing to lynch him right there, because of that smirk.

One of the few spectators able to hold onto their own sanity in the presence of Charles' pretentious hubris, was Fredrick Douglas. The great man pointed out that if Charles were merely acting crazy, “he is the most consummate actor in the world.” Meanwhile Douglas's old ally, Henry Ward Beecher, announced he believed Guiteau, “sane enough to hang.”

After 100 witnesses and 10 weeks of testimony, the case went to the jury. They came back with a verdict in 20 minutes. Allowing them five minutes to use the toilet, ten minutes to elect John Hamlin as foreman, and count the ballots, and five minutes to reassemble courtroom security: it cannot have been a contentious deliberation. At the reading of the verdict, Charles jumped to his feet, screaming at the jury, “You are all low, consummate jackasses! My blood will be on the heads of that jury!”. A Chicago Tribune headline caught the general public reaction. “The Hyena Hangs!”

Six months later, after his breakfast on Friday, 30 June, 1882, a clean shaven Charles Guiteau asked that the flowers and cards sent by his supporters be delivered to his cell. The warden informed him there were none. Charles then placed an order for his evening meal, which the warden took. Just before noon Charles was led out of his cell by a clergyman, his brother John and a pair of guards. He was led into the rotunda of the jail, where the permanent gallows awaited him. At the foot of the stairs, Charles paused to weep. Then he climbed the 13 steps, and found himself facing a crowd of 250 who had paid up to $300 each to watch him die. Hundreds more stood outside the walls, waiting to cheer the event.

Charles could not go without a speech. As his hands were tied behind his back, and his legs were bound together, he recited: “I am now going to read some verses which are intended to indicate my feelings at the moment of leaving this world....I wrote it this morning about ten o'clock.” He than recited in a child like voice, '“I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad, I am going to the Lordy,...”  His poem went on for five stanzas and then Charles bent his head so the genial hangman, “Colonel” Robert Strong, could slip the hangman's noose over his head.

The papers called Strong "the jolliest Jack Ketch in the whole country",   and bestowed on the long time city jail guard the honorary title of “Colonel” (above).  The 56 year old was best known for his genial nature, who once earnestly chided a condemned man, “If you don’t cheer up you’ll never learn how to look on the bright side of life.” Said a fellow guard of Robert Strong's work, “His noose for the neck was simply perfection.” As this noose was tightened on his neck, Charles begged the hangman, “Do not pull it too tight, Mr. Strong”. Robert assured him, “I won't hurt you, Charlie.”

With the hood closed, Strong and the clergyman stepped away, and Charles shouted, “The Angels are coming to me!” He opened his left hand, dropping a square of paper. Before it hit the platform floor, Charles shouted, "Glory, ready, go!” and “Colonel” Strong jerked the lever, opening the trap door. That quick, and almost without a sound, Charles Guiteau dropped six feet and jerked to a stop. A cheer went up from the crowd, inside and outside the jail.

The body hung still for 40 seconds, and then jerked. After three minutes the body was lowered until the feet just touched the ground. The heart kept beating for another 14 minutes. After it stopped, the body was left hanging for another half an hour, and was then lowered into its coffin and cut down. On autopsy Charles Guiteau was found to have died of suffocation. His neck was not broken by Mr. Strong's noose. Charles' brain weighed 49 ½ ounces, and had asymmetry of the hemispheres and signs of Syphlitic paresis, which can produce grandiose delusions. 

Charles has never been buried. His skull (above)  and most of his bones are in the National Museum of Health and Medicine while sections of his brain are in the Mutter Museum, both in Philadelphia. His head, minus his skull, was part of a private collection in Indiana for some years, before it was destroyed in a fire.  Free at last.

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THE ROAD TO REVERE

I present to you a symbol of the Gilded Age, a captain of industry, a practitioner of power and a advocate of the morality of wealth; George Morgan Browne. I'll wager you've never heard of him. He was a lawyer and was responsible for one of the most infamous train wrecks in American history - and I'll bet you've never heard of that, either.  George Browne graduated from the New Haven law school (Yale) in 1836 and four years later, before he was thirty, he had opened his own practice in Boston . He never doubted the nobility of his beliefs - after all his second wife was a Cabot, and this was Boston “...The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God.”. And what God told George Browne was that the rich in America did not have enough power. “They are in a small minority at the polls”, he wrote, and “their influence in....elections is notoriously less than that of an equal number of voters.” His villain would be familiar to a political observer today. “The spoilsmen avail themselves of whatever party is in power, and are equally at home in either.” The “spoilsmen” were, of course, fighting for a minimum wage, an eight hour work day and a five day work week, with overtime.

The same year that George Browne graduated law school, the Eastern Railroad was chartered in Massachusetts, capitalized with just $1,300.000. That was barely enough to lay a single line of tracks eight miles north from Boston to the beach hamlet of Revere, then 3 miles further to Lynn. In future years the company built their line on to Salem, then to Marblhead, Newburyport and finally all the way to Portland, Maine. The Eastern line carried 75, 000 weekly working class commuters at fifty cents for a ticket to Lynn, a dollar to Portland. But it was so underfunded that from the beginning it struggled with shortages of equipment. and personnel.

One of the conductors would later describe the job as “...down one day and up the next, and rest the third, and brake by hand the whole way as...(the) cars were not fitted with the air brake” The Westinghouse air brake was invented shortly after the Civil War, but the Eastern did not trust it anymore than they trusted the 30 year old telegraph. The management avoided these “unnecessary” expenses, and despite its reputation for shoddiness in service and equipment, the Eastern was always able pay annual dividends to its stockholders of between 6 and 8%. It was a business model that seemed to work, at least until July of 1855 when President and Treasurer, Mr. William Tuckerman, was forced to admit that he had lost $281,000 (equivalent to $64 million today) while literally gambling to make corporate ends meet. (Sound familiar?).

The hard nosed Mr. John Howe replaced Tukerman as President, and new blood was brought onto the board as well - including George Browne. Sixty-five of the firm's 354 employees were laid off, and the remaining workers scrambled to keep 26 trains running every day. For the time being, dividends were forgotten. In 1858 Mr. Howe stepped down and George Browne became President, at a salary of $5,000 a year (equivalent to over a $1 million today) .

After eight years of rigorous penny pinching President Browne had returned the yearly corporate dividends to 8%. According to an official company history, the Eastern's 29 locomotives, 48 yellow passenger cars (fewer than they had owned in 1858) and 13 baggage cars, were not considered “worn out until (they) had been rebuilt from one to three times” despite assurances in the annual reports that the equipment was “...equal of any first class railroad in New England”

George Browne, who signed those annual reports, even managed to pick up a cheap Confederate locomotive which had been captured by Union troops. The Eastern's maintenance chief complained this bargain was so prone to breakdowns, he refereed to it as “The Rebel”.  Even after the war the 28 trains scheduled to run on the Eastern line daily still did not have “air brakes”, nor did the company use the telegraph to communicate between stations. But the 55 tired locomotives, 98 worn out passenger cars and 27 baggage cars owned by the Eastern Railroad were simply not enough to keep the system running smoothly.  Delays and breakdowns were daily events, and passenger complaints fell on deaf ears because the company was listening to the stockholders, not the customers. The Eastern was the only line servicing the fishing villages along the coast, turning them into suburbs of Boston but also making them captive customers. The stock rose to $125 a share.

Finally, in the spring of 1871, in an attempt to deal with the constantly over-stretched company, President Browne authorized doubling the shares available – increasing the working capital for the road to eight million dollars. The goal was to buy more locomotives and cars, but no one was so impolite as to point out that this was just the sort of “gamble” which had gotten poor Mr. Tuckerman into such trouble. But it was already too late.

The problem came to a head on a sweltering Saturday, 26 August, 1871. Because of the summer weekend traffic, the single track line was again overloaded. The schedule called for 152 trains this day, but the passenger load forced the overworked staff at the Eastern's Boston terminal to send out 192. They spent the day desperately jamming passengers into hastily turned around cars and dispatching trains as quickly as they could. The schedule was in tatters, the customers were grumbling about the even worse than usual service, and express trains were slipped in between scheduled ones whenever possible. Just about 8:30, as the exhausting day was finally drawing to a close, a misty fog settled in off Revere Beach, the first truly public beach in America. A local from Everett pulled into the tiny station at Revere, running 20 minutes late. And while the passengers were still edging past each other through the open doors, the rear car was suddenly illuminated by the headlight of an oncoming express, bound for Sargus at thirty miles an hour. The Sargus engineer slammed on the locomotive’s brakes, but inertial drove the following cars onward.

The collision, it would be later judged, occurred at well under 20 miles an hour. A survivor in the fatal rear car told the New York Times, “Suddenly I...saw the crowd of passengers rushing over the seats and through the aisle, and the locomotive coming like fury after them.” The cowcatcher on the front of the engine split the wooden passenger car like a can opener. Yellow painted wood was instantly converted to kindling, which the kerosene lamps illuminating the car set aflame. The engine's smokestack snapped off, along with its steam valves. Victims, struggling to catch their breath, sucked scalding air into their lungs.

Reported the Newport, Rhode Island Daily News, “The shrieks and groans of the wounded and scalded, their frantic calls for help and their wild ejaculations caused by a frenzy of pain formed a continuation of sounds such as no mortal ear desired to hear a second time...Some were pinned with splinters, some had arms and legs broken, while other were mangled beyond recognition. Many, in fact the majority of the dead, were apparently free from bruises, but the peeling skin and deathly pallor which overspread the flesh told plainly that steam and scalding water had been frightful and effective agents of death.”

Of the 75 people jammed into the last passenger car, 29 died instantly or over the next several days. In both trains, 57 more were injured, and many more emotionally maimed for the rest of their lives. It was far from the worst rail accident in American history - 101 dead in Nashville, Tennessee in 1918 - but it was the seminal event in rail safety, thanks to Charles Frances Adams – grandson of John Quincy Adams – and director of the Massachusetts Board of Railroad Commissioners.

Adams' investigation discovered that the company had a regular policy of issuing schedule changes at the last minute, and verbally. It was a system which almost seemed designed to cause confusion, delays and accidents - and it had repeatedly caused all three. And the Commission's final report explained the failure in terms even a businessman like George Browne might understand; “A very large proportion of the rolling stock of the Eastern railroad was rendered unavailable...when it was the most needed, because trains were standing still at points of passing, waiting for other trains which were out of time...to the equal loss and inconvenience of the public and the corporation.”

Adam's report, and two coroners' juries, blamed the conductor and engineer of the express for the accident. That was as standard as citing “pilot error” in an airline crash. But Adam's report went further. It dwelt on the management of the Eastern, and it named in particular George Browne, who had directed the Eastern Railroad for fourteen years. The public agreed. Said a politician, “There is no accident in this case...only the greed of the Eastern Railroad Company”. Six months later, on 5 February 1872, George Browne resigned. His replacement invested in telegraph lines, and Westinghouse air brakes, and electric signals to warn engineers of trains ahead of them. All these improvements (and settling the civil lawsuits) cost the Eastern $510,600 (the equivalent to $90 million today). No dividends were paid in 1872, and the stock value dropped to $51 a share. In retrospect the cost of safety seemed cheap. To an ideologue, this was proof that unrestricted capitalism worked. But ideology failed to consider the moral cost of the the 29 dead and the many more scared survivors.

To escape the public outrage, George Browne left the country, living in Europe for a year. But he never altered in his views or his willingness to make them known. He even wrote letters to the London Times, correcting British politicians in their thinking. And when he came home to Boston he became a consultant for other corporations, always an advocate for the wealthy against what he termed “the vicious caprices of the populace”. In 1881 he moved to Washington, D.C., and lobbied for railroads and his vision of capitalism. He died there on 25 April, 1895, at the age of 73.

By then the Eastern Railroad had been gobbled up by its competitor, The Boston and Maine. That is the nature of capitalism - its strength and its sin – at its core, it is cannibalism, economic and flesh and blood.

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