Main Street Murder and Mayhem: More violence in the streets
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The Strean Building, which still stands, was photographed circa 1870, with a hardware store occupying the first floor. The small building at left housed Sample Sweeney’s store, in front of which Richard Fitzwilliams stabbed Benjamin Brady.
This sarcastic commentary was published in The Reporter and Tribune just after the election of Nov. 8, 1864.
Courtesy of Lisa Christman
Robert Morrow’s daughters, Sofia, left, and Elizabeth, are shown in the daguerreotype made not long before their father’s death.
The story so far: On Halloween Night 1864, political tension and personal animosity reach a peak as two men – Robert Morrow and John Lennox – draw guns and blast away at each other just steps from the Washington County Courthouse. Neither is struck, but Lennox chases Morrow down Main Street and a bullet hits Morrow just as he reaches the door of his home.
Chapter Three
John R. Wilson, M.D., found the shooting victim in considerable abdominal pain. Robert Latimer Morrow had managed to climb the stairs to his room and throw off his coat before falling into his bed.
“He said that he had been shot a few minutes before,” Dr. Wilson would later testify. “I found a gunshot wound on the point of the right buttock, about two-and-a-half inches from the middle of the spine. There was also a discolored lump about three inches to the left of the navel. The lump was extremely painful. He could not bear it to be touched. The ball was there. I told him we would not remove it, as I considered his wound mortal, and the removal of the ball would only render his case more hopeless.”
Morrow asked the doctor if there was any chance that he could live. Not wishing to worsen his condition by dashing all hope, Dr. Wilson offered that if the bullet had traveled through the body without piercing the intestines, there was a slight chance he could survive.
Leaving Morrow, the doctor walked a short distance to the residence of Sheriff James Byers to attend to the other man injured during the shootout, Benjamin Brady, 27, a butcher by trade. A bullet from the pistol of John Lennox had only grazed Brady’s arm, requiring just a small bandage.
The very next day, Dr. Wilson was summoned to a home two blocks south of the courthouse to examine the body of a man killed in a fight that followed yet another political rally, this time Democratic.
The victim was Benjamin Brady.
A brutal spectacle
On Tuesday afternoon, Nov. 1, Gen. George Washington Morgan, a Washington native, addressed a large crowd at a Democratic rally at the fairgrounds, the present site of Washington & Jefferson College’s Cameron Stadium. Morgan was campaigning for President Lincoln’s opponent in the upcoming election, Gen. George McClelland. Morgan blasted the Lincoln administration’s war policy, declaring that Union victories at such places as Gettysburg and Vicksburg meant little, and that the North was no closer to victory than it ever was.
Not all in the crowd were Copperheads and in agreement with Morgan’s views. Some were “War Democrats,” who favored states’ rights over federal control but who fully supported the North’s war efforts. And many Republicans were present, just to hear the speech of their famous native son.
Ben Brady was in the crowd, and he didn’t like what he heard a few of those Republicans saying about the general. Brady had a reputation for picking fights. A friend would later recall that Brady was, “When drinking a very violent man, when sober not.”
“I heard Ben say there were two men he was going to whip that day,” a witness later testified, adding that he saw Brady wearing brass knuckles on his right hand.
Brady found one of those men, William Vance, and knocked him to the ground while Gen. Morgan was still speaking. Then about 4 p.m. he joined a long line of people leaving the fairgrounds to meander up Main Street. When he reached Sample Sweeney’s store – on the southwest corner of Strawberry Alley and South Main Street – he spotted Richard Fitzwilliams, 39, who had a farm in what is now North Franklin Township.
Witnesses said that Brady accused Fitzwilliams of calling Gen. Morgan a liar. Fitzwilliams denied it, and then Brady punched him in the face, knocking him to the ground. A crowd began to gather. Fitzwilliams struggled to his feet, his face a mass of blood, only to have Brady strike him again. After he was knocked down a third time, someone from the crowd kicked him in the head.
“Kill the Abolitionists! Kill them all!” someone yelled.
Sarah Sweeney, one of the storekeeper’s daughters, grabbed Brady by the arm.
“Please, Ben! Don’t kill him,” she begged. “Oh, Papa,” she cried, rushing to her father, Sample Sweeney, 59. “Don’t let them kill Richard!”
“Kill the old gray-haired devil!” someone in the crowd shouted.
Fitzwilliams got to his feet and staggered through the door into the store. Brady went in after him but emerged almost immediately as Fitzwilliams lunged at him, burying a knife with a six-inch blade just below his ribs.
Brady collapsed and lay unconscious in a pool of blood. Shocked spectators could see that he was dead, or would be soon enough.
The Sweeneys fled indoors and barred the door. The enraged crowd grabbed Fitzwilliams and began beating him without mercy, and others threatened to burn the store down. Fitzwilliams would certainly have been killed if not for the intervention of men with calmer heads, among them the victim’s brothers.
The sheriff and constables placed Fitzwilliams in jail, for his own safety and to recover from his beating. Sample Sweeney was jailed as well after witnesses claimed he had handed the knife to Fitzwilliams.
A turn for the worse
After Dr. Wilson responded to the coroner’s summons and examined Brady’s body, he went up the street to check on the shooting victim, Robert Morrow.
“I found him suffering from symptoms of violent peritoneal inflammation,” he later testified.
Morrow’s condition grew worse the following day, and at 10 p.m. he called for J.L. Judson, the justice of the peace, so that he might make a statement. His brother, Adam Morrow, was present when he described his movements on the night of Oct. 31 and how he was shot by John Lennox.
“I think he was aware that he was dying when he made this statement,” Adam Morrow testified later. “His mind was not impaired, he was perfectly rational.”
Morrow asked his brother to pay the debts that his estate could not, and to be sure to look after the welfare of his family.
Morrow died at 9 o’clock the next morning.
The news of his death prompted a question: Where was John Lennox, and why was he not in jail?
Lennox had surrendered to Justice Judson the day after the shooting, and Judson had released him – perhaps without authority – on his own recognizance. Judson would justify his actions by stating that Morrow was still alive at the time Lennox surrendered, and to place him in jail would deny him his right to vote in the upcoming election.
With Morrow’s death, a warrant was issued for his arrest, but catching him would prove to be difficult when half of the politically divided borough was on his side.
Next: No escape from justice