NORTHERN ANARCHIST on Death Row Part 2

by CHRISTOPHER DRAPER

CONDEMNED to death, in November 1897 anarchist Samuel Fielden of Todmorden sat alone in a Chicago prison cell awaiting execution on the 11th of the month. On 2 November the United States Supreme Court ruled there were no federal issues involved and it would not intervene. Only an act of clemency by State Governor Robert Oglesby might stay the executioner’s hand.

LIBERTY or DEATH?

THE political prosecution of Fielden and his comrades disabused radicals around the world of any lingering belief in the United States as the embodiment of liberty. The socialist historian Edward Thompson judged this state-sponsored prosecution the decisive factor in turning Britain’s Socialist League (SL) in an anarchist direction. William Morris (founder of the SL) excoriated the USA as “a society corrupt to the core and at this moment suppressing freedom with just the same reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Czar of all the Russias.”

OGLESBY DECIDES

AT 9am on the eve of execution one of Fielden’s comrades cheated the hangman, ignited an explosive cartridge in his mouth and blew himself to pieces. Eight hours later Governor Oglesby intervened, commuting Fielden’s death sentence to life imprisonment but four of Sam’s five condemned comrades would still be hanged the following morning.

On Saturday 12 November Fielden was taken from Cooke County Jail to serve his sentence at Joliet, 30 miles south-west of the city of Chicago. At Joliet, Sam could leave his cell, exercise in the open air and resume his old work, labouring in the prison’s stone yard. Visits from family continued although little Alice no longer searched Sam’s cell as she initially did at Cooke County, looking for the candies her father, in happier days, hid around the house for her to triumphantly discover.

In 1890 a recently released prisoner, Thomas Broderick, claimed Sam was being singled out for harsh treatment, “Fielden, the English anarchist, shows the most marked fortitude and faces his dreary fate with wonderful patience and resignation. This has called down upon him the hatred of his guards. I have frequently seen the unfortunate man treated with great cruelty. Once I saw him chained to the wall for several hours and during that time all sorts of epithets were directed towards him by one of the guards and he was abused as though he had been the worst convict in the prison instead of one of the best.”

UNFOGOTTEN

“HAYMARKET MARTYRs” commemorations were organised around the world every eleventh of November and campaigning continued everywhere to secure the release of the remaining prisoners. After enduring seven years long years in jail hopes were raised in January 1893 with the inauguration of a new liberal State Governor, John Peter Altgeld who agreed to review the original prosecution. Confidence in Chicago’s police and judiciary had been severely eroded in the intervening years by a series of shocking discoveries. In January 1889, it was revealed that Inspector Bonfield, who’d led the police assault on the Haymarket meeting, “had for some time been receiving payments from saloon-keepers, prostitutes and thieves and had been trafficking in stolen goods”. Personal items stolen from one of the dead anarchists were subsequently found at the home of Detective Jacob Loewenstein.

On 25 June 1893 a magnificent “Haymarket Martyrs” monument was unveiled at Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, where years before Sam, the teamster, had regularly delivered decorative stonework. On 26 June Governor Altgeld formally ended Sam’s imprisonment with a report that rubbished the entire prosecution process that had in 1886 condemned him and his comrades to death. Altgeld emphasised this was no merciful pardon but a public declaration that Sam and his fellow Haymarket anarchists were falsely convicted and entirely innocent.

RELEASE

AT 4.20pm on 26 June 1893 Samuel Fielden, wearing a striped uniform distinguished only by his prison number, “8526”, was summoned to the office of Joliet’s Chief Warder. A special messenger, “Mr Dreyer”, handed Sam an engrossed document authorising his release. “Fielden took his pardon and folding it up carefully placed it under the brown and white striped jacket, worn black with long service, and without saying a word he reached out and grasped Mr Dreyer by the hand and then turning shook the warden’s hand fervidly.” The warden advised Sam, “If you call on Stewart Leland he will fit you out with the best suit of clothes that can be purchased outside of the World’s Fair City…Governor Altgeld has pardoned you and I can congratulate you and feel glad for I believe it is only your just dues.”

HOMECOMING

ARMED only with a rail permit and some pocket money, Sam, smoking a big cigar, left Joliet by the 6.15pm train for Chicago. He reached home, 117 West Polk Street, at 8.45pm where he was received by a large crowd. “His wife had been at the windows of their apartment on the second floor every few minutes on the lookout for him. Their little children, Alice who is 8 years of age and Harry who is nearly 7 were on the steps of the house ready to welcome their father while beside them were many of their father’s old associates…The meeting between the long separated husband and wife was tender though not demonstrative. They embraced each other for a moment and kissed each other for a moment and kissed each other tenderly. The wife murmured a welcome but the husband remained silent. He evidently desired to be stoical and did not want to give any indication of deeper feelings than a quiet sort of pleasure in returning home.”

POSTMAN BEN

THAT summer the Fieldens met old acquaintance, Benjamin Butterworth, the Walsden postman who’d come to Chicago to see the World’s Fair. In fact Butterworth made two visits, arriving first on Sunday 20 August, he returned the following Tuesday. “Glad that he had been permitted to shake hands with an old school fellow so far away from Todmorden, he heartily congratulated Mr Fielden on regaining his liberty after seven long years in Joliet.” For his part, Sam presented Benjamin with two “Haymarket” books, a sympathetic account compiled by lawyer Matthew Trumbull who’d been a Chartist in his youth in England, the other volume was Governor Altgeld’s justification for quashing Sam’s prosecution.

WORK

FIELDEN resumed his stone-hauling business, occasionally supplemented by driving a beer wagon. When he hadn’t returned to rabble rousing, after a year or so he was briefly pursued by reporters keen to depict a disillusioned anarchist but Sam wouldn’t oblige. “I will not change my mind on economic and social questions but I have not spoken at a public meeting for a long time and do not expect to.” When pressed on the matter Samuel revealed himself to be older and wiser. In the heady days of 1886 Chicago’s anarchists had convinced themselves they stood on the rim of a revolutionary cauldron; one more fiery speech and the workforce would erupt, overwhelm the plutocracy and wrest control. In reality the anarchists’ driving class consciousness ran far ahead of the everyday concerns of their fellow labourers. The anarchists provoked the tiger without the means to strike it dead. Now, on Sam’s release “He thinks the people too patient to effect any great reform in his lifetime”. He hadn’t abandoned his former aims or values but had emerged from prison with a more mature, considered anarchist philosophy which involved reconnecting with his family, nature and the land. He informed reporters he’d saved a bit of money and was looking for a farm.

SHOESTRING RANCH

IN April 1895 the Fieldens bought a small ranch situated high up in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, fifty miles south-west of Denver and a thousand miles away from the mean streets of Chicago. City newspapers lost interest in Sam although his arrival in the Rockies was warmly received by local reporters, with this particular October 1895 account republished in Todmorden:

“Up towards the western extremity of the beautiful La Veta valley where the ground begins to rise to form the might range of which La Veta pass is a gateway lies a lonely ranch…It stretches along the winding, tumbling, sparkling stream called Indian Creek… and in the vernacular of the western is called a 'shoestring ranch'. Great, graceful trees border the creek and lofty hills rise clothed in the richest verdure on either side. Westwards the huge mountains themselves tower above it. It is a romantic spot, looking secluded and peaceful enough to satisfy the most weary soul imaginable. It is the home of a man whose name has probably been spoken in every civilised country in the world and whose existence cannot but hold some interest for every working man the class whose cause he zealously advocated and risked his life for.

“He looks the typical ranchman already with his sunburned face, flowing beard, unclipped hair, wide hat and dusty farmer’s suit. He seems perfectly at home holding the halters of his horses and expiating on the good points of the meek brown cow which he had just purchased…He feels the wrongs of the people as deeply as ever but as a public figure his part has been acted…Only those who seek him with sympathetic hearts and congenial minds will hear his thoughts expressed. He keeps in touch with the radical world by reading the papers and pamphlets printed by the workers…His bright children whom he takes to their country school nearly three miles away; his faithful wife…his picturesque home, his domestic animals, the state of his crops and the prevailing market prices will now occupy all his energies.”

FRIENDS & NEIGHBOURS

FAR from the madding crowd the Fieldens were widely respected throughout this scattered, self-sufficient but close knit community. When Mr Butler, a neighbour, dropped by in June 1897 he expressed admiration for Sam’s agricultural achievements; his recently completed system for irrigating crop fields, his select herd of eighteen cattle, plus a few hogs and when Butler departed he was accompanied by several choice pigs he’d purchased to stock his own ranch.

In 1898 a few Colorado friends, led by the radical Rev. Myron W Reed, who chaired the event, organised a Denver “Haymarket Commemoration”. At this now rare public expression of his sustained solidarity, Sam “seemed imbued with much of his old-time spirit and fire… his body swayed with emotion, he gesticulated freely and his voice rang with indignation against the robbers and oppressors of the poor.” The event drew an unexpectedly hostile response from the Salida Mail, which doubted the validity of the Governor’s pardon; “Samuel Fielden, one of the anarchists who escaped the noose and was given a life sentence was present. It will be recalled that the arch sympathiser with anarchy, Governor Altgeld pardoned this man…sentenced for the awful murder at Haymarket square.”

William Holmes, a fellow Englishman and fellow anarchist, who visited the Fieldens’ the same year, reflected the other side of the Governor’s action, “(Sam) is happily in possession of good health and spirits and looks back upon his long years of imprisonment as upon a frightful dream…his soul is filled with eternal gratitude for his brave deliverer – John P Altgeld”.

Another old anarchist buddy, William J Lloyd dropped by in 1903 and as they talked, Lloyd observed that despite his rocky isolation Sam was “up to date on all passing questions”. One evening after dinner, reminiscing as they rode together along Indian Creek, Sam confided, “there was no conspiracy and none of the leaders knew of the bomb thrower or his intentions and so little did they anticipate violence that they brought their wives and little children to the meeting.”

LIFE ALONG INDIAN CREEK

IN 1905 when “little Alice” turned twenty-one she was struck down by typhoid but after eight weeks at death’s door made a full recovery. The four Fieldens lived, worked and prospered together and in 1909 added Benton Vories’ ranch to their holding, after paying him $4,200 so he could take up an appointment as the local District Water Commissioner. Sadly Sam’s wife Sarah didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy their newly acquired land as she passed away two years later. As Sam’s labouring life began to take its toll, Harry made more of the major decisions on the farm, assisted by his invalid father.

In January 1915, the local paper reported that the area’s farmers had collectively shipped 16 carloads of cattle from La Veta for sale at Denver, and was impressed by prices achieved by Harry Fielden’s 66 calves. Investing for the future, in 1916 the Huefano County News reported that “the Fielden ranch has been improved with the erection of a 20 by 100 foot barn.” As the years slipped by along Indian Creek, Sam’s children remained on the ranch, unmarried, until Harry died 2nd July 1972 followed by Alice on 11th March 1975. Samuel Fielden had passed away half a century earlier on 7th February 1922, just a couple of weeks short of his 75th birthday. All four Fieldens lie together in the simple, small, enclosed La Veta cemetery.

(Part one of this story along with many other fascinating episodes of radical history are archived and easily accessible on this NV website – CD 2021)

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NORTHERN ANARCHIST on Death Row Part 1

by CHRISTOPHER DRAPERr

ON 20 August 1887 a Chicago jury condemned a Todmorden man to be hanged for a bomb-throwing incident that killed eight policemen and injured sixty more. As the turning point in Chicago’s bloody class war this sensational case was reported around the world. Back home in England, when Samuel Fielden’s invalid father was informed of his son’s death sentence he became another victim and expired within the week. Details of the bombing and trial were comprehensively recorded at the time but Samuel Fielden’s lifestory has never before been fully told.

A Northern Childhood

Samuel Fielden was born on 25 February 1847 in Walsden, on the Lancashire side of Todmorden. There’ve always been Fieldens in Todmorden and Samuel’s father, Abraham (1816-1886) worked as an overlooker at the town’s enormous Fielden Mill, though Sam’s family occupied a much lower social level than millowner, John Fielden MP (1784-1849) whose statue graces the town’s Vale Park. Sam’s mother, Alice bore Abraham seven children although only four survived into adulthood. She’d endured an impoverished childhood selling polishing sand door-to-door. Abraham first met her as she hawked her wares around the houses in the bitterest of winters, trudging through snow in bare feet.

Sam learnt nothing of anarchism or socialism in his youth but acquired an overwhelming ethical sense from the non-conformist religion and politics of his parents. Tragically, Sam’s mother died in 1858 when he was just eleven. He inherited a basic understanding of politics from Abraham who campaigned on many social issues of the day, Chartism, the ten-hour day, the co-operative movement and much more besides. When Sam was six or seven, he learned to read by attending a local dame school for six months.

Work

Aged eight, Sam started work at Fielden’s Mill. His first job was to race along the machines removing empty bobbins, taking care to keep fingers safe from the moving parts. After a couple of years he was promoted to the heavier task of taking full spools to the weavers. At this stage Sam was a statutory “half-timer”, required to attend the factory school for half of his time at the mill. He became a “full-timer” at the tender age of thirteen when he transferred to working in the factory’s warehouse. After a couple of years he learned to weave and laboured at that until he was twenty one when he’d resolved to seek his fortune in America.

Awakening

Several incidents in Sam’s youth came to shape the character that was so forcefully emerged in later life. In 1860, at the conclusion of Sam’s factory schooling, Mr Harrison, his teacher was accused by a local Methodist of brainwashing his pupils with Unitarian heresy. When Harrison sued for libel Sam was required to give witness at a Liverpool Court hearing. He was overjoyed at the prospect. Not only did he get to spend a week away from home but visited the new Menai Bridge and at Liverpool docks Sam was thrilled by the tall ships bound for America. His imagination was stimulated by the “dime novels” he brought back from Liverpool and with the outbreak of Civil War in 1861, everyone in Todmorden’s thoughts turned to events in America as supplies of mill cotton from the Southern States slowed to a trickle. Initially Fielden’s mill supplemented the raw material with inferior Surat cotton from India but this so clogged the machines that production ground to a halt. Until hostilities ceased in 1865 milling resumed only intermittently and in the interim Sam carried tiles for workmen laying drainage for the ground on which the millowner’s magnificent new Dobroyd Castle would soon arise.

Sam learned of the cultivators of that Southern cotton when escaped slave Henry Box Brown visited Todmorden in 1861 and told of how, with the assistance of abolitionists, he’d gained his freedom concealed in a crate posted away from the plantation as a parcel. Sam’s inherent disrespect for elitism was reinforced when William, his older brother, who worked as a gardener for the Fieldens, was dismissed for showing insufficient deference. Sam’s oratorical skills which came to be recognised as his political strong suit were nurtured in the chapels of Todmorden’s Methodist circuit where from 1865 until 1868 he was admired as a fervent “exhorter” well on his way to becoming a full-blown religious minister but it was not to be.

Wanderlust

Drawn by tales of the “Wild West” Sam longed to leave home but obeyed his father’s wish to remain until he was twenty-one. He’d also given his word to marry Sarah Gill, a weaver at the factory. When Sarah promised to wait for him until he was established in America, he booked his passage and in July 1868 sailed from Liverpool. His first job on landing in New York was at Prentice’s Brooklyn hat factory, but he didn’t like the work or the wages and left after only two days. Moving north to Providence, he returned to his old trade of millwork before in March 1869 starting out West. He reached Chicago in August, by way of a bit of sightseeing at Niagara Falls. Coincidentally, the very first building he entered on reaching the city belonged to John Still and his brother who ran a plumbers business and originated from Todmorden where Sam had known some of their relatives. Less happily, it was outside this building that seventeen years later the bombing occurred that led to Sam’s death sentence.

That autumn of 1869 Fielden worked on John Wentworth’s farm and the following spring laboured at dredging the Illinois & Michigan canal. His religious fervour continued to diminish as his political awareness grew. As a deck passenger on a Mississippi steamboat, in spring 1870, he embarked on a working tour of the southern states that enlightened him on the falsity of “abolition”. The “liberated” blacks continued to be dispossessed and exploited by a myriad of sophisticated social and economic measures.

Chicago Again

On returning to Chicago in May 1871 Sam laboured around the region on a variety of navvying tasks until, after a year or so, he settled into heavy haulage work serving the city’s stone yards. Belying his big, rough, burly appearance Sam never neglected his intellectual development, spending every free hour at lectures or reading in Chicago’s public library. He returned to Todmorden in the autumn of 1879 for the first and only time. After embracing his aged father who was no longer the vigorous patriarch of memory, Sam visited the overgrown grave of his mother. He also fulfilled the pledge of two decades before and married Sarah, his childhood sweetheart. The pair sailed from Liverpool on the Germanic, arriving in New York harbour on 26 January 1880 eager to start their new life together in the “Land of the Free”.

Teamwork and Anarchy

Having saved his wages over the years, on his return to Chicago Sam bought his own team of heavy horses and worked for himself in the thriving stone haulage business. After starting a teamsters union Sam was duly elected Vice President. In the autumn of 1880 he helped reorganise Chicago’s Liberal League which existed to ensure the total separation of church and state. Over time he successively served as the organisation’s secretary, vice president and conference delegate and this involvement served to enhance his growing intellectual development, confidence and political awareness.

By 1883 his involvement with the Chicago labor movement brought him to socialism which evolved into anarchism. The following year he joined the International Working People’s Association with divisions organised on the basis of language; Fielden joined the English-language “American Group”. Confronted by a corrupt oligarchy of employers and politicians intent on smashing organised labor, Chicago IWPA was defiantly militant. Sam Fielden subsequently recalled, “I wish to say (we) were all anarchists at that time.”

Chicago’s May Days

On 3 May 1886 an “army” of Pinkerton thugs and city police opened fire on striking workers at Chicago’s McCormick Reaper Works, killing two and injuring many more. In response, Chicago IWPA organised a mass protest for the next day at 7.30pm, 4 May at “Haymarket”. There were to be three speakers with Samuel Fielden to close the event. The meeting was peaceful but as Sam was ending his speech two hundred armed police officers led by Inspector Bonfield rushed from an adjacent building, panicking the crowd. Fielden was ordered to cease immediately and assist in dispersing his audience. As Sam remonstrated a bomb arced through the air and exploded amidst the police, who responded by shooting indiscriminately, injuring officers and workers alike. Fielden was shot in the knee and when records were compiled there were eight dead policemen, another sixty seriously injured and probably similar casualties amongst the workers though, understandably, few of these injuries were reported to the authorities.

Judicial Murder

Fielden managed to limp home and the next morning, police, without warrants, searched the house, found nothing but arrested him anyway. At the police station Sam was sworn at by Lieutenant Shea and ordered to remove his bandage and expose his leg wound. Police Chief Ebersold pointing at Sam’s forehead said, “it ought to have gone in here!”

The authorities never claimed that any named individual made, threw or had prior knowledge of the bomb. No relevant evidence tying any suspect to the bomb was ever presented in court yet Sam, along with seven other anarchists, was charged with murder. Evidence wasn’t required, for the judge, prosecutor and jury were hand-picked and the verdict a foregone conclusion.

Verdict

The verdict was delivered shortly after 10am August 20 1896. Mr Osborn, the foreman intoned, “We, the jury, find Samuel Fielden (and comrades)… guilty of murder in manner and form as charged in the indictment and fix the penalty at death.” Samuel Fielden responded from the dock: “Today as the beautiful autumn sun kisses with balmy breeze the cheek of every free man I stand here never to bathe my head in its rays again. I have loved my fellow man as I have loved myself. I have hated trickery, dishonesty and injustice. The nineteenth century commits the crime of killing its best friend but as I have said before if it will do any good I freely give myself up. I trust the time will come when there will be a better understanding, more intelligence; and above the mountains of iniquity, wrong and corruption, I hope the sun of righteousness and truth and justice will come to bathe in its balmy light an emancipated world.”

“Murderers’ Row”

Fielden was imprisoned in Cook County Jail in a stone cell measuring 6ft by 8ft, reached by a flight of iron steps. In front of the cell ran a narrow footway. Sam occupied “Cell 31” in this section known as “Murderers’ Row”. Awaiting execution he was visited by his wife Sarah and their two children, Alice and Sam junior. He’d never seen his son before as the boy was born on 1 November 1886, six months after Fielden was imprisoned and, ironically, four days after the unveiling of a giant statue in New York harbour; “Liberty Enlightening the Word”!

Despite continuing world-wide protests and a further 1½ years of legal wrangling, it was confirmed that Samuel Fielden would be hanged at 12 noon, 11 November 1887, but this isn’t quite the end of the story….

(The concluding part of this story will be posted on NV in 3 weeks. Search our archive for more of CD’s articles of Northern Radical History)