Main Street Murder and Mayhem: Trials and political unrest
Observer-Reporter Archives
Robert Morrow’s older brother Adam bought the hotel at the northwest corner of Main and Maiden streets and operated it in the late 1860s. It later became the Auld Hotel, which was destroyed by fire in 1963.
Courtesy of Lisa Christman
Robert Morrow’s widow, Sarah Lewis Morrow, never remarried. She died in 1923.
Courtesy of Mark Tomazin
This jug was made in Greensboro on commission from Adam Morrow, owner of a dry goods store in Washington.
The story so far: With a volatile atmosphere in the borough of Washington just a week before the 1864 presidential election, Robert Morrow, a Union (or Republican) supporter, is mortally wounded by John Lennox in a shootout on Main Street on Halloween night. The next day, a political argument following a Democratic (or Copperhead) rally leads to the stabbing death of Benjamin Brady. Morrow dies on Nov. 3, and a warrant is issued for the arrest of Lennox, his accused killer.
Chapter Four
In spite of the warrant for his arrest, fugitive John Lennox walked to the polling place on the morning of Nov. 8, 1864, and cast his ballot. A constable posted there either did not see him or chose not to arrest the accused killer of Robert Morrow.
Lennox walked away and seemingly vanished.
Morrow’s family was frustrated by what they believed was judicial indifference.
“I am very sorry that John Lennox is still at large,” William H.H. Morrow, the murder victim’s younger brother, wrote to Adam Morrow, the oldest of the three Morrow brothers, in a letter written from Boston, Mass., and dated Dec. 7, 1864.
“I think they don’t want to find him very bad or they could find him. I think if I was at home I could find him for it’s my opinion that he’s lurking around the county. I don’t think very much of your officer. I know if he was in this part of the world he wouldn’t be at large very long until he was nicked. Hoping that he will be found and hung,” William Morrow wrote.
An avalanche of news
With Lennox a fugitive and the trial of Richard Fitzwilliams and Sample Sweeney for the killing of Benjamin Brady delayed until the May 1865 court term, local attention turned to national events, most notably war news.
One week after President Lincoln was reelected with 55% of the vote, word was received of the burning of Atlanta and the start of Gen. William T. Sherman’s march to the sea.
One bloody Union victory followed another. On April 2, the local newspapers reported that the Confederate government had evacuated Richmond, Va., and that Union forces occupied the city the next day. On April 9, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.
The news of the war’s end and of their soldiers coming home came with joy and great relief to all the borough’s residents, regardless of their politics. But the euphoria was short-lived.
The death of Abraham Lincoln on April 15 from an assassin’s bullet shocked the nation and plunged it into grief. The assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was killed and his co-conspirators captured on April 26. Little else but bereavement and the progress of Lincoln’s casket through the country by train was published in The Reporter and Tribune until after he was laid to rest on May 4. Even news of the May 3 explosion and sinking of a riverboat in Cairo, Ill., that claimed the lives of 1,400 passengers and crew was overshadowed by the grim, funereal accounts.
A sensational trial
The trial of Richard Fitzwilliams and Sample Sweeney for the murder of Benjamin Brady got underway on May 18. District Attorney James R. Ruth told the jury the victim was an upstanding citizen and the benevolent father of three young children, and that Fitzwilliams “struck the blow that laid poor Brady low, destroying the idol of a fine family.”
Thomas McKennan, who lead the defense team, called the accused “amiable and peaceable men.” Because so many witnesses would testify seeing Sweeney hand the knife to Fitzwilliams, and then seeing the latter stab Brady, his tactic was to attack Brady’s character.
“The character of the deceased,” he told the jury, “how he gloried in his prowess as a pugilist, and how the honors of the prize ring seemed to be the chief object of his ambition.”
Among the witnesses for the defense was none other than the abolitionist Dr. Francis LeMoyne, who testified that Brady “was a very generous hearted man, but was very excitable. I have heard he was violent in fighting.”
The courtroom was filled to capacity as the jury deliberated. When the jurors were brought in “amidst almost breathless silence,” the newspaper reported, “they returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’ as to both defendants, and thus ended this protracted and exciting trial.”
Lennox captured
On May 10, 1865, U.S. soldiers arrested the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis, in Georgia. And on that very same day, John Lennox was captured in Parkersburg, W.Va.
After being returned to Washington and jailed, The Reporter and Tribune reported: The impression was that he had gone to Illinois, but it is stated that he has been for a considerable time in the vicinity of Parkersburgh, engaged in driving a team, which was his employment while here. It is even stated that since the reward was offered for his arrest he secretly returned to this place and drove off the wagon and two horses he left here when he took flight, but how true this is we cannot say.”
Six months later, Lennox was still awaiting trial when at between 10 and 11 p.m. on Nov. 19, 1865, he cut through a window and escaped, briefly. He was recaptured while still in the jail yard. A few weeks later, Lennox escaped again but was caught just a few blocks away. Extra precautions were taken to secure his cell.
Lennox’s lawyers fought for and won a change of venue, claiming that he could not receive a fair trial in Washington due to his political beliefs. The trial in Beaver County was continued several times before the state Legislature remanded the case back to the Washington County court. He was finally brought to trial in May 1867, two-and-a-half years after the killing of Robert Morrow.
Trial follows hanging
The trial began on May 21. Six days earlier, in the jail yard just a short stroll from the courtroom, Robert Folger had been executed for the murder of Robert Dinsmore in Hopewell Township, another illustration of Washington County’s violent past. It’s likely that Lennox was marched past the hangman’s scaffolding as he was escorted to his trial.
The prosecution relied on eyewitness accounts of the confrontation between Lennox and Morrow, and on Morrow’s death-bed statement in which he named his killer.
The defense, led by attorney William Montgomery, brought forth several witnesses who testified that on the night Morrow was killed, guns were fired not just by Lennox and the victim but by others on the east side of Main Street and from the courthouse steps. The fatal bullet, it was argued, may not have come from Lennox’s pistol but someone else’s.
Washington was still deeply divided politically, and it was no secret that the presiding judge, Alexander W. Acheson, was a Republican, and that the defendant and two-thirds of the jurors were Democrats.
Judge Acheson’s charge to the jury took several hours. When the jurors returned after 13 hours of deliberation, they found the defendant guilty of second-degree murder. They also asked the court for mercy in sentencing. The defense attorneys immediately demanded a new trial. Acheson asked to know the reasons for their motion, and Montgomery delivered an impassioned argument in which he accused the judge of numerous errors in his rulings on evidence. The judge denied the motion, and Lennox was sentenced to eight years of solitary confinement at Western Penitentiary. Within 30 minutes he was on his way to jail.
“We cannot avoid saying that the haste exhibited in the sentencing and removing of Lennox allowed anything but a commendable feeling,” The Washington Review and Examiner opined. “It looked very much like a malignant pursuing of a man after he had been deprived of all means of defense. Surely the ordinary dictates of humanity would have suggested the propriety of his being allowed some little time to confer with his family so as to be able to make some arrangements in regard to their welfare.”
That night, according to the newspaper, while lodged in his cell at the prison in Pittsburgh, “Lennox succeeded in cutting his hobbles with an old case knife which he said he had found in the cell. The irons were completely severed when the sheriff entered the cell Sunday morning.”
Try as he might, Lennox never escaped justice. He would serve every day of his eight-year sentence.
By the time Lennox was released from jail, he would return to a town in the midst of great change. A new liquor law in Pennsylvania mandated that all saloons be closed after midnight and on Sundays and prohibited the sale of alcohol to minors. Stagecoaches had ceased to run, replaced by a network of rails that would speed local residents by train wherever they wished. Soon, huge deposits of oil and gas would lead to an explosion of industry and population. The mines and factories demanded labor, and immigrants from Europe would answer the call.
The city of Washington is a much different place now than it was at the height of its prosperity 100 years ago, and what it was 159 years ago, when Main Street witnessed these two days of mayhem. But some things have not changed at all. We are separated into political tribes that are intolerant of each other. The number of weapons carried by our citizens is alarming, and gunfire in the streets is not uncommon.
We may reside in a different time, but some of our problems remain the same.
Epilogue
John Lennox and Robert Latimer Morrow – killer and victim – are buried within a stone’s throw of each other at Washington Cemetery. Lennox, however, enjoyed 40 more years of life.
While he was in prison, Lennox’s son Samuel died at age 13. He returned to his family after his release in 1875 and took up his job as a teamster. After his wife, Permelia, died in 1899, Lennox moved in with his daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth and Matthew McConaughy. He died Jan. 8, 1905, at age 85.
Morrow’s widow, Sarah Lewis Morrow, never remarried. She earned a living as a seamstress and died in 1923. Morrow’s elder daughter, Sofia, died at 15 in 1870. The younger daughter, Elizabeth, worked with her mother until her marriage to William Christman, whose family owned The Reporter and would expand it from a weekly to a daily newspaper. It is through the courtesy of the descendants of Elizabeth Morrow Christman that some of the photos accompanying this series were published.
Richard Fitzwilliams, after his acquittal, would marry for a second time, to Ellen Chambers. He would die childless, however, in 1902, leaving a considerable estate.
Sample Sweeney, the father of five daughters and two sons, died in 1880 at age 75.
Brady’s widow, Rebecca Jordan Brady, did not remarry and died in 1897 at age 62. Brady had two sons, William Clement and Jesse, and a daughter, Katherine, who was just 2 months old when her father was killed.
The descendants of all of these people would go on to live normal, nonviolent lives. Some of them would achieve prosperity and contribute to the betterment of Washington. Just one example would be Helen Hallam Wolfe. Her mother was Katherine, daughter of Benjamin Brady. Helen would graduate from Washington Female Seminary and go on to study voice in Pittsburgh and New York. She was a soloist and director of the choir at First Presbyterian Church for 23 years. She lived to be 102, dying in 1996.
We cannot deny that violence has been a big part of Washington’s history, going back to the 18th century when settlers and Native Americans slaughtered each other, or to the 19th century when citizens took justice into their own hands, and to the early days of the 20th century, when murders were so common in Washington County that they often did not make it to the front page of the local newspapers.
We can acknowledge that death – whether from illness, neglect or violence – is less common today, and we can also hope that our future will be safer and more peaceful.
The end
A. Parker Burroughs retired as executive editor of the Observer-Reporter in 2014. He is a writer, and among his books are “Washington County Murder & Mayhem” and “True Murder Mysteries of Southwestern Pennsylvania,” both published by The History Press.