University of Virginia Library

XVIII.—THE NAMELESS DEATH.

There is another of the Signers, whose death I would like to picture, but
am afraid.

In the fearful hour of the Revolution, when our army was without arms,
our treasury bankrupt, this Signer, by the force of his personal character
alone, gave muskets, swords and cannon to the soldiers, hundreds of thousands
of dollars to the Continental Congress. He was the life, the blood,
the veins of our financial world. To him the Congress looked for aid, to
his counting house Washington turned his eyes, in his direst peril, and was
not denied. The dollars of this Signer fed our starving soldiers; his personal
credit gave us throughout this world, that which is worth more than
gold—confidence.

And yet, he died—how? Not in a duel, like Button Gwinett, nor surrounded
by the peaceful scenes of home, like Jefferson and Adams. Nor
did he meet his fate in battle. But he died—

I am ashamed, afraid to tell it.

Not two hundred yards from the old State House, there rose some years
ago, an edifice, whose walls were black, whose only echoes were sobs and
groans, whose ornaments, some iron manacles and a stout timber gibbet. It
seemed like a Curse frozen into stone, a Pestilence impersonified in bars
and bolts and black walls. In the Revolution, while the British held the
city, this edifice rung all day and night, with the horrible cries of rebel prisoners,
dying the death of dogs, their heart eaten up by a Plague, which
had been created by the filth and corruption of the den. After the Revolution,

the place made hideous by a thousand murders, was the residence
of thieves, pirates, assassins, felons of every grade. Among the various
groups of felons, who blasphemed all day in this stone Pandemonium, there
was a certain class, distinguished from the others by their silence, their pale
faces stamped with mental agony, their evident superiority in point of appearance
and education.

Some of this latter class were men, some were women; torn from their
homes by the hands of brutes, in the shape of officers of the law, they were
hurled through the gates, and left to rot in the company of the robber, the
pirate, the murderer.

This class of felons were guilty of a hideous crime, deserving of worse
penalties than theft or murder.

They were called Insolvent Debtors.

To me, this law of imprisonment for debt has ever seemed a holy thing,
worthy of the golden age of New Zealand, when burning little children and
innocent women, was a pleasant pastime for the jocular cannibals. It is
indeed a blessed law, worthy of the blood and tears which were shed in the
Revolution to establish our liberties. It merely converts your honest man
into a felon, inviting him most cordially to commit robbery, forgery or murder,
for these things are not punished with half the severity that visits the
head of your Unfortunate Debtor. Your forger can buy his Law—sometimes
his Judge—your Murderer may procure a pardon from a merciful
Governor, but what mercy is there for the wretch who owes money, which
he cannot pay?

In order more effectually to demonstrate the beauty of this law as it
existed some thirty years ago, in all its purity, let me beseech you to look
through the grated windows of Walnut street gaol, in the quiet of this evening
hour.

It is a cell that we behold; four bare walls, a chair or too, a miserable
couch. There is some sunshine here. Yes, the evening sun shines through
the grates, on the floor of the cell, and lights up the sad face of the Mother,
who with her children bends over the couch. You must not mind their
tears; you must laugh at their sobs, for the Husband, the Father, who
writhes on that couch, is an Insolvent Debtor.

He was once a man of noble presence, somewhat tall in stature, with a
frank, ingenious countenance, deep tranquil eyes, and a brow that bore the
marks of a strong intellect.

Now, the mere wreck of a man—face, form, brow, all withered, eyes
dimmed, and jaw fallen—he quivers on the couch of this Walnut street
gaol.

Why this change? For long years, pursued by honest gentlemen, with
thin lips, pinched faces, eyes bleared with the lust of gain, this Man—for he
is still a Man—has went through all the tortures with which poets, in their
imaginary hells, afflict the damned. They have hounded him in the streets,

in the church, in the house, yelling a kind of bloodhound's bay all the while,
and at last driven him into the gaol.

He is there, dying; his wife, his children by his side. The curses of
pirates, thieves, pickpockets, murderers, echo through the iron-banded
door.

Mother! Take your children by the hand; lead them to the window;
bid them look through the green trees, and behold yonder steeple glittering
in the sun. That is Independence Hall.

And here, on the debtor's couch, in the felon's gaol, lies one of the
Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Here, dying in slow agony,
writhes the man who gave arms to Washington, money to Congress; and
by his resolute energy, saved his country in the darkest hour of peril.

Robert Morris dying in a felon's gaol—

It is too much! For the honor of our country, for the sake of that
respect which honest shame and honorable poverty claims in every clime,
among all men, we cannot go on.

But those times, when Men were made felons by the holy law of Imprisonment
for Debt have passed away. The law exists no longer in any
civilized community. It is true, that in two or three barbarous despotisms
—we cannot call them states—this law does yet remain in force, but this
merely leaves us to infer, that the majority of its honest citizens are felons,
needing infamous enactments to keep them in order.

No man can call himself an American citizen, who dwells in such a
community, or submits to such a despotism.

What beautiful words these are for history, to be read in connection with
each other—Robert Morris! A felon's gaol!