Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/389

 accord. The husband had as one of his boon companions a black negro whom he invited to his home, and there they all caroused together. Presently, the woman was about to have another child, and she knew that when it should be born its color and features would disclose that the negro was the father. She was like a wild beast, caught in a trap from which there appeared to be no possible escape. One night the husband was knocked on the head and his dead body thrown into a vat or cistern. She and the negro were both arrested and later were convicted of murder in the first degree. Her child was born in prison. The case of the negro was taken to the Supreme Court. At the instance of Chief Justice Mitchell, with a view to providing for certain features of this case, an act of assembly was passed allowing the Supreme Court in its discretion to award a new trial, because of evidence discovered since the judgment of the Oyer and Terminer Court. The Supreme Court then awarded a new trial to the negro, and upon that trial he was acquitted. The situation was then that the negro was free and the woman in prison under sentence of death. Attention was called to the case all over the United States. Women were aroused and my mail was burdened with letters. Little children wrote to me beseeching my intervention. A petition in her behalf came to me from Ohio with many thousands of signatures. The Board of Pardons refused a pardon. A careful examination of the evidence led me to the opinion that both she and the negro had participated in the murder. If that opinion was well founded it was a case where the processes of justice went astray, and it would be a travesty to have the white woman hanged and the negro man escape unpunished. I refused to issue a death warrant and the governors who succeeded me followed the example set for them. Every once in a while the story of Katie Edwards and her fate crops out in the prints.

The Philadelphia Record asked me for an expression of Rh