"Yankee Common Sense"

On the frosty morning of Jan. 13, 1932 the hard-riding, fox-hunting socialites of Loudoun County, Va. awoke to find murder in their midst. Sometime during the night Agnes Boeing Ilsley, widow of a well- to-do Wisconsin banker, had been brutally done to death in bed at her house in Middleburg. Also killed was her elderly white maid Mina Buckner. A butcher with a meat cleaver could not have done a gorier job. Nothing was stolen.

The summer prior, Mrs. Ilsley had had a young Negro chauffeur named George Crawford. For receiving stolen goods Crawford had served five years on a Virginia chain gang. About Middleburg he had been arrested for minor thefts but always released for lack of evidence. When some liquor disappeared from the Ilsley house, Mrs. Ilsley discharged him.

Immediately after the double murder the enraged citizenry of Loudoun County put their horses and hounds to hunting George Crawford instead of a fox. Leader of the chase was Brigadier General William Mitchell, of Air Service renown, at whose home Mrs. Ilsley had visited the evening before her death. But George Crawford was not to be found, a fact which possibly saved him from a lynching. Nevertheless he was indicted for the murder. Exactly one year later the police of Boston fished up from the dregs of the city's unemployed on a petty larceny charge a Negro who admitted he was George Crawford. But he stoutly denied the Middleburg murders, insisting he had left Virginia months before the crime. To his defense rushed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Virginia's Governor Pollard asked Massachusetts' Governor Ely to send Crawford down to stand trial. There were formal hearings. Boston witnesses upheld his alibi. Virginia witnesses knocked it down. A confession was introduced only to be repudiated. Governor Ely signed papers for George Crawford's return to Virginia-- when suddenly, last week, in stepped the might and majesty of the Federal Government. Overnight George Crawford became a national headline character potentially as famous as that other obscure Negro, Dred Scott.* Into the Boston court of U. S. District Judge James Arnold Lowell, cousin of Harvard's president, had gone N. A. A. C. P. attorneys seeking a writ of habeas corpus. Judge Lowell, an individualist on & off the bench where he has sat for eleven years, granted the writ. His legal reasoning: Virginia does not permit Negroes to serve on juries; therefore any conviction of George Crawford would be voided by the Supreme Court as contrary to the 14th Amendment. Declared Judge Lowell: "The only persons who would get any good out of it would be the lawyers. The whole thing is absolutely wrong. It goes against my Yankee common sense. I'd rather be wrong on my law than give my sanction to legal nonsense. They say justice is blind but it is not blind as a bat." Judge Lowell's decision did not actually free George Crawford because Massachusetts continued to hold the prisoner on $25,000 bail pending an appeal to a special session of the U. S. Circuit Court later this month. But it did send wave on wave of indignation rolling through Middleburg, across Virginia and over the entire South. George Crawford became more than a "runaway nigger," for in him the South saw symbolized its right to administer criminal justice in its own way. The South remembers the fugitive slave law whereby a Negro might murder in the South and find asylum in the North. Below the Potomac there was wild talk of a sudden increase in lynching if the Lowell ruling became permanent. Only by force of arms could the South be compelled to put Negroes on its juries. The Scottsboro case in Alabama hinged on the same issue after trial and conviction. Judge Lowell had intensified the racial issue by raising it before trial. Southern resentment against Judge Lowell quickly boiled to a climax in the House of Representatives. Two days after the Boston ruling Virginia's Representative Howard Smith, whose district includes Loudoun County, arose and solemnly impeached the Massachusetts jurist for high crimes and misdemeanors. The gist of seven counts against him was that Judge Lowell had "wilfully, deliberately and viciously attempted to nullify the operation of the laws for the punishment of crime in the State of Virginia." Cried Representative Smith: "I do not contend that a judge may be impeached for an honest difference of opinion but I do aver and proclaim that a judge is impeachable who is either, first, so ignorant of the law as to be flagrantly incompetent or, second, who knowing the law, releases on the world a self-confessed murderer of the most vicious type." Stirred to immediate action the House voted (209-to-150) to have its Judiciary Committee start an impeachment inquiry into Judge Lowell's conduct. Judge Lowell waved Representative Smith's charges aside as a triviality. Said he: "I don't care what Smith said. I don't know what he said and I don't want to know." Because of the judge's reputation as a liberal, one of the first lawyers to rush to his defense was Boston's William G. Thompson who once served as chief counsel in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Likewise members of the Boston Bar whose fathers and grandfathers were Abolitionists gave him warm support. But not so Governor Ely who declared: "Any fugitive will be deluding himself to think that Massachusetts will prove a refuge for all those who might be able to fight extradition along the lines of the Crawford case." Thus, in Federal Circuit Court, "free" " Massachusetts became the attorney for "slave" Virginia.

Bostonians know Judge Lowell, whose mother was an Emerson, as the jurist who wears flashy cravats and lurid waistcoats, waves to friends from the bench, potters about with flowers. They like to bracket him as a legal libertarian with those other two Massachusetts justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Dembitz Brandeis. In 1930 Judge Lowell suffered a paralytic stroke that affected his walk. Last year when a Prohibition case based on wiretapping was before him, he effected an acquittal by addressing the jury thus: "We love to think of Uncle Sam as a thoroughly upright man. . . . Let us look at the picture of Uncle Sam descending to wiretapping. Instead of being an honorable gentleman, he becomes a sneaking cur. Just think of the shame of this thing, worse, the pity of it!''

*Dred Scott, Missouri slave, sued for freedom on the ground that two years' residence with his master on free soil had made him a citizen. In 1857 the Supreme Court denied his plea, held the Missouri Compromise of 1820 unconstitutional. That decision stripped Congress of its power to pass on slavery in the territories, helped bring on the Civil War.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.