In 1830, Seward was elected to the state senate on the freedom and social equality program of the Anti-Mason party. He developed a reputation as a man who could forge idealism with political pragmatism. In 1838 he was elected governor of New York on the Whig party platform. An effective and respected politician, Seward advocated for penal reform, education for women, and schools for immigrants. When his term ended he returned to private law practice in Auburn, and no one doubted that at the propitious time he would again hold public office.
When William Freeman was captured and taken to jail, Frances Seward stood looking out the window of her house and watched the mob parading along South Street yelling for Bill’s death. She was quite shaken by the hate and thirst for vengeance she witnessed. She was also shaken by the murders. She had known the Van Nest family, and indeed, her husband had done legal work for them. She wrote to Henry in Albany, describing what she had seen and expressing concern for the prisoner.
Seward had developed an interest in the insane. His expertise was so great that social reformer Dorothea Dix visited him in Auburn in 1843 to get advice on how to improve conditions for the mentally ill. Months before Bill killed the Van Nest family, Seward represented another man accused of murder. The trial of that man, a black convict named Henry Wyatt, had taken place in Auburn. Seward defended Wyatt, who had killed another convict, on the grounds of insanity and obtained a hung jury. Retrial was set for June. Seward was encouraged to take Bill’s case and thereby increase his knowledge and skill in the defense of the criminally insane. He hoped that, through his defense of the case, the law of insanity would be developed to a more scientific and, in Seward’s mind, more humanistic level.
Seward was also drawn to Bill’s case due to his sympathy for the black race and his hatred of slavery and racism. Although he believed that whites were a “superior race” to blacks, he also believed and fought for the right of all men to vote. In 1846 he had declared that he would “give the ballot to every man, learned or unlearned, bound or free.”4
Along with his genuine humanitarianism, Seward also took Freeman’s case for pragmatic political reasons. Seward was a member of the Whig party. Its opposition, the Democratic party, was controlled by the proslav-ery forces of the South. The Democratic party had shown signs of growing strength in the North. At the same time, the antislavery Liberty party was gaining adherents in the North. Seward was afraid that the Liberty party would take votes away from the Whig party, resulting in a Democratic party victory in New York and in the nation. Seward and other influential Whigs pushed their compatriots to adopt positions against slavery and for Negro suffrage. He hoped his defenses of Wyatt and Freeman would gain publicity for the Whig program and expose the horrors of the existing racist system.
When Seward returned to his home and law office in Auburn and people heard that he was preparing to take Bill’s case, he began to receive hate mail and some of his friends urged him to reconsider. His father-in-law told him to “abandon the nigger.” But Frances encouraged her husband to defend Bill. He agreed with her, and ultimately Frances became active in the defense, doing research on mental illness. Seward’s strong feelings are evident in a letter he wrote to his best friend, Thurlow Weed.
There is a busy war around me, to drive me from defending and securing a fair trial for the negro Freeman. People now rejoice that they did not lynch him; but they have all things prepared for ... a mock trial He is deaf, deserted, ignorant, and his conduct is unexplainable on any principle of sanity. It is natural that he should turn to me to defend him. If he does, I shall do so.
Seward met with Freeman, who agreed that Seward and two other lawyers would defend him. There were almost no black lawyers in the entire United States. Two years earlier, in 1844, Macon B. Allen, the first African American attorney in America, was first allowed to practice law in Maine.
The preliminary hearing began in Auburn on June 1, 1846, after a motion to change venue to a location where the public was not as enraged and potentially prejudiced was denied. Judge Bowen Whiting presided over the trial, and State Attorney General John Van Buren, son of former president Martin Van Buren, was sent from Albany to prosecute the case.
Under the law as it now exists, a judge determines whether a defendant is sane enough to stand trial. The rule is that a person has to be able to understand the nature of the proceeding and to help his lawyer prepare a defense by providing facts, witnesses, and potential evidence. If a defendant cannot do these things because of a mental illness, he is considered incompetent to stand trial. Such a person is kept in custody until he regains, if ever, enough sanity to go through a trial. The requirements of the law were generally the same in 1846, except that a jury decided the issue of competency to stand trial.
In Freeman’s case, the jury decided by a vote of eleven to one that he was “sufficiently sane” to go through a trial. There was a strong feeling among those sympathetic to Bill that the jury was prejudiced against him and that the judge was making every ruling against him. Seward also was upset and wrote to his friend Weed, “I am crushed between the nether millstones of judicial tyranny and popular anger. But there will be a consoling reflection by and by that I was not guilty of hanging the poor wretches whom the State Prison tormentors drive to madness.”
After the preliminary hearing, Seward was forced to retry the case of the convict. Wyatt was convicted and sentenced to be hanged. Seward then had only a few weeks to prepare Freeman’s trial, which began on July 10, after a motion for a continuance was denied.
The jury consisted of twelve white men; at that time, women were not allowed to serve as jurors. Among the twelve were three abolitionists. The prosecutor asked them the following question: “Suppose it should be proved that the prisoner is a poor demented negro, would you think society ought to be punished and not the negro?” Juror Norman Peters replied, “I should hold him responsible the same as any other man.” The prosecutor was satisfied with the answers the men gave and left them on the jury.
The state presented its case, calling seventy-two witnesses. As in most insanity cases, the prosecution attempted to elicit evidence that showed a rational planning and execution of the crime, from which the jury could infer that the defendant knew what he was doing was wrong and that he was in control of his actions. The testimony showed that a week before the murders Bill bought two knives, that he hid the knives, and that he wanted to get the persons who caused him to be sent to prison. The evidence showed that he waited outside the Van Nest farm before trying to enter, and that after the murders he attempted an escape and lied when captured. In addition to the lay witnesses, eight physicians testified to their opinions that Bill was not insane. Dr. Bigelow, a leading witness for the state, summed up their medical case when he testified: “I believe him to be a dull, stupid, moody, morose, depraved, degraded negro, but not insane.”
Bill sat at the counsel table and watched the proceedings, which would likely have been even more traumatic for him had he been able to comprehend what was taking place. He sat quietly, his small body (five-foot-seven, 115 pounds) slumped over. He laughed for no reason. He continually smiled, seemingly unaware of the hate directed at him in the crowded courtroom.5
After the prosecution finished, Seward began his defense. He called thirty-six witnesses, among them nine doctors who testified that William Freeman was insane at the time he committed the murders. The essence of the psychiatric defense was that he suffered from a delusion that the Van Nest family had caused him to be put in prison for stealing a horse. Obviously, claimed Seward, this was a delusion because the Van Nest family had nothing to do with the horse-stealing case. This delusion was so strong that it overwhelmed Freeman’s rational thought; the criminal act he committed was “an immediate, unqualified offspring of the delusion.”
There was a great deal of testimony regarding mental disease, but the heart of Seward’s defense was to explain how social conditions caused the insanity. He would not have called his strategy a black rage defense. The very words “black rage” would have conjured up a strong, black man acting in rebellion against his oppression. Seward, limited by his own racial prejudices, felt more comfortable