The Notorious Mrs. Clem by Wendy Gamber

Author:Wendy Gamber
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781421420219
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Indiana Murderess

For the meantime, Radicalism prevailed. Construction on the Dolly Varden courthouse proceeded and prosecutors declared their intention to try Clem a fourth time. They met with resistance. Continuing in an earlier vein, the Sentinel pointedly cited the $1,000 apiece Benjamin Harrison and John Dye earned for Clem’s most recent prosecution. They “have a nice thing of it,” an editorial complained, “and doubtless would not care if the ‘regular spring trial’ came on four times a year.” In a “card” sent to the same newspaper, “Marion” suggested that Clem’s prosecution might better be described as “persecution”: “Several of our prominent citizens are interesting themselves in behalf of the accused, who declare they will leave no stone unturned to secure her acquittal—thus saving the county the expense of further useless and vexatious trials.”1

Some of these anonymous citizens convinced one of the famous names in Indiana politics to join Clem’s defense team. Daniel W. Voorhees, a prominent attorney, former congressman and soon-to-be senator, had long been a key figure in the Democratic Party at both state and national levels. Like his political nemesis, Abraham Lincoln, a man to whom he was often compared, Voorhees was a renowned orator. Like Lincoln, he stood over six feet in height—hence his nickname, the “Tall Sycamore of the Wabash.” Voorhees, in the words of one biographer, was an “ultra-Democrat.” He was an unabashed racist and an ardent opponent of abolitionism—he famously defended one of John Brown’s accomplices in the raid on Harper’s Ferry by giving an eloquent speech that endorsed states’ rights and slavery. During the Civil War, Voorhees was a vocal critic of the Lincoln administration and a reputed member of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a secret society of Confederate sympathizers. A fierce opponent of congressional Reconstruction, he was the antithesis of Radicalism. Benjamin Harrison was his political, ideological—and now—legal rival. At the time of Clem’s fourth trial, Voorhees had temporarily put aside public life for private practice, enhancing his already widespread reputation as a formidable defense attorney. Soon, however, he would reenter the political fray. He would defeat Harrison in the senatorial election of 1878, part of the Democratic resurgence as northern support for Reconstruction waned.2

Most likely it was not Voorhees’s politics but his success some seven years earlier in securing the acquittal of Mary Harris, a young woman accused of murdering her former fiancé, that attracted the attention of Clem’s supporters. His participation nevertheless gave the latest proceedings a sharper partisan edge. Indeed, at a time of intense political turmoil, both Voorhees and Harrison remained true to their parties. Harrison had only recently lost the Republican nomination for governor, in part because he lacked the common touch—his opponents labeled him a “stinking little aristocrat [who] never recognized men on the street”—in part because the state party’s leader, the former governor and current senator Oliver Morton, saw him as a threat to his own political ambitions. Still, Harrison refused to endorse Morton’s rivals, the Liberal Republicans, a breakaway movement that opposed the corruption of Ulysses S.

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