The President's Vampire: Strange-But-True Tales of the United States of America (7 page)

It was at this time that the New Mary began exhibiting symptoms of pregnancy, and the spirits instructed her to appear at High Rock on June 29, 1854, for the final stage of the experiment. On the appointed day, she arrived and lay on the floor in front of the engine for two hours, experiencing labor pains. When they ended, she rose from the floor, touched the machine and it showed signs of… something. Precisely what happened is not clear; Spear claimed that for a few seconds, the machine was animate.

The
New Era
was unrestrained. “THE THING MOVES,” claimed the paper’s headline, along with an announcement that “The time of deliverance has come at last, and henceforward the career of humanity is upward and onward—a mighty noble and a Godlike career.”(16) Spear proclaimed the arrival of “the New Motive Power, the Physical Savior, Heaven’s Last Gift to Man, New Creation, Great Spiritual Revelation of the Age, Philosopher’s Stone, Art of all Arts, Science of all Sciences, the New Messiah.”(17)

The machine’s movements remained feeble, but this was not surprising in an “electrical infant” and the New Mary provided maternal attention while it gained strength (unfortunately, there’s no mention of what this involved). Despite the headlines, visitors to High Rock were unimpressed. In a letter to the
Spiritual Telegraph
, J.H. Robinson pointed out that the New Messiah could not even turn a coffee-mill(18) and Alonzo Newton admitted there was never more than a slight movement detected in some of the hanging metal balls.

Andrew Jackson Davis wrote a long, carefully worded critique of the whole project. While praising Spear as a man “doing good with all his guileless heart” and a fearless defender of unpopular causes, he suggested that Spear had mistaken his own impulses for spirit directives or had been tricked by irresponsible entities into carrying out the experiment. Davis also felt that the precision and intricacy of the machine’s construction was proof that higher intelligences were involved because Spear was “intellectually disqualified for the development of absolute science.” He also praised the Messiah’s excellent workmanship and construction; it didn’t move, but it was beautifully put together.(19)

The Electricizers suggested that a change of air would provide the machine with a more nourishing environment, so the Messiah was dismantled and moved to Randolph, New York, where “it might have the advantage of that lofty electrical position.” In Randolph, it was put into a shed but a mob broke in, trampled the machine, and scattered the pieces. No part of it survived.

Spear’s High Rock experiment may have been eccentric, but it was also characteristic of the period. New technologies profoundly changed 19th century society, producing industrialization, urbanization, the rise of capital, and a middle class whose values came to dominate society. A conservative reaction to this might have been neo-Ludditism, but Spear was no conservative; he was on a Christ-like mission to transform humanity and believed that technology, the most powerful force of the era, could serve spiritual ends.

He spent the rest of his life working for reform and acting as spokesman for the Spiritual Congress. When the spirits began preaching free love, Spear fathered a child by Caroline Hinckley (1859) and, four years later, divorced his wife to marry the mother. They went on a six-year tour of England, lecturing and holding séances, but were disappointed by the lack of interest in radical politics among British spiritualists.(20)

The couple spent several years in California working for women’s rights and socialism before settling in Philadelphia, where they lived contentedly until Spear’s death in October 1887. He is buried in Mt. Moriah Cemetery.

Did an angry mob really destroy the New Messiah? This would have been an exciting conclusion to a story that seemed headed for an anticlimax. According to Spear, the Machine was dismantled and transported hundreds of miles to the small town of Randolph. There it was housed in a temporary structure until a mob—in a scene reminiscent of peasants storming Frankenstein’s castle—destroyed it. Some sources blame Baptist ministers for inflaming local opinion, and the book,
An Eccentric Guide to the United States
, claims the episode took place in a barn belonging to the Shelton family.

Spear’s account was reported in the
Lynn News
, October 27, 1854, but is he reliable? Many questioned his sanity, but no one ever seems to have doubted his integrity or suggested he was a charlatan. The Randolph story, however, is troubling because there is no corroboration and it seems like there should be. Randolph historian Marlynn Olson has searched through contemporary sources and found nothing. In 1854, Cattaraugus County, New York, had two newspapers—one Whig, the other Republican—and neither mentions Spear, a riot, a Mechanical Messiah, or anyone delivering anti-Mechanical Messiah sermons. No known letters or diaries mention the event. “I think,” writes Ms Olson, “the whole thing was a pipe-dream of the Rev. J.M. Spear.” Perhaps, like so many other failed experiments, the machine was discreetly sunk into a pond or buried in the woods.

If the New Messiah had not vanished, the passage of 147 years would have improved the reputation of both the object and its creator. As a medium, Spear was a failure, but he built a unique, if unintentional, example of 19th-century folk art. And if it had actually moved, it would be as surprising as a Papuan cargo cult making an airplane that could fly. Spear had used the vocabulary of technology, not its language, to build a statue that expressed the human urge for transcendence.

4

THE PRESIDENT’S VAMPIRE

Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, May, 1866

No matter how you feel about the current Administration,

no one can accuse the president of being soft on vampirism.

Was a Portuguese sailor the first “real-life” vampire in American history? Did the President of the United States intervene and save the first vampire from being hanged?

Charles Fort gives a vivid account of the story in his 1932 book,
Wild Talents
: “Sometime in the year 1867, a fishing smack sailed from Boston. One of the sailors was a Portuguese, who called himself ‘James Brown.’ Two of the crew were missing, and were searched for. The captain went into the hold. He held up his lantern, and saw the body of one of these men, in the clutches of ‘Brown,’ who was sucking blood from it. Near by was the body of the other sailor. It was bloodless. ‘Brown’ was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, but President Johnson commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. In October, 1892, the vampire was transferred from the Ohio Penitentiary to the National Asylum, Washington, D. C., and his story was re-told in the newspapers.”

The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
article that Fort based his story on was even more lurid:

“A HUMAN VAMPIRE AND A MURDERER.”

“The Terrible Record of a Maniac Convict-Removed to an Asylum.”

“COLUMBUS, O., November 4—Deputy United States Marshal Williams of Cincinnati has removed James Brown, a deranged United States prisoner, from the Ohio penitentiary to the national asylum at Washington, D.C. The prisoner fought like a tiger against being removed.”

“Twenty-five years ago he was charged with being a vampire and living on human blood. He was a Portuguese sailor and shipped on a fishing smack from Boston up the coast in 1867. During the trip two of the crew were missing and an investigation made. Brown was found one day in the hold of the ship sucking the blood from the body of one of the sailors. The other body was found at the same place and had been served in a similar manner. Brown was returned to Boston and convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged. President Johnson commuted the sentence to imprisonment for life.”

President Andrew Johnson (Library of Congress)

“After serving fifteen years in Massachusetts he was transferred to the Ohio prison. He has committed two murders since his confinement. When being taken from the prison he believed that he was on his way to execution and resisted accordingly.“(2)

If James Brown were alive today, he would be described as a serial killer and classified variously as organized, disorganized, mentally ill, sexually sadistic, etc., depending on the circumstances.(3) Serial killing, however, was almost unknown in America before the twentieth-century, while the history of vampirism goes back hundreds of years.

New England was the center of belief in vampirism as a preternatural phenomenon with outbreaks recorded from the late 1700s to the late 1800s in Rhode Island, Vermont, parts of Massachusetts, and Connecticut.(4) There are also stories from New Hampshire about a scientist who made himself immortal by distilling the Elixir of Life from baby’s blood.(5)

More mundane examples of blood drinking occurred among snowbound travelers and victims of shipwreck who were forced to survive by cannibalism. Sexual pathologies like blood fetishism were discussed (in Latin) by Dr. Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, whose
Psychopathia Sexualis
included contemporary European examples (“Case 48…he first had to make a cut in his arm… she would suck the wound and during the act become violently excited sexually.”(6)) Was James Brown a violent blood fetishist? Could he have believed that he was a genuine vampire?(7)

Brown’s story has been retold in books, magazines, and web-sites, where it’s accompanied by dripping red letters and flapping cartoon bats, but these retellings are often inaccurate and offer little beyond the accounts in the
Eagle
and
Wild Talents
. That means the two main sources for these crimes were published 26 and 66 years after the events they describe.

Could anything new be learned 137 years later? Contemporary newspapers were not likely to have ignored a sensational double murder, and if official records survived, they would provide verification. Fortunately, even vampires leave a paper trail.

The President Intervenes

The commutation was the first important document to be found:

“To all to whom these Presents shall come, GREETING:

“Whereas, at the October term 1866, of the United States Circuit Court for the District of Massachusetts, one James Brown was convicted of murder and sentenced to be hung.

“And whereas, I am assured by the United States District Attorney, Assistant District Attorney, Marshal and others, that there were certain mitigating circumstances in this case which render him a proper object of executive clemency;

“Now, therefore, be it known, that I, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States of America, in consideration of the premises, divers other good and sufficient reasons me thereunto moving, do hereby commute the said sentence of death imposed upon the said James Brown to imprisonment at hard labor in the Massachusetts’ State Prison at Charlestown, Massachusetts, for the term of his natural life.”(8)

This proves that James Brown existed, that he was convicted of murder, and that the President of the United States commuted his sentence. No mention is made of what the “divers other good and sufficient reasons” for the commutation might have been, and if they had been included we would know more about both Brown and Johnson, one of America’s most forgotten presidents. (Despite the turbulence of his administration, Johnson is even more obscure than Millard Fillmore, whose total obscurity has given him a degree of notoriety.)

The commutation led to prison registers, trial records, newspaper articles—even the ship’s log—and as these accumulated, James Brown, the killer-vampire, dissolved like Max Schreck in a sunbeam. What remained was not a pile of dust but a run-of-the-mill murderer, whose story bears little resemblance to published accounts.

The following reconstruction is based on the collected documents.

Murder on the High Seas

May 23, 1866 was a fair day with a breeze from the Southeast; pleasant weather for men aboard the bark
Atlantic
as it cruised for whales in the Indian Ocean.(9) The crew spent the day bundling up the whalebone (baleen) that was used in those pre-plastic days for making umbrella ribs, buggy whips, and corset stays. Whalebone, however, was little more than a by-product of the search for whale oil, which was found in the animal’s head and blubber and provided the best illumination and mechanical lubricant available at the time. In order to collect it, fleets of ships that combined the functions of a hunting lodge, processing factory, and warehouse combed the seas.

The
Atlantic
was one of them, “ a staunch, well-built craft of two-hundred and ninety tons, “with a crew of thirty or more men.(10) Brightly painted whaleboats hung from davits, ready to drop rowers and harpooners into the sea at a shout of “There she blows!” (or “There she breaches!” or “There she white waters!”). An enormous brick stove stood on her deck for boiling whale oil out of blubber. Also on deck were James Brown, a ”negro cook” from New Bedford,(11) blacksmith James W. Gardner, and seaman John Soares (or Suarez).(12)

Brown was around 25 years old. He stood five-feet, six and a half inches tall, had a rounded chin, black hair, and “frank” eyes. His skin was decorated sailor-style with tattooed eagles, anchors, hearts, and stars and, on his right forearm, a woman wearing a skirt.(13)

He was busy scrubbing a pan when 19-year-old James M. Foster came on deck from the forecastle. Foster leaned against a cask by the fore swifter and called Brown a “damned nigger.”(14) Presumably there was bad blood between them. On whaling voyages lasting three or four years, there was often nothing for the men to do but carve scrimshaw and get on each other’s nerves. Quarrels were common and sometimes led to violence, as court papers show.

“[James Brown] wilfully, feloniously and of his malice aforethought an assault with a certain knife of the length of six inches and the breadth of one inch did then and there make, and him the said James Foster with the aforesaid knife which he the said James Brown then and there had and held did then and there strike, stab and wound and in and upon the said James Foster in the left side of the breast of him the said James Foster with the aforesaid knife, so as aforesaid had and held by him the said James Brown, one mortal wound of the length of one inch and of the depth of four inches did then and there inflict, of which said mortal wound so as aforesaid inflicted with the knife aforesaid, which the said James Brown so as aforesaid had and held, the said James Foster did then and there languish, and so languishing did then and there for the space of five minutes linger and then and there so languishing, on the day and year aforesaid, did then and there die…”(15)

Soares thought Brown had hit Foster with his fist. James W. Gardner “was within a few feet of Brown when he cut Foster and helped the latter to the wheel; asking him what was the matter but he could not speak, and lived but five or six minutes.”(16) Captain Benjamin Franklin Wing had the cook put into double-irons in the fore-hold, where he later admitted to stabbing Foster with a double-edged sheath knife and throwing it overboard.(17) (See Appendix I: Entries from logbook of the bark
Atlantic.
)

Brown and the witnesses were transferred to other ships and taken to Boston. He was indicted on September 11th, arraigned on October 19th, pleaded “Not Guilty” and tried in U.S. District Court on November 13, 1866, with Judges Lovell and Clifford presiding. District Attorney Hillard and Assistant District Attorney Dabney presented the government’s case, and Charles R. Train and N. St. John Green conducted the defense. (In an undated letter to President Cleveland, Brown writes that he paid his lawyer “nine barrels of oil at that time oil was worth two Dollars and seventy-five cents a gallons [sic]. See Appendix II: James Brown’s letters.) It was a short trial. The jury deliberated seventy-five minutes before finding Brown guilty. He was sentenced to death and President Johnson signed the commutation on January 3, 1867.

Brown was taken from the Suffolk Jail to the Charlestown State Prison, a dreary granite pile where he spent the next 22 years.(18) On April 14, 1889, he was sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus, possibly because Charlestown was being renovated. Two years later, on November 3, 1892, Brown was removed to the U.S. Government Insane Asylum in Washington, D.C. He probably spent the rest of his life there.(19)

An interesting question arises: how was this very ordinary crime transformed into a harrowing tale of maritime guignol?

The Transmogrification of James Brown

Newspapers of the Gilded Age had a casual approach to facts that allowed them to publish stories that still fascinate forteans; this was the era that produced perennial favorites like the cattle-rustling airship and the pterodactyl killed by cowboys. Furthermore, November 4, 1892, was a slow news day. “A Human Vampire” appeared on the front page between the obituary of Wheaton A. Welsh, “the well known Local Public School Principal” and a shoot-out in Wyoming, suggesting someone at the
Eagle
might have succumbed to temptation and embellished an otherwise uninteresting news item.

It’s possible, though unlikely, that the article is accurate and Brown committed two more murders in prison. If so, they could have inspired the copywriter to retrofit the original account and might explain why Brown was sent to an insane asylum. “A Human Vampire” does not go into details. If the murders were in Massachusetts, however, they should have appeared on Brown’s record when he was moved to Ohio (the Ohio Prison Register mentions one conviction for first-degree murder, death sentence commuted). Brown might have committed the murders after arriving in Ohio, but by 1889 he was almost fifty years old and suffering from cataracts in both eyes. So far, no evidence has been found to support the newspaper’s claim.

Another possibility is that Brown’s story became confused, commingled, or otherwise mixed up with another Brown who was in the news that year.