Epilogue

Zachariah Walker died in flames in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. Each time he tried to escape the bonfire the mob had erected from wooden fencing, hay, and straw, his tormentors shoved him back. Thousands looked on. After Walker finally succumbed, members of the crowd collected parts of his charred remains—not as evidence of a crime but as mementos. The investigation and trials that followed the gruesome events of August 13, 1911, produced not a single conviction.¹

A year later, John Jay Chapman made his way to Coatesville, Pennsylvania, to, in his own words, “repent.” He did so in a virtually empty room. A friend traveled to be there with him. Only two other people came to the rented storefront on the evening of August 18, 1912, to hear reflections delivered to mark the anniversary of the unpunished murder of an African American man. Chapman, who hailed from New York’s Hudson Valley, understood the atrocity as anything but “local.” Reading about the Coatesville lynching the year before, he “saw a seldom-revealed picture of the American heart and of the American nature.” He knew the current, tattered racial context well enough. But “no theories about the race problem, no statistics, no legislation, or mere educational endeavor, can quite meet the lack which that day revealed in the American people.” Fearing that he would “forget” the disturbing insights prompted by the Coatesville story, Chapman “became filled” with the notion “that I must do something to remember it.” And so to Coatesville, this site of collective “guilt,” he traveled to atone.²

Zachariah Walker’s road to Pennsylvania embraced key features of post-Reconstruction American history. He came north from Virginia, a state experiencing a vast Black outmigration and that, in 1902, disenfranchised African American voters through provisions of a new state constitution. Walker was not alone in choosing to settle in Coatesville. During the previous decade, more than one thousand African Americans from the South had moved to the once rural town that now housed two giant steel plants, including the one in which Walker worked. Immigrants from Europe came to Coatesville in similar numbers. Between 1900 and 1910, the native-born white proportion of the population dropped from more than 87 percent to 73 percent. The town exemplified America’s ongoing industrial transformation and demographic change.³

Walker’s death layered tragedy on tragedy. The night before his brutal public death, he killed a man, a steel mill security agent named Edgar Rice. Walker, after leaving a bar on a Saturday evening and under the influence, shot his gun in the street above the heads of two Polish immigrants. Rice confronted Walker. In the ensuing scuffle, Walker pulled his gun again and fatally shot the white man, a well-regarded member of the Coatesville community. Walker scarpered. The next day, a Sunday, members of a nearby volunteer fire department found the fugitive hiding in a tree. When he was discovered and being deeply distraught, Walker tried to shoot himself in the head, wounding rather than killing himself. His pursuers took him to the hospital, where first he underwent surgery before being put in a straitjacket and chained to a bed. There he admitted his crime to the police chief, a police officer, and the district attorney. That, however, was not enough for the citizens of Coatesville. A large mob gathered outside the hospital. A dozen or more stormed into the building, destroyed Walker’s bed, and hauled the man, still chained to the bedpost, through a gauntlet of angry white people and out into the countryside. Approximately five thousand men, women, and children, some coming from church, witnessed the merciless lynching. Neither Walker’s pleas nor his efforts to escape the flames could save his life.⁴

Attempts to bring Walker’s murderers to justice failed utterly. Local juries rapidly acquitted each man brought to trial; most of them were young men but the defendants also included the police chief and one of his officers, who had, rather than keep the peace, allowed the atrocity to go forward. In May 1912, prosecutors decided that further efforts at convictions would be futile and gave up. Uproar over the events in Coatesville spread widely. Black and white newspapers printed denunciations. The event attracted the attention of such luminaries as the great Black scholar, journalist, and civil rights pioneer W. E. B. DuBois and former president Theodore Roosevelt. Denizens of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, mostly withdrew into silence.⁵

John Jay Chapman’s road to Coatesville, in most respects, could not have been more different from Zachariah Walker’s. Admirers have sometimes written about Chapman’s trip there as if it were destiny. He was a child of privilege, connected to the elites of New York and of Boston. He earned two degrees from Harvard, wrote on a wide array of topics, and threw himself into the politics of reform in New York City. He participated in various civic clubs, gave speeches, and published his own small political magazine.⁶

Chapman used his pen to advance big ideas designed to discomfit his social peers (see Figure 15). Chapman’s 1898 book Causes and Consequences assessed corruption in the Gilded Age, moving well beyond machine and street-level graft. He blamed America’s tarnished politics on the money the nation’s corporations shoveled into the system and, ultimately, on a society obsessed with wealth and commerce. The iconoclast denounced partisan loyalty as “superstition.” History and historical analogy flavored his vision and his rhetoric. The calculating Lincoln should not be the reformers’ model. He advised a more idealistic outsiders’ approach to fighting corruption: “As soon as the reformers give up trying to be statesmen, and perceive that their own function is purely educational, and that they are mere anti-slavery agitators and person of no account whatever, they will succeed better.” The cultured Chapman imagined a new movement “emancipating the small towns throughout the Union, even as commerce was once disfranchising them.”⁷

Behind his urge to smash through the complacency that he thought plagued American democracy was a deep attachment to the great nineteenth-century American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Chapman wrote searchingly of Emerson’s ideas about the power of individual conscience. His critical mind ever at work, he exposed his hero’s failings, as well as his wisdom.⁸

John Jay Chapman’s lineage shaped his self-understanding. Born in the midst of the war that destroyed slavery, his name intertwined two great abolitionist legacies. His grandmother, Maria Weston Chapman, was William Lloyd Garrison’s determined Boston collaborator; he was also the direct descendant of John Jay, William Jay, and John Jay II, the last of whom was his grandfather. He had clear memories of both of his abolitionist grandparents. In a 1914 Atlantic Monthly article, he recalled Maria Weston Chapman as a strong and striking woman who read Shakespeare to her young grandchildren and whose memories of internecine antislavery struggles animated her decades later. In the wake of John Jay II’s death, his grandson reflected, “The fact is that his name and the family tradition have been controlling ideas with me ever since I can remember.”⁹

As a young man, Chapman had enjoyed his grandfather’s financial generosity; in turn, John Jay II no doubt appreciated his grandson’s enthusiasm for urban reform along with their shared animus for the Catholic Church.¹⁰ Later in life, Chapman would compose a poetic tribute to John Jay II titled “The Grandfather,” describing in the final lines John Jay II in prayer in the Bedford home of their ancestors—the formidable man “kneel[ing] where they had kneeled.” John Jay bequeathed to his grandson his ring “with the family shield and legend.” Chapman knew full well that he walked, prayed, and, indeed, owed his very birth to his abolitionist forebears from New York and New England.¹¹

Chapman also suffered—from cruelties of fate and maladies of mind. As a young man, he intentionally burned his own hand so badly that it could not be saved. He had inflicted this punishment on himself after striking an imagined romantic rival and then realizing that his jealousy was unwarranted. His first wife died in 1897 weeks after giving birth to their third child. Shortly after the turn of the century, he suffered a long depression that left him incapacitated and for a time, curtailed his robust literary output. By the time of the Coatesville lynching, however, he had resumed a more active life.¹²

Zachariah Walker’s gruesome death at the hands of the Pennsylvania mob shook John Jay Chapman during a period when he was thinking more intently about the abolitionist legacy. A massive biography of John Brown by Oswald Garrison Villard, like Chapman, a writer growing from the main trunk of an abolitionist family tree, attracted his interest. Chapman contemplated writing a play about Brown, that most radical of antebellum abolitionists. Chapman also turned his attention to William Lloyd Garrison, his efforts ultimately coming to fruition in a book-length study published in 1913 on the great antislavery agitator. His Garrison biography included an intriguing consideration of his great-grandfather William Jay’s abolitionist trajectory.¹³

John Jay Chapman chose not to draw attention to his abolitionist heritage in his 1912 Coatesville speech, which he advertised in a local newspaper as a Sunday morning prayer meeting. There would be “Reading of the Scriptures” and a “Brief address.”¹⁴ In that address, Chapman named no names, new or old. His subject was slavery itself—and all the horror with which slavery imbued the American story.

He came to claim guilt, not to absolve himself from it, and to cast his historical gaze backward to long before his grandparents embraced the radical idea of immediate abolitionism, even long before his great-great-grandfathers’ pursuit of gradual abolitionism. John Jay Chapman pronounced, “This great wickedness that happened in Coatesville is not the wickedness of Coatesville nor of-today. It is the wickedness of all America and of three hundred years—the wickedness of the slave trade. All of us are tinctured by it. No one place, no special persons are to blame.” Coatesville had given him “a glimpse into the unconscious soul of this country.” The collective unconscious, once identified, demanded collective responsibility.¹⁵ His statement, “A nation cannot practice a course of inhuman crime for three hundred years and then suddenly throw off the effects of it,” was an accusation, not an excuse. Americans must transform themselves.

The Coatesville atrocity linked the age of sail to the age of the internal combustion engine, the full span of the Jay family’s engagement with slavery. Authorities in his merchant–slaveholder ancestors’ Manhattan conducted trials before burning Black men at the stake; in Chapman’s age, local churchgoers joined a mob that hurled a Black man into a fire and the courts proved impotent to punish the vigilantes. Chapman described the modern instance: “On the day of the calamity, those people in the automobiles came by the hundred and watched the torture, and passers-by came in a great multitude and watched it—and did nothing.” The news then spread to “the whole country”—but still nothing changed. Chapman placed the blame broadly and squarely on individuals, himself included: “This whole matter has been a historic episode; but it is a part, not only of our national history, but of the personal history of each one of us.”¹⁶

Though people in this town less than forty miles west of Philadelphia resoundingly ignored him, the prominent writer had other avenues for alerting his fellow Americans to deeply unsettling truths. The long-established political and literary magazine Harper’s Weekly printed a copy of Chapman’s address the next month. He and his editors may have assumed that the kinds of educated readers who would become his audience could recall his heritage easily enough. But the exhilaration Chapman experienced when his piece was reprinted by newspapers and other magazines indicates that his message, not a celebration of his abolitionist heritage, was the point. He dared hope for change.¹⁷

Several years before, in his essay on Emerson, Chapman assessed the toll that silence had exacted before the emergence of radical abolitionism. “So long as there is any subject which men may not freely discuss, they are timid on all subjects. They wear an iron crown and talk in whispers. Such social conditions crush and maim the individual, and throughout New England, as throughout the whole North, the individual was crushed and maimed.” And yet, as Chapman conceded, Emerson restrained himself far too long after others spoke out.¹⁸

In Coatesville, as elsewhere in the nation, the crushing and maiming were literal, not figurative, destroying Black bodies and poisoning white souls just as slavery once had. He could not stay silent. And so, he proclaimed to the nearly empty room in 1912, “I say that our need is new life—and that books and resolutions will not save us, but only such disposition in our hearts and souls as will enable the new life, love, force, hope, virtue, which surrounds us always, to enter into us.”¹⁹

His Jay predecessors had, at their best moments, tried to save the nation with books and resolutions, hearts and souls, contemplating its dissolution and its reunification in light of slavery’s moral evil and emancipation’s cheering prospect. The generations overlapped, engaged with each other as much as with their times. While slavery lived on in the nation—and while the formerly enslaved remained close to the family—neither private manumissions nor state antislavery laws could end the story of the Jay family and slavery. John Jay, the founding father, had straddled the roles of slaveholder and antislavery reformer, these contradictions marking his private and public careers. But fighting slavery and demanding immediate abolition became the engine of William Jay’s and John Jay II’s identities for decades. Wrestling with their responsibility, each generation blended patriotism, radicalism, and conservatism, producing a hatred of slavery that, during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, was unyielding.

In his years after Coatesville, personal tragedy, disturbing prejudices, mental illness, and willful perversity led John Jay Chapman down ignoble paths.²⁰ But in response to Zachariah Walker’s lynching by the citizens of Coatesville, John Jay Chapman distilled his forebears’ determination to assert universal principles in the face of horrifying truths. He called for a reckoning with slavery and with what emancipation had left undone.

Heroism proved fleeting. Bound to liberty’s chain, history endures.