FIVE SOUTHERN METHODS OUTDONE
Late on the night of Thursday, June 2, a telephone operator at the East Main Street tower in Newburgh, New York, relayed an unusually large number of calls from Port Jervis to New York City, many to the offices of the major newspapers. What she’d managed to overhear trickled down to a nearby hotel lobby, where several Newburgh men were sitting up late, smoking cigars. They discussed the rumor briefly, agreed it was most unlikely, and turned in for the night. Friday morning’s headlines, however, brought irrefutable confirmation: FLIGHT OF THE BRUTE; OFFICERS OVERPOWERED; DRAGGED THROUGH THE STREETS; HEROIC ATTEMPTS TO CHECK THE FRENZIED PEOPLE IN THEIR MAD WORK; and, finally, SOUTHERN METHODS OUTDONE. At a moment when the lynching of Black people was widely viewed as an epidemic limited to the backwaters of the former Confederacy, its appearance in New York State was a frightening reminder that the contagion could very well spread North.
Port Jervis was condemned by its upstate neighbors. Middletown decried “a scene rarely witnessed in this section of the country”; Goshen wept at “the ghastly fruit of lynch law”; while Kingston foresaw “a disgrace to Orange County which will require a long time to fade away.”
The New York City papers immediately dispatched to Port Jervis their most seasoned crime reporters, who were provided desk space at the Farnum Building. Roundly their articles conveyed a sense of shock and dismay. The Tribune’s man wrote in disbelief that “in a civilized community in the state of New York a mob of men should ignore the officers of the law, drag a wretched negro through the public thoroughfares, choke him, kick him, and club him, and then in the view of 2,000 people string him up to the limb of a tree, almost in the shadow of a church.” Intoned a solemn New York Recorder, “The leaders of the mob … have on their hands the red, indelible stain of murder … What is wrong [in the South] cannot be right here.” From far across the land the Los Angeles Herald concurred, noting that Port Jervis had “unsectionalized the rage for lynching.”
To a degree, shock over what had occurred related to the fact that Orange County was associated with historic scenes of the American Revolution and the formative decades of the Republic—General Washington’s headquarters at Newburgh (where on August 11, 1870, Frederick Douglass spoke to thousands in celebration of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment), the founding of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the voyages of the steamboat inventor Robert Fulton’s Clermont, and the cultural heritage associated with the stories of Washington Irving and the verdant landscapes of the Hudson River School artists, such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, and Asher Durand. Now, the Orange County Times cited as shallow Port Jervis’s pretensions of progress and civic virtue, noting that the “addition of a supply of shot guns and a kennel of blood hounds … would enable it to claim comparison with the most lawless and desperate Southern community.” The New-York Tribune piled on, fretful that murder by mob in a town so close to Manhattan would reflect poorly on the larger city itself, and would be “pounced upon by advocates of outrage in the South as a prime vindication of their own worst excesses.”
The headlines were correct that the death of Robert Lewis had resembled a “Southern” lynching in almost every detail—a cry of sexual outrage, the quick actions of a posse, the forcing of the accused to a hurriedly chosen place of lethal punishment. But the Port Jervis lynching, an example of what scholars of violence refer to as “spontaneous vigilantism,” lacked the ritualistic staging typical of many Southern lynchings. In its suddenness it felt unreal; the participants appeared to one another frenzied and wild-eyed, yet it was grounded in the same white insecurities that characterized the practice in warmer climes.
For days, white Port Jervians could talk of nothing else, the Gazette noting that Lena McMahon “was such a decided favorite with a wide circle of friends that it would have been impossible for anyone to calm the public mind.” Even many residents who had not been present at the lynching remained badly shaken by the unsettling reports of the sadistic violence carried out by their neighbors and friends, and of the victim’s dying agonies. This anxiety was best personified by the cries of an unbalanced white citizen who claimed to have walked all the way from Port Jervis to Middletown, where he was arrested for raving in the street: “Don’t kill me! I didn’t do anything! Save me! Oh, if they should kick me as they did that poor [man]!”
After a day or two, a more subdued mood overtook the town, as whites gathered on street corners and debated solemnly: Why here? Why us? It was the beginning of a collective head-scratching as to how Port Jervis had come to this end, yet the town’s self-reflection somehow remained largely incurious about underlying racial factors. “The reasons which are held to justify mob violence in the South have no force when applied to this case,” a Philadelphia paper wrote. “[Black people] number only a small minority of the population … in the main they are peaceful and law-abiding and are as worthy of protection. The courts are also well-organized, and there is no reason to suppose that any unnecessary leniency would have been extended to the prisoner.”
A more candid editorial in the Tri-States Union conceded: “We never imagined such crimes would be enacted in this beautiful valley. The magnitude of the disgrace is most keenly felt. We mourn like a stricken household.” But although cognizant of having committed a great wrong, white Port Jervis’s focus stayed for the most part on its own wounded reputation and was noticeably lacking in regret and compassion for the lynching’s actual victims: Robert Lewis, his family, his friends, and his neighbors. In the throes of the lynching, some antagonists in the mob had egged on a general assault on the entire Black community. Such an event was a kind of sequel that was too common in many Southern lynchings and had perhaps been avoided in Port Jervis only due to the sudden downpour. This last fact was likely not lost on Port Jervis’s Black residents.
In place of sympathy or reassurances of goodwill, many whites were content to add insult to injury, much as the media issued offensive and damnable statements pointedly void of regret. The New York Times, in lamenting the mob’s actions, observed that “it is not to be denied that negroes are much more prone to this crime [sexual assault] than whites, and the crime itself becomes more revolting and infuriating to white men, North as well as South, when a negro is the perpetrator and a white woman is the victim.” The Herald dared cite a benefit in that “there will be ample opportunity for some months to come for the women of Port Jervis to go abroad without an armed guard to protect them from insult.” Closer to home, a Monticello sheet served up the odious “consolation” that despite all that was wrong with Lewis’s murder, “there is deep in the breasts of thousands of parents, husbands, brothers, and lovers—warm-hearted, noble Christian men they are too—a feeling of serene satisfaction that the earth is no longer encumbered with this animal in human form.” A paper in Pennsylvania, the Honesdale Citizen, mocked the notion that its neighbor Port Jervis had to apologize as “nothing but maudlin snivel.”
At first, Robert Lewis’s mother, Mrs. Jackson, a laundry worker in Paterson, New Jersey, expressed doubt that the reporters contacting her could be referring to her son. He went by various names, she explained, including Bob Martin, Robert Jackson, and Robert Murray, as well as Bob Lewis. She herself went by the name Jackson, from her marriage to Henry Jackson, also known as Happy Hank. Robert, she explained, had worked at a livery stable in Port Jervis beginning in 1886 but had returned in 1890 to stay with her in Paterson, where he was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a white woman, although the charges were dropped.
Mrs. Jackson, in showing a reporter from the Paterson Morning Call a photo of Robert, allowed that “he was like other young men and often got into trouble.” She said he had left Paterson for good in summer 1891 and, back in Port Jervis, had been hired to work in the stables at the Delaware House. “My mother, whose name is Sampson [the wife of Henry Sampson], lives in Port Jervis, and she often tells me of Bob and his doings. He used to come home frequently but has not been here since he called for his skates last winter.”
Not having heard from the Sampsons that anything to do with Robert was amiss, Mrs. Jackson telegraphed at once to learn if word of the lynching was true. When the worst news was confirmed, according to the Call, it “caused considerable excitement among the colored residents on 16th Avenue, and the neighbors flocked in upon the stricken woman to offer their sympathy.” The grief among Mrs. Jackson’s acquaintances was shared and personal, for many had known Robert Lewis as a boy and young man, but the way in which he had been killed was particularly unnerving, a psychological assault on the Black community at large. At the relatively modest distance between Port Jervis and Paterson, as at far greater removes, the terroristic message that total white dominance could at any time be reasserted through unforgiving violence was carried into the homes and hearts of all Black people.
On Friday morning, June 3, the Orange County coroner Joseph Harding, accompanied by reporters, arrived at Carley & Terwilliger’s Front Street furniture emporium—which doubled as a mortuary—to examine the remains of Robert Lewis. Harding had been out of town on a fishing trip on the evening of June 2 and had been called back expressly to deal with the situation. The body was in a pitiful condition, revealing the extent of the beating and torture the victim had endured. His face, terribly swollen, led Harding to conclude that Lewis had died by strangulation.
Tellingly, town authorities were concerned that a large processional funeral for Lewis might incite more white violence and initially suggested interring him discreetly in a potter’s field. Black Port Jervis would not have it. The African American community, which resided in noncontiguous parts of town—on the Acre near the Delaware, along Kingston Avenue close to the Neversink, and at the end of North Orange Street—had little if any history of collectively challenging white officials. But the deceased was neither vagrant nor tramp, and given the unusual and contradictory accounts of his crime, he may not have been guilty of anything at all. “You’ve killed Bob Lewis as if he were a dog, and now you’re going to bury him like a dog,” accused one member of the community, while insisting on a dignified service. When officials of Port Jervis balked, saying the village allotted only fifteen dollars for a burial, Black residents responded within hours, contributing the additional funds needed for a grave at Laurel Grove, and for use of the small chapel near the cemetery gate.
It was the custom at Carley & Terwilliger’s to allow in friends and neighbors who wished to pay their respects. Several white guests, however, were seen reaching into the pine casket to remove relics, including strips of clothing and even strands of the deceased’s hair. The collecting of items associated with a lynching—as proof that one had a tangible connection to so powerful an enactment of white domination—was a mania already familiar in the South. Such macabre desecration, however, was not something the coroner Harding or the undertakers had thought to guard against. This was a terrible violence to Lewis’s community, Black people having long suffered from white folks’ disregard for their dead. And given the mutilation and violation of a lynching, the laying to rest of a loved one was a doubly sacred ritual, as was the importance of respectful treatment of the deceased. But so frenzied became the assault on Robert Lewis’s remains, Black mourners grew alarmed that the souvenir hunters would tip the casket over. Demanding the help of police, they drove the offenders from the building. “Finally, the crowd had to be shut out entirely,” reported the New York Sun, “as Mr. Carley said that the negro would have been carried off piecemeal otherwise.”
(Collection of the Minisink Valley Historical Society)
News of the heinous incident spread swiftly in regional papers, enabling outsiders to lay additional scorn on the white people of Port Jervis. Yet this was a sociopathy that proved to afflict white people not only of Port Jervis. It was reported that some relics of the lynching had already traveled to New York City, where, at Worth’s Museum, five dollars bought the sick thrill of walking “in the shoes in which the Negro Bob Lewis had been lynched.” Other souvenirs turned up in Goshen and Otisville, the bearers taking handsome sums for a piece of rope or clothing, or other more hideous mementos. Days later men, women, and children were still hacking away at the maple tree upon which Lewis had been murdered, extracting large chunks of bark and leaving it looking storm-ravaged. Enterprising young “urchins,” said one news account, were boarding trains passing through town to peddle some of the smaller pieces to travelers.
The village was known for its graceful leafy avenues, and many trees had wooden enclosures around their base so that they would not be scraped by passing wagons. But any such instinct for preservation was forgotten now, and E. G. Fuller, the owner of the property where the tree was located, had to appeal to the authorities because “the bark has been cut away in dozens of places, and it will soon be killed if [the tree] does not have police protection.” (The cruel irony that police were now summoned to rescue the tree upon which a man they’d failed to save had died was nowhere recorded.)
By the time of Robert Lewis’s funeral, on June 4, strict precautions were in place. At the Tri-States Chapel outside the entrance to Laurel Grove, both the coroner Harding and Chief Kirkman stood guard over the hearse. To minimize the chance of disruption, Lewis’s body remained inside the carriage while a memorial service was held in the chapel. Only Lewis’s mother and invited mourners were admitted. The white minister, the Reverend J. B. Taylor of Drew Methodist Church, the institution once led by the Reverend Crane, encouraged his listeners to allow the Almighty to judge both Robert Lewis and the perpetrators of the lynching. “It is best for us all to be silent,” he said. “I have no words of condonement for anybody, either the party here whom we follow to the grave or for the leaders of this shameful tragedy. Even in a mob every man is looked on as an individual.” The Black community had not threatened any protests, but Taylor concluded by admonishing his listeners, “Go your way with the single idea to do what is right. Pray avoid doing anything that looks like retaliation.”
From the chapel the entourage went on foot and by carriage to a section of the grounds along the Delaware River in view of the large boulder known as the Tri-States Rock, where the states of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania meet. Only a few days before, one of the more somber moments of Decoration Day had occurred here, and many of the graves still held the fresh bouquets that had been placed on them during the observance. Happy Hank was buried nearby, in a section reserved for war veterans.
Robert Lewis’s coffin had remained closed all day, but just before it was lowered into the ground, the undertaker raised the lid a few inches so that Lewis’s mother could see his face one last time. When Mrs. Jackson saw what had been done to her child, she became agitated and shrieked uncontrollably. Even after Lewis was in his grave and mourners had strewn handfuls of dirt over the coffin, along with some wildflowers and lush grasses they’d found growing nearby, his mother refused to leave the place. Resisting those who tenderly compelled her, she cried in her sorrow, “How can I go away?”
At Barber’s pool hall, Philip Foley worked as a billiards marker, a job that entailed keeping score of patrons’ games, arranging tables and equipment, and occasionally serving players drinks. It was a decided step down from being the representative of a New York City insurance firm, but ever since leaving jail he’d struggled to regain his footing, and he seemed to have accepted his changed circumstances.
Before parting from Lena on the afternoon of June 2, as she was escorted away by her mother after the assault, Foley had vowed that he would find out who had attacked her. But there’s no evidence he tried. Instead, he spent part of the afternoon at Nolan’s Saloon before reporting for his evening shift at Barber’s.
Meanwhile, at the little house on West Street, John McMahon returned from work late in the day and learned what had befallen Lena. He collapsed and remained for several minutes prostrate on the floor. When told where Foley was, he rose, muttered a few words to his wife, and stormed out of the house. “I never before saw a face so distorted with anger,” said the newspaperman Charles Young, who had gone to West Street in response to reports of the incident. “He saw me and said, ‘If I find Foley, I’ll kill him.’”
Ten minutes later the doors of the pool hall burst open and McMahon entered, “in a half-crazed state of mind.” He would not yet have known that Robert Lewis would implicate Foley in the assault, but he had heard enough already to be furious—that Foley had spent hours secluded with Lena, first on the hill above Carpenter’s Point, then by the river, at the very least exposing her to potential scandal. The factory girls had watched Foley hesitate to come join Lena after her attack, and McMahon may have assumed from this bit of gossip that Foley had seen the assault and done nothing to intervene; and as he knew that Foley frequently fraternized in Grab Point, he may have concluded there was a connection between Foley and Lena’s Black attacker. All of this after a judge had ordered Foley to leave town, and Theresa had told him in no uncertain terms to keep his distance from Lena.
McMahon approached the younger man, telling him he was “placing him under arrest.” Foley made a savage lunge with a pool cue and ran for his life. The father chased Foley outside, around the block, and then back into the pool hall before Foley managed to escape out a back door. “He wanted to catch me but I was too fly for him,” Foley later boasted. “I got rid of the old man, and went on the outskirts of the town and stayed all night with a friend.”
In the darkness of the predawn hours of June 3, some Erie workmen on the night shift in the rail yards west of town saw someone lurking in a nearby lumberyard. They assumed it was a tramp, waiting to sneak aboard Number 12, the 4:17 a.m. train to New York City, and notified the police. But when officers arrived, they found instead the nattily attired Foley, whom they were already seeking in connection with the McMahon case. They handcuffed Foley and took him to the Ball Street lockup.
He denied having had anything to do with the assault on Lena. “Do you suppose that if I had been connected in any way with that scrape, that I would have been around Port Jervis?” he demanded. “Why, I had all the chance to skip out to New York. I tell you I am innocent, and I want you to send a copy of your paper to the young lady so that she can see I have told you the truth.” His claim was somewhat borne out by the previous day’s railroad timetable. There was a scheduled train that departed toward the east—Middletown, Goshen, New York City—at 10:00 p.m., and three heading west into Pennsylvania, at 9:20 p.m., 11:50 p.m., and 12:30 a.m. He might have availed himself of any of these departures and been gone scot-free.
Foley later said that it was only when police took him into custody that he learned of the lynching of Robert Lewis. This seems improbable. He may have been oblivious to the mob’s seizure of Lewis and the chaos sweeping the village as the lynching occurred, but his hiding in a lumberyard at 4:00 a.m., hoping to slip undetected onto an outbound train, suggests he did learn about it at some point during the night—as well as the extremely unsettling detail that Lewis had named him as a coconspirator.
He would very soon come to appreciate having been placed behind bars, for when he awoke in his cell midmorning, it was to the sounds of a crowd outside on Ball Street, close enough that its words were plainly audible. Guards saw him wince when a prominent voice from the street exclaimed, “String him up where [Lewis] was strung up!”
Port Jervis was “a nice town,” Foley would later tell the press, but not for strangers who had “no show” there. Already he had remained long after many men with his difficulties would have left. His considerable obstinacy might be chalked up to a resilient character, or his devotion to Lena. But even he was not fool enough to think he could dissuade a lynch mob.
Determined not to surrender another prisoner to lawlessness, the authorities decided it best to transfer Foley to Goshen, twenty-three miles away, for safekeeping. They ordered the Goshen train to back right down to the foot of Sussex Street, thus alleviating the risk of taking Foley in an open conveyance along Front Street to the depot. The constabulary closely guarded the one-block route from the jail to the railroad tracks, joined by a number of law-abiding citizens who had volunteered to assist the police if needed. Nonetheless, after Chief Kirkman personally walked Foley from the jail to the train, it inched its way out of the yard through a crowd of grumbling men who, it was noted, “would have torn the prisoner limb from limb had they been able to lay hands on him.”
It appears that Foley’s alleged complicity in the crime against Lena had already been generally accepted as fact. As a result of this assumption, Robert Lewis was reduced to being little more than a cog in a white man’s villainous scheme, a tool for a frustrated suitor seeking revenge on the McMahons. Foley “was undoubtedly the girl’s lover,” a Pennsylvania paper wrote, “and he may have taken this means, horribly base as it may seem, to shake off any hold which the girl may have had on him by reason of the promises made her.” The Paterson Call, taking a keen interest in the case because of that city’s connection to Robert Lewis, floated the theory that Foley had arranged for Lewis to playact a scene in which he attempted to ravish Lena, so as to create a melodrama that would make his own shortcomings appear forgivable to her parents. This speculation was based on a rumor making the rounds in Port Jervis that Foley had offered five dollars to other Black men to stage such a charade.
“Two negroes came here last night and told me that they knew of two other negroes besides Lewis that Foley put up to assault my daughter,” John McMahon told a New York Sun reporter. “I don’t blame Lewis as much as I do that villain Foley. I got to the scene of the lynching after Lewis was dead, and I said to the boys there, ‘you’ve hung one of them, but the worst one is out of reach now. Foley is the one you ought to have hung.’” Theresa echoed the sentiment, saying she had not been at the lynching, “but if I had been, I would have tried to save Lewis for trial, and I would have said ‘let the black n***** go; the white n***** is the one to hang.’”
No one knew quite what to believe, but so vehement was the disgust for Foley and so revolting all the various theories of his complicity, Robert Lewis was in many minds already half exonerated. Even some who had excitedly urged on his murder now came to suspect, with only mild contrition, that Lewis, alive, might have helped seal the fate of the true fiend. It was even possible to hear one white person quietly admit to another, “He was really a pretty decent Negro, as I knew him.” The Tri-States Union outlined the situation:
In P.J. Foley the people of Port Jervis seem to have a more despicable character than the negro Lewis, whom certain unknown people recently lynched. The negro claimed that Foley induced him to assault Miss McMahon. It now turns out that Foley, as the lover of the girl, systematically blackmailed her, compelling her to give him money from time to time to prevent his making certain exposures. It is a bad piece of business all around, but, compared with Foley, the lynched negro appears honorable in his brutal manliness.
So it was that whatever negligible remorse the town had expressed at having lynched a neighbor and fellow human being was quickly supplanted by a new kind of regret: that it had committed a most unfortunate error. As a cooperative witness in court, Lewis might have enabled prosecution of the most villainous malefactor in Port Jervis history. And by preserving Lewis for the law, the citizenry would have not only done the right thing but also escaped the infamy their murderous impatience had wrought. Whether Foley was a Lothario, a loser in love, or something far worse—a man who derived satisfaction from seducing country girls—it was clear the town had come off badly in the business.
White Port Jervians in the immediate aftermath of the lynching took comfort from any number of rationalizations: lynching was wrong but Robert Lewis deserved it; the reputation and sensitivity of a violated white woman licensed the summary judgment and execution of the perpetrator; the courts were too slow and therefore lynch law was inevitable. These conceits would persist for many years. But publicly, at least in the columns of local papers and the opinions of quoted officials, the town committed to bringing those who had instigated the lynching to justice, perceiving this as its only chance at redemption.
Some argued that the mob had been made up of strangers— “thieves and loafers, rough railroad employees who chanced to be in town,” as the New-York Tribune would have it, many of whom “had spent the day in the liquor stores of the town.” This exculpatory reasoning, that the lynching could be blamed on outsiders and inebriates, was hardly original, as it had been occasionally invoked in the South. In Port Jervis, specifically, such a theory played on the uptown-downtown divide between middle-class, churchgoing moderation and the intemperate pleasure-mongering of Front Street.
Public opinion was not unanimous, however, in accepting this too-easy rationale. In its bones, Port Jervis knew better. If the town wanted to prove the lynching did not reflect its true character, that better nature would be exhibited only if swift justice were meted out to those who had trampled on law and legitimate authority. With the help of the reputable courts of Orange County, the guilty would be held accountable before the world. Such an expectation rested on what the scholar Jason Sokol terms “the Northern mystique,” the faith that the Northeast part of America, home to Lexington and Concord, Independence Hall, the abolition crusade and the Ten-Hour Movement, was surely the nation’s enlightened heart and soul.
The North had fought in the great sanguinary conflict to maintain the Union, and it had triumphed, while the people of the Confederacy had paid the price for their obstinate defense of enslaving fellow human beings: near-total regional devastation, born of an ill-conceived war. And the South’s spectacular cruelty in the postwar era—night rider terrorism, ballot box intimidation, convict labor, lynching—revealed the bottomless nature of its depravity.
The North, without much effort, could and did hold itself superior to such a place, even as it elided from its own memory the pillories and dunking stools, the witch trials and the genocide of Indigenous peoples, as well as the enslavement of African Americans, which in New York State had proved a far more durable custom than white people cared to recall. On the verge of the twentieth century, Black citizens in Port Jervis were educated most often in inferior circumstances, if at all. They rarely rose above menial jobs as laborers, household servants, and nannies, and struggled to survive at the margins of white-dominated society. But “in the region’s collective history,” Sokol concludes, “the narrative of freedom had no room in it for these less savory realities.”
Part of that conveniently neglected history includes Orange County’s “other lynching.” It had occurred at Newburgh in the spring of 1863, when the Civil War had entered eastern Pennsylvania and the fears and prejudices generated by the conflict were at their height.
Ellen Clark, an Irish woman in her thirties and recently arrived in America, came to the Newburgh courthouse on June 19, 1863, to ask the wife of Sheriff Hanmore about the possibility of obtaining work as a maid. Mrs. Hanmore told her she knew of nothing available. Clark was leaving when she encountered Robert Mulliner, a Black man doing yard work on the grounds. He said he had heard that a family who lived nearby was looking to hire a housekeeper and would pay eight dollars a month. Clark, unaware he was a prisoner on a work detail, agreed to follow him to their house. When they took what he said was a shortcut through a wooded area, he knocked her down and began tearing at her clothes, threatening to kill her if she cried out. Clark later refused to say “what he accomplished,” but eventually slipped from his grasp and got away, although not before he struck her and took her purse containing “all of her money”—about two dollars.
Mulliner fled the area. The next morning, however, he was spotted by police from Newburgh and a local constable on the opposite side of the river as he walked along a road toward Poughkeepsie. Pretending to be travelers headed his way, they offered him a ride in their wagon, then seized him the moment he climbed aboard. He was returned to Newburgh, where word of his alleged attack on Clark had already spread among the town’s Irish American laborers and dockworkers, some of whom said they knew the injured woman’s family back in Ireland. Irish hostility toward African Americans in Newburgh was, as elsewhere, not uncommon. A Hibernian mob had crashed a traditional New Year’s Eve service at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Washington Street in 1860, smashing several windows and tearing the front door off its hinges, and a second similar assault occurred in 1862.
Sheriff Hanmore and other authorities at the Newburgh courthouse briefly debated moving Mulliner to Goshen for his own safety, as a rough-looking group had gathered outside, demanding he be handed over. The officials chose to wait, hoping the crowd would soon lose interest and disperse. Instead, within minutes its numbers swelled, and men drunk on “rum and anger” began “thundering” at the door with a sledgehammer. A priest, E. J. O’Reilly, arrived and bade them to go home, but his pleas were ignored, and when Sheriff Hanmore emerged to declare he would face down the mob at any cost, he was hooted at and warned that the “discharge of his revolver would be the signal for a general attack, and that neither himself nor those acting under his orders could live five minutes.”
As at Port Jervis, civic-minded men came forward to join Father O’Reilly in trying to calm the situation, including the district attorney, the chief of police, the proprietor of an inn, and a judge named C. F. Brown, who was roundly distrusted as “a damned abolitionist.” These Good Samaritans had managed to get the sledgehammer out of the mob’s hands when a rumor arrived that Ellen Clark had expired from her wounds. The crowd, infuriated, reclaimed the hammer and resumed pounding.
Mulliner then shouted through the door, offering to give himself up if he could be hanged lawfully. Southern sheriffs had been known on occasion to advise prisoners, regardless of guilt or innocence, to choose a dignified execution at the hands of the state rather than risk being torn apart or otherwise hideously put to death by a mob. What was unusual in this instance was that Mulliner himself had proposed the idea. But if anyone heard his proposal, they did not reply.
In moments, it ceased to matter. The wall was broken through, and Mulliner was seized and dragged into the yard, where, it was reported, “he became the football of the maddened wretches … The basest animal passions dictated his death, and if any cruelty or indignity was left undone, it was because it was not thought of in the frenzy of the moment.” His body was then strung up in a tree on the courthouse lawn, from which it hung for several hours.
As the Mulliner lynching occurred, Confederate forces were making their deepest incursion into the Northern states. General Robert E. Lee and his troops were in east-central Pennsylvania, a threat alarming enough to prompt the building of defensive entrenchments at Philadelphia. Within days the war’s two opposing armies, led by Lee and his federal counterpart General George Meade, would meet at Gettysburg. In the context of this anxiety-provoking news, Mulliner’s alleged crime against a young Irish woman may have animated deeply held Irish American resentments of African Americans, for whose freedom Irish boys by the hundreds were dying at places like Gettysburg. The mob had been enflamed by an assault on a countrywoman, but also by the sudden proximity of the war.
For this same reason the Mulliner lynching can be seen as prologue, perhaps even part inspiration, for a far greater protest over “the Negro’s war,” the New York City Draft Riots, which began two weeks later with demonstrations outside recruitment offices in Manhattan. The initial spark of the conflict was the announcement of a new draft call-up, and the accompanying reminder that men of means could, for three hundred dollars, hire a substitute to go in their place. As ever, the draft’s heaviest burden would fall on the working poor. Protests at places of recruitment led to acts of arson throughout Lower Manhattan and vicious attacks on Black persons of all ages; men were beaten, stripped of their clothes, and lynched from trees and lampposts. The four-story Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, home to two hundred children under twelve and a staff of fifty, was set afire, the occupants escaping only at the last moment by a back door. A young Black girl found hiding under a bed was murdered. Elsewhere, Black waiters and servants were hauled from their places of work to be assaulted in the street, and whole blocks of Black residents in what today is fashionable SoHo were rousted and scattered. Many fled for their lives, to Brooklyn, Staten Island, and New Jersey; those unable to get away appealed to police, who took hundreds in at police stations and armories.
To the sounds of gunshots and clanging fire bells the city teetered and collapsed in near-total chaos. Hooligans and gangs from the Five Points neighborhood, taking advantage of an overwhelmed police force and the absence of soldiers, indulged their worst tendencies. Widespread looting, arson, and pitched battles between cops and mobs armed with clubs, knives, and guns rocked Lower Manhattan. The publisher Henry J. Raymond in his New York Times discredited the idea the upheaval’s cause had anything to do with conscription, characterizing it instead as “a craving for plunder [and] a barbarous spite against a different race.” He exhorted city officials, “The mob must be crushed at once. Give them grape, and plenty of it.” In perhaps the bloodiest confrontation of the three days of upheaval, an outnumbered police unit at Broadway and Amity Street (now Third Street) stood its ground against a riotous army of several thousand trying to smash their way south to the financial district and police headquarters on Mulberry Street. Ordered by their officers to hold their position at all cost, the embattled cops swung freely, striking rioters dead with single blows from their batons. By the time the riots were quelled five days later with the arrival of federal troops fresh from the battlefields at Gettysburg, more than a thousand New Yorkers had perished.
The Newburgh lynching of 1863 is often recalled in connection with that of Robert Lewis at Port Jervis in 1892 because both occurred in Orange County. But the two lynchings, separated by almost thirty years, occurred in dramatically different contexts, almost different worlds—the first in a singular moment of national doubt and stress, the latter at a time of relative prosperity and optimism fed by accelerating technological progress. Yet when viewed from the twenty-first century, what becomes visible are the underlying racial and ethnic tensions they shared, as well as the numerous striking resemblances between the twin incidents.
It had been members of the 124th New York Regiment, the illustrious Orange Blossoms well represented by Port Jervis men, who took part in a tawdry incident in Newburgh at the Civil War’s end, when they “caught a stray Negro and commenced to amuse themselves by tossing him in a blanket,” as recorded by the local press. “The men declared that they had fought for the country, but not for the Negro.” The fears and resentments the war provoked among white Americans were of course most fully alive in 1861–1865, but they lingered three decades later in Port Jervis. In June 1892, with the town’s own substantial population of war veterans and others drawn from the surrounding countryside for its massive Decoration Day commemoration, word of an assault by a Black man on a fellow veteran’s daughter would have enraged its grieving men, soldiers still in spirit, primed by an event of memorialization powerfully evocative of the trauma and sacrifices of their youth.
The Port Jervis Tri-States Union noted on June 3, the day after the lynching, that “to avenge a crime, black enough of itself, but not so heinous as ever unreliable rumor made it appear, a merciless mob dragged the wretch a distance of a quarter of a mile and then yanked him up to a limb of a tree.”
What did that mean, “but not so heinous as ever unreliable rumor made it appear,” and why did this and other significant doubts about the case not receive further examination? Some of the newspaper’s reluctance was doubtless borne of a discretionary self-censorship. Late nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers served up no end of lurid true-crime stories, heavy on innuendo but cautious with certain facts, particularly those that might compromise the reputation of a white woman. There was a continual tension between newspapers’ urge to publish (and profit from) multiday sagas of elopements, poisonings, cheating spouses, and sexual crimes and their need to remain discreet. The word “rape” was rarely if ever used; instead, euphemisms such as “ravished,” “outraged,” or “violated” were employed, and the journalists who churned out this gripping copy often relied on stereotyped ethnic and gendered characterizations to explain human behavior, ignoring potentially revealing truths as they went. A Black man who assaulted a white woman was commonly depicted in animalistic terms, as a “brute,” a “beast,” a “coon,” an “ape,” or a “monster.” Occasionally, he pounced stark naked from his woodland ambush. The white posse pursuing the alleged criminal through swamp and forest was invariably made up of “determined men,” while newspapers often found ways to indirectly urge on a lynching with not-so-subtle “observations”: “It is said the ultimate price is demanded,” for example, or “we hear there is no room in the jail.”
The result was that news stories about lynching became compelling reading for whites precisely for their pulpy nature and faux discretion. Well-crafted euphemism can be an art form in the hands of journalists inclined to exaggerate innocence and heroism and assign bestial or less-than-human qualities to the ignoble. In seeming reaction to women’s expanding freedom to live and work independently of patriarchal authority, newspapers were never at a loss for stories of young women boldly venturing forth and coming to grief at the hands of conniving predators, abductors, or duplicitous married men. These cautionary tales carried an obvious moral, juxtaposing a stereotype of women’s innocence with men’s supposed worldliness and competence to assist in a crisis. Another lesson frequently imparted was that neglect of one’s parents was fraught with risk. An editorial admonishment of Lena McMahon that ran in the Orange County Press shortly after Lewis’s lynching reminded female readers, “Women have great power. Let us then use it by upholding all around us—by being genuine women. We cannot be genuine without being true to ourselves; we cannot be true to ourselves without being true to our parents; we cannot be true to our parents without heeding their advice.”
Such well-natured homilies were offset by muted yet highly suggestive renderings of sex and violence that emphasized the female victim’s vulnerability and subjugation. Of Lena McMahon’s plight in Port Jervis, Pennsylvania’s Allentown Morning Call wrote with typical embellishment:
[Robert] Lewis hid behind a tree until the young woman came up, and then he jumped out and seized her. He caught her by the throat, and with his other hand he bent her body back over his knee. She tried to cry out [but] the man threw her almost breathless to the ground. She lost consciousness for a while, but recovered and made a terrible outcry. Some boys … heard her outcry and crept up on Lewis but he heard the underbrush crackling, and, jumping to his feet, drew a murderous looking revolver from his pocket … He held the pistol near the girl’s head and declared that if they molested him or made an attempt to take him prisoner, he would first blow the girl’s brains out.
Narrativized renderings of this kind made for such popular reading that “family stories,” fictional serialized accounts of domestic strife, often involving a stricken young woman—something like a TV miniseries of our time—ran side by side with news columns in many dailies, and advertisers also frequently emulated the form. On June 1, the day before the Lewis lynching, Port Jervis read a distressing “farewell note” from a “Mrs. Watkins” beneath the headline SHE COMMITTED SUICIDE:
My husband—Forgive me if I cause you trouble, but I suffer so. You do not know what these long, wretched nights are to me, and I am so tired, darling—the pain will never be better. It is not easy to take my own life, but I have been sick so long. Goodbye, my husband, I love you—your wife.
An attached comment advised,
This is but one of thousands that give up, instead of using Dr. Miles’ Restorotive [sic] Nervine … Go to D.J. Pierce’s next door to the Post Office and get an elegant book and Trial Bottle free.
For all Port Jervians it was an extraordinary experience to be thrust into the glare of national attention, to have reporters from big-city papers lounging on the portico of the Fowler House or accosting residents for their opinion along Pike Street. Equally novel was seeing the names of people one knew—John McMahon, Sol Carley, Officer Yaple, Judge Crane, Dr. Van Etten—in the pages of the New York Herald and the New York Times. For the family of Philip Foley, nationally published accounts of his arrest and alleged role in the lynching were the first inkling in a long while as to his whereabouts. If he hoped for succor from them, however, it was not forthcoming. His brother, J. P. Foley, a clerk in the office of the Worthington Steam Pump Company on Liberty Street in New York City, was so upset upon reading coverage of the Port Jervis case that he suggested Philip might have “forfeited his right to brotherly sympathy.” A quote attributed to him by the New York World read, “If it is true he was in collusion with Lewis, it is a pity he was not strung up with the negro.” He said further of Philip: “I cannot understand why he has turned out so badly. There appears to be a mean streak in him which cannot be traced on either his mother’s or father’s side.” He explained that his brother had been born in Warren, Massachusetts, where their mother and sister still lived: “Mother is seventy-five years old and this trouble may prove fatal. He is the youngest of her three children, and naturally was always petted. He learned the trade of a machinist in Warren, and afterward worked his trade there and in Holyoke and in Boston. He came to New York, and for a time was engaged as pump salesman by the Gordon Steam Pump Company.”
The Port Jervis Gazette agreed that Philip certainly once had prospects, and that “Foley is a good-looking young man and acts and talks in a manner which tends to bear out his repeated assertion that he comes of a good family and has had good opportunities for improvement and refinement.” But his brother explained, “He took to drinking and idling, and I was several times called upon to pay his bills and money that he borrowed. I finally refused to have anything more to do with him.”
The Newburgh News claimed that Foley had a history of alcoholism, petty crimes, and other mischief, including stealing clothes from acquaintances and roommates, and traced his recent movements from Holyoke to New York, then to Boston, then back to New York, before coming to Middletown and Port Jervis. “Foley has been of a sporting disposition,” the News observed, “and exceedingly foppish in his dress. He has been inclined to boast of his conquests among the fair sex, but he was bright and sociable, and so had many friends.” Foley vehemently denied a rumor circulated by the News that he had been betrothed to a young lady in Middletown in 1891 and then abandoned her.
The police held him initially on suspicion of having been an accomplice in Lewis’s attack, but as even Lena denied this possibility and Foley’s chief accuser was dead, it soon became apparent he might serve as no more than a material witness, as he had seen neither the assault nor the lynching. John McMahon, however, soon gave authorities reason to keep Foley locked up, filing a charge of blackmail against him based on letters he had sent to Lena in which he appeared to threaten her reputation if she did not loan him small amounts of money or keep her promises to meet him.
“I see they are trying to make a case of blackmail against me,” Foley told a reporter. “Well, let them go ahead. I don’t see how they can do it.” He pointed out that the only cash he’d received from Lena was a loan of ten dollars, and that if he threatened her occasionally it was only to goad her into defying her parents’ restrictions about seeing him. “All that I ever said to her in a letter was that if she did not meet me, I would write her father and tell him some things,” Foley said. “Her folks have got no one to blame but themselves for this. They did not treat her well. She was a good girl, but her people wanted to get me out of the way.”
Foley denied having improper relations with Lena or plotting to harm her, and never spoke of her disrespectfully in his many conversations with the press, even after she took her parents’ side in the blackmail case. However, he warned reporters that if pushed too hard, he would “tell some stories … which will implicate several prominent people in the village.” As he had spent considerable time in Grab Point, it’s possible Foley was capable of exposing a number of men whom he had witnessed slipping in and out of the “houses of assignation” along Front Street.
The McMahons’ instinct that Foley was bad news and Judge Mulley’s condition that he clear out of Port Jervis now appeared prescient, for as the town reeled from unkind national scrutiny and the taint of an unforgivable act of racial violence, it was given to understand it also had a clever man in its custody, one who might know a few too many secrets.
As the alleged victim of a sexual assault, Lena expected that her privacy would be respected by the press and that details of the outrage she had endured were off-limits. But whatever restraint reporters displayed in this regard, they abandoned in depicting her physical recovery. Attending physicians were variously quoted as saying that her shoulder was broken, her neck badly bruised, and that her nervous system was so severely shocked, blood poisoning must result. She was reliant on laudanum. She was unbalanced in her mind. Dr. Van Etten had seen blood on her undergarments. One paper out of Middletown recorded that “great handfuls of hair [had been] torn from her head,” while in Pennsylvania readers were simply told, “Miss McMahon died Friday morning at 8 o’clock.”
Van Etten explained that Lena slept only with the help of opiates because although “the pains, aches and soreness are gradually leaving her, her sleep is nervous and unrefreshing … In her dreams she is fighting the negro, and she awakes in a fright and somewhat delirious.” The claim that Lena was fighting the Negro in her dreams—was a journalistic trope that some local reporter (or perhaps Dr. Van Etten) had likely nicked from Southern news coverage of another lynching.
A curious omission from Van Etten’s diagnosis is any discussion of what had brought on the fugue state she reported experiencing in New York City days before the lynching. As an older practicing physician in the town, and a near neighbor of the McMahons, it’s also likely he knew of the similarly mysterious incident from when Lena was a child. It’s possible Lena suffered from mild seizures of an epileptic character. Medical knowledge of epilepsy was still progressing in 1892, and while the term used today for such events—“temporal lobe epilepsy”—was not in use, the basic representations of the malady had been known since antiquity and would have been evident to a doctor of Van Etten’s experience. This was certainly one of the central unexplored and unexplained elements in the case. If Lena’s inability to recall where she had been for two days and nights was medical or psychiatric in nature, what was its cause? If instead she was lying, what truths lay behind the lies? Anyone seriously investigating the circumstances precipitating the murder of Robert Lewis might also have asked why a clever young woman like Lena, if she wished to conceal her actions, would concoct an excuse so incompetently constructed and impossible to accept.
One detects in the local media’s blend of facts and guesswork a twin determination to scrub away the possibility Lena was in any way complicit in what had befallen her, and to keep her reputation and virtue at least perceptively intact. The alternative, that she had defied her parents to run away with a flashy older man and possibly transgressed acceptable sexual or even racial norms, could not be countenanced. The white community itself seemed to disown such suspicions. It preferred not to speak of or recognize the possibility that a bond or relationship between Lena and Robert Lewis existed.
In this way all three of the tragedy’s protagonists served as scapegoats for unwanted social revolution—Lena, who independently attached herself to a man her parents disapproved of; Lewis, who dared to desire a white woman and did so forcefully, possibly in connivance with a white man; and Foley, that most contemptible rogue, who posed as a gentleman but was not one, and whose predatory heart pulsed behind a well-groomed facade.
Of course, it was the Black man’s life that had been unjustly stolen, and his reputation co-opted. “Bob Lewis was none too good to hang, and society loses nothing by his death,” the Gazette instructed readers. “He was a man of low, brutal instincts and would not hesitate to steal, rob or assault a person, male or female.” He had been fired from the Delaware House “for making insulting remarks to female employees,” and while at the hotel, “he stole food from the larder in order to satisfy the hunger of his white friend Foley. If rumor is true, he was arrested in Paterson at one time for making a criminal assault on a white girl. The fellow was mulatto with a penchant for white girls.”
This last characterization of Lewis is one that has endured. Eddie Keys, a descendant of a large and historic Port Jervis African American family, recalls that the local Black matriarchy of the 1890s viewed Lewis unfavorably and as slightly pathetic for believing his light features made it possible for him to appeal to white women. His efforts in this regard apparently had limited success and at times struck his own friends and family as reckless. A Middletown cousin named Dusty Miller remembered cautioning him only a week before the lynching, “You’ll never make old bones, Bob; you’re living too fast.”