SEVEN INQUEST
The coroner’s inquest into the lynching of Robert Lewis convened on the morning of Monday, June 6, in the Corporation Rooms, a meeting place on Front Street used frequently for village business and civic purposes. The questioning was led by C. E. Cuddeback and H. B. Fullerton of the Orange County district attorney’s office, and overseen by District Attorney Michael Henry Hirschberg. The coroner Joseph Harding told the ten members of the jury, “It is your duty to find the cause of [Robert Lewis’s] death and those who are responsible for his death. He has come to his death by violent means under circumstances which have excited the entire civilized world.” Hirschberg, in turn, exhorted the group, who sat fanning themselves with their hats, “You are to investigate; I to prosecute. I shall do my duty; you should and I believe will do yours.”
Unlike the medical examiner system that became common in America in the late twentieth century and that, as its title implies, has a narrow scope of inquiry, the coroner’s inquest, beyond its responsibility of ascertaining the cause of death, had a broader mandate, including the weighing of any issues of a criminal nature. It was more an investigation, however, than a trial. While there were witnesses, no cross-examination was permitted, and the inquest’s verdict was not binding, although any subsequent grand jury hearing could refer to its conclusions.
In the Lewis inquest, Coroner Harding had availed himself of the assistance of three of the county’s top prosecutors. There was, accordingly, the expectant atmosphere of an actual criminal trial, with standing-room-only public attendance and an ample press contingent. The start of the inquest was delayed as additional chairs were fetched from Carley & Terwilliger’s furniture emporium to accommodate the overflow crowd.
Making small talk during the delay, one of the jurymen mentioned the “other Orange County lynching” and the eerie coincidence that the leaders of the Newburgh mob that in 1863 killed Robert Mulliner, having avoided serious punishment, had each met a violent end. One had been thrown to his death from a wagon, two others were killed on the Hudson River coal docks, a few perished in an explosion at a powder mill, and another became a railroad fatality. The juryman Ed Geisenheimer shifted uncomfortably in his seat at this allusion to the mysterious ways of fate. It was he, after all, who had scavenged and sold some of the most prized relics of the Lewis lynching, including the dead man’s shoes.
Officer Simon Yaple was the first major witness. He testified that the wagon in which Robert Lewis was bound hand and foot had made it to within twenty-five feet of the door to the jail before a mob of at least three hundred to four hundred people pressed forward from all sides to seize him. Yaple also described the struggle beneath the tree on Main Street: “Every man in sight was trying to string up the negro, and not one in the crowd except [Officer] Bonar tried to help me. The negro was hauled up again and it was two or three minutes before I could get to him again by forcing my way through the mass on my hands and knees.”
He named several individuals as ringleaders of the mob, although most in their own turn in the witness chair offered alternative accounts of their actions. The railroad engineer John Kinsella told the inquest a patently false story, claiming that when it became evident the police would not be able to rescue Lewis, Ben Ryall had appealed to him, saying, “‘John, can’t you stop this, they have the wrong man.’” Kinsella testified that he then “went out in the crowd and told the boys to stop it, it was the wrong man. They said ‘you go to hell; we have the right man, and we know it.’” The grocer John Eagan, also accused of playing a key role, swore that he’d approached the victim merely to tap him on the shoulder and ask if his name was Lewis, to which the prisoner had replied, “No, it is Murray.” Eagan added, “I then went directly to the McMahon house on Kingston Avenue, and advised them to lock their house as the mob was coming.”
Dr. Sol Van Etten denied the allegation that he had egged on the mob with an exaggerated report of Lena McMahon’s condition. He did admit to speaking with many people on the day of the lynching but claimed that his only critical remarks about Lena were shared with Chief Kirkman, and then only to urge a diligent police search for the young woman’s attacker. Van Etten insisted that he never uttered the words “if they saw the girl as I saw her and they had the right man they ought to hang him,” nor had he offered to pay the bail bond of any of the lynchers—both persistent rumors.
Duke Horton testified that after Lewis had confessed to the crime on the ride back to Port Jervis and complained about “what a scrape” Foley had put him in, he’d also said that he hoped “‘you fellows [will] make it light for me.’” Horton recalled that Lewis then asked him how long a prison term he would get and that he had replied “five or ten years,” at which point Lewis, with terrible prescience, urged, “‘Hurry up and get me down there before a gang gets around.’”
By today’s standards, the inquest progressed swiftly, finishing its work in only five days. But the experience, to many in the village, was discomfiting, as it meant continued scrutiny from the outside world. The Gazette, after only two days of testimony, urged the participants to end the agony and resolve the revolting business as soon as possible. “The lynching was bad enough,” it posited. “Why add to the horror by prolonging it?” Despite the assurances of the town fathers and county prosecutors, most residents doubted a true verdict would emerge. “When the probable action of the Coroner’s jury is discussed, people smile significantly,” the New York Herald’s man in Port Jervis observed. Witnesses lied on the stand rather than accuse their friends, while men, like Kinsella, who heard testimony of their own role in the lynching, then took the witness chair to carefully refute what had been said. The jury was willing to accept such clearly perjured testimony, and the added excuse was given that as the lynching itself occurred in murky twilight, in a blur of bodies and raised voices, certain identification of any of the participants was difficult. Even William Doty, who had tried to halt the lynching, confided, “I was right in among them, and to save me, I could hardly swear to a man who was urging the mob on. We were all too much excited.” Sol Carley said the only man he recognized was Dave McCombs, the former police chief, while John Doty and Ben Ryall strained credulity by testifying under oath they had not known anyone there.
Officer Patrick Collier stated on the witness stand that he disapproved of the lynching, thinking it “too bad to mutilate a man that way until they found it to be the right man.” But Yaple’s testimony was that Collier “part of the time appeared to be assisting the lynchers.” He’d even seen him try to put the rope over Lewis’s head. Such damning testimony was humiliating for local authorities, but the examination of Officer Patrick Salley, who had been warned explicitly of the need to alert other officers to the danger of the crowd seizing Lewis and had done nothing to prevent it, was especially painful. Salley, who was “bounced” by President Obadiah Howell the day after the lynching, had joined the police force only six weeks earlier, likely expecting a quiet moonlighting job shooing people home from the saloons, not the role destiny had thrust on him.
“Why didn’t you take a more active part in this affair?” he was asked.
“I did what I could.”
But whether through a paralysis induced by the extreme violence he saw, or his fear of counteracting friends and acquaintances in the mob, certainly he had done very little.
“Didn’t you know Yaple was struggling?”
“I couldn’t tell.”
“Didn’t you see the negro kicked, cuffed, and dragged along?”
“I couldn’t see.”
“So, you left Yaple to get along the best way he could?”
“I struggled with no one, I pushed no one, tried to arrest no one.”
“Did you know it was your duty to do so as an officer to arrest those who obstructed you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you make any attempt to interfere at the hanging?”
“He was dead at the time I saw him.”
“Answer my question?”
“No, sir.”
“You took no step toward cutting him down?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you say you are unable to tell the name of a single person who took part in the violence?”
“I saw only officers Yaple and Carrigan, who were trying to put him in jail.”
“Can you say who had hold of you or pulled you?”
“No one pulled me.”
“You were in no one’s way, then?”
“I don’t know. I saw officer Yaple step to the wagon to receive his prisoner.”
“Why didn’t you step up?”
“I stepped within four feet of the jail but the crowd stopped me.”
“You had a right to be there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you see that violence was being offered to Yaple and Lewis?”
“No, sir.”
“You saw the crowd pushing them, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You had your club in your hand?”
“Yes.”
“It was given [to] you to assist in preserving order?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you consider this a proper [time] to use it?”
“No. I had my club raised and kept it raised … I tried to get the colored man to the jail … Howell told me to do my duty. I tried to get in but couldn’t. I stood with my club raised. I heard the crowd say: ‘Don’t use your club.’”
The experiences of the other lawmen that day, even those who helped battle the mob were, if not as pathetic as Salley’s, nonetheless futile. Yaple testified that he had to fight to maintain his footing as the crowd shoved and tried to dislodge him:
When they got to the maple tree I was dragged away. Some had hold of me by the collar. My club was taken from me. I saw a man climb the tree and I tried hard to get to the spot, but the negro was already up in the air. One man said he would kill me if I didn’t get out. Pat Collier cried: “If Yaple shoots, I’ve got a revolver.”
Several officers mentioned an inability to wield their clubs because of the density of the crowd, while Yaple testified that the reason he was able to recall certain faces was because he had struck them with his baton. He repeatedly brought his “persuader” down on the heads of men he knew, men apparently so determined to take part in the lynching they were willing to absorb the blows.
The overall ineffectiveness of the policemen’s clubs (Yaple at one point lost his to the mob) raises the question of whether events might have transpired differently had Yaple, who had his gun drawn, fired into the mob to protect Lewis. The results may have been catastrophic, given the number of armed individuals present (there were reports of spectators showing up with rifles), although anti-lynching forces in later years would endorse shooting into a mob as one of the few effective means of getting it to retreat or disperse. There have been numerous examples in the nation’s history—from the Boston Massacre to the Astor Place Riot to Kent State—of police or soldiers opening fire on unarmed protesters or strikers. In the instance of a lynching, of course, the objective was not to confront protesters but to reclaim authority from those in the act of illegally appropriating it, and to defend the life of a would-be victim.
Judge William Crane testified that after he had rushed from his house and across Main Street, he was able to push his way beneath the maple tree. “I said [to Officer Yaple], ‘have you your revolver with you?’ He said ‘yes.’ I said ‘then protect that man.’” Crane straddled Lewis’s head and heard him gasping for breath. When he asked Dr. Walter Illman if Lewis would live if they got him away, Illman replied, “Yes, the man is all right, get him to the hospital.” But Illman’s words were overheard and deemed treacherous by those nearby. “Hang him!” a man shouted. “Don’t let the doctor touch him!”
The crowd surging beneath the tree, seeing Yaple draw his gun and tiring of the resistance from Judge Crane and a few others, proceeded to sweep them away from the scene. “Judge Crane disappeared and so did I,” the officer testified. “I went out of that crowd like a chip on the water.”
Yaple recounted that in the immediate aftermath of the lynching, Patrick Collier approached him to say he was an undertaker (he was, it seems, tangentially connected to his brother William’s undertaking firm) and to imply he could see to the remains of the deceased. Yaple, frayed and exhausted after fighting a mob for what seemed like hours, stared at him incredulously and asked, “You don’t want to take charge after hanging the man, do you?”
To which Collier weakly replied, “There’s $25 in it.”
The most controversial aspect of William Crane’s testimony was his allegation that it had been the careless words of Raymond Carr, son of the prominent Orange County lawyer Lewis Carr, Sr., that had doomed Robert Lewis. On its way up Sussex Hill the mob had paused before the Carr residence at 51 Sussex Street, perhaps expecting a word of praise from the village elder, who was well-known for his eloquent tributes to flag and country and who had addressed the Decoration Day crowd a few days earlier at Orange Square. But Carr was not at home, and he was certainly no advocate of lynch law. Carr, Sr., was not present at the lynching of Robert Lewis.
The view looking along East Main Street in 1919, with the E. G. Fowler house on the right and the steeple of the Dutch Reformed Church in the distance. The large tree visible in the right foreground was possibly the tree from which Robert Lewis was lynched.
(Collection of the Minisink Valley Historical Society)
His son Raymond was, however. As William Crane stood over Robert Lewis in an attempt to protect him, Raymond Carr leaned down, held a lit match to his face, and cried, “You have got the right man, boys; that is Bob Lewis.” Crane put a hand on the younger man’s shoulder and told him to be quiet. Crane knew Raymond, twenty-three, a recent Harvard University graduate, and respected his family and thought he might cooperate. But instead, Raymond repeated his identification of Lewis, adding, “Damn it! He ought to be hung!” The mob buzzed in agreement. “Hang him! Don’t let the doctor touch him! Hang all the n******!” Raymond’s outburst, Crane told the coroner’s jury, had likely precipitated Lewis’s death. “It was a critical moment,” he testified, “at which a word either way might be decisive. The crowd was momentarily quelled and there was certainly an opportunity to save the negro, which was destroyed by young Carr’s words.”
Coming from anyone less respected than Judge Crane, so unflattering an account of the younger Carr’s behavior might have been simply ignored. But given its source, the claim was one that the Carr family, and Port Jervis as a whole, would need to reckon with: Had the son of Port Jervis’s most admired citizen caused the most shameful event in the town’s history?
William, like his brother Stephen, was familiar with the Carrs, who lived across the street from Orange Square, not far from William’s house on Main Street. William and Lewis Carr, Sr., were both prominent in Port Jervis legal affairs, and the previous summer of 1891, Stephen had gone camping with Raymond’s brother, Lewis Carr, Jr.
Lewis, Sr., the family patriarch, a proud, much-honored personage (President Cleveland was a personal friend), wasted no time in denouncing Judge Crane’s account. It simply could not be that his many good works, his decades of courtroom success and public service, were undone by one disastrous utterance from his son. While he had no choice but to publicly defend his boy, privately he must have been monumentally disappointed. In a moment of moral crisis, Raymond, instead of showing character and coming to the aid of those upholding the law, had stood with the rabble—had even, it appeared, goaded them on.
Prior to testifying at the inquest, William had invited Lewis, Sr., to his office to alert him, “My duty as a citizen will compel me to say that your son Raymond was the man who lit the match over the negro’s face and whose words incited the mob to do their worst.” The meeting, as expected, was not a pleasant one, with the elder Carr hotly contesting Crane’s recollection, the judge holding his ground, and their raised voices heard up and down the corridors of the Farnum Building. Seeing heads poke out from office doors, Crane reassured his guest, “I was talking to you, privately, not to all these others.” But Carr was far from appeased. Word of their unhappy encounter reached District Attorney Hirschberg, who sought to assure Carr that Raymond would have ample opportunity at the inquest to give his version of what had occurred.
In his own testimony Raymond admitted to identifying Lewis but denied uttering the words that led to the lynching: “I was downtown when I heard that the mob were up in front of our house. I hurried home, pressed through the crowd, and saw the negro lying flat on his face.” Carr overheard Crane and Dr. Illman say it was too dark to see if the victim was dead or alive. Just then a young Black man Carr identified as “Drivers” (likely Edward Drivers, age sixteen) pressed through the crowd and asked if the man on the ground was Bob Lewis. “I then pulled a match from my pocket, lit it, and held it close to the negro’s face,” Carr testified. “I involuntarily exclaimed, ‘this is Bob Lewis all right enough,’ without thinking of the possible effect of my words.”
He followed up with a letter in the Port Jervis Index that again countered Crane’s version and chided him for basking in his new role as community hero. Certainly the Carrs, father and son, would have bristled at the immense outpouring of praise for those like Judge Crane, Officer Yaple, President Howell, and Reverend Hudnut, who “endeavored to save the fair fame of the village from the eternal disgrace which has been fastened upon it by this foul and indefensible deed.” Tributes arrived from the Boston Globe, calling Judge Crane “the one cool man among a thousand passionate avengers,” as well as the Middletown Argus, which lauded him as “a champion of humanity.” A former Port Jervis resident, the Reverend A. M. Gliddon cheered that “in the midst of that exhibition of wretched, cringing, half-hearted, un-backboned crowd of male bipeds, it is a treat to see some real men.”
Others in the town resented Crane’s sudden elevation because they saw his actions as a betrayal—of his community, of his neighbors, of his race. There were attempts to warn him into silence, threats similar to those made against the prosecutors and President Howell, who had found his mailbox stuffed with hate letters from all over the country. Crane later recalled that a man came around his office, purportedly “on business,” then quickly pivoted to the subject of the lynching and mentioned that “the boys were talking a little ugly.”
If the town yearned to turn Officer Yaple and Judge Crane into heroes, however, who could blame them? Better to celebrate the goodness of a few of its neighbors than brood over the dishonorable behavior of the rest.
But why had they done right and others wrong? Yaple’s weakness for drink could make him violently irresponsible, and no one would have thought less of Judge Crane had he dismissed his maid’s interruption, pulled down the window shade, and gone back to his book. If the cowardice and pathology of a mob of hundreds of people bent on murder is a thing to ponder, more mysterious may be the courage of two.
The last witness to testify at the inquest was the flagman Lewis Avery, who, like others before him, claimed to have witnessed only “part of the riot.” He said he had pushed his way to the center of the crowd because he “wanted to see what kind of an animal it was that did that business,” but swore he did not try to put the rope around Robert Lewis’s neck or see who did, nor did he impede any police. He was in fact attempting to leave the area when he “fell down and several people trampled on him.”
With a look of exasperation, Coroner Harding then rose to say he wished to hear no more witnesses who swore that they had done nothing wrong, had not interfered with the police, or had not harmed Robert Lewis, nor seen anyone else do so. It was unbelievable, he said, that “no one of the thousand or more people who were on the streets that evening resisted the officers, [yet] still the man was hung. In all my experience, I have never known of so many people who either couldn’t or wouldn’t see what was plainly before their eyes.”
Thanks in large part to Yaple’s testimony, however, eight men were cited by the inquest for assault and inciting to riot: the Front Street grocer John Eagan, the train engineer John Kinsella, the depot worker John Henley, the former police chief Dave McCombs, the flagman Lewis Avery, Officer Patrick Collier, James Kirby, and Bill Fitzgibbons. There was little expectation on anyone’s part of actual consequences, typified by a reporter’s sighting of Kinsella around this time taking his ease at a saloon, a “thorough-going sport” in “a very light cutaway suit, a Maltese-colored high hat and a giddy necktie, dressed for Saratoga rather than the bloody streets of Port Jervis.”
Notably absent from the list was Raymond Carr. Jurors may have honestly believed Raymond’s version of events over Judge Crane’s, dismissed it as a young man’s foolishness, or opted to give him a pass in honor of his father’s reputation. The days and weeks ahead would be awkward enough without smearing one of Port Jervis’s leading families.
It hardly mattered. The jury left the room and in one hour returned to say it had acquitted all the accused. Coroner Harding then read the verdict: “Robert Lewis came to his death in the village of Port Jervis on June 2nd by being hanged by his neck by a person or persons unknown.”
Who were these persons unknown? Were they from out of town, as many Port Jervians contended, or perhaps stranded, out-of-work railway men? Or did the too-common expression that a lynching victim had died at the hands of persons unknown—the ubiquitous last word of coroner’s findings throughout the South, now invoked here in Port Jervis—connote something else? Some mysterious process in which the men mobbing their neighbor Robert Lewis to death became, for a moment, not the persons they ordinarily were, but beings unknown even to themselves, instruments of some irreversible collective force akin to gravity? Perhaps, as the scholar Jacqueline Goldsby has observed, when “witness after witness swore under oath that the members of the mob were unknown to them, Port Jervis realized its dream of being a modern metropolis. Like a city teeming with millions, no one in the crowd at Lewis’s lynching knew anyone else.”
As for the willful blindness of the witnesses, “that [they] have deliberately perjured themselves is reasonably clear,” complained the New York Morning Advertiser. Those who led the mob were known by many who testified, yet they were “able to throw no more light on the affair than if they had been in the heart of Africa when it took place.” All were intimidated by the mob spirit. “They are afraid for their own lives,” noted the Advertiser, “or afraid, at least, that their houses or barns may be burned. It is an exhibition of cowardice that is always present when mobs undertake to administer justice.” This last point was doubly true, for the mob had not only “convicted” and summarily executed Robert Lewis; it had now literally acquitted itself.
The jury had clearly vacated its duty, and had certainly failed Robert Lewis. “The case will go on record as one of the most singular suicides ever reported,” deadpanned the Honesdale Citizen. The most likely excuse was that the jurymen feared retribution from their neighbors. Yet it’s also possible they were disinclined to take their duty seriously because of the suspicion, shared by the community, that “there is something back of the whole affair,” that neither Lena, her family, nor the press had been forthcoming about what had occurred to prompt the lynching. If the precipitating facts couldn’t be established, nor an honest account of what had taken place satisfactorily produced, how could citizens delegated to a jury be expected to approach their role? As one local journal pointed out:
The thinking public doubts Miss McMahon’s story, as it also does Foley’s. The circumstances are too conflicting. If the young woman had practically no knowledge of her surroundings from Wednesday to Thursday morning, then she must have been crazy. Not a living female would or could be hired to stay overnight in Laurel Grove Cemetery, as she stated she did. The stormy weather and the delicate physique of the girl would knock that story in the head.
The folly of the coroner’s inquest soon had an equally disappointing reprise at a subsequent grand jury hearing in Goshen, where many of the same names and faces reappeared. Gathered on the Mountain Express from Port Jervis to the county seat on June 22 were Lena and Theresa McMahon, Sol Carley, Duke Horton, Dave McCombs, Dr. Van Etten, and Dr. Walter Illman, along with Officers Yaple, Bonar, Collier, and Salley. The presiding justice, E. M. Cullen, noted his “great surprise that [the lynching] should have taken place in a county like Orange, which has been living under the law for two centuries.” His solemn words, however, fell short of inspiring the jurymen to take their role seriously, for they soon became uncooperative. With brazen disrespect for the court, they added to the earlier list of men cited by the inquest the names of Howell, the village president, and other authorities. The Tri-States Union termed the prank “contemptibly malicious,” and an irate District Attorney Hirschberg quashed the indictment for lack of evidence, scolding the jury for sullying Howell’s good name and making a mockery of the severe offenses they had been charged with considering.
Hirschberg failed to break through the wall of solidarity among Port Jervis citizens and came away with little to show for the efforts of his office. Of course, what had occurred, or failed to occur, was not merely a poor reflection on the criminal justice apparatus of Orange County. It was a judgment on a community that had given only lip service to the notion of seeking justice, although it’s true that those loftier ideals had been chiefly articulated by jurists, editorialists, and clergy. Ultimately, as many a prosecutor has learned to their misfortune, legal mechanisms rely on the conscientious performance of ordinary citizens—restaurant managers, grocers, saloon owners, railroad engineers—and in their silence and collective mendacity, Port Jervians had chosen to stand squarely behind lynching. “They cannot force grand jurors to regard as a crime the wild justice of mob law,” the Argus concluded, “when the jurors feel in their hearts that the mob did the county a service by ridding it of a villain too vile for earth. The law is as powerless to punish the men who strung up Bob Lewis as is the ghost of their victim.”