TESTIMONY OF SARAH KERR, COURT OF QUARTER SESSIONS
Philadelphia, September 6, 1875
I was employed in Mr. Ross’s family as a child’s nurse in July of last year. I remember the first day of July, 1874. I dressed the two boys, Walter and Charley, that day. I first dressed Charley and sent him outdoors and then dressed Walter, that was between 3 and 4 o’clock. After that I heard them talking outdoors and looking out of the window saw Walter on the grass, that was a quarter past 4. I neither saw nor heard anything of Charley after that.
MAYOR WILLIAM S. STOKLEY HAD BECOME WELL KNOWN IN America toward the end of his first term. For the past five months, as newspapers had recorded the nation’s observations and speculations on the Charley Ross case, an international audience had read of Philadelphia’s $20,000 reward and the mayor who offered it.
On January 1, 1875, the city inaugurated Stokley into a second term. The Inquirer called the ceremony “a particularly auspicious beginning of the new year” and lauded Stokley for protecting the city’s streets better than his predecessors had. Ignoring the famous crime that the mayor’s force had not, after five months, solved, writers praised Stokley’s efforts to destroy gambling halls, to prosecute thieves more rigorously, and to pay attention to the appearance, hygiene, and vigilance of his officers.
Pennsylvania’s Republicans needed this good publicity. After the November elections, when Republican incumbents had lost more seats than they had in eleven years, the two thousand members of Philadelphia’s Union League met to discuss February’s local elections, evaluate open positions, nominate candidates, and plan yet another implementation of Simon Cameron’s weakening campaign strategy. Ulysses S. Grant’s second term would expire in 1877. If his party did not reestablish itself as a political power strong enough to control the Northern states, the Democrats could very well return the whipping Grant gave them in 1872. The president had received his party’s nomination in Philadelphia that year, an occasion that acquainted him with the city’s newly crowned mayor.
Upon his reelection, Stokley’s approval ratings appeared to be at an all-time high. Voters, however, had begrudgingly reelected him. They didn’t like their higher debts and taxes, and they didn’t like the way the city cut costs as it awaited the government’s Centennial money. One disgruntled laborer mailed a threat to the mayor’s office, warning him of hiring non-union labor.
Mr. Stokley—SIR: The workingmen of this city that are almost starving to Death have formed an association to either have work or to have satisfaction out of such men as you that is robbing the city of every cent that it is worth. You have got one chance for your life that chance is this use your influence in Council and try and do something to alleviate our sufferings. Beware, for we are in earnest.
BY ORDER OF THE SECRET SIX
P.S. On our Centennial buildings instead of Putting citizens to work they pile in the italians because they can make them work for almost nothing.
Frustrated with political rhetoric, people wondered why their president and their civic leaders maintained ambivalent attitudes toward those displaced by the Civil War and victimized by the depression. The world knew it was coming to visit a nation still very much divided, and if Philadelphia were to embarrass America at the Centennial celebration, the Democrats could gain even more momentum—and they would have a scapegoat, a presidential acquaintance, to flaunt as the one who weakened under the international spotlight.
So as Mayor Stokley declared Philadelphia’s streets safer than ever in 1875, he wasn’t exactly ignoring social tensions and the unresolved Charley Ross kidnapping. On the contrary, he was “handling” them. Like any good politician, Stokley had learned how to live with uncomfortable stories: by issuing positive public statements and waiting. Only time could turn current events into memories, figments that could never be changed but always reconstructed.
Of course, if the mayor’s police force could somehow initiate Charley’s return, or at least uncover new evidence, Stokley would look more like the hero that the papers described.
A man from Kingston, New York, gave the mayor such hope soon after his second inauguration.
I write to you this in regard to Charley Ross. I have not been interested, nor have I the time to bother about it. I am sure I know where he is. Now, Mr. Stokley, if you want to recover the lost boy, as I think you do, you will send somebody who knows him. You will find me in a store where I am employed, and will go with the person you send.
Stokley contacted Captain Heins and telegraphed Kingston. “Letter received. Please give grounds for your belief. Answer immediately.”
“A woman is here, going to take him away,” the response read. “What must I do?”
“See a justice of the peace and your district attorney, and be guided by their advice,” Stokley answered. He did not forward Pinkerton’s questions. “Telegraph the result.”
“Send detectives at once,” the Kingston office replied.
Captain Heins sent a telegram to Walling. “A man at Kingston, Ulster County, New York, professes to have important information as to the whereabouts of the boy. He has been in correspondence with our Mayor. Send an officer in Kingston in the early train tomorrow. Let your man say Mayor Stokley sent him.”
Captain H. C. Heins, Philadelphia:—Your telegram received. Sent an officer (Selick) forthwith to Kingston to investigate. The child supposed to be Charley was a boy about 7 years of age, named Franklin P. Downer. It had been stolen from its father at New Hamburg by the mother, October 30, 1873.
George W. Walling, Superintendent
By the end of January, Stokley did have breaking news to announce. The state senate would soon approve a bill that identified kidnapping as a felony, not just a misdemeanor. Under the old law of March 1860, convicted kidnappers had faced a maximum fine of $2,000 and a maximum prison sentence of seven years at solitary confinement. The new law, which would be ratified on February 25, 1875, fined kidnappers a maximum of $10,000 and sentenced them to a maximum of twenty-five years at solitary confinement. It also provided a maximum fine of $5,000 and a maximum sentence of fifteen years for convicted accomplices.
Mayor Stokley used the impending bill to launch another public search effort. He reissued circulars listing the details of the kidnapping and the descriptions of Charley, the kidnappers, their horses, buggy, and boat. The new announcement also published the supposed route of the kidnappers, marking the first time that the mayor’s office released details from the ransom letters:
After leaving Palmer and Richmond Streets, Philadelphia, about six o’clock PM, July 1, the abductors drove toward the city of Trenton, New Jersey, through which they said they passed on the night of July 2d, and on Bridge Street dropped the boy’s hat—a broad-trimmed unbleached Panama, with black ribbon and without binding.
The statement continued, “After this they may have driven toward some one of the streams of water emptying into Raritan or Newark bay, or possibly as far as Newark, but this is very uncertain. The abductors returned to Philadelphia July 3d, where they mailed letters during the month.”
Stokley challenged every citizen to empathize with Christian and Sarah Ross and again gather their neighbors together for a hunt. As an incentive, his office released another $5,000 reward for new information. It advised informants to contact either Stokley at Independence Hall or Superintendent Walling at New York’s police headquarters on Mulberry Street.