“A Faithful Servant to His Country”
ON THE SAME AFTERNOON that Pryce Lewis leaped to his death, a woman called at the office of Anson Barnes. She introduced herself as Mrs. Lew Gibson from Waterbury, Connecticut, and told Barnes that she had been given his address by Mary Lewis. Gibson then explained that she was the third cousin of Pryce Lewis and was in New York at the request of his younger brother.
When Pryce had stopped writing to Matthew Lewis after the death of his son a decade earlier, Matthew presumed his brother was dead. Only when he received a letter from Mary a few days earlier had Matthew realized Pryce was alive but indigent. He asked Lew Gibson to go to New York and bring his brother back to Waterbury to live with him. Barnes and Gibson arranged to visit Pryce Lewis the next day to break the good news.
But as they set out for Jersey City on Thursday, December 7, the World carried a report on its inside pages under the headline SUICIDE LEAPS FROM TOP OF SKYSCRAPER. It described Lewis “as a man of about fifty-five years of age” who was “bald, had a white mustache and was poorly dressed.” The paper added that the business card of one of its reporters, Isaac D. White, had been discovered in the deceased’s pocket, but that White was unable to put a name to the face that had been smashed on the fender of an automobile.
The New York Times and the New York Herald also covered the tragedy in their editions of December 7, with the former commenting that the first physician on the scene, a Dr. Russell, “found that the man’s skull had been shattered and that practically every bone in his body had been broken.”
The description of the man sounded familiar to Charles Newkirk, even though his friend Pryce Lewis was eighty years old, not fifty-five. After breakfast on Thursday morning he called at 83 Jefferson Avenue and, in the company of the landlady, entered Lewis’s small and drafty room. There on the table was the note, but they found no body in the garret. Newkirk caught a train to New York City and visited the morgue of the Hudson Street Hospital. For several seconds he stood staring at the battered face “and after some hesitation declared that it was that of Mr. Lewis.” Later, when a reporter from the Herald pressed Newkirk for more details of the dead man, he was too upset to say much, other than that Lewis was a Civil War veteran “who saw much active service as a scout.” Asked why Lewis had killed himself, Newkirk told the Herald that his friend “had realized he had outlived his usefulness and that he was too old to continue a fight for existence.”
The World ran with the story on Sunday, December 10, publishing a photo of an elderly Lewis along with embellished information about his wartime activities. There was no mention of Timothy Webster or John Scully, but the paper made much of the Lord Tracy escapade. The World also warned in its final paragraph that if assistance was not forthcoming from friends or family, Lewis, “a faithful servant to his country … will be buried by the city in Potter’s Field with only a number to indicate where he lies.”
The report left Mary Lewis in a state of great distress. She had no intention of allowing her father to be buried in an unmarked grave. She emptied her savings to pay for the funeral expenses, and Anson Barnes contributed something toward the cost. Barnes also approached the Pinkertons in the hope that as they have “established a private burial ground near Chicago for the internment of the bodies of his [Allan Pinkerton’s] faithful employees the agency will aid.” Nothing came of the request.
On Thursday, December 14, the New York Daily News reported that Lewis was to be laid to rest in Torrington, Connecticut, in a service paid for by his family, and that “in accord with his wish, flags of the United States and Great Britain were to be buried with him.”
But poor Pryce Lewis was not allowed to rest in peace. On Sunday, December 17, the New York Times evoked the ghost of Allan Pinkerton in a shabby, idle article hacked from the pages of the Spy of the Rebellion. Don’t believe the “glowing accounts of his service to the North,” taunted the paper, because “forty nine years ago Timothy Webster, the greatest of Union spies, was hanged in Richmond after Pryce Lewis had betrayed him to save his own neck. The death of that brave man was as much on Pryce Lewis’s soul as if Lewis had cut his throat … it is an old commonplace that such deeds do not prosper—a commonplace too often proved untrue by the subsequent history of those who perform them. In Pryce Lewis’s case the old smug commonplace came true … the ghost of Webster, the heroic man who looked death in the eye without a tremor, and who met it at last with a tranquil smile, may have gazed upon that mass of pulp lying on the busy street and thought of retribution.”
For a second time Mary Lewis was devastated by the thoughtless words of a New York paper. She wrote the Times, correcting its story and condemning its “lies about my father.” The paper refused to print an apology, so Lewis turned to Barnes and pleaded with him to restore the reputation of a man who had been traduced in life and now in death. Barnes took on the responsibility and tried for several weeks to persuade a paper to run the truth about Pryce Lewis. No one appeared interested, until the story landed on the desk of William Inglis, a veteran reporter for Harper’s Weekly. The tale appealed to him, not just its adventure and intrigue but also its injustice, and on January 30, 1912, Inglis’s full-page exposé appeared under the headline a REPUBLIC’S GRATITUDE: WHAT PRYCE LEWIS DID FOR THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, AND HOW THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT REWARDED HIM.
Inglis revealed what had really happened in Richmond in the spring of 1862. John Scully was the man who had betrayed Timothy Webster, not Pryce Lewis. Lewis was imprisoned for nineteen months in “loathsome surroundings” and returned to Washington “broken in health.” But it wasn’t Lewis’s fortitude in surviving a Richmond prison that impressed above all else; it was his journey through the Kanawha Valley in July 1861. By dint of his courage and boldness he “had achieved more than a hundred soldiers” and merited the gratitude of a nation. Instead he had been neglected by the government.
In the same month in 1912 that Harper’s Weekly published Inglis’s piece, an article appeared on the other side of the Atlantic in the Montgomeryshire Express, a modest publication popular with the people of Newtown. Contained within the article was an extract from an American newspaper describing Pryce Lewis’s wartime espionage, along with an accompanying letter from John Owen, for many decades a resident of Blackinton, Massachusetts, but a Newtown lad deep down.
Dear Mr. Editor,
As I am always interested in reading your accounts of old Newtown folks in the Express I thought you might be interested to read the clipping which I enclose. Mr. Price [sic] Lewis lived with his parents when a boy at the White Lion, Penygloddfa. I don’t know who would be likely to remember him as a schoolmate. We were quartered in a room above the Green Tavern, and one Edward Morgan, the teetotaler, was our teacher. That was between 60 and 70 years ago. We Welsh-Americans don’t think our Government did the square thing with our friend Price Lewis. If they could not pension him they could have made him a present of a few thousand dollars so that he might have ended his life in comfort.