General Martin D. Hardin at the conspirators execution ?

[Linda Anderson]

Everything is connected, somehow. "Murder by Gaslight" recounts the 1859 murder of Philip Barton Key by Dan Sickles in Lafayette Square. Key was carried into the Old Clubhouse to die. Seward rented the Clubhouse in 1861 after he was appointed Secretary of State by Lincoln.

Even stranger is that yesterday I was reading the story of the trunk murder in The Governor and His Lady by Earl Conrad which is about the relationship between Seward and his wife Frances.

After Colt was convicted of murdering Samuel Adams, Colt's well-connected friends sent a petition in November 1842 to ask Seward, who was in his last weeks as the Governor of New York, to pardon him.

"... any way that he [Seward] looked at the case, he saw, as the courts had decided, only a cold-blooded murder..."

Frances "had written him wondering whether there might not be merit in commuting Colt's sentence..." He answered her saying that "he probably wasn't the first governor to be in a position of being regarded as the real killer in such a manslaying. There was a reason for not pardoning Colt, he told her, which he could not, with any good effect, give to the public.

"He couldn't conscientiously pardon a well-to-do man while another, poor, unknown, had to be hanged by the state for the same offense."

Seward wrote, "'In the jail at Lockport there is lying a condemned man waiting his death, yet incapable of distinguishing day from night, and so counting the hours as they carry him along to an inevitable doom, and no one thinks of him. He is poor, a stranger, and an outcast. Colt has connections, relations and associations with the educated class...'"

http://www.murderbygaslight.com/2010/03/...crate.html