The Verdict March

An extremely rare copy of The Verdict March by Eugene L. Blake and published by F. W. Helmick in 1882 (donated by Dr. Joanna Kirkpatrick). Charles Julius Guiteau (September 8, 1841 – June 30, 1882) was an American lawyer who assassinated U.S. President James A. Garfield on July 2, 1881 at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station. After a long, painful battle with infections possibly brought on by his doctors' poking and probing the wound with unwashed hands and non-sterilized instruments, Garfield died on September 19, eleven weeks after being shot. Most modern physicians familiar with the case state that Garfield would have easily recovered from his wounds with sterile medical care, which was common in the United States 10 years later. Guiteau's trial was one of the first high-profile cases in the United States where the insanity defense was considered.
   The jury took three days and 175 potential jurors to complete the jury -- including, against the wishes of Guiteau, one African-American juror. The jury consisted of twelve men as listed in the New York City Daily Graphics newspaper: John P. Hamlin (restaurant keeper), Frederick W. Brandenburg (cigar dealer), Henry J. bright (retired merchant), Charles J. Stewart (merchant), Thomas H. Langley (grocer), Michael Sheenan (grocer), Samuel F. Hobbs (plasterer), George W. Gates (machinist), Ralph Wormley (colored laborer/plasterer), W.H. Brawner (commission merchant), Thomas Heinlein (iron worker), and Joseph Prather (commission merchant). (Sources: Wikipedia, Squidoo, and University of Missouri-Kansas Law School)

Charles E. Rosenberg wrote a book in 1968 titled, "The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and the Law in the Gilded Age" (University of Chicago Press). Rosenberg wrote the following:

Ralph Wormley, colored, a plasterer for the Pension Bureau, expressed what must have been the consensus among Washingtonians – if among prospective jurors, an outspoken one – when he said that “the man is partly crazy or something of the kind, and it seems to me that no sensible man would have done such a thing anyway.”

Even in the trial’s earliest stages, during the choosing of the jury, Guiteau made it clear that he planned to play an active role in the proceedings. He was especially animated during the first day of jury selection, discussing tactics in a loud voice and giving constant advice to his legal colleagues, Scoville and Robinson.

Not all was accepted. He asked, for example, that no Negroes be allowed on the jury and that they be challenged peremptorily. Yet Scoville did accept Mr. Wormley. (As a minor political appointee, Wormley was not worth one of the government’s challenges; although Wormley had said that Guiteau was certainly unbalanced he had also declared that any proven murderers should hang.)

It was no easy task to find jurors; even those accepted asked to be excused while almost all those questioned expressed varying degrees of hostility toward the prisoner. It was not until Wednesday, Nov. 16, after three days of selection, that the final juror was chosen. The first group of 25 had been exhausted the first day, another 75 the second day, and it was not until a third of 75 was called that the jury could be completed. It was a mixed and satisfactorily representative group. All, of course were male, and one, as we have seen, was a Negro.

Despite the presence of a Negro in the jury box, Guiteau remarked heatedly that he disliked being called by his middle name [Julius]; it had too much of the “nigger about it.”

-- TWO COMPLETE ORIGINAL NEWSPAPERS, the NEW YORK DAILY GRAPHIC (NY City, pictured above) dated Jan 27th & 28th, 1882. The NY Daily Graphic was the first daily American newspaper with daily illustrations. These two issues contain an inside, double page woodcut illustration and a cover illustration of the VERDICT of GUILTY in the murder trial of CHARLES GUITEAU, the man who assassinated President James Garfield in July, 1881. A lot of information is written about the trial.

If anyone has more specific information about the African American juror in this 1882 trial (Ralph Wormley) please contact us (contact info below).