Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[I]n a time of unprecedented violence in the United States, the murder of Alanson L. Sanborn still managed to shock the public. The 29-year old Vermonter was killed while leading a Union Army regiment through the streets of Norfolk, Virginia, on July 11, 1863.
The murder outraged Northerners, who probably thought that two years of civil war had made them immune to being appalled by barbarity. The New York Times reported that the “atrocious murder” was “now the theme of public talk and anxiety.” Sanborn’s slaying remained in the news for months as the federal government weighed what to do with his killer. The decision would ultimately fall to President Lincoln.
Sanborn was in Virginia by choice. He had felt it was his duty to serve his country. “I would rather die in the field fighting for my country than be spared at home in finest ease while my brothers die on the altar of their country,” he wrote to his mother in Thetford in May 1863. At the time, Sanborn was living in New York City, where he had gone to recruit soldiers for a new all-African-American unit. So far, he wrote, he had enlisted 12 men to fight in the 1st U.S. Colored Volunteers, and had been commissioned as lieutenant to serve beside them.
Sanborn and the other men moved south to Washington, where he continued to recruit. The regiment “is a work of justice,” he told his mother. “It is a work of humanity … to elevate downtrodden humanity.”
Sanborn’s regiment represented just a tiny fraction of the blacks who would serve. By war’s end, 179,000 African-Americans had enlisted in the Army, representing about 10 percent of the force. They typically fought under white officers and noncommissioned black officers.
July 11 found the regiment in Norfolk. Though it was a week after the twin Union victories at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Vicksburg, Mississippi, the situation was tenuous for Northern troops in Virginia; the Confederacy still held most of the state.
That day, Lt. Sanborn was marching his men to Norfolk’s Customs House, where the city’s military governor, Gen. Egbert Ludovicus Viele, would review them. The regiment’s route took it past a dry goods store, where ardent secessionists often gathered.
Dr. David M. Wright was there that day. Wright, a prominent local surgeon, slave owner and fervent racist, was incensed at seeing black men, some of them perhaps former slaves, walking the streets of his city in military uniforms. To Wright, this was a deliberate provocation.
Standing outside the store, he said something to Sanborn as the officer past. Wright’s exact words are debated. He might have insulted the troops or called Sanborn a coward. Whatever their content, the words caused Sanborn to stop on the spot and tell Wright that if he repeated his remark he would be arrested. Another version of the story, says Sanborn told Wright he was under arrest.
Accounts of what happened next also vary. The Army and Northern newspapers reported that Sanborn turned his back on Wright and was preparing to give an order to his troops, when Wright pulled out a Colt revolver and shot Sanborn in the back. Sanborn turned toward Wright and began to draw his sword. Wright fired again. The bullet passed through Sanborn’s right hand and struck his left arm, near the shoulder. Sanborn staggered forward and grabbed ahold of Wright, pulling him into the store, where he fell to the floor and died.
An Army correspondent from a different regiment reported that Wright had been part of a conspiracy to assassinate Sanborn, as well as another Union officer and a federal official who was working locally to protect freed slaves. The conspirators had supposedly drawn lots to see who was going to kill whom, and Wright had drawn Sanborn.
Wright and his supporters told a different story. They claimed that after Wright and Sanborn exchanged heated words, Sanborn had moved toward Wright to arrest him. At this point, a friend of Wright’s allegedly passed the doctor a revolver, since he was unarmed, and Wright shot Sanborn. At this trial, the doctor claimed that he begged to be able to treat Sanborn as he lay wounded on the floor, but soldiers restrained him. Some of the soldiers had to be restrained themselves, as they surged toward Wright with fixed bayonets.
Wright was arrested and ordered to stand trial before a special military commission. His lawyers protested that he should be tried in a civilian court, but the court rejected the appeal.
During his trial, Wright said he had acted in self-defense, because, as a slave owner, he could not accept being arrested by men who might have been his former slaves. “No sir, I could not submit to that,” he said. Witnesses to the shooting, however, said that Wright had earlier boasted that he would shoot the first white officer he saw among the black troops. Less than three weeks after the shooting, the commission convicted Wright and sentenced him to death.
When President Lincoln learned of the verdict, he telegraphed Major Gen. John Foster, commander of Fortress Monroe in Virginia, where Wright was sentenced to be hanged: “do not let execution be done upon him, until further order.”
Besieged by petitioners calling for him to pardon Wright, Lincoln wanted time to consider the matter. The federal judge advocate, a position Congress had created only the year before, reviewed the case and found that the military commission had conducted a fair and legal trial. But Lincoln wanted one more thing tested: Wright’s sanity. Lincoln wanted to examine whether Wright’s attorneys should have claimed their client was insane.
Lincoln selected Dr. John P. Gray, superintendent of the Utica (N.Y.) Lunatic Asylum, to do the examination. Gray met twice with Wright and learned about the doctor’s past, presumably including the fact that he had graduated from Vermont’s Norwich University in 1829. (An early 20th century history of the school defended Wright’s attack, claiming that “Dr. Wright was grossly insulted by Lieutenant Sanborn, and the offence was such as to give him strong provocation for the deed.” The history refers to Wright as a “worthy old cadet” and states that the “incident has been greatly exaggerated in certain of our Northern histories.”)
Gray found Wright to have been sane at the time he killed Sanborn, so Lincoln denied the appeal. His execution was set for Oct. 16, 1863. Lincoln granted a request from one of Wright’s lawyers that the execution be delayed a week so that the condemned could get his affairs in order.
On Oct. 17, Wright was able to attend the long-planned wedding of one of his daughters. It was held at the prison. He was also allowed to design his own coffin, which included a set of daguerreotypes of his family arrayed around the head. He inspected the coffin and, apparently finding it acceptable, signed the lid with a pencil.
On the night of Oct. 21, Wright received several visitors, including one of his daughters, who had hatched a plan for his escape. She used a master key to remove his manacles, and then swapped some of her clothes with her father, whose face she covered with a veil. Dr. Wright left the cell with the others, while his daughter climbed under the covers of his bed.
As Wright and the others were exiting the jail, a guard mentioned that one of the passing women seemed unusually tall. An officer chased after the group and pulled off Wright’s veil. “That’s played out,” the officer said. “I know you, Dr. Wright.”
Desperate means were pardonable under desperate circumstances, replied the doctor, who appeared neither embarrassed nor surprised at being caught.
Wright’s friends tried one more gambit to free him. Someone contacted a Union telegraph operator and offered $20,000 in gold and passage to England on a Confederate ship if he would send a fake message stating that Lincoln had granted Wright a reprieve.
The telegraph operator refused the bribe, and Wright was hung on Oct. 23, 1863.
Sanborn’s body was still in Virginia when Wright died. The Army had stored the body until arrangements could be made to transport it back to Vermont. For some reason, arrangements weren’t completed until late fall.
Back in Thetford, where Sanborn had grown up and where he taught school, people gathered for his funeral on an early December day. The Rev. D. S. Frost, who preached that day, spoke of how the war had shown people like Wright in their true light, “in all their moral deformity before the nations of earth as moral lepers of the human race, fit to be remembered, only to be loathed, abhorred and detested for all coming time.”
In contrast, the reverend said, the war had shown the best side of men like Sanborn and others of “freedom’s martyrs,” who had demonstrated “the real heart they possess.”
