William freeman trial

She died as a result of the attack. Hearing her screams, her husband went to the door, was stabbed, and died in the doorway. Last to die was two-year old George, murdered while he lay sleeping in an upstairs room.

He was captured the following day in Oswego County, about forty miles from the scene of the crime, and was identified as William Freeman. At sixteen, William Freeman — a young man of African and Native American descent — had been wrongly convicted of horse stealing and sentenced to five years of hard labor at Auburn Prison.

His victims, all of whom were white, included an elderly woman, her pregnant daughter, and her two-year-old grandson.

Freeman was quickly apprehended, but his mental health soon became a matter of controversy. Led by the future secretary of state William H. The Van Nest killings and the trial of William Freeman, though illustrative of many aspects of antebellum society and culture, have never received in-depth scholarly attention.

On one occasion, he suffered severe injury when he was repeatedly hit on the head with a length of wood. From then on, he suffered from deafness and existed in a state of mental confusion. When he had served his sentence and was released from prison, he became obsessed with obtaining redress for his wrongful imprisonment, and reportedly told his brother-in-law that "someone had to pay.

Auburn attorney William H. Seward who had recently served two terms as Governor of New York and later would serve as U. Seward defended another murderer, Henry Wyatt, on similar grounds that same year. Freeman was convicted but Seward successfully appealed, although Freeman died in prison before he could be retried.

The William Freeman Trial Collection consists of five complete issues of the Rochester Daily Advertiser with numerous lengthy articles about the murders and the trial. One issue includes, unusually, an engraving of Freeman done from a sketch "supplied by our friends of the Cayuga Tocsin. The majority of our archival and manuscript collections are housed offsite and require advanced notice for retrieval. Researchers are encouraged to contact us in advance concerning the collection material they wish to access for their research.