Biography

From Wikipedia: William Freeman, of African American ancestry, was accused of breaking into a home after his release and stabbing four people to death. In both cases the defendants were likely mentally ill and had been abused while in prison. Seward, having long been an advocate of prison reform and better treatment for the insane, sought to prevent both men from being executed by using the relatively new defense of insanity. Seward gained a hung jury in Wyatt's first trial, though he was subsequently convicted in a retrial and executed despite Seward's efforts to secure clemency; Freeman was convicted, though Seward gained a reversal on appeal. There was no second Freeman trial, as officials were convinced of his insanity and the man died in prison in late 1846. In the Freeman case, invoking mental illness with heavy racial overtones, Seward argued, "he is still your brother, and mine, in form and color accepted and approved by his Father, and yours, and mine, and bears equally with us the proudest inheritance of our race—the image of our Maker. Hold him then to be a Man." Although contentious locally, the trials boosted Seward's image across the North. He gained further publicity from handling, in association with Ohioan Salmon P. Chase, the unsuccessful appeal in the Supreme Court of John Van Zandt, an anti-slavery advocate sued by a slaveowner for assisting African Americans in escaping on the Underground Railroad. Chase was impressed with Seward, writing that the former New York governor "was one of the very first public men in our country. Who but himself would have done what he did for the poor wretch Freeman?" From http://www.nynpa.com/docs/nie/nielawday/WilliamSeward.pdf Seward argued that Freeman should not be held accountable for murder as he was insane. A similar argument of "temporary sanity" had won prior to the war in a trial where a white man, Daniel Sickles shot Francis Scott Key's son, Phillip Barton Key II. See also The Trial of William Freeman: for the murder of John G. Van Nest