Murder on the Ohio Belle

MURDER ON THE OHIO BELLE

MURDER ON THE OHIO BELLE

Stuart W. Sanders

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Copyright © 2020 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

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Unless otherwise noted, photographs are courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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ISBN 978-0-8131-7871-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8131-7873-8 (epub)

ISBN 978-0-8131-7872-1 (pdf)

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Manufactured in the United States of America.

Contents

Introduction

1. A Splendid New Boat

2. On the Other Side of the World

3. And the Mother Rejoiced

4. Boasting of the Bloody Deed

5. Not the First Man I’ve Killed

6. A Man of Property

7. Oh! The Horrors of War

8. A High Sense of Truth and Honor

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

On April 5, 1856, the Shepherdstown Register, a newspaper located in what is now West Virginia, ran a story about a murder that took place on the Mississippi River. The details are truly awful, the reporter stated, and well calculated to cause a thrill of horror.¹

Although Shepherdstown stands on the Potomac River across from Maryland, readers were captivated by this killing that took place more than seven hundred miles away. They viewed western waters—the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers—as mysterious places of conflict. This murder, and the thrill of horror it caused, surely reinforced that vision.

The genesis of that reporter’s revulsion was the discovery of a drowned man found bobbing in the water, his legs and arms tied to a chair. In addition to capturing the attention of editors across the nation, his death pushed authorities to ask a number of questions: Who was he? What had happened that led to his horrific demise? Why had he been bound and tossed into the river to suffer? When I began researching this story, I asked similar questions. I also wondered about the broader implications of this murder that had been reported about across the country.

The dead man was a Mississippian who had been a passenger on the Cincinnati-based steamboat the Ohio Belle. At first it appeared that his brutal end was a simple story of southern honor culture gone awry—a tale of murder and vengeance. I soon found, however, that the life of this drowned man—and the history of the Ohio Belle—told a more complex tale about deep tensions found within antebellum America.

A fascinating cast of characters revealed these strains in the cultural fabric: the drowned man, whose true identity and violent past was uncovered only after he was retrieved from the river; the steamboat clerk Hiram Stevens, killed in a flash of honor-fueled vengeance; John Sebastian, the captain of the Ohio Belle, a cool-headed river man who later lost his arm while piloting a Union gunboat; the famed actress Matilda Heron, who temporarily saved a killer from the wrath of an angry mob; and finally, the steamboat itself, the Ohio Belle, which ran passengers and freight from Cincinnati to New Orleans before being captured by a ragtag band of Arkansas secessionists.

The history of the Ohio Belle helps us better understand nineteenth-century riverine culture. It also illustrates deeper national issues of consequence. How, for example, did Americans contend with western rivers that were the borderland between the enslaved and free? How did they deal with fugitive slaves and respond to interpersonal violence and vigilante justice? How did they wrestle with cultural differences, including the strain between those who followed a regional, gendered, and racialized code of honor and those who did not? The history of this steamboat also demonstrates the struggle with class prejudice and the influence of wealth and status on public opinion and media coverage. Moreover, as the most momentous of these issues—slavery—split the nation apart, the Ohio Belle also explains how Northern-owned boats and their passengers and crew fared on Southern waters during the secession crisis and the Civil War.

The Ohio and Mississippi Rivers drove to the heart of many of these issues. Dividing geographically, politically, and philosophically a nation at odds with itself, these waters brought travelers from across the nation together to ride the border between slavery and freedom. Many of those passengers, including Alexis de Tocqueville, saw firsthand that the river was more than a physical barrier as the economic consequences of slavery were evident. Furthermore, the rivers showcased the tension between the old United States and the expanding west as steamboats like the Ohio Belle pushed the nation to grow and change.

This vessel also demonstrates the fluidity of that river border. The Belle and other northern-owned steamboats transported enslaved people, and profited from the peculiar institution. In one instance, the Belle carried an enslaved man to Cincinnati and became involved in a fugitive slave case, thereby demonstrating both the economic and political consequences of operating along the Ohio River. In addition, at a time when class differences were sharp, steamboats like the Ohio Belle were great equalizers along that border, bringing together members of the southern planter gentry, famous actresses, merchants, and travelers of the more middling class. This led to a mingling of cultural differences that could have grim consequences. In 1856, for example, crew members on the Ohio Belle refused to acknowledge one traveler’s claim to honor after he murdered one of their own.

This incident and others along the river reveal a major tension in antebellum society: how Americans contended with violence, including homicide, lynching, slavery, accidental death, and warfare. Passengers and crew sometimes traveled with an unsavory lot, including gamblers, thieves, con artists, and those whom Kentucky attorney Ben Hardin once called the bowie knife and pistol gentry. Those of this type were armed, white, southern men who were primed to take affront and were prepared to kill in order to protect their manhood and reputation. Often acquitted of murder thanks to dubious claims of self-defense, they made violence appear to be an acceptable form of conflict resolution. Less than a decade after the Ohio Belle stopped traveling western waters, for example, a journalist covering a Bluegrass State murder trial wrote, Human life is held to-day more cheaply than ever before. Courts and juries too often wink at crime, and on the rising generation we seem to be fostering an array of young ‘bloods’ whose chief reliance for future honors is on the pistol and the bowie knife.² Thanks to this ilk, those who rode aboard the Ohio Belle were familiar with concealed weapons and their deadly application. They were also acquainted with other forms of violence, including murder and vengeance, the brutalization of the enslaved, steamboat disasters, the drowning of passengers and crew, and toward the end of the Belle’s history, depredations committed by Civil War guerrillas. For these travelers, the risk of violence and danger was ever present. Therefore, the story of the Ohio Belle—from when the first vessel to bear that name cast off in 1839 until the third Belle was sold for scrap after the Civil War—provides insight into how Americans applied and reacted to violence along these borderland rivers.

The history of the Ohio Belle also presents a portrait of how western antebellum society embraced retribution. Although many hoped for justice when a wrong had been perpetrated, the threat of vengeance loomed ever present. Whether it was vigilantism on board the Ohio Belle, Union troops burning a Tennessee town in revenge for irregular violence, or a steamboat captain hoping to retaliate for his lost vessel, the history of the Belle illuminates society’s desire for reprisal. The need for a violent reckoning was, for many, a viable and popular solution. Mobs pulled slaves from jails and hanged them; rioters threw rocks and brickbats, and burned jurors and lawyers in effigy; riverboat crew members beat and shaved the heads of thieves who robbed passengers. And, in a rare example of common folk meting out vigilante justice on a member of the southern gentry, in 1856 a man was tied to a chair and dumped into the Mississippi River to drown.

This study, therefore, considers these tensions—interpersonal violence, slavery, honor culture, and retribution—through the lens of the Ohio Belle. Chapter 1 examines the importance of the Ohio River, the risks of steamboat travel, and the way that these vessels disrupted the economy on western waters. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss an important fugitive slave case involving the Ohio Belle and the murder that took place on board the vessel in 1856. Chapter 4 surveys violence on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and examines honor culture. Chapter 5 notes the consequences of the murder of the boat’s clerk, Hiram Stevens, and the perpetration of mob rule and vigilante justice in the Ohio River Valley. Chapter 6 looks at how class prejudice influenced the reporting of Stevens’s murder and reveals the killer’s true identity. Chapter 7 examines how Northern-owned boats fared as they traded on Southern waters during the secession crisis, and explores the Ohio Belle’s Civil War service and that of its captain, John Sebastian. Finally, chapter 8 reveals what ultimately happened to the passengers and crew who were present during the 1856 murder. It also outlines the final days of that splendid passenger steamer, the Ohio Belle.³

Writing this book—and reconstructing the vessel’s history for the first time—strengthened my resolve that a single event, including a forgotten murder on a nineteenth-century steamboat, can illuminate a more important, broader narrative about our past. In this instance, the Ohio Belle teaches us about important themes from the nineteenth century that are still relevant today. Honor killings still exist around the world. Vigilantes still believe themselves to be above the law. Injustice rooted in race, religion, and class affects our communities. Regional differences and social prejudices still divide us. Wealth influences media coverage. History, including the tale of a murder on a steamboat, still matters.

1

A Splendid New Boat

On March 14, 1856, the side-wheeled steamboat Ohio Belle pulled up to the wharf at Smithland, Kentucky, to pick up goods and passengers. There, nearly one thousand people had built their lives where the Cumberland River meets the Ohio. The previous day, the Belle had stopped at Evansville, Indiana, to unload freight before continuing on to the Mississippi River. At Evansville, a reporter wrote, the Belle was very heavily laden, and with a great many passengers on board, including Miss Heron, the eminent actress, and her troupe. The boat was abuzz with talk about that actress, Matilda Heron, who had earned renown as the lead role in Camille, an Alexandre Dumas play that Heron had translated and performed up and down the rivers. It was a tragic love story involving a courtesan dying from tuberculosis, and Heron played the part with emotional dexterity and depth.¹

Smithland, located just upriver from Paducah, Kentucky, was a frequent stopping point on the Ohio River. In 1841, Edward Jarvis, a passenger on the steamboat Edward Shippen, recalled that Smithland is built of brick and wood and in genteel and shabby style intermingled to suit all tastes; the streets look exceedingly muddy. In the years that followed, the town had not changed drastically. On that March day in 1856, when an aristocratic Mississippian named J. B. Jones boarded the Ohio Belle at Smithland, he likely sneered at the town before scraping the mud off his boots and boarding the vessel. Sixteen years later, another passenger remembered Jones’s appearance on the Belle. When the steamer arrived … there came on board a man who was evidently recovering from a drinking spree. His clothes were of good material and fitted him well, tho’ somewhat impaired by use. His face was soiled, and his beard had grown to an uncomely length. His eyes were bloodshot and glared unnaturally. His linen needed a change. Jones was rumpled, had a highborn swagger, and appeared to be intoxicated. When he lurched on board, he presented himself as a southern gentleman of means.²

Jones, Heron, and the other passengers on the Belle were enduring a sharp run of cold weather. In the weeks before their voyage, an ice bridge across the Ohio River had closed the river for fifty-three days. On February 25, the ice finally cracked, allowing boats to traverse the water. By mid-March, when the Belle docked at Smithland, the Ohio River was falling, and it was snowing sporadically.³

Passengers and crew traveling on other steamboats, flatboats, keelboats, and ferries would have recognized the name that adorned that side-wheel steamer. At least three steamboats named the Ohio Belle had plied the Cincinnati to New Orleans trade route since the late 1830s, with one boat replacing the other. Constructed in 1839, 1843, and 1855, respectively, each successive Ohio Belle grew in tonnage—from 294 tons to 310 tons to 406 tons in 1855—as river passage became more important to the growth of the nation.⁴

The Ohio River was integral to that growth. Formed at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers converge, the Ohio River runs nearly one thousand miles to the Mississippi River at Cairo, Illinois. The river carves out the borders of West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, and is fed by multiple tributaries, including the Kanawha, Kentucky, Wabash, Cumberland, Tennessee, and other rivers. Running from three hundred to six hundred yards wide, in 1856, the time when J. B. Jones boarded the steamboat, it spanned nearly six hundred yards at Cincinnati, the home of the Ohio Belle.⁵

That year, the river’s majesty was described by James T. Lloyd, a chronicler of steamboats and river disasters. "The peculiarity of the Ohio river [sic] which distinguishes it from the Mississippi, and some others, is its extraordinary gentleness and serenity," Lloyd wrote.