Good afternoon, everybody. Im glad to see that we are all alive and well. You all have survived now seven weeks. American history death and dying and u. S. History, we reached week seven. I am steven barry, your host for all things morbid. Today not any grimmer than any other day in this class, we will talk about the history of Death Investigation, evolution of the system of Death Investigation in the United States, which really matures and comes of age at about the dawn of the 20th century, so its a 19th century story about how Death Investigation becomes Forensic Science and ultimately becomes the csi series. Now we all have a pretty lurid sense, i think, of Death Investigation provided by local news, right . This graphic is everywhere. I found a million of these. Its always the same with police tape and chalk outlines, so we have a very lurid sense of Death Investigation where if it bleeds it leads school in journalism in the United States. I will take the evolution of this system very seriously and talk about how its developed over time, starting with historical importance. The most obvious area in Death Investigation is critically important and its our justice system, and corners and medical examiners participate from the very beginning of any Death Investigation, right, they are there on the scene, they pronounce a cause of death. That sets the entire investigation in motion. Then they are there with the Death Investigation throughout the process until the very end when they may, in fact, testify at trial. We cant imagine having a Society Without Death Investigation and its role in the criminal justice system, right, it would be anarchy, anyone of those movies where they decide all laws are off and you can get away with what you can get away with, and we would have murdered and reprisal killings and we would have nothing to approximate fairness, consequences and precision in the legal system. This is a very familiar aspect of death and investigation in the United States, the role it serves in the justice system. I want to call your attention to two other key roles death investigators have played throughout history apart from the criminal justice system. First, Public Health, and throughout our history the coroner and the medical examiner have been on the frontline and battled with most of the mortal threats and raising correlations and epidemics nobody else has ever seen. You have to imagine as it too often happens, they are in a basement, a morbid little place doing their work and yet what is washing across their examining tables, day after day, year after year, the rest of us may in a bad life see a death or two, and they see hundreds. So they are the first to sort of see patterns or shifts in how people are going out of the world. So they are the ones who sound the alarm. I will just give you a couple of examples but you can multiply them 1,000 fold. Its the coroners at the 21st century calling attention to all of the industry accidents as we see as industrialization proceeds in major cities. Coroners lead the charge against u. S. Steel who has seen a rash of accidents the corporation itself doesnt want to advertise this fact, and its the corners and the mes office that are seeing these things and leading the charge for improvements in industrial safety. The same thing, you might be familiar with the 1911 horrific fire, and some perished from the flames and others from leaping from the eighth story. Nobody tells that story from the perspective of the corners that really led the charge and they had seen the damage and had seen this time and time again well before this one factory fire. They had been dealing with this phenomenon and they were finally fed up so in 1911 they are the ones that lead the charge for more industrial safety around the areas of the factory fires. Another example, in 1924, in newark, new jersey, the pathologist performing autopsies discovers raidam, the paint they are using a watch dials and it was a Great Innovation in its day that your watch dial would be painted with the raidam paint. So they are constantly dipping this brush across their tongue that has had this raidam on it. They are dying of necrosis of the jaw and other problems and its the corners that not see just one, my daughter dies under mysterious circumstances but thats one instance. But the corner sees a pattern and starts to figure out what is going on. More examples. They are the first ones for Traffic Safety laws. Everybody gets their first car and they are overjoyed and hit the road and hit a tree shortly there after. As soon as you have cars in the 1930s you are having massive accidents, and they are cars not versed for safety and no traffic lights or stop signs and you are seeing more and more traffic fatalities. Its one case here or there for those that experienced it firsthand but for the coroner its happening in mass. So heres a new york medical examiner, 1931, our greatest source of danger to life and limb today is the operation of the automobile. Or a wisconsin corner in 1930, more lives were lost from the automobile than all the acute diseases combined. The corners are like the canary in the coal mine and they are the ones that see the dangers coming at us as they come at us. I will give you a few more examples that are interesting to me. Coroners were the first ones to raise the alarm about needle sharing. Its a 1930s case of heroin addicts getting malaria. They are the first ones to see an epidemic of child abuse and spousal abuse among the working class in the industrializing city. They are the first to sound the alarm about s. I. D. S. More and more babies were dying for no apparent good reason, and they sound the alarm about aids, and they get these cases where if its needle sharing, wait, they all seem to be addicts, as i make my investigation, they have the track marks and they have malaria. What could be going on here . The same thing with aids. What exactly is going on . The case that were most familiar with, right, will smith is in a new movie about concussions and football and thats based on a real pathologists that worked at allegheny hospital in pittsburgh and started to diagnose brain damage or repeated trauma to the head in american football players. That has become sort of a cause to celebrate. So this is that role that isnt that lurid police line, chalk outline kind of sense about how important Death Investigation to Public Health. Seeing patterns and raising the alarm about what new dangers are there that we need to we need to deal with . In a related area, in diagnosics. Because they work with corpses and not patients, death investigators never have gotten the credit they deserve for their role in Public Health or the respect they deserve from their medical peers, but the truth is they make their medical peers better, and this has been true throughout history. I will just give you one example here. At the turn of the century, General Hospital made a push to have every patient that dies have an autopsy, and we will see if the clinician was right, essentially. So the clinician said this person, adam, you died of this, and the coroner said, no, and then they unveiled how awful their clinicians were in terms of diagnostics, and everybody had to do autopsies and see these kinds of things firsthand, so they played an Important Role in improving medical diagnostics, especially through the role of the autopsy, and its the start of the tools in their tool kit as Forensic Science involves in the 19th century to produce in the 20th century our modern day medical examiner. I will just walk through some of these quickly. The autopsy has been around forever, so the first neanderthal, and the guy is poking him with a stick, what he died of, dude . They did an autopsy on cesar and they discovered it was the second stab [ inaudible ] . No, but 23 blows total. Autopsies have been around forever but its the systematic use that i think changes. The two possible candidates for the father of the modern autopsy are there on the righthand side of the screen. One is karl, and he presided over the Pathology Institute in vienna, which was really the hub of medical science. At the time he had access to a ton of cases, and when i say a ton, i mean, wow. 70,000 autopsies he supervised. 30,000 autopsies he performed himself over the course of his career. He averaged two a day, seven days a week for 45 years. That is a ton and a ton of autopsies. What he did was perfect it again as a system. How do we do it the same every time so we dont introduce any errors so we can ensure reproducable results. Microscopd to use the microscope. He was actually, in terms of diagnosing diseases and the pathologies that killed people, hes actually not that great. But in terms of systematizing autopsies he was the eminent father of the modern autopsy. Hes a germany pathologist, moves from vienna to berlin. He seals the case, you guys remember, when hippocrates and galen, they thought there were humors that go throughout our body. He said, thats garbage, because he worships the microscope, he loved it. In addition to autopsies, he brought the microscope very much to the center of Death Investigation. He deserves to be called the father of the modern autopsy. Both these things come to the United States fairly quickly in the 19th century. The most influential was william ostler, he becomes the most revered physician of his time. He taught people to be autopsies, made it the cause celebre in medicine. He told a friend, ive been watching this case, meaning his own medical case, for two months and im sorry i wont see the postmortem. He was so committed to autopsies, he wouldnt be able to do his own. When they did an autopsy on him, in fact he was right about that. When does it become systematized . Same thing with floating the lungs. That actually had been around forever. Does anybody know what that is . Okay. This is going to get morbid, we talked about that already. So in the case of a baby who is born and you want to figure out if the mother has committed infanticide or if the baby was born dead, what you would do is you would take the lungs of the baby and you would submerge them in water. And the idea was, if the baby had drawn breath, right, the lungs would be aerated, so they would float on the surface of the water. If the baby had never drawn a breath and had been born stillborn, then the lungs would actually sink. You can do the same thing with drowning victims to see if theyve drowned because theyve taken so much water into their lungs, the lungs should sink as opposed to float. They had been doing that since 1681 in the case of infanticide. We dont rely on this that much anymore, to be honest, theyve proven its inaccurate in at least 2 of cases. This is going to get even more gross. As the body decomposes, right, gases are released. Thats the bloating that you see, for instance, in a civil war corpse. Same thing is true in a babys lungs. If the corpse is decaying, the lungs will essentially have gases in them that will have them float, so i want great. 2 isnt bad for that era in terms of, you know, a degree of error, unless youre one of the women, right, who is convicted of infanticide, then that 2 doesnt look very good at all. Blood stain pattern analysis, sort of what dexter makes famous. 8 of our weight is blood, so we have 5 liters of blood, it runs close to the surface, so any time you have trauma, its going to release blood and it has all these residues in it that make it difficult to clean. Bloodstains have been used for Death Investigation for time out of mind, this guy was killed over here, he was dragged over here, hey, that guy has blood on his hands. Thats not what were talking about here with the splatter analysis and blood typing. Blood typing comes of age in 1907, the a, the ab, the o, all of that comes in in 1907, for blood tests. They use it for paternity, as you can imagine, is it my kid, is it not my kid, but they also use it for Death Investigation. The blood stain pattern analysis, 1895, you have your first scientific papers that focuses on how quickly blood dries, how arterial blood is a little brighter, and splatter analysis, bloodstains on the wall. Fingerprints too go way back, but systematized at the beginning of the 20th century. You would stick your thumb into the clay tablets the contract is chiselled into. In asia they knew fingerprints were totally unique and they would use them in Death Investigation. But it didnt come immediately to the United States until after 1902. Theres this very famous case called the scheffer case in which this guy murders someone in his apartment and busts a glass cabinet door open and he leaves a partial print on one of the shards. So they can prove because its a partial, right, he had only put his finger on part of it. Its the first case, 1902, in france, where they convict somebody on the basis of fingerprint analysis. Juries were slow to accept it, as you can imagine. People never really thought about fingerprints. But it moves to the United States pretty quickly. By 1906 in new york, basically theyre fingerprinting every criminal that comes through new york city and making cases on the basis of fingerprints. Other examples, the blood alcohol content test. Death investigators pioneered the bac test. And then the breathalyzer which comes way earlier than you would guess. Even today, 30 of traffic fatalities probably have something to do with alcohol. In the 1950s and 60s, its 50 . Its probably higher than that before. And so having a blood alcohol test and a breathalyzer test was unbelievably critical. That picture of the his and hers breathalyzer test, nothing more romantic, is from 1927, an issue of science and inventions. So you have all of these guys crazily running to create a great patent for a breathalyzer test. Even forensic dentistry becomes stabilized around 1900. The first case of using forensic dentistry in court, this is just absolutely crazy, its the salem witchcraft trials. Theres a guy, the reverend george burroughs, is accused of witchcraft. Theres evidence thats biting all these people. Of course these people are probably biting themselves and accusing him. But they admit this and use it in the court. Hes convicted, hes hung. Later they say im sorry, to his kids, and pay them. But so its an ignominious early form of bite mark analysis and forensic dentistry. But we all know by the 1870s, forensic dentistry and dental records are a key part of murder investigations. So all of this comes of age in 1900. And i want you to see the historical importance that coroners and m. E. s have played in the Public Health system and diagnostic. And Forensic Science, the toolkit they developed over that period. That said, there have been some real problems with our Death Investigation system in the United States, given its importance, granting all due respect for its successes, we have a deeply flawed system of Death Investigation in the United States. Now, modern day m. E. S and coroners operate in a complex legal environment. Its not always clear if they have the authority to do autopsies, they have prosecutors putting their demands, organ transplant specialists sitting by their side, is he dead yet, is he dead yet, tough calls to make about euthanasia, suicide. I understand, modern day medical examiners work in a difficult environment. They also have a rich rift of corruption and incompetence. Think about, whoever controls the Coroners Office controls the justice system. The wheels of justice dont turn until the coroner makes some kind of pronouncement about a cause of death and sets those wheels in motion. So if you dont want those wheels to move, buy off the coroner. Here is a great case, in the 1950s, a man was found bobbing in biscayne bay, blindfolded, with a knife in his back. And the coroner ruled it a suicide. You can just imagine the mob bosses who could control a coroner. The investigation into this death would never get started. Even if coroners didnt stoop that low, right, you can imagine they routinely got kickbacks for steering bodies to particular undertakers. You can imagine they get money for releasing crime scene photos and other bits of nastiness from their own exam tables. And this is the gnarliest bit, quite frankly. It wasnt until 1968 that we had the uniform anatomical gift act which said that coroners and m. E. S couldnt take anything out of the body before it was put in the ground. Not until 1968. So were sort of all familiar with the ghouls, as they are called, the grave robbers in the early 19th century who would steal whole bodies for uses at the medical college. We know that practice went out of favor. But the degree to which they used organs from dead bodies to do pathology tests, theres a great deal of that all the way through 1968. There was a massive trade in Human Growth Hormone when you get from the pituitary gland. We would never be able to do this, but if you dig up tons and tons of bodies buried before 1968, i wonder how many of them have the pituitary glands, quite frankly, because the coroners could make all kinds of money selling them on the black market. Just some examples, a dallas m. E. In the 1940s was in the habit of dropping dead babies on their heads to learn about injury patterns. Theyre doing this in the name of science in this case. But theyre doing it without the consent of the parents. A tacoma, washington forensic pathologist routinely stabbed corpses. A milwaukee m. E. Collected the testicles of the dead to develop theories of sterility. None of that was illegal priority 1968. At the end of the class well read mary roachs bookstiff and ill ask you at the end that have class whether were in a better place now or whether you would donate your body to science. She writes a lot about cases where if you donate your body to science, one possibility, not inevitable, and you can avoid this, but one possibility is that your decapitated head will be used to test a flip stick. That counts as having donated your body to science. So there are some problems with corruption and interests in our Death Investigation system and problems of incompetence too. Death investigation in the United States is one of the least professionalized, least standardized areas of american medicine. This issue actually bubbles to the surface every once in a while and then we just sort of tamp it back down and pretend not to notice. Ill just walk you through a few high profile disasters for Death Investigation in the United States. Starting there with john f. Kennedy, right . There is probably no autopsy that has been met with greater derision than kennedys. He was taken not to anywhere in dallas after he was shot. He was taken to bethesda naval hospital, because he was a navy man, right . And his wife thought they would treat his body with greater dignity. And maybe they did, but theyre a naval hospital, theyre not really accustomed to dealing with gunshot wounds of any kind much less the president of the United States with a wound of this nature. And then theyve got secret Service People around, the Kennedy Family is around. They got a lot wrong. They thought there were only two bullets. They couldnt identify the wound track. With two Navy Hospital pathologists operating in a confused environment, its a wonder the autopsy turned out as good as it did, which wasnt very good, was the official finding of the warren commission. You guys wont remember this because you werent alive, but i remember this, Michael Jordan, of course one of the greatest athletes of all time, theres a famous phrase, Michael Jordan is better at basketball than anyone has ever been good at anything, and he was very, very close with his father. So his father was murdered in 1993 in marlboro county, South Carolina. Marlboro county, South Carolina, had the coroner, the official coroner for marlboro county, South Carolina, was a parttime coroner and parttime construction worker, said he didnt have room in his refrigerator for the body, he didnt have anywhere to store it, so just put it in the oven. Fortunately he saved the teeth, im not even quite sure why. But this became a major investigation, as you can imagine, 1993, Michael Jordan was, i dont know, one of the greatest stars on the planet, and the loss of his father was a real black eye for pathology in the United States. The coroner in this case, i just love this quote, said, i guess ive done what the Coroners Association what Tonya Harding did for figure skating. Yes, it was a disaster. And ripped from the headlines, antonin scalia. The guy had all kinds of health problems, he was old, he was overweight. He had all kinds of risks. Im sure a heart attack is what claimed his life. But like with kennedy, the conspiracy theories that follow in the wake of failing to do any kind of analysis is a problem. So you guys know the story, right . This is very recent. He was hunting at a Little Mexican border town on a remote ranch. He was found dead by the ranch owner who said we discovered the judge in bed, a pillow over his head. And then what happens, its remote texas, right . And again, its texas. Actually they dont fly him over, they dont take him to an m. E. He was pronounced dead, with a cause of death, by phone, because thats the way our system works, it has all kinds of holes in it. And then once trump hears about this, he says, its a horrible topic, but they say they found a pillow on his face which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow. And then michael savage, the conservative radio host, this is going to be bigger and bigger, we need the equivalent of a warren commission, essentially the notion that a Supreme Court justice has been snuffed out with a pillow over his face. None that have would happen if we had a standardized system of Death Investigation. These are just the high profile disasters. Quite frankly, we dont have a system. Thats part of the problem. As late as 2009, in its report strengthening Forensic Science in the United States a path forward, Death Investigation in the United States is fragmented, deficient, hodgepodge, and disjointed. Who have a system. What we essentially have is the medical examiner whose goals should be, arent always, justice and science, overlaid on top of a much, much older system, the system of the coroner. And its the system of the coroner that i want to talk about for the rest of our lecture today. Now, i dont want to turn coroners into the villains of the story, thats not my point. Many of the advancements i laid out at the beginning, at the triangle shirt waist factory and all that, those were coroners who discovered they were on the front lines of our Public Health and discovered these real threats to us, and came forward. So i dont at all want to slight them. I do want to say, im an historian, so i want to talk about whats in their dna, that is to say, the Coroners Office, going way back, for time out of mind, is not interested in justice or science, which we would hope they would be. Its always been interested in something else, something approximating that, but not exactly the same. So does anybody know where the word coroner comes from . Corona. Its latin for crown. So in hamlet, right, they call the coroner a crowner. Essentially hes a representative of the king. Okay. So what you could do is think back, way back into medieval england. And youve got the sheriff, right, of nottingham, whos squeezing the peasants and taking all their money and none of that money is going up to the king. So the king invents the coroner. The king essentially needs somebody who can go around the sheriff and make sure revenue is running where it ought, which is to the kings coffers. Think of the coroner as the kings vulture, constantly sort of flying around and whenever theres a dispute or problem, the vulture descends to see, whoa, whoa, someone must represent the kings interest here, and make sure that he gets his end. What would that have to do with deaths . Whenever you have a death, property is loosed from its legal mooring. Is this guy a taxpayer . Does he owe money . Who does he owe money to . Does he commit suicide . If he committed suicide, thats a crime against religion, the king seizes the estate. Heres the craziest one. If they found a dead norman on the village commons, they assessed a tax on the whole village called the murdrum, which is where we get the word murder, it comes from this very ancient system of the coroner. Whenever you see the coroner, you see the imprint, france, germany, other places, they developed a medical Examiner System much earlier. Only in places that have the british imprint, british colonies or britain itself, do you have the office of the coroner. Okay. So one of the things i would like to suggest is that the coroner is really a creature of the state. Instead of the thinking of the coroner as someone on the side of justice or on the side of science and thats whats evolving in the period, really just a creature of the state. If the state is on the side of justice, if the state is on the side of science, well, then, the coroner might be there too. If the state has other interests that its protecting or other preoccupations, then the coroner will be the tool of those interests and captured by those preoccupations. Ah, and here we arrive at our assignment for the coming weeks. To illustrate the point that ive just made that the coroner is not in his or her dna necessarily, the origins of the office is not necessarily in science or in justice but in representing the interests of the state. Were going to do a little object lesson by doing a deep dive into the coroners reports from the 19th century south, using csi dixie, which you can find at csidixie. Org. What this site does is takes 682 inquests that were done in South Carolina between 1800 and 1900. It digitizes them, that is, you can read the original record. But it also datafies them. Was this a homicide, was this a suicide, was this an accidental death, all of that. Okay. Just to get a sense of what they look like. What youll see as you get into this assignment. These are the coroners reports as i first came across them when i was at the South Carolina department of archives and history. You guys know im one morbid dude, right . I have been fixated on death since i was a little kid. And i think i was always destined to open this box of coroners reports in South Carolina. The minute i opened it, i was just how many are in here . Its all endings, right . All know nothing of the noon of all of these lives, the happy moments, and all these lives are perfectly lost to me, ill only know the end. And every time i pick it up, it doesnt end well, right . They all end different. They do. They all end the same. For this weird moment, i figured, thats true of all of us, we all end different, we all end the same. Nobody has ever escaped mortality. That moment, that meeting room, the South Carolina department of archives and history, it was like, as poe would have it, death was looking gigantically down. I became fixated, and thats why i put this project together and im inflicting it on you so you can become fixated too. Here you see the business with the state, this is the state versus the dead body of ellic slave, property of h. B. English. Its just a weird way of writing it. Even in legal terms, when you commit murder, you dont commit murder against the person, you commit murder against the peace and dignity of the state. Its not money anymore, but the state has an interest that its protecting in all of these cases to some degree, the rule of law. So this is how i found them. They were just sort of a jumbled mass, trifled, a bunch of endings. Let me just show you how they work so you wont get confused when youre actually working on the assignment. Every one of them has what i call a cover sheet, kind of. Its not like it doesnt look like a form but its pretty well standardized and standardized by law. So in this case, its the state of South Carolina, kershaw district, which South Carolina was districts and then it became counties. Inquisition indented, that means taken, in the woods, it always starts with that. An inquest has to take place where the body lies, youre not supposed to move it, youre supposed to leave it there. In this case this inquest has taken place in the woods near william gardners. You always get a date, the fourth day of january, and the year of our lord 1817. You get a coroner, in the case hes a justice of the quorum, i wont even get into what that is. You get a dead guy, in this case the body of alexander mckee. You get the jurors, in this case white men, all white men, 12 white men. And then, get this phrase, which i became sort of addicted to finding in any one of these, do say upon their oaths, it became a rhapsody for me. In the case, mckee became deranged or insane, escaped from his family, died of exposure. They would routinely treat people with problems at home, they would essentially lock their loved one up and he escaped. Its like theres no Mental Health prescription to take care of right. Not in 1817. Youll start to see in South Carolina and other places reform movements for penitentiary facilities for the deaf, dumb, blind, insane, other kinds of improvements, but not in 1817. You had to take care of it at home. And in this case he escaped and died of exposure. Thats just the cover sheet. Its mostly boilerplate legalese but it does give you some data. Thats just one of the pages in a typical coroners report. In this case, what you have as a dissenting opinion, what i would call the minority report. So in this case, a guy named gino, this is in South Carolina, had been charged to take a slave to the slave jail, essentially, and the slave was injured and couldnt walk fast enough and so gino lashed a chain around his neck and dragged him until he was dead. And 11 jurors said, well and this guy was like, are you kidding . Undoubtedly a racist, undoubtedly in support of slavery, but he thought that there were some boundaries at least. And so he writes this minority report. And you get the testimony of women and slaves. They cant testify at trial. But they can testify here, before a coroners inquest. So in this case, its written out, right, by the coroner himself or another white man. So its testimony that moves through white patriarchy, to be documented. But its at least their version of what happens. So we get cases where an inquest jury finds that a slave woman had died of apoplexy but her daughter says my mom was hit with a shovel. So we get traces of what really happened in these inquest files. And you get some hint of the poor whites of the antebellum south. In this case every one of these people are making their mark. I just want you to be familiar with that. This says william hall. He cant actually write his name, the coroner has written his name for him, and then his mark, and he put an x right there. Theyre all white men but theyre all illiterate in this case. So you get much more evidence than just the cover sheet in one of these inquests. We dont really know what an inquest looks like. We dont have many people who leave us descriptions of what it is like to be at an inquest. This is nothing we do now. If somebody dies and you leave the body there for a long time, then get 12 people to stand over it and get someone to say, oh, yeah, i saw that guy walk past me two hours ago or whatnot, we just dont do it that way. They did it that way. This actually is a cartoon from 1826, i actually think its pretty good at getting at what an inquest was like. You wont be able to read this, but one of the jurors says, the mans alive, sir, for he has opened one eye. And the coroner, sir, the doctor declared him dead two hours since and he must remain dead, sir, so i shall proceed with the inquest. So whats going on here, what do you notice . Who is this guy, probably . So this guy probably owns the house. You have to be able to decode the way they would draw things in the 19th century. Wellfed, wellwarmed, clearly high class, given the wig and whatnot, his cowering dog here. This guy is the homeowner. These guys code for lower class. Theyre the jurors of the inquest. They always would write them with repulsive faces, unkempt hair. So these guys are poorer. And so what you see here is sort of overlapping layers of authority, in this one really cramped space. So theres the authority of the state, right . Who has sort of brought them all here to discover if someone has murdered against the peace and dignity of the state. You get medical authority in the form of the doctor who has made his pronouncement. This is actually a religious figure, i dont know if you can see, he has a collar. Religious legitimacy gives meaning to our mortality and explaining to us what we should do with our feelings when bad things happen, why does god allow these things to happen. So there is the authority of religion. There is an authority to local knowledge as well. These guys arent as wellfed as this guy, but they have an Authority Based on local circumstance. And then theres sort of this authority, to me at least, of death itself, because theyre all crammed into this one space and theyre really facing death together in the same intimate place. So i want you to remember that when youre working on your assignment, that that inquest was the product of this cultural process of grappling with death and coming to some kind of conclusion. These guys, right, are probably not interested exactly in science or in justice per se. They have a more supple sense of things. This is a book by one of my friends, laura edwards, shes at duke, the people and their peace legal culture and the transformation of inequality in the post revolutionary south. You should think about this book as youre working on your inquests. Her argument is essentially that what was most important in this period was the peace, not justice. What is the peace . Whatever was true yesterday should be true tomorrow. So when you have a death, you have a rift in the peace and those 12 men, 13 men, they are essentially trying to come to some sort of satisfactory conclusion and return us to the peace. So state level law gets made but at the county level where you have the coroners inquest, there life is much more supple. Laws are often ignored. And thats why women and slaves can testify, she suggests, because its not exactly a legal proceeding or a judicial proceeding. Its a proceeding of the community, to restore order to the community. So women and slaves testify at an inquest because they know what was true yesterday and what should maybe be true tomorrow. And so its very different than our sense of, right, the fbi or the Sheriffs Office, all of these people whose whole function is to compel us to obey the law. This is a different sort of endeavor altogether, shes suggesting. Okay. I want to sort of aggregate those 1,582 cases for us, to just give you a sense of what i learned from doing from seeing this a lot, all those little bundles, what came out of that massive box. To tell you the truth, what came out is what i should have known before i started and what a social worker would have told me in two seconds. So i did all of this work, i digitized 1,582 cases, a datafied all of it. A social worker would have come to me and said, tell me about this case. I said, well, its a land of massive rural poverty, its a land where most whites are radically underemployed, its a land of rampant alcoholism, its a land where they teach nobody to swim, where there are no social services, there are no treatments for addiction, where there is no access to Birth Control. She or he would have told me, okay, im going to tell what you it will look like from the morgue. They dont teach their kids to swim so theyre going to drown. They have no access to Birth Control so youll have massive numbers of unwanted pregnancies so youll have a massive number of dead babies. You have massive numbers of alcoholic, unemployed fathers, a decimating amount of spousal abuse and child abuse, and souls so desperate that theyll hang themselves before theyll live in that world anymore. So what i now know, if you were a white male in South Carolina, between 1840 and 1880, the coroner is standing above your body, how did you die . A combination of alcohol and stupidity. So we have this idea, right, of the old south particularly as this place of knife fights and eye gouging and dueling. Its so much sadder than that. If you were a white female, spartanburg county, South Carolina, same period, coroner is standing above your body, how did you die . You hung yourself. If you were an africanamerican male, you hung yourself, and werent hung by somebody else. So its a land, no social services, its a place where white men are drinking themselves and their dependents to death, essentially, a land of massive rural poverty and inequality, and thats where people go out of the world in such a place. Okay. Your assignment is going to be to write up one inquest as a narrative story. Take it as a starting point and use it to tell me something about life and death in the 19th century south. So you just take one case and you try to peel it like an onion. Tell its story but also try to branch out. And to give you an example, im going to end with one story told from csi dixie and the inquest there. It is the story of the deaths of james cook, moses parks, alan addaway, and alan minyard in South Carolina in 1876. This is where well end, with this one story from a set of inquests in the csid case set. This map i know is probably hard for you all to see. Hamburg is right here. It is directly across the Savannah River from augusta, if you can orient yourself to augusta, youre practically in hamburg. Hamburg is directly across the way. Here is the Savannah River which is rolling down to the sea here. And here is the port at charleston, one of the most important cities in the antebellum south. So hamburg had been settled in 1820 by Henry Schultz who named the town after the famous city, right, in his native germany. It quickly became a hub of wagon traffic would come here, pulling cotton from the interior of the south, at first, in 1820, we dont have railroads yet. Most of that cotton is going by Savannah River to ports here and then carried to charleston by boat. So thats 1820. By 1825, they build this hamburg to charleston railroad. And this is the b o, right, a famous, famous common carrier, the baltimore and ohio railroad. If you look on wikipedia right now, it will say its the longest common carrier in the United States. No, because everybody forgets about the hamburg to charleston line, chartered in 1827. It was the Worlds Largest rated railroad at its completion in 1833. In its heyday, 60 million bails of cotton moved through hamburg each year. Im guessing prior to that in this area it had a lot of wagon traffic. Right. And thats what well see, especially afterward. What happens to hamburg is that it becomes a spur town, right . Youre familiar with these, where the railroad essentially goes around it or finds another route. And so by 1876, hamburg is a ghost town, essentially. And what you have after the civil war is africanamericans specialized in these places. The problem, if youre africanamerican after the civil war, part of it is real estate. What real estate do you actually own . None. 40 acres and a mule, forget about it, you dont own anything. So were sort of all familiar with the degree to which the africanamerican Church Becomes the center of its not just religious life but political life and civic life. Its the one building they own, it becomes a schoolhouse, rec center, political incubator, place where everybody gathers. When theyre firebombing churches, theyre doing far more than attacking just the spirit of the Africanamerican Community. Its a real estate problem. So anyway, africanamericans specialized in these depressed little towns because they had been great once, right . But now theyre totally left behind, theyre a ghost town, you could buy this real estate for relatively cheap. And you can erect an africanamerican town where you can safeguard yourself, your kids, and your community. So thats what hamburg is by 1876. It essentially has 600 residents, a fifth of them are white, a fifth of them are fine living in a majority Africanamerican Community, theyre like, this is great, i like hamburg. So heres the story that i would tell about hamburg in 1876. So july 4, 1876, right, its the hundredyear birthday of the United States. And the president of the United States, ulysses s. Grant, tells says, what should we do to celebrate . Well, every town should have a parade, which means a militia march. They should write the towns history and they should read the declaration of independence. And well sort of collect all those town histories and it will be a biography of america, and this is going to be great. So thats the idea, july 4, 1876. Remember, majority africanamerican town. Evan africanamerican militia, their guns are terrible, they have no bullets, it doesnt matter, theyre marching, theyre having a good time, theyve read the declaration of independence and theyre in the town square of the africanamerican town which they bought with their own money. Two boys are watching these guys march under their militia captain, a guy named doc adams. This was one witness who remembered them marching, they were most equal to any company, white or colored, adams had them welldrilled. The two boys belong to the butler plantation. To get there, they have to come by wagon and then loop around to their fathers plantation which is over here. Theyre constantly having to come through hamburg on their way to augusta and from their plantation. And its driving them crazy that this is such a successful africanamerican town, its driving them crazy probably that these are black men with guns, that theyre so wellordered and welldrilled, and theyre so happy on july 4, 1876. This represents everything that they dont want to see in the history of the United States. So they drive their wagon directly into the parade. They could easily have gone around. This is actually a really large field, they could have gone around easily. They dont, they drive directly up to the parade. And they demand that doc adams essentially disperse his militia. He says, i dont know why i would do that, this is what the president of the United States had wanted all of his towns to do. Getson says, doesnt matter, this is the rut i always travel. I like that mentality, this is the rut i travel, i cannot be in a new place, in a new space, think a new thought, this is the rut i always travel. So doc adams relents and he says, open order, which is essentially make a hole. They do, and then all of the militia goes home on what had been sort of a depressing end to the fourth of july. The next day, tommy butler, henry getson and his father come to the Sheriffs Office at hamburg to swear out a warrant on doc adams, his militia, for obstructing a public road. There they meet Prince Rivers. I want to tell you the story, Prince Rivers is one of the more remarkable stories from reconstruction. Hes the town justice essentially the trial justice in the town. Also the mayor of hamburg, also the general of the militia. So he wears a lot of hats. So they come to his office to swear out this complaint. I want to just give you a little bit of a back story. This is the best picture we have of Prince Rivers. He had been born in slavery. He taught himself to read and write. He was a carriage driver in buford, South Carolina. As soon as the civil war starts he jumps on his carriage horse and rides it to freedom. He joins the United States colored troops, he becomes a sergeant. Hes attacked in new york because he has chevrons on, even whites there dont want to see a black officer, and he more than holds his own, this guy was one tough hombre. His own commander said rivers had no equal. There is not a white officer in this regiment who has more administrative ability, no antislavery novel has described a man of such marked ability. If his education had reached a higher point i see no reason why he should not command the army of the potomac. And if there should ever be a black monarchy in South Carolina, he will be its king. He didnt become the king of South Carolina, as we know. He was known as the black prince, the power of aiken county. Edgefield county, the most unreconstructed county in South Carolina, has a county carved out of it and hes trying to make a go of interracial democracy in hamburg, in aiken county, in South Carolina, at the height of reconstruction. So hes got these angry white men who have this ridiculous notion theyre going to drag his militia captain out to some legal bushes to beat the man to death. He says, maybe these guys are drunk or theyre hot heads, lets let cooler heads prevail, he says lets come back in a few days, ill have doc adams here, well have some of the militia people here, well see if we cant settle here. A couple of days later, matthew butler, no relation, probably some relation, you know how the south is, to the butler boys, shows up at Prince Rivers office. This guy is totally unreconstructed. In his first run at congress, he lost to a black man. He tried to take it out on local blacks. They burnt down his house. Utterly unreconstricted, as i say. This is a quote from one his friends, with all of his beautiful manners, when he wanted to be, he could be the most coldblooded, insolent human being that mortal eyes ever beheld. So he said he was there as general butler. I dont know if he thinks his Confederate Service isnt over. I dont know whats going on. He says hes there as the butlers lawyer but also there as general butler. He demands that the militia come to him, that they stack their arms and surrender those and that doc adams formally apologize to the butler boys for how they treated them on the fourth of july. Prince rivers asked if they did all that, would butler vouch for their safety. Butler said it is owing to how they apologize to mr. Butler for how they treated his sons on the fourth. So here is our situation. Most of the militia is holed up. This is where the parade had been days before. Most of the militia is holed up here at the armory. They maybe have 120 rounds of ammo. Their guns are really quite poor. So the gun we fought the civil war we think of as such a breakthrough, this rifled musket, the shoulder of every man in the army. But its the winchester, that Technology Comes in right after the civil war. We think of it as the gun that won the west. Its the gun that won the south. The africanamericans in their armory have 120 rounds of ammo and really crummy guns. By comparison, the people who start flooding into hamburg, coming across the bridge from augusta, many of them are carrying winchesters, and we have strong accounts that they bought the local grocer out of alcohol. So by 6 00 p. M. That evening, they are well drunk. And the folks in the army armory are starting to worry about whats going to happen. About 6 00, they open fire on the armory. The armory returns fire, maybe did or maybe didnt kill one guy, mckee merriweather. He may have been killed by his own dudes, we have no idea. He had promised earlier in the day he was going to kill everybody in the armory and then go to heaven and kill jesus christ himself. Anyway, merriweather is killed here, all bets are off, they drag a cannon from augusta and blow a hole in the armory. Africanamericans and others escape from the armory, many are captured and are carried to the dead ring which is right there. As it happens, we have surviving witness who was in the dead ring that day. One of them men there was a lieutenant in the militia, remember, doc adams controls the militia. One of his lieutenants turns to a friend and says, maze, what do you think of this . Jack mays had been a cook in the union army, now by all accounts he ran a gambling operation in hamburg. I dont know, addaway, what to think of it. Do you think they will kill of us . Just so, says mays. Do you think they will kill me . I do, says mays. All you got to do is pray to god to give up your soul, give up your wife and children and Everything Else for they will kill you. With that addaway hung his head and commenced crying. There was disagreement amongst the whites about what to do. They were in a ring around the africanamerican prisoners, they just wanted to open the ring up and turn it into a firing line and be done with it. One white named Bill Robinson who had been the son of a judge said, now, gentlemen, the way to do it is go and hold a courtmartial and whatever the Court Martial determines, then you can do it. With that a small detachment moved away from the ring. They probably consulted with general butler. Certainly they drew up a list. Addaway, as getson, remember henry getson, one of the boys in the wagon, as getson and tommy are leaving to consult and draw up a list, addaway begged of getson, do all you can for me, yes, goddamn you, you will do it in a short while, i will fix you now in a short while. Getson and tommy come back, addaways is the first name they call, they carry him to a low oak field right there where they shoot him in the head. They come back to the ring and do that four more times. The last time they call a name, pompey curry, at the sound of his name, hes up and running, runs as fast as he can. Hes gunned down. And presumed dead. And one of the gunmen says, what better fun do you want than that . In fact curry hadnt been killed and thats the reason that we have verbatim the quotations from inside the dead ring. So what do you do the next day . You convene a coroners inquest. Remember how we started our whole conversation, the wheels of justice do not turn until the coroner makes a pronouncement, this is the place where africanamericans actually control the Coroners Office in civil society. And we write so many books about massacres and about lynchings. I wish we wrote more books about what you do the next day to pick up the pieces. And in this case, Prince Rivers stood over the dead bodies of those six men and convened a coroners inquest because thats what you do. And he gathers together the pages of the testimony and issues arrest warrants for 87 white men including matthew butler, future South Carolina senator, and ben tillman, future South Carolina governor. That inquest of course makes it here to the new york times. Unfortunately it doesnt make it any farther. The wheels of justice turn no more. The straight outs were in ascend ants and reconstruction was rolling back. To rivers dismay, there were no more links in the chain of justice. He tells his son joshua, interviewed by the wpa in the 1930s, he says, now it will be a hundred years. So knows exactly what they lost at hamburg. It wasnt that it happened. It was that the government wasnt going to do anything about it. Okay. What happens to rivers . He returns to driving a carriage. And to me, right, this is the arc. It isnt just the people who were brutalized or killed during reconstruction. It is to take a person like rivers who could have been in charge of the army of the potomac, who taught himself to read and write, who had been the mayor of a town and a state legislator and all of those things, but his arc is from a carriage driver to a soldier to a state legislator to a mayor and to a carriage driver again, driving white people around. Attired in his livery suit and tall beaver hat, he looked like a piece of statuary, so erect in form was he, according to an eyewitness. What markers or memorials are on the ground . How shall we remember what happened at hamburg . In 1916, they erected a monument to the massacre, to the riot, as it was described by them. To mckee merriweather, the lone white who had been killed and promised to kill jesus christ himself probably caught in the crossfire. Inscribed on that monument is in life he exemplified the highest ideal of anglosaxon civillization, after which they watched birth of a nation. And what monument remains to Prince Rivers and all of the men in hamburg . Where is hamburg now . This is what happens to hamburg. In 1911, the river floods, and basically augusta has the money in the federal pool to get the army corps of engineers out to shore up the levies. Hamburg does not. In 1929, the next flood comes through, hamburg washes away. All that they owned, all that they bought, none of it protected, all of it returned. And now known as north augusta. And here we are around the site of the hamburg massacre. This is a golf resort with very wellappointed streets, houses, right on the river, in prime real estate. What it would have meant to the Africanamerican Community to have owned this today, how many millions of dollars might that be. I dont have anything against golf. Maybe gentrification would have happened anyway. My question is how do we remember, what markers remain on the land for us to remember. Here is the execution site. Remember that low oak field where they shot down charles addaway and three others. And what is running over that site . That is the Jefferson Davis memorial highway. So that is just an example of the kind of story that you can write from these inquests and that i hope you will write in the weeks ahead. Does anybody have any questions about Death Investigation in the United States, the Coroners Office in the 19th century south, or anything else . I know, its been another glum day in the history of death and dying in the United States. Ill see you all on tuesday. Thanks very much. Weeknights this month, were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. Tonight, we look at cabinet secretaries. James baker served as secretary of state for president george h. W. Bush and has Ronald Reagans white house chief of staff and treasury secretary. Hes interviewed about leadership and his career by attorney and historian talmadge boston in this program hosted by Baylor University law school. Watch tonight beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern and enjoy American History tv every weekend on cspan3. American history tv on cspan3. Every weekend documenting americas story. Funding for American History tv comes from these companies who support cspan3 as a public service. On october 12, 2000, two al qaeda suicide bombers attacked the Navy Destroyer uss cole in yemens adan harbor, killing 17