Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1885 — Senator Voorhees’ Speech. [ARTICLE]

Senator Voorhees’ Speech.

Concluded from First Page, pause a few in ments over his prostrate form, still as if in death, you must remember that this is a sick man, weak in physical strength, without the powers of health to uphold him in sudden and appalling calamity. He lias chronic diseases unto death. With consumption clutching at his throat and lungs and aggravated chronic dyspepsia depressing the mind, darkening the spirit, and casting the soul into gloomy depths, he tottered, reeled and fell. You strong men in this jury box; you me* with perfect digesttion, who eat three hearty meals a day, rememb -r you are dealing with your brother who is in no such condition. You are dealing with the shadow of what he once was, reduced by physical disease .50 that Dr. Boyd says, he could not resist the causss which overwhelm the mind as one in robust health might do. Come, now, put yourself in his place. “Gentlemen, I have heard'the doctrine of “cooling time” invoked in this case. Cooling time! That scene at Knoxville occurred nearly a year before Henry paid the penalty of his crime. I care not if it had occurred a h undred years before, could the parties have lived so long. You may become cool after an insult, or even a blow in passion; but when the form of the wife has cnce been seen by the mind’s eye writhing in the srms of the seducer; when once the husband has pictured to himself, looking through Walls and across ri vers, beyond the deep blue valleys and over mountains, it may be, the fair, loved form that has rested on his loving breast in happy repose surrendered in the desired of a besotted and lustful wretch, a cooling time will never come to him, and how well you know it! As well might you visit a lost sou] who had laid ripon the burning marl of hell for a thousand years and say: “You have been here long enough to become cool; there has been a cooling time since you took up your abode in eternal torment.” He would answer that it has been perpetual hell; that it had been burning time, and burning time alone. Suppose years pass by, and the husband thinks at all of his wife lost in sham will his thoughts be temperate and his blood cool? The

whole horrible subject comes up again. He can never think of her, whether living or dead, after defilement, without involuntarily recalling these revolting particulars that have crazed the brain in all the ages of the past, and will continue to do so in all the ages to come. I do not want to know a man who can grow cool under such circumstances. I wish no man for my friend whose heart can be turned to ice with something so much worse than murder, so much worse than death in his home. Cool ng time! From the moment Edward T. J ohnson fell forwa -d on his face with the fatal letter of confession in his hand, from that moment, instead of the fires of suffering, grief, bereavement, bitterness hate, revenge, if you please, (lying away by the lapse of time, they grew stronger, hotter and fiercer. What further element of wretchedness, what additional pang of woe and desolation could he experience? Every deadly ingredient of human misery which the blackest malice could invent or find was in the accursed cup which he has drained the dregs. * * * We can follow the pure and honored wife and daughter to the grave, and time, after awhile, with its healiug influences, will bring calmness and consolation to our hearts and enable us to control our grief. Death is no calamity, if we die with a good name? but let dishonor once come to follow us over the world like a hissing serpent, and neither in lite nor in death is there peace or rest. * * * I have here and there heard Major Henry spoken of as a Tennesseean. No, no; he wns not a Tennesseean. He was a bastard. He was not legitimate. He tried to run for the Legislature here and he voted here; but he was a bastard; not a legitimate growth of your State. I know the people of Tennessee. One of the greatest men of Indiana was Tighlmun A. Howard, born in Tennessee, and here in East Tennessee. Your people are brave, generous, and love pure homes and domestic bliss. Do not tell me that this crawling, besotted old beast belongs here at all. He was worse and baser than the kite in the eagle’s nest, Your nests here in these mountains were made for eagle’s and not for filthy carrion crows. * * * But here is another abomination: Captain Johnson in his hour of deepest trial has had hurled at him with the sanction of Governor Porter’s name, never recalled or denied by him, that eight or nine years ago he wanted a divorce from his wife: that at French Lick Springs, in Indiana, he had fallen in love with a rich lady and desired to marry her, although then a married man. That horrible calumny came to his ears when he was mourning the death of his wife, when he was weeping over her new made grave. Again be shrieked with pain, as if a bruised and wounded place on his body, commencing to heal, had been made to bleed afresh from the blows of an iron hammer. But the accursed lie could not live. There f're no connecting links in the discourse. It maintains a continuous height throughout. It comprises a symmetrical history of the most remarkable trial in criminal jurisprudence. It contains all the poetry of Childe Harrold, and will take a place with the English classics. ’