Historic Relic

Sixty-six years ago the populous city of Buffalo provided almost unparalleled conveniences for its inhabitants. It had approximately one saloon for every 220 citizens, male and female, infantile, adult and senile. Its facilities for gambling and original sin were on a similar scale. In this situation a 33-year-old lawyer made a difficult decision. He was rated one of the ablest young men at the Buffalo bar, had been assistant district attorney and might well have looked forward to an election as district attorney or even to Congress. But he decided to run for the hack job of Sheriff of Erie County. Doing so meant giving up his legal career for three years, but during those three years the sheriff's fees would reach a good fat sum, perhaps $40,000, at any rate much more than could be made at law. So down among the bars where he sometimes caroused between bouts of terrific hard work, word was passed around that "Big Steve" was out for sheriff. The Buffalo Courier cried: "He is at the same time so true a gentleman, so generous, modest and lovable a man that we have never heard of anybody's envying him. . . . His very name is a host."

On election day Erie County's 179,000 citizens elected him by a bare majority of 303 votes, trailing his ticket. He did a good job as sheriff. He cleaned out graft in the dissolute county jail and made himself unpopular with local politicians, but misfortune lay in store.

One night down on the waterfront a certain Mrs. Morrissey was cutting herself a slice of bread in her tenement room when her drunken son Patrick blundered in, demanding money. He knocked her down when she refused. Undaunted she got to her feet screaming, "you had better kill your mother and be done with it." Son Patrick took the bread knife and obliged her. He was the first man to be condemned to death in Buffalo in six years. It was the duty of the sheriff to hang him. The young sheriff went home to his mother Ann, widow of a Presbyterian parson, in Holland Patent; N. Y., to ask what he should do. She advised him to pay a deputy $10 to act as hangman. He replied that he would not ask another man to do a dirty job like that.

He went back to Buffalo, had a gallows built in the jail yard, a canvas stretched overhead to prevent the curious from seeing from neighboring housetops. After taking unusual precautions to have the execution go off swiftly and without a hitch, he took a stand where he could not see Matricide Patrick, and sprung the trap.

A year later in a Buffalo dive, Jack Gaffney, a dissolute young saloonkeeper, shot a man in a game of cards. When he was convicted of murder, the young sheriff went to law to test his sanity, even convoked a special jury and himself read them the law on insanity and murder. Unable to escape by this means, the sheriff played hangman a second time.

Eight years later the same young sheriff was elected Mayor of Buffalo, nine years later Governor of New York, twelve years later, on March 4, 1885, he, Stephen Grover Cleveland, became the first hang man President of the U. S.

Last week in Buffalo workmen poking around in the garage of the county jail came upon some dusty timbers. After they were examined the present sheriff of Erie County offered them to the Buffalo Historical Society as an historic relic: the gallows on which the 22nd and 24th President of the U. S. had hanged two men. The timbers were all there, but the rope was missing.

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