MLM Counties News. Notices. Need-to-know Information.
A ‘19th century frontier whodunit' details an unusual presidential order
St. Louis attorneys Benjamin Gratz Brown and Francis Preston Blair Jr. defended a Sac Indian accused of murder in an 1851 trial. Eventually, they convinced President Millard Fillmore, pictured, to commute See See Sah Mah’s death sentence. The case, an illustration of the court system of mid-19th Century Missouri, was detailed in a presentation last week by historian Bill Foley.
Foley didn't have much desire to read through old judicial records. They were, he assumed, "dry as dust and comprehensible only to those trained in the law." Gradually, though, he came to see what many lawyers already know: that court records contain the kernels of great stories, sometimes providing details of people's lives that don't exist anywhere else. Often, they can be windows into the issues that society faced at the time.
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