A NOTABLE CRIMINAL TRIAL.
IT will scarcely be credited, at first hearing
of the statement, that the writer has either
drawn or, after inspection, approved, during
the course of a professionally official career
as prosecutor of criminal pleas, over fifteen
thousand indictments in the course of a
fifteen years' official experience, and has as
sisted in at least ten thousand trials; which
experience will entitle him to credence when
he pronounces the cause celebre which is the
topic of this article the most interesting one
that came within the scope of his observa
tion or participation. It was known to the
newspapers all over the Union, and through
them to a vast clientele of readers, as the
Chemical Bank forgery case. This financial
institution, situated in New York, in a modest
little brown stone building on Broadway,
opposite the city hall and court house —
and since towered over by pretentious sky
scrapers — boasts the highest value to stock
known to any corporation in the world. In
this 189/, each of its original hundred
dollar shares sells for over two thousand
dollars. During the Civil War, and when
gold was at an enormous premium, the
Chemical Bank never refused to redeem in
the precious metal, when offered, any out
standing of their bills, long since now ceased
to be issued. Its officers, from highest to
lowest, have always been of the shrewdest;
and yet, in the summer of 1854, that bank
was made the victim of the most ingenious
criminal obtaining of money, even yet, nearly
half a century later, known to New York's
financial circles.
Not many months prior to that date news
paper readers had been made sensationally
acquainted with the details of a trial before
that great judge of the Federal Supreme
Court, John McLean, sitting at nisi prius, in
Ohio, wherein William Kissane and Lyman
Cole were arraigned as conspirators, with three others for attempting to defraud certain fire insurance companies by incendiarily destroying an Ohio River steamboat falsely laden with a variety of alleged valuable but sham merchandise much over-insured. Apart from the boldness of the crime the trial became notable from the array of coun sel engaged, among whom was one who afterwards became a candidate for vicepresident and an ambassador; another who later ascended the bench of the Supreme Court at Washington, a third who was an ex-State governor, and others who were respectively a cabinet sec retary or a Federal attorney-general, and a leading counsel for the defense of an im peached president of the United States. Throughout four weeks there was a daily contention of legal wits over novel and complicated legal questions, but all only to the simple ending of an acquittal. The Ohio case was popularly known as the Martha Washington case, because that re vered name was on the paddle-wheels of the burned steamboat. Freed from criminal danger in the matter, their jury to a moral certainty unduly influenced in their favor, Kissane and Cole — still cute as moths hovering around a candle-flame with previously singed wings — hastened to engage in a new criminal enterprise as daring and ingenious as had been the Martha Washington conspiracy. In this second criminal design they enlisted James Findlay, a broken-down commercial man of Cincinnati, who possessed a small cash capital of two thousand dollars, needful to initiate the contemplated fraud which was to involve complicated forgery and false personation. Westward their star of imperial criminality began its way under many con
