Since I like to think about the jury, including its literary history, I realized I ought to return to a story I first read many years ago in high school English: The Devil and Daniel Webster by Stephen Vincent Benét.
The short story is a very easy read, and rather a humorous one, even if not every joke might land quite like it did when readers were more routinely familiar with the person of Daniel Webster. But for lovers of New England and/or the jury, it’s definitely still worth the quick read.
The writing sings like the following, describing “the kind of man” Daniel Webster was and the unusually grand farm that therefore suited him: “The chickens he raised were all white meat down through the drumsticks, the cows were tended like children, and the big ram he called Goliath had horns with a curl like a morning-glory vine and could butt through an iron door.”
Benét’s story tells of “the biggest [legal] case [attorney Webster] argued,” which “never got written down in the books, for he argued it against the devil, nip and tuck and no holds barred.”
It goes down like this: Hard-up New Hampshire farmer Jabez Stone makes a pact with the devil for years of prosperity in return for his eternal soul. The pact is clear, the devil delivers, and, indeed, the devil even grants Stone a desired extension. Still, when it comes time to pay up, Stone balks and turns to attorney Webster for help.
And help Webster attempts, but the devil rightly turns him back upon every legal point. “Webster twisted and turned and thumped his fist on the table, but he couldn’t get away from that.” He tries compromise, but the devil has no reason to settle, having fully satisfied his end of the bargain. In short, “the King of Lawyers” stands his ground.
But Webster has one chance yet: “Then I stand on the Constitution! I demand a trial for my client!”
Now, since the dispute was not exactly Sixth or Seventh Amendment material, Webster agrees to “any court [the devil would] choose, so [long as] it is an American judge and an American jury!”
And so it is that a jury of twelve dead is assembled, a troubling lot of infamous early Americans, with Judge John Hathorne of Salem-witch-trial infamy presiding.
On the law, “it didn’t look any-ways good for the defense.” But since the role of a jury ought not be limited to the law—and here is where Benét’s story makes a contribution similar to that of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and many actual jury trials of Classical Greece—advocate Webster has plenty to say:
“He was talking about the things that make a country a country, and a man a man. And he began with the simple things that everybody’s known and felt—the freshness of a fine morning when you’re young, and the taste of food when you’re hungry, and the new day that’s every day when you’re a child. He took them up and he turned them in his hands. They were good things for any man. But without freedom, they sickened. And when he talked of those enslaved, and the sorrows of slavery, his voice got like a big bell. He talked of the early days of America and the men who had made those days. It wasn’t a spread-eagle speech, but he made you see it. He admitted all the wrong that had ever been done. But he showed how, out of the wrong and the right, the suffering and the starvations, something new had come. And everybody had played a part in it, even the traitors.”
And how about defendant Stone? Well, he—like all defendants—wasn’t as bad as the worst thing he’d done:
“Then he turned to Jabez Stone and showed him as he was—an ordinary man who’d had hard luck and wanted to change it. And, because he’d wanted to change it, now he was going to be punished for all eternity. And yet there was good in Jabez Stone, and he showed that good. He was hard and mean, in some ways, but he was a man. There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too. And he showed what the pride of it was till you couldn’t help feeling it. Yes, even in hell, if a man was a man, you’d know it. And he wasn’t pleading for any one person any more, though his voice rang like an organ. He was telling the story and the failures and the endless journey of mankind. They got tricked and trapped and bamboozled, but it was a great journey. And no demon that was ever foaled could know the inwardness of it—it took a man to do that.”
Other than the typical-of-its-day gendered language, that’s beautiful sentiment. And it swayed even the devil’s own hanging jury:
“We find for the defendant, Jabez Stone. Perhaps ’tis not strictly in accordance with the evidence, but even the damned may salute [such] eloquence.”
Indeed they may, and indeed our juries might… if only the rules of evidence and procedure would allow.
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