Empire of skulls, p.1
Empire of Skulls, page 1
ALSO BY PAUL STOB
Intellectual Populism: Democracy, Inquiry, and the People
William James and the Art of Popular Statement
Thinking Together: Lecturing, Learning, and Difference in the Long Nineteenth Century (ed.)
Dedicated to the Misfits, who,
like the Fowlers, want your skull
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE: Secrets of the Pirate’s Head
CHAPTER ONE: A Meeting of Minds
CHAPTER TWO: Coming to America
CHAPTER THREE: Heads Up
CHAPTER FOUR: A Cabinet of Curiosities
CHAPTER FIVE: Science for the People
CHAPTER SIX: Celebrity Science
CHAPTER SEVEN: What’s Sex Got to Do with It?
CHAPTER EIGHT: Life in the Octagon
CHAPTER NINE: Heading Toward Freedom
CHAPTER TEN: Decline of an Empire
EPILOGUE: The Hope of Improvement
APPENDIX: Do-It-Yourself Phrenology
Acknowledgments
Notes
Image Credits
PROLOGUE
SECRETS OF THE PIRATE’S HEAD
THE SLOOP SET SAIL FROM LONG ISLAND BEARING SOUTH, a crisp night air sweeping along the deck as it went. Soon, the pirate knew, darkness would shroud the vessel, and they’d be far enough from shore that no one would hear the screams. Below deck was a stash of gold he planned to pilfer, but only after he dispatched his shipmates: George Burr, captain of the ship and not yet forty years old; Oliver Watts, twenty-three years old; and Oliver’s brother Smith Watts, nineteen years old. The pirate was bigger and stronger than all of them. Plus, he had his axe nearby.1
When night fully engulfed them, Smith and Captain Burr retired to the cabin, leaving Oliver at the helm. The pirate, who was using the pseudonym William Johnson, decided to keep him company. After pacing around the creaky deck, he asked Oliver if he could steer. The young man was fine with that; it would give him a break, and they had plenty of time on the voyage.
After some chitchat about life and weather, Johnson squinted toward the horizon and pointed. “Is that Barnegat Light?” he asked, wondering if the lighthouse at the northern tip of Long Beach Island was coming into view.
“No,” replied Oliver, explaining that it would be at least an hour before they could see Barnegat.
Squinting harder, Johnson asked again, this time insisting that it must be the lighthouse. Oliver turned to take a closer look—a big mistake.
In a fluid motion, and with a kind of emotionless passion only a veteran killer could manage, the pirate wrapped his fingers around the axe and buried it in the back of Oliver’s skull. A crimson geyser twinkled in the moonlight, and Oliver dropped to his knees. Johnson tugged the axe out of his skull and planted it in the young man’s back to finish the job.
Just then Smith, awake from the commotion, poked his head out of the cabin door to see what was afoot. Stomping over to him quickly, Johnson swung the axe in a powerful arc, severing Smith’s head cleanly from his body. Another fountain of blood sprayed the deck red.
Storming into the cabin, Johnson found Captain Burr sitting up in bed. “What’s happening?” Burr asked. When his eyes adjusted to the sight of a large man covered in blood and gripping an axe, he had his answer.
Leaping out of bed, Burr began grappling with the maniac, trying to pry the axe from Johnson’s bloody hands. They tussled for several minutes, and Burr proved stronger than his 135-pound frame looked. Maybe getting the booty wouldn’t be as easy as the pirate had assumed.
But Johnson was able to push off Burr, creating some distance between them, and swing the axe one more time, lopping off half of Burr’s head, one of his eyes, and part of his nose. Blood, brains, and skull fragments decorated the cabin, which now looked less like sleeping quarters than like an abattoir.
When Johnson returned to the deck to dispose of the bodies of the Watts brothers, he found Oliver somehow still alive and shambling zombie-like toward him. Stunned, he held the axe in both hands—one hand at the bottom, the other right below the metal head—and used it to push Oliver over the edge of the ship. Somehow the determined zombie grabbed on to the railing, dangling off the ship’s side and refusing to die.
After trying and failing to pry Oliver’s fingers loose, the pirate realized there was only one thing left to do. He raised the axe and brought it down on the young man’s hand, severing Oliver’s fingers and thumb. Oliver fell into the sea as his digits landed on the ship’s deck.
Back in the cabin, Johnson helped himself to some beer to take the edge off. Then he grabbed Captain Burr’s bloody body, dragged it onto the deck, and pushed it over the side. Next he dragged the headless corpse of Smith and tossed it into the frigid waters.
Wait, the pirate thought, freezing in place. Where is Smith’s head? He looked around the deck but saw nothing.
Heading back into the cabin, the pirate got on his hands and knees and started feeling around in the darkened corners. Eventually his hand touched some wet, sticky, matted hair. Grabbing hold of Smith’s head, he carried it like a small sack of onions onto the deck and, standing in the twinkling starlight, smeared with the blood and brains of his shipmates, launched it into the water, followed by his trusty axe.
The pirate stuffed all the money and valuables he could find into a sack, climbed into the ship’s yawl, lowered it into the sea, and rowed away as fast as he could.2
IT DIDN’T TAKE long for other sailors to find this ship without a crew. Nor did it take long to discover that the deck was awash in blood. The sailors quickly contacted the authorities, who brought the sloop into port and started searching it for clues. Other than blood and axe marks, the best clue they found was Oliver’s severed fingers and thumb.
Determined newspaper reporters got word of the grisly ghost ship and descended on the scene, eager to craft high drama for the daily papers. They worked up colorful columns about the “pools of blood” and “human hair matted with gore” smeared across the ship. The scene had the makings of a crime of the century, and the reporters pledged to embed themselves with police until the killer was caught.3
After asking around different Long Island ports, police found the ship’s manifest. Immediately one name stood out—William Johnson. Captain Burr and the Watts brothers were known to everyone in the area, but not Johnson. Plus, people had remembered seeing a burly, gruff-looking man trailing the captain in the days before the voyage.
Then they got the tip that would break the case wide open: A large man—drunk, bloody, and carrying a sack of money—had been spotted in Manhattan. Police raced to the scene only to discover that the man had just left the city with his wife and five-year-old son in tow. They also learned his name was not William Johnson; it was Albert Hicks.
Hicks, meanwhile, took his wife and son to Rhode Island to lay low for a while. They rented a room in a flophouse and waited. After only two days, cops stormed into the flophouse at two in the morning to find Hicks asleep. When he woke up, he knew the jig was up and went peacefully, leaving his wife and son, who were apparently unaware of his crimes, to find their own way back to New York.
The trial of Albert Hicks began on May 18, 1860. Because detectives had never found the bodies of Burr and the Watts brothers, prosecutors worried that they might not be able to secure a conviction for murder. So they went with a charge of piracy, given that the crime had happened at sea and that a piracy conviction carried the death penalty. The trial lasted less than a week, and the jury took fewer than ten minutes to find Hicks guilty. After the verdict was read, the judge sentenced Hicks to death and set the execution date for Friday, July 13—a good day to hang a stoic axe murderer.
That bright summer day became a festival. Over one thousand people rode on the big boat carrying Hicks to Bedloe Island so they could watch his execution. Drinking the saloon on the ship dry, they stumbled over one another to catch a glimpse of the famous criminal and to watch his neck snap at the end of a noose. They weren’t the only ones. For only one dollar, curious New Yorkers could secure a spot on a viewing boat, consume unlimited beer and oysters, and witness the death of the man who would become the last pirate of New York.
Shortly after eleven in the morning, the hangman put a black hood over Hicks’ head and fastened a noose around his neck. After receiving the signal to proceed, the executioner pulled a lever on the gallows, which dropped a set of heavy weights and pulled Hicks into the air. His neck snapped, and for several minutes, as his spirit left this world, his body twitched in the air, dancing the dance of the condemned. “Few men have passed from earth so wholly unregretted as did this murderer and pirate,” wrote The New York Times.4
THESE GRISLY AXE murders raised some pressing questions for Americans of the time: How could Hicks have brutally slaughtered three innocent men, stolen their money, and then flaunted it around Manhattan without a care in the world? How could a supposedly advanced nation be dealing with such primitive depravity? What made Hicks become a monster?
Hicks himself had answers to these questions. In a lengthy confession given to a reporter prior to his execution, he explained that there were actually five people on the ship that night: Captain Burr, the two Watts brothers, Hicks, and the devil. “I have long felt as though I were the Devil’s own,” Hicks explained, “and that though he had served me so many years, I must at last be his.” The devil craved not just the blood of Hicks’s victims but the pirate himself in hell.5
The devil’s participation in the grisly murders made a good deal of sense to many at the time. Of course the devil was loose on the ship. Hicks’s atrocities seemed characteristic of the violence of the 1850s that would shortly open the nation’s veins in civil war. The best explanation for Hicks’s evil came down to forces outside of him—forces in a supernatural plane of existence that accounted for all that was good and bad in the world.
But maybe there was another explanation. Two weeks before Hicks’s execution, authorities locked him in shackles, loaded him into a horse-drawn wagon, and transported him to a business located at 308 Broadway. When they arrived, they parked in front of a window displaying rows of human skulls, which looked blankly ahead as the murderous pirate stepped out of the wagon and proceeded inside, passing under a sign that read “Fowler and Wells, Phrenologists.”
Inside, Hicks and the police creaked across wooden floorboards toward the back of the store. As they passed, Hicks saw many, many more skulls watching him. The walls were lined with them—a veritable army of the dead staring at the infamous pirate through hollowed-out sockets. Not all of them were actual skulls, however. Interspersed among them were plaster busts, casts, and masks taken from human heads. Hicks shuffled past the heads of great statesmen, including John Quincy Adams, James K. Polk, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Aaron Burr. There were also the heads of prominent reformers, including William Ellery Channing, Horace Greeley, and Horace Mann. There were the heads of powerful leaders of other nations, including Napoleon Bonaparte and Black Hawk. And there were the heads of evil people just like him—murderers, rapists, and thieves. There was even the head of another pirate, Charles Gibbs, who was convicted of mutiny and murder and hanged in 1831.
After his slow march past the skulls, Hicks met a genial-looking bearded man at the back of the establishment. The bearded man’s name was Lorenzo Niles Fowler, and he led the visitors through a door and into an examination room. Stately and grand, the room had high ceilings and intricate crown molding. On the walls were photos, daguerreotypes, and paintings of notable people the world over. Lining the room were two writing desks and a plush Victorian couch. That was where ladies and gentlemen could watch their friends and family receive an examination. In the middle of the room was the exam chair, where Hicks sat down, his shackles clanging against the wood.
Lorenzo gauged Hicks’s head visually, getting an overall impression of its organization and size. Then his fingers began gliding expertly across the pirate’s cranium. He felt for bumps, depressions, masses, and spans, moving from the base of the skull to the top of the forehead, along the sides, and even around the eye sockets. As he worked, he called out different numbers to his assistant, who recorded Lorenzo’s findings.
“Four,” Lorenzo announced after touching one part of the head. “Six,” after another. “Seven,” if the area was large, and “One,” if the area was small.
Hicks’s examination took only a few minutes, but it produced exactly what the police were hoping for—a scientific account of Hicks’s actions. “Phrenological Character of Albert W. Hicks, Given at Fowler and Wells’s Phrenological Cabinet” was the title of the report. It appeared in a pamphlet alongside the pirate’s confession, trial, and biography, available on newsstands the morning of his execution.6
Lorenzo’s report noted the power of Hicks’s physical attributes, including his mental faculties, but lamented that those faculties were “susceptible of intense feeling” and the “heated impulse of passion.” His aptitude for intense feeling was combined with a large brain capable of “a great amount of general mental power.” On top of that was Hicks’s knack for working with his hands. With “a good degree of order and arrangement” and “native talents for making estimates and calculations,” he would thrive in “any kind of mental operation where order, method, system, knowledge of principles and places is required.” He could have been a carpenter or brickmason, maybe even an engineer or mechanic. Too bad he was never part of a structured environment where his natural talents could help him become a contributing member of society.
But it got worse. Without proper development, Hicks’s natural aptitude for hard work, arrangement, and calculation dwindled just as his “Combativeness” grew stronger. Lorenzo’s report noted that the part of Hicks’s brain responsible for pugnacity was far too developed. Combined with a strong will and spirit of resistance, Hicks was prone to lash out at the world, especially because his “love of property,” also known as Acquisitiveness, pushed him toward “the gratification of his various desires.” These overly developed mental faculties, Lorenzo lamented, stood in stark contrast to his underdeveloped Spirituality and Veneration—faculties responsible for religion and morality—leading Hicks “to act without due regard to the Higher Power, and without feeling his dependence on, or much responsibility to, his Creator.”
All these details led Lorenzo to a striking conclusion:
The crimes that he has been led to commit are full as much the result of a want of the right kind of education, as from his natural organization. He has strong passions, and an unbending and headstrong will; but with proper culture, and good circumstances, he would, most likely, have used his energy and talents in a way to secure success and respectability, instead of warring upon the rights and interests of his fellow men.
Here, then, was a radically different account of the convicted pirate’s actions. His brutal murders were not due to the devil’s influence, nor were they the result of his nature; Albert Hicks was not born an axe murderer. His actions stemmed from a mental makeup that was not properly cultivated, as he lacked the education and environment needed to carve out a morally upright position in society. In that way, Hicks was only partially responsible for his crimes. His family, friends, and community also bore some responsibility. America too. The nation’s hands were spattered with the blood of Burr and the Watts brothers right along with the pirate’s hands.
That’s why America had to do better. To avoid another Albert Hicks, it had to do a better job educating children. To make brutal murders a thing of the past, it had to help suffering people and prop up broken families. To live up to its ideals, the fledgling democratic country needed to break the shackles that held people back. To do these things, America could and should pray to God. But equally as important was understanding human nature, which required one thing above all: phrenology.
DISCOVERED IN THE late eighteenth century by a German physician named Franz Joseph Gall and propagated around Europe in the early nineteenth century by Gall and his assistant, Johann Spurzheim, phrenology trickled onto U.S. shores in the 1820s and took root in the 1830s. A science of character and human nature, it purported to pinpoint a person’s inner being—specifically his or her mental makeup—via the shape, contours, masses, and spans of his or her head. Meaning “discourse on the mind,” phrenology was built on two key ideas. First, the shape of a person’s skull corresponded with the shape of that person’s brain, meaning that a bump or cavity on the skull mirrored a bump or cavity on the brain. Second, the brain was not a unified mental mass but composed of individual organs that performed different functions. Phrenology was the study of those individual organs and the ways they combined to create distinct character traits.7
Although phrenologists did not fully agree on the number of organs in a person’s brain, the general consensus settled on thirty-seven. The organs ranged from “Combativeness” and “Destructiveness” to “Amativeness” (sex drive), “Philoprogenitiveness” (love of children), and “Inhabitiveness” (love of home). There were also organs related to reason and intellect, including “Causality,” “Comparison,” “Eventuality,” and “Mirthfulness” (humor). And there were organs related to perceptions of the external world, including “Form,” “Size,” “Weight,” “Time,” “Tune,” and “Language.” Organs corresponding to man’s higher nature and spiritual existence included “Veneration,” “Benevolence,” and “Hope.”
In Europe, phrenology was primarily a science vying for status among other “natural philosophies” that supposedly defined humanity. In the United States, phrenology remained a science, but it also assumed important practical dimensions. Practical phrenology, as it was known, was an effort not just to gauge people’s organs and to define their character but to give them tools for enhancing their mind and progressing as human beings. American phrenologists maintained that people could literally, through concerted effort, grow their mental organs. Thinking in particular directions and refraining from thought in other directions could change the size of different parts of the brain. By reading more, practicing kindness, socializing with friends, working on math problems, praying and worshipping more, and so forth, you could actually become a different person.
