On Saturday, the 22nd of July 1837, John Smith was returning from market in the company of his wife when a gunshot struck him down in a Glasgow street. Two musket balls had found their mark. He lingered for three days before expiring, leaving behind an accusation that none could then verify: he believed senior spinners had procured his death because he had returned to work at Houldsworth’s mill, after the hands of that establishment had struck for an advance in wages. His dying suspicion opened an enquiry; it did not yet name a murderer.
For weeks past, the city had lived to the rhythm of a turn-out pitting the operative spinners against the masters and those hands willing to labour at reduced rates. In his chronicle, the Pitaval compiler depicts a clandestine Association, secret oaths, terrorising threats, and armed assaults upon those who persevered in their toil. The narrator assumes a markedly denunciatory tone, tracing these events to origins several decades old. It is therefore essential to sever what the witnesses actually swore to in court from the sweeping glosses imposed upon them by the chronicle.
The depositions brought to light earlier outrages: shots fired upon working operatives, vitriol dashed into the face of a young spinner named Cairnie, attempted burnings of cotton mills, and the violent death of the widow M’Pherson, struck down in an affray intended, so the witnesses averred, for her daughter who worked in a factory. The witness James Murdock recounted likewise the assault upon McQuarrie, shot down in broad daylight. These episodes revealed an atmosphere of terror, yet each possessed its own actors, its particular circumstances, and its varying degree of proof; their mere accumulation could not suffice to fix the murder of Smith upon the prisoners at the bar in 1838.
Following Smith’s demise, the master spinners offered a reward of five hundred pounds sterling for any information leading to the conviction of the murderer; the Crown added a further hundred. For a time, the money failed to break the silence. The dread of retaliation weighed heavily upon the operative population, and the widow, examined after the deed, could not identify the figures she had glimpsed through the dark. She deposed only to the shot fired from behind, the fall of her husband, and the belated succour of passers-by. Upon his deathbed, Smith had declared that he received no warning nor any hearing before a species of sentence was pronounced against him; three days prior to the attack, a man had told him he would not wish to stand in his shoes.
Archibald Alison, the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, resolved at length to act. On the night of the 29th of July, attended by Captain Miller and some twenty police constables, he repaired to the tavern where the committee of the Association was known to convene. There he came upon several leaders and apprehended fifteen men. The papers and ledgers impounded in that room and an adjoining chamber were to prove as momentous as the living testimony. The turn-out collapsed; within days, the hands returned to the mills. Yet these arrests did not resolve the death of Smith: they initiated a judicial investigation into an entire organisation and the deeds imputed to its charge.
The trial opened in the following January and occupied eight full days. The indictment consolidated charges of illegal conspiracy to dictate the rate of wages by intimidation, assaults upon life and property, and complicity in outrages of older date. The case of Smith constituted the capital charge: William M’Lean was presented as the hired assassin, and the governing committee of the Association as those who had suborned him. The court was further called upon to determine delicate points of Scottish jurisprudence, including the admissibility of a document recovered from the treasurer Hackett and the reception of hearsay evidence from certain witnesses.
James Moat proved one of the principal witnesses for the Crown. A member of the Association for nearly twenty years, he swore that a secret select committee had been constituted during the strike. By his account, the delegates had debated measures to be taken against hands who returned to the mills; he assigned positions of leadership to certain of the panels and described the certificates delivered by the body to its members. A paper signed “William Mean,” found among the committee’s records, commended the bearer to fellow workmen. Moat regarded this document as an anomaly, explaining that the Association was wont to grant such passes to those whom it wished to remove beyond the reach of local justice.
A second material witness, Murdock, deposed to the unlawful oaths administered to initiates. He recalled the pass-words “Ashdod” and “Armageddon,” the Bible held under the arm, and the solemn engagement to submit to the decrees of the majority. He swore that these ceremonies were accompanied by menacing injunctions against the “Nobs”—the term of opprobrium applied to those who accepted reduced wages during a turn-out. His narrative supported the existence of a coercive discipline; it did not, however, place M’Lean at the scene of the assassination.
The leaders of the Association repudiated Moat’s testimony and denied the very existence of any secret or criminal committee. They accounted for their funds as alimentary relief disbursed to operatives deprived of wages, and portrayed the guard committee as a lawful picket to persuade hands to remain on strike. Several witnesses for the defence affirmed they had never heard tell of oaths or acts of violence. Their recollection, however, was shaken by glaring contradictions, notably regarding an alibi certificate fabricated in M’Lean’s favour after the event. Certain signatories could not adhere to the hours specified; one confessed to having affixed his name while M’Lean lay already in prison, though the paper bore a date prior to his arrest.
The testimony of Robert Christie cast a further dark suspicion upon the prisoner. He related that M’Lean had spoken to him of a firearm and of an intention to dispatch the factory overseer Arthur; he deposed further to having lent him a pair of black gloves shortly before Smith was killed. After the murder, according to Christie, M’Lean had returned to his spirit-cellar and uttered words deeply implicating himself. Yet Christie had long delayed before denouncing these conversations. He had himself been taken into custody, had fled Glasgow, and explained his silence by a dread both of violating his oath and of suffering deadly vengeance. The defence pressed hard upon these vacillations, his interest in the royal and civil proclamation money, and the discrepancies in the dates of the reward placards.
The prosecution maintained that the reward was no covert bribe tendered to a suborned informer, but a public proclamation intended to elicit truth. The court permitted the jury to hear Christie, leaving his credit entirely to their discretion. A shipping agent corroborated that M’Lean had endeavoured, prior to Smith’s assassination, to secure a passage to Newport. Further circumstantial indications accumulated: conversations overheard in public-houses, the purchase of musket balls by men described as spinners, and M’Lean’s sudden flight upon the initial arrests. Yet no eye-witness had seen the assassin pull the trigger upon Smith.
Counsel for M’Lean resisted every effort to convert ancient outrages into automatic proof of his client’s guilt. The bar recalled that a combination of workmen might lawfully withdraw their labour, and urged the jury to sever that fundamental right from acts of battery and murder. He assaulted the consistency of Christie’s declarations and the extreme frailty of the direct proof. Counsel for the remaining panels contended that the Lord Advocate had indiscriminately jumbled together the sporadic violences of years with the specific occurrences of 1837, without demonstrating that each prisoner had commanded or enacted the graver outrages charged.
The Lord Justice-Clerk in his charge likewise drew distinctions between the counts of the libel. In his view, the proof supported a lesser conspiracy to intimidate the masters and the operative hands who continued their work. It did not establish with equal certainty a general design of murder and arson. As to M’Lean, he observed that Christie’s assertions, if credited, bore heavily against him, yet the evidence required to satisfy the consciences of the jurors must be beyond reasonable doubt. The questions submitted to the jury concerned distinct overt acts, not an undifferentiated collective guilt.
After deliberating for five hours, the jury returned a verdict by majority. They found proved counts 1, 2, 3, and 10 of the indictment; the remaining charges were found not proven. The printed record does not preserve the complete enumeration of the counts, rendering it impossible to match every number with certainty to a specific overt act. The High Court of Justiciary sentenced the panels to seven years’ transportation beyond the seas. The report notes that the sentence was contested and that petitions for mercy were subsequently preferred, yet it records no verdict of murder against M’Lean: the guilt established at this trial was confined to those lesser counts sustained by the majority.
The conclusion of the proceedings thus failed to furnish that clear resolution which the violent death of Smith seemed to demand. It visited punishment upon forms of intimidation and violence deemed established by the jury, while the capital allegations were not sustained. The narrative in the Pitaval lays great stress upon the restoration of public order and the salutary impression produced by the trial; it adopts, moreover, a posture of severe moral reprobation toward the Association and its adherents. The reader may follow the sequence of depositions and the decrees of the court without confounding this compiling voice with the formal findings of the law.
Upon the pavement of that Glasgow street, Smith had fallen without his wife being able to identify the faces of his assailants. Within the courtroom, words uttered under oath, impounded ledgers, and conflicting certificates took the place of that silent, nocturnal scene. Yet the trial did not transmute every suspicion into legal certainty. Its outcome rested upon that very demarcation: specific charges of conspiracy and intimidation were held proven; other indictments fell away for lack of sufficient testimony. The murder that had set the entire machinery in motion remained, upon the face of the record, a question far heavier than the verdict itself.