USA | Wisconsin's first execution was also its last. Here's how Wisconsin became the first state to abolish the death penalty in 1853
Neighbors alarmed by the commotion rushed to help as John McCaffrey walked back toward his home from the yard, his clothes wet and covered in mud.
It was about 11 p.m. July 22, 1850, but at least a few residents of Kenosha had been stirred awake “by the cry that a murder had been committed,” according to a half-column article published later that same week in the Kenosha Telegraph, a local newspaper.
The body of McCaffrey’s wife, Bridget, was found inside a barrel sunk into the ground in the yard, completely submerged beneath water collected from a nearby well.
“On raising the body, they found it still warm, although life was extinct,” according to an account published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History in 1952.
Bridget McCaffrey was badly beaten and her bruises seemed to indicate she had been strangled, said Jon Martens, collection and exhibitions specialist at the Kenosha History Center. A physician who examined the body determined she had drowned.
John McCaffrey’s hat and one of his shoes were found near the barrel. His other shoe was found closer to his home. Kenosha didn’t yet have police, but the mayor, Michael Frank, lived only a few blocks away. He arrived at McCaffrey’s house minutes after midnight and ordered an arrest.
“A deliberate murder was committed within three blocks of my residence and I was among the first on the spot to arrest the murderer,” Frank recalled in his autobiography, according to the Wisconsin Magazine of History.
The Telegraph article described the “horrid murder,” specifying that McCaffrey dragged his wife — a “very respectable and amiable woman” — to the well, then “jumped into the well and stood upon her head.” When asked what he had been doing, McCaffrey only replied: “It is bad enough.”
McCaffrey was eventually taken to a jail in nearby Racine after his arrest. The courthouse in Kenosha had only recently been built and the jail cells in the basement were regularly flooded, Martens said.
A grand jury heard the evidence in McCaffrey's case and indicted him with the “willful murder of his wife.” He pleaded not guilty.
A crowd of thousands would watch McCaffrey be hanged for his wife’s murder about a year later. His execution was the first and the last to be carried out by the state of Wisconsin.
The public reaction to McCaffrey's execution contributed to the success of a movement to end the death penalty in Wisconsin less than two years after his death — making the state the first to permanently abolish the death penalty for all crimes, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
A struggling economy; a deadly disease
By 1850, the economy in Kenosha was in shambles, despite a period of growth in the latter part of the prior decade.
A newly built plank road disrupted commerce in Kenosha by making it more convenient for rural farmers to get to Racine, where they could get better prices for their products, Martens said.
To make matters worse, in early April, the owner of a steam-powered flour mill in Kenosha, Champion Israel Hutchinson, put the farm products in his warehouse on ships and emptied a safe that held the money of farmers who still used the city as a market, Martens said. Then, he left.
That forced Frank, the mayor — who had been elected only days earlier — to suppress what he would later describe as “a riotous disturbance” at the warehouse, directly related to Hutchinson “having defrauded the farmers … out of some 40,000 bushels of wheat,” according to a transcript of Frank's diary.
The situation strained the entire community. Outraged farmers threatened to take wheat still held in the warehouse by force, but tensions calmed after a few days. Frank’s diary says “two companies of Milwaukee infantry” arrived to help remove the remaining wheat.
Cholera was a relentless problem too, both in Kenosha and elsewhere. The city had a population of only about 3,000 people at the time, yet the disease still managed to kill about one person every day, Martens said.
The simmering tensions in the city likely didn’t help what already was a “generally abusive” relationship between Bridget and John McCaffrey, who had gained a reputation for their arguments, Martens said.
John McCaffrey was an immigrant from a northern province of Ireland. He was not educated and could not write, but considered himself an inventor. He spent much of his time attempting to build a perpetual motion machine — a popular hobby around that time.
McCaffrey was also a heavy drinker, but "that doesn't necessarily put him outside the bounds of basically everybody else," Martens said.
Even the spelling of McCaffrey’s name is not known with certainty, Martens said. In his marriage record, it appears as “McCaffrey,” but in other sources it appears as “McCaffary” or “McCaffery,” among others.
There is no record of how McCaffrey met his wife, but they were married in 1848 at a Catholic church in Kenosha about two years before the murder.
There is little known about Bridget McCaffrey’s life. The location of her burial site remains unknown.
‘You have but a short time to live’
John McCaffrey’s trial began May 6, 1851.
“This was the first important trial held in Kenosha,” the Wisconsin Magazine of History says. “It was said that the record of evidence and cross examination would fill a book of 100 pages.”
The trial lasted 10 days. The prosecution had witnesses describe the night of Bridget McCaffrey’s death and a doctor testified to the condition of her body, Martens said.
A large number of the witnesses who testified against McCaffrey “agreed remarkably well,” according to the Wisconsin Magazine of History.
McCaffrey asked for the trial to be moved to another county, arguing he couldn’t get a fair trial in the city because he claimed to be from a different part of Ireland than other residents. A judge rejected his request before the trial after prosecutors presented more than a dozen affidavits denying McCaffrey’s claims of prejudice.
At trial, McCaffrey was represented by two defense attorneys, but did not present much evidence in his defense. He called witnesses to testify to his “former good character,” but “rigid cross-examination was the only other defense,” the Wisconsin Magazine of History says.
The jury was given the case and deliberated for an hour and a half, then returned with a verdict: guilty.
McCaffrey was sentenced in front of a crowded courtroom, but “seemed hardened and unconcerned," the Wisconsin Magazine of History says. The judge, E. V. Whiton, told McCaffrey that sentencing him was the “most painful act” of his career, explaining that he examined the case with “careful attention."
“You drowned her,” Whiton told McCaffrey. “The evidence shows the fact that you did it not in an instant; that it could not have been done except by your effort, and continuous act, and with difficulty; in that period, you had time to reflect; in that time, you must have felt her struggles.”
Then, Whiton continued: “I feel it my duty to announce to you that you have but a short time to live. Your days are numbered. I feel it my duty to tell you this not as a judge, but I tell you this as your friend, and let me entreat you to spend the remnant of your life in repentance of your sins.”
In his diary, Frank, the city’s mayor, was more concise: “May 25, 1851: John McCaffrey received his sentence to be hung.”
‘The last agony’
The morning of McCaffrey’s execution — Aug. 21, 1851, a Thursday — people began to arrive in Kenosha by horse and carriage.
“The public execution of someone was such a novelty that we know people came here from all over the region,” Martens said.
The crowd would eventually grow to between 2,000 and 3,000 people.
The execution would take place at a location half a mile south of the city, according to a Kenosha Telegraph article published a day later. McCaffrey arrived shortly before 1 p.m., escorted by sheriff’s deputies, stepped “upon the platform with a firm step,” then sat down next to a Catholic clergyman.
McCaffrey knelt in prayer for several minutes before the sheriff read the warrant for his execution. Then, McCaffrey was allowed to speak to the crowd. He faced south and spoke in a low voice: “I was the cause of the death of my wife and I hope my fate will be a warning to you all.”
He shook hands with the sheriff. A hood was placed over his head and a rope was fastened around his neck. Then, the time came: at 1 p.m., the sheriff “with a firm tread stepped upon the secret spring and the prisoner was hoisted in the air,” the Telegraph article says.
After a moment, McCaffrey’s shoulders shrugged, yet he continued to struggle for five minutes. A doctor asked to check McCaffrey’s pulse and found it only “slightly reduced." McCaffrey’s heart would continue to beat for 10 more minutes before he died.
“The last agony is over,” wrote Christopher Latham Sholes, the Telegraph’s editor and a politician. “The crowd have been indulged in its insane passion for the sight of a judicially murdered man.”
In his diary, Frank describes the crowd that witnessed the execution: “The spectators were remarkably quiet.”
The people who carried out McCaffrey’s execution had no similar experience and likely hadn’t held positions of authority anywhere outside of Kenosha, Martens said.
“They just did not know what they were doing,” he said.
Sholes, who personally witnessed McCaffrey’s execution, “stayed at the forefront of the struggle” to end capital punishment in Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Magazine of History says.
A year later, Sholes was elected to the state Assembly, where in March 1853, lawmakers passed a bill abolishing the death penalty. The state Senate passed the bill in July 1853 and, that same month, Gov. Leonard Farwell signed it, bringing an end to the death penalty in Wisconsin.
With the bill signed into law, Wisconsin became the first state to permanently abolish the death penalty for all crimes. Rhode Island temporarily ended the death penalty in 1852, but later reinstated it, and Michigan abolished the death penalty for all crimes except treason in 1847, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
There have been several efforts to bring back the death penalty in Wisconsin, including when the details of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes became known to the public. More than 20 bills for reinstatement were introduced by state lawmakers between 1991 and 1996, but none of them made it out of legislative committees.
As of July 2021, 23 states have abolished the death penalty, most recently Virginia on March 24.
“We do not complain that the law has been enforced,” Sholes wrote in an editorial shortly after McCaffrey’s execution. “We complain that the law exists.”
Source: postcrescent.com, Chris Mueller, July 12, 2021
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde