Trial of Reuben Crandall

. Crandall was born about 1805 to Pardon and Esther Carpenter Crandall, a Quaker couple who lived in Carpenter's Mills, Rhode Island.{{cite book When he was about 8, his father moved the family to nearby Canterbury, Connecticut. He studied for a year at Yale College and then studied medicine under a doctor in Philadelphia. He moved to Peekskill, New York, where he practiced medicine for seven years. Unmarried, he was the secretary of the local temperance society. He boarded with a Peekskill family, to whom he was also physician. Because of their medical problems, they asked Crandall to accompany them on a trip to Washington, D.C. After seeing Washington he decided that he wanted to stay, collected his belongings from Peekskill, and opened an office in Georgetown. However, illness soon made it impossible for him to continue as a physician and he soon was earning his living by giving lectures on his specialty, botany. ==Context==

In 1835 the nation was in an uproar over slavery. Ever since Nat Turner's revolt in 1831, people in the slave states were very worried, even panicked, that more slave revolts were coming. At the same time (1831–1835), abolitionism grew dramatically from almost nothing to a mighty social movement. By October Garrison had been burned in effigy, had a gallows erected in front of the office of his abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and was saved from lynching only when the mayor of Boston locked him in the jail for his protection. Congress, flooded with thousands of abolitionist petitions, enacted the first of a series of gag rules. ==Arrest==

. In January, at a bail hearing his attorneys were able to obtain, his bail was set at $5,000 (). He was unable to pay it, and so remained in jail. ==Trial==

The trial, reported on in United States v. Crandall, 25 Fed. Cas. 1684 (1836), and lasted ten days. "U.S. v. Reuben Crandall was the most sensational trial in Washington in years." The prosecution's case The prosecutors alleged that Crandall not only possessed abolitionist publications, he had published (distributed) them with the intent of causing a rebellion among the slaves of the District of Columbia. The prosecution's part of the trial ended on April 22. Defense The defense attorneys pointed out that Crandall had only lent one copy of one item to someone who had asked for it, and that a single copy did not constitute publication, nor was possession the same as publication, Outcome After three hours, the jury delivered a stinging rebuke to Key, and acquitted Crandall without hesitation. The acquittal made headlines across the country. For his safety Crandall voluntarily remained briefly in jail, until his friends could smuggle him out of town. ==Pamphlets==

Three pamphlets about the trial were published shortly after. Links are given below to a copy of each in the Internet Archive. They have also been reprinted in a collection of American pamphlets relating to slavery.{{cite news • {{cite book • {{cite book • {{cite journal • {{cite book ==References==