We are pleased to present a guest post from an Uncovering New Haven project student volunteer, Max Spicer. He will discuss selected cases he discovered in the New Haven County Superior Court Judgments (Civil Case Files).
Please be advised that this post discusses sensitive topics that some might find upsetting, triggering, or offensive. These subjects include, but are not limited to, mental health conditions and commitment to psychiatric institutions.
The research in this post is derived from the court cases themselves, as well as the Yale Obituary Record.
As we process court cases, certain figures stand out, usually for the frequency of their court visits or for the profile of their cases. Researching the backgrounds of these regulars creates a fuller narrative, allowing the cases to be understood more in their historical context. Many New Haven lawyers in the early years of the United States went on to make significant decisions as mayors, governors, and members of the General Assembly or the U.S. Senate. The cases with Silas Mix, a lawyer born and raised in New Haven, unearth a narrative unlike most others.
Silas began his career with exciting prospects as he graduated from Yale University in 1827 at 19 and attended Yale Law School until he was admitted to the bar in 1829. He then worked in the office of Nathan Smith, a prosecuting lawyer in New Haven who went on to be a United States Senator. Silas was involved in politics as well, representing New Haven in the Connecticut General Assembly in 1832 and 1833 and serving as Executive Secretary to Governor Henry Edwards. However, what seemed like a promising law career took an unfortunate turn. Silas Mix’s obituary, published in the Yale Obituary Record for 1882, includes a fairly blunt description of his career and health:
“He mingled also assiduously in politics, and perhaps the asperities of such conflicts acting on a nervous temperament tended to unsettle his mind… After a gradual loss of business, owing to his increasing moodiness and irritability, traces of insanity began to show themselves, and about 1850 he was taken to the Retreat for the Insane in Hartford, where he was confined until his death, August 19, 1882, at the age of 74.”
Whether this was an accurate diagnosis is up for debate—until fairly recently, and certainly during the mid-19th century, presenting as anything outside of what was considered normal was enough to land you in an insane asylum. While it is entirely possible that Silas Mix did go insane, it is just as likely that he was potentially on the autism spectrum, had bipolar disorder, or was suffering from any number of mental health disorders that in the 21st century are treated with medication or therapy rather than confining you in a hospital for thirty years.
Several of Silas’s cases in New Haven give an insight into the stresses of his life that sent his career off the rails. In 1836, Silas went to court as the plaintiff in a case against Thomas Woodward, the editor of the Herald in New Haven. Silas claimed that Woodward had published libel against him, saying that he was guilty of packing a jury. In Woodward’s defense, he claimed that he had merely written the known facts—that Silas was “deprived of a two-penny Justiceship for malpractice in packing a jury.” After this was published in the newspaper, with the author’s name stated as “A. Whig”, Silas had written in several times before sending the sheriff after Woodward. Though Silas would go on to win the case for a sum of around $400, the excerpts presented from the newspaper articles left him in a rather embarrassing state. The phrase “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel” may never have been quite so appropriate.
In November 1835, Silas Mix wrote in to the Herald in response to the initial “libel” they published:
“I shall expect at your hands ample satisfaction for the libel upon me published in your paper this afternoon… The statements, totally false and unfounded which you have published against me, and in which I believe you must wilfully persevere, leave me no middle ground. Yours, Silas Mix.”
Woodward, in what would become a trend in this case, replied in his following installment of the Herald in an extremely sarcastic tone, and even included a poem:
“Now Mr. Silas Mix
Since you are in such a fix
We will see you in the styx
Before the Herald contradicts
Any ‘libel upon me’”
“If the ‘everlasting great man’ intends to be personally pugnacious for our protection we shall call on the gentleman who throttled him in open Court for his insolence—an assault which his dasted spirit could not resent.”
At this point, Silas seemed to understand that writing something further would not be helpful to his cause and sent the sheriff in his stead. Woodward responded to the notice of Silas’s impending lawsuit in an article titled “Ample Satisfaction.” This was a much longer article than his previous one, but it was still filled to the brim with sarcasm.
“We were on Saturday evening last favored with a communication comprising several sheets of foolscap highly ornamented… It was politely handed us by a Sheriff Deputy, endorsed with his return of property secured to pay the damages sustained by one Silas Mix from a paragraph published in this paper on the 12 of June 1834! and whose character has been suffering most grievously from that time to the present without any consideration whatever. These sheets are daubed over with certain hieroglyphics from which we learn among other important facts that the aforesaid Silas Mix is ‘excepted by and amongst all his neighbors and other good citizens of this State to whom he is in any wise known, to be a person of good name, fame, and credit’—a fact which we never doubted, and for which he wants us to pay him six thousand dollars… We learn further that we have accused him of ‘packing a jury’ much to his injury as a counselor at law and a justice of the peace. Now that is certainly a mistake.”
Silas responded to this extremely tongue-in-cheek article by sending the sheriff back again with another notice, in Woodward’s words, “to save the reputation of that monstrous patriot and lover of the people.” At this point, it seems that the public, or at the very least accomplices of Woodward, joined in on the sarcastic action. Several other small poems or phrases were published with varying initials attributed to them. A wider view of the public perception of Silas can be gleaned through these notes.
“Silas they say is a great friend to antiquity and astonishingly gallant to the sex—these are strange affinities in these days. Joice and he might reconcile the discrepancies of age by their natural sympathies.” December 16, 1835.
“We recommend Silas to go to some new settlement among congenial spirits of the woods. Where he is not known he may do some good and not much harm.” January 9th, 1836.
It should also be noted that the jury’s deliberation for this trial was somewhat abnormal—they reached a quick decision, then were given newly admitted evidence, deliberated, and came back three times without a verdict until the judge forced them to come to a conclusion. A slightly eyebrow-raising end for a plaintiff already accused of packing a jury. Woodward used this confusion to motion for a new trial.
Several years after his embarrassing yet successful case against the Herald, Silas Mix found himself in court against “the Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt. By this point, Vanderbilt was a powerhouse in the steamboat industry, with his business controlling most of the Long Island Sound. His success in the railroad industry came later in this decade, but he was still an incredibly powerful figure in New York and the surrounding northeast.
In this case, Silas Mix appears as the plaintiff against defendants Cornelius Vanderbilt and David B. Allen, Vanderbilt’s lawyer. Silas entered a plea of trespass in many parts, beginning with an original assault:
“The said Defendants on the 25th day of September AD 1839 with force and arms at the City of New York in the State of New York made an assault upon the said Plaintiff and with great force and violence pulled and dragged about him the said Plaintiff and then and there with the force and arms and violence gave and struck the Plaintiff a great many violent blows and strokes”
Following this first assault, Silas claimed that he was dragged through the streets of New York, put on the steamboat New Haven (one of Vanderbilt’s), brought back to New Haven in the hands of a marshal, and imprisoned for 48 hours initially but then detained in confinement for six weeks. Why, you might ask, did Cornelius Vanderbilt subject Silas Mix to this treatment? According to Silas, the whole affair was designed “maliciously to hinder & delay, to vex, harass and insult and degrade the Plaintiff.” He claimed thousands of dollars of damage, partially from the physical beating but largely from the damage to his reputation and business caused by being beaten and imprisoned in his home city of New Haven.
Cornelius and his lawyer appeared in court and seemed to squash the matter in an instant. Evidence was brought forward showing that Silas Mix had been indebted to Vanderbilt, and on failing to pay his end, a warrant was created by Vanderbilt and handed to the New York authorities by David Allen. The statement released by the clerk read as follows:
“To each and every Constable or Marshall of the City of New York and to every of them—Greeting: We command you to take Silas Mix if he be found and forthwith bring him before Thomas S. Beady one of the assistant Justices… to answer unto Cornelius Vanderbilt, Plaintiff in a plea of trespass on the case to his damage fifty dollars”
The court ruled in favor of Vanderbilt, saying that it was clear that the marshal in serving the warrant was acting according to New York state law. If Silas’s plea was founded in truth, it was a rather brutal method of serving a warrant. The fifty dollars that Vanderbilt was owed would be worth roughly two thousand in the modern age, which still would not have been a great sum to one of the richest Americans in history. This case would surely have been no more than a small inconvenience to Vanderbilt, potentially even a pleasant opportunity to flex his muscle, but it surely contributed to Silas’s downfall. It was barely a decade after this case that Silas Mix was admitted to the asylum, and it is not hard to imagine how being thrown around by Vanderbilt in his own city could have contributed to the “moodiness and irritability” that cost him his standing and career.
As noted in a previous post, the records for these cases, as well as several of the cases previously profiled in this blog, are currently in the process of being digitized. They will eventually be available for public viewing at the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA).
This project is made possible through funding from the Historic Documents Preservation fund of the Office of the Public Records Administrator. We also recognize the past support of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).
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