warrant and asked Gordon if he had anything to say.
For a moment the prisoner was silent, and then in a firm voice he replied:
"My conscience is clear. I have no fault to find with the treatment I have received from the Marshal and his Deputy, Mr. Thompson; but any public man who will get up in open court and say to the jury, 'If you convict this prisoner, I will be the first man to sign a petition for his pardon.' and will then go to the Executive to prevent his commuting the sentence, is a man who will do anything to promote his own ends, I do not care what people may say.'
It was a remarkable speech to make in the shadow of the gallows, for the charge it contained against District Attorney Smith was untrue. The reporters hunted up the stenographic report of the speech to the jury and found no such words in it.
At noon, on February 21, 1862, Nathaniel Gordon, with a slanderous lie on his lips, started for the gallows. "He was deathly pale with terror [says the New York Tribune of February 22, 1862], his head hung over his shoulder, and his limbs almost refused their office. He tottered as he stood beneath the fatal beam, [so that] he had to be supported. At a given signal the cord was snapped asunder by the executioner's axe and Nathaniel Gordon was hoisted aloft into mid-air. A few convulsive twitches of the body followed. The veins of his neck and hands swelled and stood out hard; then the limbs lost their rigidity, the flesh assumed a livid hue, and the slave-trader, now a lump of dishonored clay, swung slowly to and fro in the frosty air."
