Writing from Constantinople to his wife Susan in 1885 about his homecoming plans, Lew Wallace said, “I am not to be driven to the law again, that most detestable of human occupations. I look for better employment.” In his mature years Wallace made it abundantly clear that his employment as attorney in Covington and then Crawfordsville made him feel petty and a failure. The work paid the bills, but it diverted him from pursuing his zeal for writing, creativity, and high adventure.
Wallace did not “detest” the occupation of law itself. He detested how the daily busy work required by the law exhausted his creative mind and how it brought him into face-to-face dealings with detestable elements of the human species, murderers, thieves, charlatans, liars, and cheats. In truth, Wallace truly celebrated the value of law and the evolution of American justice for its striving to secure a civil society. It was just not a good match for his interests.
This admiration for the law is evident in his reflections on the legal contributions of Benjamin Harrison and Peter Kennedy. Kennedy was a Kentuckian who moved to Indianapolis to practice law in the early part of the 19th century. In Wallace’s view Kennedy revolutionized the “old law” of frontier Indiana into “modern law.” Courts had long been hampered by “old rules,” loopholes, poorly defined procedural policy, the “tricks” of pettifoggery. Kennedy’s ethical reforms focused on giving priority to the concrete “merit of the case,” using tangible, objective evidence over subjective, prejudicial whims. In Kennedy’s court cases, and Wallace’s as his career developed, a person was never automatically guilty because she or he was poor, illiterate, or black, or of questionable character. That was bigoted thinking, gossip, and inappropriate for modern Indiana law in Wallace’s view.
Wallace had many significant cases as an attorney and prosecutor; some he won, some he lost, and some he refused to prosecute. There were several high-profile cases in Montgomery County that Wallace participated in, including the murder of Mrs. Kizziah Owen. Wallace was an attorney for the prosecution, and he wanted it recorded that he believed Mr. Jonathan S. Owen was guilty of poisoning his wife and should be hanged.
Many members of Crawfordsville’s “noted bar” participated in the 1858-1859 Jonathan Owen case. Newspaper accounts asked why the case, though serious, warranted such an illustrious array for the Defense Counsel, the best of the best: Samuel Wilson, Joseph McDonald, and James Wilson, who Wallace admired for his outstanding rhetorical skills, and Daniel Vorhees from Covington, who Wallace called the “gladiator” for his famous rough-and-tumble aggressive court-room style. Public suspicion was that Owen had pull with some powerful Crawfordsville leaders. The Prosecution Counsel included Lew Wallace, R.C. Gregory, and Robert Harrison.
One summer day in 1858, Mrs. Owen was found dead in her house a few miles outside Crawfordsville. Authorities concluded that she had died of a heart attack or possibly committed suicide. Signs on the corpse suggested poisoning, but nothing conclusive, and she had threatened suicide to friends, complaining openly about the unbearable conditions of living with her stepchildren. Mrs. Owen was quickly buried without an autopsy causing her relatives to grow suspicious. Mr. and Mrs. Owen were cousins, but members of her immediate family soon demanded the body be exhumed for further forensic testing, which had never been done in Montgomery County before. New tests proved she died of rat poison.
With the finding of poison, Mr. Owen immediately fled to Canada, where he was apprehended and returned to Indiana. He had bought rat poison at the Ladoga drug store, requested it be put on his charge account, and brought it home for Mrs. Owen to use in the house. Questions began to swirl. Did Mr. Owen make buying rat poison in Ladoga deliberately obvious so authorities wouldn’t think he was hiding something. What was his relationship with family friend, Mrs. Huffman? Why did he flee to Canada? Was he a clever killer, or truly innocent?
Mr. Owen was charged and tried for the murder of his wife by Prosecuting Attorney Lew Wallace. Sides were taken in the community. Mrs. Owen did not have a stellar character like her husband. He was known as a man “in good standing,” a trusted member of a “local church,” and managed a considerable piece of farmland with good profit. His first wife died, and as a responsible father he married again so his children would have a mother. He and his second wife had several children. The second Mrs. Owen was known to throw fits and threatened to kill herself because her stepchildren tormented her and she couldn’t take it anymore. Some in the community commented that she wasn’t a capable mother. The case was closely followed by newspapers across Indiana with reporters making assumptions that she must have committed suicide because that’s what irrational, hysterical women did. Others felt that Mr. Owens was tired of living with his wife and the family strife and decided to murder her.
The Defense, led by Samuel Wilson, managed to get the “buying rat poison in Ladoga” thrown out as unreliable circumstantial evidence. The Defense also countered the most damning evidence that Mr. Owen fled to Canada by going directly to leading law books, like Blackstone’s Commentaries, to show case after case where people acted irrationally and guilty when they feared they were in extreme danger, when in fact they were perfectly innocent. This argument was used to explain Mr. Owen’s flight from Montgomery County to Canada. Wilson argued successfully that Owen was sure the courts would convict him, so he panicked and fled.
The jury sided with the Defense arguments, but the decision to exonerate Mr. Owen nonetheless caused local public outrage. By good old frontier common sense, Mr. Owen was, plain and simple, guilty. But that’s not how the courtroom jury saw it from the powerful Defense point of view. After the case Owen, now a free man, fled Indiana without his children, and was never heard from again.
After studying Lew Wallace and his law career, Dr. Jamey Norton surmises that although Wallace and his Prosecuting partners Gregory and Harrison lost the verdict, they may have won a bigger victory, an unspoken triumph, by giving Mrs. Owen a voice. Perhaps Wallace didn’t think of himself as Prosecuting Mr. Owen as much as he saw his mission as one to defend Mrs. Owen. A dead woman, who endured a miserable domestic life, who had no way of defending herself and had no voice. The triumph was that Wallace advocated for her and because of his advocacy Mrs. Owen has not been forgotten almost 170 years after her death.
