Headline: Acquittal of the Negress Minnie Gaines by a Mixed Race Jury, New York Times July 21, 1869

Twelve members (including the two alternates) of the Minnie Gaines Murder Trial.

The murder occurred on March 5, 1869
The summer of 1869, Minnie Gaines, an African American woman was charged with bludgeoning her white lover to death. Gaines was a freed woman originally from Fredericksburg, Virginia. Her lover, James Ingle, had been a watchman at the Department of Interior. Gaines's lawyers, former Ohio congressmen Albert G. Riddle and former Freedmen's Bureau lawyer Andrew K. Browne, were well known in Republican circles. Lawyers for both sides called some sixty witnesses, among them some of the capital's best known physicians. For more than a week in July, witnesses discussed slavery, sex, violence, and insanity, as rapt onlookers filled the courtroom.

The facts in the case were relatively straightforward. Gaines, who worked as a servant in a boardinghouse confronted Ingle and demanded that he support their unborn child, he refused and threatened several times to kill her. Desperate, Gaines came to Ingle's room with a pistol and attempted to shoot him. When the pistol malfunctioned, she picked up a hammer or an axe and beat him delivering a head wound that ultimately killed him. Gaines immediately turned herself in to police. In court, the question was whether Gaines would be convicted of premeditated murder, as the prosecutor wished, or of some lesser crime, such as murder or manslaughter, or whether she would be declared not guilty because of temporary insanity.

Besides the raw sensationalism of the trial, the public took great interest in the fact that Gaines was the capital's first murder defendant to be tried before a racially mixed jury. Newspaper reporters followed the jury avidly, and the jurors ... six black men and six white men seemed conscious of their place in history. The jurors publicly broke taboos of race and space. While sequestered, they took their meals together and were quartered together at a third class hotel. One Sunday, they held a private prayer meeting and, later in the afternoon, rode out into the country with the bailiffs on an omnibus. The men also had their picture taken at a photographer's studio.

Duke Anderson, the pastor at the church Gaines attended, "fears the colored jurors will not be likely to acquit Minnie Gaines and give plausible reasons for the same." By Anderson's reasoning, we might speculate that he worried that the black jurors would feel pressure to avoid the impression of undue leniency on an African American defendant.

Justice George Fisher's instructions to the jurors also reflected the political sensitivity of the jurors' mandate. After outlining the range of possible verdicts Fisher reminded them that they could not acquit Gaines "from a feeling of sympathy in consequence of her sex, and pregnant condition, and the fact that she was once a slave," nor could they acquit "from a feeling of prejudice against slaveholders." The jurors deliberated for just ten minutes before returning with the verdict that Gaines was not guilty by reason of insanity.

Following the verdict, federal officials sentenced Gaines to an unspecified amount of time in the Government Hospital for the Insane (renamed St. Elizabeth's), where she stayed in newly built facilities for the "colored insane." Hospital officials diagnosed Gaines with "mania hysterical." They believed her mental condition stabilized in October, with the birth of her son, and in February they invited her father to come retrieve her. Having stayed almost nine months, Gaines was released on April 16, 1870. She presumably returned to Virginia, carrying with her the infant son she had named Daniel Webster Gaines.

Sadly, Minnie's son ended up in an orphanage in Boston, Massachusetts sometime in 1880 when he was 12 years old. He lived the rest of his life in the Boston area working as a waiter in restaurants; he later married, had kids, but tragically died young of tuberculosis in 1913.

Sources: "Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C." By Kate Masur