Titans of History (46 page)

Lincoln had been “naturally anti-slavery” since his youth, and it had been the issue that made him leave the law and re-enter politics in 1854. It was the Civil War that turned Lincoln into an outright abolitionist. His 1862 Emancipation Proclamation used his wartime powers to free all slaves in the rebel states. Bringing black support and enlisting soldiers for the Union cause, it was a decision as politically justifiable as it was morally sound. For Lincoln it was a triumph: “I never, in my life,” he said, “felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this
paper.” Anxious to prevent a peacetime revocation of his emergency decree, Lincoln secured in 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment that enshrined in America's Constitution the freedom of all its people.

Shot in the back of the head by the southern radical John Wilkes Booth as he attended the theater with his wife Mary on April 14, 1865, Lincoln became America's first president to be assassinated in office. Some confusion surrounds the words spoken by John Stanton, the secretary of war, as Lincoln breathed his last. But truly Lincoln belongs both “to the angels” and “to the ages.”

Active 1888–1891

More murders at Whitechapel, strange and horrible. The newspapers reek with blood
.

Lord Cranbrook, Cabinet minister, October 2, 1888

Jack the Ripper stalked the dingiest areas of Victorian London, preying on the most vulnerable and ostracized members of society: prostitutes. In a frenzied bout of blood lust, he murdered at least five women from August to November 1888. The Ripper, also known as the Whitechapel murderer or the leather apron, remains the most infamous murderer never to be caught and the first serial killer to achieve an international profile. “Horror ran through the land,” reads one account from the period. “Men spoke of it with bated breath, and pale-lipped women shuddered as they read the dreadful details.”

All of the Ripper's murders took place in or around the poverty-stricken Whitechapel area of east London. His victims were street prostitutes. Although they were not raped, in nearly every case their throat was cut and lower torso mutilated in such a way as to suggest a depraved sexual motive for the murder and an obsession with wombs. Such was the precision with which the bodies were maimed that police felt the killer must have had at least some knowledge of either anatomy or butchery.

On August 7, 1888, Martha Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times in the stairwell of a block of apartments in Whitechapel, and left with her lower body exposed. Whether the Ripper was responsible is disputed, but he was unquestionably behind the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, found in a cobbled alleyway in Whitechapel on August 31, strangled and then repeatedly stabbed in the throat, stomach and genitalia. Detective Inspectors Frederick George Abberline, Henry Moore and Walter Andrews were brought in to assist local inquiries (later supplemented by the City police under Detective Inspector James McWilliam) and separate suspects were questioned concerning both murders, but nothing came of their investigations. Then, on September 8, a pattern began to emerge, as the body of Annie Chapman was found in Spitalfields, with her throat cut and some of her organs ripped from her body.

The killer clearly thrived on the fear he was creating. On September 30, after killing his next victim, Elizabeth Stride, outside the International Working Men's Club in Dutfield's Yard, he boldly walked eastward to Aldgate, probably passing the police patrols that were passing every fifteen minutes, where he accosted Catherine Eddowes near a warehouse. Just discharged from a local police station for being intoxicated, she was found lying on her back with her throat cut, stomach opened and organs removed. The last victim of the Ripper was Mary Jane Kelly, another local
prostitute, murdered in her room in Spitalfields and chopped into tiny pieces on November 9.

On September 27, midway through the killings, the Central News Agency received a poorly written confession, in red ink, signed “Jack the Ripper.” Although this may have been a hoax, on October 16 a local committee set up to keep vigil in the area was sent what appeared to be half a human kidney, apparently from one of the murder victims. As news of a serial killer stalking the streets appeared in the press, so fear escalated into hysteria, and the London police commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, was forced to resign.

Who was the Ripper? Wilder speculation has alleged political motives on his part. Was he a social reformer—perhaps even Thomas Barnardo—eager to bring the squalid conditions of areas such as Whitechapel to public attention? Could he have been a twisted Irish nationalist: perhaps their leader in the House of Commons, Charles Stewart Parnell, who, known to walk the streets of Whitechapel, was followed for a time by police before being ruled out as a suspect? The writer George Bernard Shaw seemed to give some credence to the idea when he wrote, in September 1888: “[while] we conventional Social Democrats were wasting our time … some independent genius has taken the matter in hand … by simply disembowelling four women.”

The most controversial suggestion was that Prince Albert Victor, the duke of Clarence and eldest son of the prince of Wales, was involved in the killings, and that the government and royal family covered up the crimes to prevent a scandal. The idea has intrigued conspiracy theorists in particular, not least because the prince was known for his dissipated lifestyle, but the weight of evidence suggests he was elsewhere when several of the murders were committed.

Suspicion fell for a time on the sizeable Jewish community in east London, as old prejudices flared up during the killings, with
rumors of ritual religious murder. The Ripper had left some body parts after the double murder of September 30, and chalked a message in a stairwell claiming that “The Juwes are men that will not be blamed for nothing.” Aaron Kosminski—a Polish Jew who worked as a hairdresser in London before being committed to a lunatic asylum in 1891—was later named chief suspect by Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten, but no charges were ever brought, despite Robert Anderson (head of CID) and Chief Inspector Donald Swanson (whom he temporarily entrusted with the case) also considering Kosminski the chief suspect. Others, though, claim the cryptic message on the wall points to a Masonic connection, the Juwes representing Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, ritually killed, according to Masonic tradition, for murdering Grand Master Hiram Abif.

Macnaghten also named three other possible suspects: Montague Druitt, a barrister and teacher with an interest in surgery, who was believed to be insane and later found dead; Michael Ostrog, a Russian-born thief and con man who was detained in asylums on several occasions; and Francis Tumblety, a physician who fled the country under suspicion for the Kelly murder. Other suggestions have included Jacob Isenschmid, an insane Swiss pork butcher, and Severin Klowoski, a Polish surgeon who poisoned three wives. According to crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, however, the most likely candidate was in fact a German-born artist named Walter Richard Sickert, whose paintings included numerous misogynistic images of violent assaults on women, though criminologists had previously dismissed Sickert as a credible suspect.

Why did the Ripper murders suddenly stop? Was the perpetrator consigned to a mental institution and thus prevented from continuing his killing spree. Did he die from syphilis or perhaps even commit suicide? Could it be that, having made his grotesque point, he was content to retire again into the shadows? Did he move
elsewhere when the police presence in London became too much to handle? Or did he not stop at all but simply change his modus operandi, being guilty of not just five but eleven murders in Whitechapel between April 3, 1888 and February 13, 1891. No one can say for sure, but the slaughter ended as abruptly as it had begun.

The Ripper has been portrayed, based on a few alleged sightings, as a tall man, wearing an apron and carrying a black doctor's bag full of surgical knives, but the
Star
newspaper, reporting at the time, captures far more powerfully the awfulness of his crimes and the sheer terror he provoked. “A nameless reprobate—half beast, half man—is at large,” it wrote. “Hideous malice, deadly cunning, insatiable thirst for blood—all these are the marks of the mad homicide. The ghoul-like creature, stalking down his victim like a Pawnee Indian, is simply drunk with blood, and he will have more.”

1809–1882

The more one knew of him, the more he seemed the incorporated ideal of a man of science
.

T.H. Huxley, in
Nature
(1882)

Along with Copernicus, Newton and Einstein, Charles Darwin stands as one of a small handful of scientists who have brought about a fundamental revolution in our ways of thinking. Before Darwin, the account of creation as described in the Bible was almost universally believed. After Darwin, a vast, chilling wedge
of doubt was hammered into the claims of religion to explain the universe and our place in it. He altered radically the way we think about ourselves.

As a boy, Darwin was quiet and unassuming, with a keen interest in collecting minerals, coins and birds' eggs. After an unexceptional schooling he was sent to university in Edinburgh to study medicine. He found the dissection of dead bodies repellent and left without taking a degree, but his interest in natural history and geology had blossomed and it continued when he went on to study at Cambridge.

After Darwin graduated in 1831, his professor of botany recommended him to the Admiralty for the position of unpaid ship's naturalist on board HMS
Beagle
as it made a five-year surveying voyage around the world. The
Beagle
took Darwin around the coasts of South America, across the Pacific to the Antipodes, then on to South Africa, before returning to England. The experience opened his eyes to the wondrous variety of life forms around the planet—and the differences and similarities between them.

During the voyage Darwin read Charles Lyell's revolutionary
Principles of Geology
, which argued that geological features were the result of slow, gradual processes occurring over vast eons of time. This “uniformitarianism” was at odds with the orthodox “catastrophism,” which argued that such features were the result of sudden, violent upheavals over a relatively short timescale—and so conformed with the Church's view that the earth was of very recent creation, as described in Genesis. On his travels Darwin collected more evidence in favor of Lyell's theory, such as fossil shells in bands of rock at a height of 12,000ft (3660m).

By the time Darwin reached the Galapagos Islands, a remote archipelago off the west coast of South America, his mind was open to new ways of thinking about the natural world. He had
already noticed how the rheas—the large flightless birds of the South American pampas—looked like the ostriches of Africa, and yet were clearly different species. In the Galapagos he collected specimens of finches from the different islands, which were similar to each other yet also subtly different. Back home, closer study made it clear that the finches from the different islands were actually different species. Darwin realized they must all have had a common ancestor, but over time they had undergone a process of transmutation.

Ideas of evolution were not new, although they were not widely accepted. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus, had held the view—shared with the French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829)—that species evolved over time by inheriting acquired characteristics. What Darwin himself came to realize was that animals (and plants), in order to survive, adapt over time to changes in their natural habitat, and if they are geographically isolated for long enough these adaptations will become so pronounced that the rhea of South America, for example, emerges as a different species from its cousin, the African ostrich.

Darwin's big breakthrough followed his reading in 1838 of Thomas Malthus's
Principles of Population
, which argued that human population growth is always checked by limits in the food supply, or by disease or war. Darwin realized that the variations or adaptations he saw in animals resulted from the “struggle for existence,” in which those individuals who possessed or inherited a characteristic that better fitted them to survive in their environment were more likely to breed and pass on this favorable characteristic. He called this process natural selection.

It was an idea of great simplicity, and yet of enormous explanatory power. Through the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s Darwin continued to amass evidence, reluctant to put his theory before the public, aware as he was of the devastating impact it would
have on religious belief and the comforting notion of a moral and purposeful world.

Darwin agonized and prevaricated, suffering more and more from the psychosomatic, but nevertheless painful, illnesses that were to plague him for the rest of his life. Then in 1858 he received a letter from a young naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, who had, it was clear, independently come up with the idea of natural selection. On July 1, 1859 the two presented a joint paper at the Linnaean Society in London. And in November of that year Darwin published
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
.

It was a knockout blow to the old, comfortable certainties. Any reasonable, thinking person found it almost impossible to dissent, such was the compelling nature of the argument and the overwhelming volume of the evidence. The big guns of the Church of England were wheeled out to mount a counteroffensive, but to no avail. In place of “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small” came, as Tennyson had foreseen, “Nature, red in tooth and claw.”

The implication that man and the apes must share a common ancestor was obvious. Darwin made this explicit when, in 1871, he eventually published the long-awaited sequel
The Descent of Man
. No longer did humanity possess some special status as God's appointed steward on earth, separate from and superior to the other animals. Man was now just one beast among many. It was a bleaker world view that Darwin bequeathed to us, but it was also more intellectually honest and showed us that there was still as much—or more—wonder and mystery in a Darwinian universe.