THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 20, 1996 TAG: 9610170509
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: 69 lines
Dr. David Minton Wright, who was hanged in October 1863 for the murder of Union Lt. A.L. Sanborn during the Federal occupation of Norfolk, was the city's only known patrician to die on the gallows.
Born in Nansemond County in 1812, Wright received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1833. In 1835 he married Penelope Creecy of Edenton, N.C., where he had established his medical practice. Nineteen years later he moved to Norfolk where he was soon regarded as one of the city's leading physicians.
In 1855, when the Norfolk area was prostrated by the worst yellow fever epidemic in its history, Wright was stricken. He recovered, however, and his unselfish attention to the sick and dying won him the respect of everyone. Even though he was a Southerner, Wright strongly opposed Virginia's secession from the Union. But once that took place he remained in Norfolk, feeling that at 51 he would be more use in his adopted city rather than joining the Confederate medical corps.
On the afternoon of July 11, 1863, a little over a year after Norfolk was retaken by the Federal forces, Wright was walking on Main Street. Along the way he encountered a column of African-American Federal soldiers under the command of a white lieutenant, A.L. Sanborn. According to contemporary accounts, the troops were crowding pedestrians into the gutter. Resentment in Norfolk was then running high against the presence of African-American troops, and as Wright shared that feeling, he approached Sanborn with clenched fists calling out, ``You damned cowardly scoundrel!''
Sanborn halted his troops, turned to Wright, and said, ``You are under arrest,'' at which point the soldiers made an attempt to apprehend Wright. Maddened at the thought of being seized by black soldiers, Wright reacted violently. Two conflicting versions of what happened were later reported. One stated Wright pulled a pistol from an inner coat pocket and fired twice at Sanborn. The other claimed the pistol was handed to Wright by a spectator.
In any event, Sanborn was mortally wounded, staggered into a nearby drug store and died. After that, Wright was arrested and charged with murder. He was subsequently tried by a military tribunal in the still-existing Custom House at Main and Granby streets. During that time he was compelled to walk up and down the steep steps of the building in chains as his admirers stood nearby lifting their hats in silent sympathy.
After an eight-day trial, Wright was found guilty and was sentenced to be hanged, a verdict that Norfolk people resented as they regarded him a martyr to the Southern cause. Meanwhile, the doctor's daughter, Penelope, decided to do something to save her father. Visiting him in his dimly lighted cell, she exchanged her outer clothing with him, slipped on his boots, and crept under the blanket of his cot.
Wright then walked out of his cell and almost made it to a waiting carriage when a sharp-eyed sentry called attention to his unusual height and masculine gait. The doctor was then apprehended, but his daughter was not detained or molested.
As the time for Wright's execution drew near, President Abraham Lincoln granted a week's reprieve in order to give the case more study, but in the end he refused to intervene.
Wright was taken between long lines of troops to a scaffold set up in the center of a racetrack on the outskirts of Norfolk on Oct. 23, 1863, for his execution while sounds of wailing were heard from shuttered houses along the way. While awaiting his death the doctor had made his own coffin of cypress wood and after his body was turned over to his family it was placed in it and taken to Old Christ Church of Freemason Street for his funeral.
Inside the lid of the coffin were pictures of Wright's wife and children, one of them being his eldest son, who had been killed three months earlier at the Battle of Gettysburg. But Wright never knew that his son had died for the cause he had disapproved of at the beginning of the war. When the news of the young man's death was learned, the family spared the doctor additional mental anguish and never imparted the sad news. by CNB