Greg Stejskal served as an FBI agent for 31 years and retired as resident agent in charge of the Ann Arbor office.
Greg Stejskal
By Gregory Stejskal
There is an apocryphal story – Ernest Hemingway was having lunch with some writer friends when he proposed a wager. He bet $10 that he could write a story in six words. With no doubt some curiosity, everyone at the table put $10 in the pot. Hemingway wrote on a napkin, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Hemingway passed the napkin around the table and collected his winnings.
Hemingway’s six-word story is an extreme example of what is called flash fiction. My experience with something that might qualify as flash fiction was an 1857 reward poster that my wife found at an An Ann Arbor estate sale.
The poster has a place, Detroit, a date of April 14, 1857, and a $1,500 reward for information regarding a missing man, “John Rodgers, a resident of the town of Farmington, age 27.” The poster describes John Rodgers and his clothes when last seen leaving “Finney’s Hotel stable at dusk Tuesday evening, April 7th,” where he left a span (pair) of horses.
The poster also indicates a suspicion of “foul play” and offers $1,000 “for the detection of any person or persons who may have been guilty of the murder of John Rodgers.” The reward is posted by Stephen Rodgers.
Nagging Curiosity
Like Hemingway’s baby shoes, the poster doesn’t so much tell a story as it suggests one.
My wife had the poster framed, and it has hung next to my desk. I have often wondered about the fate of John Rodgers, and what clues were contained on the poster.
What stands out is the reward amount. In 1857, $1,500 was a very large sum, worth about $42,000 today. Stephen Rodgers must have been a man of some means a century and a half ago.
Since having the poster, I have made sporadic inquiries of local historians and checked records trying to find the rest of the long-ago story.
Lee Peel, a historian of Farmington, learned that Stephen and John Rodgers were prosperous farmers with land in Farmington, but he wasn’t able to find information about the incident described.
Later I happened on an article in the Detroit Free Press about the abolition movement and the rise of the Republican Party in Michigan. It mentions Seymour Finney, an abolitionist n the 1850s who ran a Detroit hotel. Behind the hotel he had a large barn on the northeast corner of State and Griswald Streets. (A historical marker is there now.)
Finney used the barn to hide runaway slaves until they could cross the Detroit River into Canada. The barn was just blocks from the river.
Underground Railroad
England had abolished slavery in its entire empire in 1837, so any slave who reached Canada was free.
In the 1840s and '50s, an Underground Railroad developed in the U.S. Slaves followed established routes to northern states where they were relatively safe. Some of those routes led from the south to Michigan, which has many sympathetic people willing to hide them and aid their passage to Canada.
In fact, the Republican Party -- established by slavery expansion opponents -- began to flourish in Michigan. The party’s first statewide convention was held in Jackson, Michigan in 1854. One the party’s founders was Dr. Nathan Thomas, who had a medical practice in Kalamazoo and maintained a “station” on the Underground Railroad in Kalamazoo.
There were also free Blacks in Michigan who were active in the Underground Railroad. George de Baptiste, a freeman, owned a barbershop and a bakery in Detroit. He also owned a steamship named, T. Whitney, which transported freight and passengers from Detroit to Windsor, Canada. The T. Whitney also surreptitiously smuggled escaped slaves to Canada at de Baptiste’s direction.
De Baptiste had formed a secret organization, African-American Mysteries or Order of the Men of Oppression, that worked with the Underground Railroad. As a "conductor" on the northbound escape route, Seymour Finney would have been a member or an affiliate of the clandestine group.
Secrecy was necessary because in 1850 the Fugitive Slave Act was enacted by Congress. The act required that slaves apprehended anywhere in the US including “free” states be returned to their slave masters. Rewards were offered for slaves, and despite there being many people in Michigan who were anti-slavery, there were many who were not opposed to slavery or were out to collect a reward. Slave-catchers occasionally stayed in Finney’s Hotel while their quarry hid in the barn.
So John Rodgers was last seen leaving “Finney’s Hotel stable at dusk.” Had he stumbled across fugitive slaves? Did he attempt to obstruct their escape or try to resist bounty hunters' efforts to apprehend them?
Clues from the Freep Archive
This bronze and granite sculpture by Ed Dwight is alongside the Detroit Ruver at Hart Plaza to commemorate Underground Railroad crossings.
Recently I talked to a Detroit historian, Bill Loomis, about the poster. Loomis has access to Detroit newspaper archives. (I had previously had other people with access to newspaper archives search for anything relating to John Rodgers disappearance with no success.) Loomis found a Detroit Free Press article dated May 21, 1857 and headlined “Verdict in Rodgers Case.”
The article is not about a trial, but an inquest held in the office of Justice Ensworth, presumably acting as coroner. John Rodgers body had been recovered from the Detroit River, but it is not clear from the article when it was recovered. The reward poster was dated April 14, seven days after he went missing, and the inquest occurred May 20.
One witness at the inquest was the father of the deceased, Stephen Rodgers, who offered the reward. Mr. Rodgers testified that he and John had come to the city with a load of pork which was sold. The father kept the proceeds from the sale except for $6 which he gave to his son, John, around 1 p.m. or 2 p.m. Rodgers said that he thought his son carried $25-$100 and that had two “porte-monnaies” (wallets) with him, a new one and an old one. No money was found with the body.
When Rodgers paid his son, he noticed some men standing on the corner nearby. “There were from four to six men and they were talking with one another. I noticed particularly one of them looking at us. They had the appearance of rather hard cases. I never saw them before neither have I seen them since.”
Also testifying at the inquest was a Dr. Terry, apparently was the medical examiner. He had analyzed the deceased’s stomach contents, delivered the day before in a jar. (This evokes unsavory images from an era before refrigeration.)
Terry determined that John Rodgers' last meal was corned beef and potatoes. Due to the state of digestion, the doctor believed Rodgers died two to three hours after eating his last meal.
Terry testified that he had conducted “chemical tests to the contents of the stomach to ascertain whether opium or any of its preparations were present including morphine or its salts. Nothing of the kind was detected. The time that has elapsed since the death of Rodgers would render the detection of a vegetable poison very difficult if not impossible.” This implies that if poisoning were suspected, the drug was an opiate.
Terry concluded: “I would say, that in regard to Mr. Rodgers’ death, it strikes me that the theory assumed by the physicians on the post mortem examination, that is, that the deceased was drugged is the most probable one. The absence of opium or morphine in the contents of the stomach at such a length of time after his death is no disproof of this supposition.”
The verdict was: “The jury upon their oaths present that from the appearance of the body and from all the facts and circumstances disclosed by the testimony, they are of the opinion that said Rodgers came to death in the city of Detroit by unlawful means, used by persons or persons unknown to the jurors who are unable definitely to determine from the testimony before them what means in fact were used by the murderers to effect [sic] their diabolical purpose.”
So the jury concluded that Rodgers was murdered, but they didn’t know how or why or by whom. Like the unused baby shoes several possibilities are suggested. I will continue to search for the rest of the story, but at least now I know John Rodgers fate 159 years ago this month.
