Nineteenth-century Carroll was home to the mob-driven bloodshed represented in the movie, “Gangs of New York,” a historian said.
But Jesse Glass debunked a myth Wednesday about the murder of Joseph Shaw, a roughneck editor of The Carroll County Democrat newspaper, who many mistakenly believe was killed for writing an editorial calling for President Lincoln?s assassination just days before the president was shot.
Not so, Glass said.
Shaw wrote that Vice President Andrew Johnson was a lush but would still make a better president than Lincoln.
The Democrat and its precursor, The American Trumpet, are found at theCarroll County Historical Society.
Shaw was killed, Glass said, after leaving the violent Know-Nothing party, a political movement that had all but disintegrated in the rest of the country over disputes about slavery but still thrived in Maryland in the 1850s.
“Gangs of New York” star Daniel Day-Lewis played Bill the Butcher, a character based on the real-life Know-Nothing leader William Poole.
After Shaw broke ties from the party, a competitor, Charles Webster, editor of the rival American Sentinel, ran a series of articles lampooning Shaw after he asked to borrow paper and other supplies from the Sentinel.
A mob of four men led by Webster?s friend, Henry Bell, burst into Shaw?s hotel room, stabbed him in the armpit and dragged his body downstairs to the inn?s bar, where they smoked cigars and celebrated his killing.
During a trial at the old Carroll County Courthouse in which Webster represented Shaw?s family, Bell and his accomplices were found not guilty of murder and acting in self-defense.
The next year, during a parade in downtown Westminster, a Hampstead man shouted “Hurray for Joseph Shaw!” when he saw Bell on the street.
Bell followed the man and his companions into a tavern, opened fire on them, nearly killing them. Again, the political machine made sure Bell was acquitted.
Bell?s white tombstone now sits near the entrance of the Westminster cemetery. Someone smashed his stone, leaving it smaller than the ones surrounding it.
