But I very much regret that it should have been thought necessary to suggest to you that I am brought here to “hurry you against the law and beyond the evidence.”  I hope I have too much regard for justice, and too much respect for my own character, to attempt either; and were I to make such attempt, I am sure that in this court nothing can be carried against the law, and that gentlemen, intelligent and just as you are, are not, by any power, to be hurried beyond the evidence.  Though I could well have wished to shun this occasion, I have not felt at liberty to withhold my professional assistance, when it is supposed that I may be in some degree useful in investigating and discovering the truth respecting this most extraordinary murder.  It has seemed to be a duty incumbent on me, as on every other citizen, to do my best and my utmost to bring to light the perpetrators of this crime.  Against the prisoner at the bar, as an individual, I cannot have the slightest prejudice.  I would not do him the smallest injury or injustice.  But I do not affect to be indifferent to the discovery and the punishment of this deep guilt.  I cheerfully share in the opprobrium, how great soever it may be, which is cast on those who feel and manifest an anxious concern that all who had a part in planning, or a hand in executing, this deed of midnight assassination, may be brought to answer for their enormous crime at the bar of public justice.

Gentlemen, it is a most extraordinary case.  In some respects, it has hardly a precedent anywhere; certainly none in our New England history.  This bloody drama exhibited no suddenly excited, ungovernable rage.  The actors in it were not surprised by any lion-like temptation springing upon their virtue, and overcoming it, before resistance could begin.  Nor did they do the deed to glut savage vengeance, or satiate long-settled and deadly hate.  It was a cool, calculating, money-making murder.  It was all “hire and salary, not revenge.”  It was the weighing of money against life; the counting out of so many pieces of silver against so many ounces of blood.

An aged man, without an enemy in the world, in his own house, and in his own bed, is made the victim of a butcherly murder, for mere pay.  Truly, here is a new lesson for painters and poets.  Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited, where such example was last to have been looked for, in the very bosom of our New England society, let him not give it the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate, and the bloodshot eye emitting livid fires of malice.  Let him draw, rather, a decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon; a picture in repose, rather than in action; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity, and in its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal being, a fiend, in the ordinary display and development of his character.