Matthew Hale.
Matthew Hale was a radical industrial worker from New York City who assassinated Governor Daniel Webster in 1840, sparking a period of repression, violence, and civil conflict that constituted the climax of the Crisis Years in the Northern Confederation.
Background[]
By 1840, the Northern Confederation, like much of the Confederation of North America, was experiencing serious social tensions between the urban working classes and the rich industrialists who employed them. An economic crisis in 1836 had resulted in mass unemployment, impoverishment, and loss of confidence in the pro-business, Liberal administration of Governor Daniel Webster. Despite making great gains among the disaffected population, the NC's labor movement could not bring about immediate political reform from within the government, and some desperate workers (including Matthew Hale) turned to radical measures to achieve necessary change. Forming a group called the Sons of Liberty in 1839, these men carried out attacks on both rich tycoons and pro-business politicians. Hale was a member of the Sons of Liberty, though it appears he carried out the assassination of his own initiative rather than as part of the larger terror campaign.
Hale was virulently opposed to slavery, having been described by Sobel as "an ardent abolitionist as well as a labor agitator". Part of Hale's motive for assassinating Webster was the latter's support of Mexican President Miguel Huddleston, who had announced no intention to fight against the institutions of slavery in his own country.
Assassination[]
In the late summer of 1840, the Grand Consolidated Union called a statewide general strike that paralyzed the Northern Confederation economically and led to mob rule in many cities, as Webster lacked the troops to effectively maintain order. Tensions between the workers and the government were stretched nearly to their breaking point, ready to explode into violence with provocation. Hale would provide a spark when, on September 4, he fatally stabbed Governor Webster in the capital of New York City as he walked from the Hall of Justice to his residence. Webster died three days later, and his successor, Henry Gilpin, instituted a temporary tyranny, viciously putting down the strikes and killing those associated with the Consolidated and the labor movement at large.
Sobel does not specify Hale's fate, but he was most likely arrested and put to death for the grave crime of slaying a top political officer. Though it is theoretically possible his sentence might have been commuted to life imprisonment, it is unlikely that the fanatical and repressive Gilpin administration would have displayed much lenience towards a man who had committed the N.C. equivalent of regicide.
Sources[]
Sobel's sources for Matthew Hale and his actions are Henry Gilpin's memoirs, No Apologies are in Order: My Term as Governor (New York, 1860); Andrew Shepard's The Northern Confederation in the Violent Years, 1835-1839 (New York, 1945); and Sylvia Spinner's "Matthew Hale and the Assassination of Daniel Webster: A Contrast in Characters," Essays in Radical History, III (1954).