Editor’s note: this piece briefly deals with suicide. Read Part I here.
While the investigators took up lodging on the main plaza of Lagunillas, Gardiner and two comrades were staying across the plaza—with the mayor himself. Even though under indictment, Gardiner was allowed to go to Mexico himself, purportedly to gather evidence for his defense. What he was actually there to do, however, was attempt further deception.
Lagunillas, San Luís Potosí, Mexico, December 1852
As Doubleday’s team discovered while in Lagunillas, Gardiner could only have pulled off his fraud with the help of powerful people in the United States and Mexico. In the United States, he had hired influential political and financial leaders as his agents, promising them part of the money he got from his claim. One of these allies was William Wilson Corcoran, banker, philanthropist, and supporter of American art. Another was Senator Thomas Corwin (Whig-Oh.); by the time of the investigation, Corwin was Fillmore’s Treasury Secretary. In Mexico, Gardiner had made deals with lower-level but equally valuable local officials, notably the mayor of Lagunillas.
With these pre-existing connections, Gardiner attempted to further deceive the investigators. As Doubleday learned, there were mines somewhat nearby—around 70 miles away, in the neighboring state of Querétaro. According to Doubleday, Gardiner and his comrades “stuck up various papers and proclamations relating to Lagunillas on the road to these mines to enable the parties with [Gardiner] to swear they had seen evidence they were still within the precinct of Lagunillas.” In other words, Gardiner planned to argue that Lagunillas was a large, multi-state municipality and that the mines located within this large municipality were his! The investigators caught onto the scheme, asking that Gardiner swear in writing that those specific mines were his. He declined, knowing he could not afford to create that type of written evidence that could be used against him in court.
Querétaro (light green) is just to the south of the state of San Luís Potosí (purple) in the center of this image. Selection from “Map of Mexico, including Yucatan & Upper California exhibiting the chief cities and towns, the principal traveling routes &c,” Samuel Augustus Mitchell, 1847 Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Investigators also turned one of Gardiner’s Mexican co-conspirators, Manuel Verastegui, against him. Gardiner had been quite thorough in fulfilling promised payments to co-conspirators—except for one. Not having received his share, Verastegui turned over all of his letters from Gardiner to Doubleday’s team. This gave the investigators enough evidence to return to the United States. Time was short, as Gardiner was soon to face trial.
Mexico City, Mexico, Late Winter 2019
Like Doubleday, my investigation of U.S. citizens living in Mexico took me there, albeit before I knew Gardiner’s claim was fraudulent. Lara Putnam has argued that, for transnational historical research like mine, it’s important to spend time in the place itself even when there is abundant digitized material.1 I was fortunate enough to secure a small travel grant from George Mason University’s history department. But my investigation shared a similar hitch to that of Doubleday’s: a time limit. Working full-time and having been in my job for over five years, I was able to take two weeks—but no more than that—of vacation time. That meant I undertook what I once heard historian Steven Hyland describe as “smash and grab” research.
Archivo General de La Nación, vladimix, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
_(2).jpg){kind=link}
During my two weeks at the Archivo General de la Nación and the Acervo Histórico de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriories, I looked at as many files as I could, often doing quick reads to see if a document had the potential to be useful. If so, I took a photo, accumulating well over 1,000 pages in the process, including cartas de seguridad. Like the first investigators, though, I didn’t venture to the actual places where the people in my dissertation lived. I wasn’t a U.S. citizen who believed exaggerated stories about the dangers of travel in Mexico, a common trope then and now; I simply didn’t have the time in my research process.
Washington, D.C., April 1853
Doubleday walked toward the witness stand in a courtroom at Washington’s City Hall, ready to do his part to bring Gardiner to justice. The prosecution aimed to show that Gardiner’s claim was fraudulent on as many different levels and with as many different kinds of evidence as possible. One approach was to argue that Lagunillas was simply not a place where mining was possible. During Doubleday’s testimony, they focused on a map he had produced, showing the boundaries of Lagunillas. Doubleday testified that the conditions of the roads in Lagunillas were such that a steam engine, absolutely necessary for running a mine, could not even get there. Moreover, locals had told him there were not mines in that area, something the commissioners confirmed through travel.
Both sides in Gardiner’s trials asked about the geography of Lagunillas, including this question about a comparison between Washington’s Rock Creek and water bodies in Lagunillas. From The Republic (Washington), April 11, 1853.
But Doubleday’s testimony and documentation did not go unchallenged. The defense attorney tried to discredit Doubleday’s work by asking him about tracings he had made to put together his own map; Doubleday admitted that the original tracings had been burned. He also asked if Doubleday had taken readings of latitude and longitude; he had not. Doubleday also could not say he was enough of an expert in steam engines to know if they could be transported in smaller pieces to a mine. In this and other instances, the defense attorney suggested that the investigators had their geography wrong and could not show that there was not a mine within the boundary of Lagunillas—perhaps enough for reasonable doubt.2 Charles Davis, the claims commission’s secretary, had used his knowledge of Mexican geography and status in the government to call attention to Gardiner’s claim and catalyze the investigation, but now, in a courtroom over 2,000 miles away from the purported scene of the crime, the government’s claims to authority and expertise would be called into question.
The veracity of paper evidence and the nature of archival documentation itself also came into play. Prior to Doubleday’s testimony, a Captain Barry testified that he had searched for a mining title in Gardiner’s name in the Lagunillas city hall during the initial investigation, but had found nothing. James Partridge then testified that he had seen a mining title in Gardiner’s name when he searched city hall as part of Doubleday’s investigation, the second one the government conducted. Partridge identified it as identical to the copy Gardiner’s defense had produced in court during the trial. The prosecution argued that Gardiner’s associates had placed a forged title in the city hall records after Barry’s search so that Doubleday’s group of investigators would find it. Doubleday testified that he and the other investigators also saw the mining title in the office in city hall, but that the stains on the paper did not match others in the chronologically-ordered stack, suggesting someone had likely planted it there. Other witnesses confirmed that description, adding that the paper looked less aged than others.3 Additionally, Mexican citizen Jacobo Sánchez Navarro testified that the handwriting of the governor of San Luís Potosí did not match the documents Gardiner produced for his claim, hearkening back to Davis’ initial suspicion while filing the claim that the state seal of San Luís Potosí didn’t look right.4
The prosecution also targeted another claim that was central to Gardiner’s petition for restitution: that he had owned the mine at the time the U.S. started the war in 1846. During the previous decade, between several hundred and a few thousand U.S. citizens had moved to Mexico’s interior. Some practiced their modest trades peacefully. Others, though, hoped to make a quick fortune, and for Gardiner and many others, mining was seen as the secret to wealth. U.S. citizens who had lived in Mexico at the same time as Gardiner, like merchant Alexander Atocha and carriage factory owner James Angus, provided testimony accounting for Gardiner’s activities during the period in question. They said they knew Gardiner only as a dentist who lived modestly after he set up his Mexico City practice in 1840, before his relocation to San Luís Potosí. In more damaging testimony, a U.S. naval officer who met Gardiner in Mexico during the war testified that Gardiner said he was currently “exploring the country in search of mines.” This undercut Gardiner’s claim that he owned a mine when the war started, though it did not definitively contradict it.5 Still, as part of a broader constellation of evidence, prosecutors hoped it would be sufficient to persuade the jury to convict Gardiner.
After both sides rested their cases, the jury began deliberations on May 20. The newspapers waited with bated breath. The Washington Star apparently had a reporter outside the courthouse to examine the faces of the jurors who looked out the window; their expressions betrayed “no indications of a very speedy agreement.” Two days later, the same newspaper called the case “the matter that seems to interest our citizens the most at the present time.”
From the Richmond Daily Times, May 27, 1853, via Chronicling America.
Finally, on May 28, the wait was over. The jury deadlocked. The court set a new trial date for later the same year.6 Would Gardiner face justice, or get away with his fraud?
Arlington, Virginia, United States, early 2021
Like the jury, I needed to weigh the evidence beyond what Gardiner included in his claim file. To finish my dissertation, though, I didn’t need to investigate further, as Gardiner was only a small part of the story I was telling. He appeared in my early draft as a miner expelled in 1846. After I learned more about his story, he appeared in later drafts in two different capacities—as one of a host of U.S. citizens who practiced professions in Mexico, and in the epilogue, where I discussed his trial.
Gardiner’s case did alert me, though, that I needed to be more careful with the other claims I was using. Any successful lie requires a certain degree of truth to be persuasive. Gardiner was, indeed, in San Luís Potosí in 1846. He may well have faced expulsion as the U.S. military moved into the country. His claim demonstrated how that kernel of truth could persuade a claims commission—at least for a time—but might be even more successful when encountered by a historical investigator who wasn’t as singularly focused on determining its veracity. The claim file in the archives includes some correspondence from the first investigation, but not from the investigation led by Doubleday’s team, nor does the file indicate which documents the investigations found to be definite forgeries.
The State Department’s certification of copies of documents Gardiner submitted for his claim. While many of the letters in Gardiner’s claim file pertain to the investigation, others are simply what Gardiner submitted. From Box 13 – November Term, Claim 73 – G.A. Gardner [Gardiner], RG 76.7 – Records of the United States and Mexican Claims Commissions, U.S. National Archives.
That Gardiner’s case was investigated didn’t mean it was the only one with questionable sources, however. Many of the claim files contain documents transcribed and/or translated from others. How much could I rely upon? What could I trust? As I moved toward the finish line, I made sure that any arguments I made using these claims were supported with other evidence or were couched as coming from those files and therefore not fully verified. Like the jury, I had to weigh my evidence and figure out the line of reasonable doubt.
Washington, D.C., March 1854
Nearly a year after the deadlock in the first trial of George Gardiner, Abner Doubleday sat transfixed in the audience section of a Washington courtroom as the jury in the new trial prepared to deliver its verdict. He had watched the trial since it began three months before. Would his work finally lead to justice?
“The Gardiner Trial” from the Daily Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), February 17, 1854, via Chronicling America.
After the U.S. government had failed to make its case during the first trial, another investigative group had gone to Mexico to collect even more evidence. As a newspaper noted, the testimony in the second trial was relatively repetitive, but the government was able to make a better case from the latest investigation’s findings. The proceedings once again garnered attention in both the United States and Mexico. The Baltimore Sun, in an article reprinted as far away as Iowa, suggested that “but few cases have been adjudicated to which the United States Government has been a party, of so much public importance.” Mexico’s El Universal reported on the case’s details.7
The jury entered the room. Gardiner was guilty. Immediately, the judge sentenced the disgraced dentist to ten years in prison at hard labor. But, as Doubleday reported, Gardiner had another idea. “He called for a glass of water which was brought him. I saw him put something in his mouth and swallow it.” In the 1840s, Gardiner had advertised his superior knowledge of chemistry in Mexico City newspapers, one of many foreign experts to advertise such. In that Washington courtroom, he put his knowledge to use one last time by taking strychnine. He died in his cell a half hour later.8
Mention of Gardiner’s suicide in El Universal, March 20, 1854.
Arlington, Virginia, 2022
Today George Gardiner is buried in Washington’s Congressional Cemetery, in a low, tough to find grave. He had hoped to evade imprisonment by taking his own life. Perhaps appropriately, his grave is in the shadow of today’s D.C. Jail.
What should a historian do when confronted with inaccurate information, much less what turned out to be forged documents, in our research process? Like Davis and Doubleday, an important part of the historical research process is acting as a detective, comparing what is in front of us with what we can learn of its context, and looking at each piece of evidence with an air of skepticism. While I’m guessing that Gardiner’s claim file is not high on the U.S. National Archives’s list of candidates for digitization (few other scholars have used the claim files), what are we to do with other records found to be deceptive?
Rightfully, there has been a movement among archivists to include warnings on items with offensive language. In an age of disinformation, and with the increasing availability of primary sources, should we also put caveats on records like Gardiner’s claim file, to keep others from joining Early Me and the claims commissioners in falling victim to the deceptions of people like Gardiner? Or is the work of careful investigation, documentation, and contextualization sufficient, even if it must be repeated over and over again—by Davis, Doubleday, and me?
The author at George Gardiner’s grave.
- Lara Putnam, “The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast,” The American Historical Review 121, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 377–402, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/121.2.377.
- “The Gardiner Case: Eighteenth Day,” The Republic, April 5, 1853.
- “The Gardiner Case: Twenty-Fourth Day,” The Republic, April 11, 1853; “The Gardiner Case,” Weekly National Intelligencer, May 21, 1853.
- “The Gardiner Case: Fourteenth Day,” The Republic, March 29, 1853; “The Gardiner Case: Eighteenth Day”; “The Gardiner Case: Thirty-Third Day,” The Republic, April 25, 1853; “The Gardiner Case: Fiftieth Day,” The Republic, May 16, 1853.
- “The Gardiner Case: Eighteenth Day”; “The Gardiner Case: Fifty-Fifth Day,” The Daily Union, May 28, 1853, Chronicling America; For more on U.S. citizens’ activities in Mexico, see chapter 3 of my dissertation, McKenzie, “Racing Ahead of Manifest Destiny,” 111–70.
- Doubleday and Society, My Life in the Old Army, 174; “Crónica Estranjera,” Universal, July 13, 1853, Latin American Newspapers; “Our Criminal Court,” Washington Evening Star, May 23, 1853; “The Jury,” Daily Evening Star, May 25, 1853; “The Gardiner Case: Fifty-Fifth Day.”
- “Criminal Court,” Daily Evening Star, December 29, 1853; “Más Noticias Estranjeras,” Universal, March 21, 1854, Latin American Newspapers; “The Gardiner Case—Remarkable Developments,” Des Moines Courier, March 30, 1854.
- Doubleday and Society, My Life in the Old Army, 174; “Estados Unidos,” Siglo Diez y Nueve, March 21, 1854, Latin American Newspapers; “Más Noticias Estranjeras”; “Conviction of Dr. Gardiner—His Sentence and Death,” The Daily Union, March 5, 1854, Chronicling America, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82003410/1854-03-05/ed-1/seq-3/; “Washington News and Gossip: The Gardiner Fraud,” Daily Evening Star, March 6, 1854, Chronicling America, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045461/1854-03-06/ed-1/seq-2/; “The Gardiner Case—Remarkable Developments,” The Daily Union, March 7, 1854, Chronicling America, https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn82003410/1854-03-07/ed-1/seq-3/.
