The Murder of Victor Seward
Newspaper Publisher Victor C. Seward
George Peters sat at the defendant’s table with his attorney betraying no emotion. Except, that is, to smile a reportedly “sickly” smile when his actions were described by witnesses, most notably his father, a sister and brother. His family said that he was mentally unbalanced and had been for a long time. Others said he was perfectly sane, just hot-tempered, shooting off his mouth occasionally, but for years peacefully selling vegetables on the streets of Stillwater, Minnesota. If he was mentally unbalanced, nothing had been done about it.
George and his brother William operated a market garden and sold the produce downtown. One day George purchased a 38-caliber revolver from H. Heisel & Co. Hardware on Main Street with money he made by selling a load of onions. He spent his last free day, October 10, 1892, hunting for Victor Carlton Seward, a newspaper publisher who was his boss for a brief two months almost three years earlier.
Victor was covering a convention that day, so he wasn’t at the newspaper office. But at 4:30, George caught up with him, finding him in front of Drechsler’s Music Store on Main Street, where Victor was probably heading back to the newspaper. The two briefly exchanged words, but no one was close enough to hear them. Then George aimed the gun at Victor’s head and Victor made a run for the music store, calling for help. George shot him in the back of the head, and as Victor collapsed on the music store floor, he shot him a second time in the head.
George backed up to a furniture van parked on the street, which concealed him from spectators, and coolly put the revolver back in his hip pocket. As a crowd began to gather, Frank Drechsler called to bystanders, “Seize him!’
George calmly said, “I killed Mr. Seward and I’ll explain why later.” He said he needed to see the police chief and began to walk away when Frank’s son, Will, a clerk in another store, grabbed the assailant, pinioning his arms behind him. He held George until two police officers ran to the scene. The gun was pulled from his pocket and Officers Costello and Lundgren held him at the intersection of Main and Chestnut waiting for a patrol wagon. The crowd became ugly, shouting, “Hang him! Lynch him! String him up to the nearest tree! Do away with him now! Immediately!”
“Why did you do it? Why did you shoot him?” asked a reporter for the Stillwater Messenger.
“I had just cause,” George replied defiantly. “But this is no time to talk. I’ll explain later – and I will be upheld.”
George was taken to jail where he refused to answer any questions about the shooting.
Meanwhile, several doctors were on the scene, washing Victor’s blood-soaked face and getting him transported to the office of Dr. W.H. Caine. One bullet was extricated, but the other was not found. As was the norm for the time, he was taken home. Victor died at 12:55 a.m., never regaining consciousness, his wife Lizzie and 22-year old daughter Minnie Mabel at his side. He was 47.
Victor Carlton Seward
Victor was the son of Pleaides Barber and Amos D. Seward. (He was the nephew of Myron Fitch Barbour, my third great-grandfather). He was ten when his parents moved to Mankato, Minnesota, early pioneers in a raw town with only a few log cabins when they arrived. His father helped start the school, a log cabin, and taught the students in winter. He was also instrumental in starting the Presbyterian church and was elected as its first elder. Amos would become the co-owner of a prosperous flour mill and serve eight years as county auditor.
As a young boy, Victor expressed an interest in the newspaper business and was apprenticed in the office of the Makato Independent.
The Sewards maintained close ties to their family in Ohio. At age 19, in April 1865, Victor joined the Ohio 198th Infantry, Company D. He had the fortune - or misfortune, as a young man may have seen it, of joining the Union Army just as the war was ending. He was mustered out at Camp Bradford, Baltimore on 8 May 1865. His brief weeks still made him a veteran, and he was active in the G.A.R. - the Grand Army of the Republic, a powerful veteran’s group, to the end of his life.
Victor and his brother Dwight attended Western Reserve College, which would later merge into Case Western Reserve. It was founded in 1826 as the “Yale of the West,” and was an abolitionist hotbed before the war. After completing his studies he was hired as city editor of the Cleveland Leader, a good training ground for an ambitious young man. Its owner was brash, uncompromising in his stances, and believed in using the latest technology. He must have been a good role model.
Victor returned to Minnesota where he got a job on the St. Paul Dispatch, and married Elizabeth “Lizzie” Putnam. A year later, their only child, Minnie Mabel was born.
Wanting to go into the newspaper business for himself, Victor went to Redwood Falls and started a newspaper called The Redwood Falls Mail. In 1872, he and his brother-in-law Samuel Sargent Taylor, bought the Stillwater Messenger. [See “The School Sex Scandal in St. Paul” for more on Prof. Taylor’s life.] Newspapers were expected to be community boosters, but Victor did not see his role that way. They typically took a stance on which political party they endorsed, which of course could immediately make them enemies of the opposing party.
Victor also waged a war on monopolies, took a stance on the tariff, a raging issue of his day, and proclaimed himself to be pro-labor, and for the poor and the oppressed. He was also concerned with the incarcerated and thought a lot about prison reform and convict rehabilitation. He visited the Minnesota State Prison on a regular basis, giving inspirational talks to the prisoners on occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas. He also donated books to the prison library and donated printing, such as 500 copies of a program at a Thanksgiving celebration. He supplied a Fourth of July dinner at the prison one year.
He and his brother-in-law faced many challenges for the stands Victor took. The paper was sued, and both men believed assassins were sent against them. One source said, “Seward and Taylor’s main opponents were the men who operated the Stillwater Lumberman, a group of Republicans who were disaffected with Seward’s methods and his paper. These men leased the floor directly above the Messenger offices and attempted to destroy Seward, Taylor, and the Messenger. Seward and Taylor were eventually forced out of their building, but established offices elsewhere in Stillwater.”
In 1886 he built a beautiful Queen Anne house in the same neighborhood with the town’s wealthy lumber barons. In 1889 he invested in a new starch factory and was elected vice president. Like his parents, he and Lizzie were active in the Presbyterian Church, and the Ladies Aid Society sometimes met at their house.
The New Hire
It was common to hire boys at 15 or 16 to teach them the printing trade. In 1889, George Peters responded to an ad for a new reporter. Unknown to Victor was that for the last four years the teenager had been suffering from ailments doctors couldn’t diagnose. It started when he told his parents one side of his body was growing and the other wasn’t. A doctor managed to convince him that that was not actually happening. He was treated for “costiveness,” or constipation. Some days he would feel fine and think his problems were behind him, then they would return worse than before. Once, he fasted for six days thinking it would help. He would walk for miles before eating.
In 1888 he tried attending Stillwater High School but made poor progress. In 1889 he was hired at the Messenger, and for two months employees tried to teach him how to write. Nothing he wrote was ever run in the paper, and finally, Victor himself told him gently that it just wasn’t working out. George responded in a fury, shouting that he would get his vengeance on Victor and every employee on the newspaper. Although it was disturbing, he wasn’t taken seriously, and a few weeks later he returned to visit and apologize for his behavior.
For the next two years George would stop by to say hello. The third year he only rarely stopped by; a couple of employees said he made them uneasy.
Meanwhile, at home his family wasn’t sure what to do with him. He went back into business with his brother William, gardening and selling the produce downtown. He expressed an interest in studying to be a doctor, got some textbooks and then exhibited distracted behavior and soon stopped studying. Then he took up the study of Latin but couldn’t seem to concentrate on that. He would refuse his parents’ request to do things. He treated his mother and sister badly and used “vulgar and profane” language.
One time when his father was talking to him he jumped up and said, “You G— d___ son of a b—-!,” as the newspaper reported it. “You ought to have your head smashed in!” William said there was no reason for this provocation. Another time, a few months before the murder, George attacked William, threatening to kill him, saying he could easily “put a hole through him” or split his head open with an ax. His father told William he thought something was mentally wrong with George. Yet nothing had been done. Like many families in these situations, the Peters probably didn’t know what to do and hoped somehow things would get better.
Aftermath
Lizzie inherited the newspaper and declined to sell it. For the next ten years she ran the paper herself, with help from daughter Minnie. Lizzie was a rarity, and even more so as she was the only woman in the country who owned a billboard company.
She fought a three-year battle with her husband’s life insurance company. Victor was insured for $5,000, but a clause in the policy said that death caused by intentional acts other than insanity causing death would render the policy void. A judge ruled that contrary to the jury findings in the murder trial, George Peters was in fact sane, and therefore, the policy was void.
Lizzie sold the paper in 1900 and died two years later of heart disease. She was only 57. Minnie moved to Minneapolis where she worked in the newspaper business for the rest of her working life, never marrying. Sadly, she died at the Rochester State Hospital, a mental institution, of senile dementia in 1944.
George died in the insane asylum in 1917.
The beautiful Queen Anne house still stands and is included on historic home tours. The Stillwater Messenger merged with the Washington County Post in 1928 and became the Stillwater Post-Messenger. Today, the Stillwater Gazette serves the community.
Sources:
“The Fourth in Prison,” The Prison Mirror, 4 July 1888, p. 1.
“A Cowardly Murder - V.C. Seward , Editor of Stillwater, Assassinated By a Ruffian,” Saint Paul Globe, 12 Oct 1892, p. 1.
“Foully Murdered - V.C. Seward, Editor and Publisher of the Messenger, dies by the fiendish act of an assassin,” Stillwater Messenger (Stillwater, Mn), 15 Oct 1892, p. 6.
“His Life at Stake - The Peters Trial Now Underway in Stillwater,” Saint Paul Globe, 13 Dec 1892, p. 6.
Mankato, Its First Fifty Years, Mankato, Minnesota: Free Press Printing, 1903, https://archive.org/details/cu31924010437824/page/n1/mode/2up
O’Brien, Frank G. Minnesota Pioneer Sketches; from the personal recollections and observations of a pioneer resident, Minneapolis, Minnesota: H.H.S. Rowell Publisher, 1904, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/gdc/lhbum/01848/01848.pdf
Stillwater Messenger, Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub, https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/hub/stillwater-messenger
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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