Norfolk Highlights 1584 - 1881
By George Holbert Tucker
Chapter 47
The Hanging of Dr. Wright
The hanging of Dr. David Minton Wright for the murder of Federal Lieutenant
A.L. Sanborn was a grisly highlight of the Norfolk Civil War period.
Born in 1812 in Nansemond County, Dr. Wright moved to Norfolk in 1853
from Edenton, N.C., where he had married Miss Penelope Creecy. In 1855,
when the Norfolk area was prostrated by the worst yellow fever epidemic
in its history, Dr. Wright was stricken. He recovered, however, and
his unselfish attentions to the sick and dying of his adopted city won
him the respect of everyone.
Although a Southerner, Dr. Wright was a Unionist and opposed Virginia's
secession from the Union. Once that took place, he remained in Norfolk.
On June 17, 1863, a little over a year after Norfolk was retaken by
the Federal forces, Dr. Wright was walking west on Main Street from
a celebration of his wedding anniversary. Arriving at Church and Main
streets, he met a column of black Federal soldiers under the command
of a white lieutenant, A. L. Sanborn.
Resentment in Norfolk was then running high against the presence of
black troops, and as Dr. Wright shared that feeling, he approached Sanborn
with clenched fists, saying, "Oh! You coward!"
Sanborn halted his troops, turned to Wright, and said, "You are
under arrest." At that point the soldiers moved in to apprehend
him. Maddened at the thought of being seized by the black soldiers,
the doctor did a rash thing, two versions of which have been reported.
One says he pulled a pistol from an inner coat pocket and fired twice
at Sanborn. The other says the pistol was handed to him by a spectator.
Be that as it may, Sanborn was wounded, staggered into Foster &
Moore's Drug Store, and died, after which Wright was arrested and charged
with murder.
During his trial, his admirers stood outside the courtroom and lifted
their hats silently as he hobbled in and out, his wrists and ankles
heavily chained.
Wright was found guilty and was sentenced to be hanged, a verdict that
Norfolk people resented as they regarded him as a martyr to the Southern
cause. Powerful influences were brought to bear to save his life, but
all of them failed.
In the meantime the doctor's daughter, Penelope, decided to do something
to save her father. Visiting him in his dimly lighted cell, she exchanged
her outer clothing with him, slipped on his boots, and crept under the
blankets of his cot. The doctor then walked out of his cell and had
gone fifty yards from the door of the prison to a waiting carriage when
a sharp-eyed sentry called attention to his unusual height and masculine
gait. Wright was then recaptured, but his daughter was not detained
or molested.
As the time for the execution drew near, President Lincoln granted
a week's reprieve in order to give the case more study, but in the end
he refused to intervene.
Wright was taken to the scaffold set up in the center of a racetrack
on the outskirts of the city on October 23, 1863, between long columns
of troops, while the sound of wailing was heard from shuttered houses
all along the way. Troops were posted in a square around the gallows,
while thousands of spectators looked on from rooftops or stood on tiptoe
in wagons, carts, and buggies.
Wright had made his own coffin of cypress wood while he was in prison,
and after his body had been turned over to his family, it was placed
in it and taken to Old Christ Church for the funeral. Inside the lid
of the coffin were pictures of the doctor's wife and children, one of
them his oldest son, who had been killed three months earlier in the
Battle of Gettysburg.
But the doctor never knew that his son had died for the cause that
he had disapproved of at the beginning of the war. When the news of
the young man's death was learned, the family spared him and never told
him the sad news.
 Chapter
48
A Norfolk Girl Told President Davis
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