Note 44 — Chapter VII
Reading edition
The reference in the speech was to the murder of a waiter named Keating, in the spring of 1856, at Willard’s Hotel, by a drunken Congressman from California named Herbert. Great indignation was aroused by this unprovoked crime, and although after two trials, the jury failing to agree in the first, Herbert was acquitted, his usefulness as a representative was destroyed. “He remained in Congress till the end of his term,” says Gobright in his Recollection of Men and Things at Washington, “but failed to be respected by his fellow-members,” p. 164.