1886 News

The Princeton Press, Sat., Jan. 9, 1886: WHAT BECAME OF SOME GOOD MAN'S APPLES.     Cornelius Stults, a colored man who has lived for two or three years on the Straight Turnpike, near Aqueduct Mills, was sentenced by Judge Cowenhoven, on Monday last, to two years confinement in the State Prison for an atrocious assault upon his daughter, Etta King, a girl about 15 or 16 years of age. It appeared on the trial that Stults, who for some time past has been principally employed by Charles H. Macdonald, the distiller at the Aqueduct, brought home with him, when he came from his work on the evening of Nov. 24, a half a gallon of apple whiskey, and, with his wife and son-in-law Isaac King, set about having a good time over it. From drinking they soon came to fighting, and Stults seized a loaded gun, and, pointing it at his daughter, snapped it repeatedly. The cap failed to explode, and he then took a revolver and snapped that at her two or three times. That murder was not committed appears to have been from no fault of his.     The next morning Stults' wife, still furious from intoxication, started out in pursuit of the daughter, who had taken refuge at a neighbor's. The girl ran for her life, to Justice Stout, of Kingston, who, upon hearing her complaint, issued warrants for the arrest of Stults and his wife, and committed them to trial.     The girl swore, at the same time, that she was the mother of an illegitimate child, born about Oct. 16, whose father was a young man named William Miltoper, who had run away, being charged with it, some time before the child was born, and that shortly before its birth, her father told her "he had found out down at the still house who the father of her child was," and compelled her, by threats and violence, to say it was a man whom he named, which she swore was altogether false.     This man and his wife came into the Aqueduct neighborhood in the spring of 1883. He was an excellent farm hand, she a superior house servant. Both were esteemed and liked by their employers until the still house began its fall business. Then Stults began to run to it after his work was done. Soon he was off work drunk for days together. His wife drank as freely as he, and their constant brawls disturbed the whole neighborhood. They were obliged to leave their place, and he fell into the distiller's hands almost entirely. Since that time he and his wife have been a terror to the people about them, by their drinking and shooting.		Who is to blame for this? But for the whiskey dealt out to him so lavishly by his employer, Stults would still be a useful citizen. Because of it, he has narrowly escaped killing his child, and is sentenced to State Prison, as he richly deserves. The distiller who sold him the whiskey which brutalized him, is inside the law, which allows him to sell him and a dozen or twenty others almost as degraded, whiskey by the quart without license. He can encourage drunkenness, and make drunkards and criminals with entire impunity under New Jersey laws. The miserable victims of his trade can be arrested and imprisoned for the offences they commit under the influence of the whiskey he sells them, but selling whiskey by the quart is not a crime. He is all right as far as the law goes. We punish the tool ; the workman goes unscathed.     But behind the distiller is a great company of church members and church officers who sell him their apples, and without whose support he could not keep his still going a single month. These men are supposed to be amenable to a higher law than that of New Jersey. They know perfectly the character of the business and the men who carry it on. Some of them have seen, when on their road to and from the still house, men and women staggering homeward from it in beastly intoxication. And yet they give these men and their business their direct support, and enable them to brutalize and debauch people like the Stults family with whiskey made from their apples.     Are they guiltless? If Etta King had been killed on the night of Nov. 24, would the men who sold the apples from which the whiskey was made which nerved her father to attempt her life, have been clear of her blood? Would it not have cried to God from the ground against them? And when the Judge lavished his eloquent denunciations upon Cornelius Stults for his drunken savagery, should not some of them have come home to the Christian supporters of the still house which made him a criminal?     And finally, would it not be well, in view of such cases, for good men to think what becomes of the apples they sell to a distiller?
		Truly yours,         A. S. M.

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