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slander, no bribery, no crime from which the adherents of
one party would shrink, if the calumniation and
destruction of the other could thereby be promoted; or, to use
the words of the sympathetic historian of the famous
Blackwell Case1—
44 Ambition, imprudence, and a certain impetuousness of
temper caused him—Blackwell—to be swallowed up in
the vortex of party strife. More led than leading, he
was finally sacrificed, less for minor political offences
which he had actually committed than for his own
insouciance, and the machiavellian designs of a person or
persons whose interest imperatively required that his
loose and somewhat flippant tongue should be silenced for
ever. His trial proves that the unfortunate man was
already doomed when arrested, and the hypocrisy of
pedantically adhering to the letter of the law whilst its
spirit was everywhere broken makes this trial an
instructive if also a very dismal page in our history.5,2
Count Tessin was then at the height of his power and
influence. He was the head of the Hat party, which
now ruled after the disastrous war against Russia. In its
hands the weak king was but a tool.
At first, indeed, everything seemed to thrive with
Blackwell. He was appointed Director of the Royal
Model Farm at Ållestad in the district of Elfsborg ; his
medical practice increased, and he made his name known
by publishing an Essay on the Improvement of Swedish
Agriculture. Then on a fatal day in the month of March, 1 2
1 Arfvids8on, in the periodical “ Frey” of the year 1846. He was
the first to use the voluminous acts of the trial, and with great fairness to
lay open its glaring travesty of the law. The title of his essay is
Blackivellska Rättegången. See also Diet, of National Biogr. and
the Swedish Biographisk Lexicon.
2 Blackwells ku R.
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