Free Six Miles to Charleston by Bruce Orr Page A

were now being condemned to die for.
    In all the research, there is nothing to show that they were ever formally charged for the crimes against John Peoples. Now all of a sudden they are condemned to die for those crimes?
    Now, if you recall in Chapter 3, they were all brought before Peoples and identified, although they were never formally charged with that crime. What happened there and why will become an issue, but we will get to that shortly. For now, let’s explore another element that is as equally troubling. Our villains, the source of the most vile and despicable crimes ever to have occurred in Charleston, are beginning to appear to have been railroaded and may be the actual victims themselves.
    By the time February 4 rolled around, a brief respite in the carrying out of the execution was granted. After he had received a petition from John Fisher and Lavinia Fisher, several clergy members and a number of respectable citizens “imploring an opportunity for repentance, and asking but for time to prepare to meet their God,” Governor Geddes, “for these special purposes,” granted a respite in the execution of their sentence until Friday, February 18, 1820.
    During this time, John and Lavinia were visited by numerous clergy officials attempting to prepare their physical bodies for the execution and their souls for the judgment thereafter. One of the clergy, an elderly Baptist pastor, spent much time there. Despite his wife having died the previous year, leaving him to care for a large family, he felt called to assist the couple. His congregation was also busy building a new church that needed his attention, but he still managed to find the time to minister to the couple in prayer. This man was the Reverend Dr. Richard Furman.
    Dr. Furman had led a very active life in the Baptist ministry and had greatly influenced the development of the Baptist denomination. He had been converted at the age of sixteen in 1771 because of the influence of a pastor, Joseph Reese, in the Santee area of South Carolina. By May 1774, he had been ordained and was pastor of the High Hills Baptist Church. That year he was married to Elizabeth Haynsworth. Together they had four children until her death in 1787. The distraught minister left High Hills Baptist Church that same year and found himself in Charleston as pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church. Two years later, in 1789, he would marry Dorothea Burn. Together they had thirteen children. Now she had died and Dr. Furman began to identify with the condemned couple and the agony they faced at the thoughts of not only losing each other, but the thoughts of losing their own lives.
    The sixty-five-year-old pastor could also identify with John and Lavinia on another level. When he was much younger, he had volunteered for duty in the Revolutionary War only to be halted by Governor John Rutledge. Rutledge wanted Furman to plead the patriot cause to the South Carolina Loyalists, those loyal to the crown. When Dr. Furman’s efforts began to succeed on a large scale, he came to the attention of the British general lord Charles Cornwallis, who after capturing Charleston in 1780 put a bounty on Furman. Although he had never faced imprisonment, he had indeed lived with the fear of capture and hanging at the hands of the redcoats.
    In life, Dr. Furman was a kind and caring pastor. Later, after his death in 1825, he would become a very controversial figure. He would later be glorified for his stand on education and an educated ministry and Furman University would eventually be founded and named for this man. He would also be vilified for his reversal on his stand in support of slavery. His work titled “Exposition of the Views of the Baptist Relative to the Coloured [ sic ] Population of the United States” in 1822 supported slavery as economically necessary and morally justified. It would become, literally, a bible in which supporters religiously and intellectually justified