Augustus Adee to Hamilton Fish, September 28, 1876

No. 248. Mr. Adee to Mr. Fish.

Sir: Among the matters set aside for translation and report to you, but which have got overslaughed by the pressing business of the last few weeks, is the interesting and instructive report of the prosecuting officer in the matter of the assassination of General Prim. The interest felt in the United States in all that concerns the fate of Prim, together with the many allusions made by Mr. Cushing to this case as illustration of the law’s delays in Spain, lead me, however, to venture to transmit it to you as it stands, with a few explanatory remarks.

The assassination of Prim, as you will remember, was effected under circumstances of peculiar publicity on the evening of the 27th of December, 1870. There was a thick coat of snow on the ground and it was still falling; a cab was stationed to block the mouth of the narrow street through which General Prim’s carriage would have to pass on its way home from the Cortes. When the carriage stopped, several groups of men advanced from the two sides of the street and discharged repeated shots from old-fashioned blunderbusses, concealed beneath their long cloaks, point-blank through the carriage-windows, and all made their escape.

The evidence piled up in this case now fills some 12,000 pages of foolscap. Some dozen or two of persons were arrested on suspicion, while proceedings par contumace were had against other suspected persons to the number of about a hundred. And after nearly six years of investigation, the case now passes to its second stage, d plenario, as it is called.

The fiscal reports that all efforts have failed to disclose the authors of the crime; that the complicity, at least, is demonstrated of José Maria Pastor and Rafael Porcel y Blanca; that others to the number of five are liable to process as “authors of attempted assassination;” that nobody is shown to be criminally responsible for the wounding of General Prim’s aid-de-camp; that proceedings against all the others, arrested or suspected, are to be abandoned; and that the cause may now proceed to the stage of the formal trial of those whom he denounces as accomplices.

The reasons for abandoning the prosecution of the parties suspected are given at some length in the case of each, and form the body of the document.

It would seem, therefore, that this mysterious crime, which public opinion has laid at the door of all the opposing parties in Spain, one after the other, without even plausibly fixing its paternity on any one of them, is destined to remain shrouded in more impenetrable mystery than ever.

I have, &c.,