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Godkin said, “I didn’t know whether he had wife or child.”

“Or to his church?”

“I think anybody who did as he did was unfaithful to his church.”

Moot was done. He seemed confident of victory. Then Milburn got up and asked Godkin one more time whether he considered the words “miscreant, guttersnipe, and vampire” too strong as applied to George Ball.

“I should not,” Godkin said.

Milburn looked at Judge Daniels. “That’s our case, Your Honor.” At the moment, the clock struck five. Court was adjourned for the day.

The next morning, a pallid George Ball sat at the plaintiff’s table. Looking around, he saw that every seat was taken, but it was disappointing to see that the clergymen who had been filling the courtroom for the past two days to show their support were not there. Ball fidgeted in his chair, and his eyes shifted to the twelve men sitting in the jury box. John Milburn was about to begin his closing argument.

In an even-toned voice no louder than was necessary to be heard in the courtroom, Milburn said it was regretful that the case of Ball vs. New York Evening Post had ever come to trial. President Cleveland had administered the affairs of state with “ability and manliness,” and he had taken a wife who had won the admiration and affection of the American people for the “dignity, courtesy, and simplicity with which she presided over the White House.” It was a nimble manipulation of the goodwill the jurors had for their hometown idol, Frances Folsom Cleveland.

The Maria Halpin scandal was “long gone by,” Milburn said, and it was unfortunate that the passions of 1884 had to be “raked over by this minister and his greed for money.” Milburn said he had considered and then rejected the idea of calling President Cleveland as a witness. “It would not be fair to him and his family,” he said.

“Now this action was brought for defamation of character, to get money, when it appears that (Ball) has not suffered at all in either character or purse. What an opportunity for a minister to be gracious, and say that as the campaign was passed and the heat of it was over, he would let the matter drop. But no, he must drag it into court and rake up things so painful to many.”

George Ball, Milburn conceded, may have stepped into the campaign of 1884 in the spirit of “public duty,” but that same spirit had moved Godkin to write his articles denouncing Ball. The two men had engaged in a war of words that required the widest privilege available under the law. “There can be nothing done about it unless a malicious motive can be shown.”

“Dr. Ball is the libeler, we are not.”

Milbank turned now to Ball’s excursion to Vine Alley when he interviewed Cleveland’s maid for evidence of drunken behavior and lewd associations. “That,” said Milburn, “is the work of a guttersnipe. Do you want such a man to officiate at your wedding, to preach the Gospel to you! He is with you to baptize your children, to visit you when you are sick, and to officiate at your funeral. His business is to do good, to lift up society and protect it from debasement. But our papers were for months filled with the scum of the gutter, scraped up by this man who now wants damages. He so debased the reputation of Buffalo that it will take a quarter century to recover.”

He poured on the bile. He compared George Ball to a “fish woman” and an assassin. He said it was shameful for Ball to have linked Cleveland to the death of Oscar Folsom. “In this an attack had been made not only upon the living but upon the dead, upon a man who had been in his grave for years.”

Court recessed for lunch, and when it went into session again at two o’clock, Milburn resumed his closing arguments. Bristling with sarcasm, he went over the Post articles sentence by sentence. They were “mild” compared to the language Ball had used in his attacks on Cleveland. And who could object to “vampire” when Ball was bringing shame on a “fellow townsman who was a candidate for high office.” If the Post