Three of the Haymarket defendants — Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, and Oscar Neebe — escaped the gallows and remained in Joliet penitentiary while a clemency movement gathered signatures from lawyers, editors, and trade unionists across the country. In June 1893, Illinois's new governor, John Peter Altgeld, did not merely commute their sentences: he issued an absolute pardon accompanied by an 18,000-word message dissecting the case, finding the jury packed, the judge prejudiced, and the evidence insufficient — a state governor declaring, in effect, that Illinois had hanged four men for their opinions.
The pardon destroyed Altgeld politically; the press rechristened him "John Pardon Altgeld" and an anarchist sympathizer, and he never held office again after 1896. But his message remains the most thorough official acknowledgment of a political frame-up in nineteenth-century America, and it made the Haymarket case a permanent reference point — cited in every subsequent American amnesty campaign, from Mooney and Billings to the Wilmington Ten.