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Warwick, the Puritan Pirate King Who Colonized New England

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Puritanism and piracy together helped colonize New England with the zealous oversight of Robert Rich, 1st Earl of Warwick.

Known as the “Pious Pyrate” in his day, Warwick sponsored half the pirates in the Atlantic between 1626 and 1630. His proceeds from the plunder allowed him to invest in the various companies that sponsored colonists.

Robert Rich (1587-1658), 2nd Earl of Warwick

In her new book, Jamie L. H. Goodall explains how piracy was as important as Puritanism in colonizing North America. The Daring Exploits of Pirate Black Sam Bellamy From Cape Cod to the Caribbean is less about Bellamy and more about the conditions that created pirates in the first place. Those conditions were in large part created by the man New England knew as Warwick. He “epitomized the intimate connection between piracy, colonization and intense religious devotion,” wrote Goodall.

Why Pirates? Why Bellamy?

The short version: Heads of state needed money to wage their wars, so they enlisted privateers to attack and loot enemy vessels. Then, when wars ended, unemployed privateers turned to piracy.

Privateer Boscawen engaging a Fleet of French Ships in 1745

Little is actually known about Black Sam Bellamy. He fell in love with a beautiful girl from Eastham, Mass., named Maria Hallett. He plundered the Caribbean and then sailed north, only to sink with his ship. The Whydah Gally wrecked in a hurricane off Wellfleet on April 26, 1717.

Bellamy became one of the better known pirates in 1984 when underwater explorer Barry Clifford discovered the Whydah Gally.Clifford has recovered several hundred thousand artifacts, including cannon, precious stones and pieces of silver. He also found pirate bones, though he has not identified Bellamy.

Without Warwick, Black Sam Bellamy may not have pursued his plunder. We know a lot about Warwick.

Warwick

Robert Rich was the first son and third child of Penelope Devereaux and the 1st Earl of Warwick. Penelope, famously unhappy, bore the first earl seven children, then lived as the mistress of Charles Blount, 8th Baron Mountjoy. she bore him five children.

Warwick was born in 1587 during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, a time when piracy flourished. His rich and powerful family raised him as a devout Puritan. Warwick’s father, Robert Rich, 1st Earl of Warwick, maintained a privateering fleet. In 1618 he paid King James I £10,000 for the title of Warwick.

James I didn’t feel as comfortable with the Puritan pirates as his predecessor had. He tried to pushing them away toward the Americas.

In the early years of colonization, most colonial ventures were undertaken by private investors with the permission or charter from the crown. Warwick made investments in the colonies, financed by the proceeds from his personal pirate navy. One Spanish politician said the only reason for the British colonies was that they were “good for pirates.” Boston, wrote Goodall, eventually earned a reputation as “the common receptacle for pirates of all nations.”

Warwick used his political clout and money to help Puritans get charters for the colonies of New Plymouth (New Zealand), Providence Island, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. .

The Pious Plunderer

He also helped radical Puritan ministers, sometimes by hiding them from prosecutors. Mostly, though, he paid for their livings. Helped by his relative Sir Nathaniel Rich, he supported 22 ministers. “Warwick was well placed to support, to influence, and to help organize for various political and religious initiatives an unusually large number of Puritan ministers,” wrote Robert Brenner in Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653.

Warwick’s religious zeal put him at odds with the English monarchs. When the English Civil War broke out, Parliament named  Lord High Admiral of the British Navy in 1642.

Olier-Cromwell

He retired from public life in 1649, but remained close to the Puritan leader Oliver Cromwell. His grandson, also Robert Rich, married Cromwell’s daughter Frances. The marriage didn’t last long, as Rich died shortly afterward in  1658. Warwick died the next year.

Here are some other fun facts about the 1st Earl of Warwick.

1. Warwick’s pirates bailed out Massachusetts.

In 1640, English merchants would only accept hard currency, but the colonists didn’t have much of it. Massachusetts Gov.  John Winthrop lamented, “scarcity of money made a great change in all commerce.”

Warwick helped them out of their trouble. As Lord High Admiral, he commissioned a pirate named Capt. William Jackson to assemble a small fleet. In 1643, Jackson and his men began plundering Spanish towns throughout the West Indies.

Several times they returned to New England, got drunk and spent lavishly—in hard currency. They sailed to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1646, where they “spente and scattered a great deale of money,” according to Winthrop.  He felt “divine Providence” had brought them to the colony.

John Winthrop. American Antiquarian Society

2. He helped Thomas Hooker hide from his persecutors.

Hooker, credited with founding Connecticut Colony, attracted Puritans with his fiery sermons at what is now Chelmsford Cathedral. Warwick listened to Hooker’s sermons there. Hooker ran afoul of the spiritual authorities, who silenced him and bound him over to appear before the High Commission. Warwick may have paid for his bond, and he certainly hid him away at the family’s private retreat in the Netherlands.

thomas-hooker

Thomas Hoooker and his people

3. His pirates showed up drunk in Plymouth Colony.

William Bradford described how about 80 unruly “lustie men” came on shore. There they behaved like “madmen,” after they “did so distemper them with drinke.” They grew more moderate and orderly over the next few weeks. Winthrop praised them because they “spent liberally and gave freely to many of the poorer sort [in Plymouth].

Plymouth Colony’s governor William Bradford really couldn’t complain about Warwick.  He signed the Peirce Patent, which promised Plymouth Colony 100 acres for everyone who stayed in the settlement for three out of seven years.

4. At least a half dozen places were named after him.

They include Warwick, R.I,. and  Warwick, Mass. In Virginia, he inspired the Warwick River, Warwick Towne, Warwick River Shire and Warwick County,.Warwick donated the land on which Bermuda’s oldest school, Warwick Academy, stands.

5. He was “a heroic figure among devout Puritans.”

That’s according to historian Mark Hanna. They had reason to admire him. In 1643, he headed a colonial commission tasked with governing the British colonies in North America and the Caribbean. The next year the commission incorporated Providence Plantations, now Rhode Island. He won a guarantee of religious liberty in the colonies and issued a declaration that established freedom of worship in Bermuda. .

6. He established a Puritan pirates’ nest in the Caribbean.

He started the Providence Company and financed the colonization of Providence, Henrietta and Tortuga islands. Settlers lived under strict rules: no drinking, whoring or gambling. But piracy was encouraged.

“The Earl of Warwick and his friends were sincerely trying to create three nests of pirates with the behaviour and morals of a Calvinist theological seminary,” wrote historian C.V. Woodward.

In the end, Providence Island failed when the Spanish massacred most of the inhabitants.

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Jacob Riis’s “Happy Valley”

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By 1912, social reformer Jacob Riis had spent more than 30 years giving a voice to some of New York City’s most vulnerable citizens using a pen and a camera.

Jacob Riis

As a scrappy young reporter and an immigrant himself, Riis witnessed the city’s staggering poverty and corruption firsthand. Its slum neighborhoods were filthy, dangerous, and seemingly ignored by middle- and upper-class New Yorkers. Riis wanted to change that. He bought a camera, began conducting interviews and finally published his first of many books, How the Other Half Lives, in 1890. Riis became a household name in a matter of months. He helped bring about school, housing, sanitation and zoning reform. In short, he made a difference.

Street Arabs in the Area of Mulberry Street, sleeping children, photographed by Jacob Riis.

Riis maintained a celebrated career at a breakneck pace. He practically ran everywhere he went. He spoke loudly and laughed loudly. While late nights and long hours had helped secure his prominent reputation, they also took a serious physical and mental toll. In 1912, doctors diagnosed him with coronary heart disease. The advice was clear: slow down.

Aside from his diagnosis, Riis’s upbringing, career and changing family circumstances led him to purchase a farm in Barre, Mass. He learned that the life of a New England farmer was not simple nor leisurely. Nonetheless, Barre served as a place of meaningful reflection in the twilight of Riis’s life.

The Making of an American

Riis always recalled his hometown—Ribe, Denmark— romantically. Surrounded by windswept marshland overlooking the North Sea, the Viking-settled hamlet was a close-knit community. Riis met the love of his life, Elizabeth Giørtz, there. Her family disapproved when he first proposed marriage. After all, she was the daughter of a wealthy factory owner; Riis was a carpenter’s apprentice. Heartbroken but determined to make himself worthy of her, he departed for the United States in 1870 at age 21. He later described weeping on the steamship Iowa’s upper deck as he cast a final glance at his hometown. Yet, he thought, “The world was before me.”[1]

Ribe, Denmark, in 1904.

Riis arrived in a nation on the brink of the Gilded Age, a transformational era marked by both progress and inequality. After the Civil War, the United States experienced a boom of technology and industry. Its population swelled, aided by a massive influx of immigrants like Riis. Those who chose to settle in cities like New York lived in increasingly crowded neighborhoods. By the late nineteenth century, the city boasted the nation’s highest concentration of millionaires, but three-quarters of its total population lived in tenements, “shameful old wrecks of buildings” where landlords packed up to eight families into apartments built for one.[2] Subpar sanitation bred disease and startling mortality rates.

Bandits’ Roost, 59 1/2 Mulberry Street, considered the most dangerous part of New York City. From How the Other Half Lives.

Riis witnessed crime, overcrowding and municipal corruption as he acclimated himself to his adopted country and embarked on his journalistic career. The hours were long, the pace demanding and the competition fierce, but he counted the work of a journalist among “the highest and noblest of all callings.” [3]

His success gave him the confidence to again propose marriage to Elizabeth. This time, she said yes. It also led him to speak out against the injustices surrounding him.

“…To Clean Up and Make Light in the Dark Corners”

It was one thing to tell his readers about slum conditions; Riis wanted to show them. The advent of flash photography provided his chance, a way to literally force light into dark spaces. Riis taught himself how to use a camera—no small feat; he once nearly blinded himself with the flash powder— and included 15 haunting photographs in How the Other Half Lives. Writing with “heart, humor, and understanding,” Riis emphasized his subjects’ humanity and urged lawmakers to make meaningful change in New York. [4]

After the success of How the Other Half Lives, Riis spent the rest of his life advocating for zoning regulations, clean air, green space and education. He helped transform Mulberry Bend, a portion of Manhattan’s Five Points neighborhood once described as “the foul core of New York’s slums,” into today’s Columbus Park.[5] Riis counted it among his greatest achievements. “The Bend had become decent and orderly because the sunlight was let in,” he triumphantly wrote.[6]

Simultaneously, Riis chafed against his proximity to the city’s grime and crowds. He wrote, “I have to be where there are trees and birds and green hills, and where the sky is blue above.”[7] As soon as the Riises could afford it, they created some distance and settled in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of Queens. With its shady streets and room for the growing family’s gardens and menagerie of pets, the Richmond Hill house was a place where “[t]he very lights of the city were shut out.”[8]

Jacob Riis’ wife, Elizabeth (center), and children. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

“And Now, After Twenty-Five Happy Years—”

The Riis family spent many happy years in Richmond Hill, but when Elizabeth died in 1905, their home was altered. Since they first moved in, Riis had become a nationally renowned author and confidante of President Theodore Roosevelt. Richmond Hill was not as quiet as it had been. All but one of his children were grown and gone, and now so was Elizabeth.

Three old friends. The President, Bishop Vincent and Jacob Riis taken at Chautauqua NY, August 11th 1905. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Riis worried that his youngest son, 13-year-old John, needed a mother figure. On July 29, 1907, Riis married his secretary, Mary Philips. Mary was an intelligent, capable, and kind woman. Herself a housing reform activist, she deeply admired Riis’s work. They were partners in the truest sense.

Mary Phillips Riis

During their honeymoon on a New Hampshire farm, Riis confessed that he had always wanted a farm of his own. With Mary’s encouragement, the couple began an exhaustive search of New England, finally settling on a 200-acre property on Barre’s Hubbardston Road. The “beautiful old colonial house” overlooked fields surrounded by tall pines and edged by a brook full of trout.[9] One Associated Press article called it “some of the finest farm land in Worchester county.”[10] The Riises named it Pine Brook Farm.

Introduction to Farm Life

“There was a time when the life of a farmer beckoned as a placid sort of existence where… a man was at peace with all things living and dead,” Riis wrote shortly after moving to Barre. “If I were now to describe a farmer’s life, I should rather compare it with the hair-trigger existence a fireman leads in the city…”[11] When they moved in, the Riises quickly realized how much work was needed to get the farm up and running.

The Riis house in Happy Valley.

After restoring the derelict outbuildings, they began planting crops, through which Riis received a practical education in New England’s infamously rocky soil. They planted wheat, hay and fruit trees that first year, but only the potatoes survived the frost. In a letter to the editor of The Century magazine, Riis wrote, “[W]hereas I struggled all these years with bosses and politicals [sic] I am now fighting the blight and the potato bug and winning out.”[12]

Then there were the animals. Temperamental but beloved horses, cows, pigs, chickens and a dog named Sandy constantly got into trouble, testing the fences and harassing the hired farmhands. Meanwhile, Riis battled crows in the gardens and foxes in the henhouse. It was hard work, but he and Mary found humor in it. They were up for the challenge.

Jacob Riis, Tried by Leisure

The Riises’ determination carried them through those early months, but they also learned to depend on their neighbors. Riis was initially critical of the New England farmer’s tendency to be “forever dropping one thing he has begun to take up another that must be done first.”[13] He described some of his peers as the “leisurely kind that tr[y] your city soul,” and their slower pace—exactly what his doctors encouraged—frustrated him.[14] However, he also found much to admire. “They are not men of many or long speeches, but they are level-headed and good,” Riis concluded.[15] Amidst the many challenges of farm life, he and Mary were relieved to have “made friends with some of the finest men I have ever come across….”[16]

Jacob Riis’s farm today. Photos by Emily Parrow.

“The Lengthening Shadows”

With Pine Brook Farm finally established, Riis resumed his national lecture tour, spending summers in Barre but returning to Queens during the harsh winters. After all, the farmhouse did not have electricity. Due to financial strain, the Riises later sold their home in Queens and permanently relocated to Barre in April 1913.

Meanwhile, Riis’s health steadily declined, prompting extended visits to health resorts and sanatoriums. After each treatment, returning to Pine Brook Farm gave Riis the opportunity to reflect. He fell in love with Western Massachusetts, and it was there, he decided, he wished to be buried.

He wrote:

Glad I am… that the lengthening shadows find me in this place with my feet on the soil to which my dust shall return. By our front door stand two great maples… Under them I spend my dreaming hours. A deep valley spreads out at my feet, reaching to the far range of southern hills. Great oaks and elms, and dark majestic pines, clothe the hillside. In October flaming birch and crimson maple light up the valley by day; the moonlight, when the mists are rising from the river, by a strange magic makes of it an inland sea with wooded headlands jutting into it far and near… Long years after I knew that my home was no longer in the land of my fathers, its soil gripped me still. Amid the silent wastes of the Danish heath, where the plover pipes about the viking’s lonely barrow, would I then have laid my bones. But no more do I look across the seas to where my cradle stood. In my happy valley I would live, and here I would lie, a weary toiler, glad of his rest when the day’s tasks are done.[17]

Jacob Riis Departs

Riis suffered a heart attack in the early spring of 1914. While hospitalized, he begged to return to his farm. His doctors finally acquiesced after realizing little more could be done. Riis died on May 26, 1914, leaving a remarkable legacy and a nation in mourning. The Worcester Gazette wrote, “When he chose to make our Worcester County his home and claimed citizenship with us, we loved him all the more, and now this city joins the rest of the country in lamenting the departure from this world of that eminent American, Jacob Riis.”[18]

Before he died, Riis asked that little fuss be made over his burial in Barre’s Riverside Cemetery. He requested that mourners donate to charity rather than send flowers. Because of Riis’s tangible impact on American cities, one might expect a grand monument for his burial plot. On the contrary, the grave was marked by a humble field stone bearing no inscription.

Jacob Riis’s grave

Afterward

Today, it is easy to miss the turnoff that grants public access to the former Pine Brook Farm. A few crumbling foundations are all that remain of Riis’s house and outbuildings. The fields are overgrown, but portions of his orchard survive. Nonetheless, the land remains peaceful, a testament to the idyllic country haven—meant to recapture elements of his childhood in Denmark— that Riis carved out after a long, productive career.

Footnotes to Jacob Riis’s “Happy Valley”

[1] Jacob Riis, The Making of an American (Norwood, MA: Norwood Press, 1901), 20.
[2] Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1890), 42.
[3] Ibid., 99.
[4] Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1931), 204.
[5] Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 35.
[6] Riis, The Making of an American, 99.
[7] Ibid., 183.
[8] Ibid., 185.
[9] “Back to Farm for Jacob Riis,” The Hope Pioneer, Hope, ND, February 8, 1912, 1.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Jacob A. Riis, “Our Happy Valley,” The Craftsman 25, no. 1 (October 1913): 143-144.
[12] Jacob Riis to R.U. Johnson, quoted in Louise Ware, Jacob A. Riis: Police Reporter, Reformer, Useful Citizen (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1938), 280.
[13] Jacob A. Riis, “Our Happy Valley: Number Two,” The Craftsman 25, no. 3 (December 1913): 268.
[14] Ibid.
[15] p. 269, Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17]pp. 272-273,  Ibid.
[18] “We Loved Him,” Worcester Gazette, Worcester, MA, June 15, 1914, quoted in Tom Buk-Swienty, The Other Half: The Life of Jacob Riis and the World of Immigrant America, Annette Buk-Swienty, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 8.

Image of the farmhouse at Pine Brook Farm, published in The Craftsman magazine (1913)- Public Domain: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015006761178&view=1up&seq=573&skin=2021&q1=riis

The author of this story, Emily Parrow, was born and raised in Connecticut. Emily completed her M.A. in History in 2021 and wrote her thesis on nineteenth century Newport, Rhode Island. She currently serves as the National D-Day Memorial Foundation’s Annual Giving Coordinator in Bedford, Va.

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When Satan Came To Salem in 1692

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In 1692, Satan came to Salem in Massachusetts colony and began to establish his kingdom. He started by cajoling and bullying his first victims, sometimes promising them wealth and comfort in exchange for their loyalty. He made them sign his Devil’s Book in blood. Then he gave them magical powers and helpers called “familiars” – yellow birds, dogs and cats.

The Devil then helped his recruits turn into specters and torture young girls until they joined him. His witches killed farm animals and gave grown men intense pain. They killed men at sea.

Soon, Satan’s Kingdom spread to Topsfield, Ipswich, Rowley, Amesbury, Reading and Andover. In war-torn Wells, Maine, Satan found a leader in George Burroughs, a minister who once preached in Salem. Burroughs’ specter returned to Salem and convened a meeting of witches in the Rev. Samuel Parris’s pasture.

 

Salem Witch Trials Memorial Park in Salem: remembering when Satan came to Salem.

The witches arrived on broomsticks, whole families of them. Martha Carrier led many from Andover. Burroughs started off with a trumpet and drum roll, then preached to the hundreds assembled that they must replace God’s churches with Satan’s. At noon, Burroughs administered the scarlet sacraments with help from his deacons Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Osborn, Sarah Good and Sarah Wildes. Then they had lunch, with Burroughs sitting at the head of the table next to a man in a white hat with a high crown. The Devil promised Burroughs he would reign as King of Hell.

That, at least, was one of the stories told by dozens of Puritans in and around Essex County in 1692. Why on earth did they believe it? How did it get out of control? And what stopped it?

This is how it happened.

When Satan Came to Salem

The Puritans arrived in the New World believing in folk magic and in witches. Before 1692, the courts in Puritan New England, mostly Connecticut and Massachusetts, had tried dozens of people for witchcraft. In many cases, the courts exonerated the accused. Often people accused of witchcraft turned around and charged their accuser with slander – and won.

In 1692, Essex County in Massachusetts proved fertile ground for an outbreak of hysterical witchcraft accusations. A terrifying war on the Maine frontier came closer and closer to Salem, just 10 years after King Philip’s War had devastated the colony. Some of the war refugees now living in and near Salem had seen terrible cruelty in the Maine war. Adding to the fear of war were drought, crop failure and a recent smallpox epidemic.

William of Orange

King William III reigned when Satan came to Salem.

Political instability made matters worse. Six years earlier, King James II had revoked Massachusetts’ charter and put a hated leader, Edmund Andros, in charge of all New England. But William of Orange deposed King James II, and revolutionaries in Massachusetts had sent Andros back to England in 1689. However, that left Massachusetts without a charter and without a royally sanctioned government to protect property rights. Worse, King William raised taxes on New Englanders to pay for the frontier war against the French and Indians.

Devout Puritans found this turn of events hard to take. For five decades, John Winthrop’s City on a Hill had grown and prospered. But now, it seemed, they’d displeased God. People stopped going to church, tippled in taverns and violated the dress code. Clearly, Satan was on the march.

Approaching War With Satan

Massachusetts had made witchcraft a capital crime in 1641. According to the Massachusetts Body of Laws. “If any man or woman be a witch, (that is hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit,) they shall be put to death.”

At the beginning of 1692, tension and fear filled the household of the Rev. Samuel Parris in Salem Village (now Danvers). The minister quarreled with some of his parishioners, who wanted him gone and refused to pay him.

Samuel Parris. When Satan came to Salem, he was ready.

Parris preached of the approaching war with Satan in order to silence his parishioners. In late 1691, he said, Martha Sparks of Chelmsford went to prison, charged with witchcraft. Mary Knowlton of Ipswich showed signs of bewitchment.

In the middle of January, Parris’s 9-year-old daughter, Betty, and 11-year-old niece, Abigail Williams, who lived with them, started acting strangely. They crouched under chairs, twisted their bodies into unnatural positions and spoke unintelligible words and phrases. Abigail said she had pains in her head.

Certainly the girls took their cues from the adults in the household. Whether their behavior resulted from epilepsy, boredom, child abuse, mental illness, or ergot poisoning has kept historians busy for centuries.

Their odd behavior, whatever it was, continued for four days.

Massacre in York When Satan Came to Salem

Then on January 25, something terrible happened in York, Maine: the Candlemas Massacre. A French and Indian war party killed or captured about 150 people and burned almost all of their houses. York not only had many ties to Essex County, but the destruction of the town meant Salem and the surrounding towns were not safe from attack.

french-and-indian-wars

When Satan came to Salem, he also came to York, Maine, for the Candlemas Massacre.

In early February, Sarah Good, poor and homeless, came begging at the Parris door. The minister gave something to her four-year-old daughter, Dorcas. Sarah then went off muttering. That seemed to set Betty and Abigail off again. They felt an intense fear that robbed them of breath and speech. It went on for days. The family tried home remedies, but none worked.

Then Dr. William Griggs came to visit them. He concluded they “were under an evil hand.” On February 25, Tituba, the Parris’ enslaved black servant, decided to do something to hurt the witches attacking the girls. She baked a witch cake of rye flour and the girls’ urine, then fed it to the dog.

It only made the girls worse. But it also began to show them the shapes of people who caused their affliction.

A mile away, 17-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard lived with Dr. Griggs. As his orphaned niece, she worked for him as a servant. Hubbard, too, began to show symptoms similar to the girls in the Parris house. At 17, Elizabeth could – and did – testify under oath in court. She would accuse 40 people of witchcraft and testify 32 times, resulting in the execution of 13 innocent people.

The Salem Witch Trials.

A mile away in another direction from the Parris house, 12-year-old Ann Putnam, Jr., also started to writhe and babble and complain of pains. She would accuse 62 people of witchcraft when all was said and done.

Spectral Tormenters

About six weeks after Betty Parris and Abigail Williams started their fits, the local magistrates began to fight Satan in the courtroom.

The four girls had named three spectral tormenters in the shapes of Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba. Sarah Osborne happened to have quarreled with Thomas Putnam — Ann Putnam’s father —  over her first husband’s will. Putnam led a small group to Salem Town on February 29 to swear out a complaint against Osborne and the other two before Judges John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin. Putnam would eventually testify against 43 accused witches.

Hathorne and Corwin then issued warrants for the arrest of the three women. The sheriff brought them to the meeting house. There the two judges examined them, one by one, in front of their accusers. When Sarah Good denied the charges of witchcraft, the four girls became “dreadfully tortured and tormented,” the magistrates said. They claimed her spirit lunged from her body and hurt them.

Tituba, as portrayed in the 19th century by artist Alfred Fredericks in W.C. Bryant’s A Popular History of the United States

Tituba confessed, describing how the devil came to Salem. She said a man-devil and his witches and imps had bribed and bullied her into hurting the girls. She said she also flew on a broomstick to Sarah Good’s house. In the end, her confession and naming of names saved her life.

The judges sent all three to jail — along with thieves, pirates and prisoners of war — to await trial. The prisoners had to pay a fee for their upkeep and their iron manacles. Some died in the fetid lockups as they awaited their day in court.

When Satan Came To Salem Again

But the Devil wasn’t through with Salem, far from it. Back he came to Salem in March, and to Ipswich, Malden and Topsfield. His helpers – the witches – appeared in various shapes to their victims and tried to force them to sign the Devil’s Book. If they didn’t, the witches tormented them — pinching, squeezing and pricking. By the end of March, six more stood accused  of witchcraft by seven more accusers.

Ann Putnam Jr., her mother and their servant accused 71-year-old Rebecca Nurse. Nurse’s sister, Sarah Cloyse, protested, and soon she was arrested for witchcraft. An Ipswich man, Thomas Burnham, Jr., testified he twice saw Rachel Clenton milking his cow at night. She vanished the first time and turned into a gray cat the second, he said. Then the cow died, Burnham accused Clenton and she went to jail.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead

Ann Putnam, Jr., accused four-year-old Dorcas Good of sending her specter to bite her like an animal. Under questioning, the child admitted she was a witch and said she’d seen her mother, Sarah Good, consorting with the devil. She joined her mother in manacles in prison.

Judges Hathorne and Corwin wasted no time in rooting out the witches. They issued arrest warrants, interrogated the accused and then sent them to jail with the noisy, convulsing help of the accusers.

April and May

By springtime, the Salem judges realized they couldn’t handle the volume of cases themselves. In April, accusations spread to Rowley, Topsfield, Reading, Amesbury, Beverly and Wells, Maine. Two more men, Benjamin Gould and John Indian, Tituba’s husband, joined the accusers. And two accusers, the servants Mary Warren and Mercy Lewis, found themselves accused.

Susannah Sheldon, an impoverished 18-year-old war refugee, got into the act in late April. She claimed a wealthy Salem merchant, Philip English,  and his wife, Mary, caused her to convulse. Philip English escaped, but Sheldon went on to accuse 24 people of afflicting her and testify in court against 11 of them.

All told, at least 27 more people found themselves accused of witchcraft in the month of April alone. And in Stamford, Conn., a young French maid named Katharine Branch claimed the specters of Mercy Desborough and Elizabeth Clauson tormented her. Like the Salem girls, she screamed and wept, fell to the floor, rode an invisible horse and did cartwheels with witches. Later, several ministers said Branch’s torments seemed a combination of “fakery, hysteria and improvement by craft.”

The witch panic spread further in May, as accusers called out 50 more witches that month. The Devil appeared in Woburn and Reading, and had particular success in Andover, 17 miles northwest of Salem.

In Andover, 11-year-old Phebe Chandler accused her neighbor Martha Carrier of shaking her shoulder at Sunday meeting. The judges sent Carrier to prison with her children. Jailers hung her two sons upside down by their heels until they accused their mother of witchcraft.

On May 14, William Phips sailed into Boston Harbor with a new charter from England.

William Phips

William Phips

William Phips

The new king, William III, had appointed Phips as royal governor. Phips took office two days after he arrived in Boston.

He had two wars on his hands. One with the French and Indians to his east in Maine, and one with Satan to the north of Boston. Phips would take charge of the war in Maine. He put his lieutenant governor, the ruthless William Stoughton, in charge of the war against Satan.

On May 27, Phips created the Court of Oyer and Terminer, which included nine judges led by Stoughton. Then Phips prepared to leave for Maine to fight the French and Indians.

When Satan came to Salem, William Stoughton did battle with him.

Early on, Stoughton made the key decision to allow the admission of spectral evidence – acts by demons that only an accuser can see. With spectral evidence allowed, Stoughton’s court set about trying and executing witches with astonishing speed.

Stoughton also set another rule that moved things along, one that encouraged (or tortured) the accused into confessing they practiced witchcraft.  The court spared those who confessed. Those who would not confess risked death.

Margaret Jacobs, one of the accused, saved herself by confessing and accusing her own grandfather, George Jacobs, Sr. He would die on the gallows, but he forgave his granddaughter.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer

On June 2, Stoughton convened the Court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem. The killing soon began. Over four months, the court tried almost 200 people for witchcraft and ordered close to 30 executed – all on spectral evidence. Outside the courthouse, the orgy of accusation and score settling continued.

On the first day of court, afflicted girls screamed and convulsed as the court heard testimony against 60-year-old Bridget Bishop.

Bishop pleaded innocent, but the court found her guilty. Years later, Salem minister William Bentley noted the judges admitted evidence from “children, Indians and tender females, but no man of reputation.”

Within a week, Stoughton signed Bridget Bishop’s death warrant. One of the judges, Nathaniel Saltonstall, quit in protest. Jonathan Corwin replaced him.  Saltonstall was then accused of witchcraft.

Bridget Bishop was hanged on Proctor’s Ledge on June 10.

But no one was safe. In Andover, Constable Dudley Bradstreet was the son of the former governor. He issued 48 arrest warrants to people accused of witchcraft. Finally, he said he would issue no more. Then he and his wife then fled town.

Bishop’s hanging caused concern among the Puritan ministers in Boston. The devil, they warned, could impersonate an innocent person. They said the court shouldn’t rely on spectral evidence alone. A Baptist minister named William Milborne sent a petition to the court also objecting to the use of spectral evidence. Phips ordered Milborne arrested.

Entire families went to prison. Accusers blamed the accused for old murders and deaths at sea, claiming they’d seen their specters commit the crimes. The afflicted girls were even used as witch doctors. They were brought to sickbeds to give spectral diagnoses. They would then name two or three people who caused the victim pain. Arrest and imprisonment inevitably followed.

In Connecticut, Kate Branch accused another woman, Goody Miller, who fled.

The Spectral Army

The Devil fought back in strange and terrible ways that summer, heightening the witch panic. He came to Essex County in the form of murderous native American and French fighters. They raided Billerica and Haverhill, killing and scalping women and children. Farther away, they raided Lancaster, Wells, Maine, and Dover, N.H.

When Satan came to Salem he also came to Gloucester in a strange, unsettling way. Terror gripped the town when he brought a spectral army of armed strangers who lurked around Gloucester. They fired at people, but their bullets never hit. They appeared out of swamps but left no footprints. The frightened townspeople huddled into their garrison for a fortnight. Once, when 20 or so of the strangers marched out of the woods, a militiaman fired a silver button at them and they vanished. When they reappeared, the name of God was invoked and they disappeared.

As these events unfolded, the trials continued. Dozens of the accused confessed to joining the devil’s plot in order to save themselves. At Stoughton’s urging, they accused their neighbors and even their own families of witchcraft.

Those who clung to their innocence died for it.

witchcraft-salem-hangings

On July 19, an executioner hanged Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth How, Sarah Good and Sarah Wildes. As Sarah Good awaited her death, Rev. Nathaniel Noyes urged her to confess because he knew she was a witch.

Good, according to legend, cried out, “You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.” He died bleeding from the mouth from a blood vessel that burst in his head.

Satan Came to Salem Again

Stoughton signed so many death warrants the executioner couldn’t keep up. A month after the mass hanging, another took place.

John Proctor, accused by his servant girl, wrote to ministers in Boston begging their help for an objective trials. Some confessions were coerced, he wrote.

Proctor died by hanging on August 19, along with the Rev. George Burroughs, John Willard, George Jacobs. Sr., and Martha Carrier. Burroughs’ execution perhaps mattered most, as he led the local witches in their depredations.

The court had also found Proctor’s pregnant wife, Elizabeth, guilty, but stayed her execution until she delivered her child in prison. If she survived.

Meanwhile, in Connecticut, the trail of Mercy Desborough and Elizabeth Clauson proceeded slowly.

Firebrands of Hell

Through August the accusations continued and so did the trials, with the afflicted convulsing, weeping and shouting. Many of the accused confessed, and some became afflicted themselves and began to accuse others.

By then, 11 had died by execution, and others had died in filthy prisons awaiting trial. Nine more would perish by court order. The court ordered Giles Corey pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea. As he lay dying under a pile of rocks, his tongue lolled out of his mouth. Sheriff George Corwin poked it back into place with his walking stick.

Giles Corey pressed to death

On September 22, eight more were hanged: Mary Esty (Rebecca Nurse’s sister), Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Samuel Wardwell, Margaret Scott, Wilmot Redd, Martha Corey and Anne Pudeator.  “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there,” said the Rev. Nicholas Noyes.

A week later, Gov. William Phips returned from the war in Maine to find his wife, Mary, accused of witchcraft. On October 12, Phips disbanded the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

Getting Out of Jail

The tide had already began to turn. Some of the Andover girls tried to accuse an unnamed “worthy man of Boston” of witchcraft. He responded by getting a writ to arrest them in a thousand pound defamation suit. They backed down.

In Cambridge, Harvard President the Rev. Increase Mather read an essay to a gathering of ministers. In it, he argued a devil could imitate an innocent person and therefore the court should not admit spectral evidence.

Slowly, the accused – those with family and resources – left prison on bail. Some escaped. Some who confessed retracted, saying they’d been frightened and bullied into admitting witchcraft.

In Connecticut, the court found Mercy Desborough guilty but Elizabeth Coulson innocent. The court granted Desborough a reprieve and then a stay of execution.

On December 10, a man named Samuel Rea put up a 50 pound bond to release Dorcas Good, now five, from prison in Boston.  The experience had terrified the child out of her mind. Her mother had given birth to her sister in jail, but the infant died and Good had been hanged. Dorcas never had the sense to govern herself after that, her father said.

The New Year

Though Phips had put an end to the Court of Oyer and Terminer, accused witches still awaited judgment. A half dozen still lingered on death row. The Superior Court  of Judicature then met in December to try the remaining cases.

On Dec. 16, 1692, Phips issued an order: the court could not admit spectral evidence. The court proceedings rolled on, but the accusations stopped. No spectral evidence, no witches. The Devil came to Salem no more.

Then on Jan. 31, 1693, a little more than a year after Betty Parris and Abigail Williams first had fits, Phips reprieved all condemned witches and countermanded Stoughton’s execution warrant. Stoughton furiously claimed the governor had advanced the Kingdom of Satan.

The high court dismissed many of the remaining cases or found the accused were innocent. The court heard the final case in May and ordered all prisoners released — once they’d paid their jail fees. Some who couldn’t died in prison. Others returned to families that had lost a loved one to the hangman’s noose. Tituba was sold into slavery to pay her jail fees.

After the Salem witch trials of 1692, no one has been executed for witchcraft.

Images: Rebecca  Nurse Homestead By Willjay at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82142949. Salem Witch Trials Memorial Park in Salem By Willjay at English Wikipedia – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51394405/

When Satan Came to Salem tells the overall story of the Salem witch trials. You may also be interested in the story of Connecticut’s witch hysteria here. 

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Edward Fitch, a Massachusetts Martyr in Bleeding Kansas

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During the long struggle to abolish slavery in America, Edward Fitch did not hold political office. Nor did he serve as an officer of the Union Army or in any other position typically honored in connection to the Civil War. But without the commitment, fortitude and sacrifice of men like him, the Northern abolitionist cause might have ended years before the war.

Edward Fitch

The son of a Massachusetts farmer, Edward Fitch joined hundreds of New England abolitionists migrating westward to settle in the Kansas Territory. Promises of opportunity on the American frontier drew them there. But they also uprooted their lives to help ensure that slavery would not spread to Kansas once it entered the Union as a state.

Though Fitch faced many challenges and dangers, he doggedly persisted in his new home.

Bleeding Kansas

For five years after settlement opened, “Bleeding Kansas” suffered through a series of stand-offs and violent clashes over slavery. Its brave settlers also had to bear persistent low-level conflict and banditry, which often resulted in personal ruin. These events were a tragic prelude to the Civil War. During those five years, the Kansas Territory emerged as the most dangerous and volatile region of the United States.

One might say that Edward Fitch had a front-row seat to all of it. But that would imply he merely stood by passively.

In fact, Fitch did far more than watch powerful political and societal changes. An impassioned defender of Black freedom, he ultimately gave his life for it. Edward Fitch died in a Civil War-era civilian slaughter, the last monstrous gasp of Bleeding Kansas. He perished trying to protect not only his beloved wife and children, but the ideal of emancipation that the community he helped build had come to represent. This included a tireless resistance to Southern racists’ incursions upon his community.

He did not die in vain. Even hundreds of deaths could not have crushed such a firmly rooted ideal. Edward had done his part to transmit the spirit of abolitionism through the Lawrence community and amplify it.

To this day, the power to transform nations, right historical wrongs and achieve racial justice still depends on the collective actions of ordinary people like Edward Fitch.

Caption: Kansas Territory and Missouri on a 1855 map. Note the alternate spelling.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act on May 30, 1854. Previously, Kansas and Nebraska had belonged to the Indian Territory. Many Native tribes of the Southeast had been forcibly relocated to the Indian Territory after 1830, as they suffered along the Trail of Tears.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act officially created two new American territories on the western frontier. It also opened vast tracts of the Louisiana Purchase to settlement, development and commerce.

The most contentious outcome of the Act was its effective repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The Compromise had blocked the expansion of slavery into the Great Plains since 1820. The Supreme Court would later deem it unconstitutional in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).

Before the court struck it down, though, Pierce sacrificed the Missouri Compromise to ensure Southern support. Territories could choose to enter the Union as free or slave, depending on the preference of the Americans who settled there. Southern senators justified such a repeal by invoking a form of so-called “popular sovereignty.” To some pro-slavery politicians of the 1850s, this seemed like a noble-sounding term that evoked America’s Revolutionary past. It could, they hoped, help them to find some common ground in a time of intense polarization over slavery. When filtered through reality, popular sovereignty became something closer to a massive feud.

Prior to the Civil War, civilian emigrants fought the battle against slavery in Kansas. Resourceful people, they focused on making a profitable living and providing for their families. However, they did not compromise in their commitment to abolitionism, even in the face of violence. Many came from New England, creating an important historical link between the Northeast and Kansas. The convictions of New Englanders became those of Kansas, and had a long-lasting effect in shaping the state’s identity and culture.

Edward Fitch

March 8, 1832 – Edward Payson Fitch is born in the town of Hopkinton, Mass., on a crowded family farm. A hub of shoe and boot manufacturing through the 19th century, Hopkinton is now recognized as the start of the Boston Marathon.

Hopkinton

Edward Fitch was one of the five sons of John Fitch and Lucy Howe. Not much information about his early years in Hopkinton has survived. But even without precise details, his life story provides enough clues to form a picture of his attitude as a young man. As Edward grew into adulthood, he began to find his surroundings stifling.

Crammed into a Massachusetts farmhouse with four brothers, Edward Fitch would have had hardly any room to expand his horizons. Bringing a wife and children into an already full home was out of the question. Furthermore, available farmland in the Hopkinton area was scarce and expensive. His chances for prospering in his hometown seemed dim. Edward did not have an especially adventurous personality, but he felt the squeeze and he wanted a way out.

At some point around March 1854, Edward caught word of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. It advertised transport to Kansas for potential settlers. The company expected its settlers to vote against the territory entering the Union as a slave state. Founded in Boston by Massachusetts state Rep. Eli Thayer, the company sought to turn a profit from abolitionist sentiment. Though it was an opportunistic enterprise, it was vital in establishing anti-slavery communities in Kansas.

Sign used by the New England Emigrant Aid company at their Boston headquarters. Edward Fitch would have walked by this sign before his departure.

An Abolitionist Is Born

Edward Fitch found the company’s pitch appealing on multiple levels. He would have potentially lucrative access to cheap frontier land for real estate speculation. He would have space to grow a family. And as a citizen of Kansas, Edward could vote against the spread of slavery. Edward’s father, an active community leader involved with state government, had been one of Hopkinton’s earliest supporters of the anti-slavery Liberty Party when Edward was a child. Seeing his father’s activism probably left a strong impression on the young Edward. It may have set a guiding example for his own political literacy as an adult.

While Edward may have initially absorbed his abolitionist beliefs from his parent, he was no less sincere in holding them independently. In his later letters, he railed against President Abraham Lincoln for what he felt was a weak and ineffective response to slavery. He harshly criticized Lincoln’s reluctance to take measures toward  immediate and full abolition.

During the Civil War, Edward even quipped, “I almost wish that the Rebels had after Bull Run advanced and taken Washington and then seen whether there was any spunk in the East or not.” He hoped Maj. Gen. John Frémont, commander of the Western Department in wartime, would succeed the more pragmatic Lincoln as president.

For Edward, the drive to abolish slavery was far from an abstract political imperative. He felt it inseparable from his deepest faith in God and his duty as a Christian. Thus, ending slavery was of the gravest urgency and something worth dying for.

Edward Fitch Makes the Journey

In August 1854, Edward Fitch packed his bags, said goodbye to his family and headed to Boston. Once he arrived, the New England Emigrant Aid Company prepared him for his journey. He left with the company’s third traveling party. His group was presented with a song to sing on its departure. It gave their trip an almost heroic, crusading aura. “’Tis Freedom calls us hither,/For Freedom’s sake we roam;/Mid Western wilds, in Freedom’s cause,/We’ll make our happy home.”

During a stop on the road, Fitch encountered a fellow Northerner. The man told him he “ought to have a straitjacket on” for thinking it a good idea to upend his entire life and resettle in Kansas. Fitch would later criticize his hypocrisy and others who claimed to oppose slavery, but refused to resist it.

When Fitch finally laid eyes upon the newly established village of Lawrence, Kans., his feelings of idealism and optimism deflated. Rather than a hub of industry and commerce, he saw what looked like an army camp. The town, mostly composed of tents, had a few small brick structures covered only with hay. Fitch’s earliest letters to his Massachusetts family from Kansas were tinged with regret and homesickness. He complained that he could not teach school there, due to the demands of keeping a boarding house for the many other emigrant arrivals. (Edward Fitch had taught classes in Hopkinton for a year or two.) With such a lack of infrastructure, the early settler found living hard.

Sketch of early Lawrence, Kans., circa 1854 or 1855

Stay or Go?

Some men shook their heads at the situation, gave up, and left, hoping to find better luck farther out west. Fitch may have nearly joined them, writing to his parents “You need not be surprised if…I have decided to go to California.” But he also recognized the necessity of remaining on his property to protect his claim. He bet that its value would greatly increase as the town developed.

Edward Fitch would later write that other feelings influenced his choice to stay. If he were to turn tail and abandon his claim in Lawrence, he dreaded the thought of Southern slaveholders moving in to fill the void with their plantations. These were places where American Blacks were forced to toil in the most dehumanizing conditions from birth till death, an affront to God and humanity. With this in mind, he was no doubt influenced by a deep personal desire to take part in the political and social situation of Kansas, promote abolitionist values, and make his mark on history. Ultimately, he decided to settle permanently in Lawrence, and he finalized his plans to build a farmhouse on his own lot in September 1855.

Staking a Claim

According to Chad Lawhorn of the current-day Kansas Press Association, it has been said that while most other cities of the world were founded on commerce, Lawrence was instead founded on conviction. Many people came to Lawrence looking to make their fortunes and become wealthy. Edward Fitch belonged to this category. But a shared conviction against slavery thickly permeated the community. As Lawrence grew from a frontier outpost into a real town with its own identity, it quickly gained a reputation as a stronghold of the abolitionist movement.

“Missourians Going to Kansas to Vote” by F.O.C. Darley

Resentful of growing Northern influence in Kansas, Southerners accused Lawrence’s citizens of harboring Free-State guerrilla bandits. Known as jayhawkers, their name endures today through University of Kansas sports teams. Their counterparts, “border ruffians” from nearby Missouri, sought to ensure that Kansas would become a slave state. They attempted to assert white supremacy through violence, intimidation, and voter fraud. (Although voting was officially restricted to those who lived within Kansas, in practice, agitators often flouted that restriction. Lawrence’s respect for the freedom of all races, which Fitch shared, made the town their number-one target.

A Skirmish

About a year after Edward Fitch arrived in Bleeding Kansas, he first witnessed tensions over slavery rise to a boil. He entered the fray. Sometime around August 1855, Fitch joined with a group of white settlers who came to defend a Black freeman. Southern agitators threatened the man, calling him a runaway slave. They meant to abduct him across the border and put him in chains for sale as human property.

The sight of marauding slavers capturing Blacks was a tragically common scene across America during the time of the Fugitive Slave Act. But the citizens of Lawrence refused to allow the law to victimize one of their own. Armed with his prized Sharps rifle, Fitch helped to send the would-be kidnappers in retreat. He embodied the words of the New England abolitionist minister Henry Ward Beecher. Beecher famously said that the Sharps rifle had more more moral power than a hundred Bibles when dealing with slaveholders. Anti-slavery groups often smuggled them into Kansas inside of innocuously labeled boxes. Fitch may have acquired his that way.

Ad for the rifle designed by Christian Sharps, which Fitch owned and used

The “War” Before the War

Lawrence increasingly came under siege from violent Missourians. Whether he was running an errand in town or escorting a lady to her home, Fitch had to be armed with his rifle at almost all times. A recurring refrain appears in his letters to his family from this time. “Send me a good pistol,” he wrote, or “I wish I had a good Colts revolver.” Sometimes he added a more detailed description of his preferred make. Quite understandably, he had begun to fear for his own life and those of others around him. He needed a dependable sidearm for added protection.

The escalating aggression came to a head in November 1855 with a grueling two-week armed standoff. Known as the Wakarusa War, a posse of Free-Staters set it off by rescuing Jacob Branson. Branson had witnessed a murder committed by a pro-slavery man. Instead of arresting the killer, Sheriff Samuel Jones had taken in the Free-Stater Branson on spurious charges of disturbing the peace.

The rescue of Branson

Lawrence did not recognize the county’s corrupt, pro-slavery government as legitimate. Elected largely by border ruffians who had broken the law to vote in Kansas, it was deemed the “bogus” administration. Thus, the people of Lawrence felt their resistance to law enforcement was a righteous response to an enemy’s injustices. In retaliation, Sheriff  Jones, along with former U.S. Sen. David Rice Atchinson, roused a large group of ruffians to attack Lawrence. Notably, they were armed by the official state arsenal of Missouri. Over five years before the Civil War officially began, Fitch already described his service in confronting the South as resembling that of a soldier in a war.

An earthen mud fort of the type used in the Wakarusa War’s siege defenses

Standoff

Wakarusa became the most serious test yet of Fitch’s resolve and courage as an abolitionist. He was now an enlisted man — not in the Union Army, but in the local militia. The Lawrence militia counted around 800 men against 700 to 1500 invaders (accounts vary).

For two tension-filled weeks, he bravely stood ready to fight, even sleeping with his Sharps rifle by his side. Fitch was all too aware that at any moment, a single gunshot could have transformed the stand-off into open warfare and ended his life. Lawrence’s militia had little cover, besides some hastily dug mud-and-dirt fortifications. During the “war,” the abolitionist crusader John Brown and his sons aided Lawrence. Miraculously, a brokered truce ended the stand-off, with no real battle or raid having taken place. The next time would not be so fortunate.

Destruction

On May 21, 1856, Fitch was forced to endure the sacking of Lawrence. The event left the town’s Free State Hotel in ruins, and its anti-slavery newspapers were sabotaged and ransacked. Once again, the raid was led by Samuel Jones, who sought to break Lawrence’s spirit and its ability to fight back. He did not succeed at depriving the Free-Staters of their weapons, but he left the town battered by cannon fire and explosives before it was looted. It likely weighed heavily on Edward Fitch’s soul to know that for all his effort and courage, he had been unable to prevent such devastation. The sheriff’s invading forces had taken the high ground on Mount Oread, and thoroughly surrounded the rest of Lawrence, ensuring that any attempt to stop the sack would have likely been suicide.

Ruins of the Free State Hotel

Even under such circumstances, Fitch managed to successfully mail a letter to Massachusetts five days later. He wanted to confirm to his family that he was alive, and react to this latest, worst injustice against his town. In the aftermath of the sacking, emboldened border ruffians ran fully rampant across Kansas, knowing that they could count on state support. Fitch’s writing took on an ever more hurried and anxious tone, with currents of righteous fury. He recognized that the conflict in Kansas had reached a turning point. He expected that if the Bogus Legislature returned to Lawrence again, their next demand would be for all Free-Staters to “leave the territory or be hung.”

Dodging Hate

Though this prediction did not come to pass, smaller attacks from independent pro-slavery groups continued. Another one of Fitch’s letters included a grim observation: “Men are being found dead [around Lawrence] more or less every little while.” While the circumstances of these killings were often mysterious, the motives behind them were clear.

An example of Edward Fitch’s handwriting

To make matters worse, Edward Fitch now had to contend with a pro-slavery settler whose claim neighbored his own. This “neighbor” despised him as a personal enemy, and was likely inclined to violence. Wishing to avoid becoming another dead body on the road, Fitch began to stay away from his own property. In spite of this intimidation, he was aware of the importance of the events he was living through on the future of his country, especially the fates of over 3 million enslaved Blacks, and he did not shirk from his self-imposed duty.

Fitch’s parents now feared for their son’s life. But when they seemingly all but pleaded for him to leave Lawrence, and to return to the peace and safety of his Massachusetts hometown, he replied, “I could never be satisfied, I don’t think, to come back there to live.” He held his belief even after a failed business venture in Quindaro, Kans. that neutered his ambitions in real estate and finance. (Quindaro became an abandoned ghost town after the Civil War.) Although Edward had yearned to return to New England, he would have wanted such a trip to be short, and devoid of sentimentality or comfort, to “lift his voice up like a trumpet against the administration and slavery…” Even if it killed him, Edward was determined to make Kansas his home forever.

A street in Lawrence, circa 1858 or 1859

Finding Love

In spite of their many doubts, Edward Fitch’s parents would soon find a reason to celebrate their son’s choices. Edward’s time away from his claim transformed his life. He helped to fill his days by frequenting a book and stationery store located on Lawrence’s Massachusetts Street. Otis Wilmarth, a bookseller and bookbinder from Providence, R.I., owned the store. He would eventually employ Fitch.

Fitch aided the Wilmarths through their daily lives and personal crises, such as the illness and death of Otis’s wife Julia. He almost came to be seen as a part of their family. He then made that connection real. During his many visits to their store, Edward fell deeply in love with the family’s daughter, Sarah A. Wilmarth. She completely shared his values and convictions against slavery. The couple would be happily married in early 1857. Their joyous union bloomed all the more brightly amidst the fear and uncertainty of Bleeding Kansas, leading to the births of three Fitch children.

A Fruitful Life

Fitch had finally attained his dream of starting a family on the frontier. Now he could not help but share the joys of fatherhood with his Massachusetts family and friends. Amidst dry talk of legal and financial matters, and hot takes on politics, his boundless love for his wife and children repeatedly found its way into his letters home. He described events like his daughter taking her first steps in glowing terms. Sarah cherished Edward as the most ideal husband she could have wished for. He was practically her “living idol,” as she put it.

In the midst of the chaos of Bleeding Kansas, something else that brought a sense of stability and fulfillment to Edward Fitch’s life was his involvement in remotely organizing a Free-State charity drive in Hopkinton, Mass. This was an especially impressive feat in an age before the telephone or the internet. The treasured relief sent to Lawrence from his childhood home consisted of barrels filled with clothing and other necessities, which Fitch fairly divided up among the poor and needy.

Renewed Hope

The aid recipients included some people who had recently been well-off landowners. But pro-slavery ruffians had robbed or destroyed almost everything they owned. For instance, the abolitionist missionary George Lewis received a new set of clothes from Fitch’s mother, after he had returned home one day to find his entire farm razed. Despite his predicament, his spirits were raised by the Fitch family’s generosity. He later wrote them a letter expressing sincere gratitude, and a renewed hope for the Free-State cause. No one in Lawrence was left untouched by the conflict – their collective struggle was shared every day in large and small ways, and people became each other’s strength.

Even 1,440 miles from his Massachusetts hometown, Edward Fitch always kept a strong connection to his New England family. He frequently wrote to ask about his friends, relatives and acquaintances who still lived in Hopkinton. Though he had not seen them in years since his emigration, he remembered them well, and felt concern for them in his absence. Along with the support of his parents, this sentiment would have greatly aided in maintaining the connections needed for a successful interstate charity drive.

Flyer for a Lawrence Cornet Band concer

Fitch, a hobby musician, enjoyed playing the bass violin at gatherings and belonged to the Lawrence Cornet Band. He was keen to reminisce on the innocent feelings of his boyhood, and he had a surprising sense of humor at times. During a particularly cold winter, Fitch joked that he was considering moving “to Lapland,” where it was surely bound to be warmer. One of his letters humorously recalled an incident where a barrel of hard liquor was joyously paraded through the streets of Lawrence, with even some boys ending up tipsy, much to the consternation of the local Temperance movement.

A Tragic Sacrifice

Aug. 21, 1863 – The Civil War against the breakaway Confederate States of America was in its third year. The “bogus” administration of Kansas was no more, having been replaced by the Free-State Wyandotte Constitution. While the era of “Bleeding Kansas” had ended, all of America now bled profusely from the struggle over slavery.

William Clarke Quantrill

Away from the front lines, daily life still went on for the citizens of Lawrence. They had earned a relative sense of stability after Kansas attained statehood on January 29, 1861. The state constitution had made some painful compromises, denying suffrage to Blacks, Natives and women. But a complete prohibition on slavery was now the settled law of the land. For a time, this appeared to have finally ended the violence around Lawrence. However, the bastion of freedom was about to face the most terrible atrocity ever inflicted on it – the Lawrence Massacre.

Enter Quantrill’s Raiders: a vicious band of irregular, pro-Confederate guerrilla fighters, of the type known as bushwhackers. Their leader was the slave-catching bandit William Quantrill. Among their ignoble ranks: the notorious bank and train robber Jesse James.

In a brazen daylight attack, they invaded Lawrence with such swiftness that they caught the militia by surprise. The raiders slaughtered about 150 mostly unarmed civilians in a horrific frenzy, and burnt the majority of the town to the ground. Among the martyrs to freedom that day was Edward Fitch, just 31 years old.

An artist’s depiction of the Lawrence Massacre

The Death of Edward Fitch

Two weeks after the attack, Edward’s widow Sarah Fitch managed to summon enough courage and strength of will in her condition to write a heartrending letter. It described her late husband’s final sacrifice in full detail.

Before her family had any chance to escape, a drunken raider who appeared to Sarah like a demon from hell entered their house. He then growled that not one of them would leave alive. A second raider convinced the killer to spare the wife and children. But he did not relent in shooting to death the man of the house trying to protect his family.

As with many other buildings all over Lawrence during the raid, the invaders set fire to the Fitch house afterwards. They prevented Sarah from carrying Edward’s body or possessions out of the burning wreckage of their beloved home. Instead, Edward’s charred, cremated bones had to be recovered from the ashes, after the terror of the raid had receded into a quieter grief and agony over its toll.

Ruins of the massacre

Edward Fitch, Singled Out

Sarah believed Quantrill had singled out her family because Edward’s name appeared on a list of local militia members. Quantrill’s gang may have gotten the list. While not known for sure, modern research confirms that, in certain cases, the raiders had indeed planned specific targets for their revenge.

Sarah described a particular “spirit” that seemed to possess the outlaws who destroyed their home. She sensed a ferocity and hatred in them more terrible than the vengeance unleashed onto others.

The Union Army would respond to the massacre with the heavy-handed General Order No. 11. It forced many rural families in Missouri, the origin of the raid, to abandon their homes and farms.

Caption: Sarah (Wilmarth) Fitch. Taken in her later life, many years after the Civil War, this is the only known photograph of her.

The Aftermath

While the widowed Sarah would eventually marry another man, the real love of her life had been stolen from her. Nevertheless, Quantrill and his gang of pro-slavery killers failed to turn the tide of history. Slavery would be defeated. And even though Edward did not live to see it, the Lawrence survivors would rebuild their town from the ashes.

This heroic restoration from fire has been fittingly honored with a phoenix-themed memorial sculpture in Lawrence since the 2000s. In some sense, Edward’s own life continued through his three treasured children: Julia, Charles, and the infant Edward Payson Fitch, Jr., baptized during his father’s funeral.

Edward and Sarah’s children as adults

Edward Fitch’s life as a Kansas emigrant began with dreams of making it big in untapped real estate. But it ended because he took a stand against injustice. He did not need an official declaration of war or an army conscription to tell him to do so. He only needed his own convictions about the evil of slavery, and the commands of his personal faith.

“From the Ashes,” a sculpture near the Lawrence Visitors Center

Despite his parents’ pleas, Fitch refused to back down. He did not flee from the aggression toward Lawrence, even knowing the great danger to his family.

His story shows that New Englanders confronted the forces of slavery head-on in the 19th century. They did so not just on active military duty but as ordinary civilians. And they had reasons for moving west that transcended self-serving individualism or the flawed myth of “manifest destiny.” Though he never wore the fatigues of a Union soldier, Edward Fitch still played a role in emancipating Black Americans.

End Notes

          Eric Pratt, the author of this story, is a volunteer at the Hopkinton Historical Society in Massachusetts (https://hopkhistsoc.org/) with a BA in History. This article is deeply indebted to Chad Lawhorn’s book “Postmarked: Bleeding Kansas.” It includes a collection of Edward and Sarah Fitch’s original letters. It was also aided by the research materials in “Kansas History,” a journal of the Kansas State Historical Society.

 

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New Haven’s Center Church Crypt, the Puritan City of the Dead

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In the basement of an old Congregational church on New Haven Green lies a small city of the dead. One hundred thirty seven gravestones still stand in the Center Church Crypt, built in 1813 over a portion of an old Puritan graveyard. They tell dozens of stories about the early inhabitants of New Haven. Tales From the Crypt: A Cata-Blog of Stones and Stories From the Basement of the Center Church tells many of them.

The Center Church Crypt

Buried under the bricks are Benedict Arnold’s first wife, Rutherford B. Hayes’ grandmother, Cotton Mather’s crazy cousin, a hated Loyalist and a man and a woman without whom Yale would not exist, at least as we know it. New Haven in 1813 had only about 5,800 residents, and the people interred in the crypt probably either knew each other or were related to someone else lying nearby.

The church itself has other famous names associated with it. Asher Benjamin made the pattern for it in his book, based on James Gibbs’ design for St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Ithiel Town, who bequeathed to New England the lattice truss covered bridge, supervised construction. Eli Whitney’s family pew hasn’t moved from inside the church, and Tiffany Studios designed the stained-glass windows.

Center Church on the Green

Oldest Stone in Center Church Crypt

The oldest stone in the old crypt belongs to Sarah Trowbridge, daughter of well-to-do merchant Henry Rutherford and his wife Sarah.

Ms SARAH TROWBRIDG
DECEASED JANUARY
THE 5th aged 46
1687

She hadn’t turned 16 yet when she married the boy next door, Thomas Trowbridge, who also became a well-to-do merchant. He had studied under a famous Puritan schoolmaster, Ezekiel Cheever and rose to local prominence. He served on the committee to bring the Rev. James Pierpont (also buried in the crypt) to New Haven to fill the pulpit left by the Rev. John Davenport.

Sarah had seven children before dying at the age of 46. Note the use of the title “Ms.” The next known use of “Ms.” came 70 years later, for Sarah Spooner in Plymouth, Mass. But that may have to do with the chiseler’s incompetence rather than early feminism: In addition to leaving off the “r” in “Mrs.,” he ran out of room and left off the “e” at the end of Trowbridge.

James Pierpont

James Pierpont, a Harvard graduate, is credited with co-founding Yale College. The Center Church hosted Yale’s commencement every year until 1895. Commencement exercises still take a detour around Center Church as the bells toll.

Weepy James Pierpont

Pierpont’s descendants include Aaron Burr, J.P. Morgan and James Lord Pierpont, author of Jingle Bells. He died at age 55, perhaps from over-exertion during his emotional sermons. His epitaph explains.

HERE LYETH Ye BODY OF Ye REVd
Mr JAMES PIERPONT Ye LATE
FAITHFUL & ABLE MINISTER
OF Ye GOSPEL IN N. HAVEN.
An ELOQUENT MAN & MIGHTY
IN Ye SCRIPTURES, WHO BEING
FERVENT IN SPIRIT CEASED
NOT FOR THE SPACE OF 30 YEARS
TO WARN EVERY ONE DAY
AND NIGHT Wth TEARS: WHEN
HE FINISHED HIS COURSE
NOV 22d 1714 AETATIS 55

He had three wives, but only one lies buried in the crypt – under a misspelling of her name.

THE MEMORY OF THE JUST
IS BLESSED.
UNDER THIS MONUMENT
LIES BURIED
THE PRECIOUS DUST
OF Mrs SARAH PIERPOINT
CONSORT OF Mr JAMES PIERPOINT

Wives and Mothers in the Center Church Crypt

Pierpont, a Puritan from Boston, made connections – marital connections — in high Connecticut places.

Of his other two wives, Abigail Davenport was the daughter of the co-founder of New Haven Colony, John Davenport. Davenport also co-founded the Center Church. Pierpont’s third and last wife, Mary Hooker, was the daughter of the founder of Connecticut Colony, Thomas Hooker.

Neither of those wives are buried in the crypt, but one of his mother-in-laws is: Abigail Davenport, whom the carver identified as “the relict” of John Davenport. She died in 1717 at 74.

The Real Founder of Yale?

Just after Pierpont arrived as the town minister, one of his devout worshippers, Mrs. Hester Coster, bought a piece of land in town. Before she died in 1691, she bequeathed the lot to the church “to be improved toward the maintaining of a lecture in New Haven in the spring and fall of the year.”

Image of Yale -- Creator of the Wickedest City

“A View of the Buildings of Yale College at New Haven,” lithograph, published by A. Doolittle & Son, New Haven. Courtesy of the Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database.

The church leased the property until 1717. By then, Wethersfield, Saybrook and New Haven were all vying for the Collegiate School. The trustees decided to build the school in New Haven if they could acquire the Coster lot and another piece of land. They could and did, and then renamed it Yale after another benefactor.

Hester Coster also lies buried in the Center Church Crypt under a nondescript stone.

Sarah Whiting, Painful Mother of Eight

Sarah Whiting, a tourist favorite, finished her wearisome pilgrimage in 1769. It’s the inscription describing her as “The painful mother of eight” that the visitors like so much.  She was described as “faithful, virtuous and weary.”

In Memory of
Mrs Sarah Whiting
late virtuous & amiable consort
of John Whiting Esquire
Daughter of Mr Jonathan Ingersoll
of Milford, born on the 22d of October
1726, married on the 7th of Novembr 1751
the painful Mother of eight children of
whom Six survive. On the 4th day of July 1769
She finished her wearisome pilgrimage
in joyful hope & expectation of a glorious immortality.
The hand of the good man fasten on the
skies and bids earth roll nor feels her idle whir.

Sarah had a famous brother, Jared Ingersoll, a Loyalist tax collector hanged in effigy several times.

Jared Ingersoll

The praise of Jared Ingersoll carved into his gravestone in 1781 did not reflect public opinion in 1765.

A prominent New Haven attorney, in 1764 he sailed to England to deliver a load of masts from the Connecticut River. While there, he received a commission as stamp agent for the new and soon-to-be widely loathed Stamp Act.

Upon his return, New Haven residents surrounded his house and demanded he resign. He finally did, but then he decided to go to Hartford under the protection of the Legislature. He did so hoping a mob wouldn’t destroy his house, as it did to Boston’s stamp collector.  under the protection of the Legislature so a mob wouldn’t destroy his house.

Jared Ingersoll, thoughtful, collected and sagacious. Or not.

On the way to Hartford, a posse of 500 men on horseback overtook him and rode him to Wethersfield. There the citizens demanded he shout “Liberty and property” three times, which he did, throwing his hat into the air. He then moved with his family to Philadelphia. Eventually he returned to New Haven, where he died in 1781.

His son, also Jared Ingersoll, sided with the revolutionaries and signed the U.S. Constitution, making him a Founding Father. Jared, Jr., may have hired the spin doctor who chiseled his father’s epitaph in the Center Church Crypt.

The Most Dishonest Epitaph in the Center Church Crypt?

In Memory of
The Honble Jared Ingersoll Esq.
Judge of the Court of Vice Admiralty
in the Middle District
in America.
A man of an uncommon Genius
which was cultivated
By a liberal Education at Yale College,
And improved by the Study of Mankind,
And of Laws, Policy and Government,
He distinguished himself at the Bar,
Where his perspicuity and Energy in Reasoning
And Equality in Conducting Causes,
Elevated him
To the First Eminence in his Profession.
Under the appointment of the General Assembly
He was twice honoured
With the Agency from Connecticut
At the court of Great Britain.
His Morals were unblemished.
He was thoughtful, collected and sagacious,
open and sincere,
mild, affable, and courteous.
Adapting himself to all
By a rich Variety of sentiment and Expression
Yet preserving in his whole Behavior
A graceful and majestic Dignity.
He died Aug. 25th A.D. 1781
AEtat. 60.

Wives of Famous Men

Mary Edwards married Jonathan Edwards, the son of the famous theologian also named Jonathan Edwards.

Benedict Arnold belonged to the church. On April 22, 1775, Arnold led his Second Company of the Governor’s Foot Guard to capture Fort Ticonderoga. Before they set off, the men gathered on the Green for a blessing by the Rev. Mr. Jonathan Edwards.

Jonathan Edwards and Benedict Arnold

Mary Edwards undoubtedly knew Margaret Arnold, also buried in the Center Church crypt. Mrs. Margaret Arnold departed this life June 19, 1775, at the age of 31 – just five weeks after her husband captured Fort Ticonderoga.

Not much else is known about Mary Edwards, except the way she died.

In
Memory of
Mrs MARY
EDWARDS the
AMIABLE & EXCELLENT
CONSORT OF THE Rev.
Mr JONATHAN EDWARDS
& daughter of ye Honbl
ELEAZER PORTER of
HADLEY who riding
out in a carriage was
accidentally drowned

Tales from the Crypt tells us,

She had been riding into the country, on horseback, and had stopped at the pond to allow her beast to drink, when it is supposed it waded into the pond beyond its depth and both the horse and rider were drowned.  The sad event greatly excited the community and when Mrs. Edwards was buried in New Haven she was followed to the grave by the largest procession that had ever been seen in that town.

Three Sisters

The Center Church Crypt has a plaque on the wall dedicated to Amelia Broome Jarvis and Maria Broome, “two amiable sisters, lovely they were in life.” However, there was a third sister, Betsy, left unmentioned.

Perhaps Betsy didn’t die in her 20s, as her sisters had. Perhaps she died elsewhere. Or perhaps no one liked her.

One of the two lovely, amiable sisters, Amelia Broome Jarvis, lived with her husband in New York, according to Tales From the Crypt.

She died suddenly of an apoplectic fit during a visit to her wealthy parents in 1788, just 23 years old.

Her gravestone bears a poem.

Swept with a hasty torrent hence
Like a vain dream we pass
Spring up and grow and wither soon
as doth the short lived grass
Alas its gone and quickly too
when Blasting winds blow o’er
And then the place in which it grew
Shall never know it more.

Male Admirers

In life, she had won the admiration of 18-year-old John Quincy Adams. Perhaps he’d met her while the family lived in Boston. In 1785, three years before her death, Adams paid a visit to her father while traveling through New Haven with a friend. The Broome house sat on a hill above the harbor, “a most agreeable situation,” wrote Adams.

I was in great hopes of seeing Mrs. Jarvis (Amelia). Her sister Betsy Broome (Miss) was at home, but not at all sociable. Samuel Broome is a “sincere, open-hearted good man.”

To be fair to Betsy, the Marquis de Chastellux visited the family while they lived in Boston a few years earlier. He praised the “excellent dinner,” “the honors of which were performed by Mrs. Jarvis [Amelia] and her sister [Betsey], with as much politeness and attention as if they had been old and ugly.”

Rutherford B. Hayes

Adams wasn’t the only president of the United States associated with the Center Church Crypt. Rutherford B. Hayes, a genealogy nut, visited the crypt to see the gravestone of his grandmother.

Rutherford B. Hayes

It read,

Mrs REBEKAH HAYS
the amiable & virtuous consort
of Capt. EZEKIEL HAYS
& daughter of Col. JOHN RUSSEL
late of Br’nford, departed
this Life May 27th 1773 in
the 51st year of her age.

It concludes, “Her children rise up, and call her blessed. Her Husband also praiseth her.”

Cotton’s Cousin in the Center Church Crypt

Warham Mather, Cotton’s cousin, was born in Northampton, Mass., in 1666. After graduating from Harvard he moved to New Haven, where he tried the ministry, medicine and the law. He failed at the first two but had some success as a lawyer. He died in 1745.

When the probate court reviewed his will, witnesses said he was mentally incompetent when he wrote it.

Jared Ingersoll, before people hated him, testified.

At this time I could not discern that Mr. Mather was affected by any pain of Body, but so prodigiously broke as to his Intellectuals, that I must confess I should have soon as thought of pulling a Dead man out of his grave & getting him to execute any Deed or other Instrument as he.

The court ordered the will changed to include “heirs of the whole blood only.”

The last person buried on the City Green was Mrs. Martha Whittelsey, buried by her husband’s side in 1812.

Generally the crypt is open for public tours from the beginning of april to the end of October, but during the pandemic it has been closed. For more information, click here.

Images: Center Church Crypt, By 2112guy – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3146058.  Center Church on the Green By Farragutful – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79676674.  This story updated in 2023.

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St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the London Model for the New England Meetinghouse

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New Englanders visiting Trafalger Square in London often get a shock when they see the façade of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The famous parish church of the Royal Family looks a lot like a New England meeting house both inside and out.

James Gibbs had some very different ideas when he designed St. Martin-In-The-Fields. He shaped it like a Greek temple, added a portico and columns to the front and put a steeple in the center, just behind the portico.

St. Martin-in-the-Fields

Gibbs, a Scottish architect, laid the cornerstone in 1722. It was finished in 1726 and then criticized. No matter. Gibbs included the design of St. Martin-in-the Fields in a pattern book he published in 1728. His Book of Architecture traveled across the Atlantic into gentlemen’s libraries and then onto colonial greens.

“In the end it became the model church throughout New England and much of North America,” wrote HRH Prince Charles, in a fundraising letter for the church. Charles, like the rest of his family, rarely attends church services.

Gibbs, a Catholic, designed the church as an Anglican parish. But Puritan New England adapted it for their meeting houses.  Then other denominations did, too. From the Church of Saint-Joseph in Madawaska, Maine, to St. Catherine of Siena in Greenwich, Conn., columned portico, rectilinear shape, steeple, weathervane — Even into the 20th century, American country churches had the elements Gibbs introduced in St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

James Gibbs

St. Martin-In-The-Fields

James Gibbs broke the mold when he designed St. Martin-in-the-Fields for Anglican worshippers. Most English churches were Medieval and suited more to the Catholic Mass than the Anglican service.

Inside the church, Gibbs shrunk the Catholic altar and stuck it in a shallow apse. He designed built-in box pews along a central aisle facing the pulpit. He then put side and rear balconies halfway up giant columns. That made it easy for parishioners to see and hear the centerpiece of the ceremony: the sermon.

Outside, he made one big innovation, the one that would define what a church looks like. He put the steeple in the center, just behind the pediment.

Interior of the church

He also simplified the exterior and gave it the classical lines of a Greek temple.

Anglicans, like the Puritans, abhorred religious symbolism. So Gibbs put a weathervane, not a cross, on top of the steeple. Instead of statues of saints, Gibbs put a clock on the steeple – useful in a day when people didn’t have wristwatches. The royal coat of arms went onto the pediment rather than more saints.

In England and France, people just hated it, especially the steeple. Americans loved it. St. Martin-in-the-Fields, they thought, was exactly what a church should look like.

Gibbs’ suggested steeple designs

“With hundreds of derivatives of Gibbs’s London landmark, Americans became imbued with the idea that a proper church should be vaguely classical and have a portico and steeple no matter how basic,” wrote architectural historian Calder Loth.

Patterning St. Martin-in-the-Fields

The colonies needed new churches in their burgeoning cities and towns. But trained architects were few and far between.

Gibbs’ pattern book told them how to build them.  (what is a pattern book. Describe pattern book)

He wrote the book for” gentlemen concerned in building.” He especially targeted toward those in “the remote parts of the Country, where little of no assistance for Designs can be procured.”

The book included “useful and convenient buildings and proper ornaments.” The buildings could be executed “by any Workman who understands Lines, either as here Design’d, or with some Alteration, which may be easily made by a person of Judgment.”

New England colonists ate it up. The book earned Gibbs a 1,900 profit and became a must-have for the colonial gentleman’s library.

Center Church on the Green

Center Church on the Green

New Haven’s Center Church on the Green is one of the most famous offspring of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. It’s also one of the most lavish.

Asher Benjamin, who wrote his own pattern book, designed it. Ithiel Town, who bequeathed to New England the lattice truss covered bridge, supervised construction, which went from 1812 to 1815. It has all the basic elements: a steeple, a portico, a classical (read relictilinear) shape, a clock and a weathervane.

The Congregational Church in Guilford, Conn., borrowed its conical steeple from Benjamin after he’d borrowed from Gibbs. It added an American innovation, clapboard construction, to which the colonies’ abundant forests made a sensible contribution.

North Yarmouth and Freeport Baptist Meetinghouse

North Yarmouth and Freeport Baptist Meetinghouse

Known as the Old Baptist Meeting House, the St. Martin-in-the-Fields-style building has a claim as the oldest Baptist Church in Maine. Built in 1796, it functioned as a Baptist meeting house until 1889, when the congregation moved. It has since served as an antiquarian society, a library, a World War II observation tower, a Town Meeting hall and a wedding venue.

Arlington Street Church

The Arlington Street Church

Builders finished the Arlington Street Church in 1861, the first public building erected on the fill that made up Back Bay. It sits on 999 pilings pounded into mud. Its architects, Arthur Gilman and Gridley James Fox Bryant, deliberately modeled the building on St. Martin-in-the-Fields. It’s always been a Unitarian-Universalist Church. In 2004. It held the first state-sanctioned same-sex marriage in the United States.

Church-on-the-Hill

Church-on-the-Hill in Acworth

The Acworth Congregational Chursh, also known as The-Church-on-the-Hill or Acworth Meetinghouse, was built in 1821. Though modeled on St. Martin-in-the-Fields on the outside, its interior has a decidedly Victorian look and feel.

Built in 1821, its design mimics the Congregational Church of Templeton, Mass., which of course gets its idea from St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

A nonprofit now owns the building.

First Baptist Church

First Baptist Church

The church that Roger Williams founded met in several plain, boxy meeting houses until 1774. Then, the Baptists wanted to bring respectability to their denomination. What better way to do it than with a steeple, a portico and a bell.

Work began on the building in the summer of 1774, at the time the largest building project in New England. The Port of Boston had closed in retaliation for the Boston Tea Party, so workmen flocked from Boston to Providence to find work on the church.

John D. Rockefeller paid to restore it in 1957, but one thing he didn’t restore: a gallery set aside for free and enslaved black parishioners.

Marlboro Meeting House

Marlboro Meeting House

The people of Marlboro, Vt., liked their St. Martin-in-the-Fields-style Congregational Church so much they replaced it in 1931 after it burned down. The first church was built in 1820, but then moved to the town common. Even before the famous Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields got started (see below), Adolf Busch and his son-in-law, Rudolf Serkin, started the Marlboro Music Festival.

A Little More about St. Martin-in-the-Fields

St. Martin-in-the-Fields got its name during the Middle Ages, when it was located well outside of London — in the fields. It didn’t move; London just grew.

The church holds 20 services a week, runs the award-winning Café in the Crypt and has a brass rubbing, shop. Every year it houses 400 homeless people.

You may also have heard the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under the direction of Sir Neville Mariner. It’s a chamber orchestra founded by Mariner and John Churchill, master of music at St.-Martin-in-the-Fields. It gave its first concert in the church in 1959. The ensemble, which later included woodwinds, is credited with reviving Baroque music in England.


Yarmouth Meeting House By NewTestLeper79 – Visit, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107297726. Arlington Street Church By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58886179. First Baptist Church By Beyond My Ken – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104511048. St. Martin in the Fields (side view) By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107268575. By Diliff – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32215421. Center Church on the Green By Farragutful – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79676674. St. Martin-in-the-Fields front view By Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net)., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11327834. Arliington Street Church side view By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10003248. Center Church with banners By Smuconlaw. – Own work., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19269291. This story was updated in 2024.

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