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The Boatload of Ginseng That Launched the China Trade

The Empress of China launched the China trade on Feb. 22, 1784, when she sailed out of New York Harbor loaded with ginseng, lead, Spanish silver coins and woolen cloth. The Treaty of Paris had been signed, America and Britain were at peace and America was free for the first time to trade with China.

The Empress of China

American merchants had long eyed China as a tantalizing opportunity ever since peace broke out. Not only were Americans enamored of Chinese tea, silks and home goods, but traders didn’t have too many other options. The British had cut off American trade with the West Indies, and European nations had set up daunting trade barriers.

Within 20 years of the Empress of China’s voyage, American ships would outnumber those of all other nations trading with China. Profit from the China trade would finance mills, factories, railroads and mines as well as courthouses, schools, roads and bridges. Philanthropic merchants would pour their wealth from China into such institutions as the Perkins School for the Blind, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Bunker Hill Monument and the Boston Athenaeum.

The China Trade Begins

The Empress of China, built as a privateer during the American Revolution, got a quick retrofit after the peace treaty was signed on Sept. 3, 1783.

Extremely cold weather froze the Empress of China in New York Harbor and delayed her first voyage. Finally, the weather broke and she sailed off to the East.

John Green, an Irishman from Philadelphia, was the Empress of China’s captain. Samuel Shaw, a 29-year-old Bostonian who had served as Gen. Henry Knox’s aide-de-camp, served as his senior business agent, or supercargo.

On Aug. 23, 1784, the ship sailed up the Pearl River in South China. The sailors aboard the ship thrilled to see the Stars and Stripes unfurled for the first time in that part of the world.

Chinese painting of the factories at Canton, 1820.

The French, the Danes, the Dutch and the British all greeted them politely. But the Chinese restricted them to a section of Canton where goods were exchanged in large factories, or hongs, while their ships moored nearby. Shaw reported on exchanges between British and American mariners:

On board the ships it was impossible to avoid speaking of the late war. They allowed it to have been a great mistake on the part of their nation – were happy it was over, –glad to see us in this part of the world, — hoped all prejudice would be laid aside, — and added, that, let America and England be united, they might bid defiance to all the world.

The ‘New People’

The Chinese didn’t know what to make of the Americans. They called them the ‘New People.’ (Later they would call them the ‘Flowery-Flag Devils’ because the stars on the flag looked to the Chinese like flowers.) Shaw showed them a map of the United States and explained the size and possibilities of the new country. The Chinese, he wrote, ‘were not a little pleased at the prospect of so considerable a market for the productions of their own empire.’

Samuel Shaw, China trade pioneer

The Chinese had less interest in buying foreign goods than in selling their own. They did, however, prize ginseng, used as a curative, energy booster and aphrodisiac. Ginseng grew in only a few places: eastern Asia and parts of North America, including Canada, the mountains of New England, New York and Appalachia.

It took three months to scour the eastern United States for nearly 30 tons of ginseng to ship aboard the Empress of China. It was the largest shipment ever to arrive in Canton. Unfortunately for the Americans, the Europeans had also brought large amounts of the root. The price plummeted.

The China Trade Takes Off

Otherwise, trading went well. The Chinese made an empty building available for the Americans. Shaw negotiated the purchase and sale of goods with the Chinese hong merchants.

The Empress of China left Canton on Dec. 28, 1784 and arrived in New York Harbor on May 11, 1785. 22 months after her departure. She carried 800 chests of tea, 20,000 pairs of nankeen trousers and a huge quantity of porcelain. Newspapers announced her return, and stores up and down the East Coast sold her cargo. That’s where the Americans learned how to make real money in the China trade: the sale of Chinese export goods to Americans.

All told, the voyage earned a 25 percent return on investment. Investors had hoped for more, but they made enough to spawn a new era of commerce with China.

Shaw gave a complete report of the voyage to John Jay, the U.S. foreign minister. Jay shared his findings with Congress. Members of Congress responded with ‘a peculiar satisfaction in the successful issue of this first effort of the citizens of America to establish a direct trade with China.’

Wealth

For the next 60 years, the China trade would make New England merchants very, very wealthy. In Boston alone the China trade enriched George Cabot, John Perkins Cushing, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Robert Bennet Forbes, Israel Thorndike and Russell Sturgis. Gideon Nye from North Fairhaven, Mass., made his fortune in the China trade. And in Salem, Mass., trade with China made rich men of Elias Hasket Derby, Abiel Abbot Low and Joseph Peabody.

Salem waterfront ca 1770-1780

You can still see the wealth generated by the China trade in Salem’s Chestnut Street District, part of the Samuel McIntire Historic District, the Salem Maritime National Historic Site and the Peabody-Essex Museum.

With thanks to When America First Met China by Eric Jay Dolin. This story about the China trade was updated in 2023.

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The Civil War Love Letter of Sullivan Ballou

Just before he died, Union Army Maj. Sullivan Ballou sat down in Washington, D.C., to write a love letter to his wife of six years, Sarah Shumway Ballou.

Sullivan Ballou

His regiment, the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry, was about to go into battle. He did not have a good feeling about the outcome.

The date: July 14, 1861. He had 15 days to live.

Sullivan Ballou

Sullivan Ballou was born on March 28, 1829, to a prominent Huguenot family in Smithfield, R.I. His father died when he was four years old, and his mother subsequently struggled to support Sullivan and his two sisters.

He managed to graduate from Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and attended Brown University for two years. He then went to the State and National Law School in Ballston, N.Y. The school moved to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1853. That’s probably where Sullivan Ballou fell in love with Sarah Shumway, who lived in that town.

Sullivan Ballou returned to Rhode Island, where he was admitted to the bar. He and Sarah married in 1855, and they soon had two sons.

Sullivan had an extremely bright future until the Civil War broke out. He was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives, chosen as clerk of the House and later as Speaker. He was a staunch Republican who campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

Sullivan Ballou Goes to War

When the war started, he felt he had to go. He enlisted on June 5, 1861 in the 2nd Rhode Island Infantry Regiment and was commissioned a major. The regiment moved to Washington, D.C., where it joined the Union Army of Northeastern Virginia in Camp Clark.

When Sullivan Ballou got word they would march soon, he sat down and wrote his letter. It would survive for more than a century and become the centerpiece for filmmaker Ken Burns’ series The Civil War. He declares his love for Sarah and for his country in the poignant missive:

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

A week later, Sullivan Ballou was fighting the First Battle of Bull Run. It was the first major battle of the war and a disaster for the Union. As he tried to rally his men, a cannonball struck him in the leg, tearing it off and killing his horse. He was carried to a field hospital where he died an agonizing death on July 29. He was then buried next to his commander, Col. John Slocum.

The Letter

Sarah Shumway Ballou, widow of Sullivan Ballou

He had never mailed the letter. He left it in his trunk, which was sent back to Sarah with the rest of his effects.

The Confederates left the battlefield in March 1862, which allowed Rhode Island Gov. William Sprague and 70 troops to retrieve the bodies of Union soldiers. They discovered the enemy had dug up the remains of Sullivan Ballou. In addition, they decapitated, desecrated and burned it.

The Rhode Island delegation gathered what remains of him they could find and took them home. Thousands of people viewed his flag-draped coffin at the Armory of the First Light Infantry. He was then buried in Swan Point Cemetery.

Sarah never married again. She lived on a $29-a-month military pension and earned money teaching piano to young boys in Woonsocket. Eventually, she moved to New Jersey to live with her son. She died in 1917 and was buried next to Sullivan. The original letter, never found, probably accompanied her into her grave.

‘My very dear Sarah’

Here is the entire letter written by Sullivan Ballou:

My very dear Sarah:

The indications are very strong that we shall move in a few days—perhaps tomorrow. Lest I should not be able to write you again, I feel impelled to write lines that may fall under your eye when I shall be no more.

Our movement may be one of a few days duration and full of pleasure—and it may be one of severe conflict and death to me. Not my will, but thine O God, be done. If it is necessary that I should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready. I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American Civilization now leans upon the triumph of the Government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution. And I am willing—perfectly willing—to lay down all my joys in this life, to help maintain this Government, and to pay that debt.

But, my dear wife, when I know that with my own joys I lay down nearly all of yours, and replace them in this life with cares and sorrows—when, after having eaten for long years the bitter fruit of orphanage myself, I must offer it as their only sustenance to my dear little children—is it weak or dishonorable, while the banner of my purpose floats calmly and proudly in the breeze, that my unbounded love for you, my darling wife and children, should struggle in fierce, though useless, contest with my love of country.

First Battle of Bull Run

Deathless Love

Sarah, my love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break; and yet my love of Country comes over me like a strong wind and bears me irresistibly on with all these chains to the battlefield.

The memories of the blissful moments I have spent with you come creeping over me, and I feel most gratified to God and to you that I have enjoyed them so long. And hard it is for me to give them up and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when God willing, we might still have lived and loved together and seen our sons grow up to honorable manhood around us. I have, I know, but few and small claims upon Divine Providence, but something whispers to me—perhaps it is the wafted prayer of my little Edgar—that I shall return to my loved ones unharmed. If I do not, my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, and when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.

Forgive my many faults, and the many pains I have caused you. How thoughtless and foolish I have often been! How gladly would I wash out with my tears every little spot upon your happiness, and struggle with all the misfortune of this world, to shield you and my children from harm. But I cannot. I must watch you from the spirit land and hover near you, while you buffet the storms with your precious little freight, and wait with sad patience till we meet to part no more.

Wait for me

But, O Sarah! If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; in the brightest day and in the darkest night—amidst your happiest scenes and gloomiest hours—always, always; and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath; or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

Sarah, do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for me, for we shall meet again.

As for my little boys, they will grow as I have done, and never know a father’s love and care. Little Willie is too young to remember me long, and my blue-eyed Edgar will keep my frolics with him among the dimmest memories of his childhood. Sarah, I have unlimited confidence in your maternal care and your development of their characters. Tell my two mothers his and hers I call God’s blessing upon them. O Sarah, I wait for you there! Come to me, and lead thither my children.

Sullivan

This story about Sullivan Ballou was updated in 2023.

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The Hope and Glory of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment

In the middle of the Civil War, 1,007 African-American soldiers of the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment disembarked at Boston South Station with 37 white officers. They then paraded in full dress uniform across Boston Common as a tumultuous throng cheered them on.

Sgt. William H. Carney of the 54th Massachusetts won the Medal of Honor for his valor at Fort Wagner.

It was May 28th, 1863, and they had trained for several months at Camp Meigs in Readville, Mass. They were on the way to war under the leadership of 25-year-old Col. Robert Gould Shaw.

They marched knowing that the Confederacy had promised to sell black soldiers into slavery if captured, and to execute the white officers.

The 54th Massachusetts

A third had worked as laborers, a quarter farmers. There were teamsters, waiters, barbers, seamen, cabinetmakers, a dentist and a druggist. Fathers had enlisted with their sons, and brothers enlisted together. Frederick Douglass’ two sons joined the 54th.

TDuring their march, the soldiers passed abolitionist Wendell Phillips’ house, where William Lloyd Garrison watched them with tears streaming down his face. They then passed the house of Oliver Wendell Holmes, who came out with Henry James, Sr., who saluted his son, an officer in the regiment.

Down State Street they marched, where a gang of rowdies tried to attack them. A large police force, however, repelled the toughs. The regiment then marched in review on Boston Common before Gov. John Andrew and set off to Battery Wharf singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic in a thousand voices.

John Andrew

Gov. John Andrew

That stirring moment was largely the work of Andrew, who became Massachusetts governor on Jan. 3, 1861, three months before the Civil War broke out.

Andrew, born in Windham, Maine, on May 31, 1818, was a 42-year-old lawyer who had taken up the abolitionist cause with fervor. He handled the legal defense of runaway slaves and helping to found the Republican Party. He was elected state representative from Hingham, Mass., in 1857, and his popularity as an orator and advocate took him to the governor’s office.

Detractors called him a ‘straight and impractical republican’ and, worse, ‘a lawyer of a low type and a brutal fanatic.’

As governor he immediately began preparing for war, accepting recruits from other states to serve in Massachusetts regiments. In 1862 he began working with Frederick Douglass to win permission to recruit African-American uniformed soldiers for the Union Army.

”If Southern slavery should fall, and colored men should have no hand and play no conspicuous part in the task, the result would leave the colored man a mere helot,” Andrew wrote. They would have ‘lost their masters, but not found a country.’

Paving the Way

Andrew and a group of Massachusetts radicals – radicals because they thought slavery should be abolished – then went to Washington in January to ask President Lincoln for permission to raise a colored regiment. Andrew wanted it to be a model for future African-American regiments.

Henry Augustus Monroe, 13-year-old drummer boy for the 54th Massachusetts.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton granted permission, and the fabled 54^th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was born. It did indeed pave the way for more African-American soldiers.

Seven months after the parade on Boston Common, Robert Gould Shaw led about 600 troops of 54th Massachusetts Regiment in an assault on Fort Wagner at the mouth of Charleston Harbor. Nearly half were killed, wounded or captured. Shaw died in the battle, and the Confederates tossed into a common grave with 74 of his men.

Though the 54th Massachusetts failed to take the fort, the soldiers’ skill and courage quelled any doubt about the fighting ability of African-American soldiers.

Heroes of the 54th Massachusetts

William H. Carney received the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1900 for rallying the troops at Fort Wagner. Born a slave in Virginia, he escaped and enlisted in the 54th Massachusetts.

During the fighting, Carney rescued the American flag when the standard bearer fell. He carried the flag to the enemy’s ramparts and back, saying “Boys, the old flag never touched the ground!”

Henry Monroe joined as a 13-year-old drummer boy for the 54th Massachusetts. He directed maneuvers with his drum during the battle. Later, as a Methodist minister, he described the rebel fort as a “slumbering volcano.” He then explained how it “awoke to action and poured forth sheets of flame from ten thousand rebel fires, and earth and heaven shook with the roar of a hundred pieces of artillery.”

Detail from Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ plaster cast for the 54th Regiment Memorial.

(You can see 43 photographs of the members of the 54^th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment here, courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.)

By the end of the Civil War, 10 percent of the soldiers in the Union Army were African American, double their population in the North.

Of the 54th Massachusetts, Andrew said,

I know not where, in all of human history, to any given thousand men in arms there has been committed a work at once so proud, so precious, so full of hope and glory.

Veterans of the 54th Massachusetts at the dedication of the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment on Boston Common, May 31, 1897.

This story last updated in 2022. For the story of Frederick Douglass’ escape to freedom, click here.

Detail of Robert Gould Shaw Memorial By Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2675742.

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Walter Camp and the Birth of Modern Football

Leave it to a clockmaker named Walter Camp to turn a chaotic excuse for a brawl into a game of precision and time limits. We now know it as football.

Camp starred in football for Yale just as the game came back into fashion in the 1870s. His real contribution to football, though, was in setting the rules over 15 years of meetings with collegiate athletic directors at a Springfield, Mass., hotel.

Walter Camp

Walter Camp, the Father of Modern Football. National Portrait Gallery.

Walter Camp was born in New Britain, Conn., on April 7, 1859, into the family that owned the New Haven Clock Company. Chauncey Jerome founded the company in 1817 and made a fortune by selling cheap clocks with brass works. A devastating fire and Jerome’s own mistakes allowed his nephew, Hiram Camp, to take over the company. By the time Walter was born, the New Haven Clock Co. was the world’s largest clockmaker.

When Walter Camp was a year old, the sport that would become football was banned by Yale, and a year later Harvard would follow.

Mob Football

Walter Camp as a Yale football player.

It was then known by different names, but it resembled the medieval European sport of mob football. The game had unlimited players, and one of its few rules disallowed manslaughter and murder as methods of moving the ball to the goal.

By the 19^th century, mob football moved to college campuses as an intramural sport. Each college played by its own rules. A Harvard tradition known as Bloody Monday started in 1827, when the freshman class played the sophomore class. Winslow Homer illustrated the game in an engraving called Class Day at Harvard University in 1858.

But the game evolved into an excuse for a brawl that usually ended with injuries. Under pressure from the surrounding towns, college administrators banned it.

At that point another version was becoming popular at East Coast prep schools. Called the Boston game, it used the round, inflatable ball introduced in 1855. Graduates of Boston’s elite prep schools played it. They called themselves the Oneida Football Club, which some consider the first organized football club.

The Oneidas played pickup teams from 1862-65 on Boston Common. In 1925, surviving members of the club dedicated a small stone monument on the Common. It claims the Oneidas never allowed a point. The inscription reads,

On this field the Oneida Football Club of Boston, the first organized football club in the United States, played against all comers from 1862 to 1865. The Oneida goal was never crossed.

Football Returns to College

By 1873, football returned to college campuses. On October 20 of that year, representatives from Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and Rutgers met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City. They intended to agree on the first set of collegiate rules.

Harvard refused to participate because the soccer-based rule conflicted with the Boston game, to which Harvard was committed. The new rules spread quickly, though, to college and high school campuses throughout the country.

Such was the state of affairs when Walter Camp entered Yale in 1876. Football was again becoming popular and the rules were just starting to be codified. Camp was a star athlete who played halfback for the football team as an undergraduate and later as a medical student. He was named captain, a position equivalent to head coach at the time. He also became a member of the Intercollegiate Football Association, formed during his freshman year.

Massasoit House

Class Day at Harvard University, 1958, by Winslow Homer

Three years after the Intercollegiate Football Association met in New York, the Massasoit House hotel in Springfield, Mass., hosted representatives from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia to adapt rules based on rugby rather than soccer. That decision was just one step in the evolution of football that Walter Camp would so greatly influence.

Camp would become a fixture at Massasoit House, bringing a technocratic approach that perfected the game step by step, year after year. The same kind of Yankee inventiveness that revolutionized clock-making went into 15 years of refinements that resulted in America’s most popular sport.

As a senior at Yale, Camp prevailed at Massasoit House and cut the number of players to 11 from 15. That year he also came up with the idea for a static line of scrimmage. In 1882, the Yale-Princeton game ended in a scoreless tie, and Camp revised the rule to require the offense to gain five yards in three attempts or give up the ball. He also added measuring lines to the field. The next year, he revised the scoring system.

In 1883, Camp’s medical studies were interrupted, and he ended up working for the family clock-manufacturing business. He did maintain his interest in the workings of the human body and later developed a set of exercises for the U.S. military called the Daily Dozen.

A Football Powerhouse

From 1888 to 1892, Camp was unpaid head coach at Yale while working for the family business. As an engineer he understood the advantages of planning and specialization. Each Yale player trained for a specific role including quarterback, which Camp invented, along with offensive signal calling. He borrowed mass-production techniques from the clock company to shape the team’s drills. From 1885 to the end of 1899, Yale won 46 straight games and outscored its opponents by 2018 to 29.

For years, Camp and journalist Caspar Whitney selected the annual All-American team, known as Walter Camp’s All-American team. For 42 years he edited the yearly college football guide, and he wrote and spoke prolifically about the sport. By 1892, he had created the game we now know as football. At the age of 33, Walter Camp was called the ‘Father of American Football.’

The Oneida Club dedicates a monument to the game on Boston Common, 1925.

Camp had his critics. As Yale’s head coach, athletic director and spokesman, some viewed him as a self-promoter who compiled questionable statistics to support his views. He hoarded gate receipts for the football program at the expense of minor sports like wrestling and swimming. And he used an alumni-funded slush fund of $100,000 to pay for gifts and vacations for his star players.

Hall of Fame

None of that could stem the rising popularity of football. Rivalries sprang up all over the country, usually culminating in the Thanksgiving Day game we watch today. As far back as 1887, Boston Latin High School and the English High School of Boston faced each other on Thanksgiving – and they’re still doing it every year.

By the time he died in 1925, Camp had written 30 books and 250 magazine articles creating the myth of football players’ manliness and courage. His foundation has awarded the Walter Camp Player of the Year award since 1967. No player from Yale has won the award.

Walter Camp died on March 14, 1925. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 1951.

This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read about the improbable beginnings of the New England Patriots here.

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Tenting Tonight: A Civil War Song Endures 150 Years Later

The beloved Civil War song Tenting Tonight captured the war-weariness of the homesick soldier, but it was written by a draftee who never fought.

That draftee, Walter Kittredge, was born on Oct. 8, 1834 in Reed’s Ferry (now Merrimack), N.H.

Walter Kittredge

Kittredge was 29 and singing with the famous Hutchinson Family Singers when he got his draft notice in 1863.

Hutchinson Family Singers

The Hutchinson Family Singers reigned as the most popular American entertainers in the 1840s. They toured New England singing native folk tunes and patriotic anthems in four-part harmony.

The singers didn’t shy away from controversy and sang political songs promoting workers’ rights, women’s rights, abolition and temperance. During the Civil War they sang at at mass outdoor meetings promoting the Union cause.

The Hutchinson Family Singers were still in demand when Kittredge joined them in 1855. Eight years later, when he received his draft notice, Kittredge knew he did not want to go to war.

The night before he had to report for the draft, a haunting melody ran through his head. So did the words “tenting on the old campground.”

He wrote the entire song and the lyrics that night at his home in Merrimack.

Camp of the second Connecticut regiment at Washington, in a grove on the north side of the city, May, 1961. (Library of Congress)

Tenting Tonight

Kittredge never had to fight in the Civil War because he was rejected by the surgeons at the draft board. Lucky for him, he’d had rheumatic fever as a child.

The Hutchinsons learned Tenting Tonight and sang it at Old High Rock in Lynn, Mass. Their audience loved it. The next year a New York song firm published the song as sheet music. Within three months the company sold more than 10,000 copies, a huge hit for the time.

The Hutchinson Family Singers

The song captured the public’s changing taste for music. Strident tunes like Battle Hymn of the Republic gave way way to songs of sorrow and loss.

Soldiers on both the North and the South sang Tenting Tonight at Civil War encampments. Fifty years after the war ended, tearful veterans sang Tenting Tonight when they gathered for reunions. They sang it at the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 and the Great Soldiers’ Reunion in Washington in 1892.

Tenting Tonight just kept going. Roy Rogers sang it in the 1938 film Come on Rangers. Modernist composer Charles Ives quoted the song in his own work They Are There, a popular song during both world wars. Musicians still perform it to this day.

Tenting Tonight has been called one of the nation’s first protest songs for its antiwar sentiment:

We’re tenting tonight on the old campground,
Give us a song to cheer
Our weary hearts, a song of home
And friends we love so dear.

Chorus:

Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace.

Tenting tonight, tenting tonight,
Tenting on the old camp ground.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Witch Trial Records Produced Hysteria of Their Own

Whether you’re a Pawn Stars fan or Antiques Roadshow is more your speed, the story is the same. Money-hungry owner of a rare ‘authentic’ bit of American history has his object appraised and comes face-to-face with the cold hard truth: The colonial desk has drawers made of pressboard, that 1472 on the bottom of the vase is really 1972, the Vermeer handed down through generations is really a paint-by-number made by a kid at summer camp.

Judge William Stoughton signed Bridget Bishop’s death warrant during her witch trial.

And so you sniff with satisfaction and click off the television. ‘Never happen to me,’ you say. But are you so sure?

Suppose you ran into a stranger, a military veteran down on his luck. And he explained he needed money to travel home because his wife just died. He knew that the rare document he possessed was worth more than he was asking, maybe even a lot more. But he was looking for quick cash and was offering you a win-win proposition. Would you help this poor fellow, or turn your back?

Now look at the two photos below. Two death warrants signed for witches from the witch trial records of the Salem witch hysteria – Bridget Bishop and Martha Corey. Look closely at the witch trial death warrant on the right. The paper seems incredibly bright and clean, the wax stamp is bright red. Almost too perfect, isn’t it?

And the witch trial death warrant on the left, tattered and barely readable. The stamp destroyed. You can’t even tell what it says. Who could authenticate such a document? But isn’t that what a missing sheriff’s order from 1692 would most likely look like?

You decide. Because one witch trial death warrant is undoubtedly worthless and one witch trial death warrant is worth, who knows?

Not so simple now, is it? It wasn’t so simple for investigative reporter A.B. Macdonald of Kansas City, either.

Witch Trial Hysteria

In 1692 and 1693, the courts of Massachusetts did indeed order the deaths of 20 people for witchcraft. Two hundred (perhaps a few more) were charged in what historians now believe was a massive case of petty jealousies and score settling. One scientist, though, has posited that it was a case of fungus-induced hysteria.

Killing witches was nothing new, but the the Salem trials stood out for their sheer insanity and corruption. In the aftermath, the court papers were stored away and an 1875 review found the death warrants for the 20 murdered witches were, for the most part, gone from the files.

Bridget Bishop’s death warrant

Pilfered for profit? Removed as souvenirs? Purged because of the shame now associated with the trials? Simply lost? It’s not clear. But only one witch trial death warrant remained with the original records. The others were missing, and a great mystery to the collector community.

$20 Death Warrant

Forged death warrant

This was roughly the state of play in 1932 when “Captain E. Newman Bradley” knocked on the door of A.B. MacDonald, a writer for the Kansas City Star. Though somewhat knowledgeable about historic documents, MacDonald bought Bradley’s story that he needed money to travel because he had been notified his wife was dead.

MacDonald’s main reservation about paying $20 for the witch trial death warrant was that he was taking advantage of Bradley’s misfortune. He would pay more, he offered, if the man could wait until morning for a check. But Bradley was clearly a bird-in-the-hand man, and fled with a wave of his hand.

Of course, researchers now suspect Bradley had more than one death warrant in his collection, and he was probably off to his next mark.

Though the witch trials actually took place in what is now Danvers, Mass., much of the action, including the executions, took place in modern-day Salem. Thus Salem has forever been the hub for the history and hysteria surrounding the witch trials. So it was Salem where MacDonald’s document ultimately wound up for review.

With visions of scoring $10,000 for the document, a Vermont antiques dealer presented it to Howard Corning, secretary of the Essex Institute, now the Peabody Essex Museum. Priceless or worthless?

Corning delivered the bad news. The document was not only a forgery, it was a bad one, Corning said. And he pointed the dealer to the authentic warrant – the bright clean one for Bridgett Bishop – to demonstrate what they should look like.

More Forgeries Surface

But MacDonald was not the only one fooled. A slew of phony death warrants were floating around, bought by eager collectors. As more and more people began plaguing Corning about their ‘authentic’ warrants, he began speaking out about them. Harvard historian Steven Biel produced a terrific article about the forgeries for Common-Place in 2005.

Today the forgeries are lodged in collections and attics around the country, and the ways they are uncovered make for interesting reading. MacDonald wrote of his experience for the Kansas City Star.

In 1939, another death warrant emerged for five of the accused witches. It is in the Boston Public Library collections. Others, however, remain missing. None of this means that the ‘death warrant’ you find mixed in with the family photos in the attic or stashed in a box at the yard sale isn’t real. But you probably want to have it checked out before planning your retirement.

You can view the witch trial records, collected at various libraries and museums, at the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive.

This story was updated in 2022.

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