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The Boston Massacre: John Adams Saves a Soldier’s Life

On March 5, 1770, Matthew Kilroy shot Samuel Gray to death during the Boston Massacre.

Kilroy had fought with Gray earlier, and witnesses saw him point his gun at him. He was taken into custody to await trial.

The event that helped trigger the American Revolution began with name calling, petty quarrels and street brawls. Sam Adams used it to stir up anti-British feeling. John Adams used it to uphold high-minded principles.

In the process, John Adams also saved Matthew Kilroy from the gallows.

Would phone spying prevented the Boston Massacre?

Propaganda depicting the Boston Massacre.

Before the Boston Massacre

Boston roiled with tension and anger over British soldiers quartered there during the winter of 1769-70. Two thousand of His Majesty’s Troops, along with their wives, children and hangers on, crowded into the town you could walk in an hour. The soldiers competed for housing and for women, and they weren’t always polite about it. They didn’t make much money, and often looked for side hustles, which lowered wages for the locals.

A Boston protest

Then on February 22, a Loyalist shot to death 11-year-old Christopher Seider during a protest against merchants who broke the ban on selling British goods. Two thousand people attended his funeral.

Eight days later, a fight broke out at John Gray’s ropeworks.

Ropeworks

The ships sailing in and out of Boston Harbor used huge quantities of rope. One ship could use as much as 31 miles of the stuff. By 1770, Boston’s wharves had a more than a dozen ropewalks, sheds as long as football fields. Men laid down strands of hemp inside, then twisted them into rope by walking the length of the shed. The workers then dipped the rope in kettles of hot tar, which often started fires. Ropeworks were dirty, dangerous sweatshops, but the poorly paid British soldiers were willing to work in them to earn extra cash.

Charlestown Navy Yard ropewalk, 1852.

On Friday, March 2, Patrick Walker, a private with the 29^th Regiment of Foot, left his nearby barracks to fetch a bucket of water from a well next to Gray’s ropeworks.

William Green, a ropeworker, called out: “Do you want work?”

Walker replied, “yes.”

Green said, “then go clean my s–t-house.” (Other witnesses remembered him saying “the necessary house” or “the little house.”)

According to one witness, Walker

…damned us and made a blow at, and struck me, when I knocked up his heels, his coat flew open, and out dropt a naked cutlass, which I took up and carried off with me. He went away, and came back with a dozen soldiers with him.

Others reported a different chain of events. However it developed, dozens of workers and soldiers got into a free-for-all. An elderly justice of the peace happened on the scene and tried to intervene, only to narrowly escape getting knocked down himself.

No Peace

The ropeworkers drove off the soldiers, but feelings didn’t subside over the weekend.

Historian J.L. Bell notes that two of the soldiers, Thomas Walker (the regiment’s black drummer) and Pvt. John Rodgers, needed medical attention. Several soldiers later testified as to their injuries. None of the ropeworkers seemed much the worse for wear, Bell noted.

A 29th Regiment of Foot soldier in 1742.

Among the ropeworkers was Samuel Gray, a journeyman, a streetfighter and no relation to the boss. Among the soldiers was Matthew Kilroy, an illiterate grenadier who would kill Samuel Gray in the Boston Massacre three days later.

Over the weekend, workers and soldiers armed with clubs prowled the streets, spoiling for a good fight. Several broke out between the soldiers and workers.

On March 4, the soldiers returned to John Gray’s ropeworks, looking for a missing sergeant rumored to have been killed. The sergeant showed up, but both sides shouted at each other angrily.

John Gray, who leaned Loyalist, went to visit the regimental officers. He struck a deal. He would fire William Green, and they would keep the soldiers away from the ropeworks. Both sides would try to calm things down.

John Adams

John Adams, a 34-year-old lawyer, spent the chilly winter night of March 5 by a fire in the South End home of Henderson Inches. Inches, married to a niece of John Gray, was hosting a get-together with old friends in their arts and social club.

Dan Abrams and David Fisher recreate the scene in John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father’s Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial.

“[Adams] and his fellow guests were alarmed by the ringing of bells. Supposing it to be a signal of fire, they quickly put on their hats and cloaks ‘and went out to assist in quenching the fire or aiding our friends who might be in danger’.”

John Adams

They fell in with many other Bostonians who rushed to the scene, filling the wintry streets.

…Adams joined the stream of people flowing toward the top of King Street, the scene of the incident. His fears focused on Mrs. Adams, who was alone in their house with maids and their young son. It already was a difficult time for her; the Adamses had buried their young daughter, Susanna, only a month earlier and Abigail was hardly herself.

When Adams reached the Customs House, he saw British soldiers forming a protective wall around their comrades. He hurried on to his house in Cold Lane. On the way he ran into a company or two of regular soldiers drawn up in front of Dr. Cooper’s old Church with their muskets all shouldered and their bayonets all fixed.” He ignored them and went home. Abigail, to his relief, was fine.

The Quarrel That Ignited the Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre started with another argument. This time, 30-year-old Pvt. Hugh White was standing sentry in front of the Customs House, a rented mansion used for offices. A wigmaker’s apprentice started a quarrel with him, saying a lieutenant hadn’t paid his bill. The sassy boy irritated White so much he finally hit him in the head with his musket.

Though attention focused on the Customs House, the action also took place in front of the Old Statehouse, pictured here.

The boy started crying and a sergeant chased him away. But the boy and another apprentice told passersby what White had done. Some then made their way to the Customs House to hurl insults at White.

“Damned rascally Scoundrel Lobster Son of a Bitch”! a witness later remembered them saying. The crowd threw snowballs and oyster shells at White, but mostly missed. White then made a show of loading his musket.

Henry Knox, then a burly 19-year-old bookseller, came out of his shop on Brattle Street. He watched White handle his gun and said, “If you fire, you die.”

Samuel Gray

A couple of boys got into the First Meeting House and started ringing the bell. People then began showing up with fire buckets.

A town watchman, Edward Langford, tried to calm both sides. In the street, someone told Samuel Gray what had happened at the Customs House. He then made his way toward the growing crowd and planted himself at the front. Months later at trial, John Adams quoted a witness saying

[Gray] had a stick under his arm, and said he would go to the riot, “I am glad of it, (that is that there was a rumpus) I will go and have a slap at them, if I lose my life.” And when he was upon the spot, some witnesses swear, he did not act that peaceable in-offensive part, which Langford thinks he did. They swear, they thought him in liquor—that he run about clapping several people on the shoulders saying, “Dont run away”—“they dare not fire.”

At the same trial, patriots tried to characterize the crowd as small boys.

“We have been entertained with a great variety of phrases, to avoid calling this sort of people a mob,” Adams said. “The plain English is gentlemen, most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tarrs.”

Matthew Kilroy

Matthew Kilroy was in the guardhouse with a handful of other grenadiers when Capt. Thomas Preston ordered them to march to the Customs House.

Kilroy was big and burly, like the rest of the grenadiers. A 22-year-old Irishman, he had already served in the British Army for seven years. He couldn’t read or write. Someone once overheard him saying he would not miss an opportunity to fire on the inhabitants of Boston.

The grenadiers rushed toward the Customs House, led by Cpl. William Wemms. Shouting oaths, they pushed aside people who got in their way. They made their way through the crowd and formed an arc in front of the Customs House.

Wemms ordered them to load their rifles. Knox pulled Preston aside and said, “”For God’s sake, take care of your men for if they fire your life must be answerable.”

The Boston Massacre

The crowd dared the soldiers to fire. Then a group of several dozen sailors arrived, led by a tall sailor of mixed race–Crispus Attucks. They had picked up heavy sticks from a pile of firewood. The sailors had their own grievances. The British Royal Navy had a habit of kidnapping sailors off the street and impressing them into a miserable service aboard ship.

Some of the sailors surged forward throwing ice and rocks. British bayonets sliced into them. Attucks got close enough to grab one of the bayonets with one hand and knock the soldier down with the other.

An 1868 print of the Boston Massacre by Alonzo Chappel, showing more chaos (and probably more accurately) than the earlier propaganda.

“Fire!”

Then a missile – a snowball, or an oyster shell, or a stick – struck Pvt. Edward Montgomery’s musket. He lost his balance and fired his weapon—probably, say historians, inadvertently. Someone shouted, “Fire.”

Fourteen shots rang out. Attucks took two balls in the chest and fell into the gutter. Samuel Gray went to look at Attucks and Kilroy leveled his rifle at Gray’s head. Gray may have shouted, “Don’t fire, damn you!”

Kilroy fired. The ball left a hole the size of a fist in Samuel Gray’s head. He struggled for a moment, then collapsed, dead, onto the feet of the town watchman.

A sailor named James Caldwell took two bullets in the back. Samuel Maverick, an apprentice, caught a ricocheting ball and died the next day. Patrick Carr, an Irish immigrant who happened to pass by, was shot in the hip. He died nine days later.

The constable took charge, directing people to fetch a doctor, memorize soldiers’ faces, carry away the dead and wounded. Captain Preston ordered the men to prop their rifles and march back to the guardhouse. The next day, all eight were taken into custody.

John Adams, Esq.

Adams later remembered James Forrest, a wealthy Irish merchant, visiting him in his law office. With tears streaming, Adams recalled, Forrest begged him to defend the soldiers. Lawyers Josiah Quincy, Jr., and Robet Auchmuty, Jr., said they’d accept the case if John Adams did.

Agreeing to take the case was one of the best things he ever did, Adams wrote. He did it because he believed a fair trial was the right of all English citizens. If the poor fools fired in self-defense, they must be tried, he wrote. If the truth came out and law prevailed, they must be acquitted.

A jury acquitted Capt. Thomas Preston in the first trial. The second trial, of the seven grenadiers, was harder. Despite confusion and conflicting witness statements, two soldiers were consistently singled out. Edward Montgomery for killing Crispus Attucks and Matthew Kilroy for killing Samuel Gray.

The prosecution attacked Kilroy for joining in the ropewalk melee three nights before the Boston Massacre.

Adams painted a dramatic picture of a fearsome mob assaulting a small squad of soldiers who did their best to restrain themselves. “[T]he law does not oblige us to bear insults to the danger of our lives, to stand still with such a number of people round us, throwing such things at us, and threatening our lives, until we are disabled to defend ourselves,” he said.

No one, continued Adams, said Matthew Kilroy knew Samuel Gray. And even if he did, and even if he hated him, he had a right to defend himself.

The rule of the law is, if there has been malice between two, and at a distant time afterwards they met, and one of them assaults the other’s life…the law presumes the killing was in self defence.

Grave marker for the victims of the Boston Massacre in the Old Granary Burying Ground.

The Verdict

A jury returned a verdict of not guilty for five of the grenadiers. But it found Montgomery and Kilroy guilty of manslaughter. The punishment was death by hanging.

But John Adams had a well-known trick up his sleeve called “benefit of clergy.” Originally intended to protect clergy from the gallows, it allowed people to avoid hanging by proving they could read the Bible. To let illiterate criminals like Kilroy off the hook, the court asked them to recite an easily-memorized psalm. If they could manage that, the court would lessen their punishment to branding on the thumb.

Appeals were made to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson to waive the painful punishment. Hutchinson, however, didn’t want to further inflame Boston. So on Dec. 14, 1770, Matthew Kilroy and Edward Montgomery stood before the sheriff and held out their hands for the red-hot iron. It either burned an “M” for murder—or maybe an “F” for felon—so they couldn’t escape hanging again.

Just before the sheriff put the hot iron to his thumb, Matthew Kilroy and Edward Montgomery burst into tears.

With thanks to John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father’s Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial and to J.L. Bell, who probably knows more about the Boston Massacre than anyone else on the planet. Check out his Boston 1775 blog. He’s also written The Road to Concord. This story updated in 2022.

Images: Ropewalk: Courtesy By Leslie, Published by the Boston Public Library – https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/4016581027/in/photostream/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75001991. Old Statehouse By Dion Hinchcliffe – Site of the Boston Massacre, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19245186. Gravestones By Rhododendrites – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84157347.

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Agrippa Hull, Race Under British Rule

After decades of neglect the common burial grounds of slaves are now being documented, honored and preserved from New York to Mississippi and beyond. But Agrippa Hull was buried among his white countrymen in a dignified distinct tomb, as the oldest surviving American Revolutionary War veteran in the quintessentially New England town of Stockbridge, Mass.

Agrippa Hull

He travelled a unique road.

Agrippa Hull

He lived during an extremely tenuous time for black people in America. Yet Agrippa Hull seems to have graciously navigated the dark clouds of prejudice. The revolutionaries demanded freedom and independence from colonial rule in a largely white context of self-determination. Yet as soon as he could, Hull took a determined stance by enlisting in the Continental Army. And every surviving anecdote and record confirms that Hull lived magnanimously, served effectively and was remembered fondly.

Today we can barely imagine the circumstances in which Hull lived. In the early 1700s the estimated number of slaves in the Massachusetts colony alone reached approximately 3.5 percent of the total population, or some 2,000. But Agrippa Hull was born in Northampton, Mass., to free African-American parents around the year 1759. Plagued by poverty, they had to give up their son at the age of six. They sent him to live with a family of free blacks that could better care for him in Stockbridge.

Agrippa Hull ultimately achieved a level of prosperity and respect that many other black Americans did not. As a Continental Army soldier, Hull witnessed the social and economic spectrums along which people of color lived in the 18^th century. And he distinguished himself by how he moved along that spectrum during his long lifetime.

Triangular Trade

Discordant views, policies and practices of bondage pervaded the colonies without any central authority over the issue. Slave-trading flourished in Triangular Trade: English traders carried manufactured goods to Africa and sold them there for slaves. Black men and women were bound then shipped to the New World. There the slavers exchanged them for such raw materials as lumber, furs, tobacco and sugar which in turn was exported to re-supply English factories.

People sometimes romanticize freedom of religion as the reason migrants left Europe for the New World. But with the growth of the new nation, people of faith did form coalitions which pressed authorities hard to end slavery. They were guided by the Bible’s Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

James Oglethorpe

In the southern colonies bondage was by no means universally accepted. Consider the policy of James Oglethorpe, the British governor of the colony of Georgia, created in 1732. In Great Britain, Oglethorpe had a reputation as a humanitarian and social reformer because he worked to improve the deplorable conditions in debtors’ prisons. From its inception Oglethorpe outright banned slavery in Georgia as incompatible with British common law. Not until Oglethorpe left Georgia in 1743 did planters and ship owners overturn his policy and introduce slavery.

England prohibited the keeping of slaves following a 1772 lawsuit known as Somersett’s Case. But outside of her borders hypocrisy ruled. The slave trade was tolerated and English merchants thrived.

Private Agrippa Hull

With the outbreak of war all 13 colonies desperately needed volunteers. The southern colonies, with the exception of Maryland, refused to enlist black men. New England units accepted volunteers regardless of race. Surviving muster roles show Agrippa Hull, at age 18, enlisted as a free black man with the Continental Army. In 2008, the book Friends of Liberty popularized the story of his service.

Continental Army foot soldiers.

Records show Hull as a private in the First Stockbridge Company on May 1, 1777. He was one of an estimated 5,500 men of color (black, native American and mulatto) from throughout the colonies who joined the American war effort. When posted to then-Brig. Gen. John Paterson’s brigade of the First Massachusetts Regiment, Berkshire County enlistment rolls give Hull’s physical characteristics as being “five feet seven inches tall; complexion, black; hair, wool.”

John Paterson

Without weapons training, it was military rank not race which demanded Hull serve Paterson as his valet (or “orderly” or “personal assistant”). In order to carry out his duties he had to depend on the cooperation, if not respect, of other white men of his own rank. In that first year of his service Hull stood by Paterson as he led troops in Saratoga. Then together they endured the brutal winter of Valley Forge to help assure Washington’s glory at Monmouth Court House in June 1778.

Kosciuscko

Later that year Paterson was put in command of the garrison at West Point. There the venerated engineer and tactician Tadeus Kosciuscko worked to fortify that strategic base along the Hudson River. Through interactions between the commander and the engineer, Kosciuscko is recorded as impressed by Hull’s wit and intelligence. As a gesture of goodwill, Paterson reassigned Hull to Kosciuscko’s camp as his valet in May 1779.

West Point ca 1831, from Phillipstown.

Travels with Agrippa Hull

Kosciuscko’s work on the defense of West Point added to his distinction. In 1780 Washington named him lead engineer in support of the southern army. Militiamen rarely served outside of their home region. Yet Hull volunteered to stay by Kosciuscko’s side. Detached from his Massachusetts regiment, he traveled hundreds of miles south into the Carolinas, where the most arduous fighting of the war took place. As the two men traveled farther from New England they increasingly witnessed people’s struggles with slavery.

Spanish Florida offered runaways freedom on two conditions: convert to Roman Catholicism and serve four years in the military. Most who successfully took up that offer settled in Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, just north of St. Augustine. There a fort was built, establishing the first legally sanctioned free black settlement in North America. In a counterbid to drive a wedge between abolitionists and slavers and to draw volunteers to their ranks, the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, adopted the Spanish policy of granting freedom to runaway slaves. The British offered emancipation to all who escaped and crossed over to their side.

Upon reporting in the Carolinas, Hull and Kosciuscko joined the battle-worn Americans serving under Gen. Nathanael Greene. Half were undernourished and no longer fit for duty. They then witnessed firsthand the desperate plight of enslaved, barefoot and shirtless blacks answering Lord Dunmore’s invitation, fleeing plantations for freedom. In fact, Dunmore’s scheme resulted in what historians recognized as the largest flight of slaves prior to the Civil War era.

The Battle of Eutaw Springs

In September 1781, another anecdote emerged to burnish Hull’s resume after the Battle of Eutaw Springs. Hull went to assist overworked surgeons laboring to save the lives of some 380 American wounded. And according to MassMoments, “the horror of amputations they performed stayed with [Hull] for the rest of his life.”

Home Again

At the end of the war in 1783 the Continental Army disbanded. To Hull’s great delight, on July 23 at West Point Gen. George Washington himself formally signed and dated his discharge papers. Returning home to Stockbridge, Hull promptly found paid work as a manual laborer in the household of a prominent lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813). Sedgwick was the lawyer who in 1781 argued the case that freed Elizabeth Freeman – the first in which a black woman sued and won her liberty. For all practical purposes the case set the precedent for ending slavery in Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Freeman played an important role in ending the slave trade.

In order to qualify for a service pension, soldiers had to submit their discharge papers to verify their time. The patriot Agrippa Hull was so proud that Washington signed his discharge papers he refused to ever part with them. Writing to the pension board on Hull’s behalf, Sedgwick explained that Hull would “rather forego his pension than [give up] the discharge papers.”

By 1785 Hull had saved enough money to buy his own land and eventually became a prominent Stockbridge landowner in his own right. He established his own household and married a woman by the name of Jane Darby. It turns out that Sedgwick negotiated Darby’s freedom too, after she managed to escape her owners.

Theodore Sedgwick

Abolitionist strength and the force of Massachusetts law grew so much that the 1790 census shows no enslaved people in Stockbridge or anywhere in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Yet the colonial legacy of unbridled British commerce in slaves continued to corrupt America for decades.

A Stockbridge Anecdote

Hull’s life showed the absurdity of prejudice. Every surviving memoir describes him as a joy to work with and a man who served the cause of the Revolution with distinction. On February 17, 2015 the Berkshire Edge, a local news and features publication, printed “a favorite Stockbridge anecdote”:

“A haughty man attended church to listen to a discourse from a distinguished mulatto preacher. On coming out of church the man asked Hull, ‘Well how do you like that n[…] preaching?’ To which Hull is to have responded ‘Sir, he was half black and half white; …I liked my half, how did you like yours?’ ”

Gravestone of Agrippa Hull

Agrippa Hull died in 1848 at the age of 89 as the oldest Revolutionary War veteran in Stockbridge. A fresh American flag is placed at his grave every Memorial Day.

The author of this story, John E. Happ, has been immersed in the contrasting narratives of foreign cultures since college in Spain and speaks five languages. His varied assignments in Germany, Switzerland, the Philippines and Japan contribute greatly to his research and perspectives. Happ is a contributing author at the Journal of the American Revolution, has written for the web site The 75^th Artillery C.A.C During World War One and the adventure magazine, Atlantic Coastal Kayaker.

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Mary Bliss Parsons, the Witch of Northampton

The year 1656 wasn’t the first time Mary Bliss Parsons of Northampton was accused of witchcraft. Nineteen years later, in 1675, she was indicted for witchcraft and imprisoned for 10 weeks in Boston to await her trial. Some of the magistrates who sat in judgment of her went on to hear the horrific Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-3, the last hurrah for New England’s witch hunters. They had recognizable names: Thomas Danforth, Simon Bradstreet, William Stoughton and then-governor, John Leverett.

Simon Bradstreet

Mary Bliss Parsons

Mary Bliss was born in England in about 1627, most likely in Painswick Parish, Gloucestershire. She came to Mount Wollaston (now a part of Quincy) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1635 at the age of about eight. She sailed with her parents and four elder step-brothers.

By 1640 they, and many others, had followed the great Puritan divine Thomas Hooker to Hartford in Connecticut Colony and belonged to the first group of settlers there.

Thomas Hoooker and his people

Many extant records and a number of depositions explain the accusations of witchcraft against Mary. When the whole story comes out it all comes down to the jealousy of one woman. Sarah Lyman Bridgman convinced other townsfolk that Mary Bliss Parsons—with the help of the devil—had caused their hard luck, even the deaths of their babies.

Mary wasn’t afraid to take her complaints and opinions right to the source of her grievance. If she paid you to weave some yarn and you delivered it full of flaws, she wouldn’t stand for it. If you borrowed the family’s team of oxen to plough a field and she saw you whipping and mistreating them, she would march across the field and give you a talking to.

Joseph Parsons

Legend says Mary Bliss was a great beauty. To make herself even more enviable she married Joseph Parsons in 1646. He would become the wealthiest man in Hampshire County and, before he died, one of the richest in the territory. Joseph traded furs, owned a retail store and the sawmill and co-owned the first grist mill in Northampton. In 1661, he got a license to keep an ordinary, or tavern, there. He would become the largest land owner in the new settlement of Northfield, and in Boston he bought a house, a wharf and warehouses.

Joseph also served often as selectman and, because he knew the Indians through his trading enterprises, as liaison between the natives and the townsmen.

Early Springfield buildings

It was written that Mary Parsons was ‘possessed of great beauty and talents.’ She was not very ‘amiable,’ she had ‘haughty manners’ and was ‘exclusive in the choice of her associates.’ So, there she was, beautiful and rich with a mind of her own to speak.

As if that wasn’t enough to annoy all the other goodwives in town, she had an astoundingly successful birthrate. In the 17^th century, many women died giving birth, and many children did not survive childhood. For 25 years Mary got pregnant just about every two years. Her last child was born when she was a grandmother. She had 11 children, including two sets of twins. All but two of her children survived to adulthood. In a time when male children were valued above females (males were needed to run the farm) her first six babies were boys and then came five girls. It was just as if she had said, “Joseph, I have given you all the help you need. Now I will help myself.”

Sarah Bridgman

Sarah Lyman Bridgman was convinced Mary’s good fortune was a gift from the devil. Her gossip spread from town to town in the Connecticut River Valley. Many of Sarah’s friends and neighbors listened and wondered. They told stories. Several people saw Mary walking out at night wearing nothing but her shift. One man followed her and saw her walk on water. When he reported her, he said her clothes were not wet.

The Connecticut River

Because of her night walks, her husband installed a lock on the door to their house. He later complained to a friend that no matter where he hid the key, Mary would find it and go out in the night. Frustrated, Joseph forced her into the cellar and locked her in for her own safety. Alone and terrified Mary reported seeing spirits fly at her in the dark. All this happened during the early years of their marriage while they lived in Springfield during a witch scare. Another woman and her husband in Springfield were suspected of witchcraft.

While in church, probably during a sermon about doom and the devil’s presence in town, two ‘bewitched’ children (the minister’s young daughters) fell screaming to the floor under a witch-induced spell. Overcome by fear, Mary joined them on the floor clutching at her throat and crying out in terror. She had to be carried home. Mary Bliss Parsons’ strange behavior in Springfield aroused suspicions that followed her to Northampton.

No one knows why she was so disturbed during this time. She did lose both her second baby and her father in 1650. Springfield also experienced a witch scare at the time.

Jealousy

Both Mary and her enemy Sarah, had come of age in Hartford. Mary’s father, an average yeoman, had only six acres of land. Sarah’s much better off father had 30 acres. After their marriages, both young women moved with their husbands to Springfield. Some years later, when Mary’s husband decided to join in the settlement of Northampton in Massachusetts, Sarah and her family soon followed.

Poor Sarah had little good fortune. Her husband was not rich and not much involved in town government. He served as constable for a short term, and the other positions given him were unimportant. Sarah had eight births but only four children survived infancy—three girls and one boy. Three boys and one girl died at two months, four months, six months and nine months.

Sarah accused Mary of causing her only son a grave injury. He had gone into a swamp to fetch a wandering cow when ‘there came something and gave him a great blow on the head…and going a little further…he stumbled and put his knee out of joint.’ The healing did not go well even after the knee was set and, as a result, he suffered a lot of pain. In his delirium ‘he cried out that Goody Parsons would pull off his knee’. And then from his bed he said ‘there she sits on the shelf…there she runs away and a black mouse follows her.’

Sarah’s stories about Mary’s witchery spread to both Springfield and Northampton. When Joseph Parsons heard the gossip, he sued Sarah for slander and won his case, further damaging Sarah’s reputation.

The Trial

Sarah died in 1668 at about the age of 47, but the animosity she carried toward Mary Parsons lived on. In 1674 Sarah’s daughter, Mary Bridgman Bartlett, a young wife and the mother of her first child, died under suspicious circumstances. People said ‘she came to her end by some unlawful and unnatural means…by means of some evil instrument.’

Her husband, Samuel Bartlett, and father, James Bridgman, saw to Mary Parsons’ arrest, indictment, imprisonment and trial on May 13, 1675.

Depositions and testimony of this trial have been lost, but historians assume that many of the same charges brought against Mary during the slander trial of 1654 were aired along with the new charge of the murder by witchcraft of Mary Bridgman Bartlett.

Mary testified to her innocence and that she had committed no crimes. She said, “The righteous God knows of my innocency—with whom I leave my cause.”

Gov. John Leverett

A jury of 12 men found her innocent, and the governor, and magistrates of the Court of Assistants allowed her to go free. She went home to care for her children, the last of whom was still only two.

Karen Vorbeck Williams, the author of this story, is the award-winning author of My Enemy’s Tears: The Witch of Northampton, The House on Seventh Street, and Pretty: A Memoir.

Image of the Connecticut River: By I, Denimadept, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2417686. This story was updated in 2023.

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Alice Bishop, Pilgrim Murderess, Kills her 4-Year-Old Daughter

The mystery of why Alice Bishop cut her four-year-old daughter’s throat in Plymouth Colony still lingers 370 years later.

Alice didn’t deny that she did it. In fact, she confessed right away when a neighbor saw the pool of blood on the floor of her home.

She had, apparently, been a good Pilgrim mother up until then. But she did it, and she hanged for it in the fall of 1648 at the Duxbury Fair.

A Fair Puritan, chromalithograph, by Pery Moran (detail)

Donna A. Watkins, a descendant of Alice Bishop, tells the story of her life in her book Diverse Gashes. Though Watkins doesn’t have a definitive answer, she does sort through the difficulties the Pilgrims’ endured just to survive. She especially focuses on the struggles faced by Pilgrim women to run the house and family while remaining subservient to men and achieving godly perfection—all under the prying eyes of the neighbors.

Alice Bishop

Alice first appears in the historical record as “Alice Martin” on the day she married George Clarke–Jan. 22, 1639 (N.S.).

Watkins believes Alice Bishop may have been related to William Bradford, who served as Plymouth’s governor on and off for 30 years and wrote Of Plimoth Plantation. How, or when, she arrived in Plymouth—or even whether she was born there—isn’t known. But her absence from the Pilgrims’ records suggests she didn’t cause trouble or engage in ‘unseemly behavior,’ Watkins argues.

Alice’s new husband George Clarke had bought a 10-acre plot of land with a small wooden house on it in a neighborhood called Playne Dealing, two miles north of Plymouth. George farmed, Alice tended the house. That meant getting up before dawn, building a fire, cooking over an open hearth, hauling water, spinning hemp or flax or grinding corn.

She gave birth to their first child, Abigail, in 1643. Her second, the ill-fated Martha, was born in 1644. George Clarke died, probably suddenly, around then.

A replica house in Plymouth Colony, similar to the one Alice Bishop lived in.

On Dec. 5, 1644, the widowed Alice Clarke married Richard Bishop, a hired man. It wasn’t unusual for widowed spouses to remarry quickly in colonial New England. The Bishops’ daughter Damaris was born in 1646. Richard and Alice seemed to get along, as no records exist of trouble between them.

Alice Bishop, Murderess

On Saturday, July 22, 1648, Alice Bishop would have been cooking meals for two days, since the Pilgrims forbade cooking on Sunday. Her husband was probably working in the fields. Abigail, then six, may have helped her mother with the chores.

Then a neighbor, 23-year-old Rachel Ramsden, stopped by the house to visit. Rachel noticed four-year-old Martha asleep on her bed. Alice gave her a kettle and asked her to borrow some buttermilk from Goodwife Winslow.

Alice had seemed normal, Rachel later testified. But when she returned, Alice seemed ‘sad and dumpish.’ Then Rachel noticed blood at the foot of the ladder leading to the attic. She asked about the blood. Alice pointed upstairs and told her to look.

Rachel, not seeing Martha in the bed, feared Alice had killed her, so she ran home to tell her parents. Her parents notified William Bradford, who quickly assembled three other men into a posse and went to the Bishop’s house.

The men later declared to the court what they saw: “…at the foot of a ladder which leads into an upper chamber, much blood; and going up, all of us, into the chamber, we found a woman child of about four years of age lying in her shift upon her left check with her throat cut with diverse gashes cross ways[.]”

The men then described the savagery of the attack: “…the wind pipe cut and stuck into the throat downward, and a bloody knife lying by the side of the child[.]”

They concluded that Alice Bishop had killed the child with the knife, and she confessed to them that she had.

But Why?

Donna Watkins notes that the court records tell us nothing about why Alice Bishop killed Martha Clarke. One possible explanation: Her older daughter did it, and Alice took the fall for it.

But Watkins delves further into another explanation. Perhaps Alice just suddenly lost control under the demands of constant physical labor, motherhood, marriage, a mixed family, snooping neighbors and the community’s expectations of perfect behavior. And to make it even harder to live in that overcontrolled Puritan environment, Alice Bishop as a woman only ranked as a second-class citizen.

The Pilgrims, Watkins noted, expected complete domestic harmony. Court records show plenty of actions against neighbors, but few against family or household members. “They controlled their emotions at home at the expense of their relationships with their neighbors,” wrote Watkins.

She speculated that Rachel Ramsden, the neighbor, could have said something critical of Alice Bishop. Perhaps Martha should have been up and awake by then. And perhaps four-year-old Martha misbehaved, which caused Alice Bishop to suddenly fly into an uncontrolled rage and take a knife to her daughter’s throat.

William Bradford

William Bradford, then governor, may have had Alice Bishop in mind when he wrote about the reasons for evil to appear in Plymouth Colony. “…[A]s it is with waters when their streams are stopped or dammed up. When they get passage they flow with more violence and make more noise and disturbance than when they are suffered to run quietly in their own channels.”

William Bradford

Bradford wrote those words between 1648 and 1650, around the time Alice Bishop went to the gallows for murdering her daughter. At that time, Bradford had sunk into sadness and despair. Many of the original Pilgrims had died, Plymouth had shrunk and settlers had scattered into new towns. It was then that he stopped writing Of Plimoth Plantation.

Watkins argues, plausibly, that the murder of Martha Clarke and the hanging of Alice Bishop, possibly his relatives, contributed to his depression.

Donna A. Watkins in her book Diverse Gashes: Governor William Bradford, Alice Bishop, and the Murder of Martha Clarke, Plymouth Colony, 1648, explores the reasons Alice Bishop may have slashed her four-year-old daughter’s throat.

Images: House and fence in Plimoth By Ben Franske – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4459090.

This story was updated in 2022.

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A Pants-Free Preacher Starts a Bonfire of the Vanities in New London

In 1743, religious enthusiasts ignited a bonfire of the vanities on the docks of New London, Conn. Their deranged leader, James Davenport, preached them into a frenzy as they threw their prized possessions into the blazing fire.

The next night, they did it again.

Then the bonfire of the vanities turned into a bonfire of indecency when James Davenport threw his pants onto the pyre.

New London, Conn., in 1813

New London

Many New England towns were caught up in religious fervor called the First Great Awakening during the 1730s and 1740s. A cross-eyed English minister named George Whitefield helped start it all with speaking tours of America. He delivered a fiery blast of Biblical rhetoric with personal philosophy, and he rose to power and influence.

James Davenport and others followed in Whitefield’s footsteps. They preached that people could find salvation through spiritual rebirth – a rebirth that started with public weeping, groaning and howling.

The ecstatic revival meetings alarmed many of the Puritan leaders. The disorderly assemblies threatened their control of their communities.

Worse, religious revivals upended the belief that some people were destined for salvation, while the rest were out of luck. The Puritan ruling class also believed in a worldly difference between the saved and the unsaved. The saved had wealth, the unsaved did not. The pants-free preacher undermined that convenient belief with the message that anyone could get to heaven.

James Davenport

James Davenport, ironically, came from an old and distinguished Puritan family. He was born in 1716 in Stamford, Conn., the great-grandson of the John Davenport who settled New Haven. A bright child, he entered Yale to follow his father and grandfather into the Puritan ministry. He graduated at the age of 17 and was ordained at 21 in the Congregational church in Southold, Long Island.

The Rev. John Davenport

While in college, James Davenport caught a bad case of religious revivalism.

He didn’t deliver prepared sermons from the pulpit. Instead, he screamed, he sang, he rambled, he ranted about damnation and hellfire, and he whipped his listeners into frenzies. The Boston Evening Post commented, “Were you to see him in his most violent agitations, you would be apt to think that he was a madman just broke from his chains.”

One day in Southold he opened his Bible and pointed to a random passage. God, he thought, spoke to him through that passage and told him to go and denounce another Congregational minister 50 miles away. So he left his parish, traveled to another town and burst into a church – uninvited – in the middle of a service. He called the minister a blind guide leading his parish straight to hell. Twenty parishioners agreed with him and left the church to start their own.

Frenzies

James Davenport got more and more outrageous. He once ranted from the pulpit for 24 hours, then collapsed. When he recovered, he demanded his parishioners write down their confessions.

He prayed and fasted for a mentally ill woman who couldn’t speak. He predicted she would be ‘delivered and recover her speech’ on a certain date. But on that day, she died. Davenport claimed he did deliver her – to heaven.

He started to roam around Connecticut. For four years he crashed religious services and attacked ministers as hell-bound wolves in sheep’s clothing. He also preached in the open air, the way George Whitefield did. He paraded through the streets, preaching at the top of his lungs with his head thrown back and eyes closed. People followed him, howling and singing hymns.

George Whitefield, by John Russell.

Other itinerant preachers also stirred up trouble in New England. Connecticut’s General Assembly finally tried to do something about it. In 1742, the assembly passed, “An Act for Regulating Abuses and Correcting Disorders in Ecclesiastical Affairs,” which punished uninvited preaching. It only took a month for Davenport to get arrested.

A revival meeting during the Second Great Awakening.

Trial

James Davenport turned in one of his most bizarre performances during his trial before the General Assembly. A local newspaper reported,

At one point everyone there heard him ‘vehemently crying out, That he saw hell-flames slashing in their faces; and that they were now! now! dropping down to hell.’

When the sheriff tried to take him away, he shouted, “Lord! thou knowest somebody’s got hold of my sleeve, strike them! Lord, strike them—”. His followers attacked the sheriff and his deputies as they dropped James Davenport down to jail.

The general assembly declared him insane and banished him from Connecticut. He returned to his old parish on Long Island. But he ignored orders to stay home and just preach to his congregation.

Davenport went to Boston, where he disrupted services, held all-night revival meetings and paraded through the streets. The Boston Post reported that the street processions were, ‘attended with so much Disorder that they look’d more like a company of Bacchanalians after a mad Frolick than sober Christians who had been worshipping God.’

But worse than annoying were his attacks on Puritan ministers – which proved extremely popular among Boston’s lower classes. Officials arrested him and, once again, James Davenport went to court.

A jury in Boston declared him insane.

Bonfire of the Vanities

James Davenport then humiliated himself so thoroughly in New London that people still wrote about it hundreds of years later.

After his trial in Massachusetts, he returned to Connecticut. His health had deteriorated, and he had to lean on an assistant to walk. But people in New London had invited him, and he went.

On March 6, 1743, he exhorted his followers to build a bonfire of the vanities. They couldn’t find salvation, he said, unless they burned their idols. And so they burned their books. For hours, a feverish Davenport preached his followers into a frenzy as they threw their books into the fire and danced around it, shrieking. When it finally died out, Davenport announced he would light another bonfire of the vanities the next day.

Unidentified July 3 bonfire, 20th century. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Evil Spirit

And so again he goaded his followers into a state of hysteria. One after the other they threw onto the pyre such finery as silk dresses, petticoats, fans, shoes with red heels, necklaces, wigs and rings.

James Davenport got so caught up in the moment he took off his pants and threw them in the fire.

A woman snatched the pants back and handed them to Davenport. Suddenly the spell that held him for so many years suddenly broke.

The Boston Weekly Post-Boy reported that the person told Davenport he thought the Devil was in him. Davenport said he thought so too. He said God had left him and an evil spirit possessed him.

The crowd melted away from the second bonfire of the vanities.

The next year, he published Mr. James Davenport’s Confessions & Retractions in which he took it all back. He claimed to have an inner peace he’d never before experienced. He got a parish in New Jersey, where he stayed put.

But his health, never good, failed, and he died at the age of 41.

With thanks to David S. New, Christian Fundamentalism in America, A Cultural History. This story was updated in n2021.

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