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henry wadsworth longfellow

The Midnight-ish Rides of William Dawes, Samuel Prescott and Paul Revere

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of”……William Dawes. No, that doesn’t work. “Of the midnight ride of …Samuel Prescott. No, that doesn’t work either; Oh, I have it: “Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Thus, Paul Revere became a legend and an icon in American history, and William Dawes and Samuel Prescott were left in the dust from Paul Revere’s horse, a footnote at best, if remembered at all.

Sadly, much of the history Americans know is founded on myths and legends. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” did much to create a history rife with deliberate inaccuracies and gives all the glory to Revere. The truth, however, is almost completely different from the “history” of the poem, learned by countless generations of Americans in school, and carried through to adulthood.

Paul Revere holds his then-claim to fame.

In fact, until Longfellow wrote the poem, Revere, was known for his metalwork but not for Revolutionary War heroics anywhere in New England, let alone the rest of the country. He was locally well-known as an artisan and entrepreneur. When he died in 1818, his obituary made no mention of the “famous” ride. Just as Hollywood creates heroes, Longfellow created a heroic persona for Revere far beyond what he actually did.

Some Truth to the Story

While the events described in the poem all took place on the night of April 18, 1775, they were set in motion long before that. The possibility of a confrontation between British forces and colonists had been brewing for months. The colonist had prepared for just such an eventuality.

The most critical part of the preparation was prior warning. Paul Revere did play a part in these events, and he did arrange for the famous signal from the steeple of Christ Church (Old North Church) – one if by land and two if by sea. And it is true that he did participate in part of the ride that night to warn of British movements.

But beyond that, the majority of Longfellow’s poem amounts to fictional propaganda. He wrote it just before the start of the Civil War. Longfellow, an ardent abolitionist, designed the poem to stir up patriotic fervor, not to record history.

Straying From the Truth

“And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm…“ It didn’t take long for Longfellow to stray from the truth. Revere was not on the opposite shore in Charlestown. He was in Boston, on the shore near the Old North Church, and when he, “…with muffled oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore…” — he did it as a passenger. Two very brave and anonymous men did the rowing past the British guard boats.

“Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride, On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere…And lo! As he looks on the belfry’s height, a Glimmer, and then a gleam of light! He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight A second lamp in the belfry burns!” If he was impatient at all, it was on the Boston shore where he would have seen the signal, since he only crossed the water once the signal had been given. With a horse waiting for him on the “opposite shore,” he would have quickly mounted and gone on his way with little ceremony.

William Dawes, Too

It beggars belief to think the colonial leaders would assign such a critical task to just one man as Longfellow’s poem infers. Of course they didn’t. Revere was only one of at least two men specifically assigned to carry the message of the British movements to critical personnel and start the add-on affect of riders spreading out throughout the countryside.

William Dawes rode too.

They did it this way for a couple of reasons. First, one man could not possibly cover the area needed to reach all the important personnel. Secondly, they had to assume capture, so they needed redundant messengers. If one got caught, then another carried the same messages. In fact, Paul Revere and William Dawes just started a chain of riders that got bigger as the night progressed.

The idea that Revere, or any single rider, rode to warn every village and farm is staggering. In the first place, they didn’t have enough time to stop at every house to issue a warning. And that assumes they even knew how to find each house. Although Longfellow never claimed Revere rode along shouting “the British are coming, the British are coming,” this somehow got added to the legend.

Three Reasons

It doesn’t make sense for three reasons. First, not every house held patriots. Many held loyalists, and British patrols were out everywhere. Riding by shouting their presence would have amounted to a very risky proposition.

Secondly, many homes were farmhouses, and not located on any main route. Going to every one would have taken days for one or two men.

Thirdly, anyone riding around in the dead of night, when everyone slept, shouting “the British are coming” would have been thought a crackpot. Since they were all British, the warning would have seemed nonsensical. And that assumes sleeping people would even hear them at that time of night.

The Real Reason They Rode

The riders did not blindly go from place to place hoping to find everyone to pass on the news. They all had specific targets – personnel they were tasked with warning. Those personnel would then get the message out to everyone who mattered. Most of the time, the riders knocked on doors to wake the residents up. Then they’d quickly convey the message that the Regulars (or Redcoats) were out, and then ride on to the next target. The messages were brief and to the point. By Revere’s own account, his message was, “The Regulars are coming out.”

In fact, two men, Paul Revere and William Dawes, Jr., set out at about same time, along different routes that eventually converged in Lexington. Alerting specific men, those men, in turn, rode out to warn others, and so on and so on. While Revere took the water route to Charlestown, Dawes took the longer land route out of Boston. He barely cleared the city before the Regulars shut it down. Dawes would have started sooner since it took time for Revere’s slow and silent rowboat ride across to Charlestown.

“It was one by the village clock, When he galloped into Lexington…It was two by the village clock, When he came to the bridge at Concord town…” Revere did make it to Lexington, joined a half hour later by Dawes. It was about midnight, not one as in the poem. That meant both Revere and Dawes set out somewhere near 11 p.m. They had as their ultimate mission at Lexington to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock, spending the night in the town. Other riders then took over to spread the alarm around Lexington and the surrounding countryside. Here that they were fortuitously joined by Dr. Samuel Prescott, who just happened to be in town returning from an evening with a female friend at around 1 a.m. The three men now set off together toward Concord.

William Dawes and Samuel Prescott Escape

They never made it farther than Lincoln, 4.4 modern miles from Concord. Neither Revere nor Dawes saw Concord Bridge because a British patrol stopped them. The British captured Revere, but Dawes and Prescott managed to escape. Undoubtedly riding at breakneck speed, through unfamiliar fields and along farm roads, Dawes’ horse threw him. Apparently the horse continued on since Dawes, probably more than a little sore, had to walk back to Lexington. His night ride had ended.

Prescott, however, continued to Concord, and he, not Revere, passed the warning to Concord. Through all this, countless other nameless riders actually spread “…the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm…”

Prescott made it to Old North Bridge in Concord.

Revere and the Regulars

When questioned by the patrol, Revere seems to have had no problem bragging to the British that he knew of the army’s movement from Boston. He also knew the militia were gathering at Lexington to meet them. Revere wasn’t the only one being held by the patrol, and they all set off back toward Lexington. As the British patrol and its prisoners neared Lexington, they could hear sporadic shots and the ringing of bells. Revere told the major commanding the patrol that these were the alarms to warn the countryside of the coming of the Regulars. At this point, discretion became the better part of valor for the British. They released their prisoners and set off to warn their coming compatriots, but not before confiscating Revere’s horse.

On foot now, Revere walked back to the Rev. Jonas Clarke’s house, where Hancock and Adams stayed. The whole area was abuzz, and Clarke’s house must have been in disarray. Hancock and Adams needed to leave. They may have heard the firing on Lexington Green as they fled the area, assisted by Revere.

The Forgotten Man

Mostly forgotten in all of this: Dr. Prescott. He didn’t belong to the original plan to spread the warning. Rather than run after escaping the British patrol, he continued on to Concord,. With great courage, since he had almost been captured at the edge of town, stopped at several houses in Lincoln to raise the alarm. Other nameless riders set off from there. Reaching the sentry at Concord, Prescott further spread the word. The Concord First Parish Church bell then began the general alarm.

The memorial to the Paul Revere capture site

Prescott then rode to his brother Abel’s house and told him to ride to Sudbury with the alarm. He continued on to Acton and Stowe, continuing to spread the warning.

After the Ride

After the Lexington and Concord battles, Revere couldn’t return to Boston, now under siege. He tried to get a commission in the army but was refused. He continued to offer his services, however, and was initially used as a courier and in an effort to produce more gunpower. Nine months after Bunker Hill, Revere was involved, with others, in a successful effort to find and recover his friend Joseph Warren’s body from the battlefield. In April 1776 he was commissioned an infantry major in the Massachusetts Militia and transferred to the artillery a month later.

In November 1776 he won promotion to lieutenant colonel and stationed at Castle William, defending Boston Harbor. He spent the next two years quietly, broken only by the occasional prisoner escort and two brief deployments to Rhode Island. In the summer of 1779, he commanded an artillery detachment during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. As one of the senior leaders of the campaign, his enemies later tried to lay blame on him. Although the hearings reached no conclusion, Revere was asked to resign. Rather than resign, however, he demanded a court-martial, which cleared him in February 1782.

After the war, already a renowned silversmith, he invested in an iron-working foundry. With its success, he expanded further into bronze casting and rolled copper. In 1801 he founded the Revere Copper Co., now called Revere Copper Products, and headquartered in Rome, N.Y.

Revere died on May 10, 1818 in his home on Charter Street, Boston. He is buried at the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street.

Paul Revere went into manufacturing after the Revolution.

Paul Revere’s home in Boston’s North End, a stone’s throw from Old North Church, is preserved as a museum. A statue of him astride his horse stands in the park in back of the church.

William Dawes, Jr.

It is not clear what William Dawes, Jr. did in the aftermath of the ride. His story picks up again on 9 Sept. 9,1776, with his commission as a major in a Boston militia regiment. He saw no action during the war, serving mostly as a quartermaster in central Massachusetts. He also served as a prisoner escort for British prisoners from the battles at Saratoga.

Dawes must have still served in the militia in some capacity after the war because he refused to join a punitive expedition against Indians. On Feb. 25, 1799, Dawes died in Marlborough, Mass. Believed to have been buried at the King’s Chapel Burying Ground where he has a tomb marker, there is some speculation that he is buried in his wife’s plot at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain.

William Dawes has a plaque at King’s Chapel Burying Ground.

A traffic island in Cambridge, Mass., has a bronze plaque denoting the route of his ride, along with bronze horseshoes set in the pavement.

His family name did not fade from history, however. Among other notable Dawes relations, his great-grandson, William Dawes, served as a Union officer in the Civil War. One of William’s sons, Charles Gates Dawes, served as the 30th vice president of the United States under Calvin Coolidge. He also won a Nobel Prize in 1925 for his work on the Dawes Plan for World War I reparations.

Dr. Samuel Prescott

Little is known about Dr. Samuel Prescott after his ride. A man of that name is recorded at Fort Ticonderoga, and another in a British prison in Halifax. There is no evidence beyond the name to indicate that either of these men is the Dr. Samuel Prescott that rode to Concord. One account claims he died in prison in 1777 but evidence is lacking. While most have forgotten Prescott’s ride, Concord remembers it yearly at midnight on April 18 and Acton on Patriot’s Day.

Unquestionably, Paul Revere, William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott performed an extremely valuable service that night. Without their timely warning, events at Lexington and Concord may have been very different. But during their lifetime, they were never iconic Revolutionary War heroes. Without Longfellow’s assistance, Revere undoubtedly would have been remembered solely for his superb silver work and for his entrepreneurship with iron and copper. In a sense, Longfellow may have done Revere, Dawes and Prescott a favor by calling attention to the ride, which probably would have been nothing more than a minor footnote without the poem.

Charles Gates Dawes is the author’s 9th Cousin, 2 times removed. However, he did not realize his relationship to William Dawes until he researched this article. William Dawes is not a relative of his.

Images: Paul Revere Capture Site, photo taken by By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11394644.

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Giving the Devil Her Due: The Neglected History of Tituba, Salem’s First Witch

Posterity has treated few characters in the Salem witch trial drama as poorly as Tituba, a woman enslaved in the household of minister Samuel Parris. Tituba, the first to confess to witchcraft, played a decisive role in setting the trials in motion. Her agency, long underestimated by historians, must be acknowledged, if we wish to understand more fully the famous events she helped to instigate.

A racist caricature of Tituba by Alfred Fredericks in W.C. Bryant’s A Popular History of the United States. Despite the legend, there is no evidence that Tituba taught witch magic to the children of the Parris household.

Scarcely a passage of American history has given birth to as many myths as the fateful events of 1692 in Salem, Mass. The witch hunt has entered national consciousness as a cautionary tale. But in the process, much of its true substance has been lost. When legend maligns, misrepresents or simply neglects its subjects, historians should intervene to set the record straight.

The Life of Tituba: Facts and Fabrications

Little is known about Tituba’s life before she arrived in Salem. Historians have almost universally claimed that Samuel Parris acquired her in Barbados. But as historian Bernard Rosenthal concedes, the evidence is “purely circumstantial.”[1] The sole, tantalizing clue is a 1676 document listing a child named “Tattuba” among those enslaved on the plantation of Samuel Thompson on Barbados. But without more substantial proof linking this Tattuba to Parris, we cannot be sure she is the same woman who lived in his household in Salem.

Because her early life is obscure, doubt persists about Tituba’s ethnicity. Various arguments have linked her to one group or another. But since slaveholders could and did rename the people they enslaved at will, such arguments lack support. We can only speculate about her native country and her people, elements essential to our modern understanding of ethnicity. Yet there is no ambiguity about how the society Tituba inhabited defined her race. Every extant source from Tituba’s lifetime describes her as an “Indian.”

One of the most striking peculiarities of Salem scholarship is that, on this aspect of Tituba’s story, the sources say one thing, and the historians say another.

Samuel Parris

Metamorphosis of Tituba

In the centuries since she lived, Tituba has undergone a racial metamorphosis. Her first transformation was effected not by a historian, but by a poet.

In 1832, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his verse-drama Giles Corey of the Salem Farms, and gave his Tituba an African father. Longfellow’s version seems to have been the right narrative at the right time. Perhaps the real, native Tituba held little appeal for 19th-century American intellectuals. To them the frontier seemed increasingly remote. Perhaps the intense struggle over slavery in their own lifetimes predisposed them to expect enslaved people in the nation’s past to have black faces.

The mixed-race Tituba of Giles Corey entered the history books and then remained there until the middle of the 20th century. Her metamorphosis was a sleight of hand performed by generations of historians who preferred, in her case, to deal in stereotypes rather than documentary evidence. Thus Tituba the Indian was recast, in the words of historian Marion L. Starkey, as Tituba the “trembling black woman.”[2]

In this version, Tituba is little more than a victim. And that story dominated the historiography of the trials until recent decades.

Granted, as suspicion began to circle around her in February 1692, Salem’s first witch was in a dangerous position. As a racial outsider and a slave in the Puritan community, she had very little protection under the law. She was also accused of a capital crime. So some historians have made the mistake of assuming Tituba acted weakly because her position was weak.

To the contrary, Tituba turned her weakness into strength, and acted decisively to save her own life.

Tituba’s Confession: Inventing the Conspiracy

Tituba held two cards in her hand as she faced magistrate John Hathorne across the interrogation table. The first was that she was alone in confessing. Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good, accused alongside her, kept their silence. That allowed Tituba to control the narrative of her alleged crime.

Her second advantage – and this may seem counterintuitive − was her race. Historian Elaine G. Breslaw has pointed out that, as a Native American, Tituba belonged to a group the Puritans “associated with demonic power.”[3] And so when Tituba spoke about witchcraft, they were prepared to listen.

After the witch panic had died down and the people of Salem began to come to terms with what they had done, Tituba appears to have recanted her testimony. Robert Calef, a contemporary critic of the trials, records that she claimed to have confessed under duress, after “her master did beat her.”[4] This may have been the truth; but it was not the whole truth. Had Tituba given her testimony strategically, she would hardly have admitted as much so soon after the trial. But close analysis of her testimony suggests she was thinking very strategically indeed.

Suggestive Manipulation

Tituba’s testimony reads like a case study in suggestive manipulation. The content of her confession seems crafted to play on the fears of her accusers. Though her native heritage was a source of her credibility, the images she evoked were distinctly English. She claimed the Devil appeared to her in animal forms – as a hog, as a “great dog.” as a bird, as “a red rat and a black rat.”[5] These creatures would have been immediately recognizable to the Puritans as familiars, demonic agents in the guise of household animals. They figured prominently in English witch beliefs.

English tradition held that a witch gave her familiar sustenance by allowing it to drink her blood. Sure enough, we find in Tituba’s confession the image of Sarah Good allowing her bird-familiar to “suck her between her fingers”.[6]

We cannot know whether Tituba shared her enslavers’ concept of witchcraft. It is unclear, therefore, whether the beliefs expressed in her testimony are her own, or simply what she thought her interrogators wanted to hear. What matters is that Salem believed her. For the Puritans, the explanation Tituba offered was familiar enough to be plausible – but also frightening enough to keep them from scrutinizing it too closely. This enabled Tituba to add a crucial element to her story.

On the first day of her interrogation, she testified that she saw four women hurting the children. Two she could identify as Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good. But the other two, she claimed, she did not recognize.[7] The implications were dramatic. Tituba had given the Puritans evidence of a Satanic conspiracy at work in their town. By leaving the identity of two of the conspirators open, she ensured that anyone could become a suspect.

witchcraft-salem-hangings

Ambition of Tituba

On the second day of interrogation, Tituba seems to have grown more ambitious. This time, she told Hathorne of a book in which the Devil, in the guise of a tall man, commanded her to sign her name. The book also contained nine other signatures. Two could be accounted for as belonging to Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good, but the remaining seven could not be identified. Tituba had widened the scope of the conspiracy.

Then, when asked to describe the unknown persons at the clandestine gathering, she complicated matters further. One of the women, she said, wore a “black silk hood with a white silk hood under it.” The tall man had white hair and wore black clothes.[8] Both descriptions suggested expensive outfits – these diabolic conspirators were people of status.

Historians of the witch hunts can use one tell-tale sign to determine the moment a witch panic reached critical mass and began to take on a life of its own. That sign is the presence of elite men among the accused. Once those nearest the levers of power began to be implicated, it became very difficult for anyone to control the spread of accusations. By conjuring two well-dressed gentlefolk from Boston, Tituba ensured that suspicion would climb freely up the social ladder.

Sure enough, in May 1692, the Salem witch trials claimed their first high-status victim: George Burroughs, the former minister of the village.

The Power of a Lie

What might have happened had Tituba given a more conventional confession, or held her tongue altogether? It is difficult to imagine that she would have escaped punishment. Nothing she might have said could change these facts. She had been close to the afflicted girls, and she was low enough in the social hierarchy of the village to be the perfect scapegoat for their suffering. If Samuel Parris really did beat her to coerce a confession, he had probably already decided on her guilt, and that she would take the blame.

Had Tituba simply admitted to bewitching the children, she would almost certainly have been tried and convicted. Perhaps she would have died in jail, like Sarah Osborne, or hanged, like Sarah Good. Though New England’s courts were generally more lenient in cases of witchcraft than their continental European counterparts, she likely would have received the death penalty. The whole drama might have ended there, with an unfortunate slave woman its sole, unmourned casualty.

But Tituba took action, and the outcome was entirely different. Over the course of nine months, denunciations spread through Salem like wildfire. They implicated some 200 people in the network of a vast imagined conspiracy. Nineteen were then hanged as witches, and one man crushed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea. As the village descended into suspicion and recrimination, the woman whose confession provided the impetus for the panic seems to have been overlooked.

Tituba languished in a jail cell for 13 months until her release after the end of the trials in May 1693. Thus she survived, sheltered by the chaos she helped to create.

mary-webster-examination

From History to Myth

Here Tituba disappears from the historical record and passes into American mythos. It has not treated her well. Reduced to a foil for the nation’s racial anxieties, she has suffered the distortion of the basic facts of her life. Preferring to project onto her rather than understand her, historians and dramatists alike have overlooked her agency in shaping those famous events in Salem. It is an error that has only recently begun to be corrected. Our understanding of the trials is all the better for it, because Tituba’s role was decisive.

Her confession turned an open-and-shut witchcraft trial into an open-ended witch panic. By manipulating the Puritans’ fears, Tituba did more than preserve her own life. She tore the community that had enslaved her apart.

End Notes

Emerson Hurley studies early modern history at the University of Melbourne, with an interest in the social history of the European witch hunts. He can be contacted at [email protected].

[1] Bernard Rosenthal, “Tituba’s Story,” The New England Quarterly 71, no. 2 (1998): 197.

[2] Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 43.

[3] Elaine G. Breslaw, “Tituba’s Confession: The Multicultural Dimensions of the 1692 Salem Witch-Hunt,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 3 (1997): 546.

[4] Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World, Display’d in Five Parts (London: Samuel Bridge, 1700), 91.

[5] Brian Levack, ed., The Witchcraft Sourcebook, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2015), 287.

[6] Levack, Sourcebook, 288.

[7] Levack, Sourcebook, 286.

[8] Benjamin Ray, “Salem Witchcraft No. 125: Tituba,” Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, published 2018, accessed December 26, 2021.

Images: Memorial stone to Sarah Good, By Tim1965 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8485227.

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Six Fun Facts About Paul Revere’s Ride

The poem Paul Revere’s Ride took an obscure patriot of the American Revolution and elevated him to American myth.

In 1860, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow first asked his children to listen so they shall hear the midnight ride of Paul Revere. He meant it as legend but people took it as historical fact.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868

The poem created legions of Paul Revere fans who solidified his fame after the Civil War. They installed an equestrian statue in Boston’s North End, where he had lived for 30 years. His great grandson then bought his house to save it from demolition. The Paul Revere Memorial Association raised the money to buy and restore it. Paul Revere’s house is now an important stop on Boston’s Freedom Trail.

But the backlash had already started in 1896, when a poet named Helen F. Moore wrote a parody of Paul Revere’s Ride called The Midnight Ride of William Dawes. It read, in part,

‘Tis all very well for the children to hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
But why should my name be quite forgot,
Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
Why should I ask? The reason is clear —
My name was Dawes and his Revere.

1. Paul Revere’s Ride

Paul Revere’s Ride was really about fighting slavery, which Longfellow hated. He gave money to fugitive slaves, bought slaves their freedom and supported African-American churches, schools and newspapers. His close friend, U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner, was such an outspoken abolitionist that a southern colleague, Preston Brooks, beat him within an inch of his life on the Senate floor.

Longfellow published Paul Revere’s Ride in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, which appeared on newsstands the day South Carolina seceded. At the time, people viewed it as a call to arms for the North. More recently, historian Jill Lepore has argued the poem is an allegory about slavery itself. Paul Revere’s Ride is “a poem about waking the dead,” wrote Lepore in The American Scholar. “The dead are Northerners, roused to war. But the dead are also the enslaved, entombed in slavery…”

2. Paul Revere Made Lots of Rides

Paul Revere had made the same ride a week and a half earlier. He made lots of rides, in fact. On Dec. 13, 1774, Revere rode all the way to Portsmouth, N.H., to warn the patriots that the King’s troops were on their way to seize gunpowder from Fort William and Mary in New Castle. The redcoats arrived three days late, and they didn’t intend to take the powder in the first place. But a skirmish did result — between 400 New Hampshire volunteers and six British soldiers defending the fort. The redcoats surrendered. Then, 11 days before his midnight ride, Revere rode to Concord to warn that the redcoats would probably come to seize the large cache of military supplies stored there. The patriots moved the supplies.

3. Longfellow and Revere

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a family connection to Paul Revere dating to the American Revolution. His grandfather, Peleg Wadsworth, commanded Revere, then a colonel, during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. Recrimination followed the worst U.S. naval disaster until Pearl Harbor. And investigation revealed Revere had made enemies because of his arrogance. He demanded a court martial, which exonerated him.

Penobscot Expedition by John Thomas Serres

4. Some Birthday Present

Rose Kennedy made all of her children memorize the poem. John F. Kennedy campaigned for U.S. Congress in 1946 at the base of Paul Revere’s statue in the North End. His brother Edward recited the entire poem during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. When in 1975 Rose Kennedy turned 85, she asked each of her 28 grandchildren to memorize a stanza of the poem as a birthday present.

5. Mistakes Were Made

The poem got a lot of facts wrong about Paul Revere’s ride. For example, Revere – not a friend – ordered the lanterns hung in the belfry of Old North Church. He also had help, which Longfellow omits. The aforementioned William Dawes took a parallel route to the south and met in Lexington. There they encountered a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott, while”‘returning from a lady friend’s house at the awkward hour of 1 a.m. (Revere’s words).”

Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley

6. Obituary Omission

No one outside of the Boston area knew who Paul Revere was until Longfellow wrote Paul Revere’s Ride. Even during his lifetime, Bostonians knew Revere as a successful businessman who had lots of friends. That’s how his obituary read after he died on May 10, 1818. It didn’t even mention the ride.

This story was updated in 2023.

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When John Alden Went to Jail for Murder

Most school children know the story of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, but few know he went to jail for murder.

He didn’t stay long, and he didn’t do it, but the story reminds us that the Pilgrims strayed far from Plymouth Colony. They had a trading business in Maine that did so well it let them repay their considerable debt to their financial backers.

John Alden and Priscilla Mullins

John Alden

Not much is known about John Alden until he met the Pilgrims as a 21-year-old in Southampton, England. They hired him as the Mayflower’s cooper, to make the barrels and casks that carried all the food, drink, clothing and gunpowder on board the ship.

Alden could have gone back to England, but he chose to stay. It was a wise choice. He emerged as a leader of Plymouth Colony, serving on the Governor’s Council and as treasurer, deputy to the General Court and a member of the Council of War.

Alden also belonged to the group of eight who assumed a large debt.

London merchants had underwritten their Mayflower voyage and provisions to establish Plymouth Colony. The Pilgrims, however, had a hard time repaying them during those lean first years—in fact, they ended up borrowing even more.

But they made a deal in 1626 that bought them time. The merchants’ partnership broke up, and eight colonists agreed to assume their debt in exchange for a monopoly on the fur trade along the Kennebec River in Maine.

The Kennebec Patent

The year before they made that deal, Plymouth Colony had had a good harvest with enough surplus corn to trade. “It pleased ye Lord to give ye plantation peace and health and contented minds, and so to bless their labours, and they had corne sufficient, (and some to spare to others,) with other foode,” wrote William Bradford.

A handful of young men, including John Howland, loaded the surplus corn into a shallop that came with them in the Mayflower. They then sailed it up the coast of Maine and up the mouth of the Kennebec River. At the head of the river they came upon an Abenaki village, where they traded the corn for 700 pounds of beaver fur.

That highly profitable trip convinced the colonists to set up a trading post, in what was known as Koussinoc or Cushnoc. Today it’s known as Augusta.

The Plymouth colonists managed to obtain a patent for the land along the Kennebec and to build a bigger boat to carry on their trade. They built a trading house and stocked it with trade goods: “coats, shirts, ruggs, & blankets, biskett, pease, prunes” and, of course, corn, according to Bradford.

Exporting beaver furs to Europe was a lucrative business. The Cushnoc trading post made enough profit for the Plymouth colonists to pay back their creditors in 12 years. They ran the trading post for 40.

Site, including plaque, of the Cushnoc trading post in Augusta.

But why did they have to go all the way to Maine to trade with indigenous people for beaver fur? Because Myles Standish had made an ill-considered attack on two Massachusett leaders, luring them to a meal and then killing them. That pretty much ruined relations with the local tribes with whom the Pilgrims had traded furs.

Another question: Why is history so silent on the Plymouth colonists’ trading post at Cushnoc? Some have speculated that the colonists themselves didn’t want word to get out about their money-making operation.

Murder on the Kennebec

John Howland ran the trading post for several years. John Alden, along with other Pilgrims such as Edward Winslow and William Bradford, visited Cushnoc to bring supplies.

Alden had come to Cushnoc in the spring of 1634 when a dispute broke out over trading rights. A man named John Hocking, or possibly Hoskins, from Piscataqua (New Hampshire) sailed up the Kennebec in a boat owned by his bosses, Lord Brook and Lord Saye (from whom Saybrook, Conn., took its name).

Hocking sailed past Cushnoc to trade with the Indians who would paddle down the Kennebec with canoes full of furs. The Plymouth colonists maintained they had exclusive rights to trade in the area and told Hocking to leave. Hocking refused, anchoring his vessel in the river.

John Alden, deputy governor at the time, told Howland to cut Hocking’s line. So Howland ordered four of his men to cut the cable to Hocking’s bark. They took a canoe into the river, and paddled toward Hocking, who threatened to shoot them unless they stopped. The Plymouth men cut one anchor cable, and then tried to cut the other. Hocking shot one man, Moses Talbot, dead.

The three remaining men returned fire, shooting John Hocking in the head and killing him.

“The rest of ye men carried home the vessel and ye sad tidings of these things,” wrote Bradford.

John Alden, Jailbird

Several months later, John Alden visited Boston on business, and the General Court ordered him jailed. A relative of John Hocking had brought a complaint against Alden.

Massachusetts Bay Colony had no jurisdiction over Plymouth or Kennebec, but went ahead and arrested him anyway. John Winthrop explained in his journal that they feared the king would send over a governor general once he got word of the unpleasantness at Kennebec. And the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony wished to continue to govern themselves.

new-england-living-standards-john-winthrop

Portrait of John Winthrop, American Antiquarian Society.

William Bradford sent Myles Standish to Boston to explain what happened, and Gov. Thomas Dudley set Alden free.

The Courtship of Priscilla and John Alden

What may not have happened to John Alden got far more historical recognition than what did happen.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem The Courtship of Miles Standish about a love triangle between Alden, Standish and Priscilla Mullins. Longfellow, through his mother, was descended from John and Priscilla. He claimed the story came down through his family.

In the tale, John Alden and Myles Standish are roommates in Plymouth Colony in 1621. Both have their eyes on Priscilla who was, in fact, the only marriageable woman in the colony at the time. Standish asks Alden to propose to Priscilla on his behalf. Priscilla replied, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”

Historian John Goodwin wrote there’s no reason for believing any of it. The story of John Alden going to jail, however, is true.

With thanks to Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. Image of Cushnoc site By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=280178. This story was updated in 2023.

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How the Jewish Immigrants Came to New England

It’s an oft-told story about the Jewish immigrant who rose from poverty on New York’s Lower East Side to prominence through hard work, thrift and education. That same story can be told about many prominent Jewish immigrants who grew up in New England’s slums: In Boston’s Ends, in East Hartford, in New Haven’s Legion Avenue and in South Providence.

Without Jewish New England, we wouldn’t have Dorothy’s ruby slippers, cybernetics, the Cornish game hen, West Side Story or the right to privacy. Nor would we have the Venetian Hotel Resort Casino, Mr. Spock or the first U.S. shopping mall in Stamford, Conn.

Today, Massachusetts is the fourth most Jewish state in the United States and the most Jewish state in New England. Connecticut’s Jewish population ranks seventh.

Colonial Jewish Immigrants

Newport, R.I., was the only colonial town with a large enough Jewish population to support a congregation. After Newport Jews consecrated its synagogue, nearly nine decades would pass before Jewish New England could build another.

Touro Synagogue. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Spanish and Portuguese Jews had lived in Newport, R.I. since the mid-17th century, when they arrived via Barbados. [The Spanish Inquisition had driven them out of Brazil to the Caribbean, then to Rhode Island.] They left a permanent mark on the city by establishing a cemetery in 1677 – believed the first in America. Several more waves of Jewish families then arrived from Curacao in 1690 and from New York in the mid-18th century.

Many Newport Jews prospered as merchants in the sea trade. Bellevue Avenue, now lined with Gilded Age house museums, once was lined with Jewish shops. By 1758 the Jewish community could support a house of worship, and built the Touro Synagogue, consecrated in 1763.

The British occupation of Newport devastated the town’s economy. Jewish patriots left before they arrived. The occupiers turned the Touro Synagogue into a hospital, which saved it from destruction.

When the British left, they were accompanied by Loyalist Jews – including Isaac Touro, the synagogue’s hazzan.

George Washington visited Newport in 1790, and wrote a letter to the Jewish community that remained. In it, he pledged, “To bigotry, no sanction. To persecution, no assistance.” The Touro congregation re-reads the letter out loud every year.

But Newport’s Jewish community continued to dwindle as Jews left for Boston, New York and Charleston, S.C. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited in 1852, and two years later published a poem called The Jewish Cemetery at Newport.

Gone are the living, but the dead remain,
And not neglected; for a hand unseen,
Scattering its bounty, like a summer rain,
Still keeps their graves and their remembrance green.

Jewish Immigrants in Boston

Jews lived in Boston in as early as 1630, but not until Moses Michael Hays moved to town did Jews establish any permanent institutions. None of those institutions, however, had anything to do with the Jewish religion. Puritan intolerance wouldn’t allow it.

Hays was a Portuguese Sephardi and a patriot. He had left Newport before the British occupied it during the Revolution. He prospered in the shipping business as Boston grew with the China and other maritime trades.

Hays also helped found the national insurance industry and the Massachusetts Bank, to which he made the first deposit. (It’s now Bank of America.) Hays also served as the Grand Master of the Massachusetts Lodge, with Paul Revere as his deputy. He donated to Harvard, the Boston Common and roads and tunnels.

Jewish immigrants in the North End

Hays’ brother-in-law was Isaac Touro, who in 1783 died in Jamaica. Hays then helped raise Touro’s sons, Judah and Abraham, along with his own, also named Judah.

Under Hays’ tutelage, his son and his nephews succeeded in business and supported the founding of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Boston Athenaeum. Judah Touro donated the last $10,000 for the Bunker Hill Monument.

But Boston’s leading citizens could build no temple, no burying ground. The small Jewish community had to associate with Jewish congregations in New York and Newport, and bury their dead in Newport.

German and Polish Immigrants

A wave of Jews fleeing economic chaos and political oppression in Poland and Germany started arriving in New England around 1840. Jews had been barred from most trades and professions and young Jews had to overcome steep obstacles in order to marry.

By 1852, a thousand German and Polish Jews arrived in Boston, a tiny part of the massive wave of immigrants from Ireland. They established the Ohabei Shalom congregation and created a cemetery in East Boston in 1844.

In 1852, Ohabei Shalom built a modest frame temple on Warrenton Street in what is now the city’s Theater District. As they prospered, they moved to Roxbury and Brookline and to the large, bowfront homes in the Upper South End.

Boston’s Ends

The Jewish population then grew steadily until the 1880s, when it began to explode. Anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe, primarily the Settlement of the Pale and Russia, sent waves of poor Jews to Boston and elsewhere in New England. They came first to the South End in Boston, then to the North End, East Boston and especially the West End.

By 1910, the West End had a Jewish population of 24,000. The South End had 8,000, East Boston 5,000, and between 3,000 and 5,500 in Lynn, Malden, Brockton and South Boston.

After a massive fire in East Boston in 1908, Jews began to move to the City of Chelsea, across the Mystic River from Boston. By 1915, half of Chelsea’s 18,000 residents were Jewish, giving the city the nickname, “Jerusalem of America.”

The Suburban Diaspora

Boston’s Jewish neighborhoods produced the art historian Bernard Berenson, movie mogul Louis B. Mayer, actor Leonard Nimoy, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, the Filene family, CBS owner Sumner Redstone and journalists Theodore White and Nat Hentoff.

As Boston’s Jewish immigrants succeeded, they built temples and formed social and philanthropic societies. They began moving north to towns like Marblehead and Swampscott. They also moved south to Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan along Blue Hill Avenue and west to Brookline and Newton.

Scholars

A 13-year-old Jewish immigrant from the Pale, Mary Antin, arrived in Chelsea with her family in 1894. She graduated from Girls’ Latin School, went to college and became a popular writer and lecturer. At 31 she wrote a best-selling autobiography, The Promised Land, which described how education kept the American dream alive for her.

Mary Antin

“In probably no other American sub-culture is so high a value placed upon learning and intellectuality, or upon helping of the poor by the rich and the weak by the strong,” wrote Lawrence Fuchs, American Studies scholar, about the Jewish people.

Boston’s many universities attracted Jewish scholars and intellectuals from other American cities, including Noam Chomsky, Felix Frankfurter, Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Asimov and Norbert Wiener, who originated cybernetics.

King Charles Solomon found a different path to success. Solomon emigrated as a boy from Russia to the West End and then ran the city’s underworld as Boston’s answer to Al Capone.

Jewish Immigrants in Connecticut

Jewish immigrants who first landed in Boston and New York eventually began to migrate throughout New England.

During the Civil War, Connecticut had fewer than 1,500 Jews. But then, as in Boston, German Jews comprised the first wave of Jewish immigration. They took the steamboat up the Connecticut River from New York and settled in East Hartford. By 1843, they established the Beth Israel congregation. They worked as grocers, butchers, boarding house operators, shop owners, tailors and tobacconists. As they prospered, they moved to West Hartford.

In 1848, a German Jew named Gerson Fox started a dry goods store in Hartford. G. Fox then grew into the largest privately held – and perhaps the most beloved — department store in the United States.

G. Fox, the most beloved of Hartford’s downtown department stores

Then came the wave of Eastern European Jews from Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine and Galicia. They crowded into Hartford’s East Side tenements. By 1910, Eastern European Jews outnumbered German Jews in Hartford by a margin of 5 to 1.

Politics and Show Biz

Two Jews had won election to the Hartford City Council in 1860, and from then on Connecticut Jews have found unusual success in politics. Russian immigrant Herman Koppleman, who first won election to the Hartford City Council in 1904, had a long career as political boss and U.S. Congressman. Connecticut has sent three Jews to the U.S. Senate: Abe Ribicoff, Joe Lieberman and Ralph Blumenthal – two more than any other New England state.

Hartford’s Jewish immigrants, like Phyllys and Lester Luntz, rose in the professions. They wrote the first forensic dentistry textbook, and their son Frank became a prominent Republican political consultant. Hartford has also produced comediennes Totie Fields and Sophie Tucker.

By 1920, Hartford had a Jewish population of 16,000. Today, Greater Hartford has Connecticut’s largest Jewish population; in 2000 , about 33,000 Jews lived in the Greater Hartford.

New Haven, Bridgeport and Waterbury also have significant Jewish communities. After World War II, successful Jews like Arthur Miller and Joan Rivers began to move out of New York into Connecticut’s wealthy towns and suburbs.

New Haven

Another leading Jewish family arrived in another Puritan capital in 1758. Jacob and Solomon Pinto became prominent citizens and Jacob’s three sons all fought in the Continental Army. But it wasn’t until the 1840s that groups of Jews — again from Germany — began to settle in New Haven. The first congregation in 1843, Mishkan Israel, used a $5,000 bequest from Judah Touro to turn a building into a synagogue in 1854.

The influx of Russian Jews began in 1882, reaching 8,000 by the turn of the century. Pogroms accelerated the flow of refugees and New Haven had 20,000 Jews by World War I.

Al Capp, creator of Li’l Abner, had Latvian parents who came to New Haven in 1880s. Jazz clarinetist Artie Shaw was born in New Haven to a Russian father and an Austrian mother. Today, many New Haven Jews live in the affluent Westville neighborhood.

Antisemitism threw a shadow over New Haven Jews as it did throughout New England; Yale University had a quota on Jewish admissions that lasted until the 1960s, argues Dan Oren, a 1979 Yale graduate.

Today, Yale has a Jewish president and many affiliated Jewish organizations.

Bridgeport and Waterbury

Bridgeport’s main influx of Jewish immigrants began in 1881, with Russian, Polish and Hungarian Jews, as well as Hungarian non-Jews. In 1915, the Bridgeport Evening Farmer quoted the Rev. Stephen F. Chernitzky saying “Bridgeport is the largest Hungarian city in America…here in Bridgeport, one out of every ten men is Hungarian.”

Edwin Land, the son of a Bridgeport scrap metal dealer from Eastern Europe, invented instant photography in Cambridge, Mass., after dropping out of Harvard.

Edwin Land

The first wave of Jews to Waterbury came from Germany. In 1872, the first Jewish congregation formed with 40 Jewish families. About 9,000 Eastern European Jews had arrived in Waterbury by the early 20th century.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz was born in 1949 in Waterbury, Conn., the granddaughter of Romanian Jews. “I’m not a practicing Jew, but I feel very Jewish.”

In nearby Naugatuck, a grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants named Adrian Greenburg worked in his parents’ hat shop as a boy. He became Adrian, the Hollywood costume designer who created Dorothy’s ruby slippers. Undoubtedly sensitive to anti-Semitism, he identified himself as “a New Englander.”

Jewish Farmers of Connecticut

When growing antisemitism forced Jews out of the Pale beginning around 1880, millions of Jewish immigrants arrived in New York City.

Jewish relief societies in the United States then tried to help them. In 1889, a wealthy German Jewish banker named Baron Maurice de Hirsch donated $2.4 million for resettling Russian Jews in the United States. The Jewish Agricultural Society in New York and the Baron de Hirsch Fund gave Jewish farmers small loans to establish farms.

Jews who wanted out of the crowded tenements of New York’s Lower East Side could buy farms for cheap in such Connecticut towns as Newtown, East Haddam, Norwich and Colchester. Yankee farmers had found the land too difficult to farm profitably and put their land up for sale. The Jews who bought them also bought into backbreaking work that they supplemented with part time jobs in light industry.

But by 1928, the Jewish Agricultural Society estimated 1,000 Jewish farms and 5,000 Jewish farm families lived in Connecticut.

Alphonsine and Jacques Makowsky fled Germany and then settled on a poultry farm in northeastern Connecticut, where they developed the Cornish game hen. The Makowskys then sold as many as 3,000 a day to New York restaurants like the 21 Club.

Rhode Island’s Jewish Immigrants

In 1838, a Dutch clothing merchant named Solomon Pareira settled in Providence, laying the groundwork for the Jewish community along Weybosset Neck. By 1849, they had a cemetery and by 1855, a congregation.

By 1877 Jews from Eastern Europe began to arrive in the Providence-Pawtucket area. They came to escape Russian pogroms and restrictive laws. By 1900, 1600 Jews settled in the area, clustering in the city’s North End and South Providence.

S.J. Perelman’s Russian Jewish parents brought their only son from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Smith Hill in Providence. His father ran a dry goods store and raised chickens. Perelman grew up to become one of the funniest essayists of the 20th century—despite dropping out of Brown. Ira Rakatansky, Rhode Island’s most famous modernist architect, was born in Providence in 1919 of Russian emigré parents.

Jews also moved to Pawtucket, Woonsocket, Westerly, Bristol and West Warwick. Newport’s Jewish population rebounded in the late 19^th century.

Rhode Island’s Jewish community continued to grow until World War I, and then immigration restrictions stopped the flow of newcomers from Eastern Europe.

Northern New England

By the Civil War, Portland and Bangor had small Jewish communities. Portland had 3,000 Jews by 1920. Today Greater Portland’s Jewish population numbers about 6,500.

Bangor had a congregation of German Jews founded in 1849, but they either left Maine or assimilated. Polish and Lithuanian Jews arrived in the late 19th century and organized Congregation Beth Israel in 1888. It is still operating.

Jewish peddlers from New York and Boston first came to Vermont selling goods to quarry workers around Rutland. Lithuanian Jews came to Burlington in the 1880s, forming a community called Little Jerusalem. Then in 1885, they established the Ohave Zedek synagogue in Burlington.

The New Deal

President Franklin D. Roosevelt brought so many Jewish intellectuals into his administration that people vilified the New Deal as the “Jew Deal.” Roosevelt said he wanted people around him who understood living in a tenement, and he liked them to have brains and ambition. He didn’t care that they were Jewish.

Many of Roosevelt’s Jewish New Dealers came from New England. Louis Brandeis, though appointed to the Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson, had a vision of a just society. It included strong First Amendment rights, the right to privacy, corporate transparency, consumer protection and fair wages. Roosevelt adopted many of his ideas.

Louis Brandeis

Though born in Kentucky, Brandeis spent much of his adult life in Massachusetts after graduating from Harvard Law School at 20. He practiced law in Boston for many years. Known as the people’s lawyer, he was considered the finest, fairest and most incorruptible judges on the high court. Seven years after his death, the Jewish community founded Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass.

Boston’s Filene brothers, Edward and Lincoln, strongly supported Roosevelt’s New Deal, unlike most other businesspeople who viewed him as too radical. Louis Kirstein, a vice president and part owner of Filene’s, also backed Roosevelt and served in several New Deal agencies

Charles Wyzanski, Jr., served as solicitor in FDR’s Labor Department and David Wise as a behind-the-scenes political operative who later served in the Roosevelt administration. Both were born in Boston.

Isador Lubin, an economist who belonged to Roosevelt’s brain trust, was born in Worcester, Mass., and graduated from Clark University.

Post World War II

New England’s Jewish immigrants and their descendants formed many charities. During World War II, Jewish aid societies helped resettled Jews from Germany. The Jewish Family and Children’s Service brought Stephan Ross, a Polish Holocaust survivor, to Boston as a boy. When he grew up, he spearheaded the creation of the New England Holocaust Memorial.

In 1956 Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser began expelling Jews from Egypt, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society brought about 60 Jewish families from Egypt to Boston.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Boston Refugee Committee and Jewish Family and Children’s Services helped resettle some 10,000 Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Most arrived in Greater Boston after 1985.

Jewish New England

Today, Jews comprise about 4 percent of Massachusetts’ population, exceeded only by New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. Somewhere between 208,000 and 260,000 Jews live in Greater Boston, the seventh most Jewish metropolis in the United States.

The National Yiddish Book Center is located in Amherst, Mass., and the Jewish Women’s Archive in Brookline. Massachusetts also produces such Jewish publications as the Jewish Advocate, in Boston; the Metro-West Jewish Reporter; the Jewish Journal/North of Boston; the Jewish Chronicle, in Worcester; and the national monthly Sh’ma, published by Jewish Family and Life in Newton.

Connecticut ranks behind Massachusetts in New England with a population that’s 3.3 percent Jewish, followed by Rhode Island (1.8 percent). Jews make up about 1 percent of Maine and Vermont. New Hampshire brings up the rear, with a Jewish population of .8 percent.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Curse of Humphrey Atherton

Humphrey Atherton had far more power and influence than the Quakers he persecuted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the 1650s.

At least one of his victims, Mary Dyer, has gone down in history as a courageous woman whose stand against religious intolerance cost her her life.

Her statue stands in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse, and schoolchildren learn of her martyrdom to this day.

Statue of Mary Dyer in front of the Massachusetts Statehouse.

As for Humphrey Atherton, he is remembered mostly for his violent death, said to result from a curse placed on him by one of his victims.

Humphrey Atherton

He was born in England sometime around 1608 and came to Massachusetts during the Great Migration of Puritans. He brought with him his wife, who he had married when they were both 15. They had three children, and would have nine more.

Puritans arrive in Massachusetts, ‘Arrival of Winthrop’s Company in Boston Harbor’ by William Formby Halsall, ca. 1630.

Humphrey Atherton quickly rose to power in the young colony. He won election as selectman and treasurer and eventually served as Speaker of the House. For many years he served as a justice of the peace. He officiated over many marriages, including that of Myles Standish, Jr., and Sarah Winslow.

Atherton belonged to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company and organized the first militia in Dorchester. He became the highest ranking military officer in New England. As major-general in the Suffolk Regiment, his responsibilities included subduing Indians and catching criminals, like Quakers.

Humphrey Atherton also served as a member of the Court of Assistance. That gave him the power to prosecute criminals and heretics. He embraced that power with gusto.

He played a major role in the capital punishment of at least one witch, Mrs. Ann Hibbins. She later appeared as Mrs. Hibbins in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

Quakers especially resented Humphrey Atherton’s insult toward Mary Dyer. As her body dangled from the noose, Atherton supposedly said, “She hangs there like a flag.”

Mary Dyer headed to the gallows.

Death

According to legend, Wenlock Christison, the last Quaker sentenced to death, had an exchange with Humphrey Atherton.

Joseph Besse, an English Quaker who chronicled the sufferings of Quakers, wrote about it.

Humphrey Atherton said to Christison, “You pronounce woes and judgments, and those that are gone before you pronounced woes and judgments; but the judgments of the Lord God are not upon us yet.”

Christison then told Atherton he would face God’s judgment. Christison, however, won a reprieve.

On Sept. 16, 1661, Atherton drilled his militia with ‘much pomp and ostentation.’ He then rode his horse home through Boston Common. He came to the place where officials released Quakers from a cart after they whipped them.

His horse suddenly shied, and threw Humphrey Atherton with such violence that he died instantly. Wrote Besse:

His eyes being dashed out of his head, and his brains coming out of his nose, his tongue hanging out at his mouth, and the blood running out at his ears.

Men took up his body and brought it into the courthouse where he had sentenced Quakers to death. “His blood ran through the floor,” wrote Besse, “exhibiting to the spectators a shocking instance of the Divine vengeance against a daring and hardened persecutor.”

Afterward

Humphrey Atherton’s remains now lie in the Old North Burying Ground in the Dorchester section of Boston. Harlow Elliot Woodword, in Epitaphs from the Old Burying Ground in Dorchester, wrote that Quakers ‘believed his horrible death to be God’s visitation of wrath.’

The tomb of Humphrey Atherton.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow included the curse of Humphrey Atherton in his play, John Endicott.

His descendants include rocket scientist Robert Goddard, suffragist Susan B. Anthony, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson and actress Raquel Welch.

Images: Tomb of Humphrey Atherton By Ishtar456 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11255440. This story was updated in 2023.