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James Mitchell Varnum Wins the Right to a Jury Trial for Rhode Island

James Mitchell Varnum fought against English rule in the American Revolution as one of George Washington’s generals. Then shortly after the war he fought for the rule of English law in a Rhode Island courtroom.

The case, one of the most famous in U.S. history, involved the right to refuse paper money and the right to a trial by jury. It set the precedent that the courts have a right to review and strike down laws deemed unconstitutional.

Charles Wilson Peale painting of James Mitchell Varnum

James Mitchell Varnum

James Mitchell Varnum was a giant of a man, a competent, energetic self-promoter who liked to live large. He bought land behind the Kent County Courthouse in East Greenwich, R.I., and built a mansion on it. There he entertained a who’s who of the Revolutionary elite, including George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette, Comte de Rochambeau, John Sullivan and Nathanael Greene.

Born in Dracut, Mass., on Dec. 17, 1748, he began studying at Harvard, but transferred to Brown. By 22 he was married to Martha Child and a member of the bar. He entered the Army when the American Revolution broke out, fought in several engagements and advocated that freed African-American slaves be allowed to enlist. He ended his military service as a brigadier general, and the Rhode Island General Assembly appointed him to the U.S. Congress. Two years later he returned to his law practice.

In September of 1786, a Newport, R.I., cabinetmaker named John Trevett tried to buy a joint of meat from a butcher named John Weeden. Trevett offered paper money, but Weeden demanded hard cash: gold or silver. Trevett then sued.

Under a brand-new state law, Rhode Islanders had to accept paper money as legal currency or pay a fine of 100 pounds. Then the General Assembly passed a law that said anyone who broke the law would not be tried by jury. The reason? They thought no jury would convict someone for refusing to accept paper money, largely considered worthless.

Trevett decided to sue. John Weeden chose James Mitchell Varnum as his defense lawyer. He chose wisely.

The Varnum House Museum

Trial By Jury

James Mitchell Varnum argued, in essence, that depriving citizens of the right to a jury trial violated Rhode Island’s constitution.

But Rhode Island in 1786 did not have a constitution. In fact, Rhode Island didn’t have a constitution until 1842.

It had, instead, the royal charter of 1663 that Charles II had granted the colony. Under the charter the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta and other fundamental laws of England were granted to the people of Rhode Island. After receiving the royal charter, the General Assembly passed a law that guaranteed to freemen trial by jury.

Trevett v. Weeden

In arguing for John Weeden, James Mitchell Varnum made an argument novel for the time. The legislature is subordinate to the constitution, he said, and the courts have the power to decide if the laws it passes are constitutional.

In an eloquent courtroom plea, he asked why did the people endure, ‘a long, painful and bloody war, but to secure inviolate and to transmit unsullied for posterity, the inestimable privileges they received from their forefathers?’

The right to a jury trial was one of those privileges, he said. And power must be limited to protect the liberties of citizens.

The five justices of the Superior Court of Judicature dismissed the case – in essence, a victory for John Trevett and James Mitchell Varnum.

Seventeen years later, though, the case set a precedent for Marbury v. Madison. In that ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts have the power to strike down laws.

Trevett vs. Weeden has since been called ‘one of the earliest and most renowned cases of judicial review.’

The Old Colony House in Newport, where Trevett v. Weeden was heard.

The Aftermath

The controversy didn’t end in that Rhode Island courthouse, however. The General Assembly, which at the time appointed the judges to the state’s high court, called them on the carpet. Lawmakers demanded the five judges appear before it to explain their decision, and then moved to dismiss them.

Judge David Howell appeared and argued for an independent judiciary. James Mitchell Varnum argued the judges were entitled to due process and that the legislature couldn’t just fire them.

The General Assembly’s motion to dismiss the judges failed, but lawmakers got their payback by refusing to reappoint four of them when their terms expired. They also exacted revenge on James Mitchell Varnum by ousting him from his seat in the U.S. Congress.

All this took place as delegates prepared to assemble for the first constitutional convention in the United States. James Mitchell Varnum, hoping to influence the outcome, wrote a pamphlet about Trevett v. Weeden and circulated it in Philadelphia.

One could argue the Trevett v. Weeden trial cost him his life. No longer a congressman, he received an appointment as a supreme judge of the Northwest Territories. In 1788, he made the long journey westward to Marietta, Ohio. But he caught tuberculosis and died on Jan. 9, 1789. He had just reached 40 years of age.

Today, the James Mitchell Varnum House is open to the public during the summer.

The state didn’t officially embrace Varnum’s concept of judicial review until 2004, when it was enshrined in the Rhode Island constitution as an amendment.

Images: James Mitchell Varnum House by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62728157; Old Colony House By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58527502 This story was updated in 2021.

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The 1635 Perplexing Death of Maid Mary Sholy

In 1635, Mary Sholy had the tragic misfortune of meeting William Schooler. Schooler was not the sort of man the early settlers of Massachusetts wanted in their midst.

The Puritans who came to America were largely escaping intolerance. They wanted to establish a new country where they could practice their religion in peace. However, they also found America appealed to men and women who had other matters to escape. William Schooler was one of these

Schooler lived in London. He made his living selling wine and was married to an upstanding woman. But Schooler was a philanderer and a drunk. He would later admit his adultery. Schooler got into trouble in London when he wounded a man in a duel. He fled (likely to Holland) and from there made the journey to America.

In 1635, English colonists had small settlements under construction in Newbury, Mass. and Portsmouth, N.H. Schooler moved to the outskirts of Newbury and shared a house with another man. Their neighbors viewed them with a jaundiced eye because they lived as atheists.

Mary Sholy Goes Home

View of Ipswich from Castle Hill

Mary Sholy was a maid. She worked for a man in Portsmouth, and she had come to Newbury on personal business. The trip from Newbury to Portsmouth over land would have been a difficult one in 1635, roughly 30 miles on a narrow path, and a traveler would need to cross the Merrimack River.

Mary wanted to go home to Portsmouth, and William Schooler offered to guide her for a fee of 15 shillings. The pair departed Newbury, and it was the last time anyone would see Mary alive.

William returned to Newbury two days after he had left. Because of this unexpectedly quick return, the local authorities suspected something bad had occurred, and so they questioned William.

He told them he had crossed the Merrimack River with Mary, though not where he intended to, and guided Mary toward Portsmouth, then known as Pascataquack. However, she stopped part way and refused to accompany him any farther. He had then left her. He noted ominously that he had encountered a bear shortly after turning back.

Schooler’s neighbors noted that he had a scratch on his nose and blood on his clothing and hat. The blood, he explained, came from a pigeon he had killed to eat. The scratch was from a bramble. The magistrates at Ipswich thought the scratch was too large to be from a bramble. However, lacking any evidence of a crime they released Schooler.

William Schooler Can’t Keep Quiet

About one year later, Indians discovered Mary Sholy’s body in the woods, partially decomposed and undressed. She was about three miles from the Merrimack River.

William Schooler, meanwhile, had been conscripted to serve in the militia. He complained bitterly and loudly about this required service, and word of his complaining reached the governor who issued a warrant to arrest and question him.

When approached by court officers, however, Schooler assumed they planned to accuse him of murdering Mary Sholy, and he began loudly proclaiming his innocence. The protest renewed suspicions that Schooler had not told the truth about Mary Sholy, so he was again questioned.

Jailbreak and Back

This time the judges at Boston concluded he was guilty of a crime, and they sentenced him to death. While he was imprisoned on Powder Horn Hill awaiting execution, Schooler broke out of jail. But he returned and surrendered.

Some in the community, notably some ministers, protested the death sentence. The evidence against Schooler was purely circumstantial. They implored Schooler to confess to save his soul, but he refused. He had lied about certain details, but he had not murdered or harmed Mary Sholy in any way, he said.

John Winthrop

John Winthrop recorded the case in his journal. The clergy demanded that the court rescind the order of execution, but the court declined. Even if he had not actually murdered Mary Sholy, the court concluded, William Schooler had abandoned her in the woods and left her in great peril. And even when he suspected a bear endangered her, he did nothing. He was worthy of hanging for that behavior alone.

He was hanged on Sept. 28, 1637, protesting his innocence to the last.

If you enjoyed this article you might like Divorce, Murder and Madness: The Puritan Tuttles of the New Haven Colony. This story was updated in 2022.

Photo Credit: by John Phelan [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

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How the French-Canadian Textile Worker Came to New England

The story of a French-Canadian textile worker named Phillippe Lemay is the story of thousands of Quebecois farmers who came to New England to work in the mills.

They had no money, large families, little education, a strong work ethic and a deep attachment to the Roman Catholic Church. As soon as they stepped off the train in their homespun clothes, they were identified as ‘frogs,’ ‘Canucks’ and ‘pea soup eaters.’ The Irish especially disliked them – and that dislike turned into murder at least once.

Phillippe Lemay survived it all. In late 1939 and early 1940, he told his story to Louis Pare, an interviewer with the Federal Writers Project for the Folklore Project.

“The picture of one French Canadian textile worker and the picture of another are just as much alike as deux gouttes d’eau, or, as we have learned to say in English, like two peas in a pod,” Lemay said.

Weaving room of an Amoskeag mill.

The Quebec Diaspora

Phillipe Lemay was born June 29, 1856, the fourth child in a family of 14 children, on a small farm in St. Ephrem d’Upton near Montreal. The farm couldn’t support the growing Lemay family, so when Phillippe was eight years old his father decided to take the family to Lowell, Mass., and look for work.

french-canadian-textile-workers-lowell-mill

Lowell textile mills

The trip alone cost them nearly everything they had. The Lemays had to faire encan – auction off all their household goods — to pay for railroad tickets, food and lodging.

The wood-burning trains of the era moved slowly during the day, not at all at night. And so Phillippe Lemay’s family took four days to go from St. Ephrem d’Upton to Lowell. Today the trip takes about 4-1/2 hours by car.

Lowell

The Lemays arrived in Lowell with little more than the clothes on their backs and a new baby born during the journey. They joined 20 or so French-Canadian families in the city.

But after the Civil War ended, many more French-Canadians moved to Lowell in a great wave of migration. Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 residents of Quebec moved to the United States. One-third of Quebec moved to New England to neighborhoods called Little Canadas.

They were attracted to New England’s textile factories, which paid a living wage, albeit barely. But at least they earned enough to survive, which they couldn’t do back home.

In the early years, French-Canadian textile workers earned 50 cents a day. Their board cost $2 a week, and they worked from 5 am to 8 pm with a half hour each for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Later, the mills shortened the workday from 6 am to 6 pm.

Most French-Canadian textile workers didn’t come to stay. They wanted to go back to their Canadian farms with the money earned in the mills.

Some took leaves of absence from their jobs, perhaps a month in the spring to plow and plant their farm, another month in the fall to harvest. A friend or neighbor would tend the farm during the summer.

Many feared becoming citizens. They couldn’t speak English, a big handicap. They still paid taxes in Quebec and felt they couldn’t pay taxes in the United States.

In the end, about half the Quebecois – including Phllippe Lemay’s parents — returned to Canada.

A French-Canadian Textile Worker

As soon as he arrived in Lowell, eight-year-old Phillippe Lemay became a French-Canadian textile worker. He went to work in Lawrence Mill No. 5 as a bagboy and doffer, replacing full bobbins with empty ones. His father, who worked in a saw mill, wanted him to go to school. But Phillippe saw that his parents needed every penny he could earn. His disobedience earned him frequent spankings.

Doffer boys in a South Carolina textile mill, by Lewis Hine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

“The only ones who had a chance to get an education were the youngest of the children, because older brothers and sisters worked in the mills, helping their parents,” Lemay explained.

At first the newcomers from Quebec boarded with relatives. Then, when they could afford it, they rented tenements, usually owned by the company. The windows had no curtains, just paper shades that had to be rolled by hand. A braided rag rug covered the floor, scrubbed with lye once a week.

Life revolved around the mill and the church. Priests commanded enormous respect. In French-Canadian Old Town, Maine, for example, a popular superstition claimed a priest could cure any disease if he wished to.

Every night after dinner, but before the dishes were washed, the Lemay family prayed together and recited the rosary beads. Saturday nights they had fun during old-fashioned social gatherings in their homes, singing and square dancing. Phillippe Lemay remembered a fiddler who knew one tune and an accordionist who knew another, so they didn’t play together.

French vs. Irish

Lowell’s large Irish community feared the French had come to take their jobs. The Irish began a campaign of petty persecution. Irish boys put dirt in French children’s pails when they tried to get water from the public pumps. They stuck French worshippers with needles and pins during Mass, so much so that the French began to stay home. Phillippe Lemay’s father worked outside at night, when Irish boys threw rocks at him.

french-canadian-textile-workers-amoskeag

The Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H.

In 1872, when Phillippe was 16, the Lemays moved to Manchester, where the giant Amoskeag mills offered plenty of employment to a French-Canadian textile worker. But they fared no better with the Irish. Before the first French church was built in 1873, the French had to walk through the Irish neighborhood to attend Mass. Irish boys threw swill at them, beat them with sticks and threw rocks.

french-canadian-textile-worker-amoskeag-boy

A young French-Canadian textile worker leaving work at Amoskeag Mills, Manchester, N.H.

The completion of that first French church, St. Augustine, caused an immediate increase in French immigration from Quebec. Five or six families arrived every day on the train from Canada. The French Canadians began to open businesses — bakeries, beer parlors and grocery stores. They built a rectory for their pastor, then a school for French children, then a cemetery. They started to form fraternal organizations like the St. Jean Baptiste Society and to publish their own French-language newspapers.

Murder of a French-Canadian textile-worker

A marching band called the Fanfare Canadienne started at St. Augustine Church. Made up of French-Canadian textile workers, it played popular tunes for fraternal organizations.

One night in 1880, a 23-year-old band member named Jean Blanchette was talking in French with several bandmates near Victory Park in downtown Manchester. Three intoxicated Irishmen came out of a beer parlor and heard the French spoken. They attacked the French-Canadian textile workers, who fought back.

One of the Irishmen fell on a bottle of hard liquor in his pocket, and it broke. He threw the broken bottle at Jean Blanchette, severing his jugular vein. Blanchette died 20 minutes later. A thousand people marched in his funeral procession through the streets of Manchester, which were lined with French onlookers.

Sixty years later, Phillippe Lemay said the French-Canadian textile workers didn’t exact revenge from the Irish who killed their friend. Blanchette’s assailant went to prison for five years and died shortly after his release.

Lemay worked hard at his trade and rose through the mill’s ranks. In 1901, he asked for a promotion as an overseer of a spinning mill. His request shocked his superintendent. “What! A Frenchman had the crust to think he could be an overseer!” recalled Lemay.

He got the promotion to the dismay of the American and Irish workers, who stopped talking to him. Eventually more French-Canadian textile workers got promotions to management positions.

By 1906, Manchester had a French-Canadian bishop and in 1918, the first of many French-Canadian mayors. French-Canadians became distinguished doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, architects and bankers.

“To what do we owe our success?” said Phillippe Lemay.

I believe we owe it to the self-sacrificing French Canadian immigrants from old Quebec, to the courage that made them refuse to accept defeat and quit when that would have seemed the natural thing to do; to the cheerfulness that carried us through our trials and tribulation and helps us old-timers to wait happily for the final bell calling us home to rest after our long, hard life in the textile mills. And perhaps the bloody death of Jean-Baptiste Blanchette, a martyr in the true sense of the word, had its share in bringing about the conditions we are enjoying today.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also like to read about Lewis Hine, the photographer who exposed child labor, here. This story was updated in 2023.

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A Vermont Moose Visits Paris in 1787

In 1784, a Vermont moose went to Paris to settle an argument between a French natural historian and Thomas Jefferson.

The historian, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count Buffon, attacked the character of the new American nation. He believed in the theory of degeneration, and he boosted it in Histoire Naturelle, a 44-volume exploration of the natural world.

Scientific Racism

Degeneration held that all natural elements began in one location (presumably Europe), where they existed in their purest form. As people, plants and animals spread out to other parts of the world, they degenerated into inferior versions of their species.

The theory, of course, provides one of many examples of scientific racism throughout history.

It held that Europeans were superior to their counterparts in other parts of the world. As humans moved farther from their European roots, living conditions and traditions, they degenerated. The same held true for animals.

Inset: Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale in 1800.

Leclerc’s theory played well with the European aristocracy since it described Americans, with democratic ideals, as inferior beings. And he didn’t stop there. He castigated American Indians as physically weak people with small genitals and a limited drive to procreate.

Jefferson Pushes Back

Thomas Jefferson, American minister to France and himself an avid student of natural history, confronted LeClerc over his theories.

Indians, Jefferson noted, were as fertile as any people when afforded healthy surroundings.

LeClerc also held the lack of facial hair on many Indians was a sign of inferiority. Jefferson retorted that it was actually a product of Indian grooming traditions, which held that hair was unmanly. They plucked it. LeClerc agreed to correct his research in future editions.

Next Jefferson tried to challenge LeClerc on his assertions that European deer were much larger than their American counterparts. He told LeClerc of deer and elk with large antlers, to say nothing of the moose. Jefferson claimed the American moose were so tall a a European reindeer could walk underneath one without touching the moose’s stomach.

To prove his point, Jefferson shipped from his home an enormous set of deer antlers. And LeClerc said he would stand corrected if Jefferson could prove his point about the moose.

The Vermont Moose

To defend the moose’s honor, Jefferson badgered New Hampshire Gov. John Sullivan, as he knew moose abounded in Northern New England. He asked Sullivan to procure the bones and hide of a moose and ship them to France.

In 1786, Jefferson continued pressing Sullivan on the matter. In a letter he wrote:

“The readiness with which you undertook to endeavor to get for me the skin, the skeleton, and the horns of the Moose, the Caribou, . . . and the Elk, emboldens me to renew my application to you for those objects, which would be an acquisition here, more precious than you can imagine.

“Whatever expense you incur in procuring or sending these things, I will immediately repay either here or in Boston as you please.”

After years of Jefferson’s pestering, Sullivan finally rounded up a team of hunters who went moose chasing. They got their specimen, most likely in the town of Brookfield, Vt. The dead moose then began a long journey to France, via Durham and Portsmouth, N.H., where it was packed, along with an assortment of other animal specimens, and shipped to France.

An Expensive Trip

Sullivan didn’t show his dismay with the request, but he did note the trouble to get the moose. When submitting his bill to Jefferson, he said, “from motives of friendship for you I only Charge for the expenses I have paid in Cash without any thing for my own Trouble which has been very considerable.”

All in all, shipping the moose cost over 46 pounds. The bill included:

Paid to Capt. Robert Colburn for the Skeleton of a moose and Transporting to Durham.
moose horns and expence of procuring them.
a pair of Elks horns & expence of procuring.
a pair of Deers horns & expence of procuring.
pair of Caribous Horns & expense of procuring.
expense of cleansing the Skeleton from flesh and salting and tending the same to prevent putrefaction.
Expense of Dressing the Skins to preserve it with the hair on, free from worms & with expense of Alum brick Dust & Tobacco.
a Tanner for fleshing the Skins.
Expense of a Box and putting up the skeleton.
expense of sending the Box to Portsmouth.
horns of the Spike horned Buck.
Expense of 3 times sending to Effingham Connecticut River and the province of Main, to procure the skeleton
Truckage and Storage paid at Durham and Portsmouth

Though the moose skin and skeleton arrived somewhat worse for wear, they did persuade LeClerc he was incorrect in his assessment of the size of American moose. He promised to correct the error in a future edition of his work. He died, however, before he could publish.

Thanks to Jefferson, Buffon and the Moose by Keith Stewart Thomson in American Scientist; Antlers for Jefferson, New England Quarterly. This story about the Vermont moose that went to Paris was updated in 2022.

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Joseph Orono, The Blue Eyed Indian Who Helped the Revolutionary Cause

The Penobscot sachem Joseph Orono died in 1801, too early to know about his consolation prize for losing his people’s land to white settlers.

He lived plenty long, though. He was said to have been born in 1688, which made him 113 when he died in 1801. If that’s true, Joseph Orono lived through every one of the French and Indian Wars as well as the American Revolution, in which he participated

A Penobscot chief

Five years after his death, Orono, Maine named itself after him. He probably would have preferred the land along the Penobscot River promised him, and then taken.

Joseph Orono

Historical accounts agree that Joseph Orono had reddish hair, blue eyes and a pale complexion. He spoke fluent French, English and Penobscot.

Accounts disagree about his lineage. Some say he had some relation to Baron de Castine, a French nobleman who married an Indian. (Castine also had a town named after him in Maine.) Perhaps Orono was Castine’s son-in-law, or grandson.

Joseph Orono himself said his father was French, and his mother half French, half Indian. A devout Catholic, he believed the Indians had suffered from war, and advocated peace. White people viewed him favorably, and described him as able, friendly and sagacious.

Revolution

In 1775, Joseph Orono and three other Penobscot chiefs went to air their grievances to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, as Maine then belonged to that colony. The Indian delegation stopped in Falmouth, now Portland, where the people gave them money, horses and a carriage to help them on their journey.

Two days after the Battle of Bunker Hill, they arrived in Watertown, Mass., where the Provincial Congress then met. It included Sam Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren.

On June 21, 1775, Joseph Orono addressed the Provincial Congress on behalf of the whole Penobscot tribe. As he spoke, the men inside could hear the groans of the soldiers dying of their battle wounds.

Orono said that if the Congress took care of his people’s grievances, the Penobscots would aid the rebels with their whole force. Those grievances consisted chiefly of trespasses by the whites upon their timber lands and cheating them in trade.

The committee responded warmly, and said the Indians’ complaints would receive their attention as soon as they could take a breath from the Revolution. Eventually, Massachusetts signed a treaty giving six miles of land on each side of the Penobscot river to the Indians.

Frigates

In 1779, the British built a fort in what is now Castine. Joseph Orono communicated intelligence about their activities to the patriots. Massachusetts then sent the Penobscot Expedition to Castine, and the Penobscot Indians fought with them. Whether Joseph Orono actually fought is unclear; he would have been 91.

The British routed the Americans in the worst naval disaster until Pearl Harbor. But Joseph Orono continued to help the cause, communicating intelligence to patriots in Machias and Halifax.

In 1780, Joseph Orono earned his Indian nickname, K’tolaqu. It means ‘frigate.’

Orono went to Newport, R.I., where French forces had landed before marching to Yorktown. His mission: to request a Catholic priest from the French consul. But he was so amazed by the French frigates in the harbor that he couldn’t stop talking about them afterword.

Island Life

Joseph Orono had often stayed and hunted with a friend on Deer Isle, a white settler named Seth Webb. After he broke with other Penobscots in 1783, he moved a small group of his people to White Island, off Deer Isle.

Penobscot wigwams

They established a little village with a Franciscan missionary, a Catholic chapel and wigwams. But they couldn’t live in peace there, either. In 1786, Joseph Orono complained to Massachusetts Commissioner Benjamin Lincoln, once a member of the Provincial Congress. People were chopping down his trees and burning the wigwams, he said.

A decade later, Massachusetts reneged on its deal to deed the land along the Penobscot River to Orono’s people. All they had left was the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation.

Penobscot Indian reservation, ca. 1940s

Five years after Joseph Orono died, white settlers near the Indian reservation incorporated, naming the town Orono. Today, the University of Maine has its main campus there. An island in Penobscot Bay also bears his name.

In May 2018, the University of Maine and the Penobscot Nation were scheduled to signed an agreement ‘formalizing their collaborations in the past decade to help manage the tribe’s cultural heritage.’

With thanks to Canoe Indians of Down East Maine, by Bill Haviland. This story about the Penobscot chief Joseph Orono was updated in 2022.

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Nathaniel Sewell Comes to America in 1643 – and Regrets It

In 1643, Londoners were worried about the well-being of street children. So they developed a scheme to improve the children’s lot in life by sending them to America, where they could be apprenticed as laborers. So it was that Nathaniel Sewell arrived in Massachusetts aboard the vessel Seabridge. He was sent to live with William Franklin of Newbury.

nathaniel sewell

Hung in the Chimney

Franklin and Sewell apparently couldn’t get along, with Franklin determined to reform the boy at all costs. Sewell apparently resisted.

John Winthrop devoted quite a passage to the case in his diaries, which turned out badly for all involved.

Franklin “used him (Nathaniel Sewell) with continual rigor and unmerciful correction, and exposed him many times to much cold and wet in the winter season,” wrote Winthrop. He also “used divers acts of rigor towards him, as hanging him in the chimney and so forth,” Winthrop noted. But apparently the punishments did little to reform the boy. So Franklin set off toward Boston to take Sewell to court for a hearing about his bad behavior.

Winthrop recorded: “the boy being very poor and weak he tied him upon an horse and so brought him (sometimes sitting and sometimes hanging down) to Boston, being five miles off, to a magistrates, and by the way the boy calling much for water, would give him none, though he came close by it, so as the boy was near dead when he came to Boston, and died in a few hours after.”

Trial for the Murder of Nathaniel Sewell

The case created a stir. What was Franklin’s culpability? He had tried to reform the boy and turn him into a productive citizen. Yet his methods were undoubtedly harsh.

Winthrop came down on the side of Nathaniel Sewell. The treatment, especially depriving the boy of water on the journey to Boston, was unreasonable. It was “evil because it arose from a distemper of passion,” Winthrop wrote. He turned to the Bible, to Deuteronomy and Exodus, to determine the proper course of action.

“If a master strike his servant with a rod, which is a lawful action, and he die under his hand (as the servant did), he was to die for it,” he concluded.

Other leaders of the colony had doubts, however, that Franklin was guilty of a crime that warranted the death penalty. Franklin had stature as a respected member of the Newbury community, one of its original settlers and landholders.

The Verdict

So in April of 1644, a court of assistants found Franklin guilty of murder. But because of the disagreement among its members, this lower court referred the case to the General Court. It asked if the higher body felt Franklin deserved a second trial.

The General Court agreed with the lower court that Franklin was guilty and deserved the death penalty. In May of 1644, William Franklin was hanged — the first American colonist executed for murder while correcting a servant.

Thanks to History of Newbury, Mass., 1635-1902, by John James Currier and Town Born: The Political Economy of New England from Its Founding to the Revolution, by Barry Levy. This story was updated in 2022.

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