Levi Lincoln Archives - New England Historical Society

In March of 1778, a traveler brought strange news to Sandwich, Mass., about an unnatural murder in Brookfield. A woman had hired two Russians to kill her husband. The woman turned out to be well-known in Sandwich: Bathsheba Spooner, daughter of a notorious Loyalist.

She had moved away from the Cape Cod town with her family as eight-year-old Bathsheba Ruggles. At 20, she married a prosperous farmer in Brookfield, Joshua Spooner.

Newcomb Tavern, Birthplace of Bathsheba Spooner

Twelve years later, her 17-year-old lover and two deserters from the British Army – Hessians, not Russians – beat Joshua Spooner to death. Then they shoved his body head-first down a well. Bathsheba Spooner went to trial for inciting the men to kill her husband.

She was sentenced to hang, along with her co-conspirators. But Bathsheba was pregnant. Which raised a question: Did her unborn child pay for the sins of his Loyalist grandfather?

Bathsheba Spooner

She was born on Feb. 13, 1745 in the Newcomb Tavern on Grove Street.

Her father, Timothy Ruggles, had gone from guest at the tavern to landlord, as he had married the widow Newcomb. They had six children. The Newcomb Tavern became a hotbed of Loyalist sentiment, and its patrons often clashed with the patriots in town.

Timothy Ruggles then moved the family to a farm in a new town called Hardwick, Mass. There he served as chief judge of the common pleas court in Worcester. Young John Adams, who studied law in Worcester, admired him. “His honor is strict . . . People approached him with dread and terror,” wrote Adams.

Timothy Ruggles

At six feet tall, Ruggles had a commanding presence and an outsize personality. He graduated from Harvard, practiced law and rose to brigadier general in the French and Indian War. He also won a number of elections to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, including as speaker from 1762 to 1764.

As patriots began agitating against the Crown, Timothy Ruggles led the Loyalist cause in New England. He founded the Loyal American Association, which vowed to enforce obedience to the King. The group also pledged resistance to the rebels and to use force to retaliate if harmed.

Unhappy Marriage

Ruggles influenced Bathsheba, his favorite daughter, to marry Joshua Spooner. He reasoned the union would cement her social position in town. Spooner could provide for her with an elegant home and fine clothing on his large farm in nearby Brookfield, Mass.

Winthrop Chandler, ‘The Homestead of General Timothy Ruggles’

But Bathsheba’s marriage to Joshua Spooner did not go well. She was pretty and intelligent, but “her passions had never been properly restrained.” Later in court, witnesses testified her husband was weak, easily intimidated and unable to sustain “a manly importance as the head of the family.” Others described him as an abusive drunk who slept with the servants when Bathsheba turned him away. Though they had four children, she had an “utter aversion” to him.

Meanwhile, her patriotic neighbors shunned her. They viewed her father as a leading traitor, and they suspected she agreed with him. John Adams, exaggerating a bit, wrote that the “whole continent” viewed Timothy Ruggles with “utter contempt and derision.”

In 1774, patriots attacked Ruggles’ farm and poisoned his cattle. Threatened wherever he went, Ruggles finally took refuge in British-occupied Boston. Eventually he fled to Nova Scotia, and Massachusetts confiscated his property.

Bathsheba, who adored her father, found herself isolated in Brookfield with a husband she hated. Some people thought her quite mad.

Infidelity

One day in March 1777, a handsome, 16-year-old Continental Army soldier, Ezra Ross, met Bathsheba while traveling home to Ipswich, Mass. He had completed his enlistment after fighting with Washington in New York and Trenton. He had suddenly taken ill in Brookfield, and Bathsheba took him in and nursed him to health.

Ross returned to Brookfield in August on his way to support the patriots at Ticonderoga. Then, after the victory at Saratoga, Ross came again to the Spooner home. People saw him out riding with Bathsheba, nearly twice his age.

When Bathseba discovered Ezra had gotten her pregnant she made plans to get rid of her husband. She gave Ezra Ross a vial of nitric acid and told him to pour it into Spooner’s grog. But he didn’t do it.

Then in February 1778, two British deserters showed up in Brookfield. Sgt. James Buchanan and Pvt. William Brooks were among the many British soldiers who left the army during its arduous trek from Saratoga to Boston. There they were to leave for Britain.

With her husband away on business, Bathsheba brought the deserters into her home, offering them food, drink and rest. Increasingly desperate to kill her husband before he detected her pregnancy, she offered the soldiers $1,000 to do the deed. They said they would.

When Spooner came home he threw the soldiers out of his house. But Bathsheba hid them in the barn and continued to feed them. On March 1, 1777, Ezra Ross suddenly reappeared, and he agreed to help the soldiers kill her husband. That night, Joshua Spooner came home from Cooley’s Tavern and William Brooks attacked him in his dooryard, aided by Buchanan and Ross. They beat him to death and then threw his body down the well.

Apprehension and Trial

Bathsheba had planned to say Joshua got up in the middle of the night and fell into the well. But she had selected three very clumsy murderers. They left such evidence as Spooner’s battered hat, blood and footprints in the snow and a snowbank next to the well.

The three murderers fled to Worcester, where authorities apprehended them the next day. They wore Joshua Spooner’s clothing and carried Bathsheba’s money.

Robert Treat Paine

They confessed to the crime and went to prison. So did Bathsheba, though she never confessed.

The trial began on April 27 at the Old South Meeting House in Worcester

William Cushing presided, along with John Sullivan and David Sewall – patriots all. Robert Treat Paine, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, led the prosecution on behalf of the commonwealth.

Levi Lincoln, a relative of the 16^th president, defended Bathsheba on the grounds of insanity. “Many cool-headed contemporaries of Mrs. Spooner believed that she was beside herself when she committed the act for which she was tried,” wrote a distant relation, Samuel Swett Green, in 1888. Lincoln himself said he believed her insane.

Lincoln also pleaded with the jury to set aside “all political feeling.”

Bathsheba Spooner, Guilty

After 16 hours, the jury found all four guilty. Cushing set June 4 as the date for them to hang. In late May, Bathsheba begged the court to delay her execution because of her pregnancy. Cushing relented and moved the date to July 2. Then began a series of examinations to determine if the child had quickened in her womb. Panels of midwives did not agree.

William Cushing

Five thousand people watched the four murderers hang on July 2. John Avery, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Council, signed the warrant of execution. Avery also happened to be Joshua Spooner’s step-brother and an ardent patriot who hated Timothy Ruggles.

With the noose around her neck, she took the sheriff’s hand and uttered her final words: “My dear Sir, I am ready. In a little time I expect to be in bliss and but a few years must elapse when I hope I shall see you and my other friends.” An autopsy revealed a five-month male fetus.

Bathsheba’s sister Martha Green buried Spooner in the Brookfield cemetery and Bathsheba on the Green estate in Worcester.

Monument to Timothy Ruggles in Middleton, Nova Scotia

Timothy Ruggles died in Nova Scotia at the age of 82 in 1793.

Images: Monument to Timothy Ruggles By Hantsheroes – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37862735.

With thanks to The Most Extraordinary Murder, by Chaim M. Rosenberg for the Journal of the American Revolution, Sept. 20, 2018.

Abraham Lincoln, the Great Unifier, didn’t talk much about his Puritan ancestors. Nor did he talk much about his ancestors from Virginia, where the original Anglican settlers were known as Cavaliers.

He had good reason to hide the fact that his ancestor Samuel Lincoln had come to Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration. Lincoln also downplayed his Anglican, or Cavalier, ancestors who settled in Virginia.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

“Exposing either of the ancestral strands could have been politically risky,” wrote David S. Reynolds, in his recently published Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times.

Lincoln had to try to unify the country. So he hid his Cavalier and Puritan ancestors and claimed dubious Quaker roots. The North and the South found Quakers an acceptable compromise, something that would have astonished the early Puritans.

Puritan Ancestors vs. Cavaliers

During Lincoln’s presidency and afterward, people viewed the Civil War as a contest between Puritans and Cavaliers. More recently, Kevin Phillips in his book, The Cousins’ Wars, made the same argument. He maintained the American Civil War was merely an extension of the English civil wars.

The argument has some truth to it. Puritans from eastern England largely settled New England. Anglicans, or Cavaliers, from the west fled Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan uprising and settled in Maryland and Virginia.

The Puritan Northerners prized liberty, innovation, education, reform and hard work. From the southern point of view, they were fanatical, narrow-minded, money-grubbing commoners who disturbed the peace.

Prince Rupert of Rhine, considered the quintessential cavalier

In contrast, the Cavalier southerners thought of themselves as hospitable, chivalrous, traditional and aristocratic. Northerners called that oppressive, decadent and unjust – especially in regards to slavery.

In the late 1850s, The New York Herald wrote, “The people of the North and those of the South are distinct and separate.” They think differently, wrote the Herald, and they spring from a different stock. Different in every way, they cannot coalesce.

“The Puritan and the Cavalier…will always fight when they meet. There is nothing in common between them but hate.”

Lincoln’s Puritan Ancestors

Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, was born out of wedlock to a poor young woman who’d been taken advantage of by a plantation owner. Lincoln proudly described his mother as “the daughter of a nobleman…so-called of Virginia.” He told a friend he had inherited through his mother his brains and ambition from his Virginian grandfather.

Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas, had qualities associated with his Puritan ancestors: piety, honesty and lack of pretension.

Lincoln learned that his ancestor, Samuel Lincoln, had settled Hingham, Mass., during the Great Migration in 1637. He had come from Hingham in Norfolk County, a hotbed of anti-Anglican sentiment. His pastor arrived a year later, excommunicated for his radical views. Samuel Lincoln helped fund and build the Old Ship Church in 1681.

In 1848, Lincoln spoke in Dorchester and mentioned his Puritan ancestors, describing himself as one of the “Hingham Lincolns.”

Samuel had two brothers, and he and his wife had 11 children, so within the first generation Hingham had 60 Lincolns. Another Massachusetts Lincoln with Puritan ancestors from Hingham was Levi Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson’s attorney general and governor of Massachusetts. His son, Levi, Jr., also won election as governor of Massachusetts, and another son, Enoch, served as governor of Maine.

Samuel’s son Mordecai moved to Scituate and brought smelting furnaces to Massachusetts. Mordecai’s son, also Mordecai, married Hannah Saltar. Their son, John, was Abraham Lincoln’s great-grandfather.

Obadiah Holmes

Significantly, Hannah Saltar was descended from Obadiah Holmes, a Baptist and therefore a heretic in Puritan eyes. The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts in 1651 ordered him whipped 30 times in public.

An engraving of Obadiah Holmes about to be whipped.

News spread about the savage whipping and the persecution of the Baptists in Massachusetts. Baptist minister John Clarke turned the persecution of Baptists into an international cause celebre with a book that included a description of Holmes’ whipping. That put pressure on the Puritans to allow more religious freedom.

But Lincoln had no interest in summoning the memory of his illustrious Baptist ancestor. Baptists in Lincoln’s time reminded people of the divisions over slavery. The Baptist church in 1845 split apart into northern and southern conferences over the issue.

So Lincoln didn’t tell people during his campaign for president about his Puritan ancestors. Or about his Baptist or Cavalier forbears. He said he came from Quakers who left Berks County, Pa., for Virginia.

Mordecai’s son Mordecai had moved to Berks County, Pa. But it’s unlikely they were Quakers.

Everyone Likes Quakers

In the run-up to the Civil War, Quakers had broader appeal than Baptists, Cavaliers/Anglicans or Puritans/Congregationalists. Both southerners and northerners could tolerate them. The North saw Quakers as opponents of slavery, the South as a group unlikely to go to war over slavery.

By 1886, the perception grew that Lincoln served as a bridge between Puritans and Cavaliers. A Georgia newspaper editor named Henry Grady described Lincoln as both:

From the union of colonists, Puritans and Cavaliers, from the straightening of their purposes and the crossing of their blood, came he who stands as the first typical American…Abraham Lincoln. He was the sum of the Puritan and Cavalier, for in his ardent nature were fused the virtues of both, and in the depths of his great soul the faults of both were lost. He was greater than the Puritan, greater than the Cavalier, in that he was American.

With thanks to David S. Reynolds, Abe: Abraham Lincoln and His Times, published in September 2020.

Images: Samuel Lincoln sign By Timothy Valentine – https://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/3232950290/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5821709. This story last updated in 2022.

Levi Lincoln

Bathsheba Spooner, Hanged for Murder—Or For Her Loyalist Father?