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Massachusetts General Court

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

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.

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George Scigliano, Lost Leader of Boston’s Italian Community

George Scigliano won the reverence of Boston’s North End for vanquishing the money lenders, criminals and labor bosses who preyed on poor Italian immigrants. Perhaps his greatest achievement was dismantling the padrone system, which made debt slaves of Italian immigrants.

George Scigliano

Yes, debt slaves. During the late 19^th century, criminals exploited the hapless new arrivals from southern Italy and Sicily. They offered to find them jobs and shelter, and if they got into trouble they helped them get out of it. For a fee, of course, a fee that turned into debt bondage.

The corrupt system of feeding powerless immigrants to industrial America was called the padrone system. Even children suffered from it. Poor, starving parents in Italy sold their children to the padrones, who put them out as peanut vendors or street musicians.

Some people defended the padrones, calling them labor contractors who found jobs, saloonkeepers who gave them a refuge from hostile natives and as translators who helped them navigate the U.S. court system. Gunther Peck argued they “acquired success by providing vital cultural, economic, and political services.”

George Scigliano began to dismantle the padrone system. He called, “perhaps the greatest evil which has beset the Italian immigrant in this country.” He died at a tragically young age of 32 before he could finish his work.

George Scigliano

He was born on Aug. 26, 1874, the son of Italian immigrants. His mother came from Tuscany, his father from a Neapolitan family with a Calabrian name. They arrived earlier than the great wave of Italian immigrants from the south, and George’s father built a modestly successful business. He ran a food-and-wine shop and then added a saloon, at 140 North Street (since demolished).

George Scigliano’s father is in white, to the left. He’s in front of his business with his family and employees. Courtesy Boston City Archives.

George attended the Eliot School and then the Boston University School of Law. In 1900, he won election at the age of 26 to Boston’s Common Council. Three years later, he ran for and won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

He labored on behalf of his Italian constituents. Scigliano helped organize the first Italian labor union, founded the Italian Benevolent League and established October 12 as Columbus Day in Massachusetts.

He also earned the admiration of the city’s Italian immigrants by defending them from verbal attack. In 1901, Sen. George Frisbie Hoar called Portuguese and Italian immigrants ‘absolutely unfit’ for U.S. citizenship.

Italian immigrants arriving in Boston.

Scigliano then replied with a stinging rebuke. He characterized ‘The Italian’ as ‘a people descended from the ancient Roman dynasty which conquered all of the then known world and educated it.’ He noted the Italians ‘entered and conquered England at a time when the ancestors of our able senator were roaming savages, opened up their country and taught them the meaning of citizenship.’

Facing Down the Padrone

Just before Scigliano filed his bill to ban the padrone system, one brazen boss stood in North Square and announced he needed a thousand Italians to work on a huge construction project in Providence. The job would last nine years, the workers would have nine-hour days and they’d get paid as much as $2 a day. All they had to do was to pay a $1 registration fee to get hired and $1.05 for transportation to Rhode Island.

North Square (Paul Revere’s house to the far left)

Word spread quickly and within a day several hundred workers deposited several hundred dollars. State Rep. Scigliano, then president of the Italian Protective League, smelled a rat. He asked his friends in Providence to find out if the construction project actually existed. He didn’t. So he called the police and went with them to Washington Street downtown and arrested the padrone. He then made sure the padrone returned the money to his victims.

Debt Slaves

Horatio Alger exposed the padrone system to a wide audience with the publication of his novel Phil the Fiddler in 1872. It told the story of padrones who forced Italian boy slaves to beg in the New York streets. The local papers did a series of exposes in the following year, which forced some of the padrones to move north to Boston.

Italian laborers. Courtesy Global Boston.

They’d been in Boston already, meeting immigrant ships at the dock with promises of employment in exchange for a dollar or two. The padrone then hustled them onto trains bound for logging camps in the north woods. Or to farms and mines in the south and west, or to construction projects building canals, railroads, bridges, sewers and skyscrapers. When the immigrant arrived at the job site, he found he owed the padrone for transportation.

Isolated, unable to speak English and unfamiliar with their surroundings, they became debt slaves to the padrone. They then had to give him part of their paychecks and shop at the company stores. The stores charged exorbitant rates and gave the padrone a kickback.

George Scigliano to the Rescue

Scigliano filed a bill to abolish those practices. He told legislators:

In almost all cases, where payment is held back, the money is not paid to laborers, and so, at the end of the season, late in the fall, after the first frost sets in, the laborer returns to the city, and is to house himself for the winter without funds.

He won the enthusiastic support of the local newspapers. The Boston Post editorialized,

These men, bound by contract to the padrone, must buy the necessaries of life from the contractor’s store, live in the miserable shanties which he puts up, and often submit to the withholding of the greater part of their pay until the end of the season.

The bill passed. Then Scigliano took aim at another common swindle: the immigrant banks. Italian immigrants who managed to keep some money often deposited their savings in immigrant banks. The banks were notorious for cheating their customers—by simply not giving them their money back.

Cut Short

Scigliano filed a bill to regulate the immigrant banks. But it didn’t pass until after he died of a mysterious ailment at the age of 31.

St. Leonard’s

His funeral was the largest in North End history, with 1,500 people marching in the procession that carried his coffin to St. Leonard’s Church. Hundreds, if not thousands, watched from the street.

With thanks to Eric Scigliano, What Would Uncle George Do? My Heroic Immigrant Great-Uncle And His Message For Today in Post Alley and to Stephen Puleo, The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day.

Images: Immigrants arriving, courtesy trustees of the Boston Public Library. St. Leonard’s By yeowatzup – Saint Leonard's Church, North End, Boston, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24521830. This story was updated in 2022.

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Native-American Slavery in New England

Native-American slavery began almost as soon as English colonists arrived in Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay. The earliest records date to 1636. By the end of the 17th century, the colonists enslaved over 1,200 Native Americans or sold them as slaves to other colonies.

Prior to 1700, colonists enslaved most of the Native men, women and children after capturing them in war. The Pequot War from 1636-38 provided New England leaders the chance to increase trade in Native-American slaves. A powerful trading nation, the Pequot dominated southern New England in the decades before the English arrived. Though they did not expand beyond southeastern Connecticut, the other Native Nations felt the Pequot’s trading power. The arrival of the English made a volatile situation worse. Aligning themselves with the Narragansett, Niantics and Mohegans, colonists used the murder of two English traders as an excuse to ignite the conflict.

The Pequot War

According to historian Alfred A. Cave, “Puritan chroniclers freely admitted that their military offensive against the Pequot Indians was highly punitive, deliberately intended to inflict the maximum number of casualties.” During the yearlong conflict, the English killed over 700 of the approximately 4,000 Pequot and enslaved many more. The colonists and their allies killed many of the male captives. The women and children who could not escape were to “be disposed aboute in the townes” of New England, or sold into slavery in colonies as far away as the Caribbean and Nicaragua.

Trespassing

After the English destroyed the Pequot nation, their hegemony slowly grew in the area. Warfare and disease left Native-American villages throughout New England vacant. As the number of English colonists grew, they began moving into these ghost towns. That decreased the distances between English settlements and Native American villages. But as the English moved farther and farther inland, they brought their livestock with them.

English farmers routinely let their livestock roam free in the forests surrounding their burgeoning settlements. Often the animals found their way into the fields of Native American farmers and ate their crops. The Native Nations of New England complained to the colonial government, but their complaints fell on deaf ears. Fed up, many began killing any English livestock that wandered into their fields. Tensions rose and led to an inevitable war. Metacomet, known by the English as King Philip, leader of the Wampanoag, reportedly said that “for forty Yeares Time, Reports and jealosys of War had bin very frequent, that we did not thinking that now a War was breaking forth.” However, he wrote, “about a Week before it did, we had Cause to think it would.”

Metacomet, known as King Philip

King Philip’s War

King Philip’s War lasted three years. Metacomet rallied a large Native-American alliance, consisting of several Native Nations of New England to fight. Ultimately, the English prevailed, further cementing their hegemony in the region. Recounting the war in 1685, a colonist by the name of Edward Randolph noted that “upward of 3000 Indian men women and children destroyed, who if well managed would have been very serviceable to the English, which makes all manner of labour dear.” During King Philip’s War, the English enslaved huge numbers of Native American captives, claiming it as their right in a “just war.” They often sold hundreds of Native American captives at large scale auctions. Others got assignments “to individuals as rewards for wartime service, and as a form of monetary restitution to war-battered English towns.”

A scene from King Phillip’s War, illustration from Indians of North America by George M. Bodge

King Philip’s War was a turning point in the history of New England. The colonists captured and killed almost 50 percent of the Native American populations. They lost 5 ,000 of 11,000 Indigenous souls in southern New England. The war also drastically changed the way Native American slavery operated.

Native-American Slavery Begins to Change

Prior to the 18th century, most Native-American slaves were war captives or refugees. The English called it something different; they “sold and devoted unto servitude “By the second half of the 17th century, Native-American slavery began to look much different.

The English felt confident in their dominance of the region and tried to assert sovereignty over all the Native Nations. They felt it right to consider the Native Americans of New England subject to English colonial law. Native Americans did not agree. Nevertheless, the colonists consistently set out to punish Native Americans who broke English law. These offenses ranged from “killing Cattle and Shepe,” stealing a handkerchief and “Eatting of mottin that was stolen.” When English judges found Native Americans guilty of breaking English law, they sentenced them to indentured servitude. Once indentured, they could be bought and sold throughout New England and beyond. And, if they tried to escape and failed, colonial officials would tack years onto their sentences. That effectively tied them to lifelong slavery. Thus, the colonists found ways to keep Native-American slavery alive even when the numbers of POWs declined.

Going to Court

Native Americans did not take this lying down. Since before King Philip’s War, Native Americans tried to use the English court system to retain sovereignty and resist English incursion. In 1700, leaders of the Mashpee petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to free several Mashpee thrown into debtors’ prison.

In the petition, Simon Popmoney, George Wapock and the other leaders claimed the English frequently made them and their children servants for too long. They pleaded “Ignorance of the Law, weaknes, foolishnes, & Inconsideration.”

“[S]ome of us that are Elder, & severall of our Children have run in to the English mens Debts, and not being able, nor perhaps careful to pay att the time appointed; our Self & our poor Children, are frequently made Servants for an unreasonable time.”

In this letter we see a rather brilliant strategy unfolding. By using such subordinate language, the Mashpee leaders attempted to use the English colonists’ own notions of superiority against them. By claiming fault through “Ignorance…weaknes, foolishnes, & Inconsideration” they told the English what they wanted to hear. Nevertheless, they defended their sovereignty by asserting the unfairness of long stretches of servitude. Unfortunately, the results of such cases depended upon the presiding judge, who often had Native American slaves himself.

The Long Life of Native-American Slavery

Perhaps as a response to the widespread abuse of indentured servitude after King Philip’s War, colonies created laws governing the status of Native Americans. In the early 18th century, Massachusetts passed a law rating Native American, as well as African, slaves with “horses and Hogs.” While in the past, the English bought and sold Native American slaves while they had term left on their indenture, but they still viewed them as people — unequal to Europeans, but people nonetheless. Now, English eyes viewed Native Americans as property.

Rhode Island attempted to ban the practice. But, in the end, the ban had little to no effect. It allowed indentures of children for up to 30 years. In colonial New England, that amounted to a life sentence.

Ultimately, the practice of Native-American slavery persisted up to the Revolution, if not beyond. In 1744, a physician from Annapolis visited a southern Connecticut town with an African slave. [T]he children were frightened att my negroe, for here negroe slaves are not so much in use,” he wrote. “Their servants being chiefly bound or indentured Indians.”

Thirty years later, the Rhode Island census of 1774 showed over 35 percent of Native Americans in the colony lived with white families.

The author of this story, Jordan Baker, holds a BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com, where he has also written about the Mourning Wars.. This story was updated in 2022.

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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 Mullin

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 2022.

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Richard Cutts (Unintentionally) Avenges the War of 1812

With friends like Richard Cutts, James Madison didn’t need enemies. Though Cutts was the rare New Englander who supported Mr. Madison’s War, his financial misadventures cost the president dearly.

Mr. Madison’s War, of course, was the War of 1812, deeply unpopular in New England. When Madison wanted to send state militias to invade Canada, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island refused. Some New Englanders even wanted to secede from the union.

But Richard Cutts, a congressman from the District of Maine, not only supported Madison, he married his sister-in-law and lived at the White House.

Richard Cutts paid a price for his friendship with Madison. But Madison paid a steeper price.

Richard Cutts

He was born June 28, 1771, the fifth of eight children of Thomas and Elizabeth Scammon Cutts. His father was a wealthy shipbuilder and merchant from Saco, Maine, which then belonged to Massachusetts. The family lived on Cutts Island.

Cutts Island

Richard Cutts attended Phillips Andover, entered Harvard at 15 and graduated in 1790. He started studying law but gave it up. Then he went into his father’s business, traveling to Europe at least twice as captain of his father’s ships. He came back and twice won election for state representative.

Cutts then won election to Congress as a Jeffersonian Republican from eastern Maine. In April 1804 he married Anna Payne, youngest sister of Dolley Payne Madison, First Lady of the United States. He was 30, she was 22, and their wedding marked a highlight of the social season.

Anna Payne Cutts

Cutts was described as a ‘dark-haired, broad-browed, handsome young man … regarded with favor by many bright eyes in Washington, and quite a squire of dames at home and abroad.’ James and Dolley Madison ‘appear to have been entirely satisfied with the character and position of Mr. Cutts,’ but it was a trial to Dolley to give up her youngest sister, who had lived with her.

The new Mr. and Mrs. Richard Cutts took off for Maine, where Cutts built a house in Saco. When Congress was in session, they lived in the White House with the Madisons. Anna Cutts and another sisters, Lucy Washington, helped Dolley with the entertaining for which she was famous.

War of 1812

Richard Cutts won re-election to Congress four times, but he supported the War of 1812, a war New Englanders viewed as unnecessary. They also felt they bore an unfair burden for the conflict. The British captured Castine in the District of Maine, bombarded towns that refused to bribe them and devastated commerce along the coast. Cutts’ support of the war cost him his seat in 1812.

The war cost him more than that. According to his friend and neighbor John Quincy Adams , the British captured or destroyed most of his ships, reducing him to poverty.

Adams was probably being kind. According to historian Stephen W. Brown, Richard Cutts had invested in dubious shipbuilding enterprises at the outset of the war, and lost heavily.

His brother-in-law, the president, came through for him, though. He appointed Richard Cutts Superintendent General of Military Supplies.

The Cuttses and the Madisons were close. When Dolley Madison famously fled the White House, she took a carriage with Anna and Richard Cutts. And when she returned, she stayed with them.

The Madisons had no children of their own, though Dolley had a grown son by her previous marriage. They loved to have young children in their midst, and cherished the seven Cutts children.

Cutts’ children viewed Montpelier, Madison’s estate, as their second home. But when Richard’s financial embarrassments grew acute, he stayed home when Anna visited her sister.

Living Large

Richard Cutts liked to live large and invest recklessly. He borrowed $5,000 from Madison — about $100,000 today – in 1816.

He asked Dolley Madison’s brother-in-law, John G. Jackson, to co-sign a bank loan of $6,000 in 1817. Madison left office in March of that year, and Cutts’ job as Superintendent General of Military Supplies ended.

President James Monroe then helped Cutts out by naming him Second Comptroller of the Treasury. And Madison loaned him another $11,500 that year. And Dolley Madison loaned him money (how much is not known) belonging to her son, Payne Todd. Cutts promised to double the sum in a North Carolina gold mining venture. He didn’t.

In 1818-19 he built a house near the White House. Now belonging to the Cosmos Club, it was then one of the most pretentious homes in the District. He also bought some house lots in Washington. Cutts’ timing couldn’t have been worse, for the real estate bubble burst in the financial panic of 1819.

The Cosmos Club today

In 1819 he borrowed $4,500 in a loan co-signed by Return Jonathan Meigs, Jr., father of Jackson’s second wife. After Meigs died, Cutts still owed money on the loan, and Meigs’ house was sold to pay it off.

Bad to Worse

In December 1820, President Monroe wrote Madison claiming Cutts was performing poorly in his job at the Treasury. Madison defended him, and Cutts kept his job.

Finally in 1822 Richard Cutts declared bankruptcy. His furniture was sold at auction; Dolley Madison bought most of it and set up a trust for Anna. The bank seized his house, and James Madison bought it back and let the Cutts family live in it. He also bought four of Cutts’ house lots from the bank.

But no good deed goes unpunished, and Cutts’ creditors entangled Madison in two lawsuits.

Jackson bitterly complained in 1823 “Cutts is doing nothing, and never will, to pay his old debts or indemnify his endorsers.” Nor would he use his government salary to pay off old debts, wrote Jackson.

In 1828, Richard Cutts briefly went to debtors’ prison, and the newly elected president Andrew Jackson fired him from his Treasury job. His last day in office was March 21, 1829.

Last Years

Richard and Anna Cutts continued to live in the house owned by James Madison. Anna died in 1832, and Madison died four years later. Dolley Madison moved into the Cutts house in 1837, where she continued to entertain frequently. She lived there for the last 12 years of her life, facing increasing financial difficulty. She eventually sold her husband’s papers for $30,000 to help make ends meet.

Her son Payne–drinker, gambler, spendthrift—bears most of the blame for her financial troubles later in life. But surely Richard Cutts deserves some approbation as well.

He lived quietly in Washington for the rest of his life, which ended on April 7, 1845. Of his last years, John Quincy Adams could only write, ‘he has resided in the city of Washington, in the retirement of private life.’

With thanks to Stephen W. Brown, Voice of the New West: John G. Jackson, His Life and Times;

David O. Stewart, Madison’s Gift: Five Partnerships That Built America; and Founders Online, Madison and Richard Cutts’ Financial Difficulties: Editorial Note.

Images: Cutts Island By © Steven Pavlov / http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Senapa, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45142130; Cosmos Club By Tim1965 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8538536. This story was updated in 2023.

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How the Londonderry Scots-Irish Saved New Hampshire from Massachusetts

The Londonderry Scots-Irish saved New Hampshire from a Massachusetts takeover by multiplying along the border and fighting the town across from it.

Massachusetts had taken over Maine in the 1650s, and by 1731 Royal Gov. Jonathan Belcher cast a greedy eye on New Hampshire as well.

But he worried that the aggressive Irish – they weren’t called ‘Scots-Irish’ until the 1830s – in Londonderry would thwart his takeover attempt.

As he hatched his plan, Belcher complained to an ally in New Hampshire, “I am afraid the Irish party wou’d oppose it.”

He was correct.

Jonathan Belcher

Gov. Jonathan Belcher

Jonathan Belcher was born in 1682 into a wealthy Massachusetts family. His father, Andrew, built a trading empire, partly on the backs of slaves and with the help of pirates, according to some. His ambitious son Jonathan didn’t let scruples get in his way either. He owned slaves, bribed government officials and set up an illegal smelting operation in Simsbury (now East Granby), Conn.

Jonathan Belcher won an appointment as royal governor of New Hampshire and Massachusetts in 1730 by spreading his largesse among government ministers. As governor, he gave plum political jobs to his friends and took them away from his enemies. He also let his political friends harvest pine trees reserved for the king’s masts, which would prove his eventual undoing.

But Belcher couldn’t stop the fighting between the Londonderry Scots-Irish and the people of Haverhill, Mass., over their border.

Erasing the border would end the fighting, Belcher thought. He had other reasons for wanting to annex New Hampshire, as well. He needed to satisfy farmers in eastern Massachusetts who wanted more land for their children, and he wanted access to those tall white pine trees in central and northern New Hampshire.

Eastern White Pine

And he wanted to shut up his political enemies, who enjoyed his inability to stop the fighting over the border.

The Londonderry Scots-Irish

New Hampshire had actually belonged to Massachusetts until 1679, when London officials divided it into a separate province. But throughout the 17^th century, New Hampshire remained thinly settled with only four real towns: Portsmouth, Dover, Exeter and Hampton.

Then the Scots-Irish arrived.

They were Presbyterian Scottish farmers who had settled in Ulster in the 1600s. They first arrived in Boston in four ships in 1717, but their fellow Protestants did not extend a warm welcome. The Scots-Irish timing, unfortunately, was off. They arrived during a food shortage, a smallpox epidemic, inflation and scarce housing.

The Massachusetts Puritans made it clear the Scots-Irish needed to move on.

And so a group led by James MacGregor settled a village in 1719 they called Nutfield, now Londonderry and Derry, N.H. There they planted the first potato in North America, established farms and fought with their neighbors to the south in Haverhill, Mass.

Border Wars

For a long time no one had paid much attention to the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts because no one lived there.

But then the growing population of Massachusetts began to clash with the growing population of Londonderry Scots-Irish. The Londonderry Scots-Irish claimed a part of what Haverhill, Mass., viewed as its own.

People in Haverhill started calling the Londonderry Scots-Irish ‘papists.’ They cut hay in the Scots-Irish fields, threatened them with violence and arrested them for trespassing and nonpayment of taxes. But the Londonderry Scots-Irish gave as good as they got.

Massachusetts, for its part, claimed Londonderry, arguing the colony’s northern boundary followed the Merrimack River all the way to Lake Winnipesaukee. To stake its claim, the Massachusetts General Court granted a township in what is now Concord, called Pennycook, and encouraged settlement there. Then it granted more townships from Concord on south.

Nonsense, argued the New Hampshire faction. The northern border of Massachusetts lay three miles north of the mouth of the Merrimack River, then extended westward all the way to the New York line.

The final decision on the border lay in England. Both New Hampshire and Massachusetts sent agents to London to argue their case. But in order to prevail, they had to demonstrate they could settle the territory and establish local governments that had actual authority. Both sides found that task difficult.

John Wentworth

Further aggravating Jonathan Belcher was the lieutenant governor for New Hampshire, John Wentworth. Wentworth also had designs on land in New Hampshire.

Wentworth found an ally in David Dunbar, an Irish thorn in Jonathan Belcher’s side. Belcher, in fact, called him a ‘bullfrog from the Hibernian fens.’

The king had appointed David Dunbar Surveyor General of the King’s Woods. It was a big job, and Dunbar took it seriously. He aggressively enforced the timber laws, reserving the biggest white pines for the king’s masts.

John Wentworth came up with a plan: He invited David Dunbar to visit Londonderry. He told him that New Hampshire, unlike Massachusetts, made sure the king got the biggest pine trees. Wentworth’s plan worked, as Dunbar took up the cause of the Londonderry Scots-Irish.

Then in 1630, John Wentworth died. The king named David Dunbar Belcher’s lieutenant governor in charge of New Hampshire. Belcher was furious.

He decided one way to get rid of David Dunbar was to annex New Hampshire. He had an ally in Richard Waldron, New Hampshire’s secretary of state. Waldron circulated a petition requesting that New Hampshire join Massachusetts. It backfired. Only 500 people signed it, and of those only 10 could actually vote. The rest were boys, servants and indigent people. Belcher’s plan was dead.

Dunbar then managed to use Belcher’s tolerance of illegal logging against him. He and Belcher’s other enemies got the king to fire him as governor of New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

And from then on, the Londonderry Scots-Irish staked out New Hampshire’s southern border as their overflow populated the borderline.

This story was updated in 2022.

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