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Newcastle Maine

Unequal Justice: Murders at Sea on the Albion Cooper and the Theresa

Life on a ship in the 1850s was neither democratic nor easy. The captain made the rules and issued fierce punishments. In the same 12-month span, fantastic murders occurred on two Maine ships – the Albion Cooper and the Theresa. But they had very different outcomes.

The Albion Cooper Mutiny

The Albion Cooper case involved the seven-man crew of the brig Albion Cooper. The vessel’s home port was in Maine, but the trouble on the ship occurred in Cuba. There, two members of the crew – Abraham Cox and Peter Williams – mutinied.

Williams had been held in irons for fighting with the first mate, and he persuaded Cox, the ship’s cook, to join him in his revenge scheme. The captain and four crewmen were hacked to death with an ax and tossed overboard. A fifth member of the crew, Thomas Fahey, had agreed to join the mutineers rather than face the same fate as the rest of the crew.

It soon became clear that the ship was too much for the three men to handle. So they plundered it, set it afire and hopped in a life boat in September of 1857. They spent harrowing nights at sea, during which visions of the murdered men plagued Williams. Finally, the men were rescued. Fahey quickly explained what had happened, and Cox and Williams soon confessed.

Cox, the cook, had been driven to mutiny by the torments of the crew. A judge sentenced him to die on the gallows in Auburn, Maine. A crowd of thousands came to witness his execution. In front of them, Cox declared: “If this jail and that courthouse were a lump of gold, and were mine, I would give it, could it deliver me from having done what I did.”

Williams, executed on the same scaffold moments later, shouted that a visiting angel had forgiven him for his murders. “I have killed them. I killed all four of them myself,” he said.He was then hanged until he was dead.

Murder on the Theresa

The story of the Theresa, of Richmond, Maine, was almost the exact opposite, but gruesome nonetheless. Capt. John Holmes of Newcastle, Maine, ran a tight ship. He had served as master on more than one vessel. The voyage of the Theresa took him to Brazil. On the return trip, a sailor – George Chadwick – defied Holmes’ order to stand watch.

The “Ontario” of Newcastle, Maine, John Holmes, Commander, leaving Antwerp, 1846. Artist: Petrus Cornelis Weyts

Holmes was not a man to be defied, especially when he was drunk – which he frequently was. He had Chadwick stripped and tied in the main rigging. “The law says I shall not flog this man, but I say I will,” Holmes said. “He has refused duty at the wheel.”

Holmes beat Chadwick with a cord and then a belaying pin – a club-like device designed to secure the rigging on a ship. Chadwick begged the captain not to kill him, and Holmes replied he would “kill him on the spot if didn’t stop his damned noise.” When Chadwick was lowered from the rigging he was dead.

When the ship pulled in to New York, Holmes was arrested. There was little doubt about what happened, and he was shipped to Wiscasset, Maine. But he wasn’t sent to rot in a jail, as Cox and Williams had been. He was taken to the insane asylum at Augusta and began planning a defense.

George Evans

Holmes had for his lawyer George Evans, a former U.S. senator and an able defense lawyer. Given the totality of the evidence against his client, Evans chose his only option. He would claim that Holmes was not merely drunk when he killed Chadwick, he was insane.

George Evans

The prosecution relentlessly painted Holmes as a sadistic drunk. “That criminal sitting there,” the prosecutor said at trial, “from the time that the ship left Pernambuco until she arrived at New York, made that ship’s deck a hell.”

The court did not buy the insanity defense and sentenced Holmes to hang.

The newspaper Bath Times published an editorial: The affair furnishes a terrible lesson to shipowners, calling upon them to be more careful in the selection of masters to hold in their hands to so great an extent the lives and well-being of the crew under their charge.”

Only the president of the United States could halt the execution, and the newspaper noted that seemed unlikely, given recent events.

But Captain Holmes had hired the right lawyer. Evans’ first act was to try to gather some show of public support for Holmes. He turned to a Portland barber, John Todd, for assistance. Todd had given haircuts to Holmes in preparation for his trial and grew to like him. Todd also opposed the death penalty. So he undertook the task of getting signatures on a petition for mercy. He described the story in his memoir, A sketch of the life of John M. Todd : sixty-two years in a barber shop, and reminiscences of his customers.

John Todd

Todd received much abuse from people he asked to sign the petition, he wrote.

My friends would say “get out of here,” when I asked them to sign it. “Don’t you ask me to sign that, I will sign one to hang him.

But he got the signatures. Armed with the petition, Evans traveled to Washington to visit his old friend from the Senate, President James Buchanan. Evans told Todd that Buchanan would do anything for him so long as it was consistent with his sworn duty.

James Buchanan

Evens thought his best hope was if Buchanan didn’t know the details of the murder. If so, he could provide a sanitized story about the evidence and pass the matter off as a simple favor. Unfortunately for Evans, Buchanan knew all about it. Evans returned from Washington and told Todd he stooped lower than he ever though possible. “Nothing but the saving of the life of a fellow-being would have prompted him to have done so,” Evans told Todd.

Visit with the President

When I stepped into the room of the president he told me to sit down. He arose, took me by the hand most cordially, and said, ‘I am glad to see you, Mr. Evans, still I am sorry to meet you, for I have read that trial with great interest, partly because you were his counsel, partly because of its atrocity.’

I never was more embarrassed in my life. My right bower of defense was gone, for I had felt sure that he had overlooked the trial because of the great burdens of state he was laboring under. He was not ignorant of the facts in the case.

I said, ‘Mr. President, I know Captain Holmes was insane at that time.’

‘Yes, I am aware of that, an insanity induced by liquor.’

He looked me in the face and said, with great emphasis, ‘ George, I will sign that petition if you can accept it on one condition, that is knowing I break my official oath.’

I stood looking him squarely in the face, and said, ‘Mr. President, I shall accept it under any condition, for I feel that he was irresponsible at the time.’

Mr. Evans told me the president turned red as fire, took the paper, signed it, and passed it to him without a word. ‘I took the paper,’ he said, ‘and left the room, and I suppose we parted never to meet again upon earth.’

Holmes did go free, Todd recalled, and corresponded often with his old barber friend from his new home in Cardiff, Wales. He established a chandlery, a much better fate than that reserved for the mutineers of the Albion Cooper.

This story last updated in 2022.

Thanks to:

Mystery on the Isles of Shoals: Closing the Case on the Smuttynose Ax Murders of 1873 by J. Dennis Robinson

Legal Executions in New England: A Comprehensive Reference, 1623-1960 By Daniel Allen Hearn

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Six Revere Bells

Paul Revere

What better way to ring in the New Year than with Revere bells – especially since Paul Revere was born on Jan. 1, 1735 (New Style).

A Revere bell in Bath, Maine, will ring in the New Year as it has since 2002. So will the Revere bell that was moved from a defunct church to the Old South Meeting House in Boston in 2012.

Revere was one of the few competent bell makers in the United States. He got into the business in 1792 when the bell at his church, the New Brick Church, cracked. Revere offered to recast it, though he knew nothing about molding and casting bells.

The first of the Revere bells, a 912 pounder, was not terribly successful. The Rev. William Bentley wrote “the sound is not clear and prolonged, from the lips to the crown shrill.”

But Revere and his sons Paul, Jr., and Joseph Warren went ahead, casting 398 bells between 1792 and 1828, first at their North End foundry and after 1804 in Canton, Mass. The bells often bore the inscription “THE LIVING TO THE CHURCH I CALL AND TO THE GRAVE I SUMMON ALL.”

For the 1976 Bicentennial celebration, Evelyn Stickney and her husband Edward tried to track down every known Revere bell. They compiled a list of 134 bells, including 84 taken directly from the Revere and Sons stock books. Most of the bells are in New England, though there are Revere bells in Alabama, Georgia and Washington, D.C. The only Revere bell outside of the United States is in Singapore.

The Stickneys described the importance of bells in early New England: “The gabriel bell woke the people of the parish,” they wrote. “[T]he sermon bell announced it was time for the church services; the pardon bell rang before and after the sermon during prayers for the pardoning of sins; the pudding bell, which undoubtedly was the most popular, told the cook to prepare dinner while the church-goers headed for home; the passing bell tolled three times at a man’s death with a ring for each year of his age.”

St. Patrick Catholic Church

St. Patrick Catholic Church in Newcastle, Maine, is the oldest Catholic church in continuous use in New England and the only one to own a Revere bell. It was founded by Irish immigrants and a French priest.

James Kavanaugh and Mattew Cottrill came to Boston from Ireland in 1781. They were building a church in Boston when Father Francis Matignon arrived from France, sent by the Pope. Kavanaugh and Cottrill were each married to their wives by Father Matignon in the early 1790s. The wives then moved with their husbands to Newcastle, a thriving shipbuilding area.

In 1798, an assistant to Father Matignon said the first Catholic Mass in Newcastle, probably at Cottrill’s home. In 1808, St. Patrick Church was built at a cost of $3,000, with Cottrill and Kavanaugh each contributing $1,000. In 1818, Cottrill donated the Paul Revere bell to the church. It was one of the last Revere bells cast by Paul Sr., who died May 10, 1818. The original cost was $350, with another $165 to ship. It hung from a wood structure outside the church until a brick bell tower was added in 1866.

First Unitarian Church

Providence started out as a Baptist community, and the first Congregational church wasn’t formed until 1721.

The Congregationalists built their first house of worship in 1723, which stood on the site of the current Providence County Courthouse. A larger church was built on the corner of Benefit and Benevolent streets, but it burned down in 1814. A new building was designed for the same spot by local architect John Holden Greene and finished in 1816. It was inspired by the New South Church in Boston, designed by Charles Bulfinch.

The bell, at 2,488 lbs., is the largest cast by the Revere foundry. Though the church was founded as a Congregationalist church, it became Unitarian in the beginning of the 19th century.

King’s Chapel

King’s Chapel also claims to have the largest of the Revere bells, the last one he cast and the sweetest. (You can listen to it here.) But according to the Stickneys’ list, it is 2,437 lbs. – 51 lbs. lighter than the bell in Providence.

Royal Governor Sir Edmund Andros founded the King’s Chapel congregation in 1686, the first Anglican church in New England. The first church was a wooden structure at the corner of Tremont and School streets, where its successor stands today. It was built in the King’s Chapel Burying Ground because no resident of Boston would sell land for a church that wasn’t Congregationalist. John Winthrop and John Cotton are buried there; so is William Dawes, who rode with Revere on that famous midnight ride.

The current stone building was started in 1749 and built around the old wooden one. When it was finished, the old church was taken out through the windows, then sent to Nova Scotia. There the wood was used to build St. John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg.

The King’s Chapel bell was cast in England and hung in 1772. It cracked in 1814 and was recast by Paul Revere. King’s Chapel has since become a Unitarian church.

Hampstead Community Center

Hampstead, N.H., has one of the oldest surviving meetinghouses in New England. It is now a community center.

The interior has been modernized and a floor was added where the balcony used to be. The exterior is original, however.

The meetinghouse was built in 1745, though the interior wasn’t finished for another 47 years. The Revere bell, cast by Paul Revere, Jr., is in the belfry.

Five Revere Bells

Woodstock, Vt. has five Revere bells, the only community to be so fortunate. In 1818 three men traveled from Woodstock to Boston and bought a Revere bell for the First Congregational Church. It cost $319.95, at 45¢ a pound. It cracked in 1974, and is now displayed at the church.

Still ringing in Woodstock are Revere bells from the Masonic Temple, Saint James Episcopal Church and the North Universalist Chapel. The fifth is displayed on the putting green in front of the Woodstock Inn.

The Phantom UUSB Revere Bell

The Unitarian Universalist Society in Brooklyn, Conn., has one of the few pre-Revolutionary church buildings in Connecticut. Built in 1771, it has since been restored.

The UUSB are the direct successors of the first Unitarian congregation in Connecticut. Its first minister, the Rev. Samuel May, was a peace activist, education reformer, temperance crusader, supporter of women’s rights and a supporter of Prudence Crandall.

Back around 1935, a Works Progress Administration survey reported the UUSB church had a Revere bell. The New England Historical Society, not seeing it on the Stickney list, consulted Dennis Landis, UUSB president and historian. He could not confirm the story.

“I had a chance to view the bell closely about 2001 and saw a different bellfounder’s name and the date 1828,” he wrote. “It remains an open question who made the original bell, which was repaired several times and recast. I don’t think there was any indication of the bellmaker in the church records, only that someone was empowered to acquire one. It would be reasonable for a Revere bell to have been secured, but we just can’t prove it.”

Photos: First Unitarian church of Brooklyn, Conn., by Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Brooklyn, ConnecticutUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29832055; Hampstead Meetinghouse By Nlynch – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21779605; Revere bell in Pawtucket Congregational Church in Lowell, By Emw – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21009269; First Unitarian Church in Providence, By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32710198

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Ida May Fuller Gets the First Social Security Check

Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vt., received the first Social Security check on Jan. 31, 1940.

Ida May Fuller

The check was numbered 00-00-0001, the first of the first batch of 220,000 checks issued to adults as well as children.

Born on a farm outside of Ludlow, Ida May Fuller attended the Black River Academy in Rutland, Vt., three years behind Calvin Coolidge. She worked for a while as a schoolteacher, then in 1905 began work as a legal secretary. She never married.

Between 1937 and her retirement in 1939, she paid a total of $24.75 in Social Security payroll taxes.

While running an errand on Nov. 4, 1939 she dropped by the Rutland Social Security office to inquire. Urged to apply for benefits, she filed her claim.

“It wasn’t that I expected anything, mind you, but I knew I’d been paying for something called Social Security and I wanted to ask the people in Rutland about it,” she said.

That first Social Security check was for $22.54, nearly what she had paid into the system.

Frances Perkins

Some critics thought it suspicious that a Vermonter received the first check because John Winant, former New Hampshire governor, was the first head of the Social Security Board.

But it was another New Englander who made sure Ida May Fuller got her check: Frances Perkins, President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of Labor.

Perkins was born in Boston, grew up in Worcester and summered at her family homestead in Newcastle, Maine. Her ancestors included Revolutionary War orator James Otis.

Perkins persuaded Franklin Roosevelt to ride the wave of Townsend clubs to support a federal retirement program for workers. California physician Francis Townsend started the clubs after he saw three elderly women rooting through a garbage can for food. During the Great Depression, more than half of older Americans were poor.

Thousands of Townsend clubs pressured Congress to pass an old age pension plan. Sensing the opportunity, Roosevelt acquiesced to Perkins’ demand. He assigned her to run the committee that would craft the legislation.

President Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act, with Labor Secretary Frances Perkins behind him.

“The Taxing Power, My Dear”

As soon as the Social Security Act passed, conservatives in Congress began to attack it as unconstitutional. Frances Perkins had made sure it would withstand judicial scrutiny. Months before Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act on Aug. 14, 1935, she had consulted with Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone, a native of Chesterfield, N.H.

Kirstin Downey describes what happened in her biography of Perkins:

At an afternoon part at Stone’s home, Frances was drinking tea with the justice when he asked her how things were going. She told him they were wrestling with how to establish an economic security program. Stone looked around to see if anyone was listening, then leaned in toward Frances. “The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power,” he said in quiet tones.

The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Social Security Act.

Paying for My Expenses

Though Ida May Fuller had paid into Social Security for only three years, she received monthly checks until her death on Jan. 27, 1975 at 100 years old. She received a total of $22,888.92 from Social Security.

During her last eight years, Ida May Fuller lived with her niece in Brattleboro, Vt. Near the end of her life she told a reporter her Social Security benefits “come pretty near paying for my expenses.”

She was described in 1955 as “a kindly, likable, practical and placid woman whose ability to derive deep satisfaction from simple, wholesome living has eased her through life.”

But as a Republican, she hadn’t voted for Franklin Roosevelt.

Ida May Fuller was 76 when the photo at the top of the page was taken in 1950. Congress had just voted an 80 percent raise in benefits, and she held up her check for $41.30. She didn’t think Congress should have raised the benefits.

With thanks to The Woman Behind the New Deal, by Kirstin Downey. This story was updated in 2021.

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