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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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The British Plot to Poison Boston in 1776

In the days leading up to March 17, 1776, Massachusetts was on edge. British troops, under siege for nearly a year, prepared to leave Boston. The people had many worries. Would the British commander, Gen. William Howe burn the city? Would he plunder it? Or would he change his mind and stay? But few if any suspected a British plot to poison Boston.

Lord Howe evacuating Boston (March 1776) Engraving by J. Godfrey

The British army, hemmed in by rebel cannons, had decided to yield its position and flee to Halifax. Howe and American general George Washington had reached a tacit agreement. So long as the British could leave unmolested, they would not destroy Boston.

The Plot To Poison Boston

But Howe began losing control of his troops. The general had tried to create an orderly process for seizing citizens’ goods the military could use. The soldiers had to issue receipts and certificates for future payment. However, others saw this as a sign that he condoned looting.

Soldiers began plundering stores and homes for anything of value they could find. Frustrated, Howe issued a proclamation:

“The commander-in-chief finding, notwithstanding former orders that have been given to forbid plundering, houses have been forced open and robbed, he is therefore under a necessity of declaring to the troops that the first soldier who is caught plundering will be hanged on the spot.”

Washington, meanwhile, waited impatiently for the British to depart. Concerned that Howe might be stalling while reinforcements arrived, Washington ordered his troops to continue building fortifications. On March 17, however, the British finally made good on their plans. An armada of ships, loaded with more than 9,000 soldiers and more than 1,000 loyalists, made their way to sea.

Dr. John Warren, whose brother Joseph had perished at Bunker Hill, made an assessment of the town after the British fled.

“The houses I found to be considerably abused inside, where they had been inhabited by the common soldiery, but the external parts of the houses made a tolerable appearance. The streets were clean, and, upon the whole, the town looks much better that I expected. Several hundred houses were pulled down, but these were very old ones.”

The Damage Done

The story in Charlestown, which the British had burned, was different. Almost nothing still stood, Warren reported, save for an occasional wall or chimney.

Other parts of Boston also bore the marks of the British occupation while under siege.

The British had turned the Old South Church into a riding school for officers. They had dragged Deacon Hubbard’s ornate pew outside and converted it to a hog sty. The parsonage was pulled down and burned for fuel, as was the Old North Chapel, dating to 1677, the steeple of the West Church and Boston’s celebrated Liberty Tree.

William Howe

The Common was disfigured and fortified, and Faneuil Hall fitted out as a theater, Warren noted. What cannon the British could not remove with them had been spiked (for the most part) and shells split and shot dumped into the harbor. The Americans would repair and recover much of what had been abandoned.

In total, damage amounted to £323,074. Washington informed John Hancock that the British officers who occupied his opulent home hadn’t harmed it. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John, describing their house as “very dirty, but no other damage has been done to it.”

Shocking Discovery

But what Warren and fellow physician Dr. Samuel Scott found in the British medical supplies shocked them the most. In a workhouse used as a hospital, Warren discovered a cache of medicines. They could be highly useful in treating soldiers or citizens. However, Scott found that, upon leaving, the British had mixed arsenic into the medicines. He provided an affidavit to the Legislature.

“I, John Warren, of Cambridge, physician, testify and say, that on or about the twenty-ninth day of March last past, I went into the workhouse of the town of Boston, lately improved as a hospital by the British troops, stationed in said town,” he wrote.

In one room they supposedly used to store medicine, “I found a great variety of medicinal articles lying upon the floor,” he wrote. They’d packaged some and scattered the rest on the floor, he wrote.

Dr. John Warren by Rembrandt Peale, Harvard University Portrait Collection

“Amongst these medicines, I observed small quantities of what, I supposed, was white and yellow arsenic intermixed; and then received information from Dr. Daniel Scott that he had taken up a large quantity of said arsenic from over and amongst the medicine,” wrote Warren. He then described how Scott had collected it chiefly in large lumps and secured it in a vessel.

A Shocker

Warren then asked Scott to let him see the arsenic. He did, and Warren judged the lumps of arsenic to weight 12 to 14 pounds. Surprised, he looked at the medicine carefully. He judged them as popular and useful — without the poison.

“I advised Dr. Scott to let them remain, and by no means meddle with them, as I thought the utmost hazard would attend the using of them,” he wrote. The medicine stayed there.

This shocking news reached Massachusetts via the newspapers, and as the horror of the British plot to poison the returning colonists sank in, so did its significance as a propaganda weapon.

The affidavit was quoted and distributed throughout the colonies. It served as a useful message to reinforce public antipathy toward the British.

Thanks to History of the Siege of Boston by Richard Frothingham and The Siege of Boston by Allen French. This story was updated in 2022.

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Isaiah Thomas Reads the Declaration of Independence

Isaiah Thomas, America’s first great publisher, spent several years during the American Revolution just scraping to get by.

Isaiah Thomas

Thomas’s years of struggle were brightened by one glorious moment, when he read the Declaration of Independence on the steps of South Church in Worcester, Mass.

Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1749 (N.S. Jan. 30, 1750). He was apprenticed at age six to Zachariah Fowle. In 1770 he started the wildly radical Massachusetts Spy, a weekly newspaper described as “rabid, yellow and very successful.” His high-minded motto of “Open to all parties, but influenced by none,” described an impartiality he couldn’t sustain. Soon the Spy supported the cause of American liberty and it quickly got under Loyalist skin.

Front page of the Spy, July 7, 1774

He was hanged in effigy in North Carolina, wrote Marcus McCorison.

The British troops in Boston paraded before the Spy office and threatened Thomas with a tarring. By 1773 he was fully involved in the radical cause. In his autobiographical notes he stated that he secretly printed handbills at night for the Sons of Liberty. Thomas established a schedule of post riders to the south for the delivery of the Spy and other papers…

Thomas Hutchinson in 1750.

Massachusetts Gov. Thomas Hutchinson ordered the attorney general to prosecute Thomas. But the grand jury found no cause for indictment.

Flight

By April 1775, armed conflict seemed inevitable. Thomas learned British commander Gen. Thomas Gage planned to seize his press and arrest him for treason. On April 16, 1775, three days before war broke out, Isaiah Thomas fled Boston. He hurriedly packed his press, his fonts of type and his scarce paper and got ready to leave.

The next night, he smuggled his equipment out of Boston with the help of Gen. Joseph Warren and Col. Timothy Bigelow. They ferried him across the Charles River to Charlestown in the dead of night. He then packed his press and his supplies to Worcester. Two days later, he fought as a minuteman — “engages in the fight,” writes his grandson, without specifying. He at least watched the skirmishes and then published the first eyewitness account of them. Post riders rode throughout the colonies with his report to spread the word.

Put Him to the Sword

In September, a circular letter went to British officers telling them to execute Thomas and other patriots, including Sam Adams and John Hancock. Under the list of names, the instructions read “to put the above persons to the sword, destroy their houses and plunder their effects.”

But for Thomas, the American Revolution proved less drama and more a grind. He had little money. His two apprentices slept on printers’ rags in a garret. All three frequently dined on bread and milk in the printer’s office.

In the spring of 1776, Thomas leased his press and newspaper to two other printers. He went to Salem, Mass., to try to make a living. But Loyalists attached his press and type and he had to sell them to pay his debts. He moved his family to Londonderry, N.H.

“They must have been dark years,” wrote his grandson and biographer Benjamin Franklin Thomas. “Somehow he got through them and supported his family.”

The Declaration of Independence

Declaration of Independence

During those years, Isaiah Thomas had one bright day. On July 24, 1776, he read the Declaration of Independence, the first in Massachusetts to do so.

The stage from Philadelphia stopped in Worcester on its way to Boston with the news. Thomas stood on the steps of the South Church and read the declaration to the entire population of Worcester and adjoining towns.

“The declaration was received with every demonstration of joy and confidence,” wrote his grandson.

The King’s arms on the courthouse were burned to ashes. The sign was taken off the King’s Arms tavern, and the townsfolk celebrated inside with 21 patriotic toasts. They gave full vent to their patriotic feelings and were surprised to find the next morning that a dozen of them had joined the Continental Army – including Isaiah Thomas’s apprentice. Thomas got him excused on the grounds he was less than 16 years old.

In the spring of 1778, Isaiah Thomas resumed printing the Spy. He would remain in Worcester, printing until the end of his life. He would also found the American Antiquarian Society and achieve his life’s major goal: publish a history of the printing industry.

Isaiah Thomas died on April 4, 1831.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Spy Revere, P. (1774) Masthead and part of front page of The Massachusetts spy, or, Thomas’s Boston journal showing a female figure of Liberty in upper left and rattlesnake labeled “Join or Die” symbolizing the 13 colonies, challenging a griffin, across the top. United States, 1774. July 7. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2002712180/.

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