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David Wooster, Revolutionary War Hero, Befriends a Freed Slave

David Wooster is known more as the person who gave New Haven’s Wooster Square neighborhood its name than for his heroism during the American Revolution. He’s even less known as an abolitionist.

Centuries after his death, the revolutionary war general got caught up in the Battle of Wooster Square, a conflict over symbols of ethnic and racial pride.

David Wooster

On June 24, 2020, a crew hired by the city took down the statue of Christopher Columbus in Wooster Square, New Haven’s Little Italy. Italian-Americans protested the removal of the statue that symbolized their heritage. As the statue came down, they clashed with black, Native American and Latino protesters who said Columbus represented the evils of colonial conquest.

Two days later, a group of people met with state Rep. Roland Lemar to ask to rename Wooster Square after William Lamson, a black New Haven entrepreneur in the early 19^th century. That did not sit well with the Italian-American community, which submitted a petition with 3,000 names asking to keep the name “Wooster Square.”

Perhaps a closer look at the life of David Wooster would change some minds (or not).

David Wooster

He was born into a well-to-do family in Stratford, Conn., on March 2, 1711, the youngest of six. His Puritan parents, Abraham and Mary, imposed a severe and sober discipline.

Wooster graduated from Yale College and then earned his master’s degree. In his early 30s he commanded the first warship built in Connecticut, the Defense, to defend the East Coast from pirates and smugglers. During his time on the Defense, “the shores of Connecticut were unpolluted by pirate invasion,” according to the oratory on the dedication of his monument.

David Wooster house, now gone.

In 1745, David Wooster married Mary Clapp, the daughter of Yale President Thomas Clapp. They had four children and bought a gracious house in New Haven. The house survived British arson but not urban renewal. The Woosters entertained frequently, employed black servants and kept a phaeton for rides around town.

Siege of the Fortress at Louisbourg

In 1758 David Wooster led Connecticut forces at the Siege of Louisburg. His gallantry earned him the right to bring a ship of prizes and prisoners to France and England. The English feted him, and he was “gladdened with the sunshine of the royal smile.”

He also served six years in the French and Indian War, rising to the rank of colonel. Afterward, New York granted him 3,000 acres of Vermont, but he lost it to squatters. Nevertheless, he prospered. Both he and his wife inherited money, and he earned quick and substantial profit as a merchant.

Yale President Theodore Dwight called him a “brave, generous-minded man, respectable for his understanding and for his conduct both in public and private life, ardent in his friendships and his patriotism, diffusive in his charities and steadfast in his principles.”

A Letter

In 1773, Wooster received a letter from Phillis Wheatley, the first published African-American poet. She had astonished Bostonians with her work. They couldn’t believe a young black slave could write such poetry. Wheatley proved them wrong, and moved to England. There she became the darling of abolitionist circles and tried to publish her first book. So she asked Wooster for help.

She apparently didn’t know him, but knew of him through a servant of his neighbor, a Mr. Badcock. She must also have assumed he would sympathize with her.

Phillis Wheatley , victim of the slave trade.

Wheatley in her letter asked Wooster if he would help sell her first book of poems. John Wheatley, she wrote, had just given her her freedom, and she knew she’d have to make her own way in the world. She asked Wooster if he would use his influence with the gentlemen and ladies he knew to subscribe to her poetry. (Back then, people subscribed to books before their publication.)

“The more subscribers there are, the more it will be for my advantage as I am to have half the Sale of the Books,” Wheatley wrote. “This I am the more solicitous for, as I am now upon my own footing and whatever I get by this is entirely mine, & it is the Chief I have to depend upon.”

For God, for Country and for Yale

Wooster believed ardently in independence from Britain–and for enslaved people. In the war’s early days, Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen got credit for seizing Fort Ticonderoga, but David Wooster helped plan the attack and lent money for it.

In May 1775, the Connecticut General Assembly appointed the 64-year-old businessman a major general of a militia regiment. Before marching off to war, he assembled his regiment on the New Haven Green and led them in prayer. His pastor, Jonathan Edwards, also an abolitionist, couldn’t make it.

Center Church on the Green today

Wooster then led patriot forces in the ill-fated expedition to Quebec and returned home. He received a new command of the Connecticut militia, and he paid his men and officers with his own money. Still, he hoped his country would repay him. So he asked for receipts. But British soldiers burned his house after his death with the receipts inside. His wife ended up in debtors’ prison.

Battle of Ridgefield

Charged with the defense of Connecticut, he got word that on April 25, 1777, British Gov. William Tryon had invaded Connecticut at Westport with 2,000 troops. Tryon’s forces marched 20 miles north toward Danbury to destroy military supplies.

Along what is now Rte. 28, the British ravaged the land. They then burned Danbury.

Troop movements during Tryon’s raid.

Wooster and Benedict Arnold, who happened to be staying in New Haven, responded to the British with 700 militiamen and Continental Army soldiers. The British retreated toward Ridgefield, burning houses along the way.

On April 27, Benedict Arnold barricaded the center of Ridgefield. He received reinforcements, but the British drove them off in a running battle down Main Street. Wooster tried to rally his undisciplined militia with the words, “Come on, my boys, never mind such random shots.” A ball then hit him in the back, severing his spine. A small Masonic stone memorial marks the place where he fell from his horse at the intersection of the Post Road (Route 1) and Patriots Bank.

His men carried him from the field to a nearby house. The surgeon told him he had no hope. Wooster suffered agonizing pain for the next five days. His wife Mary came to his deathbed, but he didn’t recognize her until the end. He died on May 2, 1777.

Condolences

After Wooster’s death, poet Phillis Wheatley wrote a letter of condolence to his widow – one lost to history until rediscovered around 1980. In it, she thanked Mary for selling her poems to their friends. She also praised David Wooster while pointing out the hypocrisy of those who supported independence from Great Britain but not for the enslaved.

“I sincerely sympathize with you in the great loss you and your family sustain,’ Wheatley wrote.

“You will do me a great favor by returning to me by the first oppy those books that remain unsold and remitting the money for those that are sold–I can easily dispose of them here for 12/ Lmo. (12 shillings lawful money) each–I am greatly obliged to you for the care you show me, and your condescention in taking so much pains for my interest–I am extremely sorry not to have been honour’d with a personal acquaintance with you.”

Wheatley also enclosed a poem, one not terribly admired by critics, that lauds Wooster as a martyr for freedom:

He nobly perish’d in his Country’s cause
His Country’s Cause that ever fir’d his mind
Where martial flames, and Christian virtues join’d.

Wooster Square

Long after their deaths, developers built a desirable residential neighborhood around a square named after Wooster. Sea captains and prosperous businessmen bought homes in Wooster Square. Then, following a typical urban trajectory, the neighborhood declined as industry moved in. Then in the late 19th century, Italian immigrants crowded into the old buildings and ran shops and restaurants.

Houses in the Wooster Square Historic District.

In the 1930s, one entrepreneur, Frank Pepe, established F rank Pepe Pizzeria N apoletena on the first floor of Wooster Street.

The city slated Wooster Square for urban renewal in the 1930s, but plans changed by the late 1950s. Postwar prosperity allowed preservation and gentrification to make the neighborhood, once again, a desirable place to live.

By 2004, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., called Pepe’s New Haven pizzeria a “thriving community treasure.”

Frank Pepe’s exterior.

And then in 2020, another battle – over a statue and a name.

With thanks to Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation Vol 1, edited by David Dabydeen, Sukhdev Sandhu.

Images: Center Church on the Green, By Dicklyon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79216980. Frank Pepe’s By Krista – frank pepe exterior, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38640336. This story was updated in 2022.

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Boston Riots Once Every 3 Years — for Centuries

Boston riots during the 18^th century happened so often you could have called the town Riot City.

Between 1700 and 1764, 28 riots broke out in Boston. During the same time, New York had only four, and Philadelphia had just six, according to historian Jack Tager.

Police try to quell a Boston riot after the Red Sox World Series victory in 2007.

The Boston riots encompassed all classes. Gentlemen and college students rioted, as did the poor. Women and children rioted for bread and meat. Bostonians protested against customs regulations, brothels and the impressment of sailors. Several Pope Day riots targeted Catholicism and led to the Stamp Act riot. Other Boston rioters attacked immigrants and union organizers. Sometimes the police rioted, but at least one rioted erupted when the police went on strike.

Michael Hindus studied Boston riots and reached a conclusion in a 1971 essay, A City of Mobocrats and Tyrants: Mob Violence in Boston, 1747-1863.

My study of rioting in Boston over an extended period has convinced me that too many types of people took to the streets for too many different reasons for any single formula to apply.

In other words, everyone seemed to riot in Boston.

The Boston Revolt

Tager counted 103 Boston riots from 1700 to 1976, or one riot every 2.76 years. But one man’s riot is another man’s revolt. In 1689, Bostonians engaged in actions the British government almost certainly viewed as a riot. Boston, however, called it a revolt.

King James II gave Bostonians a convenient target for their ire. He consolidated the northern colonies into the Dominion of New England and sent Sir Edmund Andros to rein them in. Andros cracked down on the forbidden activities of smuggling and trading with the French and Dutch. He also infuriated the Puritan elders by holding an Anglican service in a Puritan meeting house. The papist had to go!

Andros is taken prisoner during the Boston Riot, er, Revolt.

So armed Bostonians and militiamen from nearby towns seized Andros and his people and threw him in jail. The Protestant William of Orange, meanwhile, seized power in England, and Boston got away with it. Andros went back to the United Kingdom.

Boston Riots Over Food

In the 18^th century war and economic stagnation created chronic food shortages.

Boston riots first kicked into gear during Queen Anne’s War, which lasted from 1702 to 1713. The costs of the war fell heavily on Boston’s poor, who had to fight it in the north and cope with grain shortages at home. War profiteers hoarded grain to raise prices and gouge their customers, or else they shipped it to the Caribbean to feed the slaves on sugar plantations.

In 1707, poor women dumped out chamber pots on the heads of soldiers marching home from war. Then in 1710, Boston men tried to sabotage a grain-filled ship owned by war profiteer Andrew Belcher. The ship lay at anchor, about to depart Boston Harbor for the West Indies. One man rowed out and smashed the rudder; the next day 50 men rowed out and tried to force the captain to come ashore. Authorities had some rabble-rousers arrested, but didn’t charge them with anything because they had so much public support.

Riots and looting broke out the next year when a fire left 100 families homeless.

Then in 1713, Belcher once again shipped Indian corn to the Caribbean. Boston selectmen warned him against it, but Belcher refused.

Two hundred poor men broke in to Belcher’s warehouse, trashed it and wounded the lieutenant governor. Boston selectmen responded by passing a law that said grain could not be exported in times of food shortage. Grain also had to be sold at a set price to one of a group of 15 people. In 1714 the town established a granary where the poor could buy grain at below-market prices.

Another Boston riot over food broke out in 1737, when the price of meat skyrocketed. Rioters, including many volunteer firefighters, tore down butchers’ stalls.

More Food Riots

Merchant hoarding inspired 14 food riots in Boston during the American Revolution, including some led by women. Abigail Adams witnessed one and described it to her husband in a letter. “There has been much rout and Noise in the Town for several weeks,” she wrote.

Abigail Adams, 1766 (Benjamin Blythe)

During the Kosher Meat Riot of 1902, Jewish men, women and children led the battle against local butchers in the city’s poor neighborhoods. They were angry because the price of kosher beef suddenly rose to 18 cents a pound from 12 cents a pound.

The butchers blamed the Beef Trust in Chicago. Hundreds of Jews didn’t buy it or didn’t care. They formed picket lines outside the butcher shops, first in the North End, then a few days later in the West End. They smashed windows, threw rotten food at the shops and destroyed the product. Ten years later, history repeated itself with another meat riot.

Press Gang Riots

Bostonians rioted for three days against British press gangs in 1747. They’d had plenty of practice: they’d rioted twice in 1741 and once in 1746 against the press gangs.

Caricature of a British press gang

The British Royal Navy had a predilection for capturing — or ‘impressing’ — random American seamen and forcing them to work aboard his royal majesty’s warships. King George’s War was on in 1747, and mariners knew life aboard ship in wartime was harsh and dangerous.

So it did not go over well when, on Nov. 16 and 17, British press gangs rounded up 46 shocked sailors and tradesmen along the waterfront. About 300 men retaliated by capturing a British navy lieutenant. The riot escalated when Gov. William Shirley tried to call out the militia, who refused to respond. Shirley characterized the rioters as “seamen and a great number of lewd and profligate persons.” In reality, the respectable upper-class militiamen supported them. Shirley called them “ill-minded.”

The impressment riot helped set the stage for the American Revolution. It taught Boston that authorities couldn’t do much to suppress large-scale uprisings, wrote Hindus.

Draft Riots

Then in 1863, the Boston draft riot earned less notice than the draft riot in New York. The main actors were working-class white men who couldn’t afford the $300 to get out of the draft. They attacked an armory with women and children helping supply paving stones and ammunition. The women, fearing the poverty they’d suffer if the breadwinner went off to war, held up their children and dared militia to shoot them.

A century later, on April 9, 1969 Harvard police rioted. Thirty students protesting the Vietnam War took over University Hall, driving out the office workers ‘under duress.’ One student physically carried a dean out of the building. Hundreds more joined them, until police stormed the building. They handled the students roughly and injured many of them.

In 1970, a protest against the draft and the Vietnam War at Northeastern University erupted into a riot.

Stamp Act Riot

Annual Pope Night brawls between North and South End gangs in Boston had escalated up until then. They began with raucous parades making fun of the Roman Catholic pope, then turned into brawls—or riots, if you prefer–and a celebratory bonfire.

Attack on Gov. Hutchinson’s house

John Hancock and Sam Adams wanted to stir up trouble, and they found a reliable ally in Ebenezer Mackintosh, the leader of the South End gang.

During the Stamp Act Riot of Aug. 26, 1765, a mob ransacked the mansion of Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. Gov. Francis Bernard feared more violence a few months later on Pope Night, so he called out the militia from October 31 to November 6—the day before the Stamp Act took effect and the day after Pope Night. The militia stayed home.

That ushered in a penchant for riots that included the Liberty Affair in 1765, the Boston Massacre in 1770 and the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

Boston Riots Over Race and Slavery

In 1819 came a new wave of Boston riots, sparked by immigration, class-conflict and slavery.

Sixty African-Americans carrying clubs, knives and hatchets in 1819 confronted a group of white people who had captured a runaway slave. The whites fought off the rescuers and arrested 15, but not before one of them was injured.

During the 1829 Gentleman’s Riot, 1,500 members of Boston’s elite class, along with their clerks, rioted against abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Many had made fortunes in textile manufacturing, which gobbled up cotton harvested by slaves in the south.

When the gentlemen assembled, Mayor Theodore Lyman stood on a chair and asked them to desist. They didn’t, but marched to the Female Anti-Slavery Society to break it up, then went for Garrison. They tied him up and started to drag him through the streets, but two men rescued him. He holed up in the old statehouse. Then a coach provided by authorities took Garrison to jail and charged him with disturbing the peace. In the end, they let him go.

A smaller confrontation developed in 1843. “In Boston on August 27, 1843, sailors beat four blacks. When the victims defended themselves, a larger crowd gathered and assaulted every black person in sight,” wrote Paul A. Gilje in Rioting in America.

More Slavery Riots

During the Boston Slave riot of 1854, abolitionists led by Brahmin Thomas Wentworth Higginson armed themselves with axes. They attacked a courthouse in which fugitive slave Anthony Burns was held. They failed to free him, and the governor placed Boston under martial law.

Anthony Burns

Then in 1903, a speech by Booker T. Washington to the Business League at the African Methodist Episcopal Church turned into a battle between his African-American followers and those of William Monroe Trotter. Trotter thought Washington too much of an Uncle Tom, and his followers hissed and shouted during Washington’s speech. A melee erupted as Washington spoke. His followers provoked a melee in which someone threw red pepper and stink bombs. Twenty-five police showed up and arrested Trotter.

Anti-Irish Riots

Many ethnic riots, but not all, started because the Yankee laboring poor feared losing their livelihoods to the cheap workforce arriving from Ireland. The Yankees developed a predilection for beating up the Irish and trashing their homes.

In 1823, Yankee workmen rioted against Irish immigrants, throwing stones through the windows of their homes.

That was only a prelude to the Brothel Riots of 1825, when Yankee firefighters, teamsters and mechanics tore down two notorious West End brothels, the Beehive and the Tin Pot. Michael Hindus notes that the teamsters, or truckmen, had become the ‘fellows to call when any game was on foot in those days.’ They seemed to like fighting for its own sake, sometimes rioting, sometimes suppressing riots.

The mood that generated the growth of the Know Nothing Party of the mid-1800s showed up early in Massachusetts. This cartoon, "Uncle Sam's Boarding House" from Puck Magazine, highlights the party's anti-immigrant platform.

The mood that generated the growth of the Know Nothing Party of the mid-1800s showed up early in Massachusetts. This cartoon, “Uncle Sam’s Lodging House” from Puck Magazine, highlights the party’s anti-immigrant platform.

During three days of rioting in July 1826, Yankee laborers nearly destroyed the Irish section of Boston. Hindus speculates the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4 may have inspired a torrent of nativist feeling. The clear meaning of the Revolution was getting muddied by immigrants and their strange Catholic symbols and rituals.

In 1834, a group of anti-Irish Know Nothings burned down an Ursuline convent in Charlestown.

In 1837 came the Broad Street riot. That year, a financial panic caused hard times throughout the country and economic uncertainty for Yankee laborers. Irish immigrants fought mostly volunteer Yankee firefighters on Broad Street. Ten thousand spectators egged on the 800 combatants, and the melee didn’t end until Mayor Samuel Eliot called in the state militia.

1917 Anti-Union Riot

On July 1, 1917, union members and socialists organized a peaceful parade of men, women and babies through the streets to a mass meeting on Boston Common. Mother’s League, Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Labor League 20 and the Lithuanians of Boston. Soldiers and sailors attacked the marchers, trampled their banners and burned their pamphlets in the street. After an hour and a half of fighting, the police intervened.

A fight also broke out in Scollay Square, after the police superintendent revoked a peace advocate’s permit to speak.

Ghetto Riots of 1967-68

Boston had a relatively small African-American population until the 1950s, when many migrated north for better jobs and opportunity. But Boston grew increasingly inhospitable to its black population. Urban renewal destroyed neighborhoods and the local government offered little economic or political advancement.

In June 1967, a dozen women calling themselves Mothers for Adequate welfare locked themselves into a welfare office in the Grove Hall section of Roxbury. Police tried to eject them, and a fight broke out. The fight escalated into a large scale riot, as angry young people stoned police cars, smashed windows and set fires. Police arrested 30 rioters, while dozens of on both sides went to hospital with injuries.

That Boston riot mirrored African-American uprisings throughout the United States, riots that continued after an assassin killed Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4.

Immediately after King’s death, James Brown agreed to let his concert at Boston Garden be televised to keep young African-Americans at home. The hardest working man in show biz did keep many young African Americans rooted to their TV sets. But others stoned cars on Blue Hill Avenue, looted liquor stores, burned a furniture store and beat up some white people. The Boston riot, however, was more contained than those in Washington or Chicago or Detroit.

1972 Puerto Rican Riots

New England’s Puerto Rican riots have been largely forgotten. But three days of Boston riots erupted in the South End in July 1972 during a Puerto Rican Day celebration.

The Boston Globe reported the fight grew into a confrontation between bystanders and more than 100 policemen. Mostly young Puerto Ricans set buildings on fire, damaged police cruisers and stoned passing cars. The police were criticized for aggravating the situation.

Luis Palmarin, a South End resident, told the Globe: “The cop arrested me when I tried to stop him from beating a man who was bleeding badly. He threw me in the car, grabbed a soda bottle from the floor, called me a spic and hit me in the face with the bottle.”

Boston City Councilman Albert “Dapper” O’Neil made the situation worse by ordering the police to “club those maggots and leeches out of the park.”

Police Riots

Economic hardship followed the boom years of World War I and unions ramped up their organizing efforts. On May Day, a day to celebrate international labor solidarity, socialists held a meeting in Roxbury at the Dudley Street Opera House.

Boston’s Roman Catholic churches had railed against socialists to their Irish parishioners. The Opera House meeting erupted into a brawl between the socialists on one side and police and weapon-wielding onlookers, including soldiers and sailors, on the other. When the hourlong brawl ended, police arrested 113 people and put them in crowded cells, their walls splashed with blood. Two police officers and a civilian were shot and dozens injured. In the end, two died.

Coolidge called up the militia to quell violence during the Boston police strike

Four months later, the police themselves went on strike for better wages and shorter hours. Young men ran wild, smashing shop windows and looting the merchandise, throwing rocks at streetcars and overturning street vendors’ carts. Gov. Calvin Coolidge called out the militia, who, along with Harvard students and upper-class volunteers, tried to quell the violence. The militia restored peace at the cost of eight lives, and Coolidge replaced the striking police with strikebreakers.

Anti-Busing Riots of 1974-76

Nearly everyone knows about the Boston riots against school desegregation from 1974 to 1976. The ferocity of opposition to busing set Boston apart as the Little Rock of the North.

In 1974, U.S. District Court Judge Arthur Garrity, Jr., came up with a plan to bus schoolchildren between black and white neighborhoods in order to comply with the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965. In response, Boston School Committee Chair Louise Day Hicks formed Restore Our Alienated Rights, and the group led demonstrations, prayer vigils, marches and sit-ins.

Sporadic violence broke out on both sides. A white youth tried to beat a black lawyer with an American flag, and a black teenager stabbed a white teenager in South Boston High school. The school closed down for a month, and Garrity fired the principal and took control himself. Five hundred police officers guarded South Boston High every day in 1975.

With thanks to Jack Tager, Boston Riots: Three Centuries of Social Violence. This story was updated in 2022.

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A Brahmin Suffragist Suffers a Night of Terror in Prison

On the night of Nov. 14, 1917, 63-year-old Mrs. John Winters Brannan wrapped herself in her heavy sealskin coat to protect herself from the thugs about to hurl her into a cold, filthy prison cell. A scene of violent confusion had suddenly surrounded her and the 32 other suffragists in the Occoquan Work House. The next 12 hours would ever after be known as the night of terror.

Police had arrested the suffragists picketing in front of the White House, taken them in vans to Union Station and put them on the train to Lorton, Va., 20 miles away. There, more vans picked them up and took them to Occoquan, where they waited in the matron’s office.

Silent Sentinels picket the White House. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The women began to notice shabbily dressed men milling outside. Then the workhouse superintendent, William Whittaker, burst into the room. “Seize these women, take them off, that one, that one, — take her off.” The men began manhandling the women, shaking one suffragist violently, throwing another to the floor.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan, though stunned, said to the superintendent, “I will give my name under protest.” Then she started to walk toward the desk.

“Oh, no, you won’t,” shouted the superintendent. “Don’t talk about protest; I won’t have any of that nonsense.”

It was exactly that intransigence – there’d been a century of it — that drove Eunice Dana Brannan to suffer through a night of terror for women’s rights.

Eunice Dana Brannan

Eunice Dana was born on Aug. 27, 1854, in Westport, Conn., the youngest of four children of Charles Dana, founder of the New York Sun and confidante of President Abraham Lincoln. Her ancestor, Richard Dana, had arrived in Cambridge, Mass., from England in 1640, founding a Boston Brahmin dynasty.

In the decade before the Civil War, Charles Dana worked as managing editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and made it the leading voice of anti-slavery. He also believed in equal rights for women, an uncompromising position his daughter would adopt.

She married John Winters Brannan, a prominent doctor, in 1882. They had two sons and a daughter who later joined the woman’s rights movement.

Eunice Dana Brannan, 1917. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

A 1917 photo of her reveals a regal society matron in a jeweled dress with an elaborate coiffure. She was ‘an aristocrat of intellect and feeling,’ according to a colleague in the women’s rights movement.

Suffragist

When Eunice Brannan got involved in the women’s rights movement, the idea of standing on a soapbox to harangue strangers horrified her. But she traveled to England in the 1890s to see for herself the tactics used by the Pankhurst sisters, women’s rights activists who called themselves suffra-gettes.

In 1897, she told the Political Equality Club in Geneva, N.Y., that she had changed her mind when she saw the Pankhursts’ orderly outdoor meetings.

But over the next decade English suffragettes made little progress toward the vote. To gain attention for their crusade, the suffragettes began to smash windows, fight with policemen and go to jail.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan did not approve. Around 1908, Munsey’s Magazine reported, ‘Mrs. Brannan is said to have reduced a young English-American suffragist to the freezing point by the icy question, “And I suppose you have been in jail” leveled at her on the moment of introduction.

But decades and decades of work — organizing, marching, petitioning, campaigning — had not brought women full voting rights except in 11 U.S. states.

Mrs. John Winters Brannan would change her mind about going to jail.

Silent Sentinels

President Woodrow Wilson did not publicly support a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote. On March 4, 1917, the day of his inauguration for a second term, the suffragists picketed outside the White House.

Calling themselves the Silent Sentinels, they picketed nearly every day, rain or shine, wearing white, gold and purple sashes. They held banners that said, “Mr. President How Long Must Women Wait For Liberty.” And they made it impossible for Wilson to enter or leave the White House without seeing them. Eunice Brannan was among the pickets.

Wilson put up with them for a while, even inviting them in for coffee. They refused. Then in April 1917 the United States entered World War I. That month, police started arresting the suffragists for obstructing traffic. The courts released them quickly.

Police arrest two of the Silent Sentinels. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The women kept it up, and they started getting prison sentences. Then the prison sentences got longer and longer. In July, Eunice Brannan was among a group of suffragists sentenced to Occoquan Work House. One suffragist had a high-ranking husband who complained to Wilson, who pardoned them all after three days.

In August, the suffragists unfurled a banner that said,

“Kaiser Wilson Have You Forgotten Your Sympathy With the Poor Germans Because They Were Not Self-Governed? 20,000,000 American Women Are Not Self-Governed. Take the Beam Out of Your Own Eye.”

More Arrests

In October, police arrested one of the suffragists’ leaders, Alice Paul, and the court sentenced her to seven months in prison. To protest her sentence, a larger-than-usual contingent of women picketed the White House. Police arrested them. A judge released them.

The suffragists went right back to the picket line. Again, police arrested them. A judge released them again.

The suffragists returned to the White House picket line. The police arrested 33 and, this time, the judge handed down sentences from six days to six months.

The prisoners came from all over the country and from all walks of life: the great-great-granddaughter of Revolutionary Gen. Artemas Ward, a Framingham, Mass., shopkeeper, a Romanian immigrant, the country’s only woman geologist, a 73-year-old Floridian with a bad leg and three munitions workers from Bridgeport, Conn.

Eunice Brannan got 45 days. She told the judge, “The responsibility for an agitation like ours against injustice rests with those who deny justice, not those who demand it.”

The Night of Terror

The night of terror began when they arrived at Occoquan Work House. Eunice Brannan wrote a deposition about it, and another prisoner, Doris Stevens, included it in her book, Jailed for Freedom.

“… I . . . saw the guards seizing the different women of the party with the utmost violence, the furniture being overturned and the room a scene of the utmost disturbance,” wrote Brannan. “I saw Miss [Kathryn] Lincoln lying on the floor, with every appearance of having just been thrown down by the two guards who were standing over her in a menacing attitude.

“… The whole group of women were thrown, dragged or herded out of the office on to the porch, down the steps to the ground, and forced to cross the road … to the Administration Building. During all of this time, . . . Superintendent Whittaker was . . . directing the whole attack. . . .

A cell in Occoquan Work House.

The thugs hurled the women into freezing, filthy stone cells, where they had no privacy. An exposed toilet in the cell could only flush from the corridor, so the women had to ask the same guards who’d abused them to flush the toilet for them.

More Terror

Eunice Brannan looked across the corridor and saw Kathryn Lincoln. Brannan asked whether she was all right after the guards had thrown her to the floor.

Instantly Superintendent Whittaker rushed forward, shouting at her, “Stop that ; not another word from your mouth, or I will handcuff you, gag you and put you in a strait jacket.”

The guards shackled Lucy Burns’ hands to the top of the cell, so she had to stand all night.

Lucy Burns in prison. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

They slammed the frail Dorothy Day down on an iron bench. When they hurled Dora Lewis into the cell, her head struck the iron bed. Alice Cosu saw her pass out and suffered a heart attack.

Mary Nolan, the 73-year-old Floridian, wrote that Alice Cosu was vomiting. “We called and called. We asked them to send our own doctor, because we thought she was dying. . . . They [the guards] paid no attention. A cold wind blew in on us from the outside, and we three lay there shivering and only half conscious until morning.”

Eunice Brannan thought of the offense with which they had been charged — obstructing traffic, — and felt their treatment was out of all proportion to the offense. She also concluded the superintendent, the matron and guards must have had the support of higher authorities.

The Next Day

The day after the night of terror, Mrs. John Winters Brannan put on prison clothes. A guard gave her a cup of skimmed milk and a slice of toast, and then took her to the sewing room. There she was went to work sewing on the underpants of the male prisoners.

Doris Stevens, Mrs. Hopkins and Eunice Brannan in prison garb, probably in July 1917. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Marines from Quantico stood as sentinels outside the workhouse. None of their friends or family had any word about their situation. Matthew O’Brien, their attorney, tried to visit them but couldn’t. The phones to the Women’s Congress headquarters were tapped.

Finally, one of the marine sentinels went to the women’s headquarters and said ‘unknown tortures’ were going on. O’Brien, got a court order and forced his way into the workhouse. Still he couldn’t see his clients.

Some of the women refused to eat, including Lucy Burns and Dora Lewis. On Day 7, they prison officials force fed them. Lewis wrote that five people seized her and held her down. The doctor forced a tube down her throat, “I gasping and suffocating with the agony of it.”

9 Days After the Night of Terror

Finally O’Brien got a writ of habeas corpus to show cause why the women should be detained in a Virginia prison after their arrest in Washington, D.C. The hearing started nine days after the night of terror, on November 23, in a little courthouse in Alexandria.

The suffragists filed into court one by one, shocking some of the spectators. Some were so weak they had to lie on the benches. Eunice Brannan collapsed, and court officers took her to a sofa in an anteroom.

Three of the most brutally abused women didn’t appear in court. The judge asked why. The defense said they were too ill. O’Brien retorted the prison officials didn’t want people to see their injuries. The judge ordered the three to be brought in the next day.

Testimony About the Night of Terror

On the morning of November 24, Eunice Brannan got a chance to talk to her husband, now the chairman of the board of trustees of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He testified during the hearing that day:

“I find Mrs. Brannan in a state of almost complete collapse from the shocking treatment to which she has been subjected in Occoquan Workhouse … Today is the first opportunity I have had to hear my wife’s full story, though I have been in Washington three times this week, attempting to find out the actual conditions of her imprisonment.”

The superintendent had forbidden her to describe her treatment to anyone, he said. Brannan said he noticed the look of terror that came into the faces of all the women prisoners when William Whittaker stepped near them.

“From my wife’s account it was evident that the suffrage prisoners were deliberately terrorized when they entered Occoquan and were treated with great brutality by the men guards, who handled them and knocked them about with the fury of thugs, under the immediate direction of Mr. Whittaker himself, who called out that the men ‘would be glad to get their hands on them and handle them rough.’”

Brannan concluded the suffragists had broken no law, since the Constitution guarantees their right to petition and the Clayton Act makes picketing in the District legal.

Not Guilty

“If they are guilty of an offense it is trivial in comparison with the outrageous insults and brutal treatment to which they have been subjected.”

The judge ruled for the women, saying they could be paroled pending appeal. Eunice Brannan and two others agreed to their release, fearing prison would kill them. The others insisted on serving out their sentences in the Washington District Jail.

Julia Hurlbut, Eunice Brannan, 1918, probably in front of National Woman’s Party headquarters in New York City. Note Brannan’s coat. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Vindication for the Night of Terror

News of the night of terror sparked protests across the country. In March 1918, four months after the night of terror, a judge ruled they’d been illegally arrested, convicted and detained in Occoquan Work House.

In 1918, Eunice Brannan burned one of Wilson’s speeches in Lafayette Square. “We have forgotten the history of our country if we have forgotten how to object, how to resist, how to agitate when it is necessary to readjust matters,” she announced

On August 18, 1920, the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

With thanks to David Dismore, “Today in Herstory: The “Silent Sentinels” Go Back to Court — This Time, to Seek Justice,” feminist.org blog. And to Chas Wells, Biographical Sketch of Eunice Dana (Mrs. John Winters) Brannan, Alexander Street, and Doris Stevens, “Jailed for Freedom.” This story updated in 2022.

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The Rolling Thunder Revue Visits Jack Kerouac’s Gravesite

Bob Dylan returned to some of his most important roots when he came to Massachusetts, particularly Cambridge and Lowell, with his Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.

Once the king of folk music, he reunited with the queen, Joan Baez, during the rollicking, improvisational concert tour.

Rolling Thunder Revue played Cambridge, where Dylan had once haunted coffeehouses, and Lowell, Mass., so Dylan could visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

Critics called the Rolling Thunder Revue some of the best live music Dylan ever performed.

Before the Rolling Thunder Revue: Dylan and Baez sing a duet.

Joan Baez

According to the popular legend, Bob Dylan left Hibbing, Minn., at the age of 19 for New York City. He fell in love with Joan Baez, already a star who helped him rocket to fame. But he took an important detour to Massachusetts, where he fell under the influences that shaped his music.

Joan Baez came to Boston when her father, Albert Baez, moved the family there to teach physics at MIT.

(He’s credited with co-inventing the x-ray microscope.) She enrolled in Boston University but got so bored she dropped out after six weeks.

In the late ‘50s, every college town and city seemed to have a coffeehouse scene, where, as writer David Hajdu wrote, ‘coffeehouses modeled upon European cafés emerged with foreign-film festivals and bookstores that sold imports of Henry Miller novels as outposts of intellectual and sensual dissent.’

The folk revival began in such coffeehouses, as did the protest movements of the 1960s.

Cambridge featured coffeehouses like the Club 47 and Tulla’s Coffee Grinder. Across the river, Boston had the Salamander, The Turk’s Head, the Yana, the Unicorn and the Golden Vanity. They featured such young folk musicians as Tom Rush, Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal.

Baez started out at the Club 47 in 1958 and quickly achieved stardom, the first of the iconic young folk singers. Later she brought the boy she was dating – and singing duets with — to Cambridge. Club 47 was so well known for launching careers that Dylan played there for free.

Bob Dylan in Cambridge

In Cambridge, Bob Dylan met Eric von Schmidt, Richard Farina and his wife, Carolyn Hester. Farina would later marry Joan Baez’s younger sister, Mimi.

Von Schmidt exposed him to many traditional folk songs, all of which Dylan remembered when he returned to New York.

The Boulevard at Revere Beach

One summer day, von Schmidt invited Dylan and the Farinas to Revere Beach, just north of Boston. According to Hajdu, they talked about coming up with a new kind of music.

“We should start a whole new genre,” Farina said. “Poetry set to music, but not chamber music or beatnik jazz, man. Music with a beat. Poetry you can dance to. Boogie poetry!”

Dylan, stunned by the comment, did exactly that six months later. He played harmonica on Carolyn Hester’s third album, which gave him an entrée to Columbia Records and to his manager, Albert Grossman.

Eventually he broke up with Baez and married another woman. He famously became known as the ‘voice of his generation,’ something he didn’t want. At the height of his fame in 1966 he had a motorcycle accident and didn’t perform for another seven years.

Dylan and Ginsberg during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. By Elsa Dorfman.

Rolling Thunder Revue

In 1975, Bob Dylan haphazardly recruited musicians like Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Mick Ronson to play the Rolling Thunder Revue. Playwright Sam Shepard joined the tour, as did Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and actress Ronee Blakley.

They held the first concert at the Plymouth War Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 30-31, then played at Southeastern Massachusetts University in North Dartmouth. Then the Rolling Thunder Revue went on to Lowell, where Dylan wanted to visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

Twenty years earlier, Kerouac had written a long poem called Mexico City Blues. According to Ginsberg, Dylan told him someone handed him Kerouac’s poem in St. Paul in 1959. “It blew my mind,” he said.

He said it was the first poetry he read that spoke his own American language, and Beat writing influenced his own.

On November 2, 1975, the Rolling Thunder Revue crammed 14,000 into a gym at the University of Lowell, recently formed from the Lowell Technological Institute and Lowell State College.

Dylan ambled onstage and sang about five songs, dedicating A Hard Rain.to Kerouac. Larry Sloman, who documented the tour, wrote that after the intermission,

…the curtain rose to an incredible sight, Bob and Joan, together again after all these years.

They sang Blowin’ in the Wind to a thunderous response. Then more songs, and a finale with everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Dylan’s mother onstage singing This Land Is Your Land.

Ginsberg, who frequently visited Lowell, hung out with Kerouac’s relatives and drinking buddies. He tried to educate the Rolling Thunder Revue about Jack Kerouac.

The next day, Dylan, Ginsberg and various band members visited Kerouac’s gravesite.

Watch it here.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Dylan and Ginsberg By Elsa Dorfman – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1724930.

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New Hampshire’s Jonathan Daniels Martyred in Alabama in 1965

Jonathan Daniels smoked cigarettes. He liked to drive fast. He liked a good argument. And when he saw something wrong, he tried to stop it.

Jonathan Daniels with children of the West family. (Source: Episcopal Church archives)

In 1965, Daniels had graduated from the Virginia Military Institute as class valedictorian. A native of Keene, N.H., he’d returned to New England to study at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass. He intended to join the priesthood.

The Fight for Civil Rights

On Sunday, March 7 of that year, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a march of civil rights activists from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery,. the state capital, 54 miles away. They marched to protest Jim Crow laws that prevented African Americans from voting. Alabama police beat demonstrators as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Two days after the day known as “Bloody Sunday”

Two days after “Bloody Sunday,” protesters tried to cross the bridge again. Jonathan Daniels took a bus from New England to join them. A court had ordered them not to cross the bridge, and King had secretly agreed to turn around at the Pettus bridge.

Police turning around protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on “Turnaround Tuesday.”

When the buses that brought him to the town rolled back north, Daniels and a small group of other protesters stayed behind. They felt a need for a greater commitment to eliminating racial segregation than just dropping in for a rally. So Daniels wrote to his college and received permission to remain in Alabama. He could take his exams in June and still continue his studies toward the priesthood.

Daniels spent the next few months living with the West family in Alabama and working to register black voters. Congress was striking down many of the voter registration laws that had historically suppressed the black vote.

Jonathan Daniels Goes To Church

On Sundays, Daniels and a group of fellow protesters attended services at the all-white St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Selma. They hoped to integrate the congregation. While they were tolerated at the service, their small group of black and white integration supporters were not welcomed.

Jonathan traveled to New England to take his exams in late spring, and returned to Alabama in July. The trip home would be his last. Friends recalled he had no reservations about returning to Alabama because he felt a strong obligation to bear witness to racial segregation there. He wanted to do his part to change it.

Lowndes County

Lowndes County in Alabama was probably more dangerous than most places to try to change people’s racist attitudes, even by Alabama standards. Viola Liuzzo, an activist from Michigan, was shot and killed in the area while shuttling protesters from the Selma march. Members of the Ku Klux Klan killed her.

Many lynchings had taken place in Lowndes County in the century after the Civil War, and it had a long history of suppressing the black vote.

On August 14, Daniels and his fellow activists traveled to Fort Deposit to picket several stores that wouldn’t sell to black customers. The protesters, 27 in all, were arrested. Most went to jail in nearby Hayneville on charges of disturbing the peace and parading without a permit. Their bail was set at $100 each. The group agreed that they would all stay in jail until they all got bailed out.

The activists were released from jail on August 20. Most of the protesters began walking toward their homes. But six decided to stop at a market, Varner’s Cash Store, for cold soft drinks. They then planned to make their way back home. They had shopped at the store before, so they felt safe going in.

Varner’s Cash Store, 2013

Jonathan Daniels Not Welcome in Hayneville

However, this time when they entered the store, the civil rights activists were confronted by a man with a shotgun. He ordered them to leave and then pointed the gun at them. Jonathan Daniels shoved Ruby Sales, a fellow protester, down and out of the line of fire. But he left himself exposed. A shotgun blast to the chest killed him, making him the 26th civil rights worker killed in the South. As the remaining five scrambled for cover, the man shot Rev. Richard Morrisroe, Catholic priest from Chicago, in the back.

For the next several minutes, the remaining survivors of the attack tried to rally help, shouting and pounding on doors. But no one came outside.

“We looked back and this white guy who shot us was standing over Jon’s body with his gun like he was daring somebody to do something about it,” Ruby Sales would later recall.

Trial and Acquittal

The man who had killed Jonathan Daniels was Tom Coleman, a 52-year-old highway department worker and part-time deputy sheriff. Coleman was well known in town. His father was a local football hero, for whom the town named its football field. He was quickly arrested and charged with manslaughter.

The justice system in Lowndes County largely answered to itself. The local judge barred the state’s attorney general from stepping in to prosecute the case against Coleman. When the prosecutors asked for a continuance to let Richard Morrisroe recover from his gunshot wounds so he could testify, the court rejected the request.

Lowndes County Courthouse

The trial went ahead in October. Coleman claimed he had shot the two clerics in self-defense.

Coleman’s cousin testified that he had seen a knife in Daniels’ hand and the Morrisroe had something that looked like a pistol. Morrisroe would later confirm he had something in his hand. It was a dime. No knife was ever found.

Deputy Sheriff Joe Jackson testified that Daniels had drawn attention to himself by kissing one of the black women he had been imprisoned with when they were released from jail.

A Nation of Laws

The prosecutor sounded an alarm for the jury: “This is a nation of laws, not men,” he said. “If you decide to throw the law out, we are going to be in for far more trouble than we’ve ever seen.”

After more than an hour of deliberation, the jury, all white, declared Coleman not guilty.

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black declined to intervene when activists appealed to the Supreme Court to shut down the courts in Lowndes County. They argued the court systematically excluded women and blacks from the juries.

Across the country, reaction to the jury decision was intense. President Lyndon Johnson promised a federal investigation. Alabama’s attorney general declared the judge’s decision shameful.

Jonathan Daniels, Saint

In Lowndes County, there was far less anger over Jonathan Daniel’s death. “If they had been tending to their own business, like I tend to mine, they’d be living and enjoying themselves today,” County Solicitor Roscoe Perdue told a newspaper.

Today Jonathan Daniels is well-remembered in his hometown of Keene, N.H. There is a school named after him and commemorative memorials throughout town. The Episcopal Church recognizes him as a martyr of the church and commemorates his life each August 14, the day of his arrest.

Ruby Sales, pushed out of the line of fire by Jonathan Daniels, went on to have a long career as a civil rights activist.

If you enjoyed this article, you might like: The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns. Image: Lowndes County Courthouse By Altairisfar – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17384557. Jonathan Daniels By unknown – Original publication: unknownImmediate source: http://www.episcopalarchives.org/Afro-Anglican_history/exhibit/leadership/daniels.php, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=45648799. Varners Cash Store By Richard apple – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24460714. This story was updated in 2022.

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The 1635 Perplexing Death of Maid Mary Sholy

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

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

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

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

Mary Sholy Goes Home

View of Ipswich from Castle Hill

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

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

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

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

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

William Schooler Can’t Keep Quiet

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

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

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

Jailbreak and Back

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

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

John Winthrop

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

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

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

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

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