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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. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Boston Massacre: John Adams Saves a Soldier’s Life

On March 5, 1770, Matthew Kilroy shot Samuel Gray to death during the Boston Massacre.

Kilroy had fought with Gray earlier, and witnesses saw him point his gun at him. He was taken into custody to await trial.

The event that helped trigger the American Revolution began with name calling, petty quarrels and street brawls. Sam Adams used it to stir up anti-British feeling. John Adams used it to uphold high-minded principles.

In the process, John Adams also saved Matthew Kilroy from the gallows.

Would phone spying prevented the Boston Massacre?

Propaganda depicting the Boston Massacre.

Before the Boston Massacre

Boston roiled with tension and anger over British soldiers quartered there during the winter of 1769-70. Two thousand of His Majesty’s Troops, along with their wives, children and hangers on, crowded into the town you could walk in an hour. The soldiers competed for housing and for women, and they weren’t always polite about it. They didn’t make much money, and often looked for side hustles, which lowered wages for the locals.

A Boston protest

Then on February 22, a Loyalist shot to death 11-year-old Christopher Seider during a protest against merchants who broke the ban on selling British goods. Two thousand people attended his funeral.

Eight days later, a fight broke out at John Gray’s ropeworks.

Ropeworks

The ships sailing in and out of Boston Harbor used huge quantities of rope. One ship could use as much as 31 miles of the stuff. By 1770, Boston’s wharves had a more than a dozen ropewalks, sheds as long as football fields. Men laid down strands of hemp inside, then twisted them into rope by walking the length of the shed. The workers then dipped the rope in kettles of hot tar, which often started fires. Ropeworks were dirty, dangerous sweatshops, but the poorly paid British soldiers were willing to work in them to earn extra cash.

Charlestown Navy Yard ropewalk, 1852.

On Friday, March 2, Patrick Walker, a private with the 29^th Regiment of Foot, left his nearby barracks to fetch a bucket of water from a well next to Gray’s ropeworks.

William Green, a ropeworker, called out: “Do you want work?”

Walker replied, “yes.”

Green said, “then go clean my s–t-house.” (Other witnesses remembered him saying “the necessary house” or “the little house.”)

According to one witness, Walker

…damned us and made a blow at, and struck me, when I knocked up his heels, his coat flew open, and out dropt a naked cutlass, which I took up and carried off with me. He went away, and came back with a dozen soldiers with him.

Others reported a different chain of events. However it developed, dozens of workers and soldiers got into a free-for-all. An elderly justice of the peace happened on the scene and tried to intervene, only to narrowly escape getting knocked down himself.

No Peace

The ropeworkers drove off the soldiers, but feelings didn’t subside over the weekend.

Historian J.L. Bell notes that two of the soldiers, Thomas Walker (the regiment’s black drummer) and Pvt. John Rodgers, needed medical attention. Several soldiers later testified as to their injuries. None of the ropeworkers seemed much the worse for wear, Bell noted.

A 29th Regiment of Foot soldier in 1742.

Among the ropeworkers was Samuel Gray, a journeyman, a streetfighter and no relation to the boss. Among the soldiers was Matthew Kilroy, an illiterate grenadier who would kill Samuel Gray in the Boston Massacre three days later.

Over the weekend, workers and soldiers armed with clubs prowled the streets, spoiling for a good fight. Several broke out between the soldiers and workers.

On March 4, the soldiers returned to John Gray’s ropeworks, looking for a missing sergeant rumored to have been killed. The sergeant showed up, but both sides shouted at each other angrily.

John Gray, who leaned Loyalist, went to visit the regimental officers. He struck a deal. He would fire William Green, and they would keep the soldiers away from the ropeworks. Both sides would try to calm things down.

John Adams

John Adams, a 34-year-old lawyer, spent the chilly winter night of March 5 by a fire in the South End home of Henderson Inches. Inches, married to a niece of John Gray, was hosting a get-together with old friends in their arts and social club.

Dan Abrams and David Fisher recreate the scene in John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father’s Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial.

“[Adams] and his fellow guests were alarmed by the ringing of bells. Supposing it to be a signal of fire, they quickly put on their hats and cloaks ‘and went out to assist in quenching the fire or aiding our friends who might be in danger’.”

John Adams

They fell in with many other Bostonians who rushed to the scene, filling the wintry streets.

…Adams joined the stream of people flowing toward the top of King Street, the scene of the incident. His fears focused on Mrs. Adams, who was alone in their house with maids and their young son. It already was a difficult time for her; the Adamses had buried their young daughter, Susanna, only a month earlier and Abigail was hardly herself.

When Adams reached the Customs House, he saw British soldiers forming a protective wall around their comrades. He hurried on to his house in Cold Lane. On the way he ran into a company or two of regular soldiers drawn up in front of Dr. Cooper’s old Church with their muskets all shouldered and their bayonets all fixed.” He ignored them and went home. Abigail, to his relief, was fine.

The Quarrel That Ignited the Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre started with another argument. This time, 30-year-old Pvt. Hugh White was standing sentry in front of the Customs House, a rented mansion used for offices. A wigmaker’s apprentice started a quarrel with him, saying a lieutenant hadn’t paid his bill. The sassy boy irritated White so much he finally hit him in the head with his musket.

Though attention focused on the Customs House, the action also took place in front of the Old Statehouse, pictured here.

The boy started crying and a sergeant chased him away. But the boy and another apprentice told passersby what White had done. Some then made their way to the Customs House to hurl insults at White.

“Damned rascally Scoundrel Lobster Son of a Bitch”! a witness later remembered them saying. The crowd threw snowballs and oyster shells at White, but mostly missed. White then made a show of loading his musket.

Henry Knox, then a burly 19-year-old bookseller, came out of his shop on Brattle Street. He watched White handle his gun and said, “If you fire, you die.”

Samuel Gray

A couple of boys got into the First Meeting House and started ringing the bell. People then began showing up with fire buckets.

A town watchman, Edward Langford, tried to calm both sides. In the street, someone told Samuel Gray what had happened at the Customs House. He then made his way toward the growing crowd and planted himself at the front. Months later at trial, John Adams quoted a witness saying

[Gray] had a stick under his arm, and said he would go to the riot, “I am glad of it, (that is that there was a rumpus) I will go and have a slap at them, if I lose my life.” And when he was upon the spot, some witnesses swear, he did not act that peaceable in-offensive part, which Langford thinks he did. They swear, they thought him in liquor—that he run about clapping several people on the shoulders saying, “Dont run away”—“they dare not fire.”

At the same trial, patriots tried to characterize the crowd as small boys.

“We have been entertained with a great variety of phrases, to avoid calling this sort of people a mob,” Adams said. “The plain English is gentlemen, most probably a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and molattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tarrs.”

Matthew Kilroy

Matthew Kilroy was in the guardhouse with a handful of other grenadiers when Capt. Thomas Preston ordered them to march to the Customs House.

Kilroy was big and burly, like the rest of the grenadiers. A 22-year-old Irishman, he had already served in the British Army for seven years. He couldn’t read or write. Someone once overheard him saying he would not miss an opportunity to fire on the inhabitants of Boston.

The grenadiers rushed toward the Customs House, led by Cpl. William Wemms. Shouting oaths, they pushed aside people who got in their way. They made their way through the crowd and formed an arc in front of the Customs House.

Wemms ordered them to load their rifles. Knox pulled Preston aside and said, “”For God’s sake, take care of your men for if they fire your life must be answerable.”

The Boston Massacre

The crowd dared the soldiers to fire. Then a group of several dozen sailors arrived, led by a tall sailor of mixed race–Crispus Attucks. They had picked up heavy sticks from a pile of firewood. The sailors had their own grievances. The British Royal Navy had a habit of kidnapping sailors off the street and impressing them into a miserable service aboard ship.

Some of the sailors surged forward throwing ice and rocks. British bayonets sliced into them. Attucks got close enough to grab one of the bayonets with one hand and knock the soldier down with the other.

An 1868 print of the Boston Massacre by Alonzo Chappel, showing more chaos (and probably more accurately) than the earlier propaganda.

“Fire!”

Then a missile – a snowball, or an oyster shell, or a stick – struck Pvt. Edward Montgomery’s musket. He lost his balance and fired his weapon—probably, say historians, inadvertently. Someone shouted, “Fire.”

Fourteen shots rang out. Attucks took two balls in the chest and fell into the gutter. Samuel Gray went to look at Attucks and Kilroy leveled his rifle at Gray’s head. Gray may have shouted, “Don’t fire, damn you!”

Kilroy fired. The ball left a hole the size of a fist in Samuel Gray’s head. He struggled for a moment, then collapsed, dead, onto the feet of the town watchman.

A sailor named James Caldwell took two bullets in the back. Samuel Maverick, an apprentice, caught a ricocheting ball and died the next day. Patrick Carr, an Irish immigrant who happened to pass by, was shot in the hip. He died nine days later.

The constable took charge, directing people to fetch a doctor, memorize soldiers’ faces, carry away the dead and wounded. Captain Preston ordered the men to prop their rifles and march back to the guardhouse. The next day, all eight were taken into custody.

John Adams, Esq.

Adams later remembered James Forrest, a wealthy Irish merchant, visiting him in his law office. With tears streaming, Adams recalled, Forrest begged him to defend the soldiers. Lawyers Josiah Quincy, Jr., and Robet Auchmuty, Jr., said they’d accept the case if John Adams did.

Agreeing to take the case was one of the best things he ever did, Adams wrote. He did it because he believed a fair trial was the right of all English citizens. If the poor fools fired in self-defense, they must be tried, he wrote. If the truth came out and law prevailed, they must be acquitted.

A jury acquitted Capt. Thomas Preston in the first trial. The second trial, of the seven grenadiers, was harder. Despite confusion and conflicting witness statements, two soldiers were consistently singled out. Edward Montgomery for killing Crispus Attucks and Matthew Kilroy for killing Samuel Gray.

The prosecution attacked Kilroy for joining in the ropewalk melee three nights before the Boston Massacre.

Adams painted a dramatic picture of a fearsome mob assaulting a small squad of soldiers who did their best to restrain themselves. “[T]he law does not oblige us to bear insults to the danger of our lives, to stand still with such a number of people round us, throwing such things at us, and threatening our lives, until we are disabled to defend ourselves,” he said.

No one, continued Adams, said Matthew Kilroy knew Samuel Gray. And even if he did, and even if he hated him, he had a right to defend himself.

The rule of the law is, if there has been malice between two, and at a distant time afterwards they met, and one of them assaults the other’s life…the law presumes the killing was in self defence.

Grave marker for the victims of the Boston Massacre in the Old Granary Burying Ground.

The Verdict

A jury returned a verdict of not guilty for five of the grenadiers. But it found Montgomery and Kilroy guilty of manslaughter. The punishment was death by hanging.

But John Adams had a well-known trick up his sleeve called “benefit of clergy.” Originally intended to protect clergy from the gallows, it allowed people to avoid hanging by proving they could read the Bible. To let illiterate criminals like Kilroy off the hook, the court asked them to recite an easily-memorized psalm. If they could manage that, the court would lessen their punishment to branding on the thumb.

Appeals were made to Gov. Thomas Hutchinson to waive the painful punishment. Hutchinson, however, didn’t want to further inflame Boston. So on Dec. 14, 1770, Matthew Kilroy and Edward Montgomery stood before the sheriff and held out their hands for the red-hot iron. It either burned an “M” for murder—or maybe an “F” for felon—so they couldn’t escape hanging again.

Just before the sheriff put the hot iron to his thumb, Matthew Kilroy and Edward Montgomery burst into tears.

With thanks to John Adams Under Fire: The Founding Father’s Fight for Justice in the Boston Massacre Murder Trial and to J.L. Bell, who probably knows more about the Boston Massacre than anyone else on the planet. Check out his Boston 1775 blog. He’s also written The Road to Concord. This story updated in 2022.

Images: Ropewalk: Courtesy By Leslie, Published by the Boston Public Library – https://www.flickr.com/photos/boston_public_library/4016581027/in/photostream/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75001991. Old Statehouse By Dion Hinchcliffe – Site of the Boston Massacre, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19245186. Gravestones By Rhododendrites – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84157347.

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Mary Bliss Parsons, the Witch of Northampton

The year 1656 wasn’t the first time Mary Bliss Parsons of Northampton was accused of witchcraft. Nineteen years later, in 1675, she was indicted for witchcraft and imprisoned for 10 weeks in Boston to await her trial. Some of the magistrates who sat in judgment of her went on to hear the horrific Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-3, the last hurrah for New England’s witch hunters. They had recognizable names: Thomas Danforth, Simon Bradstreet, William Stoughton and then-governor, John Leverett.

Simon Bradstreet

Mary Bliss Parsons

Mary Bliss was born in England in about 1627, most likely in Painswick Parish, Gloucestershire. She came to Mount Wollaston (now a part of Quincy) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1635 at the age of about eight. She sailed with her parents and four elder step-brothers.

By 1640 they, and many others, had followed the great Puritan divine Thomas Hooker to Hartford in Connecticut Colony and belonged to the first group of settlers there.

Thomas Hoooker and his people

Many extant records and a number of depositions explain the accusations of witchcraft against Mary. When the whole story comes out it all comes down to the jealousy of one woman. Sarah Lyman Bridgman convinced other townsfolk that Mary Bliss Parsons—with the help of the devil—had caused their hard luck, even the deaths of their babies.

Mary wasn’t afraid to take her complaints and opinions right to the source of her grievance. If she paid you to weave some yarn and you delivered it full of flaws, she wouldn’t stand for it. If you borrowed the family’s team of oxen to plough a field and she saw you whipping and mistreating them, she would march across the field and give you a talking to.

Joseph Parsons

Legend says Mary Bliss was a great beauty. To make herself even more enviable she married Joseph Parsons in 1646. He would become the wealthiest man in Hampshire County and, before he died, one of the richest in the territory. Joseph traded furs, owned a retail store and the sawmill and co-owned the first grist mill in Northampton. In 1661, he got a license to keep an ordinary, or tavern, there. He would become the largest land owner in the new settlement of Northfield, and in Boston he bought a house, a wharf and warehouses.

Joseph also served often as selectman and, because he knew the Indians through his trading enterprises, as liaison between the natives and the townsmen.

Early Springfield buildings

It was written that Mary Parsons was ‘possessed of great beauty and talents.’ She was not very ‘amiable,’ she had ‘haughty manners’ and was ‘exclusive in the choice of her associates.’ So, there she was, beautiful and rich with a mind of her own to speak.

As if that wasn’t enough to annoy all the other goodwives in town, she had an astoundingly successful birthrate. In the 17^th century, many women died giving birth, and many children did not survive childhood. For 25 years Mary got pregnant just about every two years. Her last child was born when she was a grandmother. She had 11 children, including two sets of twins. All but two of her children survived to adulthood. In a time when male children were valued above females (males were needed to run the farm) her first six babies were boys and then came five girls. It was just as if she had said, “Joseph, I have given you all the help you need. Now I will help myself.”

Sarah Bridgman

Sarah Lyman Bridgman was convinced Mary’s good fortune was a gift from the devil. Her gossip spread from town to town in the Connecticut River Valley. Many of Sarah’s friends and neighbors listened and wondered. They told stories. Several people saw Mary walking out at night wearing nothing but her shift. One man followed her and saw her walk on water. When he reported her, he said her clothes were not wet.

The Connecticut River

Because of her night walks, her husband installed a lock on the door to their house. He later complained to a friend that no matter where he hid the key, Mary would find it and go out in the night. Frustrated, Joseph forced her into the cellar and locked her in for her own safety. Alone and terrified Mary reported seeing spirits fly at her in the dark. All this happened during the early years of their marriage while they lived in Springfield during a witch scare. Another woman and her husband in Springfield were suspected of witchcraft.

While in church, probably during a sermon about doom and the devil’s presence in town, two ‘bewitched’ children (the minister’s young daughters) fell screaming to the floor under a witch-induced spell. Overcome by fear, Mary joined them on the floor clutching at her throat and crying out in terror. She had to be carried home. Mary Bliss Parsons’ strange behavior in Springfield aroused suspicions that followed her to Northampton.

No one knows why she was so disturbed during this time. She did lose both her second baby and her father in 1650. Springfield also experienced a witch scare at the time.

Jealousy

Both Mary and her enemy Sarah, had come of age in Hartford. Mary’s father, an average yeoman, had only six acres of land. Sarah’s much better off father had 30 acres. After their marriages, both young women moved with their husbands to Springfield. Some years later, when Mary’s husband decided to join in the settlement of Northampton in Massachusetts, Sarah and her family soon followed.

Poor Sarah had little good fortune. Her husband was not rich and not much involved in town government. He served as constable for a short term, and the other positions given him were unimportant. Sarah had eight births but only four children survived infancy—three girls and one boy. Three boys and one girl died at two months, four months, six months and nine months.

Sarah accused Mary of causing her only son a grave injury. He had gone into a swamp to fetch a wandering cow when ‘there came something and gave him a great blow on the head…and going a little further…he stumbled and put his knee out of joint.’ The healing did not go well even after the knee was set and, as a result, he suffered a lot of pain. In his delirium ‘he cried out that Goody Parsons would pull off his knee’. And then from his bed he said ‘there she sits on the shelf…there she runs away and a black mouse follows her.’

Sarah’s stories about Mary’s witchery spread to both Springfield and Northampton. When Joseph Parsons heard the gossip, he sued Sarah for slander and won his case, further damaging Sarah’s reputation.

The Trial

Sarah died in 1668 at about the age of 47, but the animosity she carried toward Mary Parsons lived on. In 1674 Sarah’s daughter, Mary Bridgman Bartlett, a young wife and the mother of her first child, died under suspicious circumstances. People said ‘she came to her end by some unlawful and unnatural means…by means of some evil instrument.’

Her husband, Samuel Bartlett, and father, James Bridgman, saw to Mary Parsons’ arrest, indictment, imprisonment and trial on May 13, 1675.

Depositions and testimony of this trial have been lost, but historians assume that many of the same charges brought against Mary during the slander trial of 1654 were aired along with the new charge of the murder by witchcraft of Mary Bridgman Bartlett.

Mary testified to her innocence and that she had committed no crimes. She said, “The righteous God knows of my innocency—with whom I leave my cause.”

Gov. John Leverett

A jury of 12 men found her innocent, and the governor, and magistrates of the Court of Assistants allowed her to go free. She went home to care for her children, the last of whom was still only two.

Karen Vorbeck Williams, the author of this story, is the award-winning author of My Enemy’s Tears: The Witch of Northampton, The House on Seventh Street, and Pretty: A Memoir.

Image of the Connecticut River: By I, Denimadept, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2417686. This story was updated in 2023.

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A Pants-Free Preacher Starts a Bonfire of the Vanities in New London

In 1743, religious enthusiasts ignited a bonfire of the vanities on the docks of New London, Conn. Their deranged leader, James Davenport, preached them into a frenzy as they threw their prized possessions into the blazing fire.

The next night, they did it again.

Then the bonfire of the vanities turned into a bonfire of indecency when James Davenport threw his pants onto the pyre.

New London, Conn., in 1813

New London

Many New England towns were caught up in religious fervor called the First Great Awakening during the 1730s and 1740s. A cross-eyed English minister named George Whitefield helped start it all with speaking tours of America. He delivered a fiery blast of Biblical rhetoric with personal philosophy, and he rose to power and influence.

James Davenport and others followed in Whitefield’s footsteps. They preached that people could find salvation through spiritual rebirth – a rebirth that started with public weeping, groaning and howling.

The ecstatic revival meetings alarmed many of the Puritan leaders. The disorderly assemblies threatened their control of their communities.

Worse, religious revivals upended the belief that some people were destined for salvation, while the rest were out of luck. The Puritan ruling class also believed in a worldly difference between the saved and the unsaved. The saved had wealth, the unsaved did not. The pants-free preacher undermined that convenient belief with the message that anyone could get to heaven.

James Davenport

James Davenport, ironically, came from an old and distinguished Puritan family. He was born in 1716 in Stamford, Conn., the great-grandson of the John Davenport who settled New Haven. A bright child, he entered Yale to follow his father and grandfather into the Puritan ministry. He graduated at the age of 17 and was ordained at 21 in the Congregational church in Southold, Long Island.

The Rev. John Davenport

While in college, James Davenport caught a bad case of religious revivalism.

He didn’t deliver prepared sermons from the pulpit. Instead, he screamed, he sang, he rambled, he ranted about damnation and hellfire, and he whipped his listeners into frenzies. The Boston Evening Post commented, “Were you to see him in his most violent agitations, you would be apt to think that he was a madman just broke from his chains.”

One day in Southold he opened his Bible and pointed to a random passage. God, he thought, spoke to him through that passage and told him to go and denounce another Congregational minister 50 miles away. So he left his parish, traveled to another town and burst into a church – uninvited – in the middle of a service. He called the minister a blind guide leading his parish straight to hell. Twenty parishioners agreed with him and left the church to start their own.

Frenzies

James Davenport got more and more outrageous. He once ranted from the pulpit for 24 hours, then collapsed. When he recovered, he demanded his parishioners write down their confessions.

He prayed and fasted for a mentally ill woman who couldn’t speak. He predicted she would be ‘delivered and recover her speech’ on a certain date. But on that day, she died. Davenport claimed he did deliver her – to heaven.

He started to roam around Connecticut. For four years he crashed religious services and attacked ministers as hell-bound wolves in sheep’s clothing. He also preached in the open air, the way George Whitefield did. He paraded through the streets, preaching at the top of his lungs with his head thrown back and eyes closed. People followed him, howling and singing hymns.

George Whitefield, by John Russell.

Other itinerant preachers also stirred up trouble in New England. Connecticut’s General Assembly finally tried to do something about it. In 1742, the assembly passed, “An Act for Regulating Abuses and Correcting Disorders in Ecclesiastical Affairs,” which punished uninvited preaching. It only took a month for Davenport to get arrested.

A revival meeting during the Second Great Awakening.

Trial

James Davenport turned in one of his most bizarre performances during his trial before the General Assembly. A local newspaper reported,

At one point everyone there heard him ‘vehemently crying out, That he saw hell-flames slashing in their faces; and that they were now! now! dropping down to hell.’

When the sheriff tried to take him away, he shouted, “Lord! thou knowest somebody’s got hold of my sleeve, strike them! Lord, strike them—”. His followers attacked the sheriff and his deputies as they dropped James Davenport down to jail.

The general assembly declared him insane and banished him from Connecticut. He returned to his old parish on Long Island. But he ignored orders to stay home and just preach to his congregation.

Davenport went to Boston, where he disrupted services, held all-night revival meetings and paraded through the streets. The Boston Post reported that the street processions were, ‘attended with so much Disorder that they look’d more like a company of Bacchanalians after a mad Frolick than sober Christians who had been worshipping God.’

But worse than annoying were his attacks on Puritan ministers – which proved extremely popular among Boston’s lower classes. Officials arrested him and, once again, James Davenport went to court.

A jury in Boston declared him insane.

Bonfire of the Vanities

James Davenport then humiliated himself so thoroughly in New London that people still wrote about it hundreds of years later.

After his trial in Massachusetts, he returned to Connecticut. His health had deteriorated, and he had to lean on an assistant to walk. But people in New London had invited him, and he went.

On March 6, 1743, he exhorted his followers to build a bonfire of the vanities. They couldn’t find salvation, he said, unless they burned their idols. And so they burned their books. For hours, a feverish Davenport preached his followers into a frenzy as they threw their books into the fire and danced around it, shrieking. When it finally died out, Davenport announced he would light another bonfire of the vanities the next day.

Unidentified July 3 bonfire, 20th century. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Evil Spirit

And so again he goaded his followers into a state of hysteria. One after the other they threw onto the pyre such finery as silk dresses, petticoats, fans, shoes with red heels, necklaces, wigs and rings.

James Davenport got so caught up in the moment he took off his pants and threw them in the fire.

A woman snatched the pants back and handed them to Davenport. Suddenly the spell that held him for so many years suddenly broke.

The Boston Weekly Post-Boy reported that the person told Davenport he thought the Devil was in him. Davenport said he thought so too. He said God had left him and an evil spirit possessed him.

The crowd melted away from the second bonfire of the vanities.

The next year, he published Mr. James Davenport’s Confessions & Retractions in which he took it all back. He claimed to have an inner peace he’d never before experienced. He got a parish in New Jersey, where he stayed put.

But his health, never good, failed, and he died at the age of 41.

With thanks to David S. New, Christian Fundamentalism in America, A Cultural History. This story was updated in n2021.

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New England Witchcraft Trials: It Wasn’t Just Salem

Plenty of people in early New England were persecuted for witchcraft, and not just in Salem, Mass.

Witches had troubled the European colonists from the get-go. In 1635, Plymouth Colony made it a crime to “form a solemn compact with the devil by way of witchcraft.” As late as the 19^th century, women were persecuted for cursing butter churns, making animals sick and causing people to die.

“Examination of a witch” by Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1853)

Salem’s witchcraft hysteria was just the most spectacular (and certainly the most memorable) of the witch trials. Two hundred people faced charges, and 20 died at the executioner’s hand. But Hartford had its own mini-witch hysteria, as did many towns scattered throughout New England.

Connecticut Witchcraft Prosecutions

In Connecticut, witch hysteria took hold 45 years before Salem began its mass executions. The colony formally tried 43 people for witchcraft (Massachusetts tried 50.) Most were acquitted or escaped, but nine men and two women were executed as witches between 1647 and 1663. The first, a woman from Windsor named Alse Young, died, as the others would, on the basis of flimsy evidence. She went to the gallows on the site of the Old State House.

The witch hysteria peaked during the “Hartford Witch Panic.” It started in 1662 when a young Hartford girl died after claiming a neighbor, Goodwife Ayres, tormented her. In 1662, Goodwife Ayres and her husband sensibly skipped town.

More accusations followed for the next 50 years in the Connecticut River towns of Hartford, Windsor, Farmington and Wethersfield. Most, however, resulted in acquittals as Connecticut judges came to their senses.

By 1715, the law making witchcraft a capital offense was off the books, and the witchcraft hysteria died down. (Click here for more about the Hartford Witch Panic.)

The Witch No. 1, lithograph, J.E. Baker.

Disturbing Witches

Your chances of getting hauled into court for witchcraft got better if your neighbors didn’t like you. Often the people accused of dealing with the devil were shrewish or grouchy or arrogant. Sometimes they lived on a town’s margins, and took the blame for its misfortunes.

Eunice Cole of Hampton, N.H., was difficult, unlikeable and didn’t have much money. From 1656 to 1680 she went to court three times to face charges. She was in and out of prison for slanderous speech and familiarity with the devil. She did perform one near-magic feat: dying peacefully in her own bed at the age of 90. (Read more about Eunice Cole here.)

Just because a jury found you not guilty of witchcraft didn’t mean your persecution ended. A Boston jury exonerated Mary Webster of Hadley, Mass., but that didn’t stop her neighbors from disturbing her.

The Puritans believed ‘disturbing’ witches – beating or restraining them – prevented them from casting spells. Mary Webster’s neighbors dragged her from the house, hanged her from a tree until she nearly died, than buried her in the snow and left her. She survived, and spent the rest of her life known as ‘Half-Hanged Mary.’

Mary Webster was lucky compared to Susannah Martin of Amesbury, Mass. A neighbor first accused her of witchcraft in 1669. Susannah’s husband sued the neighbor for slander, and ultimately she was cleared of the charges. But the taint of the accusation lingered, and she was charged again during the Salem witchcraft hysteria of 1692. She died on the gallows at the age of 70 with three other accused witches. (Read about Susannah Martin here.)

Court of Oyer and Terminer

In Salem and nearby towns, officials began rounding up suspected witches even before Gov. William Phips ordered the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened.

William Phips

As the storm gathered, Philip English may have been a target because of his wealth. Essex County’s High Sheriff George Corwin had a nasty habit of seizing the property of accused witches and dividing the spoils with his deputies.

Corwin arrested Philip English’s wife Mary on April 18, 1692. Five weeks later, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was formed to investigate the disturbances in Salem. (Read more about it here.) The court quickly turned into a killing machine.

Philip English followed his wife to jail when a neighbor accused him of witchcraft. She said he pinched her and threatened to kill her if she didn’t touch his ‘Devil’s book.’ Philip and Mary English managed to flee to New York until the bloodshed ended.

Two hundred (perhaps a few more) were charged in what historians now believe was a massive case of petty jealousies and score settling. Nineteen died by hanging, one man was crushed to death and five people died in jail.

The Salem bloodlust

But then the Puritan leaders came to their senses and realized the witchcraft trials were a shocking case of government run amok — and an embarrassment. After the 20 alleged witches were executed in Salem, Mass., no one was indicted, convicted or executed for witchcraft in New England. One of the witch trial judges, Samuel Sewall, even apologized for his role in the witch hysteria. (Read about Judge Sewall here.)

Samuel Sewall.

Witchcraft After the Trials

That didn’t mean people stopped believing in witches. Rhoda Dustin was known as the Witch of Weare, N.H., but lived in an era when witchcraft prosecutions had died down. She was born in 1736, and with her husband ran an inn. The townspeople believed she could fly, inflict illness on people and curse butter churns so they wouldn’t make butter. Though they gossiped about her and tried to counteract her curses, she was never tried and died peacefully in Vermont in 1824.

Hannah Cranna, like Susannah Martin and Eunice Cole, was a shrew. But she was born nearly a century after the witch trials ended, in 1783. Hannah married Capt. Joseph Hovey, probably much older than she, and they lived in Monroe, Conn.

Hannah Cranna’s headstone.

No whisperings of witchcraft followed her until her husband died suspiciously. He went out for a walk one night and fell over a cliff in an area he knew well. People thought she’d cast a spell on him.

From then on, Hannah lived in poverty, and used her reputation for witchcraft to extort food and firewood from her neighbors. She never went to trial, though neighbors talked about her.

When she died, her neighbors ignored her wishes and buried her after sundown. When they returned to her house, it had gone up in flames, sealing the legend of Hannah Cranna, witch. (Read more about Hannah Cranna here.)

This story was updated in 2022.

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In 1919, A Private Detective Nailed the Murderer of Lucina Broadwell

When Barre, Vt., police in 1919 first saw the naked body of Lucina Broadwell in a vacant lot, they immediately suspected her husband. People knew the 29-year-old mother of three had problems at home.

The husband had an airtight alibi, though, and police were baffled. So they called in a private detective, whose investigation and arrest made page one news through the summer and fall of 1919.

The story captivated the people of Barre, a thriving quarrying city, and the surrounding towns. Part of the fascination had to do with the modern forensic techniques used by the private detectives to find her killer. And part of it had to do with the discovery of a little red book that listed the names of prominent Barre citizens who patronized a house of ill repute.

Discovery of Lucina Broadwell

Around 7:30 in the morning of May 4, 1919, 21-year-old Harold Jackson from the country town of Orange, Vt., woke up in the Hotel Buzzell. He couldn’t find any toilet facilities in the hotel, but he noticed a vacant lot across the street. So he walked over to it and did his business behind a woodworking shop. As he returned to the hotel, he saw a woman’s naked body lying on the ground. Badly frightened, he ran to the police station. Officer A.B. Curtis hurried to the lot.

Lucina Broadwell

He found a woman lying face down with her hands tied behind her back. She wore only shoes, stockings and a pair of kid gloves. Curtis saw her shirtwaist tied around her neck with knots secured by a man’s handkerchief.

Police quickly identified Lucina Broadwell, who lived nearby. Curtis had photographs taken of the body before it was taken to the Undertaking Rooms for an autopsy.

Many suspected her husband, a carpenter named Harry Broadwell.

Celebrity Detective

Three days into the murder investigation, police still had no clue who killed Lucina Broadwell. So they called in James Rodney Wood, Jr., of the Wood Detective Agency.

Wood was the son of the first private detective in New England. James Rodney Wood, Sr., had worked as a Boston police officer for 20 years before striking out on his own. He had gotten many convictions through dogged pursuit of criminals. His son took over the agency.

When Wood got the call to investigate the Lucina Broadwell murder, he had a reputation to uphold as the most famous detective in New England. He didn’t always find that easy. In notes he later used in a talk to young detectives, Wood wrote, ‘think of the strain you are under.’

…you, a detective from Boston here, [the] case should be cleared up at once, in short the buck is passed to us — so let’s start and clean up this rotten mess — or in other words, there is a rotten egg, let’s break it wide open and let the “stink” out and find the guilty party.

James Wood’s handwritten notes on the case.

Barre, Vermont

Wood boarded a train and arrived in Barre in the afternoon. The city had started to boom in the 1880s with the success of its granite quarries. Stonecutters and quarrymen from Italy, Scotland, Spain, Scandinavia, Greece, Lebanon and Canada arrived to pull the stone from the earth and to carve it. The city’s population had exploded to nearly 11,000 people by 1910, up from 8,500 a decade earlier.

With the sudden influx of working-age men came speakeasies, dance halls and bawdy houses. One bordello would feature prominently in the death of Lucina Broadwell.

Barre, around the time of Lucina Broadwell’s murder

The Investigation

Upon his arrival in Barre, Wood reviewed the case notes and then stayed up all night observing the Hotel Buzzell. Police thought Lucina had been murdered there, but he concluded the lighting conditions wouldn’t have allowed it.

He then interviewed Harry Broadwell, who had come home from work, given Lucina two five-dollar bills for household supplies, then went off and got drunk with other men in a speakeasy. Harry could account for his movements all night long. He didn’t kill Lucina.

He did give Wood several useful leads, though. First, he suspected his wife was ‘sporty.’ Second, he’d heard Lucina went to the Parker house with a man named George Long. Third, Lucina wrote frequently to a friend in the Boston area, Grace Grimes.

Wood telephoned his Boston office and told them to find Grace.

Then he went to the Parker House.

Freaky Mrs. Parker

Mrs. Isabelle Parker was very careful to explain where her lodger “Long” had been the night of Lucina Broadwell’s murder. Then Long came in, and aroused Wood’s suspicion because of his anxiety to explain his whereabouts that Saturday night.

Wood described Mrs. Parker as 75 to 80 years of age. She might have been termed slightly demented, he wrote. She

…imagined she was a fortune teller, wrote poetry, dressed very freaky, wore a wig of heavy grey hair…

Most people in Barre, he wrote, thought she was a nut, but she was a very shrewd woman.

She would go about Barre and get a line on the different men and women who were inclined to be a little sporty. For example, if she knew I was a married man and liked to step out, she would make it her business to form my acquaintance and eventually tell me that a certain woman, either married or single, was infatuated with me and would like to meet me. She would invite me down to her house at a certain time and tell me to come in the back door and when I arrive, would introduce me to some woman, married or single, whom she had told the same story.

The men would pay her something for the use of the room. Eventually her married customers might tell her they knew their spouse was a little sporty, furnishing her with a new customer.

Grace Grimes

Then Wood heard from his office. They’d found Grace and she’d come in at 9 a.m. the next day. Wood took the sleeper to Boston, staying up all night on the train reviewing notes from the case.

Grace told the detectives she’d received a letter from Lucina Broadwell mailed on the day of her murder. She said she’d been going to the Parker house with George. He told her he planned to buy a new Buick and he wanted her to go to California with him. But she had decided George was full of hot air, that he was no good and she wasn’t going to see him again. She would go to the Parker House that night, ditch George and tell Mrs. Parker what she thought of her.

When Grace finished telling her story, Wood then arranged for one of his female operatives to accompany her to Lebanon, N.H. Grace wouldn’t go to Vermont, because she was wanted by Vermont police. Lebanon, though, was close enough.

Cracking the Lucina Broadwell Case

Wood then arranged for Mrs. Parker to meet with Grace Grimes in New Hampshire. Mrs. Parker admitted she knew Lucina Broadwell, and said she had met George Long at her house on the night of her murder. George had gotten her a veal loaf and bread to eat.

That led to the first piece of circumstantial evidence against George Long: The autopsy found Lucina Broadwell had eaten veal and bread an hour before her murder.

1910 Metz roadster

Wood found other circumstantial evidence:

He had told one of his detectives to ‘work in his own way’ around the crime scene. The detective found tire tracks that matched the Metz car George Long had driven that night.
The handkerchief found at the scene had a laundry mark on it from a local laundry. Wood tracked down the owner, an Eddie Barron, who had left Barre months ago. Wood’s agents tracked down Barron and learned he’d given the handkerchief to Long.
Wood found a hair in Long’s car, and had Lucina Broadwell’s body dug up to see if it matched her hair. It did.

James Wood also found a sensational piece of evidence – a little red book that listed the names, addresses and phone numbers of some of Barre’s most prominent citizens. It also listed George Long’s name coupled with Lucina Broadwell on the date of her murder.

Guilty, Guilty

Long admitted being intimate with Lucina Broadwell, but denied killing her.

Wood arrested both Mrs. Parker and George Long. After a month-long trial, a jury found Long – real name George Rath – guilty of second-degree murder. He served life in prison.

Isabelle Parker was found guilty of running a house of ill repute, and sentenced to 2.5 years in prison.

Wood later used the Lucina Broadwell case to explain the importance of circumstantial evidence. It was considered throughout New England as one of the strongest circumstantial cases ever tried, Wood wrote.

With thanks to the Harvard Law School Library, Historical & Special Collections, Wood Detective Agency records.

Image: Metz car By Florin Chelaru – IMG_1516, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63363677.

This story was updated in 2023.

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