The Tar-and-Feathering and Execution of John Roberts

Last month I wrote about using today’s online newspaper databases to track down a couple of reports about women tarred and feathered by sailors in the mid-1700s. Those reports turned out to be different distortions of a newspaper report about sailors tarring one woman in 1743.

Here’s another investigation into an even more horrific event, reported in a secondary source and for a long time untraceable. In 1865, Frank Moore’s Diary of the American Revolution, which was a collection of news reports and letters, ran this item on page 359 of volume 1:

THIS morning, at Charleston, South Carolina, John Roberts, a dissenting minister, was seized on suspicion of being an enemy to the rights of America, when he was tarred and feathered; after which, the populace, whose fury could not be appeased, erected a gibbet on which they hanged him, and afterwards made a bonfire, in which Roberts, together with the gibbet, was consumed to ashes.

Unfortunately, the footnotes on that page got garbled in the printing. There were three notes, numbered 1-3. But within the text there was no superscript 1 and two superscript 2s.

The first few paragraphs on that page should have ended with a superscript 1. They indeed came from the source listed in note 1: Hugh Gaine’s New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury newspaper for 2 Dec 1776. I checked.

The second item was the story of John Roberts’s torture and killing, and Moore found that in the William Upcott Collection of Newspaper Extracts at the New-York Historical Society. Unfortunately, some authors trying to make sense of Moore’s footnotes have written that the story came from the New York newspaper.

The Upcott collection consisted of Revolutionary-era newspaper clippings, most or all from British printers. I hope that each clipping includes information on the newspaper it came from, but, having never seen the files, I don’t know if that’s true. I kind of doubt it.

However, through online hunting I can say that at least three British newspapers printed this text. Here’s how it appeared in the 4 Jan 1777 Ipswich Journal:

Charles-Town, Dec. 2. This Morning John Roberts, a Dissenting Minister, was seized at this Place, on Suspicion of being an Enemy to the Rights of America, when he was tarred and feathered, after which the Populace, whose Fury could not be appeased, erected a Gibbet, on which they hanged him, and afterwards made a Bonfire, in which Roberts, together with the Gibbet, was consumed to Ashes.

On 7 Jan 1777 the same news appeared in the Leeds Intelligencer and Manchester Mercury.

The Ipswich Journal headed that section “F. America,” and the first three items (of which that was third) “From the SOUTH-CAROLINA GAZETTE.” The Manchester Mercury headed its section “London, January 2,” suggesting this news came from a London newspaper of that date, and underneath that “From the SOUTH CAROLINA GAZETTE.”

We should therefore expect to find that news item in at least one London newspaper from early January 1777. Unfortunately, I have limited access to British databases, and their O.C.R. transcriptions are terrible.

We should also expect to find the original report in John Wells’s South-Carolina and American General Gazette from 2 Dec 1776. But the early American newspaper database I use doesn’t include any issue from that month. It’s possible no copies of this issue survived, or it’s possible that database has limitations.

Finally, once this item appeared in the South Carolina press, I’d expect to see it reprinted or alluded to in other American newspapers. At this time each side was hyping stories of atrocities by the enemy and trying to explain away enemy accusations, so this news would have been most appealing to Loyalist printers. Gaine had restarted his New York Mercury with a Loyalist slant in late 1776 under British occupation, and James Robertson launched another Loyalist paper in that city in January 1777. The South-Carolina and American General Gazette was itself a Loyalist paper from 1780 to 1782. But I couldn’t find any further reference to John Roberts’s death in eighteenth-century newspapers.

In fact, I can’t find another period record of the torture, execution, and burning of John Roberts beyond those two British newspapers. No South Carolina Loyalist appears to allude to it. No coreligionist of Roberts is recorded complaining about it. No published letter, memoir, or local history of South Carolina mentions it. I can’t find any report of the incident until Frank Moore’s Diary in 1865. After that, all citation trails lead back to Moore.

Among the possible explanations to explore:

• The chaos of wartime printing meant that the crucial issue of the South Carolina Gazette got to London but not to New York.
• There are errors in the London account, such as the victim’s name, which get in the way of searching independent American sources.
• Roberts was killed not just for being an enemy to American Patriots but also for fomenting a slave rebellion. That could explain why he was treated so badly and his body was burned. It might also explain why so little was published about it, why Loyalists didn’t make a martyr out of him—the slaveholding class tended to tamp down news of actual uprisings.

All further possibilities and leads are of course welcome.