“Guilty of the crime laid to this charge, & adjudged to receive 1000 lashes”

Here’s a taste of another presentation at last week’s “1775: A Society on the Brink of War and Revolution” conference at the Concord Museum.

Sarah Pearlman Shapiro, now a visiting assistant professor at Brown University, shared a paper on “Care Work Vulnerabilities and Sexual Assault in 1775 Boston.”

But it was really about one case, described in this short essay for the David Center for the American Revolution:

In late December 1775, Anne Moore packed up her employer’s home and office, preparing to move with the British 59th Regiment’s physician from occupied Boston to London. By the end of the evening, Moore would need medical care. The sun had long since set when her colleague, Private Timothy Spillman, arrived with various items to include alongside the doctor’s remedies and medical supplies. Moore offered Private Spillman rum and water to warm up from the bitter cold before she retired to her bedroom upstairs. In the middle of the night, Private Spillman extinguished the candle next to her bed, knocked her unconscious against the windowpane, and attempted to sexually assault her. When she came to, she ran into the cold and to her neighbors in search of help.

Private Spillman was brought before a British General Court-Martial for nearly killing Moore. In his deposition, Private Spillman claimed he did not know Moore and she must have fallen down the stairs. From her deposition, along with her stark bruises on her face and neck, Private Spillman was sentenced to one thousand lashes for assault. However, the verdict reached by the thirteen men made no reference to the sexual nature of the attack. Eighteenth-century notions of consent—she had offered him a drink—precluded such a verdict.

Because this assault happened inside besieged Boston, and because Spillman was enlisted in the British army, he was tried by court-martial rather than the civilian courts. The same legal principles seem to have applied. But the record of the procedure was preserved in Britain’s War Office papers rather than in Massachusetts archives.

You can read the verdict yourself in this extract from microfilm at the David Center.

However, Prof. Shapiro told me that because Spillman was being transferred (“draughted”) from one regiment to another, his punishment fell through the cracks, and there’s no record of it being carried out.