“Praying for an Act of Assembly to hang the Memorialist”

At the end of August 1771, Richard Steele finished a very busy year.

Since the start of September 1770, the young man had been:

• convicted of theft, whipped, cropped, and branded twice
• locked up seven times, twice in irons
• escaped three times
• acquitted of theft twice

All those events were reported in Connecticut’s newspapers. And then we don’t hear about Steele’s activity for three years.

That said, on 15 October the Connecticut Courant in Hartford ran a long essay, filling most of a newspaper page and headed:

A MEMORIAL, praying for an Act of Assembly to hang the Memorialist.

To the Honorable the General Assembly of the Colony of Connecticut, to be conven’d at New-Haven, on the second Thursday of October, 1771.

The MEMORIAL of Richard Steele Burglarian, now confin’d in Fairfield Goal, in behalf of himself and the rest of the Housebreakers who now, or hereafter may, practice their calling and profession, within said colony

In this context the word “memorial” meant a memorandum, not a remembrance of the dead (yet).

The author was not Richard Steele but someone (ironically) stealing his persona to complain, for himself and fellow criminals, about the state of legal justice in the colony. The essay was dated September, and its writer was apparently unaware that in late August a court acquitted Steele of the charges that had landed him in the Fairfield jail. Not that such knowledge would have made the author happy.

The essay argued that under Connecticut’s legal system “the reformation of the punished—has…never been to any degree effected.” Yet “the confining of us to hard labour” was “utterly inconsistent with the privileges and liberties of Englishmen.”

That left only one course of action: “That your honors would order, decree and enact that the first offence be punished with death.”

It’s a weird use of sarcasm. I suspect that the real target was talk of establishing a prison to lock up convicted criminals for long terms. The essayist expressed hope

That the proposal for confining us to hard labour may (as we are confident it will) be treated with the contempt it deserves.

The Connecticut assembly didn’t approve converting the Simsbury copper mine into a prison until October 1773, but this looks like an attempt to quash that proposal early. It didn’t work.

Indeed, Richard Steele probably was the sort of criminal the New-Gate Prison was designed for. The traditional corporal punishments hadn’t deterred him, and by the end of 1770 he had no more ears to crop. Yet juries may have been reluctant to send the young man to the gallows for property crimes—hence the two acquittals in 1771.

An underground prison might have looked like the best way to keep Richard Steele off the streets.

COMING UP: Steele goes to New-Gate.