Two Looks at Revolutionary New England

This week the Journal of the American Revolution published back-to-back articles about Revolutionary New England.

First, Derek W. Beck adapted material from his book The War Before Independence, 1775-1776 to discuss “Henry Knox’s ‘Noble Train of Artillery:’ No Ox for Knox.”

As Beck says, most of the pictures of the mission to bring cannon and mortars from Lake Champlain to the siege of Boston show men prodding oxen through snow. But the documentary record shows Knox renting horses for most of the trip.

The next day, Prof. Len Travers shared “Casualty Of Revolution: The Sad Case of Betty Smith.” Tracing a woman named Elizabeth Smith in eighteenth-century America is a formidable challenge, but this one made herself notorious. She first shows up in the diary of young Anna Green Winslow, as Travers explains:

Smith may have been a servant for the Winslow family at some time. That’s at least one way of explaining Anna’s reference in a letter to her mother on February 25, 1771: “Dear mamma,” she began, “I suppose that you would be glad to hear that Betty Smith, who has given you so much trouble, is well & behaves herself well. & I would be glad if I could write you so.” The next word, of course, was “but.”

For Betty had fallen into bad company—the very worst kind, some would have said. “But the truth is,” Anna continued, “no sooner was the 29th Regiment encamp’d upon the common [in 1768], but miss Betty took herself among them (as the Irish say) & there she stay’d with Bill Pinchion & awhile.”

Next Smith fell into crime, followed by stops at the whipping-post, the Castle, the workhouse, and back to jail. She tried to escape in the worst possible way, only to be convicted of theft again in March 1772 and sent to the gallows.

Betty Smith wasn’t sent off to be hanged, even though theft was still potentially a capital crime. Instead, she had to stand on the gallows with a noose around her neck and then be whipped again as a reminder to behave better.

Beside Smith stood a man named John Sennet, convicted of having sex with an animal on Boston Common. Again, earlier in the century other men and boys convicted of that crime had been executed (along with the unfortunate animals). Though still founded on painful corporal punishment, the colonial justice system became less harsh over time.

Travers’s short article doesn’t discuss another source on Betty Smith, a broadside poem probably sold on the day that she and Sennet stood on the gallows. Anthony Vaver shared that doggerel on Early American Crime. It includes this verse put into the mouth of John Sennet:

Though Murd’rers pass with crimes of deeper hue,
Thieves and house-breakers always have their due.
Cushing has eas’d the former from their fate,
But vengeance always does on Villains wait.

I suspect “Murd’rers…eas’d…from their fate” refers to Ebenezer Richardson, who had been convicted of murdering Christopher Seider in 1770 yet still not sentenced as Massachusetts’s royal judges awaited a pardon from London.

Those lines point to Judge William Cushing, and an earlier verse puns on the name of Judge Nathaniel Ropes. Both men had been appointed to the court after Richardson’s trial, but they weren’t helping to hang him. Boston’s Whigs wanted to keep that injustice in front of people’s eyes, and Betty Smith’s time on the gallows provided an opportunity.

“Great excitement here against inoculation for small pox.”

When Justice Nathaniel Ropes of Salem came down with smallpox in early 1774, as reported yesterday, Essex County was already in an uproar over the disease and its treatment.

As Andrew Wehrman described here, in late January a crowd from neighboring Marblehead burned down the smallpox hospital on Cat Island (now Children’s Island, shown here via the Marblehead Reporter).

Salem’s selectmen had given their approval to that hospital in the summer of 1773. Then they approved creating a smaller hospital in Salem, according to these quotes from Joseph B. Felt’s Annals of Salem (1827):

Nov. 1 [1773]. Small pox of so mortal a kind had prevailed here, that 16 out of 28, who were seized with it and sent to the Pest house, died. The town grant leave to some of the inhabitants to build a hospital in the S. E. part of great pasture for the purpose of inoculating. . . .

[Dec.] 9th. First class of 132 enter the Hospital for inoculation. James Latham, called the Suttonian Doctor, inoculated them. . . .

Jan. 7th [1774]. Second class of 137 enter the Hospital for inoculation.

The Marblehead hospital went up in flames on 26 Jan 1774. Almost a month later, on 25 February, authorities jailed two men, John Watts and John Gulliard, on suspicion of setting that fire. Felt’s Annals report what happened that night:

In the evening 4 or 500 persons from Marblehead rescued the two men and carry them back. Military companies are ordered out to prevent this, but to no effect.

March 1st. By order of the High Sheriff, his deputy in Salem assembles several hundreds of the people here with arms, for recovering the two prisoners and seizing the principals concerned in their rescue. In the mean while, 6 or 800 were prepared at Marblehead to resist this force. The proprietors of the consumed hospital, fearful that if these two bodies came in collision, lives would be lost, agree to give up the prosecution of their claims for satisfaction. Such an agreement being made known here, the sheriff releases the men, whom he had summoned to enforce the law.

Salem’s town meeting then voted to stop inoculation at their own hospital, promising to reimburse the proprietors.

Two days later, those investors sat down with Dr. Latham to ask some pointed questions about his methods. Rumors said that “his patients had not done so well as those of American physicians.” Did that mean they might still be infectious?

Given all that, it’s no wonder that Felt’s Annals concludes its entry for 9 March with: “Great excitement here against inoculation for small pox.”

And just around that time, the people of Salem must have heard that Justice Ropes had the disease—perhaps even as a result of being inoculated at one hospital or the other. He was already known as a supporter and appointee of the unpopular royal government, and of course he was a rich man.

The common people of Salem might have perceived Ropes as having gotten a form of inoculation they couldn’t afford, then having brought the disease into their town. Such feelings could have been enough to spur a crowd to surround the judge’s house, breaking his windows and decorations—a time-honored way for a New England community to express disapproval of a wealthy citizen.

In any event, the very next item in Felt’s annals after the “Great excitement” over inoculation was Nathaniel Ropes’s death. As I noted yesterday, his family believed that the mobbing had hastened his death. I’m not sure how susceptible a man with late-stage terminal smallpox would be to psychological stress, but that couldn’t have been an easy night for his family.

The Death of Nathaniel Ropes

The Ropes Mansion, topic of yesterday’s posting, is named after the family of Nathaniel Ropes, who bought the house in 1768. Ropes was a wealthy Salem merchant and attorney, and an ally of the royal governors in the Council. In 1772, the royal government appointed him to the Superior Court.

That was just in time for a controversy over whether the court’s justices should receive salaries paid from the proceeds of the tea tax, which would insulate them from the Massachusetts General Court and thus from the people they judged. Ropes apparently first accepted the money (various sources put it at £100 to £250 a year), then realized how unpopular that move was. In early 1774 he refused the salary, and even reportedly submitted his resignation from the bench after less than two years.

On 29 May 1774 John Adams wrote in his diary about Ropes’s mix of feelings:

[Essex County lawyer William] Pynchon says Judge Ropes was exceedingly agitated, all the time of his last sickness, about the public affairs in general, and those of the superior court in particular; afraid his renunciation would be attributed to timidity; afraid to refuse to renounce; worried about the opinion of the bar, &c.

By then Ropes had died, on 18 Mar 1774 at the age of forty-eight.

The earliest reports of Ropes’s death in the newspapers apparently said nothing about the circumstances. But in the 1800s, historians recorded the local tradition—no doubt preserved by the Ropes family, who were still living in that Salem mansion—that the night before the justice died, a mob had been surrounding his house, breaking windows. The family felt those disturbances had hastened the justice’s death.

Most historians have since written that that crowd was motivated by the issue of judicial salaries. But Ropes had formally and publicly renounced his pay on 8 February, along with all of his colleagues except Chief Justice Peter Oliver. The legislature was focusing its ire on Oliver, threatening to impeach him, and the Whig press reported all that. Other historians have therefore suggested that the mob was driven by general class resentment.

I suspect the biggest reason for the attack on Ropes’s mansion in March 1774 was the disease the justice was dying of: smallpox.

TOMORROW: Salem’s smallpox crisis of 1774.