The Father of Kezia Hincher’s Child Revealed

On 16 Aug 1753, the Rev. Edward Jackson filed an appeal of the decision against him in his libel case, telling the Massachusetts Superior Court that he had new evidence to prove that the rumors he’d fathered Kezia Hincher’s illegitimate child were baseless.

On the very same day—which I don’t think is a coincidence—there was a rift in the household where Hincher was living. Her brother-in-law, farmer Ebenezer Richardson, made out a bill to William, Dorothy, and Phinehas, three children of his late wife, Rebecca. It covered support and clothing from 11 Apr 1736 until each had turned seven, to be paid from their father’s estate.

The Woburn town clerk, James Fowle, attached a note for the probate judge, Samuel Danforth, saying that the children’s father, Phinehas Richardson, had actually died in 1738. (Let’s give Ebenezer Richardson the benefit of the doubt and assume his error—which increased the amount due him—was inadvertent.)

Those children had been between five years and three months old when their father had died, so in 1753 they were all well past seven. They were still below the age of majority, however. I take this bill as a sign that those minor children were severing ties with their stepfather—possibly moving in with biological relatives—and that he replied by demanding money due to him from their inheritances.

What had prompted that split? People in Woburn had just realized that the father of Kezia Hincher’s child was not her employer, the Rev. Mr. Jackson, but her brother-in-law, Ebenezer. The couple had apparently kept quiet about their affair while Rebecca Richardson was alive, and then longer, as the minister’s reputation sank. But in August 1753, the secret was out.

In fact, this whole case remained so notorious that twenty years later that Boston broadside titled “Life, and Humble Confession, of Richardson, the Informer” had Ebenezer saying:

WOOBURN, my native place can tell,
My crimes are blacker far than Hell,
What great disturbance there I made,
Against the people and their Head.

A wretch of wretches prov’d with child,
By me I know, at which I smil’d,
To think the PARSON he must bare
The guilt of me, and I go clear.

And thus this worthy man of GOD
Unjustly felt the scourging rod,
Which broke his heart, it proved his end,
And for whole blood I guilty stand.

In January 1754, seventeen days before the hearing that formally ended Jackson’s libel suit, Ebenezer Richardson and Kezia Hincher announced their intention to marry. And it looks like they were no longer welcome in Woburn.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

New Evidence in Edward Jackson’s Libel Case?

On 16 Aug 1753, the Rev. Edward Jackson of Woburn petitioned the Superior Court to reconsider the verdict against him in his libel suit against the Rev. Josiah Cotton, a verdict which implied he really was the father of Kezia Hincher’s illegitimate child. New evidence had come to light, he said.

A local tradition held that one of Jackson’s local enemies gave an enslaved servant a letter for Hincher. That slave asked one of Jackson’s own slaves for directions to where the widow lived, and Jackson’s slave took the letter to the minister. The local historian Samuel Sewall wrote:

The letter may reasonably be supposed to have been unsealed; for what the need of seals to letters, carried by the hand of a poor ignorant African, that had never learnt the alphabet, and to whom English and Latin, Greek and Hebrew were all alike?

Seeing it to be in this condition. Mr. Jackson ventured to open it; and finding that its contents furnished a complete exposure of the falsity of the charge against him, or a direct clew to such a discovery, he quickly copied it, and’ keeping the original for his own use, he returned the copy...

This tale flatters the racist wish to see black people as foolish, and it excuses Jackson from looking at someone else’s mail. But it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny on several counts:

• There was no need for Jackson’s slave to take the letter and return it to the other man’s slave if he simply went to ask the minister for directions.
• Some enslaved people did know how to read, and some letters did get lost, so anyone sending a potentially embarrassing document would seal it—if he was foolhardy enough to put such remarks in writing at all.
• Folks in Woburn had been living in the middle of ministerial feuds for twenty years. And people aren’t stupid just because they’re held in bondage (though thinking they are makes that bondage thing easier to do). The idea that a slave of one of Jackson’s enemies would blithely walk up to the minister’s servant and had over a private letter is ridiculous.
• Locating Kezia Hincher in a town of only 1,575 people (per the 1765 census) shouldn’t have been hard. She was still living with her brother-in-law, Ebenezer Richardson. (By this time her sister Rebecca had died, leaving Ebenezer a widower.)

So if Jackson did come across a letter from one of his accusers, this wasn’t how it happened. His new evidence probably took another form. In any event, something happened in August 1753 that sent Jackson back to court to reverse the judgment against him.

TOMORROW: What happened in court—and what didn’t.

And the People’s Choice Is...Ebenezer Richardson!

Ebenezer Richardson was born in Woburn on 31 Mar 1718, eldest son of Timothy and Abigail Richardson. The family farm was along the town’s border with Stoneham.

Woburn was one of the older British towns in the colony of Massachusetts, and had already spun off the town of Wilmington. This old photograph shows the meeting-house built in 1732 for Woburn’s “second parish,” which in 1799 became Burlington. (Check out the Burlington Historical Commission’s heritage trail for other sites in that town.)

When Ebenezer was twenty-two years old, he married a widow named Rebecca Richardson, formerly Rebecca Fowle. A large portion of the Woburn population was named Richardson, descendants of two of the town’s earliest settlers. As far as I can tell, Rebecca’s first and second Richardson husbands weren’t closely related. (To complicate matters, there was another Ebenezer Richardson living in Woburn at the same time, an occasional town official.)

When Rebecca married the second time, she was thirty-four years old and had six children. She had the “widow’s third” of her husband’s estate, and her kids were due to inherit more when they came of age. Ebenezer became responsible for managing Rebecca’s property and for helping to raise her children (for which he was reimbursed from their father’s estate). In the 1740s the couple had three more children of their own. Then Ebenezer inherited his own father’s property, giving him quite a solid Middlesex County farm while he was still in his early thirties.

The household also included Rebecca’s younger sister Kezia, whose husband, Thomas Hincher, had died, leaving her with one child and little property. Thomas had served in the province militia, and Massachusetts owed him £42.10s. (in depressed local currency, probably). In 1746, Ebenezer went into Boston to collect that money for his sister-in-law.

Clearly the Richardsons had taken in Kezia Hincher (sometimes spelled Henshaw) as a poor relation. She earned some money for herself by working as a housekeeper for the Rev. Edward Jackson, the unmarried minister of Woburn’s first parish.

The first surviving sign of trouble in the Richardson household came in early 1751, when Ebenezer was “put into the Goal [i.e., jail] at Charlestown—from which he broke out” by March 1751. It’s unclear what that was all about. Was he in debt? Was he suspected of a minor crime? (A major crime would probably be better documented.)

But the real stink arose later that year when Kezia Hincher became pregnant, and people in Woburn whispered that the new child’s father was the Rev. Mr. Jackson.

TOMORROW: The midwife and the ministers.