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Captain David Perry, 80, Recalls a Simple Revolutionary Soldier’s Life

In 1821, Revolutionary War captain David Perry approached a young Vermont publisher with a request. At age 79 he had little time left. He had written his a memoir to leave behind for posterity, but he had no money to print it. If the publisher would print it, he could have any proceeds from selling it.

Publisher Simeon Ide of Windsor, Vt. agreed and published the short book, Recollections of an Old Soldier, The Life of Captain David Perry.

Battle of Bunker Hill. E. Percy Moran, artist; Photomechanical print, c 1909, Library of Congress

Perry, the book notes, will not go down in history as a great leader of the revolutionary cause. But his book, reprinted many times, gives a glimpse into the thinking of the American citizen soldier of 1776.

Faithful Soldier

“Thousands, no doubt, of the Revolutionary Heroes, might have left a more brilliant specimen of talent and learning,” begins the foreward.

“Many have moved in a higher sphere of action, who have left no record of their toils and privations behind them,” it said. “But we venture to assert, that few have better earned the appellation of a faithful Soldier, than the subject of these memoirs.

“Though his name may not live on the annals of his country, yet his fellow-citizens should never forget, nor act unworthily of the sentiments of gratitude, which a recollection of this important truth should ever inspire, that, had it not been for the prowess and achievements – the fortitude, patience and perseverance of those who, like himself, in the humbler ranks of the common soldier, bared their breasts to the foe, upon the “tented field,” that country had never known a name and a rank among the nations.”

The Boy Soldier

Captain David Perry was born in Rehoboth, Mass. in 1741. His mother died, so he and his siblings scattered to relatives. Perry moved in with an uncle who helped find him training as a cobbler. But the local militia approached Perry at 15 about joining up. Small for his age, he worried that he might not “pass muster.” However, the service accepted him.

In all, Perry served in four campaigns of the French and Indian war from Massachusetts, 1758-1762, and in two campaigns of the American Revolution from Connecticut, 1775-1776.

His soldier’s life was sprinkled with the remarkable and brutal aspects of war. He tells of how one of his fellow soldiers executed an injured French priest by shooting him in the head at the orders of his British commander. How viciously British officers kept their men in line. And the arduous life of the soldiers during the siege of Quebec.

Civilian Life of Captain David Perry

Along the way Perry also sketches in some of the details of the personal life of a soldier. Perry spent his life in Rehoboth and Dighton, Mass., Killingly, Conn., Plainfield, N.H., and Chelsea and Ira, Vt.

He struggled in business, once going deep into debt after a failed partnership. He was in Roxbury during the Battle of Bunker Hill and played a role in the siege of Boston. But he declined an officer’s request to reenlist because of concern for his wife and five children. “I told him a soldier ought not to have any thing to think of at home,” he wrote. However, he later relented when the shortage of soldiers grew worse.

Of his own life, he tells that at the time his mother died he believed he saw her ghost. He had his own fearful near-death experience when, overcome with fever, he felt his soul leave his body.

“This transition (as I firmly believe) from life to death, and from death to life, which took place nearly sixty years ago, is as fresh in my mind now as it was then: and not many days have passed from that time to this, which have not brought the interesting scenes I then witnessed clearly to view in my mind. But I never dared to say any thing about it, for a great many years afterwards, for fear of being ridiculed,” he wrote.

He recalls discovering that he could actually see cannon fire passing through the air. And despite his own poverty, Perry once paid 20 pounds to enlist a soldier in the Revolutionary army.

A Final Thought

At the conclusion of his brief memoir, Perry offers a call for Americans to never forget the spirit upon which the country was founded.

He cautioned people against greed and self-indulgence. “If they are ambitious to ape the follies, extravagance, and luxury of European countries, their freedom can have but a short duration.”

“When we reflect back to our Revolutionary war, and see how much blood and treasure were spent to gain our independence, shall we, after so long an experience of the advantages arising from so good a government, be any more deceived by internal or foreign enemies? Shall we contrast the mildness of our government, and the civil and religious liberty that we enjoy under it, with the bigotry and tyranny which prevails under the monarchies of Europe, and say we are willing to exchange the former for the latter? I dare say not. Then let me conjure my posterity to stand by this government of our choice, and never be deceived by political or ecclesiastical demagogues.”

Captain David Perry died in 1826 at age 84.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Oldest Newspaper in Each New England State

Those quarrelsome publishers just love to argue over the honor of being the oldest newspaper in the United States. But which one deserves the title?

The Hartford Courant, founded in 1764, says it’s nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper. The Courant, though, lost its independence when purchased by the Times Mirror chain. Then the Tribune Corporation bought Times-Mirror.

The Rutland Herald started 30 years later than the Courant, but managed to stay independent. So now it can claim the distinction as the oldest newspaper owned by the same family in continuous operation, published under the same name in the same city, in the United States.

The New Hampshire Gazette also claims to be the oldest newspaper. However, since its founding in 1756 it has changed owners about 25 times, disappeared and merged with other publications.

The Newport Mercury, founded in 1759, was identified as the nation’s oldest newspaper during one of the New Hampshire Gazette‘s lulls. It didn’t quite disappear, having been published by The Newport Daily News as a weekly with reprinted daily stories for out-of-town subscribers. In 2018 it became Mercury Magazine.

Hartford Courant 1764

Thomas Green started the Connecticut Courant as a weekly on Oct. 29, 1764. It claims the title ‘America’s oldest continuously published newspaper’ and the slogan, ‘Older than the nation.’

Hartford printer Ebenezer Watson then took over the Connecticut Courant. Watson died suddenly of smallpox in late 1777, creating a dilemma for American patriots.

The British had shut down all the newspapers in Boston. Plus, New York’s Loyalist newspapers printed nothing but pro-British news. The Courant, as the only paper large enough to provide reliable (that is, pro-patriot) news, was viewed as crucial to maintaining popular support for the Revolution in New England.

Patriots approached Watson’s widow, Hannah Bunce Watson, and asked her to continue publishing the newspaper. She knew little about printing, but went ahead publishing the Courant to support the war effort. She made 20-year-old George Goodwin a business partner, as he had already worked for the newspaper for 12 years.

In 1779, she married Barzillai Hudson, and he took control of the newspaper. In 1837 the Connecticut Courant became the Hartford Courant, now the largest daily newspaper in Connecticut.

Bangor Daily News 1889

Richard J. Warren founded the Bangor Daily News on June 18, 1889, making it the oldest newspaper in Maine. In 1900 it merged it with the Bangor Whig and Courier. Today Warren’s great-grandson publishes the newspaper and his sister, Carolyn J. Mowers, serves as chairman of the board.

Though not as old as the Rutland Herald, the Bangor Daily News is a rarity in the newspaper business: a newspaper under the ownership of a single family. Today it’s the only newspaper in Maine owned independently. The BDN is also Maine’s largest, covering a readership area larger than Connecticut.

It did fail to publish once in its history: on Dec. 30, 1962, when a blizzard dumped five feet of snow on Bangor.

Daily Hampshire Gazette 1786

Massachusetts claims the oldest newspaper in the United States, the Boston News-Letter, but the Loyalist rag didn’t survive the Revolution. Founded in 1704 , it ceased publication when the British withdrew from Boston in 1776.

That leaves the Daily Hampshire Gazette, founded in 1786 in Northampton, Mass., as the oldest newspaper in the Bay State. In the first edition of the Hampshire Gazette, its 22-year-old publisher, William Butler, reported the news of Shay’s Rebellion. For more than a century the paper was published every week, but in 1890 it became a daily.

The Daily Hampshire Gazette went through a series of owners until its business manager, Harriet Williams DeRose, bought it in 1929. When she died in 1960, her son Charles Nathan DeRose took over. Charles died 10 years later and his two sons took over. By 2005, there were no more DeRoses interested in running the newspaper. That year Newspapers of New England, a chain based in Concord, N.H., bought the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

New Hampshire Gazette 1756

The New Hampshire Gazette has trademarked its claim as ‘The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper,’ but not without dispute. The sassy alternative, published every two weeks, has appeared only intermittently on the journalism scene.

Daniel Fowle, the first man to print the words of Samuel Adams, founded the New Hampshire Gazette in Portsmouth in 1756. After he died in 1787, the Gazette continued publishing. In 1839, the Maryland Gazette went under and the Portsmouth Gazette was recognized as the nation’s oldest newspaper.

In the 1890s, the Portsmouth Herald began publishing the Gazette as a weekend supplement, changing its name to the Herald Weekend Edition in 1960. However, Daniel Fowle’s descendant Peter Fowle discovered in 1989 that the ‘Gazette’ name was no longer under trademark. He took the rights to the name and in 1999 began publishing the New Hampshire Gazette ‘episodically, in a very small format.’

Today it includes ‘The Fortnightly Rant,’ film reviews, two pages of history, stories from the New Hampshire Indymedia Collective, vintage news from the 19^th century and ‘Admiral Fowle’s Piscataqua River Tidal Guide.’

Newport Mercury 1759

In 1759, Ann Smith Franklin and her son started the Newport Mercury in Newport, R.I., with the ‘freshest advices.’ She was Benjamin Franklin’s sister-in-law, the widow of his brother James (the one Ben didn’t get along with). Ann Smith Franklin and her son published the newspaper until she died in 1763.

Solomon Southwick, a patriot, took over the paper, but buried the press and type when the British landed in Newport. After the Revolution, he resumed publishing the newspaper.

The Newport Mercury has the distinction of first publishing an African-American woman, Phyllis Wheatley, in a newspaper.

Edward A. Sherman, owner of the Newport Daily News, bought the Newport Mercury in 1928 and published it as a paid weekly. In 2005, the News turned the Mercury into an alternative weekly, covering entertainment, food and the arts.

Mirroring the newspaper industry’s struggles, the Mercury became a once-monthly insert into the Newport Daily News in 2018.

Rutland Herald 1794

On Dec. 8, 1794, the Rev Samuel Williams and his distant cousin Judge Samuel Williams, both Federalists, founded the Rutland Herald. Three years later, William Fay bought the newspaper and for four decades devoted it to biblical parables, poems and homilies.

The newspaper’s readers got a welcome relief when abolitionist George Beaman bought it in 1844. From 1856 to 1882, the father-and-son team of George and Albert Tuttle turned the Rutland Herald into a daily and covered the Civil War. .

Rutland native Percival W. Clement bought the Herald in 1882, having bought the Rutland Railroad, the Clement National Bank, New York real estate and a brokerage house. He used the newspaper to promote his political ambitions, succeeding in 1918 by winning the race for Vermont governor.

In 1927, P.W. Clements died and his son-in-law, William H. Field, moved back to Rutland to run the newspaper. Field, a co-founder of the New York Daily News, markedly improved the Herald. His son ran it until Robert W. Mitchell became owner-publisher in 1948. Mitchell’s son, R. John Mitchell, succeeded his father when he died in 1993.

Images: Bangor Daily News By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22888057; Shays Rebellion By Shockabrah – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58001789

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The Body Snatcher of Chebacco Parish

In April 1818, the discovery that a body snatcher had removed eight human bodies from their final resting place shocked the people of Chebacco Parish on Massachusetts’ North Shore.

Several months earlier, people saw lights in The Old Burying Ground (now in Essex). It snowed that night, so no telltale footprints were left.

But when the snow melted, it revealed a hair ornament on the ground. It belonged to 26-year-old Sally Andrews, who died of consumption on Christmas Day 1817. Further investigation found her grave empty.

Heinous Crime

Not only did town officials discover a body snatcher had removed Sally’s body, they found seven more bodies missing as well. They included 10-year-old boys Isaac Allen and Phillip Harlow; Mary Millet, aged 35; William Burnham, 79; Elisha Story, 65; and Samuel Burnham, 26.

All had been recently buried. The body snatcher had also taken a colored man who had been buried six years previously.

The furious residents of Chebacco Parish raised the enormous amount of $500 for information about the person who had conducted this “most daring and sacrilegious robbery.”

As a reminder of the heinous crime, eight coffins were left open for the public to view for three months.

Anatomists

The townspeople had no hope of recovering the bodies, as they believed they had ‘passed under the dissecting knife of the anatomist.’

Suspicion fell on the ‘anatomist’ for a reason: In the 19^th century, body snatchers robbed graves to sell to doctors or medical students for anatomical research or lectures. Doctors even did it.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van Rijn

The body snatchers generally targeted fresh graves, as the soft earth made digging easier. Sometimes they hired women to act as grieving relatives who claimed the bodies of the dead at poorhouses. Sometimes they hired women to attend funerals so they could detect any obstacles to the body snatching.

The demand for fresh bodies grew as colleges established medical schools in America. Harvard Medical School, established in 1782 by John Warren, younger brother of Joseph Warren, Aaron Dexter and Benjamin Waterhouse.

Wrote Warren’s son, John Collins Warren, Jr., “No occurrences in the course of my life have given me more trouble and anxiety than the procuring of subjects for dissection.”

Body Snatcher

Thomas Sewall, a promising young doctor in town, was a likely suspect as a body snatcher.

He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1812 and set up a physician’s practice in Ipswich. He also lectured on anatomy to medical students.

The Rev. Robert Crowell described his scientific approach to medicine:

Though endowed by nature with a bold and penetrating genius, and though rich in all the learning of his science and vigilant in marking its progress, he never allowed his judgement to yield to the fascination of theories, or to the authority of systems; but founded his practice on the solid basis of experience.

The townspeople suspected that ‘solid basis of experience’ included dissecting fresh bodies.

Sure enough, authorities discovered he possessed parts of the bodies of Sally Andrews and William Burnham.

Daniel Webster

Sewall hired Daniel Webster as his lawyer, but it didn’t matter. A jury found him guilty on two counts of knowingly and willfully receiving, concealing and disposing of the bodies of two of his patients. The court fined him $800 and ordered him out of the community.

Aftermath

Webster invited him to move to Washington, D.C., to reestablish his career. In 1825 he cofounded the medical department at Columbian College (later George Washington University), and he taught anatomy.

In 1819, Chebacco incorporated into the town of Essex.

Two decades after the body snatcher incident, the townspeople could still barely talk about it, wrote Duane Hamilton Hurd in his book, History of Essex County, Vol. II. Hurd had arrived in town 22 years later, and wrote that a ‘pungency and acerbity in every occasional allusion to it by the majority of the adults.’

If you liked this story about the body snatcher of Chebacco Parish, you may also like to read about Fortune, the slave whose body was used for medical training, here.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Unmaking of Rhode Island’s Manville Jenckes Mills

In 1923, Senator Henry Lippitt decided it was time for him to retire. At age 66, he had served in the U.S. Senate and gone on to run the family’s textile mills, the Manville Mills. With no obvious successor in his family, Lippitt reached out to the owners of the Jenckes Mills. mostly the Jenckes family. Merging their two operations seemed a reasonable approach to ensuring a peaceful succession for the mills. And the Manville Jenckes Mills were born.

Manville had three operations in Rhode Island — Woonsocket, Manville, and Georgiaville. It specialized in fancy, fine cotton clothing, draperies and upholstery fabrics. Jenckes had mills in Pawtucket and Central Falls, R.I., a large one in Gastonia, N.C., and a stake in a Canadian textile mill. Together, they had eight mills with 7,700 workers.

The combined companies had little overlap, and the merger anticipated savings by reducing the overhead and possibly sharing some specialized facilities. In total, it operated 620,000 spindles and more than 10,000 looms.

The stage was set for a disaster.

World War I Prosperity

Sam Slater’s mill. first in the U.S. Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Both Manville and Jenckes had prospered during World War I, but Jenckes, especially, had experienced exponential growth. It produced fabric used to make tires.

The tire fabric business boomed during World War I and in the decade that followed. As demand for tires soared, tire manufacturers signed deals with fabric makers to operate a mill on behalf of that tire company. So one mill might be assigned to Firestone, for example, which would receive its total output. And Firestone would pay the entire cost of operating that mill, plus a fixed percentage of profit for Manville Jenckes.

Over time, the tire companies began demanding better pricing, ordering only as they needed at competitive prices. Some manufacturers simply set up their own fabric divisions. Through the 1920s, Manville Jenckes made up for the changes in business practices by selling to smaller companies.

The fine cloth markets, meanwhile, had been more volatile during the 1920s as the company shopped around for jobs producing sheets, cotton twill or satin, whatever kept the mills turning. With military contracts drying up after the war, the overall textile industry suffered from excess capacity, which kept prices low.

Sales of fine textiles shrank at the new company from $13.2 million in 1924 to just $6.3 million in 1928.

The High Life at Manville Jenckes Mills

Life was good for the owners of Manville Jenckes. The company paid dividends to its owners of $600,000 to $1 million per year leading up to 1929.

Salaries were even richer. Salaries paid to the company management increased from three percent of all revenue in 1924 to five percent of revenue by 1930.

In The Financial History of the Manville Jenckes Company, the author concludes that the management salaries at the family-run enterprise were “high, though not exorbitant.” But the salaries undercut one of the original goals of the merger: reducing overhead. Rather than decrease after the merger, overhead increased over five years by 44 percent.

Henry Lippitt

Labor Unrest

As the family that owned the company prospered, its employees did not. To try to increase profitability, mills would speed up machinery and demand longer days from their employees. In 1927, Rhode Island used its police to force workers to return to the mills. Manville Jenckes simply closed two mills that had formed unions rather than negotiate with workers.

The violence would reach a peak in Rhode Island in 1934 when the National Guard shot four mill workers in Saylesville. When word spread that a crowd of workers were massing at Manville Jenckes North Carolina plant, the governor of Rhode Island banned public assemblies in Rhode Island. The Guard ordered an emergency supply of teargas. The plane carrying it crashed, killing the pilot.

Manville Jenckes’ North Carolina plant saw the worst violence. Northern mills had a long history of shifting work to the South. In the 1920s, a northern mill worker could expect $21.50 for a 48-hour work week. Southern workers got $15.80 for a 55-hour week.

But a squeeze on cotton continued, and even the North Carolina plant pushed its workers to work more hours at faster paces. By 1929, all across the South workers were furious. They walked off the job and demanded the right to unionize. In April of that year, workers struck the Manville Jenckes plant. Police and militia broke it up. In that strike, a local police chief was killed, a crime that was never solved.

End of an Era at Manville Jenckes Mills

The 1929 stock market crash and beginning of the Great Depression took a heavy toll on the tire fabric business. Small tire makers failed by the score. Manville Jenckes sales figures highlight just how deeply the crash hurt the company. In the first half of 1929, sales were $14.4 million. That dropped to $8.8 million during the second half of the year. The first half of 1930 saw the company take in $7.7 million. Only $4.9 million came in during the second half.

The impact on fine textiles was just as bad. Before the crash, annual sales were hovering at $5 million to $6 million. In 1932 the company sold just $2.7 million worth of fine textiles.

What demand for fabric existed focused on cloth used for essentials — underwear, coat linings and casket cloth.

Depression Days

Manville Jenckes had been blindsided by the Depression of the 1930s. The company purchased raw materials well ahead of when it needed them. That way production would not halt should commodities such as cotton become scarce. Now, with no demand for its own goods, the company had a massive oversupply of raw material. To make matters worse, the Depression crushed prices. So raw cotton that Manville Jenckes owned was worth less than half what it had paid for it. Even if it could find a buyer, the company would take huge losses on its raw materials.

The company was pressed to pay for orders of raw goods it didn’t need and years of fat salaries and dividends left it without enough cash to operate.

Mills fell quiet and workers lost their jobs. The pain was passed on to the families that owned the mill, as well, as the dividends stopped.

Sen. Henry Lippitt in 1930 came out of retirement at 73 to try to rescue the mills. Other members of the owners’ families would resign. Lippitt himself would die less than three years later.

In February of 1931, facing demands for money it didn’t have, the company went into receivership and reorganized.

Thanks to The Financial History of Mansville Jenckes Company, by Henry Lippitt II and Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960, by Gary Gerstle.

If you liked this story you might enjoy The Brunswick Children Strike the Cabot Mill. This story last updated in 2022.

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Constance Baker Motley Faces Down Racism

Constance Baker Motley encountered overt racism for the first time when she left her home in New Haven to attend Fisk College in Nashville. She got off her southbound train in Cincinnati to stretch her legs, and railroad workers attached a rusty old car to the train. When she tried to return to her seat, the porter blocked her way. He pointed to a sign that read ‘Colored’ and directed her to the rusty old car.

Constance Baker Motley would, over the course of a long legal career, play an instrumental role in ending public discrimination in the South.

She began her battle against racism, though, before she even got to college. She stole the ‘Colored’ sign.

Constance Baker Motley

She was born Sept. 14, 1921, in New Haven, Conn., the ninth of 12 children. Her parents immigrated from Nevis, part of the British West Indies. Rachel Huggins, her mother, was a domestic worker. Her father, McCullough Alva Baker, worked as a chef for Yale student societies, including Skull and Bones.

Though poor, they belonged to New Haven’s black elite. The family regularly attended St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, founded in 1844 by free blacks, including the grandparents of W.E.B. Du Bois.

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Some people considered West Indians arrogant, and McCullough Baker proved their point. His maternal grandfather was white and all of his grandparents were free. He didn’t think of himself as a black American, wrote his daughter. Olive-skinned, he dressed and walked as if he were president of the First National Bank, she said.

New Haven

Race relations in New Haven were as good as anywhere in New England until after World War II, wrote Constance Baker Motley in her 1999 autobiography. Many abolitionists had taught at and attended Yale, and their descendants helped black children get an education.

She went to integrated public schools in New Haven. At her junior high school, Augusta Lewis Troup, a WPA mural depicted the Amistad mutiny. Her white teachers never taught them about Amistad, though it had been a major historical event in New Haven, she reflected in her book.

As a young girl, her family never discussed slavery, nor that her great-grandmothers had been enslaved.

Constance Baker Motley was a standout student in high school, where she read about black history and current politics. “I began consciously to identify with black America,” she wrote. And she decided to get involved in the civil rights movement – as a lawyer. Her mother wanted her to go into hairdressng.

Many Firsts

A local philanthropist helped pay her way through Fisk, a historically black college. She decided to transfer to NYU, which was integrated at the time. In 1946 she received her law degree from Columbia University Law School.

That same year she married a man very unlike her father, the gentle Joel Motley, Jr., a real-estate and insurance broker.

Thurgood Marshall in 1957

Constance Baker Motley then got a job as Supreme Court Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall’s law clerk. She wrote the original complaint in Brown V. Board of Education, a landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation.

As a civil rights attorney, she visited fire-bombed churches, participated in freedom marches and visited Rev. Martin Luther King in jail.

James Meredith in 1962.

Constance Baker Motley successfully represented James Meredith before the U.S. Supreme Court in his bid to enter the University of Mississippi. She argued nine more cases before the high court, and won eight of them.

She became the first black woman elected to the New York state Senate, then the first to serve as borough president of Manhattan. In addition, she was the first African-American woman appointed to the federal judiciary. In 1978, she ruled Major League Baseball must allow a female reporter into the players’ locker room.

One of her colleagues remembered her as unflappable. She once ran into an opposing attorney in an airport and extended her hand. He refused to shake it.

“Oh, you still don’t shake black people’s hands,” she said. “Very well then,” and sailed off

A Century of Struggle

Constance Baker Motley died of congestive heart failure on Sept. 28, 2005. She was buried at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in New Haven.

Before her death, she reflected on the civil rights movement and concluded:

A century of struggle for equality for black Americans has paid off, in large measure.

Watch Constance Baker Motley talk about her childhood here.

This story was updated in 2022.

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New Hampshire’s Infanticides of 1739

The discovery of New Hampshire’s infanticides began on Saturday, Aug. 11, 1739, when someone found a dead infant girl in a well on the outskirts of Portsmouth.

Suspicion immediately fell on Sarah Simpson, a 27-year-old widow. She probably had little money, as she had spent her childhood as an indentured servant. Her neighbors suspected her of concealing a pregnancy.

But that was just the beginning. Simpson said she hadn’t delivered a baby girl and, to prove it, she led the constable to a spot near the Piscataqua River. There they found the shallow grave of her infant son. Infanticide? She insisted she had delivered him stillborn.

Nevertheless, the constable arrested Sarah Simpson and charged her with concealing the death of her child.

An Epidemic of Child Deaths

The New Hampshire colonists had a heightened sensitivity to the loss of young children. The colony in 1739 had experienced four years of an epidemic of throat distemper, which mostly killed children.

Across New England some 5,000 people died of diphtheria between 1735 and 1740. Three out of four were children. In New Hampshire, where it struck first and worst, 75 out of every 1,000 people died of it. In Portsmouth, the disease killed 80 children under 10.

Infanticides

If Sarah Simpson hadn’t killed the baby girl, who had? The next day, officials questioned Penelope Kenny, the 20-year-old servant of Dr. Joseph Franklin. They suspected her of throwing the baby down the well.

She, too, denied it. The magistrates ordered her examined by several women, probably midwives who believed she gave birth to a child within the past week.

After a night in jail, Sarah Simpson confessed to giving birth to a baby—but a baby boy. She said she ‘put it alive into a tub in her Master’s Cellar and then left it, till Friday-Night following, when she threw it into the River.’

The shocking infanticides (if Sarah Simpson was lying) no doubt resulted from the women’s fears of harsh punishment for having extramarital sex. They probably thought concealing their pregnancies a matter of survival.

But killing and hiding an illegitimate baby brought an even worse punishment than loss of income. In 1714, the New Hampshire General Court passed a law against infanticides, called “An Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murdering of Bastard Children.”

“Whereas many lewd women that have been delivered of Bastard children, to avoid shame and escape punishment, do secretly bury or conceal the death of their children …shall suffer Death.”

They allowed one exception: “except such Mother cann make proof by one witness at least, the Child whose death was by her so intended to be concealed was born dead.”

Guilty

Three weeks after the discovery of the dead child, a jury found Sarah Simpson and Penelope Kenny guilty of concealing the deaths of their children.

Chief Justice Henry Sherburn ordered the infanticides hanged by the neck until they were dead.

The Henry Sherburn house in Portsmouth. Courtesy Library of Congress.

On Dec. 27, 1739, an executioner hanged first Sarah Simpson, then Penelope Kenny, before a large crowd in a field covered with snow.

The mournful spectacle included sermons, confessions of guilt and the anguished deaths of the two women. The infanticides were the first judicial executions in New Hampshire history.

Mysteries

But several mysteries remained: Who had thrown the baby girl into the well? Some still suspected Penelope Kenny as the culprit. And who had fathered the dead children? No evidence exists that suggests officials tried to find out. The women apparently took the secret to their graves.

Between 1623 and 1800, New England executed 29 women, mostly white servants or enslaved African-Americans, for infanticide.

Thanks to The Story of the First Executions in New Hampshire’s History by Christopher Benedetto. This story was updated in 2023.

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