No harm to kill Indians’: Equal Rights in a Time of War”



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Columbia University Seminar in Early American History and Culture, May 10, 2005

Not for quotation or citation without author’s permission.

“‘No harm to kill Indians’: Equal Rights in a Time of War”

Richard D. Brown

University of Connecticut

In 1813 the United States was at war. Along its frontiers—north, south, east and west—British forces and Indian warriors, sometimes in concert, invaded United States territory and threatened attack. Though most American citizens lived in safety far from the battlefronts, when they read newspapers and talked with neighbors they knew their nation was at war. In New England particularly, “Mr. Madison’s war” provoked controversy, both principled and partisan. Some found it so detestable that their votes reinvigorated the waning Federalist Party. When His Majesty’s troops seized the United States Capitol and burned it in 1814, their old Mother Country humiliated Americans.

During the previous year newspapers across the United States had filled their pageumns with war news, both glorious successes like Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory on Lake Erie in September, and ignominious defeats like Chateaugay, Quebec, and Chrysler’s Farm, New York, in October and November 1813.1 Most horrific of all was the “Great Slaughter by the Creeks” at Fort Mims in Alabama, where “the Indians entered . . . sat [sic] fire . . . [and] literally butchered” the Americans. According to an eyewitness, inside the fort the Indians burned a house so “old men, women and children, who were in an upper room, were burnt to death.”2 Readers throughout the United States shuddered at such atrocities.

Close to the fighting along the New York-New England Canadian, the terror felt by white citizens put Indian lives at risk. One Indian who feared “he should be considered as hostile to his native country and tribe” was Nicholas John Crevay (or Creway), a Penobscot, who traded across the United States-Canadian border.3 With hostilities destroying his livelihood and threatening his life, Crevay obtained a “passport” from a New Hampshire militia officer so that he and his wife, Sally—one of Quebec’s St. François Indians—could move to safety far from the frontier. Accordingly, in the autumn of 1813 the Crevays made their way into Massachusetts, and in October they stopped at Stoneham, a small town about 250 miles south of the Canadian border, barely ten miles north of Boston. Here they erected a one-room dwelling or “hut,” on the public land surrounding “a beautiful pond in the south part of the town, called Spot Pond, filled with pure water.”4 If the Canadian border was quiet the next spring, the Crevays could return north and resume their usual way of life.

But that did not happen. Three days before New England’s Thanksgiving, on November 23 around ten o’clock at night, while the Crevays were “lying upon their bed of hemlock boughs,” some person or persons fired six times into their shelter. Though this Indian married couple was so distant from the battlefront that they could not possibly “be considered as hostile” to the United States, both husband and wife were shot. Sally Crevay would recover from her lacerations but, after suffering “the most excruciating tortures” for six days, Nicholas John Crevay “died of his wounds.”5 Stunned by this “unheard of and shocking massacre,”6 the people of Stoneham and surrounding towns wondered who could have perpetrated this “horrid and atrocious murder.”7

Local talk rapidly identified four men— Samuel Angier, Alpheus Livermore, Mark Packard, and John Winch, all workers at Ebenezer and Thomas Odiorne’s nail factory in Malden, two miles downstream from Spot Pond. Though the authorities acted promptly, Mark Packard fled before they could arrest and hold him with the others in the state’s jail in Cambridge. So on December 3, four days after Crevay’s death, when the Middlesex County grand jury indicted the four “labourers” for the crime, the state held only three prisoners. According to Solicitor General Daniel Davis’s indictment, the four had used muskets “loaded and charged with gunpowder and iron nails . . . feloniously, willfully and of their malice aforethought, . . . [to] kill and murder, against the peace of the Commonwealth.”8 Regardless of massacres Indians might perpetrate on the frontier, and no matter that the United States was at war, Massachusetts made no mention of Crevay’s Indian identity; it was officially shocked by this brutal crime. The Solicitor General himself would prosecute the defendants vigorously before the Supreme Judicial Court.

But although respectable citizens voiced outrage, the outcome of the trial of four (now three) white men—all Yankees—was uncertain. In all of New England no white man had been convicted for the murder of an Indian since 1676, one hundred thirty-seven years in the past.9 Even if some or all of the defendants were in fact guilty, the evidence in court might be too sketchy to persuade Yankee jurymen that any of the prisoners was guilty beyond reasonable doubt. And if prejudice towards wayfaring Indians operated in the minds of these taxpaying voters, the prosecutor might find it especially difficult to convict the jury’s fellow citizens of a hanging crime. Solicitor General Davis could make the wheels of justice turn, but no one could say whether justice would be done for Nicholas John Crevay, Sally, his wife, or the four nail workers.

The assault on the Crevays, the prosecution of Angier, Livermore, Packard, and Winch, and the question of punishment raised critical questions about equal justice in the early republic. Though in 1776 the new nation proclaimed officially, “all men are created equal,” and Massachusetts abolished slavery within a decade, in 1813 slavery flourished in most of the south and was only gradually fading out in the north.10 For African Americans, Indians, and people of mixed race, equality—social, cultural, economic or political—was scarcely imaginable. 11 Yet though hostile feelings toward Indians might be common, no responsible citizen could condone murder. The right to live was fundamental. As a result, the proceedings against Angier, Livermore, Packard and Winch for the murder of Nicholas John Crevay tested whether the actual life of an Indian man could be valued equally with the lives of others, especially in wartime.

Facts on the ground swiftly demonstrated the imperfect character of criminal justice. One defendant absconded even before the grand jury returned the indictment on December 3, 1813. Packard’s flight seemed prima facie evidence of guilt, and his absence complicated questions about the culpability of the others. The case was tangled further when, in order to allow Winch’s wife, Hepzibah, to testify in defense of Angier, the judges ruled that Winch’s trial must be separated from that of Angier and Livermore. As a result, Angier and Livermore would go first before the bar of justice; and Winch would stand trial only after the jury had rendered judgment in their case. Before any trial began, four defendants had been reduced to three, and those three prisoners would be tried in two separate proceedings.12

Before trial, early republican newspapers seldom reported criminal events, so it is not surprising that printed notice of the Crevay murder appeared only after the verdict. “We avoided saying a word previous to their trial,” proclaimed the Boston Patriot, which identified Crevay as Indian, “but the cause of humanity and the character of our country are too much concerned to cover over an atrocious deed of this nature.”[i] Earlier, when the Boston printers David Watson, Jr., and T. G. Bangs had learned of the case they saw it stirred exceptional interest, so they arranged to print a transcript from “minutes taken at the trial.” The commercial opportunity presented by the trial of local white men for the “Murder of Nicholas John Crevay, an Indian,” led them to produce a dense 50-page pamphlet, which they promptly advertised in Boston and Worcester for 25 cents.[ii]

The actual trial of Alpheus Livermore and Samuel Angier was unremarkable from a legal or procedural standpoint. Held on Wednesday, December 15, 1813, it began around nine in the morning and ended at “a late hour in the evening.”[iii] Spending one full day on a capital case was commonplace. In all, thirteen witnesses testified on the events surrounding the crime: a physician; a militia officer expert on guns; three neighbors of the Crevays; five nail factory workers; one owner of the nail factory; the keeper of a shop where nail workers gathered to drink; and John Winch’s wife, Hepzibah, in whose house Samuel Angier boarded. One eyewitness to the crime, Sally Crevay, was not called to testify, presumably because she lay severely wounded and was expected to die within a few days.[iv] Neither Angier nor Livermore testified because courtroom rules disqualified defendants in capital cases from testifying owing to their presumed temptation to swear falsely in their own defense.

The prosecutor began by laying out a circumstantial account of the crime. According to the press report of the trial, which emphasized the victim’s Indian identity, Crevay was “one of the Penobscot tribe of friendly Indians,” who “with his squaw, had placed his wigwam near the Spot Pond in Stoneham.”[v] Solicitor General Davis explained that he “had rendered himself obnoxious to the people in the vicinity by repeated instance of ill conduct.” Indeed on the day of the murder Crevay “was found in a state of intoxication at Malden, where he was severely chastised by some of the people in that neighborhood.”[vi] According to one nail worker, “the Indians were very saucy. . . . They were drunk, and used ill language. . . . Because they could get no more rum . . . they threatened me, and called [militia] captain [Unite] Cox a damned rascal.”[vii]

That evening another worker testified that Angier declared “The Devil take the Indians, or damn the Indians,” and invited him “to go and pull down the wigwam and burn the boards.”[viii] Angier, Livermore, Packard, and Winch had wanted to “’’rout’ or drive off the Indians” for several days according to the Solicitor General, and on the evening of November 23, after sharing a quart of gin with co-workers, had “avowed to their fellow workmen, their intention of attacking the Indians.” Both Angier and Livermore were seen making their guns ready and preparing cartridges. Winch vowed “’that if he went to rout the Indians, he should fire nothing lighter than lead.’” After making these threats and asking others to join them, the defendants left the factory. When the time elapsed that it would have taken them to walk to Spot Pond, neighbors heard six shots in the vicinity of the Crevays’ dwelling.[ix] The next morning Nicholas Crevay was found “mangled by a charge of iron nails of the largest and common size,” and “the Woman was shot through the body by one or more musket balls . . . [and] her clothes and skin were burnt by the [muzzle] blaze.”[x] No one testified to seeing Angier and Livermore do the deed, but both had spoken of such an attack, prepared for it openly, and an attack had been carried out—with fatal consequences. Their defense, that Livermore’s gun was later found to be rusty and so had not been fired, and Hepzibah Winch’s testimony that Angier had been home in bed at the time the guns were discharged, did not persuade the jury. After an hour’s deliberation, the twelve Yankee voters returned a guilty verdict against both men.[xi]

The next day, December 16, 1813, their fellow nail worker, John Winch, stood trial—defended by the same attorneys, Samuel Hoar and Abner Rogers, with the addition of the prominent Boston lawyer, Harrison Gray Otis.[xii] Winch’s jury was also largely the same. Though five jurors were new, Winch faced the same foreman and six other men who had decided Angier’s and Livermore’s guilt. Proceedings against Winch went quickly, but since no report of Winch’s trial was published, neither prosecution or defense arguments, nor any sworn testimony, survives. Witnesses in Angier and Livermore’s trial had seemingly implicated Winch equally, and the nail worker George Dexter had testified that Winch “declared if he went, [to rout the Indians] he would not fire anything lighter than lead.’”[xiii] But the jury found John Winch, a somewhat older married man, not guilty.[xiv] Perhaps Harrison Gray Otis’s skills as defense counsel—six years earlier he had won exoneration for the defendant in a celebrated murder case—and the alternate jurors made the difference.[xv] It is also possible that the jurymen, having condemned two fellow citizens for the murder of a single Indian, refused to send a third man to the gallows.

Now, with Samuel Angier and Alpheus Livermore looking on, Solicitor General Davis moved that the two convicts be sentenced to death. Their penalty had never been in doubt since, as Justice Samuel Sewall announced, “the punishment by law appointed is Death!”[xvi] But Sewall did not simply pronounce sentence. He delivered a homily. After acknowledging the Crevays’ misbehavior, Sewall reinforced certain prejudices against Indians while confronting others by asserting Indians’ equal right to the protection of the law. His was a complicated message that reflected the ambiguous, narrowly conceived commitment to equal rights characteristic of Sewall’s class and region.

He began by assuming the hostility Crevay excited must be explained by “the supposition of offensive conduct on his part.” Directing some blame for the crime at the victim, he characterized Crevay in Indian stereotypes: “Untutored, wild, sunk in poverty and wretchedness, he had been especially in the drunken fits which were frequent with him, troublesome, unruly, saucy, as the witnesses expressed it, and disposed to irritate and abuse the people of the neighborhood.” Not only was Crevay ignorant, impoverished, and “wild,” the judge declared the Indian did not know and keep his place. That Crevay was “troublesome, unruly, saucy,” made him provocative; perhaps especially to free white workingmen whose self-discipline enabled them to know and keep their place. “Unhappily,” Sewall continued, “the resentment conceived against him, general as it was, was also accompanied with contempt, with a most erroneous prejudice and delusion.” Whereas the judge, like other respectable citizens, could condescend to tolerate a misbehaving Indian, “it seems to have been an opinion, adopted and talked over there, that Indians were not to be regarded as human beings; but were exposed as wild beasts or vermin, to be hunted and destroyed.”[xvii] This opinion Sewall pronounced “a most erroneous prejudice and delusion.”[xviii]

The day before Sewall had treated this very theme in his charge to the jury. The victims, he had admonished, “were, though Indians, of the human species, of the great family of mankind, and had derived, as we ourselves have, the capacities and rights of human creatures, from that God who created of one blood all the nations of the earth.” The fact that “this community are now engaged in a war, in which certain tribes have arranged themselves with the public enemy, and are to be considered as hostile to the people of the U.S.,” could not mitigate the crime. Even if Crevay had been part of “a hostile tribe or prisoner of war, when received among us into the bosom of our society, his person and life were to be regarded as in safety, under the protection of the laws.”[xix] Sewall could understand Angier and Livermore’s behavior: “probably inflamed with gin, . . . and mutually exciting each other . . . in purposes of inhuman sport,” they lost their “feelings of humanity” and committed an “atrocious murder.” The lesson for all was never “to steel and harden their hearts against their fellow creatures.”[xx] Sewall closed his homily by advising the convicts to use “the interval which may be allotted you” to prepare their souls by “earnest and deep repentance.” Then he repeated the formulaic words “you shall be hanged by the neck, until you be dead, dead, dead—and may God have mercy on your soul.”[xxi] Thereupon the sheriff returned Angier and Livermore to jail to await the Governor and Council’s determination of their execution date.

In Boston Nathaniel Coverly, junior, a printer with an eye for the sensational, quickly printed two broadsides on the nail workers, embellished with images of respectably dressed men labeled “Angier” and “Livermore,” as well as with sentimental, cautionary religious verse.[xxii] The first broadside, “TRIAL FOR MURDER,” reprinted information the Boston Patriot provided on the background of conflict between the nail workers and Crevay as well as the Patriot’s description of the defendants at their trial. To describe Crevay as “drunken . . . , troublesome, unruly, [and] saucy,” was not the whole story: “it does not seem the provocation was great on the part of the Indian man, and the woman knew nothing of the parties. Some of these young men,” the Patriot had reported, “condescended to engage in a wrestling match with the Indians [sic] who lived in a hut in Stoneham near Spot Pond.” But Crevay humiliated them: “He threw all that engaged with him; they thereupon united and threw him into the water, in a place where he might have been drowned.” Not satisfied that Crevay had learned his place from this icy bath, a day or two later the nail workers enacted “a wanton piece of barbarity” by shooting the Indians in their beds.[xxiii]

Moreover, according to Coverly and the Patriot, the two young men compounded their vicious behavior with “unbecoming levity” in the courtroom: “What their ideas could have been we cannot divine; they must have thought that wantonly killing an Indian could not endanger their lives.” This “barbarous idea,” the broadside claimed, “was too prevalent in the neighbourhood where this murder was committed.” The condemned men, their fellow workers and neighbors did not appreciate that “God has made of one blood all the families of the earth . . . be their color whatever it may.”[xxiv]

The verses that followed, by emphasizing that Angier, age 20, and Livermore, age 19, were “youths of years but few,” imply that Coverly’s “TRIAL FOR MURDER” broadside, though providing some account of the crime, served chiefly as a lesson for youth. Its message, that God’s sovereignty and mercy knew no racial boundaries, stressed that: “The human race is dear alike,/ Unto their Saviour Lord,/ Savage, or Turk, or Heathen born,/ Do tremble at his word.”[xxv] Coverly’s second broadside, “THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER,” used the same images of Angier and Livermore as the first, but contained no details of the episode. It emphasized the crime of murder and Judge Sewall’s admonition at sentencing.[xxvi]

Drawing on a long tradition of commercialized piety, the printer aimed at inculcating the moral lesson of a traditional execution sermon, and as in a sermon Coverly began with a quotation derived from scripture, Proverbs, 1:10-16: “My Son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not: If they say, come with us, let us lay wait for blood; walk not thou in the way with them.” Coverly, like Judge Sewall, stressed that the criminals had followed a depraved logic in believing that “killing an INDIAN . . . to their perverted minds was doing God justice!” In fact, God had created mankind of one blood and “a savage is the creature of the Creator, born of the human race, his life at the disposal of the Deity alone!” Like an evangelical preacher, the broadside asserted that “perhaps in the bosom of an Indian reigns as much love of God, as in that of a civilized Christian.” Declaring that all should seek God and follow the golden rule, Coverly closed his prose text by expressing his hope that “the example of punishment about to be inflicted upon these unfortunate men, may inculcate a serious lesson to youth, and indeed to all those who walk in the ways of darkness.” Like the earlier broadside, “THOU SHALT DO NO MURDER” concluded with sentimental religious verse.[xxvii]

From the perspective of printers like Bangs and Watson, and Coverly, a murder, especially a sensational one like Crevay’s, and the prospect of an execution day, offered commercial opportunity. A year before all three printers had profited from the execution of Samuel Tully for piracy.[xxviii] Now, by hurrying broadsides into print in anticipation of the execution day, Coverly hoped for advance as well as immediate sales to the crowd of execution spectators. Like Bangs and Watson’s trial report and the newspaper coverage, Coverly reinforced Massachusetts’ official message: the life of an Indian must be protected equally with others’.

But whether Angier and Livermore would actually hang was not yet certain. Normally the Governor and Council set the execution date at least a month after sentencing to allow convicts time to prepare their souls for death and to seek pardon through petition. Massachusetts allowed no judicial or legislative appeal from a decision of the Supreme Judicial Court, but the Governor, with his Council—in common with executives everywhere—possessed the power to pardon or commute a sentence to serve the cause of justice or if they judged the convict deserved mercy. If no one petitioned to save a prisoner or if the judges expressed no qualms about the trial, then the executive set a date, the governor signed a death warrant, and the sheriff executed the convict.

Although at trial Angier and Livermore evidently behaved “with unbecoming levity,” the jury’s verdict and Judge Sewall’s death sentence concentrated their minds wonderfully. In little more than a fortnight both men made “a declaration, or confession” to the Reverend Ezra Ripley, the minister who had previously visited them in jail and counseled them that “while they concealed the truth & favored falsehood,” the two men “could have no grounds from reason or revelation, to expect pardon & acceptance with God.”[xxix] But unlike the classic confessions of guilt and repentance that church and state sought to extract from gallows-bound convicts, though Angier and Livermore expressed contrition they denied they had attacked the Crevays.

Each man began with the conventional formula: “as a dying man, & in the presence of God, to who I must give account, do solemnly swear.” Livermore denied he ever went “to the wigwam of the Indians,” though he confessed he “had thoughts of going with others to rout the Indians.” But on hearing Winch’s threat that “he would carry nothing lighter than lead,” Livermore swore he “determined not to go.” Instead, “after doing some writing,” on the night of November 23 he had gone to bed. Angier’s “confession” reinforced Livermore’s denial: “Alpheus Livermore did not go with us.”[xxx]

Angier admitted he had gone with Winch and Packard “to the wigwam of the Indians;” but he claimed they had “charged their guns with powder only.” All three had, he conceded, “fired his gun about the hut,” but “not into it.” Then, hearing no sound within the dwelling, they started to leave. But “Winch proposed returning to the hut, on which Winch loaded the three guns saying, if I load them, I will wake them up.” So for a second time all three approached the Crevays’ “wigwam.” Now “Winch searched & found the door, put in his gun & fired; on which some body in the hut said you have hurt me very much, my friend.” Next, Winch seized Packard’s gun “went to the hut & fired into it,” and before Angier could discharge his gun harmlessly into the woods, Winch “snatched it from me & went back to the hut & fired it.” Then they all hurried away. “Packard & I,” Angier said, “were convinced that Winch had fired something more than powder;” Winch “would not tell us, but laughed at us.” Angier ended his declaration professing, “had I supposed any injury to the bodies of the Indians was intended, I should not have gone.” He had “no intention of any harm to their persons, much less killing them, but only of frightening them.”[xxxi] According to Angier, Winch had misled him and Packard into being his accessories while he committed murder. Livermore was wholly innocent.

Three days later, Angier and Livermore’s attorney, Samuel Hoar, Jr., sent a copy of their “declaration” to Harrison Gray Otis, the senior colleague and state senator who had helped win acquittal for John Winch. If Hoar felt chagrined for aiding in a miscarriage of justice, there was only a hint of discomfort in his letter. “I fully believed the declarations true,” he told Otis, though he could not “determine . . . what infatuation prevented their making the statement to me before their trial.” Livermore’s father, he explained, would call on Otis for advice on how to proceed.”[xxxii] Though no record survives of Otis’s counsel, judging from the subsequent actions of the family, friends, and neighbors of Angier and Livermore, the Boston attorney advised them to generate as many petitions and signatures on behalf of the condemned men as they could. This would have been standard advice, because since the creation of the Commonwealth in 1780 petitions often gained relief. Only a quarter of those condemned to death had sought pardons, but among those who did, about half won commutations or outright pardons. When petitions enjoyed substantial public support, convicts’ chances of success were even better.[xxxiii] The fact that Angier and Livermore were young and had no prior convictions lent hope to the idea that the Executive might be merciful.

What followed was a larger, more extensive petition campaign than Massachusetts subjects and citizens had ever before mounted, one that tested the ideal of equal justice before the law. Back in 1676 when four men were sentenced to hang for murdering Indian women and children, a single petition asked clemency for the two convicts who signed it.[xxxiv] Now, in the republican era, a 1797 campaign on behalf of a condemned Irish sodomite had garnered 445 signatures on four petitions from citizens. In 1801 the campaign to save the life of “a dark skinned Hindoo” rapist brought seven citizens’ petitions with 121 signatures; and in 1805 two petitions carrying the signatures of 102 citizens called on the Governor and Council to save from hanging a man who raped his daughter.[xxxv] Now, early in 1814, the lawyers for Angier and Livermore, and the young men’s parents started a petitioning campaign that yielded 10 citizens’ petitions with 584 signatures plus those of the convicts and their parents.

The number of petitions and signatures would be impressive to the Governor and Council. But it would be mistaken to view this outpouring on behalf of Angier and Livermore simply as a massive “backlash” against the execution of two Yankees for murdering an Indian. Though 584 signatures on 10 petitions was more than ever before, these numbers may have been smaller than Samuel Hoar, Jr., Harrison Gray Otis, and others who led the effort expected. For the first time ever in Massachusetts, these leaders had paid to print a petition form, presumably with the idea of circulating it so widely as to garner dozens of petitions with thousands of signatures. In fact, however, only four of the citizens’ petitions came back on the printed forms. And though one used supplemental pages to carry 193 signatures, the other three petition forms included a total of just 65 signatures. The majority of petitioners (56%, 326) added their names to handwritten texts.[xxxvi]

Moreover the clustering of petitioners revealed the effort to save the two nail workers never caught on widely in any part of Massachusetts. Instead, petitioning was limited to Malden and the towns where the two convicts and their families had once dwelled. The largest number came from: Frankfort (in Maine), where Alpheus’ older brother, Daniel Livermore still resided; Malden, where the two worked at the Odiorne nail factory; and Reading and Andover, where Angier had grown up. These towns, where selectmen, justices of the peace, and one representative to the Massachusetts legislature actively supported the petitions, accounted for 91% (530) of the signatures.[xxxvii] Boston, where one of the Odiorne brothers was a nail merchant, and where Harrison Gray Otis commanded a following, supplied most of the rest (9%, 50 names).

Still, the arrival of so many petitions supported by so many citizens, and the “confession and declaration” of the prisoners demanded Governor Caleb Strong’s and the Council’s attention. All the petitions, as was customary, began by expressing respect for the trial and jury, and all condemned Crevay’s murder. But there were also differences. Most emphasized that the trial evidence was “circumstantial” rather than conclusive, and that there was good reason to doubt that Livermore actually participated in the attack. In addition, they noted that the judges acknowledged that the defendants acted more out of the misguided notion that Indians did not enjoy equal protection, than “premeditated malice.” The Reading and Andover petition, which was silent on Livermore, testified that the 88 signers had “known Angier from his childhood and have never seen in him any vicious propensity whatever.” The 19-year-old was a “sober and industrious youth” who “must have been seduced by John Winch.”[xxxviii]

The most poignant appeal came from Angier’s parents, Asa and Abigail. Admitting they “did hope and expect that Samuel was not present, when the horrid deed was perpetrated,” they acknowledged their son confessed to being there. “Our feelings upon the reception of the dreadful information,” they said, were “too deeply wounded for us to describe.” Asa and Abigail went on to plead their own distress and Samuel’s steadfast family assistance. Among their six younger children was Daniel, who was “deformed and has been a cripple from his infancy.” In addition, Asa had been “from sickness” unable to work for years until recent months, so the family had depended on Samuel, “a dutiful and obedient son.” “Four years,” they declared, “has he paid sixty dollars a year to us for our support and his little brothers and sisters.” Winch must be the guilty party because their son could not have intended to go “to the Indian hut with any motive other than that of frightening them.”[xxxix] Winch, of course, had already been tried and acquitted.

Arguments and appeals like these, if not quite standard, were not rare. Although prosecutors regularly explained to jurors that circumstantial evidence was sufficient for a capital conviction, as with claims of youth and doubts about malicious premeditation, pardon pleas grounded exculpatory claims on such arguments. Governor Strong and the Council could not brush off the petitions. Impressive for their number, their signatories, and their substance, the Governor and Council decided to heed the appeal of the Malden petitioners who, headed by four Selectmen, had asked them “to resort to such means as may be within the power of the Executive, to ascertain with greater certainty the guilt or innocence of these unhappy young men.” Accordingly in mid-January 1814, instead of scheduling Angier’s and Livermore’s execution, the Council appointed a committee to collect further evidence.[xl]

This “Livermore and Angier” committee acted quickly. Employing the Middlesex County sheriff and his deputy, as well as Justices of the Peace, they sought witnesses who could testify as to the facts of the case, and accepted personal testimonials regarding the characters of the accused men. In a month’s time they or their agents traveled to Carlisle, Lynn, and Malden to take depositions from 14 witnesses, including Nicholas John Crevay’s wife, Sally.[xli] They also accepted three affidavits on behalf of the character of Alpheus Livermore, one coming from his older brother Daniel of Frankfort, Maine. But after evaluating this supplementary evidence, the Livermore and Angier committee made no immediate recommendation to the Governor and Council. There was, they were convinced, more to be learned. In the coming month George Odiorne, the Boston nail merchant, would be traveling to Philadelphia and would track down the missing Mark Packard to get his account of the episode. Since Packard had nothing to lose from telling the truth, and since circumstances prevented him from comparing stories with the other defendants, information from him could be especially useful. In the meantime Angier and Livermore, like other convicts, would wait in jail.

The Livermore and Angier committee next met on May 23 and 24, 1814, when it took sworn testimony from 13 more people, seven of whom it had not heard from before. Much of this evidence pointed toward Winch as the ringleader. A new Malden witness, a nail worker named Rand, reported “Wynch asked him to go up that evening with him to rout and kill the damned Indians,” and that Winch had offered him “a good musket and ammunition,” and would “treat him with a good supper,” as well as give him “a three dollar bill to go.” When Rand refused, Winch “swore that if he could not get any others to go with him he would go alone and kill them.” Moreover, on the night of the attack, Samuel Brown, Jr., an occasional boarder at Winch’s house, stated that before the men left that evening “it was observed it was no harm to kill Indians. We were at war with them. There was no law to hurt them for killing Indians.” Later that night, when Brown asked if “those who went to rout the Indians had returned,” a fellow boarder, Aaron Osgood, said, “he guessed they had killed them.”[xlii]

Osgood, lived some 30 miles north of Malden in Salisbury, and evidently also used Winch’s house occasionally as an inn. In a separate deposition he reported an episode that particularly enraged Winch toward Nicholas and Sally Crevay. One day “the Indians” had gone into the house “just after we had dined.” Whether they were paying customers or beggars is not clear, but “they wanted some meat,” Osgood reported, and “Winch’s wife as I understood gave them each a piece.” Then Crevay “told his Squaw to sit down & eat her dinner.” Next, when “Winch’s wife took up the dish to carry away [,] the Indian put his hand in to the dish & took out some meat.” Though grabbing meat from a common dish may have been usual in an Indian household, this breach of deferential, respectable manners ignited Winch’s rage: both Indians, he said, were “saucy” and Winch declared, “if he ever catch’d them he would lay them in the door yard or knock them down.” Later, “it was mentioned in the factory that they had behaved saucily at Odiornes” as well. Finally, Osgood reported hearing “conversation that it was no shame to kill these Indians and that the Indians at the Westward had scalped the whites.”[xliii] This incident, like Crevay’s wrestling matches with nail workers described in the Boston Patriot and Coverly’s “TRIAL FOR MURDER” broadside, was never mentioned in the trial. But together these conflicts helped explain neighborhood motives for teaching the Crevays a lesson; and they identified the Indians’ most vociferous antagonist as John Winch.

The May 23, 1814 testimony offered by Mr. George T. Odiorne, younger brother of the nail factory owners, reinforced the idea that Winch had led the assault. Odiorne, who sold imported iron and steel goods as well as Malden nails from his shop on the Boston waterfront, had returned from Pennsylvania where he had spoken to Mark Packard, whom he found working at a nail factory outside Philadelphia. Packard told Odiorne the attack on the Crevays had indeed been launched from Winch’s house, and when Packard had entered the room where Winch was loading his gun, “Wynch order’d him out, saying he did not wish any one to see what he loaded his gun with.” Moreover, just as Angier had claimed, Packard reported that when their first round of shots outside the hut “did not rouse the Indians, . . . they concluded they were not there.” But, again confirming Angier’s story, Packard said after the men began to depart, “Wynch proposed to load their guns again to fire them into the hut and then burn it.” So they all returned towards the dwelling; but Winch alone “went to the door of it and fired his gun into it,” and immediately grabbed the other guns and did the same. “They then,” according to Packard, “all returned home.”[xliv]

Thus George Odiorne’s second-hand report of Packard’s account reinforced the two convicts’ “confession and declaration.” But the day after giving testimony, Odiorne realized he “left the Committee yesterday with an impression in their minds that Packard had confirmed Angier’s declaration as it respects Livermore,” so he “called on one of the Committee . . . and told him that . . . Packard had positively declared that Livermore was present.” Packard said he and Livermore shared a gun, but denied either had gone “up to the hut.”[xlv] So while much of Angier’s and Livermore’s “confessions” seemed accurate, if Packard spoke truly, each convict had sworn to a lie by denying Livermore’s actual participation in the attack. Odiorne believed Packard, and stated his conviction that Packard had no knowledge of Angier’s story when he gave his version of events.

The Livermore and Angier committee, having now collected supplementary information from nearly two-dozen people, having weighed numerous petitions and studied the printed trial report, as well as considered the “confessions and declarations” of the two convicts, was ready to act.[xlvi] The committee declared “the charge of the Court and the verdict of the Jury were correct.” The judicial process had not miscarried. But Angier and Livermore, they concluded, “were instigated to the crime . . . by a much older person . . . who . . . accompanied them and who, at several times . . . had expressed the most inveterate malignity towards the murder’d Crevay & his wife.”[xlvii] The committee also judged that there was reasonable doubt as to Angier and Livermore’s intentions. There was “reason to believe” the young men “did not go out with an intention to murder Crevay and that they did not actually fire the guns by which he was killed.” But the two nail workers were not innocent: “they most probably knew that the guns were loaded with balls or nails, and that one or both of the Indians were killed or wounded by them.” Consequently they were “guilty of the crime . . . in a legal if not moral sense.”[xlviii]

But should the two young men be executed? The committee decided otherwise arguing, “the ends of publick justice will be best promoted by granting . . . a pardon on condition that they be imprisoned in the State’s prison for life.” The convicts should spend the first four months in “the solitary cells” and the rest at “hard labour.” The next day, May 25, 1814, almost exactly six months after the attack, the Governor and Council, having “read & maturely considered” the recommendation, voted to accept it and one week later the commutation was announced in the press.[xlix] Massachusetts’ record of never executing a white man for the murder of an Indian since 1676 would remain intact.

Ironically, the post-judicial examination of evidence in the Crevay murder pointed to the guilt of one individual, John Winch, the sole person who had been acquitted of the crime. In this sense, certainly, the Massachusetts courts had perpetrated a gross miscarriage of justice, effectively reinforcing the idea that “it was no harm to kill Indians.” Moreover, except for Samuel Angier, Alpheus Livermore, and Mark Packard, every person who gave evidence to exculpate Angier and Livermore in the petitioning period from January through May 1814 could have provided the same information in December 1813 to convict Winch. That they did not was partly a function of the prosecutorial system of the time and place, which relied heavily on informal investigation and reports volunteered prior to trial. This system correctly identified the parties for Solicitor General Davis to prosecute, and it provided important witnesses. But it was a hurried, improvised system that, as the later investigation demonstrated, was far from complete. Regardless of the race or class of victims and defendants, the system supplied “rough justice” according to present-day standards.

No one expected the prosecution to spend the time and money that the Governor’s Council invested in the case, because the prosecution customarily relied chiefly on “the hue and cry” of the neighborhood. It was the people in the vicinity who determined that a crime had been committed at the coroner’s inquest; and the same array of neighbors informed the prosecution as to witnesses who might supply testimony. In this case, the respectable elite of eastern Massachusetts was horrified by Crevay’s murder, but nail factory workingmen and their neighbors felt ambivalent. On the day of the assault, and earlier, most of these men, perhaps convinced that God had, indeed, “made of one blood all the families of the earth,” had rejected Winch’s attempt to raise a vigilante mob against the Crevays.[l] But three of their fellows—Angier, Livermore, and Packard—had taken the bait. Perhaps these three were among the workers Nicholas Crevay had humiliated at wrestling.

Because of their ambivalence, it appears some men with indirect knowledge of the crime kept silent during the two trials in December. Judging from Angier and Livermore’s reported “levity” at trial, the two defendants must have supposed they would be acquitted as, indeed, Winch would be the next day. After all, as Samuel Brown, Jr., recalled, the talk of the factory had been that “it was no harm to kill Indians. We were at war with them. There was no law to hurt them for killing Indians.”[li] And Aaron Osgood had casually reported the general “conversation that it was no shame to kill these Indians and that the Indians at the Westward had scalped the whites.”[lii] Under these circumstances, though neighbors and co-workers would not swear falsely to conceal evidence, neither were they eager to assist in the prosecution of their own. The prosecutor had called the crime an “unheard of and shocking massacre,” and he characterized Angier and Livermore’s acts as “savage and brutal;” but press accounts refrained from sensational censure, and related the facts only.[liii] In Malden, one suspects, Crevay’s passing aroused few tears. In Angier and Livermore, nail workers could see themselves if they had crossed the line to follow Winch’s lead. Malden householders saw the two young men as sons, brothers, and faithful hired men to whom they owed protection, not blame. [Boston press is another story, and the evangelical overtones suggest perhaps that the printers there didn’t know the local circumstances that tended to whitewash the young men whose waywardness the printers sought to highlight. I don’t think you need to put this here, but perhaps in another place it’s worth making some allusion to the difference between local and more regional coverage of the case?]

So if they were relatively passive when Angier and Livermore went to trial, they sprang to action later when these co-workers and neighbors stood condemned to hang. The nail factory bosses, the Odiornes, joined with Malden’s political leaders to take the lead in circulating pardon petitions and seeking additional evidence. Family and friends of Angier from his earlier residence in Andover and Reading, and family and friends of Livermore from his years in Frankfort joined the movement to save their lives. That they succeeded was partly the consequence of their respectability and their numbers. Since the governor and council took seriously even a single petition in a capital case, these officials were bound to give thorough consideration to petitions from hundreds of citizens, including justices of the peace, selectmen, and a state representative. The pardon appeal was so weighty that the Governor and Council took the exceptional, perhaps unique step of investing time and resources to develop a full investigation of the facts beyond the trial record.[liv]

The executive’s decision to commute the convicts’ sentences to life in prison was unusual in some respects, because the Governor and Council explicitly affirmed the correctness of the conviction “in a legal sense.” But they also noted their doubt that Angier and Livermore had fired the guns that killed Crevay, as well as their conviction that a “much older person . . . with the most inveterate malignity” actually instigated the crime. Here their decision followed the long-standing custom of treating the youth of the condemned as exculpatory. The paternalist condescension they expressed was regularly invoked to diminish the responsibility of women, children, and youth who could—albeit selectively—be forgiven transgressions for which adult men were held accountable.[lv] Unlike Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, however, the executive did not mention the misguided prejudices of the convicts and their neighbors toward Indians. Sewall, in speaking of the “aversion to the Indians, and dislike of them, [that] had become general in the neighbourhood,” had been explaining the circumstances of the crime, not mitigating it.[lvi] Blocking such prejudicial conduct was one of the aims of the whole judicial process, so prejudice could not be presented as an extenuating factor for the guilt of the murderers.

Yet Sewall, by acknowledging local prevalence of the “most erroneous prejudice and delusion . . . that the Indians were not to be regarded as human beings; but were exposed as wild beasts or vermin, to be hunted and destroyed,” had recognized this “absurd” view as contributing to the crime. “The prisoners,” he said, were “sincere in trusting to this opinion,” and “acted under the strange infatuation . . . without fear of consequences almost openly and boastingly.” Though not intended, the Chief Justice’s enlightened condescension toward the criminals’ “delusion” and “infatuation” could be seen as mitigating their actual guilt.[lvii] The Governor and Council, who read Sewall’s remarks and shared his outlook, may have seen Angier and Livermore as not fully culpable because of their backward, ignorant views toward Indians as well as their youth.

But if the two young men became more worthy objects of mercy in the case of the murder of an Indian, one doubts that ignorant, youthful prejudices would have mitigated their guilt had their victim been a respectable white person. Sewall’s firm insistence to the jury that “an Indian has the same protection as a white man,” was necessary because of prevailing prejudices. Yet Sewall himself had voiced prejudice toward the “untutored, wild, . . . drunken” victim, and it was due to exactly those prejudices that the two nail workers could garner such broad community support, so many signatures on so many petitions that the Governor and Council took the extraordinary step of reopening the case to collect further evidence.[lviii] The aftermath of Angier’s and Livermore’s commutation, when the Solicitor General turned to indict John Winch for “assault . . . with an intent . . . to kill and murder . . . the wife of one Nicholas John Crevay,” reveals the ambivalent motives of Massachusetts authorities and their constituencies.[lix]

Contrary to the murder of her husband, Solicitor General Davis required significant prodding to take up the assault on Sally Crevay. Only after Alpheus’s father, the Baptist minister Jason Livermore, made a complaint against Winch in February 1814, did Davis prosecute the assault on “the wife of Crevay.”[lx] So unconcerned had Davis been with her fate initially, that when he wrote the indictment for Winch in April 1814, five months after the attack, he could not supply her full name—identifying her only as “a certain Indian woman, named Crevay, . . . (the Christian name of which woman is . . . as yet unknown).”[lxi] Then, after the Middlesex Grand Jury indicted Winch, his trial was held over to November 1814. At that time Winch pleaded “not guilty,” and his trial was postponed again, to April 1815, when Davis asked for a further delay, “stating that the witnesses for the government” were not in attendance. Thereafter the Court continued Winch’s case from term to term until October 1816, when Attorney General Perez Morton, finally directed the indictment “to lie on the files of this Court until further order.” In the meantime the Supreme Judicial Court discharged Winch, so he was never punished for his role in the attack on the Crevays.[lxii]

Moreover, Alpheus Livermore and Samuel Angier not only escaped hanging, their actual punishment was less than that ordered by the Governor and Council on May 25, 1814. First, humane principles interceded for the prisoners, because when the Council learned that four consecutive months of solitary confinement would be “greatly injurious to the constitution and health of the unhappy prisoners,” it rearranged the convicts’ punishment to start with 60 rather than 120 days “in the solitary cells,” to be followed twice at annual intervals by 30-day terms in solitary confinement. Instead of concentrating the most severe punishment at the beginning, the Council spread it over two-and-a-half years.[lxiii] Even before that time had elapsed, while Winch’s case was being repeatedly postponed, Livermore and Angier again requested pardons, the former in October 1815 and both men in February 1816.[lxiv]

Nor did the friends of the two convicts forget them. In August 1815, the second year of their imprisonment, 32 residents of Frankfort, led by their selectmen, petitioned for Livermore, testifying again to past good behavior and their belief that “the agency which he might have had” in the crime “proceeded more from thoughtlessness than from any malignity of heart.”[lxv] Later, many of the men from Malden—headed by the five selectmen and the Congregational pastor—as well as petitioners from Reading and Andover tried again. Making the same arguments as in 1814, they stressed the same themes and claimed the two young men were merely “accomplices.”[lxvi] For the present, however, the Governor and Council laid the petitions aside.

Only in January 1818, when Angier and Livermore had served just over four years behind bars, did the Council again appoint a committee to review their case. This committee found that both prisoners had “conducted themselves with uniform regularity and been obedient to the Laws” of the state prison. Consequently there was “good reason to hope they may become good citizens & useful members of Society.” More important, handwritten petitions from the several towns, “signed by Clergymen, Magistrates and hundreds of other citizens,” demonstrated that “a strong opinion prevails in favor of a pardon.” Whereas “at the time of the conviction and for many months after the public feeling was in unison with the conviction,” the Council committee explained, “and for a long time since, that feeling has been changed.” Disclosure of facts “not known at the trial” had turned public sentiment around. In addition, the committee reported the Penobscot tribe “have expressed their willingness that the . . . Convicts may be restored to liberty.” They concluded that inasmuch as the two men were “sincerely penitent” and no longer endangered public safety, “the object of punishment” had been achieved. So the committee recommended, and the Council and Governor adopted, a full remission of Angier’s and Livermore’s remaining sentence. That same day, January 29, 1818, Governor John Brooks issued their pardon.[lxvii]

What are we to make of their punishment and, more broadly, of Massachusetts’s response to the murder of Nicholas John Crevay and the near-fatal attack on his wife, Sally? In the first instance, certainly, the prosecutions of the four nail workers in December 1813 marked public revulsion against the violent assault on the two strangers, even though the victims were Indians who, it was believed, had transgressed community standards of behavior. From the outset the nail workers had supporters, but state officials and citizen jurors were ready to prosecute and convict for so heinous a crime as murder. And at first the verdict against Angier and Livermore was popular. As the Boston Patriot declared: “It is a melancholy [sic] thing to see two such young men perishing on a gallows; but it is not so dreadful as the idea of a man and his wife being shot in their beds.”[lxviii] Concurring, Boston’s Independent Chronicle condemned “this depravity of wanton killing,” declaring “the late horrid murder cannot but excite the commiseration of the public for the unfortunate aboriginals.”[lxix] Even in wartime the ideal of equal rights prevailed.

But after justice won its courtroom victory, compassion turned from the victims toward the convicts—hardworking young men with few advantages and many sympathizers. This transfer of sympathy, from victim to criminal was not new; in 1805 the Otsego County, New York, child murderer Stephen Arnold, first provoked angry revulsion, conviction, and a death sentence, but gradually he won public sympathy and commutation for a crime no less heinous than Crevay’s murder. As in Angier and Livermore’s case, once the convict was locked up and seemed penitent, he became an object of sympathy.[lxx]

In the case of the nail workers the idea that the older man John Winch was the truly guilty party, not his young and impressionable accomplices, led many men to petition for pardon. Ultimately it was this judgment, and the report that Angier and Livermore behaved properly in prison and appeared penitent, that won their release—even though officials believed they had lied about their role in the assault. Both the public and executive officials concluded that four years in jail was a suitable punishment for Angier’s and Livermore’s part in attacking the Crevays.

But what about John Winch? The fact that following his acquittal for murder the state pursued Winch only halfheartedly for the brutal attack on Sally Crevay, suggests that Chief Justice Sewall’s injunction that Indians be accorded the same human rights, the same protections of the laws as others, did not command broad or deep public support. The casual way that authorities identified Sally Crevay, never bothering to establish her Christian name, also suggests that gender as well as race were operating in their minds. If in practice the protection of an Indian man was less important than the protection of a white man, then the safety of an Indian woman seemed to warrant even less concern. It may be, of course, that there was little or no evidence to find against Winch; but more likely the Malden nail workers who cooperated to win pardons for Angier and Livermore in 1814 were less cooperative when it came to prosecuting Winch in 1815.

For elite Massachusetts leaders, it mattered that the War of 1812 and the popularity it lent them was over. In 1815 and 1816 resurgent Republicans made Federalists pay for their participation in the discredited Hartford Convention. When Winch came before the Supreme Judicial Court after the war it cannot have been a winning strategy for Federalists to risk such popularity as they still enjoyed by asserting equal protection for Indians or any minority. The electoral majorities who preferred Republicans, after all, were chiefly interested in asserting majority rights, not protecting minorities. Ironically, the prosecution and conviction of Samuel Angier and Alpheus Livermore for the murder of Nicholas John Crevay suggests that equal rights before the law was more fully realized during the War of 1812 than afterward. In New England “Mr. Madison’s War” had strengthened the political grip of the Federalist elite, allowing them to assert paternalist ideas of equality before the law as public policy—up to a point. Notwithstanding popular revulsion against Indian frontier violence, officials like Chief Justice Samuel Sewall, who sought to uphold the principle of “the great family of mankind . . . created of one blood,” could command public support. In the aftermath of the War, majoritarian male democracy came to overshadow Federalist notions of paternalism that recognized rights for African Americans as well as Indians.[lxxi]

-----------------------

1 Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989), 144-45, 147-48.

2 Columbian Centinel (Boston), October 6, 1813, p.1.

3 The Trial of Alpheus Livermore and Samuel Angier (Boston, 1813), 8. Variant spellings include: Creway, Cruay, Crouay (a town in Normandie, France).

4 Same, and John Warner Barber, Historical Collections, . . . of Every Town in Massachusetts (Worcester, 1841), 428.

5 Trial of Livermore and Angier, 8, 9.

6 Same, 9.

7 Same, 6.

8 Same, 4, 5.

9 Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “Massacre at Hurtleberry Hill: Christian Indians and English Authority in Metacom’s War,” William and Mary Qtly., 3d Ser., 53 (1996), 459-86.

10Paul Finkelman

11 Hortons, Daniel Mandell, Douglas Wood Sweet

12 Trial of Livermore and Angier, 3-5.

[i] Boston Patriot, Dec. 18, 1813, p.2. Newspapers reported Crevay’s Indian identity from the start.

[ii] Same; adv. in Boston Gazette, Dec. 20, 1813, p. 2, Dec. 23, 1813, p.3, Jan. 1, 1814, p.4; Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette, Jan. 19, 1814, p. 4. One year earlier Bangs and Watson missed out on the printing of A Report of the Trial of Samuel Tully and John Dalton, on an indictment for Piracy (Boston, 1812), a work that Joshua Belcher issued in three editions between 1812 and 1814; but they had printed The Life of Samuel Tully: who was executed at South-Boston, Dec. 10, 1812, for piracy (Boston, 1812).

[iii] Columbian Centinel, Dec. 18, 1813, p. 2.

[iv] Same.

[v] Same.

[vi] Trial of Livermore and Angier, 8.

[vii] Same, 26. The worker was Daniel Townsend.

[viii] Same, 19. The worker was Nathan Robinson.

[ix] Same, 10, 16.

[x] Same, 8, 9.

[xi] Same, 38, 39, 47.

[xii] Commonwealth vs. Alpheus Livermore, &al., Records of the Supreme Judicial Court, November term 1813, Middlesex County, Massachusetts Archives. The addition of Otis, assigned by the Court, is puzzling. It may be that the nail factory owners, the Odiornes, who were in partnership with a third brother, George Odiorne, a Boston merchant, were responsible for bringing the distinguished Otis into the case.

[xiii] Same, 22.

[xiv] Columbian Centinel, Dec. 18, 1813, p. 2.

[xv] See [Thomas O. Selfridge], Trial of Thomas O. Selfridge, Attorney at Law, before the Hon. Isaac Parker, Esquire, for Killing Charles Austin, on the Public Exchange, in Boston, August 4th, 1806 (Boston, n.d. [1807].

[xvi] Same, 48.

[xvii] Same, 49.

[xviii] Same, 49.

[xix] Same, 43.

[xx] Same, 49, 50.

[xxi] Same, 50.

[xxii] On Coverly see: Daniel A. Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature and the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 178-82 and passim.; Daniel A. Cohen, ed., The Female Marine and Related Works: Narratives of Cross-Dressing and Urban Vice in America’s Early Republic (Amherst, Mass.: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1997), ix-xi, 2-7

[xxiii] [Samuel Angier and Alpheus Livermore], “Trial for Murder. Boston, December 18, 1813,” broadside, American Antiquarian Society. All but the final quotation in this paragraph are identical in the Boston Patriot account of December 18, 1813, and the Coverly broadside.

[xxiv] Same.

[xxv] Same. Check exact age for Livermore and provide citation. According to the undated 1814 pardon petition submitted by the inhabitants of Reading and Andover, Angier was a “youth of nineteen years.” Gov. Council Recs., Massachusetts Archives.

[xxvi] [Samuel Angier and Alpheus Livermore], “Thou Shalt Do No Murder,” broadside, American Antiquarian Society. In this broadside Coverly called attention to Samuel Tully’s execution for murder the year before, an occasion when Coverly had printed two broadsides with “The Last Words of Samuel Tully, who was Executed for Piracy, at South Boston, December 12, 1812,” each illustrated with a woodcut of the execution, one published over the name “Timothy Longlive.”

[xxvii] Same. The religious verse was virtually identical to the first broadside. The commercialization of piety is treated fully in Cohen, Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace.

[xxviii] See n. 13 and n. 35.

[xxix] Certification of Rev. Ezra Ripley dated Concord, Jan. 17, 1814, attached to “Confessions” of Angier and Livermore to Rev. Ezra Ripley, Concord jail, Jan. 7, 1813 [sic, i.e. 1814], a copy. Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass..

[xxx] “Confessions” of Angier and Livermore to Rev. Ezra Ripley, Jan. 7, 1813 [sic, i.e. 1814], a copy. Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Mass.

[xxxi] Same.

[xxxii] Samuel Hoar, Jr., to Hon. H.G. Otis, Concord, Jan 10, 1814, Massachusetts Archives, Boston.

[xxxiii] For statistics on Massachusetts death sentence pardons and petitions see Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown, “Pardons Won and Pardons Lost: Narratives from Massachusetts, 1780-1820,” unpublished paper delivered at American Historical Association meeting, Boston, Jan. 5, 2001, table 3 “Massachusetts Death Sentence Pardon Petitions and Outcomes (excluding treason), 1780-1819. This shows that 9 out of 17 petitioners won pardons or commutations. Note that during the period there were 67 death sentences and 58 executions, and only one quarter, 17 of the 67 sentenced parties, submitted petitions. Notable failures of citizen petitions include Ephraim Wheeler (rape, 1805), Joseph Drew (murder, 1808), Henry Phillips (murder, 1817). Compiled from the Records of the Governor’s Council, Pardons Granted Files, and Pardons Not Granted Files, Massachusetts Archives, Boston, and Daniel Allen Hearn, Legal Executions in New England: A Comprehensive Reference, 1623-1960 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999).

[xxxiv] Pulsipher, “Massacre at Hurtleberry Hill,” William and Mary Qtly., 3d Ser., 53 (1996), 460n., 483-4.

[xxxv] Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown, The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest, and Justice in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), ch. 6 (pp.189-229, 336-46.)

[xxxvi] These numbers have been compiled from the petition papers in Gov. Council Recs., Massachusetts Archives. They are not now strictly accurate as they may include some duplicate names, and have not been double-checked by the author for accuracy. The petition form, which in printers’ terms was a “broadside,” began with the words: “To His Excellency CALEB STRONG, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Subscribers beg leave respectfully to express their PETITION and hope, that your Excellency may see fit to grand a PARDON to ALPHEUS LIVERMORE and SAMUEL ANGIER . . ..” According to the G. G. Barnhill, the American Antiquarian Society curator of prints and broadsides, at least 50 to 100 copies of such an imprint would have been required to make it a viable printing job.

[xxxvii] The list of signatures on the petition from Malden was headed by four selectmen, whose names were grouped and designated “Selectmen of Malden,” almost as if the petition was a formal act of the town meeting. Two Malden and two Frankfort justices of the peace signed petitions, in addition to the Frankfort delegate to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

[xxxviii] Reading and Andover petition for pardon for Samuel Angier, n.d., Gov. Council Recs., Massachusetts Archives. The “premeditated malice” language is from the undated manuscript Malden petition, same location.

[xxxix] Asa Anger [sic] and Abigail Angier, pardon petition for their son, Samuel Angier, n.p., Jan. 19, 1814, Gov. Council Recs., Massachusetts Archives.

[xl] Appointment of this committee is probably in the Governor’s Council Records, but I do not have it. The date given is extrapolated from the dates of Rev. Ezra Ripley’s communications with Council (Jan. 7-14) and the dates of depositions providing further evidence (beginning Jan. 17). Other evidence in the records identifies Councilor Benjamin Pickman, Jr., as the chair of the committee, and Councilors George Bliss and William Prescott as his colleagues.

[xli] Nathaniel Austin account for witnesses, Feb. 23, 1814, bill for $21 approved by the committee for payment, and by the Council for payment, Gov. Council Recs., Massachusetts Archives. See also the depositions and affidavits in the Livermore and Angier file.

[xlii] For testimony of E. Rand, Samuel Brown, Jr., and part of Samuel Osgood testimony see: “A – Testimony Received May 23 & 24 [1814],” Gov. Council Records, Massachusetts Archives.

[xliii] Aaron Osgood statement, May 7, 1814, Salisbury, Mass.. Taken by George Bliss. Gov. Council Files, March 1814-May 1815, Box 22.

[xliv] G. T. and E. Odiorne sold a variety of Swedish and English iron and steel for marine and general uses from their shop at the corner of Milk and Batterymarch Streets, Columbian Centinel, Nov.13, 1813, p. 4. Odiorne’s testimony, and that of E. Rand are from document “A – Testimony Received May 23 & 24 [1814],” Gov. Council Records, Massachusetts Archives.

[xlv] “A – Testimony Received May 23 & 24 [1814],” Gov. Council Records, Massachusetts Archives.

[xlvi] The report comments that the printed trial report was “correct,” according to the judges who attended the trial. “Report on applications to pardon Livermore and Angier, May 25, 1814,” Gov. Council files, 1814. Massachusetts Archives.

[xlvii] The word “Indians” is crossed out and Crevay and his wife are inserted as more precise and according to the indictment. Same.

[xlviii] Same. I have reversed the order of the phrases.

[xlix] Same. Boston Gazette, June 2, 1814, p. 2.

[l] [Samuel Angier and Alpheus Livermore], “Trial for Murder. Boston, December 18, 1813,” broadside, American Antiquarian Society.

[li] Samuel Brown, Jr., testimony: “A – Testimony Received May 23 & 24 [1814],” Gov. Council Records, Massachusetts Archives.

[lii] Aaron Osgood statement, May 7, 1814, Salisbury, Mass.. Taken by George Bliss. Gov. Council Files, March 1814-May 1815, Box 22.

[liii] Crime stories often began with a sensational headline: “HORRID RAPE and MURDER !” (Worcester Aegis, July 11, 1804, p. 2); “HORRID MURDER,” same, July 23, 1806, p. 2; “A DEVIL INCARNATE,” same, July 29, 1807, p. 3.

[liv] In the period I have studied closely, 1780-1820, this is the only case that led to such a post-trial investigation. On general practices see: Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, ch. 6.

[lv] Report on applications to pardon Livermore and Angier, May 25, 1814,” Gov. Council files, 1814. Massachusetts Archives. It is important to note, however, that in some cases males under age 18 were held responsible for capital crimes and executed, for example the 16-year-old Stephen Merrill Clark (arson, 1821), who came from a respected, white Yankee family. In 1813 the 18-year-old Yankee, Ezra Hutchinson, was executed for rape.

[lvi] Trial of Livermore and Angier, 43.

[lvii] Trial of Livermore and Angier, 49.

[lviii] Same, 43.

[lix] Supreme Judicial Court Records, Middlesex, October 1816, pp. 601-02, Massachusetts Archives.

[lx] Governor’s Council Records, vol. 37 (1812-1814), p. 429. Massachusetts Archives. The name had appeared on an earlier January 1814 deposition presented to the Livermore and Angier committee of the Governor’s Council, of which Solicitor General Davis was apparently ignorant.

[lxi] Supreme Judicial Court Records, Middlesex, October 1816, pp. 601-02, Massachusetts Archives.

[lxii] Same. Winch did serve some months in jail for failing to appear at a court date and thus defaulting on a $1200 bond due to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for his appearance at court. Supreme Judicial Court Records, Middlesex, Nov. 1815-Jan. 1816, pp. 274-75, Massachusetts Archives.

[lxiii] Governor’s Council Records, vol. 37 (1812-1814), pp. 439-40. Massachusetts Archives.

[lxiv] Livermore’s petition is dated “State Prison, Oct. 23, 1815,” Gov. Council Files. Angier’s & Livermore’s petition to “his Excellency Caleb Strong, Esqr. and the Honr. Council,” Feb. 1, 1816, Gov. Council Files.

[lxv] “Petition in favour of Alpheus Livermore,” docketed by A. Bradford, Secretary of the Commonwealth, Oct. 30, 1815, Gov. Council Files, Massachusetts Archives.

[lxvi] Second Malden petition, n.d., Gov. Council Files, Massachusetts Archives.

[lxvii] “Report,” Jan. 29, 1818, and “Livermore & Ainger [sic]. Punishment remitted,”Gov. Council Files, Massachusetts Archives; Governor’s Council Records, v. 39, (1816-1818), pp.213-14.

[lxviii] Boston Patriot, Dec. 18, 1813, p. 2.

[lxix] Independent Chronicle, Dec. 20, 1813, p. 3.

[lxx] Alan Taylor, “’The Unhappy Stephen Arnold’: An Episode of Murder and Penitence in the Early Republic,” Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, 1997), 96-121.

[lxxi] John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: negotiating race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), see ch. 6 on the general context.

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