Guest blogger Ken Miller tells us about his research on three Massachusetts women during the American Revolution.
The American
Revolution carried grave consequences for Bathsheba Spooner, a suspected
loyalist in Worcester County, Massachusetts. The daughter of the reviled Tory,
Brigadier General Timothy Ruggles, the thirty-two-year-old Spooner orchestrated
the murder of her well-to-do husband, Joshua, in early March 1778 with the help
of three co-conspirators—her young lover, the teenaged Continental soldier,
Ezra Ross, and William Brooks and James Buchanan, two British prisoners of war
captured during the Battle of Saratoga. After beating their victim to death and
disposing of his corpse in the family well, his assailants hastily divided
their spoils. Apprehended, tried, and convicted for the grisly crime soon
thereafter, all four malefactors perished at the gallows on July 2, 1778.
Tragically, revolutionary authorities chose to disregard legal precedent and hang
Spooner even though she had reached an advanced stage of pregnancy, with her
post-mortem exam revealing a five-month old fetus.
I spent the
month of February at the David Library researching the Spooner case as a
short-term residential fellow. I’m approaching the controversy as the
centerpiece of an anticipated microhistory designed to illuminate the perils of
loyalism across Massachusetts during the initial years of the Revolutionary
War. To contextualize the murder, I conducted extensive research in Britain’s
loyalist claims and colonial office records, the British headquarters papers,
and the correspondence of the Massachusetts general, William Heath. I also
perused the papers of Robert Treat Paine, the case’s prosecuting attorney,
uncovering long neglected trial testimony.
My
investigations ultimately shed light on the wartime travails of Spooner’s more
obscure Worcester County neighbors, underscoring the painful costs of
allegiance for Whig and Tory alike. Among the loyalist claims, for example, I
located the petition of the widow Ann Greenleaf, a Bolton resident who
courageously defied local Whigs by carrying intelligence to the enemy until she
was finally discovered and forced to take refuge behind British lines in late
1778. Sarah Duncan, by contrast, the wife of a loyalist merchant, refused to
abandon her home and family, prompting her devoted husband to remain in
Worcester and brave the wrath of vengeful patriots. The stories of these
diverse Massachusetts women illustrate the wide range of female experiences
during Americans’ first civil war.
As for
Bathsheba, the site of her husband’s slaying, the infamous Spooner well,
remains an historic landmark, located just off East Main Street in Brookfield,
Massachusetts. Alas, two hundred and forty years after the crime that sent her
to the gallows, Bathsheba’s final resting place remains unknown.
Ken Miller is
associate professor of early American history at Washington College in
Chestertown, Maryland, and the author of "Dangerous
Guests: Enemy Captives and Revolutionary Communities during the War for
Independence," just released in paperback by Cornell University Press.
