Abstract
On 12 May 1778, during the American Revolution, the New Hampshire Gazette reported the murder of Brookfield, Massachusetts resident, Joshua Spooner. William Brooks, James Buchanan and Ezra Ross were charged with Spooner’s murder. Spooner’s wife, Bathsheba, was charged as an accessory. All four were convicted and sentenced to death. Mrs Spooner engaged Ross, a 17-year-old Continental army veteran with whom she was having an affair, to kill her husband. Impatient with Ross’s progress she recruited Buchanan and Brooks, British soldiers from General John Burgoyne’s captured army, to participate in the plot in exchange for ‘the deceased’s watch, buckles, and a thousand dollars’. Brooks eventually beat Spooner to death and the three men hid his body in his well. They were apprehended with money and Spooner’s goods. Bathsheba was soon arrested for complicity.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 (Cambridge, 2009), 1–19.
Paul H. Smith, ‘The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength’, William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 259–277.
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011), 357.
Jere R. Daniell, Colonial New Hampshire: A History (Millwood, NY, 1981), 240–244;
and Jere R. Daniell, Experiment in Republicanism: New Hampshire Politics and the American Revolution, 1741–1794 (Cambridge, MA, 1970), 109–112.
On petit treason, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), 119–120.
On the Ruggles’s family’s loyalism, see Deborah Navas, Murdered By His Wife: A History With Documentation of the Joshua Spooner Murder and Execution of His Wife, Bathsheba, Who Was Hanged in Worcester, Massachusetts, 2 July 1778 (Amherst, MA, 1999), 14–28 and 93.
‘To Sir William Howe’, New Hampshire Gazette, 12 May 1778. On the fusion of familial and governmental authority, see Kathleen Wilson, ‘Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender, and Governmentality in Eighteenth-Century British Frontiers’, American Historical Review (AHR) 116/5 (2011): 1294–1322;
Carole Shammas, A History of Household Government in America (Charlottesville, VA, 2002), 52–82;
and Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 1992), 17–52 and 151–191. On the threat to the American republic and virtuous marriage presented by the ‘vile seducer’,
see Jan Lewis, ‘The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic’, William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 689–721.
Classic studies of Loyalist ideology and experiences include: Robert McCluer Calhoon, The Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973);
and Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA, 1974).
Important recent studies that focus on Loyalist diversity and identity formation include Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (Charlottesville, VA, 2011);
and Liam Riordan and Jerry Bannister (eds), The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto, 2012). Some of the most dynamic new scholarship focuses on the Loyalist diaspora and its effects on the subsequent development of the British Empire in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. See Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles.
The Stamp Act Crisis (1765–1766) was the result of a tax imposed by the British Parliament on its American colonies that required a stamp issued by the Treasury office on paper used for certain legal transactions, recreational goods, and materials printed in the colonies. See Edmund S. Morgan and Helen H. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (3rd edn, Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), 72.
Thomas Paine, ‘Reflections on Unhappy Marriages’, in Common Sense and Related Writing, ed. Thomas P. Slaughter (Boston, 2001), 71–72.
Daniell, Experiment in Republicanism, 74–112; and Paul W. Wilderson, Governor John Wentworth and the American Revolution: The English Connection (Lebanon, NH, 1994), 221–265.
As shown by T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York, 2010), 166–167 and 203–206; these committees, originally called for by the Continental Congress to enforce a plan of boycotts (called ‘the Association’) in protest of the 1774 Coercive Acts, were truly Revolutionary bodies constituted at the provincial (later state) and local level that enforced Revolutionary policy and authority.
Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996), 252–277; on women and boycotts, see Kerber, Women of the Republic, 37–41; on Revolutionary France,
see Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (University Park, PA, 1994);
and Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, NJ, 2001), 3–30.
On the centralization of power in Revolutionary France at the expense of local authority, see Alan Forrest, The French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 62–70; on the Committee of Public Safety,
see R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 1989), 28–32 and 108–110.
On provisions of Loyalist Claims, see Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists and the American Revolution (New York, 1969), 181.
Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), 249–311;
Nancy Christie, ‘“He is the master of his house”: Families and Political Authority in Counterrevolutionary Montreal’, William and Mary Quarterly 3/2 (2013): 341–370;
and Janice Potter-MacKinnon, While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women in Eastern Ontario (Montreal, 2003), 128–160
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2016 Gregory T. Knouff
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Knouff, G.T. (2016). Seductive Sedition: New Hampshire Loyalists’ Experiences and Memories of the American Revolutionary Wars. In: Forrest, A., Hagemann, K., Rowe, M. (eds) War, Demobilization and Memory. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40649-1_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-40649-1_16
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-58038-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40649-1
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)