Posted on 10/27/2020 10:08:10 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1784, American Revolutions veteran Dirick (sometimes Dirich or Derach) Grout and Francis Coven (or Coyen) were hanged in Boston for burglary.
Coven was a Frenchman who had come to North America with the French expeditionary force deployed to support the colonial rebels; Grout was a New Yorker of Dutch extraction who had served in the Continental Army. Both were caught up in the economic collapse that hit the newly independent states upon the revolution’s 1780s conclusion — from which soil emerged a property crime wave around wealthy Boston that led Justice Nathaniel Sargent to fret that “vicious persons” now were “roving about the countryside disturbing peoples rest and preying upon their property.” Small wonder when, as the Massachusetts Centinel noted, “we daily see men speculating with impunity on the most essential articles of life, and grinding the faces of the poor and laborious as if there were no God.”
According to Alan Rogers’s Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts (which is also the source of the preceding paragraph’s quotes), there was not only a “sharp jump in the number of postwar executions” but a shift in the proportion of those executions that underscored the Commonwealth’s alarm at its bold and violent thieves:
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Hangin’ for burglary! They didn’t mess around back then.
What they would’ve made of philly today. They could’ve solved that problem, right quick.
Don't we have a resident blog pimp that posts something called the "Economic Collapse" blog? I wonder if his great great great great grandfather published a pamphlet called the "Economic Collapse" pamphlet back then? "Hear ye, hear ye! Collapse lurketh just around the corner! Clicketh here for more!"
“My name is Jimmy. You will respect me!”
Not same guy but...
“My name is Jimmy. You will respect me!”
Not same guy but...
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