Skip to content

The American Malefactor’s Dictionary: bingo and its variants

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Go to The American Malefactor's Dictionary

bingo

– whiskey, brandy, or other strong drink; liquor.

bingo-boy

– a drunken man; a drunkard.

bingo-mort

– a female drunk.

Sources

  • Barrère, Albert and Charles G. Leland. A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon, and Cant. [London]: The Ballantyne Press, 1889.
  • Grose, Francis and Egan Pierce. Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Revised and Corrected. London: Printed for Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1823.
  • Farmer, John S. and W. E. Henley. A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English. Abridged from Slang and Its Analogues. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1912.
  • Matsell, George W. Vocabulum: Or, the Rogue’s Lexicon.. New York: George W. Matsell, 1859.
  • Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of the Underworld. New York: Bonanza Books, 1961.

Note: See “Cant: The Language of the Underworld” to learn more about the background of the American Malefactor’s Dictionary.

Filed in Dictionary | Tagged | Comments (0)

Early American Criminals: Henry Tufts’s Thanksgiving

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

[display_podcast]

Go to Early American Criminals

Note: This post follows “Early American Criminals: Henry Tufts’s Bill of Goods, a Preamble.”

Over the last year or so, Early American Crime has focused on burglars in early America, and Henry Tufts was one of the most prolific. He committed burglaries throughout New England for a good part of his life before retiring to a farm and writing his memoirs with the help of a ghostwriter. The length of Tufts’s narrative and the variety of crimes he committed besides burglary make it impractical to recount the complete history of his life through blog posts. As a result, the next few articles on Early American Crime will cover Tufts’s early fall into a life of crime and highlight his life as a burglar, but will leave aside his many other crimes for future treatment and study.

Apples, Pears, and Cucumbers

Henry Tufts was born in Newmarket, NH on June 24, 1748. He had a happy childhood until he hit the age of fourteen, when he “exhibited numerous indications of that natural propensity to theft” by stealing apples, pears, cucumbers, and other fruits.

These small crimes emboldened Tufts to try even more daring thefts. One time while walking through a farmer’s field, Tufts came across a sickle, so he hid it in some bushes and continued on his way. When the owner of the sickle missed it, he immediately suspected Tufts. In a rage, the farmer confronted Tufts’s father and charged Henry with the theft, but Henry steadfastly denied having taken the sickle. After several rounds of argument and accusations, the owner finally left unsatisfied and Henry went unpunished. Tufts waited a year before retrieving the sickle and then selling it (although how much he got for what presumably had become a rusty sickle is not covered in his book).

In another episode that could have come out of a Mark Twain novel, Tufts and two of his friends concocted a scheme to steal a loaf of bread and some cheese from “a steady old farmer” named Stevens and then rob his cucumber yard. The two friends were not as experienced in the criminal arts as Tufts was, so one of the boys got cold feet and proposed instead that he procure the bread and cheese from his father’s house. In the mean time, Tufts and the other companion went into the field and took as many cucumbers as they could carry.

When the three reconvened and sat down to enjoy their gains, Tufts decided that he wanted all of the spoils to himself. He secretly threw a pebble at the back of one of his companions to startle him and then jumped up and cried, “they are coming in pursuit of us.” The two other boys ran off in terror. After Tufts ensured that his two friends had returned to their homes, he went back to the food and transferred it to another hiding place. The next day Tufts told his friends that after they ran off he was overtaken by Stevens, who made Tufts agree to provide him with three days labor as punishment. The two boys each offered to give Tufts a day’s work apiece as part of their share in the “common penalty.”

A Prodigal Son

When Tufts turned 20 he asked his father to give him some of his inheritance to help him start a life on his own. His father denied his request and informed him that he intended to give the entire estate to Henry’s oldest brother. Henry was flabbergasted by the answer, but most likely Tuft’s father did not want to split up his meager estate into unprofitable pieces. With no education, Tufts saw little to no prospects for his future. He wrote, “It is written (as ‘tis said) in the Hebrew annals, that the man, who gave his son neither property, education nor trade, brought him up to be a thief. The truth of this was verified in me.”

After considering all the work he did for his father as a boy, and believing that he should be compensated in some way for his contribution in helping to support the family, he stole his father’s horse, rode it to the town of Chester, and sold it for thirty dollars. After only two months of traveling and doing odd jobs, the money Tufts got for the horse began to run out, so Tufts returned to his father a prodigal son, gave his father what little money he had left from the sale of the horse, and incurred his father’s wrath.

An Unsatisfying Lifestyle

At the age of 22, Tufts married Lydia Bickford of Durham, NH. Their marriage bliss was interrupted, however, by a false accusation that Tufts had stolen two bags of rye. Tufts was acquitted of the charges, but the incident, combined with the criminal acts of his youthful past, ruined his reputation and credit and sent his family into poverty. Faced with a choice of remaining with his family in poverty with a ruined reputation or of leaving them to head out into the world where he would be met as a stranger, Tufts chose the latter. He said goodbye to his family, traveled eastward, and ended up near Saco, ME, where he secured a job clearing land and tending livestock.

Tufts worked alongside a man named James Dennis, who listened to Tufts complain about his inability to support himself and his family in the lifestyle to which he aspired. Dennis proposed that they rectify this situation by robbing a store in Saco owned by a Mr. Pickard. Tufts had never attempted such a serious crime before, but with trepidation he agreed to go along. After the duo broke into the store in the darkness of night, Dennis directed Tufts to serve as lookout while he combed the store. Dennis did not find much money, so he packed up two large bundles of English goods and other commodities worth about two hundred dollars. The whole process took about a half hour.

The two burglars traveled quickly to Wells, ME in order to drop their score off at the house of Richard Dutton, who was a friend of Dennis’s. After celebrating their successful venture with drink the next day, Dennis and Dutton set out in the evening to sell some of the goods. They made the mistake, however, of asking such a low price for the articles that the potential buyers suspected they were stolen. The interested party called a magistrate, and Dennis and Dutton were arrested. Dutton received a pardon for telling the authorities all he knew about the stolen goods and confessed that more were hidden back at his house. Under heavy questioning Dennis admitted to carrying out the burglary and also impeached Tufts.

When the authorities arrived at Dutton’s house to arrest Tufts, they discovered him in bed with Dutton’s wife. They seized him and threw him in the jail at Falmouth, which is now called Portland. After spending a couple miserable months in prison, Tufts and Dennis decided to create a fire and burn their way out, but the flames quickly fanned out of control. The two prisoners were forced to cry for help, and when aid finally arrived the two convicts were practically suffocated. The prison-keepers rescued the two malefactors and fought the fire for three hours until they finally snuffed it out.

Thanksgiving

The fire made the Falmouth jail unsuitable for holding any prisoners, so the authorities proposed moving the two burglars to the Old York jail. But with Thanksgiving just around the corner, the authorities instead put Tufts and Dennis under guard with Mr. Modley and his family until the holiday was over. Tufts writes of the experience, “Here gratitude obliges me to give testimonial to the humanity and benevolence of that gentleman, to whom is due my peculiar thanks, for using us, while left in his family, as well as I have since fared in any part of America.”

The day after Thanksgiving, Tufts and Dennis were transferred to the Old York jail. During the journey, Dennis broke out of his irons and escaped. Once Tufts arrived at the jail, he was held in heavy irons and placed in the most secure ward. He remained in such a state for nineteen days, until Mr. Pickard, the owner of the burglarized store, showed up. He told Tufts that he would drop the charges against him if Tufts would agree to serve on a three month’s voyage on his brother’s ship to the West Indies. Tufts jumped at the opportunity, and the two headed off to join the vessel. During the journey, Pickard decided to stop at a tavern. He allowed Tufts to continue on ahead and said that he would catch up to him in a short while. Tufts, however, missed a turn, and the two never met up again.

Note: The story of Henry Tufts continues with “Henry Tufts’s Partners in Crime.”

Sources

  • Tufts, Henry. A Narrative of the Life, Adventures, Travels, and Sufferings of Henry Tufts. Dover, NH: Samuel Bragg, 1807. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank.
  • Williams, Daniel E. “Doctor, Preacher, Soldier, Thief: A New World of Possibilities in the Rogue Narrative of Henry Tufts.” Early American Literature 19.1 (Spring, 1984): 3-20.
Filed in Criminals | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Early American Criminals: Henry Tufts’s Bill of Goods, a Preamble

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

[display_podcast]

Go to Early American Criminals

The main source of information about the burglar and thief Henry Tufts differs from many of the previous sources that document the lives of early American criminals. The most obvious difference is the length of A Narrative of the Life, Adventures, Travels, and Sufferings of Henry Tufts, which was published in 1807. Up until this point, most criminal narratives were printed on one-page broadsides or in booklet form. Tufts narrative goes on for 366 pages.

The length of Tufts’s narrative means that it offers a greater amount of detail about his crimes, thoughts, and motivations than previous criminal accounts. Tufts also took on a greater number of professional identities besides burglary, including horse thief, doctor, preacher, counterfeiter, con man, soldier, trapper, trader, showman, speculator, fortune teller, and wizard. This varied life is like no other burglar whose life story had appeared in print before this time.

The tone and treatment of Tufts’s crimes in the narrative is different as well. Whereas the confessions of most burglars from the colonial period are full of remorse, Tufts’s account of his criminal past is light-hearted and invokes laughter. His story is a picaresque and lacks the usual piety of his predecessors. This difference in tone could be attributed to the fact that earlier burglars told their life stories from death row, while Tufts told his from the comfort of his retirement on a farm.

Yet another difference between Tufts’s narrative and its predecessors is that it is ghost-written with a self-conscious literary style. True, many of the ministers who regularly visited burglars and other criminals awaiting execution had at least some hand in the writing or publishing of their life stories. But the literary technique used to evoke irony and satire in Tufts’s narrative is much too sophisticated for Tufts to have written it himself. Tufts admits in his book that he received no education, and the historical records that he left behind indicate that he was semi-literate, if even that.

Which brings us to another crucial difference: Henry Tufts as the narrator of his own story is an unreliable one. In the few cases where the historical record coincides with an episode in his book, Tufts inevitably gets the details wrong. In addition, the action of Tufts’s story sometimes differs from what Tufts the narrator says about it, and contradictions and inconsistencies appear frequently throughout the book. This discrepancy between Tufts as the Narrator and Tufts as the Subject of his book gives the ghostwriter the tools he needs to create a literary criminal narrative.

Henry Tufts emerges in his book as a colorful character who, despite his assertions that his narrative is an attempt to atone for his past actions, clearly relishes telling the tales of his criminal adventures. I like to think that the ghostwriter saw the inherent literary potential of Tufts’s character, and used his propensity for exaggeration and self-delusion to enhance the story. But for these reasons, we must read Tufts’s narrative with the knowledge that we may be buying a bill of goods in the process.

Note: The story of Henry Tufts continues with “Henry Tufts’s Thanksgiving.”

Sources

  • Tufts, Henry. A Narrative of the Life, Adventures, Travels, and Sufferings of Henry Tufts. Dover, NH: Samuel Bragg, 1807. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank.
  • Williams, Daniel E. “Doctor, Preacher, Soldier, Thief: A New World of Possibilities in the Rogue Narrative of Henry Tufts.” Early American Literature 19.1 (Spring, 1984): 3-20.
  • —. “My Only Practical Atonement: Variations of Personality and Performance in the Narrative of Henry Tufts.” South Central Review 8.1 (Spring, 1991): 23-36.
Filed in Criminals | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The American Malefactor’s Dictionary: billy noodle

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Go to The American Malefactor's Dictionary

billy noodle

– 1. “a soft fellow that believes the girls are all in love with him”; 2. a ladykiller; 3. a conceited ass.

Sources

  • Farmer, John S. and W. E. Henley. A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English. Abridged from Slang and Its Analogues. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1912.
  • Matsell, George W. Vocabulum: Or, the Rogue’s Lexicon.. New York: George W. Matsell, 1859.

Note: See “Cant: The Language of the Underworld” to learn more about the background of the American Malefactor’s Dictionary.

Filed in Dictionary | | Comments (0)

Early American Criminals: Stephen Smith on the Common

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

[display_podcast]

Go to Early American Criminals

Stephen Smith was born a slave in 1769 in Virginia. His last name was originally Allen, but he changed it to Smith in order to escape from the master who owned him, William Allen. Smith’s father was a religious man, but his mother encouraged him to steal. With her prompting, Smith committed several small thefts until he stole some leather from Allen, who consequently sent Smith to the West Indies to be sold.

In the Woods

After arriving in the Caribbean, Smith concealed himself in the very vessel that carried him south and returned back on it to Virginia. He snuck off the ship undetected and onto an island, where he lived in the woods until he almost starved. In desperation, he broke into a house to find something to eat and stole some shirts and shoes. After living in the woods for two days more, he approached another house to ask for some food, but he did not receive the cordial welcome he expected. The inhabitants of the house instead tried to capture him, and when Smith ran back into the woods they shot at him and wounded his leg.

Smith lasted in the woods with his wound for a few days, but he was eventually caught and taken back to his master. Allen relinquished his responsibility for Smith by giving him to his son, who sent Smith back to the West Indies. Once again Smith managed to escape the islands and traveled back north. This time he ended up in Nova Scotia, first in St. John’s and then in St. Ann’s, where he was arrested for breaking into a house and a store.

Smith pleaded not guilty to the burglaries and was cleared of both, although later he confessed that he was guilty of breaking into the house. But Smith faced two other indictments that he incurred while in custody: one for striking a lawyer and another for assaulting the gaol-keeper. He pleaded guilty to these two offenses, but was pardoned by the governor in exchange for leaving the province.

Boston

In August 1796, Smith complied with the terms of his pardon and traveled south to Boston. After living there for seven months he was once again arrested and indicted on four charges. This time he faced two counts of house-breaking and two of arson.

While in Boston, Smith had worked as a servant for Samuel Goldsbury and William Turner. After Smith left their employ, both of their houses were burglarized and then set on fire, which partly damaged Goldsbury’s house, but completely destroyed Turner’s. Suspicion fell on Smith, who was traced to the residence of another black man named Kimball who lived on Devonshire Street. Upon searching Kimball’s house, the authorities found a bag that contained some plate and a few other items belonging to Goldsbury and a pair of silver buckles belonging to Turner.

The Boston Gazette reported that while living in Boston, Smith had proved himself to be “an abusive bad fellow.” Even though he regularly paid for his board while living with Kimball, he did so “without any visible means of procuring money.” Smith spent most of his nights out and was not at home on the nights when the burglaries and arsons occurred. Smith tried to convince his girlfriend to give evidence that he was with her on the night of one of the burglaries, but she turned out to be “too honest” to do so.

Smith pleaded not guilty to all of the charges against him. In court, he was first tried on the burglary of Goldsbury’s house. The trial lasted throughout the day, but in the end he was found guilty of the charge, which itself was enough to sentence him to die. As Smith received his death sentence, tears welled up in his eyes, but he did not allow any of them to trickle down his face. He later admitted in his Life, Last Words, and Dying Speech that even though he originally pleaded not guilty to the four charges, he was indeed “guilty of the whole.” He also admitted to shoplifting, stealing wine and porter from two men with whom he lived, associating with “bad Women,” and breaking the Sabbath.

The Bottom of the Common

On October 12, 1797, a large crowd gathered at the bottom of the Boston Common near the Central Burying Ground to see Smith’s execution, which was preceded with a public whipping at the post of “several Culprits, convicted of inferior crimes.” At about 1:45 p.m., Smith was led out of jail and escorted on foot to the scene.

After the usual prayers and speeches were concluded, a halter was placed around Smith’s neck and a white cap drawn over his eyes. It was reported that “after an instant’s pause which HE appeared to devote to fervent though silent prayer, HE was led to the scaffold, the supporting line unfastened and the malefactor launched into ETERNITY.” Smith was 28 years old at the time and was the last person hanged on the Boston Common for burglary.

After hanging for a half hour, Smith’s body was cut down, placed in a coffin, and buried. But Smith had not reached his final resting place. Soon after his coffin was covered with dirt, his body was dug up and taken for dissection.

Sources

  • [“Albert Gardner”]. Impartial Herald (Newburyport, MA). September 19, 1797, vol. V, issue 369, p. 3. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank.
  • [“At the Supreme Court”]. Western Star (Stockbridge, MA). September 18, 1797, vol. VIII, issue 44, p. 3. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank.
  • “Boston, Monday, March 27.” Boston Gazette. March 27, 1797, issue 2215, p. 3. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank.
  • “By Mail. Boston, Oct. 14.” Commercial Advertiser (New York, NY). October 18, 1797, vol. I, issue 15, p. 3. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank.
  • “October 13. Execution.” New-Hampshire Gazette. October 17, 1797, vol. XLI, issue 2134, p. 2. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank.
  • Rogers, Alan. Murder and the Death Penalty in Massachusetts. Amherst, MA: Univ of Massachusetts Press, 2008.
  • Smith, Stephen. Life, Last Words, and Dying Speech of Stephen Smith. [Boston: 1797]. Database: America’s Historical Imprints, Readex/Newsbank. Documenting the American South version: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/smithste/smithste.html.
Filed in Criminals | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)