History records that Rachel Wall was the last woman to be hanged in Massachusetts, and legend remembers her as the only woman pirate from Boston. Her highly publicized trial took place as America implemented its new constitutional government. The state attorney general who prosecuted her had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence. A few weeks after the trial, the presiding judge became one of the first US Supreme Court justices, and her defense attorney, who had helped ratify the constitution, soon became the first US Attorney for Massachusetts under the constitution. Not only that, but her death warrant carried perhaps the most famous signature in US history, that of governor John Hancock. On this week’s episode, we uncover the fascinating true story of Rachel Wall’s life, trial, and death that’s hiding within the legend.
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The Dread Pirate Rachel
• A transcript of the Life, Last Words, and Dying Confession of Rachel Wall. (quod.lib.umich...)
• A 1905 examination of the Rachel Wall case (books.google.c...) by the Massachusetts Historical Society.
• Alan Rogers explains the Rachel Wall case (books.google.c...) while writing about the death penalty in the first two decades of the Massachusetts Constitution.
• The 1711 act for suppressing robberies and assaults (books.google.c...) , the 1784 act for the punishment of robbery (archive.org/de...) , and an 1805 act for punishing and preventing larceny and robbery (books.google.c...) (see section 7 for the lesser penalty for assault and attempted robbery).
• The legend of Rachel Wall the pirate is forged in Piracy, Mutiny, and Murder (books.google.c...) , by Edward Rowe Snow.
• Rachel Wall in Sea Queens: Women Pirates Around the World (books.google.c...) , by Jane Yolen.
• Rachel Wall in Women Pirates: Eight Stories of Adventure (archive.org/de...) , by Myra Weatherly.
• Amy Berkley debunks the legend of Rachel Wall (robertallisonh...) , the pirate.
Boston Book Club
Memories of Childhood’s Slavery Days is a slim volume of memoir by Annie L Burton, published in 1909. It has an opening passage that can be off-putting for the modern reader, recalling “happy, carefree childhood days on the plantation.” However, the book isn’t the whitewashing that the first sentence indicates. Burton was enslaved on a plantation in Alabama, and her earliest memories were formed during the Civil War years. While she says that the whites were too preoccupied with the war to pay much mind to her and her playmates, Burton recalls whippings given for stealing enough food to last until the next ration day, wives being sold down the river when they didn’t produce a child within a year of their wedding day, and lynchings in the town square.
The arc of Burton’s life after the war brought her to the Boston area multiple times, and gives insight into a time of transition for formerly enslaved people in both the South and the North. In 1879, she was visiting Memphis, and she happened to read a help wanted ad placed by a white Newton family in need of a cook. She answered the ad, got hired, and on June 15, 1879 she stepped off a train in Boston’s Old Colony Station before making her way to the family’s home in Newtonville. As we’ll hear in a few minutes, the Dread Pirate Rachel Wall also spent time as a domestic servant in the Boston area, so it’s interesting to contrast their experiences, which took place about a century apart.
Burton spent about five years working in the households of the Boston area’s wealthy white residents, moving to Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, and eventually Wellesley. A death in the family took her back to the South, and after that she moved to Jacksonville, Florida for a while, where she opened a restaurant and claims to have introduced Boston Baked Beans to the Southern palate. Eventually, she found her way back to Boston and opened a restaurant here, which she says was right across from the Providence depot. The book ends abr...
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