“…a poisonous substance… administered by person or persons unknown.”

She was just a month shy of her twenty-seventh birthday on that beautiful, clear crisp Fall day, October 21, 1861, when the young and beautiful Mary Ann Birmingham, daughter of the celebrated Indian Physician Samuel T. Birmingham, died in a” paroxysm of spasms” at her father’s house where she lived with Alexander C. Peters, her physician husband and eighteen-month-old son, Samuel. The young family had only moved to Lowell from New York City in the past year or so.

The house was in an empty corner on the periphery of Lowell, hard by the railroad tracks and north of the ambitiously named, yet equally vacant, “Ayer’s New City.”  Had she been ill for some time, as her husband would claim, or did an illness come on suddenly? The cause of death was put down as “convulsions.” The death record also contained a peculiar anomaly.  Although there was no place to indicate race on the form, the City Clerk, John McAlvin,  nonetheless placed an asterisk by her name and explained it on the bottom of the sheet with the notation “African” in parenthesis.  Mary Ann had been born in Philadelphia, the daughter of possibly a white mother and a black or mixed-race father. She was a woman of color, more often recorded as “mulatto,” an offensive term but one once liberally assigned to mixed race or light skinned individuals.

 Mary Ann was hurriedly buried the next day. Her father, Samuel Till Birmingham, “a well-known mulatto doctor…,” as a local newspaper deemed him, hired the carpenter David H. Gordon to bury her.

Convulsions in the nineteenth century were often associated with eclampsia a dangerous, life-threatening condition at childbirth.  Suspicions about the cause of death swirled uneasily. Perhaps it was her husband’s hasty departure from Lowell shortly after her burial that caused her father to demand an inquest.  Unsatisfied with the initial post-mortem, the carpenter Gordon would be brought back to disinter Mary Ann’s body for a fuller investigation.

Local doctors Walter Burnham and his ambitious young assistant William Bass performed the autopsy at Dr. Birmingham’s request. Both Vermonters and “eclectic” or “physo-medical” physicians, their practice like Birmingham’s own was on the fringe of more conventional medicine.   Mary Ann’s stomach was discovered to be “greatly inflamed,” and so was removed and sent to Doctor Hayes, the state medical assayer in Boston.  The autopsy revealed another grim find.  Mary Ann was “a delicate condition,” pregnant, at the time of her death.

The Coroner’s Jury heard testimony from eight or more witnesses and determined portentously on that Mary Ann had died “from a certain poisonous substance called soluble salts of lead, being administered to her by person or persons to the jury unknown.” Lead in sufficient concentration is highly toxic but was also known to cause miscarriage in pregnant women.  

In fiction and life, spouses are often the obvious suspects in potential murders and this case would be no different. Worse still, Peter’s precipitous departure from Lowell following his wife’s death only intensified the suspicions of him. Many knew of problems between the couple as would be revealed in the following weeks, along with details of the Doctor’s questionable relationship with a certain widow, the enigmatic Mrs. Hazelton. Mary Ann had died of poison, that was much clear, and now her husband, Dr. Peters, was easily the chief suspect.

Peters had been gone from Lowell for nearly four weeks when news of the coroner’s finding reached him on November 15^th. He had fled to Canada but that would only be revealed later. He returned to Lowell and surrendered himself refusing to say where he’d gone, not wishing to “compromise a friend.” He was sent to the drafty jail. Mounting suspicions added to his discomfort as he awaited a hearing in the local Police Court.

Poisoning Was in the Air

Young Doctor Peters had good reason to be anxious. He was about to face trial in the midst of the sideshow-like atmosphere of another notorious crime also, coincidentally set in Lowell.  Over the past few months, the melodramatic and sensational trial of the notorious Anna A. Dower, a dubious nurse accused of poisoning her invalid patient Rhoda Wilkins, titillated the public.  It was no secret that Anna had designs on Rhoda’s husband, the machinist Harrison Wilkins.  Dower complained that Rhoda mistreated him and spoke indiscreetly of her plans to marry the machinist once Rhoda was gone.  With her amorous indiscretions, Anna’s singular eccentricities furnished deliciously macabre aspects to the case.  A self-proclaimed medium, she would claim to awaken from long trances in a mystical amnesia.  She’d rather unwisely suggested that, if she had poisoned Rhoda, it might have been during such a trance. Ann admitted that she’d discard medicines from Rhoda’s many doctors for substitutes prescribed in these trances by her Indian spirit guide “Laughing Waters.”  The thrilling and ghastly combination of a scheming love triangle, mysterious “spiritual doctors,” séances and an unconscious medium made the tale irresistible, and the three successive trials were unprecedented and riveting.  Surely the Peters trial, a death by poison of a beautiful young wife, a pool of swirling, salacious gossip and a husband in flight, could only promise more of the same for the prying, prurient public.

Who was this victim, Mary Ann? She is the puzzle at the center of the mystery and almost impossible to decipher.  Like many women of her time, her memory was shaped not by herself but by men about her like a homeopathic remedy, diluted until only the memory of the shape of its molecules in the surrounding solution remains. She had secrets in her short, tragic life which would be revealed. Her husband, Alexander C. Peters, would seem a man of secrets as well but his would remain better hidden.  Chapters of his life remained sealed from view only obscuring Mary Ann even more.  But of all the men around her, her father, Samuel Till Birmingham was the most formidable.  He was an exceptional individual whose achievements would be extraordinary for anyone but perhaps even more so for a man of color in a hostile world. He attained professional distinction and wealth while surmounting adversity, racism, loss and tragedy in a life that spanned the 19^th Century.  Yet it can be difficult to be the child of a parent of great ambition and fortitude and the slim record of their lives gives clues of a troubled relationship between a giant of a father and a romantic and head-strong young woman.

The Remarkable and Indefatigable Samuel Till Birmingham

Mary Ann was the youngest of three known children of Samuel T. Birmingham and his first wife Elizabeth Bailey. The family was living in Moyamensing, the turbulent heavily Irish and African American district south of Philadelphia, at her birth in 1834.  Samuel, beginning at age sixteen, trained as an apprentice for thirteen years with the prominent Philadelphia doctor, William Pott Dewees. This apprenticeship was likely prestigious and prized for Dewees was a celebrated early pioneer in the study of obstetrics and gynecology. He was the first professor of midwifery at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school.  The men’s friendship extended long after the apprenticeship, until Dewees’ death in 1843.

 Samuel was born in 1800 to a free family of color in New Castle, Delaware.  He was sent to Quaker schools in nearby Philadelphia.  He may also have gone to medical school during or after his thirteen-year internship, but the record isn’t clear.[1] 

Mary Ann was just seven when her mother died of Tuberculosis in 1843. Elizabeth was buried in the nearly forgotten African-American Bethel Cemetery, now hidden under a modern playground.  Doctor Dewees died the same year.  Following his wife’s death, Birmingham moved his family to a modest farm in rural Bradford, Clearfield County in north central Pennsylvania, not far from the better known Punxatawney.  The Birminghams were joined just two other families of color in the town of 800.  Birmingham may have been following in the path of Dr. Dewees.  Dewees himself, had left medicine at one point to take up and then fail at farming in Phillipsburg, a town a few miles to the east of Bradford.  Doctor Henry P. Loran, a former of student and brother-in-law of Dewees, perhaps not coincidentally, lived in the Borough of Clearfield, just across the West Branch of the Susquehanna River from Birmingham’s farm.

In Bradford, Birmingham married a young woman twenty-five years his junior, Ann Graham, the daughter of a local farmer John Graham and his wife Eva Shirey. The 1850 census, the only record of Birmingham’s time there, offers few insights but poses more questions.  The census form records Birmingham’s profession as a physician but a later detailed history of doctors in Clearfield County lacks any mention of him. Ann, his young wife, is not recorded in the census record but three young children, two toddlers and an infant, are included in the count along with Birmingham’s adult children, Elizabeth and John.  but not teen-aged Mary Ann. Perhaps indicative of tension between father and daughter, she was living instead with her paternal grandmother, Mary Fox along with two younger cousins, the daughters of Samuel’s sister Mary Ann Dorsey, far to the east in Chester County, outside of Philadelphia.

Doctor Birmingham sets up shop in Massachusetts.

In 1852, Birmingham gathered his family together, including Mary Ann, his mother, wife, and nieces, moving to Massachusetts. But his and presumably Ann’s three young children were inexplicably missing hinting at some unknown tragedy.  He set up a medical office on Cambridge Street in the West End of Boston, the center of the city’s small African-American community. If the family lived in Boston, it was only for a brief period.  The former security of Boston and the West End community was replaced with peril by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Subsequent events were tumultuous, particularly in Boston.[2]

Within a year, the Doctor settled his family on the outskirts of Lowell, but he maintained his medical office in Boston, seeing patients there three days a week.  Birmingham bought several lots from Daniel C. Ayer, a showman of a speculator whose talent for promotion rivalled the Doctor’s own.  The Doctor’s house sat on the southern edge of the city, quite literally on the other side of the tracks.  Birmingham’s initial modest house stood isolated, bordering Hale’s Brook with few neighbors in sight.  Ayer’s ephemeral “New City” was less than half a mile to the south and was nearly as deserted as Birmingham’s vicinity.  The Doctor may have sought the privacy which the isolation provided along with easy access by rail to Boston and points north, west and south. Birmingham was prosperous in Massachusetts.  By the mid-1860s he was one of the wealthier men in Lowell and his prosperity was evidenced in an 1868 advertisement for the sale of his Lowell property.[3]  

When the family arrived, Lowell was the second largest city in Massachusetts and New England. “A new and Complete Gazetteer of the United States” of 1852 described the transience of the population: “Comparatively few adults are natives of Lowell; approximately one third of the city are foreigners, principally Irish; the other two thirds are nearly all from the different New England states. But despite a population of a 33,000, its African American community was minuscule, perhaps 75 souls. One account in 1863 noted “There are few persons of ‘African Descent’ in Lowell; it is quite probable that no city of its size in the country has a less number…”  

Lowell however was strongly abolitionist in sentiment which was demonstrated by two notable incidents.  The agitation in Boston touched Lowell in 1851 when a wealthy and opportunistic Virginia farmer, Nathaniel Boothe threatened to sue for the return of the 26 year-old eponymous Lowell barber Nathaniel Booth.  Linus Child, the Agent of the Boot Mills, negotiated the purchase of Booth’s freedom at a discounted rate and arranged a public subscription to fund it. Purchasing freedom was the preferred “constitutional” method of liberation for conservative Whigs of either the Cotton faction or the “Conscience” bloc.[4]    However, not everyone in Lowell agreed with purchasing freedom which only validated slavery, so when slave catchers arrived in Lowell in 1853 in pursuit of another local barber, Edwin Moore, Lowell abolitionists were quick to speed him off to Canada.

Two years later in 1854, hardly settled in Lowell, Birmingham moved his family once again to a far more isolated farm in Pelham, New Hampshire, fifteen miles to the north-west.  He kept the Lowell property, at times setting up others such as the colorful Doctor Wah-Bah-Goosh, in his place. The Pelham farm provides the strongest circumstantial evidence for Birmingham’s participation in the Underground Railroad, because this location aligns with accounts of other active in the effort. Not surprisingly, he sold the farm after the start of the Civil War.[5]

Birmingham’s training with Dr. Dewees in Philadelphia must have been thoroughly grounded in the conventional medicine of the day.  Yet in Massachusetts, Birmingham pivoted. Something motivated a change of philosophy and he now advertised himself as an “Indian Botanic Physician.” Botanic medicine as a medical philosophy was a reaction to and rejection of the often violent and bloody practice of conventional medicine of the time and it claimed ancient, traditional roots.  Its appeal was expressed in one of the standard volumes on the subject:

The Botanic Practitioner, instead of gathering up instruments of steel to amputate a mortifying arm or leg, successfully applies his powerful antiseptics; – mortification is checked – the limb saved and the patient is made whole, instead of being maimed for life. J.E. Carter,’ The Botanic Physician’”

Or more dramatically:

Pause for a moment and view the Corner Stone of the Primitive Medical Edifice, which is already laid, and no longer suffer yourselves to be cut to pieces by the lancet or the two edged sword of the poisonous mineral drugs, which man’s device has hatched up to pick your pockets and bear you to an untimely grave.  Daniel Smith, “The Reformed Botanic Physician and Indian Physician,” [6]

Birmingham’s own mentor, Doctor Dewees approach was conventional and “modern.” His remedy for the pain of childbirth was “copious bloodletting.” He championed removing childbirth from “the aged and imbecile nurse” to the more “suitably indoctrinated” male physicians.

Yet, Birmingham also stood apart from others on the fringe of medicine and had greater credibility in two senses.  He had an enviable conventional medical background and honest Native American heritage; his maternal grandfather was Francis Freeman, a Native American guide to George Washington in the War for Independence.  Birmingham explained this distinction himself in his late-in-life compendium of his accumulated knowledge, A Balm for Every Wound:

…those of the white race who set themselves up as Indian doctors cannot be any more than pretenders, for an Indian was never known to disclose a secret to a white man, more especially the art of healing disease…The position of the author, however is peculiar. He was trained in circumstances different from the Indians generally, and feels a friendly interest in the whites, among whom he enjoyed the advantages of a liberal and scientific education…a practical knowledge of Anatomy…an advantage in which the Indians among themselves do not generally possess.”

The Investigation Begins

The investigation of Doctor Peters for his wife’s death began on Tuesday, December 3^rd, the coldest day of the season so far. The discomfort was not limited to the weather. The Police Court me in a courtroom crammed into the City Market House, a notoriously noisy and chaotic brick barn of a building, nearly indistinguishable from the clattering mills that closed in on it. This hearing would be a change from the quotidian parade of the usual habitual drunks, petty thieves, adulterers and fornicators whose moral depredations cluttered the docket.  Judges and attorneys competed with the deafening roar of clacking of looms of the neighboring carpet mills just across a narrow canal. The ubiquity and variety of noise inspired a joke of the day about an Irishman before the court.–rustic Irish jokes being a staple of the times.   Hearing the noise of the sausage maker a floor below, the confused defendant asked anxiously just what might be the din?  Just a sausage maker said a disinterested lawyer inured to the racket when, at that very moment, a pig in a cart outside let out a keening squeal. “Och!” Cried the man.  “And ye say it’s a sausage factory it is.  Mother, they put the pig in whole in this country!”

Attorneys Theodore Sweetser and William Gardner, stalwarts before this bench, stood defense for Peters.  This accomplished legal pair was well experienced in representing all sorts of defendants for assault, counterfeiting, adultery, divorce, perjury and similar offenses, and more importantly they had an enviable record of acquittal or dismissal for their clients. Sweetser, an Amherst College graduate, was also a City Solicitor and most fortuitously, the next-door neighbor to Judge Nathan Crosby, the Justice of the Police Court.  Evincing their success, they’d recently moved their offices up Central Street from the damp, ageing Canal Block teetering over the Pawtucket Canal to the newly built Tyler Block even more convenient to the court.

A curious assemblage of witnesses was called by the prosecution over two non-consecutive days yet among them only one had been present at Mary Ann’s actual death.  The others seemed to mostly have knowledge of turmoil between husband and wife and overheard perhaps some pointed words or observed suspect behavior in the weeks before the death.  Mary Ann died of poison, just as the coroner had determined, but had her husband administered the fatal draught?  He clearly had the wherewithal as a physician, but did he have a strong motive to be rid of a troublesome wife and by particularly gruesome means?

The carpenter Daniel Gordon was called first and testified that he had been summoned by Dr. Birmingham on the 22^nd of October to bury his daughter and that he then exhumed her on the 24^th.   The Coroner Thomas Pressey testified next.  He described how he took the contents of Mary Ann’s stomach to Dr. Hayes in Boston.  On cross examination he clarified that it was Doctor Burnham who’d removed the contents of the victim’s stomach but he, Pressey, had place it in the bottle.  This was done in the presence of Doctors Burnham and Bass, the carpenter Gordon and the coroner’s jury.   When asked, he stated that he hadn’t seen Dr. Peters until the doctor turned himself in to the Marshall’s Office. There he heard Peters ask if he might return to his house without revealing a purpose.  Pressey told him he’d have to arrange that with the officers but he did recall then that Deputy Rand had asked Peters where he’d been but Peters, had declined to answer so as not to “compromise a friend.”

The testimony of Dr. Hayes, the state medical assayer, followed next.  He confirmed his discovery of the lead in the stomach and the absence of any other organic poisons in any significant quantity.  When noting that salts of lead initially taste sweet, he thought that the lead had first been administered in a diluted form followed by another more concentrated solution.  Was he suggesting that the victim might have been unaware of being poisoned? This would be an obvious inference. In cross examination, Dr. Hayes affirmed that the quantity of the poison found in the stomach was enough to cause the death of a healthy person.

Dr. Bass was the last witness of the day.  He explained that he and Dr. Burnham had visited the victim shortly after her death while the body was still warm.  Although Dr. Peters had come to collect them, he thought that it was Dr. Birmingham who had in fact sent for them.  When they arrived at the scene, Birmingham told them, that she’d complained about her heart, that he had administered an “anti-spasmodic” tincture and that she’d died an hour and a half from what he had thought was the beginning of her illness, seemingly having no knowledge of any prior illness. Bass further testified that it was decided that he and Burnham would hold a post-mortem exam the next day. Doctor Peters, he explained, had deferred to Birmingham in this matter. This examination revealed an enlarged heart and the stomach inflamed and damaged.  No poison was immediately discovered but the observed damage to the stomach was consistent with poison.  Mary Ann had been buried after the initial post-mortem but exhumed the next day when the contents of her stomach were examined, and the remains of the lead poisoning found.  The defense, throwing doubt on the cause of death induced Dr. Bass to allow that she might have died of heart disease as Doctor Birmingham had initially thought. 

Judge Crosby was called away to Washington to tend to an ill son so the court adjourned until the morning of Thursday the 17th when more sensational revelations were uncovered, including a shocking secret that would suggest that Peters had no need to resort to murder to be free of Mary Ann, if that was his goal.

Hannah Burton was the first witness called when the court reconvened. She clearly had a low opinion of Doctor Peters which she was eager to share.  She spoke of a Sunday when an agitated Peters came to her house looking for his wife.  He asked her if Mary Ann was there and when Hannah replied that she was not, he exclaimed that he “hated colored women.”   It was not clear if this was aimed at Mary Ann or Hannah who reasonably would take offense at the outburst.  Hannah was the daughter of Peter Lew and his first wife, Eunice. The Lews were an extended family in Lowell and Dracut and many of its members were active in the local Underground Railroad.  She was followed on the witness stand by her husband, Alexander Burton, a barber in Lowell.[7]

Burton testified that he and Peters had discussed Mary Ann’s health in October. Back then Peters had said his wife had been very sick for three weeks with inflammation of the bowels.  Peters had even confided that he feared that she wouldn’t recover.  Later, at Mary Ann’s funeral, Burton recounted that Peters commented, “It is just as I told you she is dead.”  How had Peters been so certain when others testified that she seemed well?  Defense must have decided that it was best to draw attention away from this awkward revelation and asked Burton about the Peters’ marriage. He replied that he knew nothing about the marriage other than she was his wife although he was aware of some letters about the matter had circulated among some of the parties.

Mrs. Hannah J. Walker’s testimony followed Burton’s.  The garrulous Hannah was born Hannah Jane Van Vronker. Hannah described herself as an intimate friend; She and Mary Ann were the same age and as young mothers of color were likely welcome companions. Hannah was married to Edwin G. Walker of Charlestown who would later become a distinguished attorney in Boston. He had also been one of Shadrack Minkins’ courthouse rescuers in the notorious escape from the Federal court and slave hunters in Boston. 

The effect of Ms. Walker’s testimony for the prosecution would only throw doubt on Peters’ guilt.  Hannah was likely staying at her mother’s house on Chapel Street after the recent birth of her first daughter. It was less than a mile from there to the Peter’s place on Tanner Street.  She swore that Mary Ann had been at her house the week before and appeared well.  Further she was at Mary Ann’s place the Sunday before her death and she seemed fine then too, perhaps except for “some trouble in her head.”  Yes, she continued that Mary Ann was well right up to the Sunday before her death.  But cross examination pressed Hannah and undermined her confident assertions.  She admitted that she had in fact gone to Mary Ann’s because her friend was ill.  Mary Ann had been at Walker’s house the day before when she’d complained of palpitations from the walk.  She’d also asked Walker not to tell her husband that she’d been ill with inflammation of the bowels.  Mary Ann confessed to her that she’d been very sick the night after the visit. 

Probing deeper, the defense attorneys extracted from Walker that Mary Ann had once told her that if she ever lost her husband, it would kill her. Walker continued revealing that Mary Ann declared that she had lost the affection of husband and didn’t care if she lived or died. What’s more, Mary Ann had consulted a doctor who told her that she’d injured herself.  Mary Ann, it seemed was quite aware that she was dying. She had specific instruction for a particular chemise that she wanted to be buried in.  She also spoke about disposing of her son’s belongings and of a gold watch that should be kept for young Samuel when he grew up.

Walker acknowledged that she was amicable with Dr. Peters; after Mary Ann’s death, their son Samuel stayed with her the very night before Peters left Lowell.  Most curiously, he told her his plan was to take the child to Philadelphia if he couldn’t leave it in Boston. 

Walker was far from finished.  She divulged that Mary Ann had exclaimed, “I am afraid I have sold my soul for revenge.” And then “as lief the devil will have (me) as not.”  Mary Ann had also insisted that she would have her revenge on Mrs. Hazelton. Mary Ann lamented to Mrs. Walker to “keep the marriage certificate sacred.” Was this peculiar comment a reference to her husband’s presumed adultery or something more?

Walker further revealed that she was aware of a “variance” between Mary Ann and her father. She also knew that Dr. Birmingham kept a great many bottles of things at his house.  Rather than casting suspicions on Peters the voluble Hannah Walker unwittingly had been led to paint an image of her friend Mary Ann as an overwrought, possibly hysterical woman, distraught over her marriage and despairing of living.  Couldn’t such an unstable woman with ready access to her father’s laboratory, indeed have poisoned herself?

A loquacious Ms. Walker may have confounded the prosecution, but Dr. Peters was not free from suspicion yet because next to come was the testimony of the blunt speaking Sarah Graham.  She was the only witness present around the time of death other than Peters himself and she had her doubts about the situation. Sarah was Dr. Birmingham’s 30-year-old, Irish-born domestic; she would maintain a life-long fidelity to the doctor and his wife. So strong was the connection that she would ultimately be buried in the family’s plot in the Lowell Cemetery.   Testifying, Sarah acknowledged that she knew the couple for some four years. She said that she lived near them (likely right across the quiet street.) She was called to the house before 10:00 AM in the morning to find Mary Ann lying on the floor with Doctor Peters supporting her.  Mary Ann was in spasms and Peters told Sarah he was afraid that she was dying.  He instructed Sarah to hold a vial to Mary Ann’s nose while he poured what he said was Lobelia into her mouth.  Lobelia is an emetic used to induce vomiting, but she only frothed and so they put her to bed. Sarah left for only five minutes. When she returned Peters told her, to her disbelief, that Mary Ann was dead. Sarah wasn’t so sure because Mary Ann felt warm to her, but Peters maintained that he’d seen “a great many cases of the kind and they all appeared so.”    As she left, she saw Dr. Birmingham’s mother and Hannah Walker arrive.

On cross examination, Sarah repeated that she’d doubted that Mary Ann was dead and also revealed that Peters knew that Mary Ann had specified how she was to be dressed for her funeral.  She also shared that Peters had told her he’d been afraid to leave Mary Ann alone at times because of her behavior.  Sarah acknowledged that he appeared grief-stricken, and that he’d mournfully said he would be satisfied if she could say only one word to him.  She also knew that Peters and Mary Ann had made plans to go berry picking on the very day of her death.  When pressed, she said she thought he’d said that she’d died of heart disease. She saw him go to another room where, in despair and grief, he told his son that he had no mother.  Then Sarah abruptly refused to answer other unspecified personal questions.

When the investigation continued in the afternoon, John Pierce, a cashier at the Merchants Bank, was the first to testify. Pierce’s relevance was not immediately clear.  He acknowledged that he was acquainted with Peters and that the doctor was frequently at his house in Belvidere and had indeed been there in the days before Mary Ann died.  But in explanation he offered that Peters often provided medicine to the family.   Mrs. Hazelton was also often at his house; this would be no surprise because Pierce, was married to Mrs. Hazelton’s younger sister, Mary Dorothea.  Still, he said that he had not known that his widowed sister-in-law had been there on the eve of Mary Ann’s death. 

The furtive Mrs. Hazelton next took the stand.  Born Sarah E. Cushing, she was the young widow of Moses Morse Hazelton, a machinist from Boscawen, New Hampshire, a rocky hill town just below the headwaters of the Merrimack River and a fertile source for many of Lowell’s ambitious young men.   Moses and Sarah married in September 1852, but the unfortunate groom was dead after less than a year and half of marriage at 31 of unknown causes and months after the birth of their daughter Ella.

Sarah was from Stanstead County in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, just across the Vermont border.   In Lowell, addition to her sister, she had two half- brothers who, their Baptist professions not-withstanding, operated the Pentucket Springs Brewery along the Merrimack in Centralville. 

On the stand, Mrs. Hazelton confessed that she’d known Dr. Peters for a year, perhaps more; they’d first become acquainted at Doctor Birmingham’s place, where she obtained medicines.  She insisted there was nothing between her and Peters but further testimony proved more contradictory.  She said that Peters had implied that he wasn’t married.  She admitted she’d seen him outside Lowell; he’d previously accompanied her to Boston as well as Canada. She travelled frequently to Stanstead. More recently she’d gone back to Quebec in July and stayed there until September.  She wrote to him while she was away.  What’s more, before returning home to Lowell, she’d met up with him in Portland, Maine, although they’d been careful not to ride in the separate cars.  Perhaps not coincidently, she’d returned to Canada the Saturday after Mary Ann’s death.  This would have been approximately the same time that Dr. Peters also fled Lowell.  So, it surely was no coincidence when he arrived In Stanstead just days later. and that he stayed there for three days.  Ever seemingly cautious of appearances and propriety, she said she told him to go to the nearby City of Sherbrooke and wait for word of the coroner’s inquest. He did go but then he returned for three more days.  Sarah said they’d spoken about his wife’s death and the circumstances around it and that he’d resolved to return when he heard news of the coroner’s finding.  She said she’d told him to go back and stand trial. If he was not guilty all would be well.  She would only own that they’d had a friendship, but she also revealed that she’d seen Peters on the Wednesday prior to Mary Ann’s death at their home and while there she was shown what appeared to be the Peters’ marriage certificate.  

Mrs. Hazelton was the “friend” whom Peters initially refused to “compromise.” But trying to cover up their obvious affair could only worsen suspicions.  Better to be out with it and be judged as a love-struck adulterer rather than a philanderer so desperate to be disentangled from a troubling wife that he would poison her. Now the defense would reveal that he had a simpler, legal, if unchivalrous escape from his presumed vows. The answer was in that vexing marriage certificate.  

Mrs. Hazelton said that she was told that Mary Ann was not actually Peters’ wife.  Peters himself told her that they weren’t truly married and that they couldn’t be because Mary Ann already had a husband – named Marshall!  The marriage certificate was fraudulent.  Doctor Peters was perhaps morally, but not legally bound to Mary Ann.  Defense counsel asked, had she then – knowing Peters was not legally married – become engaged to Peters? No. He’d never proposed and there was no such discussion between them.  They’d only begun writing to one another in August.  It was just this past September that she discovered that Mary Ann had grown jealous; she’d learned it from an anonymous letter sent to her brother-in-law, Mr. Pierce. She’d later received one herself.  (Mary Ann was the presumed author, perhaps abetted by Hannah Walker.)  Peters, she said, gave no indication of his wife’s jealousy. 

When she received the anonymous letter at the end of September, she’d decided to confront Mary Ann and assure her that she was no threat to the marriage. Dr. Peters escorted her to the meeting on Wednesday where she was shown the contentious marriage certificate but then a dejected Mary Ann admitted that she and Peters were not legally married; the marriage certificate was a forgery.  Hazelton said Mary Ann suggested that she’d been pressured into the phony marriage by her father who had insisted on writing to her in New York as Mrs. Peters.  Mary Ann had told her that she’d been known as Mrs. Marshall in New York.  According to Mrs. Hazelton, Mary Ann despaired that she had no right to Peters and Mary Ann said she “blamed him for taking care of her for as long as he did.” 

Mrs. Hazelton revealed that she saw Doctor Peters on the night of the funeral and again on Friday before she left for Canada to stay with her sister Sephronia, but there had been no plan for him to follow her north; he’d come on his own with no notice. Still, she insisted that he was resolved to return to Lowell no matter what.

Defense recalled Doctor Birmingham, (there’s no record of his initial testimony) apparently for the purpose of clarifying the marriage question.  Birmingham claimed that he had understood from a letter that Mary Ann and the Doctor were married.  He did admit that she’d married a man named Marshall six years prior in Lowell, but he didn’t think they’d been together for more than a month.  They’d gone to New York, but this Marshall, he supposed, had left her after a brief time.  Birmingham had heard that Marshall had gone to Liberia as an agent for a colonization society. 

The testimony closed with Birmingham. The defense chose not to call any witnesses.  Defense Attorney Sweetser had done his job well. He’d planted doubts not only about the cause of death but also implying through questioning that Mary Ann may well have poisoned herself. What’s more, a phony marriage may be unseemly, but was no obstacle to Peters leaving her. Was this though enough reason for Mary Ann to mortally harm herself?  As for Doctor Birmingham and his disingenuous answers, he certainly knew much more about the actual husband, this murky man Marshall, than his evasive answers revealed. No doubt he was trying to defend his daughter’s honor, but the marriage to this man Marshall was a matter of public record but six years past could be lifetime and the transient churn of the industrial city a useful amnesiac.

The Absent Husband

Dr. Birmingham, may have believed that his daughter’s marriage to Marshall had ended but he knew more about this cipher Marshall than he was letting on.  In fact, it would have been well-known that this same John Marshall had been the center of a public controversies well known in the abolitionist community occurring just at the time of his marriage to a sixteen-year-old Mary Ann in March of 1855. This was her first marriage; Marshall was married once before and twenty years her senior.  

For several years, a John Marshall had been travelling across New England lecturing on slavery and abolition and purportedly to raise funds for the defense of Calvin Fairbank, the renowned Oberlin movement abolitionist then jailed in Kentucky.[8] This was Fairbank’s second jailing when he and John Marshall met. Marshall was also incarcerated.

CARD.

The subscriber hereby tenders his thanks to the Union M.E. Church of Charlestown, for the very kind manner in which he was received, and the aid which it rendered him, in behalf of Mr. Fairbank, who is now in prison in Kentucky, where he is paying the penalty for loving his neighbor as well as himself, and doing to others as they should do to him.  If other New England Churches will show a like attention to suffering humanity, they will sufficiently prove their anti-slavery character.  JOHN MARSHALL   Boston, June 9, 1852“ The Liberator:” June 11, 1852

However, just months before their marriage, Marshall had been publicly exposed in a domestic scandal involving a prominent New England abolitionist pastor and his equally prominent wife. The aggrieved husband posted this plaintive notice in the Dover (N.H.) Morning Star in the Fall of 1854.

John Marshall

It is well known to the friends of freedom in many places east and west, that a colored man bearing the above name has for several years been engaged in the Anti-Slavery cause.  He has been very popular, highly esteemed as a lecturer, and has done much to promote the interest of that righteous enterprise. The friends of the slave will, therefore, learn with pain that he has forfeited their confidence and rendered himself unworthy of their countenance. They will deeply regret his fall, but will not knowingly encourage a man in their work who seeks to destroy innocence, virtue and domestic peace.

Elias Hutchins

Marriage was no rehabilitation or respite for Marshall for on April 27, 1855, a month after his marriage to Mary Ann, William Lloyd Garrison published a more scathing exposé in The Liberator accusing Marshall of fraud.

CAUTION NECESSARY.

Many weeks ago, evidence was brought to our notice of the bad character of the individual John Marshall, referred to in the subjoined notices; and we determined to warn our readers and the public to be on their guard against him. But learning that he had obligated himself to withdraw entirely from public lecturing, we refrained from publicly exposing him. He has, however, violated his engagement, we understand, and we deem it a duty we owe to all parties this public caution. The following article from the (Ohio) Free Presbyterian, exhibits, in part, the character of this man.

BEWARE OF SWINDLERS

It becomes my duty to the public on their guard against a set of knaves among our colored population, who are obtaining money on various false pretences, by appealing to the sympathy of anti-slavery men.  The first I will mention is a fellow by the name of Marshall, a yellow man of perhaps 35 or 40 years, who formerly resided at or near Jeffersonville, Indiana. The anti-slavery public will remember a man by the name of Calvin Fairbanks, who was, some years since, prosecuted and convicted in Kentucky for meddling with slaves. Having served some years in the Kentucky penitentiary, he obtained his freedom, but was again arrested on a similar charge, and thrown into the Louisville prison, some two years since. This man Marshall, for some cause, was committed to the same prison. Fairbanks (sic) by this means, made an acquaintance with him.  Nothing appearing against Marshall, he soon obtained his liberty, and by some agreement with Fairbanks, was to go out and solicit some pecuniary assistance for him, to help get him a fair trial.  He obtained certificates of recommendation, on which to travel from three gentlemen of Cincinnati, well known as reliable friends of the oppressed. These were Dr. W.H Brisbane, John Joliffe, Esq. and Levi Coffin, merchant.  Immediately after Marshall started on his begging expedition, Fairbanks trial was hurried through, and he, without a particle of testimony to establish the charge, found guilty and sent to the penitentiary.  Upon this Mr. Coffin wrote to Marshall at Columbus, Ohio, the facts and told him to come back and return the money again to those who contributed it. Marshall wrote, in reply to Coffin, that he would collect no more, but could not return just then, being under a promise to Fairbanks to visit his mother and sister, somewhere eastwardly. Some months after this, we find this man returning his thanks, through some of the Boston papers to a liberal public, and especially the island of Nantucket, for their generous aid to the unfortunate Fairbanks. Mr. Coffin wrote him again that if he did not desist his swindling operation, he would publish him in the papers.  He received no reply.  Since then, this knave has been heard from, travelling and collecting money in Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and perhaps other states, and has been said to have settled down in Boston. Having realized upwards of twenty thousand dollars, he is about to retire from business.

And just for good measure, Garrison reprinted the hapless Hutchins’ mortifying notice. 

Doctor Birmingham may have had a plan to rehabilitate Marshall as a physician which was listed as his profession on the marriage record. But just a few months later the newly married couple was living in the West End of Boston with Doctor John Rock, the respected Black physician and abolitionist.  Marshall, the “lecturer,” as indicated on a census form, had embarked on a new tour, despite Garrison’s admonitions, but this time with a fresh appeal to raise money to free his two sisters and a brother who he claimed remained enslaved.   But others suspicious of a guileful Marshall.  One particular detractor, William Coates of Boonton, New Jersey, delightedly chronicled Marshall’s doings in letters to Garrison which the editor dutifully published. 

As Coates reported, Marshall explained that he had been born into slavery in Virginia, became a carpenter and worked to buy his freedom for $2500 (at other times it was reported as $2000.)  The correspondent commented on Marshall’s fine clothing and gold watch and found Marshall was reticent to speak about Boston and the abolitionists there.  By September Marshall returned briefly to Boston to collect his seemingly abandoned wife, Mary Ann. Back on his lecture circuit across New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it was said he began passing her off as his sister – a sister he was raising funds to rescue.  Coates noted that it was a believable ruse because they indeed resembled one another:  tall, slim and with a light complexion similar to Marshall’s own.

Marshall’s fraud must have caught up with him again in the too-trusting abolitionist community. By the end of 1855 he had switched allegiance, finding refuge among the rival colonization forces, the maligned scheme to resettle free black people in the newly created state of Liberia on the west coast of Africa.  He sailed to Monrovia aboard the barque “Lamartine,” as an agent for the New Jersey Colonization Society, arriving in December to examine the territory assigned to the New Jersey society.  The colonization forces must have thought that recruiting him was a coup, as they crowed in their publication, The African Repository: “He [John Marshall] goes to Liberia to examine it thoroughly, and if satisfied, intends to return, and proclaim his convictions to those with whom he was once united in advocating a different way.”

Coincidentally one of his fellow passengers was the young Boston doctor, Isaac H. Snowden, son of Samuel Snowden, abolitionist and printer.[9] As for Marshall, his further whereabouts are unknown, but he may have returned to Lowell later in 1856 where a John Marshall was convicted and fined for assaulting his wife.

The Doctor is released.

When the court reconvened on December 22, Defense Attorney Sweetser moved for a dismissal and Peters was released for lack of sufficient evidence. A release for lack of evidence is not an acquittal but the decision mirrored the public sentiment. Days before one local paper had commented, “From the evidence thus far, it would appear the woman poisoned herself.”

Coincidentally, the second trial of Anna Dower was simultaneously underway and was far more widely reported.  On the surface, they were quite similar, a poisoning, a love triangle and a wife as an inconvenient obstacle to the scheming lovers. Race may have been a factor and the presumably self-poisoning of a distraught woman of color lacked the excitement of the salacious and fantastical Dower case with its colorful defendant and her spirit guides. If both cases had similar outcomes, they had different consequences.  Anna Dower was freed on October 30,1863 after her astounding third trial before the state supreme court.  If her plan had been to snag Harrison Wilkins, her alleged victim’s widower, it failed. She had been sentenced to death in her second trial, only the second woman in Massachusetts history. Less than three months after Dower’s acquittal, On January 10, 1864, Harrison discretely married another woman, Hannah Gurney of Newburyport at the First Baptist Church in Ashland, twenty miles outside of Lowell.  As for Peters, just six months after his release, on January 22, 1862, he married the Widow Hazelton in Manhattan, far from the snooping eyes and accusatory tongues of Lowell. The newlywed couple settled in Newark where Peters practiced for the rest of his life as both a doctor and a pharmacist. The former Mrs. Hazelton died in Lowell in 1872 while visiting family and she was buried in the Lowell Cemetery.  Peters married again in 1875 and after his death in 1903 his cremated remains were sent to Lowell to be interred with Sarah within sight of Mary Ann’s grave in the Birmingham family plot.  His third wife, Julia Searing was also buried in the Lowell plot upon her death in 1920.

Doctor Peters Secrets

There is almost nothing of Dr. Peters’ life prior to Newark in accounts of his life other than mention his of medical studies in Philadelphia and that he’d been an active Mason there.  There is nothing recorded about his family in Philadelphia, only his parents’ names, Richard Peters of Pennsylvania and Marie Adele Estuarte, reportedly born in France. There’s also no acknowledgment of his brief time in Lowell and certainly not of his phony marriage to Mary Ann. Similarly, there’s no mention of son Samuel.  All this suggests that Peters had a more complex background than the gentle, neighborly druggist memorialized in his obituary.  Indeed, he may have been mixed race himself but in few official records that indicate race, Peters is identified as white. The earliest record, the 1860 Lowell census is blank for race, not just for Peters but also for Mary Ann and the toddler Samuel as well. There are two mentions in The Weekly Anglo-African in 1859 and 1860 that may well have been him. One is of “Alexander C. Peters, P.G.P.J.S.G” of the “Saint George’s Commandry of F.A.M.” of Philadelphia and the second mentions the welcoming remarks of “Bro. Alex C. Peters, of Philadelphia” at an event at the Stone Square Lodge in Williamsburg.  The world of African American lodges was an important network for professional Black men. Samuel Birmingham was also active in the Prince Hall Masonic Lodge during his Boston years and the two men may well have become acquainted through their lodge affiliations and shared professional interests,

If Peters was indeed mixed race, he wouldn’t have been unique in crossing an ambiguous color line in search of a possibly easier life unhindered by the daily indignities of racism in the Jim Crow Era of late 19^th Century America.  This was also true for some members of the Birmingham family. Lewis Hayden Birmingham, who followed his father into medicine, was recorded as “mulatto’ as a teenager in the 1870 census but as white in the 1880 and all subsequent censuses as well as on his death certificate. Siblings George Washington, Amelia and Sarah, were similarly recorded as white in public records after 1870.

Another mystery is the whereabouts of Mary Ann and Alexander’s young child Samuel. Why did Peters appear to abandon his young son Samuel to others?  Why wasn’t the boy welcome in the new blended family that included Hazelton’s daughter Ella along with their own son and another daughter?  For that matter why hadn’t the child’s grandfather, Samuel Birmingham who’d generously taken in many others, not take in his namesake?

Mary Ann’s Final Secret in Doctor Birmingham’s Will

In his late-in-life will, Doctor Birmingham left his estate to be divided among the surviving children from his second marriage.  As for his older children, he specified awards of one dollar to one granddaughter, the daughter of his son John from his first marriage, and the same amount to a surviving niece and three surviving nephews.  This is a technique to make explicit the decedent’s intent and to nullify any potential challenges by the disinherited.  He also coldly left a single dollar to “… a son of …Mary Ann Peters supposed to be named Peters.”

Birmingham’s will contained one last surprise.  He also left a single dollar to “Sarah Woods of Boston, daughter of Mary Ann Birmingham…”[10]   It’s a mystery why his generosity did not extent to this granddaughter as well, but the existence of this daughter was possibly another point of contention between father and daughter and yet another tragic moment in the young woman’s short, difficult life.

How did Mary Ann die?

Mary Ann died of poison, but did Alexander Peters coldly and deliberately poison his wife to be free of her to pursue a new romance? He was ardently pursuing Mrs. Hazleton but Peters didn’t need such a drastic escape as the revelation of the fraudulent marriage certificate revealed.  He might have been convicted of fornication but a few months in the house of correction couldn’t be worth the life of the mother of his child. His affection for her seemed genuine as others testified and it seems unimaginable that he would subject her to such a drawn out and painful death. 

Did then Mary Ann, grieving and heart- broken over the imminent loss of her husband, willfully poison herself in some fateful, melodramatic gesture?  Mary Ann was distraught but the woman who vowed to have her revenge on Mrs. Hazelton would not enjoy that revenge through her own painful death.  But in taking soluble salts of lead, Mary Ann may not have intended to kill herself but to induce an abortion.

The coroner’s investigation determined that she was pregnant, the one significant fact that distinguished this case from the Downer case, yet not pursued in the investigation, perhaps deliberately so.  Soluble Salts of Lead, the poison that killed her, was known to cause abortions and Mary Ann would have had some familiarity with basic medicine from her father and Peters as well as access to her father’s laboratory. Maybe this was why she told Hannah Walker that she didn’t want her husband to know of her illness and why she revealed that she’d consulted a doctor who told her she’d “injured herself” and lamented that she’d “sold her soul for revenge.”  Recognizing the cause may have prompted Doctor Peters to tell Sarah Graham that he’d seen many cases like this. Was it possible that he assisted Mary Ann in her abortion attempt? It’s conceivable that a young, inexperienced physician could have failed to understand the full effects of a powerful substance. His participation could well explain his hasty flight from Lowell.

Unexpected pregnancies were not uncommon at the time and could devastate an unmarried woman’s life, barring her from home, church and work.  For some women the consequences of childbirth “out of wedlock” were unbearable. One young unmarried mill girl, in desperation, tossed her young infant from the train while returning home to New Hampshire.  Infants were regularly found abandoned, alive and not, along the river and canals. Lacking any effective birth control, abortions were a common necessity, tolerated but diffidently ignored. 

 The procedure was a dangerous choice for women who more often than not could only turn to incompetent and unskilled quacks.  If the practice of abortion required discretion, the identities of abortionists were poorly kept secrets.  So poorly, that the Boston Globe could refer to one self-styled “female physician” as a notorious abortionist.”   A Dr. Harman could coyly advertise that he “gives particular attention to the treatment of all those delicate but destructive disorders … which require the special care of a competent practitioner. …Harmon had been charged but never convicted of abortions and if the meaning of his claim was obscure, the purpose of his Red Pill –the only thing that will answer the purpose …designed for purely legitimate purposes  – to restore the menstrual flow… was clearer.  Even less ambiguous was the interstitial message in the  CAUTION warning in the advertisement for the competing  “Sir James Clark’s Celebrated Female Pills: These Pills should not be taken during the FIRST THREE MONTHS OF PREGNANCY, as they are sure to bring on miscarriage… Cautious circumspection was wise because, in an indication of the widespread practice, the Massachusetts Legislature in 1847 enacted a law with a substantial fine and jail sentence for publishing any information about where to obtain an abortion or the methods.

Prosecutions for abortions were rare and occurred only when the woman died under particularly egregious circumstances.   In the rare instances of prosecution, established doctors were released for lack of evidence or because the required witnesses failed to come forward.  In one instance, a prominent New Hampshire dentist turned surgeon was convicted and sentenced to an unthinkable fourteen years in prison.  The public was outraged.  A petition quickly drew hundreds of signatures. The Governor in turn pardoned the man who returned to his former practice.  Physicians of dubious reputation were less fortunate. One quack “Indian Physician” was sentenced to five years of hard labor, but even this was a rare exception. Mary Ann was dead, accidentally, seemingly by her own hand. With no one living to carry the blame, the true cause was likely best quietly ignored as was the custom.  

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[1] A degree was hardly a requisite to practice medicine. Almost anyone could call themselves a physician and many did just that without any obvious qualifications or experience.  But a degree was no assurance of competence, and many enrolled students never completed their courses. Degree programs were generally two years long with no prerequisites beyond, presumably a good recommendation or more importantly an ability to pay fees. Dewees himself returned to collect a degree from the University of Pennsylvania after many years in practice. Further, a clutter of schools opened and closed with rapidity. The most disreputable were exposed as notorious “diploma mills,” a term coined for them.  They conferred degrees with the liberality of the Wizard of Oz.   It was just about impossible to sort out the quackery and pseudo-science amidst the competing philosophies:  allopathic, botanic, eclectic, clairvoyant and physo-medical. Birmingham’s practice itself would later veer far from his estimable training and education into a more spiritual and naturopathic discipline.

[2] Boston had greeted the despised Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 with defiance.  Massachusetts had previously passed laws to impede its implementation in the state including banning the detention of fugitives in its jails. Boston’s African-American community and white abolitionist allies had triumphantly managed two widely celebrated rescues, first with the ingenious escape of William and Ellen Crafts, followed by the bold rescue of Shadrack Minkins from the Federal court room, right under the noses of his pursuers. But these successes enraged Southern slavers who demanded that Massachusetts capitulate to its “constitutional duty.” As a result, the resources of the United States government, its marshals and military would be deployed at shocking cost in the shameful capture and return of Thomas Simms and later Anthony Burns.  Boston, once a welcome haven, had now become a perilous place for fugitives and for free people of color as well. 

[3] … a large, well finished two story house, a laboratory building, a good stable and carriage, grapery, a gardener’s quarters and tool house, poultry house and etcetera, all in good repair, with about two acres of land, handsomely enclosed and stocked with a large number or choice bearing apple, pear and peach trees in full bearing condition, with an abundance of all the smaller fruits upon it, also are two artificial ponds, stocked with pickerel and gold fish, a lawn shaded with forest trees, and being bound by a stream of water, affords ready facilities for pleasure boating. It has been fitted up with great expense and is really one of the most desirable estates in the market.

Alas, the Doctor would not recognize his estate today.  No vestiges remain.  In over a century and a half the neighborhood has gone through convulsions of development, deterioration, abandonment and rebuilding. The once pastoral River Meadow Brook, meandering behind his long-gone orchards, is now a muddy channelized stream shadowed by a looming freeway.  It’s now a dusty, non-descript assemblage of warehouses and used car lots. A notorious “Super Fund” contamination site is just to the south.

[4] The Virginia Boothe must have found in the Fugitive Act and an easy way to make some cash.  Young Booth had lived in Lowell at least since 1844 but the aggrieved farmer hadn’t bothered to list any fugitives among his nineteen slaves in the 1850 census which allowed for this notation.

[5] Massachusetts at the time had a large, well organized Underground Railroad network; two routes were reported to pass through Lowell and neighboring Dracut.  On the western side of Dracut – in today’s Pawtucketville neighborhood of Lowell – stood the isolated farmhouse of Adrastus and Elizabeth Lew on the aspirationally named Mount Hope Street.  The Lew’s home was a welcoming stop on the underground route and their daughter Elizabeth explained in an interview, years later, that they conveyed fugitives on to the next stop in Pelham, New Hampshire.  Michelle Arnosky Sherburne, author of Slavery and the Underground Railroad in New Hampshire, does not list a stop in Pelham but Wilbur Siebert in his 1935 contribution to the American Antiquarian Society, “The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts” did include the link between Dracut and Pelham.  Birmingham’s farm, some ten miles directly north on Mammoth Road from the Lew’s home, was unquestionably the Pelham stop.  Indeed, Birmingham named his first child born in Pelham for Lewis Hayden, the celebrated Boston abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor.  Birmingham’s family remained in Pelham until he sold the New Hampshire property in the spring of 1861 just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. He returned to his Lowell house in the months before Mary Ann’s death. 

[6] There was no shortage of quackery among the competitors in the field. Peter Coley promised to see his clients in his usual “Pine Grove” at least until he was sent to the jail in East Cambridge for drunkenness. The remarkable Mrs. Lewis was both an “Indian Magnetic AND Clairvoyant Physician” who could cure cancer with a plaster “without ANY use of the Knife.”

[7] Ten years before, Alexander Burton had had his own moment of vindication in court.  In February of 1851, in the confusion following the successful rescue of Shadrack Minkins from the Boston Federal Court Room, Burton was arrested at his Salem barber shop.  George Lunt, the U.S. District Attorney, accused Burton of being the “head rioter” who had seized the Marshall’s sword during the rescue. The supposed brandishing of this sword by the black rescuers was a particular outrage among some.  But when the deputies came to apprehend Burton, a crowd of three-thousand swarmed the shop to prevent his capture and the full police force was called up.  Later in court, with no case, Lunt asserted that it was another, Alexander P. Burton, also allegedly a barber, and that this Burton, born in France, was the in fact the wrong man.  Burton responded by suing Lunt for wrongful arrest and for ten-thousand dollars in damages, a stunning amount for the time.  But when Burton’s lawyer failed to appear the suit was dismissed. The Savannah Daily News & Herald reported this story under the header, “The Late Outrage in Boston,” but it was not the unlawful arrest of an innocent man that vexed the paper’s editor but the extraordinary, peaceful rescue of Shadrack.  In later years, Burton would be Ben Butler’s coachman and Butler, as Governor, appointed him the official State House messenger.

[8 Fairbank served a total nineteen years for two convictions for aiding slaves to escape. He was first arrested in 1844 along with Delia Webster, Daniel Webster’s niece.  Lewis Hayden of Boston negotiated Fairbank’s first pardon by raising $650 paid to Hayden’s former owner.  The committed Fairbank was soon arrested again for a similar offense. It’s believed he helped at least 47 slaves to escape.

[9] John had followed his father into printing but was drawn to medicine after his father’s death. The only way he could be accepted at the Harvard Medical School was if he was sponsored by the Massachusetts Colonization Society and agreed to practice in Liberia after graduation.  Despite his acquiescence, he was dismissed from Harvard after a term when protests by white students caused the school to expel the black students deciding that their presence was too disruptive.  He did complete a term at Dartmouth and apprenticed with Dr. John Clarke in Boston.  On this particular trip he was returning to Liberia with members of his Boston family, his mother, wife, sister and children.  Snowden remained in Liberia where he died there in 1869. 

[10] This Sarah Woods was most likely Sarah J. Thompson, born in 1851 and married to Sampson Woods in 1869. Mary Ann would have been fourteen or fifteen the time of Sarah’s birth.  This young Sarah was living at the Saint Vincent’s Orphanage at the time of her Mary Ann’s death.