CHAPTER VIII.

OLD CHARLESTOWN ROAD, LECHMERE'S POINT, AND PUTNAM'S HEADQUARTERS.

"Poor Tommy Gage within a cage

Was kept at Boston ha', man,

Till Willie Howe took o'er the knowe

For Philadelphia, man."

F the many whose custom it is to pass over the high-road

likely that few are aware that they follow the course over which condemned criminals were once transported for execution. Its antecedents may not be as prolific of horrors as the way from Newgate to Tyburn, which counts a life for every rod of the journey, but its consequence as one of the most frequented highways of colonial days caused its selection for an exhibition which chills the blood, and carries us back within view of the atrocious judicial punishments of the Dark Ages.

To kill was not enough. The law was by no means satisfied with the victim's life. The poor human shell must be hacked or mangled with all the savagery which barbarous ingenuity could devise; and at last Justice erected her revolting sign by the public highway, where the decaying corse of the victim creaked in a gibbet, as it mournfully obeyed the behest of the night-wind. Gibbeting, burning, impaling, have all a precedent in New England, of which let us relate an incident or two.

In the year 1749 a fire broke out in Charlestown, destroying some shops and other buildings belonging to Captain John Codman, a respectable citizen and active military officer. transpired that Captain Codman had been poisoned by his negro servants, Mark, Phillis, and Phoebe, who were favorite domestics, and that the arson was committed to destroy the

evidence of the crime. The man had procured arsenic and the women administered it. Mark was hanged, and Phillis was burnt at the usual place of execution in Cambridge. Phoebe, who was said to have been the most culpable, became evidence against the others. She was transported to the West Indies. The body of Mark was suspended in irons on the northerly side of Cambridge road, now Washington Street, a little west of and very near the stone quarry now there. The gibbet remained until a short time before the Revolution, and is mentioned by Paul Revere as the place where he was intercepted by a patrol of British officers on the night he carried the news of the march of the regulars to Lexington. A specimen of one of these barbarous engines of cruelty was once kept in the Boston Museum. It was brought from Quebec, and looked as though it might have been put to horrid purpose.

NIX'S MATE.

This was, in all probability, the latest occurrence of burning and gibbeting in Massachusetts. Earlier it was not uncommon to condemn malefactors of the worst sort to be hung in chains. As long ago as 1726 the bodies of the pirates, William Fly, Samuel Cole, and Henry Greenville, were taken after execution to Nix's Mate, in Boston harbor, where the remains of Fly were suspended in chains; the others were buried on the island, which then contained several acres. Hence the superstitious awe with which the place is even now regarded by mariners, and which the disappearance of the island has served so firmly to establish.

We must confess that while our humanity revolts at these barbarous usages of our ancestors, we cannot but admit that punishment followed crime in their day with a certainty by no. means paralleled in our own. The severity of the code, the infliction of death for petty crimes, we must abhor and condemn; but we may still contrast that state of things, in which the criminal's life was held so cheaply, with the present time,

in which condemned malefactors repose on luxuriant couches, while the law jealously guards them from the penalty of crime, and justice, uncertain of itself, repeals its sentence and sets the guilty free. To something we must attribute the startling increase of crime. Can it be the laxity of the law?

Thomas Morton, the Merry Andrew of Mount Wollaston, relates, in his New English Canaan, an occurrence which, he says, happened to Weston's colony, in what is now Weymouth; and upon this slight foundation Hudibras built his humorous account of the hanging of a weaver for the crime of which a cobbler had been adjudged guilty :

"Our brethren of New England use
Choice mal-factors to excuse,

And hang the guiltless in their stead,
Of whom the churches have less need;
As lately happened."

Morton's story goes that, one of Weston's men having stolen corn from an Indian, a parliament of all the people was called to decide what punishment should be inflicted. It was agreed that the crime was a felony under the laws of England, and that the culprit must suffer death. Upon this a person arose and harangued the assembly. He proposed that as the accused was young and strong, fit for resistance against an enemy, they should take the young man's clothes and put them upon some old, bedridden person, near to the grave, and hang him in the stead of the other. Although Morton says the idea was well liked by the multitude, he admits that the substitution was not made, and that the course of justice was allowed to take effect upon the real offender.

Branding was not an unusual punishment in former times. A marine belonging to one of his Majesty's ships lying in Boston harbor, in 1770, being convicted of manslaughter, was immediately branded in the hand and dismissed. Montgomery and Killroy, convicted of the same crime for participation in the 5th of March massacre, were also branded in the

same manner.

Directly in front of Mount Prospect, of which it is a lesser

satellite, is the hill on which once stood the Asylum for the Insane, named for noble John McLean. During the siege this elevation was indifferently called Miller's and Cobble Hill, and subsequently Barrell's Hill from Joseph Barrell of Boston, whose superb old mansion has been demolished.

The work on Cobble Hill was laid out by General Putnam and Colonel Knox. It was begun on the night of November

22, 1775, and was considered, when completed, the best specimen of military engineering the Americans could

finish the work without the least interruption from the enemy. Cobble Hill was within point-blank range of the enemy's lines on Bunker Hill, and the post was designed to command the ferry between Boston and Charlestown, as well as to prevent the enemy's vessels of war from moving up the river at pleasure, a result fully accomplished by arming the fort with.

18 and 24 pounders.

As Colonel Knox had a principal share in laying out the fort on Cobble Hill, the only one of the works around Boston he is certainly known to have designed, the eminence should retain some association with the name of this distinguished soldier of the Revolution.

At the time he quitted Boston to repair to the American camp, Knox rented of Benjamin Harrod a store in old Cornhill (now the site of the "Globe" newspaper), who readily con

sented that Knox's goods might remain there, in the belief that his tory connections - he had lately married the daughter of Secretary Flucker - would be a safeguard for both. The store, however, was rifled by the British, and the landlord put in a claim against Knox for the time it was shut up, which Knox indignantly refused to allow. After the evacuation, William Knox, brother of the general, continued the business of a bookseller at the same stand.

When the Revolution began, Knox was a lieutenant of the Boston Grenadiers, commanded by Thomas Dawes, with the rank of major. Dawes was an officer of activity and address, and had exerted himself to bring the militia to a high standard of excellence. The presence of some of the best regiments in the British service offered both a model and incentive for these efforts. The company was composed of mechanics and professional men, selected with regard to their height and martial bearing, no member being under five feet ten inches, and many six feet in height. Joseph Peirce was a lieutenant with Knox, and Lemuel Trescott (afterwards a distinguished officer in the Massachusetts line) was orderly-sergeant. The company made a splendid appearance on parade, and Knox was considered a remarkably fine-looking officer. So at least thought one young lady, who, it is said, became captivated with her tall grenadier through those broad avenues to the female heart, admiration and pity, and by the following circumstance:

Harry Knox had been out gunning some time previous, when the piece he carried, bursting in his hands, occasioned the loss of several of his fingers. "He made his appearance in the company," says Captain Henry Burbeck, "with the wound handsomely bandaged with a scarf, which, of course, excited the sympathy of all the ladies. I recollect the circumstance as well as though it had only happened yesterday. I stood at the head of Bedford Street and saw them coming up."

It is probable that Lucy Flucker was a frequent visitor to Knox's shop, for he reckoned the cream of the old Bostonians, as well as the debonair officers of his Majesty's army and fleet, among his customers. Longman was his London correspondent,