Reviews of Books

Domestic Loyalties

Reviewed by Daniel A. Cohen, Florida International University

One dark night in March 1778, thirty-seven-year-old Joshua Spooner of Brookfield, in Worcester County, Massachusetts, strolled home to his wife Bathsheba and three young children after a friendly evening of drink and conversation at a nearby tavern. Entering his front yard, Spooner was suddenly accosted by three men, who beat him to death and dumped his body down a well. The victim, a wealthy farmer and businessman, was intimately connected to what had been one of the leading families in the ancien régime of provincial Massachusetts. Twelve years earlier, Spooner had married the daughter of Brigadier General Timothy Ruggles, soon to become one of the most prominent and detested loyalists in revolutionary New England. An imposing giant of a man, General Ruggles was finally forced to flee Massachusetts with the British army that evacuated Boston in 1776, leaving his favorite daughter behind enemy lines and trapped in an unhappy marriage. Bathsheba Ruggles Spooner, it seems, had developed an "utter aversion" (p. 29) to her husband, who reportedly failed to maintain an appropriate aura of "manly importance as head of his family" (pp. 33, 155). Even their eight-year-old son may have imbibed Bathsheba's contempt, referring to his father as "Old Bogus" (pp. 33, 136).

1

The immediate impetus to murder seems to have been provided by another man—actually, little more than a boy. During the fall or winter of 1777–1778, Bathsheba Spooner had engaged in an amorous relationship with Ezra Ross, a sixteen-year-old soldier who paused to convalesce in Brookfield after being discharged from the Continental army. In late January or February (probably upon realizing that she was pregnant), Bathsheba urged the pliable youth to murder her husband, promising to marry him afterward. When young Ross failed to dispatch Joshua in a timely manner, Bathsheba tried to seduce, cajole, and bribe several other men to do the job, including two of her household servants and two escaped British prisoners-of-war, James Buchanan and William Brooks, whom she invited into her home. Following weeks of ineffectual scheming, Ross, Buchanan, and Brooks finally rose to Bathsheba's challenge and fatally assaulted her hapless husband. Bathsheba quickly distributed Joshua's cash and clothes to his assassins and sent them on their way. By the following evening, however, the three soldiers, Bathsheba Spooner, and three household servants (at least tangentially involved) had been apprehended and either confessed or implicated each other in the ill-conceived plot. Bathsheba and the three soldiers were all convicted on capital charges in April 1778 and hanged in early July, despite Bathsheba's plea that her execution be stayed pending the delivery of her unborn child.

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