A Colonial Murder Mystery

In February 1732, thirty six year old Ambrose Madison, the grandfather of future U.S. President James Madison, brought his wife, Frances and his three children, to an estate called Mount Pleasant (now known as Montpelier). Six months later, Ambrose Madison was dead. In the early summer, Ambrose fell ill. Poisoning was suspected. Like most poisoning victims during this period, the poison did not kill him outright, but caused enough internal damage that he lingered near death for weeks, finally dying in late August. Madison left what was regarded at the time as a “considerable estate” including “ten negro men, five negro women, and fourteen children”, along with cattle, hogs, sheep, horses, twelve books and four silver tea spoons.


Did Ambrose Madison die of accidental poisoning or was he murdered? His death marked a milestone in the annals of Virginia crime for it occasioned the first known conviction of slaves for the use of poison against their master.

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The Female Stranger (Archibald Mercer Colonial Detective Series)

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The Tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier

The tomb of the Unknown Confederate Soldier is located at the Beauvoir Confederate Cemetery located on the grounds of Beauvoir House in Biloxi, Mississippi. Beauvoir was the last home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Davis wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government at Beauvoir.



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King Kong and the true story of Skull Island

The 1933 film King Kong (remade in 1976 and 2005) tells the story of a giant pre-historic creature which rules over a lost island (Skull Island) where it defeats all comers. Ultimately the creature is captured by a group of adventurers and brought back to New York, where it runs amok and is ultimately destroyed by man’s superior technology.


The film had its official world premiere on March 23, 1933 at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. In 1991, the film was deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Was there ever such an island? Was there ever such a monster? In fact, the movie was inspired by a real life monster hunt on an Indonesian island conducted by W. Douglas Burden in 1926.

For years strange tales of a monster living on a remote Indonesian island circulated throughout the East Indies. Official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors. The creature was allegedly a "dragon" which inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands. The fire breathing creature was reported to be seven meters long.

Lieutenant Steyn van Hensbroek, an official of the Dutch Colonial Administration accompanied by a detachment of soldiers landed on the island. After a few days, Hensbroek managed to kill a strange animal. But there were more of the beasts, which were photographed by Peter A. Ouwens, the Director of the Zoological Museum of Java who accompanied the expedition. The expedition provided the first reliable evidence of the existence of what we now call the Komodo dragon.




Secrets of Mysterious Islands


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Lincoln's Political Humor

As a politician, Lincoln used humor with devastating effect. Lincoln got a tremendous laugh from the audience when he said that the arguments of his Senate opponent Stephen A. Douglas were, “as thin as… soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.” On another occasion he said of a political opponent, “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas better than any man I ever met,” suggesting that it is, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”


Of a political opponents ideas Lincoln asked, “How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.” Of the opponents policies Lincoln said, “If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.” The opponent was clearly like, “The man who murdered his parents, then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan.”

Political opponents saw their arguments forgotten by audiences after Lincoln followed up their speeches with a homely stories and humorous anecdotes.

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Lincoln's Love Life

We get an inkling of Lincoln’s sometimes savage wit in his description of his early love life.  In autumn 1836, Abraham Lincoln, then a twenty-seven-year-old Illinois representative studying law, agreed rather enthusiastically to marry Mary S. Owens, whom he had met three years earlier when she was visiting her sister in New Salem, Illinois. Essentially, Lincoln entered into a scheme with Mary's sister to entice Mary from her home in Kentucky to Illinois, never doubting that she would be willing to accept him for a husband. But Lincoln had not seen Mary since her previous visit, and upon her arrival, found himself in a predicament. Mary was not nearly as beautiful as he remembered. In fact, as he explained to another friend: "I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff; I knew she was called an 'old maid,' and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the appellation; but now, when I beheld her, I could not for my life avoid thinking of my mother; and this, not from withered features, for her skin was too full of fat to permit its contracting in to wrinkles; but from her want of teeth, weather-beaten appearance in general, and from a kind of notion that ran in my head, that nothing could have commenced at the size of infancy, and reached her present bulk in less than thirty five or forty years; and, in short, I was not all pleased with her."   Mary detected his true feelings and rejected his dutifully repeated proposal of marriage.

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Abortion in Colonial America

Originally designed as a protection against syphilis, the condom began to come into use as a contraceptive in the eighteenth century. Condoms were usually made from sheep gut and were stocked by brothels and a few specialist wholesalers such as London’s Mrs. Philips who advertised to apothecaries, druggists, and “ambassadors, foreigners, gentlemen, and captains of ships going abroad.” Condoms were not widely used by the general population.


Abortion, rather than contraception, was the primary form of artificial birth control. Most available abortion material relied on folk remedies for ending pregnancy. Bloodletting, for example, was thought to be helpful. It was hoped that bleeding from any part of the body might flush the womb. Similarly, bathing went back to primitive beliefs that pregnancy could simply be washed away. The health risks involved in bringing on an abortion by falling or taking strong purgatives were relatively low, or at least not much worse than childbirth itself. In the absence of any legislation, abortion in America prior to 1800 was governed by traditional British common law. The common law did not recognize the existence of the fetus in criminal cases until it had quickened (begun to move perceptibly in the womb). This occurred late in the fourth or early in the fifth month. According to the prevailing view of the time, the fetus had no soul before quickening and had not demonstrated its independent existence through movement. Until quickening, the fetus was regarded as an extraneous part of the pregnant woman that could be removed without ethical constraint. After quickening, the expulsion and destruction of a fetus without due cause was considered a crime.

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Marriage in Early America

The first permanent English colony in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia on May 14, 1607 by the Virginia Company of London. The party consisted of 104 men who came to America not to settle but to become rich. Within a short time it became apparent to the colony’s sponsors that their great venture in the New World was in danger of being wrecked, “…on the shoals of dissolute, irresponsible, manhood.” It was not until the fall of 1608 that “the first gentlewoman and woman-servant” arrived. The gentlewoman was already married to colonist Thomas Forrest; the servant, Ann Burrus, would soon marry John Laydon, the first marriage to be solemnized in Virginia. More women crossed the Atlantic to Virginia and Maryland in the next several years, but they remained relatively few in number. By 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses, petitioning that wives as well as husbands be eligible for grants of free land, argued that in a new colony, “it is not known whether man or woman be the most necessary.”

The Virginia Company’s London recruiters began searching for women of marriageable age, offering free passage to Virginia and trousseaus for girls of good reputation. New husbands reimbursed the company with 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco when they married. The first shipment of ninety “tobacco brides” arrived in Jamestown in the spring of 1620. The youngest was Jane Dier, aged fifteen. The oldest was Alice Burges, aged twenty-eight.

Some over eager British merchants, hired to provide the colonies with wives simply kidnapped any young woman who came to hand. In October 1618, a warrant was issued for one Owen Evans, who was kidnapping young women from their villages and sending them off to be sold in Virginia as indentured servants. As time went on, most of the single women who came to the Chesapeake Bay colonies voluntarily sold themselves as indentured servants. They re-paid the cost of their passage with a term of four or five years in service. At the end, the women were supposed to receive food, clothing, and tools to give them a start in life, then emerge into a world filled with wife-hungry young men and take their pick.


 
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