Category Archives: will Rees mysteries

Fingerprints and more: forensics in 1800

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My weaver/detective Will Rees frequently refers to Philip, his Native American friend who has taught him to look for tracks and identify some of them. So Rees can tell the difference between boots and shoes, and usually the gender of the wearer. He examines cart wheel tracks and hoof prints and can identify the horse if one of the horseshoes is damaged. He can see if a victim’s blood is drying or has petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes. Other than that, unless there is an obvious rope burn or bruises around the neck or stab wounds, he has very little to help solve the case. The discovery of DNA is almost 300 years in the future.

In 1800 and before, forensics was not in its infancy, it was nonexistent.

Take fingerprints, a staple of crime fiction for the last 200 years. In 1822, Johannes Purkinje, establishes the nine basic patterns of fingerprints and creates a classification system. It wasn’t until 1880 that Henry Faulds wrote that fingerprints could be used for identification and also suggested that powder could expose latent fingerprints.

AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) so beloved of the crime shows on TV did not come about until the 1960s. By then, most stories featured smart criminals who wore gloves or used other methods to hide their prints.

What about blood and bloodstains? Blood grouping was not discovered until 1901. Since then, grouping has been refined so that blood can by typed very accurately. In 1800, a detective could not be 100% sure a dark brown stain was blood – it could be coffee or chocolate. Flourescein, the first of the chemicals that reacts with blood, was not used since the early 1900’s. It reacts with the hemoglobin and glows under UV light. Luminol does the same thing but a clever murderer can destroy it with bleach.

Also, without the presence of a human body, the blood could not be identified as human. It could be animal blood. Not chemical tests can quickly identify the blood as human or animal, right down to the species.

Blood spatter and drip patterns, however, was mentioned in writing in 1514 so this is something Rees COULD notice. Of course, it might or might not be helpful.

So, how does Will Rees or any other early detective solve murders without the tools we take for granted? Ratiocination or the ‘little gray cells’. One of the things I love about writing historical mysteries is the slow unraveling of the puzzle, step by careful step, until the final conclusion is reached.

Policing in Early America

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The rise of the modern police force in a relatively modern phenomenon. Policing in early America was a hodgepodge of constables, sheriffs , night watchmen and justices of the peace. The Boston Night Watch was established in 1631. These were usually poorly paid and untrained. Moreover, although they were paid, it was more of a stipend than a salary. All officers had to have another profession that put food on the table. In my Will Rees series, series, Rouge runs a tavern.

Bands of citizens, like a more powerful Neighborhood watch, was another system employed to keep order. Too often, they became groups of zealots who went after anyone of whom they disapproved.

As the populations increased, especially cities like Boston and New York, port cities where immigrants arrived, these patchwork systems were quickly overwhelmed.

Attempts as establishing some kind of security force were tried. The wealthy usually hired their own men to protect themselves and their possessions. A system that paid the men with rewards was also tried. But abuse was rampant. Innocent men were hanged for crimes so the ‘detective’ could collect the reward.

London was the first city to set up a trained, professional force: the Metropolitan Police. This was a country-wide force with trained officers and it quickly became a model for the United States. New York City became the first police force modeled on the ‘bobbies’. (The American system, however, was decentralized. Politicians chose the officers and they reported to a neighborhood precinct house. Cronyism and corruption were constant problems.) The police did not wear uniforms until 1853, in New York City.

Boston began experimenting with a police force modeled on the British in 1837. By 1860, all large American cities had established full time police forces.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s, when Rees is investigating, there was no such thing as a police force.

Women’s Rights in Early America

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The short comment on the title is that women had none. Although I would expect that wives had some input in their married lives and the lives of their children, legally they had none.

Women could not vote. The only people who could were white men, and white men with property at that. Women could not inherit from their husbands unless specifically mentioned in a husband’s will. If he did not mention her, she became the responsibility of her son. If the relationship was poor, he could, and frequently did, turn her own to starve on the road.

Women owned nothing. Although a woman might bring a dowry to a marriage, property of such, as soon as the marriage took place, the property became her husband’s. He could spend it as he wished, including on other women. If he chose to gamble it away, she had no legal recourse. (This, by the way, is a common trope in Regency and romance fiction.) One of the sources I read described a case of divorce. When the woman wished to remarry, she had to do so in her petticoat. Even the clothing on her back belonged to her husband and he refused to give her any of it. (This is why the farm Lydia owns becomes Rees’s after their marriage.)

Even her children belonged to her husband. In a dispute, he might remove them and forbid her to see them again. He usually chose his children’s spouses and determined where and when they were apprenticed.

Domestic abuse was not a crime. Although it was expected a husband would not beat his wife to death, English common law gave him the right to beat her with a stick no bigger than his thumb.

This is not a world I would ever wish to return to and it is certainly unfortunate that some people seem to think this is still the way the world should work.

One of the wonderfully progressive facts about the Shakers is that they believed in equality between the sexes. Although their work was divided by gender, and followed along traditional gender roles, women bore a equal share in the governance of the community. Education as well was offered to both boys and girls, a rarity at that time.

Inequality in 1800 US

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Inequality is not a new phenomenon. Through most of human history, recorded history for sure, most of the resources have been coopted by the few. One of the few times in history when there was a big shake up was during the Black Death. Entire villages were wiped out. Crops rotted in the fields. With such a diminished labor pool, surviving serfs were able to negotiate better wages and working conditions for themselves.

However, change usually comes about through some cataclysm or continuous revolts.

In the United States, most of the founding fathers were wealthy and quite a few were plantation owners with slaves. (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, e.g.) Although Will Rees, of the Will Rees mysteries is not poor, he and his family do struggle a bit to make ends meet. Besides farming, Rees takes his loom and weaves for farmwives for a bit of ‘cash money’. Lydia sells her eggs and cheese at market.

Rees comes face to face with the difference in wealth in Murder, Sweet Murder. Lydia receives a frantic letter from her sister begging her to come to Boston. Their father, Marcus Farrell, has been accused of murder. Although Lydia is reluctant, she has been estranged from her father for years, he is still her father. She and Rees, along with the baby and daughter Jerusha, head off to Boston.

Although Rees knew Lydia came from money, he is shocked by the wealth of the Farrell family. The large house is stocked with servants, they own several vehicles including a carriage with a matched foursome, and apparently money is no object.

The Farrells also look down upon Rees for his more humble life. He grew up on a poor farm and certainly does not make enough for servants.

But Marcus Farrell is enmeshed in the Triangle Trade. He owns sugar plantations in the Caribbean as well as a distillery in Boston and a fleet of ships to transport slaves from Africa.

Marcus Farrell, it seems, is morally bankrupt. The question is, is he also a murderer?

Slavery in Murder, Sweet Murder

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In Murder, Sweet Murder, I continued looking at slavery in the United States, following Death in the Great Dismal and Murder on Principle. Since the importation of slaves was not forbidden until1808 (but there was plenty of smuggling through Spanish Florida as well as other slave ships that ignored the law. The Clotilda brought 110 children from Africa in 1859.), Rees’s father-in-law was still bringing in enslaved people during the Rees family’s visit to Boston.

Lydia had already fled the family home, joining the Shakers in Maine as a young woman. This is where she met Will Rees. Now her brother James, a sea captain, is estranged from their father. James refuses to engage in ‘that filthy trade’, his words. Conditions on the ships were horrific.

It is commonly assumed that slavery was wholly a Southern institution. Nothing could be further than the truth. During the Colonial period and through the Revolution, slavery was widespread. However, after the War for Independence, states such as New York and New Jersey began passing laws to abolish slavery gradually. By 1804, all the Northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either immediately or incrementally.

No Southern states abolished slavery although individual owners freed their slaves.

The demand for slaves increased dramatically with the invention of the cotton gin and cotton became ‘King Cotton’. The rising demand for sugar also increased the amount of land on the plantations in Jamaica and the other islands devoted to sugar. Plantations that once grew indigo and cacao switched to sugar, as I describe in the mystery. 

Both sugar and cotton exhaust the soil, so plantation owners looked west for fresh land. That, of course, amplified the conflict between the free states and the slave states and set the stage for the Missouri Compromise where Missouri entered the union as a slave state and Maine, formerly part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as a free state. 

Families

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As I looked around the table at Christmas dinner, and saw people who had not spoken to one another for years, I thought of how complicated families could be.

In Murder, Sweet Murder, I set the mystery against Lydia’s family, but Will Rees’s is no less difficult.

Lydia, estranged from her father and step-mother, left her family years ago. Her father is a wealthy Boston merchant engaged in the Triangle Trade. He owns a distillery that distills molasses into rum as well a fleet of ships that run slaves from Africa.

Lydia cannot accept her father’s profession and after some problems in her personal live, runs away. She lands at Zion, a Shaker community in Maine. In Murder, Sweet Murder I bring her back to Boston, and her family. She is no more tolerant of her father’s profession now than she was then.

Rees’s father was an abusive alcoholic who died by falling off a wagon in a drunken stupor. Rees is not an alcoholic but he makes other mistakes with his children. Before the action begins in A Simple Murder, David, Rees’s oldest son runs away from home, and takes refuge in Zion with the Shakers. Rees had left David (he would say his father abandoned him) with Caroline and her husband. When Rees returns home and recovers the farm, sending Caroline’s family packing, she never forgives him.

In A Devil’s Cold Dish, Caroline does her very best to destroy her brother and his family.

As the stories go on, and Rees’s history unfolds, his family expands. But it also changes. By the time of Murder, Sweet Murder, Jerusha, Rees’s oldest daughter, wants to leave home for school. David and Simon have already left for a farm in a distant town.

Families are complicated, even in fiction.

Sugar, Molasses and Rum

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Before rum, there was sugar – from sugarcane. Sugar is present in many fruits and vegetables. Sugar beets, for example, have more sugar than an apple. There are also many types of sugar: glucose, fructose, lactose, with slight differences in their chemical structures. 

The sweetest of all is sugarcane.

Sugarcane is a picky plant, requiring heat, sunshine and water. It must be grown in a frost free environment. Discovered millennia ago, it grew first in New Guinea and from there spread to India and the Indian subcontinent. It did not reach Europe until many centuries later, during the Middle Ages, and it was rare and expensive. A description of a banquet in 1457 mentions sugar sculptures. As sugar was planted in Madeira and the Canary Islands, the demand for sugar increased tenfold.

Christopher Columbus brought sugarcane to the New World and the first sugar plantation was set up in Hispaniola. Slaves were imported to work the plantations and the desire for sugar continued to increase. With the plantations in the West Indies, sugar became cheap enough for most households to afford. From a few pounds consumed per capita in the colonies in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the amount rose to eighty pounds by the end.

Sugarcane is a grass. The crop is chopped into lengths, crushed and boiled. (Now much of this is done by machines but during the time of Will Rees, it was all done by hand.) The sugar we know and love is the crystallized result from the sugarcane syrup. Raw sugar is brown and has a higher molasses content. Slave accounts allude to the difficult and dangerous work connected to the production of sugar, from the chopping of cane to the boiling of the syrup. Slaves in the more northern states did not want to be sold down south: to the cotton or cane fields.

Molasses is a byproduct of this process. Once, it was discarded but the demand for molasses grew exponentially when it was discovered it could be fermented into an alcoholic drink. The fermentation of sugarcane juice is mentioned in Sanskrit texts. By the time of the sugar plantations in the West Indies, the enslaved were fermenting the molasses into ‘Rumbullion”, ‘kill-devil,’ and ‘screech’ – all forms of (probably undrinkable) rum. It rapidly gained in popularity, however, and was used as currency in Africa and was exported to Great Britain.

Sugarcane is a heavy feeder and requires about 660 gallons of water for every 2.2 pounds of sugar. So, not great for the environment as well as its role in obesity, tooth decay, diabetes, and other health risks.

Rum

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Rum was the lubricant and the fuel for the engine of commerce leading up to the American Revolution and a bit beyond. It was a favorite drink of the slavers, the slaves, and pretty much everyone else. Called Nelson’s blood (as well as a number of less flattering names), rum made up part of the British sailors’ pay.

What is rum? Rum is distilled from the molasses left over from sugarcane. The cane has particular requirement and cannot be grown in the temperate lands. It must be grown with lots of sun and water. It also needs intensive labor to cut, cart and process the cane under the tropical sun. A clear and distinct link between the growing demand for sugar and slavery can be drawn because, as plantations were turned over to cane, the needs of a large work force demanded more workers – Slaves.

The slaves needed to be fed. New England ships brought dried cod, picked up the molasses for transport to the distilleries in New England. The resulting drink (called among other things, screech, kill-devil, demon water) was put in casks and sent to Africa to purchase more slaves and also to Great Britain. This was the previously discussed Triangle Trade.

Ironically, the long trips over the ocean, stored in casks, made the rum more drinkable.

Although rum was still consumed after the War for Independence, as mentioned in Murder, Sweet Murder, it was falling out of favor as the new country’s beverage. Whiskey, from rye grown in Western Pennsylvania, and distilled in the country, was considered more patriotic and as such became the drink of choice.

The Triangle Trade

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The enslavement of thousands is a stain on the United States. The ripple effects are still being felt to this day.

Slaves were bought and sold in the northern colonies, but, by about 1800 these areas, states now in the new United States, had by and large forbidden the importing and sale of slaves. (That does not mean there were none; the slaves already present were allowed to remain.)

However, that does not mean merchants in the north were guiltless. Merchants, such as Lydia’s father, engaged in a three cornered trade in which New England businessmen took African slaves to the United States and the West Indies for work on the plantations, especially the sugar plantations.

The by product of making sugar, molasses, was shipped to New England for distillation into rum. That rum was exported to Great Britain and brought to Africa. The rum, and the profits from selling the rum, was used to purchase more slaves.

This trade was called the benign sounding Triangle Trade.

Boston

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Murder, Sweet Murder, the next Will Rees mystery, is set in Boston.

Since the birth of the United States, Boston has been one of the country’s most important cities. It was settled by the Puritans in 1630 and quickly became a trading center and hub of commerce.

During the 1770s, Boston was a hotbed of patriotic fervor. The taverns in Boston were instrumental in firing up the populace and planning. (More about that later.) The first shots were fired nearby and several battles, including Breed’s Hill, were fought within the town.

By the time Rees joins Lydia in Boston, and finally meets her family, the war has been over for twenty years.

Once the war was over, Boston’s economy recovered and the population grew significantly, so much so it went from a village to a town. Then, in 1822, the name was changed to the City of Boston.

Boston was also one of the first cities to adopt a metropolitan police force. In 1790, Boston’s population was 43,000 and the ability of night watchmen and constables to keep order and protect lives and property was already strained. The rapid growth that occurred beginning in the early 1800s, and increased with the influx of foreign immigrants, further stressed the system. In 1837, Boston established a police force modeled on the London police.