Although we modern folk are used to celebrating Thanksgiving on the same day and eat a menu that is the ‘traditional’ fare, Rees and his family would not know of many of these customs Since George Washington proclaimed the first nationwide Thanksgiving in 1789, but it was not an official yearly celebration until 1863 when it was established by Abraham Lincoln.
Since there was no nationwide date chosen, the dates of observance varied from state to state. By the early eighteen hundreds, however, Thanksgiving was customarily celebrated on the fourth Thursday. FDR tried to change it to the third Thursday to lengthen the time for Christmas shopping but there was so much outcry, he reversed his decision.
The first holiday was a religious once and for over two hundred years the activities included church as well as a hearty meal.
While we are talking about the meal, no one is quite sure if the Pilgrims ate turkey. (Most likely, they ate venison and wild ducks for their meal.) Cranberry sauce had been invented in the sixteen sixties but potatoes were unknown. Pumpkin pie, on the other hand, has a long history. Pumpkins were made into pies in Tudor England. Most of the sources I’ve read theorize that the Pilgrims and early settlers did not eat pumpkin pie as they did not have the butter and flour for the crust. In fact, pumpkin pie did not become a traditional part of the holiday feast until the early nineteenth century.turkey
So pleased to receive this wonderful review from Missi Stockwell Martin.
Murder, Sweet Murder (Will Rees Mysteries #11) by Eleanor Kuhns
Will Rees accompanies his wife to Boston to help clear her estranged father’s name in this gripping mystery set in the early nineteenth century.
January, 1801. When Lydia’s estranged father is accused of murder, Will Rees escorts her to Boston to uncover the truth. Marcus Farrell is believed to have murdered one of his workers, a boy from Jamaica where he owns a plantation. Marcus swears he’s innocent. However, a scandal has been aroused by his refusal to answer questions and accusations he bribed officials.
As Will and Lydia investigate, Marcus’s brother, Julian, is shot and killed. This time, all fingers point towards James Morris, Lydia’s brother. Is someone targeting the family? Were the family quarreling over the family businesses and someone lashed out? What’s Marcus hiding and why won’t he accept help?
With the Farrell family falling apart and their reputation in tatters, Will and Lydia must solve the murders soon. But will they succeed before the murderer strikes again? (Summary via Goodreads)
Readers of the Will Rees Mystery series by Eleanor Kuhns are going to go crazy, in a good way, when they start reading the eleventh book, Murder, Sweet Murder……Rees and his wife Lydia along with two of their children are heading to Boston to visit Lydia’s family.
In Murder, Sweet Murder Lydia, who left home many years ago when her father had tried to marry her off to a gentlemen that she did not love, is returning after receiving a letter from her younger sister asking for help. It seems that their father Marcus was accused of murder and Cordelia, Cordy, knows that Will and Lydia have helped solve crimes in their hometown in Maine so they are the obvious choice to clear Marcus’s name. Unfortunately when they arrive at Lydia’s old home, they are not as welcomed as they had hoped. First no one other than Cordy wants an investigation, it seems the case has somehow been swept under the rug, and second the family is not so warm to accepting Will into the family. When Lydia left she didn’t keep in touch with anyone other than Cordy so they are not aware of Will as her husband and of her children.
Will and Lydia are not deterred and begin their investigation into the young man’s death. It is known that he is from Jamaica, a plantation that Marcus owns, but not much more is known. He was killed in the middle of the night outside a tavern that was closed, no witnesses that they are aware of and not much to go on…so Will decides to start at the place of death and go from there……
Every time that they think they have a clue or a fact to the murder, something happens that changes their minds. Once they start investigating they learn of more people that could possibly have committed the murder and when they find out that the person killed isn’t who everyone thinks, they are lead down another disturbing road. And when someone else is murdered in exactly the same way as the first person, Will and Lydia are more determined to find the killer !!
Readers will be drawn into the story immediately !! Readers will love that Will and Lydia are traveling to Boston allowing us to get to know Lydia’s family and the secrets that have kept her away for all those years. There will be members of the family you will fall in love with instantly and there will be some you will hate as soon as you meet them….but you will enjoy the time that you spend in Boston and will be just as glad as Will is when they leave.
The Giveaway for Murder, Sweet Murder, ends next Tuesday so be sure and join the lottery. I am giving away ten copies of the hardcover book.
I had a wonderful interview with Fran Lewis on May 25. I always enjoy talking to her and she asks such great questions. The second link is to her review of the book. Thank you Fran!
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.
Even though the U.S. banned the importation of the enslaved from Africa in 1808, slavery itself was not banned and the enslaved were not freed. Slavery continued to be critical to the economy, particularly in the south but in the north as well. The high demand for slave labor from the cotton trade (the cotton woven into cloth at New England textile factories) encouraged some plantation owners, such as Alabama plantation owner Timothy Meaher, to risk illegal slave runs to Africa. In 1860, his schooner Clotilda sailed from Mobile to what was then the Kingdom of Dahomey He bought Africans captured by warring tribes back to Alabama, creeping into Mobile Bay under the cover of night. Some of the enslaved were divided between Foster and the Meahers, and others were sold. Foster then ordered the Clotilda taken upstream, burned and sunk to conceal the evidence.
After the Civil War, the freed slaves wished to return to Africa but did not have the money to do so. They set up a town in Alabama, near Mobile, called Africatown. It is set up under the same system as the African villages with a chief, a system of laws, a church and a school.
Based on stories told by modern day descendants living in Africatown, a search for the ship Clotilde was begun. Ben Baines, a reporter, found a shipwreck but it was too large to be the schooner. A company that specializes in maritime shipwreck recovery took on the job. Although the wreckage of the Clotilda was not very deep in the water, maybe eight to ten feet, the visibility was so poor that it was hard to find. It was finally recovered in 2019.
The Clotilda is proof that the slave trade went on for far longer than it should have, by law, and far longer than most of us believe.
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?
To modern eyes, health care 200 years ago was primitive at best, lethal at worse. A recent knee replacement inspired me to consider medical care and pain management. (A friend of mine told me that a knee replacement is essentially an amputation of one’s leg.) However, it is described, it is a painful procedure.
The choices for treating pain were limited. I think we have all heard the story of the wounded man being treated with a glass of whiskey and a stick clamped between the teeth. Alcohol was used to help the patient into insensibility as well as a disinfectant.
Another choice was salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin. Of course, it wasn’t aspirin. yet; the distilling of salicylic acid did not take place until late in the nineteenth center. No, it had to be used in its natural state. The leaves of the willow tree was steeped into a tea which was given to the patient as an analgesic. As a blood thinner and an anti-inflammatory, it is given to surgical patients and heart attack patients alike. It is still one of the most widely used medications in the world.
Finally, there were the opiates. The sap of the opium poppy has been used for millennia to treat pain. Of course, none of the stronger extracts had been distilled from the poppy until 1820 (morphine) and beyond.
One of the early methods of gaining the analgesic effects of the opium was to steep the straw into a tea. (I allude to this in Death in Salem with a character addicted to ‘straw tea’.) But the most common method of ingesting opium was as laudanum, a tincture of opium and alcohol. A reddish brown liquid, it was extremely bitter. By the early eighteen hundreds, laudanum was common and during the eighteen hundreds it became an ingredient in many patent medicines. It was frequently prescribed to women for menstrual cramps and various aches and pains. As might be expected, addiction was prevalent. Mary Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s wife, was an addict. Another fun fact: nurses would spoon feed laudanum to the infants in their care to help them sleep. And if that doesn’t make your hair curl, I don’t know what will.
Laudanum is still available by prescription.
Our world of Tylenol and Ibuprofen seems almost like paradise in comparison.
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.
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.
averns and coffeehouses were an important part of Colonial and Federalist life. They served as meeting places, inns, restaurants and more. Before post offices were built, taverns and coffeehouses also handled letters. In the early days of the colonies, taverns were built at ferry landings. Later on, when coaches began running, the taverns became handy stops and, in fact, Rouge’s tavern frequently sees an influx of passengers either going to or from Boston.
As one might expect, there was a wide range of comfort and amenities provided, ranging from a grand inn like the Raleigh in Williamsburg to the ordinary that served the ferrymen or waggoneers. In the last, the beds were likely to be hard wooden pallets, the mattresses filled with cornhusks or straw as well as fleas and other critters. Food offered was usually cornmeal mush.
All of the taverns mentioned in Murder, Sweet Murder, with the exception of the Painted Pig, which is my own creation, existed in 1801 in Boston. The Warren Tavern is still in use as a bar and restaurant. The Green Dragon, which was the Headquarters of the Sons of Liberty (and where much of the planning for the War of Independence occurred), was demolished in 1822.
