Alice Martin Bishop

Neonaticide: murder of a child one day old or younger. Infanticide: murder of a child less than one year old by their parent. Filicide: murder of child older than one year old by their parent.

While women commit just 13% of all US violent crime, they are responsible for half of all child murders.

Many filicidal mothers have frequent depression, psychosis and suicidal thoughts and manifest one of five common motives:

a) Mother kills child out of love or for child’s best interest, possibly saving their children from future “harm” or “evil.” AKA Altruistic Filicide.

b) Mother kills child without any cognition or memory of her motive. May be responding to voices in her head.  AKA Acutely Psychotic Filicide.

c) Child dies as the result of abuse or neglect.

d) Mothers kills child because child is unwanted.

e) Spousal Revenge Filicide

(See Friedman and Resnick)

I think there is little doubt AMB was mentally unbalanced and not just because she hacked through her daughter’s windpipe.  What are the psychic wounds any person would sustain by being orphaned, seeing people die of horrible diseases and starvation, witnessing war, leaving one’s home country and having their husband die?  Therefore, I am not a fan of making AMB a raving lunatic living amidst the tranquil Plymouth community.  I believe all Pilgrims underwent relentless psychological trauma.  Maybe Alice represents the furthest edge of the community’s psyche – one eventually broken by living the Pilgrim dream?

In other words, Alice’s only rational response to such tragic and erosive conditions was to be traumatized and that might have contributed to a not entirely-unexpected psychic break.  Hoffer and Hull, who wrote extensively on English infanticide, claim that economic pressures, lean harvests and community uncertainty were correlated with increased filicide in sixteenth century England.  There are more than a dozen reported cases of infanticide/filicide in early colonial Virginia, Maryland and Massachusetts where living conditions, perhaps, generated similar, secondary motives.  Friedman and Resnick studied contemporary murdering mothers and found Alice’s life written in them: “The mothers were often poor, socially isolated, full-time caregivers, who were victims of domestic violence or had other relationship problems. Disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and primary responsibility for the children were common.” 

Other experiences and attributes regularly found in filicidal mothers:

• Endless child care and enduring baby’s crying/primary caregiver status
• Underlying mental illness
• Intellectual disabilities
• Belief child was abnormal
• Experience auditory hallucinations

Any one (or multiple) of these could have been AMB’s experience.  Because she did not kill an infant, I think it more likely she was committing altruistic or psychotic filicide but we cannot rule out that she was a rage-fueled child abuser either.  We do not have records that Abigail and Damaris were abused but that does not mean it did not happen.

I have discussed this case with my good friend, Patricia L. High, former Assistant District Attorney for Oklahoma County who has seen more than her fair share of terrorizing mothers. Automatically, Pattye believes AMB is a pissed off mother intent on ridding herself of that ungrateful Abigail who has, once again, done something unforgiveable like wet the bed.  Pattye’s experience is that mothers critically, even fatally, injure their children much more from places of rage and intent than from psychosis and voices in their heads.

I try to believe that because I don’t want to be an AMB apologist.  Martha died and did so savagely.  There are no heirs of Martha to tell her side of the story.    Certainly, there was nothing this four year-old child could have done to justify her slaughter. 

But applying modern definitions and experiences of child abuse will not slip seamlessly in seventeenth century Plymouth.  Take Pattye’s bed wetting theory. Would Alice hack her child to death for wetting a straw- filled bed in a community where clothes went weeks, even months, soiled and smelly?   By the evidence records we have, Martha was sleeping when she was killed – she had not spilled a pot from the stove, not hurt her little sister, not smart mouthed her mother.  She slept and Alice looked up, went for the knife and then climbed the ladder.

I think this scenario demonstrates intent.  For whatever unfathomable reason, AMB knew she needed to kill Martha.  That does not mean she was “in her right mind” at the moment or had any explanation for why she did it, only profound regret afterward (which the evidence record does indicate).  While she may have known what she was doing at the moment that does not mean that in the next moment, when she returned to a rational state, she wished she had never killed her child.  

In England, prior to the 18th century, mothers were pardoned in court because they were known to be insane or intellectually challenged. “Madness, not a medical term but a legal one, did not ‘excuse’ a homicide, but averted the death penalty” (Hoffer, 146).  Therefore, insanity was not so much a successful defense strategy but rather a way to save a mother from execution during sentencing. 

This does not seem to be the case in the American colonies.  Take, for example, the case of Dorothy Talbye who was hanged in 1639 Boston for the murder of her three year-old child.  It sounds remarkably similar to AMB’s case.  Except everyone knew Talbye was mentally ill because she had previously attempted to kill her children as well as her husband.  Talbye had been exiled form the church and publicly whipped – each to no avail.  As Governor Winthrop recalled her, “she was so possessed with Satan that he persuaded her by his delusions, which she listened to as revelations from God.”   Note how the existence of her mental illness is not questioned and yet, it could not justify her actions (Hoffer, 41).   Furthermore, even if the jurors believed Talbye was in the grips of Satan, there was no saving her – only saving the community’s exposure to one snatched by the Devil (Hoffer, 41).

If anyone had noticed Alice being mentally unstable, it would not have helped her much either. All of this, legally, is a moot point.  Judges found all forms of filicide “threats to the entire community” (Hoffer, 40) and punished it severely.   The M’Naughten standard which would be the foundation piece of our modern insanity defense was centuries away from American courtroom practice.

The AMB case’s greatest questions will be those that begin with “Why?”  And I do not expect we will ever have complete answers.  We can only remain aware of the context that shaped Alice’s beliefs and experiences.  It is always unimaginable when a woman murders those to which she gave birth.  We presume every child is cherished and that every woman is hardwired to love childrearing above all other acts.  Neither one is true.  Filicide severs these quaint notions from us. 

The persistent efforts of judges and ministers to obtain and publish confessions and repentances of the guilty as they stood upon the gallows grew in part from the belief that crimes must not be hidden, even by those about to die.  -Hoffer, 50

Plymouth’s first murder trial was held in 1630 with John Billington accused of murdering John Newcomen.  Billington was executed the same year (Philbrick, 157). Similar to AMB’s trial, there was no lengthy investigation-trial-retrial.  Cases were quickly delivered to juries, adjudicated, and if death were called for, there was no need to tarry.  Ross writes,

The Massachusetts legal system was not, in the fashion of early modern European polities, a patchwork of numerous and bounded jurisdictions with overlapping responsibilities and clashing agendas.  Settlers stripped away much of the complexity that they had known in England and thereby made the machinery for punishing offenders simpler and quicker (986).

With a streamlined system and only one Plymouth citizen with formal legal training (William Brewster, see Murrin 158), retributive justice was quickly determined by Plymouth citizens who had minimal functional literacy (Murrin, 158) but lived expertise in the community’s moral codes.  Nonetheless, “colonial courts were not concerned with questions of motive, but of fact.  The motive of the defendant does not generally appear in records” (Hoffer, 145). While English law required two witnesses to convict someone of murder, this was obviously not the case for AMB – we had Rachel Ramsden “eyewitness” account and AMB’s confession (Philbrick, 195).

A web page (American Female Hanging) reviewing the hanging deaths of American women provides the following data:

About 500 women have been executed in the United States between 1608 and 1900 – with well over 200 hanging for murder, notable infanticide.  In other words, a lady can commit many crimes and receive the death penalty – witchcraft, arson, even adultery.   

Hanging may appear a more painless way to die (awful anticipation followed a quick snap of the neck) but early executioners were often no more than an untrained sheriff or other civil servant tasked with the grim duty.  If the “correct drop” was not achieved (by scaffold height, design, knot, rope and weight of the person), the death may be caused by much slower strangulation.  In AMB’s case, she may have well stood on the back of a wagon or placed side saddle onto a horse and dragged off the back by her neck to achieve the hanging.

The following is a list of early colonial women who were executed beside AMB executed:

1632: Jane Champion for an unknown offense.

1633: (June 24) Margaret Hatch in Virginia for murdering her child.

1638: (December 6) Dorothy Talby hanged in Salem, MA for infanticide of daughter, Difficulty. Talby had prior conviction and public whipping for attacking her husband.

1643: (March 21) Mary Latham James Britton was hanged in Massachusetts for adultery.

1660: (June 1) Mary Dyer hanged in Boston for refusing to stop practicing her Quaker faith. 

1692: 13 women hanged including my great x8 grandmother Martha Allen Carrier in Salem, MA for practicing witchcraft.

I try to imagine the day.  Alice Martin Bishop’s sentence is handed down – guilty of willful murder.  To be hanged by the neck until she is dead.  What did Richard think? How did Abigail and Damaris learn of their mother’s impending death?

Alice Martin Bishop left her trial and stopped briefly at home. Said her goodbyes to tearful, terrified girls, maybe shared a prayer with Richard.  It was likely she was quickly transported to her execution sight – was a formal scaffold built or did they just hang her from a tree?  How long did her body hang there? What were her last words?  Did she go to her death believing she was damned to hell?  And ultimately, what was she telling herself about why she killed her young daughter?

We know the hanging was likely a public spectacle if for no other reason than privacy would have been infeasible in this small community for such a publicized crime (ample court records prove that).  “Hangings [were meant ] to be spectacles so that the example of the fruits of the crime could be impressed on the people” (Chapin 55).  As had been done in England, executions happened almost immediately after sentencing and done so in an intentionally public setting.

While we know that a clergy member likely attended the execution to offer some consolation, we do not know if the Puritan practice of delivering a sermon to the public from a gallows pulpit had begun by the time AMB was executed (Chapin, 55).  What would a clergy member have said to Alice and what to the spectators?  What warning, what solace could he had offered his parishioners?  Did he insinuate that Alice must have been under some sort of demonic delusions? Did the gatherers pray for Martha? For her mother?

It seems only reasonable that Alice knew she would be executed.  We have no record of her recanting her confession or attempting to flee.  As Rachel Ramsden described her on that fateful July day, Alice probably remained “sad and dumpish.”

 And so on an early autumn day, a noose was placed around Alice’s neck.  Final words were said, maybe her face was covered.  And then Alice Martin Bishop was hanged for murder.

The Plymouth Court Records for the AMB case read:

II:132  Court session held at New Plymouth on 1 August 1648 (SATURDAY). On 22 July 1648 a committee was sworn by Governor William Bradford “to make inquiry of the death of the child of Allis Bishop, the wife of Richard Bishope.” Their report stated that they had found blood on the floor at the foot of the ladder what lead to the upper chamber in the Bishop house, and that in the upper chamber they found the body of a female child, about four years of age, with her throat cut several times. In addition they found the knife, and reported that Mrs. Bishop confessed to five members (all at the same time) of the twelve-man jury that she had killed her child. The child’s body had originally been discovered by one Rachel Ramsden, the twenty-three year old wife of Joseph Ramsden. Mrs. Ramsden had told her parents of her discovery and very shortly the law was after Mrs. Bishop.

II:134 Two months later, at the Court held at Plymouth on 4 October 1648, Alice Bishop was indicted “for felonius murder by her comited upon Martha Clark, her owne child, the frute of her own body.” The Grand Jury of seventeen men found a true bill, and immediately following the petit jury of twelve men found her guilty of the murder. She then “had the sentence of death pronounced against her, viz., to bee taken from the place where shee was to the place from whence shee came, and thence to the place of execution, and there to be hanged by the necke vntell her body is dead, which acordingly was executed.” Very likely she was executed almost immediately. There is no mention in the records that the execution took place in Daxbury, but even so the delay would not have been very long.

At a Court of Assistants held at New Plymouth, the first of August, 1648, before Mr. Bradford, Governor, Mr. Coliar, Captain Miles Standish, and Mr. William Thomas, Gent, Assistants, the said Allice, being examined, confessed she did commit the aforesaid murder, and is sorry for it.

1648 “At the General Court of our Sovereign Lord the King, held at Plymouth aforesaid, the 4th of October, 1648

4 October before Mr. Bradford, Governor,   Mr. Thomas Prence, Captain Miles Standish, Mr. Timothy Hatherle and Mr. William Thomas,

At this Court, Allice Bishope, the wife of Richard Bishope, of New Plymouth, was indited for felonious murder by her committed, upon Martha Clark, her own child, the fruit of her own body.

The names of the grand inquest that went on trial of the aforesaid bill of indictment, were these:-

John Dunham,  Sen. John Barker,  Isaske Weels   Josepth Colman,   Mr. Thomas Burne, John Allis, Robert Finny,  Thomas Bordman,  Henery Wood, James Bursell, Ephrain Hickes , Josepth Tory, James Walker  Micsell Backwell,  James Wyat,  Daniell Cole,  Loue Brewster  

These found the said Allice Bishope guilty of the said felonious murder of Martha Clarke aforesaid; and so she had the sentence of death pronounced against her, viz., to be taken from the place where she was to the place from whence she came, and thence to the place of execution, and there to be hanged by the neck until her body is dead, which accordingly was executed. (Source: The “Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England” edited by Nathaniel B. Shurtleff , Boston 1855, volume two of Court Orders 1641-1651).

In the first days of October 1648, 32 year old Alice Martin Bishop was hanged in Plymouth Colony for stabbing to death her four year-old daughter, Martha, an event of which she said she had no recollection.  Although she was put on trial, there was little to consider.  AMB had admitted her guilt October 1, 1648 (but not the first time she admitted she had killed Martha) and her trial ended on October 4 – on which the same day she was hanged.  Naturally, this testimony is confusing.  AMB says she does not remember killing Martha and yet, repeatedly, admits to her guilt and regret.

There are several observations, necessary clarifications and questions resulting from the trial documents:

Trial Preparation and Prejudices:  As gory as this murder must have appeared, it does seem the inquest was completed by objective coroners and that AMB was given every benefit of a transparent trial by jury.  I have never questioned whether AMB was intentionally falsely accused and I think the evidence makes her the most likely suspect as Martha’s killer.  Certainly, we could look at other potential suspects – Richard, Abigail, Rachel, a stranger and so forth – but it is extremely unlikely that additional evidence will appear to take us off AMB’s trail.

I find no evidence that AMB’s rights were not protected during her arrest, inquest and trial.  That is not to say her trial was not sensational in this small community: the trial was a “major communal drama…[where] magistrates provided elaborately for an inquest and trial” (Hoffer, 42).  It is my belief that the investigation was handled with the upmost care because the community was horrified by what Alice had done: the Governor and Assistants wanted irrefutable proof (which was not hard to come by) and for justice to be swift and appropriate.

AMB did not have a defense lawyer but nor would anyone criminally charged in 1648 Plymouth Colony. She may have had people who testifed on her behalf as to her moral character and mental state – but again, we have no documentation of such.

Thompson explains the investigative work that went into criminal trials:

Much ground work would have been done before the trial; the accused would have been examined by a magistrate [and] depositions from witnesses would have been collected in writing. Since magistrates combined this inquisitorial role with the judicial, the examination might often act as the real trial when the examining magistrate decided in his own mind on the guilt or innocence of the accused.  This is the explanation for the high conviction rate, around 90 percent…and for the rarity of appeals (p 7).

Admitting Guilt:  Alice admits her guilt and apologizes on July 22, 1648 – the day the inquest was held. A grand jury of 17 found a true bill to move to trial and a jury of 12 men convicted her (Hoffer, 42).  We know the names of the grand jury and trial jurors – all male and perhaps no surprise.  However, women occasionally sat on Plymouth juries as in the 1678 inquest into the death of Anne Baston’s child (Deetz).  Is there any reason to believe the outcome for AMB would have been different if women were impaneled to hear the case?  It seems doubtful – the evidence was overwhelming and they had AMB’s confessions before them (Chapin, 113).

Why did Alice never attempt to place the blame elsewhere? The most obvious answer is that she knew she had murdered her daughter and was so shocked by her actions that she could do nothing but confess.  It is a remarkable example of the Pilgrim mindset that is rarely seen amongst contemporary murdering mothers.  Murrin writes, “The proper response to sin in New England was confession and repentance, not denial of guilt.” And goes on to explain that, “If through misguided sentimentality or a misplaced concern for harmony the community failed to punish sins, it would break its covenant with God, and He would devastate the land with some appropriate catastrophe” (188). Alice had to claim her crime and the community had to take her life for their own well-being.  Alice was forsaken – clearly – but the community could not put themselves in the crosshairs of a God intent on retribution.   Living in Plymouth Colony was dangerous enough.

Governor Bradford:   Bradford was 58 years old when he presided over this trial as a court official (not a member of the jury).  This was a time of great social flux in the colony in which such a sensational crime surely left Bradford pensive of his mission.  Within ten years, he threatened to resign because: “as Governor Bradford had complained, the spiritual life of Plymouth…had declined to the point that God must one day show his displeasure.  For children of the Saints, it would be impossible not to see the calamities ahead as the judgment of the Lord” (Philbrick, 177 as well as 166).  In other words, perhaps the unimaginable crime that had happened in their midst was but just one portent of the decay in which the colony was sliding.

Crimes Punishable by Death and Premeditated Murder:

In 1636, the Plymouth Colony codified crimes that were punishable by death: willful murder, “forming a solemn compact with the devil by way of witchcraft,” arson of homes or ships, sodomy, rape, buggery and adultery (see also Baker).

 “The fact that the word ‘Willful’ is alongside ‘Murder’ is of great importance upon the analysis of murder cases. More than once, the fact that the word ‘Willful’ is used prevents the death sentence from being carried out” (Jordan).  Willful murder would be intentional, premeditated and seemingly how AMB was judged.  Even if she did not have a murder plan in place, the court ruled she knew what she was doing when she killed Martha.

Bradley Chapin & Criminal Trials in the Colonies:

Chapin (1983) provides excellent analyses of American colonial legal systems and practices relevant to this case. I am sharing several of his observations because they add context to the AMB case:

“Because Plymouth lacked formal authorization to create a government, William Bradford showed concern from the beginning as to whether it had the right to punish criminals” (6).  AMB’s case certainly rocked the Plymouth community – only in its’ second decade of true existence – to its’ core.  How this trial was handled and the lessons the community would take from it must have been of paramount importance to the governor.

 “[T]he governor and assistants in Plymouth…administered the criminal justice system at their discretion for an extended period of time” and “by regularly reelecting the governors and assistants the settlers implicitly approved magisterial justice” (18). “Both the Bible and Calvin said they could, indeed ought, to leave the disciplinary function to the magistrates” (20).  I find this an exceptional perspective on the Plymouth Colony mindset: these were a people of a distinct religiously-based worldview who had packed up their lives just a generation ago to incubate a utopia in a vast, unknown wilderness.  Community obedience was the foundation by which their Puritan visions of grandeur were built.  Certainly, Strangers and ne’er-do-wells had moved to the Plymouth Colony but everyone was expected to obey all laws. As Chapin notes, “[The Plymouth settlers] aimed at establishing spiritual communities in which the administration of justice would be a means of maintaining the integrity of their experiments” (20).

Plymouth law did guarantee trial by jury (23).  “One of the first laws passed in America was the Plymouth order requiring that the trail of ‘all Criminall facts” would be by jury (40).  As the Salem Witch Trials would indicate at the end of the seventeenth century, “trial by jury” could be bastardized to “trial by rumor, suspicion and retribution.”  But I remain convinced that the trial of AMB exemplifies the intent of Plymouth colonial law at its’ earliest evolution.

It’s easy to make Alice Martin Bishop mentally ill.  To insist she had post-partum depression, to assume she had to be psychotic.  To make her a seventeenth century Andrea Yates.  Because the alternative is to imagine she is a cold-hearted, murdering mother.  And for those of us who claim AMB in our family tree, that’s a real downer.

While we have zero evidence that AMB was perceived as mentally/emotionally unbalanced, we need to conjure up some sort of explanation for July 22, 1648. This blog entry is replete with uncertainties and “what-ifs?”  That being said, I wish some researchers and genealogists would stop making presumptions about who Alice was and what her motives were.  Randolph Roth, as an example, makes claims that I fail to see have the evidence to back them up: “[e]very child…murdered by a relative in the frontier period from the 1630s through the 1650s was killed by a deranged or depressed parent.”  Does Alice seem deranged to us because she nearly decapitated her sleeping child?  Of course.  Would she meet today’s clinical standard for any form of mental illness?  We are in no position to answer that.  Roth attributes filicides in this period not only to mental illness but also the stressors of mid-seventeenth century colonial America where “social, economic, and political stability” were lacking. 

We can imagine what happened and why; we can point to patterns and possible causations — but that’s the extent of it.  Alice, Martha and the rest of the Bishop-Clark-Martin clan deserve the best of our research efforts. 

Seventeenth century colonists used terms such as “mad,” “idiots” and “deluded” to describe people who we would probably consider mentally ill or with an intellectual disability (Eldridge, 362). I have yet to find any primary source document that describes AMB that way. The trial records make no mention of her emotional/mental state (save one comment by Ramsden) but why would they?  The jurors believed Alice had knowingly, with intent, murdered Martha (the defense strategy of not guilty by reason of insanity was two centuries away).  However and significant to note, Eldridge contends that early colonial law, following English common law, protected mentally ill persons from being convicted of crimes for which they could not reasonably be expected to understand they were committing (379). This was apparently not the opinion of the court with AMB’s case as it was with Mercy Brown who, in 1690, murdered her son with an axe in Connecticut.  While the court noted she was in a “distracted state,” Brown was, nonetheless, hanged (Eldridge p. 380. 380-381 cites additional cases of child murders where the accused — known to be mentally ill – were put on trial with original sources coming from Winthrop’s Journal).

Alice’s confession contains no reference to voices in her head, believing Martha would be better off dead or believing her daughter somehow consumed by demonic forces.  AMB merely admitted to the murder and gave no reasons as to why.   To me this connotes either an inability to recognize one’s own thought processes or a sociopathic lack of concern.  Since there is no evidence Alice mistreated her other children, the latter scenario does not seem plausible.  Perhaps, at some point between Martha’s murder and Alice’s execution, Alice attempted to explain the reasons why but we do not have any of those records.

We must carefully note that the Pilgrims did not uniformly use supernatural evil to explain unusual and even dangerous behavior (Eldridge, 370).  Indeed, “colonists did sometimes ascribe mental illness to immediate, physical causes” (Eldridge, 371).  Although there is no recorded physical ailment in AMB we can, at least, “diagnose” her with exhaustion.  Alice (along with other Plymouth mothers who did not murder) was on a non-stop cycle of getting pregnant, giving birth and nursing…all the while raising other children…all the while running a home in a primitive community…all the while suffering from disease and chronic malnutrition.

Seventeenth century settlers also recognized that psychological trauma could feed a mental illness.  Gov. John Winthrop of Massachusetts Bay Colony commented on a family that decided to move away writing, [they] “had a daughter that presently went mad, and two other of his daughters, being under ten years of age, were discovered to have been often abused by diverse lewd persons, and filthiness in his family.” (Winthrop’s Journal: 83, concerning year 1642).  I discuss numerous times in this blog periods when AMB could have been victimized/traumatized but we can only consider the possibility of these.

Depression, although not named as such, was a recognizable symptom in colonial America and was often described with terms such as “dropsy,” “lethargy” and “languishing.”  Eldridge notes it was more commonly cited among women and for prolonged periods (p.367).  Even if AMB had a visible signs of melancholy or a mental illness, her family and community would have been expected to care for her, regardless of her age or social status (Eldridge, 374 and Rothman, 14). Again, it is important for us to imagine AMB’s formative experiences.  They may explain, partly, why she murdered her child but it is equally important to note that many of her experiences were common to all early Plymouth Colony residents:

1. The Mayflower voyage was arduous –physically, mentally and emotionally – and culminated with AMB’s family dying on board in quick succession leaving her an orphan at four.  As Bradford remembered, “Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles…they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain or refresh their weather beaten bodies, no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor.”
2. AMB’s new home must have seemed like a different planet entirely – food was seriously lacking, people were dying, there were no proper homes and frightening sounds and sights surely marked a young mind: “The Indians’ war cries were a particularly potent psychological weapon that the Pilgrims would never forget” (Philbrick, 71) and that “the cry of a cougar has been compared to the scream of a woman being murdered” (Philbrick, 83).
3. “Unresolved mourning” is a common immigrant phenomena involving “catastrophic change, exposing the individual who experiences it to disorganization, pain and frustration accompanied by anxiety” (Kogan, 1206). Intriguing to the AMB case: “for many immigrants, this mourning is delayed in the first years…to allow integration onto the new culture; others are stuck in a kind of pathological mourning” (Kogan, 1206-07).  And finally, “It is possible for parts of the self to be left behind, lost in transit.  The migratory process is thus conceived as a catalyst of potentially profound shifts” (Harlem, 461). 
4. We do not know the conditions in which Alice lived once she was taken in by another family. Was she loved?  Was she a sibling or servant?  Was she abused?

Regardless of whether AMB had memories from her English home, one of her first memories would have been the domino deaths of her family and the terrifying and unfamiliar circumstances of the new place she was to call home.  To use Harlem’s terminology, Alice had, within days, lost her “postmigratory attachment” (her family) and whatever utopian vision her young mind had conjured up of the New World.  Both had been dashed against the rocks leaving the orphan with a drastically diminished sense of security and stability.  As Philbrick reminds us, “We think of the Pilgrims as resilient adventurers upheld by unwavering religious faith, but they were also human beings in the midst of what was, and continues to be, one of the most difficult emotional challenges a person can face: immigration and exile” (p. 76).  The Pilgrims assumed they were on a divinely- designed settlement plan but AMB could have well thought she had been utterly forsaken by God.

Countless AMB researchers insist she had post-partum depression.  Again, a claim based on zero medical evidence.  First, there is a profound difference between post-partum depression and the much less common post-partum psychosis (Manchester, 720) which would lead to a delusional thinking and then, in rare cases, to homicidal tendencies.   To be clear, post-partum psychosis is marked by unrelenting and crippling depression, hallucinations, delusions and disordered thought processes (Manchester, 720).  Certainly, a post-partum depression could be exacerbated by overwhelming household and child care responsibilities (Manchester, 721) but they do not cause post-partum psychosis which is a severe, diagnosable, often chemically-based mental disorder.

We are always trying to make puritans of the Puritans  – Stratton, 191.

Puritan engagements were not spawned entirely from romantic affection.   However, romantic practice was very much expected in Puritan marriages.  Husband and wife were to treat each other kindly, respectfully, tend to one another when ill, promise their bodies to each other only and raise a family (Thompson, 126).   

Marriage

Marriages were biblically-based in their function (to raise families) but civil unions – in other words, Pilgrims were not married in the church.  Most men and women married in their early 20’s with several instances of women giving birth less than nine months from their wedding dates.  Adult Pilgrims were expected to marry and begin families – being a footloose bachelor would have been a nonsensical ideal idea in this community.  When one spouse died, like George Clark, persons often remarried within the year, in part because the community expected them to get on with the family raisin’ business.

Houses & Home Management

The first Plymouth Colony homes were one-and-a-half story timber cottages with a sleeping loft on top.  Aside from the church and meeting house, there were few other places for Pilgrims to congregate as there were no stores (Walsh, 7), theatres and parks for hundreds of years.   Ye Ol’ Amusement Park had yet to arrive although the Pilgrim family was granted some R&R.   Walsh writes, “Just before 6 o’clock [Saturday] all work was stopped.  After supper the family sat by the fire and [t]he father spoke of the good things had had noticed about each of them during the day, corrected any faults he had seen, and then read to them from the Bible” (15).  Can we expect that Richard Bishop did this?

Pilgrim homes were more than the kinship nucleus.  They were “residential children’s homes, juvenile detention centers, industrial, domestic and agricultural training schools, banks, hospitals, mental institutions, old people’s homes; social service departments, Sunday and elementary schools” (Thompson, 157).

John Demos’ demographic study of the Pilgrims stated that the colony’s average household grew from 7.8 children per family for first-generation families, to 8.6 children for second-generation families, and to 9.3 for third-generation families.  Alice and Richard Bishop were technically second generation parents. 

Child Rearing

Following a natural pregnancy-breastfeeding-conceiving cycle, most Plymouth mothers had several children spaced two years apart. For women with six children or more (which was entirely common), two decades of their lives were spent tending to small children. Furthermore the role that “other mothers” played in child care cannot be underestimated whether they were household servants like AMB, older siblings like Abigail Clark or grandmothers. 

Plymouth children were commonly placed in “foster” homes before the age of ten for apprenticeships and to “earn their keep” as household servants.  Some of these children underwent relentless physical and sexual abuse documented in court records.  But other children were placed in loving homes where they got some basic education and vocational training.  Parents, foster families and the community cared for the happiness and moral development of their children as they were the future upon which the colony’s history would be written.  As Hemphill notes, “ministers urged parents to teach their children proper deference behavior because they believed that the family hierarchy was society in microcosm” (275).

As such, the pressure was on to not raise brats:

What a shame is this for any man to take great care to have his dog well taught, his horse well broken, his land well husbanded, his house goodly trimmed and richly furnished; and yet to have his child shamefully rude in manners…Parents must teach their children good manners, and civil behavior. (A Godly Forme of Householde Government, 1598).

Puritan Robert Cleaver pointed out that:

What a shame is this for any man to take great care to have his dog well taught, his horse well broken, his land well husbanded, his house goodly trimmed and richly furnished; and yet to have his child shamefully rude in manners…Parents must teach their children good manners, and civil behavior.

Education:

In the early years of Plymouth Colony, Elder Brewster was the only college-educated person (Walsh, 16) but some residents had functional literacy/numeracy (about 60% of men and 30% of women could sign their own names — Moran 33).  While the community did not have formal school houses, colonial law specified that parents should teach their brood to navigate the Bible and practice critical reflection on issues of morality.  This homeschooling mindset would diminish later on:

Though Puritans were willing to teach women to read and to allow them to help in the education of their children, they may have been reluctant in the 1640s and 1650s to entrust them entirely with the responsibility of directing and catechizing the children and servants in the wake of the radical religious activities of Anne Hutchinson (Moran, 35).

This is notable as Alice’s youngest daughter, Damaris, married into a family affiliated with Hutchinson.

The following notes may be helpful in understanding Plymouth Colony and the life of Alice Martin Bishop.

Community Standards:

Plymouth may have been settled upon with a Utopian mindset, but living there was hellish. It would take fifteen years for the Pilgrims to remove themselves from chronic starvation mode as the few English ships brought enough provisions and settlers had yet to master agriculture, hunting and livestock management in the new land (Walsh, 10). Even in the more popular Massachusetts Bay Colony’s Boston, “food was so scarce…that the poorer people had nothing save acorns, clams and mussels to eat” (Walsh, 10).  In January 1632, Governor Winthrop “appointed a day of prayer [in which] every man, woman, and child in the Bay Colony spent his or her time praying to the Lord to save them from starvation” (Walsh, p. 11).

Plymouth set upon building twenty homes in their first year (most lived aboard the Mayflower the first year).  But because the community was ravaged by disease, only seven homes were built (Philbrick, 80).  Within ten years, the colony had 300 people with the population swelling to 2,000 by the mid 1640’s.

Each town in Plymouth could choose who could live amongst them including excluding less than desirables (Powell, xviii).    In other words, Clark and Bishop may have wandered in from other colonies, but they ultimately earned the right to stay. 

By 1690, Plymouth Colony comprised more than a dozen towns with Plymouth proper being one of the largest and most centrally located.  Nonetheless, it was becoming a quaint backwater to Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Massachusetts Bay Colony Est. 1629:

4 March 1629 a royal charter created the Massachusetts Bay Colony Corporation to be governed by a Governor, deputy governor and eighteen assistants who comprised a council.  “They were permitted to make whatever laws they liked …provided that such laws did not oppose the laws of England” (Walsh, 3).  In 1630, under the new charter, seventeen ships departed for the MBC including one with Governor John Winthrop and settled in the city of Boston. MBC would quickly dwarf Plymouth Colony with the former having 1000 residents which was three times the size of Plymouth (Philbrick, 147). The distance between the two colonies was approximately fifty miles. 

Religion:

We all have been taught about the Pilgrims and Puritans but these are not interchangeable terms.  Puritanism is a religious sect that emerged from the Anglican Church (England).  Puritans of the sixteenth century wanted to “purify” the Church of what they felt were corrupt and secular practices.  Ultimately, Puritans wanted to practice their faith as had been done in the earliest forms of Christianity. Notably, Puritans believed the Bible was the sole source of religious education and development and that certain church rituals and practices were not biblically based and therefore not pure to the Christian faith.

Pilgrims derived from the Puritan movement and were those communities that decided the only way to practice their Christian faith appropriately was to separate entirely from the Anglican Church.  Therefore, those who sailed on the first ships to New England (1620’s – 1630’s) are known as Pilgrims.  These Pilgrims were neither England’s wealthiest or poorest but often self-educated yeomen (Morgan, 35). Philbrick’s Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War does an outstanding job of explaining this history. 

The church served as each colonial town’s keystone institution where important meetings and social gatherings took place.  Not every Plymouth resident was a Pilgrim (some of these were known as “Strangers”) but sustained church participation certainly leveraged greater social prestige.  Church attendance was required of all citizens in each Plymouth town but attendance did not guarantee you were a member of the church.  Declared personal conversion ensured membership and while good works were indicative of salvation, they were not the means by which one gained eternal salvation.   Amongst the New England Pilgrims, there was no central governing entity with authority over colonial churches.

Godly Mission Meets Reality:

Puritans had thought they would be an almost homogenous group, saintly to be sure:

In coming to the wilderness, then, the founders of New England hoped to protect their children from profanity.  In the new world they expected to have the company of godly men like themselves.  They miscalculated.  To be sure, they could have supposed that all the inhabitants of their new Canaan would be saints; they must have expected many scoundrels to show up—and they were prepared to deal with scoundrels – but they did not imagine that the emigration would bring to the shores of Massachusetts Bay such a horde of average, lusty Elizabethan Englishmen (Morgan, 170).  And [t]he number of unregenerate who crossed the ocean along with the saints was too great to banish from the land (171).

More often than not, Strangers, servants, convicts and others outnumbered Saints to a great degree (170).  Here the godly at least controlled the government, as they definitely did not in old England.  If they had not escaped the unregenerate, they had at least gained political power over them.  No sin would be condoned, much less encouraged (171).

 Satanic Worries:

The Pilgrims believed in malevolent spirits.  They did not, like those in Massachusetts Bay Colony believe in town hysteria.  Plymouth would not experience the witch crazes that ravaged other parts of New England.  The 1636 Plymouth Code of Laws cites witchcraft as a capital offense, punishable by death, however there were not actual witch convictions made in Plymouth Colony. 

Lest we forget, the Pilgrims believed God had chosen them to cross the ocean and build a utopian community in a savage world (here “savage” meaning an disparaging term for Native Americans as well as a place with none of the swanky seventeenth century comforts the Pilgrims had become accustomed to).   In other words, it seemed reasonable to believe in signs, omens and voices from the beyond.  This was Pilgrim common sense.   As an example, there was a Mayflower sailor who was a heinous bully to grown men on board (and one can only wonder how he treated children with no escape). When he fell ill with a “grievous disease [and] died in a desperate manner” William Bradford chalked it up to the action and pleasure of God.  (Bradford, Chapter Nine).  AMB would have witnessed if not been subjected to this bully and reasonably believed God was capable of terrible retribution.  And then watched her parents felled the same way.

Morgan and Philbrick speak regularly of the supernatural and specifically malevolent influences at play in the Pilgrim psyche.  ”Children were ignorant and children were evil; but ignorance could be enlightened and evil restrained, provided the effort was made soon enough” (Morgan, 97).  Did Alice see herself or Martha as beyond redemption?   Pilgrim authorities new that the community’s youngest souls  were vulnerable as “Satan never hesitated to begin his assault upon children in their infancy” (Morgan, 96).  Everyone was susceptible to a coup d’état of their soul: “The Pilgrims’ intensely felt spiritual lives did not prevent them from believing in witches and warlocks and living with the constant fear that Satan and his minions were out there, conspiring against them” (Philbrick, 79). All of this is to say that some researchers (myself included)  wonder about a possible psychosis in AMB that would not have been observed as odd by her community. 

Plymouth Colony Governance and Legal Structure:

The colony remains one of our nation’s greatest experiments in the development of self-governance.  Unlike the Massachusetts Bay Colony which had received a chart from the English government, the Pilgrims had no authority to form a government.  But they did anyway with their first document being the 1620 Mayflower Charter.  Formal laws were not codified for another fifteen years (known as the 1636 Book of Laws) and represented a mix of biblically-based tenets and English common law.  

Notes from Fennell:  Each March, a Governor and seven Assistants were elected at the General Court session by freedmen.    The General Court served as the legislative-judicial body for the colony. Assistants served as the cabinet to the Governor “giving [their] best advice both in publick Court [and] private Councell [with] the Gov[ernor] for the good of the Colonyes [within] the limit[s] of this Governm[ent]” (PCR 11: 8).  Also elected were Constables who were tasked with keeping the peace in each town and Messengers who, relevant to this story, delivered court-ordered punishments (including executions) and served as jailers. Coroners were selected each year by the Court of Assistants to conduct inquests for suspicious deaths (see PCR 11:7).  The coroners were the first town officials to arrive at the death of Martha Clark. 

Quoting Fennell: The Court of Assistants also handled an array of judicial decision-making in the Colony. Each Assistant was charged with a duty of “hauing a special hand in the examina[cion] of publick offenders” and “a voice in the censuring of such offenders as shall not be brought to publick Court” (PCR 11: 8-9).  An Assistant could also perform the role of examining, arresting and imprisoning suspected law breakers when the Governor was absent, as long as the defendant was presented to the full Court of Assistants or the Governor thereafter, and the Assistants often referred defendants to the full General Court for more serious charges.”

In the AMB case, it appears that:

1. Governor Bradford was present from the date of Martha’s murder through AMB’s execution
2. That AMB was indicted by a jury as appointed by the Court of Assistants
3. That AMB was tried and delivered of her punishment by a jury as appointed by the Court of Assistants

Therefore, her trial was seen as appropriate public deliberation because of the seriousness of the crime.  A jury of freedmen listened to the evidence with the Governor and Assistants serving as judicial officers.

1636 Book of Laws: Amongst other governance concerns this set of legal codes identified crimes and their expected punishments.  Death penalty crimes were murder, witchcraft, treason, arson, sodomy, rape, bestiality, adultery, and cursing or smiting one’s parents.  However, actual executions were relatively rare and for some of the above crimes, nearly non-existent.   The execution of a parent for child-murder did occur although the circumstances heavily influenced the punitive outcome.  In AMB’s case, the evidence appears so overwhelming that it is doubtful the court felt (or were inclined to feel) any leeway.  We must keep in mind this was centuries before notions of insanity, mentally incapacitated and so forth were part of codified legal defenses. 

Rights of the Accused

The following procedural rights were part of early American criminal proceedings (Chapin, 61, quoted excerpts):

1. “No search or seizure without warrant.”
2. “Confessions out of court [ruled] invalid.”
3. “Grand jury indictment in capital cases.”
4. “Right to confront accusers.”
5. “Trial by jury’
6. “No cruel or unusual punishment”
7. “Right to appeal.”