Registration is now open for the Dismas House Prison Break 5K, which will take place on May 22, 2010 at 9 a.m. in Westborough, MA.

The run will start at St. Luke’s Church on 1 Ruggles Street and welcomes both runners and walkers. Registration is $25.00, which includes timing at start and finish, medals and prizes to winners, a unique short sleeve t-shirt, and a post-race party with the sponsors.

Now that the weather finally appears to be turning the corner toward spring, pull out your running shoes and begin training so that you can join me at this event.

Dismas House is located in Worcester, MA and provides transition housing and services to former prisoners. The men and women in the program receive educational, recovery, and reentry tools to help them grow towards the goal of reintegration into society and avoid a return to incarceration.

I was recently interviewed by Leonard Sipes about “Early American Crime in the Media” for D.C. Public Safety Radio, which presents audio programs on crime, criminal offenders, and the criminal justice system.

The program lasts a half hour and covers the criminal justice system in colonial America, how crime was covered in early American newspapers, and the politicization of crime in the eighteenth century.

Listen to the interview by clicking here or by going to the D.C. Public Safety Radio site.

D.C. Public Safety Radio is sponsored by The Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, a federal executive branch entity providing parole, probation and reentry services to Washington D.C.

assay

– to commence; to try it.

Possibly derived from the phrase “to take the assay or essay,” i.e., to taste wine to prove that it is not poisoned. It may have been brought into use by counterfeit coiners.

Sources

• Barrère, Albert and Charles G. Leland. A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon, and Cant. [London]: The Ballantyne Press, 1889.
• Matsell, George W. Vocabulum: Or, the Rogue’s Lexicon.. New York: George W. Matsell, 1859.
• Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of the Underworld. New York: Bonanza Books, 1961.

Note: See “Cant: The Language of the Underworld” to learn more about the background of the American Malefactor’s Dictionary.

American Homicide by Randolph Roth (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), 655 pp.

In American Homicide, Randolph Roth attempts to use the massive amount of historical data that he and his colleagues have assembled for the Historical Violence Database to explain patterns in the murder rate over broad historical time periods. His goal is to try to understand from an historical perspective why the United States is the most violent nation among affluent Western nations today.

And violent it is: from 1965 to 1992, the homicide rate for the U.S. was 9 per 100,000 people. The first-world democracy with the next highest rate is Canada, with only a quarter of the homicides per capita as the United States. Australia ranks third, with only a fifth of the U.S. number. If the murder rate in the United States continues, 1 out of every 142 children born today will be murdered. Even if the lower rate of 6 per 100,000 that the United States experienced during the 1990’s continues, nearly 1 out of every 200 newborns will eventually be murdered.

The risk of being murdered is by far highest in the South, moderately high in the Southwest, and lowest in the North. Poor Americans experience the highest murder rate, but even middle-class and affluent Americans run a much greater risk of being murdered than do people in other affluent democracies. Such high homicide numbers today make it hard to believe that America’s homicide rate was once the lowest in the Western world.

Roth and his colleagues compiled the historical data that informs his book by examining “every scrap of paper on criminal matters in every courthouse, every article in every issue of a number of local newspapers, every entry in the death records, and every local history based on lost sources, local tradition, or oral testimony” (xi-xii). The results are monumental, and they make all of this data available on the Historical Violence Database from the Criminal Justice Research Center at The Ohio State University.

Roth begins his book by discounting the usual explanations for the high homicide rate in the United States, such as urban poverty and unemployment, substance abuse, or support for law enforcement. He shows how each explanation does not stand up to close historical or geographic analysis. Instead, Roth identifies four main correlations to homicide rates over four centuries:

1. The belief that government is stable and that its legal and judicial institutions are unbiased and will redress wrongs and protect lives and property.
2. A feeling of trust in government and the officials who run it, and a belief in their legitimacy.
3. Patriotism, empathy, and fellow feeling arising from racial, religious, or political solidarity.
4. The belief that the social hierarchy is legitimate, that one’s position in society is or can be satisfactory and that one can command the respect of others without resorting to violence (18).

Roth systematically analyzes homicide among Anglo-Americans, other European immigrants, African-American slaves, and Native Americans from colonial times to the present. Roth even compares American homicide rates with European ones to get a sense of how unique violence in America really was at the time.

From its very beginning, America was a violent place. Seventeenth-century colonial America had high homicide rates, mainly due to political instability and an absence of unity among settlers. Law and order was also difficult to uphold on the colonial frontier with its competing jurisdictions and assorted notions of justice.

Roth contends that indentured servitude during this time had a strong impact on homicide rates, because it disrupted the social hierarchy. The institution forced free men and women down to the bottom of the social ladder, where they were remained for years living as near-slaves. Not surprisingly, this arrangement created power struggles between servants and their owners that often ended violently. In the mid-seventeenth century, indentured servitude accounted for 29 percent of the homicides in New England, 50 percent in Virginia, and 67 percent in Maryland.

Once political stability was achieved on the frontier in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, homicide rates dropped dramatically. Roth cites three events in particular that galvanized colonial society and led to a sharp drop in murder rates, which continued throughout much of the eighteenth century. King Philip’s War was one, by unifying colonists who lived on the front line in New England in their fight against a common enemy. The Chesapeake area experienced a similar unifying effect during its transformation into a slave society, when white slave owners put aside their differences in the interest of defending white supremacy. The third event was the Glorious Revolution in 1688, which brought all colonists together when the governmental reforms that accompanied it appeared to benefit the colonies as a whole.

The low homicide rate among unrelated adults through much of the eighteenth century did not last, though. The Revolutionary Period and its political turmoil saw the return of high homicide rates, with people questioning both government legitimacy and the loyalties of their fellow neighbors.

After America’s homicide rate dropped once again in the early nineteenth century as the country was coming together and taking shape, the rate soared in the mid-nineteenth century. This time, the murder rate diverged sharply from the rest of the Western world after roughly following worldwide trends up until this point. Roth’s account for why the homicide rate in the U.S. skyrocketed at this time in history should give us pause, if not chills. My guess is that Roth wrote the following passage before our recent partisan squabbles really took shape, but it certainly seems to mirror descriptions of our current political situation:

The Democrats failed as a national party and the Whigs failed altogether, leaving the two-party system in ruins. Parties that were more aggressive ideologically took their place. The leaders of these parties questioned the legitimacy of national institutions and challenged other Americans’ morality, patriotism, and right to citizenship. They used extreme rhetoric to generate partisan enthusiasm, and they encouraged righteous and retributive violence, especially in defense of property or rights (301).

In some ways, there are two books riding parallel with one another throughout Roth’s book. One is quantitative, with its presentation of large quantities of data and number crunching. The other is interpretive, with lots of anecdotal evidence, notable stories of murder, and his attempt to explain fluctuating homicide rates through political, social, and economic trends. The latter requires the more convincing of the two. Roth, for example, cites war as a divider at times and a unifier at others, depending on whether the murder rates are up or down through that period. Granted, war is a complex phenomenon that cannot be reduced to an essential element, but the difficulty in ascribing its effect on murder rates illustrates just how tricky interpreting numbers can be when they involve so many variables in motive, emotion, and method that murder does.

Not surprisingly, Roth’s interpretive assessment of his data has received the most critical attention from other historians. In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore takes Roth to task for grafting what she sees as dubious conclusions onto quantitative data, as though Roth is simply generating raw numbers and then looking for entry-points to slap his own agenda on top of them. As she puts it, “if you know what the homicide rate is, it’s easy to find a story that fits your data.”

Lepore, however, ungenerously characterizes Roth’s data-collecting methods, which required him to comb through countless qualitative sources to extract quantitative numbers. I would like to believe that this exhausting process informed his interpretation of the data. Yes, it is possible to come up with various stories to fit the numbers, but the job of the historian is to find the best story that fits the availability of evidence. Time and more research will tell whether or not there is any weight to Roth’s interpretations. If we take Lepore’s strict rules for what qualifies as historical evidence to heart, we would indeed arrive in a “no man’s land” that would “devolve into meaninglessness,” which, ironically, is how she characterizes Roth’s project.

Homicide statistics for the twentieth century are surprisingly not as complete or as readily available as they are for the centuries that preceded it. The reason for this discrepancy is that the official data gathered by twentieth-century government agencies only record the number of victims–not the circumstances of their deaths–out of reluctance to specify motive before cases have been played out in court. For this reason, we will have to wait for more data to be collected before drawing firm conclusions about the most recent century.

Even if we don’t buy into Roth’s overarching conclusions, he presents the most comprehensive picture of American homicide to date. More studies will follow. A separate volume, Child Murder in America, will appear at a later date, since, according to Roth, the patterns for murders of children or by children are fundamentally different from those involving adults. So far, Roth’s work has greatly enhanced our understanding of violence and murder in America and shows great promise for future work on this topic.

Don’t forget to visit the Early American Crime Bookshop.

artful dodger

– someone who avoids lodging in the same place twice out of fear of arrest.

In England, the term also meant either a lodger or an expert thief. The Artful Dodger was, of course, the name of Fagan’s top child-pickpocket in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

Sources

• Farmer, John S. and W. E. Henley. A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English. Abridged from Slang and Its Analogues. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1912.
• Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of the Underworld. New York: Bonanza Books, 1961.

Note: See “Cant: The Language of the Underworld” to learn more about the background of the American Malefactor’s Dictionary.

Read my article on Anthony Lamb, who was perhaps America’s most successful transported convict, in February’s issue of The Readex Report: “‘Human Serpents sent us by our Mother Country’: The Transformation of Anthony Lamb, Transported Convict.”

J. L. Bell posted a follow-up to my recent article about the burglar William Linsey on his Boston 1775 blog: “‘This Day is to be Executed in Worcester . . .’” I highly recommend it.

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Even though William Linsey was orphaned at a young age, this rough start did not appear to have any negative impact on him. Linsey was originally born in Palmer, MA in 1746, but at the age of two he went to live with Phinehas Mixture in Dudley, MA. By Linsey’s own account, Mixture raised him well by teaching him to read and giving him proper discipline and counsel.

Around the age of 18 or 19, however, Linsey committed his first act of theft. One day, instead of going to church as he usually did, Linsey stayed behind. He waited for his neighbor, Ebenezer Fosgit, to go to Sunday services with his family and for the children he left behind to go out into the fields to work. With the coast clear, Linsey broke into Fosgit’s house and took about 25 pounds in old Massachusetts currency from a drawer. Linsey was immediately suspected and held on a warrant. His master, though, did not want to see him punished, so Mixture settled the matter with Fosgit privately.

Four or five months after committing his first theft, Linsey was visiting Samuel Warden when he observed him put away a dollar someone had given him as a payment. Linsey waited for an opportunity when Warden was away to sneak into the house and take the dollar. This time, he was not suspected of the theft, since Warden focused his suspicions on someone else.

Linsey had committed two acts of theft at this point, and in each case he got away with it. The mercy bestowed upon Linsey by Mixture and his later success in carrying out a theft undetected were apparently enough to embolden Linsey into taking up a life of crime. Linsey proved to be an average criminal, at best, but he had an uncanny ability to escape punishment and get away with his crimes in one way or another. The swift hand of justice was slow in coming to him.

Fraud

Soon after stealing the dollar from Warden, Linsey left home at the age of 19 and went to work for a Mr. Grosvenor in Pomfret, CT. On his way to join Grosvenor, Linsey stopped in Mr. McClellan’s shop in Woodstock, where he took out forty shillings on the account of a Mr. Pratter and assured McClellan that Pratter would settle the payment later. McClellan soon discovered that he had been cheated and sought to punish Linsey. But just as Linsey’s original master did, Grosvenor stepped in and settled the matter with McClellan privately.

Linsey’s failed attempt to commit fraud at McClellan’s shop did not stop him from trying it again. This time, he tried to use a forged order to receive goods and money from another merchant in Pomfret, but he was soon caught and committed to the gaol in Windham. While being held there, Linsey and a fellow prisoner executed an escape by lighting a fire and burning their way out of the prison.

After his escape from the Windham gaol, Linsey headed east and back into Massachusetts, where he was caught committing yet another act of fraud, this time against Col. Gage. He was held in the Ipswich gaol, where he received ten lashes and was ordered to pay the cost of his crime. Linsey was soon released from jail by Col. Gage, whom he ended up living with for eleven months afterward, presumably to work and pay off the debt of his crime.

Burglary

Fraud wasn’t the only crime in Linsey’s repertoire. He also committed a string of burglaries throughout this period. In September 1768, Linsey broke into the shop of Thomas Legatt of Leominster and took a great quantity of items, including fabrics, hats, gloves, cakes, biscuits, chocolate, razors, ink pots, two spelling books, two primers, and a Bible. This burglary turned out to be the second time Linsey targeted Legatt’s shop. Many crimes earlier, Linsey used a forged order to obtain goods and money from Legatt. After realizing what happened, Legatt pursued and caught Linsey in Brimfield, although Linsey somehow managed to escape before he could be punished.

This time, loaded down with goods, Linsey was taken in Londonderry, NH, held in the Portsmouth gaol, and then transferred to Worcester, MA, where he was tried for the burglary and his earlier act of forgery. The Superior Court ordered him to stand in the pillory, to be whipped twenty times, and to be branded–all of which were carried out on the same day. Amazingly, not long after his punishment Linsey went to live and work with Legatt for a month, where he was careful to behave himself before moving on to continue his crime spree.

Despite all of these setbacks, Linsey committed over twenty acts of theft, burglary, and fraud over the course of five years. He admitted later that “Having so often escaped with impunity, for my wretched crimes, I was under no awe or restraint, neither learning God nor regarding man, resolutely bent upon working wickedness.”

The Telltale Candle

On the night of September 8, 1770, Joseph Bellows of Groton woke up around one or two in the morning and discovered a candle that had burned down to its socket and an open door. In the belief that these two oddities were the result of carelessness on the part of a family member, he went back to bed. Bellows learned the truth in the morning, however, when he noticed that several articles that were there the night before were suddenly missing. Someone had clearly entered his house and burglarized it.

The burglar, of course, was Linsey. After entering Bellow’s house through a window, Linsey lit a candle and proceeded to go through the cellar and other rooms in the house where no one was sleeping. He took a wide assortment of items, including a beaver hat, a pair of leather breeches, a pair of men’s shoes, thirty pounds of pork, and a pair of yarn stockings.

The Boston News-Letter, October 25, 1770. (From Early American Newspapers, an Archive of Americana Collection, published by Readex (Readex.com), a division of NewsBank, inc.)

Linsey was immediately suspected, and he was traced to Fitchburg, where he was captured in a house with some of the items in his possession. After some searching, the rest of the goods were found in the barn hidden in some hay.

Linsey was taken once again to the Worcester gaol, where he faced the Superior Court and for a second time was found guilty of burglary. The circumstances he faced this time around, however, were much different from the last. Massachusetts had been experiencing a sharp increase in burglaries–some of them committed by Linsey himself–and so the colony had just recently passed a law making burglary punishable by death without benefit of clergy. Linsey’s guilty sentence brought with it the death penalty.

Linsey was executed in Worcester on October 25, 1770 at the age of 24. This time around, Linsey received no mercy nor found a means of escaping punishment. Like the candle he left burning in the home of Joseph Bellows, his string of crimes had at last reached an end.

Sources

• “Boston, October 25, 1770.” Boston News-Letter. October 25, 1770, issue 3499, p. 3. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank.
• Cohen, Daniel A. Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace: New England Crime Literature And the Origins of American Popular Culture, 1674-1860. Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2006.
• Linsey, William. The Dying Speech and Confession of William Linsey. Boston: Printed and Sold in Milk Street, 1770. Database: Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800), Readex/Newsbank.

Read more about burglary in Early American Crime.

arch-cove

– the head of a gang or mob; governor; president.

arch gonnof

– the head of a gang of thieves.

The use of “arch” to signify the leader or head of a gang is still in use today. Action-adventure movies or television shows often use the terms “arch enemy” or “arch villain.”

Sources

• Matsell, George W. Vocabulum: Or, the Rogue’s Lexicon.. New York: George W. Matsell, 1859.
• Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of the Underworld. New York: Bonanza Books, 1961.

Note: See “Cant: The Language of the Underworld” to learn more about the background of the American Malefactor’s Dictionary.

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In May 1744, Elizabeth Robinson was sentenced at the Old Bailey in London to transportation to the American colonies for her involvement in the theft of 104 China oranges from a warehouse. She was loaded onto the Justitia that same month and eventually landed in Virginia. She ended up in Maryland, where she reportedly continued her criminal ways and met a young boy named Joseph Cooper, whom she seduced.

Cooper later moved north to Philadelphia, where in 1750 he learned that Robinson was being held in a prison workhouse in the same city and went to visit her. Apparently, his affections for her continued to run strong, because she convinced him to help her pay her fines so that she could get out of prison. Not having enough money, Cooper sold himself into servitude for a three-year term in order to raise the sum needed to free Robinson.

Robinson appreciated what Cooper did for her, so she proposed a plan to help him raise enough money to purchase his freedom. She introduced him to a gang of burglars and convinced him that if he joined them that he could easily raise the money he needed. Cooper went along with Robinson’s scheme and in due course met Francis McCoy and his wife Mary, John Crow, and John Morrison, the mastermind of the gang.

One of the Gang

Cooper joined Morrison in committing a string of burglaries. He started out small by first accompanying Morrison in stealing some fowls, turkey, and ducks, which they took to the McCoy’s. The two then went on to rob Mr. S—h’s house on Walnut Street, where they took some clothing, two silver spoons, and silver tea-tongs. They brought the items to John Crow, who was a servant at Mr. N—l’s brewhouse, and Crow agreed to stash the goods for them there.

The following night the gang gathered at the McCoy’s to plan their next hit. They proposed robbing Mrs. P—w’s store after learning that it held plenty of valuable goods, ripe for the taking. Mary McCoy served Cooper some rum to help give him courage, and she furnished him and Morrison with a bag in which to carry away any stolen loot.

The two arrived at Mrs. P—w’s at two in the morning, lit a candle, and got to work targeting the best items in the store. They not only completely filled the bag they brought with them, but also filled another bag they found in the shop and two handkerchiefs. They then took some silver, paper money, and pennies from the shop’s till and proceeded to rob the house, where they took some silver spoons, silver and gold buttons, two pistols, and other sundry items. They took the haul to John Crow, who hid the valuables in Mr. N—l’s hay loft, and then went back to the McCoy’s to divide the money. By the time they parted, the sun was just beginning to break over the horizon.

Crime Wave

Around the time that Cooper joined the Morrison gang, Philadelphia was up in arms over a string of robberies, thefts, and burglaries that seemed to come one on top of another. A great quantity of valuable goods was taken from Mr. S—rs’s store. Mr. C—m’s house was broken into and robbed of plate and money. And someone broke into Mr. F—n’s house in the night and took clothing and a gold bead necklace.

All of the burglaries showed a similar skill in execution, which led the authorities to believe that they were carried out by the same person or group. The citizens of Philadelphia began to keep a watchful eye and organized a nightly watch, but these steps proved fruitless. The city had never before experienced such a crime wave.

A break in the case of the serial burglaries finally came in the middle of January when Mrs. P—w’s shop was robbed. Soon after the burglary, Mr. N—l the brewer came to the Chief Justice to tell him that his servant, John Crow, suddenly came into possession of several items of considerable value. When the brewer confronted Crow over how he obtained the items, Crow claimed that he bought them at such a low price that the brewer became suspicious that the goods were stolen.

Crow was brought in for questioning, and indeed the goods were identified as belonging to Mrs. P—w. Crow said that he purchased the pilfered goods from Elizabeth Robinson and identified John Morrison as being present when the transaction took place. The authorities decided to speak with Morrison to find out what he knew about the burglary and learned that he was at the home of Francis McCoy. When an officer arrived at the McCoy house, Morrison ran out the back door, but McCoy falsely told the officer that Joseph Cooper was the one who had slipped away. This lie turned out to be a big mistake.

Interrogations

McCoy and his wife were both brought in for questioning, and since they had named Cooper, he was rounded up as well. All three steadfastly maintained their innocence in the affair, especially McCoy, who continually cried out that he hoped the authorities would find the guilty party. However, when McCoy was being placed in irons, a stolen necklace was found hidden in one of his shoes, which cast an even darker cloud over his claim of innocence.

The three were held in prison for only a short time before Cooper finally broke and agreed to tell the authorities all he knew about the string of burglaries. Cooper disclosed his relationship with Elizabeth Robinson, how she encouraged him to join the Morrison gang, and all of the burglaries he carried out with Morrison.

After Cooper spilled the beans, a great search went out to find Morrison, and a reward of fifty pounds was offered for catching him. The prisoners insinuated that Morrison frequented Jack Stinson’s tavern on Water Street, and, sure enough, the authorities discovered him in a room of the tavern lying in bed pretending to be sick.

Stinson denied knowing Morrison, even though evidence clearly showed the contrary, so he also was taken into custody. While being held, Stinson finally admitted that Morrison was living with him, but he claimed that he did not know Morrison well and had no idea that he was suspected of breaking into houses.

John Crow was the next to crack and added his confession to Cooper’s. He admitted participating with Morrison in the theft of 5 shirts from a hedge and to receiving and concealing various stolen goods from Morrison. He also related how he often saw Morrison and Elizabeth Robinson together and how Morrison commended Robinson for being worth the equivalent of two men in his gang with her ability to go up and down chimneys with great dexterity.

With so much evidence mounted against him, Morrison decided that he could no longer maintain his innocence. He gave detailed confessions for 17 separate crimes that he had committed either alone or with the help of his associates who were all being held in jail. During his last robbery, he entered Mr. R—s’s kitchen and took some venison, ham, and bacon. Spotting a barrel of flour, he took off his shirt, tied up the sleeves, and filled it with as much flour as he could. His biographer noted that even though he was in possession of a great quantity of money, plate, and valuable goods at this point, Morrison continued to steal petty items, “so strong was his Propensity to Thieving!”

Punishment

While being held in jail, the prisoners attempted to execute an escape, but their plan was thwarted when a boy was found trying to enter the prison with files and other tools meant to help them break out. Morrison then pretended to be a Quaker and requested that some preachers be brought in to speak with him, but they soon found out that he had never been a Quaker and that he was only trying to use them to help his case.

At their trial, Morrison pleaded guilty of burglarizing Mrs. P—w’s. Elizabeth Robinson, Francis McCoy, Mary McCoy, John Crow, and John Stinson all pleaded not guilty. The jury, however, disagreed and quickly found all of them guilty of being accessories to the burglaries, with the sole exception of Mary, who the jury assumed was coerced by her husband. The next day, Morrison, Robinson, McCoy, and Crow all received a death sentence, and Stinson was burned in the hand for his role in harboring Morrison.

Before their execution, more information about the backgrounds of the gang members began to emerge. John Morrison was 24 years old at the time of the trial. He was born in Ireland and came to America as an indentured servant at age 14. Stinson apparently had bought Morrison when he first arrived, but Morrison was so badly behaved that Stinson sold him to someone else in the country. When Morrison eventually returned to Philadelphia, he sold limes and onions from house to house and used this trade to examine how windows and doors were fastened. If he knocked at a door with no answer, he used the opportunity to steal whatever he could find in the entryway.

In addition to her time in the prison workhouse, Elizabeth Robinson had been prosecuted once before in Philadelphia for shoplifting and stealing and had received a whipping as punishment. Francis McCoy and his wife were both born in Ireland and had lived in Philadelphia for a long time with several children. They supported themselves and their family by stealing for many years.

On Wednesday, February 13, the four gang members who were sentenced to death were carried in two carts along with their coffins to their place of execution. They said little along the way, as they were engrossed in reading and praying. A great number of people showed up to witness the drama, and they weren’t disappointed. As Robinson was being tied to the gallows, the rope attached to her accidentally fell down. For a brief moment, she believed that she had received a pardon, but her hope was dashed as the rope was taken up and retied. At the last moment, a reprieve arrived for Crow, so he was returned to the prison, where he shed tears and thanked God and the Governor for their mercy in sparing his life.

Finally, the moment everyone was waiting for arrived, and the cart drove away, leaving the three gang members hanging. Robinson died immediately, but McCoy struggled for a long time before finally passing on.

Joseph Cooper was never brought to trial for his role in the burglaries. He received immunity as a reward for serving as a witness.

Sources

• An Account of the Robberies Committed by John Morrison, and His Accomplices, In and Near Philadelphia, 1750. Philadelphia, 1750-1. Database: Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (1639-1800), Readex/Newsbank.
• “Feb. 5.” The New-York Gazette. February 11, 1751. No. 421, p. 2. Database: America’s Historical Newspapers, Readex/Newsbank
• Marietta, Jack D. and G. S. Rowe. Troubled Experiment: Crime and Justice in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800
  . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
• Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, 18 January 2010) May 1744, trial of Elizabeth Robinson and Mary Davies (t17440510-40).

Read more about burglary in Early American Crime.

antelope

– a hog (ironic: “a hog’s ugliness and clumsiness are contrasted with an antelope’s beauty and grace”).

antelope lay

– hog stealing.

Sources

• Barnes, Daniel R. “An Early American Collection of Rogue’s Cant.” The Journal of American Folklore 79, no. 314 (Oct.-Dec., 1966), 600-607.
• Partridge, Eric. A Dictionary of the Underworld. New York: Bonanza Books, 1961.

Note: See “Cant: The Language of the Underworld” to learn more about the background of the American Malefactor’s Dictionary.