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chapter 5  Puritan Twilight in the New England Republics In second half of the 1790s highly placed New Englanders believed that forces beyond their grasp had launched a broad assault on their world. They watched the resurrection of the old Gallic peril, and this time it was even more menacing than it had been in papist garb; for now it was spreading vicious anti-Christian ideas by musket, sword, and cannon. They suspected that the American fifth column, the Jeffersonians, or as they called it, the French party, was poised to deliver New England’s old bastions of the true faith to the ranks of apostasy. Simultaneously they saw their communities threatened by impersonal demographic and economic forces. And so some of them panicked. They resolved to protect their homeland from debauchery and disbelief. They detected conspiracies. They persecuted political dissenters. They launched religious revivals. Moreover they revived the Mosaic code of their ancestors as they set out to hang two men in their eighties for a strange, victimless crime for which no one had been sentenced to hang in their region for well over a century. As a result the two octogenarians languished gloomily in their cells counting the days to their executions . Yet their strange stories each took an unexpected final twist. In November 1796 Governor Adams and his council had denied the petition Caleb Strong had drafted for his client, most likely because it rehearsed courtroom arguments and sought to exonerate John Farrell. So the determined Caleb Strong had drawn up a second, less confrontational petition for Farrell, ‘‘humbly’’ seeking ‘‘the Mercy of the Government’’ and ‘‘compassionate Attention to his unhappy Case.’’ Again lamenting that he, the convicted man, ‘‘has no Friends,’’ this petition seemed to admit some culpability, inasmuch as Farrell now declared, ‘‘he is not guilty in the Manner which one Witness against him testified.’’ Here Farrell opened the door 130 Chapter 5 to the possibility that he had behaved improperly with the dog, but that the testimony against him was flawed. Now, instead of repeating courtroom arguments that the jury had rejected, this second petition stirred compassion by stressing Farrell’s declining health and begging ‘‘your Excellency and Honours to commiserate a poor, friendless & distressed old Man.’’1 But however piteous, this second petition of Farrell’s was no more successful than his first; and on the day after Christmas, December 26, 1796, Governor Samuel Adams, with the advice and consent of the council, issued Farrell’s death warrant for February 23, 1797, at Northampton. Nevertheless there would be another chapter—wholly unexpected—in the chronicle of the old man’s life. Caleb Strong, Farrell’s senior defense attorney, a Federalist , a man known for his compassion and one whose leadership would later be recognized by his election as governor of Massachusetts eleven times, would invent a novel republican remedy to save his client. First he would seek a delay in the scheduled execution and then, if Farrell won a postponement he would use the time to mount a petitioning campaign to save the old Irishman’s life. Though Quakers and other foes of slavery in Britain and the United States had recently been using popular petitions to end the slave trade, such petitions had not been aimed at saving the life of an individual criminal and certainly not a man convicted of such a crime as bestiality. In Massachusetts, certainly, and perhaps everywhere, the strategy Strong invented was unprecedented. He began by drafting yet another appeal for Farrell to sign. But though Strong drafted this third petition, here John Farrell’s voice, pathetic and personal, is more resonant than his attorney’s; and the plea—perhaps reflecting the convict’s growing realization of his fate—is both more modest and impassioned: I am sorry to trouble your Excellency, and Honors with another petition,—but life is sweet, although I enjoy but few of its comforts —one consolation I have, which is, that I never saw a person in distress, without releaving [sic] him, if it was in my power; and what little property I have been possessed of, has been spent in that way;—but alas! no one appears to releave me: I am quite confounded at the Providence, that reduces me to this distress and ignominy —for I must now declare, in the presence of that God, before whose Bar, I must shortly stand, that I am not guilty of the charge for which I am to die: and that...

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