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apter 3 “if i spend my days in prison i still will be a democrat” As March gave way to April, Timothy Joy’s journal began to document a steady stream of new inmates arriving in Ipswich Prison. Like Joy, these men were debtors. Their particular fault, though, as Joy viewed the situation, was that they owed money to Federalist creditors . With the Massachusetts gubernatorial election between incumbent Elbridge Gerry (a Democratic-Republican) and Caleb Strong (the Federalist challenger) looming (April 6), Joy, undoubtedly in›uenced in part by his own belief that he was the victim of Federalist persecution, quickly concluded that the sudden incarceration of these men was politically motivated.“This day,” he noted on March 31, “two new prisoners were brought in for debt by the Gentle Feds who now begin to hunt out all they can of the oposite party & if they owe them they must pay, vote for them, run away or go to Jail.” “After what I have seen,” he concluded, “I shall not wonder if Massachusetts gets shackled with a Fed Governor the ensuing year.” Four days later, Joy received a visit from David Cummings, the Essex County solicitor. A local Democratic-Republican leader, Cummings assured Joy that “he did not think the Grand Jury would ‹nd a bill against [him], that [he] was committed out of spite & that after election it would be forgotten .” Joy closed his journal for the day by noting, “Another prisoner just brot in—another Republican put in by a Fed for debt just before election.” Joy’s suspicion about systematic Federalist voter suppression, it turns out, was widely shared among local Democratic-Republicans and would soon, though unbeknownst to the young man, trigger a chaotic election-day riot in nearby Salem.1 At nine o’clock in the morning on Monday, April 6, 1812—election 57 day—Timothy Joy sat ill and despairing in his cell after a restless night of little sleep. Suddenly, the quietude of the morning was broken by the arrival of “a disagreeable visitor.” “Mr. Sheriff [Daniel] Dutch of Salem came just now,” he coldly recorded, “& served a writ on me in behalf of Leigh & Ferguson, of Berwick, Maine, the debt 31.45 cts.” “I wonder when the Gentlemen Feds,” he continued, “will leave off persecuting me. How can I pay money con‹ned as I am in jail? I now must lay here the lord knows how long to gratify these fellows malice.” Fifteen miles away, Salem’s Federalist selectmen—Samuel Ropes, Abel Lawrence, Michael Webb, William Mans‹eld, and Phillip Chase—opened the city’s poll at Salem Town Hall—the same court building where Joy had been remanded to jail just seventeen days prior. Anticipating a large turnout for the closely fought and intensely partisan gubernatorial and state races and painfully aware of “the inconveniences which had heretofore been experienced from the smallness of the court house hall” where past balloting had occurred, the selectmen had chosen to relocate the polling stations to the building’s ground ›oor, where they con‹gured the new layout to allow voters to enter at one door in the building, to proceed down a narrow passageway past the ballot box to cast their votes, and to exit the building through a door at the opposite end of the structure. Despite their careful planning, however, the ensuing voting would be anything but orderly , though the precise details of what transpired and why it happened were a point of much contention and partisan interpretation.2 According to the city’s Federalist newspaper, the Salem Gazette, the moment the polls opened, “a strong body of the democratic party, by previous concert, ‹lled the avenue to the boxes and crowded the area of the house, and in this manner the passage to the ballot box was completely blocked up, and all approach to it utterly impossible.” Chaos reigned in the tightly con‹ned and rapidly warming space: determined men, both Democrats and Federalists, jostled for room and struggled with each other for control over the voting space, tempers ›ared, and the shouting and cursing of both the protestors and Salem town of‹cials echoed through the building and spilled out into the nearby street, drawing even more people to the scene. Despite their best efforts, the Federalist voting of‹cials and town constables could not remove the protestors, and the ballot box was rendered inaccessible . “In this manner,” the paper continued, “the whole body of citizens were actually kept at...

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