Seacoast History Blog #52

June 25, 2009

It’s a good day for history when a long dead character finally gets her story told in an important publication. Our copy of HISTORICAL NEW HAMPSHIRE arrived today (Vol 63, No 1) with Carolyn Marvin’s detailed telling of the hanging of Ruth Blay on December 30, 1768. The story of the last woman executed in NH has long been the buzz of Portsmouth historians, but accounts were fuzzy and no reporter had really done her homework – until now. After a year of research and months of writing, Marvin’s 20-page study is now the most comprehensive source available. 

Although most people don’t read scholarly essays in history journals, the facts are now collected, interpreted and published. That means that other history writers, students and journalists searching for Ruth Blay will find Marvin’s article. Although the myths and false reports will never die, we now have a place to go to learn the basics from a hard-working author who has made herself into an expert on the topic. And that is a very good thing for poor Ruth who finally has a biographer and publicist after all these years.

Ruth is doubly lucky that Marvin, who is a research librarian at the Portsmouth Athenaeum is also an accomplished writer. Her essay separates the popular legend from facts to get at the human character beneath. Until now, most of us have come to Ruth Blay through Albert Laighton’s poem or Charles Brewster’s essay. Both mock the local sheriff who, legend says, hanged Ruth quickly so that he could go to dinner, just missing a reprieve that arrived too late from the royal governor. The focus of the story was on the sheriff, not the victim, who some versions said, killed her infant child and buried it beneath the floorboards of a schoolhouse where she was a teacher. 

MORE ON Ruth Blay and Carolyn Marvin 

Marvin tracks back to Blay’s youth, digs into her early years and describes how a 30 year old unmarried woman could conceal her pregnancy in the clothing of the era. Like all good historians, Marvin sees her subject as a citizen of her own time, not ours. We learn, for example, that 30 to 40 percent of women were pregnant at the time of their marriage in Revolutionary days. Ruth’s refusal to name the father, as in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, allow Marvin the chance to speculate on his identity, adding intrigue to an already intriguing tale

The child, probably stillborn, was discovered beneath the floorboards of a barn in South Hampton by a five-year old child. What followed seems like a travesty of justice to modern readers, but as Marvin continually reminds us, colonial New England was a wholly different nation. The author peoples the trial of “The King Vs Ruth Blay” with real characters. She brings Blay’s brief prison term to life by digging up a sketch of the Portsmouth jail and comparing it to the restored “gaol” at nearby York, Maine. We learn about the victim’s three reprieves and follow the death cart to the execution site, now South Cemetery.

Good history writing is a balancing act. The writer needs to keep the narrative alive, while filling in great gobs of expository detail. Where the reader needs to learn important facts about a forgotten era, the writer must paint the background, artfully, then leap out of the way to let the story progress. Marvin does this smoothly, offering expert commentary based on her unique knowledge of the topic, while correcting errors and setting the records straight, all without a hint of ego or bias. The reader can tell, as I have often noticed in conversations with Marvin, that she feels deeply for this character, but never lets her empathy get In the way of the facts.

Most intriguing are Blay’s own final words, published as a broadside by NH Gazette printers Robert and Daniel Fowle on the morning of Blay’s hanging. We get the whole first person account, a primary document I had never seen before. Blay hints that two women bore false witness against her. In modern terms, if we believe her account, Blay was framed. The mystery grows even deeper as eaech new fact is unearthed. By providing us with enough context to draw our own conclusions, Marvin turns what has been largely a nursery rhyme character into a fully human figure with a voice and a past.   

In the model of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Marvin tells a woman’s tale from a woman’s perspective with impeccable research and clear prose, never wavering from the topic, but never letting the topic weight us down. The author knows that Ruth Blay is not just a footnote to history, but a touchstone to the society that formed our own modern culture. This is the kind of writing we need more of and Marvin shows us that one good essay on a marginalized figure like Ruth Blay reveals more about our American history than 10 more biographies of George Washington.

For now, this is everything you need to know about Ruth Blay, at least until Carol Marvin’s book comes out next year.

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© Copyright 2009 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.

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