The Hanging of Efraim Wheeler: A Story of Rape, Incest and Justice in Early America

On 20 February 1806, Ephraim Wheeler, an illiterate and impoverished occasional farm hand who married into a mixed-race family, was executed in Lenox Massachusetts for the rape of his thirteen year-old daughter Betsy, alleged to have taken place on 8 June 1805. Later the same day of the offence Betsy was examined by her mother, but Massachusetts’ law prevented a wife from giving evidence against her husband, so there was no independent physical evidence of sexual contact offered at the trial. Wheeler was condemned on the testimony of his daughter alone, who claimed there had been two prior attempts at rape. Several petitions were presented in the hope that Wheeler’s sentence would be commuted, including a community petition signed by 93 local residents, and one from Wheeler’s wife, daughter and son. That the alleged offence was perpetrated against Wheeler’s own daughter was not an issue in the prosecution’s case; the issue was consent not incest, and Betsy claimed she had been taken against her will. However, the Governor’s Council, responsible for advising the state governor on appeals and petitions, made it clear that though judged irrelevant at the trial, it was the fact that the rape was perpetrated against his own daughter that weighed against mercy. Governor Caleb Strong concurred with the Council’s judgement. A miscarriage of justice? Wheeler thought so. He consistently denied the rape and, with his eternal soul at stake, proclaimed unequivocally his innocence on the gallows moments before his death.

Wheeler argued that he was the victim of a scheme hatched by an embittered wife. It is also possible Betsy chose this means to free herself from a tyrannical father, who frequently used physical violence against her and other members of the family. Given what the Browns are able to tell us, neither explanation seems persuasive. In the end, it is almost certainly true that Wheeler raped his daughter, but her passive disposition towards a parent demanding to be obeyed persuaded him (to his dying day) that she had given her ‘consent’ to their sexual intercourse. Incest, then, but not rape. Only Betsy could say that it was done without her consent, and her testimony convinced the jury.

Even if we assume Wheeler’s guilt, and there is good reason that we should, was justice served by an execution? The evidence presented in court was slight, if intuitively compelling. But no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts for over twenty-five years, and had the offence occurred to the north, in Vermont, Wheeler would have served life in prison. Moreover, had Governor Hancock been still in office, it is likely he would have commuted Wheeler’s sentence--or so Strong’s Jeffersonian opponents later claimed--thereby underscoring the arbitrariness of the application of the death penalty. That Wheeler was uneducated and a lifelong failure--as a farmer, husband and father--who was orphaned as a young boy and indentured to a cruel shoemaker, placed him decidedly in the class of folk most at risk in such circumstances. These aspects of the case resonate loudly in the death penalty debates of more recent times.

The Browns provide a rich analysis of the various elements of Wheeler’s story, and in the telling they provide a micro-history in which issues of gender, race and class, family violence and poverty, theories of punishment, and death penalty politics intersect. The primary sources for their analysis of the rape and trial are an exceptionally detailed trial report and Wheeler’s informative narrative of his life told to a local journalist on the eve of the hanging. The authors even-handedly present the competing perspectives on what "really" happened in 1805 and 1806, from the viewpoints of Wheeler’s wife and daughter, the prosecutor and the court, the community and the press, and Ephraim Wheeler himself. From all of the perspectives, it is clear there can be no single "true" version of these events. This uncertainty provides the book with the air of a mystery in the vein of The Return of Martin Guerre, the acknowledged inspiration behind the Brown’s work.

The context for their tale is enriched by a detailed social history of the time and place, laced with fascinating biographies of family members, judges, lawyers, and clergymen involved in the case, and intertwined with the evolving punishment debate in the early decades of the new republic. In the year of Wheeler’s trial sodomy was removed from the list of capital crimes in Massachusetts and several corporal punishments were abolished, including whipping, branding, cropping ears, cutting off fingers, the stocks and pillory. Not long before, abolition of the death penalty for rape had been narrowly defeated in the state legislature. The more humane ideas of the European Enlightenment were gaining ground in eroding the principles of the harsh penal code inherited from Britain. Increasingly, legislators were convinced that incarceration with hard labour was a more humane punishment because it was amenable to quantitative distinctions as a measure of the severity of crimes and held out the prospect of the moral improvement of the criminal. Then, as now, partisan politics also figured in the context of the death penalty debate. 1806 was an election year in Massachusetts, and Governor Strong’s refusal to commute Wheeler’s sentence was taken up by the Jeffersonians, who attacked Strong and his party as defenders of ‘the sanguinary principle of a monarchical system’ that should be replaced (260). The implication, of course, was that only the Jeffersonians could be relied upon to carry out the needed reforms.

The Hanging of Ephraim Wheeler is a wonderful read, generally persuasive in its interpretations, and likely to become a benchmark book against which other micro-histories of the early republic will be judged. It is also an eloquent reminder of what remains to be done to purge the American judicial system of the vagaries, arbitrariness, and rank injustices associated with the death penalty. Only abolition will do.