20th [July 1775]. Mr. Carpenter was taken by the night Patrole — upon examination he had swum over to Dorchester and back again, was tried here that day and sentence passed on him to be executed the next day, — his coffin bro’t into the Goal-yard, his halter [noose] brought and he dressed as criminals are before execution. Sentence was respited and a few days after was pardoned.

-from the diary of Boston selectman Timothy Newell

On or around this date in 1775, an immigrant wig-maker was faux-executed by the British garrisoned in a besieged Boston.

Richard Carpenter was not a figure of decisive importance to the onrushing American Revolution but the excellent and venerable blog Boston 1775 by J.L. Bell has made a wonderful little microhistory of the man by cobbling together his appearances across different sources from his first 1769 business advert until his 1781 death in a British prison hulk.

Carpenter swam across Boston harbor to escape to patriot lines, then swam back into Boston; the Brits who captured him naturally took him for an enemy agent who could have been hanged … but from multiple reports (sometimes with muddled dates) this fate was “merely” visibly prepared for him only to be abated shortly before execution. In Bell’s speculation, hostilities were still not yet fully matured and “neither side had the stomach for such fatal measures. The executions of Thomas Hickey and Nathan Hale were still several months away.”

For an extraordinary snapshot of this revolutionary everyman, click through the full series:

• Richard Carpenter: barber and swimmer
• “Carpenter was sentenced to be hanged this day”
• Richard Carpenter “apprehended and confined in irons”
• Richard Carpenter “Returned from his Captivity”
• “Do something for one of my old Jail Mates”
• “Onboard the prison ship at New York”

On this day..

• 1721: Walter Kennedy
• 1661: Antonius Hambroek, defying Koxinga
• 1972: Misao Katagiri
• 1834: Catherine Snow, the last hanged in Newfoundland
• 1797: David McLane, an American traitor in Quebec
• 1683: Lord Russell, Whig martyr
• 356 BCE: Herostratus burns the Temple of Artemis
• 1798: Anthony Perry and Mogue Kearns, Protestant and Catholic
• 1915: Private Herbert Burden, memorial model
• 1986: Vice-President Paulo Correia and five others
• 1976: Lt. Col. Abu Taher
• 1944: Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, for the plot to kill Hitler