On this date in 1829, George Chapman became the first person hanged in Waterloo, N.Y.

According to the July 29, 1829 New York Spectator, the tailor Chapman “had a quarrel with Daniel Wright, laborer (both excessively intemperate drinkers),” but the two sorted it out.

“According to a vulgar custom, however, they must ratify their treaty of amity over a bottle of whiskey”: in drinking their accord the drunks promptly fell back into dispute, leading Chapman to fatally clobber Wright across the head with a shovel.

This article refers soberingly to the perpetrator’s “inevitable doom”, and so it was.

The following spring (according to this pdf memoir which misstates the year of the event), thousands came by foot, by boat, by ox-cart, sleeping under the stars to witness the strange spectacle of Chapman’s public execution. “Trees around the spot were so filled with sight-seers that they looked as if they were covered with blackbirds.”

On this day..

• 1754: Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, the first Washington atrocity
• 1345: Arnaud Foucaud, jobbing trooper
• 1753: George Robertson, prick
• 1794: The neighbors of Susan Sorel, the female atheist
• 2015: A day in the death penalty around the world
• 1879: Alexander Soloviev, bad shot
• 1213: Peter of Pontefract, oracle
• Themed Set: Old New York
• 1686: Paskah Rose, Jack Ketch interregnum
• 1872: Franks survives Fiji's first hanging
• 2002: Napoleon Beazley, who threw it all away
• 1871: The Paris Commune falls
• 1987: Valery Martynov, betrayed by Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen