“The day was remarkably calm, serene and placid, for the season — as was also, the mind, the countenance, and the conduct of the prisoner” on February the 13th of 1818 when “more than ten thousand persons” witnessed the execution of Samuel Godfrey on Woodstock (Vt.) Green.

That’s per A Sketch of the Life of Samuel E. Godfrey, which is reproduced in full in this post; some version of the publication was sold on Woodstock Green on the day of the hanging, presumably without the final appendix actually reporting the execution’s result.*

Alternating between mariner and hatter, with frequent brushes against authority and a keen feel (up to and including the transaction that cost him his own life) for the injustices visited upon him by the powerful, Samuel Godfrey emerges episodically as an American picaro on the Canadian frontier — which he is made to cross thanks to the hated British practice of seizing and impressing American seamen.

Although the man’s personal history is impossible to audit, the historical events in which he situates his autobiography were quite real: the dramatic naval battle of the HMS Cleopatra and the Ville de Milan is narrated here; there were American-British skirmishes at Odelltown, Quebec during the War of 1812; and certainly his audience would have been familiar with the flood that devastated Woodstock in 1811.

* Despite the extensive prepared “valedictory address” printed in the document in this post, Godfrey’s scaffold statement was actually quite cursory thanks to a planning snafu. According to the Amherst, N.H. Farmers’ Cabinet (Feb. 21, 1818), he said only: “I have no remarks to make, only that I declare before God and man, that I am innocent of the crime for which I am about to suffer. I had an address prepared for the occasion, but it is not here; if it was, I should be glad to have it read.”

On this day..

• 1879: Anders Larsson, the first private execution in Sweden
• 1844: John Knatchbull, moral madman
• 1995: Franklin Thomas, David Thomas, and Douglas Hamlet, the last in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• 1945: 59 collaborationists in Bulgaria
• 1751: John Morrison, Francis McCoy, and Elizabeth Robinson, robbers
• 1864: Bizoton Affair executions
• 1859: Father Paul Loc, Vietnamese martyr
• 2009: Minurul Islam and two friends, for a dowry death
• 1892: Two Georgian bandits, witnessed by Stalin
• 1906: William Williams, the last hanged in Minnesota
• 1542: Kathryn Howard, the rose without a thorn
• 1942: Patrick Stanley Vaughan Heenan, Japanese spy