Category Archives: will Rees mysteries

Inequality in 1800 US

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Inequality is not a new phenomenon. Through most of human history, recorded history for sure, most of the resources have been coopted by the few. One of the few times in history when there was a big shake up was during the Black Death. Entire villages were wiped out. Crops rotted in the fields. With such a diminished labor pool, surviving serfs were able to negotiate better wages and working conditions for themselves.

However, change usually comes about through some cataclysm or continuous revolts.

In the United States, most of the founding fathers were wealthy and quite a few were plantation owners with slaves. (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, e.g.) Although Will Rees, of the Will Rees mysteries is not poor, he and his family do struggle a bit to make ends meet. Besides farming, Rees takes his loom and weaves for farmwives for a bit of ‘cash money’. Lydia sells her eggs and cheese at market.

Rees comes face to face with the difference in wealth in Murder, Sweet Murder. Lydia receives a frantic letter from her sister begging her to come to Boston. Their father, Marcus Farrell, has been accused of murder. Although Lydia is reluctant, she has been estranged from her father for years, he is still her father. She and Rees, along with the baby and daughter Jerusha, head off to Boston.

Although Rees knew Lydia came from money, he is shocked by the wealth of the Farrell family. The large house is stocked with servants, they own several vehicles including a carriage with a matched foursome, and apparently money is no object.

The Farrells also look down upon Rees for his more humble life. He grew up on a poor farm and certainly does not make enough for servants.

But Marcus Farrell is enmeshed in the Triangle Trade. He owns sugar plantations in the Caribbean as well as a distillery in Boston and a fleet of ships to transport slaves from Africa.

Marcus Farrell, it seems, is morally bankrupt. The question is, is he also a murderer?

Slavery in Murder, Sweet Murder

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In Murder, Sweet Murder, I continued looking at slavery in the United States, following Death in the Great Dismal and Murder on Principle. Since the importation of slaves was not forbidden until1808 (but there was plenty of smuggling through Spanish Florida as well as other slave ships that ignored the law. The Clotilda brought 110 children from Africa in 1859.), Rees’s father-in-law was still bringing in enslaved people during the Rees family’s visit to Boston.

Lydia had already fled the family home, joining the Shakers in Maine as a young woman. This is where she met Will Rees. Now her brother James, a sea captain, is estranged from their father. James refuses to engage in ‘that filthy trade’, his words. Conditions on the ships were horrific.

It is commonly assumed that slavery was wholly a Southern institution. Nothing could be further than the truth. During the Colonial period and through the Revolution, slavery was widespread. However, after the War for Independence, states such as New York and New Jersey began passing laws to abolish slavery gradually. By 1804, all the Northern states had passed laws outlawing slavery, either immediately or incrementally.

No Southern states abolished slavery although individual owners freed their slaves.

The demand for slaves increased dramatically with the invention of the cotton gin and cotton became ‘King Cotton’. The rising demand for sugar also increased the amount of land on the plantations in Jamaica and the other islands devoted to sugar. Plantations that once grew indigo and cacao switched to sugar, as I describe in the mystery. 

Both sugar and cotton exhaust the soil, so plantation owners looked west for fresh land. That, of course, amplified the conflict between the free states and the slave states and set the stage for the Missouri Compromise where Missouri entered the union as a slave state and Maine, formerly part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as a free state. 

Families

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As I looked around the table at Christmas dinner, and saw people who had not spoken to one another for years, I thought of how complicated families could be.

In Murder, Sweet Murder, I set the mystery against Lydia’s family, but Will Rees’s is no less difficult.

Lydia, estranged from her father and step-mother, left her family years ago. Her father is a wealthy Boston merchant engaged in the Triangle Trade. He owns a distillery that distills molasses into rum as well a fleet of ships that run slaves from Africa.

Lydia cannot accept her father’s profession and after some problems in her personal live, runs away. She lands at Zion, a Shaker community in Maine. In Murder, Sweet Murder I bring her back to Boston, and her family. She is no more tolerant of her father’s profession now than she was then.

Rees’s father was an abusive alcoholic who died by falling off a wagon in a drunken stupor. Rees is not an alcoholic but he makes other mistakes with his children. Before the action begins in A Simple Murder, David, Rees’s oldest son runs away from home, and takes refuge in Zion with the Shakers. Rees had left David (he would say his father abandoned him) with Caroline and her husband. When Rees returns home and recovers the farm, sending Caroline’s family packing, she never forgives him.

In A Devil’s Cold Dish, Caroline does her very best to destroy her brother and his family.

As the stories go on, and Rees’s history unfolds, his family expands. But it also changes. By the time of Murder, Sweet Murder, Jerusha, Rees’s oldest daughter, wants to leave home for school. David and Simon have already left for a farm in a distant town.

Families are complicated, even in fiction.

Sugar, Molasses and Rum

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Before rum, there was sugar – from sugarcane. Sugar is present in many fruits and vegetables. Sugar beets, for example, have more sugar than an apple. There are also many types of sugar: glucose, fructose, lactose, with slight differences in their chemical structures. 

The sweetest of all is sugarcane.

Sugarcane is a picky plant, requiring heat, sunshine and water. It must be grown in a frost free environment. Discovered millennia ago, it grew first in New Guinea and from there spread to India and the Indian subcontinent. It did not reach Europe until many centuries later, during the Middle Ages, and it was rare and expensive. A description of a banquet in 1457 mentions sugar sculptures. As sugar was planted in Madeira and the Canary Islands, the demand for sugar increased tenfold.

Christopher Columbus brought sugarcane to the New World and the first sugar plantation was set up in Hispaniola. Slaves were imported to work the plantations and the desire for sugar continued to increase. With the plantations in the West Indies, sugar became cheap enough for most households to afford. From a few pounds consumed per capita in the colonies in the beginning of the eighteenth century, the amount rose to eighty pounds by the end.

Sugarcane is a grass. The crop is chopped into lengths, crushed and boiled. (Now much of this is done by machines but during the time of Will Rees, it was all done by hand.) The sugar we know and love is the crystallized result from the sugarcane syrup. Raw sugar is brown and has a higher molasses content. Slave accounts allude to the difficult and dangerous work connected to the production of sugar, from the chopping of cane to the boiling of the syrup. Slaves in the more northern states did not want to be sold down south: to the cotton or cane fields.

Molasses is a byproduct of this process. Once, it was discarded but the demand for molasses grew exponentially when it was discovered it could be fermented into an alcoholic drink. The fermentation of sugarcane juice is mentioned in Sanskrit texts. By the time of the sugar plantations in the West Indies, the enslaved were fermenting the molasses into ‘Rumbullion”, ‘kill-devil,’ and ‘screech’ – all forms of (probably undrinkable) rum. It rapidly gained in popularity, however, and was used as currency in Africa and was exported to Great Britain.

Sugarcane is a heavy feeder and requires about 660 gallons of water for every 2.2 pounds of sugar. So, not great for the environment as well as its role in obesity, tooth decay, diabetes, and other health risks.

Rum

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Rum was the lubricant and the fuel for the engine of commerce leading up to the American Revolution and a bit beyond. It was a favorite drink of the slavers, the slaves, and pretty much everyone else. Called Nelson’s blood (as well as a number of less flattering names), rum made up part of the British sailors’ pay.

What is rum? Rum is distilled from the molasses left over from sugarcane. The cane has particular requirement and cannot be grown in the temperate lands. It must be grown with lots of sun and water. It also needs intensive labor to cut, cart and process the cane under the tropical sun. A clear and distinct link between the growing demand for sugar and slavery can be drawn because, as plantations were turned over to cane, the needs of a large work force demanded more workers – Slaves.

The slaves needed to be fed. New England ships brought dried cod, picked up the molasses for transport to the distilleries in New England. The resulting drink (called among other things, screech, kill-devil, demon water) was put in casks and sent to Africa to purchase more slaves and also to Great Britain. This was the previously discussed Triangle Trade.

Ironically, the long trips over the ocean, stored in casks, made the rum more drinkable.

Although rum was still consumed after the War for Independence, as mentioned in Murder, Sweet Murder, it was falling out of favor as the new country’s beverage. Whiskey, from rye grown in Western Pennsylvania, and distilled in the country, was considered more patriotic and as such became the drink of choice.

The Triangle Trade

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The enslavement of thousands is a stain on the United States. The ripple effects are still being felt to this day.

Slaves were bought and sold in the northern colonies, but, by about 1800 these areas, states now in the new United States, had by and large forbidden the importing and sale of slaves. (That does not mean there were none; the slaves already present were allowed to remain.)

However, that does not mean merchants in the north were guiltless. Merchants, such as Lydia’s father, engaged in a three cornered trade in which New England businessmen took African slaves to the United States and the West Indies for work on the plantations, especially the sugar plantations.

The by product of making sugar, molasses, was shipped to New England for distillation into rum. That rum was exported to Great Britain and brought to Africa. The rum, and the profits from selling the rum, was used to purchase more slaves.

This trade was called the benign sounding Triangle Trade.

Boston

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Murder, Sweet Murder, the next Will Rees mystery, is set in Boston.

Since the birth of the United States, Boston has been one of the country’s most important cities. It was settled by the Puritans in 1630 and quickly became a trading center and hub of commerce.

During the 1770s, Boston was a hotbed of patriotic fervor. The taverns in Boston were instrumental in firing up the populace and planning. (More about that later.) The first shots were fired nearby and several battles, including Breed’s Hill, were fought within the town.

By the time Rees joins Lydia in Boston, and finally meets her family, the war has been over for twenty years.

Once the war was over, Boston’s economy recovered and the population grew significantly, so much so it went from a village to a town. Then, in 1822, the name was changed to the City of Boston.

Boston was also one of the first cities to adopt a metropolitan police force. In 1790, Boston’s population was 43,000 and the ability of night watchmen and constables to keep order and protect lives and property was already strained. The rapid growth that occurred beginning in the early 1800s, and increased with the influx of foreign immigrants, further stressed the system. In 1837, Boston established a police force modeled on the London police.

Shakers and Orphans

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Throughout my books, I reference the number of orphans, runaways, semi-orphans and other children who were raised by the Shakers. This group took in children from their very beginning right to 1966, when the United States government passed a law forbidding it.

Since the Shakers were celibate and did not reproduce themselves, they relied upon converts to increase membership. They also took in orphans or semi-orphans. Although the Shakers might have wished for the orphans to ‘make a Shaker’, they did not insist and many of the children married out of the community.

In a time when there was no safety net, no foster care, no food stamps, the injury or death of the man of the family was a catastrophe. No unemployment or workman’s comp either. Women had few options for work outside the home (wet nurse was one!) and when they did work they made far less than a man. Add in the prevalence of disease, some of which carried off both parents, and there was a frightening number of orphans.

Semi-orphans, what was that? Well, if a single father or more often a single mother couldn’t support her children she had a few options. Depositing them on the Shakers’ doorstep was one. Indenturing them out if they were old enough (and children as young as six were indentured) was another. Babies couldn’t be indentured unless a premium was paid to the employer for the extra care. Orphanages? The first and for many years the only was set up in Charleston, SC in 1793. Black orphans were not welcomed. However, they did not apprentice children out before they were twelve which, for those days, was enlightened. Although these were children they were still worked hard and as susceptible to accidents and death as an adult. One account describes a thirteen year old boy apprenticed to a ship maker. A load of lumber fell upon him, killing him. They found a series of strange bruises on his leg, bruises it turned out from a bag of marbles in his pocket. He was still a child who wanted to play. Sometimes the employers were called up before the town fathers for excessive cruelty to their indentured servants but not often. Many of the children perished.

And where did you go if you couldn’t suppor yourself? The workhouse. The descriptions in Dickens’s novels, although they take place at a later time, are unfortunately all too accurate.  Sometimes, if a woman remarried, she would be able to recover her children.

So the lot of poor children was dire, for orphans and semi-orphans it was almost a death sentence. Babies were especially at risk. They are so vulnerable and if they were nursing especially so. In those days there really was no good alternative to mother’s milk. Many women survived by wet nursing infants. Some managed to nurse both their own and the others. Some wealthy woman put out an infant to nurse if they were ill or if their husband wanted a male heir. Since nursing confers some contraceptive effect they handed off an infant girl to a wet nurse so they could conceive again. What happened to the infants of the wet nurse? Many or the wealthy women did not want to have the child in their household or to share. Some of the wet nurses sneaked off to feed their child. Another option is to hire a cheaper wet nurse. There are many accounts of women who did so and while they were nursing another child their own died.

So the Shakers were by far the best and safest alternative for orphans. The fact that they educated these children, not only in all the skills they would need to live in the agrarian world, but also to read and write is amazing. They truly lived by their altruistic beliefs.

Mistakes and more

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One of the pitfalls of writing historical fiction is the danger of making mistakes. It could be simple mistakes. In A Devil’s cold dish, I refer to a stack of hay as a bale. Balers were not invented until the early 1800s, a fact I knew. But I was trying to expand my synonyms from stack and pile and all the other words. A reader called on it immediately.

Then there was the mystery where I had Rees rewarding Hannibal with oats a few times. I immediately got pushback from a reader who accused me of giving the poor (fictional) horse colic.

These are somewhat trivial errors. More serious mistakes involve easily confirmed facts that somehow the writer (me) got wrong. In Murder on Principle, I refer to Jefferson’s opponent as John Quincy Adams. He is actually the son of the correct candidate, John Adams. This is a case of temporary forgetfulness. I knew it was John Adams but made the mistake once and it was repeated. No one else caught it, not the agent nor the editor. That was left to a reader who wrote a really harsh review.

This is what makes writing historical fiction so challenging; everything must be triple checked and even then it is all too easy to make a mistake.

Believe me, someone will know.

I must add, however, that sometimes the reader who is so sure of their facts, is wrong. I used the term ‘cracker’ in one of my books and a reader wrote a gotcha review. I, however, had done my research and had a copy of a letter written in 1763 by a British official using that exact term.

The passage of time always creates an undiscovered country.

Albany Book Fair

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I had a great experience on Saturday at the Albany Book Fair. This is one of my favorite venues. It is not far away from my home. And the Fair allows you a full day, not an hour or so. I always enjoy talking to the other authors as well as the people passing through.

Besides that, this was my very first in-person activity, which made it even more special. Usually I sell my books to the parents that are wandering through. This time, I sold several to the students wandering through. (Am I aging myself when I say some of them look like grade schoolers?)

This time, I sold two of my first book: A Simple Murder. That makes sense since a lot of us mystery readers want to read a series from the very beginning.

I also sold four of Death in the Great Dismal. Not too surprising since the swamp is such an amazing place. I took the opportunity to recommend the Great Dismal as a destination.