First Murder in the USA? First Murder in the USA? On September 3, 1783, in Paris, representatives of Great Britain and the United States signed the treaty that formally ended the Revolutionary War. No surviving record can crown a true first murder in a country this new. What the record can do is name the earliest killings it documents — and this film follows them, document by document. Six days after that signature, a man died in Philadelphia. Twenty days after it, a man died in Princeton, Massachusetts. In neither city had the news yet reached the press. One of those deaths produced three convictions, two death warrants and a pardon. The other produced an acquittal. Both happened in a country whose war had been formally ended, on paper, less than a month before, and which did not yet know it. This is the story of what the record can actually prove about the earliest killings we can document in the United States, and of how differently that new country handled two of them. Before looking for a first killing in the United States, we have to decide when the United States began, and the answer is that there is no single date. July the fourth, 1776 is the national birthday. Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, and the former colonies declared themselves free states. Declaring it did not make Britain agree. Britain acknowledged American independence in writing in the provisional articles, signed in Paris on November the thirtieth, 1782. The definitive treaty of September the third, 1783 restated that acknowledgment and formally ended the war. But the treaty itself required ratification. Congress ratified it at Annapolis on January the fourteenth, 1784; Britain ratified on April the ninth; and the two sides exchanged those ratifications in Paris on May the twelfth, 1784. Only then did the treaty enter into force. So the boundary we use in this film is one choice among several, and we are going to say exactly what it is. We start the clock at the signature of the definitive treaty, September the third, 1783. Not the day America became independent. The day the war was formally ended by a signed treaty. Choose a different date and you get a different answer, and we will come back to that at the end. Here is the part that makes September of 1783 strange. The treaty was signed in Paris. The news had to cross the Atlantic in a ship. The editorial record at Founders Online traces it precisely. News of the definitive treaty reached Massachusetts first, carried by passengers aboard the ship Robin-Hood, which arrived at Cape Ann on October the twenty-second; the Boston press printed the report three days later. Word first appeared in the Pennsylvania press on November the first. There is a detail in that record that is almost too good. The first report to reach Boston had the date wrong. The gentlemen aboard the Robin-Hood pronounced that the definitive treaty was absolutely signed on the second day of September. It was the third. So for seven weeks, the boundary this film uses existed only on a sheet of paper in Paris. Both of the deaths in this film happened inside those seven weeks, before any American newspaper had printed what was signed on their behalf. Captain William Pickles was a naval officer. On Wednesday, September the seventeenth, 1783, the Pennsylvania Gazette printed this, under its Philadelphia dateline. On Tuesday, the ninth instant, departed this life, Captain William Pickles, of the navy. His remains were the day following interred in the burying-ground of Saint Peter's, with military honours, and attended by a number of his friends and citizens. The same notice says how he died. It is much to be lamented, that after leading a life of danger, he should at last fall by the hands of assassins, as he attempted the rescue of an unhappy man they were about to murder. That is a contemporary printing, eight days after the death, naming the date and describing a killing. September the ninth, 1783 was a Tuesday, so the notice agrees with itself. Six days after the treaty was signed. The record is precise about his death, and silent on one thing: none of the records we examined dates the attack itself. Every page of the Pennsylvania Packet from late August to the end of October, and of the Pennsylvania Gazette across the same weeks, was searched. Neither paper ever printed a report of the fight itself. The state's council minutes do not date it. Neither does the published law report. Neither does either of the two Philadelphia diaries we searched, which recorded a great deal else. A specific date for that attack circulates online with no record behind it, so this film does not repeat it. What the contemporary newspaper dates, precisely, is the death. Four Italian men were indicted for the murder of Captain Pickles. The case is reported as Respublica against Mesca, in Dallas's Reports, the first volume of Pennsylvania case law. Their counsel raised a question that belonged to that particular moment. Under an old English statute, a foreigner tried for his life could ask for a jury made up half of foreigners. Counsel asked for that jury. And the argument that followed was not really about these four men. It was about whether a statute passed by the British Parliament still ran in Pennsylvania at all, now that Pennsylvania was not British. The state disputed it. It was argued twice, on September the twenty-fifth and the twenty-ninth. Counsel argued that the old statute was a beneficial one, and that it had been used in Pennsylvania before the revolution. The Chief Justice allowed the jury, on the strength of an earlier Pennsylvania case from 1764, while saying plainly that it would not be granted in new cases going forward. Read that twice. The court granted these men the protection of a British statute, and simultaneously announced that the protection was ending. A rule inherited from the old regime was applied even as the court declared it was closing, in a murder trial, three weeks after the treaty was signed. So in the same month as the earliest killing we could document after the signature, Pennsylvania's courts were openly working out which of the old laws were still theirs. The court's conviction record was read into the minutes of Pennsylvania's Supreme Executive Council on October the eighth, 1783, and the official published edition of those minutes is what we examined. The record of the conviction of Pietro Giacobe Francisca Mesca and Mattes Brattelli, for the murder of William Pickles, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer held at Philadelphia the twenty-second day of September last, was received and read, by which it appears that the said Pietro Giacobe, otherwise called Pietro Simone Francisco Mesca and Matteo Brattelli, are sentenced by the said court, to be hanged by the neck till they be severally dead. Three men, not four. One of the four indicted is not in the sentence. And three men, not two. The first entry runs two of the names together into one; every later entry in the same volume separates them cleanly. The record also spells the third man's name three ways across these entries — Brattelli, Bratelli, Battelli. We keep each record's own spelling when quoting it, and call him Bratelli otherwise. The Council ordered a warrant for their execution on Saturday the eighteenth of October, and directed the sheriff to call out a body of men to keep order at it. Then the record does something easy to miss. The execution was respited to Saturday the twenty-fifth. A fresh warrant was issued for that day. And on the twenty-fifth of October, the Council took into consideration the case of Matteo Bratelli, then under sentence of death, and ordered a reprieve for thirty days. His petition was read again in November. And on November the fourteenth, the General Assembly resolved that Council do pardon the said Matteo Battelli, and the Council ordered that a pardon should immediately issue. So the eighteenth of October, which is the date you will find printed, is not when it happened. And one of the three condemned men did not hang at all. He was pardoned, by a resolution of the legislature, seven weeks after sentence. What the minutes prove is the sentence, the warrants, the reprieve and the pardon. They do not record the executions themselves. Two men were left scheduled to hang on the twenty-fifth of October, and we have not been able to document independently that it was carried out. Fourteen days after Pickles died, and some two hundred and forty miles to the north, John Frost was killed by his son. This case is sometimes summarized as surviving only because, ten years later, his son dictated a confession from a prison cell before being hanged for a different killing. That summary is wrong, and the record is much better than that. A coroner's inquest was held on September the twenty-fourth, 1783, the day after the killing. It survives in the Massachusetts court files. We are working from a scholarly transcription of it, not yet from the document itself. That transcription reports the inquest finding that Samuel Frost did feloniously kill and murder John Frost upon the twenty-third day of September currant, between the hours of five and six in the afternoon, with a hand spike. The day after. With the hour. And the weapon. A grand jury indicted Samuel Frost for murder with malice aforethought, and the case was tried at Worcester at the April term of 1784. Contemporary newspapers carried the killing at the time, including the Massachusetts Spy of October the second, 1783 — ten years before the confession existed. The confession printed in 1793 agrees with the inquest; the motive and the scene it retells had already appeared, in outline, in the 1783 newspapers. We will still keep the confession separate, because a retrospective telling is not the same kind of evidence as a contemporary report. One correction, because it is easy to find and it is wrong. A town history published in 1915 dates this killing to 1789. A coroner's inquest held the day after, and an indictment tried in 1784, settle it. Samuel Frost was tried for murder, and the court found him not guilty. Later accounts say he was acquitted on grounds of insanity; the earliest such account we found is a Worcester police history published in 1900. The verdict identified so far records a general finding of not guilty and gives no reason. His own 1793 confession says only that he was acquitted, contrarily to his expectations. It never mentions insanity. So this is what we can say. Frost was acquitted. Later accounts attributed that acquittal to insanity, and the verdict identified so far gives no reason. We are not going to diagnose a man across two hundred and forty years from hostile sources, and the sources on Samuel Frost are hostile. The printed material about him described him in terms meant to place him outside the human, and that language tells you about its authors, not about him. Hold the two cases next to each other, because the contrast is the point. In Philadelphia, four foreign men were charged with killing a naval officer. They were granted a jury half made of foreigners, under a British statute the state was actively arguing about. Three were convicted. One was pardoned. The other two were left under warrant. In Princeton, a son killed his father. An inquest sat over the body the next day, he was indicted for murder, and a jury acquitted him. Same fortnight. Same brand-new country. Two very different outcomes, and the records do not tell us why. Everything in this film depends on a line drawn by four men in Paris, and it is worth showing how much that line decides. Go back to James Molineaux, killed in Cedar Street in Philadelphia on the seventeenth of July, 1783. Same city. Same year. The same state printing the same kind of reward. He falls outside this film by seven weeks. But start the clock at the Declaration of Independence in 1776 — the national birthday — and Molineaux is comfortably inside, and so are a great many others, and the question we set out to answer has a completely different answer. That is what a boundary does. It is a choice, and it decides the result before the research begins. We have told you ours. There is one more event sometimes placed inside our twenty days, and we mention it because someone will raise it. A man named Cheney Clow was hanged in Kent County, Delaware. Some later accounts put that hanging in September of 1783; the Delaware Public Archives date it to 1788. Either way, we are not counting it: a judicial execution is not the category of homicide this search counts, and the death it punished had happened years earlier. Here is how much of this we can actually see. There was no national crime register in 1783. There was no United States department that collected killings. Each state kept its own records, and they survive unevenly. But the picture is not blank, and this is where we want to correct the story we started with. Twice in 1783, when a killing in Philadelphia left its killers unidentified, the record shows the same response. When James Molineaux was killed in Cedar Street in July, a coroner held an inquest and the state printed a reward. When William Brann was killed near the Center House in October, the same thing happened, with a description of the two men suspected of it, down to the dog they had with them. A memorandum printed beneath that proclamation is worth hearing in part, because of how specific it is. The person who murdered the said William Brann, it says in part, was drest in a blue coat, and his companion in a green coat. They appeared to be foreigners, and had with them a large dog. The murder was committed in the afternoon. That is a state government, a week before the news of the treaty first appeared in Pennsylvania's press, printing a description of a dog in the hope of catching two men. So a substantial published Pennsylvania record survives, and we examined it. What is missing is not the record alone. What is missing is anyone in 1783 whose job it was to add Pennsylvania's killings to Massachusetts's — no one was counting across the states. Each claim in this film names the record behind it, and the search behind them was wide. Here is exactly where it stopped. We searched the OCR-searchable American newspapers for 1783, the Pennsylvania and Delaware council records, the Calendar of Virginia State Papers, the North Carolina Colonial and State Records for that year, Archives of Maryland Online, two Philadelphia diaries, a scholarly homicide database covering Massachusetts, Maryland and Virginia, and the standard file of American executions, which records no execution anywhere in the country in September 1783. We could not reach everything. A major subscription newspaper archive, two South Carolina titles, and the Maryland Gazette sat outside our search, along with Pennsylvania's manuscript court files; and the Massachusetts homicide worksheet we relied on covers adult victims only. Beyond that lies the paper that early America never put online: manuscript court and coroner files, and newspapers preserved only as page images no search can reach. Some of history still has to be read the old way. If one of those pages one day names an earlier death, this film's question is built to welcome it. The answer you are about to hear is the strongest the records we examined can give. So: not found is not the same as does not exist. So, is this America's first murder? Here is the most the record lets us say. Among the surviving records we examined, the earliest precisely dated death from a homicide after the definitive treaty was signed is that of Captain William Pickles, in Philadelphia, on September the ninth, 1783. Six days after the signature. The attack that killed him is undated; his death is not. It is also the earliest murder conviction we found after the signing. The killing of John Frost on September the twenty-third is the earliest we found in Massachusetts. Neither is a proven national first, and nothing we searched could make one. Change the boundary and the answer changes with it. Start at the Declaration in 1776, or at the provisional articles in 1782, and there are earlier cases. Start when the treaty actually entered into force, in 1784, and both of these deaths fall before the peace was legally complete. What we are left with is better than a trivia answer. In September of 1783, in a country whose definitive peace treaty had just been signed abroad and not yet reported at home, two men died by homicide. One killing brought four foreign men before a jury half made of foreigners, arguing about whether English law still applied, and ended in three convictions, a pardon, and two fates the record does not give us. The other put a son before a Worcester jury that acquitted him. The paperwork of peace had not yet crossed the ocean. The country itself was already at work.