America’s First Murderer
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
On a day late in September 1630, John Billington -- an original Plymouth colonist, a landholder, a father to two sons, a signatory of the Mayflower Compact -- stood with a noose around his neck. He was condemned to hang. When he died that day, John Billington left behind a bequest of grim historic firsts for the New World.John Billington was the first person to perpetrate a crime in the colony. He had the dubitable honor of being the first European to be convicted of murder in this new place. And he was the first to be put to death by the state in the New World.
Earlier that same year, John Billington shot a young man named John Newcomen, who had newly migrated to Plymouth. Billington “waylaid” the man and shot him in the woods. Governor William Bradford, in his historic writing “Of Plymouth Colony 1620 - 1647,” doesn't mention the reason for the shooting.
T¬he hanging death of Billington was a consequence of a long, tense history between his family and the Puritan leaders. The Billingtons (John, his wife Eleanor and sons, John and Francis) were part of the Strangers -- a group of people who came to America on the Mayflower with the stiffly pious Separatist Puritans. Billington is considered to have been a Catholic, the branch of Christianity that the Puritans disliked the most.
On the voyage to North America, John Billington was involved in an attempted mutiny aboard the Mayflower. With tensions already high, one of John Billington’s sons almost blew up the ship. In a cabin full of people, the unknown son fired his father’s gun beside an open barrel half-filled with gunpowder. Despite the risk of the muzzle flash of the shot lighting the gunpowder, no one was hurt.
Once in the new world, Billington’s bad repute continued to develop, after he scoffed at being pressed into military service by Captain Miles Standish. He was threatened with being hogtied, but is said to have prayed for forgiveness. The records show that the leaders chose not to carry out the sentence since it was, after all, Billington’s first infringement. It would barely be his last.
Billington evidently disliked how the Puritan leaders governed the colony, for he is said to have spent a lot of his time involved in what would be considered anti-government subversion. He was implicated in a plot to bring down the Plymouth Colony's religious governance. When pressed, however, he refused having been a participant and wasn't charged.
Over the course of the 10 years that the family cultivated its plot of land at Plymouth, accorded to them by the British crown as members of the first settler party, the Billingtons appear to have continued to make trouble for their fellow colonists.
John Billington Jr. ended up lost in the woods and roamed 20 miles before happening upon a Native American village. From there, he was taken to another village further away. A group of 10 men set sail to find the boy and discovered him at what is now Cape Cod after a couple of days. When he came back to the colony, he was “behung with beads”.
William Bradford particularly disliked the family. The long-time governor of Plymouth said the Billingtons were “one of the profanest families” to come to the colony.
From these chronicles, it may seem that John Billington and his family were the scourge of the early Plymouth Colony. But not so fast. John Billington may serve as a exemplary marker to remind us that history is never so clear-cut.
Posted byParvez Ahmed at 9:50 PM
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