“The gallows was sufficiently elevated above the walls of the prison to afford a distinct view of the unfortunate men to spectators at the distance of several hundred yards.
“Hare has made a confession which is now hawking about town for sale. In it he observes that, ‘for the last fourteen years of my life I have been a robber, and have robbed on a large scale, and been more successful than any robber either in Europe or in this country that I ever heard of.’”
This lying dying boast of Hare fitly closes his evident failure as a highwayman.
An account of a negro highwayman is given in the Federal Republican and Baltimore Telegraph of September 11, 1818.
Relay House, Mattapan Tavern.
In the early years of this century there existed in eastern Massachusetts an organized band of thieves. It is said they were but one link in a chain of evil night-workers which, with a home or shelter in every community, reached from Cape Hatteras to Canada. This band was well organized, well trained, and well housed; it had skilful means of concealing stolen goods in innocent-faced cottages, in barns of honest thrift, and in wells and haystacks in simple dooryards. One mild-manered and humble house had a deep cellar which could be entered by an ingeniously hidden broad-side door in a woodshed; into this cave a stolen horse and wagon or a pursued load of cribbed goods might be driven, be shut in, and leave no outward sign. Other houses had secret cellars, a deep and wide one beneath a shallow, innocuous storage place for domestic potato and apple bins, and honest cider barrels. In a house sheltering one of these subterranean mysteries, a hard-working young woman was laboriously and discreetly washing clothes when surprised by the sheriff and his aids, who wisely invaded but fruitlessly searched the house. Nothing save the simplest household belongings was found in that abode of domesticity; but in later years, after the gang was scattered, a trap-door and ladder were found leading to the sub-cellar, and with chagrin and mortification the sheriff remembered that the woman’s washing tubs stood unharmed upon the trap-door during the fruitless search.
An amusing battering ram was used by another woman of this gang on the sheriff who came to her house to arrest one of those thieves. The outlaw fled upstairs at the approach of the officer, but his retreat was noted, and the man of law attempted to follow and seize him. The wife of the thief—his congenial mate—opposed the passage of the sheriff, and when he attempted to push her one side and to crowd past her, she suddenly seized the crosspiece over the staircase, swung back by her hands and arms, planted both feet against the officer’s chest, and knocked him down with such a sudden blow and consequent loss of wind, that the thief was far away ere the sheriff could move or breathe.
The leader of this band of thieves was an ingenious and delightful scamp—one George White. He was hard to catch, and harder to keep than to catch. Handcuffs were to him but pleasing toys. His wrists were large, his hands small; and when the right moment came, the steel bracelets were quickly empty. Locks and bolts were as easily thrust aside and left far, far behind him as were the handcuffs. At last he was branded on his forehead H. T., which stands for horse thief; a mean trick of a stupid constable who had scant self-confidence or inventiveness. Curling lovelocks quickly grow, however, and are ill in no one’s sight; indeed, they were in high fashion in similar circles in England at that time, when various letters of the alphabet might be seen on the cheeks and brow of many a gay traveller on the highway when the wind blew among the long locks.
