When one thinks of the past, crime is not the first thing that jumps to one's mind; it would probably be the last thing, if thought about at all. Today when one thinks of crime, one thinks of muggings, robbery, murder-the same things that took place then. The most common crime then was assault & battery. Apparently the ultimate insult in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century was to call someone a "damned rascal." Those were fighting words and were quoted over and over again in depositions. When people were not hitting each other with sticks or fists, they seemed to have a penchant for smacking each other with cowhides, a practice which conjurs up a strange image and makes one wonder why so many people had cowhides at hand.
As it follows that for every action there is a reaction, for every crime there was a punishment, and punishment in the 18th Century was very different than it is now. The earliest punishment found in Cumberland County records was the result of a theft by Bridget Hagan in 1750, the year Cumberland County was created from Lancaster County. Bridget was required to restore the value of what she stole to the owner, pay the same amount to the Government, pay the prosecution costs (and money was scarce in the Colonies) and to receive fifteen lashes on her bare back at the public whipping post.1 This was English soil, and English law prevailed.
The stocks, pillory and the whipping post, which was not done away with until 1789, were on the square in Carlisle. Records exist of six people having their ears cut off and nailed to the pillory, and there were probably many more.2 Forgery and horse stealing brought stiff fines and the whipping post, but selling liquor to the Indians or to the public without a license, and assault & battery only resulted in a fine. Keeping a house of ill repute got one several hours in the stocks and a small fine. Between 1779 and 1787, alone, eleven men and two women were sentenced to hang in Carlisle: three for murder, three for robbery, two for burglary, two for counterfeiting, one for rape, one for arson and one for the "unmentionable offense. "3.
What were the conditions like if one were sent to jail—in a word—wretched. As Edwin Tunis says, in his book Colonial Living,
It occurred to no one in the 18th Century that a prison should have any quality other than strength. If you could keep a prisoner where you put him, his comfort and health needed no consideration. A Colonial prison cell usually had one barred window, small and high and a bundle of straw was provided for a bed. The prisoner's food was passed to him through a slot, and if he was at all aggressive he was kept in irons
There are many records in the basement of the court house4 that tell what conditions were like in the jail. On April 21, 1752, Paul Cox, who had been in jail for five weeks for debt, said that for some part of the time he had been tortured with irons, "equal a common thief or criminal." In July 1753, Emanual Minskey, a silversmith, and four other prisoners said that they "are still detained without food or water for 24 hours past and must actually perish if not relieved by the court.'' Thomas James, who had been in jail for twenty-one weeks, in such deplorable conditions said that had it not been for Richard Parker the prison keeper he would have perished- and the stories go on and on.
Alexandria, [District of Columbia], 25 February 1810. Thomas Cruse sat down, opened his desk, took out a clean sheet of paper, dipped his pen in the bottle of ink and wrote “Dear Sir.” He was writing to his brother-in-law, Judge James Hamilton of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Indentured servants were men and women who agreed to work for a master without pay for a specified number of years, usually in return for having their passages to America paid. This 1775 advertisement in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Gazette announced that the ship Hawke had just arrived from London and was lying off the Market Street wharf with a shipment of “a few likely healthy servants” of many different trades “whose times are to be disposed of.”