1845: Abner Baker, feudmaker
Add comment October 3rd, 2020 Headsman
On this date in 1845 — sneering at the noose with the words "Behold the necklace of a whore!" — Abner Baker was publicly hanged in Manchester, Kentucky.
He was the second casualty — the first was the man whom he murdered — in the Baker-Howard feud, or the Clay County War, a bloody interfamily conflict that would blight the Kentucky mountains into the next century.
Its headwaters were a man out of his head: just how much so would be the controversy of his case, and a foundational grievance of the feud.
Said head perched itself on the shoulders of our man Abner Baker, who — prior to his unfortunate turn towards derangement — was a respectable frontier striver, with an unsuccessful stint in commerce redeemed by a medical practice. He had also to his name a wife born Susan White, a woman — or rather a 14-year-old girl — from a wealthy family who was respectable in the eyes of all save he.
As Baker slid into lunacy, he leveled at his spouse the most lurid charges of concupiscence, of having committed gleeful incest, of having orgies with slaves, and of cheating on him with another wealthy man, Daniel Bates. Bates was married to Baker's sister.
Testimony printed in an 1845 volume to capitalize on interest in the case, Life and trial of Dr. Abner Baker, Jr: (a monomaniac) features many acquaintances establishing a delusional paranoia about his wife's intercourse with Daniel Bates — with Baker brandishing a Bowie knife around her to the extent that their mutuals feared for her life; ranting about his wife cuckolding him in his very bed while he slept beside her; fixing on his certainty that Bates designed to murder him. They also report acquaintances, and Baker's own father, increasingly convinced that the man had gone mad.
On September 13, 1844, Baker presented himself at Bates's salt works and shot Bates in the back. Bates lingered on for several hours, doing much to stoke the succeeding generations of clan vigilantes by bequeathing $10,000 to seek his murderer's life and making his son promise to take revenge.
The subsequent legal drama pitted that quest for revenge against Baker sympathizers' conviction that the man was too starkers to swing. The first magistrates to review the matter days after Bates's murder took the latter view and released him, allowing Baker to decamp to Cuba to recuperate.
The Bateses were not to be balked this easily, however, and prevailed on Commonwealth attorneys to indict Baker for murder. At the urging of his father, the good doctor voluntarily returned to defend himself when he learned of this. The text of the trial comprises witnesses clashing over whether the killer suffered from "monomania", but the subtext was the flexing muscle of the White family — that of Abner Baker's poor traduced wife.
The Whites were Clay County royalty on the strength of their salt mining wealth, and allied to the Bates family. Their peers and rivals, the Garrards, were locked in tense economic competition and even came within a whisker of murdering Daniel Bates himself in a different standoff in 1840. They took a more sympathetic view of Abner Baker's obviously unbalanced mental state and tried to shield him from his persecutors; the Garrard patriarch was one of the magistrates who had initially ruled Baker too crazy to prosecute.* It was the Whites who, in effect, outmuscled the Garrards by forcing Baker's prosecution and execution.
"The BAKERS wept with rage for the WHITES helping the BATES to bring Abner Baker to trial when they knew he was insane," this history of Clay County feuding observes. "The lines had been drawn and competition for salt hardened into hostility."
Enjoy a podcast situating this affair in the regional economy and the resulting political rivalries, from American History Tellers here, as well as a successor episode on the resulting feud, here
* Baker thanked the Garrards in his last address from the gallows ("the Garrard family, on whom I had no claims, came up like noble-souled men, and asked the county to give me justice").
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1973: Jose Gregorio Liendo, "Comandante Pepe" - 2018
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1750: James Maclaine - 2015
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1945: Henry William Hagert - 2012
1873: Kintpuash, aka Captain Jack - 2011
2008: A son, all in the family - 2010
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1795: Tula, Curacao's Nat Turner - 2008
1886: Robert Silas Fowler, lustful
1850: Prof. John Webster, for the timeless conflict between donors and academics
1814: Six slaves in Guyana
1862: William B. Mumford, flag desecrator
1837: The slave Julius, property of John and Rebecca Matthews
1817: Eleanor Gillespie
Entry Filed under: 19th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Diminished Capacity,Doctors,Execution,Hanged,History,Kentucky,Murder,Power,Public Executions,Sex,USA,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1840s, 1845, abner baker, daniel bates, economics, feuds, manchester, mental illness, mining, misogyny, politics
2010: Farid Baghlani, womanslayer
6 comments November 13th, 2013 Headsman
On this date in 2010, Farid Baghlani was hanged in Ahvaz for a 2004-2008 serial murder spree that claimed the lives of six women.
At trial, Baghlani openly attributed his crimes to his hatred for women, probably not a defense calculated to maximize his prospects of acquittal. Those who lost loved ones to Baghlani returned the sentiment, and celebrated his execution by handing out sweets.
1617: A miller of Manberna, the hangman's last - 2020
1951: Marcel Ythier, Andre Obrecht's first - 2019
1989: Rohana Wijeweera - 2018
1752: William Montgomery, small enough to fail - 2017
1544: Maria von Beckum and her sister-in-law Ursula - 2016
1765: Patrick Ogilvie, but not Katharine Nairn - 2015
Announcing: Execution Playing Cards - 2014
1795: David McCraw, "blasted all our conjugal happiness" - 2014
1943: The Zalkind family - 2012
Themed Set: Meaghan Good - 2012
1663: Corfitz Ulfeldt, in effigy - 2011
1676: Col. Thomas Hansford, the first American independence martyr - 2010
1534: Barthélemi Milon, for the Affair of the Placards - 2009
1849: Frederick and Marie Manning, a Dickensian scene - 2008
1002: St. Brice's Day Massacre - 2007
2006: Three old men and a taxi driver
2005: Mohammed Bijeh, the desert vampire
2002: Aileen Wuornos, Monster
2009: Hiroshi Maeue, suicide website murderer
2008: One man pardoned during hanging
2007: Majid and Hossein Kavousifar
2009: Behnoud Shojaee, Mohammad Mostafaei client
Entry Filed under: 21st Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,Iran,Murder,Ripped from the Headlines,Serial Killers
Tags: 2010, 2010s, ahvaz, farid baghlani, misogyny, november 13
1793: Olympe de Gouges, a head of her time
10 comments November 3rd, 2008 Headsman
On this date in 1793, Olympe de Gouges' forward thoughts were removed from her shoulders in the Place de la Revolution.
Most recognizable today for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen* — a proto-feminist call for equality of the sexes issued in response to the day's revolutionary but guy-centric Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen — de Gouges was much more than a one-issue woman.
Fully engaged with the liberal intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, de Gouges spent the 1770's and 1780's in Parisian salon circles cranking out plays (over 40) and petitions, pamphlets and manifestos on animal welfare, poverty, the treatment of orphans, and ending slavery.
The latter issue, and not women's rights, was the cause her contemporaries would have most associated with her.
But the natural-born gadfly didn't pick her battles with injustice, and the Terror was a bad period to be indiscriminate. Like some of her Girondist associates, she risked the Paris mob's wrath by openly opposing Louis XVI's execution — right in character, Olympe was down on the whole idea of the death penalty — and she carried principle into foolhardiness by printing broadsides savaging Robespierre.
Show trial time.
There can be no mistaking the perfidious intentions of this criminal woman, and her hidden motives … calumniating and spewing out bile in large doses against the warmest friends of the people, their most intrepid defender.
Misogynist condescension veined the prevailing interpretation of this misbehavior.
Olympe de Gouges, born with an exalted imagination, mistook her delirium for an inspiration of nature. She wanted to be a man of state. She took up the projects of the perfidious people who want to divide France. It seems the law has punished this conspirator for having forgotten the virtues that belong to her sex.
And strange to say, that condescension outlived Robespierre by centuries.
Only recently, as mainstream thought has (sort of) caught up with de Gouges, has the scope of her work (French link) attracted renewed appreciation, and Olympe been acknowledged an Olympian herself.
* Article 10: "Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum." The work was dedicated to Marie Antoinette.
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1740: Ned Darcy, of the Kellymount Gang - 2019
1913: Captain Manuel Sanchez Lopez - 2018
1865: Samuel Clarke, Jamaican radical - 2017
1591: Brian O'Rourke, Irish lord - 2016
1854: William Lipsey and James Logan, in gold rush Coloma - 2015
1697: Three duty stamp counterfeiters - 2014
1941: Alfredo Castoldi, German spy in Vichy Algiers - 2013
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1858: Henry Jackson, in Decatur - 2012
1324: Petronilla de Meath, the first Irish woman burned for heresy - 2011
1991: Barrios Altos massacre - 2010
1942: Duncan Scott-Ford, because loose lips sink ships - 2009
1783: John Austin - 2007
1793: Marie Antoinette
1794: Andre Chenier, poet
1794: The last cart of the Terror, not including the Marquis de Sade
1794: Maximilien Robespierre, Saint-Just and the Jacobin leadership
1794: Not Thomas Paine
1794: Loizerolles and others for the Conspiracy of the Prisons
1792: Jacques Cazotte, occultist
Entry Filed under: 18th Century,Activists,Artists,Arts and Literature,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Famous,France,Freethinkers,Guillotine,History,Intellectuals,Martyrs,Public Executions,Treason,Women
Tags: 1790s, 1793, declaration of the rights of man, declaration of the rights of woman, feminism, feminist, French Revolution, gender, marie antoinette, maximilien robespierre, misogyny, november 3, olympe de gouges, paris, place de la revolution, slavery