On This Day…in 1746 – Thomas Heyward Jr. with Giveaway by Donna Schlachter

Thomas Heyward Jr from Wikipedia

Born on this day in 1746 in what is now knowns as Jasper County (then, St. Luke’s Parish) to Mary Miles Heyward and Daniel Heyward, Thomas Jr. grew up to be an American Founding Father, lawyer, judge, and politician. Of interest, he was called “Junior”, yet there is no indication he was named after his father. This author conjectures that perhaps his father’s name was Daniel Thomas or Thomas Daniel, as was his son, but both went by different Christian names.

Middle Temple students called to The Bar -- Wikipedia

 

Educated at home, Thomas studied law in England, where he joined the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple, the British equivalent of the American Bar Society. On his return to the United States, he was elected to the Continental Congress in 1775, and in 1776, was the final delegate to sign the Declaration of independence, forever enshrining him as a Founding Father.

Although the exact dates aren’t known, Thomas married twice, both times to women named Elizabeth. His first wife, Elizabeth Mathews, daughter of Colonel John and Sarah Gibbs Mathews, was also the sister of South Carolina governor John Mathews.

Thomas Heyward House, current day -- Wikipedia

 

 

Following his term, he returned to South Carolina to serve as a judge in 1778. Of note, he presided over a trial of several persons on the charge of treason against the United States. The jury found them guilty and they were executed in sight of the British army encamped nearby. His participation in this trial earned him no points with the enemy, and two years later, while serving in command of a militia unit, he was captured by the British during an attack on Charleston.

To prove their mastery over him, the British captured his many slaves, transporting 130 to a sugar plantation in Jamaica. However, this huge financial loss (more than $50,000 value), resulted in his being named as a martyr to the revolution by the press.

After being relocated to a prison ship in the harbor, they were removed to St. Augustine, Florida, where he remained for about 11 months until freed in a prisoner exchange. As though to mock his captors, he transposed a popular song, “God Save the King”, into “God Save the States”, earning him even more popularity. He was finally released in 1782, and it was during this year that Elizabeth died during childbirth, having delivered six children to him. Only one, Daniel, survived childhood.

His second wife, Elizabeth Savage, was the daughter of Colonel Thomas and Mary Elliott Savage of Charleston. Together they had three children, all of whom lived to adulthood: Thomas, William, and Elizabeth.

As was common in that time, he also had children of the female slaves he owned. Most notably, his grandson, Thomas E. Miller, became one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the south in the 1890s.

In 1784, he became a member of the American Philosophical Society, and he continued serving as a judge, retiring in 1798.

Thomas Heyward, Jr. is buried at Old House Plantation near Ridgeland, South Carolina, passing away at the age of 62.

Giveaway: Leave a comment to enter a random drawing for another story about a former slave, Theresa, in “Theresa’s Talent”. Don’t forget to cleverly disguise your email address so the bots don’t get you but we can if you win. For example: donna AT livebytheword DOT com





About “Theresa’s Talent”: Theresa, a former slave, wants two things: to own a business, and to vote. She excels at cooking and baking, so the first should be easy. The second? Already suffragettes had been working for twenty years—while it was the law in Colorado, would she see it the law of the land for every woman in the union in her lifetime?

Toby, a freeman now working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, loves the sense of adventure and justice that being a private investigator brings. But when he sees justice failing for a white man, he can’t stand idly by and do nothing. Even if it means putting himself in danger.

But, is he willing to put another in the same position? 

About Donna:
A hybrid author, Donna writes squeaky clean historical and contemporary suspense. She has been published more than 60 times in books; is a member of several writers' groups; facilitates a critique group; teaches writing classes; and judges in writing contests. She loves history and research, traveling extensively for both, and is an avid oil painter. She is taking all the information she’s learned along the way about the writing and publishing process, and is coaching committed writers eager to tell their story. Learn more at https://www.donnaschlachter.com/the-purpose-full-writer-coaching-programs Check out her coaching group on FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/604220861766651



www.DonnaSchlachter.com

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Resources:

https://www.middletemple.org.uk/about-us

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Heyward_Jr.

Courts of the Old West

By Jennifer Uhlarik 

If you’re anything like me, watching western movies as a kid led to the belief that the western territories and states were a completely lawless land. Sure, I knew there were lawmen—sheriffs, marshals, and the like—and even a plethora of bounty hunters. Western movies, shows, and books were filled with those. But so many westerns, whether on the big or small screen, or in print, conveyed the idea that things were dealt with by vigilante justice rather than in an actual court of law. People took matters in their own hands, rather than seeking out a lawyer, a judge, or a court, right? Turns out, nothing was further from the truth.

 

In researching for my newest release, Love and Order: A Three-Part Old West Romantic Mystery, I had the pleasure of ferreting out whether there was the court system in Colorado Territory in the 1800s and how such an animal might have operated in that time and place. 

Judge Roy Bean, a Justice of the Peace, dubbed himself the "Only law west of the Pecos."

So, the court system in the western territories was typically set up with a Territorial Supreme Court, comprised of three justices who were each appointed by the President of the United States. These justices were not only the highest judges in the territory—but often, they were the only judges. (Yes, there might have been Justices of the Peace who were in charge of hearing small local matters, but these JP’s were not typically part of the Territorial Court system that would try cases dealing with the Territorial laws. An example would be Judge Roy Bean).

 

Each territory was segmented into three parts, and each Supreme Court Justice became the traveling judge who oversaw cases in one of those territorial districts. Each judge had a U.S. Marshal working closely with him to schedule trials, who acted as bailiff during trials, and helped with other court matters. If a lawman or prosecutor wished to bring a case to trial, he would contact the Marshal, get the case on the judge’s docket, and then would have to wait until the judge and his traveling court continent made it through the circuit to the nearest town to hear that case.

 

In most places, there wasn’t a dedicated courthouse in which to host a trial. So where did the proceedings happen? Anywhere they could find a place. Court cases might have been held in an open field if the weather permitted, in a schoolhouse, a church, a meeting hall, or a saloon. And the cases were often seen as a great source of entertainment, so people would often take off work to witness the spectacle. And a spectacle it often was! 

An Old West Saloon

Though the judges had garnered the attention of the President to receive the appointment as territorial justice, many of them saw this as a punishment. They viewed it not as an honor, but as being banished to the uncivilized territories. Thus, many of them took a very lackadaisical attitude toward their jobs. Judges were sometimes known to come into court drunk (or to become so as the day went on—especially when the venue was a saloon). They also often lent only half an ear to the proceedings while they trimmed their nails or took care of other personal grooming tasks. And often, lots of shenanigans went on because the judge would allow the audience too much power. For instance, in one case I read about, held in a local saloon, many of the townsfolk who were in attendance would holler out, asking for a recess, so that they could get a refill on their alcoholic beverages—and the judge permitted it. I’m sure you can imagine the wild and wooly spectacle such a trial might have been.

 

Certainly, some of the judges would’ve taken their jobs seriously, but many didn’t treat it with the respect it deserved. So if the outcome of a trial was in question, the defendants and their attorneys could always ask for an appeal to the Supreme Court. But wait…! Keep in mind that the judge who just heard the case was one of the three Justices of the Territorial Supreme Court, and an appeal required two of the three Justices to agree to hear the case. If the original judge ruled no (which they often did), and he could convince a second Justice to deny the request, then the appeal would go nowhere. The initial judgment stood.

 

I mentioned earlier about the court contingent that the judges traveled with. Interestingly, each territorial judge had a whole group of people they would bring along on their circuit—a slate of prosecutors, defense attorneys, a court reporter, investigators, and more. Everyone the judge would need to try a case was in that company, except for the defendants and witnesses. Now, that’s not to say that every trial lawyer traveled with the judge around the territory. In fact, one of the many interesting facts I discovered through my research was that the topmost profession in the 1800s western territories was that of attorney. So not all attorneys could travel with the itinerant court system. In fact, attorneys were so prevalent in that day that most of them had to have a second job to pay the bills, which tied many of them to their local towns. They might also own a saloon (great if the court used their venue for its cases!), ran cattle or horses on a ranch, or operated a local store. Some were miners, land surveyors, or had some other kind of business to help make ends meet. Really, the only attorneys who made a living from their law practice were the ones who were part of the traveling court system. 

By Jonathunder -
Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3899115

 

So if a defendant didn’t have a private attorney, a traveling defense attorney would be assigned his case. Same with the prosecutors. If a local prosecutor wasn’t bringing the case, a traveling one was assigned. These attorneys could prepare for their cases before arriving in the town where the trail was to take place by writing letters, sending telegrams, reading up on any reports or testimony that had been gathered (if there was any), and could break away from the traveling company to go and meet with a defendant or other witnesses in between other cases they were assigned. But I’m sure you can imagine, expecting a traveling attorney to mount an airtight defense under such circumstances could be a risky thing. So it was in the defendant’s interest to retain his own attorney so that he could expect a better defense. (Surprise, surprise…not a lot has changed in that aspect between the courts of old and courts of today).

 

(If you’re interested in learning more about how one became an attorney in the Old West, I wrote a post on the topic several years ago. Please find it here.)

 

Lastly, as I mentioned earlier, when the court rolled into town, it was usually quite a spectacle. Often, there was as much excitement for the court proceedings as there might be for a traveling circus, medicine show, or other form of entertainment. And sometimes, there’d be some very interesting happenings in the proceedings. In one case I read about, a widow sat quietly through the trial of her husband’s killer, waited for the verdict, and then calmly left her seat, approached the defendant, and feet from the judge, leveled her dead husband’s pistol at the killer’s belly. If my memory serves, not only the U.S. Marshal bailiff drew down on her, but so did the judge, the defense attorney, and several who’d come to watch the proceedings.

 

So yes, there was a court system in the western territories of the 1800s. But I should add one other fact. The movies, TV shows, and novels I took in during my teens did have it partially right. Because the traveling courts could take months to reach a town and try a case, it often did lead to the prevalence of vigilante groups bringing justice outside of the courts—especially since jails of the Old West tended to be rather “leaky.” (That’s a tease for next month’s topic…)

 

It's Your Turn:

Were you aware that there was a robust court system in the western territories of the 1800s? What did you find surprising about how these courts operated?

 

Jennifer Uhlarik discovered western novels at twelve when she swiped the only “horse” book from her brother’s bookshelf. Across the next decade, she devoured westerns and fell in love with the genre. While attaining a B.A. in writing from the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. She has finaled in and won numerous writing competitions and appeared on various best-seller lists. Besides writing, she’s been a business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, a historical researcher, a publisher, and a full-time homemaker. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband and fur children.

 

 

Available now

 

Love and Order

 

Wanted: 

Family, Love, and Justice

One Old West Mystery Solved Throughout Three Short Romantic Stories

Separated as children when they were adopted out to different families from an orphan train, the Braddock siblings have each grown up and taken on various jobs within law enforcement and criminal justice.

 

Youngest child, Callie, has pushed past her insecurities to pursue a career as a Pinkerton agent. Middle child, Andi, has spent years studying law under her adoptive father’s tutelage. And the eldest and only son, Rion, is a rough-and-tumble bounty hunter. 

 

When the hunt for a serial killer with a long history of murders reunites the brother and sisters in Cambria Springs, Colorado, they find themselves not only in a fight for justice, but also a fight to keep their newly reunited family intact. How will they navigate these challenges when further complicated by unexpected romances?

 

History of Eating Utensils by Donna Schlachter with Giveaway

 

http://www.eatingutensils.net/history-of-cutlery/

 

From the beginning of time, after humans learned to heat their food to make it more palatable, the need for tools to prepare and serve the food became obvious. After all, dismembering a wildebeest required a sharp instrument, as did turning over a hunk of meat on a hot stone in a fire pit.

https://www.pexels.com/photo/4992936/

Originally, people used whatever they had at hand. A piece of flint for what we now know as a knife. A sharp stick as a fork. A carved rock to grind grain or hold liquid. A shell or a chip of wood might be a spoon. Interestingly, the material used depended on where you lived. The ancient Greek and Latin word for spoon was cochlea, or shell, while the Anglo-Saxon word was spon, meaning a chip of wood.

Eventually, uniformity in the tools needed created craftspeople who sharpened flint and tied them to handles made from bones or antlers, or who carved indentations in rocks to use as a pestle or bowl. Various people groups perfected the forming and firing of clay pots to cook in, to hold ingredients, and to eat off of. Spoons were easy to carve from wood, and were used not only in cooking but also as a transport device to get the food from the banana leaf to the lips.

Next came the use of softer metals, such as copper and bronze, allowed for casting of utensils such as knives, forks, spoons, ladles, and more. Pots and pans were also made of these more malleable materials, and storage of foods was made easier. Eating utensils such as forks and spoons hadn’t become popular. Instead, the two-tined fork was used primarily in cooking.

Around the eighth century BC, the Romans—those masters of invention and ingenuity, expanded available kitchen and cooking tools to include meat hooks to hang meat to smoke, or to fish it out of a pot; meat mincers, to grind the meat into a form that was more easily cooked and served to tenderize what might otherwise be a tough cut of meat; spatulas for turning food over more easily in the pan; colanders to strain out water or other unwanted fluids; and ladles for serving soups, broths, and stews.

https://www.pexels.com/photo/kitchen-utensils-on-the-kitchen-counter-4794871/

In the Middle Ages (500 AD – 1500 AD), slotted spoons became popular, as did frying pans, pepper mills, tongs and even a waffle iron. Weighing scales, roasting forks, rolling pins, and cheese graters became essential tools in modern—at least, according to medieval definition—kitchens. During this time, wealthy families, no doubt wanting to show off their wealth, used a smaller version of the cooking fork for eating. Also around this time, these same families used spoons made of precious metals. In particular, around the 1300s, pewter became popular, making spoons affordable. Forks made an appearance after a wedding in 1004, in which the bride used a golden fork at her wedding feast. Given that most people used their fingers and knives at this point, you can imagine the stir it caused. However, local clergy considered she was trying to upstage God, who had provided us with natural forks—our fingers—and when she died a few years later of the plague, asserted her death was God’s punishment.

In modern times, beginning in the 1600s, with wealth and education expanding across Europe and now into the Americas, and with increased use of servants, more specialized tools, such as apple corers, cork screws, and, within two hundred years, can openers, appeared. By this time in history, knives were also popular, both for cooking and eating. However, in 1669, King Louis XIV of France, disgusted that diners regularly used the tips of their knives to clean their teeth (other versions of this story say it was to decrease violence at table), decreed that any knife brought to the table must have a rounded tip. In 1608, an English traveler published an account of the fork in Europe. Forks were quickly adopted in England, but the Americas were slower to catch on to the practice. By the early 1700s, in Europe, four-tined forks proved easier for scooping food for quicker consumption of meals, leaving more time for other activities.

In the United States, beginning in the 1800s, labor saving devices became common in every household. Potato peelers, jelly molds, and salad spinner proliferated, long before anybody ever dreamed of Tupperware. By this time, forks were well established in the United States.

Copper utensils, which reacted with acidic foods, declined, and other metals came into common usage, such as tinned or enamel iron, and, eventually, steel, tin, and aluminum.

http://www.eatingutensils.net/history-of-cutlery/

 

 

In my upcoming release, Cooking Up Trouble, set in 1834, most of the emphasis is on utensils used in baking. At this time in history, the standardized measuring system hasn’t been established (that doesn't happen until the late 1890s with the Fanny Farmer Cookbook), so everybody’s version of a pinch, a measure, a cup, and other common forms of measuring ingredients was different. Recipes were often shared, with varying results. My heroine spends a lot of time not only testing the measure of ingredients, but in figuring out what the two missing ingredients in her grandmother’s walnut cake might be. You can check out the book that’s releases September 12th, but is available for pre-order, here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CGKFS338

Leave a comment to enter a random drawing for an ebook copy of Cooking Up Trouble once it releases.

About Cooking Up Trouble:
A shameful marriage proposal to settle a debt, and a secret calling to do women’s work land Holly and Adam as opponents in a baking contest in Chicago, 1834. Can they overcome their headstrong desire to fix their own problems, or will they submit to God’s call on their lives?

About Donna:

A hybrid author, Donna writes squeaky clean historical and contemporary suspense. She has been published more than 60 times in books; is a member of several writers groups; facilitates a critique group; teaches writing classes; ghostwrites; edits; and judges in writing contests. She loves history and research, traveling extensively for both, and is an avid oil painter. She is taking all the information she’s learned along the way about the writing and publishing process, and is coaching writers at any stage of their manuscript. Learn more at https://www.donnaschlachter.com/the-purpose-full-writer-coaching-programs Check out her coaching group on FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/604220861766651



www.DonnaSchlachter.com Stay connected so you learn about new releases, preorders, and presales, as well as check out featured authors, book reviews, and a little corner of peace. Plus: Receive 2 free ebooks simply for signing up for our free newsletter!

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Resources:

https://blog.etundra.com/get-equipped/history-kitchen-utensils/

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-history-of-western-eating-utensils-from-the-scandalous-fork-to-the-incredible-spork-64593179/

http://www.eatingutensils.net/#google_vignette

http://www.eatingutensils.net/history-of-cutlery/