RI's Albert Hicks, and the Most Spectacular Execution in American History

RI's Albert Hicks, and the Most Spectacular Execution in American History

My historical true crime narrative DELIBERATE EVIL: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, DANIEL WEBSTER, AND THE 1830 MURDER OF A SALEM SLAVE TRADER is scheduled to be published by Chicago Review Press this December. While waiting for that month to roll around, I’ve been probing other crime and criminals from New England’s past, looking for a topic that might serve as fodder for a follow-up book.

In so doing, I’ve unearthed Albert W. Hicks, born circa 1820 in Foster, Rhode Island – a man who became infamous as America’s “last pirate,” and whose 1860 public hanging in New York was as great a spectacle as could be imagined: the very best sideshow that P.T. Barnum, who played an intimate role, could have ever wished for. Upon consideration, Mr. Hicks will not wind up at the center of my next book. Nevertheless, his story is certainly worth a short mention.

The farm-born Hicks was one of eleven children. Two of these became criminals. The eldest, Simon, wound up a convicted murderer who escaped and remained a fugitive for the rest of his life, just as lost to the family as to law-enforcement.  And then there was Albert.

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Over the course of several decades, Albert and various accomplices raided ships throughout the Atlantic and as far away as the South Pacific, often fomenting mutinies as well as using other means to achieve their ends. When on land Hicks made a specialty of highway robberies. By his own account in his autobiography published the day after his execution, he’d killed approximately 100 innocent victims through the years.

Finally, in the spring of 1860, he used an axe to slaughter the small crew of the Oyster Sloop A.E. JOHNSON while it sailed in the Narrows of New York, coming away with $230 for his trouble. New York City detectives eventually discovered Hicks to be the perpetrator and tracked him down to a boarding house outside Providence, where he was put under arrest. His trial in Manhattan made headlines nationwide, as did his execution on Friday, July 13th, 1860.

The well-publicized hanging took place in the center of New York Harbor on Bedloe’s Island, today known as Liberty Island. A week before the event the impresario P.T. Barnum paid Hicks $25 plus two boxes of cigars to sit for the making of a life-mask. On the morning of the execution, Hicks – in handcuffs and leg-irons – emerged from the Tombs Prison accompanied by several marshals and deputies (dressed in plug hats and black frock coats) who marched on either side of him. A large party of men and boys followed them to the steamer RED JACKET. Everyone with a ticket – for tickets on this and many other vessels had indeed been sold to those of the general public wishing to view the proceedings – clambered aboard along with Hicks and his guards.

On its way to Bedloe’s, the RED JACKET circled the massive, ocean-going steam/sail side-wheeler GREAT EASTERN. Even the shackled Hicks gawked open-mouthed at the enormous, steel-hulled leviathan: the so-called eleventh wonder of the world launched two years earlier. One half hour later, Hicks stood on the gallows – the noose around his neck. A priest with open Bible recited in his ear. Newspapers later estimated that more than 12,000 by-standers looked on, either from the island or from boats in the harbor.

Hicks did not die quickly. His neck did not break. After the trap in the gallows floor sprang open and Hicks dropped, he struggled for many minutes. He gasped, choked, and turned blue while swinging leisurely in the fair sea winds. It was otherwise a beautiful summer day. Once Hicks was dead, Barnum – by previous agreement – cut the hair from Hicks’s head and chin. Within days, a mannequin topped by the life-mask and decorated with the hair, appeared on a makeshift gibbet in Barnum’s Great American Museum at the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, in what is today New York’s financial district. The display was presumably destroyed when the museum burned to the ground in 1865.

They buried Hicks at Calvary Cemetery in nearby Queens. But he did not stay there for long. So-called “resurrectionists” – body snatchers – desecrated Hicks’s grave in short order. The corpse most likely wound up on a slab at Columbia Medical College. Hicks’s young wife, who’d married him with no idea of his pirating past, disappeared into history along with their small son.

Many members of the extended Hicks clan still reside in northwestern Rhode Island and northeastern Connecticut. Generations of law-abiding Hicks family members lie in graveyards throughout the area – which only goes to show that sometimes the apple falls very far from the tree. Sometimes it even falls through the trapdoor of a hangman’s scaffold.

 

Edward Renehan is the author of more than 25 books published by Doubleday, Crown, Oxford University Press, and other major houses. He lives in Wickford. Find out more at edwardrenehan.com.