Patience Boston (Sam(p)son)
“The house of the archive is engendered by a cultural impulse, or
instinct, that necessitates the construction of an external house of memory,
a domicile where memory is officially stored and inevitably molded into
the shape of the desire of those who determine to house such memories.
But the archive, as it is manifested in the domain of Western influence,
also manages to hide from itself its authoritative, or patriarchic, agenda” (Lopenzina 16).
This website provides transcripts of the newspapers which published articles about Patience Boston’s conviction and execution.
I hope that people use this archive to further understand how Boston’s life and narrative were manipulated and controlled by colonisation, as well as how she did not always align herself with journalism’s white settler lens.
Patience Boston was born on Monomoy Island, next to Cape Cod, on December 26th 1711 (Faithful Narrative 1). She was a member of the Nauset Tribe (Carmona). In 1734, she was convicted of drowning the eight-year-old grandson of her enslaver (Boston, Confession 1). On July 24th 1735, Boston was executed at York (Confession 1).
After her death, Reverend Samuel Moody and Joseph Moody, who visited Boston in prison, published A Faithful Narrative OF THE Wicked Life AND Remarkable Conversion OF Patience Boston alias Samson (1738) with Samuel Kneeland and Timothy Green. Although the narrative is written from Boston’s perspective, Moody and Moody expressed in the preface “that it could not be exactly taken in her own Way of expressing her self” (i).
In A Faithful Narrative, Boston reported that when she was three-years-old, her mother died and her “Father bound me to Mr. Paul Crow, a Religious Family” (1). Later, she was “freed from my Master, after which I thought my self happy that I had no Body to Command me” (Boston, Faithful Narrative 3). However, when Boston married an enslaved man, “because his Master would have it so, I bound my self a Servant with him during his Life Time, or as long as we both should live” (Faithful Narrative 3).
Then, she explained that “After I found I was with Child, I had tho’ts of murdering it, and whilst I was big I ran away from my Master…After I got Home, I was delivered of a Child, which I had hurt in my Rambling…and it died in a few Weeks, so that I now think I am Guilty of its Death” (Boston, Faithful Narrative 3). Later, Boston “found my self to be with Child again, I was brought under some Conviction; so that I refrain’d from my wicked Courses” (Faithful Narrative 4). She described that “it pleased God to take away the Child by sudden Death in the Bed by us” (Boston, Faithful Narrative 4).
Boston told “the Justice” that she “had Murdered our last Child” (Faithful Narrative 5). However, she noted that she “was resolved and fixed in my Mind, not to tell any more lies” and “when I came on my Trial; pleading Not Guilty, I was acquitted, and my Heart rejoiced” (Boston, Faithful Narrative 6).
After this, Boston was “Bound to Capt Dimmick, who after about a Year sold me, at my desire, to Mr. Joseph Bailey of Casco Bay” (Faithful Narrative 6).
She described that “From some groundless Prejudice which I had taken against my Master, to whom I was sold by Mr. Bailey, I did last Fall bind my self to a wicked Oath that I would kill that Child, though I seem’d to love him, and he me” (Boston, Faithful Narrative 7). Boston was referring to Benjamin Trot, the child whom she drowned in a well (Faithful Narrative 7-8). The use of “groundless Prejudice” erases the way in which Boston’s autonomy was seized by white settlers, as she was passed from enslaver to enslaver (Faithful Narrative 7). Indeed, her narrative was restricted by Reverend Samuel Moody’s and Joseph Moody’s editorial decisions.
Boston admitted to the murder of Trot immediately. In prison, she converted to Christianity and discussed her relationship with God in The confession, declaration, dying warning and advice of Patience Boston, alias Patience Boston. It was also published after her death by S. Kneeland and T. Green.
Her ‘words’ were made into commodities of settler capitalism. Boston’s confession, as well as her execution, was part of the apparatus of colonialism in terms of political power, repression, and economic gain.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1995), Michel Foucault argues that the public execution is to be understood not only as “a judicial, but also as a political ritual” because it restores the challenged power of the sovereign (47). In Boston’s case, her crime threatened to destabilise white settler colonial power structures – she disputed a position of mere submission. Therefore, Boston’s explanation of her crimes, her confession, and then her execution reflected how power had been “eclipsed” by her crime and was then “restored” by the spectacle of her punishment (Foucault 48).
Foucault also notes that the “public execution allowed the luxury of these momentary saturnalia, when nothing remained to prohibit or to punish” (60). In the moment of confession at a public execution, the convicted may oppose political structures. Despite the restrictions on Boston’s voice and life by the expanding apparatus of colonialism, in her narratives, she managed to subtly offer queries about the political, religious, and land structures. Read more here...
Works Cited
- Boston, Patience. The confession, declaration, dying warning and advice of Patience Sampson, alias Patience Boston. Printed and sold by S. Kneeland and T. Green in Queen Street, Boston, 1735.
- Boston, Patience. A faithful narrative of the wicked life and remarkable conversion of Patience Boston alias Samson. Edited by Samuel and Joseph Moody, printed and sold by S. Kneeland and T. Green in Queen Street, Boston, 1738.
- Carmona, Vana. “Patience Boston 1711-1735.” Atlantic Black Box, Sept 28 2020, Patience Boston 1711-1735 – Atlantic Black Box, accessed 10 Feb 2025.
- Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1977.
- Lopenzina, Drew. Red Ink: Native Americans Picking up the Pen in the Colonial Period, State University of New York Press, 2012.
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