Jane Champion was the first woman executed in America
By: Dale M. Brumfield
Tags: Womens Rights, Colonial America, Slavery, Cultural Archaeology, Social Justice

Jane Champion was the first woman executed in America

And it wasn’t for witchcraft

As explored in the Dec. 6, 2019 story The baby in the suitcase, unplanned pregnancy and childbirth for single American women in the repressive 1950s was fraught with serious societal repercussions. However, 325 years earlier, in 1632 colonial Jamestown, an unplanned pregnancy could get a woman executed.

And that’s exactly what happened to Jane Champion.

According to author Ann Jones in her book “Women who Kill,” the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia was established in 1607 by an all-male “band of rogues and bachelor adventurers.” And while the first few women began showing up sporadically starting in 1609, it wasn’t until the 1620s that large numbers of women were recruited and even coerced to go to the new colony across the Atlantic.

Life was especially difficult for this mere handful of Jamestown women during the “starving times” of 1609–10, where they had no influence, no power and no rights yet were expected to manage a household and feed their families under a husband who controlled all aspects of their lives. In one extreme case, a pregnant woman was reportedly killed by her starving English gentleman husband, who felt entitled to “ripp the childe out of her woambe and threw itt into the River and after chopped the Mother in pieces and salted her for his foode.” He claimed she just disappeared.

But in this case, justice was served. After being discovered, and still believing he was permitted to his heinous act per his upper-class comportment, he was nonetheless “hanged by the Thumbes with weightes att his feete a quarter of an howere before he wolde Confesse the same.”

He was reportedly then, in defiance of Colonial British custom, burned at the stake.

Trafficking women

The first consignment of 90 single “breeding women” sailed from England in 1620 at the insistence of Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia Company. He and Capt. John Smith agreed that women were needed in Jamestown to make the colony more stable and less influenced by “dissolucon.”

Jamestown, around 1620.

Their conscription methods were nothing more than plain human trafficking. Historian Carl Bridenbaugh notes that these “young and uncorrupted” women were enticed to hazard a journey to an unknown land across the Atlantic via methods not unlike those used shortly thereafter with African slaves. With seventeenth-century daughters worth far less than sons in income potential and in keeping bloodlines, names and legacies active, and with England becoming Protestant, these superfluous offspring could no longer be sequestered into nunneries, which as Milton noted for Catholic fathers had become “convenient stowage for their withered daughters.”

With families functioning more as employer/employee relationships, and with fathers having to either buy their girls a husband through a dowry or support them in spinsterhood (starting in their early twenties), these women thus faced the prospects of either getting married off or sent to the new world, in what the patriarch may have seen as a patriotic alternative but that more resembled a kidnapping than an adventure.

Bridenbaugh adds that “women were transported to America after 1629 in considerable numbers by ruses and devices which will forever remain obscure.”

Once in Jamestown, any man who married one of these women who arrived “on good recommendation” had to defray the cost of her shipping, amounting to 120 pounds of good leaf tobacco. Sensing an opportunity, in 1621, when “an extraordinary choice lot of thirty-eight maids for wives” showed up, shippers and brokers (in language and practice eerily similar to slave traders) upped the price to 150 pounds.

The lonely, horny men gladly forked over, and by 1622 the total of 147 young women were all married. By 1625, three-fourths of those women were dead from disease and Indian attacks.

In addition to the constant threat of illness or attack, the institution of Gov. Thomas Dale’s “Divine, Moral and Martial Laws” coupled with the rigid decrees of the Church of England made the lives of the women who managed to survive a living hell. With church attendance mandatory, women had to sit for hours and listen to the ministers excoriate them for being naturally susceptible to the sin of uncleanness because of innate pride and character weakness, which inexorably drew them into “lustful company.”

In a classic form of victim-blaming, a Reverend Foxcroft ranted that “the daughters of Zion are haughty, and walk with stretched forth necks, and wanton eyes; therefore the Lord will smite with a scab the crown of the head of the Daughters of Zion …”

Welcome to America.

Smiting and killing

Like Martha, the 40-year-old Waynesboro mother of three teenagers who in 1954 concealed her pregnancy and childbirth then hid her newborn in a suitcase to presumably protect herself from the unbearable pressures of a society that valued God, family and conformity above all else, early colonial women were similarly driven by even more inflexible pressures to do the same, and even take their shame a step further.

A woman in Deerfield, Massachusetts named Sarah Smith, whose husband had been kidnapped by Indians two years earlier, killed her illegitimate newborn “with intent to conceal her lewdness.” Another Massachusetts woman named Abiel Converse, also killed her newborn “to hide her misfortune.”

While the criminal stigma of pregnancy outside marriage was dreadful enough to colonial women, the crime of infanticide was considered even worse — thus unmarried pregnant women found themselves facing possible execution no matter what path they chose. The church taught that murder of an unbaptized infant was the murder of its eternal soul, for the unbaptized had no place in heaven. Rev. Foxcroft reminded parishioners “[that] monstrous fact being detected, has brought to her yet greater shame, by an infamous execution, as a murderer.”

“Pride has tempted many a young woman to destroy the fruit of her own body,” he thundered from the pulpit, “that she may avoid the scandal of a spurious child …”

It is not clear when Jane arrived in Jamestown, or married her husband, a wealthy landowner named Percival Champion. But sometime around September of 1630, Jane had a brief love affair with another colonist named William Gallopin. She soon discovered she was pregnant and went to great pains to conceal her illegitimate pregnancy from the colony. While the exact dates are unclear, sometime in late 1631 into early 1632 Jane gave birth, and she and William allegedly murdered the infant and hid the body. Accordingly, they both faced execution.

The minutes of the Jamestown court state:

“Wm. Gallopin & Jane Champion wife of Percival Champion Indicted by Gd. Jury for murder & concealing ye death of ye sd. Jane’s child supposed to be got by ye sd. Wm. pleaded, found guilty by petty Jury & sentenced to be hang’d.”

While the record attests that William was sentenced to hang, there is no record that punishment was carried out, while Jane’s hanging is verified. There is also a startling lack of information on Percival Champion’s responses to his wife’s affair, pregnancy and execution. By 1635, he was living in Elizabeth City while he and a partner, John Slaughter, were conducting business as usual, leasing land in what would become Warwick County, Virginia.

Precedent

The hanging of Jane Champion set the standard for colonial women convicted of infanticide. The very next year, on June 24, 1633, another James City County woman named Margaret Hatch was hanged for killing an illegitimate infant. Hatch initially claimed she was pregnant again in an effort to stay her execution, but a “jury of matrons” examined her and concluded she was not.

On December 6, 1638 Dorothy Talby was hanged in Salem, Massachusetts for the murder of her infant daughter, named (perhaps appropriately) Difficulty. In the fall of 1648, 32-year-old Alice Martin Clarke Bishop was hanged at Plymouth, Massachusetts for stabbing to death her 4-year-old daughter, Martha.

Since Jane champion, between 1632 and 2020 a total of about 538 American women have been executed. In marked contrast, in the same period over 19,500 men have been executed.

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Read more American Grotesk Historytelling at www.dalebrumfield.net

Sources:

Baker, David V. “Women and Capital Punishment in the United States: An Analytical History.” McFarland, 2002.

Jones, Ann. “Women Who Kill.” Feminist Press, 2009. N.p.

Vance Kaufman-Osborn, Timothy. “From Noose to Needle: Capital Punishment and the Late Liberal State.” University of Michigan Press, 2009. P. 166.

__. “The American Female Hanged 1608–1937.” Web. www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/amfemhang.html

__. “Minutes of the Jamestown Court, 1630–1633.” Virginia Historical Magazine, 1896. P. 390.

Tarter, Brent. “Sir John Harvey: Royal Governor of Virginia: 1628–1639.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 125, no. 1 (2017): 2–37.

Tarter, Brent and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography. “Sir John Harvey (ca. 1581or 1582–by 1650).” Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, 13 Mar. 2017. Web. 10 Jan. 2020.