Judge ends sale of Colonial records

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — The pages are delicate, frayed and browned with age, covered in elegant looping script. They document the comings and goings in Providence County court some 270 years ago, telling of a Native American man being sentenced to 15 lashes at a whipping pole for stealing paper money while drunk and other cases. They are peppered with some of Rhode Island's most prominent family names: Greene, Arnold, Perry, Angell and Lippitt.

Long missing, the Colonial court records recently made their way back to the custody of the state thanks to a Superior Court ruling. Judge Maureen Keough issued a temporary restraining order last week blocking the sale of the historic documents on eBay.

It was a legal history researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who alerted Rhode Island state archivist, Ashley Selima, that Rhode Island Colonial court records dated 1746 to 1749 were being auctioned off on eBay.

J. Stephen Grimes, now retired judicial archivist for the state Supreme Court, contacted the attorney general's office, and the state moved to block the sale by Frederick Schroeder Jr., 61, of Providence.

"I was thrilled to know it still existed," Grimes said. "You still need the records of the people."

The records are being held in a vault, equipped with environmental controls, fire protection and security, at the Judicial Records Center in an old Slater Mill building in Pawtucket. They join bound volumes documenting the social, economic and legal fabric of a nation in its early days.

Rhode Island's first courts record book, for example, also found in the vault, tells of Roger Williams acting as a state leader and sitting as a judge, long before separation of powers took root. Another account details the court-martial of four Indians for their role in the "Swamp Fight." They were sentenced to a firing squad.

Indeed, court records offer a raw and rich glimpse into Colonial life. They reveal how women, Native Americans and African Americans were treated, as well as prevailing societal values.

"The best part is to read the verbatim testimony ...," Grimes said. "The case files that's where the gold is."

Take a 1762 Newport County Superior Court of the Judicature decision denying naturalization petitions of two Jewish men because they didn't "profess the Christian Religion".

A 1745 murder indictment reads "Jenny (an Indian Woman so named) of Providence ... Spinster, not having the Fear of God before her Eyes but being seduced by the Instigation of the Devil ... did by laying her Hands on the Nose and Mouth of a male Child named Quom of or about a year Old stop the Breath of said child and him thereby deprive of Life."

Another details the 1777 indictment of Ebenezer Slocum for treason for corresponding with the British Army and Navy in Newport and supplying them with provisions.

There are divorce records dating to 1749.

"It was extremely rare for someone not to show up in court records back then," Grimes said.

In 1750, 75 out of 1,000 Rhode Islanders had a case in court, compared to today's rate of 15 per 1,000, Grimes said. "The courts were five times more active than they are now," Grimes said. "That's where arguments were settled. Most of them were economic."

Court records reveal, too, that "Rhode Island was always a bit different," said Grimes, who retired Wednesday after 30 years at the records center. Unlike neighboring states, Rhode Island had no fornication cases, he said. Occasionally, "bastardization" cases arose to prevent children from becoming wards of a town.

The eBay posting for the recently recovered hand-scripted records advertised about 90 pages from Inferior Court of the Common Pleas in Providence County, the predecessor to Superior Court, from 1746 to 1749. It notes that the records are replete with the names of prominent Rhode Islanders, including Stephen Hopkins, Nathaniel Greene, Solomon Drowne, Jabez Bowen and Thomas Arnold, as well as other family names such as Jenckes, Tillinghast, Perry, Waterman and Ward:

"Most of the trials are for civil matters, however. There are criminal matters as well, including an interesting trial of an Indian man by the name of John Jacobs. He confessed to stealing a `small trunk with a quantity of paper money and some other papers but the quantity and the quality there of he doth not know being much in liquor (drunk).' " Jacobs was sentenced to "15 stripes on the naked back" on the public whipping pole in Providence or a fine of 15 pounds.

"This rare and interesting mid-18th century book gives some insight as to what the Colonial courts were like as well as the type of problems with which Colonial society dealt," Schroeder wrote, advertising through an account named armoryantiques. He started the bidding at $9.99.

The bidding had risen to $960 by the time the state got involved, Grimes said.

"This was kind of fun tracking these down," Rebecca Tedford Partington, chief of the attorney general's civil division, said.

Dawn Oliveri, Schroeder's lawyer, lamented that the state had sought a restraining order, crippling her client's ability to make a living. She planned to ask the court to vacate it so he could resume his business, without having the attorney general's office vet each sale.

"We told them from day one we were going to give it back," Schroeder said Thursday. He would not say where he got the court records, but Oliveri said he buys boxes of documents at estate sales.

Oliveri observed that the state should thank people who preserve such records. "They didn't care for these items properly," she said. If not for Schroeder, "they would have ended up at the Johnston landfill."

"He has nothing but respect for archives," Oliveri said.

Indeed, other Colonial court records are missing from the state archives, including those from the mid- to late 1700s for Kent County, Grimes said. "They were neglected for hundreds of years at courthouses," he said. "Benign neglect more than anything."