Middlebury history includes domestic violence

#MiddleburyCT #DomesticViolence

This article was originally published in the May 2022 issue of the Middlebury Bee-Intelligencer.

By DR. ROBERT L. RAFFORD

Hannah Abbott’s gravestone stands in Middlebury Cemetery on Middlebury Road. It makes no mention of how she died. (Robert Rafford photo)

Middlebury, like the rest of the world, has never been immune from crime. We sometimes long for the “good old days,” when all townsfolk knew and respected each other, but history tells a different story at times. One of the most dramatic crimes in Middlebury took place on July 13, 1841, at the household of David (1797- c.1848) and Hannah (Hawkins) Abbott (1800-1841). David, who had been drinking heavily that day, strangled his wife Hannah and attempted to take his own life by cutting his throat with a knife. Unlike his poor wife, and despite his injury, David survived.

David had come from a prominent and prolific Middlebury family. He and his wife Hannah (Hawkins) were the parents of six sons and six daughters, aged between and three and twenty-two years at the time of the murder. The accounts of his crime and subsequent trial were reported in many newspapers along the East Coast.

On that fateful Tuesday, David, who was about 44 years of age, had been drinking heavily, and newspapers were quick to point out that David was “intemperate” and often abused his wife, and that “Rum was the instigating cause of this crime … ” (from the New Haven Palladium, as reported in the Litchfield Enquirer). That November, the accused was determined to be sane and was quickly tried in the New Haven Superior Court before a jury of his peers and Judge Waite. He was found guilty of the crime of first-degree murder, and Judge Waite sentenced him to be hanged the following July. He was subsequently jailed in New Haven.

In his sentencing, Judge Waite opined, “And of the severity of the law you have no reason to complain. The object is not vengeance, but protection. Its design is to shield the living from the further violence of the murderer, and deter others from the commission of like offenses” (The Hartford Courant). David’s mother, Sarah, demurred.

The following May, on a motion submitted by David Abbott, but mostly by his mother, Sarah (Tyler) Abbott (1769-1855), the Connecticut Legislature assigned their petition for commutation to its select committee on capital punishment to debate his sentence. His widowed mother, Sarah, was an elder sister of the noted Congregational cleric, the Rev. Bennett Tyler, D.D. (1783-1858), all born in Middlebury. Rev. Tyler had become a president of Dartmouth College, and was a founder, president and theology professor at the Theological Institute of Connecticut, later the Hartford Seminary, from 1834 to 1857. Sarah was a determined woman who had bolted from the church of her family, the Middlebury Congregational Church, and joined the Middlebury Methodist Episcopal Church in town, a shocking event at the time, as told in Ray Sullivan’s book, “Breakneck.”

At the commutation hearing, doctors of the day classified David as a “monomaniac,” which, in 19th century psychiatry, described one who was partially insane, but in other ways of sound mind. The Connecticut State Legislature voted in June, 134 to 36, to overturn the Superior Court’s sentence, and commuted it to life in prison,

There was outrage at the decision. In a smarmy, erroneous editorial in the Litchfield Enquirer, this decision, and another similar one were condemned as “tyranny and usurpation … (showing) beyond all doubt, the madness and folly of a Legislature in usurping powers which are not entrusted to them. They are utterly unworthy of an enlightened Legislature of the 19th century. They are fitted only for Turkish despotism. I feel humbled and ashamed for the State of Connecticut.”

David was sent to Wethersfield Prison, but died a few years later, probably of poor health. Despite this early trauma to the family, a number of the Abbott children went on to have prominent and successful lives.

You are urged to join the Middlebury Historical Society by going online at MiddleburyHistoricalSociety.org or visiting them on Facebook. Questions about membership can be sent to Bob at robraff@comcast.net.