Deliberate Evil, page 5
Captain White and Joe Jr. had rarely spoken ever since, and Joe and his wife had remained for the most part on the farm in Wenham. After the marriage, Joe Jr. hardly ever came to the mansion, and then only when Captain White was not at home. There had been about a week, as Lydia Kimball would recall, between Joe Jr.’s most recent visit to the home (on an errand she did not know or remember) and April 6, when he came to pick up Mary Beckford and bring her to Wenham for her visit.
Given his histrionics, some suspected that Joe Knapp Jr. had imbibed more than a bit of wine, or perhaps some stronger spirit, before his arrival at the White mansion for the wake. While extreme emotions were expected from the captain’s nearest and dearest female family members, the same was considered quite odd when displayed by men. Joe Jr., however, rocked in his seat, muttered prayers, tearfully expressed wonderment and astonishment that such a crime could have taken place, and otherwise made himself something of a spectacle. Amid his ravings, Joe Jr. went so far as to suggest out loud that Stephen White—the captain’s primary heir who stood across the room—should be considered a prime suspect, given the vast wealth that would now likely be his. What offense Stephen White might have taken from these inebriated remarks, or whether he even heard them, is not on record. But many did hear, and not a few kept the seed of speculation in their heads.
On the next morning, April 10, the elite of Salem—the full great and mighty membership of the of the East India Marine Society—accompanied the body of Captain Joseph White on a short march from his mansion to the Howard Street Cemetery. Nearly every business in town closed for the day, or at least closed its doors for the few early hours of official town-wide mourning. The wealthy merchants walked wearing their blackest black suits and matching top hats. There were no women among them, no Blacks, no common workers—members only, the true captains of Salem shipping and industry escorting one of their own to his final rest.
The niece Mary and grandniece Mary, together with other female members of the White family, remained at the residence, as was the custom at the time. Men of the working class lined the route of the entourage down Essex Street and then onward to Howard Street. Most who stood gawking were workers from the wharves and laborers from Salem’s small industries, the majority of them likely mourning more for the hourly wages they were missing than for the man who rested in the box carried on six strong shoulders.
Howard Street Cemetery as it is today, where Captain Joseph White and his wife rest in their underground vault. In the distance can be seen the rear of the old Salem Jail. Photo by the author
At the burial ground, the large oblong stone above the in-ground crypt of the White family had been moved away, affording those who gathered a view of the dark space below containing the caskets of Captain White’s much-mourned wife Elizabeth, his brother Henry (Stephen White’s father, who’d passed in 1825), and Captain White’s grandniece Elizabeth White Carlton. After a few prayers, the pallbearers used ropes to lower Captain White down and lay him next to his wife. Then the crowd dispersed, leaving only the workers who would now place the great stone back where it belonged.
Not long after the burial, the small island off the New Hampshire coast upon which Captain White had been born in 1748, the southernmost of the Isles of Shoals, was renamed in his honor: Joseph White Island (now commonly referred to as White Island). Such was the prominence of the man and the widespread word of the tragic death.
* * *
While Salem mourned and buried the captain, word of the murder began to spread beyond the town limits, as in this item that appeared in the Franklin, Massachusetts, Republican on the thirteenth:
An assassination of almost unexampled atrocity took place in the town of Salem, Mass. on the night of the 6th ult. Joseph White, Esq. one of the most aged and opulent citizens of that town . . . was murdered in his bed by some unknown person, who entered the house by one of the back windows, and committed the horrid deed by first striking him on the head with some heavy instrument and then inflicting 10 [sic] stabs near the heart with a knife. There is no way for accounting for this cold-blooded deed, as the assassin took none of the money or other valuable articles within his reach, and appears to have been entirely actuated by a wish to take the life of Mr. White, although an aged man, retired from business and inoffensive in his conduct. Great excitement was occasioned in the town by the occurrence.3
Other newspapers adopted the same sensational prose:
SHOCKING AFFAIR!—On Wednesday morning last, Joseph White, Esq. was found dead in his bed, having been murdered by some person or persons yet unknown. A severe blow was given him on the left temple, which in the opinion of the physicians, caused his immediate death—and thirteen wounds in the body, with a dirk, or other sharp instrument, which several times penetrated his heart. Mr. White was upwards of 80 years of age, was a widower, and the only persons in the family at the time, were, a young man, and a woman who had lived for many years in the family. Not an article was taken from the house, and no trace of the perpetrators of this unparalleled outrage has as yet been discovered. A reward of $2500 is offered for the detection of the murderer—$500 of which is by the Selectmen of Salem, $1000 by the heirs of Mr. White, and $1000 by the Governor, in a proclamation issued on Thursday last.4
In Salem, a watch was formed. Young John Francis “Frank” Knapp, the brother of Joe Knapp Jr., was quick to join.
7 The Knapps of Salem
“Life is made of marble and mud.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne,
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
It is impossible to navigate the balance of this story without understanding two key coordinates: the histories of two additional families along with that of the Whites. These are the Knapps of Salem and the Crowninshields of Salem.
During the summer of 1812, with war against Britain having put an end to virtually all Salem shipping, leading families such as the Whites, Silsbees, and Crowninshields became heavily engaged in the business of privateering: commandeering British vessels and seizing their cargos and sometimes the vessels themselves. With regard to these operations, the Whites were particularly active. In addition to Captain White’s aptly named Revenge, there were also nine heavily armed brig privateers owned by Joseph and Stephen White, the largest of which, the 310-ton Grand Turk, carried eighteen guns. Like its sister ships, the Grand Turk was designed not just for firepower but also for speed. Early in the spring of 1812, the brothers sent their thirty-nine-year-old associate Captain Joseph Jenkins Knapp Sr. to New York to oversee the building of an additional 172-ton privateer, the schooner Growler, which went to sea that autumn.
Eighteen years later, on the very evening when Captain Joseph White was to die, Captain Knapp sat in the Derby Street mansion of attorney Joseph Waters, there to sign the papers necessary to formalize his personal and business bankruptcy. With him sat his son, Nathaniel Phippen Knapp, known as Phippen, a young, twenty-three-year-old, Harvard-educated attorney.
Here now came the conclusion of the senior Knapp’s twenty-five-year merchant career—which, though not as spectacular as that of others in town, had at least been respectable up until recent setbacks. Knapp’s principal creditor? None other than Captain Joseph White himself. The house at 85 Essex Street to which Knapp returned that evening, the house he’d built in 1802, was now owned not by Knapp but by White, to whom Knapp would henceforth have to pay rent if he was to stay.
The Knapp House, built 1802, was originally located at 85 Essex Street (as shown here, circa 1890) but in 1895 was moved around the corner to 9 Curtis Street, where it remains in private hands. Photo by Frank Cousins from the Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
In previous years, Knapp had owned several vessels in whole or part, a few of them in partnerships with the Whites. “The Knapps were well thought of in Salem,” wrote Bradley and Winans. “Captain Joseph Knapp, Sr., was a shipmaster and merchant. He and Captain White were frequently associated in business transactions. Knapp and his family lived for many years on the south side of Essex Street, not far east from the home of Captain White.”1
Knapp’s financial unraveling seems to have started as early as 1818, a year when he could boast stock-in-trade of $5,500—a worthy sum, yet still only a fraction of the amounts the Whites and other major families could claim. Tragedy struck when, in December of that year, Knapp’s 178-ton brig General Jackson—skippered by his brother-in-law Captain John Phippen—went down with all hands during a voyage to the Caribbean. As severe as was the personal loss, even more so was the financial loss, from which Knapp would never quite recover despite robust efforts over the next twelve years.
Knapp was a direct descendant of William Knopp, a native of Suffolk, England, who settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1630 on money advanced by Richard Saltonstall, to whom he was to remain indentured for a number of years. William’s grandson Isaac, born 1672, moved to Salem sometime between 1703 and 1707, and became a shipwright. All the generations thereafter descending from Isaac resided in the general Salem area and were associated with the maritime trades, either as shipwrights, merchantmen, or sailors before the mast.
Joseph Knapp married Abigail Phippen, the daughter of Salem’s Nathaniel Phippen and Ann Picket Phippen, in 1798. She died in July 1827 at age forty-five. Knapp and Abigail were the parents of eight children, including Joe Jr. (born 1802), Nathaniel Phippen (1808), and John Francis “Frank” Knapp (1811).
After the death of Abigail, Knapp endured a miserable time. Although some of the children were quite grown when Abigail passed, the youngest were twelve (Sarah Ann), ten (William Henry), and seven (Samuel), each of them commanding much of his attention. What is more, his grown son Frank regularly proved himself an unwelcome and unhappy distraction, engaging in various vices and criminal activities in step with his friends Richard (Dick) and George Crowninshield—sociopathic criminal scions of the venerable Salem family, both a few years older than Frank. Sometimes, though not always, Frank lured his brother, Joe Jr., into his escapades.
By all accounts, Frank was quite handsome. The reporter James Gordon Bennett was to describe him as “a well-made full-faced youth . . . 5' 7" in height [with] thick dark and straight hair, growing low, parted and combed smoothly; the nose strong and blunt, the mouth rather large and cheeks full but very pale.”2 He was known to enjoy the ladies, especially ladies of easy virtue such as could be found walking near the wharves on late evenings, looking for trade, or working in brothels. He also enjoyed gambling. But both pastimes, combined with many libations, demanded money, which Frank, allergic to honest employment, routinely found other means of getting.
In the early summer of 1827, at the same time when his mother was gravely ill with the sickness that would kill her within a matter of weeks, the sixteen-year-old stole $300 from his father and embarked for Manhattan with the Crowninshield brothers. There the three caroused, drank, whored, gambled, and quickly ran through Frank’s money. Once that was gone, they engaged in petty thefts, which landed all three in a Manhattan jail for several weeks, after which Frank returned home, leaving the Crowninshields to continue frolicking in New York. At a loss for what to do with his errant son, Joe Knapp Sr. found the solution that came most easily and naturally—arranging a job before the mast on a merchant vessel, sending him off to do as well or as poorly as he could beyond the horizon.
Joe Sr. had trouble elsewhere as well. Of particular concern was Joe Jr.’s recent marriage to the grandniece of Joe Sr.’s principal creditor, Captain Joseph White. That he steadfastly relied on the generosity and patience of White in order to keep the Knapp family finances from falling off a cliff, the senior Knapp knew all too well. A key part of this delicate equation of debt had been the measure of good will Captain White had previously displayed with regard to both Joe Sr. and Joe Jr. Now, with the all-too-vindictive Captain White in a state of rage over the marriage of Joe Jr. to his favorite grandniece, tension entered into relations between White and Joe Sr. This tension went well beyond finance, but nevertheless—as Knapp feared—wound up influencing finance and inspiring White to call in Joe Sr.’s debt. This probably came as no surprise to Knapp. After all, the matrimony had already, by all accounts, resulted in Captain White rewriting his will to disinherit the grandniece he had once so favored. And she was his blood.
Joe Knapp Jr. had—like most Salem boys—gone to sea in his teens. Records show that by the time he reached age twenty in 1823 he was qualified to serve as master on one of his father’s vessels, a small brig named the Governor Winslow. Subsequently, he skippered a far more substantial vessel owned by the Whites, the 240-ton Caroline. He was admitted to the prestigious East India Marine Society in 1825.
Front door to Knapp House circa 1890. Photo by Frank Cousins from the Frank Cousins Collection of Glass Plate Negatives. Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA
He’d seemed a success. But now, after his marriage to his Mary, he found himself without an assignment on any White vessel, and as well blackballed by other merchants who were White’s friends. In the absence of a post as ship’s master or at least one as supercargo, he was consigned to menial tasks about the farm under the supervision of his wife’s brother-in-law, John Davis. Like his forebears, he was a man of the sea, not of the land. He’d made a stiff sacrifice for love and, many thought, had become deeply embittered by the idea of having been forced to make it.
In the time leading up to his bankruptcy, Joe Knapp Sr. had shaken the trees for revenue. He took in boarders at the large home he had once shared with so many children but now shared with only three. He sold a long-held insurance policy on his life. And, for a long while, he left unpaid the bill from the undertaker for Abigail’s casketing and conveyance to her grave in Salem’s Harmony Grove Cemetery. Too many other demands were more urgent, and none of his older children were in a position to help him very much, if at all.
One wonders what Joe Knapp Sr.’s reaction had been when, sometime during the day of April 7, he heard of the murder of the man to whom he’d surrendered everything the evening before. Relief? Trepidation? As Knapp well knew, now it would be Stephen White who would hold the keys to his financial destiny. And what that meant remained to be seen.
8 The Crowninshields of Salem
“Young men and young women, full of courage, originality, and genius, are everywhere to be met with.”
—Frank Crowninshield,
founding editor of Vanity Fair (1913)
One of the most mysterious, successful, and odd clans in Salem was the Crowninshields, beginning with the very first member of the family to set foot on the shores of the New World.
Upon his arrival at Boston in 1684, “Dr.” Johannes Kaspar Richter von Kronenscheldt claimed to be a surgeon and the descendant of Saxon nobility. In passable English, he told of how he had been educated in Britain and Ireland but said little more about his personal or family history. Others, however, rumored that Kronenscheldt had variously fled Saxony over gambling debts, killed a man in a duel, or been expelled from Saxony on account of various other misdeeds.
To these allegations the good doctor never gave a response—which only led to even more speculation, including speculation that his nobility might be pure fiction. Two centuries later, genealogical research funded by the doctor’s by-then blue-blooded WASP descendants yielded no evidence that a Kronenscheldt family ever even existed in Saxony, or anyplace else on the continent. When it was suggested that further research might yield either a Catholic or Jewish connection, the funding promptly stopped—and the family roots were left undiscovered. In Boston society at the time, one was better off not knowing certain facts.
The tradition in the family remained profoundly un-Puritan. As David Ferguson has written:
Kronenscheldt’s descendants have always been atypical of New England; none was ever very religious, much less troubled by any Puritan conflict between piety and the desire to get ahead in the world. Except among the women, and then not always, they have cared little for the social conventions of their times. Closely knit they were not; each went his or her way without thinking very much about what the others may have thought. . . . None was ever very self-conscious; not a few were, in money matters, ostentatious in a manner quite inconsistent with that of New England peers.1
They were renegades, rebels, individuals, iconoclasts, winners—and losers.
After moving to the Lynn/Salem area, Kronenscheldt married and fathered five children. He died in 1711, after which his wife, the former Elizabeth Allen, soon remarried and moved away from New England, to parts unknown. Most of the children went with her. Fifteen-year-old John, born in Salem in 1696, remained behind, soon becoming a crewmember on one of the many coastal cod- and mackerel-fishing schooners. Profoundly illiterate, John sometimes signed himself Groucell, sometimes Groungsell, sometimes Cronchel. Unlike his pretentious father, young John was irretrievably common and rough and soon matured into a true hard-drinking and womanizing denizen of the waterfront. The one characteristic he shared with his forebear was general irreverence. His main claims to fame in the family record are that he was the first to make a living on the water, the first to own his own vessel, and—not unimportant—the first to marry money. His bride, Anstiss Williams, born in Salem in 1700, was the daughter of a successful Salem merchant.
John prospered well enough, sticking to the coast and the profession of fishing—at least officially. This trade in cod and mackerel he reportedly combined with other seagoing ventures of a less reputable nature: smuggling and, it was said, a bit of pirating on the side. On these earnings, he and Anstiss raised ten children. When he passed in 1761, he left an estate valued at £1,500, which made him “upper-middle class.” The estate included a Black slave, valued at £36.
