Heading: (African American - 1835 rape scandal)
Author: Gill, Samuel
Title: Letter from a Connecticut doctor seeking legal aid in defense against charges of raping an African American servant girl in a tavern
Place Published: Litchfield County Jail, Litchfield, Connecticut
Publisher:
Date Published: July 22, 1835
Description: Autograph Letter signed by Samuel Gill (in the text). To John Arnold Rockwell, attorney, Norwich Connecticut. 4 pp., stampless address on p. 2. 33x19.7 cm (13x7¾”).
Rambling autobiographic account to an attorney, pleading for legal aid, by an Opium-addicted alcoholic Connecticut doctor, jailed for rape of a young Black servant girl at a tavern. In nearly 5,000 words crammed into every inch of a tall letter sheet because the writer could not afford to buy more paper, the jailed Doctor, reveals that, in addition to his ”intemperate use of strong drink”, years before he had been addicted to Opium by another physician (probably at the Hartford Retreat for the Insane). He was now anxiously awaiting a trial, after a Grand Jury indictment, on a charge of rape of a young Black servant girl at a tavern in Norfolk, Connecticut. Impoverished, abandoned by family and friends, and, as penniless stranger ”in whom none took any interest,” he had been incompetently represented by an unpaid court-appointed lawyer who showed no interest in an impromptu client who had himself confessed to being guilty of ”something.” Gill admitted that in a drunken stupor, feeling ”sorry and ashamed,” he had politely apologized to the girl for his improper behavior, which, he now insisted, involved nothing more than ”lascivious toying and that with the apparent permission of the girl herself.” He had not sought ”illicit intercourse with her...,” seemingly denying that ”her clothes were raised” or that ”there was any indecent exposure of my own person...” As for the ”aggravation which the offense derives from difference of race. I would not stigmatise... a race of immortal beings as to call my conduct beastly; but I do feel that I could not be R.M. Johnson for the presidential chair. It is enough that the African females are not objects of desire. But drunkenness can make a man fondle the picture of Pocahontas on a tavern sign.” Gill says nothing more about the interracial issue of the alleged crime, beyond this cryptic reference to Kentuckian Richard Mentor Johnson, who was soon to be elected Vice President of the United States, despite openly living with a mixed race slave as his common law wife with and formally acknowledging their two daughters as his children.Writing with elegant ambiguity, Gill here presented his own defense to another attorney he hoped would take his case at a second Court proceeding. The results of that trial are unknown - because the fate of Samuel Gill, possibly a graduate of Yale Medical School, after his embarrassing, race-tainted rape trial was virtually erased from historical memory, his disappearance from official records possibly explained by his self-declared intention, were he freed, to immediately immigrate to British Canada, there to ”spend my days forever - and never again enter the territory of the United States.”
Gill‘s reference to spending time at a ”Retreat” (for the Insane), might evn lead one to dismiss the whole story as an Opium-fueled fantasy - except that all the proper names in the letter are identifiable, including his first court-appointed lawyer, Truman Smith, being a distinguished state legislator, who would later turn down appointment to Zachary Taylor‘s Presidential Cabinet to take his seat in the U.S. Senate. And lawyer Rockwell, to whom he wrote this plea for aid, being the future author of a classic book on Mexican mining law during the California Gold Rush.
The entire letter was filled with both a mixture of plaintive pleas and self-deprecatory comments, such as his admission that, as an ”Opium-eater”, he had ”deemed myself utterly unfit” to practice Medicine, a profession he had soon abandoned to live an aimless life, apparently supported for a time by a wealthy mother (whom his enemies had ”conspired” to spirit away to Illinois without knowledge of her son‘s plight). As for the girl he was accused of raping, he dismissed her court testimony, not necessarily as lies, but rather as ”exclusively affirmative replies” to question from the prosecution, the ”precise meaning” of which she may not have understood. At one point, he calls her ”most precocious in respect to the development of the malignant passions”, but elsewhere he writes that he could not deny ”that which constituted essentially the crime charged, the subjecting of the girl in constraint with pride and conscious innocence.” And he added that, had he not been penniless, he might have ”put this girl for the summer in another and suitable family. ”
Beyond this curious manuscript, the life and fate of Samuel Gill remains an historical enigma.

A few words missing from edge chips, some ink cross-outs which have cause holes in the paper, still, virtually all the minuscule text is decipherable.