Knowlton Chapter 15
Fifteen: “Crime” and Punishment
I was locked up in a room with two petty thieves, one of them a still, clever, honest little fellow—only he would sometimes get a little rummy, and when in this state he put on a man's overcoat, at a tavern, in Worcester, and walked about, not, however, out of sight of the house, in open day. But there were lawyers enough, and jail-room enough, in Worcester, and they all wanted business. A stranger is more likely to be taken up for some petty offence in such a place, than in our small towns which contain no starving lawyers to protect public morals and preserve the peace and "dignity of the Commonwealth." My other room-mate was rascal to the core, but could tell as good a story for himself as the other man.
By the early spring of 1824, Charles was beginning to get some paying business as a doctor. He had struggled through the winter, doing a fair amount of work free, to win patients from Hawley’s other physician. Dr. Moses Smith was an established member of the community, serving as Town Clerk and later as Hawley’s representative to the state legislature. Smith had married the influential widow of the town’s previous physician, Dr. Daniel Fobes. He was clearly the local man and Charles was clearly the outsider.
Although the 1887 History of the Town of Hawley claims Knowlton’s “fame as an advocate of materialism and other views tending to atheism had preceded him,” this is probably an exaggeration. While Charles was certainly well on his way to materialism, after medical school and three years of marriage to Tabitha Stuart, he hadn’t yet publicized his thoughts. Charles did become quite notorious later, and he even returned to Hawley for a public debate with its preacher and a famous evangelist. But in 1824, Charles was probably known simply as the new physician in Hawley, not as a famous freethinker.
Whatever his local reputation, just as the Knowltons’ first hard winter in Hawley was ending and Charles’s practice was beginning to improve, he had to leave. The previous November when Charles had walked home from Hanover to attend court in Worcester, his trial had been put off until the next session. That session had finally begun, just as Tabitha was coming to term with their first child.
Childbirth in the early nineteenth century was dangerous. Charles wanted to be by his wife’s side—not only as Tabitha’s husband and the baby’s father, but as the best available doctor in the area. Charles waited as long as he could, but the days passed and Tabitha did not go into labor. Her lateness wasn’t that unusual. First children are often a week or two late. But it meant that after waiting until the middle of April, Charles had to leave his wife and rush down to Worcester to stand trial for body-snatching.
Charles had a horse this time, and didn’t have to walk seventy miles from the Berkshire foothills to central Massachusetts. But the last-minute gallop through rain and mud was grueling enough. Charles rode directly to Worcester, where his father Stephen was waiting for him. Stephen Knowlton had put up the bail money for Charles the previous summer. His son’s late arrival led Stephen to fear Charles would not show up for the trial, and the money would be forfeited.
Stephen had used his father Ezekiel’s political connections to get an eminent attorney with connections in Boston, Samuel Hoar, to defend his son. “I presume he did not regard it as a case of much consequence,” Charles said. “But I thought quite otherwise.” Charles wanted the Worcester trial to be a test case for the position he had outlined in his Hanover dissertation: that doctors needed to learn anatomy for the public good, and should be allowed to dissect corpses. Hoar disagreed, preferring to deal with the actual charges facing Charles. These were that Charles had illegally dug up a corpse, and that he had “aided and abetted” in its dissection.
It was common knowledge that Charles had not been the only medical student involved in the crimes. Hoar was able to use the prosecutor’s uncertainty about who had actually done the body-snatching, to get the first charge thrown out. That left Charles’s involvement in the dissection, which there was no way to deny. Charles was found guilty and sentenced to two months in jail and court costs.
Charles was taken directly from court to the Worcester County Jail, where he was put in a cell with two convicted thieves who’d received similar sentences. Although the Commonwealth had failed to convict Charles of stealing the body in Royalston, his sentence reflected the judge’s assumption of his guilt. Charles’s cell was small, cold, dark, and crowded. There were three parasite-infested mats on the floor for beds, and a square, tin dish of food was shoved through a slot in the door twice a day. Better food could be bought from the jailers, but the prices were high.
As always, Charles had very little money. He was not about to give his jailers the satisfaction of taking what little he had. “For many days I was very hungry,” he said. But after a while Charles became accustomed to semi-starvation. “I got so I could lay by a crust, or a bit of cold meat, until I should be more hungry,” he said, “and soon after this I began to forget to eat them before the hour for the next meal came round.”
Charles lay half-starved in his damp cell, telling his companions little stories of his life and listening to theirs. He was allowed a couple of books, so he had nothing to do but “read and write by day, and lie and think by night.” The surroundings, isolation, and malnutrition added urgency to Charles’s thoughts. “My head was very clear,” Charles said, “and it was upon my flea and bed-bug couch, which lay on the floor, that I became a materialist, and conceived some important views…which I still believe correct.” Charles had acted as a materialist when he’d stolen corpses, and a superstitious society had punished him for it. As a result of that punishment, he found himself lying in a jail cell in Worcester, thinking about medicine and philosophy and wondering what was happening to his family back home in Hawley. It was finally clear to Charles, what was at stake and what he had to do.