Rachel Wall (née Schmidt) was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on October 1, 1760. She was 29 years old on October 8, 1789, when she was executed by hanging on the Boston Common. According to some accounts, Wall may have been America’s first female pirate; it is certain that she was the last woman to be hanged by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The American Antiquarian Society holds a copy of Wall’s last words and dying confession, dictated by Wall herself and printed as a broadside by the jailers at the Boston Goal [sic] on October 7, 1789. Wall’s life of piracy has expanded into mythology over the centuries since her death, so this remarkable broadside stands out as a sworn narrative directly from Wall.
Wall recounts that she was born to “honest and reputable” parents, who gave her an education and raised her as a Presbyterian. Her father was a farmer, and she had three brothers and two sisters when she left home—without her parents’ consent or knowledge—to move to Philadelphia with her new husband, George Wall. The young couple later moved to New York City, then Boston, where George abandoned Rachel for some time. In Rachel’s words, she worked in servitude until George returned to her. “As soon as he came back,” George enticed Rachel to leave her servitude and “take to bad company,” a band of pirates whom she blames for her eventual ruin. George eventually abandoned Rachel in Boston again, leaving her alone with his whereabouts unknown. She notes in her statement that as a dying person, she forgives her husband.
Wall confesses to four specific crimes in her final statement. In spring of 1787, she sneaked aboard a vessel at Long Wharf under cover of darkness and stole a black silk handkerchief containing about 30 pounds in gold and small change from under the sleeping ship captain’s head. Around 1788, she broke into a sloop at Doane’s Wharf and stole a silver watch, silver shoe buckles, and a parcel of small change while the crew slept. In 1785, Rachel conspired with George (imprisoned in Boston at the time) to bake a cake containing a saw and a file and send it to his cell to aid in his escape attempt from the jail.
Wall also admits to a crime for which a woman named Dorothy Horn had already been punished (with a public whipping on the gallows). It is notable that Wall does not admit to piracy among these crimes, nor the crime for which she has been sentenced to hang.
Wall admits that she is guilty of “a great many” petty crimes, including theft, lying, and “almost every other sin a person could commit, except murder.” However, she denies her guilt in the robbery for which she would soon be executed.
Alleged to have stolen a bonnet off a “Miss Bendar,” Wall claims to know nothing of the crime. Her alibi? That she had been at work all the preceding day and had simply been walking by when she heard a commotion in the street and was arrested for the robbery.
In her final words to her jailers, Wall forgives the witnesses who testified against her in the bonnet robbery trial. She commits her soul to the “hands of Almighty God” and her fate is sealed. Wall and the two men hanged alongside her were the last three people in the Commonwealth to be executed for highway robbery. The details of Rachel’s short life remain mysterious, but her intriguing legacy persists almost 250 years later.
