The Execution of Isaac Hayne: Charleston, South Carolina, August 1781

During the American War for Independence, both sides executed enemy soldiers and civilians. Some were found guilty of spying or treason after a trial, although the “trial” was often pro forma. For many others a trial was dispensed with. 

After the Battle of King’s Mountain in October 1780, the victorious Patriots shot dead many of the defeated Loyalists after they had surrendered. King’s Mountain was part of a broader pattern of tit for tat executions that plagued the backcountry of South Carolina, especially during the British occupation of 1780-1782. 

Patriot Paddy Carr slaughtered every Loyalist he could lay his hands on, refusing quarter to those who surrendered. Loyalist “Bloody Bill” Cunningham became infamous for butchering patriots and their families. Both sides murdered "enemies" in their beds. 

Patriots executed without trial Blacks alleged to have aided or joined the British enemy. Governor John Rutledge ordered partisan leaders Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion to hang “renegade Negroes.”      

Most of the victims of these war crimes, for that is what they were, were anonymous, or just names. Only a few of them are etched in our historical memory because their stories have been told again and again. 

We remember Nathan Hale, who the British executed as a spy in 1776. Why? Because of his supposed last words: “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." Powerful stuff, even if not true. 

Isaac Hayne is not as well-known as Hale, but he was the most famous person to be hanged in the South during the war. A painting of Hayne being led to his execution is displayed in the Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon on East Bay Street in Charleston, where he was imprisoned in the summer of 1782. 

The British hanged Hayne on a charge of treason, which he vigorously denied. How he got into that situation is convoluted. Hayne had inherited several plantations south of Charleston, mainly near Jacksonborough. He had a reputation as an excellent breeder of horses. He served as a cavalry officer in the patriot militia. 

After the fall of Charleston in 1780, the British paroled Hayne and others in the militia. He returned home. That summer and autumn smallpox spread across the state. One of his children died of it, and his wife and two other children became infected. He rode to Charleston to seek medical help. 

He had not wanted to come. The victorious British commander, Sir Henry Clinton, had issued a proclamation requiring the paroled militia to swear allegiance to the Crown. While Hayne was in Charleston, the British town commandant, Colonel Paterson, convinced him to take the oath. 

Paterson assured him, he later claimed, that he would not be required to take up arms against his former comrades. Hayne signed and went home. His other children survived but his wife died from smallpox. 

After Patriots regained control of most of the state in 1781, Hayne believed, or claimed, that he no longer owed allegiance to the invaders. He joined the partisans. In July 1781 he took part in a partisan raid on the plantation of Andrew Williamson. They kidnaped (or rescued) Williamson, a former Patriot general who had defected to the British after the fall of Charleston. 

A British detachment led by major Archibald Campbell intercepted the kidnapers and rescued Williamson. Campbell captured Hayne and took him back to Charleston as a prisoner. The commandant of Charleston was no longer Paterson, but Colonel Nisbet Balfour. He ordered Hayne to be imprisoned in the Provost Dungeon, the bottom floor of the Exchange Building. Balfour charged him with treason for having violated his oath of loyalty to the king. 

Hayne expected to receive a trial but Balfour and the commanding general in South Carolina, Lord Rawdon, declared him guilty and sentenced him to hang. For months, Balfour had been placing warnings in the newspapers that militia who had taken parole and signed the oath of allegiance would be liable to treason charges if they rejoined the Patriots. 

Balfour had hoped it would stem a rising tide of defections to the partisan bands. The warnings failed to bring about the desired result. He and his superior, General Lord Rawdon, decided to make an example of someone to deter others. [Image: Francis, Lord Rawdon]

The British commanders had another likely motive, one common in war: revenge. The previous October, patriots in New York had captured Major John Andre. He was returning to British lines after a secret meeting with Benedict Arnold, to arrange Arnold's switch to the British side. Because he was caught wearing civilian clothes, the Patriots charged Andre as a spy, which meant he had no right to a trial. They hanged him at Tappan, New York, a few days later, with the approval of George Washington. 

Andre was a talented and popular officer, and his execution outraged many of his comrades. Balfour had been his close friend, and Rawdon had helped him to prepare for his position. 

Many people in Charleston protested the sentence on Hayne and urged Balfour and Rawdon to reconsider the verdict. Those who pleaded for Hayne’s life included several prominent Loyalists, including William Bull, the former royal lieutenant governor. 

Women from both sides of the political divide came to beg for mercy. The sister of Hayne’s deceased wife brought his two surviving children to see Rawdon and Balfour. They begged for mercy on their knees. British officers also petitioned for to save Hayne, including the one who had captured him. Rawdon refused to change the sentence. His only concession was to allow Hayne a stay of a few days to visit with his children. 

At dawn on August 4 Hayne’s captors led him out of the Provost Dungeon. Several hundred soldiers escorted him to the place of execution at Boundary Street (now Calhoun Street), close to the present-day College of Charleston.

Hayne’s execution made him a martyr to the Patriot cause in South Carolina and a figure in Southern folklore, celebrated in story and song. Unlike Nathan Hale, he was largely forgotten in the annals of American history, probably due to the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Growing up in Chicago in the '50s and '60s, I heard about Hale but not Hayne. 

Almost immediately after the execution, Rawdon returned to Britain.  Fear of retaliation for Hayne’s execution may have sped up his departure. He arrived home to find that the execution was being criticized even in Britain. The Duke of Richmond, an opponent of the American war, moved to censure Rawdon’s conduct in the House of Lords. 

Although Richmond's motion lost by a large majority, Rawdon demanded the duke make an apology or meet on the field of honor. A duel was narrowly avoided when Richmond issued an apology. Rawdon went on to become Governor-General of India and rack up several peerages, including Earl of Moira and Marquess of Hastings. 

In later years, Rawdon blamed Balfour for Hayne’s death. Both played a role in it, but it seems that Rawdon was the more determined to hang him. 

During Balfour’s time as commandant of Charleston, Hayne was the only Patriot to be executed. Rawdon had ordered many executions under his command in America, though mainly of army deserters. Balfour, who remained in Charleston after Rawdon’s departure, bore the brunt of local anger about Hayne’s execution. 

In March 1782, General Alexander Leslie, who replaced Rawdon as commander in South Carolina, wrote Sir Henry Clinton that Balfour’s situation in Charleston had become “very unpleasant” since Hayne’s execution. In August 1782 Balfour was transferred to New York. After the war, he went on to become a Major General.

Below are two illustrations purporting to be of executions that took place during the American War for Independence. The first allegedly records the execution of Major John Andre at Tappan, New York in October 1780. The second claims to portray the execution of Colonel Isaac Hayne in Charleston. 

The illustrations are almost identical, except for changes in the colors of the uniforms. Even the flags remain the same. It is likely that the artist or artists was not present at either execution. The artist of Hayne's hanging obviously copied the artist of Andre's. They were after all, copycat killings. 

Peter McCandless, Remarkable Charlestonians in the American Revolution. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2025.

David K. Bowden, The Execution of Isaac Hayne. Lexington, SC: The Sandlapper Store, 1977.

David Ramsay, The History of the Revolution in South Carolina. Trenton, NJ, 1785. 

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Adventures of a Black Loyalist: Scipio Handley

 

At the beginning of the American Revolution, Scipio Handley was a free black fisherman who plied his trade in Charleston Harbor. We know very little else about him. We do know he was involved in a number of events during the revolutionary era, and after the war applied for compensation to the Loyalist Claims Commission in London. The memorial he submitted to the Claims Commission provides the little we know about Handley. It is part of thousands of pages of documentation, memorials and testimony, that now survives in the UK National Archives at Kew.

After the last royal governor, Lord William Campbell, fled Charleston in September 1775, Handley used his boat to carry supplies to the Tamar and its crew. When Lady William (Sarah Izard) decided to flee to her husband’s side, Handley took her. He was taking a great risk. The Committee of Safety prohibited any boats from town going to the British ships without a pass. Handley avoided Patriot patrols by going at night when the moon was down or when it was cloudy. But one night a patrol intercepted him ferrying supplies. They arrested him. According to Henry Laurens, Arthur Middleton wanted to hang Handley, and most of the council agreed. Laurens agreed that he should be hanged if guilty, but only after a “proper” trial. Exactly what would have constituted a proper trial in the wake of the Thomas Jeremiah incident is worth pondering. We will never know. Handley escaped from captivity one night shortly before Christmas and disappeared. That same night, a Patriot force numbering around 200 and disguised as “Indian warriors” attacked a camp of runaways and Loyalists on Sullivan’s Island. The “Indians” killed about two dozen runaways and captured others, including a few Loyalists. The rest managed to escape to the British ships anchored nearby or to Morris Island on the other side of the harbor mouth. The victors destroyed the pest house on Sullivan’s Island, which the runaways had used as a shelter. It is likely that many of them had resided there once before, on their arrival from West Africa, to perform quarantine.  In the aftermath of the Patriot attack, Lord William sailed off to St. Augustine. He took some of the runaways and Loyalists with him.

Was Scipio Handley one of them? Had he fled to the island the night he escaped, just before the Patriot attack? We don’t know, but we do know that somehow, Handley made his way to Florida, along with other Blacks and Loyalists. Or so he said in his memorial. He claimed that in escaping he had to jump from a second story window, that he landed badly, and suffered a rupture. In severe pain, he made his way to the British in St. Augustine. From there, he went on to Barbados. He took up fishing again and remained there for the next three years. Whether the British offered him a position as an auxiliary during that time he did not say.  When the British captured Savannah in the last days of 1778, they recruited him to work for their army as a Black Pioneer. He learned to make munitions, a dangerous and noisome job. He was at Savannah in the autumn of 1779 when a combined Patriot and French force attacked the city with disastrous results. He claimed that the “Negroes” did everything they could to repel the attack. They knew that “the rebels” would show no mercy to them if the British had to surrender. Handley was wounded during the battle. He was carrying grapeshot to the artillery when a musket ball hit him in the leg. It took months for the wound to heal so that he could walk. He would have taken part in the British siege of Charleston the following spring, he declared, if he had not been wounded. At the time he submitted his memorial, he stated that he remained unable to walk properly and that the pain was so bad that at times he could not work. He requested compensation from the Claims Commission in the amount of £97 for the loss of his possessions, livelihood, fishing boat, seven hogs, and furniture. The total claim would be about $25,000 in today’s money. That may seem substantial but many white planters and merchants claimed thousands of pounds, literally millions today. When the commission interviewed him  he brought along a white widow from Charleston as a testimonial witness. Mrs. Eleanor Lister. She had made and sold pies for her living, which she sometimes traded for fish from Mr. Handley. Lister testified that she believed Scipio was free and that he had possessed at least some of what he claimed. When one of the commissioners asked what kind of  furniture Handley possessed she answered tellingly: “Good enough for Negroes.” She asked the commission to give him “something” because he had “risked his life to serve His Majesty.” The commission dismissed her and asked Handley why he did not return to South Carolina to recover his property. “They’d hang me if I went back,” he replied. “During the war, Governor Rutledge ordered that all slaves who helped the British be executed.” The records of the Loyalist Claims Commission record the amounts awarded to the claimants, at least some of them. It does not contain any information about what Scipio Handley received, if any. Other Black Loyalists did receive varying amounts of compensation, although not a great deal.  The commission took about six years to make its final report on the awards. It may be that by then, Scipio Handley had died. Perhaps we will never know that either.

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Images of Anti-Slavery

The UK has the unenviable distinction of having been a global leader in the Atlantic slave trade, second only to Portugal. British ships transported more than three million Africans to the Americas between the 1600s and 1807. The profits of the trade and the labors of the enslaved were huge. 

[Image: British Slave Ship, Insurrection on Board a Slave Ship, Carl Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, 1795]

By the late 18th century, a movement to end the trade and eventually slavery itself began to gain momentum in Britain. Anti-slavery sentiment arose from both religious and secular sources. 

Religious sects like the Quakers had long opposed slavery. After mid-century, they were joined in Britain by members of Dissenting (Non-Anglican but Protestant) sects such as Methodists and by some Anglicans. 

The influence of Enlightenment thinkers also played a role. The illustration below, from Voltaire's popular novella Candide, shows Candide and his companion Cacambo encountering a slave who has had his hand destroyed in a mill and a leg cut off for running away. The slave tells them, "This is the price of your eating sugar in Europe."

In the 1780's, the pioneering potter Josiah Wedgwood, Charles Darwin's grandfather, produced the famous medallion below on behalf of the movement to end the slave trade.

The image below, of "tight packing" aboard the slave ship Brookes, was published in Plymouth, England in 1788. It became an icon of the antislavery movement. Mortality onboard such vessels was often enormous. As much as 50% of the "commodity" did not survive the voyage. 

In the same year, British artist George Morland exhibited his sentimental genre painting "The Slave Trade," showing Africans being loaded into boats on the West African coast.

The painting below, by JMW Turner, depicts the infamous case of the slave ship Zong . The Zong Incident occurred in 1783, almost sixty years before Turner painted his take on it. 

When the Zong overshot its intended destination in Jamaica and ran low on water, the captain ordered more than 100 Africans thrown overboard in order to save the rest. The captain claimed insurance on the "lost cargo." The insurance company refused to pay.

In the court case that followed, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield (pictured below), who had effectively declared slavery illegal under English law in 1772, denied the insurance claim. Many people thought the captain and his henchmen should have been tried for murder.

The Zong "Massacre," as it is often called today, galvanized opponents of the slave trade. In its wake, they mounted a mass popular movement to end it, led by MP William Wilberforce. Parliament finally abolished the slave trade in 1807. 

Abolition of slavery itself in the empire followed in 1833, but the institution survived decades longer in many parts of the globe. Turner's painting the Zong Massacre in was done in 1840 for the International Conference on Abolition of Slavery, held in London.

The legal slave trade to the USA ended in 1808, but a clandestine trade and slavery itself lasted until the end of the Civil War. British artist Eyre Crowe produced a famous depiction of a slave sale in Charleston, South Carolina in 1856. 

During the Antebellum Era (1820-1860), abolitionists in the USA produced many anti-slavery images. They tended to focus on the brutality and violence of the slave system, in which slaveowners wielded tyrannical power over their human chattels. Below are a few examples.

Today, a new curriculum for US History in the Florida of Governor Ron DeSantis, emphasizes the "benefits" of slavery to the enslaved.  He is simultaneously at war with one of Florida's biggest economic powerhouses, Disney, Inc. 

There is a certain irony in this. Disney famously produced a film that, inadvertently, perhaps, made slavery look like a Good Barbie land. I refer of course to Song of the South (1946), the movie based on the Uncle Remus Stories of Joel Chandler Harris. 

My, oh my, what a wonderful day! Zippity do da! Zippityay, sings Uncle Remus to the nice little white children of his owner. Yes, it was that good. 

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Masters of Caricature: Thomas Rowlandson

Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) was a prolific English caricaturist of the Georgian Age. His cartoons and prints encompassed politics, personality, social life, medicine, death, and other topics both contemporary and timeless. He produced large numbers of illustrations for books, both fiction and non-fiction. 

Many of Rowlandson's published works are bawdy and erotic, certainly by later Victorian standards. His unpublished works included more explicit erotica, which he created for private individuals. 

"The Courtesan" is an example of the milder erotica. An elderly "customer" leers lustily at the young woman, the Georgian equivalent of the modern escort.

A more explicit drawing is "Ladies Trading on their Own Bottom" (1810). Here, an elderly Jewish man seated between two prostitutes is giving them bags marked 100, clearly payment for services rendered.  

In the 1780s Rowlandson became friends with another master caricaturist, James Gillray. Gillray's success producing satirical prints encouraged Rowlandson to try his hand at it. Together, he and Gillray helped to make the pugnacious John Bull a personification of Britain and British resistance to the French and Napoleon. 

One of Rowlandson's forays into political caricature was a series he did on the electoral campaigning of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. The story is related in the 2008 film The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley, and by yours truly elsewhere. 

The Duchess' political activities aroused a scandal. Rowlandson took full advantage of the situation, portraying her mingling with and even kissing men from the lower orders. The cartoons implied that she was acting much like a common woman of the streets. [See Scandal: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the British Election of 1784] 

Rowlandson seems to have been a bit obsessed with the Duchess. Despite the implied criticism in his electoral cartoons, I think he may have had a secret crush on her. His depictions of her were not always political. An example is a watercolor, "A Gaming Table at Devonshire House" (1787).

Devonshire House was the London residence of Georgiana and her husband the duke, where they (or she) threw many lavish parties. Here, Rowlandson pictures the Duchess in a hat throwing the dice during a game of faro. Her sister, also hatted, is reaching into her purse for more money. One of the young men at the table is the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, who famously gambled away a fortune. 

The painting is dripping with sensuality. Rowlandson may have been criticizing Georgiana's fondness for gambling but he was an avid and often successful gambler himself. He certainly captures her famous beauty here. 

Rowlandson was equally fascinated with the more grisly business of anatomy and one of its offshoots, body snatching. He produced a number of prints showing anatomists and their pupils dissecting corpses. on the right, the man in the brown coat is looking at a price list for bodies. [Image: "The Dissecting Room"]

In "The Persevering Surgeon" Rowlandson adds a touch of eroticism. The surgeon is about to dissect the body of a young woman, and seems to be leering lustily at her breasts. 

Rowlandson also portrayed the business of securing the "subjects" of dissection. Body snatching, as it was known, involved stealing freshly dead bodies. It was an illegal, but highly profitable trade. 

Obtaining enough bodies legally, even for teaching purposes, was difficult. The growth of anatomy schools in the late 18th century increased the demand for them far beyond the legal supply. 

Anatomists and their pupils often hunted for subjects. Starting in the late 18th century, professional gangs of "Sack Em Up Men," also known as "Resurrection Men," helped to supply the deficiency. They obtained the goods from cemeteries, dead houses, and hospital morgues. In some infamous cases they murdered people to sell their bodies. 

Rowlandson portrayed their nocturnal work in prints such as "The Resurrection Men." 

You may have noticed the presence of skeletons in the previous images. They obviously represent Death, the nemesis of us all, and the great equalizer. They appear in many of Rowlandson's prints. an example is "Death in the Dissecting Room." Here, Avenging Death makes a sudden appearance, terrorizing the anatomists and the body snatcher hauling in a fresh subject. 

Rowlandson's interest in the grisly and macabre is also seen in his drawing of men hanging from a gibbet along the Thames. 

 

In 1814, a friend of Rowlandson's, George Henry Harlow, produced this portrait of him. He was then in his late 50s and at the peak of his career. He died in 1827. 

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The Anatomist and the Irish Giant

Visitors to London's Leicester Square today find it a place of entertainment and perhaps a bit of naughtiness. Eating, drinking, theater, and gambling are on offer. Few of the visitors are aware that once the square was home to a major center for teaching surgery and anatomy. Untold numbers of dissections took place there, of both human and animal bodies. 

During the late 18th century, Leicester Square was the location of the anatomy school of the renowned (and sometimes reviled) surgeon John Hunter. His bust once graced the central area of the square but was removed as part of a renovation in 2012. It is unlikely that many visitors ever gave it more than a passing glance anyway. They are usually there for other reasons than absorbing a bit of history.

The younger brother of anatomist William Hunter, John learned his trade working for William. The business included the art of body snatching, the main source of human corpses for dissection until the 1830's. Eventually, the brothers fell out and John went his own way.

After serving as an army surgeon for several years, John set up his own anatomy school, which eventually settled at the Square. The building, which also contained his house and an extensive anatomical museum, now houses a pub. (below)

Directly across the square lay the house of his friend Joshua Reynolds, a portrait painter of the wealthy who had a strong interest in anatomy. Reynolds' house is now a bar. But don't knock Progress.

Hunter dissected every type of human or animal he could lay his hands on. His subjects included the famous Irish Giant, Charles Byrne or O'Brien, pictured at the top of the post in a print by Thomas Rowlandson from 1785. 

Hunter acquired the giant's body against the deceased's wishes by bribing the man who had it, allegedly for the then enormous sum of 500 pounds. Hilary Mantel wrote a novel about Hunter's pursuit of the Irishman's corpse, The Giant, O'Brien (1998).

In the painting of Hunter below, one can see part of the giant's skeleton, at top right. The painting today is on display at St. George's Hospital in Tooting. Hunter was chief surgeon at St. George's when it was located near Hyde Park. Today the hospital boasts one of the top cardiology units in the UK. I had the good fortune to benefit from it a couple of years ago. 

Ironically, Hunter himself died of a heart attack in 1793. It happened during a heated argument with the governors of St. George's Hospital. It may have been a burst aneurysm. 

Animals of all kinds, lower as well as higher, went under John Hunter's dissecting knives. He maintained a large menagerie at his suburban house at Earl's Court, including kangaroos, giraffes, and leopards. [Images: Hunter's house at Earl's Court.]

Hunter's huge anatomical collection, or what survives of it, now resides in the Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn Fields. Among the exhibits is the skeleton of the Irish Giant. It's fascinating stuff, but definitely not for the squeamish. [Image 1: Part of the Hunterian Collection Image 2: The skeleton of the giant]

In 1771, Hunter married Anne Home, a poet who wrote the lyrics to 14 of Franz Joseph Haydn's English songs. She and Haydn met after her husband's death. They became close friends. How close is a matter of speculation. 

Hunter left Anne in straitened financial circumstances. In 1799, she sold her husband's anatomical collection to the government for the then huge sum of £15,000. The government gave the collection to the Royal College of Surgeons. 

In 1776, Hunter became surgeon to King George III. In 1790, Prime Minister William Pitt appointed Hunter Surgeon General of the British Army. In the latter post he instituted reforms to insure that surgeons were recruited on the basis of ability rather than family connections.

Further Reading:

Wendy Moore, The Knife Man (London: Penguin, 2006)

Druin Burch, Digging up the Dead  (London: Vintage, 2008)

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Imagining John Bull, Part 2: The Victorian Age and Beyond

During the 19th century, John Bull featured in many publications. In 1820 the first of several periodicals named John Bull appeared. Its  orientation was Tory or old-style conservative, and it survived until 1892. Others followed in the 20th century, the last ceasing publication in 1964. 

From its inception in the 1840s, the popular humor magazine Punch featured many images of  John Bull. The main artists were John Leech and John Tenniel. The Punch cartoons developed what we might call the mature Victorian John Bull, a tamed version of the hard-drinking, gluttonous, somewhat crude Georgian farmer. 

The Victorian Bull is a matter of fact fellow, more middle class, who dresses respectably in a long-tailed jacket, waistcoat, boots, and a low topper (top hat).

In 1859, Leech drew Bull reacting to exaggerated rumors of a possible French invasion. In response, the English Volunteer Movement arose, which led to the creation of rifle corps, a kind of Home Guard of volunteers. 

Here, Bull is speaking to a Volunteer. He says his bulldog is a weapon the "poodles" (French) should fear. The bulldog soon became a common feature of Bull cartoons and in itself another British symbol.

Leech's younger colleague, Sir John Tenniel, is best known today as the artist responsible for the illustrations in Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He was also the first cartoonist to receive a knighthood. 

Punch cartoons portray John Bull as a calmer, more thoughtful fellow than the Bull of the Georgian era. He exudes the  "common sense" of the day. Georgian John Bull had generally reflected hard Tory views. Punch's Bull, like the magazine itself, was basically liberal and reformist at home. 

Like Uncle Sam, Victorian John Bull remained firmly patriotic. As the empire expanded, he became increasingly imperialistic in outlook. He also reflected the ethnic prejudices and racialist views of the day. 

An example is "Moonshine" (1883) by J. Proctor. John Bull, with suitably subservient Scots and Welsh supporters, confronts simianized and violent-looking Irish "poll watchers" pressuring people to vote for Irish Home Rule, or autonomy.

Cartoons of Bull did not portray all the Irish as primitive, ape-like creatures. They showed the "loyal" Irish as hearty, clean cut specimens of "Anglo-Saxon" humanity. We can see this in Tenniel's "A Hint to the Loyal Irish"(1868). Bull is wearing a police uniform. He is recruiting special constables to combat the radical Fenians, who had resorted to terrorist acts, including bombings. 

The man facing policeman Bull asks him to "give us the oath (of allegiance to the UK) and some of them sticks. There's hundreds of the boys is ready to help ye Sor." 

Bull was a cheerleader for imperialism in the late Victorian period. Tenniel's "Never Say Die" (1900) shows Bull countering defeatist sentiments by pointing at a poster announcing recent reverses in the Boer War in South Africa. The "reverses" are in fact recent British successes. 

During World War I, Bull became a recruiter for the British military, pressuring young men to "do their bit for God and Country." He now sported a Union Jack vest to buttress his patriotic credentials. 

In 1906, Tory MP Horatio Bottomley revived the John Bull magazine as an unashamedly nationalistic tabloid. After a few difficult years, it became highly profitable. During the First World War, Bottomley's journal denounced the "Germ-Huns" and attacked British residents with German-sounding surnames as potential subversives. By the autumn of 1914, the magazine claimed to have "the largest circulation of any weekly journal in the world."

The enormous carnage of World War I tarnished John Bull's image. As the bodies piled up in their millions, many people rejected the idea that Bull represented the common Briton. Rather, they viewed him as a recruiter of cannon fodder for an establishment responsible for the slaughter. 

In 1937, W.H. Auden wrote in a poem that Bull "passed away at Ypres and Passchendaele," the names of bloody battles on the Western Front. Not quite. But Bull's popularity as a symbol of Englishness or Britishness began to fade. 

In the following decades, Britain gradually became less imperialistic, less boastful, more focused on a peaceful domestic existence. The 1960s, with its youth culture and rebellious anti-imperialistic, anti-war outlook, sent Bull to the dustbin of history. The last John Bull magazine closed down in 1964. 

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Grave Robbing and Murder in Georgian Britain

 Astley Cooper (1768-1841) was one of the most innovative surgeons and anatomists of the early nineteenth century. He pioneered several significant operations and added much to knowledge of the body and pathology. There is a darker side to his story, however, one which reveals much about the relationships between power and poverty.

Cooper, who hailed from Norfolk, had an amazing ability to secure bodies for dissection, for himself and his medical pupils. He once bragged before a parliamentary inquiry into the body snatching trade that he could get anyone's body to dissect if he wanted it badly enough. 

Cooper' main providers were known as resurrectionists, or sack 'em up men. They could earn good money stealing corpses from graves or securing them otherwise before burial. (Image: "The Resurrectionists," c.1775, by Thomas Rowlandson).

In some cases, we don't know how many, the body snatchers didn't wait until the subjects were dead. The most famous murdering body snatchers were Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, who gave us the word "burking" for the procedure. (Image: Burke and Hare smothering a victim -- one of 16 people they murdered).

Less well known than Burke and Hare are the trio of Bishop, Williams, and May. They are known as the "London Burkers." Their operation was uncovered in 1831 after the notorious case of the so-called Italian Boy. The number of their victims is unknown. Bishop and Williams were hung, May died on board a prison ship awaiting transport to Australia. (Image: the London burkers in the dock at their trial)

Several other burkers were executed, and it is likely others were never caught. Cooper got most of his bodies from an organization known as the Borough Gang. They operated out of Southwark, near Guy's and St. Thomas's Hospitals, where Cooper was a surgeon and anatomist. If you have visited Borough Market, you have been in their heartland. 

Some of the Borough Gang members were or had been hospital porters, dissection room assistants, grave diggers, workhouse officers, and church sextons. Their jobs and experience made them useful to the task of acquiring fresh "subjects." 

Snatched bodies could of persons recently buried. In some cases, the corpses were stolen before burial, from poorhouses, graveyard watch houses, morgues, or houses. Watch houses were created to prevent body snatching from the ground, but the watchmen sometimes looked the other way for a fee. 

(Images: Rotherhithe Watch House, next to the burial ground of St. Mary's Rotherhithe, 1824, and historical plaque. This is likely to have been one of the places the Borough Gang got bodies from due to its proximity to Guy's and St. Thomas's Hospitals)

 

Body snatching was not even a crime until 1778. It then became a misdemeanor punishable by a fine and at most a few months in prison. It seems odd that a society that hanged people for petty theft would punish corpse stealing so lightly. But the main focus of the Georgian criminal law was to protect property. A dead body was not considered to be property. (Image: Resurrectionists, by Phiz, 1841)

The illegal source of Cooper's "dissection material" did not much hurt his reputation. His income rose to princely sums. He even operated on a king, removing a sebaceous cyst from the head of George IV in 1820. His Majesty rewarded the surgeon with the baronetcy that made him Sir Astley Cooper, Bart.

The Burke and Hare and Italian Boy scandals did lead to a law that gradually put the resurrectionists out of business. In 1832, Parliament passed the Anatomy Act, which permitted the anatomy schools to acquire the bodies of paupers who died in a workhouse if no one claimed them within three days.

The law infuriated the working classes, those most likely to end their days in a workhouse. The fury increased after Parliament added the Poor Law Act of 1834, which made admission to the workhouse a requirement for receiving poor relief (welfare). 

The New Poor Law was designed to make the workhouse environment as unpleasant as possible, to discourage requests for public assistance. Families were broken up, recipients forced to wear uniforms and fed a spare diet. The poor saw themselves as being criminalized. Previously, the only bodies that could be legally dissected were those executed for murder. (Images: Women and men paupers separated in Victorian workhouses)

Curiously, the Wikipedia article on Sir Astley Cooper does not even mention body snatching.

Further Reading: 

Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830s London

Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute

Druin Burch,  Digging up the Dead 

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