Shortlisted, Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical
WritingOn a frigid February evening in 1805, Amos Babcock brutally
murdered Mercy Hall. Believing that he was being instructed by God,
Babcock stabbed and disembowelled his own sister, before dumping
her lifeless body in a rural New Brunswick snowbank. The Ballad of
Jacob Peck is the tragic and fascinating story of how isolation,
duplicity, and religious mania turned impoverished, hard-working
people violent, leading to a murder and an execution. Babcock was
hanged for the murder of his sister, but in her meticulously
researched book, Debra Komar shows that itinerant preacher Jacob
Peck should have swung right beside him. The mystery lies not in
the whodunit, but rather in a lingering question: should Jacob
Peck, whose incendiary sermons directly contributed to the killing,
have been charged with the murder of Mercy Hall? In this epic saga,
media accounts of what happened in the aftermath of the murder have
taken on a life all their own, one built of half-truths,
conjecture, and narrative devices designed to titillate, if not
inform. A forensic investigation of a crime from the Canadian
frontier, the tale of Jacob Peck, Amos Babcock, and Mercy Hall
remains as controversial and riveting today as it was more than two
hundred years ago.
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