Broadsides.
[Cox, Susanna]. A Collection of Broadsides. Ca. 1809-10.
A New Dirge, Containing the History of Susanna Cox. Who was executed at Reading, Berks Co., PA., for the murder of her own infant child. Translated by Louis Storck, the celebrated author of “Sketches of Nature,” “Address to the Great German Nation,” etc.
9.5 x 7 inches, the top half of a leaf; printed in black; vertical crease; worn; one chip; affixed to a linen backing.
Together with:
Ein Neues Trauer-Lied…Susanna Cox…
9.5 x 8 inches, the bottom half of a leaf; vertical crease; printed in black; worn; one chip; affixed to a linen backing.
Boxed together with:
Ein Neues Trauer-Lied…Susanna Cox…
7 ¼ x 16 ¼ inches; printed in black; foxed and dampstained; light edgewear.
Boxed together with:
Ein Neues Trauer-Lied…Susanna Cox…
7 ½ x 16 ¼ inches; printed in black; several creases; waterstained; edgeworn with a few small chips; affixed to a linen backing.
Boxed together with:
Neues Trauerlied…Susanna Cox…
9 ¼ x 16 ½ inches; printed in black; horizontal crease; foxed; affixed to a linen backing.
Boxed together with:
A New Mournful Song, Containing the History of Susanna Cox. Who was hung in Reading for infanticide, in the year 1809. From the German.
8 ¼ x 11 ¼ inches; printed in black with red trim; cleanly torn nearly completely in half along a crease; foxed.
Several permutations, in English and German, of these dirges to Susanna Cox, the last woman publicly put to death in Pennsylvania—for infanticide, on Gallows Hill, in Reading, 1809. (Only one other woman was executed in Pennsylvania after Cox, two years later, for the same crime.) Very little official documentation about Cox’s crime, trial, and execution survives, but local legend was preserved in these songs. Cox (1785-1808) was born to a couple in the southern Berks of Pennsylvania, and was hired out to the Snyder family at the age of 13. Nearly a dozen years later, she was involved in a clandestine affair with a married man named Mertz, which resulted in her pregnancy. Cox smothered the newborn infant, who was found three days later on the Snyder property by their son-in-law, Jacob Gehr. After the discovery Cox protested that the baby had been still-born—though the unreported knowledge of such a death was an equally capital offense—but eventually confessed her crime. Cox remained utterly uneducated until her death (and only received religious instruction after her arrest), but had three attorneys present her defense on April 7, before Judge John Spayd: Frederick Smith, who later became a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice; Mark John Biddle, who would later lead the Reading militia in the War of 1812; and Charles Evans, who would go on to found a Reading cemetery. After a one-day trial and a subsequent lost appeal before Governor Simon Snyder, the death sentence was passed.
After the hanging, a broadside printing Cox’s confession in both English and German was sold throughout the city; that document is virtually non-existent. Johann Gombert’s German poem, “The Sorrow Song of Susanna Cox,” was offered in broadside form soon after, as was its English translation, “The New Mournful Song of Susanna Cox.” (Though one source claims the German poem contained 38 verses, the fact that three of ours prints 32 verses, and one prints 31, makes this seem unlikely.) Almost 150 years later, a new English translation, The Mournful Ballad of Susanna Cox, appeared in The Eagle (August 18, 1942).
The first two leaves described here—clearly the top and bottom halves of the same leaf—print a German original, Ein Neues Trauer-Lied, and its English translation by Louis Storck, A New Dirge. The two German pieces that follow, also titled Ein Neues Trauer-Lied, are textually identical to one another, and differ from the first version only in occasional punctuation. (The first of these two, though foxed and dampstained, is in remarkable condition:
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