Henry Tufts

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Henry Tufts was an infamous 18th century thief who committed thefts and numerous escapes from prisons throughout New England and Canada. What we know about his life and crimes comes from his 1807 autobiography A Narrative of the Life, Adventures, Travels and Sufferings of Henry Tufts, Now Residing at Lemington, in the District of Maine. In Substance as Compiled from his own Mouth.

Neal Keating’s 1993 reprint of Tufts’ autobiography summarizes Tufts as a “…horse thief, bigamist, burglar, adulterer, con man, scoundrel, counterfeiter, (military) deserter and common criminal.”

Tufts was born in Newmarket,_New_Hampshire, in June of 1748 to a tailor and his wife. Tufts would grow up in the nearby town of Lee,_New_Hampshire, where he would first exhibit his “natural propensity to theft.”

Tufts began his criminal activities at the age of 14 with thefts of “apples, pears, cucumbers, and other fruits of the earth,” and then graduating to “a paper money bill” of a neighbor. He soon went on to stealing horses (which he disguised by coloring them) including the theft and subsequent selling of his father’s horse. The autobiography goes on to list countless thefts of everything from silver spoons to livestock and clothes. He stole from houses, barns, and stores. He usually sold the stolen objects in neighboring towns.

He would marry a Lydia Bickford around the age of 22--but would later marry other women without divorcing Lydia.

Tufts was first imprisoned in 1770, where he attempted his first of many escapes by using the cell’s heating fire to burn through a wooden wall of the jail.

Many of his lifelong history of escapes from various jails were due to small tools concealed on his person or visits from friends who gave him saws and such to cut through jail cell bars. Not even his fellow prisoners were safe from his sociopathic ways: once he and a fellow prisoner “stripped off all our clothes, turn(ed) them inside out, and (flung) them out” of the small hole Tufts had made in the jail wall. Tufts exited first and, before waiting for his accomplice to follow, “gathered up (his) apparel, which I expected in all likelihood to need…and sped away.”

Tufts spent several years among a Native American tribe and learned their natural medicines, which he would use throughout his later years to act as a healer to supplement the income he was making as a thief.

When imprisoned, Tufts often saw himself as the unfair victim, once commenting on his time in a jail as “in the shocking circumstances…described, I continued for upwards of three months, without aid or assistance from either friend or foe, or so much as the expectation of relief – no eye had pity on me!”

Ultimately his string of thefts led him to be captured and sentenced to death. His sentence was later changed to life in prison (from which he escaped), but not before seeing his own grave being dug.

His last minute escape from the scaffold seemed to cause Tufts (now “between fifty and sixty years of age) to “(shake) off my old tricks and corrupt habits.” He went to live with his children and his first wife in Lemington, Maine. He lived by “dealing out medicine and cultivating a small farm.” He seemed to live a transgression-free life (with the exception of one episode of an dalliance with an 18-year-old woman he was healing who later turned the tables on Tufts and cheated on him, which outraged a hypocritical Tufts’ sense of right and wrong).

He ends his autobiography with a brief chapter titled Advice to the Young where he proclaims his final years as “guilty of few or no misdemeanors” and urges his young readers to “avoid those quicksands of vice on which I have been so often wrecked.” He closes with “…a hope…that others will overlook the injuries they have sustained in the loss of property, or otherwise, through my means” and asking that “Heaven grant I may do no more wickedly.”

Ultimately, while an entertaining book, it is difficult to tell how much of Tufts’ autobiography is completely true. In his foreword to a 1993 reprint of the book, Keating points out that “Henry Tufts’ favorite scheme was lying…(and) in his autobiography he lies.…”