Yesterday I responded to novelist Laurie Halse Anderson’s
question about whether John Adams actually wrote about 1777 as
“the year of the hangman.” I quoted Adams’s words from over a
decade later indicating that unspecified, untraceable “Tories”
had said that 1777 “had three gallowses in it, meaning the three
sevens.” However, Adams didn’t write “the year of the hangman,”
and neither did anyone else I can find in the 1770s. The label
doesn’t appear the Archive of Americana database of period
newspapers and pamphlets. Nor is it in the Adams family letters,
the George Washington Papers, and the other digital databases I
usually check for period usage. In fact, the earliest use of
that phrase for 1777 that I found through Google Books is Lynn
Montross’s The Reluctant Rebels: The Story of the Continental
Congress, 1774-1789, published in 1950. That book includes a
chapter titled “Year of the Hangman,” and at one point says, “It
was the year of the hangman, and the gallows jokes exchanged in
the State House were n