The Somers Affair was an incident on board the American brig USS Somers while on a training mission in 1842 under Captain Alexander Slidell Mackenzie (1803-1848). Midshipman Philip Spencer (1823-1842) was accused of plotting a mutiny that would kill those who opposed him and then use the Somers as a very fast, well-armed pirate ship. Spencer was arrested and executed, along with two other alleged co-conspirators, Samuel Cromwell and Elisha Small, when the Somers was thirteen days away from shore. The three were hanged without a court-martial following a hastily assembled shipboard meeting. The ship then returned to New York. An inquiry and a court martial both cleared Mackenzie. There was enormous public attention, most of it unfavourable to Mackenzie.[1][2]
The case is particularly notable since Philip Spencer was the son of Secretary of War John C. Spencer.
This Lithograph, published circa 1843, shows the mutineers hanging under the US flag.
^Samuel Eliot Morison, "Old Bruin": Commodore Matthew C. Perry, 1794-1858 (1967) pp 144-62.
^Buckner Melton, A Hanging Offense: The Strange Affair of the Warship Somers (2007) p 261.
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