“There is the gallows, and I shall soon know, dear sir, more than you.”

In October 1773, on the eve of the American Revolution, a young man named Levi Ames was led to the gallows at Gallows Bay in Boston, Massachusetts. Convicted of burglary, Ames faced public execution before a vast crowd (nearly half the population of the city). Yet what might have been remembered only as a spectacle of justice became instead a testimony to the power of the gospel.

An Account of the Execution of Levi Ames gathers together the remarkable eyewitness record of Samuel Stillman, the Baptist pastor who ministered to Ames from his imprisonment through his final moments. Stillman walked with him from the prison cell to the scaffold, hearing his confessions, guiding him to Christ, and standing beside him as he faced death with a trembling yet sincere hope in the mercy of God.

This volume includes Stillman’s narrative of Ames’s conversion and execution, two sermons preached in response to the events, an additional account of Stillman’s ministry by Samuel Mather, and the final speech of Levi Ames himself. Together, these documents provide a rare window into eighteenth-century pastoral care, public execution, and evangelical preaching, all centred on the sufficiency of Christ’s atoning blood for the chief of sinners.

Sober, moving, and deeply gospel-focused, this work reminds readers that no life is beyond the reach of grace, and no hour too late for repentance.