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302 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

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2) In the first eighteen. years in the life of the Colony, Bill-
ington was the only one to die at the hands of the executioner. But
in 1638 another case of willful murdef was uncovered—"a matter
of much sadness to them.”?** Arthur Peach, ‘“‘a fustie and a despar-
ate yonge man,” the “ring leader,” and two runaway servants (a
third had escaped capture) died on the gallows for the robbery
and murder of an Indian youth of the “Narigansett” tribe who was
returning from the Bay Colony carrying cloth and beads he had
acquired there in a trade. Should three white men forfeit their
lives for the murder of one Indian? “Some of the rude & ignorante
sorte” among the English, Bradford reported, raised the question
whether “any English should be put to death for the Indeans.”
But English justice triumphed. If it had not, there was some con-
cern that the murder would be speedily avenged and “it would
raise a warr.”’ The authorities saw to it that some of the “Narigan-
sett’ Indians were present at the hanging, “which gave them & all
the countrie good satisfaction. . . .”

3) Not for another ten years did the hangman again respond
to an order of the court. In 1648, Alice Bishope, a married woman
and the only woman executed in Plymouth Colony according to
the official records, ended her life “for felonious murther by her
commited, uppon Martha Clark, her owne child, the frute of her
owne body.’’?*° ;

4) No other executions were reported until the provocations
of King Philip’s War in 1675. In that year the court ordered the
execution of three Indians—two by hanging, one by shooting—for
the murder of another Indian who had been friendly to the Eng-
lish and had given them timely warning of the sinister plans of
that Indian Chief.'3* That the Indian people might observe more
closely the administration of English criminal justice “it was judged
very expedient by the Court” to give them a share in the deliber-
ations of the jury. The record states:

... together with this English jury ... some of the most indifferentest.
gravest, and sage Indians [were] admitted to be with the said jury.
and to healp to consult and advice .. . these fully concurred with the
jury fof 12 Englishmen] in theire verdict.

5) In the following year three Indians were hanged for the
“horred murder” of an English woman. It was discovered that one

“They Shall Surely Be Put to Death” 3 303
né on: : fama

Ein the “‘crewill villanie,”

had aided in yié By found “worthy to die,
and so received th ich was, that his head
should be st re ; as immediately accord-

e tisual, method of legal execution—

Although, hanging, wasith |
as it was in England andthe Bay, Calony at that time—we note
this one reported case ofsbeheading;—presimably a more “‘honor-
_, able” death-—and one incidence of deathiby shooting., Pe
3 The records reveal only one execution for a sex offense, that
of Thomas Graunger in 1642 for “buggery.” He was “servant to
an honest man of Duxbery, being about,16 or 17, yearsyof age.”
Bradford tells us that it was ‘“‘a very sade spectakle”’yand,one that
he was reluctant to report. “Horrible it is to mention, byg the truth
of the historie requires it... . first the mare, and then he cowe,
and the rest of the lesser catle, were kild before his. face, accord-
ing to the law, Levit: 20.15. and he him selfe was executed.”2*
That there were no ptheg.executions for this crimepor for any
, ber of trials for these

~ F if

be severly whipt att the post and sent out of country.'%°

Who should hang for his crimes, and who should be spared?
was the dismal question facing the first session of the General Court
of the Province government meeting in Boston in June 1692. But
the legislators were not alone in this decision. The King’s Privy
Council, according to the terms of the Charter, had a veto power
over all laws of the Province, which were to be sent to London

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IN THIS ISSUE

The Devil in Salem By Peggy Robbins 4

Drug Addiction: “The Army Disease”’ By Byron Stinson 10
Houston’s Republic By Lowell! Harrison 18
Elmer Ellsworth: “The Greatest Little Man...” By Richard K. Patterson

Suicide Fight By Robert M. Utley | 41

DEPARTMENTS

What’s Coming in AHI 43

VOLUME VI, NUMBER 8

DECEMBER,

Book Reviews

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OUR COVER: “Home for Christmas — 1784” by the noted historical painter
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ebrated
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Hysteria or demonic possession? Whatever the case, Salem,

Massachusetts endured in 1692 a gothic nightmare of fear that saw

over 200 convicted of witchcraft, and sent twenty poor souls

to meet their master, in Heaven or Hell.

t is difficult for the modern mind to understand

how the barbaric Massachusetts witch hunts of the
late 17th century could have occurred in America,
and it is easy to suppose that the shocking accounts of
citizens sent to the gallows for the practice of witch-
craft have been exaggerated in their telling and re-
telling. But records reveal, with facts all too plain,
that in Salem Village and its vicinity in 1692, alone,
170 “witches” were imprisoned, and twenty of them
were put to death, nineteen on the gallows and one by

being pressed under heavy weights until dead.

The Salem witch trials became the most celebrated
of all witch hunts even though the number of people
who suffered during the Salem hysteria was small in
comparison with the thousands who were persecuted
in Europe in such outbreaks during the late Middle
Ages.

The Massachusetts Bay Colony, from its first settle-
ment, was a likely place for belief in witchcraft as the
means by which Satan, through the use of human

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New England in the
17th century was a re-
ligious community of
fanatically rigid Calvin-
ists. ‘The unknown was
categorized as evil and
the Devil’s power was
reckoned to be as strong
as God’s. Massachusetts
Bay settlers were largely
Puritans who considered
the Devil their particu-
lar, personal enemy;
since their religion was
the true one, it was the
one Satan was most anx-
ious to destroy. Doctors,
judges, schoolmasters,
and particularly min-
isters, as well as the less
learned among the Puri-
tans, were strong be-
lievers in witchcraft.
Even the most minor
occurence was attributed .
to witchery: if a farmer’s
cow failed to give milk,
or his horse went lame,
or his well dried up, it
was a witch’s doing; if a
housewife couldn’t get
the butter to come, a
witch was controlling
the churning; if a horse’s
mane was found tangled,
it had been knotted by a
witch who had used it as
a stirrup to mount for a
stolen ride to a witches’

Arresting a witch. Engraving from the painting by Howard Pyle
originally published in “Harper’s Magazine” for July I, 1883.

beings, carried on his war against Heaven. The Eng-
land from which the colonists emigrated had wit-
nessed, during the decade prior to the 1620 landing
at Plymouth, the trial of the Lancashire witches, with
ten of the accused sent to the gallows. James I, King
of England from 1603 to 1625, had written for the
enlightenment of his subjects a treatise on witchcraft
called Demonologie which served to increase the gen-
eral fear of witches. Typical of the “investigations”
James I reported was one having to do with the cause
of tempests which beset his bride on her voyage from
Denmark; he found that several hundred witches had
taken to sea in a sieve from Leith and caused the storms.

Sabbath (a gathering at
which witches got instructions from their master,
the Devil). The Puritan culture, with its strict, tedi-
ous, repressed way of life, in which even Christmas
and Mardi Gras were labeled “pagan festivities” and
fiercely forbidden, lent itself to the stimulating, un-
restrained belief in witchcraft and monotony-breaking
witch hunts.

The first recorded American witch hanging was in
Boston in 1648. Little is known of the circumstances.
In 1656, a quarrelsome Boston widow named Anne

' Hibbins who was “possessed of preternatural knowl-

edge” was executed as a witch. In 1663, in Hartford,
Connecticut, Rebecca Greensmith, who “confessed
that she had familiarity with the Devil, which had
frequent use of her body,” and her husband Nathan-

300 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

State or Commonwealth either of England or these Colonies.”
Their court records show no executions for this crime.

2) “Wilfull Murder.” A number of murder trials enlivened
the scene, but most of them ended in acquittals. We shall report
below the few that demanded the extreme penalty.

3) “Solemn Compaction or conversing with the divell by
way of witchcraft, conjuration or the like.” Witchcraft was a uni-
versal crime at that time, although no one in Plymouth raised any
great hue and cry over the Devil and his disciples. A few were ac-
cused: one was tried and acquitted, but no one was executed. Ply-
mouth seemed to have escaped the panic that struck at Danvers
Village and Salem in 1692. (See Chapter 14.) :

4) “Wilfull & purposed burning of ships [or] howses.” A few
were accused of arson, none executed. Cees :

5) “Sodomy, rapes, buggery.” Trials for these sex crimes
were occasionally noted but there was only one recorded execu-
tion.

In contrast to the Bay Colony, the Plymouth fathers refused
to make adultery a capital offense. There seemed to have been
some sentiment in favor of the extreme penalty, for “adultery”
appeared on the original list, but the record was evidently changed
to read: “Adultery to be punished” and in later years to: “Adul-
tery shalbee severly punished.”’?" It thus remained a serious but
non-capital offense.

These same capital crimes were repeated in the 1658 and the
1671 revisions as written in the Book of Laws, without substantial
changes. However, beginning in 1671, a few additional laws were
enacted carrying a possible death penalty. For example, a) during
and after King Philip’s War, it was deemed necessary to make the
selling of arms or ammunition to the Indians punishable by death.
for, under certain circumstances, such acts amounted practically
to treason.!28 b) Burglary and robbery on the highway were made
capital crimes on third conviction, but the court was given the
right to order, in lieu of death, that the offender be “otherwise
grievously punished.”!”° c) Piracy on the high seas became a capital
offense in 1684.1%°

These crimes, then, the Plymotheans considered most serious
and “worthy of death.” In the later years of its existence, Plymout!
Colony may have added to the list—the records are not clear 0!

“T hey Shall Surely Be Put to Death” 301

the only crimes that actually led to an execution
ecords, supplemented by

leven men and one women
ef = %

this point—but

“side of the Oj lony
y +x since he, hj and two
little sons § | the Mayflowerga qmaverick § e start in
the company OF the® 5”. “I know # or Brad-
ford, “by what freinds{he ifledii aeany, for
his was “one of the profanest families: the ship
Jay at anchor in Cape Cod harbe

‘original’ patent for Ply
prompted ‘the leaders to ¢

filed an order
.” Bradford

on in 1625: “Billing-
atens to arrest you, I know not
will live and die.’’?**
t against Billington in 1630 was
with whom he had had a quarrel
rof he dyed.” There was no ques-
ding him “guilty of wilfull murder,
Or10US EVIG ge.’ There was, however, a serious
. As the Plymouth Colony had been planted without
a charter, did it have the right to take a person’s life? A feeling of
anxiety spread among the little group of civil and religious leaders.
They turned to the Bay Colony for advice. They consulted Gov-
ernor Winthrop and others—‘‘the ablest gentle-men in the Bay
Colony,” asking whether Billington “ought to dye, and the land
to be purged from blood,” as the word of God had commanded.”
An affirmative answer from Boston finally brought Billington to an
ignominious end on the gallows.

298 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

ing them what Cotton Mather had prompted him to say, but speak-
ing with evident sincerity:

I pray GOD that I may be a Warning to you all, and that I may be
the last that ever shall suffer after this manner. In the fear of GOD I
warn you to have a Care of the Sin of Drunkenness, for that’s a Sin
that leads to all manner of Sins and Wickedness: (Mind and have a
Care of breaking the Sixth Commandment, where it is said, Thou
shalt do no Murder.) For when a Man is in drink, he is ready to com-
mit all manner of Sin, till he fill up the Cup of the Wrath of GOD,
as I have done, by committing that Sin of Murder. I beg of GOD, as
I am a Dying Man, and to appear before the LORD within a few
Minutes, that you may,take notice of what I say to you: Have a Care
of Drunkenness and ill Company, and mind all good Instruction,
and don’t turn your back upon the Word of GOD, as I have done.
When I have been at a Meeting, I have gone out of the Meeting-
House to commit sin, and to please the Lust of my flesh: and don’t
make a mock at any poor Object of Pity, but bless GOD, that he hath
not left you, as he hath justly done me, to commit that horrid Sin of
Murder. ...”

The final scene, described by eyewitness Dunton:

After he had been about an hour at thé Gallows, and had prayed
again, his Cap was pulled over his Eyes, and then having said, “O
Lord, Receive my Spirit; I come unto thee, O Lord; I come, I come,
I come”; he was Turned off, and the multitude by degrees dispers’d.
I think, during this Mournful Scene, I never saw more serious nor
greater Compassion.

The older Colony to the south of Boston, far less populous
and accustomed to a more rural existence than the Bay Colony.
was not so often bothered by serious crimes, although it had its
share of violations of the sex code and of drunkenness. The Pilgrim
leaders were probably as profoundly religious as the men of Boston.
They were as firm in their belief that “God gave. ..right Judg-
ments and true lawes’’ to the Israelites,?> yet they did not adopt
those laws with the same literalness.

When they first posted in Plymouth the capital crimes con
tained in the 1636 edition of the laws (some five years before the
draft of the Body of Liberties was submitted to the people in the
Bay Colony), they grouped them thus:1*°

1) “Treason or Rebellion against the person of the Kins

Jc pee:

Portrait of Cotton Mather. Courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum.

294 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

ment from 1630-1692 condemned to death and executed at least
twenty-three persons for witchcraft (but nineteen of these afier
the revocation of the Bay Colony charter); eleven for murder (ex-
clusive of those killed for acts relating directly to King Philip's
war); two for bestiality; two for adultery; four for rape; two for
arson: four for defying orders of banishment (Quakers); five to
six (?) for piracy; and two for treason. The total of 56 or 57 here
listed must be considered a minimum figure, considering the frag-
mentary nature of some of the official documents.*””

A firm belief in the deterrent effect on all who witnessed the
agonies of a human being dangling from a noose prompted the
authorities to set up the gallows in a conspicuous place. Although
under Hebrew law the most common form of execution prescribed
was stoning to death—also in public—the Puritans did not follow
this practice. They did not wish to believe God had prescribed any
one method in commanding that men and women convicted of cer-
tain crimes be “surely put to death.” At any rate, they preferred the
practice they were familiar with in England—a hanging by the neck.
Timely publication of the event brought people from miles around
to make a morbid holiday out of the final act in this drama of justice.
Who knows but what this spectacle served to stay the hand of the
young would-be burglar, robber, or pirate?’

Hanging was almost the exclusive method of execution. Judge
Sewall notes that eight Indians were shot to death in Boston, but
this incident occurred in 1676 at the conclusion of the war with the
Indians and was, probably, a military execution.!2! The only other
exception to the use of the noose in carrying out an official execu-
tion was the beheading of an Indian (see p. 302).

For some years certain historians maintained that two people
were burned to death in Boston for arson. This statement, which
has now been discredited, arose probably from ambiguity in the
court record, but such an event as a burning to death would have
been so striking, so shocking, and so out of keeping with current
practice that it would surely have been commented upon by con-
temporary writers—which was not the case. The court record con-
demning to death Maria, a Negress, in 1681, for arson stated that
she be taken “to the place of Execution & there be burnt” but the
record in the case of the Negro servant, Jack, to be executed for
arson on the same day, stated that he ‘‘be hanged by the neck till

“They Shall Surely Be Put to Death” 298

he be dead & then taken doune & burnt to Ashes in the fier with
Maria, negro.” An assumption that both bodies were to be burned
after hanging seems more reasonable but no definitive statement
can be made.!*? ones
No one, according to, Puritan, belief, should be launched into
eternity without time to prepare himself to meet his Maker. Thus
one who killed suddenly, might. be guilty of two sins: depriving
his victim of his right to further earthly existence and condemning
his soul to hell by depriving him,of.a chance to make his peace
with God—if that happened to be necessary. The law had, there-
fore, provided for a period of at least four days between sentence
and execution.’?? During this interval, the reverend elders were
on hand to minister to the condemned and to pray with him.

- “The ministers did not overlook an unexampled opportunity
to drive home a lesson on idleness, debauchery, drunkenness, Sab-
bath breaking, or whatever topic seemed most appropriate to the
occasion. It became the custom to preach one or more “execution
sermons” preceding the hanging in the presence of the condemned
and a large throng of the curious. How could one more forcefully
‘point a moral? Where could one find a more appropriate living ex-
ample of the just rewards of sin than in the poor sinner sitting ab-
jectly before the preacher unable, probably unwilling, to stop the
flow of condemnatory and reproachful words heaped upon his head.
‘Sometimes the condemned himself at the end of the sermon, or just

before he mounted the ladder, would address the crowd in words
of anguish and complete self-abnegation, warning all listeners to
shun his evil example, to heed the word of God, and to obey their
parents.

Few of these sermons have been preserved, but we do have a
vivid report of an eyewitness to the hanging of James Morgan for
murder (see p. 289). John Dunton, a young man who had just
come from London where he was in the bookselling business, was
in Boston in 1686 and attended this grim event which he described
in a long letter he sent back to London as, “a Piece of News, for
there has not (it seems) been seen an Execution here this seven
years. So that some have come 50 miles to see it... .”1°4

The condemned had the unenviable honor of being the sub-
ject of sermons by three distinguished divines: Cotton Mather and
~ his father, Increase Mather, and Joshua M oodey. With an audience,

296 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

Dunton tells us, of almost five thousand, “they went first to the
New Church [the Mathers’ church, the Second Church in Boston,
rebuilt after the fire of 1676}, but the Gallery crack’d, and so they
were forced to remove to Mr. Williard’s [the Third, or Old South
Church]. They were all preach’d with so much. Awfulness, and so
pathetically apply’d to the Poor Condemned Man, that all the Au-
ditory (as well as myself) were very much affected thereat. ...”

The sermons were lengthy (the idea of short sermons was
not known to the Puritans), but a few brief extracts give the flavor.
Rev. Cotton Mather was reported to have said in part:.

... My request unto you is, That you wou’d at this hour think of an
Interest in Christ—Surely when the Executioner is laying the Cold
Cloth of Death over your Eyes, the Look, with the Shriek of your
Soul, will then say, “O now a Thousand Worlds for an Interest in
Jesus Christ!” Surely a few minutes after that, when your naked Soul
shall appear before the Judgment-Seat of the Most High, you will
again say, an Interest in Jesus Christ, is worth whole Mountains of
Massive Gold!

... The sharp Ax of Civil Justice will speedily cut you down; O
for a little good Fruit before the Blow! Manifest your penitence for
your Iniquities by a due care to excel in Tempers quite contrary to
those ill habits and Customs whereby you have heretofore blas-
phemed the Worthy Name of Christ and Christianity: Especially em-
ploy the last minutes of your Life, in giving a Zealous Warning unto
others, to take heed of those things which have been destructive unto
you. Tell them what wild Gourds of Death they are, by which you
have got your Bane; point out before them those Paths of the De-
stroyer which have led you down So near unto the Congregation of

the Dead. ...
The Rev. Joshua Moodey is reported to have said:

_.. You seem to bewail your Sin of Sabbath-breaking: Well, know
that you shall never have another Sabbath to break.—The Lord help
you to keep this as you ought.—It is a very awful thing to us to look
on you, a Person in your Youth, Health, and Strength, Brests full of
Milk, and Bones moistened with Marrow, and then to think that
within so many Days, this Man, tho’ in his full strength, must Dye:
And methinks it shou’d be much more awful to you.—Consider, You
have no time to get Sin pardoned, and Wrath turn’d away, (if it be
not done already) but between this and Death, into the very Borders,
and under the Sentence of which, you now are. In the Grave there is

“They Shall Surely Be Put to Death” 297

no Repentance, no Remission, Eccles. 9:10. Before four Days more
pass over your head, (and O how swiftly do they fly away!) you will

__ be entered into an Eternal and Unchangeable state, of Weal or Wo;
~ and of wo it will be, if speedy, thorough Repentance prevent it aot
But yet know, That notwithstanding all that has been spoken

_ there is yet hope in Israel contértiing'this thing. There is a way found

- out, and revealed by GOD for«the: Turtiing of his Anger even from

forgiven. ... i oo

3 Cotton’s father, Increase, standi
about a mile out of Boston, just before the hangman was called to

3 do his duty, made Morgan’s sins clear to him—as if that were neces-
“sary at that hour: | :

s. Consider what a Sinner you have been; The Sin which you are to
dye for, is as red as Scarlet; and many other Sins has your wicked
Life been filled with. You have been a stranger to me; I never saw
you; I never heard of you, until you had committed the Murder, for
which you must dye this Day; but I hear by others that have known
you, how wicked you have been; and you have your self confessed
to the World, That you have been guilty of Drunkenness, guilty of

Cursing and Swearing, guilty of Sabbath-breaking, guilty of Lying
guilty of Secret Uncleanness; as Solomon said to Shimei, ‘Thow know-
est the Wickedness which thine own heart is privy to; so I say to you:
and that which aggravates your guiltiness not a little, is, That since
you have been in Prison you have done Wickedly: You have made
your self drunk several Times since your Imprisonment; yea, and
you have been guilty of Lying since your Condemnation.

Consider what misery you have brought upon your self: on your
Body, that must dye an accursed Death; you must hang between
Heaven and Earth, as it were forsaking of both, and unworthy to be
in either. And what misery have you brought upon your poor Chil-
dren? You have brought an Everlasting Reproach upon them. How
great will their shame be, when it shall be said to them that their
Father was hang’d? Not for his Goodness, as many in the World have
been; but for his Wickedness: Not as a Martyr, but as a Malefactor:
But that which is Ten thousand thousand times worse than all this
is, That you have (without Repentance,) brought undoing Misery
upon your poor, yet precious Soul: Not only Death on your Body,
but a second Death on your never-dying Soul: O tremble at that! ...

After Morgan was on the ladder, he addressed the crowd tell-

1692, other girls, most of them older than Betty and
Abigail, began joining Tituba and her two charges
in the Parris kitchen. The young visitors had no
trouble getting permission from their parents to visit
the parsonage, and, if their elders were aware of the
time they spent with Tituba, it must have been as-
sumed the sessions were concerned with cooking and
housework. Several of the older girls who worked as
servants in Salem Village homes managed to slip by
the parsonage for a few exciting moments while on
errands.

Tituba’s fortune-telling began with palm-reading
and continued with involved, mysterious machina-
tions by which the girls supposedly could divine the
occupations of their future husbands, and the like.
It was later divulged that the two slaves at one point,
to break the spell of an unidentified witch, prepared
a witch cake of rye meal mixed with the children’s
urine, baked it and fed it to a particular dog, the
belief being that the dog was a “familiar,” a messenger
servant assigned to a witch by the Devil. Obviously,
the secret experimentation with magic and supersti-
tion in the Parris kitchen was no light matter. ‘There
is little doubt that it was there, in the parsonage, that
the girls’ inherent Calvinist fears of the unknown
were sparked into a flame, a flame that lit the stage
for the terrible Salem witch hunts.

In February, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams be-
gan to have hysterical fits, behaving very much as the
Goodwin children had four years earlier in Boston.
Soon their friends were similarly affected. Ann Put-
nam, the daughter of the village’s prosperous and
highly respected Sergeant Thomas Putnam, a tense
12-year-old who had been one of the most determined
of the delvers into the occult under Tituba, was the
first to follow Betty and Abigail “into horrible be-
witchment.” There is indication that Ann’s mother
was the one adult who knew of Tituba’s kitchen

Tituba and the children. (Bryant’s “Popular History of U.S.”)

magic; one account claims Mrs. Putnam, a sickly
woman troubled by dreams, sent Ann to Tituba for
dream interpretation. Ann was joined in bewitchment
by Mercy Lewis, the sly, untidy, 19-year-old maid
servant in the Putnam household.

The Reverend Mr. Parris was baffled and distressed
by the affliction of his daughter and niece. When
prayer and fasting failed to help them, he called in
Salem Village’s only doctor, William Griggs. The doc-
tor watched the pair twisting and jerking and listened
to their piercing gobberish; he pronounced sadly,
“The evil hand is upon them,” adding, it being the
work of the Devil, that he was powerless to help them.
Summoned by Sergeant Putnam to see Ann and
Mercy, he repeated the diagnosis: The girls had been
afflicted by witchcraft.

Word of this sped through Salem Village and by
the next day others were having fits: 16-year-old Mary
Walcott, a neighbor of the Parrises; 20-year-old Mary
Warren, maidservant to John and Elizabeth Proctor;
and 17-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard, niece of Mrs.
Griggs, who lived and worked in the doctor’s house- .
hold. Other girls joined the number of afflicted as the
days passed. All evidenced “possession” in the same
general pattern, which included convulsions, contor-
tions, hysterics, barking, periodic blindness, and com-
plaints of being struck, cut, and bitten.

Today, nearly three centuries later, educated opin-
ions are in complete disagreement as to whether these
girls were “caught up in histrionics” and faking symp-
toms of madness or had actually become mentally ill.
One chronicler of the Salem story says that, if Thomas
Putnam and Samuel Parris had just given the girls
in their households sound spankings, the witchcraft
persecutions would never have taken place. Others
insist this view makes the girls far more gifted at
acting than could have possibly been the case; their
behavior was not fraudulent but pathological. It is
well to remember there is great witchcraft power in
a society that believes in witchcraft.

As soon as the girls were pronounced bewitched,
all Salem Village sought to know who the witches
were. Under constant badgering, sick little Betty Parris
sobbed out something about Tituba; the older girls
finally admitted a little about her kitchen magic, and
the first witch had been pinpointed. But the girls were
uneasy that Tituba was being blamed, although the
slave cleverly admitted everything, apparently instinc-
tively aware that confessed witches, for whom there
might be salvation, were seldom hanged. The afflicted
ones cried that Tituba was not alone in practicing
witchcraft and they named two other witches, Sarah
Good and Sarah Osburn. Sarah Good was a shiftless,
dirty, pipe-smoking tramp who wandered with her
ragged children from door to door, begging, and who

was suspected of stealing when turned away. Well-
to-do Sarah Osburn had been considered respectable,
but she was a cross, strange woman, and she had not
been inside Samuel Parris’ church in a year.

Four “yeomen of Salem Village in the County of
Essex,’’ one of whom was Thomas Putnam, appeared
before the local magistrates and swore out warrants
for the arrest of the three accused women on suspicion
of witchcraft. Mrs. Osburn was in bed, ill, when ar-
rested and had to be sup-
ported even to stand. They
were taken to the nearest
prison — there was none in
Salem Village — and there
they were examined for
“witches teats from which
Satan sucks blood” and
“Devil’s marks,” accepted
evidence of guilt. Tituba
was found to have “Devils
scars’ but the examiners
were undecided about the
moles on the other two.
The three were left in leg
chains.

On March I, 1692, a pre-
liminary examination of
the women was made in an
improvised courtroom in
the village church by mag-
istrates Jonathan Corwin
and John Hathorne (great-
great-grandfather of Na-
thaniel, who added a “w’”
to his name), who had
been sent from Salem
‘Town, a much larger com-
munity a few miles from
Salem Village. Neither of
these men had any legal

William testified that he had “been afraid she was a
witch” and had seen “a strange tit or wart’ on her
body. Dorcas Good, Sarah’s 5-year-old daughter, was
encouraged to testify against her; the child declared
that her mother had familiars: “three birds, one black,
one yellow, and these birds hurt children and afflict
people.”

As the questioning of Tituba began, the girls be-
came motionless and quiet, hanging on her every word
— possibly terrified that she
might reveal their part in
the experimentation with
forbidden magic and make
them objects of suspicion.

But Tituba didn’t in-
criminate any of them. She
knew what the people of
Salem Village wanted to
near, anad she told it to
them, picking up and en-
larging upon each sugges-
tion made by her ques-
tioners. Yes, she said, she’d
been bidden by the Devil to
serve him. Goody Osburn
and Goody Good and some
other unidentified women
had hurt the little girls and
Tituba had been made to
hurt them, too, although
she hadn’t wanted to. And
there was an evil man from
Boston, tall and with white
hair, who had a book with
nine witch names in it, but
she could not tell whose
names they were because
she could not read. Tituba
had been made to see red
cats and rats, and huge

dogs and hogs, and to listen
to them talk, and she had

training. Professional law-
yers were generally disre-

Cotton Mather wrote on witchcraft and “wrestled with the
Devil.” He lived to regret his approval of the Salem witch
trails. (Reproduced from “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine”)

been forced to serve them.
She had been to many

garded in the colony and at
no time did attorneys figurein the proceedings nor did
anyone suggest that an accused witch might have the
right of counsel.

With the Reverend Mr. Parris assisting the magis-
trates, the accused were questioned before a throng
that filled every inch of the meeting-house and in-
cluded all the afflicted girls, who were lined up on
the front bench. Both Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn
claimed innocence — Mrs. Good defiantly, Mrs. Os-
burn weakly — but what they tried to say was lost in
the screams and noisy movements of the girls, who
accused them to their faces. Sarah Good’s husband

witches’ Sabbaths, flying through the sky with the
man from Boston, a hog, two cats, and a yellow,
woman-headed dog, the last of which was Goody
Osburn’s familiar. One of Sarah Good’s familiars was
a wolf and Tituba had seen Witch Good set the wolf
on Elizabeth Hubbard.

Apparently enjoying the rapt attention of the crowd,
over whom she was exercising a positive spell, the old
slave confessed for three days. Of the small number
who doubted the truth of her tale, only a few dared
make even mild issue of it — and they were soon sorry.

Continued on page 44

‘ 5
Hi) “
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Mul Ye.
wg ld We —

i Sie

Continued from page 9

There was a general consensus that anyone expressing
skepticism of witchcraft was hiding something and
was a witch himself.

The slave John, during Tituba’s testimony, suc-
cumbed to complete demoniac possession, having
roaring fits before witnesses at Ingersoll’s Inn across
from the meeting-house — thus landing himself in the
category of the victims rather than the guilty.

On March 7, the magistrates sent the three women,
the first lot of history’s “Salem witches,” to Boston to
be imprisoned until their trial. Two months later,

Captain Alden denounced. (Bryant’s “Popular History of U.S.”)

Sarah Osburn died in prison. Sometime during that
period, a tiny baby belonging to Sarah Good also died
in prison; the records do not tell whether it was born
prior to, or during, Mrs. Good’s imprisonment.

The jailing of the three witches did not ease the
girls’ affliction nor lighten their fits. In addition, sev-
eral married women, including Ann Putnam’s mother,
began having hysterical seizures. Led by Ann Putnam
and Abigail Williams, the afflicted cried out periodi-
cally against others of Salem Village: farm woman
Martha Corey, who had laughed at the girls’ antics
as “‘put-ons”; 71-year-old, deeply pious Rebecca Nurse,
whose family had been in a prolonged quarrel with
Samuel Parris over a land boundary; little Dorcas
Good, who, the girls said, had bitten them; Elizabeth
and John Proctor, after John had punished the Proc-
tors’ maidservant, Mary Warren, for crying out against
Rebecca Nurse; Bridget Bishop, who operated a tavern
with a bad reputation; Abigail Hobbs, who “lived
like a gypsy”; 80-year-old Giles Corey, Martha’s hus-
band; the Reverend George Burroughs, a former min-
ister at Salem, who once bested Ann Putnam’s uncle
in a lawsuit; and many others. At each examination
there were witnesses who testified the accused one

iel were hanged; they had been arrested after being
“called out against by a person esteemed pious while
suffering a violent public fit.’’ As the years passed, a
few other accusations of witchcraft in New England
resulted in the hanging of “the Devil’s advocates.”

Then, in 1688, in Boston, the four children of a
sober, pious mason named John Goodwin began hav-
ing strange fits. As the Reverend Cotton Mather, the
highly esteemed young minister of Boston’s Second
Church, later described their symptoms in his Mem-
orable Providences “Sometimes they would be deaf,
sometimes dumb, and sometimes blind, and often all
this at once. One while their tongues would be drawn
down their throats; another while they would be
pulled out upon their chins to prodigious length.
They would have their mouths opened into such .a
wideness that their jaws went out of joint, and anon
they would clap together again with a force like that
of a strong spring-lock. The same would happen to
their shoulder-blades, and their elbows, and hand-
wrists. . . . They would make most piteous outcries
that they were cut with knives, and struck with blows
that they could not bear. . . . Their heads would be
twisted almost around, . . . they would roar exceed-
ingly. Thus they lay some weeks most pitiful spec-
tacles.”

The oldest Goodwin child, a teen-age girl, had had
a quarrel over some laundry with a slovenly, vile-

tongued Irish washerwoman named Glover, and the -

Goodwins’ neighbors began to remember that “the
late husband of Goodwife Glover said she was such
a scandalous old woman she was undoubtedly a witch.”
(“Goodwife,” often shortened to “Goody,” and “Good-
man” were much-used forms of address at this period.)

John Goodwin called in Cotton Mather and three
other clergymen, who held a day of prayer and fasting
in the Goodwin house. It wasn’t the first: time Mather
had “wrestled with the Devil” in “a case of posses-
sion, when Satan had entered a human body and
spoke through it.” In his sermons—he called one
“Discourse on Witchcraft’ — he told of his bouts with
the Devil, often quoting the evil one’s exact words,
and his congregation thought him a very brave man
for personally battling Satan.

After the day with the ministers, the youngest
Goodwin child recovered, but the other three con-
tinued to be “so seized by the Devil they could not
look upon the Bible or the Catechism.” Goodwin
entered a complaint against Mrs. Glover with the
magistrates, and she was arrested and brought to trial
under the law making witchcraft a capital offense.
She “gave a wretched account of herself,’ received
the sentence of death, and was hanged as a witch.

The oldest Goodwin child continued to be “spelled,
bewitched,”’ and Cotton Mather, who was 26 at the

Peggy Robbins is a regular contributor to AHI.
For more on Salem and witchcraft, she suggests:
Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem (New
York, 1969); George Lincoln Burr, ed., Narratives
of the Witchcraft Cases: 1648-1706 (New York,
1914): and Marion Starkey, The Devil in Massa-

*
7

chusetts (New York, 1949).

time, took her into his home so that he might closely
observe her as part of his study of witchcraft. Less
than a year later he published his book on witchcraft
in general and the Goodwin case in particular. It
was a fast best-seller throughout Massachusetts.

At this time there lived in Boston a 36-year-old
merchant, Samuel Parris. Parris had studied theology
at Harvard but, before completing the course, left to
become a trader in the West Indies. Upon returning
to Massachusetts he tried a merchant’s career, but
was not successful in business. In 1689 he decided to
return to the ministry; he was unable, however, to find
an opening in Boston, where the churches wanted
eraduate theologians. Finally, late in 1689, Parris
accepted a call to the little hamlet north of Boston
called Salem Village, which could not afford a regular
minister.

Mr. Parris’ small library, when he moved with his
family from Boston to Salem Village (now Danvers) ,
included a copy of Cotton Mather’s book about witch-
craft, and Puritan children were encouraged to read
everything written by both Cotton and his father,
Increase Mather, the president of Harvard University.
The latter in 1684 had written a book against witch-
craft — against its practice and against permitting it
to go unpunished, not against believing in it. It is
quite probable that Parris’ family, including the
younger members, had witnessed the hanging of Good-
wife Glover in Boston. Puritans didn’t approve of chil-
dren wituessing frivolous activity but sanctioned their
attendance at such “corrective procedures” as hangings.

Preacher Parris’ household in Salem Village in
early 1692 included his withdrawn, meek wife; his
gentle, obedient, 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth, called
Betty, who was subject to sudden weeping spells; his
Il-year-old niece, Abigail Williams, a_ self-satisfied,
restive child bold enough to engage in lusty talk about
the Devil; and two slaves Parris had brought from
Barbados — John, and his consort Tituba, both Carib
Indians.

The aging Tituba was not an enthusiastic worker,
but she liked taking care of the children, and she
spent much of her time in the parsonage kitchen
telling them stories of magic and showing them for-
tune-telling tricks, with both the slave and the children
being careful that the Parrises knew nothing of their
talk. Sometime during the cold, gloomy January of

statement of deep repentance. But he did not stop
there; during his long life, on the anniversary of the
fast day, he did penance. As late as 1720, after reading
a passage in a New England history about the Salem
trials, he wrote in his diary, “The good and gracious
God be pleased to save New England and me and my
family!” With the exception of Nathaniel Saltonstall,
who had early run from the Salem court, Sewall was
the only judge at the trials who admitted error.

Of the afflicted girls, Ann Putnam was the only one
to express remorse for her actions, so far as is known.
In August 1706, Ann, a semi-invalid who was only 26
but who looked much older and had less than ten

The Witch House, Salem, Mass. was built in 1642 and was the
home of Judge Jonathan Corwin. It was here that Judge Corwin
presided over the preliminary examinations of those accused of
witchcraft in 1692. In 1945 the Witch House was purchased by
Historic Salem, Inc., and its restoration was financed by Historic
Salem, Inc. and by the City of Salem. Ownership of the Witch
House was transferred in 1948 to the City of Salem. (Photograph
by Markham W. Sexton)

years of life remaining, “made public confession.”
Head bowed, she stood in the Salem Village church
while the minister read the long confession she had
written. She claimed to have acted “not out of anger,
malice or ill will,” but because of being deluded by
Satan. Her confession ended, “I desire to lie in the
dust and earnestly beg forgiveness of God and from
all those whom I have given just cause of sorrow and
offense, whose relatives were taken away and accused.”

On January 15, 1697, the day after the Massachu-
setts fast day, Cotton Mather wrote in his diary that
he had been “afflicted last night with discouraging
thoughts, as if unavoidable marks of the Divine Dis-
pleasure must overtake my family for my not appear-
ing with vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the
judges when the inextricable storm from the invisible
world assaulted the country... .”” The Puritans had
not reversed their position as to belief in witchcraft;
they had just rejected spectral evidence as a means for
catching witches.

Witch House 1642

restarcd buy

Historic Salem,

was “queer” or “‘practiseth tricks” or the like, and in
each case the girls went into fits. As an example, while
Mrs. Corey was before the magistrates, Abigail Wil-
liams jumped up, pointed to the rafter overhead, and
screamed, ‘Suffer to look! There sits Goody Corey on
the beam suckling a yellow bird betwixt her fingers!’’

In April, Hathorne and Corwin were joined in
conducting the examinations by four additional magis-
trates, including Samuel Sewall of Boston and Thomas
Danforth, the colony’s deputy governor, who served
as presiding magistrate. But this resulted in little
change in the examining procedure.

At the examination of Elizabeth and John Proctor,
Ann Putnam threw herself on the floor and pleaded
pathetically that they be made to stop tormenting her.
Judge Sewall wrote in his diary, after referring to this
scene, ‘’Iwas awful to see how the afflicted persons
were agitated.” Then, later, he added in the margin,
as if remorsefully, ‘‘Alas, alas, alas!”’

The arrest of 70-year-old John Alden, son of Pris-
cilla and John, as Tituba’s “tall man from Boston,”
added to the excitment in Salem. After fifteen weeks
in prison, John Alden managed to escape; he stayed
far away until the witch hysteria subsided.

During May 1692, the witch hunts were extended
to the villages surrounding Salem, and the jails in all
of them grew full. The prisoners, from little Dorcas
Good to the several aged and infirm, were forced to
exist under such conditions that they grew thin and
dirty, with wild, matted hair and sullen eyes — they
looked like witches!

There had been no formal trials because there was
no legally constituted court to try them. But Sir Wil-
liam Phips, the new royal governor, had arrived in
Boston on May 14, and he issued a commission for a
Court of Oyer and Terminer to be held in Salem
Town, appointing the judges on May 27. The seven
judges included Samuel Sewall and three others from
Boston, John Richards, William Sergeant, and Wait
Winthrop; Bartholomew Gedney from Salem; Na-
thaniel Saltonstall from Haverhill; and the new
deputy governor, William Stoughton, the presiding
justice, from Dorchester.

The court opened in the solidly packed courthouse
in Salem Town on the morning of June 2, with Bridget
Bishop the first to face the judges — and the assembled
afflicted girls. Witnesses testified the tavernkeeper,
filthy now in the red dress once considered offensively
flashy, had a “preternatural teat” on her body and
that she had wrought mischief upon her neighbors
even as her “disembodied shape” had tormented the
girls. She was sentenced to be “hanged by the neck
until dead” on the tenth of June, and on that day the
sheriff took her in a cart to Salem’s Gallow’s Hill and

so hanged her.

The procedure in the Bishop trial, as well as future
trials, was little different from the preliminary exam-
inations: in general, convictions were obtained on the
old evidence and the continuing afflictions of the girls.
There was a jury, but the judges, and particularly the
merciless Chief Justice Stoughton, were all-supreme.
Cotton Mather, in his account of the Bishop trial,
said, “There was little occasion to prove the witch-
craft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders.”

A heavily controlling feature in convicting the
“witches” was the fact that the Court of Oyer and
Terminer had decided to accept “spectral evidence,”
testimony that an accused had appeared as a “shape”
or apparition of some sort rather than her recognizable
bodily person, just as had been done in the prelim-
inary examinations. Much of the evidence against all
the accused was spectral evidence.

Before the second session of the court, Judge Salton-
stall, who was troubled about the kind of evidence
being accepted, resigned from the court. Although he
did so quietly, his reason must have been suspected
because some of the afflicted girls promptly claimed
to have been tormented by his “shape,” which acted
mysteriously. Saltonstall hurried to Haverhill, far re-
moved from the witchcraft scene, and stayed there,
but he took to drinking heavily — so heavily that Sam-
uel Sewall, hearing about it, wrote him reprovingly.
His place on the court was filled by Jonathan Corwin,
who had helped hold the first examinations and
voiced no complaint about the acceptance of spectral
evidence.

When the second court session ended on June 30,
all five who had been tried — Sarah Good, Rebecca
Nurse, Susanna Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes
— had been condemned to die on July 19. At the gal-
lows that day, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes told
Sarah Good she would do well to confess because she
knew she was a witch. Her reply was loud enough for
all the crowd on Gallows Hill to hear, “You are a
liar! I am no more a witch than you are a wizard,
and if you take away my life God will give you blood
to drink!” Tradition has it that, many years later,
Noyes choked to death on his own blood.

The third court session, on August 5, again con-
demned all who were tried— John and Elizabeth
Proctor, John Willard, George Jacobs, Martha Carrier,
and George Burroughs — but Elizabeth Proctor, preg-
nant, was given a stay of execution until after the
baby’s birth. The other five made the trip to Gallows
Hill on August 19. Burroughs, speaking from the
scaffold ladder, repeated the Lord’s Prayer, which no
servant of Satan was supposed to be able to do, but
it didn’t save him. /

Cotton Mather, ‘present at the hanging, was having
ever stronger doubts about accepting spectral evidence.

are =
SS

He had earlier written Judge John Richards, “Do not
lay more stress upon pure Spectre evidence than it
will bear —It is very certain that the Devills have
sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only
innocent, but also very vertuous.”

On September 9, the court condemned six witches,
and on September 17, nine more. Of these fifteen,
eight whom preacher Noyes called “‘firebrands of
Hell” were hanged on September 22 — Martha Corey,
Mary Easty, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret
Scott, Wilmot Reed, Samuel Wardwell, and Mary
Parker. One of the others escaped, one was pregnant,
and five confessed in time to be reprieved. Some fifty-
five of those who had confessed earlier, including
Tituba, had not been scheduled for trial but were
still in prison with those protesting innocence.

Giles Corey was also brought before the court on
September 17. When asked how he pleaded, he re-
fused to utter a word. Under law, a man who “stood
mute” could not be tried; he could, however, be sub-
jected to peine forte et dure — tortured. Corey was
taken to a public lot and laid on the ground, and
heavy stones were piled on his chest. With each addi-
tion of more weight, he was coaxed to answer to his
indictment. He moaned, but said not a word. It took
Giles Corey two terrible days to die.

Corey’s dramatic protest against witch hunting,
added to the uneasiness about accepting spectral evi-
dence which had been steadily building, particularly
since the execution of the Reverend Mr. Burroughs,
began to still the witchcraft hysteria. Lady Phips, the
governor’s wife, publicly stated the witchcraft trials
were a disgrace to the colony. Then the girls cried
out against her, and Sir William, furious, called a
halt to the court sessions. On October 29, 1692, he
issued an order dissolving the Special Court of Oyer
and Terminer.

But there was still the problem of the accused who
were in jail and who, by law, had to be tried — some
140; an undetermined number had died in jail. Gov-
ernor Phips appointed another court which began
meeting in Salem in January 1693; it did not admit
spectral evidence and, in a series of trials, found no
one guilty. In May, Sir William, disgusted with the
whole affair, issued a proclamation releasing all ac-
cused witches from jail. His action brought loud pro-
test from some of the Puritan ministers, but it ended
the Salem witch hunts. Twenty had been put to death,
others had died of ill treatment, and many, like little
Dorcas Good, had minds and bodies permanently
injured by their ordeals. The property of all the ac-

<<.
<=

The trial of a witch. The accusing girls are pointing at their

victim and crying out, “There is a flock of yellow birds around

her head!” From the painting by Howard Pyle originally pub-
lished in “Harper’s Magazine” for December 1892.

WONDERS

OF iE

INVISIBLE WORLD:

Cr, The Wonders of the

Mnvtlible Cold,

Displav’d in Five Parts.

Part I. An Account of the Suferings of Margaret Rule, Written b
the Reverend Mr. C, AM. : OE goals

Pp: L baahabes oe to the Author, &e. And his Reply relating

P. IIf, The Differences between the Inhabicants of Salem-Village, and
Mtr. Parris their Minifter, in New-Fngland.

P. IV. Letters of a Gentleman uninterelted, Endeavouring to prove.
the received Opinions about Witchcraft tobe Orthodox. With thort
Effays to their Anfwers.

P. V. A fhort Hiftorical Accour of Matters of Fact in that Affair.

To which is added, A Poft(cript relating to a ‘Book intitled, The
Life of Sr WILLIA PHP S.

Colle&ted by Rebsrt Calef, Merchant, of Bofes in NeweEnglarid.

Licenfed and Entred according to Order.

LONDON:

Printed for Nath. Hillar, at the Princes-Arms, in Leaden-Hall-ftreet,
over againft St. Mary-Ax, and Fofeph Collyer, at the Golden- Bible,

on London-Bridge. 1700. :

Title page of Robert Calef “More Wonders of the Invisible
World” published in London in 1700. (Rare Book Division, The
New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundation.)

cused had been seized at the time of their arrest and
few of the victims were able to recover anything.

Parris, who was held responsible by many for the
Devil’s work in Salem, was ousted from the Salem
Village church; he and his family afterward wandered
from one small parish to another.

In 1696, a document signed by twelve of the men
who had served as jurors in some of the witchcraft
cases was presented to the public. It concluded, “We
do therefore hereby signify to all in general, and to
the surviving sufferers in special, our deep sense of,
and sorrow for, our errors, in acting on such evidence
to the condemning of any person; and do hereby de-
clare that we justly fear that we were sadly deluded
and mistaken... . We do heartily ask forgiveness of
you all... 7

On January 14, 1697, which had been declared a
day of prayer and fasting in repentance of sins in the
whole of Massachusetts Bay, Samuel Sewall publicly
acknowledged personal guilt for his actions as a judge
of the witchcraft trials and asked for the forgiveness
of God and man. He stood before the congregation
of Boston’s ‘Third Church while the minister read his

3 Shem ___Witett CLAS TL

COLONIAL AMERICA

Three hundred years ago the largest witch hunt in American
history gripped Salem, Massachusetts. Before the hysteria finally
subsided, nineteen people were executed and more than a
hundred others convicted of or charged with practicing witchcraft.

‘Under an Evil
an

by Larry Gragg

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Background information on victims of Salem Witchcraft Executions.
DANIEL ALLEN HEARN

October 14th 1988

Mr. M. Watt Espy

Capital Punishment Research Project
PiU. (ROR eee

Headland, AL 36345

Dear Watt:

I recently developed some new tidbits regarding Massachusetts. Wish
to send information along.

V/ First, "Mowenas" and "Moquolas", Indians executed in 1696 at Northampton.
The exact date should read as October 23rd 1696.

Secondly, enclosed is an excerpt from the "Records of the Quarterly
Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts" dated November 1670. There is a
reference to what appears to be a hitherto unknown execution. There is
no name given but it is still a new confirmation. The place of execution
would be Boston. Evidently the man escaped and was captured in Essex
County and the Constable of Salem is noted here as putting in for his fees.
The man may or may not have been the "William Wheeler" noted farther down
the page. At any rate, it is a case for which the actual trial records are
utterly lost.

Lastly, I've been able to develop some personal data on some of the
witches that you might like for your records:

Martha Carrier: Maiden name was Martha Allen. She married Thomas Carrier
: at Billerica on 5-7-1674 after he got her pregnant. Six
children between 1674-1689; three boys and three girls, of
. which five survived her. Her parents were Andrew & Faith
Allen, origional settlers of Andover MA in 1646. Martha

was herself one of six children. She was approximately 45
years old when executed. Her husband died at Colchester CT
on 5-16-1735 aged 109.

Sarah Wildes: ‘Maiden name was Sarah Averill, daughter of William & Abigail
Averill of Ipswich MA. She was one of seven children, all
English-born. Parents arrived at Ipswich in 1637 and were
very poor. In Nov. 1649 Sarah was whipped for committing
fornication. She married John Wildes of Topsfield 11-23-1663
and bore him one son, Ephraim, in addition to his seven
children by a previous marriage. She was 63 years old when
executed. Her husband survived her, remarried, and died on
May 14, 1705. Sarah had 16 grandchildren by her only son.

Wilmet Redd: “ Alias "Mammy Redd", wife of Samuel Redd of Marblehead MA, a
fisherman. She was executed 9-22-1692 and her husband re-
married on Nov. 4th of the same year. He died 3-31-1716.

Margaret Scott:

( ¢

Ann Pudeator:

Rebecca Nurse:

Mary Easty:

Sarah Goode:

Bridget Bishop:

Susanna Martin:

Maiden name was Margaret Stevenson. She was origionally

a bound girl and came to Mass. prior to 1640. Granted man-
umission by Act of Court of Assistants dated 5-28-1642.
Married Benjamin Scott of Cambridge shortly thereafter.
Bore six children; three at Cambridge and three at Rowley
where family moved in 1650; four boys and two girls born
between 1644 and 1656. Three survived her. Husband died
June 1671 and she never remarried. She was 75 years old
when she was executed.

Maiden name unknown. Arrived at Salem MA in 1673 as the
wife of Thomas Greenslitt. She had five children by him;
four boys and one girl. Thomas Greenslitt died July 1674.
Married Jacob Pudeator of Salem sometime between March of
1677 and June of 1679. Pudeator's first wife drank herself
to death and Ann was nurse to her in her final illness.
She outraged her neighbors by marrying the husband of her
deceased patient and it was widely rumored that Jacob and
Ann had hurried along the death of the first Mrs. Pudeator.
Jacob Pudeator died Oct. 1681. Ann did not remarry. Ann
was 70 years old when executed. The Greenslitts may or

may not have come to Massachusetts in 1673 from Barbados«s

Maiden name was Rebecca Towne, daughter of William and Joanna
Blessing Towne. Full sister of Mary Easty (also executed).
She was born Yarmouth in Norfolkshire, England, 2-21-1621;
eldest of eight children. Came to Salem with family in 1640.
Married Francis Nurse about 1641 and bore eight children
between 1642 and 1665. She was 71 years old when executed.

Maiden name was Mary Towne, daughter of William & Joanna
Blessing Towne. Full sister of Rebecca Nurse (also executed).
Born at Yarmouth, Norfolkshire, England, on 8-24-1634. Came

to New England with parents and siblings in 1640. Married
Isaac Easty of Topsfield prior to 1656. Seven children by

him, six boys and one girl. She was 56 years old when executed.

Maiden name was Sarah Solart. Daughter of John & Elizabeth
Solart of Wenham MA. One of nine children. Father was an inn-
keeper. Sarah married first Daniel Poole who died Nov. 1683.
Sarah married second William Goode, late in 1685. Had six
children by Goode. She was 38 years old when executed.

Maiden name unknown. First appears in 1666 as "the widow
Bridget Wasslebee". Married second time to Thomas Oliver on
7-26-1666. Bore him two daughters. He died 1679 aged 78.
Bridget married third husband, Edward Bishop, aged 61 in 1680.
He survived her and died 1-13-1695. She was rumored to have
poisoned her first husband and was appeached of witchcraft
twelve years before her fatal conviction on that charge.

Maiden name was Susanna North. Born in England in 1625,
youngest of three daughters of Richard North. Came to New
England with parents in 1638 and was among first settlers of
Salisbury MA. Married George Martin 8-11-1646; bore him eight
children 1647-1667; five sons and three daughters. Had been
appeached of witchcraft and infanticide 23 years before her
fatal conviction. She was 67 years old when executed.

pe ee ee ed

DANIEL ALLEN HEARN

but this is unsubstantiated. Age undeterminable.

Martha Corey: Maiden name unknown. Is first known as "Martha Rich"
prior to marriage to Giles Corey. She had one natural
child named Thomas Rich prior to marrying Corey. Also |
said to have bore a mulatto boy named 'Benjamin' in 1677
|
}

Giles Corey: 75 years old at time of death; NOT eighty as is usually |
reported. First appears at Salem in early 1640s. Married
| first to Margaret; she died sometime between 1658 and
i 1664. Bore four daughters. Married secondly on 4-11-1664
’ to Mary Brite, a manumitted servant origionally bought
N out of a Virginia vessel and brought to Mass. She died
8-27-1684 aged 54. Married thirdly sometime shortly
afterward to Martha Rich. She was executed six days after
Giles was pressed to death.

: A}thngh Ye story of he Sthem With Triehs had been Fold, retold
and rehashed ad nauseam For centuries, 1+ does not appear that
anyone ever compiled personel ratiles of those who suffered. Hence
1 had to pitee all ths infrrmation fayether Sram at fapty dierent
SUCES. Linker / Cannot guile a speeitie Source for Gach. f tid
rely hesuily thangh m whl statshes and Essex Co. Curt records.

t*¢
hs

arly in 1692, several young girls in Salem

Village, Massachusetts were “led away with little

sorceries,” according to Cotton Mather, Boston’s

eminent man of God. Their experiments, which
involved little more than divining what their future hus-
bands would be like, began in the household of the village
minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris. Elizabeth, Parris’s
nine-year-old daughter, and Abigail Williams, his eleven-
year-old niece, under the guidance of Tituba, the family’s
West Indian slave, fashioned a crude crystal ball by drop-
ping an egg into a bowl of water. To the impressionable
girls, the undulating egg white appeared to float in the
shape of a coffin.

Confronted with this horrific image, the frightened
youngsters began to act in peculiar ways. Neighbors were
shocked by their “afflictions,” which seemed to worsen
each day. One clergyman claimed that the children “were
bitten and pinched by invisible agents, their arms, necks,
and backs turned this way and that way, and returned
back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of them-
selves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natu-
ral disease to effect.”

Unable to determine a physical cause for their “dis-
tempter,” William Griggs, the village doctor, confided to
Parris that the children were “under an Evil Hand”—the
blanket seventeenth-century diagnosis for maladies physi-
cians were unable to understand.

Anxious to ease the girls’ suffering and to prevent fur-
ther spread of the afflictions (several teens who lived near
the parsonage had begun to exhibit similar symptoms),
Parris consulted with neighboring ministers. Upon observ-
ing the girls, the clergymen confirmed the physician’s di-
agnosis—“the hand of Satan was in them.” The reactions
of the Reverend Parris and civil authorities to these as-
sessments led to the largest witch hunt in American his-
tory.

To the modern mind, the tragic epic of the Salem witch
trials seems virtually incomprehensible. But to the seven-
teenth-century mind, sorcery and the occult were very
real. With few exceptions, everyone—even the most highly
educated individuals—believed in witchcraft and feared
the evil associated with it.

When Parris and the other ministers repeatedly asked the
girls who was afflicting them, they finally obliged by nam-
ing Tituba and two other village women, Sarah Good and
Sarah Osborne—both likely candidates fitting the stereo-
typical witch “mold.” The destitute pipe-smoking Good
wandered from house to house begging food, while Os-
borne was a semi-invalid old woman known for depression
and erratic behavior. Salem magistrates J onathan Corwin
and John Hathorne swiftly issued warrants for the arrest
of the accused, and on March 1 constables took them into
custody for questioning.

The large crowd that filed into the village meetinghouse
to witness the “examination” of the suspects brought with
them their profound belief in the occult. Well educated and

poorly educated alike gleaned from almanacs the astro-
nomical data needed to practice astrology, relied on
charms, and heeded the words of fortune tellers. They con-
sidered comets, lightning, and thunder as omens of catas-
trophe and gossiped about prophecies, visions, and disem-
bodied voices.

Cotton Mather claimed many “would often cure hurts
with spells, and practice detestable conjurations with
sieves, and keys, and peas, and nails, and other imple-
ments, to learn the things for which they had a forbidden
and impious curiosity.” What most worried the Puritan di-
vine was his conviction that this interest inevitably led to
a greater fascination with the more insidious practice of
witchcraft.

Mather had good reason for his concern. Many seven-
teenth-century immigrants to New England brought with
them their Old World belief that witches or wizards,
through curses, charms, or the evil eye, could cause harm
in their villages. While ordinary folk worried about
witches damaging their crops, harming their livestock, or
making someone in their family ill, Mather and some of
his clerical colleagues had a much greater fear. They had
come to believe that a well-organized witch conspiracy
existed in New England, bent upon the overthrow of
Christianity.

While the community's members might disagree on the
threat posed by witchcraft, most agreed on the means em-
ployed by Satan to recruit witches. Preying upon those
with financial difficulty, marital problems, or religious
cares, the devil offered happiness and material success for
their allegiance.

Two aspects of this alleged pact became important in the
witch prosecutions of 1692. Puritans believed that the
devil gave to witches natural and unnatural creatures
known as “familiars” to aid them in carrying out their evil
deeds. Some also contended that the witch, in turn,
granted Satan permission to use her shape or her “specter”
to afflict others. Indeed, testimony of someone’s specter
doing harm became the most crucial form of evidence in
the 1692 trials.

For four days during the first week of March, Salem
Villagers heard magistrates Corwin and Hathorne interro-
gate the first three suspects about familiars, specters, and
incidents in their past that might shed light on the afflic-
tions of the suffering girls. Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne
denied complicity in the affair, but Tituba, impressed by
the spectacle and fearful of reprisals, confessed to a num-
ber of malicious actions. The devil had forced her to harm
the girls on several occasions and to sign a pact, she testi-
fied. As she wrote in the devil’s book, Tituba claimed she
saw numerous names, including Good’s and Osborne’s.
Moreover, she offered detailed descriptions of the two vil-
lagers’ familiars. Good had a yellow bird, a wolf, and a cat.

This article is based on the author’s research for The Salem Witch
Crisis (Praeger Publishers, New York, an imprint of Greenwood
Publishing Group, Inc.), scheduled for publication in July. Printed
by permission of the publisher.

In 1697 the Massachusetts colony sought to pay penance for the
suffering caused by the witchcraft trials, ordering all to observe
a day of prayer and fasting, in the hope this would bring a
pardon from God for “all the errors of his servants and people.”

in Salem and hanged. In addition, the judges had ordered
that one suspect, Giles Corey, be “pressed.” Corey, in an
apparent protest against the trials, had pleaded not guilty
but then refused to put himself on trial “by God and my
country.” This strategy prevented the court from trying
him before a jury. Under English law, however, the judges
were permitted to impose the sentence of piene forte et
dure (hard and severe punishment) to coerce a change of
mind. Consequently, they ordered Sheriff George Corwin
to pile great weights upon Corey. The seventy-two-year-old
man refused to relent and died after two days of this tor-
ture.

More than one hundred suspects awaited their trial when
Governor Phips returned to Boston in early October from a
military campaign against Native Americans on the fron-
tier. Appalled at the scope and spectacle of the trials and
upset because even his own wife was named by the af-
flicted, Phips forbade any more arrests and, at the end of
the month, dismissed the Court of Oyer and Terminer. His
decision reflected a rapidly developing opposition to the
trials.

Ever more people had grown skeptical of the testimony
and actions of the afflicted. In his May examination, John
Alden had called them “wenches . .. who played their jug-
gling tricks, falling down, crying out, and staring in peo-
ples’ faces.” During Elizabeth Proctor’s June 30 trial,
Daniel Elliott testified that he had overheard one of the af-
flicted claim “she did it for sport they must have some
sport.” Mary Warren, one of the afflicted who accused more
than a dozen people, even admitted to several villagers
that “her head was distempered” when she had made
those allegations. Moreover, “when she was well again she
could not say that she saw any of [the] apparitions at the
time aforesaid.”

By early October many also came to realize that several
of the more than fifty people who had confessed to famil-
iarity with the devil had done so under great duress. They
had been intimidated by the afflicted or by the persistent
questions of the magistrates and sometimes even family
members who thought a confession might spare their lives.
(Only those who refused to confess were hanged; confes-
sion was one way to avoid death.)

Those who later recanted their confessions had explana-
tions similar to that of Margaret Jacobs, who told the
judges, “I was cried out upon by some of the possessed per-
sons, as afflicting them; whereupon I was brought to my
examination, which persons at the sight of me fell down
vhich did very much to startle and affright me. The Lord
above knows I knew nothing in the least measure how or

who afflicted them; they told me, without doubt I did, or
else they would not fall down at me; they told me, if I
would not confess, | should be put down into the dungeon
and would be hanged, but if | would confess | should have
my life, the which did so affright me, with my own vile
wicked heart, to save my life; made me make the like con-
fession I did, which confession, may it please the honored
court, is altogether false and untrue.”

As well as harboring doubts about the testimony of the
confessors and accusations of the afflicted, many Salem
villagers were impressed by the deportment of the con-
demned. Shortly before her execution, Rebecca Nurse’s sis-
ter Mary Esty petitioned the court not for her own life but
“that no more innocent blood be shed.” The five victims ex-
ecuted on August 19 had likewise expressed the hope that
“their blood might be the last innocent blood shed.” The
Reverend George Burroughs left a particularly vivid im-
pression. According to one contemporary, the former
Salem Village minister’s protestation of innocence and
recitation of the Lord’s Prayer (that witches were allegedly
unable to utter) “drew tears from many” who had attended
the public execution.

The people of Salem Village and surrounding communi-
ties demonstrated their opposition to the trials most force-
fully by coming forward to support the accused. Before
Governor Phips halted the trials, almost three hundred
family members, neighbors, clergymen, and even jailers ei-
ther had signed petitions or testified on behalf of the ac-
cused. As Cotton Mather reported on October 20, the “hu-
mors of this people now run” against a continuation of the
trials.

Although important, this shift in public opinion was not
as significant to Phips as the opinion of the colony’s lead-
ing minister, Increase Mather (Cotton’s father). Phips had
an obvious reason for his high regard for Increase. The
minister not only had been instrumental in securing the
new charter for Massachusetts but also in persuading the
king to select Phips as the new governor.

In late September, several clergymen persuaded Mather
to draft a treatise detailing the problems with the evidence
used in the trials. In a work he called Cases of Conscience,
Mather presented a synthesis of what several ministers
had been arguing privately since late May. He maintained
that specter evidence, the most critical in all convictions,
was seriously flawed. Satan could assume any shape.
Consequently, testimony of a person’s image doing harm
did not provide conclusive proof that the individual had
made a pact with the devil. Although specter evidence
could be used to raise suspicion, it was insufficient for a
conviction. If the court accepted his argument, Mather ac-

“a

Osborne had one with “wings and
two legs and a head like a woman”
and the other “all over hairy.”

While the magistrates questioned
Good and Osborne in the meeting-
house, the afflicted girls, who lis-
tened during their testimony, suf-
fered numerous fits—convincing
proof to the judges of the accused
witches’ frightful powers. Even
Sarah Good’s husband and daughter
offered evidence against her; Wil-
liam Good admitted that he thought
his wife was a witch, and six-year-
old Dorothy claimed to have seen
her mother’s familiars—three birds
of various colors.

Sarah Good’s examination led
some villagers to recall past con-
frontations with her, and a few of them came forward later
in the year to offer damning evidence in her trial. Sarah
Gadge, for example, remembered an argument that had
ended with Good threatening that “she should give
[Gadge] something.” The following day, one of Gadge’s
cows had mysteriously died—an occurrence she attributed
to Good’s evil powers.

On March 7, magistrates Corwin and Hathorne, con-
vinced they had assembled enough evidence to justify an
indictment, ordered the three women held in a Boston jail
to await their day in court.

To seventeenth-century eyes, there had been little ex-
traordinary about this particular episode of accusations.
The three women fit contemporary ideas on witches and
the practice of witchcraft. Almost eighty percent of the
roughly one hundred people accused of witchcraft in New
England prior to 1692 were women; most of them were
poor and more than forty years of age. Several had sullied
reputations, being known for supposedly having magical
powers, criminal backgrounds, or simply disagreeable dis-
positions. Robert Calef, in one of the contemporary ac-
counts of the Salem trials, explained that because the ac-
cused in this case included a confessing slave, as well as
“Sarah Good, who had long been counted a melancholy or
distracted woman, and one Osborne, an old bed-rid
woman; which two were persons so ill thought of, that the
accusation was the more readily believed.”

Initially, then, the accusations of early March seemed
little different from previous ones. As Salem’s John
Higginson recalled a decade later, the situation was
“looked on at first as an ordinary case which had fallen out
before at several times in other places, and would be
quickly over.”

Usually, after suspects in witchcraft episodes were jailed,
the afflicted recovered. In 1692 Salem Village, however,
not only did the girls’ symptoms worsen, the number of
those suffering afflictions increased. When fasts and

prayer meetings failed to afford re-
lief, villagers concluded that addi-
tional, as-yet unidentified witches
must be in their midst. Widespread
panic, which would soon escalate
into mass hysteria, set in.

On March 11, the afflicted
youths named Martha Corey, and
days later they accused Rebecca
Nurse of harming them. Because
both of these women were members
of the Congregational Church, their
arrest posed a fundamental crisis of
faith for the people of Salem
Village.

For three generations, ministers
had taught settlers in Massa-
chusetts that even though man was
born in sin and deserving of
damnation, God had chosen to save a few “elect” souls. In
most congregations, Membership was based largely upon
the applicant’s explanation of his or her conversion experi-
ence. In churches accepting this evidence of God’s gift of
grace, few believed that an elect person could fall from
grace after having once been saved. But now two of God’s
apparent elect stood accused of witchcraft. Confused
Salem Villagers looked to their spiritual leader for guid-
ance.

On March 27, the Reverend Samuel Parris responded
with a sermon entitled “Christ Knows How Many Devils
There Are in His Churches and Who They Are.” This dis-
course became the key to the rapid acceleration in accusa-
tions that made the Salem episode unique in American
history. “Let none then build their hopes of salvation
merely upon this,” Parris explained, “that they are church
members this you and I may be, and yet devils for all that.”
Church members may have once considered their congre-
gation a sanctuary safely out of the devil’s reach, but no
more. “Christ knows how many devils among us,” said
Parris, “whether one or ten or twenty.”

When Parris said that. the devil had breached the walls
of the church and entered into covenants with two of the
elect, he was arguing that virtually anyone could be sus-
pect. Parris’s dismal prospect that the church no longer of-
fered refuge from evil heightened the atmosphere of dis-
trust enveloping Salem Village. As one minister described
the mood during the examination of Rebecca Nurse, “they
were afraid that those that sat next to them were under
the influence of witchcraft.”

There is little question that Parris’s sermon changed the
pace and character of the accusations, During the follow-
ing two months more than sixty people stood accused of
practicing witchcraft. Increasingly the “specters” of people
from across the social spectrum harmed the afflicted.
Farmers, merchants, artisans, and clergymen, or more
often their wives and daughters, as well as the deviants of
the villages surrounding Salem, now faced the prospect of

56 “ARRESTING A WITCH" BY HOWARD PYLE; HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. 1883

Usually, after suspects in witchcraft trials were jailed, the afflicted
recovered. In 1692, however, not only did the girls’ symptoms
worsen, the number of those suffering afflictions increased.
Widespread panic, which would soon escalate into hysteria, set in.

a witchcraft trial. By late May, Thomas Newton, who re-
ceived a commission to handle the prosecution of the
witches, marveled that “the afflicted spare no person of
what quality soever.”

On May 14, as the jails between Salem and Boston filled
with suspects, William Phips, the new royal governor of
Massachusetts, arrived from England. He was greeted
with frightful stories of the sufferings of the increasing
number of afflicted. Their relatives told him of family
members “taken with preternatural torments some
scalded with brimstone some had pins stuck in their flesh
others hurried into the fire and water and some dragged
out of their houses and carried over the tops of the trees
and hills for many miles together.”

Phips faced a legal dilemma. The Massachusetts Bay
colony had made the practice of witchcraft a felony under
the authority of a charter granted by Charles I in 1629.
That document, however, had been revoked in 1686. Two
years later, the colony became part of the Dominion of New
England. Since the 1689 overthrow of Edmund Andros, the
Dominion governor, Massachusetts had existed in a legal
limbo while its agents negotiated with William III for a
new charter. Technically, then, no law against witchcraft
existed. Governor Phips, who had arrived with a new char-
ter, was unable to convene another provincial legislature
to confirm the old statute until June 8.

Not wanting to wait that long, Phips appointed a special
Court of Oyer and Terminer (a judicial body to hear and
determine) on May 27. He selected Deputy Governor Wil-
liam Stoughton and eight leading merchants and land-
owners to serve on the court. All but one of the nine had
some experience with witchcraft cases.

The judges spent the brief time between their appoint-
ment and the first trial consulting clergymen, reviewing
the transcripts of the preliminary examinations, reading
accounts of earlier trials, and studying English guide-
books on proper procedures in witchcraft cases.

Out of their deliberations, the judges agreed to admit
three types of evidence. Accepting the proposition that a
witch had to nourish her familiars, the judges ordered a
physical search of suspects for a “witch’s teat,” a peculiar
growth or “preternatural excrescence.” Acknowledging the
tradition that the devil gave witches the power to. harm
people by thrusting pins into or twisting images of them,
the judges also ordered constables to search suspects’
homes for puppets or dolls. Beyond this physical evidence,
the judges decided to accept testimony from any who re-
called confrontations with the accused and then experi-
enced some misfortune.

Most importantly, however, they concluded that “specter
evidence” would be the key to convictions. If the afflicted
or other villagers came forward with testimony of the ac-
cused’s shape or specter doing harm, the judges saw that
as the best evidence of complicity with Satan on the
grounds that the devil could not use humans’ shapes with-
out their permission.

In all, twenty-seven individuals in Salem underwent
jury trials for witchcraft between June 2 and September
17. Because prosecutors Thomas Newton and Anthony
Checkley were able to introduce specter evidence in all of
the trials, the juries rendered guilty verdicts in each case.

Among the convicted were George Burroughs, a former
Salem Village minister, and church members Martha
Corey and Rebecca Nurse. The latter’s trial drew particu-
lar attention because of the high regard most people held
for her. Perhaps no one had been more surprised by the
charges against her than Nurse herself. Upon learning of
her impending arrest, the pious seventy-one-year-old
Nurse asked, “what sin hath God found out in me unre-
pented of that he should lay such an affliction upon me in
my old age?”

For Nurse’s June 30 trial, almost forty people signed a
petition attesting that “her life and conversation” had al-
ways been that of a Christian and they “never had any
cause or grounds to suspect her of any such thing as she is
now accused of.”

When the jury, on the strength of this overwhelming af-
firmation of Nurse’s character, found her innocent, the af-
flicted “made an hideous outcry.” Justice Stoughton then
asked the jury to reconsider their verdict. Jury foreman
Thomas Fisk agreed to do so on the basis of a puzzling re-
mark Nurse had made upon seeing accused witch
Deliverance Hobbs and her daughter being led into the
courtroom. “What, do these persons give in evidence
against me now?” Nurse asked, "They used to come among
us.” The jury wanted to know if Nurse's "us" meant a
group of suspects or a group of witches. When Fisk asked
the accused to clarify the statement, the nearly deaf, dis-
tracted woman made no reply. Taking the suspect’s failure
to respond as an admission of guilt, the jury reversed its
verdict.

By September 22, nineteen of the convicted, including
Rebecca Nurse, had been wheeled in carts up Gallows’ Hill

The Salem Witch Trial Tercentenary Committee is sponsoring a
memorial, to be completed this summer in a Salem cemetery, in
memory of all those falsely accused of witchcraft in 1692.
Meanwhile, a dramatic bronze statue depicting three victims of
Salem’s witch hysteria [see the January 1989 issue, page 6] still
awaits completion by sculptor Yiannis Stefanakis.

286 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

tie.” The Court was probably right but it was powerless to carry
out any further sanctions against Porter who had evidently con-
vinced the Commissioners he had been unfairly treated. The Com-
missioners certainly knew there was no such capital law in England.

As to treason or conspiracy against the Commonwealth, “In

the time of warr with the Indians” (King Philip’s War) Walter

Gendall confessed that he had betrayed the English by counselling

~ with the Indians. The Court spared his life but ordered that he

be made to: “Runn the Gantelop (gantlet) through the military

-Companyes in Boston .... with a Roape about his necke .. .” and

to forfeit his lands to the government, pay costs and charges of the
proceedings, and then to leave the jurisdiction under threat of
life imprisonment if he returned.”

Who, then, was put to death? The precise identification
of all who were sentenced to die could be determined only if the
complete records of the Court of Assistants were available, for that
court had jurisdiction over all criminal trials “extending to Life,
Member or Banishment.” But clerks who were neither infallible
nor immortal, plus the ravages of fire, decay, and time itself have
been the despair of those seeking a continuous and complete report
of judicial proceedings. Nevertheless, it is surprising how many of
the legal documents of seventeenth century Massachusetts have
been preserved, transcribed by diligent scholars from almost il-
legible handscript and made available to later generations.

The decisions of the Court of Assistants are believed to be sub-
stantially complete from 1630 to 1673. Winthrop’s diary covering
the period from’ 1630 to 1649 serves as a supplementary source,
for hangings never seemed to have escaped his notice. From 1644
to 1673 the official’reports are considered “fragmentary” by the
editor of the third volume of the records of that court, but he as-
sures us he has gleaned additional material from the court files of
the several counties, particularly of Suffolk County, the records
deposited in the State Archives, old manuscripts in possession of
the Massachusetts Historical Society, and elsewhere to complete
insofar as possible the annals for that period. It is idle to speculate
on the extent of the missing reports, if any, of capital trials. Again

- from 1673 to 1692 the records are believed to be complete trans-

cripts of the court’s proceedings except fora short period from

“They Shall Surely Be Put to Death” : 287

April 22, 1686, to December 24, 1689. Judge Sewall’s Diary, com-
mencing in 1674, is an additional ‘source of information.
With these limitations in mind, a review of the Bay Colony’s
records from 1630 to 1692 shows that only nine of the twenty-five
capital laws were invoked to cut short a human life: witchcraft,
murder, bestiality, adultery, rape, arson, defiance by Quakers, pi-
racy, and treason. =

-_ To return to the original question: Who, then, was executed?
Who of these seventeenth century residents of Massachusetts heard
the solemn words of the judge in the stillness of the court room:
_“...and you are to return from hence to the place from whence
you came and from thence to the place of execution, there to be
hangd til thou beest dead—& the Lord be mercifull to thy soule!”

We can identify at least these men and women who paid the su-

_-preme price:

For witchcraft: Prior to the famous Salem trials in 1692, there
were only a few trials for this crime, with some acquittals, some
convictions, and three executions. In 1692 on “Gallows Hill’ (as
it is now called) in Salem, the executioner “dispatched” nineteen
men and women for “familiarity with the Devil” (as reported in

Chapter 14).

For murder: John Williams, a ship’s carpenter newly arrived

from England, escaped from prison where he was confined for

theft and murdered and robbed a fellow prisoner who escaped with
him in 1637.9

__ William Schooler, reputed to have been ‘‘a common adulterer”’
in London and wanted there for wounding a man in a duel, fled
to New England (leaving his wife in England—‘‘a handsome, neat
woman’) and allegedly killed ‘a poor maid” from “Newberry.”

: _/He had served her as a guide for hire on a long trip through the

wilderness from Newbury to a town on the other side of the Mer-
rimack and had abandoned her in the woods, near Swampscott
with no means of survival. Six months later an Indian found her
body. Schooler was charged with murder. Evidence adduced against
him was entirely circumstantial. Although he admitted to many
lies in his original story, he denied the charge of murder. His guilt
was evidently based on the theory that failure to act when one has
a legal duty to do so might constitute murder as inuch as an overt
act of killing—-a common-law principle stil] invoked in Massachu-

290 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

mitted during the period of King Philip’s War, and the following
year took the lives of four Concord Englishmen for killing three
Indian women and three Indian children.1 :
Judge Sewall’s laconic diary entry for September 13, 1676,
with no further elucidation of the event, reads: “The after part
of the day very rainy. Note, there were eight Indians shot to death
on the Common, upon Wind-mill hill.”!°? How many more Indians
were legally executed during or immediately after that war due
to their part in the hostilities cannot be determined.

For bestiality: A servant by the name of Hackett [or Hatchet]
eighteen or twenty years old, was considered ‘‘a very stupid, idle,
and ill-disposed boy ... [who] would never regard the means of
instruction.” In 1641 they accused him of the crime of bestiality
and had one witness, but there was “much scruple” among the
magistrates for two witnesses were needed, and so the case went
to the General Court. There it was agreed that one witness plus
the lad’s confession were sufficient. Governor Bellingham, moved
possibly by the defendant’s youth or guilessness refused to pro-
nounce the sentence, but Deputy Governor Endecott did so and or-
dered him confined. This case excited a great deal of interest. ‘‘Di-
vers of the elders and other christians resorting to him, and labor-
ing by the word of God to convince him of his sin, and the present
danger of his soul ... it pleased the Lord so to bless his own ordi-
nances, that his hard heart melted.” His execution was postponed
one week to give the lad more time for communion with God. His
genuine repentance, evidenced by loud and doleful complaints
against himself and his sinful course of life, bewailing his disobedi-
ence to his parents and their commands, convinced Winthrop that
“the Lord hath received his soul to his mercy.” And yet, ever mind-
ful of his Puritanism, Winthrop reporting on the lad’s last mo-
ments of life, had to remind the reader that the Lord ‘was not
pleased to afford him that measure of peace and comfort as he
might be able to hold out to others, lest sinful men, in the love ot
their lusts, should set mercy and repentence at too low a rate. ...—
Prepared for death, the youth ‘‘quietly yielded himself, when he
was required.’’108

Benjamin Gourd or Goad of Roxbury, a lad of seventeen, the

yf nent to be reported for this capital crime, bitterly regretted his

act. “The causes he alleged” for his conduct, according to Judge

They Shall Surely Be Put to Death” 291

Sewall, “were, idlenes, not obéying parents, etc.”” The court in
674 condemned him to hangyand: ‘the mare yow abused before
your execution in your sight shaibibe knockt on the head.”
For adultery: Becausetbf:the usual jury’s resistance to bring-
ng in a verdict of “guilty asindicted’>in adultery cases, it is strange
lat anyone was executed for this crite which was evidently not
ncommon. There were only two recorded hangings for adultery
in the history of the Bay Colony, (and none in Plymouth) and
these occurred rather early in the life of the Colony (1644) when
le Puritans still had a strong influence over legislatures and courts.
e‘sinfulness of the defendants’ conduct in this case was made
vid by Winthrop—possibly the reason why these two young peo-
¢ above all others should pay the extreme penalty and why the
eneral Gourt refused James Britton’s petition for a pardon. Let

inthrop tell the story with its poignant lesson to ‘‘all young
aids”: X

_ At this court of assistants one James Britton, a man ill af-
fected both to our church discipline and civil government, and one
Mary Latham, a proper young woman about 18 years of age, whose
father was a godly man and had brought her up well, were con-
demned to die for adultery, upon a law formerly made and published
in print. It was thus occasioned and discovered. ‘This woman, being
_ rejected by a young man whom she had an affection unto, vowed she
would marry the next that came to her, and accordingly, against her
friends’ minds, she matched with an ancient man who had neither
_ honesty nor ability, and one whom she had no affection unto. Where-
upon, soon after she was married, divers young men solicited her
_ chastity, and drawing her into bad company, and giving her wine
and other gifts, easily prevailed with her, and among others this Brit-
ton. But God smiting him with a deadly palsy and fearful horror of
_ conscience withal, he could not keep secret, but discovered [disclosed]
this, and other the like with other women, and was forced to
acknowledge the justice of God in that having often called others
fools, etc., for confessing against themselves, he was now forced to do
the like. The woman dwelt now in Plimouth patent, and one of the
magistrates there, hearing she was detected, etc., sent her to us. Upon
her examination, she confessed he did attempt the fact, but did not
commit it, and witness was produced that testified (which they both
confessed) that in the evening of a day of humiliation through the
country for England, etc., a company met at Britton’s and there con-
tinued drinking sack, etc., till late in the night, and then Britton and

PTT SO ee a

288 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

setts, The court held him “worthy of death, in undertaking the
charge of a shiftless maid, and leaving her (when he might have
done otherwise) in such a place as he knew she must needs perish
....” Nevertheless the case was a doubtful one. ‘““Some ministers
and others, .. thought the evidence was not sufficient to take away
his life.” One wonders if the man’s reputation and the circumstance
that he escaped from prison while awaiting trial had counted
: against him, for Winthrop said ‘the had lived a vicious life, and now
lived like an atheist. ... He was very loath to die, and had hope
he should be reprieved”; but the court ordered him hanged in
Boston in 1637.%*
-In 1638 the hangman dispatched Dorothy Talby for killing
her daughter, a child of three with the strange name of “Difficulty.”
Vv Dorothy had been suffering from “melancholy or spiritual delu-
sions” and had previously attempted the lives of her husband and
herself.**

We have previously related the execution of Franklin in 1644
for causing the death of his apprentice.

The case of Mrs. Cornish, a resident of Weymouth who moved
to Acomenticus (now York, Maine) reported by Winthrop in
1645, cannot be verified because the Court of Assistants records
are incomplete for that year and no mention of the case appears in
the General Court records. According to Winthrop’s meager ac-
count, she was executed for the murder of her husband whose body
was found in the river. “Strong suspicion” was directed against
her. She was “‘a lewd woman” and had “‘confessed to have lived
in adultery” with several persons, including the mayor. Further-
more, when she came close to the body it “bled abundantly’—a@
superstition shared by people of that era that if a body bleeds on
the approach or touch of the accused there is an immediate pre-
sumption of guilt. Although “‘she persisted in the denial of the
murder,” she was condemned and executed. She was probably
the same woman who in 1638 had been found by the Court of -\s-
sistants ‘“‘suspitious of incontinency, & was seriously admonished t
take heede.”’*® ;

Mary Martin, whose grandfather had been mayor of Plimouth.

J eae a young maid of 22, servant to Mrs. Bourne in Boston.
“finding herself to be with child” and not having the courage ©

face the taunts and infamy of living ina Puritan community where

os “hey Shall Surely.Be Put to Death” 365
& Deat?,

|] would know she was an unwed mother, secretly killed the child
birth and hid the body’“Upon the discovery of the deed, she
nfessed and admitted otheY siris OF fornication and so was con-
ed to die. She aroused’ sympathy from the Governor, who
ly reported a bungling job at ‘the execution in 1646:

ae : tc coe She

ft r she was turned off [that is, awn free from the gallows ladder]
1d had hung a space, she spake, and asked what they did mean to
. Then some stepped up, and turned the knot of the rope back-
rd, and then she soon died.!° ae

-Sewall’s diary records the execution of two servants:

Scotchman and Frenchman kill their Master, knocking him in the
Ahead as he was taking Tobacko. They are taken by Hew and Cry, and
mndemned: Hanged. Nicholas Feavor, born in the Ile of Jersey,
*rt Driver, born in the Ile of Orknye in Scotland, Executed, Mar.
1675.01

ames Morgan was executed in 1685 for killing a man in a
drunken brawl “by running a spitt into his belly a little above the
pavell.’”102
- Hugh Stone of Andover suffered death on the gallows in 1690
r killing his wife.* .
Samuel Watts was a pirate. His indictment states that in 1689
on the high Seas, that is to say in martins vineyard Sound near
‘arpolin Cove ... Watts being under a Red Flagg .. with force
ind Armes an Assault did make and with Bullets which he out of
mall Guns feloniously shot; the body of . . . Samuel Pease [master
af the sloop Mary of Boston] in severall places did strike and mor-
tally wound. ...’” He was hanged for murder, but could as well
€ been hanged for piracy.'
- Elizabeth Emmerson, a single woman living in Haverhill,
Killed her two bastard children in 1691 and paid for it with her
life.105
___ Skirmishes with Indians caused innumerable deaths of both
English and Indians. Which killings might have been scored as the
inevitable accompaniment of battles sporadically occurring be-
fen these two for-the-most-part “friendly enemies’ and which
fre, in a legal sense, “murders,” it is difficult to determine. How-
meer, the courts tricd and condemned to death an Indian named
Little John” in 1675 tor murders of Lancaster residents com

go
b

a ae ae

SP BH ASAIN ROE PR

292 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN EARLY MASSACHUSETTS

the woman were seen upon the ground together, a little from the
house. It was reported also that she did frequently abuse her hus-
band, setting a knife to his breast and threatening to kill him, calling
him old rogue and cuckold, and said she would make him wear horns
as big as a bull. And yet some of the magistrates thought the evidence
not sufficient against her, because there were not two direct witnesses;
but the jury cast her, and then she confessed the fact, and accused
twelve others, whereof two were married men. Five of these were ap-
prehended and committed, (the rest were gone,) but denying it, and
there being no other witness against them than the testimony of a
condemned person, there could be no proceeding against them. The
woman proved very penitent, and had deep apprehension of the
foulness of her sin, and at length attained to hope of pardon by the
blood of Christ, and was willing to die in satisfaction to justice. The
man also was very much cast down for his sins, but was loth to die,
and petitioned the general court for his life, but they would not grant
it, though some of thé magistrates spake much for it, and questioned
the letter, whether adultery was death by God’s law now. This Brit-
ton had been a professor [adherent of the faith] in England, but com-
ing hither he opposed our church government, etc., and grew dis-
solute, losing both power and profession of godliness.

They were both executed, they both died very penitently, espe-
cially the woman, who had some comfortable hope of pardon of her
sin, and gave good exhortation to all young maids to be obedient to
their parents, and to take heed of evil company, etc."

For rape: Tom, an Indian, for the rape of another Indian's

-squaw in 1674;1!" Samuel Guile for the rape of Mary Ash, wife of

John Ash, in 1675; Basto, a Negro slave, for the rape of a child
of his Master, in 1676;1* and William Cheny, for the rape of his
servant, Experience Holdbrooke, in 1681."*

For arson: Arson was not usually punished by death, but in
1681, when this crime was considered more serious as the towns
grew more populous and several disastrous fires had proved the
danger, two Negro servants were executed for two independent
acts of arson. Maria, servant of Joshua Lamb of Roxbury, confessed
she had set fire to a dwelling house. Jack, servant to Samuel Wool
cot of Weathersfield, set fire to Lieutenant Clark’s house in North:
ampton. The hangings took place on the same day in 1681.1"

For defiance by Quakers: Boston Common. was probably th
stage where four Quakers, in 1660, paid with their lives for darins

ei hey Shall Surely Be Put to Death” 293

to defy orders of banishment and to return to Boston, to “‘test the
bloody laws” (see Chapter 10). a

_ For piracy: The ‘ ‘piraticall seizing of ships” seertied to break
forth with some virulence,in the later years of the Bay Colony.
The court condemned,,to},death five pirates in 1675" and
thirteen in 1689.1!",,/These,,qulprits were not foreign pirates
from the Spanish Main;, they were chiefly English who attacked
id attempted to steal some ofthe ships in the Boston Bay area.
convicted pirate from a foreign.country would probably have had
ittle chance for survival, but.there was evidently some popular
‘distaste for executing Englishmen for this crime. Of the five con-
ined in 1675, one was allowed to petition for pardon and was
said not executed; the other four may have been. The thir-

ness s the show]: I fear it was ill done. . .. Some in the Council thought
Hawkins, because he got out of the Combination before Pease was
kill’d, [Pease was master of the sloop they were attacking] might live
as well as Coward [who was pardoned]; so I rashly signed, hoping sO
_ great an inconvenience would not have followed. Let not God im-
pute gin... . .118

Eventually, probably all but two were spared, for Sewall wrote
that “chiefly through Mr. Winthrop’s earnestness [grandson of
Governor John Winthrop] in Reprieving, only Tho. Johnson dies”
We have already reported the hanging of Watts, one of the pirates,
for the murder of Pease.

For treason: There is no record of the execution of any peace-
~ time traitors or conspirators, but in the wake of King Philip’s War
two Indians, Caleb and Columbine, who had evidently been
friendly with the English, but turned against them during the war,
were hanged in 1676 for treason, being “open and murderous
enemies.’’!!9
In summary, then, we can say that the Bay Colony govern-

o~e

knowledged that there was little
chance it could gain any more con-
victions, and some witches might es-
cape justice. That was a price, how-
ever, that Mather and most of the
province’s clergy were willing to pay.
“It were better,” he wrote, “that ten
suspected witches should escape,
than that one innocent person
should be condemned.”

In explaining to officials in
London his decision to suspend the
trials, Phips emphasized his re-
liance upon Mather and other min-
isters who “did give it as their judg-
ment that the Devil might afflict in
the shape of an innocent person and
that the look and touch of the sus-
pected persons was not sufficient
proof against them.” In December, Phips appointed a new
court to deal with the remaining cases. Because the judges
agreed to use specter evidence only as presumptive evi-
dence, only three individuals were convicted; Phips subse-
quently pardoned them.

During the next two decades, Massachusetts colonists
struggled with the consequences of the witchcraft crisis.
Several people who had been instrumental in the accusa-
tions and trials acknowledged that they had committed
grievous errors. In 1694, for example, the Reverend
Samuel Parris admitted to his congregation that his ser-
mons two years earlier had contributed to the crisis atmo-
sphere in Salem Village. While he maintained that he had
sought “to avoid the wronging of any,” Parris apologized to
the families who had “unduly suffered in these matters.”
Twelve years later, Ann Putnam, Jr., who had accused
twenty-one individuals of witchcraft, sought membership
in the Salem Village congregation. She pleaded with the
congregation to forgive her 1692 actions “particularly, as I
was a chief instrument of accusing Goodwife Nurse and
her two sisters.”

Samuel Sewall, a judge on the Court of Oyer and
Terminer, likewise publicly acknowledged his role. In
1696, as Sewall stood in front of his Boston congregation,
he had his pastor read a confession in which the judge ac-
cepted “the blame and shame” of agreeing to the execu-
tions of nineteen of the convicted. Twelve of the jurors
joined Sewall in expressing their sorrow in the “condemn-
ing of any person” during the great witch hunt.

Indeed, the entire colony sought to pay penance for the
suffering of 1692 when the provincial legislature ordered
all to observe a day of prayer and fasting in January 1697.
Civil and religious leaders hoped this special day would
bring a pardon from God for “all the errors of his servants
and people” in the witchcraft episode.

Slowly, civil and religious leaders came to the conclusion
that true reconciliation could not be achieved until the

government reversed the convic-
tions of 1692 and compensated the
victims or their surviving family
members. In 1703 and 1710, re-
sponding to petitions from these in-
dividuals and groups, the provincial
government reversed the guilty ver-
dicts of all but seven of those con-
victed.* In 1710, the legislature
also voted to award partial compen-
sation to many of the accused
witches or their survivors for jail
expenses, court costs, and property
confiscated in 1692.

This cumulative effort to make
amends for the errors and mass
hysteria of 1692 did not eliminate
all the bitterness resulting from the
year of prosecutions. For Salem
Village, a community wracked by factional strife for
decades, controversy ultimately focused on the Reverend
Parris’s role in the witchcraft crisis. After a fierce five-year
struggle with a faction led by Rebecca Nurse’s relatives,
who never could forgive the man they called the “great
prosecutor,” Parris lost his job.

Nor did the provincials’ attempt to heal the wounds
caused by the prosecutions prevent contemporary and sub-
sequent generations from heaping infamy upon the trials’
supporters, notably Cotton Mather. Because he had writ-
ten an uncritical account of the trials called Wonders of the
Invisible World, Mather quickly gained an enduring repu-
tation as the leading apologist of the Court of Oyer and
Terminer. Boston merchant Robert Calef made that charge
in a 1700 work he sarcastically entitled More Wonders of
the Invisible World, in which he largely ignored Mather’s
advice to the judges throughout the summer to use spec-
tral evidence cautiously. Instead, he focused upon the
painfully deferential Mather’s defense of jurists he re-
spected and found difficult to criticize in print. As New
England historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it, Calef “tied
a tin can to him after the frenzy was over; and it has rat-
tled and banged through the pages of superficial and popu-
lar historians.”

Although the year-long struggle against occult forces de-
terred New Englanders from engaging in massive witch
hunts ever again, the majority of these highly religious
and superstitious settlers never renounced their belief in
witchcraft. Rather, they concluded that no sufficiently just
method existed for routing out the evil force. *

History professor at the University of Missouri-Rolla, Larry Gragg
specializes in early American history with a special emphasis on
seventeenth-century New England. His book The Salem Witch
Crisis will be published in July.

*Bridget Bishop, Elizabeth Johnson, Susanna Martin, Alice Par-
ker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Redd, and Margaret Scott. Because no
advocates came forward on behalf of these individuals, their convic-
tions remain on the record.

ACCUSATION OF A BEDEVILED GIRL” BY HOWARD PYLE; THE BETTMANN ARCHIVE, NEW YORK CITY 59

MASSACHUSETTS

GRAUNGER, Thomas WM, 17 Plymouth Col.
Beastiality 9-8-1642

GOURD, Benjamin WM, 17 Roxbury
Beastiality 4-2-1674

WILLIAM BM, 17 Boston
Murder, BM 10-15-1747

Slave PHYLLIS BP £7 Boston
Murder, W 5-16-1751

Slave BRISTOL BM, 16 Taunton
Murder, WF 12-1-1763

ROSS, Ezra WM, 16 Worcester
Murder, WM 7-2-1778

CLARKE, Stephen Merrell WM, 15/16 Salem
Arson §-1O+Lezs

NOWLIN, James Edward Wm, 17/18 Cambridge
Murder, WM50 1-20-1888

LEON GONG Ch, 17/719 Suffolk
Murder, 4ChM 10-12-1909

GIACAMAZZA, Paul WM, 17/19 Middlesex
Murder, WM 6-30-1942

Metadata

Containers:: Box 20 (2-Documentation of Executions), Folder 9
Resource Type:: Document
Description:: Ann Pudeater executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Wilmot Read executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Margaret Scott executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Samuel Wardwell executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) George Sr. Jacobs executed on 1692-08-19 in Massachusetts (MA) Bridget Bishop executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) John Willard executed on 1692-08-19 in Massachusetts (MA) John Proctor executed on 1692-08-19 in Massachusetts (MA) Martha Carrier executed on 1692-08-19 in Massachusetts (MA) George Burroughs executed on 1692-08-19 in Massachusetts (MA) Rebecca Nurse executed on 1692-07-19 in Massachusetts (MA) Sussanah Martin executed on 1692-07-19 in Massachusetts (MA) Elizabeth How executed on 1692-07-19 in Massachusetts (MA) Sarah Good executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Sarah Wild executed on 1692-07-19 in Massachusetts (MA) Giles Corey executed on 1692-09-16 in Massachusetts (MA) Mary Parker executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Alice Parker executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Mary Eastley executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) John Williams executed on 1637 in Massachusetts (MA) Martha Corey executed on 1692-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) William Schooler executed on 1637-09-23 in Massachusetts (MA) Dorothy Talby executed on 1638-12-06 in Massachusetts (MA) Mary Martin executed on 1646 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA) Nicholas Feavor executed on 1675-03-18 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA) Tom Captain executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA) William Hackett executed on 1641-12-10 in Massachusetts (MA) Benjamin Gourd executed on 1674-04-02 in Massachusetts (MA) Mary Latham executed on 1643-03-21 in Massachusetts (MA) James Britton executed on 1643-03-21 in Massachusetts (MA) Tom executed on 1674 in Massachusetts (MA) Samuel Guile executed on 1675-10-16 in Massachusetts (MA) Basto (owner name: Cox) executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA) William Cheney executed on 1681-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Marja (owner name: Lamb) executed on 1681-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Jack (owner name: Wolcott) executed on 1681-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Mary Dyer executed on 1660-06-01 in Massachusetts (MA) William Leddra executed on 1661-03-14 in Massachusetts (MA) William Robinson executed on 1659-10-22 in Massachusetts (MA) Marmaduke Stevenson executed on 1659-10-22 in Massachusetts (MA) William Coward executed on 1689-01-17 in Massachusetts (MA) Thomas Johnson executed on 1689-01-17 in Massachusetts (MA) John Smith executed on 1672 in Massachusetts (MA) Alexander Wilson executed on 1672 in Massachusetts (MA) Samuel Watts executed on 1689 in Massachusetts (MA) William Coward executed on 1689-01-17 in Massachusetts (MA) James Hawkins executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) Pammatoock executed on 1689-09-26 in Massachusetts (MA) Hugh Stone executed on 1690 in Massachusetts (MA) Rebecca Nurse executed on 1692-07-19 in Massachusetts (MA) Samuel Watts executed on 1689 in Massachusetts (MA) William Coward executed on 1689-01-17 in Massachusetts (MA) James Hawkins executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) Pammatoock executed on 1689-09-26 in Massachusetts (MA) Robert Driver executed on 1675-03-18 in Massachusetts (MA) Hugh Stone executed on 1690 in Massachusetts (MA) Rebecca Nurse executed on 1692-07-19 in Massachusetts (MA) James Morgan executed on 1685-03-11 in Massachusetts (MA) Hugh Stone executed on 1690 in Massachusetts (MA) Thomas Pound executed on 1689-01-17 in Massachusetts (MA) Samuel Watts executed on 1689 in Massachusetts (MA) Eleazer Brick executed on 1689-01-17 in Massachusetts (MA) Christopher Knight executed on 1689-01-27 in Massachusetts (MA) Elizabeth Emmerson executed on 1693-06-08 in Massachusetts (MA) John Littlejohn executed on 1675-09-22 in Massachusetts (MA) executed on 1676 in Massachusetts (MA)
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Date Uploaded:: June 30, 2019

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