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Page 49
Martha Corey and Rebecca Nourse were cried out against. Both were
church-members of excellent character; the latter seventy years of
age. They were examined by the same magistrates, and sent to prison,
and with them a child of Sarah Good, only four or five years old, also
charged with diabolical practises. Mr. Parris preached upon the text,
"Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?" Sarah
Cloyse, understanding the allusion to be to Nourse, who was her
sister, went out of church, and was accordingly cried out upon,
examined, and committed. Elizabeth Procter was another person charged.
The Deputy-Governor and five magistrates came to Salem for the
examination of the two prisoners last named. Procter appealed to one
of the children who was accusing her. "Dear child," she said, "it is
not so; there is another judgment, dear child:" and presently they
denounced as a witch her husband, who stood by her side. A week
afterward warrants were issued for the apprehension of four other
suspected persons; and a few days later for three others, one of whom,
Philip English, was the principal merchant of Salem. On the same day,
on the information of one of the possessed girls, an order was sent to
Maine for the arrest of George Burroughs, formerly a candidate for the
ministry at Salem Village, and now minister of Wells. The witness said
that Burroughs, besides being a wizard, had killed his first two
wives, and other persons whose ghosts had appeared to her and
denounced him....
Affairs were in this condition when the King's Governor arrived. About
a hundred alleged witches were now in jail, awaiting trial. Their case
was one of the first matters to which his attention was called.
Without authority for so doing,--for by the charter which he
represented, the establishment of judicial courts was a function of
the General Court,--he proceeded to institute a special commission of
Oyer and Terminer, consisting of seven magistrates, first of whom was
the hard, obstinate, narrow-minded Stoughton. The commissioners
applied themselves to their office without delay. Their first act was
to try Bridget Bishop, against whom an accusation twenty years old and
retracted by its author on his death-bed, had been revived. The court
sentenced her to die by hanging, and she was accordingly hanged at the
end of eight days. Cotton Mather, in his account of the proceedings,
relates that as she passed along the street under guard, Bishop "had
given a look toward the great and spacious meeting-house of Salem, and
immediately a d�mon, invisibly entering the house, tore down a part of
it." It may be guessed that a plank or a partition had given way under
the pressure of the crowd of lookers-on collected for so extraordinary
a spectacle.
At the end of another four weeks the court sat again and sentenced
five women, two of Salem, and one each of Amesbury, Ipswich, and
Topsfield, all of whom were executed, protesting their innocence. In
respect to one of them, Rebecca Nourse, a matron eminent for piety and
goodness, a verdict of acquittal was first rendered. But Stoughton
sent the jury out again, reminding them that in her examination, in
reference to certain witnesses against her who had confest their own
guilt, she had used the expression, "they came among us." Nourse was
deaf, and did not catch what had been going on. When it was afterward
repeated to her she said that by the coming among us she meant that
they had been in prison together. But the jury adopted the court's
interpretation of the word as signifying an acknowledgment that they
had met at a witch orgy. The Governor was disposed to grant her a
pardon. But Parris, who had an ancient grudge against her, interfered
and prevailed. On the last communion day before her execution she was
taken into church, and formally excommunicated by Noyes, her
minister....
In the course of the next month, in which the Governor left Boston for
a short tour of inspection in the Eastern country, fifteen
persons--six women in one day, and on another eight women and one
man--were tried, convicted, and sentenced. Eight of them were hanged.
The brave Giles Corey, eighty years of age, being arraigned, refused
to plead. He said that the whole thing was an imposture, and that it
was of no use to put himself on his trial, for every trial had ended
in a conviction,--which was the fact. It is shocking to relate that,
suffering the penalty of the English common law for a contumacious
refusal to answer,--the _peine forte et dure_,--he was prest to death
with heavy weights laid on his body. By not pleading he intended to
protect the inheritance of his children, which, as he had been
informed, would by a conviction of felony have been forfeit to the
crown.
There had been twenty human victims, Corey included; besides two dogs,
their accomplices in the mysterious crime. Fifty persons had obtained
a pardon by confessing; a hundred and fifty were in prison awaiting
trial; and charges had been made against two hundred more. The
accusers were now flying at high quarries. Hezekiah Usher, known to
the reader as an ancient magistrate of fair consideration, was
complained of; and Mrs. Thacher, mother-in-law of Corwin, the justice
who had taken the earliest examinations. Zeal in pushing forward the
prosecution began to seem dangerous; for what was to prevent an
accused person from securing himself by confession, and then revenging
himself on the accuser by arraigning him as a former ally?...
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