University of Virginia Library

12. CHAPTER XII.

The work of that day was the death of George Burroughs.
The unhappy allusion that he made to the
knife, just before he stopped so suddenly and fixed his
eyes upon a young female who sat near him with her
back to the light, and her face muffled up so that nobody
knew her till after she had gone away, was now in
every body's mouth. She was the sister of Rachel Dyer,
and her name was Mary Elizabeth; after Mary Dyer
and Elizabeth Hutchinson. It was now concluded
that what he knew of the perjury of the witnesses, of
the sheet and of the knife, he had been told by Mary
Elizabeth or by Rachel Dyer, who had been watching
him all the livelong day, from a part of the house,
where the shadow of a mighty tree fell so as to darken
all the faces about her.

It was Rachel Dyer who spoke out with a voice of
authority and reproved him for a part of his wild speech.
And it was Rachel Dyer who came up to his very side,
when he was in array against the judges and the elders
and the people, and stood there and spoke to him without
fear; while Mary Elizabeth sat by her side with her
hands locked in her lap, and her blue eyes fixed in despair
upon the earth.

Nor were the people mistaken; for what he knew of
the forgery, he did know from Rachel Dyer, and from
Mary Elizabeth Dyer, the two quaker women whose
holy regard for truth, young as they were, made their

simple asseveration of more value than the oath of most
people. To them was he indebted for the knowledge,
though he was not suffered to speak of it—for the times
were not ripe enough, that even as the knife-blade was,
the spindle and the sheet were, a wicked forgery; and
the sign that he made to Elizabeth Dyer, when he stopped
in the middle of his speech, and the look of sorrow
and love which accompanied his endeavor to appease
her frightful agitation, as she sat there gasping
for breath and clinging to Rachel's garb, were enough
to betray the truth to everybody that saw them.

It was fatal to him, that look of sorrow and love, and
ere long it was fatal to another, to one who loved him
with a love so pure and so high as to be without reproach,
even while it was without hope; and it would have been
fatal to another in spite of her loveliness, but for the
wonderful courage of her....the heroine of our story,
whose behavior throughout a course of sore and bitter
trial which continued day after day, and month after
month, and year after year, deserves to be perpetuated
in marble. No hero ever endured so much—no man
ever yet suffered as that woman suffered, nor as a multitude
of women do, that we pass by every hour, without
so much as a look of pity or a word of kindness to
cheer them onward in their path of sorrow and suffering.
If God ever made a heroine, Rachel Dyer was a
heroine—a heroine without youth or beauty, with no
shape to please, with no color to charm the eye, with
no voice to delight the ear.

But enough—let us go to our story. Before the sun
rose again after the trial of poor Martha, the conspirators
of death were on the track of new prey, and fear
and mischief were abroad with a new shape. And before
the sun rose again, the snare was laid for a preacher
of the gospel, and before a month was over, they

dragged him away to the scaffold of death, scoffing at
his piety and ridiculing his lofty composure, and offered
him up a sacrifice to the terrible infatuation of the
multitude. But before we take up the story of his death,
a word or two of his life. It was full of wayward and
strange adventure.

He appears to have been remarkable from his earliest
youth for great moral courage, great bodily power, enthusiastic
views, and a something which broke forth afterwards
in what the writers of the day allude to, as an
extraordinary gift of speech. He was evidently a man
of superior genius, though of a distempered genius, fitful,
haughty and rash. “He appeared on earth,” says
an old writer of America, “about a hundred years too
soon. What he was put to death for in 1692, he may
be renowned for (if it please the Lord) in 1792, should
this globe (of which there is now small hope, on account
of the wars and rumors of wars, and star-shooting that
we see) hold together so long.”

He was not a large man, but his activity and strength
were said to be unequalled. He went about every
where among the nations of the earth; he grew up in
the midst of peril and savage warfare; and at one period
of his life, his daily adventures were so strange, so
altogether beyond what other men are likely to meet
with, even while they are abroad in search of adventure,
that if they were told in the simple language of truth,
and precisely as they occurred, they would appear unworthy
of belief. The early part of his life, he spent
among a people who made war night and day for their
lives, and each man for himself—the men of Massachusetts-Bay,
who did so, for about a hundred and fifty
years after they went ashore on the rocks of New-Plymouth—putting
swords upon the thighs of their preachers,
and Bibles into the hands of their soldiers, whithersoever

they went, by day or by night, for sleep, for battle
or for prayer.

On account of his birth, he was brought up to the
church, with a view to the conversion of a tribe to
which his father belonged: Constituted as he was, he
should have been a warrior. He made poetry; and he
was a strong and beautiful writer: He should have made
war—he might have been a leader of armies—a legislator—a
statesman—a deliverer. Had he appeared in the
great struggle for North-American liberty, fourscore
years later, he probably would have been all this.

He never knew his father; and he was dropped by
his mother, as he said, in the heart of the wilderness,
like the young of the wild-beast; but he escaped the
bear and the wolf, and the snake, and was bred a savage,
among savages, who while he was yet a child, put
him upon the track of his unnatural mother, and bid him
pursue her. He did pursue her with the instinct of a
blood-pup, and found her, and fell upon her neck and
forgave her and kissed her, and wept with her, and
stood by her in the day of her trouble. On her death-bed
she told him her story. She had been carried away
captive by the Indians while she was yet a child. She
grew up to their customs and married a warrior who
was descended from a white man. Of that marriage
the boy about her neck was born. She had no other
child, but she was very happy until she saw the Rev.
Mr. Elliot of Plymouth, a man who seeing others of
the church occupied in warfare and cruel strife, turned
his back upon the white men that he loved, and struck
into the woods of the north, and went about every where
preaching the gospel to the savages and translating precious
books for them, such as “Primers, catechisms,
the practice of piety, Baxter's Call to the Unconverted,
several of Mr. Shepard's composures, and at length the

Bible itself, which was printed the first time in their
language in 1664, and a second time, not long after,
with the corrections of Mr. Cotton, minister of Plymouth.”
After meeting with Mr. Elliot, who soon added
her to his Indian church, and filled her heart with fear
about original sin, faith, free grace and a future life, she
grew melancholy; and being assured that her brave
wild husband, a chief who hated the white man with a
hatred passing that of the red men, would never permit
her to preach or pray if he knew it, she forsook him and
fled for refuge to New-Plymouth—her boy, whom she
could not bear to leave with his pagan father, strapped
to her back, and her soul supported by the prayers of
the true church. For a time she doated on the boy, for
a time she was all that a mother could be; but before a
twelvemonth was over, perceiving that she was regarded
by the whites, and by the women especially (her sisterhood
of the church) as unworthy to associate with
them because of the babe, and because of the father,
whose lineage they said was that of Anti-Christ and the
scarlet-woman, she took to prayer anew, and bethought
herself anew of the wrath of God—her Father—and resolving
to purify herself as with fire, because of what
she had been to the savages—a wife and a mother, she
strapped the boy on her back once more, and set off
a-foot and alone to seek the hut of his wild father;—and
having found it she kissed her boy, and laid him at his
father's door in the dead of night, and came away with
a joyous heart and a free step, as if now—now, that the
little heathen was in a fair way of being devoured by the
wolf or the wild hog, under the very tree which overhung
the very spot of green earth where she had begun
to love his father, as he lay asleep in the shadow, after
a day of severe toil—she had nothing more to do to be
saved.

The father died in battle before the boy had strength
enough to draw a child's arrow to the head. The boy
went in pursuit of his mother at the age of twelve, and
by her he was taught the lessons of a new faith. She
persuaded him to leave the tribe of his father, to forsake
the wild men who were not of the true church, and to
come out from the shadow of the wilderness. The
whites aware of the value of such a youth and of the
use he might be in their bold scheme for the overthrow
of Indian power throughout all North America—the
spread of the Gospel of truth and peace and charity, as
they called it—added their solicitation to hers. But
no—no—the brave boy withstood them all, he would
neither be bribed nor flattered, nor trapped, nor scared;
nor was he, till he saw his poor mother just ready to die.
But then he gave up—he threw aside the bow and the
arrow, he tore off the rich beaver dress that he wore,
buried the tomahawk, offered up the bright weapons of
death along with the bright wages of death, on the altar
of a new faith—prayed his mother to look up and
live and be happy, and betook himself with such fervor
and security to the Bible, that he came to be regarded,
while yet a youth, as a new hope for the church that
had sprung up from the blood of the martyrs.

He married while he was yet a boy. At the age of
twenty, he was a widower. At the age of twenty-four
he was a widower again, with a new love at his heart
which he dared not avow—for how could he hope that
another would be found to overlook his impure lineage;
now that two had died, he believed in his own soul, a
sacrifice to the bitter though mute persecution they had
to endure for marrying with one who was not altogether
a white man? a love which accelerated his death,
for till the name of Elizabeth Dyer came to be associated
with his, after the trial of Martha Cory, the wretched

women, who had acquired such power by their pretended
sufferings, were able to forgive his reproof, his
enquiry, and his ridicule of what they swore to, whenever
they opened their lips to charge anybody with
witchcraft. From the day of the trial it was not so.
They forgave him for nothing, after they saw how much
he loved Mary Elizabeth Dyer. And yet, he was no
longer what he had been—he was neither handsome nor
youthful now; and they who reproached others for loving
him when he was both, why should they pursue him
as they did, when the day of his marvellous beauty and
strength was over? when his hair was already touched
with snow, and his high forehead and haughty lip with
care? Merely because he appeared to love another.

He had been a preacher at Salem till after the death
of his first wife, where he had a few praying Indians
and a few score of white people under his charge. They
were fond of him, and very proud of him (for he was
the talk of the whole country) till, after her death, being
seized with a desire to go away—to escape for a time,
he cared not how nor whither, from the place where he
had been so very happy and for so short a period, he
left his flock; and went eastward, and married anew—
and was a widower again—burying a second wife; the
second he had so loved, and so parted from, without a
wish to outlive her—and then he crossed the sea, and
traversed the whole of Europe, and after much trial and
a series of strange vicissitude, came back—though not
to the church he had left, but to the guardianship of another
a great way off.

He could bear to live—and that was all; he could not
bear to stay, year after year, by the grave where the women
that he so loved were both asleep in their youth
and beauty—and he forbidden to go near them. But
he prospered no more—so say the flock he deserted,

when he went away forever from the church he had
built up, and took refuge again among the people of
Casco Bay, at Falmouth—a sweet place, if one may
judge by what it is now, with its great green hill and
smooth blue water, and a scattered group of huge pine
trees on the north side. It was a time of war when he arrived
at Falmouth, and the Indians were out, backed by
a large body of the French and commanded by a French
officer, the Sieur Hertel, a man of tried valor and great
experience in the warfare of the woods. At the village
of Casco Bay, there was a little fort, or block house,
into which about a hundred men with their wives and
little ones were gathered together, waiting the attack
of their formidable and crafty foe, when the preacher
appeared.

There was no time to throw away—they were but a
handful to the foe, afar from succor and beyond the
reach of sympathy. He saw this, and he told them there
was no hope, save that which pious men feel, however
they may be situated, and that nothing on earth could
save them but their own courage and a prayerful assiduity.
They were amazed at his look, for he shewed no
sign of fear when he said this, and they gathered about
him and hailed him as their hope and refuge; the servant
of the Lord, their Joshua, and the captain of
their salvation, while he proceeded to speak as if he had
been familiar with war from his boyhood.

For weeks before the affair came to issue, he and they
slept upon their arms. They never had their clothes
off by night nor by day, nor did they move beyond the
reach of their loaded guns. If they prayed now, it was
not as it had been before his arrival in a large meeting-house
and all together, with their arms piled or stacked
at the door, and the bullet-pouch and powder-horn,
wherever it might please the Lord,—but they prayed

together, a few at a time, with sentries on the watch
now, with every gun loaded and every knife sharpened,
with every bullet-pouch and every powder-horn slung
where it should be; and they prayed now as they had
never prayed before—as if they knew that when they
rose up, it would be to grapple man to man with the
savages.

At last on a very still night in the month of May, one
of the two most beautiful months of the year in that
country of rude weather, a horseman who was out on
the watch, perceived a solitary canoe floating by in the
deep shadow of the rocks, which overhung the sea beneath
his feet. Before he had time to speak, or to recollect
himself, he heard a slight whizzing in the air, and
something which he took for a bird flew past him—it
was immediately followed by another, at which his horse
reared—and the next moment a large arrow struck in a
tree just over his head. Perceiving the truth now, the
horseman set off at full speed for the fort, firing into
the canoe as he darted away, and wondering at his narrow
escape after the flight of two such birds, and the
twang of a bowstring at his very ear.