Mrs. Good was carried to jail. Not long after her little daughter
Dorcas, aged four years, was apprehended at the suit of the brothers
Putnam, chief citizens of Salem. There was plenty of testimony produced
of bitings and chokings and pinchings inflicted by this infant; and she
was committed to prison, and probably, as Mr. Upham says, fettered with
the same chains which bound her mother. Nothing short of chains could
keep witches from flying away; and they were chained at the cost of
the state, when they could not pay for their own irons. As these poor
creatures were friendless and poverty-stricken, it is some comfort to
find the jailer charging for "two blankets for Sarah Good's child,"
costing ten shillings.
What became of little Dorcas, with her healthy looks and natural
childlike spirits, noticed by her accusers, we do not learn. Her mother
lay in chains till the 29th of June, when she was brought out to receive
sentence. She was hanged on the 19th of July, after having relieved her
heart by vehement speech of some of the passion which weighed upon
it. She does not seem to have been capable of much thought. One of
the accusers was convicted of a flagrant lie, in the act of giving
testimony: but the narrator, Hutchinson, while giving the fact, treats
it as of no consequence, because Sir Matthew Hale and the jury of his
court were satisfied with the condemnation of a witch under precisely
the same circumstances. The parting glimpse we have of this first victim
is dismally true on the face of it. It is most characteristic.
"Sarah Good appears to have been an unfortunate woman, having been
subject to poverty, and consequent sadness and melancholy. But she was
not wholly broken in spirit. Mr. Noyes, at the time of her execution,
urged her very strenuously to confess. Among other things, he told her
'she was a witch, and that she knew she was a witch.' She was conscious
of her innocence, and felt that she was oppressed, outraged, trampled
upon, and about to be murdered, under the forms of law; and her
indignation was roused against her persecutors. She could not bear in
silence the cruel aspersion; and although she was about to be launched
into eternity, the torrent of her feelings could not be restrained, but
burst upon the head of him who uttered the false accusation. 'You are a
liar,' said she. '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.' Hutchinson says
that, in his day, there was a tradition among the people of Salem, and
it has descended to the present time, that the manner of Mr. Noyes'
death strangely verified the prediction thus wrung from the incensed
spirit of the dying woman. He was exceedingly corpulent, of a plethoric
habit, and died of an internal hemorrhage, bleeding profusely at the
mouth." (Vol. ii. p. 269.)
When she had been in her grave nearly twenty years, her
representatives--little Dorcas perhaps for one--were presented with
thirty pounds sterling, as a grant from the Crown, as compensation for
the mistake of hanging her without reason and against evidence.