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.