George Burroughs
Out of the twenty-one witches put to death during the Salem witch trials, eight were men. One of those was George Burroughs, a former minister of Salem, who seems to have been accused because he did not quite fit into the community, which he only served for a year and a half.
Burroughs was born in Suffolk, England and immigrated to Massachusetts with his mother when he was a small boy. After attending Harvard, he graduated in 1670 and became a minister in Falmouth, Maine in 1674. Burroughs married but his life did not remain settled for long as Wabanaki Indians destroyed the town in 1676. Burroughs and the remaining survivors- including a small girl called Mercy Lewis managed to escape, and in 1680, Burroughs’s became the minister for Salem, with Lewis joining his family as a servant.
Burroughs’s tenure in Salem was not a success. As an outsider, he automatically became an object of scrutiny. People looked for differences- and found them. Burroughs was too ‘secretive.’ He was suspected of religious dissent and may have been a secret Baptist. Perhaps because of this, he became alienated from supporters of the former minister, Mr. Bayley. Parishioners began to refuse to pay his wages, and when his wife died, Burroughs was forced to borrow money from Thomas Putman. Finally, as it became apparent life in Salem wasn’t working out, Burroughs returned to a rebuilt Falmouth.
Meanwhile, in Salem, the witch trials began, and Burroughs was implicated in absentia. He was accused by several of the afflicted girl’s of being the leader of the witches, sent by the devil to find recruits in Salem. Two of the accused witches, Abigail Hobbs and Mary Warren even claimed him as their ringleader. These testimonies, plus Burroughs unpopularity and strange habits were enough. On April 30, 1692, Burroughs was arrested in Maine when Captain Jonathan Walcott and Thomas Putman filed a complaint of witchcraft against him. He was taken to the jail at Salem to await trial.
At the trial on August 5, 1692, Burrough’s extraordinary strength and private nature were exploited as suspect, as was the fact he survived the Wabanaki raid- a fact supplied by Lewis and attributed to magic. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang. However, the crowd nearly halted his execution on August 19 when they became briefly convinced of Burrough’s innocence. The former minister gave a heartfelt speech and then recited the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly- supposedly impossible for a condemned witch. However, Cotton Mather, who loathed Burroughs managed to silence any dissent. Burroughs hanged and was buried without ceremony in an unmarked grave.