The retort seemed to strike
the House favorably, and was printed in the papers throughout
the country, and Cox let me and Massachusetts alone thereafter.
I had a like encounter with Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana,
who was a more formidable competitor. Mr. Voorhees made the
same charge against the people of Massachusetts of having
burned witches at the stake in the old Puritan time. It was
in a debate under the five-minute rule. After reiterating
the old familiar slander that the State of Massachusetts in
her early history had burned witches at the stake, Mr. Voorhees
added that in 1854 or 1855 the Know Nothings broke up convents,
burned Catholic churches, and would have burned Catholics
and Sisters of Charity themselves at the stake within her
borders, if they had dared to do so.
I declared both of these charges to be utterly false, and
said that no human being was ever burned at the stake in
Massachusetts for the crime of witchcraft, and though at a
time when the whole civilized world believed in witchcraft
on the authority of certain passages in the Old Testament,
the courts of Massachusetts did execute some nineteen or
twenty persons of both sexes for the alleged crime of witchcraft,
it was also true that the people of Massachusetts were the
first among men to see the error and wickedness of this course;
that although late in the following century, many people were
condemned for witchcraft in England and on the Continent,
the love of justice and the intelligence of Massachusetts
first exposed that error and wickedness.
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