LISTEN · EPISODE 10
Rebecca Nurse: "Innocent as the Child Unborn"
Content note: this post discusses imprisonment, execution, and a forced body search.
On June 29, 1692, a jury in Salem Town found Rebecca Nurse not guilty of witchcraft. She was 71, a church member, and a mother of eight. The court refused to accept the verdict. Three weeks later, she was hanged.
Rebecca Nurse is one of the best-remembered victims of the Salem witch trials. This episode of Witches, Bitches, and Sluts separates what the records say from the saintly version that grew up around her.
If her, then anyone
The first women accused in Salem were outsiders: an enslaved woman, a poor woman, and a sick woman tangled in a land dispute. Rebecca Nurse was the opposite. Her family farmed 300 acres, and she was a full church member. When she was accused in March 1692, being respectable stopped protecting anyone.
Judged by her face
At her examination, the magistrate held her dry eyes against her while the afflicted girls screamed. Her answer: “You do not know my heart.” She also said the Devil might appear in her shape. If that was possible, spectral visions proved nothing. The colony’s ministers made that same argument months later, after she was dead.
Not guilty, then guilty
Thirty-nine neighbors signed a petition for her, including members of the Putnam family. The jury acquitted her. When the court objected, the jury went back out over one remark about two fellow prisoners. Asked what she meant, she said nothing. She later wrote that she was hard of hearing and never heard the question. The verdict became guilty. The governor granted a reprieve, then withdrew it. Her church excommunicated her, and she was hanged on July 19, 1692.
The long apology
Her family refused to let it go. They pushed the minister Samuel Parris out of Salem Village. In 1706, her chief accuser, Ann Putnam Jr., publicly apologized by name. The colony reversed her conviction in 1711, and her church reversed her excommunication in 1712. In 1885, her descendants built a monument calling her a Christian martyr.
Why the saint version isn’t enough
The saint story says Salem was wrong to hang a woman this good. But Rebecca had a temper and fought with neighbors over pigs, and she still didn’t deserve to hang. Neither did anyone else. Nobody hanged in 1692 was a witch.
Sources behind the episode
Read or download the Episode 10 source list (PDF).