Whenever normal pleasures are withdrawn from a community that community will undoubtedly indulge in abnormal ones.  We should not be surprised, therefore, to find that the Puritans had an itching for the details of the morbid and the sensational.  The nature of revelations seldom, if ever, grew too repulsive for their hearing, and if the case were one of adultery or incest, it was sure to be well aired.  There was a possibility that if an offender made a thorough-going confession before the entire congregation or community, he might escape punishment, and on such occasions it would seem that the congregation sat listening closely and drinking in all the hideous facts and minutiae.  The good fathers in their diaries and chronicles not only have mentioned the crimes and the criminals, but have enumerated and described such details as fill a modern reader with disgust.  In fact, Winthrop in his History of New England has cited examples and circumstances so revolting that it is impossible to quote them in a modern book intended for the general public, and yet Winthrop himself seemed to see nothing wrong in offering cold-bloodedly the exact data.  Such indulgence in the morbid or risque was not, however, limited to the New England colonists; it was entirely too common in other sections; but among the Puritan writers it seemed to offer an outlet for emotions that could not be dissipated otherwise in legitimate social activities.

To-day the spectacle or even the very thought of a legal execution is so horrible to many citizens that the state hedges such occasions about with the utmost privacy and absence of publicity; but in the seventeenth century the Puritan seems to have found considerable secret pleasure in seeing how the victim faced eternity.  Condemned criminals were taken to church on the day of execution, and there the clergyman, dispensing with the regular order of service, frequently consumed several hours thundering anathema at the wretch and describing to him his awful crime and the yawning pit of hell in which even then Satan and his imps were preparing tortures.  If the doomed man was able to face all this without flinching, the audience went away disappointed, feeling that he was hard-hearted, stubborn, “predestined to be damned”; but if with loud lamentation and wails of terror he confessed his sin and his fear of God’s vengeance, his hearers were pleased and edified at the fall of one more of the devil’s agents.  Often times a similar scene was enacted at the gallows, where a host of men, women, and even children crowded close to see and hear all.  Judge Sewall has recorded for us just such an event: