They could press him. They could not condemn him

This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.

Giles Corey needs to be remembered.

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In the spring of 1676, Giles Corey beat a farmhand to death on his Salem farm. The man’s name was Jacob Goodale. The court reduced the charge to unreasonable force and fined him. He went back to his land.

He was a tall, heavy man. He was sixty-five at the time of the beating and would live another twenty-five years. He had buried one wife by then and would bury another. He had farmed a hundred acres in Salem Village for almost two decades. He was profane and litigious and not well-liked. People remembered Goodale long after the court had let Corey pay off his death.

In 1690 he married a third time. His wife was Martha Panon Rich. She was older than him, devout, and unafraid to say what she thought. When the witchcraft accusations began in Salem Village in the winter of 1692, she said the girls were lying. She said the courts should not believe them. The court arrested her in March.

What happened next is the hardest part of Corey’s story to tell. Before he was an accused man himself, he gave testimony to the court against his own wife. He told the examiners that her behavior had been strange. He retracted some of it later. The words were on the record.

In April the afflicted girls turned on him. The warrant came on April 18, 1692. He was examined on April 19 by John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin and denied everything. The depositions accumulated through the summer. Ann Putnam Jr. swore his specter had appeared to her in April demanding she sign the Devil’s book. Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, Abigail Williams, and Elizabeth Hubbard all swore he had pinched and choked them. Ann Putnam Sr. said the ghost of Jacob Goodale had appeared to her in a winding sheet, fifteen years dead, demanding vengeance against the man who had killed him. Giles and Martha sat in the Ipswich jail through the worst of the summer.

On July 25 he signed a deed. He gave his hundred acres to his sons-in-law, William Cleeves and Jonathan Moulton. He wrote that he was under great troubles and affliction and did not know how soon he might die. Whatever else he intended to do later, he had already moved his land out of reach.

On September 17, 1692, the Court of Oyer and Terminer called him forward. The procedure was simple. He was asked how he pled to the indictment. He was then asked to submit himself to trial by jury — to put himself on the country, in the language of the time.

He pled innocent. Then he refused to do the second thing.

Under the English common law that Massachusetts had adopted, a defendant who refused to submit to trial could not be tried. The court could not proceed without his consent. The common law also supplied a remedy for that refusal. It was called peine forte et dure, which is Law French for strong and severe punishment. The defendant was stripped, laid on his back on the bare ground, and a board was placed across his chest. Stones were added until he pled or died. The procedure had been used in England since the thirteenth century. It would not be used again in what became the United States.

The Massachusetts Body of Liberties, written in 1641, had forbidden any punishment that was barbarous, inhumane, or cruel. There was no Massachusetts statute authorizing peine forte et dure. The court used it anyway.

He knew what he had chosen. They held him in a field beside the Salem jail for two days. They sent Captain Gardner of Nantucket, an old acquaintance, to plead with him to enter a plea. He refused. The sheriff, George Corwin, was twenty-six years old and had been seizing the property of the convicted across Essex County for months. Corwin gave the order to add weight.

The legend, which is partially true, is that Corey refused to plead in order to protect his estate from forfeiture. The truth is more complicated. The land was already gone — deeded in July to his sons-in-law. What he was protecting was something else. A court that had already chosen its verdict could not have his words. It could have his life. It could not have his consent.

The two words attributed to him during the pressing — more weight — do not appear in the official court papers. Samuel Sewall, who sat as one of the judges, did not write them down. They surface later in Robert Calef’s account, published in 1700. They may be accurate. They have the ring of the man who once beat a farmhand to death on the same Salem land.

He died at noon on September 19, 1692. Sewall wrote four lines in his diary that evening. About noon, at Salem, Giles Corey was pressed to death for standing mute. Much pains was used with him two days, one after another, by the Court and Captain Gardner of Nantucket, who had been of his acquaintance — but all in vain. Calef added one terrible detail: that Corey’s tongue had been pressed out of his mouth in the last hour, and that Sheriff Corwin had forced it back in with his cane.

Three days later, Martha was hanged on Gallows Hill with seven other women. They were the last to be executed in the trials.

Six weeks after Corey’s death, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was dissolved by Governor Phips. The Massachusetts ministers had turned against the use of spectral evidence. The public horror at what had happened to Corey was one of the reasons.

Sheriff Corwin died of a heart attack in 1696. He was thirty years old. Philip English, whose property Corwin had seized, put a lien on the corpse and refused to allow burial until the family paid back what had been taken. Eventually they did.

The Salem church reversed Corey’s excommunication in March 1712. The Massachusetts General Court formally exonerated him the year before, in 1711, in the Act to Reverse the Attainders. In 2001 the Commonwealth completed the final exonerations of every accused. By then his name had been on the field beside the Salem jail for three hundred and nine years.

There is a temptation, in any story like this, to make the man into a saint. He was not. He had killed once, by his own hand, on his own land, and the colony had let him buy his way out of it. He was old and contentious and afraid. The grand jury had assembled enough depositions against him to make conviction nearly certain. He could see the gallows being prepared for his wife.

What he did at the end was small in its mechanics and immense in what it cost him. He did not preach. He did not pray. He did not denounce the court. He said nothing. By saying nothing he denied the court the consent it required to make him a convict. They could press him. They could not condemn him.

It was not enough to stop them. Martha died three days later. But it was the kind of refusal that does its work slowly — in the diary entry, in the sermon afterward, in the magistrate who began to doubt, in the colony that would later beg forgiveness for what its courts had done.

A flawed man, late in his life, found the one form of resistance the law had left him. He used it.

The court broke before he did.

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Sources: Diary of Samuel Sewall, Massachusetts Historical Society; Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World (1700); The Salem Witchcraft Papers, edited by Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum (1977); the Massachusetts Archives Digital Repository and the University of Virginia’s Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive; David C. Brown, “The Case of Giles Corey,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 121 (1985); David C. Brown, “The Forfeitures of Salem, 1692,” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (1993); Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare (2002); Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story (1993); Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft (2014).

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Next in this series: Rebecca Nurse — When a community decided evidence could be fear.

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Charles C. Jett is the author of six books and more than 800 essays on civic education, leadership, and judgment under pressure. A Naval Academy graduate, Harvard MBA, and Professional Certified Coach, he publishes at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.