Reverend George Washington Burroughs This is Me

Education

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1. 1. Common-place: The Refugee's Revenge

   common-place.dreamhost.com/vol - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/13/2003   Last Visited: 2/28/2008

   Yet Elizur Keysar was just one of many contemporaries who thought that George Burroughs was the "Ring Leader" of the witches.So vast a conspiracy, many New Englanders concluded, could not be led by women.The witches' most likely master was, instead, a minister, a well-educated man who could subvert God's church from within.
   
   And one of those best situated to uncover that man's alliance with the devil was someone who "very well knew" him and had once lived with his family, maidservant though she was.
   ...
   And who, for that matter, was Burroughs?Both have primarily been known as residents of Salem Village--Lewis as the servant of Thomas and Ann Carr Putnam, parents of the afflicted Ann Jr., and Burroughs as a one-time and angrily dismissed pastor of the Village church.
   ...
   But in fact, Lewis and Burroughs knew each other so well not in the Village but in another time and place: in the 1670s and 1680s in the little town of Falmouth (now Portland), located on Casco Bay, Maine.
   ...
   George Burroughs, who was born in Virginia but raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts, attended Harvard as a member of the class of 1670.
   ...
   Neither then nor later did Burroughs achieve ordination as the leader of a formally organized Puritan congregation.Consequently, at no time during his pastoral career could he baptize babies or administer the sacraments, although he could both preach and instruct children in religious precepts.In fact, he probably taught Mercy Lewis, who knew her Bible well.
   
   Suspicions of Burroughs first surfaced in mid-April 1692, after Abigail Hobbs confessed that the devil had recruited her as a witch about four years earlier while her family, too, was living in Falmouth.
   ...
   Others too later repeated Ann's charge that Burroughs had bewitched them.
   
   But why were these matters relevant to the charge that George Burroughs was a witch, and what, other than the fact that she had once been his servant, caused Mercy Lewis's animus against George Burroughs?
   
   To answer those questions it is necessary to go back nearly two decades, to the moment when the lives of a little girl and a young minister first began to intertwine.
   
   In August 1676, the three-year-old Mercy Lewis and the twenty-three-year-old George Burroughs were both living in Falmouth, when their world suddenly collapsed around them.
   ...
   Mercy's parents escaped with her to an island in the bay, along with George Burroughs and others, but her father's extended family was hard hit.

2. 2. "Witchcraze" by Patricia Causey © 2004 - 2006,  All Rights Reserved.  --  The History

   www.witchcraze.com/TheHistory. - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/23/2007   Last Visited: 9/13/2007

   The Hanging of George Burroughs, former Minister of Salem Village

3. 3. History Unwrapped – August 2005

   www.americanvision.org/osafarc - [Cached]

   Published on: 8/1/2005   Last Visited: 12/20/2006

   One of the accused witches of Salem, Massachusetts, was a former pastor of the Salem village church, George Burroughs.Although Burroughs was a minister, his brief stay in town had won him more enemies than friends.When he was charged with being a wizard, few locals would vouch for his character.The strange fact of the case was that Burroughs himself could not defend himself.In fact he even pretended to possess supernatural power.Eventually he was convicted, not of witchcraft, but of perjury!His compiled crimes cost him his life.