Rebecca Nurse

English-born American colonist

• Born: February 21, 1621 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England
• Died: July 19, 1692
• Place of death: Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts)

Nurse was tried and executed for the crime of witchcraft at the age of seventy-one. Because she was so obviously innocent and saintly, her hanging came to symbolize the hysteria, intolerance, and injustice of the Salem witchcraft trials.

Early Life

Rebecca Nurse was baptized Rebecca Towne on February 21, 1621, in Great Yarmouth, England. Her parents, William Towne and Joanna Blessing, had married on April 20, 1620, in Saint Nicholas Church in Great Yarmouth. Rebecca was the oldest of eight children. Her siblings Mary, John, Susanna, Edmund, and Jacob Towne were all born and baptized in England. In about 1635, the family emigrated to America and settled in Topsfield, Essex County, Massachusetts. By 1639, they had moved to nearby Salem Town, where the two youngest children, Joseph and Sarah, were born. Her sisters Mary and Sarah would also be accused at the Salem witch trials .

Little is known specifically about Rebecca’s early life. Her parents are known to have been farmers, and in colonial times, parents generally taught their children the skills they would need as adults. Rebecca and her sisters would have learned how to cook, sew, make soap, make candles, and clean the house. As the oldest child, Rebecca would have cared for the younger children and helped manage the household. Girls received a domestic education to prepare them to be proper wives. Rebecca’s brothers would have helped with the farming. Church attendance, Bible study, and prayer would have been regular family activities.

Life’s Work

In 1645, Rebecca Towne married Francis Nurse, who had been born on January 18, 1618, in Great Yarmouth, the same English town Rebecca was from. Francis was a skilled artisan who made trays and other household items. They settled near the North River in Salem and had eight children: John (born c. 1645), Rebecca (born in 1647), Sarah (born in 1648), Samuel (born in 1649), Mary (born in 1655), Elizabeth (born in 1656 or 1657), Francis (born in 1660 or 1661), and Benjamin (born in 1665 or 1666). In 1672, Francis served as the constable of Salem Town. He had a reputation for fair judgment in resolving disputes.

In the 1630’s, a group of farmers had established Salem Village, five miles (eight kilometers) from Salem Town. In the 1660’s, they petitioned for independence and became a separate parish by 1672. On April 29, 1678, Francis Nurse acquired the valuable Bishop farm in Salem Village. Townsend Bishop had originally received the grant for the 300-acre (121-hectare) farm in 1636. James Allen, who owned the property in 1678, rented it to Nurse, who had the option to purchase the land after twenty years. The Nurse family worked the farm and became prosperous. Of their four daughters, only Sarah remained unmarried. Rebecca married Thomas Preston, Mary married John Tarbell, and Elizabeth married William Russell.

In 1689, the Reverend Samuel Parris became the minister of the Salem Village Church. Nurse retained her membership at the Salem Town church but worshiped at the Salem Village church. During 1690-1691, partisan tensions and conflict mounted between the two churches. Suddenly, in January, 1692, three young girls had inexplicable fits. In February, the three girls, the Reverend Parris’s daughter Elizabeth, Abigail Williams, and Ann Putnam, were examined by William Griggs, the local physician. Griggs concluded that possession by the devil had caused the young girls’ ailment. Under pressure to explain, the girls finally accused Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Parris’s slave Tituba of being witches who had visited them in spectral form.

On March 1, 1692, as magistrates questioned the accused women at the Meeting House, the young girls had fits again, and the three women were charged with witchcraft and jailed. Soon, more villagers, including adults, claimed to be afflicted, and more people were accused.

On March 13, 1692, Ann Putnam identified Rebecca Nurse as one of her spectral tormentors. On March 19, Abigail Williams accused Nurse as well. On March 23, acting on a complaint by John and Edward Putnam, constables arrested Nurse in her bedroom. There had been numerous land disputes between the Putnams and the Nurses in the past. At the time of her arrest, Nurse was a venerable, seventy-year-old grandmother, respected by her fellow Puritans as a devout and kind person. She was also frail, bedridden, and partially deaf.

The hysteria escalated so rapidly that by May, there were about 150 accused men and women in jail on suspicion of witchcraft. Nurse was forced to submit to a physical examination for a “mark of the devil” on her skin. Although Nurse declared her innocence and the exam was inconclusive, she was tried on June 29, 1692. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty, but the afflicted girls went into violent fits again. When questioned about a comment by another accused woman, Nurse was too deaf to hear the question. She did not answer, so the presiding judge, Chief JusticeWilliam Stoughton, asked the jury to reconsider the testimony. The jury then decided on a guilty verdict, and Nurse was sentenced to death.

On July 3, Nurse was excommunicated from her church in Salem Town. Many people became outraged at the court’s verdict. On July 4, 1692, thirty-nine prominent community members signed a petition on her behalf. Her family went to Boston and presented the petition to Governor William Phips, who granted a reprieve. However, on July 12, Justice Stoughton signed a warrant for execution. On July 19, 1692, Rebecca Nurse, her sister-in-law Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, Susannah Martin, and Sarah Good were hanged for witchcraft. Her husband and other family members retrieved her body from the common grave and buried her at their homestead.

Nurse’s execution led to the first public protests against the trials and their use of supernatural evidence. In October, Governor Phips disbanded the original witchcraft court and replaced it with the Superior Court of Judicature, which disallowed spectral evidence. Consequently, prisoners awaiting trial were released and those awaiting execution were pardoned. The Salem witch trials had ended, but eighteen people had been executed by hanging, at least five had died in jail, and one had been tortured to death.

In 1711, the government made restitution to the Nurse family for Rebecca’s wrongful death. On March 6, 1712, the Salem Town church overturned Nurse’s excommunication. In 1885, a monument was erected as a memorial to Nurse.

Significance

Nurse became the most famous and the most iconic victim of the Salem witch trials. Those tragic trials demonstrated the need for reform in the colonial American legal system. The trials’ victims were convicted, imprisoned, and executed based on spectral evidence, hysteria, and hearsay. Contrary to legal practice today, the Salem defendants had no legal counsel, they were not considered innocent until proven guilty, judges were biased, and guilty verdicts were not based on evidence of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The execution of Nurse, the most obviously innocent of those convicted, became the impetus for the end of the trials and the reform of the courts.

Today, 27 acres (11 hectares) of the Nurse property and the saltbox home they lived in have been historically preserved as The Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts. The property has been used in numerous films, including Three Sovereigns for Sarah, a 1985 film about Sarah Cloyce, Rebecca Nurse’s sister. Sarah and another sister, Mary Esty, were also accused of witchcraft, but Sarah escaped execution and worked to clear the names of her sisters. Her efforts demonstrated that land disputes and other economic factors were the underlying causes of the Salem witch hysteria. Nurse herself has remained an iconic figure representing the innocence of all those falsely accused in the Salem trials. She has been portrayed sympathetically in such works as Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (pr., pb. 1953) and the CBS television miniseries Salem Witch Trials (2003).

Bibliography

Hill, Frances. A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Includes well-researched discussions of Rebecca Nurse throughout the book. Illustrated. Bibliography and chapter notes.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Salem Witch Trials Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2000. An excellent sourcebook with period works, actual documents from the trial, personal eyewitness accounts, and subsequent fiction and nonfiction works. Bibliography, index.

Hoffer, Peter Charles. The Salem Witchcraft Trials: A Legal History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. A scholarly, concise history written for students and the general reader, this volume shows clearly how many modern legal rights did not exist in colonial times. Much of the narrative concerns Rebecca Nurse. Chronology and bibliographic essay.

Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. A scholarly, comprehensive study of the Salem witchcraft trials, with numerous sections on Rebecca Nurse. Extensive notes and appendices.

Roach, Marilynne K. The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002. A detailed day-by-day narrative of events from January 1, 1692, through January 14, 1697. An epilogue discusses the aftermath of the trials through 2001. Extensive chapter notes and bibliography. Illustrated, with drawings, maps, and photos. Appendices and index.

Schuetz, Janice. The Logic of Women on Trial: Case Studies of Popular American Trials. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Based on trial records and other primary sources, this book examines the significance of gender and social and historical context in the felony trials of nine American women, including Rebecca Nurse. Bibliography.

Tapley, Charles Sutherland. Rebecca Nurse: Saint but Witch Victim. Boston: Marshall Jones, 1930. The complete biography of Rebecca Nurse, including chapters on the Nurse homestead, the monument, and her descendants. Illustrated.