It’s a common misperception that witches were burned at the stake following the Salem witch trials in 1692. The accused were actually hanged, and another accused died while being pressed under a board gradually covered with stones to obtain his confession.
That having been said, are there any recorded incidents of a person being burned at the stake for any crime during America’s colonial period? I remember reading something about slaves who were executed at the stake in colonial New York for an insurrection.
The last sanctioned burning at the stake in England occurred in 1789 (for counterfeiting), and with colonial American law based on English law, it’s not impossible that it happened on these shores.
Source: Execution By Burning Caution - TMI warning. The URL details how burning at the stake actually kills a person.
Burned At The Stake: A Black Man Pays for a Town’s Outrage - In early 1893, a white reporter, writing in the New York Sun, offered a grisly account of the burning at the stake in Paris, Texas, of a black man accused of molesting a white girl. Note this second account contradicts the claim of the first account that the last incident took place in 1825. Another TMI warning.
I’ll stop now.
If a Mod feels deleting the links are appropriate, so be it.
I don’t know of any more government-sanctioned burnings, but, like Duckster, I’ve heard of several vigilante-style mob lunching burnings of blacks, but they were in the late 19th/early 20th century.
The best source of information for this sort of thing is the Espy file of legal executions, which aims to list every legal execution in U.S. history. It can be downloaded from here, but it’s a very large PDF file. It looks like there were 66 executions by burning between 1681 and 1825. The charges included murder, arson, rape, (slave) revolt, and witchcraft. (A black man named Manuel was executed for witchcraft in Illinois in 1779; I’ve looked but haven’t been able to find a really good source of information about this case).
By my count, of the 66 executed by burning, 60 were black and 6 white. Four of the 6 whites executed by this method were accused of “slave revolt” (in 1712 in New York). I presume that means that they aided a slave revolt.
I’d like to know more about this myself. Illinois didn’t exist as a state until 1818, and there wasn’t much of anything here in 1779. At that time, the revolutionary war was still being fought, and any govermental authority here (Illinois) at the time was British, and military. (Hmmm now that I think about it, the Clark expedition was right about then - the battles of Vincennes and Kaskaskia. But to give you an idea of little there was in the the way of white settlement, the armies involved were tiny. Less than 100, IIRC. So I don’t think there were any formal trials or courts then. Must have been a vigilante thing.)
We discussed cases of execution by burning in the US here.
It does appear that there was at least one case of execution by burning at the stake in the proto-US. Though as bibliophage notes at the end of the thread the records on what exactly happened are pretty scanty.
Translating it to English, I’m pretty sure he is trying to say “Even though started by a mob, law enforcement has been known to be complicit in this affairs” (not agreeing or disagreeing, just translating)
I was mostly jerking his chain; IMO folks that post via voice recognition or some funky word-recognizer swipe-ish keyboard replacement on their phone need to be told they have an obligation to actually proofread before clicking [Submit].
I use a spell check but if the wrong word is spelled right, my mind does not register it.
I try to ‘preview’ because I seem to see mistakes in grammar easier there. If I am wound up, I just slam the post button. Those posts are always messed up someway.
Then there is a spelling error in the ‘reason for edit’ line…
Where I forget a word is the hardest for me to spot because I type so slow and have to look at the keyboard.
If I type exactly as I think, there is no way for any program to make sense of it.
I should really spend all my time with ‘Tetris’ and ‘Freecell’ and just not go to message boards…
I am not asking anyone to agree with me.* ::: sheesh :::
I think you could make the case that these lynchings were fairly often sanctioned by the government:
“Local police and sheriffs rarely did anything to defend Negro citizens and often supported lynchings. Arthur Raper estimated, from his study of one hundred lynchings, that at least one-half of the lynchings are carried out with police officers participating, and that in nine-tenths of the others the officers either condone or wink at the mob action.”
