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Indians convicted of crime, or taken prisoners in war, were sold by our fathers as slaves!
June 14, 1642: “If parents or masters neglect training up their children in learning, and labor, and other employments which may be profitable to the
Commonwealth, they shall be sufficiently punished by fines for the neglect thereof.”
Nov. 4, 1646: The General Court order:--
If a man have a rebellious son, of sufficient age and understanding,--viz., sixteen,--which will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them, then shall his father and mother, being his natural parents, lay hold on him, and bring him to the magistrates assembled in court, and testify unto them, by sufficient evidence, that this their son is stubborn and rebellious, and will not obey their voice and chastisement, but lives in sundry notorious crimes.
Such a son shall be put to death.
1672 : Our ancestors had the
gag and
ducking-stool for female scolds.
Such persons were “to be gagged, or set in a ducking-stool, and dipped over head and ears three times, in some convenient place of flesh or salt water, as the court judge meet.”
Down in the deep the stool descends:
But here, at first, we miss our ends.
She mounts again, and ages more
Than ever vixen did before.
So throwing water on the fire
Will make it but burn up the higher.
If so, my friend, pray let her take
A second turn into the lake;
And, rather than your patience lose,
Thrice and again repeat the dose.
The
stocks stood in the centre of a village.
The offender had both hands and both feet entrapped between two boards; sometimes only one foot and one hand.
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Stocks. |
