--they, therefore, by an ordinance passed in 1641, had required that
the body of every executed criminal should be buried within twelve
hours after death, except in cases of anatomy, which prevented the
possibility of hanging in chains after the English fashion; and the
only way in which they could set a mark of infamy upon the deceased
criminal, without a breach of the colonial ordinance as well as of the
divine law, was to burn the body.[25]

[Footnote 25: The ordinary punishment for all capital felonies during
the colonial regime seems to have been simply hanging. Heretics and
witches were subjected to no severer penalty; and in 1674, Robert
Driver, who was convicted of murdering his master, Robert Williams of
Piscataqua, and who thus incurred the penalty for petit treason, was
sentenced to be "hanged by the neck until he be dead."--See Records of
the Court of Assistants.]

But this tendency to a strict adherence to the laws of Israel
disappeared early in the provincial period, under the operation of the
same causes which led to the abandonment of those rugged metaphrases
of the Psalms of David, and of the song of Deborah and Barak, &c.,
contained in the Bay Psalm-Book, for the smoother though less literal
version of Tate and Brady and the presumptuous "Imitations" of Dr.
Watts. When, therefore, under the new charter the offence called for
it according to the custom of England, the gibbet was erected; and
though the occasions for its employment were very rare, the report of
sundry instances of its use has come down to us, as in the case of the
pirates whose bodies hung in chains, from time to time, on the now
vanished Bird Island in Boston Harbor, a locality as near the place
where the fact was committed as could conveniently be used. I confess
I find it impossible to understand whence the provincial judges
claimed to derive their authority for ordering the bodies of criminals
to be hung in chains. We have seen that, even if our fathers brought
with them the right to exercise this authority, they soon enacted
provisions entirely inconsistent with the practice; and I am not aware
of any subsequent act of parliament, extending to the Colonies, that
restored the authority; and certainly there was no law of the Province
to that effect.

I ought not to dismiss this subject without adding something to the
brief allusion already made to the comparative mildness of the laws of
Massachusetts in respect to capital punis