ut
the country, and Cox let me and Massachusetts alone thereafter.

I had a like encounter with Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana,
who was a more formidable competitor. Mr. Voorhees made the
same charge against the people of Massachusetts of having
burned witches at the stake in the old Puritan time. It was
in a debate under the five-minute rule. After reiterating
the old familiar slander that the State of Massachusetts in
her early history had burned witches at the stake, Mr. Voorhees
added that in 1854 or 1855 the Know Nothings broke up convents,
burned Catholic churches, and would have burned Catholics
and Sisters of Charity themselves at the stake within her
borders, if they had dared to do so.

I declared both of these charges to be utterly false, and
said that no human being was ever burned at the stake in
Massachusetts for the crime of witchcraft, and though at a
time when the whole civilized world believed in witchcraft
on the authority of certain passages in the Old Testament,
the courts of Massachusetts did execute some nineteen or
twenty persons of both sexes for the alleged crime of witchcraft,
it was also true that the people of Massachusetts were the
first among men to see the error and wickedness of this course;
that although late in the following century, many people were
condemned for witchcraft in England and on the Continent,
the love of justice and the intelligence of Massachusetts
first exposed that error and wickedness.

I explained that a convent was burned in Massachusetts, not
in 1854 or 1855 by the Know Nothings, but in 1836, by a mob
excited by a rumor that some terrible cruelty had been inflicted
upon some young women who had been placed in a convent at
Charlestown; that the criminals were arrested, tried and sentenced,
and that their crime left no more stain upon the State than
any criminal act committed within the limits of any civilized
country. In conclusion, I said it did not become the political
friends of the men who had burned our soldiers alive at Fort
Pillow, or who burned orphan asylums in New York, and hung
negroes on lamp posts, to talk of cruelties in a past age.

This retort angered Voorhees beyond endurance, and before
I could finish my sentence, he sprang to his feet and cried
out in great anger: "Every word the gentleman says is false
and he knows it." There was a demand that my words be taken
down and that the words of Mr. Voorhees be taken down. That
was done.