Posted on 07/24/2023 7:59:46 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1735, a truculent indentured servant with a name like a primetime drama was hanged in York, Maine (at that time part of the Massachusetts colony), for killing her master’s grandson.
Patience Boston had cut a hard-partying, hard-drinking swath from her teen years to her execution at age 23, leading a succession of masters to dump her contract on whomever would take it. Early American Crime tracks her rowdy career, “mad and furious in my Drink, speaking dreadful Words, and wishing bad Wishes to my self and others” through a succession of fights, adulteries, dead infants (which she didn’t kill), a nonexistent infant (which she claimed to have killed).
All this draws upon a lengthy “Faithful Narrative of the Wicked Life and Remarkable Conversion of Patience Boston alias Samson” published three years after the woman’s death by her ministers Samuel and Joseph Moody (more on them in a bit). In it, “Patience” relates in a first-person voice* the real murder she finally did commit....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Sounds just a little bit like Cat Ballou.
I enjoy your posts; this one especially. Of course, we cannot know that she was ‘saved’, but God’s Holy Spirit has unlimited power to touch any heart...
What about yours Cheshire?
Assuming her conversion was sincere, she still deserved to hang. Finding God should not exempt one from a temporal penance for whatever crime they have committed. What comes after that is up to God.
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