As the stage-coach runs along through old Narragansett, it comes to another scene of crime, of horrible crime and horrible punishment--that of hanging in chains. This demoralizing sight was almost unknown in America. You can scarcely read a tale, a history of old English life, without hearing of men "hanging in chains." That most popular of children's books, _The Fairchild Family_, has a typical English scene, wherein the solemn English father, in order to make his children love each other the more, takes them through a lonely wood to see the body of a man hanging in chains on a gibbet, a horrible and revolting sight. Travellers on the Portsmouth Road in England, after the year 1786, passed at Hind Head a gibbet with three men swinging in chains, three barbarous murderers of an unknown sailor--not a pleasant outlook for tired riders on the coach. By the old South Ferry in Narragansett, a man was murdered by a fellow-traveller. At the inn where they had rested the last night one of them spent on this earth, a woman had dressed his hair, and she noted a curious white lock which grew like our artist Whistler's in a thick head of black hair. On this single identification was built a chain of evidence which ended in that unusual and terrible sight in the new world, the body of a criminal hanging in chains. It swung there till the poor bones dropped to the earth, and finally the great chains rusted apart. Then schoolboys took the heavy links which had bound a sight they had not seen, and with equal bravado and apprehension cracked open their winter store of hickory nuts and butternuts with the last emblem of an obsolete law.
Not far from this scene is a crossroads which could be viewed from the stage-coach, but I trust no traveller saw there the execution of a law as obsolete and as barbaric as hanging in chains.
For on this crossroads took place several of those eccentric, ridiculous performances known as "shift-marriages." Any widow, about to be married again, could be free from all debts of her dead husband's contracting by being married at the crossroads, "clad only in her shift." Sometimes she was enjoined to cross the King's Highway four times thus scantily clad.
George Hazard, Justice, made entry in the town book of South Kingston, Rhode Island, that Abigail Calverwell on the 22d of February, 1719, was taken in marriage "after she had gone four times across the highway in only her shift and hair low and no other clothing." Think of this poor creature, on this winter's night, going through such an ordeal. Another Narragansett widow, Jemima Hill, was married at midnight "where four roads meet," clad only in her shift. Another entry in a town record-book specifies that the bride had "no other clothing but shifting or smock." Let me hasten to add that these marriages were not peculiar to Rhode Island; they took place in many of the colonies, certainly in Pennsylvania and in all the New England states.