Guilty of Cruelty-The Brutal History of York, Maine

In 1692, a raiding party burned York, Maine to the ground, killed the town’s own minister at his front door, and marched eighty of its people into the Canadian wilderness. It would not be the town’s only reckoning with violence.Guilty of Cruelty traces four centuries of law, war, and punishment in one of America’s oldest towns. From a 1644 hanging built on rumor and a corpse’s ordinary decay, to a colonial court that convicted a slaveholder of nothing worse than 'cruelty' for beating a woman named Rachel to death, to the stone dungeon that still stands on Lindsay Road today. It follows the captives, the condemned, the executioners, and the ministers whose own guilt would later inspire Nathaniel Hawthorne.Drawing on court records, provincial archives, and recent archaeology, this history separates what York actually did from what three centuries of monuments, pamphlets, and ghost tours have since claimed it did and asks what an honest reckoning with that difference actually requires.