A crime ‘not to be named among Christians’

“A brief spasm of prosecutions in the mid-Atlantic region… may have been encouraged by a frequently reprinted 1755 English newspaper report describing how George Chambers was convicted of bestiality and sentenced to death….

“Farther south, North Carolina tried John Everitt for having sex with a mare in 1764 and Robert Johnson the following year for penetrating a cow. And while the language of the indictments echoes charges filed in New England — the offenses were described as ‘a venereal affair’ and ‘the detestable and abominable Crime of buggery (not to be named among Christians)’ — neither man was executed….”

— From  “Taming Lust: Crimes Against Nature in the Early Republic” by Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown (2016) 

 

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