CRIMINAL TRIALS.

By PELEG W. CHANDLER.

VOLUME I.

BOSTON:

CHARLES C. LITTLE AND JAMES BROWN.

LONDON:

A. MAXWELL, 32 BELL YARD, LINCOLN'S INN.

MDCCCXLI.

L17083

SEP 1 0 1936

Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1841,

By PELEG W. CHANDLER,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

BOSTON:

PRINTED BY FREEMAN AND BOLLES,

WASHINGTON STREET.

PREFACE,

THE publication of the following volume may be regarded as an experiment, which, if successful, will demonstrate that the most important and interesting criminal trials, which have taken place in this country, may be rendered acceptable to the general reader, in the form of abridged narrations divested of the technicalities of legal proceedings.

In selecting the cases for publication, the author has been chiefly governed by a desire to present those, which might be interesting to the American reader, not only as illustrative of the morals and manners, but as connected with the religious or political history, of the periods in which they occurred; and, in preparing them for the press, he has attempted to give an account of each case, after a careful examination of all the facts which might throw light upon

a