II.THE WITCHES.
Thestory of the witchcraft delusion in New England is a sequel and companion-piece to the history of the conflict with the Quakers. Both exhibit the least attractive side of our forefathers, and both point the moral that the intermeddling by ecclesiastics in matters of public policy is dangerous to the state. It is a strange tale of superstition and of panic, painful to dwell upon, but necessary to a proper comprehension of the characters of the leaders of New England, and of the conditions under which the struggling colonies developed their strong and distinct individuality. It should always be remembered that belief in witchcraft was not a peculiarity of New England, and that the reason the colonists there have been judged so hardly for their panic is that men have felt that they had claimed to besuperior to the men of their generation, and thus should be measured by a higher standard. Their claim had some justification. The leaders of thought in New England had advanced in some directions far beyond their contemporaries; in political insight and political adroitness they have had few equals in any period; but they were hampered and burdened by the very religion which to their fathers had been a gospel of liberty and a source of inspiration. This had become a theology with its dogmas and its rules; the devout and earnest ministers who had contended for their faith in England, or had braved the perils of the seas and the loneliness of the wilderness to be free to worship God as they chose, had given place to the second generation, who had never known suffering, and were therefore ignorant of mercy; men who were enthusiastic indeed, but not so much enthusiastic for religion as for their creed; not so zealous for Christ as for their own peculiar way of worshipping him. The result had been a general lowering of spiritual tone, which was recognized and freely acknowledged and deplored by the best men of the period. It seems inevitable that this hardening and narrowing should follow ages of contest and struggle. Whenthe faith becomes a war-cry, it necessarily loses much of its spirituality. Beliefs for which one age has suffered become crystallized into formulas for the next, and divines wonder at the hardness of men’s hearts in refusing obedience to what once indeed had been a law of life, but by being made a commandment has become a law unto death.
So, while our New England forefathers were clever politicians, shrewd and adroit men of affairs, practical and full of ingenious expedients, intelligent and clear-headed about their secular business, they retrograded in religion, and became formalists and controversialists. Theological orthodoxy supplanted intelligent Christianity, and New England religion sank into a dreary series of wranglings about Cambridge platforms and Saybrook platforms, half-way covenants and whole-way covenants, old lights and new lights, consociations and associations, until it became, for a time at least, more arid and lifeless than ever had been the Church of England, against the formalism of which they were continually protesting. It is true that a few isolated cases of witchcraft are found occurring in the early history of the colonies, and it was then that the severe laws were enacted; yet the serious trouble, thegreat panic, did not come until the first generation, “those men who had seen the works of the Lord,” had been gathered unto their fathers. One cannot imagine John Cotton playing the part of his namesake Cotton Mather, or John Winthrop, superstitious as he was, in the place of Stoughton. Even Wilson and Norton, who exulted in the blood of the Quakers, thought witch-finding a cowardly yielding to popular folly. The responsibility of the men of the first generation lies rather in the character of the religious training they gave their successors, a gloomy religion, which in themselves had been mitigated by a piety, sincere if fanatical, and perhaps also by some recollection of the brighter experiences of their childhood’s days in the more genial religious life of England, a life their children had never known.
It is, then, not astonishing that our forefathers in New England should have been victims to a common delusion of their times. We may even say that the circumstances of their lives were such as to render them especially liable to it; for though the hardships of the early history of the settlement grew less as time went on, the life in New England was, at the best, lonely and depressing. Thecolonists lived dreary lives of laborious and uninteresting toil, with few physical comforts, and with poor and unvaried diet. They had few amusements, little or no recreation, and they were constantly in face of difficulties, constantly exposed to danger. Their houses were on the verge of the mysterious forest, where strange sights and sounds were to be seen and heard, where dwelt the Indians, often hostile and always a source of uneasiness. They had few books, and those they had were not of a character to draw them away from the contemplation of themselves. The Bible they had, it is true, but to read it for any purpose except that of spiritual exercise would have been deemed profane. Sermons of abnormal length and dryness, controversial treatises, ponderous alike literally and figuratively, and, as we shall see later, ghastly and blood-curdling accounts of memorable providences, formed their principal literature. The settlers had been for the most part emigrants from quiet country towns and villages in England, put down in the unknown wilderness, to work out, under the pressure of religious enthusiasm, a new social and religious polity. The life was small, narrow, and squalid, only redeemed from utter sordidness by gleams of religiousidealism and by the stern resolution of the better class of the settlers to keep themselves and their neighbors in the paths of righteousness. Their religion was a sombre Calvinism, giving more prominence to the terrors of the law than to the comforts of the gospel. Living as they did in scriptural thought, speaking in scriptural phraseology, dwelling constantly upon the similarity of their position with that of the children of Israel, it is not surprising that they should have carried their intense literalism into every particular. Their external relations, their religious and political systems, were ruled by the law of Moses as they imagined it from their somewhat uncritical study of the Old Testament. Their Christianity was profoundly internal and introspective, something which was between each individual soul and the Almighty, rather than a law of social life. The result of this was twofold. They were led to ascribe to their own convictions the character of divine revelations, and were also rendered intensely morbid, sometimes exalted above measure and sometimes as irrationally despondent. They felt that they were the chosen people of the Lord, doing a great work for him, in “setting up the candlestick of a pure church in the wildernessto which the like-minded might resort”; and this feeling led them to believe that they were especially exposed to the malice and spite of the devil, who desired to thwart their purpose. They saw special providences in every common occurrence that made for their welfare or that seemed to vindicate their theological prejudices, the envy and spite of the devil in every misadventure or threatening circumstance. Cotton Mather may be taken as a characteristic specimen of the more intelligent and devout thinkers among the men of the second generation, and for him the whole daily life of the colony was a spiritual warfare. The very object of his greatest work, the “Magnalia Christi,” is to show the special workings of Divine Providence in favor of the people of Massachusetts, and to exhibit how they had battled against “principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The savage Indians were supposed to be devil-worshippers, and to serve him at their “pow-wows” in the dark recesses of the unbroken forest. Every storm, every meteor, every unnatural birth, was a portent.51It is not strange that under such conditions a strong belief in the realityof witchcraft should have existed, especially when the delusion was general in Europe as well as in America.
The belief in the power of evil spirits to interfere with man has been held in every age and in all parts of the world. It is a survival of that fear of the unseen, which filled the souls of men in those early ages when, ignorant of the forces of nature, they felt the universe about them to be hostile and ascribed all unfamiliar sensations to the agency of some invisible enemy. It is not strange that such a belief should have arisen. Man’s commonest experiences were those of hostility and pain; wild animals were hostile, his wilder fellow-men were still more hostile; from both he suffered injuries that were inflicted consciously and with evil intent; by analogy—the earliest, as it is the latest, form of reasoning—the other evils he suffered must be also the acts of conscious beings. The twinges of rheumatism were no less real than the pain from the blow of a foeman’s club; it was only natural to reason that they had been inflicted by an unseen enemy.
The fear of the unseen, so characteristic of primeval man, has left many traces in language, religion, and custom. Like many anotherinstinct inherited from savage life, it remains lurking in the human mind, and at certain times comes to the surface. It has developed itself in two directions. On the one hand it has led to religion, to a faith in a supernal Protector with whom the darkness and the light are both alike; on the other, to a grovelling fear of evil spirits, which has been the cause of the belief in magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. The fear of Jehovah was, for Israel and for the world, the beginning of wisdom. The “seeking unto wizards that peep and mutter” is the parody of religion, which seems always to exist by its side.
It is probable also that the belief in evil spirits may have had, in some cases, a different origin. It has been often pointed out on historical as well as on philological grounds that, in many cases, the conquest of one tribe by another has degraded the religion of the conquered into a secondary and dishonorable position. When the Saxon convert renounced Woden, Thunor, and Saxnote and all their words and works, the gods of Asgard still remained, in the belief of both convert and converter, as malignant enemies of Christianity. Whether from a primitive fear or a degraded polytheism, the result hasbeen the same; man tends to surround himself with a host of invisible foes.
The monotheistic religions, especially, have waged a bitter warfare upon this form of polytheism, as derogating from the honors due only to the highest. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all declared war against the witch and the magician, at times by stern legislation, at times by wise teaching of the unreality and nothingness of the pretences of those who claim supernatural powers.
Perhaps the most strange fact in the history of the subject, and a remarkable example of the impossibility of anticipating every result of an action, is that the very efforts which were made by the enlightened lawgivers of Israel to eradicate this debasing superstition have been in later times the provocation of the continued recurrence of the delusion. The words of the law of Israel have been used to prove the reality of the existence of the offence it had attempted to obliterate, while the severity of the punishments employed among a people just rescued from barbarism has been made an excuse for equal severity under circumstances the most widely different.
Even now such superstitions are extremely common among the negroes of the southernportion of the United States, and of the West India Islands, as they are among the Slavs in Bohemia and Russia, and among the ignorant in every land. Even among the educated classes there is a more than half-serious belief in “charms,” “mascots,” and “hoodoos,” which is laughed at but acted upon. The superstitions about Friday, the number thirteen, and many others of the same nature, are still acted upon all over the world, and the belief in the evil eye is not confined to any one class or nation. Spiritualistic materializations and the marvels of Hindu theosophy are modern examples of this same recurrence to the fears and follies of our savage ancestors.
In the seventeenth century, it was only a few emancipated spirits who did not so believe, and they were looked upon with horror by the majority of religious men as Sadducees and unbelievers. No less an authority than King James himself, the British Solomon, had written a most “learned and painful” treatise to prove the necessity of such a belief for all Christian people, a treatise in which he expounded satisfactorily, to himself at least, all the most recondite minutiæ of the subject.52
In his reign, by Act of Parliament, witchcrafthad been made punishable by death,53and the scandalous case of Lady Essex’s divorce had been decided on grounds of “maleficium versus hanc.”54Still more recently, as the wise and godly Baxter relates, during the period of the Commonwealth, the learned Calamy had looked on with approval, while Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder, tortured some poor wretches, among whom was one unfortunate dispossessed clergyman of the persecuted Church of England, into confessing revolting absurdities.55Still later, after the Restoration, the usually judicious Sir Matthew Hale had condemned and burned two women as witches, in the very Suffolk from which so many of the New Englanders had come, on evidence of the same character as that upon which American courts had to decide.56If these erred in believing in witchcraft, they erred in good company, with all the most orthodox teachers of religion and philosophy in Europe, Protestant and Catholic as well. Even Selden, who had no belief in witchcraft himself, justified the severity which was exercised against those condemned of that offence, by arguing that if a man thought that by turning his hat around and saying “Buz” he could kill a man, he ought to be put to death if he made the attempt,no matter how absurd the claim might be. Sir Thomas Browne, the well-known author of theReligio Medici, gave his testimony as an expert at the trial of the Suffolk witches, upon the side of the reality of witchcraft.57When the student of the early annals of the Colonies realizes the extent of this superstition, and at the same time the literal character of the religion of the majority of the settlers in New England, their bitter hatred of theological opponents, and their readiness to believe evil in regard to them; when he appreciates how harsh and mean and unlovely was the life that most of them lived, and observes that, side by side with an exalted religious enthusiasm, the lowest and most abhorrent forms of indecency and vice prevailed, he will no longer be inclined to wonder at the existence in such a community of the witchcraft delusion, but will rather be amazed that, with such a people and among such surroundings, its duration was so short and its victims so few.
Although the crime of witchcraft was especially named in the colonial statutes, and the penalty of death imposed upon offenders, it was some time before a case was detected; and the early settlers seem usually to have acted most cautiously in this matter. Connecticuthas the unenviable pre-eminence of having furnished the first victim, if Winthrop may be believed. He notes: “One of Windsor was arraigned and executed in Hartford for a witch” in March, 1646–7.58Then followed, in 1648, the execution of Margaret Jones at Charlestown, Mass., whose fate Winthrop also describes. She was tested according to the most approved maxims of witch-finders in England, being stripped and searched for witch-marks, or the teats by which it was believed the devil’s imps were nourished. The search paid no regard to decency, and when the inquisitors found some small excrescence they were fully satisfied of the guilt of the accused, and she was accordingly hanged.59In the same year the founders of the liberties of Connecticut put to death, at Hartford, one Mary Johnson, with whom, it is related, “Mr. Stone labored with such success that she died in penitence, confessing her abominable crimes of familiarity with the devil.”60In 1650, a Mistress Lake was hanged at Dorchester, and a Mistress Kendall at Cambridge, showing that not all the superstitious had migrated from those places to Hartford and Windsor.61In 1651, Mary Parsons of Springfield was hanged for infanticide; she was generally accused of beinga witch, but on trial before the General Court was cleared, owing to the insufficiency of the testimony;62and Hugh Parsons, her husband, who was tried and found guilty by the Court of Assistants in 1652, was re-tried and acquitted by the General Court, “which, after perusing and considering the evidence, ... judged that he was not legally guilty of witchcraft, and so not to dye by law.”63These instances of careful examination, as well as the small number of the cases, show that in the first twenty-five years there was no general panic, and that the authorities were inclined to proceed with a deliberation which contrasts very favorably with the tone of feeling in England at this time. In 1651, Goodwife Bassett was hanged at Stratford,64and John Carrington and his wife of Wethersfield, probably at Hartford,65and in 1653, Goodwife Knapp suffered at Fairfield.66In Massachusetts there were no more cases until 1656, in which year Mistress Hibbins, a woman of position, whose husband had sat as an assistant at some of the earlier trials, was hanged in Boston. It is noticeable in her case that though the magistrates had refused to accept the verdict of the first jury that had found her guilty, the General Court, to whom the case came in regular course,condemned her.67Her execution shocked the wiser portion of the community, and even men of the narrow religious views of Norton and Wilson, though they did not venture openly to oppose the popular demand for her life, were heard to say in private that they had hanged a woman whose chief offence was in having more wit than her neighbors.68
After her death there were no more executions in Massachusetts for over thirty years, though the increasing frequency of marvellous occurrences and suspicious cases promised ill for the future. Good sense as yet controlled public affairs, in this direction at least. In Connecticut witch-finding still continued; in 1558 the wife of Joseph Garlick of Easthampton (L. I.) was tried for this offence; in 1659 there was an alarm in Saybrook; and in 1662, one Goody Greensmith of Hartford was convicted, on her own confession, of having had carnal intercourse with the devil, and was hanged for the offence; two other women were condemned with her but “made their escape”; her husband was not so fortunate and was put to death. Mary Barnes of Farmington was indicted January 6th, 1662–3, and was probably executed with the Greensmiths.69
Other cases occurred, but it is believed thatthis was the last execution for witchcraft in Connecticut. The Gallows Hill in Hartford was, however, long remembered, and has not even yet lost its unsavory reputation. The political changes incident to the reception of the charter, by which the colony of New Haven was calmly absorbed by its astute and ambitious neighbor, seem to have occupied men’s minds sufficiently to keep them from any great amount of activity in this direction. Yet, in 1665, Elizabeth Seger was found guilty of witchcraft at Hartford, but set at liberty, and, 1669, Katharine Harrison of Wethersfield was tried and condemned; the verdict, however, was overruled and the prisoner released by the Special Court of Assistants;70four women were tried in 1692, at Fairfield, one of whom was condemned to death, but not executed; two women were indicted at Wallingford, and a woman was tried at Hartford as late as 1697, but acquitted.71It has sometimes been said that the arrival of Andros and the loss of the charter in 1687 was the only thing that prevented a serious outbreak of the delusion in Connecticut.
When the delusion revived in Massachusetts it was with increased force and virulence. Its recrudescence may be directlytraced to the publication and general circulation in the colony of a book by Increase Mather, entitled “An Essay for the recording of Illustrious Providences,” etc., which contained a detailed account of all the marvels that Divine benevolence or wrath had wrought in the last thirty or forty years.72At about the same time appeared the account of the trials in England under Sir Matthew Hale73and of the remarkable mania which had raged in Sweden in 1669.74These horrible stories became the subject of conversation, of meditation in private, and of sermon and prayer in public. They were apparently read or related to the young as edifying and instructive literature; for, from this time forward, children in New England began to repeat the phenomena that had prevailed on the other side of the Atlantic.
The colony was in a very excited and discontented condition. The beloved patent upon which the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had been so boldly reared had been taken away from them, and they had been brought under the government of England. Their “purity of doctrine” was more than threatened, as not only had they been compelled to desist from persecuting Quakers, but they had also been constrained to allow the hatedBook of Common Prayerto be read in public, and to permit men to worship God according to its rubrical provisions. More than this, the king’s governor had actually polluted one of their meeting-houses by using it for the performance of the services of the national church. It seemed indeed to many of the men who were now prominent in the room of their wiser fathers, that Satan was making a desperate attack upon the colony; and their minds were predisposed to believe any marvels the result of diabolical agency.
The first manifestation of the revived delusion appeared in 1688, in the family of John Goodwin, a sober and prosperous mechanic of Boston. His children, all of whom were said to be remarkable for “ingenuity of character,” and who had been religiously brought up, and were “thought to be without guile,” suddenly exhibited the most alarming symptoms. One of them, a young girl, had given some offence to an old Irishwoman of bad character, and had been repaid with vigorous abuse and vituperation. Shortly afterwards she began to fall into fits, which were deemed by her friends and neighbors to have something diabolical about them. Soon the same complaint attacked also her sister and her two brothers,and the terrified observers reported that they were all “tormented in the same part of their bodies at the same time, though kept in separate apartments, and ignorant of one another’s complaints.” They were free from trouble at night and slept well. Their afflictions always came on in the daytime and in public. Their diabolical visitants were apparently instructed in theology, and displayed a depraved taste in literature that was intensely scandalizing to the pious Cotton Mather, who interested himself most deeply in the strange affliction of the children. He relates that they would throw the children into a senseless condition if they but looked on the outside of such good books as theAssembly’s Catechismor Cotton’sMilk for Babes, while they might read with complete impunityOxford Jests, popish or Quaker books, or theBook of Common Prayer.75The other symptoms were yet more alarming, physically, if not spiritually. “Sometimes they would be deaf, then dumb, then blind, and sometimes all these disorders together would come upon them. Their tongues would be drawn down their throats, then pulled out upon their chins. Their jaws, necks, shoulders, elbows, and all their joints would appear to be dislocated, and they wouldmake most piteous outcries of burnings, of being cut with knives, beat, etc., and the marks of wounds were afterwards to be seen.” The ministers of Boston and Charlestown came to the house, and kept there a day of fasting and prayer, with the happy result of curing the youngest of the children. The others continued as before; and then, the clergy having failed, the magistrates took up the case. The old woman whose violent tongue had apparently had some connection with the first outbreak of the complaint, was arrested and thrown into prison, and charged with witchcraft. She would neither deny or confess, but “appeared to be disordered in mind,” and insisted on talking Gaelic, though she had been able to talk English before. The physicians examined her, and reported that she wascompos mentis, and on their report the poor creature was hanged—a serious blot on the usually judicious administration of Sir Edmund Andros; so unlike him that one is inclined to suspect he must have been absent from Boston when this foolish crime was perpetrated. The children gradually recovered, grew up, “experienced religion” in the usual way, and never confessed to any fault or deceit in the matter. Hutchinson writes that he knew one of them in afteryears, who had the character of a very sober, virtuous woman.76
As these cases may be referred to the circulation of the record of the former marvels and illustrious providences, so now in their turn they became the provoking causes of many others; for a full and particular account of these was printed, first in Boston, and then, almost immediately afterward, in London, with an introduction from no less a person than Richard Baxter. This, together with the other relations, was circulated throughout the colony, and led to a still greater outbreak of the delusion.77Men thought about witches and talked about witches, and very naturally soon came to believe that all the accidents and disasters and diseases, which they could not explain by common natural causes, were the result of demoniac agency.
The strong rule of Andros had ended in revolution and disturbance; but, much to their disappointment, the people had been obliged to accept a new charter under which the rule of the hierarchy was still restrained by the appointment of the governor by the crown. The leaders, astute as ever, succeeded in securing the appointment of Sir William Phips, an ignorant and underbred sailor,hoping to be able to influence him easily, and thus to continue their authority. The lieutenant-governor was Stoughton, one of themselves, whose narrowness of mind and bitter prejudices made him a man upon whom they could rely implicitly. But before the charter arrived, the colony was thrown into a ferment of excitement by the dreadful occurrences at Salem village (now Danvers), which, to the minds of the majority of the population, indicated unquestionably that the enemy of souls was making a most desperate attack upon the community.
The trouble broke out in the family of the minister of the village, Parris by name, who had shortly before had serious difficulties with some of his congregation.78His daughter and his niece, girls ten or eleven years old, began to make the same complaints that had been made by the Goodwin children in Boston three years before. The physicians found themselves at a loss, and hence were quite convinced that the ailments were supernatural, and declared that the children were bewitched. An Indian woman named Tituba, a servant in the house, tried some experiments of a somewhat disgusting nature, which she claimed would discover who the witch was that was tormenting them.When the girls knew what she had done, they immediately cried out that Tituba appeared to them, pricking and tormenting them, and straightway fell into convulsions. The woman, alarmed at this, confessed what she had been doing, but stoutly maintained that, though she knew how to find out witches she herself was none. The condition of the children excited much attention, and the more they were investigated the worse they grew, and soon several others were seized with the same symptoms. These all had their fits, and when in them would accuse not only the Indian woman, but also two old half-witted crones in the neighborhood, one of whom was bed-ridden as well as imbecile. The three were committed to prison, where Tituba confessed that she was a witch and accused the others of being her confederates. They soon had company in the jail, as two others, women of character and position, Mistress Cory and Mistress Nurse, were complained of; and when they were brought to examination, all the children “fell into their fits” and insisted that the accused were tormenting them. The women naturally denied this outrageous charge, but in spite of their denial were committed to prison, and with them, so greatwas the infatuation and panic, a little child of only four years of age, who, as some of the girls insisted, “kept biting them with her little sharp teeth.”
Panic, like rumor, thrives by what it feeds on; and from day to day new victims were accused and committed, until the prisons were crowded. More than a hundred women, many of them of good character and belonging to respectable families in Salem, Andover, Ipswich and Billerica, were arrested, and after an examination, usually conducted by Parris, were thrown into the jails to await their formal trial.79Many of these, in order to escape, confessed whatever they were charged with, and generally in their confessions tried to win favor for themselves by accusing some one else.80Neighborhood quarrels, old sores, spite, envy, and jealousy added their bitterness to the prevailing madness. It seems incredible that any rational beings could have been found to give credence to the farrago of nonsense that was solemnly sworn to; yet it was the most marvellous tales that found the readiest credence. One confession may be cited as a sample, to illustrate what was the force of panic terror in the midst of this apparently civilized community.81
“The examination and confession (8 Sept. 92) of Mary Osgood, wife of Captain Osgood of Andover, taken before John Hawthorne and other their Majesties justices.“She confesses that about 11 years ago, when she was in a melancholy state and condition, she would walk abroad in her orchard; and upon a certain time she saw the appearance of a cat, at the end of the house, which yet she thought was a real cat. However, at that time it diverted her from praying to God, and, instead thereof, she prayed to the devil; about which time she made a covenant with the devil, who, as a black man, came to her, and presented to her a book, upon which she laid her finger, and that left a red spot. And that upon her signing, the devil told her he was her God, and that she should serve and worship him, and, she believes, she consented unto it. She says further, that about two years agone, she was carried through the air, in company with Deacon Frye’s wife, Ebenezer Baker’s wife, and Goody Tyler, to Five-Mile Pond, where she was baptized by the devil, who dipped her face in the water and made her renounce her former baptism, and told her that she must be his, soul and body, forever, and that she must serve him, which she promised to do. She says ... that she was transported back again through the air, in company with the forenamed persons, in the same manner as she went, and believes she was carried upon a pole.... She confesses she has afflicted three persons, John Sawdy, Martha Sprague, and Rose Foster, and that she did it by pinching her bed-clothes and giving consent the devil should do it inher shape, and the devil could not do without her consent. She confesses the afflicting persons in the court by the glance of her eye....Q.Who taught you this way of witchcraft?A.Satan, and that he promised her abundance of satisfaction and quietness in her future state, but never performed anything; and that she has lived more miserably and more discontented since than ever before. She confesses further, that she herself, in company with Goody Parker, Goody Tyler, and Goody Dean, had a meeting at Moses Tyler’s house, last Monday night, to afflict, and that she and Goody Dean carried the shape of Mr. Dean, the minister, to make persons believe that Mr. Dean afflicted.Q.What hindered you from accomplishing what you intended?A.The Lord would not suffer it to be that the devil should afflict in an innocent person’s shape.82Q.Have you been at any other witch meetings?A.I know nothing thereof, as I shall answer in the presence of God and of His people: but said that the black man stood before her, and told her, that what she had confessed was a lie; notwithstanding, she said that what she had confessed was true, and thereto put her hand. Her husband being present, was asked if he judged his wife to be any way discomposed. He answered that having lived with her so long he doth not judge her to be any ways discomposed, but has cause to believe what she has said is true.”
“The examination and confession (8 Sept. 92) of Mary Osgood, wife of Captain Osgood of Andover, taken before John Hawthorne and other their Majesties justices.
“She confesses that about 11 years ago, when she was in a melancholy state and condition, she would walk abroad in her orchard; and upon a certain time she saw the appearance of a cat, at the end of the house, which yet she thought was a real cat. However, at that time it diverted her from praying to God, and, instead thereof, she prayed to the devil; about which time she made a covenant with the devil, who, as a black man, came to her, and presented to her a book, upon which she laid her finger, and that left a red spot. And that upon her signing, the devil told her he was her God, and that she should serve and worship him, and, she believes, she consented unto it. She says further, that about two years agone, she was carried through the air, in company with Deacon Frye’s wife, Ebenezer Baker’s wife, and Goody Tyler, to Five-Mile Pond, where she was baptized by the devil, who dipped her face in the water and made her renounce her former baptism, and told her that she must be his, soul and body, forever, and that she must serve him, which she promised to do. She says ... that she was transported back again through the air, in company with the forenamed persons, in the same manner as she went, and believes she was carried upon a pole.... She confesses she has afflicted three persons, John Sawdy, Martha Sprague, and Rose Foster, and that she did it by pinching her bed-clothes and giving consent the devil should do it inher shape, and the devil could not do without her consent. She confesses the afflicting persons in the court by the glance of her eye....Q.Who taught you this way of witchcraft?A.Satan, and that he promised her abundance of satisfaction and quietness in her future state, but never performed anything; and that she has lived more miserably and more discontented since than ever before. She confesses further, that she herself, in company with Goody Parker, Goody Tyler, and Goody Dean, had a meeting at Moses Tyler’s house, last Monday night, to afflict, and that she and Goody Dean carried the shape of Mr. Dean, the minister, to make persons believe that Mr. Dean afflicted.Q.What hindered you from accomplishing what you intended?A.The Lord would not suffer it to be that the devil should afflict in an innocent person’s shape.82Q.Have you been at any other witch meetings?A.I know nothing thereof, as I shall answer in the presence of God and of His people: but said that the black man stood before her, and told her, that what she had confessed was a lie; notwithstanding, she said that what she had confessed was true, and thereto put her hand. Her husband being present, was asked if he judged his wife to be any way discomposed. He answered that having lived with her so long he doth not judge her to be any ways discomposed, but has cause to believe what she has said is true.”
When the new charter arrived and thenew government went into operation, the Governor and Council appointed Commissions of Oyer and Terminer for the trial of witchcrafts. Their action was of more than questionable legality, as by the charter the power of constituting courts of justice was reserved to the General Assembly, while the Governor and Council had only the right of appointing judges and commissioners in courts thus constituted. The Court, however, was established, and was opened at Salem in the first week of June 1692.83At its first session only one of the accused was brought to trial, an old woman, Bridget Bishop by name, who had lived on bad terms with all her neighbors, and consequently had no friends. She had been charged with witchcraft twenty years before, and although her accuser had acknowledged on his death-bed that his accusation had been false and malicious, the stigma of the charge had always remained. Consequently all the losses her neighbors had met with, in cattle, swine, or poultry, all the accidents or unusual sicknesses they had had, were attributed to her spite against them, and were now brought forward as evidence against her. This testimony, together with the charges made by the possessed children, who continuedto reveal new horrors from day to day, and the confessions of other women who to save themselves accused her, was confirmed to the satisfaction of the Court by the discovery of a “preternatural excrescence,” and she was convicted and executed.84The further trials were postponed until the end of the month, and in the interval the Governor and Council consulted the ministers of the province as to the proper course to pursue. In their reply they recommended caution and discretion, but concluded their advice by saying, “Nevertheless we cannot but humbly recommend unto the government the speedy and vigorous prosecutions of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God and the wholesome statutes of the English nation for the detection of witchcrafts.”85
The ministers had as little doubt of the laws of England being available for their purpose as they had of what they considered to be the laws of God; yet it is very doubtful whether, at the time of Bishop’s trial and execution, there was any law in existence which authorized their proceedings. The old colonial law was no longer in force; and witchcraft not being an offence at commonlaw, the only law by which their action could be justified was the statute of James I., which must therefore have been considered as in force in the colony. It is probable that the execution was utterly illegal. Before the next cases were tried, the old colonial statute was revived and made again the law of the province.
The trials were resumed in July, and were conducted in the same manner as in the case of Bishop, but with even greater harshness. In one case, that of Mrs. Nurse, the perversion of justice was most scandalous. The accusations were so absurd, and her character and position so good, that the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty. So great, however, was the indignation of the populace, and so serious the dissatisfaction of the Court, that the cowardly jurors asked permission to go out a second time, and then brought in a verdict of guilty, which was accepted. The poor woman, whose deafness had prevented her hearing and answering some of the most serious charges, was solemnly excommunicated by Mr. Noyes, the minister of Salem, and formally delivered over to Satan, and, with four others, was hanged. It was long remembered that when one of them was told at the gallows by Noyes that heknew she was a witch, and that she had better confess, and not be damned as well as hanged, she replied that he lied, that she was no more a witch than he was a wizard, and that, if he took away her life, God would give him blood to drink;86and it was believed in Salem that the prediction was literally fulfilled, and that Noyes came to his death by breaking a blood-vessel in his lungs, and was choked with his own blood.
It would be needlessly revolting to relate the details of the subsequent trials, in which the Court, driven by the popular panic and the prevailing religious ideas, perverted justice and destroyed the innocent.87Nineteen persons in all were executed, all of whom, without exception, died professing their innocence and forgiving their murderers, and thus refused to save their lives by confessing crimes which they had not committed and could not possibly commit.88Besides those who suffered for witchcraft, one other, Giles Cory, was put to death with the utmost barbarity. When arraigned for trial he refused to plead, and was condemned to thepeine forte et dure, the only time this infamous torture was ever inflicted in America. It consisted in placing the contumacious person on a hard floor, andthen piling weight after weight upon him, until he consented to plead or was crushed to death. A nearly contemporary account relates that when, in the death agony, the poor wretch’s tongue protruded from his mouth, the sheriff with his cane pushed it in again; and local tradition and ballad told how in his torment he cried for “more rocks” to be heaped on him to put him out of his misery.89This was the last of the executions. The Court of Oyer and Terminer sat no more, and in the interval between its adjournment and the opening of the sessions of the “Supreme Standing Court,” in the following January, time was given for consideration and reflection.90
But it may be questioned whether consideration and reflection would have put a stop to the delusion without the operation of another and more powerful cause. Thus far, the accused persons had been generally of insignificant position, friendless old women, or men who had either affronted their neighbors or, by the irregularity of their lives, had lost the sympathy of the community.91But with their success, the boldness or the madness of the accusers increased; some of the most prominent people in the colony, distinguished in many cases by unblemishedlives, were now charged with dealings with the devil, and even the wife of the Governor fell under suspicion. The community came at last to its senses, and began to realize that the evidence, which till then had seemed conclusive, was not worthy of attention. Confessions were withdrawn, and the testimony of neighbors to good character and life was at length regarded as of greater weight than the ravings of hysterical girls or the malice of private enemies. So it came about that before long those who were not prejudiced and committed by the part they had played, acknowledged that they had been condemning the innocent and bringing blood-guiltiness upon the land. Even Cotton Mather, who had been largely responsible for the spread of the delusion, was compelled to admit that mistakes had been made, though he still maintained that if a further investigation had been held in the cases of many who were set free, their guilt might have been made apparent. Some that had served on the juries that had condemned the victims put forth a paper admitting their delusion and begging pardon of God and man for their mistake.92The impressive story of Sewall’s penitence, and public confession of hisfault in the South Church in Boston, is well known; more consistent and logical was the declaration of the stern-tempered Stoughton, that when he sat in judgment he had the fear of God before his eyes, and gave his opinion according to the best of his understanding; and, although it might appear afterwards that he had been in error, yet he saw no necessity for a public acknowledgment of it.93
Parris, whose part in these acts of folly and delusion had been the most prominent of all, and who was strongly suspected of having used the popular frenzy to ruin some of his personal antagonists, was compelled to resign his position and leave the people whom he had so grossly misled.94Noyes, whose delusion had been at least sincere, made public confession of his fault, and was forgiven by his congregation and by the community that had erred with him. Thus ended one of the most painful episodes in the early history of New England.
The other colonies in America were not so entirely free from this superstition that they should reproach the Puritans for it as a special and peculiar product of their religious system. There were cases in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, thoughthere is no record of any one having been put to death for the offence in those colonies. In Pennsylvania, under the prudent instructions of William Penn, who seems to have been less superstitious than the Massachusetts Quakers, the jury brought in a verdict that the person accused was guilty of “being suspected of being a witch,” and, fortunately, at that time suspicion was not punishable.95In New York, a certain Ralf Hall and his wife were tried in 1665, but were acquitted, and an attempt, in 1670, to create an excitement in Westchester over Katharine Harrison, who had moved thither from Connecticut, was sternly suppressed.96There were trials for witchcraft in Maryland in the last quarter of the seventeenth century; and in Virginia in 1705, thirteen years later than the Salem trials, a witch was ducked by order of court.97
It is hard to decide how much of all this was panic and how much deliberate fraud and imposture. There is no reason to suspect anything worse than pure superstition in the early cases in Massachusetts and Connecticut; but the marvellous attacks of the Goodwin children in Boston and of the Parris girls in Salem seem to belong to a different category.98It is almost incredible that the girlwho played so cleverly upon the vanity and the theological prejudices of Cotton Mather was not fully aware of what she was doing; and the fact that the Parris children accused persons with whom their father had previously had trouble, renders their delusion extremely suspicious. The great St. Benedict is reported to have cured a brother who was possessed by the devil by thrashing him soundly; and it is much to be regretted that the Protestantism of the New Englanders prevented their knowing and experimenting with the saint’s specific, which, in all ages of the world, has been admitted to be wonderfully efficacious. It has been held by many that the testimony at Salem was deliberately fabricated; Hutchinson, writing at a time when men who could remember the trials were yet living, is strongly of that opinion. The case does not, however, seem as clear as that of the Goodwins; and of them Hutchinson, as has been said, reports that they were estimable women who had never acknowledged any deception on their part.
The phenomena of mental disease are so strange and complicated that at the present day men are not as ready to set everything down to fraud as they were a hundred yearsago. It is possible to account psychologically for all the phenomena recorded, without being obliged to adopt any very violent hypothesis. Even if at the outset the children in either case were pretending, it is quite as conceivable that they should have passed from pretence of nervous symptoms to the reality, as it is to think that absolute fraud would pass so long undetected. The symptoms described are such as would be recognized by any alienist to-day, and could be duplicated out of the current medical journals. It may also be noticed that many of the possessed were girls just coming to maturity, and thus of an age when the nervous system was passing through a period of strain.
The rapidity with which the panic spread was most remarkable, and it is painful to notice the abject terror into which the population was thrown. Parents accused their children, and children their parents, and, in one case at least, a wife her husband. Some men were tied neck and heels until they would confess and accuse others.99It was a period of the most pitiful mental and spiritual cowardice, and those that were most directly responsible for the shameful condition of affairs were men who, fromtheir learning and their position, should have been the leaders and sustainers of the popular conscience in soberness of mind and charity. But the ministers of New England had emphasized the necessity of a belief in witchcraft as a part of the Divine revelation. The Old Testament spoke of witches, and had said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” while the New Testament supplied the idea of diabolical possession; hence they argued, with a style of argument not yet disused, that any one who denied the existence of witchcraft was a Sadducee and an impugner of the truth of God’s Word. Soon the reasoning was extended to prove that any one who denied that the particular phenomena under discussion were caused by witchcraft was an enemy of religion. The ministers, as has been said, have an unenviable prominence in the accounts of this disastrous delusion. They were as forward in destroying the witches as their predecessors had been in persecuting the Quakers. They hounded on the judges and juries in their bloody work, they increased the popular excitement by their public fasts and prayers and sermons, they insulted the victims on the scaffold. It is no wonder that, under such leadership, the population was excited to madness. It wasonly when they found their own families and friends accused by those on whose testimony others as innocent had been destroyed, that they were able to recognize that the accusations were absurd and the evidence worthless. Yet it may be said on their behalf that they were not really as far in advance of the majority of their contemporaries as they imagined they were, and it is to their credit that, when their eyes were opened, they were opened thoroughly and not closed again. Cases of witchcraft now disappeared from New England, while in other lands, where there was the same sombre Calvinism but less enlightenment, as in Scotland, the delusion continued for many years.100
The theological spirit now devoted itself to barren questions of little moment, around which wordy battles raged and hatreds developed, only less destructive than those in the previous century because the divines were no longer the rulers of the state. Religion sank into a barren formalism, which had no noble or time-honored forms to redeem it from utter indifference. From this deplorable condition it was roused by three influences which led to a spiritual revival: the Episcopal movement in Connecticut, the preaching and writings of Jonathan Edwardsin western Massachusetts, and the preaching of Whitefield. The dry bones once more lived, and the descendants of the Puritans manifest by their earnest activity and deep spirituality how stout and strong was the stock from which they have inherited many of their most precious characteristics. They may be thankful that the old bigotry has not returned, and that they are now saved from all danger of interfering with public affairs by the complete separation of church and state.
Panic terror of the supernatural, whenever it has occurred, has been a parody of the prevailing form of religion. When the religious ideas are at once narrow and introspective, when the social life is poor and unsatisfying, and when there is also a profound ignorance of bodily and mental physiology, we have the combined conditions for the ready and serious development of religious panic. Such were the circumstances of the witchcraft delusion that followed the religious revival due to the preaching of the Franciscan friars; such were the circumstances in Sweden in the seventeenth century, and in Scotland in the eighteenth; such were the circumstances in New England at the period we have considered. The isolated cases which appeared in various countries from time to time were the resultof superstition and ignorance. That they did not cause a panic may be attributed in some cases to the better social condition; in others, to the presence in the community of men of sense and character who prevented the spread of delusion and calmed, instead of exciting, the minds of their fellows. It is one of the saddest features of the Salem trials, that though prominent men whose influence might have been expected to be exercised on the side of soberness, disbelieved in the reality of the “possession” and criticised privately the methods employed, yet they allowed the delusion to proceed to its tragical extent without interposing their authority to prevent or at least to denounce it. Brattle, in his account of the delusion, written in October 1692, mentions many by name who agreed with him in condemning the proceedings of the justices in Salem, and the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, but looked on while the unfortunates were tormented into confession and put to death at the demand of popular frenzy.101
Though we talk of the progress that the race has made in learning and enlightenment, it is alarming to notice how ineradicable are the superstitions of mankind, how germs which men deem dead really lurk dormantfor ages, and then develop themselves with startling rapidity when they find the proper menstruum. Man, like other animals, seems to exhibit a tendency from time to time to revert to the original type, and to reproduce the physiognomy of long-perished races, with their fears and their hatreds, their low spiritual conceptions and their dominant animal passions. It is the work of education, of civilization, and of religion to strive against this tendency. We can only hope that as men have, in spite of this, made steady progress in many directions, and have conquered and are conquering the animal that is in them, they may in time get the better of all the evil legacies which their primeval ancestors have bequeathed them. Modern science has removed the fear of the plague in all civilized countries and is lessening the danger of the cholera; in like manner, we may hope the old terrors will also in time be swept away, and man be freed from any danger of their recurrence.