Another reason for going so fully into Bekker’s arguments is that they give us an excellent chance to take up a question which is of cardinal importance in weighing the whole matter of witchcraft. I refer, of course, to the question of Biblical exegesis.If we wish to treat our forefathers fairly, we are required to criticise the few opponents of the witch dogma in a really impartial way. We ought not to commend such portions of their argument as chance to square with our own ideas, and ignore the rest. We must review their case as a whole, so as to discover how far it was right or reasonable on the basis of their own postulates. We must test the correctness of their premises, as well as the accuracy of their logic.This process we have gone through with already in several instances. We have seen that all the opponents of witchcraft so far examined struggle to maintain a position that is strategically indefensible, either because they admit too much, or because they ignore certain difficulties, or because they are frankly eccentric. It does not help their case to contend that what they admit or what they ignore does not signify from our present scientific point of view. Itdidsignifythen. The only man whose argument covers the ground completely and affords a thorough and consistent theory on which a seventeenth-century Christian was logically justified in rejecting witchcraft and demoniacal possession as facts of everyday experience is Balthasar Bekker.Now the truth or falsity of Bekker’s very radical conclusions hinged—for Bekker himself and for his contemporaries—on the soundness of his Biblical exegesis. If his way of disposing of those passages which mention devils and witches and diviners and familiar spirits is not justifiable—if the Biblical writers did not mean what he thinks they meant—then his whole case goes to pieces. In discussing the witchcraft dogma of the seventeenth century, we must accept the Bible, for the nonce, as the men of the seventeenth century (Bekker included) accepted it—as absolutely true in every detail, as dynamically inspired by the Holy Ghost, as a complete rule of faith and practice. Modern views on this subject have nolocus standi.Now, if we only keep these fundamental principles firmly in mind, we shall have no doubt as to the outcome. Beyond question, the Bible affords ample authority for belief in demoniacal possession, in necromancy, in the ability of Satan and his cohorts to cause physical phenomena, and in the power of sorcerers to work miracles.[99]True, not all the details of the witchcraft dogma rest upon Biblical authority, but enough of them do so rest to make the case of those who uphold the traditional opinion substantially unassailable, except upon the purely arbitrary assumption that all these wonders, though formerly actual, have ceased in recent times.[100]Bekker’s exegesis is erroneous in countless particulars and presents an altogether mistaken view of Biblical doctrines. As interpreters of the language of Scripture, the orthodox theologians of his time, who pinned their faith to witchcraft, were nearer right than he was. And what is true of Bekker’s exegesis, is equally true of that followed by all previous opponents of the witchcraft dogma. My reason for not referring to this point in criticising their books is obvious. Bekker has gone farther, and succeeded better, in explaining away the testimony of Scripture than any of the others. It is more than fair to them to rest this part of the case upon his success or failure. If Bekker falls, all of them certainly fall,—and Bekker falls.[101]From our cursory examination of the works put forth by some of the chief opponents of the witch dogma, it must be evident that none of these works can have had a very profound influence on the beliefs of the seventeenth century,—their function was rather, by keeping discussion alive, to prepare for the change of sentiment which took place soon after 1700, in what we are accustomed to call “the age of prose and reason.” Such an examination as we have given to these books was necessary to establish the proposition with which we set out,—that our ancestors in 1692 were in accord with the practically universal belief of their day. It has shown more than this, however,—it has demonstrated that their position was logically and scripturally stronger than that of their antagonists, provided we judge the matter (as we are in honor bound to do) on the basis of those doctrines as to supernaturalism and the inspiration of the Bible that were alike admitted by both sides. We may repeat, then, with renewed confidence, the statement already made:—Our forefathers believed in witchcraft, not because they were Puritans, not because they were Colonials, not because they were New Englanders, but because they were men of their own time and not of ours.Another point requires consideration if we would arrive at a just judgment on the Salem upheaval. It is frequently stated, and still oftener assumed, that the outbreak at Salem was peculiar in its virulence, or, at all events, in its intensity. This is a serious error, due, like other misapprehensions, to a neglect of the history of witchcraft as a whole. The fact is, the Salem excitement was the opposite of peculiar,—it was perfectly typical. The European belief in witchcraft, which our forefathers shared without exaggerating it, was a constant quantity. It was always present, and continuously fraught with direful possibilities. But it did not find expression in a steady and regular succession of witch trials. On the contrary, it manifested itself at irregular intervals in spasmodic outbursts of prosecution.Notable examples occurred at Geneva from 1542 to 1546;[102]at Wiesensteig, Bavaria, in 1562 and 1563;[103]in the Electorate of Trier from 1587 to 1593;[104]among the Basques of Labourd in 1609;[105]at Mohra in Sweden in 1669 and 1670.[106]In the district of Ortenau, in Baden, witchcraft prosecutions suddenly broke out, after a considerable interval, in 1627, and there were seventy-three executions in three years.[107]From the annals of witchcraft in Great Britain one may cite the following cases:—1581, at St. Osith’s, in Essex;[108]1590-1597, in Scotland;[109]1612, at Lancaster,[110]and again in 1633;[111]1616, in Leicestershire;[112]1645-1647, the Hopkins prosecution;[113]1649-1650, at Newcastle-on-Tyne;[114]1652, at Maidstone, in Kent;[115]1682, at Exeter.[116]The sudden outbreak of witch trials in the Bermudas in 1651 is also worthy of attention.[117]It is unnecessary for us to consider how much of the evidence offered at witch trials in England was actually true. Some of the defendants were pretty bad characters, and it would be folly to maintain that none of them tried to cause the sickness or death of their enemies by maltreating clay images or by other arts which they supposed would avail. Besides, now and then an injury is testified to which may well have been inflicted without diabolical aid. Thus Ann Foster, who was hanged for witchcraft at Northampton in 1674, confessed that she had set a certain grazier’s barns on fire, and there is much reason to believe her, for she was under considerable provocation.[118]As to occult or super-normal powers and practices, we may leave their discussion to the psychologists. With regard to this aspect of the Salem troubles, we must accept, as substantially in accordance with the facts, the words of Dr. Poole: “No man of any reputation who lived in that generation, and saw what transpired at Salem Village and its vicinity, doubted that there was some influence then exerted which could not be explained by the known laws of matter or of mind.”[119]Even Thomas Brattle, in speaking of the confessing witches, many of whom he says he has “again and again seen and heard,” cannot avoid the hypothesis of demoniacal action. They are, he feels certain, “deluded, imposed upon, and under the influence of some evil spirit; and therefore unfit to be evidences either against themselves, or any one else.”[120]One common misapprehension to which the historians of witchcraft are liable comes from their failure to perceive that the immediate responsibility for actual prosecution rests frequently, if not in the majority of instances, on the rank and file of the community or neighborhood. This remark is not made in exculpation of prosecutors and judges,—for my purpose in this discussion is not to extenuate anybody’s offences or to shift the blame from one man’s shoulders to another. What is intended is simply to remind the reader of a patent and well-attested fact which is too often overlooked in the natural tendency of historians to find some notable personage to whom their propositions, commendatory or damaging, may be attached. A prosecution for witchcraft presupposes a general belief among the common people in the reality of the crime. But this is not all. It presupposes likewise the existence of a body of testimony, consisting of the talk of the neighborhood, usually extending back over a considerable stretch of years, with regard to certain persons who have the reputation of being witches, cunning men, and so on. It also presupposes the belief of the neighborhood that various strange occurrences,—such as storms, bad crops, plagues of grass-hoppers and caterpillars, loss of pigs or cattle, cases of lunacy or hysteria or chorea or wasting sickness,—are due to the malice of those particular suspects and their unknown confederates. These strange occurrences, be it remembered, are not the fictions of a superstitious or distempered imagination, they are—most of them—things that have really taken place; they are theres gestaeof the prosecution, without which it could never have come about, or, having begun, could never have continued. And further, in very many instances of prosecution for witchcraft, there have been among the accused, persons who believed themselves to be witches,—or who had, at any rate, pretended to extraordinary powers and—in many instances—had either used their uncanny reputation to scare their enemies or to get money by treating diseases of men and cattle. And finally, the habit of railing and brawling, of uttering idle but malignant threats, and, on the other hand, the habit of applying vile epithets—including that of “witch,”—to one’s neighbors in the heat of anger—customs far more prevalent in former times than now—also resulted in the accumulation of a mass of latent or potential testimony which lay stored up in people’s memories ready to become kinetic whenever the machinery of the law should once begin to move.[121]Nobody will ask for evidence that railing and brawling went on in colonial New England, that our forefathers sometimes called each other bad names, or that slander was a common offence.[122]That suspicion of witchcraft was rife in various neighborhoods years before the Salem outbreak, is proved, not only by the records of sporadic cases that came before the courts,[123]but by some of the evidence in the Salem prosecution itself.That the initial responsibility for prosecution usually rested with the neighborhood or community might further be shown by many specific pieces of testimony. The terrible prosecution in Trier toward the close of the sixteenth century is a case in point. “Since it was commonly believed,” writes Linden, an eyewitness, “that the continued failure of the crops for many years was caused by witches and wizards through diabolical malice, the whole country rose up for the annihilation of the witches.”[124]To like purpose are the words of the admirable Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, in the closing chapter of the most powerful and convincing protest against witch trials ever written—that chapter which the author begged every magistrate in Germany to mark and weigh, whether he read the rest of the book or not:—“Incredible are the superstition, the envy, the slanders and backbitings, the whisperings and gossip of the common people in Germany, which are neither punished by magistrates nor reproved by preachers. These are the causes that first rouse suspicion of witchcraft. All the punishments of divine justice with which God has threatened men in the Holy Scriptures are held to come from witches. God and nature no longer do anything,—witches, everything. Hence it is that all demand, with violent outcry, that the magistracy shall proceed against the witches, whom only their own tongues have made so numerous.”[125]As for England, the annals of witchcraft are full of instances which show where the initial responsibility rests in particular prosecutions. Two examples will serve as well as many.Roger North, the distinguished lawyer, who was at Exeter in 1682, when a famous witch trial occurred,[126]gives a vivid account of the popular excitement:—[127]“The women were very old, decrepit, and impotent, and were brought to the assizes with as much noise and fury of the rabble against them as could be shewed on any occasion. The stories of their acts were in everyone’s mouth, and they were not content to belie them in the country, but even in the city where they were to be tried miracles were fathered upon them, as that the judges’ coach was fixed upon the castle bridge, and the like. All which the country believed, and accordingly persecuted the wretched old creatures. A less zeal in a city or kingdom hath been the overture of defection and revolution, and if these women had been acquitted, it was thought that the country people would have committed some disorder.”[128]Our second example is a very notable case, which occurred in 1712,—that of Jane Wenham, the last witch condemned to death in England. Jane Wenham had a dispute with a neighboring farmer, who called her a witch. She complained to the local magistrate, Sir Henry Chauncy. He referred the dispute to the parson of the parish, who, after hearing both sides, admonished the wranglers to live at peace and sentenced the farmer to pay Jane a shilling. The old crone was not pleased. Shortly after, one of the clergyman’s servants, a young woman, was strangely afflicted. Jane was brought to trial. Every effort seems to have been made by the court to put a stop to the affair, but the local feeling was so strong, and the witnesses and complainants were so many (including the clergymen of two parishes) that nothing could be done. The official who drew up the indictment endeavored to make the whole affair ridiculous by refusing to use any other phraseology in describing the alleged crime than “conversing with the devil in the form of a cat.” But the well-meant device only intensified the feeling against the witch. Mr. Justice Powell, who presided, did what he could to induce the jury to acquit, but in vain. They brought in a verdict of guilty, and he was obliged to pass sentence of death. He suspended the execution of the sentence, however, and secured the royal pardon,—to the intense indignation of the neighborhood. Here we have a jury of the vicinage, accurately reflecting the local sentiment, and insisting on carrying out its belief in witchcraft to the bitter end, despite all that the judge could do.[129]It is well to note that the clergymen involved in the prosecution were not New England Puritans, and that the whole affair took place just ten years after the last execution of a witch in Massachusetts. Of itself, this incident might suffice to silence those who ascribe the Salem outbreak to the influence of certain distinguished men, as well as those who maintain that the New Englanders were more superstitious than their fellow-citizens at home, that their Puritanism was somehow to blame for it, and that witchcraft was practically dead in the Mother Country when the Salem outbreak took place.[130]Yet Thomas Wright—never to be mentioned without honor—speaks of the New England troubles as “exemplifying the horrors and the absurdities of the witchcraft persecutions more than anything that had occurred in the old world,”[131]and Dr. G. H. Moore,—in an important article on The Bibliography of Witchcraft in Massachusetts—declares that the Salem outbreak “was theepitomeof witchcraft! whose ghastly records may be challenged to produce any parallel for it in the world’s history!”[132]In further refutation of such reckless statements I need add but a single instance. In 1596 there was an outbreak of some pestilence or other in Aberdeen. The populace ascribed the disease to the machinations of a family long suspected of witchcraft. A special commission was appointed by the Privy Council, “and before April 1597, twenty-three women and one man had been burnt, one woman had died under the torture, one had hanged herself in prison, and four others who were acquitted on the capital charge, were yet branded on the cheek and banished from the sheriffdom.”[133]There was a very special reason why troubles with the powers of darkness were to be expected in New England—a reason which does not hold good for Great Britain or, indeed, for any part of Western Europe. I refer, of course, to the presence of a considerable heathen population—the Indians. These were universally supposed to be devil-worshippers—not only by the Colonists but by all the rest of the world—for paganism was held to be nothing but Satanism.[134]Cotton Mather and the Jesuit fathers of Canada were at one on this point.[135]The religious ceremonies of the Indians were, as we know, in large part an invocation of spirits, and their powwows, or medicine men, supposed themselves to be wizards,—werewizards, indeed, so far as sorcery is possible.[136]The Colonial government showed itself singularly moderate, however, in its attitude toward Indian practices of a magical character. Powwowing was, of course, forbidden wherever the jurisdiction of the white men held sway, but it was punishable by fine only, nor was there any idea of inflicting the extreme penalty[137]—although the offence undoubtedly came under the Mosaic law, so often quoted on the title-pages of books on witchcraft, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”The existence of all these devil-worshipping neighbors was a constant reminder of the possibility of danger from witchcraft. One is surprised, therefore, to find that there was no real outbreak until so late in the century. It argues an uncommon degree of steadiness and common sense among our forefathers that they held off the explosion so long. Yet even this delay has been made to count against them, as if, by 1692, they ought to have known better, even if they might have been excusable some years before. In point of fact, the New Englanders, as we have seen, made an end of trying witches nearly ten years earlier than their English fellow-citizens. But we shall come back to this question of dates presently.Much has been written of the stupendous and criminal foolishness of our ancestors in admitting “spectral evidence” at the Salem trials. Nothing, of course, can be said in defence of such evidence in itself; but a great deal might be said in defence of our ancestors on this score. The fact is,—and it should never be lost sight of,—there was nothing strange in their admitting such evidence. It was a matter of course that they should admit it. To do so indeed, was one of the best established of all legal principles. Spectral evidence was admitted, for example, in England, either in examinations or in actual trials, in 1593,[138]1612,[139]1616,[140]1621,[141]1633,[142]1645,[143]1650,[144]1653,[145]1654,[146]1658,[147]1660,[148]1661,[149]1663,[150]1664,[151]1665,[152]1667,[153]1670,[154]1672,[155]1673,[156]1680,[157]1683.[158]Even Chief Justice Holt, whose honorable record in procuring the acquittal of every witch he tried is well-known,[159]did not exclude spectral evidence: it was offered and admitted in at least two of his cases—in 1695 and 1696[160]—both later than the last witch trial in Massachusetts. In the 1697 edition of that very popular manual, Michael Dalton’s Country Justice, spectral evidence (“Their Apparition to the Sick Party in his Fits”) is expressly mentioned as one of the proofs of witchcraft.[161]What may fairly be called spectral evidence was admitted by Mr. Justice Powell, anxious as he was to have the defendant acquitted, in the trial of Jane Wenham in 1712.[162]The question, then, was not whether such evidence might be heard, but what weight was to be attached to it. Thus, in Sir Matthew Hale’s case, Mr. Serjeant Keeling was “much unsatisfied” with such testimony, affirming that, if it were allowed to pass for proof, “no person whatsoever can be in safety.”[163]He did not aver that it should not have been admitted, but only protested against regarding it as decisive, and in the end he seems to have become convinced of the guilt of the defendants.[164]It is, therefore, nothing against our ancestors that they heard such evidence, for they were simply following the invariable practice of the English courts. On the other hand, it is much to their credit that they soon began to suspect it, and that, having taken advice, they decided, in 1693, to allow it no further weight. We may emphasize the folly of spectral evidence as much as we like.[165]Only let us remember that in so doing we are attacking, not New England in 1692, but Old England from 1593 to 1712. When, on the other hand, we distribute compliments to those who refused to allow such evidence to constitute full proof, let us not forget that with the name of Chief Justice Holt we must associate those of certain Massachusetts worthies whom I need not specify. It is not permissible to blame our ancestors for an error of judgment that they shared with everybody, and then to refuse them commendation for a virtue which they shared with a very few wise heads in England. That would be to proceed on the principle of “heads I win, tails you lose,”—a method much followed by Matthew Hopkins and his kind, but of doubtful propriety in a candid investigation of the past. We shall never keep our minds clear on the question of witchcraft in general, and of the Salem witchcraft in particular, until we stop attacking and defending individual persons.Sir John Holt, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench from 1682 to 1710, has a highly honorable name in the annals of English witchcraft. A dozen or twenty cases came before him, and in every instance the result was an acquittal.[166]Chief Justice Holt deserves all the credit he has received; but it must be carefully noted that his example cannot be cited to the shame and confusion of our ancestors in Massachusetts, for most of his cases,—all but one, so far as I can ascertain,—occurred after the release of the New England prisoners and the abandonment of the prosecution here. As to that single case of acquittal, we must not forget that there were also acquittals in New England,—in 1674 and 1676, for example.[167]As to acquittals in Englandafter1693, let it be remembered that there wereno trials at all for witchcraftin New England subsequent to that year. If Chief Justice Holt is to be commended for procuring the acquittal of a dozen witches between 1693 and 1702, what is to be ascribed to our forefathers for bringing no cases to trial during that period?The most remarkable things about the New England prosecution were the rapid return of the community to its habitually sensible frame of mind and the frank public confession of error made by many of those who had been implicated. These two features, and especially the latter, are without a parallel in the history of witchcraft. It seems to be assumed by most writers that recantation and an appeal to heaven for pardon were the least that could have been expected of judge and jury. In fact, as I have just ventured to suggest, no action like Samuel Sewall’s on the part of a judge and no document like that issued by the repentant Massachusetts jurymen have yet been discovered in the witch records of the world.[168]But it is not for the sake of lauding their penitential exercises that I lay stress upon the unexampled character of our forefathers’ action. There is another aspect from which the outcome of the Salem trials ought to be regarded. They fell at a critical moment, when witchcraft was, for whatever reason, soon to become a crime unknown to the English courts. They attracted attention instantly in the Mother Country.[169]Can there be any question that the sensational recovery of the Province from its attack of prosecuting zeal, accompanied as that recovery was by retraction and by utterances of deep contrition, had a profound effect in England? The mere dropping of the prosecution would not have had this effect. In 1597, JamesI., alarmed at the extent to which witch trials were going in Scotland, revoked all the existing special commissions that were engaged in holding trials for this offence.[170]But the evil was soon worse than ever. What was efficacious in the New England instance was the unheard-of action of judge and jury in recanting. This made the Salem troubles the best argument conceivable in the hands of those reformers who, soon after 1700, began to make actual headway in their opposition to the witch dogma.I am not reasoninga priori. By common consent one of the most effective arraignments of the superstition that we are discussing is the Historical Essay on Witchcraft of Dr. Francis Hutchinson, which appeared in 1718.[171]Now Hutchinson, who gives much space to the New England trials, refers to Sewall’s action, and prints the recantation of the jurors in full. Nor does he leave in us doubt as to the purpose for which he adduces these testimonies. “And those Towns,” he writes, “having regained their Quiet; and this Case being of that Nature, that Facts and Experience are of more weight than meer rational Arguments; it will be worth our while to observe some Passages that happened after this Storm, when they had Time to look back on what had passed.”[172]Whatever may be thought of these considerations, one fact cannot be assailed. In prosecuting witches, our forefathers acted like other men in the seventeenth century. In repenting and making public confession, they acted like themselves. Their fault was the fault of their time; their merit is their own.We must not leave this subject without looking into the question of numbers and dates. The history of the Salem Witchcraft is, to all intents and purposes, the sum total of witchcraft history in the whole of Massachusetts for a century. From the settlement of the country, of course, our fathers believed in witchcraft, and cases came before the courts from time to time, but, outside of the Salem outbreak, not more than half-a-dozen executions can be shown to have occurred. It is not strange that there should have been witch trials. It is inconceivable that the Colony should have passed through its first century without some special outbreak of prosecution—inconceivable, that is to say, to one who knows what went on in England and the rest of Europe during that time. The wonderful thing is, not that an outbreak of prosecution occurred, but that it did not come sooner and last longer.From the first pranks of the afflicted children in Mr. Parris’s house (in February, 1692) to the collapse of the prosecution in January, 1693, was less than a year. During the interval twenty persons had suffered death, and two are known to have died in jail.[173]If to these we add the six sporadic cases that occurred in Massachusetts before 1692, there is a total of twenty-eight; but this is the whole reckoning, not merely for a year or two but for a complete century. The concentration of the trouble in Massachusetts within the limits of a single year has given a wrong turn to the thoughts of many writers. This concentration makes the case more conspicuous, but it does not make it worse. On the contrary, it makes it better. It is astonishing that there should have been only half-a-dozen executions for witchcraft in Massachusetts before 1692, and equally astonishing that the delusion, when it became acute, should have raged for but a year, and that but twenty-two persons should have lost their lives. The facts are distinctly creditable to our ancestors,—to their moderation and to the rapidity with which their good sense could reassert itself after a brief eclipse.[174]Let us compare figures a little. For Massachusetts the account is simple—twenty-eight victims in a century. No one has ever made an accurate count of the executions in England during the seventeenth century, but they must have mounted into the hundreds.[175]Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-finder General, brought at least two hundred to the gallows from 1645 to 1647.[176]In Scotland the number of victims was much larger. The most conscientiously moderate estimate makes out a total of at least 3,400 between the years 1580 and 1680, and the computer declares that future discoveries in the way of records may force us to increase this figure very much.[177]On the Continent many thousands suffered death in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mannhardt reckons the victims from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century at millions,[178]and half a million is thought to be a moderate estimate. In Alsace, a hundred and thirty-four witches and wizards were burned in 1582 on one occasion, the execution taking place on the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 28th of October.[179]Nicholas Remy (Remigius) of Lorraine gathered the materials for his work on the Worship of Demons,[180]published in 1595, from the trials of some 900 persons whom he had sentenced to death in the fifteen years preceding. In 1609, de Lancre and his associate are said to have condemned 700 in the Basque country in four months.[181]The efforts of the Bishop of Bamberg from 1622 to 1633 resulted in six hundred executions; the Bishop of Würzburg, in about the same period, put nine hundred persons to death.[182]These figures, which might be multiplied almost indefinitely,[183]help us to look at the Salem Witchcraft in its true proportions,—as a very small incident in the history of a terrible superstition.These figures may perhaps be attacked as involving a fallacious comparison, inasmuch as we have not attempted to make the relative population of New England and the several districts referred to a factor in the equation. Such an objection, if anybody should see fit to make it, is easily answered by other figures. The total number of victims in Massachusetts from the first settlement to the end of the seventeenth century was, as we have seen, twenty-eight,—or thirty-four for the whole of New England. Compare the following figures, taken from the annals of Great Britain and Scotland alone. In 1612, ten witches were executed belonging to a single district of Lancashire.[184]In 1645 twenty-nine witches were condemned at once in a single Hundred in Essex,[185]eighteen were hanged at once at Bury in Suffolk[186]“and a hundred and twenty more were to have been tried, but a sudden movement of the king’s troops in that direction obliged the judges to adjourn the session.”[187]Under date of July 26, 1645, Whitelocke records that “20 Witches in Norfolk were executed”,[187]and again, under April 15, 1650, that “at a little Village within two Miles [of Berwick] two Men and three Women were burnt for Witches, and nine more were to be burnt, the Village consisting of but fourteen Families, and there were as many witches” and further that “twenty more were to be burnt within six Miles of that place.”[189]If we pass over to the Continent, the numbers are appalling. Whether, then, we take the computation in gross or in detail, New England emerges from the test with credit.The last execution for witchcraft in Massachusetts took place in 1692, as we have seen; indeed, twenty of the total of twenty-six cases fell within the limits of that one year. There were no witch trials in New England in the eighteenth century. The annals of Europe are not so clear. Six witches were burned in Renfrewshire in 1697.[190]In England, Elinor Shaw and Mary Phillips, “two notorious witches,” were put to death at Northampton in 1705 (or 1706).[191]In 1712 Jane Wenham was condemned to death for witchcraft, but she was pardoned.[192]Two clergymen of the Church of England, as well as a Bachelor of Arts of Cambridge,[193]gave evidence against her. Just before the arrest of Jane Wenham, Addison in the Spectator for July 11, 1711, had expressed the creed of a well-bred and sensible man of the world: “I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any particular Instance of it.” Blackstone, it will be remembered, subscribed to the same doctrine, making particular reference to Addison.[194]Prompted, one may conjecture, by the stir which the Wenham trial made, theRev.J. Boys, of Coggeshall Magna, in Essex, transcribed, in this same year, from his memoranda, A Brief Account of the Indisposition of the Widow Coman. This case had occurred in his own parish in 1699, and he had given it careful investigation. Both in 1699, when he jotted down the facts, and in 1712, Mr. Boys was clearly of the opinion that his unfortunate parishioner was a witch. His narrative, which remained in manuscript until 1901,[195]may be profitably compared with Cotton Mather’s account of his visit to Margaret Rule in 1693.[196]Such a comparison will not work to the disadvantage of the New England divine. Incidentally it may be mentioned that the mob “swam” the widow Coman several times, and that “soon after, whether by the cold she got in the water or by some other means, she fell very ill, and dyed.” Let it not be forgotten that this was six years after the end of the witchcraft prosecutions in Massachusetts. In 1705 a supposed witch was murdered by a mob at Pittenween in Scotland.[197]In 1730, another alleged witch succumbed to the water ordeal in Somersetshire.[198]The English and Scottish statutes against witchcraft were repealed in 1736,[199]but in that same year Joseph Juxson, vicar, preached at Twyford, in Leicestershire, a Sermon upon Witchcraft, occasioned by a late Illegal Attempt to discover Witches by Swimming,[200]and in 1751 Ruth Osborne, a reputed witch, was murdered by a mob in Hertfordshire.[201]The last execution for witchcraft in Germany took place in 1775. In Spain the last witch was burned in 1781, In Switzerland Anna Göldi was beheaded in 1782 for bewitching the child of her master, a physician. In Poland two women were burned as late as 1793.[202]That the belief in witchcraft is still pervasive among the peasantry of Europe, and to a considerable extent among the foreign-born population in this country, is a matter of common knowledge.[203]Besides, spiritualism and kindred delusions have taken over, under changed names, many of the phenomena, real and pretended, which would have been explained as due to witchcraft in days gone by.[204]Why did the Salem outbreak occur? Of course there were many causes—some of which have already suggested themselves in the course of our discussion. But one fact should be borne in mind as of particular importance. The belief in witchcraft, as we have already had occasion to remark, was a constant quantity; but outbreaks of prosecution came, in England—and, generally speaking, elsewhere—spasmodically, at irregular intervals. If we look at Great Britain for a moment, we shall see that such outbreaks are likely to coincide with times of political excitement or anxiety. Thus early in Elizabeth’s reign, when everything was more or less unsettled, Bishop Jewel, whom all historians delight to honor, made a deliberate and avowed digression, in a sermon before the queen, in order to warn her that witchcraft was rampant in the realm, to inform her (on the evidence of his own eyes) that her subjects were being injured in their goods and their health, and to exhort her to enforce the law.[205]The initial zeal of JamesI.in the prosecution of witches stood in close connection with the trouble he was having with his turbulent cousin Francis Bothwell.[206]The operations of Matthew Hopkins (in 1645-1647) were a mere accompaniment to the tumult of the Civil War; the year in which they began was the year of Laud’s execution and of the Battle of Naseby. The Restoration was followed by a fresh outbreak of witch prosecution,—mild in England, though far-reaching in its consequences, but very sharp in Scotland.With facts like these in view, we can hardly regard it as an accident that the Salem witchcraft marks a time when the Colony was just emerging from a political struggle that had threatened its very existence. For several years men’s minds had been on the rack. The nervous condition of public feeling is wonderfully well depicted in a letter written in 1688 by theRev.Joshua Moodey in Boston to Increase Mather, then in London as agent of the Colony. The Colonists are much pleased by the favor with which Mather has been received, but they distrust court promises. They are alarmed by a report that Mather and his associates have suffered “a great slurr” on account of certain over-zealous actions. Moodey rejoices in the death of Robert Mason, “one of the worst enemies that you & I & Mr. Morton had in these parts.” Then there are the Indians:—“The cloud looks very dark and black upon us, & wee are under very awfull circumstances, which render an Indian Warr terrible to us.” The Colonists shudder at a rumor that John Palmer, one of Andros’s Council, is to come over as Supreme Judge, and know not how to reconcile it with the news of the progress their affairs have been making with the King. And finally, the writer gives an account of the case of Goodwin’s afflicted children, which, as we know, was a kind of prologue to the Salem outbreak:—“Wee have a very strange th[ing] among us, which we know not what to make of, except it bee Witchcraft, as we think it must needs bee.”[207]Clearly, there would have been small fear, in 1692, of a plot on Satan’s part to destroy the Province, if our forefathers had not recently encountered other dangers of a more tangible kind.In conclusion, I may venture to sum up, in the form of a number of brief theses, the main results at which we appear to have arrived in our discussion of witchcraft:—1. The belief in witchcraft is the common heritage of humanity. It is not chargeable to any particular time, or race, or form of religion.2. Witchcraft in some shape or other is still credited by a majority of the human race.3. The belief in witchcraft was practically universal in the seventeenth century, even among the educated; with the mass of the people it was absolutely universal.4. To believe in witchcraft in the seventeenth century was no more discreditable to a man’s head or heart than it was to believe in spontaneous generation or to be ignorant of the germ theory of disease.5. The position of the seventeenth century believers in witchcraft was logically and theologically stronger than that of the few persons who rejected the current belief.6. The impulse to put a witch to death comes from the instinct of self-preservation. It is no more cruel or otherwise blameworthy, in itself, than the impulse to put a murderer to death.7. The belief in witchcraft manifests itself, not in steady and continuous prosecution, but in sudden outbreaks occurring at irregular intervals.8. Such outbreaks are not symptoms of extraordinary superstition or of a peculiarly acute state of unreason. They are due, like other panics, to a perturbed condition of the public mind. Hence they are likely to accompany, or to follow, crises in politics or religion.9. The responsibility for any witch prosecution rests primarily on the community or neighborhood as a whole, not on the judge or the jury.10. No jury, whether in a witch trial or in any other case, can be more enlightened than the general run of the vicinage.11. Many persons who have been executed for witchcraft have supposed themselves to be guilty and have actually been guilty in intent.12. Practically every person executed for witchcraft believed in the reality of such a crime, whether he supposed himself to be guilty of it or not.13. The witch beliefs of New England were brought over from the Mother Country by the first settlers.14. Spectral evidence had been admitted in the examinations and trials of witches in England for a hundred years before the Salem prosecutions took place.15. Trials, convictions, and executions for witchcraft occurred in England after they had come to an end in Massachusetts, and they occurred on the Continent a hundred years later than that time.16. Spectral evidence was admitted in English witch trials after such trials had ceased in Massachusetts.17. The total number of persons executed for witchcraft in New England from the first settlement to the end of the century is inconsiderable, especially in view of what was going on in Europe.18. The public repentance and recantation of judge and jury in Massachusetts have no parallel in the history of witchcraft.19. The repentance and recantation came at a time which made them singularly effective arguments in the hands of the opponents of the witch dogma in England.20. The record of New England in the matter of witchcraft is highly creditable, when considered as a whole and from the comparative point of view.21. It is easy to be wise after the fact,—especially when the fact is two hundred years old.
Another reason for going so fully into Bekker’s arguments is that they give us an excellent chance to take up a question which is of cardinal importance in weighing the whole matter of witchcraft. I refer, of course, to the question of Biblical exegesis.
If we wish to treat our forefathers fairly, we are required to criticise the few opponents of the witch dogma in a really impartial way. We ought not to commend such portions of their argument as chance to square with our own ideas, and ignore the rest. We must review their case as a whole, so as to discover how far it was right or reasonable on the basis of their own postulates. We must test the correctness of their premises, as well as the accuracy of their logic.
This process we have gone through with already in several instances. We have seen that all the opponents of witchcraft so far examined struggle to maintain a position that is strategically indefensible, either because they admit too much, or because they ignore certain difficulties, or because they are frankly eccentric. It does not help their case to contend that what they admit or what they ignore does not signify from our present scientific point of view. Itdidsignifythen. The only man whose argument covers the ground completely and affords a thorough and consistent theory on which a seventeenth-century Christian was logically justified in rejecting witchcraft and demoniacal possession as facts of everyday experience is Balthasar Bekker.
Now the truth or falsity of Bekker’s very radical conclusions hinged—for Bekker himself and for his contemporaries—on the soundness of his Biblical exegesis. If his way of disposing of those passages which mention devils and witches and diviners and familiar spirits is not justifiable—if the Biblical writers did not mean what he thinks they meant—then his whole case goes to pieces. In discussing the witchcraft dogma of the seventeenth century, we must accept the Bible, for the nonce, as the men of the seventeenth century (Bekker included) accepted it—as absolutely true in every detail, as dynamically inspired by the Holy Ghost, as a complete rule of faith and practice. Modern views on this subject have nolocus standi.
Now, if we only keep these fundamental principles firmly in mind, we shall have no doubt as to the outcome. Beyond question, the Bible affords ample authority for belief in demoniacal possession, in necromancy, in the ability of Satan and his cohorts to cause physical phenomena, and in the power of sorcerers to work miracles.[99]True, not all the details of the witchcraft dogma rest upon Biblical authority, but enough of them do so rest to make the case of those who uphold the traditional opinion substantially unassailable, except upon the purely arbitrary assumption that all these wonders, though formerly actual, have ceased in recent times.[100]Bekker’s exegesis is erroneous in countless particulars and presents an altogether mistaken view of Biblical doctrines. As interpreters of the language of Scripture, the orthodox theologians of his time, who pinned their faith to witchcraft, were nearer right than he was. And what is true of Bekker’s exegesis, is equally true of that followed by all previous opponents of the witchcraft dogma. My reason for not referring to this point in criticising their books is obvious. Bekker has gone farther, and succeeded better, in explaining away the testimony of Scripture than any of the others. It is more than fair to them to rest this part of the case upon his success or failure. If Bekker falls, all of them certainly fall,—and Bekker falls.[101]
From our cursory examination of the works put forth by some of the chief opponents of the witch dogma, it must be evident that none of these works can have had a very profound influence on the beliefs of the seventeenth century,—their function was rather, by keeping discussion alive, to prepare for the change of sentiment which took place soon after 1700, in what we are accustomed to call “the age of prose and reason.” Such an examination as we have given to these books was necessary to establish the proposition with which we set out,—that our ancestors in 1692 were in accord with the practically universal belief of their day. It has shown more than this, however,—it has demonstrated that their position was logically and scripturally stronger than that of their antagonists, provided we judge the matter (as we are in honor bound to do) on the basis of those doctrines as to supernaturalism and the inspiration of the Bible that were alike admitted by both sides. We may repeat, then, with renewed confidence, the statement already made:—Our forefathers believed in witchcraft, not because they were Puritans, not because they were Colonials, not because they were New Englanders, but because they were men of their own time and not of ours.
Another point requires consideration if we would arrive at a just judgment on the Salem upheaval. It is frequently stated, and still oftener assumed, that the outbreak at Salem was peculiar in its virulence, or, at all events, in its intensity. This is a serious error, due, like other misapprehensions, to a neglect of the history of witchcraft as a whole. The fact is, the Salem excitement was the opposite of peculiar,—it was perfectly typical. The European belief in witchcraft, which our forefathers shared without exaggerating it, was a constant quantity. It was always present, and continuously fraught with direful possibilities. But it did not find expression in a steady and regular succession of witch trials. On the contrary, it manifested itself at irregular intervals in spasmodic outbursts of prosecution.Notable examples occurred at Geneva from 1542 to 1546;[102]at Wiesensteig, Bavaria, in 1562 and 1563;[103]in the Electorate of Trier from 1587 to 1593;[104]among the Basques of Labourd in 1609;[105]at Mohra in Sweden in 1669 and 1670.[106]In the district of Ortenau, in Baden, witchcraft prosecutions suddenly broke out, after a considerable interval, in 1627, and there were seventy-three executions in three years.[107]From the annals of witchcraft in Great Britain one may cite the following cases:—1581, at St. Osith’s, in Essex;[108]1590-1597, in Scotland;[109]1612, at Lancaster,[110]and again in 1633;[111]1616, in Leicestershire;[112]1645-1647, the Hopkins prosecution;[113]1649-1650, at Newcastle-on-Tyne;[114]1652, at Maidstone, in Kent;[115]1682, at Exeter.[116]The sudden outbreak of witch trials in the Bermudas in 1651 is also worthy of attention.[117]
It is unnecessary for us to consider how much of the evidence offered at witch trials in England was actually true. Some of the defendants were pretty bad characters, and it would be folly to maintain that none of them tried to cause the sickness or death of their enemies by maltreating clay images or by other arts which they supposed would avail. Besides, now and then an injury is testified to which may well have been inflicted without diabolical aid. Thus Ann Foster, who was hanged for witchcraft at Northampton in 1674, confessed that she had set a certain grazier’s barns on fire, and there is much reason to believe her, for she was under considerable provocation.[118]As to occult or super-normal powers and practices, we may leave their discussion to the psychologists. With regard to this aspect of the Salem troubles, we must accept, as substantially in accordance with the facts, the words of Dr. Poole: “No man of any reputation who lived in that generation, and saw what transpired at Salem Village and its vicinity, doubted that there was some influence then exerted which could not be explained by the known laws of matter or of mind.”[119]Even Thomas Brattle, in speaking of the confessing witches, many of whom he says he has “again and again seen and heard,” cannot avoid the hypothesis of demoniacal action. They are, he feels certain, “deluded, imposed upon, and under the influence of some evil spirit; and therefore unfit to be evidences either against themselves, or any one else.”[120]
One common misapprehension to which the historians of witchcraft are liable comes from their failure to perceive that the immediate responsibility for actual prosecution rests frequently, if not in the majority of instances, on the rank and file of the community or neighborhood. This remark is not made in exculpation of prosecutors and judges,—for my purpose in this discussion is not to extenuate anybody’s offences or to shift the blame from one man’s shoulders to another. What is intended is simply to remind the reader of a patent and well-attested fact which is too often overlooked in the natural tendency of historians to find some notable personage to whom their propositions, commendatory or damaging, may be attached. A prosecution for witchcraft presupposes a general belief among the common people in the reality of the crime. But this is not all. It presupposes likewise the existence of a body of testimony, consisting of the talk of the neighborhood, usually extending back over a considerable stretch of years, with regard to certain persons who have the reputation of being witches, cunning men, and so on. It also presupposes the belief of the neighborhood that various strange occurrences,—such as storms, bad crops, plagues of grass-hoppers and caterpillars, loss of pigs or cattle, cases of lunacy or hysteria or chorea or wasting sickness,—are due to the malice of those particular suspects and their unknown confederates. These strange occurrences, be it remembered, are not the fictions of a superstitious or distempered imagination, they are—most of them—things that have really taken place; they are theres gestaeof the prosecution, without which it could never have come about, or, having begun, could never have continued. And further, in very many instances of prosecution for witchcraft, there have been among the accused, persons who believed themselves to be witches,—or who had, at any rate, pretended to extraordinary powers and—in many instances—had either used their uncanny reputation to scare their enemies or to get money by treating diseases of men and cattle. And finally, the habit of railing and brawling, of uttering idle but malignant threats, and, on the other hand, the habit of applying vile epithets—including that of “witch,”—to one’s neighbors in the heat of anger—customs far more prevalent in former times than now—also resulted in the accumulation of a mass of latent or potential testimony which lay stored up in people’s memories ready to become kinetic whenever the machinery of the law should once begin to move.[121]
Nobody will ask for evidence that railing and brawling went on in colonial New England, that our forefathers sometimes called each other bad names, or that slander was a common offence.[122]That suspicion of witchcraft was rife in various neighborhoods years before the Salem outbreak, is proved, not only by the records of sporadic cases that came before the courts,[123]but by some of the evidence in the Salem prosecution itself.
That the initial responsibility for prosecution usually rested with the neighborhood or community might further be shown by many specific pieces of testimony. The terrible prosecution in Trier toward the close of the sixteenth century is a case in point. “Since it was commonly believed,” writes Linden, an eyewitness, “that the continued failure of the crops for many years was caused by witches and wizards through diabolical malice, the whole country rose up for the annihilation of the witches.”[124]To like purpose are the words of the admirable Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, in the closing chapter of the most powerful and convincing protest against witch trials ever written—that chapter which the author begged every magistrate in Germany to mark and weigh, whether he read the rest of the book or not:—“Incredible are the superstition, the envy, the slanders and backbitings, the whisperings and gossip of the common people in Germany, which are neither punished by magistrates nor reproved by preachers. These are the causes that first rouse suspicion of witchcraft. All the punishments of divine justice with which God has threatened men in the Holy Scriptures are held to come from witches. God and nature no longer do anything,—witches, everything. Hence it is that all demand, with violent outcry, that the magistracy shall proceed against the witches, whom only their own tongues have made so numerous.”[125]
As for England, the annals of witchcraft are full of instances which show where the initial responsibility rests in particular prosecutions. Two examples will serve as well as many.
Roger North, the distinguished lawyer, who was at Exeter in 1682, when a famous witch trial occurred,[126]gives a vivid account of the popular excitement:—[127]“The women were very old, decrepit, and impotent, and were brought to the assizes with as much noise and fury of the rabble against them as could be shewed on any occasion. The stories of their acts were in everyone’s mouth, and they were not content to belie them in the country, but even in the city where they were to be tried miracles were fathered upon them, as that the judges’ coach was fixed upon the castle bridge, and the like. All which the country believed, and accordingly persecuted the wretched old creatures. A less zeal in a city or kingdom hath been the overture of defection and revolution, and if these women had been acquitted, it was thought that the country people would have committed some disorder.”[128]
Our second example is a very notable case, which occurred in 1712,—that of Jane Wenham, the last witch condemned to death in England. Jane Wenham had a dispute with a neighboring farmer, who called her a witch. She complained to the local magistrate, Sir Henry Chauncy. He referred the dispute to the parson of the parish, who, after hearing both sides, admonished the wranglers to live at peace and sentenced the farmer to pay Jane a shilling. The old crone was not pleased. Shortly after, one of the clergyman’s servants, a young woman, was strangely afflicted. Jane was brought to trial. Every effort seems to have been made by the court to put a stop to the affair, but the local feeling was so strong, and the witnesses and complainants were so many (including the clergymen of two parishes) that nothing could be done. The official who drew up the indictment endeavored to make the whole affair ridiculous by refusing to use any other phraseology in describing the alleged crime than “conversing with the devil in the form of a cat.” But the well-meant device only intensified the feeling against the witch. Mr. Justice Powell, who presided, did what he could to induce the jury to acquit, but in vain. They brought in a verdict of guilty, and he was obliged to pass sentence of death. He suspended the execution of the sentence, however, and secured the royal pardon,—to the intense indignation of the neighborhood. Here we have a jury of the vicinage, accurately reflecting the local sentiment, and insisting on carrying out its belief in witchcraft to the bitter end, despite all that the judge could do.[129]It is well to note that the clergymen involved in the prosecution were not New England Puritans, and that the whole affair took place just ten years after the last execution of a witch in Massachusetts. Of itself, this incident might suffice to silence those who ascribe the Salem outbreak to the influence of certain distinguished men, as well as those who maintain that the New Englanders were more superstitious than their fellow-citizens at home, that their Puritanism was somehow to blame for it, and that witchcraft was practically dead in the Mother Country when the Salem outbreak took place.[130]
Yet Thomas Wright—never to be mentioned without honor—speaks of the New England troubles as “exemplifying the horrors and the absurdities of the witchcraft persecutions more than anything that had occurred in the old world,”[131]and Dr. G. H. Moore,—in an important article on The Bibliography of Witchcraft in Massachusetts—declares that the Salem outbreak “was theepitomeof witchcraft! whose ghastly records may be challenged to produce any parallel for it in the world’s history!”[132]In further refutation of such reckless statements I need add but a single instance. In 1596 there was an outbreak of some pestilence or other in Aberdeen. The populace ascribed the disease to the machinations of a family long suspected of witchcraft. A special commission was appointed by the Privy Council, “and before April 1597, twenty-three women and one man had been burnt, one woman had died under the torture, one had hanged herself in prison, and four others who were acquitted on the capital charge, were yet branded on the cheek and banished from the sheriffdom.”[133]
There was a very special reason why troubles with the powers of darkness were to be expected in New England—a reason which does not hold good for Great Britain or, indeed, for any part of Western Europe. I refer, of course, to the presence of a considerable heathen population—the Indians. These were universally supposed to be devil-worshippers—not only by the Colonists but by all the rest of the world—for paganism was held to be nothing but Satanism.[134]Cotton Mather and the Jesuit fathers of Canada were at one on this point.[135]The religious ceremonies of the Indians were, as we know, in large part an invocation of spirits, and their powwows, or medicine men, supposed themselves to be wizards,—werewizards, indeed, so far as sorcery is possible.[136]The Colonial government showed itself singularly moderate, however, in its attitude toward Indian practices of a magical character. Powwowing was, of course, forbidden wherever the jurisdiction of the white men held sway, but it was punishable by fine only, nor was there any idea of inflicting the extreme penalty[137]—although the offence undoubtedly came under the Mosaic law, so often quoted on the title-pages of books on witchcraft, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
The existence of all these devil-worshipping neighbors was a constant reminder of the possibility of danger from witchcraft. One is surprised, therefore, to find that there was no real outbreak until so late in the century. It argues an uncommon degree of steadiness and common sense among our forefathers that they held off the explosion so long. Yet even this delay has been made to count against them, as if, by 1692, they ought to have known better, even if they might have been excusable some years before. In point of fact, the New Englanders, as we have seen, made an end of trying witches nearly ten years earlier than their English fellow-citizens. But we shall come back to this question of dates presently.
Much has been written of the stupendous and criminal foolishness of our ancestors in admitting “spectral evidence” at the Salem trials. Nothing, of course, can be said in defence of such evidence in itself; but a great deal might be said in defence of our ancestors on this score. The fact is,—and it should never be lost sight of,—there was nothing strange in their admitting such evidence. It was a matter of course that they should admit it. To do so indeed, was one of the best established of all legal principles. Spectral evidence was admitted, for example, in England, either in examinations or in actual trials, in 1593,[138]1612,[139]1616,[140]1621,[141]1633,[142]1645,[143]1650,[144]1653,[145]1654,[146]1658,[147]1660,[148]1661,[149]1663,[150]1664,[151]1665,[152]1667,[153]1670,[154]1672,[155]1673,[156]1680,[157]1683.[158]Even Chief Justice Holt, whose honorable record in procuring the acquittal of every witch he tried is well-known,[159]did not exclude spectral evidence: it was offered and admitted in at least two of his cases—in 1695 and 1696[160]—both later than the last witch trial in Massachusetts. In the 1697 edition of that very popular manual, Michael Dalton’s Country Justice, spectral evidence (“Their Apparition to the Sick Party in his Fits”) is expressly mentioned as one of the proofs of witchcraft.[161]What may fairly be called spectral evidence was admitted by Mr. Justice Powell, anxious as he was to have the defendant acquitted, in the trial of Jane Wenham in 1712.[162]The question, then, was not whether such evidence might be heard, but what weight was to be attached to it. Thus, in Sir Matthew Hale’s case, Mr. Serjeant Keeling was “much unsatisfied” with such testimony, affirming that, if it were allowed to pass for proof, “no person whatsoever can be in safety.”[163]He did not aver that it should not have been admitted, but only protested against regarding it as decisive, and in the end he seems to have become convinced of the guilt of the defendants.[164]It is, therefore, nothing against our ancestors that they heard such evidence, for they were simply following the invariable practice of the English courts. On the other hand, it is much to their credit that they soon began to suspect it, and that, having taken advice, they decided, in 1693, to allow it no further weight. We may emphasize the folly of spectral evidence as much as we like.[165]Only let us remember that in so doing we are attacking, not New England in 1692, but Old England from 1593 to 1712. When, on the other hand, we distribute compliments to those who refused to allow such evidence to constitute full proof, let us not forget that with the name of Chief Justice Holt we must associate those of certain Massachusetts worthies whom I need not specify. It is not permissible to blame our ancestors for an error of judgment that they shared with everybody, and then to refuse them commendation for a virtue which they shared with a very few wise heads in England. That would be to proceed on the principle of “heads I win, tails you lose,”—a method much followed by Matthew Hopkins and his kind, but of doubtful propriety in a candid investigation of the past. We shall never keep our minds clear on the question of witchcraft in general, and of the Salem witchcraft in particular, until we stop attacking and defending individual persons.
Sir John Holt, Chief Justice of the King’s Bench from 1682 to 1710, has a highly honorable name in the annals of English witchcraft. A dozen or twenty cases came before him, and in every instance the result was an acquittal.[166]Chief Justice Holt deserves all the credit he has received; but it must be carefully noted that his example cannot be cited to the shame and confusion of our ancestors in Massachusetts, for most of his cases,—all but one, so far as I can ascertain,—occurred after the release of the New England prisoners and the abandonment of the prosecution here. As to that single case of acquittal, we must not forget that there were also acquittals in New England,—in 1674 and 1676, for example.[167]As to acquittals in Englandafter1693, let it be remembered that there wereno trials at all for witchcraftin New England subsequent to that year. If Chief Justice Holt is to be commended for procuring the acquittal of a dozen witches between 1693 and 1702, what is to be ascribed to our forefathers for bringing no cases to trial during that period?
The most remarkable things about the New England prosecution were the rapid return of the community to its habitually sensible frame of mind and the frank public confession of error made by many of those who had been implicated. These two features, and especially the latter, are without a parallel in the history of witchcraft. It seems to be assumed by most writers that recantation and an appeal to heaven for pardon were the least that could have been expected of judge and jury. In fact, as I have just ventured to suggest, no action like Samuel Sewall’s on the part of a judge and no document like that issued by the repentant Massachusetts jurymen have yet been discovered in the witch records of the world.[168]
But it is not for the sake of lauding their penitential exercises that I lay stress upon the unexampled character of our forefathers’ action. There is another aspect from which the outcome of the Salem trials ought to be regarded. They fell at a critical moment, when witchcraft was, for whatever reason, soon to become a crime unknown to the English courts. They attracted attention instantly in the Mother Country.[169]Can there be any question that the sensational recovery of the Province from its attack of prosecuting zeal, accompanied as that recovery was by retraction and by utterances of deep contrition, had a profound effect in England? The mere dropping of the prosecution would not have had this effect. In 1597, JamesI., alarmed at the extent to which witch trials were going in Scotland, revoked all the existing special commissions that were engaged in holding trials for this offence.[170]But the evil was soon worse than ever. What was efficacious in the New England instance was the unheard-of action of judge and jury in recanting. This made the Salem troubles the best argument conceivable in the hands of those reformers who, soon after 1700, began to make actual headway in their opposition to the witch dogma.
I am not reasoninga priori. By common consent one of the most effective arraignments of the superstition that we are discussing is the Historical Essay on Witchcraft of Dr. Francis Hutchinson, which appeared in 1718.[171]Now Hutchinson, who gives much space to the New England trials, refers to Sewall’s action, and prints the recantation of the jurors in full. Nor does he leave in us doubt as to the purpose for which he adduces these testimonies. “And those Towns,” he writes, “having regained their Quiet; and this Case being of that Nature, that Facts and Experience are of more weight than meer rational Arguments; it will be worth our while to observe some Passages that happened after this Storm, when they had Time to look back on what had passed.”[172]
Whatever may be thought of these considerations, one fact cannot be assailed. In prosecuting witches, our forefathers acted like other men in the seventeenth century. In repenting and making public confession, they acted like themselves. Their fault was the fault of their time; their merit is their own.
We must not leave this subject without looking into the question of numbers and dates. The history of the Salem Witchcraft is, to all intents and purposes, the sum total of witchcraft history in the whole of Massachusetts for a century. From the settlement of the country, of course, our fathers believed in witchcraft, and cases came before the courts from time to time, but, outside of the Salem outbreak, not more than half-a-dozen executions can be shown to have occurred. It is not strange that there should have been witch trials. It is inconceivable that the Colony should have passed through its first century without some special outbreak of prosecution—inconceivable, that is to say, to one who knows what went on in England and the rest of Europe during that time. The wonderful thing is, not that an outbreak of prosecution occurred, but that it did not come sooner and last longer.
From the first pranks of the afflicted children in Mr. Parris’s house (in February, 1692) to the collapse of the prosecution in January, 1693, was less than a year. During the interval twenty persons had suffered death, and two are known to have died in jail.[173]If to these we add the six sporadic cases that occurred in Massachusetts before 1692, there is a total of twenty-eight; but this is the whole reckoning, not merely for a year or two but for a complete century. The concentration of the trouble in Massachusetts within the limits of a single year has given a wrong turn to the thoughts of many writers. This concentration makes the case more conspicuous, but it does not make it worse. On the contrary, it makes it better. It is astonishing that there should have been only half-a-dozen executions for witchcraft in Massachusetts before 1692, and equally astonishing that the delusion, when it became acute, should have raged for but a year, and that but twenty-two persons should have lost their lives. The facts are distinctly creditable to our ancestors,—to their moderation and to the rapidity with which their good sense could reassert itself after a brief eclipse.[174]
Let us compare figures a little. For Massachusetts the account is simple—twenty-eight victims in a century. No one has ever made an accurate count of the executions in England during the seventeenth century, but they must have mounted into the hundreds.[175]Matthew Hopkins, the Witch-finder General, brought at least two hundred to the gallows from 1645 to 1647.[176]In Scotland the number of victims was much larger. The most conscientiously moderate estimate makes out a total of at least 3,400 between the years 1580 and 1680, and the computer declares that future discoveries in the way of records may force us to increase this figure very much.[177]On the Continent many thousands suffered death in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mannhardt reckons the victims from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century at millions,[178]and half a million is thought to be a moderate estimate. In Alsace, a hundred and thirty-four witches and wizards were burned in 1582 on one occasion, the execution taking place on the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 28th of October.[179]Nicholas Remy (Remigius) of Lorraine gathered the materials for his work on the Worship of Demons,[180]published in 1595, from the trials of some 900 persons whom he had sentenced to death in the fifteen years preceding. In 1609, de Lancre and his associate are said to have condemned 700 in the Basque country in four months.[181]The efforts of the Bishop of Bamberg from 1622 to 1633 resulted in six hundred executions; the Bishop of Würzburg, in about the same period, put nine hundred persons to death.[182]These figures, which might be multiplied almost indefinitely,[183]help us to look at the Salem Witchcraft in its true proportions,—as a very small incident in the history of a terrible superstition.
These figures may perhaps be attacked as involving a fallacious comparison, inasmuch as we have not attempted to make the relative population of New England and the several districts referred to a factor in the equation. Such an objection, if anybody should see fit to make it, is easily answered by other figures. The total number of victims in Massachusetts from the first settlement to the end of the seventeenth century was, as we have seen, twenty-eight,—or thirty-four for the whole of New England. Compare the following figures, taken from the annals of Great Britain and Scotland alone. In 1612, ten witches were executed belonging to a single district of Lancashire.[184]In 1645 twenty-nine witches were condemned at once in a single Hundred in Essex,[185]eighteen were hanged at once at Bury in Suffolk[186]“and a hundred and twenty more were to have been tried, but a sudden movement of the king’s troops in that direction obliged the judges to adjourn the session.”[187]Under date of July 26, 1645, Whitelocke records that “20 Witches in Norfolk were executed”,[187]and again, under April 15, 1650, that “at a little Village within two Miles [of Berwick] two Men and three Women were burnt for Witches, and nine more were to be burnt, the Village consisting of but fourteen Families, and there were as many witches” and further that “twenty more were to be burnt within six Miles of that place.”[189]If we pass over to the Continent, the numbers are appalling. Whether, then, we take the computation in gross or in detail, New England emerges from the test with credit.
The last execution for witchcraft in Massachusetts took place in 1692, as we have seen; indeed, twenty of the total of twenty-six cases fell within the limits of that one year. There were no witch trials in New England in the eighteenth century. The annals of Europe are not so clear. Six witches were burned in Renfrewshire in 1697.[190]In England, Elinor Shaw and Mary Phillips, “two notorious witches,” were put to death at Northampton in 1705 (or 1706).[191]In 1712 Jane Wenham was condemned to death for witchcraft, but she was pardoned.[192]Two clergymen of the Church of England, as well as a Bachelor of Arts of Cambridge,[193]gave evidence against her. Just before the arrest of Jane Wenham, Addison in the Spectator for July 11, 1711, had expressed the creed of a well-bred and sensible man of the world: “I believe in general that there is, and has been such a thing as Witchcraft; but at the same time can give no Credit to any particular Instance of it.” Blackstone, it will be remembered, subscribed to the same doctrine, making particular reference to Addison.[194]Prompted, one may conjecture, by the stir which the Wenham trial made, theRev.J. Boys, of Coggeshall Magna, in Essex, transcribed, in this same year, from his memoranda, A Brief Account of the Indisposition of the Widow Coman. This case had occurred in his own parish in 1699, and he had given it careful investigation. Both in 1699, when he jotted down the facts, and in 1712, Mr. Boys was clearly of the opinion that his unfortunate parishioner was a witch. His narrative, which remained in manuscript until 1901,[195]may be profitably compared with Cotton Mather’s account of his visit to Margaret Rule in 1693.[196]Such a comparison will not work to the disadvantage of the New England divine. Incidentally it may be mentioned that the mob “swam” the widow Coman several times, and that “soon after, whether by the cold she got in the water or by some other means, she fell very ill, and dyed.” Let it not be forgotten that this was six years after the end of the witchcraft prosecutions in Massachusetts. In 1705 a supposed witch was murdered by a mob at Pittenween in Scotland.[197]In 1730, another alleged witch succumbed to the water ordeal in Somersetshire.[198]The English and Scottish statutes against witchcraft were repealed in 1736,[199]but in that same year Joseph Juxson, vicar, preached at Twyford, in Leicestershire, a Sermon upon Witchcraft, occasioned by a late Illegal Attempt to discover Witches by Swimming,[200]and in 1751 Ruth Osborne, a reputed witch, was murdered by a mob in Hertfordshire.[201]The last execution for witchcraft in Germany took place in 1775. In Spain the last witch was burned in 1781, In Switzerland Anna Göldi was beheaded in 1782 for bewitching the child of her master, a physician. In Poland two women were burned as late as 1793.[202]
That the belief in witchcraft is still pervasive among the peasantry of Europe, and to a considerable extent among the foreign-born population in this country, is a matter of common knowledge.[203]Besides, spiritualism and kindred delusions have taken over, under changed names, many of the phenomena, real and pretended, which would have been explained as due to witchcraft in days gone by.[204]
Why did the Salem outbreak occur? Of course there were many causes—some of which have already suggested themselves in the course of our discussion. But one fact should be borne in mind as of particular importance. The belief in witchcraft, as we have already had occasion to remark, was a constant quantity; but outbreaks of prosecution came, in England—and, generally speaking, elsewhere—spasmodically, at irregular intervals. If we look at Great Britain for a moment, we shall see that such outbreaks are likely to coincide with times of political excitement or anxiety. Thus early in Elizabeth’s reign, when everything was more or less unsettled, Bishop Jewel, whom all historians delight to honor, made a deliberate and avowed digression, in a sermon before the queen, in order to warn her that witchcraft was rampant in the realm, to inform her (on the evidence of his own eyes) that her subjects were being injured in their goods and their health, and to exhort her to enforce the law.[205]The initial zeal of JamesI.in the prosecution of witches stood in close connection with the trouble he was having with his turbulent cousin Francis Bothwell.[206]The operations of Matthew Hopkins (in 1645-1647) were a mere accompaniment to the tumult of the Civil War; the year in which they began was the year of Laud’s execution and of the Battle of Naseby. The Restoration was followed by a fresh outbreak of witch prosecution,—mild in England, though far-reaching in its consequences, but very sharp in Scotland.
With facts like these in view, we can hardly regard it as an accident that the Salem witchcraft marks a time when the Colony was just emerging from a political struggle that had threatened its very existence. For several years men’s minds had been on the rack. The nervous condition of public feeling is wonderfully well depicted in a letter written in 1688 by theRev.Joshua Moodey in Boston to Increase Mather, then in London as agent of the Colony. The Colonists are much pleased by the favor with which Mather has been received, but they distrust court promises. They are alarmed by a report that Mather and his associates have suffered “a great slurr” on account of certain over-zealous actions. Moodey rejoices in the death of Robert Mason, “one of the worst enemies that you & I & Mr. Morton had in these parts.” Then there are the Indians:—“The cloud looks very dark and black upon us, & wee are under very awfull circumstances, which render an Indian Warr terrible to us.” The Colonists shudder at a rumor that John Palmer, one of Andros’s Council, is to come over as Supreme Judge, and know not how to reconcile it with the news of the progress their affairs have been making with the King. And finally, the writer gives an account of the case of Goodwin’s afflicted children, which, as we know, was a kind of prologue to the Salem outbreak:—“Wee have a very strange th[ing] among us, which we know not what to make of, except it bee Witchcraft, as we think it must needs bee.”[207]Clearly, there would have been small fear, in 1692, of a plot on Satan’s part to destroy the Province, if our forefathers had not recently encountered other dangers of a more tangible kind.
In conclusion, I may venture to sum up, in the form of a number of brief theses, the main results at which we appear to have arrived in our discussion of witchcraft:—
1. The belief in witchcraft is the common heritage of humanity. It is not chargeable to any particular time, or race, or form of religion.
2. Witchcraft in some shape or other is still credited by a majority of the human race.
3. The belief in witchcraft was practically universal in the seventeenth century, even among the educated; with the mass of the people it was absolutely universal.
4. To believe in witchcraft in the seventeenth century was no more discreditable to a man’s head or heart than it was to believe in spontaneous generation or to be ignorant of the germ theory of disease.
5. The position of the seventeenth century believers in witchcraft was logically and theologically stronger than that of the few persons who rejected the current belief.
6. The impulse to put a witch to death comes from the instinct of self-preservation. It is no more cruel or otherwise blameworthy, in itself, than the impulse to put a murderer to death.
7. The belief in witchcraft manifests itself, not in steady and continuous prosecution, but in sudden outbreaks occurring at irregular intervals.
8. Such outbreaks are not symptoms of extraordinary superstition or of a peculiarly acute state of unreason. They are due, like other panics, to a perturbed condition of the public mind. Hence they are likely to accompany, or to follow, crises in politics or religion.
9. The responsibility for any witch prosecution rests primarily on the community or neighborhood as a whole, not on the judge or the jury.
10. No jury, whether in a witch trial or in any other case, can be more enlightened than the general run of the vicinage.
11. Many persons who have been executed for witchcraft have supposed themselves to be guilty and have actually been guilty in intent.
12. Practically every person executed for witchcraft believed in the reality of such a crime, whether he supposed himself to be guilty of it or not.
13. The witch beliefs of New England were brought over from the Mother Country by the first settlers.
14. Spectral evidence had been admitted in the examinations and trials of witches in England for a hundred years before the Salem prosecutions took place.
15. Trials, convictions, and executions for witchcraft occurred in England after they had come to an end in Massachusetts, and they occurred on the Continent a hundred years later than that time.
16. Spectral evidence was admitted in English witch trials after such trials had ceased in Massachusetts.
17. The total number of persons executed for witchcraft in New England from the first settlement to the end of the century is inconsiderable, especially in view of what was going on in Europe.
18. The public repentance and recantation of judge and jury in Massachusetts have no parallel in the history of witchcraft.
19. The repentance and recantation came at a time which made them singularly effective arguments in the hands of the opponents of the witch dogma in England.
20. The record of New England in the matter of witchcraft is highly creditable, when considered as a whole and from the comparative point of view.
21. It is easy to be wise after the fact,—especially when the fact is two hundred years old.