It was further testified that Burroughs, notwithstanding his holy orders, hated prayer and the ordinances of religion. His zeal only burned in the devil’s cause. The confessing witches also attributed their seduction to his wiles; he led them on to witch meetings, or to sorceries, by the promise of fine clothes and other unhallowed pleasures; he brought the poppets, or rag babies to them for afflicting people, and taught them where to stick the pins the most effectually; he even exhorted them to bewitch all Salem village, but with caution to prevent discovery;and now, they affirmed, for their penitence and confessions, Burroughs and the devils tortured them continually.
After Burroughs was hung, these confessors recanted, and confessed again the utter falsehood of all they had said respecting him. But they could not quicken the dead, or heal the wounds of bereaved friends, nor soften the hearts of such men as Stoughton, Mather, Parris, and the like.
The evidence was then turned to show that Burroughs was endowed with preternatural strength. He had been known to hold out in one hand, by the breech, a gun of seven feet barrel as if it had been a pocket pistol, and then to reverse it, and sticking his forefinger in the muzzle, to hold it out at arm’s length that way. So he would carry a full barrel of cider or molasses without staggering. But he offered to show that whatever he did in this way was to try his strength with an Indian who did the like, and even more than he could. But they who gave the testimony, says Mather, saw no Indian and it was at once concluded it must have been the devil, as Ann Putnam said he often appeared like an Indian! How did this testimony refute Burroughs? Did the witnesses see the devil in the shape of an Indian at the time? One Ruck, a brother-in-law to Burroughs testified to his preternatural walking. On a certain occasion a party in his company went to a distant field to gather strawberries. When they returned, a thunder shower was advancing, and all but the prisoner rode upon horses and at a quick pace; yet he suddenly slipped out of sight, and to their astonishment was at the house, with his basket of strawberries, before them. But he offered to show that another man was with him and walked as fast as he did, but Stoughton and his associates concluded that this pretended companion must have been the devil also and would not hear the evidence.
After this manner was the unfortunate man overwhelmed with false and absurd testimony, and the prejudice of those who held his life at will; and it was sneeringly said that he used many twistings and evasions to get off, but without effect; for the jury without hesitation returned a verdict of guilty, and the court pronounced his death sentence.
At his execution Mather and other ministers took care to be present. Burroughs, with the rest, was carted through the streets of Salem on his way to the gallows. Being on the ladder and the rope about his neck, in solemn and decided tones he proclaimed his innocencebefore the multitude. He then made his dying prayer with a deliberation and fervency that won the admiration of all present, and drew tears from many eyes. In conclusion he pronounced the Lord’s prayer without hesitancy, and the “amen” served the hangman for his death signal, and he was swung off. After it was over a strong murmur of discontent ran through the crowd, a popular uproar was feared, and a rescue of the other prisoners; but Mather, as he sat on his horse in the midst, addressed the people to dissuade them from violence. Burroughs, he said, should not be regarded as a minister after his league with the devil; and both his prayers and address, however earnest, were still deceptive, for the devil himself, he continued, when he will, can assume the guise of an angel of light.
At the same time, and to assist Mather, a story was circulated in the assembly that the bewitched girls could plainly see the black man standing near Burroughs, and assisting him in this his last effort. After this the executions went on in peace. At this session also was tried and condemned old Martha Carrier. She was regarded as one of the most decided and active witches in the country. This was the woman, of whom it was repeatedly testified, that the devil had promised her that she should be Queen of Hell; an elevation to which her enemies readily awarded her a title. Her true character was untiring industry, ceaseless vigilance and extraordinary exactitude in the discharge of all duties, and so she never sought excuses for remissness or neglect she would grant none to others, and as a majority of the world are ever on the other side, she first became the terror and then the hatred of her delinquent neighbors. In spite to her family, it was said that she ruled her husband, and that Goodman Carrier would never stick to any bargain of goods or chattels, lands or tenement, unsanctioned by her. Her children too she kept in strange obedience to her will; but her’s was a well-ordered and a thrifty household. Yet they called her a witch until the foul stain became deep and fixed.
Mather declares that when the poor tortured witnesses were brought forward against her in court every one expected their death on the very spot. Her malignant look would strike them down, and then her touch, her eyes being averted, would raise them up; and when they could speak, and testified that her shape had twisted their necks almost round; she said that they were miserable wretches and no matter if their necks had been quite twisted off.
She was indicted for afflicting Mary Walcott and Elizabeth Hubbard; and to make sure of her they terrified and tortured two of her own sons into confession, by tying them neck and heels together, until they said she was a witch, and had also given them over to the devil, and they particularized the time and place.
So old Goody Foster, and her daughter and granddaughter, the two Lacys, were brought up again to renew the old story of the witch sacrament, and riding on a pole; a recital of which wonderful adventure deeply interested Stoughton and his associates. Even in open court during the trial Susanna Shelden’s hands were tied so inexplicably with a wheel band, which they were obliged to cut, like the Gordian knot.
Most of the testimony on her trial, was similar to that given in against Bishop, How, and Martin; being of various injuries to the cattle and health of the people of Andover. But to every accusation she opposed a decided denial; threats could not weaken her, nor promises seduce her resolution to abide by the truth. Invitations to repent, confess and be saved and which others accepted so readily, she treated with contempt; her conscience was too sensitive for such falsehood and her courage remained unshaken through all the terrors of a public prosecution, trial and execution.
And who will deny to Martha Carrier’s name a place among those of recorded martyrs for the love of truth.
The boldness and even ultraism of the Andover witcher in covenanting with the devil, and renouncing infant baptism, and receiving an adult baptism at his hands by plunging in rivers and ponds, (a hit by the standing order at the Anabaptists,) and in riding on poles with him, startled and terrified the country. Some of these practices were peculiar to that company, and brought out by spectral discoveries of Abagail Williams and other pupils of old Tituba. Under this excitement the General Court met at Boston in October, 1695, and then passed a law of death against those who should feed, consult, employ or covenant with no evil or wicked spirit.
John Proctor and his wife, with John Willard, were also tried at the August session of the commissioners.
Willard had for some time been used by the prosecutors as a witch hunter, and to bring in the victims for examination; a most odious and unpopular office. But the many cases of individual and family distress and despair, which he daily witnessed in this employment, at last so excited his compassion, that he refused to act. Immediately upon which, and to punish signally the supposedaffront and rebellion, he was cried out upon as being himself in league and covenant with the devil, and well knowing his danger he at once turned and fled northwardly into the wilderness towards Canada. But swift runners were sent on foot in the same direction who soon came up with him. And it was given out by his enemies, that the bewitched girls at Salem were conscious of the exact moment of his arrest, though many miles distant; and that one of them cried out in open court, “now Willard is taken!” which proved to be correct. He was brought back, and hung in terror to all offenders against the then dominant bloody influences.
Proctor and his wife were those whose primary examination of the 11th of April has been already detailed. Some of the same magistrates who then advised their commitment, now sat on their final trial, and they found no favor. Both were returned guilty by the jury and both received sentence of death from the commissioners, and with only ten days space to prepare for eternity.
Goody Proctor turned out to be in delicate health and circumstances, and her execution was deferred until the fury of persecution was past, and she was saved.
But for Proctor himself, although he became ensnared by his conjugal fidelity, there was no commiseration or hope; and as death nearly approached, he showed more fear than any of his suffering companions. Indeed, in all these terrors it was notorious that females suffered with the most patience and fortitude.
His letter to five of the principal clergymen in and about Boston shows their supposed influence with the government, and in the witch prosecutions.
It was written in prison a little before his trial, and is addressed Messrs. Mather, Allen, Moody, Willard and Bailey.
Up to his last moments, Proctor begged hard for his life, or for only a little space to prepare, or for repentance, often saying he was not fit to die; but all to no purpose.
After he went up the ladder he begged Mr. Noyes, his own pastor, to pray with him; but he refused, because Proctor would not confess himself guilty of witchcraft, and thus give the strongest possible sanction to the bloody measures then in progress. As he was at last forcibly pushed off, begging for his life and protesting that he was an innocent man.
On the 9th and 17th of September the witch commissioners sat and sentenced to death fifteen more; and on the 22nd of the same month, eighth of these, viz.: MarthaCorey already mentioned, Mary Easty, of Topfield, Alice Parker and Ann Pudater of Salem, Margaret Scott of Rawley, Mary Parker and Samuel Wardwell of Andover, and William Reed of Marblehead, were hung; and as the cart with these ascended witch hill to the place of execution, it proceeded with difficulty, and at last came to a stand; whereupon the afflicted declared that the devil himself blocked the wheels. Why should he hinder a witch execution? It was doctrine then, that at their death, he had the immediate possession of their souls.
It was on this occasion that the Rev. Mr. Noyes, turning to the eight bodies hanging on the tree, said aloud to the by-standers, “how sad it is to see those eight fire brands of hell, hanging there!”
Wardwell was one of those who had confessed himself guilty of witchcraft; but afterwards denied his confession. When he was on trial his former confession, and the spectre evidence of the afflicted, were given in against him, and this was all the evidence.
Calef says that at his execution, whilst addressing the people and protesting his innocence, the hangman smoked tobacco, and the smoke blowing in his face interrupted his discourse; but the accusers said that it was the devil who smoked him.
Here it seems according to the afflicted, the devil did not wish his man to escape; contrary to his allged conduct in the cases of Burroughs and Proctor.
Mrs. Mary Easty, hung on this occasion, was also the sister of Rebecca Nurse, and no doubt but that her connection with that ill-fated woman who was herself a victim to sisterly love, was the cause of her persecution and death. The three sisters were noted for their mutual love. Her’s was a hard case and excited great public commiseration. It was hoped that her spotless character and example would prove too strong on her trial, for the fictions and fits of the afflicted and their partizans. But they employed a jury of eight women, and a doctor to search her body for the devil’s marks, and an excresence was found which was pronounced to be a witch teat; and it turned the case against her.
Shortly before her execution, she called her husband, children and friends about her in prison, and gave them her last farewell, with such affectionate and pious exhortation, as drew tears from the eyes of all present. She also sent to the court the following petition, which presents a vivid picture of her case, and of the unhallowed times on which she had fallen.
“To the Honorable Judge and Bench, now sitting inSalem, and the Rev. Ministers; This petition humbly sheweth; That whereas your poor petitioner being condemned to die, doth humbly beg of you to take into your judicious and pious consideration, that your poor and humble petitioner knowing my own innocency (blessed be the Lord for it) and seeing plainly the subtility and wiles of my accusers towards myself, cannot but judge charitably of others, who are going the same way to death with me, if the Lord step not mightily in.“I was confined a whole month, on accusation of witchcraft, and then cleared by the afflicted persons, as some of your Honors know, and in two days time I was cried out upon by them again, and have been since confined, and now am condemned to die. The Lord above knows my innocence, and it will be known at the great day by men and angels. I petition to your Honors, not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set. I question not but your Honors do to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witches, and would not for the world be guilty of innocent blood; but by my own innocency I know you are in the wrong way. May the Lord in mercy, direct you in this great work.“I would humbly beg that your Honors would be pleased to examine some of those confessing witches; I being confident that there are some of them who have belied themselves and others, as will appear, if not in this world, I am sure it will in the world to come, whither I am going.“They say that myself and others have made a league with the devil; we cannot confess. The Lord knows they belie me, as I question not they do others; the Lord alone who is the searcher of all hearts knows, as I shall answer at his judgment seat, that I know not the least thing of witchcraft, therefore I cannot, I durst not, belie my own soul.“I beg your Honors not to deny this my humble petition, from a poor dying innocent person, and I question not but the Lord will give a blessing to your endeavors.“Mary Easty.”
“To the Honorable Judge and Bench, now sitting inSalem, and the Rev. Ministers; This petition humbly sheweth; That whereas your poor petitioner being condemned to die, doth humbly beg of you to take into your judicious and pious consideration, that your poor and humble petitioner knowing my own innocency (blessed be the Lord for it) and seeing plainly the subtility and wiles of my accusers towards myself, cannot but judge charitably of others, who are going the same way to death with me, if the Lord step not mightily in.
“I was confined a whole month, on accusation of witchcraft, and then cleared by the afflicted persons, as some of your Honors know, and in two days time I was cried out upon by them again, and have been since confined, and now am condemned to die. The Lord above knows my innocence, and it will be known at the great day by men and angels. I petition to your Honors, not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set. I question not but your Honors do to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witches, and would not for the world be guilty of innocent blood; but by my own innocency I know you are in the wrong way. May the Lord in mercy, direct you in this great work.
“I would humbly beg that your Honors would be pleased to examine some of those confessing witches; I being confident that there are some of them who have belied themselves and others, as will appear, if not in this world, I am sure it will in the world to come, whither I am going.
“They say that myself and others have made a league with the devil; we cannot confess. The Lord knows they belie me, as I question not they do others; the Lord alone who is the searcher of all hearts knows, as I shall answer at his judgment seat, that I know not the least thing of witchcraft, therefore I cannot, I durst not, belie my own soul.
“I beg your Honors not to deny this my humble petition, from a poor dying innocent person, and I question not but the Lord will give a blessing to your endeavors.
“Mary Easty.”
This touching and modest declaration Mary Easty sealed with her blood. Her husband, Captain Isaac Easty, was a soldier, and then stood in arms against the French and Indians, and to defend the country and the same power which forced away his wife from her once happy home and family, and without regard to her known piety and virtue, carted her up Witch Hill and hung her on the limb of a tree.
Of the other persons hung on the 22d of September 1692, few particulars have come down to us, either in history or by tradition. It was the last execution and its atrocity manifestly weakened the authority of Phipps’ bloody witch court, and the credit of the Parris afflicted band. It swelled the number of victims to twenty, nineteen of whom had now been hung on that fatal gallows-tree, in after ages an object of peculiar superstitious dread; and their bodies, unhonored even by funeral decencies, though not unwept by private affection, were cast with public ignominy into untimely graves about its roots. But the tree withered, as was supposed, thunder-smitten, and stood for years with leafless, outstretched branches and shattered trunk, until burned to the ground by the descendants in the third and fourth generation of those who suffered on it. In superstitious minds tempests and torrents could not wash away the blood from the unhallowed hill whereon it grew, and the soil was cursed and barren of all wholesome vegetation.
But all were not executed who were tried and sentenced. Besides Elizabeth Proctor, Abigail Falkner of Andover was saved by her delicate family condition. At her trial the court took the confession of her little daughter, ten years old, against her. But Dorcas Hoar of Beverly, Rebecca Eams of Boxford, Abigail Hobbs of Topsfield, Mary Bradbury of Salisbury, and Ann Foster and Mary Lacy of Andover, all flattered their persecutors by a confession of the charges against them, and thus escaped death.
This whole slaughter of the innocent under the similitude of legal forms, was the work of little more than three short months. A sudden bereavement, indeed, of near and loved friends. When, however, a lawful court was established, this sham tribunal, happily for the country, came to an end. And it is some consolation to know that it was entirely discontinued with the regular jurisprudence of the country.
The last witch trials ever holden in Massachusetts were those five at Ipswich about the middle of May, 1693, and to which I have already referred.
By this time the spectre evidence, or the devil’s testimony through the mouths of the afflicted, had become so unpopular that none of the judges dared to sustain it, and the juries also disregarded it; and from this time forth it was manifest that there could be no more convictions for alleged witchcrafts.
And thus public opinion, operating through the jury and the only part of the government at that time throughwhich it could operate, in effect annulled the bloody witch law, passed by false agents of the people, against common justice and in favor of the then ruling political interests and influences; or the old charter church and state aristocracy. And history rarely reveals to us a more bloody despotism. And shall it not stand forever as a warning against any interference by a people’s self-government with the religion or business of the community?
Early in the year of 1727 the last witch-fire was kindled with which the air of bonnie Scotland was polluted. Two poor Highland women, a mother and daughter, were brought before Captain David Ross of Littledean, deputy-sheriff of Sutherland, charged with witchcraft and consorting with the devil. The mother was accused of having used her daughter as her “horse and hattock,” causing her to be shod by the devil, so that she was ever after lame in both hands and feet. The fact being satisfactorily proved, and Captain David Ross being well assured of the same, the poor old woman was put into a tar-barrel and burned at Dornoch in the bright month of June. “And it is said that after being brought out to execution, the weather proving very severe, she sat composedly warming herself by the fire prepared to consume her, while the other instruments of death were getting ready.” The daughter escaped. Afterward she married and had a son who was as lame as herself, and in the same manner; though it does not appear that he was ever shod by the devil and witch-ridden. “And this son,” says Sir Walter Scott, in 1830 “was living so lately as to receive the charity of the present Marchioness of Stafford, Countess of Sutherland in her own right.”
This then, is the last execution for witchcraft in Scotland; and in June, 1736, the Acts Anents Witchcraft were formerly repealed. Henceforth to the dread of the timid, and the anger of the pious, the English Parliament distinctly opposed the express Law of God: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live;” and declared the text upon which so much critical absurdity had been talked, and in support of which so much innocent blood had been shed, vain, superstitious, impossible and contrary to that human reason which is the highest Law of God hitherto revealed unto men. But if Parliament could stay executions it could not remove beliefs nor give rationality in place of folly.
Not more than sixty years ago an old woman named Elizabeth M’Whirter was “scratched” by one Eaglesham in the parish of Colmonel, Ayrshire, because his son hadfallen sick, and the neighbors said he was bewitched. Poor old Bessie M’Whirter was forced over the hills to the young man’s house, a distance of three miles, and there made to kneel by his bedside and repeat the Lord’s Prayer.
In offering this collection of witch stories to the public, I do not profess to have exhausted the subject, or to have made so complete a summary as I might have done, had I the space, but I do not think that I have left much untold.
Neither have I attempted to enter into the philosophy of the subject. It is far too wide and deep to be discussed in a few hasty words; and to sift such evidence as is left us—to determine what was fraud, what self-deception, what disease and what the exaggeration of the narrator—would have swelled my book into a more important and bulky work than I intended or wished. As a general rule, I think we may apply all four conditions to every case reported; in what proportion, each reader must judge for himself. Those who believe in direct and personal intercourse between the spirit-world and man will probably accept every account with the unquestioning belief of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; those who have faith in the uniform operations of nature, will hold chiefly to the doctrine of fraud; those who have seen much of disease and that strange condition called “mesmerism,” or “sensitiveness,” will detect the presence of nervous derangement, mixed up with a vast amount of conscious deception, which the credulity and ignorance of the time rendered easy to practice; and those who have been accustomed to sift evidence and examine witnesses will be dissatisfied with the loose statements and wild distortion of every instance on record.
The whole world was overrun with witches. From every town came crowds of those lost and damned souls; from every hovel peered out the cursing witch, or cried aloud for help the stricken victim. These poor and old and wretched beings, on whose heads lighted the wrath of a world, and against whom every idle lad or moping maid had a stone to fling at will, were held capable of all but omnipotence. They could destroy the babe in the womb and make the “mother of many children childless among women;” they could kill with a look and disable with a curse; bring storms or sunshine as they listed; by their “witch-ropes,” artfully woven, draw to themselves all the profit of their neighbor’s barns and breweries; yetever remain poor and miserable, glad to beg a mouthful of meat or a can of sour milk from the hands of those whom they could ruin by half a dozen muttered words. They could take on themselves what shapes they would, and transport themselves whither they would. No bolt nor bar could keep them out; no distance by land or sea was too great for them to accomplish; a straw—a broomstick—the serviceable imp ever at hand—was enough for them; and with a pot of magic ointment, and a charm of spoken gibberish, they might visit the king on his throne or the lady in her bower, to do what ill was in their hearts against them or to gather to themselves what gain and store they would. Yet with all this power the superstitious world saw nothing doubtful or illogical in the fact of their own exceeding poverty, and never stayed to think that if witches and wizards could transport themselves through the air to any distance they chose, they would be but slippery holding in prison, and not very likely to remain there for the pleasure of being tortured and burned at the end. But neither reason nor logic had anything to do with the matter. The whole thing rested on fear, and that practical atheism of fear, which denies the power of God and the wholesome beauty of Nature, to exalt in their stead the supremacy of the devil.
This belief in the devil’s material presence and power over men was the dark chain that bound them all. Even the boldest opponent of the Witchcraft Delusion dared not fling it off. The bravest man, the freest thinker, could not clear his mind of this terrible bugbear, this phantasm of human fear and ignorance, this ghastly lie and morbid delusion, or abandon the slavish belief in Satan for the glad freedom of God and Nature.
Superstition dies hard; or rather, so far as we have yet gone, it does not die at all, but only changes its form and removes its locality. If educated people do not now believe in witches and Satanic compacts, as in the ignorant old times of which these stories treat, they do still believe in other things which are as much against reason and as incapable of proof. And perhaps it may give some cause to think that assertion does not necessarily include truth, and that skepticism may be at times a wiser attitude of mind than credulity, when they remember that the best brains in the world were once firmly convinced of the truth of Possession and the diabolical art of witchcraft, and realize how many innocent men and women were murdered on the strength of these beliefs and to vindicate the honor and glory of God. Solong as one shred of superstition remains in the world, by which human charity is sacrificed to an unprovable faith, so long will it be necessary to insist on the dead errors of the past as a gauge for the living follies of the present.
But the snake is scotched, not killed. So far are we in advance of the men of the ruder past, inasmuch as our superstitions, though quite as silly, are less cruel than theirs, and hurt no one but ourselves. Yet still we have our wizards and witches lurking round area gates and prowling through the lanes and yards of the remoter country districts; still we have our mediums, who call up the dead from their graves to talk to us more trivial nonsense than ever they talked while living, and who reconcile us with humanity by showing us how infinitely inferior is spirituality; still we have the unknown mapped out in clear lines sharp and firm; and still the impossible is asserted as existing, and men are ready to give their lives in attestation of what contravenes every law of reason and of nature; still we are not content to watch and wait and collect and fathom before deciding, but for every new group of facts or appearances must at once draw up a code of laws and reasons, and prove, to a mathematical certainty, the properties of a chimera, and the divine life and beauty of a lie. Even the mere vulgar belief in witchcraft remains among the lower classes. And indeed so long as conviction without examination, and belief without proof, pass as the righteous operations of faith, so long will superstition and credulity reign supreme over the mind, and the functions of critical reason be abandoned and foresworn. And as it seems to me that credulity is a less desirable frame of mind than skepticism, I have set forth this collection of witch stories as landmarks of the excesses to which a blind belief may hurry and impel humanity, and perhaps as some slight aids to that much misused common sense which the holders of impossible theories generally consider it well to tread under foot, and loftily ignore.