Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather: A Reply

by Charles Wentworth Upham

Not daring to refuse any longer, Parris, professedly yielding to the demand, consented to a Mutual Council, but avoided it, in this way. Each party was to select three Churches, to maintain its interests and give friendly protection to its rights and feelings. The aggrieved brethren selected the Churches of Rowley, Salisbury and Ipswich. Parris undertook to object to the Church of Ipswich; and refused to proceed, if it was invited. Of course, the aggrieved brethren persisted in their right to name the Churches on their side. Knowing that they had the right so to do, and that public opinion would sustain them in it, Parris escaped the dilemma, by calling an ex parte Council; and the Churches invited to it were those of North Boston, Weymouth, Malden, and Rowley. The first was that of the Mathers. That Parris was right in relying upon the Rev. Samuel Torrey of Weymouth, is rendered probable by the circumstance that, of the names of the fourteen Ministers, including all those known to have been opposed to the proceedings at Salem, attached to the recommendation of the Cases of Conscience, his is not one; and may be considered as made certain by the fact recorded by Sewall, that he was opposed to the discontinuance of the Trials. The Pastor of the Malden Church was the venerable Michael Wigglesworth, a gentleman of the highest repute; who had declined the Presidency of Harvard College; whose son and grandson became Professors in that institution; and whose descendants still sustain the honor of their name and lineage. From the tone of his writings, it is quite probable that he favored the witchcraft proceedings, at the beginning; but the change of mind, afterwards strongly expressed, had, perhaps, then begun to be experienced, for he did not respond to the call, as his name does not appear in the record of the Council. The fact that Parris chiefly depended upon the Church at North Boston, of which Cotton Mather was Pastor, to sustain his cause, in a Council, whose whole business was to pass upon his conduct in witchcraft prosecutions, is quite decisive. That Church was named by him, from the first to the last, and neither of the other Boston Churches. It shows that he turned to Cotton Mather, more than to any other Minister, to be his champion.

It is further decisively proved that the reaction had become strong among the Ministers, by the unusual steps they took to prevent that Council being under the sway of such men as Cotton Mather and Torrey, thereby prolonging the mischief. A meeting of the "Reverend Elders of the Bay" was held; and Mr. Parris was given to understand that, in their judgment, the Churches of Messrs. Allen and Willard ought also to be invited. He bitterly resented this, and saw that it sealed his fate; but felt the necessity of yielding to it. The addition of those two Churches, with their Pastors, determined the character and result of the Council, and gave new strength to the aggrieved brethren, who soon succeeded in compelling Parris and his friends to agree to submit the whole matter to the arbitration of three men, mutually chosen, whose decision should be final.

The umpire selected in behalf of the opponents of Parris was no other than Elisha Cook, the head of the party arrayed against Mather. Wait Winthrop appears to have been selected by Parris; and Samuel Sewall was mutually agreed upon. Two of the three, who thus passed final judgment against the proceedings at the Salem Trials, sat on the Bench of the Special Court of Oyer and Terminer. The case of the aggrieved brethren was presented to the Arbitrators in a document, signed by four men, as "Attorneys of the people of the Village," each one of whom had been struck at, in the time of the prosecutions. It exclusively refers to Mr. Parris's conduct, in the witchcraft prosecutions; to "his believing the Devil's accusations;" and to his going to the accusing girls, to know of them "who afflicted" them. For these reasons, and these alone, they "submit the whole" to the decision of the Arbitrators, concluding thus: "to determine whether we are, or ought to be, any ways obliged to honor, respect, and support such an instrument of our miseries." The Arbitrators decided that they ought not; fixed the sum to be paid to Parris, as a final settlement; and declared the ministerial relation, between him and the people of the Village, dissolved.

With this official statement of the grounds on which his dismission was demanded and obtained, before his eyes, as printed by Calef (p. 63), this Reviewer says that Parris remained the Minister of Salem Village, five years "after the witchcraft excitement;" and further says, "the immediate cause of his leaving, was his quarrel with the Parish, concerning thirty cords of wood and the fee of the parsonage." He thus thinks, by a dash of his pen, to strike out the record of the fact that the main, in truth, the only, ground on which Parris was dismissed, was the part he bore in the witchcraft prosecutions. The salary question had been pending in the Courts; but it was wholly left out of view, by the party demanding his dismission. It had nothing to do with dismission; was a question of contract and debt; and was absorbed in the "excitement," which had never ceased, about the witchcraft prosecutions. The Arbitrators did not decide those questions, about salary and the balance of accounts, except as incidental to the other question, of dismission.

The feeling among the inhabitants of Salem Village, that Cotton Mather was in sympathy with Mr. Parris, during the witchcraft prosecutions, is demonstrated by the facts I have adduced connected with the controversy between them and the latter, and most emphatically by their choice of Elisha Cook, as the Arbitrator, on their part. Surely no persons of that day, understood the matter better than they did. Indeed, they could not have been mistaken about it. It remained the settled conviction of that community.

When the healing ministry of the successor of Parris, Joseph Green, was brought to a close, by the early death of that good man, in 1715, and the whole Parish, still feeling the dire effects of the great calamity of 1692, were mourning their bereavement, expressed in their own language: "the choicest flower, and greenest olive-tree, in the garden of our God here, cut down in its prime and flourishing estate," they passed a vote, earnestly soliciting the Rev. William Brattle of Cambridge, to visit them. He was always a known opponent of Cotton Mather. To have selected him to come to them, in their distress and destitution, indicates the views then prevalent in the Village. He went to them and guided them by his advice, until they obtained a new Minister.

The mention of the fact by Mr. Hale, already stated, that Cotton Mather's book, Memorable Providences, was used as an authority by the Judges at the Salem Trials, shows that the author of that work was regarded by Hale as, to that extent at least, responsibly connected with the prosecutions.

I pass over, for the present, the proceedings and writings of Robert Calef.

After the lapse of a few years, a feeling, which had been slowly, but steadily, rising among the people, that some general and public acknowledgment ought to be made by all who had been engaged in the proceedings of 1692, and especially by the authorities, of the wrongs committed in that dark day, became too strong to be safely disregarded. On the seventeenth of December, 1696, Stoughton, then acting as Governor, issued a Proclamation, ordaining, in his name and that of the Council and Assembly, a Public Fast, to be kept on the fourteenth of January, to implore that the anger of God might be turned away, and His hand, then stretched over the people in manifold judgments, lifted. After referring to the particular calamities they were suffering and to the many days that had been spent in solemn addresses to the throne of mercy, it expresses a fear that something was still wanting to accompany their supplications, and proceeds to refer, specially, to the witchcraft tragedy. It was on the occasion of this Fast, that Judge Sewall acted the part, in the public assembly of the old South Church, for which his name will ever be held in dear and honored memory.

The public mind was, no doubt, gratified and much relieved, but not satisfied, by this demonstration. The Proclamation did not, after all, meet its demands. Upon careful examination and deliberate reflection, it rather aggravated the prevalent feeling. Written, as was to be supposed, by Stoughton, it could not represent a reaction in which he took no part. It spoke of "mistakes on either hand," and used general forms, "wherein we have done amiss, to do so no more." It endorsed in a new utterance, the delusion, sheltering the proper agents of the mischief, by ascribing it all to "Satan and his instruments, through the awful judgment of God;" and no atonement for the injuries to the good name and estates of the sufferers, not to speak of the lives that had been cut off, was suggested. The conviction was only deepened, in all good minds, that something more ought to be done. Mr. Hale, of Beverly, met the obligation pressing upon his sense of justice and appealing to him with especial force, by writing his book, from which the following passages are extracted: "I would come yet nearer to our own times, and bewail the errors and mistakes that have been, in the year 1692—by following such traditions of our fathers, maxims of the common law, and precedents and principles, which now we may see, weighed in the balance of the sanctuary, are found too light—Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former precedents, that we walked in the clouds and could not see our way—I would humbly propose whether it be not expedient that somewhat more should be publicly done than yet hath, for clearing the good name and reputation of some that have suffered upon this account."