Without the least purpose or wish to cover up or extenuate the follies, excesses, or outrages I am about to describe, into which the community suffered itself to be led in the witchcraft proceedings of 1692,—with a desire, on the contrary, to make the lesson then given of the mischief resulting from misguided enthusiasm, and which will always result when popular excitement is allowed to wield the organized powers of society, as impressive as facts and truth will justify,—I feel bound to say, in advance, that there are some considerations which we must keep before us, while reviewing the incidents of the transaction. The theological, legal, and philosophical doctrines and the popular beliefs, on which it was founded, have, as I have shown, led, in other countries and periods, to similar, and often vastly more shameful, cruel, and destructive results. But there was something in the affair, as it was developed here, that has arrested the notice of mankind, and clothed it with an inherent interest, beyond all other events of the kind that have elsewhere or ever occurred.
The moral force engendered in the civilization planted on these shores, and pervading the whole body of society, supplied a mightier momentum, as it does to this day, and ever will, to the movement of the people, acting in a mass and as a unit, than can anywhere else be found. A population, invigorated by hardy enterprise, and the constant exercise of all the faculties of freedom, and actuated throughout by individual energy of character, must be mightier in motion than any other people. Such a population multiplies tenfold its physical forces, by the addition of moral and intellectual energies. The men of the day and scene we are now to contemplate, however deluded, to whatever extremities carried, were controlled by fixed, absolute, sharply defined, and, in themselves, great ideas. They believed in God. They also believed in the Devil. They bowed in an adoration that penetrated their inmost souls, before the one as a being of infinite holiness: they regarded the other as a being of an all but infinite power of evil. They feared and worshipped God. They hated and defied the Devil. They believed that Satan was waging war against Jehovah, and that the conflict was for the dominion of the world, for the establishment or the overthrow of the Church of Christ. The battle, they fully believed, could have no other issue than the salvation or the ruin of the souls of men. This was not, with them, a mere technical, verbal creed. It was a deep-seated conviction, held earnestly with a clear and distinct apprehension of its import, by every individual mind. For this warfare, they put on the whole armor of faith, rallied to the banner of the Most High, and met Satan face to face. In this one great idea, a stern, determined, unflinching, all-sacrificing people concentrated their strength. No wonder that the conflict reached a magnitude which made it observable to the whole country and all countries at the time, and will make it memorable throughout all time. Those engaged in it, with this sentiment absorbing their very souls, passed, for the time, out of the realm of all other sentiments, and were insensible to all other considerations. The nearer and dearer the relatives, the higher and more conspicuous the persons, who, in their belief, were in league with the Devil, the more profound the abhorrence of their crime, and the determination to cut off and destroy them utterly. They believed that Satan had, once before, "against the throne and monarchy of God, raised impious war and battle proud;" and that for this he had been cast out from "heaven, with all his host of rebel angels;" that he, with his army of subordinate wicked spirits, was making a desperate effort to retrieve his lost estate, by a renewed rebellion against God; and they were determined to drive him, and all his confederates, for ever from the confines of the earth. The humble hamlet of Salem Village was felt to be the great and final battle-ground. However wild and absurd this idea is now regarded, it was then sincerely and thoroughly entertained, and must be taken into the account, in coming to a just estimate of the character of the transaction, and of those engaged in it.
One other thought is to be borne in mind, as we pass through the scenes that are to be spread before us. The theology of Christendom, at that time, so far as it relates to the power and agency of Satan and demonology in general,—and this is the only point of view on which I ever refer to theology in this discussion,—and the whole fabric of popular superstitions founded upon it, had reached their culmination. The beginning, middle, and close of the seventeenth century, witnessed the greatest display of those superstitions, and prepared the way for their final explosion. As the hour of their dissolution was at hand, and they were doomed to vanish before the light of science and education, to pass from the realm of supposed reality into that of acknowledged fiction, it seems to have been ordered that they should leave monuments behind them, from which their character, elements, and features, and their terrible influence, might be read and studied in all subsequent ages.
The ideas in reference to the agency and designs of the great enemy of God and man, and all his subordinate hosts, witches, fairies, ghosts, "gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire," "apparitions, signs, and prodigies," by which the minds of men had so long been filled, and their fearful imaginations exercised, as they took their flight, imprinted themselves, for perpetual remembrance, in productions which, more than any works of mere human genius, are sure to live for ever. They left their forms crystallized, with imperishable lineaments, in the greatest of dramas and the greatest of epics. The plays of Shakespeare, as the century opened, and the verse of Milton in its central period, are their record and their picture.
But there was another shape and aspect in which it was pre-eminently important to have their memory preserved; and that was their application to life, their influence upon the conduct of men, the action of tribunals, and the movements of society, and, in general, their effects, when allowed full operation, upon human happiness and welfare. This want was supplied, as the century terminated, by the tragedy in real life, whose scenes are now to be presented in Witchcraft at Salem Village.
However strange it seems, it is quite worthy of observation, that the actors in that tragedy, the "afflicted children," and other witnesses, in their various statements and operations, embraced about the whole circle of popular superstition. How those young country girls, some of them mere children, most of them wholly illiterate, could have become familiar with such fancies, to such an extent, is truly surprising. They acted out, and brought to bear with tremendous effect, almost all that can be found in the literature of that day, and the period preceding it, relating to such subjects. Images and visions which had been portrayed in tales of romance, and given interest to the pages of poetry, will be made by them, as we shall see, to throng the woods, flit through the air, and hover over the heads of a terrified court. The ghosts of murdered wives and children will play their parts with a vividness of representation and artistic skill of expression that have hardly been surpassed in scenic representations on the stage. In the Salem-witchcraft proceedings, the superstition of the middle ages was embodied in real action. All its extravagances, absurdities, and monstrosities appear in their application to human experience. We see what the effect has been, and must be, when the affairs of life, in courts of law and the relations of society, or the conduct or feelings of individuals, are suffered to be under the control of fanciful or mystical notions. When a whole people abandons the solid ground of common sense, overleaps the boundaries of human knowledge, gives itself up to wild reveries, and lets loose its passions without restraint, it presents a spectacle more terrific to behold, and becomes more destructive and disastrous, than any convulsion of mere material nature; than tornado, conflagration, or earthquake.