Essays in American history

by Henry Ferguson

It is, then, not astonishing that our forefathers in New England should have been victims to a common delusion of their times. We may even say that the circumstances of their lives were such as to render them especially liable to it; for though the hardships of the early history of the settlement grew less as time went on, the life in New England was, at the best, lonely and depressing. The colonists lived dreary lives of laborious and uninteresting toil, with few physical comforts, and with poor and unvaried diet. They had few amusements, little or no recreation, and they were constantly in face of difficulties, constantly exposed to danger. Their houses were on the verge of the mysterious forest, where strange sights and sounds were to be seen and heard, where dwelt the Indians, often hostile and always a source of uneasiness. They had few books, and those they had were not of a character to draw them away from the contemplation of themselves. The Bible they had, it is true, but to read it for any purpose except that of spiritual exercise would have been deemed profane. Sermons of abnormal length and dryness, controversial treatises, ponderous alike literally and figuratively, and, as we shall see later, ghastly and blood-curdling accounts of memorable providences, formed their principal literature. The settlers had been for the most part emigrants from quiet country towns and villages in England, put down in the unknown wilderness, to work out, under the pressure of religious enthusiasm, a new social and religious polity. The life was small, narrow, and squalid, only redeemed from utter sordidness by gleams of religious idealism and by the stern resolution of the better class of the settlers to keep themselves and their neighbors in the paths of righteousness. Their religion was a sombre Calvinism, giving more prominence to the terrors of the law than to the comforts of the gospel. Living as they did in scriptural thought, speaking in scriptural phraseology, dwelling constantly upon the similarity of their position with that of the children of Israel, it is not surprising that they should have carried their intense literalism into every particular. Their external relations, their religious and political systems, were ruled by the law of Moses as they imagined it from their somewhat uncritical study of the Old Testament. Their Christianity was profoundly internal and introspective, something which was between each individual soul and the Almighty, rather than a law of social life. The result of this was twofold. They were led to ascribe to their own convictions the character of divine revelations, and were also rendered intensely morbid, sometimes exalted above measure and sometimes as irrationally despondent. They felt that they were the chosen people of the Lord, doing a great work for him, in “setting up the candlestick of a pure church in the wilderness to which the like-minded might resort”; and this feeling led them to believe that they were especially exposed to the malice and spite of the devil, who desired to thwart their purpose. They saw special providences in every common occurrence that made for their welfare or that seemed to vindicate their theological prejudices, the envy and spite of the devil in every misadventure or threatening circumstance. Cotton Mather may be taken as a characteristic specimen of the more intelligent and devout thinkers among the men of the second generation, and for him the whole daily life of the colony was a spiritual warfare. The very object of his greatest work, the “Magnalia Christi,” is to show the special workings of Divine Providence in favor of the people of Massachusetts, and to exhibit how they had battled against “principalities and powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” The savage Indians were supposed to be devil-worshippers, and to serve him at their “pow-wows” in the dark recesses of the unbroken forest. Every storm, every meteor, every unnatural birth, was a portent.[51] It is not strange that under such conditions a strong belief in the reality of witchcraft should have existed, especially when the delusion was general in Europe as well as in America.

The belief in the power of evil spirits to interfere with man has been held in every age and in all parts of the world. It is a survival of that fear of the unseen, which filled the souls of men in those early ages when, ignorant of the forces of nature, they felt the universe about them to be hostile and ascribed all unfamiliar sensations to the agency of some invisible enemy. It is not strange that such a belief should have arisen. Man’s commonest experiences were those of hostility and pain; wild animals were hostile, his wilder fellow-men were still more hostile; from both he suffered injuries that were inflicted consciously and with evil intent; by analogy—the earliest, as it is the latest, form of reasoning—the other evils he suffered must be also the acts of conscious beings. The twinges of rheumatism were no less real than the pain from the blow of a foeman’s club; it was only natural to reason that they had been inflicted by an unseen enemy.

The fear of the unseen, so characteristic of primeval man, has left many traces in language, religion, and custom. Like many another instinct inherited from savage life, it remains lurking in the human mind, and at certain times comes to the surface. It has developed itself in two directions. On the one hand it has led to religion, to a faith in a supernal Protector with whom the darkness and the light are both alike; on the other, to a grovelling fear of evil spirits, which has been the cause of the belief in magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. The fear of Jehovah was, for Israel and for the world, the beginning of wisdom. The “seeking unto wizards that peep and mutter” is the parody of religion, which seems always to exist by its side.

It is probable also that the belief in evil spirits may have had, in some cases, a different origin. It has been often pointed out on historical as well as on philological grounds that, in many cases, the conquest of one tribe by another has degraded the religion of the conquered into a secondary and dishonorable position. When the Saxon convert renounced Woden, Thunor, and Saxnote and all their words and works, the gods of Asgard still remained, in the belief of both convert and converter, as malignant enemies of Christianity. Whether from a primitive fear or a degraded polytheism, the result has been the same; man tends to surround himself with a host of invisible foes.

The monotheistic religions, especially, have waged a bitter warfare upon this form of polytheism, as derogating from the honors due only to the highest. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all declared war against the witch and the magician, at times by stern legislation, at times by wise teaching of the unreality and nothingness of the pretences of those who claim supernatural powers.

Perhaps the most strange fact in the history of the subject, and a remarkable example of the impossibility of anticipating every result of an action, is that the very efforts which were made by the enlightened lawgivers of Israel to eradicate this debasing superstition have been in later times the provocation of the continued recurrence of the delusion. The words of the law of Israel have been used to prove the reality of the existence of the offence it had attempted to obliterate, while the severity of the punishments employed among a people just rescued from barbarism has been made an excuse for equal severity under circumstances the most widely different.

Even now such superstitions are extremely common among the negroes of the southern portion of the United States, and of the West India Islands, as they are among the Slavs in Bohemia and Russia, and among the ignorant in every land. Even among the educated classes there is a more than half-serious belief in “charms,” “mascots,” and “hoodoos,” which is laughed at but acted upon. The superstitions about Friday, the number thirteen, and many others of the same nature, are still acted upon all over the world, and the belief in the evil eye is not confined to any one class or nation. Spiritualistic materializations and the marvels of Hindu theosophy are modern examples of this same recurrence to the fears and follies of our savage ancestors.

In the seventeenth century, it was only a few emancipated spirits who did not so believe, and they were looked upon with horror by the majority of religious men as Sadducees and unbelievers. No less an authority than King James himself, the British Solomon, had written a most “learned and painful” treatise to prove the necessity of such a belief for all Christian people, a treatise in which he expounded satisfactorily, to himself at least, all the most recondite minutiæ of the subject.[52]

In his reign, by Act of Parliament, witchcraft had been made punishable by death,[53] and the scandalous case of Lady Essex’s divorce had been decided on grounds of “maleficium versus hanc.”[54] Still more recently, as the wise and godly Baxter relates, during the period of the Commonwealth, the learned Calamy had looked on with approval, while Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder, tortured some poor wretches, among whom was one unfortunate dispossessed clergyman of the persecuted Church of England, into confessing revolting absurdities.[55] Still later, after the Restoration, the usually judicious Sir Matthew Hale had condemned and burned two women as witches, in the very Suffolk from which so many of the New Englanders had come, on evidence of the same character as that upon which American courts had to decide.[56] If these erred in believing in witchcraft, they erred in good company, with all the most orthodox teachers of religion and philosophy in Europe, Protestant and Catholic as well. Even Selden, who had no belief in witchcraft himself, justified the severity which was exercised against those condemned of that offence, by arguing that if a man thought that by turning his hat around and saying “Buz” he could kill a man, he ought to be put to death if he made the attempt, no matter how absurd the claim might be. Sir Thomas Browne, the well-known author of the Religio Medici, gave his testimony as an expert at the trial of the Suffolk witches, upon the side of the reality of witchcraft.[57] When the student of the early annals of the Colonies realizes the extent of this superstition, and at the same time the literal character of the religion of the majority of the settlers in New England, their bitter hatred of theological opponents, and their readiness to believe evil in regard to them; when he appreciates how harsh and mean and unlovely was the life that most of them lived, and observes that, side by side with an exalted religious enthusiasm, the lowest and most abhorrent forms of indecency and vice prevailed, he will no longer be inclined to wonder at the existence in such a community of the witchcraft delusion, but will rather be amazed that, with such a people and among such surroundings, its duration was so short and its victims so few.

Although the crime of witchcraft was especially named in the colonial statutes, and the penalty of death imposed upon offenders, it was some time before a case was detected; and the early settlers seem usually to have acted most cautiously in this matter. Connecticut has the unenviable pre-eminence of having furnished the first victim, if Winthrop may be believed. He notes: “One of Windsor was arraigned and executed in Hartford for a witch” in March, 1646–7.[58] Then followed, in 1648, the execution of Margaret Jones at Charlestown, Mass., whose fate Winthrop also describes. She was tested according to the most approved maxims of witch-finders in England, being stripped and searched for witch-marks, or the teats by which it was believed the devil’s imps were nourished. The search paid no regard to decency, and when the inquisitors found some small excrescence they were fully satisfied of the guilt of the accused, and she was accordingly hanged.[59] In the same year the founders of the liberties of Connecticut put to death, at Hartford, one Mary Johnson, with whom, it is related, “Mr. Stone labored with such success that she died in penitence, confessing her abominable crimes of familiarity with the devil.”[60] In 1650, a Mistress Lake was hanged at Dorchester, and a Mistress Kendall at Cambridge, showing that not all the superstitious had migrated from those places to Hartford and Windsor.[61] In 1651, Mary Parsons of Springfield was hanged for infanticide; she was generally accused of being a witch, but on trial before the General Court was cleared, owing to the insufficiency of the testimony;[62] and Hugh Parsons, her husband, who was tried and found guilty by the Court of Assistants in 1652, was re-tried and acquitted by the General Court, “which, after perusing and considering the evidence, ... judged that he was not legally guilty of witchcraft, and so not to dye by law.”[63] These instances of careful examination, as well as the small number of the cases, show that in the first twenty-five years there was no general panic, and that the authorities were inclined to proceed with a deliberation which contrasts very favorably with the tone of feeling in England at this time. In 1651, Goodwife Bassett was hanged at Stratford,[64] and John Carrington and his wife of Wethersfield, probably at Hartford,[65] and in 1653, Goodwife Knapp suffered at Fairfield.[66] In Massachusetts there were no more cases until 1656, in which year Mistress Hibbins, a woman of position, whose husband had sat as an assistant at some of the earlier trials, was hanged in Boston. It is noticeable in her case that though the magistrates had refused to accept the verdict of the first jury that had found her guilty, the General Court, to whom the case came in regular course, condemned her.[67] Her execution shocked the wiser portion of the community, and even men of the narrow religious views of Norton and Wilson, though they did not venture openly to oppose the popular demand for her life, were heard to say in private that they had hanged a woman whose chief offence was in having more wit than her neighbors.[68]