After her death there were no more executions in Massachusetts for over thirty years, though the increasing frequency of marvellous occurrences and suspicious cases promised ill for the future. Good sense as yet controlled public affairs, in this direction at least. In Connecticut witch-finding still continued; in 1558 the wife of Joseph Garlick of Easthampton (L. I.) was tried for this offence; in 1659 there was an alarm in Saybrook; and in 1662, one Goody Greensmith of Hartford was convicted, on her own confession, of having had carnal intercourse with the devil, and was hanged for the offence; two other women were condemned with her but “made their escape”; her husband was not so fortunate and was put to death. Mary Barnes of Farmington was indicted January 6th, 1662–3, and was probably executed with the Greensmiths.[69]
Other cases occurred, but it is believed that this was the last execution for witchcraft in Connecticut. The Gallows Hill in Hartford was, however, long remembered, and has not even yet lost its unsavory reputation. The political changes incident to the reception of the charter, by which the colony of New Haven was calmly absorbed by its astute and ambitious neighbor, seem to have occupied men’s minds sufficiently to keep them from any great amount of activity in this direction. Yet, in 1665, Elizabeth Seger was found guilty of witchcraft at Hartford, but set at liberty, and, 1669, Katharine Harrison of Wethersfield was tried and condemned; the verdict, however, was overruled and the prisoner released by the Special Court of Assistants;[70] four women were tried in 1692, at Fairfield, one of whom was condemned to death, but not executed; two women were indicted at Wallingford, and a woman was tried at Hartford as late as 1697, but acquitted.[71] It has sometimes been said that the arrival of Andros and the loss of the charter in 1687 was the only thing that prevented a serious outbreak of the delusion in Connecticut.
When the delusion revived in Massachusetts it was with increased force and virulence. Its recrudescence may be directly traced to the publication and general circulation in the colony of a book by Increase Mather, entitled “An Essay for the recording of Illustrious Providences,” etc., which contained a detailed account of all the marvels that Divine benevolence or wrath had wrought in the last thirty or forty years.[72] At about the same time appeared the account of the trials in England under Sir Matthew Hale[73] and of the remarkable mania which had raged in Sweden in 1669.[74] These horrible stories became the subject of conversation, of meditation in private, and of sermon and prayer in public. They were apparently read or related to the young as edifying and instructive literature; for, from this time forward, children in New England began to repeat the phenomena that had prevailed on the other side of the Atlantic.
The colony was in a very excited and discontented condition. The beloved patent upon which the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had been so boldly reared had been taken away from them, and they had been brought under the government of England. Their “purity of doctrine” was more than threatened, as not only had they been compelled to desist from persecuting Quakers, but they had also been constrained to allow the hated Book of Common Prayer to be read in public, and to permit men to worship God according to its rubrical provisions. More than this, the king’s governor had actually polluted one of their meeting-houses by using it for the performance of the services of the national church. It seemed indeed to many of the men who were now prominent in the room of their wiser fathers, that Satan was making a desperate attack upon the colony; and their minds were predisposed to believe any marvels the result of diabolical agency.
The first manifestation of the revived delusion appeared in 1688, in the family of John Goodwin, a sober and prosperous mechanic of Boston. His children, all of whom were said to be remarkable for “ingenuity of character,” and who had been religiously brought up, and were “thought to be without guile,” suddenly exhibited the most alarming symptoms. One of them, a young girl, had given some offence to an old Irishwoman of bad character, and had been repaid with vigorous abuse and vituperation. Shortly afterwards she began to fall into fits, which were deemed by her friends and neighbors to have something diabolical about them. Soon the same complaint attacked also her sister and her two brothers, and the terrified observers reported that they were all “tormented in the same part of their bodies at the same time, though kept in separate apartments, and ignorant of one another’s complaints.” They were free from trouble at night and slept well. Their afflictions always came on in the daytime and in public. Their diabolical visitants were apparently instructed in theology, and displayed a depraved taste in literature that was intensely scandalizing to the pious Cotton Mather, who interested himself most deeply in the strange affliction of the children. He relates that they would throw the children into a senseless condition if they but looked on the outside of such good books as the Assembly’s Catechism or Cotton’s Milk for Babes, while they might read with complete impunity Oxford Jests, popish or Quaker books, or the Book of Common Prayer.[75] The other symptoms were yet more alarming, physically, if not spiritually. “Sometimes they would be deaf, then dumb, then blind, and sometimes all these disorders together would come upon them. Their tongues would be drawn down their throats, then pulled out upon their chins. Their jaws, necks, shoulders, elbows, and all their joints would appear to be dislocated, and they would make most piteous outcries of burnings, of being cut with knives, beat, etc., and the marks of wounds were afterwards to be seen.” The ministers of Boston and Charlestown came to the house, and kept there a day of fasting and prayer, with the happy result of curing the youngest of the children. The others continued as before; and then, the clergy having failed, the magistrates took up the case. The old woman whose violent tongue had apparently had some connection with the first outbreak of the complaint, was arrested and thrown into prison, and charged with witchcraft. She would neither deny or confess, but “appeared to be disordered in mind,” and insisted on talking Gaelic, though she had been able to talk English before. The physicians examined her, and reported that she was compos mentis, and on their report the poor creature was hanged—a serious blot on the usually judicious administration of Sir Edmund Andros; so unlike him that one is inclined to suspect he must have been absent from Boston when this foolish crime was perpetrated. The children gradually recovered, grew up, “experienced religion” in the usual way, and never confessed to any fault or deceit in the matter. Hutchinson writes that he knew one of them in after years, who had the character of a very sober, virtuous woman.[76]
As these cases may be referred to the circulation of the record of the former marvels and illustrious providences, so now in their turn they became the provoking causes of many others; for a full and particular account of these was printed, first in Boston, and then, almost immediately afterward, in London, with an introduction from no less a person than Richard Baxter. This, together with the other relations, was circulated throughout the colony, and led to a still greater outbreak of the delusion.[77] Men thought about witches and talked about witches, and very naturally soon came to believe that all the accidents and disasters and diseases, which they could not explain by common natural causes, were the result of demoniac agency.
The strong rule of Andros had ended in revolution and disturbance; but, much to their disappointment, the people had been obliged to accept a new charter under which the rule of the hierarchy was still restrained by the appointment of the governor by the crown. The leaders, astute as ever, succeeded in securing the appointment of Sir William Phips, an ignorant and underbred sailor, hoping to be able to influence him easily, and thus to continue their authority. The lieutenant-governor was Stoughton, one of themselves, whose narrowness of mind and bitter prejudices made him a man upon whom they could rely implicitly. But before the charter arrived, the colony was thrown into a ferment of excitement by the dreadful occurrences at Salem village (now Danvers), which, to the minds of the majority of the population, indicated unquestionably that the enemy of souls was making a most desperate attack upon the community.
The trouble broke out in the family of the minister of the village, Parris by name, who had shortly before had serious difficulties with some of his congregation.[78] His daughter and his niece, girls ten or eleven years old, began to make the same complaints that had been made by the Goodwin children in Boston three years before. The physicians found themselves at a loss, and hence were quite convinced that the ailments were supernatural, and declared that the children were bewitched. An Indian woman named Tituba, a servant in the house, tried some experiments of a somewhat disgusting nature, which she claimed would discover who the witch was that was tormenting them. When the girls knew what she had done, they immediately cried out that Tituba appeared to them, pricking and tormenting them, and straightway fell into convulsions. The woman, alarmed at this, confessed what she had been doing, but stoutly maintained that, though she knew how to find out witches she herself was none. The condition of the children excited much attention, and the more they were investigated the worse they grew, and soon several others were seized with the same symptoms. These all had their fits, and when in them would accuse not only the Indian woman, but also two old half-witted crones in the neighborhood, one of whom was bed-ridden as well as imbecile. The three were committed to prison, where Tituba confessed that she was a witch and accused the others of being her confederates. They soon had company in the jail, as two others, women of character and position, Mistress Cory and Mistress Nurse, were complained of; and when they were brought to examination, all the children “fell into their fits” and insisted that the accused were tormenting them. The women naturally denied this outrageous charge, but in spite of their denial were committed to prison, and with them, so great was the infatuation and panic, a little child of only four years of age, who, as some of the girls insisted, “kept biting them with her little sharp teeth.”
Panic, like rumor, thrives by what it feeds on; and from day to day new victims were accused and committed, until the prisons were crowded. More than a hundred women, many of them of good character and belonging to respectable families in Salem, Andover, Ipswich and Billerica, were arrested, and after an examination, usually conducted by Parris, were thrown into the jails to await their formal trial.[79] Many of these, in order to escape, confessed whatever they were charged with, and generally in their confessions tried to win favor for themselves by accusing some one else.[80] Neighborhood quarrels, old sores, spite, envy, and jealousy added their bitterness to the prevailing madness. It seems incredible that any rational beings could have been found to give credence to the farrago of nonsense that was solemnly sworn to; yet it was the most marvellous tales that found the readiest credence. One confession may be cited as a sample, to illustrate what was the force of panic terror in the midst of this apparently civilized community.[81]
“The examination and confession (8 Sept. 92) of Mary Osgood, wife of Captain Osgood of Andover, taken before John Hawthorne and other their Majesties justices.