Essays in American history

by Henry Ferguson

“She confesses that about 11 years ago, when she was in a melancholy state and condition, she would walk abroad in her orchard; and upon a certain time she saw the appearance of a cat, at the end of the house, which yet she thought was a real cat. However, at that time it diverted her from praying to God, and, instead thereof, she prayed to the devil; about which time she made a covenant with the devil, who, as a black man, came to her, and presented to her a book, upon which she laid her finger, and that left a red spot. And that upon her signing, the devil told her he was her God, and that she should serve and worship him, and, she believes, she consented unto it. She says further, that about two years agone, she was carried through the air, in company with Deacon Frye’s wife, Ebenezer Baker’s wife, and Goody Tyler, to Five-Mile Pond, where she was baptized by the devil, who dipped her face in the water and made her renounce her former baptism, and told her that she must be his, soul and body, forever, and that she must serve him, which she promised to do. She says ... that she was transported back again through the air, in company with the forenamed persons, in the same manner as she went, and believes she was carried upon a pole.... She confesses she has afflicted three persons, John Sawdy, Martha Sprague, and Rose Foster, and that she did it by pinching her bed-clothes and giving consent the devil should do it in her shape, and the devil could not do without her consent. She confesses the afflicting persons in the court by the glance of her eye.... Q. Who taught you this way of witchcraft? A. Satan, and that he promised her abundance of satisfaction and quietness in her future state, but never performed anything; and that she has lived more miserably and more discontented since than ever before. She confesses further, that she herself, in company with Goody Parker, Goody Tyler, and Goody Dean, had a meeting at Moses Tyler’s house, last Monday night, to afflict, and that she and Goody Dean carried the shape of Mr. Dean, the minister, to make persons believe that Mr. Dean afflicted. Q. What hindered you from accomplishing what you intended? A. The Lord would not suffer it to be that the devil should afflict in an innocent person’s shape.[82] Q. Have you been at any other witch meetings? A. I know nothing thereof, as I shall answer in the presence of God and of His people: but said that the black man stood before her, and told her, that what she had confessed was a lie; notwithstanding, she said that what she had confessed was true, and thereto put her hand. Her husband being present, was asked if he judged his wife to be any way discomposed. He answered that having lived with her so long he doth not judge her to be any ways discomposed, but has cause to believe what she has said is true.”

When the new charter arrived and the new government went into operation, the Governor and Council appointed Commissions of Oyer and Terminer for the trial of witchcrafts. Their action was of more than questionable legality, as by the charter the power of constituting courts of justice was reserved to the General Assembly, while the Governor and Council had only the right of appointing judges and commissioners in courts thus constituted. The Court, however, was established, and was opened at Salem in the first week of June 1692.[83] At its first session only one of the accused was brought to trial, an old woman, Bridget Bishop by name, who had lived on bad terms with all her neighbors, and consequently had no friends. She had been charged with witchcraft twenty years before, and although her accuser had acknowledged on his death-bed that his accusation had been false and malicious, the stigma of the charge had always remained. Consequently all the losses her neighbors had met with, in cattle, swine, or poultry, all the accidents or unusual sicknesses they had had, were attributed to her spite against them, and were now brought forward as evidence against her. This testimony, together with the charges made by the possessed children, who continued to reveal new horrors from day to day, and the confessions of other women who to save themselves accused her, was confirmed to the satisfaction of the Court by the discovery of a “preternatural excrescence,” and she was convicted and executed.[84] The further trials were postponed until the end of the month, and in the interval the Governor and Council consulted the ministers of the province as to the proper course to pursue. In their reply they recommended caution and discretion, but concluded their advice by saying, “Nevertheless we cannot but humbly recommend unto the government the speedy and vigorous prosecutions of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God and the wholesome statutes of the English nation for the detection of witchcrafts.”[85]

The ministers had as little doubt of the laws of England being available for their purpose as they had of what they considered to be the laws of God; yet it is very doubtful whether, at the time of Bishop’s trial and execution, there was any law in existence which authorized their proceedings. The old colonial law was no longer in force; and witchcraft not being an offence at common law, the only law by which their action could be justified was the statute of James I., which must therefore have been considered as in force in the colony. It is probable that the execution was utterly illegal. Before the next cases were tried, the old colonial statute was revived and made again the law of the province.

The trials were resumed in July, and were conducted in the same manner as in the case of Bishop, but with even greater harshness. In one case, that of Mrs. Nurse, the perversion of justice was most scandalous. The accusations were so absurd, and her character and position so good, that the jury brought in a verdict of not guilty. So great, however, was the indignation of the populace, and so serious the dissatisfaction of the Court, that the cowardly jurors asked permission to go out a second time, and then brought in a verdict of guilty, which was accepted. The poor woman, whose deafness had prevented her hearing and answering some of the most serious charges, was solemnly excommunicated by Mr. Noyes, the minister of Salem, and formally delivered over to Satan, and, with four others, was hanged. It was long remembered that when one of them was told at the gallows by Noyes that he knew she was a witch, and that she had better confess, and not be damned as well as hanged, she replied that he lied, that she was no more a witch than he was a wizard, and that, if he took away her life, God would give him blood to drink;[86] and it was believed in Salem that the prediction was literally fulfilled, and that Noyes came to his death by breaking a blood-vessel in his lungs, and was choked with his own blood.

It would be needlessly revolting to relate the details of the subsequent trials, in which the Court, driven by the popular panic and the prevailing religious ideas, perverted justice and destroyed the innocent.[87] Nineteen persons in all were executed, all of whom, without exception, died professing their innocence and forgiving their murderers, and thus refused to save their lives by confessing crimes which they had not committed and could not possibly commit.[88] Besides those who suffered for witchcraft, one other, Giles Cory, was put to death with the utmost barbarity. When arraigned for trial he refused to plead, and was condemned to the peine forte et dure, the only time this infamous torture was ever inflicted in America. It consisted in placing the contumacious person on a hard floor, and then piling weight after weight upon him, until he consented to plead or was crushed to death. A nearly contemporary account relates that when, in the death agony, the poor wretch’s tongue protruded from his mouth, the sheriff with his cane pushed it in again; and local tradition and ballad told how in his torment he cried for “more rocks” to be heaped on him to put him out of his misery.[89] This was the last of the executions. The Court of Oyer and Terminer sat no more, and in the interval between its adjournment and the opening of the sessions of the “Supreme Standing Court,” in the following January, time was given for consideration and reflection.[90]

But it may be questioned whether consideration and reflection would have put a stop to the delusion without the operation of another and more powerful cause. Thus far, the accused persons had been generally of insignificant position, friendless old women, or men who had either affronted their neighbors or, by the irregularity of their lives, had lost the sympathy of the community.[91] But with their success, the boldness or the madness of the accusers increased; some of the most prominent people in the colony, distinguished in many cases by unblemished lives, were now charged with dealings with the devil, and even the wife of the Governor fell under suspicion. The community came at last to its senses, and began to realize that the evidence, which till then had seemed conclusive, was not worthy of attention. Confessions were withdrawn, and the testimony of neighbors to good character and life was at length regarded as of greater weight than the ravings of hysterical girls or the malice of private enemies. So it came about that before long those who were not prejudiced and committed by the part they had played, acknowledged that they had been condemning the innocent and bringing blood-guiltiness upon the land. Even Cotton Mather, who had been largely responsible for the spread of the delusion, was compelled to admit that mistakes had been made, though he still maintained that if a further investigation had been held in the cases of many who were set free, their guilt might have been made apparent. Some that had served on the juries that had condemned the victims put forth a paper admitting their delusion and begging pardon of God and man for their mistake.[92] The impressive story of Sewall’s penitence, and public confession of his fault in the South Church in Boston, is well known; more consistent and logical was the declaration of the stern-tempered Stoughton, that when he sat in judgment he had the fear of God before his eyes, and gave his opinion according to the best of his understanding; and, although it might appear afterwards that he had been in error, yet he saw no necessity for a public acknowledgment of it.[93]

Parris, whose part in these acts of folly and delusion had been the most prominent of all, and who was strongly suspected of having used the popular frenzy to ruin some of his personal antagonists, was compelled to resign his position and leave the people whom he had so grossly misled.[94] Noyes, whose delusion had been at least sincere, made public confession of his fault, and was forgiven by his congregation and by the community that had erred with him. Thus ended one of the most painful episodes in the early history of New England.

The other colonies in America were not so entirely free from this superstition that they should reproach the Puritans for it as a special and peculiar product of their religious system. There were cases in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, though there is no record of any one having been put to death for the offence in those colonies. In Pennsylvania, under the prudent instructions of William Penn, who seems to have been less superstitious than the Massachusetts Quakers, the jury brought in a verdict that the person accused was guilty of “being suspected of being a witch,” and, fortunately, at that time suspicion was not punishable.[95] In New York, a certain Ralf Hall and his wife were tried in 1665, but were acquitted, and an attempt, in 1670, to create an excitement in Westchester over Katharine Harrison, who had moved thither from Connecticut, was sternly suppressed.[96] There were trials for witchcraft in Maryland in the last quarter of the seventeenth century; and in Virginia in 1705, thirteen years later than the Salem trials, a witch was ducked by order of court.[97]

It is hard to decide how much of all this was panic and how much deliberate fraud and imposture. There is no reason to suspect anything worse than pure superstition in the early cases in Massachusetts and Connecticut; but the marvellous attacks of the Goodwin children in Boston and of the Parris girls in Salem seem to belong to a different category.[98] It is almost incredible that the girl who played so cleverly upon the vanity and the theological prejudices of Cotton Mather was not fully aware of what she was doing; and the fact that the Parris children accused persons with whom their father had previously had trouble, renders their delusion extremely suspicious. The great St. Benedict is reported to have cured a brother who was possessed by the devil by thrashing him soundly; and it is much to be regretted that the Protestantism of the New Englanders prevented their knowing and experimenting with the saint’s specific, which, in all ages of the world, has been admitted to be wonderfully efficacious. It has been held by many that the testimony at Salem was deliberately fabricated; Hutchinson, writing at a time when men who could remember the trials were yet living, is strongly of that opinion. The case does not, however, seem as clear as that of the Goodwins; and of them Hutchinson, as has been said, reports that they were estimable women who had never acknowledged any deception on their part.

The phenomena of mental disease are so strange and complicated that at the present day men are not as ready to set everything down to fraud as they were a hundred years ago. It is possible to account psychologically for all the phenomena recorded, without being obliged to adopt any very violent hypothesis. Even if at the outset the children in either case were pretending, it is quite as conceivable that they should have passed from pretence of nervous symptoms to the reality, as it is to think that absolute fraud would pass so long undetected. The symptoms described are such as would be recognized by any alienist to-day, and could be duplicated out of the current medical journals. It may also be noticed that many of the possessed were girls just coming to maturity, and thus of an age when the nervous system was passing through a period of strain.