It began with the troubles between the parish of Salem and the lately-called minister, one Samuel Parris, into the nature of which troubles it is not necessary to enter. In 1689, Mr. Parris had come to Salem from the West Indies, and he had brought with him two colored servants. These people, John Indian and Tituba, his wife, were experts in palmistry, second-sight, magic, and incantations, and they soon infected a circle of the village children with love for these matters. The daughter and the niece of Mr. Parris, aged respectively nine and eleven, were among the most prominent at first; but they had older companions who soon began to make earnest that which in its inception was only intended as a play. The girls learned to go into trances, to talk gibberish, to creep about on all-fours, and generally to give a good imitation of the pythonesses of old. The chief of these young people were Mary Walcott and Elizabeth Hubbard, each aged seventeen; Elizabeth Booth and Susannah Sheldon, each aged eighteen; and Mary Warren and Sarah Churchill, each aged twenty. These, however, though the leaders in a way, did not long retain the supremacy; for it was found that Ann Putnam, aged twelve, and Mercy Lewis, aged seventeen, were preeminent for mischief and ingenuity. Another leader in the mischief was Mrs. Ann Putnam, about thirty years of age and probably of unsound mind, though she was apparently not suspected of anything beyond vindictiveness and eccentricity. She was a beautiful and well-educated woman, admirably fitted for the part she was destined to play in the coming orgy of murder.
The antics of these girls, not improbably first carried out in a spirit of sport, were begun at the parsonage about Christmas, 1691; but after a time they were challenged for their actions, when they declared that they could not help themselves, being bewitched. Instead of disregarding their folly or attributing it to childish mischief and putting a stop to it by the strong hand, Mr. Parris published the matter to the world. The children now found themselves of a sudden objects of the most widespread scrutiny; they also found themselves, it is not absurd to suppose, in a position where they deemed themselves in peril if they were discovered to be impostors. They were soon acknowledged as truly suffering from witchcraft; and then began the inquisition as to the guilty parties. Tituba, the Indian hag, who had probably taught them the tricks which they now put into effect against her, was the first named by them as one of their tormentors; and then followed the names of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn, two old women with few friends. Tituba confessed,--it is at least possible, because of the craze for notoriety often to be found in such people,--but the two white women denied their guilt, and all were sent to Boston for trial. The matter might now well have been allowed to die out; but the girls had tasted power and were anxious for more.
Tituba, in her confession, had implicated the two women, Good and Osburn, and "two others whose faces she could not see"; and the girls were importuned to name these other "tormentors." At first they refused,--probably because they had not held council to decide on the two to be named,--but at last they indicated two of the most estimable women in the community, Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse, aged respectively sixty and (about) seventy years. The village was thunderstruck, for these women, if not of the highest rank, were full of courtesy and kindliness and were well-educated and well-bred. None the less, they were accused, Goodwife Corey by little Ann Putnam,--at whose instigation it seems unnecessary to suggest,--Goodwife Nurse, whose husband was one of the most honored persons in the village, while she herself was regarded as a model of virtue and piety, by more than one of "The Afflicted Children," as the girls were now called; but the bearing of Mistress Putnam at the examination was sufficient to show where stood the chief accuser. The girls went into their regular fits at each answer to the questions, unshamed by the sight of the venerable lady standing there in her dainty dress and with her fragile figure and pure face; and Mrs. Putnam broke in on the magistrate's questions with "Did you not bring the black man with you? Did you not bid me tempt God and die? How oft have you eaten and drunk your own damnation?" It is no wonder that the accused, at such a horrible outburst of vindictive hate,--as she must have known it to be,--raised her hands to heaven with the cry, "O Lord, help me!" But at that the "Afflicted Children" went into the most extraordinary convulsions; and the foolish magistrate, Hathorne by name, who had until then been favorably inclined toward the prisoner, connected the spasms of the girls with the uplifted hands of the old lady, and this turned the tide against her. She was remanded for trial.
The mischief was now fairly afoot. Personal malice began to work; some of the girls were servants and accused their masters and mistresses, as in the cases of John Proctor and George Jacobs. On the other hand, now that superstition was thoroughly awakened, it ran its usual course of madness, and the most absurd pretexts for accusations were eagerly fastened upon. Susannah Martin, for instance, was accused, and executed, upon the ground that she had walked on a country road without getting her skirts or stockings muddy, and must be a witch to be able to perform such a feat! Even such a man as the Rev. George Burroughs, who had been pastor of the church at Salem for about three years, but had long left there, and in 1692 was living in Maine, was arrested on a charge of witchcraft and taken to Salem to be tried, on the plea that he was, though of small stature, strong enough to lift a barrel of cider or hold a heavy musket out at arm's length. He was named by the "Afflicted Children"; but the fact that while in Salem he had been inimical to the party of Mrs. Ann Putnam makes the real source of the accusation not problematical. He was formally accused by little Ann Putnam, who said that one evening there came to her the apparition of a minister and asked her to write her name in the devil's book; then appeared two women in shrouds, who scolded the first wraith away; then the two women told Ann that they were the ghosts of the first and second wives of Mr. Burroughs, who had murdered them, and one of them showed to the child the gaping wound which had been inflicted upon her. On such testimony as this Mr. Burroughs, a man of high standing and deep learning, was condemned to die.
Nor was this an isolated case; on the contrary, it was the rule. So numerous grew the accusations that Sir William Phips, the first royal governor, appointed a special court to try cases of witchcraft, and nineteen in all suffered death upon such accusations as have been instanced. At last the girls made the mistake--whether or not instigated by Mrs. Putnam in these instances does not appear--of accusing persons who could not possibly be suspected of such practices, even allowing the possibility of the practices themselves. When they brought charges against the Rev. Samuel Willard, one of the most eminent divines of Boston, and Lady Phips, the wife of the governor, they were sharply rebuked; and when they added to their list the name of Mistress Hale, wife of the minister in Beverly and famous throughout the colony for her saintly character, they ranged against them the best of all the people of the country. Mr. Hale himself had been a believer in the accusations; but now, when their falsity was thus proved to him, he changed his allegiance and declared war against the perpetrators of the real crimes, as he now saw those accusations to be. This was practically the end of the insanity, and the death blow to the panic was given when some people of Andover, on being accused, brought action for defamation of character and thus removed the matter to its true tribunal. There were no more accusations after that.
Some fourteen years afterward, one of the "Afflicted Children," Ann Putnam, who had been the most active of all, made public confession in the Salem church that she had been a cause of the shedding of innocent blood. She declared, however, that she had not acted "out of anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them, but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded of Satan." This latter declaration has been generally interpreted to mean that Ann was even then, at the age of twenty-five, convinced that she had had actual communion with the powers of darkness--in other words, that she was a self-deceived seer of visions. The theory is open to doubt. Ann's words are at least susceptible of another interpretation; and, whether they were intended to bear this meaning or not, it may well be that she was "deluded of Satan" under the form of Mistress Ann Putnam, her mother. The complicity of Mr. Parris, the minister, is probable; but there is little doubt that the moving spirit of the conspiracy, after this had gained strength and purpose, was Mistress Ann Putnam. She was a brilliant woman in many ways, a fact which is not at all incompatible with the further fact that she was a moral degenerate, or at least a monomaniac. It is most probable that she directed the whole progress of the conspiracy, which at first arose in opportunity by the accident of the teaching of the old Indian woman and its effect upon some hysterical girls, who saw before them a chance to become notorious, and that she worked it throughout to her own ends, persuading the girls that, having once embarked upon such an enterprise, their sole safety consisted in playing the game to its finish. Possibly she also was to some extent self-deceived; she was a descendant of the Carrs of Salisbury, who were noted as being very nervous and excitable, and she was herself of the most irritable and sanguine temperament. But it seems little probable that she was a victim rather than a ruler in the insanity which came of her fostering, for not only were her daughter and servant the most prominent members of the "Afflicted Children," but it was her personal enemies who first disappeared into the shadows of death, and it was her hand which guided the accusation that smote every victim, until the reign of terror grew beyond even her control. She stands as the female Robespierre of America, slaying for lust of power and afterward for fear of losing her own head; and she remains one of the most picturesque and yet gruesome figures that our history has produced.
We shall leave this ominous figure standing on the threshold of New England as we turn southward to inquire as to the conditions existent in the other great colony of English America; but on our way it is worth while to take a passing glimpse at New York. This city had emerged from New Amsterdam; the old vrouws, with their feather beds and their multiplicity of petticoats and their scrupulously clean houses and their floors with patterns traced in sand, had passed away. They had been most picturesque in their way, though they left no enduring effect upon the type which we now know.
Of the lives of the old burghers and their wives and families, their characteristics and their customs, we have a most animated account in the words of the master-writer, Washington Irving. Fine old fellows were these burghers; and companionable and merry were their wives and daughters. What a group is offered in the polite, yet firm Peter Minuit; the pleasure-loving, but vacillating and not too scrupulous Wouter Van Twiller, in frequent tilt with the irascible but honest Dominie Bogardus; the honest, but ill-adapted Wilhelm Kieft; the grand old Peter Stuyvesant, despotic, yet paternal in his rule, stubborn, but brave. Of another kind, and in a lighter vein, we have a picture of the genial and universal favorite, Antony Van Corlear, of whom Irving writes:
"It was a moving sight to see the buxom lasses, how they hung about the doughty Antony Van Corlear--for he was a jolly, rosy-faced, lusty bachelor, fond of his joke, and withal a desperate rogue among women. Fain would they have kept him to comfort them while the army was away; for besides what I have said of him, it is no more than justice to add, that he was a kind-hearted soul, noted for his benevolent attentions in comforting disconsolate wives during the absence of their husbands--and this made him to be very much regarded by the honest burghers of the city."
The vrouws were comfortable persons, not given to vivacity, yet in their way individual, and that sometimes in a manner not altogether commendable. We are told in the court records of Brooklyn that two ladies, Mistress Jonica Schampf and Widow Rachel Luguer by name, actually assaulted one Peter Praa, captain of militia, when he was proudly leading his troops on training day, and so dealt with him in "ivill inormities"--which included beating, hair-pulling, and other like amenities--that his life was for a time thought to be forfeit. In the matter of legal quarrels, too, there was vigor as well as characteristic type among the vrouws; we are told that Dominie Bogardus and Anneke, his wife, sued a female neighbor because the latter had said that the chaste Anneke, in crossing a muddy street, had lifted her petticoats higher than was necessitated by the mud or was consistent with modesty.