Phipps landed on the 14th of May; on the 16th the charter was published, and he installed in office. On the 2nd of June, Stoughton was sitting as chief judge, appointed by the governor, in a special court at Salem, on the trial of a poor old friendless woman, one Bridget Bishop, who was accused by Samuel Parris; another poor woman, Deliverance Hobbs by name, among other things was accused, as Cotton Mather relates, “of giving a look towards the great and spacious meeting-house of Salem, and immediately a demon, invisibly entering the house, tore down a part of it.” She protested her innocence, but was hanged on the 10th of June.
Cotton Mather and the other ministers of Boston and Charlestown were loud in their gratitude and praise of the zealous Phipps and Stoughton, and the accusations and trials and condemnations proceeded. It was a chapter out of the history of the middle ages.
It remained for the science and better knowledge of the present day to explain these witch phenomena according to psychological and natural laws. At that time they were believed to be nothing less than the work of the devil, and as such were punished. “We recommend,” said the minister of that stern puritan religion which had now grown rampant in severity, “the speedy and rigorous prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious;” and the court accordingly, on the 30th of June, condemned to death five women, of blameless lives, all protesting their innocence. Of these five, Rebecca Nurse, whose sister had left the church while Samuel Parris was preaching a violent sermon against witches, was at first acquitted on insufficient evidence, and a reprieve was granted by Phipps. But Parris, who seems to have been a man of a virulent disposition, could not bear that an especial object of his hatred, one against whom he had preached, and whom he had denounced from the pulpit, should escape. The subservient governor recalled the reprieve, and the following communion-day she was taken in chains to the meeting-house, excommunicated, and hanged with the rest.
The frenzy increased. On August 3rd, six more were arraigned; and John Willard, an officer who had been employed to arrest suspected persons, declining to serve any longer, was accused by “the afflicted,”—afflicted indeed!—condemned and hanged. Among those who suffered with Willard was Procter, the husband of Elizabeth Procter, her execution having been delayed on account of her pregnancy. He had truly and manfully maintained his wife’s innocence, and, as we have already related, been himself accused; others witnessed against him under the agony of torture, and he was condemned. He was a man of firm and clear character, and petitioned for trial in Boston, but to no purpose. The behaviour and execution of this man sank deep into the public mind, and offended many. Still greater was the effect produced by the execution of George Burroughs, himself a minister, who was accused of witchcraft because he denied its possibility. He was formerly the minister at Salem; afterwards at Saco, whence he had been driven by the Indian war; and was now, to his own sorrow, once more in Salem, where he had many enemies. Among other things charged against him was the fact, that though small of size, he was remarkably strong, whence it was argued that his strength was the gift of the devil. “On the ladder,” says Bancroft, “he cleared his innocence by an earnest speech, and by repeating the Lord’s Prayer composedly and exactly with a fervency that astonished all who heard him. Tears flowed to the eyes of many; it seemed as if the spectators would rise up to hinder the execution. Cotton Mather, on horseback among the crowd, addressed the people, cavilling at the ordination of Burroughs as no true minister; insisting on his guilt, and hinting that the devil could sometimes assume the appearance of an angel of light; and the hanging proceeded.”
On September 9th, six women were found guilty and condemned; and a few days later again eight women; while Giles Cory, an old man of eighty, who refused to plead, was pressed to death—a barbarous usage of the English law, which, however, was never again followed in the colonies. On the 23rd of this month, the afflicted are stated by Hildreth to have amounted to about fifty; fifty-five had confessed themselves witches and turned accusers; twenty persons had already suffered death; eight more were under sentence. The jails were full of prisoners, and new accusations were added every day. Such was the state of things when the court adjourned to the first Monday in November. The interval was employed by Cotton Mather in preparing his “Wonders of the Invisible World,” containing a triumphant account of the trials, and vaunting the good offices of the late executions, which he considered a cause of pious thankfulness to God. Although the president of Harvard College approved, the governor commended, and Stoughton expressed his thanks for the work of Cotton Mather, yet a spirit was abroad in the colony and becoming more demonstrative every day, which was very adverse both to these outrages on humanity and to their promoters.
In the interim between the last executions and the sitting of the adjourned court, the representatives of the people assembled, together with the church of Andover, with their minister at their head, and protested against these witch trials: “We know not,” said they, “who can think himself safe, if the accusations of children and others under a diabolical influence shall be received against persons of good fame.” Very truly and reasonably did they say so; for even now one of the Andover ministers was accused, and the wife of the minister of Beverley; and when the son of old Governor Bradstreet refused as a magistrate to grant any more warrants, he himself was accused, and shortly after his brother, for bewitching a dog; and both were obliged to flee for their lives, their property being immediately seized. And more than this, when Lady Phipps, in the absence of her husband, interfered to obtain the discharge of a prisoner from jail, accusations were whispered even against her!
The frenzy of delusion becoming weaker, Cotton Mather wrote, and circulated in manuscript, the account of a case of witchcraft in his own parish in Boston. This called forth a reply from Robert Calef, a clear-headed, fearless man, who, by the weapons of reason and ridicule, overcame and put to flight, in an astonishingly short time, both witches and devils. It was in vain that Cotton Mather denounced him as “a coal from hell;” the sentiment of the people went with him; and though a circular from Harvard College signed by the president, Increase Mather, solicited from all the ministers of the neighbourhood a return of the apparitions, possessions, enchantments, and all extraordinary things, wherein the existence and agency of the invisible world is more sensibly demonstrated, the next ten years produced scarcely five returns.[[19]]
The invisible world was indeed becoming really so; and as is always the case, the superstition, when it ceased to be credited, lost its power of delusion. Cotton Mather and his party were too self-righteous to follow the example of William Penn and the Quakers of Pennsylvania, or they might soon have cleared Massachusetts of its witches. The Swedes who emigrated to the banks of the Delaware brought with them all the terrors and superstitions which the wild and gloomy Scandinavian mythology had engrafted upon Christianity, and a woman was accused by them of witchcraft in 1684. The case was brought to trial; William Penn sat as judge; and the jury, composed principally of Quakers, found the woman “guilty of the common fame of being a witch; but not guilty as she stood indicted.” No notoriety could be obtained by witchcraft in Pennsylvania; it furnished the excitement neither of preaching, praying nor fasting; and the psychological epidemic, not finding there a moral atmosphere capable of sustaining it, died out. There were no more cases of witchcraft in Pennsylvania.
Scarcely was this fatal delusion at an end, when Boston was visited by the yellow fever, brought there by troops from the West Indies on their way to co-operate in the attack on Canada, and to which the recently excited state of the public mind made the city more susceptible.
In 1694 Sir William Phipps, who was a man of choleric temper, having got into dispute with the royal collector at Boston, and afterwards with the captain of a man-of-war, on whom he inflicted personal chastisement and then committed to prison, was recalled to England to account for his conduct, where he died shortly after his arrival. The general court petitioned parliament that he might not be removed. The Earl of Bellamont was appointed his successor; but his arrival being delayed, Stoughton administered the government for several years.