Thus the old world restrictions upon woman, and their persecutions, were soon duplicated in the new world. Liberty of opinion became as serious a crime in America as in England, and here as in Europe, the most saintly virtue and the purest life among women were not proof against priestly attack. While Mistress Hutchinson was the first woman thus to suffer, many others were also persecuted. When Mary Fisher and Anne Austin, two Quaker women who had become famous for their promulgation of this heretical doctrine in many parts of the world, arrived in Boston harbor, July 1656, they were not at first permitted to land, but were ultimately transferred to the Boston jail, where they were closely confined, and notwithstanding the heat of the weather their one window was boarded up. Their persons were also stripped and examined for signs of witchcraft, but fortunately not a mole or a spot could be found. Boston—“The Bloody Town”—was the center of this persecuting spirit and every species of wanton cruelty upon woman was enacted. Stripped nude to the waist they were tied to a whipping-post on the south side of King Street and flogged on account of their religious opinions; but it was upon the famous “Common” that for the crime of free speech, a half nude woman with a new born babe at her breast was thus publicly whipped; and it was upon the “Common” that Mary Dyer, another Quaker woman, was hung in 1659. Both she and Anne Hutchinson prophesied calamity to the colony for its unjust course, which was fulfilled, when in 1684, it lost its charter in punishment for its intolerance. No Christian country offered a refuge for woman, as did Canada the colored slave. But the evils of woman’s persecution by the church, did not end with the wrongs inflicted upon her; they were widely extended, affecting the most common interests of the world. While famines were unknown among the ancient Romans in the first period of their history, yet Christendom was early and frequently afflicted with them. While the operations of nature were sometimes the cause, the majority of famines were the result of persecutions, or of christian wars, especially the crusades which took such immense numbers of men from the duties of agriculture at home, making them a prey upon the scanty resources of the countries through which these hordes passed. As was seen in the Irish famine of 1847-8 and at the present moment as result of a scanty food supply in Russia, pestilence of various kinds followed famine years. But the crusades in which the church attempted to wrest the holy sepulchre from Turkish hands, were scarcely more productive of famines than its persecuting periods when mankind lost hope in themselves and the future. Our own country has shown the effect of fear and persecution upon both business and religion, as during the witchcraft period of New England, scarcely two hundred years since, all business of whatever nature in country and in town was neglected, and even the meeting house was allowed to fall out of repair. Nor was this ruin of a temporary nature, as many people left the Colony and its effects descended to those yet unborn. Both Bancroft’s History of the United States, and Lapham’s History of the Salem Witchcraft, paint vivid pictures of the effects following the different church persecutions of woman. Of the Hutchinson trial, Bancroft says:
This dispute infused its spirit into everything. It interfered with the levy of troops for the Pequot war; it influenced the respect shown to magistrates; the distribution of town lots; the assessment of rates and at last the continued existence of the two parties was considered inconsistent with public peace.
Of the witchcraft period, Upham says:
It cast its shadows over a broad surface and they darkened the condition of generations.... The fields were neglected; fences, roads, barns, even the meeting house went into disrepair.... A scarcity of provisions nearly amounting to a famine continued for some time. Farms were brought under mortgage, or sacrificed, and large numbers of people were dispersed. The worst results were not confined to the village but spread more or less over the country.
Massachusetts was not the only colony that treated witchcraft as a crime. Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia possessed similar enactments. Witchcraft was considered and treated as a capital offense by the laws of both Pennsylvania and New York, trials taking place in both colonies not long before the Salem tragedy. The peaceful Quaker, William Penn, presided upon the bench in Pennsylvania at the trial of two Swedish women accused of witchcraft. The Grand Jury acting under instruction given in his charge, found true bills against these women, and Penn’s skirts were only saved from the guilt of their blood by some technical irregularity in the indictment.
Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York, eight of the thirteen colonies recognized witchcraft as a capital crime. Margaret M. was indicted for witchcraft in Pennsylvania in 1683, the law against it continuing in force until September 23, 1794. By law of the Province of East New Jersey, 1668, any person found to be a witch, either male or female, was to suffer death. In that state the right of complaining against a child who should smite or curse either parent, pertained to both father and mother; the penalty was death. As late as 1756, Connecticut recognized the right of parents to dispose of children in marriage. In Maryland 1666 the commission given to magistrates for Somerset county directed them under oath to make enquiries in regard to witchcraft, sorcery, and magic arts. In 1706 Grace Sherwood of Princess Anne County, Virginia, was tried for witchcraft. The records of the trial show that the court after a consideration of the charges, ordered the sheriff to take the said Grace into his custody and to commit her body to the common jail, there to secure her with irons or otherwise, until brought to trial.[82]
In 1692, the Grand Jury brought a bill against Mary Osgood of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, as follows:
The powers for our sovereign lord and lady, the king and queen, present that Mary Osgood, wife of Captain John Osgood in the county of Essex, about eleven years ago in the town of Andover aforesaid, wickedly, maliciously and feloniously a covenant with the devil did make and signed the devil’s book, and took the devil to be her God, and consented to serve and worship him and was baptized by the devil and renounced her former Christian baptism and promised to the devil both body and soul, forever, and to serve him; by which diabolical covenant by her made with the devil; she, the said Mary Osgood is become a detestable witch against the peace of our sovereign lord and lady, the king and queen, their crown and dignity and the laws in that case made and provided. A true bill.[83]
When for “witches” we read “women,” we gain fuller comprehension of the cruelties inflicted by the church upon this portion of humanity. Friends were encouraged to cast accusation upon their nearest and dearest, rewards being offered for conviction. Husbands who had ceased to care for their wives or who by reason of their sickness or for any cause found them a burden, or for reasons of any nature desired to break the indissoluble bonds of the church, now found an easy method. They had but to accuse the wife of witchcraft and the marriage was dissolved by her death at the stake. Church history is not silent upon such instances, and mention is made of a husband who by a rope about the neck dragged his wife before that Arch Inquisitor, Sprenger, making accusation of witchcraft against her. No less from protestant than from catholic pulpits were people exhorted to bring the witch, even if of one’s own family, to justice.
In 1736, the statute against witchcraft was repealed by the English Parliament, yet a belief in witchcraft is still largely prevalent even among educated people. Dr. F. G. Lee the vicar of an English church, that of All Saints in Lambeth, a few years since publicly deprecated the abolition of its penalties in a work entitled “Glimpses of the Twilight,” complaining that the laws against witchcraft had been “foolishly and short-sightedly repealed.” A remarkable case occurred in Prussia 1883 when the father of a bed-ridden girl, having become persuaded that his daughter was bewitched by a woman who had occasionally given her apples and pears, was advised the child would be cured if she drank some of the blood of the supposed witch. The woman was therefore entrapped into a place where some of the chief men of the commune had assembled to receive her. She was seized, one of her fingers pricked with a needle and her blood given to the sick child. In 1885 a case of slander based upon alleged witchcraft came before Justice Randolphs, District Court of Jersey City. The justice listened to the evidence for several hours before recalling the fact that there was no law upon which he could base his decision, the latest legislation being the law of 1668 repealed 1795 (twenty years after our Declaration of Independence), the crime was no longer officially recognized.[84] It is curious to note the close parallel between accusations during the witchcraft period and those against the New Jersey suspect of 1885. It was said of her that during the night she accomplished such feats by supernatural power as jumping from a third story window, alighting upon a gate post as gently as a falling feather. It was also asserted that people whom she was known to dislike became gradually ill, wasting away until they died. The accused woman declared it was her superior knowledge that was feared, and thus again the middle ages are paralleled, as the witches of that period were usually women of superior knowledge. In 1882, a Wisconsin farmer was put under bonds to keep the peace, on account of his attempts to assault an old lady who he averred was a witch, who injured his cattle, and entered his house through the chimney or key hole, to his great terror and distress. The state of Indiana about sixty years ago possessed a neighborhood where the people believed in witchcraft. If the butter failed to come, or the eggs to hatch, or a calf got choked, or even if the rail fences fell down when covered with sleet and snow, the whole trouble was attributed to the witches, who were also believed to have the remarkable power of saddling and bridling a man and with sharp spurs riding him over the worst roads imaginable, to his great harm and fatigue. Even the great Empire State, as late as January 1892, had within its borders a case of murder where an inoffensive old man lost his life because he was believed to be a wizard; and this occurred in the center of a prosperous farming country where money is liberally expended for educational purposes, this being one of the rare instances where a man fell under suspicion.