The witchcraft craze.
The witchcraft craze at Salem is commonly thought to have been a legitimate outgrowth of the gloomy religion of the Puritans. It was, however, but one of those panics of fear which during several centuries periodically swept over civilized lands. In the twelfth century thousands of persons in Europe were sacrificed because the people believed them to be witches, in league with the devil, and with the power to ride through the air and vex humanity in many occult ways. Pope Innocent VIII. commanded (1484) that witches be arrested, and hundreds of odd and repulsive old women were burned or hanged in consequence. From King John down to 1712, innocent lives were constantly sacrificed in England on this charge; in the year 1661 alone, one hundred and twenty were hanged there. It was therefore no new frenzy that broke out in Massachusetts. In 1648 Margaret Jones was hanged as a witch at Charlestown; in 1656 the sister of Deputy-Governor Bellingham, for being "too subtle in her perception of what was occurring around her," suffered the same fate; in 1688 an Irish washerwoman named Glover went to the gallows because a spiteful child said she had been bewitched by the poor creature.
The trials.
There was general despondency in Massachusetts in 1692, the result of four small-pox epidemics which had quickly followed each other, the loss of the old charter, a temporary increase in crime, financial depression, and general dread of another Indian outbreak. The time was ripe for an epidemic of superstitious fear. All at once it broke out with great fury in the old town of Salem. Despite the protest of Cotton Mather and other prominent clergymen, who, though believers in witches, condemned unjust methods of procedure, a special court of oyer and terminer was hastily organized (1692) by the governor and council for the trial of the accused. Lieutenant-Governor Stoughton, who presided over this extraordinary tribunal, was in active sympathy with the fanatics who conducted the prosecution. The witnesses were chiefly children, and the testimony the flimsiest ever seriously received in an American court of justice. But the judges, although sober and respectable citizens, were as deluded as the people; while the frenzy lasted, nineteen persons were hanged for having bewitched children in the neighborhood, and one was pressed to death because he would not plead. Of the hundreds of others who were arrested, two died while in prison.
Sewall's repentance.
By the following year the craze had exhausted itself, and there was a general jail-delivery. Many of the children afterwards confessed to the falsity of their testimony. Samuel Sewall was one of the trial judges. He afterwards, while standing in his pew in the Old South Church at Boston, had read at the desk at public declaration expressing his deep repentance that he had been in such grievous error, and asking the congregation to unite with him in praying for the forgiveness of God. Cotton Mather, however, endeavored to vindicate himself by the statement, "I know not that ever I have advanced any opinion in the matter of witchcraft but what all the ministers of the Lord that I know of in the world, whether English or Scotch, or French or Dutch, are of the same opinion with me."
The witchcraft delusion elsewhere in the colonies.
Belief in witchcraft was not confined to Massachusetts. Evidence of this superstition—childish to us of to-day, but a stern reality in the strongest minds of Cotton Mather's time—was noticeable throughout most of the colonies until the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1705 a witch was "ducked" in Virginia. There were trials for witchcraft in Maryland during the last quarter of the seventeenth century, but there is no evidence extant of an execution. In Pennsylvania in 1683 a woman was tried as a witch, and bound to good behavior. In 1779, during a similar panic among the French creoles at Cahokia, Ill., two negro slaves were condemned to be hanged, and another to be burned alive while chained to a post, on the charge of practising sorcery; there is, however, no evidence that the sentence was carried out.
81. Political Conditions.
Administration.