In the month of September, 1692, they believed themselves in the thick of “the fight between the Devil and the Lamb.” Cotton Mather was nimble and triumphant on the Witches’ Hill whenever there were “firebrands of hell” swinging there; and they all hoped to do much good work for the Lord yet, for they had lists of suspected persons in their pockets, who must be brought into the courts month by month, and carted off to the hill. One of the gayest and most complacent letters on the subject of this “fight” in the correspondence of Cotton Mather is dated on the 20th of September, 1692, within a month of the day when he was improving the occasion at the foot of the gallows where the former pastor, Rev. George Burroughs, and four others were hung. In the interval fifteen more received sentence of death; Giles Corey had died his fearful death the day before; and in two days after, Corey’s widow and seven more were hanged. Mather, Noyes, and Parris had no idea that these eight would be the last. But so it was. Thus far, one only had escaped after being made sure of in the courts. The married daughter of a clergyman had been condemned, was reprieved by the Governor, and was at last discharged on the ground of the insufficiency of the evidence. Henceforth, after that fearful September day, no evidence was found sufficient. The accusers had grown too audacious in their selection of victims; their clerical patrons had become too openly determined to give no quarter. The Rev. Francis Dane signed memorials to the Legislature and the Courts on the 18th of October, against the prosecutions. He had reason to know something about them, for we hear of nine at least of his children, grandchildren, relatives, and servants who had been brought under accusation. He pointed out the snare by which the public mind, as well as the accused themselves, had been misled—the escape afforded to such as would confess. When one spoke out, others followed. When a reasonable explanation was afforded, ordinary people were only too thankful to seize upon it. Though the prisons were filled, and the courts occupied over and over again, there were no more horrors; the accused were all acquitted; and in the following May, Sir William Phipps discharged all the prisoners by proclamation. “Such a jail-delivery has never been known in New England,” is the testimony handed down. The Governor was aware that the clergy, magistrates, and judges, hitherto active, were full of wrath at his course but public opinion now demanded a reversal of the administration of the last fearful year.
THE PHYSIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL CAUSES OF THE TROUBLE.
As to the striking feature of the case—the confessions of so large a proportion of the accused—Mr. Upham manifests the perplexity which we encounter in almost all narrators of similar scenes. In all countries and times in which trials for witchcraft have taken place, we find the historians dealing anxiously with the question—how it could happen that so many persons declared themselves guilty of an impossible offense, when the confession must seal their doom? The solution most commonly offered is one that may apply to a case here and there, but certainly can not be accepted as disposing of any large number. It is assumed that the victim preferred being killed at once to living on under suspicion, insult, and ill-will, under the imputation of having dealt with the Devil. Probable as this may be in the case of a stout-hearted, reasoning, forecasting person possessed of nerve to carry out a policy of suicide, it can never be believed of any considerable proportion of the ordinary run of old men and women charged with sorcery. The love of life and the horror of a cruel death at the hands of the mob or of the hangman are too strong to admit of a deliberate sacrifice so bold, on the part of terrified and distracted old people like the vast majority of the accused; while the few of a higher order, clearer in mind and stronger in nerve, would not be likely to effect their escape from an unhappy life by a lie of the utmost conceivable gravity. If, in the Salem case, life was saved by confession toward the last, it was for a special reason; and it seems to be a singular instance of such a mode of escape. Some other mode of explanation is needed; and the observations of modern inquiry supply it. There can be no doubt now that the sufferers under nervous disturbances, the subjects of abnormal condition, found themselves in possession of strange faculties, and thought themselves able to do new and wonderful things. When urged to explain how it was, they could only suppose, as so many of the Salem victims did, that it was by “some evil spirit;” and except where there was such an intervening agency as Mr. Parris’ “circle,” the only supposition was that the intercourse between the Evil Spirit and themselves was direct. It is impossible even now to witness the curious phenomena of somnambulism and catalepsy without a keen sense of how natural and even inevitable it was for similar subjects of the Middle Ages and in Puritan times to believe themselves ensnared by Satan, and actually endowed with his gifts, and to confess their calamity, as the only relief to their scared and miserable minds. This explanation seems not to have occurred to Mr. Upham; and, for want of it, he falls into great amazement at the elaborate artifice with which the sufferers invented their confessions, and adapted them to the state of mind of the authorities and the public. With the right key in his hand, he would have seen only what was simple and natural where he now bids us marvel at the pitch of artfulness and skill attained by poor wretches scared out of their natural wits.
The spectacle of the ruin that was left is very melancholy. Orphan children were dispersed; homes were shut up, and properties lost; and what the temper was in which these transactions left the churches and the village, and the society of the towns, the pastors and the flocks, the Lord’s table, the social gathering, the justice hall, the market, and every place where men were wont to meet, we can conceive. It was evidently long before anything like a reasonable and genial temper returned to society in and about Salem. The acknowledgments of error made long after were half-hearted, and so were the expressions of grief and pity in regard to the intolerable woes of the victims. It is scarcely intelligible how the admissions on behalf of the wronged should have been so reluctant, and the sympathy with the devoted love of their nearest and dearest so cold. We must cite what Mr. Upham says in honor of these last, for such solace is needed:
“While, in the course of our story, we have witnessed some shocking instances of the violation of the most sacred affections and obligations of life, in husbands and wives, parents and children, testifying against each other, and exerting themselves for mutual destruction, we must not overlook the many instances in which filial, parental, and fraternal fidelity and love have shone conspicuously. It was dangerous to befriend an accused person. Proctor stood by his wife to protect her, and it cost him his life. Children protested against the treatment of their parents, and they were all thrown into prison. Daniel Andrew, a citizen of high standing, who had been deputy to the General Court, asserted, in the boldest language, his belief of Rebecca Nurse’s innocence; and he had to fly the country to save his life. Many devoted sons and daughters clung to their parents, visited them in prison in defiance of a blood-thirsty mob; kept by their side on the way to execution; expressed their love, sympathy, and reverence to the last; and, by brave and perilous enterprise, got possession of their remains, and bore them back under the cover of midnight to their own thresholds, and to graves kept consecrated by their prayers and tears. One noble young man is said to have effected his mother’s escape from the jail, and secreted her in the woods until after the delusion had passed away, provided food and clothing for her, erected a wigwam for her shelter, and surrounded her with every comfort her situation would admit of. The poor creature must, however, have endured a great amount of suffering; for one of her larger limbs was fractured in the all but desperate attempt to rescue her from the prison walls.” (Vol. ii. p. 348.)
The act of reversal of attainder, passed early in the next century, tells us that “some of the principal accusers and witnesses in those dark and severe prosecutions have since discovered themselves to be persons of profligate and vicious conversation;” and on no other authority we are assured that, “not without spot before, they became afterward abandoned to open vice.” This was doubtless true of some; but of many it was not; and of this we shall have a word to say presently.
THE LAST OF PARRIS.
Mr. Parris’ parsonage soon went to ruin, as did some of the dwellings of the “afflicted” children, who learned and practiced certain things in his house which he afterward pronounced to be arts of Satan, and declared to have been pursued without his knowledge and with the cognizance of only his servants (John and Tituba, the Indian and the negress). Barn, and well, and garden disappeared in a sorry tract of rough ground, and the dwelling became a mere handful of broken bricks. The narrative of the pastor’s struggles and devices to retain his pulpit is very interesting; but they are not related to our object here; and all we need say is, that three sons and sons-in-law of Mrs. Nurse measured their strength against his, and, without having said an intemperate or superfluous word, or swerved from the strictest rules of congregational action, sent him out of the parish. He finally opined that “evil angels” had been permitted to tempt him and his coadjutors on either hand; he admitted that some mistakes had been made; and, said he, “I do humbly own this day, before the Lord and his people, that God has been righteously spitting in my face; and I desire to lie low under all this reproach,” etc.; but the remonstrants could not again sit under his ministry, and his brethren in the Province did not pretend to exculpate him altogether. He buried his wife—against whom no record remains—and departed with his children, the eldest of whom, the playfellow of the “afflicted” children, he had sent away before she had taken harm in the “circle.” He drifted from one small outlying congregation to another, neglected and poor, restless and untamed, though mortified, till he died in 1720. Mr. Noyes died somewhat earlier. He is believed not to have undergone much change, as to either his views or his temper. He was a kind-hearted and amiable man when nothing came in the way; but he could hold no terms with Satan; and in this he insisted to the last that he was right.
Cotton Mather was the survivor of the other two. He died in 1728; and he never was happy again after that last batch of executions. He trusted to his merits, and the genius he exhibited under that onslaught of Satan, to raise him to the highest post of clerical power in the Province, and to make him—what he desired above all else—President of Harvard University. Mr. Upham presents us with a remarkable meditation written by the unhappy man, so simple and ingenious that it is scarcely possible to read it gravely; but the reader is not the less sensible of his misery. The argument is a sort of remonstrance with God on the recompense his services have met with. He has been appointed to serve the world, and the world does not regard him; the negroes, and (who could believe it?) the negroes are named Cotton Mather in contempt of him; the wise and the unwise despise him; in every company he is avoided and left alone; the female sex, and they speak basely of him; his relatives, and they are such monsters that he may truly say, “I am a brother to dragons;” the Government, and it heaps indignities upon him; the University, and if he were a blockhead, it could not treat him worse than it does. He is to serve all whom he can aid, and nobody ever does anything for him; he is to serve all to whom he can be a helpful and happy minister, and yet he is the most afflicted minister in the country; and many consider his afflictions to be so many miscarriages, and his sufferings in proportion to his sins. There was no popularity or power for him from the hour when he stood to see his brother Burroughs put to death on the Hill. He seems never to have got over his surprise at his own failures; but he sank into deeper mortification and a more childish peevishness to the end.