P.
[50] This was a meeting of the council for a preliminary examination, and not “a court” for the trial of the accused. Danforth, deputy governor; Addington, secretary, and Russell, Hathorne, Appleton, Sewall and Corwin, members of the council, were present. It was the only examination that Samuel Sewall attended. On his return to Boston he made this entry in his diary: “April 11, 1692. Went to Salem, where, in the meeting house, the persons accused of witchcraft were examined; was a very great assembly; ’twas awful to see how the afflicted were agitated.” At a later date he inserted in the margin, “Væ, væ, væ.” These words have been taken by a late writer “as expressions of much sensibility at the extent to which he had been misled.” He did in later years regret, and well he might, the course he took in the witchcraft trials; but he never expressed, as the writer does, his disbelief in the reality of diabolical agency as exhibited at that examination. The occasion itself was mournful enough to draw forth these exclamations from one holding his opinions; and hence they are explained without a forced interpretation.
P.
[51] The maid here alluded to was Mary Warren, one of the most violent of the accusing girls. She was a domestic in Proctor’s family.
P.
[52] The documents which Gov. Hutchinson printed belong with the court files at Salem, which have been very carefully arranged and mounted by Mr. William P. Upham. These papers, or such of them as remain, were printed (with many errors) by Mr. W. E. Woodward, in Records of Salem Witchcraft, Roxbury, 1865, 2 vols. sm. 4to. Among these the papers which Gov. Hutchinson printed do not appear. They were doubtless borrowed by him, and never returned. In the Massachusetts archives is a volume of witchcraft papers (vol. cxxxv.), but these documents are not among them.
In 1860, Mr. N. I. Bowditch presented a collection of original papers relating to Salem witchcraft, which once belonged to the Salem court files, to the Massachusetts Historical Society. More than sixty years ago these papers came into possession of the late Hon. John Pickering; who, says Mr. Bowditch, “as he was a sworn officer of the court, had some scruples of conscience about retaining them himself; and therefore, after examining them, gave them to my late father [Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch]. (Proceedings, 1860-62, p. 31).” The collection has been arranged and elegantly bound at the expense of Mr. Bowditch. The volume does not contain the papers printed by Gov. Hutchinson. As Gov. Hutchinson printed only portions of these papers, and doubtless took others which he did not print, it is a matter of some historical interest to know the present location (if they exist) of the original papers which he used.
P.
[53] It is can in the examination, but, I suppose, by the answer, should have been wrote can’t.
H.