This was a horrible winter to the advanced guard of English settlers on the upper Connecticut. The navigation of the river was completely blocked by ice before the middle of November; and the vessels which were to have brought their winter supplies by way of Long Island Sound and the river were forced to return to Boston, leaving the wretched settlers unprovided for. For a little while some scanty supplies of corn were obtained from the neighboring Indians, but this resource soon failed. About seventy persons straggled down the river to the fort at its mouth. There they found and dug out of the ice a sixty-ton vessel, and made their way back to Boston. Others turned back on the way they had come, and struggled through the snow and ice to "the Bay." But a few held their grip on the new territory. Subsisting first on a little corn bought from more distant Indians, then by hunting, and finally on ground-nuts and acorns dug from under the snow, they fought through the winter and held their ground. But it was a narrow escape. Spring found them almost exhausted, their unsheltered cattle dead, and just time enough to bring necessary supplies from home. The Dorchester people alone lost cattle to the value of two thousand pounds.
The Newtown congregation, in October, 1635, found customers for their old homes in a new party from England; and in the following June Hooker and Stone led their people overland to Connecticut. They numbered one hundred, with one hundred and sixty head of cattle. Women and children were of the party. Mrs. Hooker, who was ill, was carried on a litter; and the journey, of "about one hundred miles," occupied two weeks. Its termination was well calculated to dissipate the evil auguries of the previous winter. The Connecticut Valley in early June! Its green meadows, flanked by wooded hills, lay before them. Its oaks, whose patriarch was to shelter their charter, its great elms and tulip-trees, were broken by the silver ribbon of the river; here and there were the wigwams of the Indians, or the cabins of the survivors of the winter; and, over and through all, the light of a day in June welcomed the newcomers. The thought of abandoning Connecticut disappeared forever.
WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ENGLAND
(1647-1696)
BY JOHN G. PALFREY[[1] ]
The people of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, like all other Christian people at that time and later,—at least, with extremely rare individual exceptions,—believed in the reality of a hideous crime called witchcraft. They thought they had Scripture for that belief, and they knew they had law for it, explicit and abundant; and with them law and Scripture were absolute authorities for the regulation of opinion and of conduct.
In a few instances, witches were believed to have appeared in the earlier years of New England. But the cases had been sporadic. The first instance of an execution for witchcraft is said to have occurred in Connecticut, soon after the settlement [1647, May 30th]; but the circumstances are not known, and the fact has been doubted. A year later, one Margaret Jones, of Charlestown in Massachusetts, and it has been said, two other women in Dorchester and Cambridge, were convicted and executed for the goblin crime. These cases appear to have excited no more attention than would have been given to the commission of any other felony, and no judicial record of them survives....
With three or four exceptions,—for the evidence respecting the asserted sufferers at Dorchester and Cambridge is imperfect,—no person appears to have been punished for witchcraft in Massachusetts, nor convicted of it, for more than sixty years after the settlement, though there had been three or four trials of other persons suspected of the crime. At the time when the question respecting the colonial charter was rapidly approaching an issue, and the public mind was in feverish agitation, the ministers sent out a paper of proposals for collecting facts concerning witchcraft [1681]. This brought out a work from President Mather entitled "Illustrious Providences," in which that influential person related numerous stories of the performances of persons leagued with the Devil [1684].
The imagination of his restless young son[[2] ] was stimulated, and circumstances fed the flame. In the last year of the government of Andros [1688], a daughter, thirteen years old, of John Goodwin,—a mason living at the South End of Boston,—had a quarrel with an Irish washerwoman about some missing clothes. The woman's mother took it up, and scolded provokingly. Thereupon the wicked child, profiting, as it seems, by what she had been hearing and reading on the mysterious subject, "cried out upon her," as the phrase was, as a witch, and proceeded to act the part understood to be fit for a bewitched person; in which behavior she was presently joined by three others of the circle, one of them only four or five years old. Now they would lose their hearing, now their sight, now their speech; and sometimes all three faculties at once. They mewed like kittens; they barked like dogs.