It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow wormy. It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on, the Quakers called it a retribution for these things. But let us be just, even to the unjust. Toleration was a new-born virtue in those days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did not wish to be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"—a doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is, therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to death from the beginning;—of course, four too many.
Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,—coming into meeting dressed in sackcloth, with ashes [pg 281] on their heads and nothing on their feet,—or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body. The Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed, the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,—playing over again upon George Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and imprisonment from which they had just escaped;—as minorities have persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.
Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the majority. Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as these: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion! thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth! thou best to be spared of all mankind!"—all of which are genuine epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton Mather, who collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even Dr. Chauncy's catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.
There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the Quaker feud in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends wished to espouse a fair Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his marrying out of their society, and the Congregationalists his marrying into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed her:—"Ruth, let us break from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my religion, and thou shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the resolution, the Puritan historian says, so far as going into the Church, and marrying, and staying there for life. But probably the ministers thought it to be another case of synecdoche.
With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the astonishing part played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It must be remembered that the belief in this visitation was no new or peculiar thing in New England. The Church, the Scriptures, the mediæval laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had been laws against it in England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described this crime as definitely and seriously as any other. In Scotland four thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg, Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl was burnt alive in Würtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there were no witches on the earth, nor devils,—except" (as they profanely added) "the New-England ministers, and such as they."
John Higginson sums it up best:—"They proceeded in their integrity with a zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and evidence." "But there is a question," he wisely adds, "whether some of the laws, customs, and privileges used by judges and juries in England, which were followed as patterns [pg 282] here, were not insufficient." Cotton Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long list of the legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally, that the fact of fifty confessions was, after all, the one irresistible vindication of their strong measures.
It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every other evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the authorities to do, when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural precedents, the prisoners insisted on entering a plea of guilty? When Goody E—— testified that she and two others rode from Andover to a witch-meeting on a broomstick, and the stick broke and she fell and was still lame from it,—when her daughter testified that she rode on the same stick, and confirmed all the details of the casualty,—when the grand-daughter confirmed them also, and added, that she rode on another stick, and they all signed Satan's book together,—when W. B——, aged forty, testified that Satan assembled a hundred fine blades near Salem Meeting-House, and the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine were carried round, and Satan was like a black sheep, and wished them to destroy the minister's house, (by thunder probably,) and set up his kingdom, and "then all would be well,"—when one woman summoned her three children and some neighbors and a sister and a domestic, who all testified that she was a witch and so were they all,—what could be done for such prisoners by judge or jury, in an age which held witchcraft a certainty? It was only the rapid rate of increase which finally stopped the convictions.
One thing is certain, that this strange delusion, a semi-comedy to us,—though part of the phenomena may find their solution in laws not yet unfolded,—was the sternest of tragedies to those who lived in it. Conceive, for an instant, of believing in the visible presence and labors of the arch-fiend in a peaceful community. Yet from the bottom of their souls these strong men held to it, and they waged a hand-to-hand fight with Satan all their days. Very inconveniently the opponent sometimes dealt his blows, withal. Surely it could not be a pleasant thing to a sound divine, just launched upon his seventeen-headed discourse, to have a girl with wild eyes and her hair about her ears start up and exclaim, "Parson, your text is too long,"—or worse yet, "Parson, your sermon is too long,"—or most embarrassing of all, "There's a great yellow bird sitting on the parson's hat in the pulpit." But these formidable interruptions veritably happened, and received the stern discipline in such cases made and provided.
But beside Quakers and witches, the ministers had other female tormentors to deal with. There was the perpetual anxiety of the unregenerated toilet. "Immodest apparel, laying out of hair, borders, naked necks and arms, or, as it were, pinioned with superfluous ribbons,"—these were the things which tried men's souls in those days, and the statute-books and private journals are full of such plaintive inventories of the implements of sin. Things known as "slash apparel" seem to have been an infinite source of anxiety; there must be only one slash on each sleeve and one in the back. Men also must be prohibited from shoulderbands of undue width, double ruffs and cuffs, and "immoderate great breeches." Part of the solicitude was for modesty, part for gravity, part for economy: none must dress above their condition. In 1652, three men and a woman were fined ten shillings each and costs for wearing silver-lace, another for broad bone-lace, another for tiffany, and another for a silk hood. Alice Flynt was accused of a silk hood, but, proving herself worth more than two hundred pounds, escaped unpunished. Jonas Fairbanks, about the same time, was charged with "great boots," and the evidence went hard against him; but he was fortunately acquitted, and the credit of the family saved.
The question of veils seems to have [pg 283] rocked the Massachusetts Colony to its foundations, and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th, 1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was utterly and unalterably opposed to veils, regarding them as a token of submission to husbands in an unscriptural degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an unscriptural extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such cases; so Paul, veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr. Cotton came to Salem to preach for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his chance to put in his solemn protest against veils; he said they were a custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to meeting without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding visible result from a single sermon within the memory of man.