ownership, vexed land-titles, and royal encroachments. For several
years the people had no visible government at all. They did not hold
themselves so well in hand as did New York, and were less audacious and
aggressive in resistance; but in one way or another, they fairly held
their own, prospered and multiplied. Pennsylvania enjoyed from the
first more undisturbed independence and self-direction than the others;
at one time it seemed to be their ambition to discover something which
Penn would not grant them, and then to ask for it. But the great Quaker
was equal to the occasion; no selfishness, crankiness, or whimsicality
on their part could wear out his patience and benevolence. In the
intervals of his imprisonments in England he labored for their welfare.
The queen contemplated making Pennsylvania a royal province, but Penn,
though poor, would not let it go except on condition it might retain
its democratic liberties. The people, in short, kept everything in
their own hands, and their difficulties arose chiefly from their
disputes as to what to do with so much freedom. It was a colony where
everybody was equal, without an established church, where any one was
welcome to enter and dwell, which was destitute of arms or defense or
even police, which yet grew in all good things more rapidly than any of
its sister colonies. The people waxed fat and kicked, but they did no
evil in the sight of the Lord, whatever England may have thought of
them; and after the contentious little appendage of Delaware had
finally been cut off from its big foster sister (though they shared the
same governors until the Revolution) there is little more to be said of
either of them.
The Roman Catholic owners of Maryland fared ill after William came into
power; he made the colony a royal province in 1691, and for thirty
years or more there were no more Baltimores in the government. Under
Copley, the first royal governor, the Church of England was declared to
be established; but dissenters were afterward protected; only the
Catholics were treated with intolerance in the garden themselves had
made. The people soon settled down and became contented, and slowly
their numbers augmented. But the Baltimores were persistent, and the
fourth lord, in 1715, took advantage of his infancy to compass a
blameless reconciliation with the Church of England, thereby securing
his installation in the proprietary rights of his forefathers, from
which the family was not evicted until the Revolution of the colonies
in 1775 opened a new chapter in the history of the world.
Virginia recovered rapidly from Berkeley, and suffered little from
Andros, who was governor in 1692, but with his fangs drawn, and an
experience to remember. The people still eschewed towns, and lived each
family in its own solitude, hospitable to all, but content with their
own company. The love of independence grew alike in the descendants of
the cavaliers and in the common people, and the wide application of the
suffrage equalized power, and even enabled the lower sort to keep the
gentry, when the fancy took them, out of the places of authority and
trust. Democracy was in the woods and streams and the blue sky, and all
breathed it in and absorbed it into their blood and bone. They early
petitioned William for home rule in all its purity; he permitted land
grants to be confirmed, but would not let their assembly supplant the
English parliament as a governing power. He sought, unsuccessfully, to
increase the authority of the church; for though the bishop might
license and the governor recommend, the parish would not present. It
was a leisurely, good-natured, careless, but spirited people,
indifferent to commerce, content to harvest their fields and rule their
slaves, and let the world go by. A more enviable existence than theirs
it would be hard to imagine. All their financial transactions were done
in tobacco, even to the clergyman's stipend and the judge's fee. No
enemy menaced them; politics were rather an amusement than a serious
duty; yet in these fertile regions were made the brains and characters
which afterward, for so many years, ruled the councils of the United
States, or led her armies in war. They lay fallow for seventy-five
years, and then gave the best of accounts of themselves. England did
not quite know what to make of the Virginians; to judge by the reports
of the governors, they were changeable as a pretty woman. But they were
simply capricious humorists, full of life and intelligence, who did
what they pleased and did not take themselves too seriously. They
indulged themselves with the novel toy, the post-office; and founded
William and Mary College in 1693. This venerable institution passed its
second centennial with one hundred and sixty students on its roll; but,
soon after, it "ceased upon the midnight, without pain." Anybody may
have a college in these days.
The Carolinas, no longer pestered by Grand Models, became another
rustic paradise. Their suns were warm, their forests vast, their people
delighting in a sort of wild civilization. When James II. went down,
the Carolinians needed no care-taker, and declined to avail themselves
of the martial law suggested by the anxious proprietors. But in 1690
they allowed Seth Sothel to occupy the gubernatorial seat, and sent up
a legislature. The southern section was subjected to some superficial
annoyance by the proprietors, who wished to make an income from the
country, but were unwilling to put their hands in their pockets in the
first place; they insisted upon their authority, and the colonists did
not say them nay, but maintained freedom of action in all their
concerns nevertheless. A series of proprietary governors were sent out
to them--Ludwell first, then Smith; both failed, and retired. Then came
Archdale, the Quaker, who struck a popular note in his remark that
dissenters could cut wood and hoe crops as well as the highest
churchmen; his policy was to concede, to conciliate and to harmonize,
and he was welcome and useful. The Indians, and even the Spaniards,
were brought into friendly relations. Liberty of conscience was
accorded to all but "papists," who were certainly hardly used in these
times. An attempt to base political power on possession of land was
defeated in 1702. The Church of England was accepted in 1704, and
though dissenters were tolerated, it remained the official dispenser of
religion until the Revolution. All these things were on the surface;
the colony, inside, was free, happy and prosperous; it had adopted rice
culture, with a great supply of negro slaves, and it brought furs from
far in the interior. The Huguenots had been enfranchised as soon as it
was known that England had turned her back on Catholicism and James.
None of the colonies had before them a future more peaceful and
profitable than South Carolina. The slaves were her only burden; but at
that period they seemed not a burden, but the assurance of her
prosperity.
North Carolina was as happy and as peaceful as her southern sister, but
the conditions of life there were different. The proprietors attempted
to control the people, but were worsted in almost every encounter. Laws
were passed only to be disregarded. Here, as elsewhere, the Quakers
became conspicuous in inculcating liberal notions, and were paid the
compliment of being hated and feared by the emissaries of England. What
was to be done with a population made up of fugitives of all kinds, not
from Europe only, but from the other colonies, who held all creeds, or
none at all; who lived by hunting and tree-cutting; who were as averse
from towns as Virginia, and many of whom could not be said to have any
fixed abode at all? If restraints were proposed, they ignored them; if
they were pressed, they resisted them, sometimes boisterously, but
never with bloodshed. Robert Daniel, deputy governor in 1704, tried to
establish the Church of England; a building was erected, but in all the
province there was but one clergyman, with an absentee congregation
scattered over hundreds of miles of mountain and forest. In the
following year there were two governors elected by opposite factions,
each with his own legislature; and in 1711 Edward Hyde, going out to
restore order, confounded the confusion. He called in Spotswood from
Virginia to help him; but there were too many Quakers; and the old
soldier, after landing a party of marines to indicate his disapproval
of anarchy, retired. Meantime, fresh emigrants kept arriving, including
many Palatinates from Germany. It was not a profitable country to its
reputed owners, who, in 1714, received a hundred dollars apiece from
it. But it supported its inhabitants all the better; and it was eight
years more before they supplied themselves with a court house, and
forty, before they felt the need of a printing press.
In New England, Connecticut and Rhode Island, which had suffered
comparatively little from the despotism of James, readily recovered
such minor rights as they had been deprived of. There was a dispute
between Fitz-John Winthrop and Fletcher as to the command of the local
militia, the former, with his fellow colonists, demanding that the
control be kept by the colony; Winthrop went to England and got
confirmation of his plea; and from the people, on his return, the
governorship. There were a score and a half of flourishing towns in
Connecticut, each with its meeting house and school. Little Rhode
Island recovered its charter, whether the original or a duplicate. An
act was pending in England to abrogate all colonial charters, and was
backed by the strong mercantile influence; but the French war caused it
to go over. Lord Cornbury, and Joseph Dudley, the Massachusetts-born
traitor, did their best to get a royal governor for these colonies, but
they failed; though Dudley, at the instance of Cotton Mather, was
afterward made governor of Massachusetts.
But no son of Massachusetts has so well deserved the condemnation of
history as Cotton Mather himself. Such political sins as his advocacy
of Dudley, and his opposition to the revival of the old charter, are
trifling; they might have been the result of ordinary blindness or
selfishness merely; but his part in the witchcraft delusion cannot be
so accounted for. In his persecution of the accused persons he was
actuated by a spirit of inflamed vanity and malignity truly diabolic;
and if there can be a crime which Heaven cannot forgive, assuredly
Cotton Mather steeped himself in it. He was a singular being; yet he
represented the evil tendencies of Puritanism; they drained into him,
so to say, until he became their sensible incarnation. In his person,
at last, the Puritans of Massachusetts beheld united every devilish
trait to which the tenets of their belief could incline them; and the
hideousness of the spectacle so impressed them that, from that time
forward, any further Cotton Mathers became impossible. There is no
feature in Mather's case that can be held to palliate his conduct. He
had the best education of the time, coming, as he did, from a line of
scholars, and out-Heroding them in the variety and curiousness of his
accomplishments, and in the number of his published "works"--three
hundred and eighty-three. Nothing that he produced has any original
value; but his erudition was enormous. Of "Magnalia," his chief and
representative work, it has been said that "it is a heterogeneous and
polyglot compilation of information useful and useless, of unbridled
pedantry, of religious adjuration, biographical anecdotes, political
maxims, and theories of education.... Indeed, it contains everything
except order, accuracy, sobriety, proportion, development, and upshot."
This man, born in 1663, was not yet thirty years of age when his
campaign against the witches began; indeed, he had given a hint of his
direction some years earlier. In his multifarious reading he had become
acquainted with all existing traditions and speculations concerning
witchcraft, and his profession as minister in the Calvinist communion
predisposed him to investigate all accessible details concerning the
devil. He was passionately hungry for notoriety and conspicuousness:
Tydides melior patre was the ambition he proposed to himself.
A huge memory, stored with the promiscuous rubbish of libraries, and
with facts which were transformed into rubbish by his treatment of
them, was combined in him with a diseased imagination, and a personal
vanity almost surpassing belief. His mental shallowness and consequent
restlessness rendered anything like original thought impossible to him;
and the faculty of intellectual digestion was not less beyond him. It
is probable that curiosity was the motive which originally drew him to
the study of witchcraft; a vague credence of such things was common at
the time; and in France and England many executions for the supposed
crime had taken place. Mather had no convictions on the subject; he was
incapable of convictions of any kind; and the revelation of his private
diary shows that at the very time he was wallowing in murders, and
shrieking out for ever more victims, he was in secret doubting the
truth of all religion, and coquetting with atheism. But men of no
religious faith are prone to superstitions; the man who denies God is
the first to seek for guidance from the stars. Suppose there should be
a devil?--was Mather's thought. It is not to be wondered at that such a
man should be fascinated by the notion; and we may perhaps concede to
Mather that, if at any time in his career he approached belief in
anything, the devil was the subject of his belief. Had his character
been genuine and vigorous, such a belief would have led him to plunge
into witchcraft, not as a persecutor, but as a performer; he would have
aimed to be chief at the witches' Sabbath, and to have rioted in the
terrible powers with which Satan's children were credited. But he was
far from owning this bold and trenchant fiber: though he could not
believe in God, he dared not defy Him; and still he could not refrain
from dabbling in the forbidden mysteries. Moreover, there was an
obscure and questionable faculty inherent in certain persons,
unaccountable on any recognized natural grounds, which gave support to
the witchcraft theory. We call this faculty hypnotism now; and
physiology seeks to connect it with the nervous affections of hysteria
and epilepsy. At all times, and in all quarters of the earth,
manifestations of it have not been wanting; and in Africa it has for
centuries existed as a so-called religious cult, to which in this
country the name of Hoodooism or Voodooism has been applied. It is a
savage form of devil worship, including snake-charming, and the lore of
fetiches and charms; and its professors are able to produce abnormal
effects, within certain limits, upon the nerves and imaginations of
their clients or victims. Among the negro slaves in Massachusetts in
1692, and the negro-Indian mongrels, there were persons able to
exercise this power. They attracted the attention of Cotton Mather.
Gradually, we may suppose, the idea took form in his mind that if he
could not be a witch himself, he might gain the notoriety he craved by
becoming the denouncer of witchcraft in others. Ministers in that day
still had great influence in New England, and had grasped at temporal
as well as spiritual sway, maintaining that the former should rightly
involve the latter. What a minister said, had weight; what so
well-known a minister as Cotton Mather said, would carry conviction to
many. If Mather could procure the execution of a witch or two, it could
not fail to add greatly to his spiritual glory and ascendency. It is,
of course, not to be imagined that he had any conception, beforehand,
of the extent to which the agitation he was about to begin would be
carried. But when evil is once let loose, it multiplies itself and
gains impetus, and rages like a fire. The only thing for Mather to do
was to keep abreast of the mischief which he had created. If he
faltered or relented, he would be himself destroyed. He was whirled
along with the foul storm by a mingling of terror, malice, vanity,
triumph and fascination: as repulsive and dastardly a figure as has
ever stained the records of our country. He was ready to sacrifice the
population of Massachusetts rather than confess that the deeds for
which he was responsible were based on what, in his secret soul, he
unquestionably felt was a delusion. For though he may have
half-believed in witchcraft while it presented itself to him as a
theory, yet as soon as he had reached the stage of actual examinations
and court testimony, he could not fail to perceive that the theory was
utterly devoid of reasonable foundation; that convictions could not be
had except by aid of open perjury, suppression and intimidation. Yet
Cotton Mather scrupled not to put in operation these and other devices;
to hound on the magistrates, to browbeat and sophisticate the juries,
and to scream threats, warnings and self-glorifications from the
pulpit. Needs must, when the devil drives. Had he paused, had he even
held his peace, that noose, slimy with the death-sweat of a score of
innocent victims, would have settled greedily round his own guilty
neck, and strangled his life. But Cotton Mather was too nimble, too
voluble, too false and too cowardly for the gallows; he lived to a good
age, and died in the odor of sanctity.
Immediately after the news of William's accession was known in New
England, Mather opposed the restoration of the ancient charter, because
it would have interfered with the plans of his personal political
ambition. He caused the presentation of an address to the king,
purporting to represent the desire of the majority of reputable
citizens of Boston, placing themselves at the royal disposal, without
suggesting that the charter rights be revived. Cotton Mather's father,
Increase, was the actual agent to England; but it was the views of
Cotton Mather rather than his own that he submitted to his majesty. The
blatant hypocrite had dominated his father. The king gave Massachusetts
a new charter which was entirely satisfactory to the petitioners, for
it took away the right of the people to elect their own officers and
manage their own affairs, and made the king the fountain of power and
honor. It was identical with all charters of royal colonies, except
that the council was elected jointly by the people and by its own
members. Sir William Phips, at Increase Mather's suggestion, was made
governor, and William Stoughton lieutenant-governor. The members of the
council were "every man of them a friend to the interests of the
churches," and of Cotton Mather. He did not conceal his delight. "The
time for favor is come, yea, the set time is come! Instead of my being
made a sacrifice to wicked rulers, my father-in-law, with several
related to me, and several brethren of my own church, are among the
council. The governor is not my enemy, but one whom I baptized, and one
of my own flock, and one of my dearest friends.--I obtained of the Lord
that He would use me to be a herald of His kingdom now approaching."
Such was the attitude of Cotton Mather regarding the political outlook.
Obviously the field was prepared for him to achieve his crowning
distinction as champion of God against the devil in Massachusetts. In
February of the next year he found his first opportunity.
There was in Salem a certain Reverend Samuel Parris who had a daughter,
a niece, and a negro-Indian servant called Tituba. The children were
about twelve years of age, and much in Tituba's society. Parris was an
Englishman born, and was at this time forty-one years old; he had left
Harvard College without a degree, had been in trade in Boston, and had
entered the ministry and obtained the pastorship of the Congregational
church at Danvers, then a part of Salem, three or four years before. He
had not lived at peace with his people; he had quarreled bitterly with
some of them, and the scandal had been noised abroad. He was a man of
brutal temper, and without moral integrity. These were the dramatis
personae employed by Cotton Mather in the first scene of his hideous
farce.
The children, at the critical age between childhood and puberty, were
in a condition to be readily worked upon; it is the age when the
nervous system is disorganized, the moral sense unformed, and the
imagination ignorant and unbridled. Many children are liars and
deceivers, and self-deceivers, then, who afterward develop into sanity
and goodness. But these unhappy little creatures were under the
fascination of the illiterate and abnormal mongrel, and she secretly
ravished and fascinated them with her inexplicable powers and obscure
devices. Their antics aroused suspicions in the coarse and perhaps
superstitious mind of Parris; he catechised them; the woman's husband
told what he knew; and Parris beat her till she consented to say she
was a witch. Such phenomena could only be due to witchcraft. The
cunning and seeming malignity of the children would tax belief, were it
not so familiar a fact in children; and notable also was their
histrionic ability. They were excited by the sensation they aroused,
and vain of it; they were willing to do what they could to prolong it.
But they hardly needed to invent anything; more than was necessary was
suggested to them by questions and comments. They were quick to take
hints, and improve upon them. Sarah Good, Martha Cory, Rebecca Nourse,
and all the rest, must be their victims; but God will forgive the
children, for they know not what they do. Presently, the contagion
spread; though, upon strict examination of the evidence, not nearly so
far as was supposed. Hundreds were bewildered and terrified, as well
they might be; the magistrates--Stoughton, Sewall, John Hathorne, poor
Octogenarian Bradstreet, Sir William Phips--these and others to whom it
fell to investigate and pronounce sentence--let us hope that some, if
not all of them, truly believed that their sentences were just. "God
will give you blood to drink!" was what Sarah Good said to Noyes, as
she stood on the scaffold. But why may they not have believed they were
in the right? There was Cotton Mather, the holy man, the champion
against the Evil One, the saint who walked with God, and daily lifted
up his voice in prayer and defiance and thanksgiving--he was ever at
hand, to cross-question, to insinuate, to surmise, to bluster, to
interpret, to terrify, to perplex, to vociferate: surely, this paragon
of learning and virtue must know more about the devil than any mere
layman could pretend to know; and they must accept his assurance and
guidance. "I stake my reputation," he shouted, "upon the truth of these
accusations." And he pointedly prayed that the trial might "have a good
issue." When Deliverance Hobbs was under examination, she did but cast
a glance toward the meeting house, "and," cries the Reverend gentleman,
in an ecstasy of indignation, "immediately a demon, invisibly entering
the house, tore down a part of it!" No wonder a man so gifted as he,
was conscious of a certain gratification amid all the horrors of the
diabolic visitation, for how could he regard it otherwise than as--in
his own words--"a particular defiance unto myself!" Such was the pose
which he adopted before his countrymen: that of a semi-divine, or quite
Divine man, standing between his fellow creatures and the assaults of
hell. And then Cotton Mather would go home to his secret chamber, and
write in his diary that God and religion were perhaps, after all, but
an old wives' tale.