He had his own grudges against his neighbors to work off, and nothing
could be easier. All that was needed was for one of the children, or
any one else, to affirm that they were afflicted, and perhaps to foam
at the mouth, or be contorted as in a fit, and to accuse whatever
person they chose as being the cause of their trouble. Accusation was
equivalent to condemnation; for to deny it, was to be subjected to
torture until confession was extorted; if the accused did not confess,
he or she was, according to Cotton Mather, supported by the evil one,
and being a witch, must die. If they did confess, they were spared or
executed according to circumstances. If any one expressed any doubt as
to the justice of the sentence, or as to the existence of witchcraft,
it was proof that that person was a witch. The only security was to
join the ranks of the afflicted. In the course of a few months a reign
of terror was established, and hundreds of people, some of them
citizens of distinction, were in jail or under suspicion. Twenty were
hanged on Witches' Hill, west of the town of Salem, while Cotton Mather
sate comfortably by on his horse, and assured the people that all was
well, and that the devil could sometimes assume the appearance of an
angel of light--as, indeed, he might have good cause to believe. But
the mass of the people were averse from bloodshed, and none too sure
that these executions were other than murders; and when the wife of
Governor Phips was accused, the frenzy had passed its height. It was
perceived that the community, or a part of it, had been stampeded by a
panic or infatuation. They had done and countenanced things which now
seemed impossible even to themselves. How could they have condemned the
Reverend George Burroughs on the ground that he had exhibited
remarkable physical strength, and that the witnesses against him had
pretended dumbness? "Why is the devil so loth to have testimony borne
against you?" Judge Stoughton had asked; and Cotton Mather had said
"Enough!" But was it enough, indeed? If a witness simply by holding his
peace can hang a minister of blameless life, who may escape hanging by
a witness who will talk? It was remembered that Parris had been
Burroughs's rival, and instrumental in his conviction; and now that the
frenzy was past it was easy to point out the relation between the two
facts. There, too, was the venerable Giles Cory, who had been pressed
to death, not for pleading guilty, nor yet for pleading not guilty, but
for declining to plead at all. There, once more, was John Willard, to
whom the duty of arresting accused witches had been assigned; he, as a
person of common sense and honesty, had intimated his disbelief in the
reality of witchcraft by refusing to arrest; and for this, and no other
crime, had he been hanged. Had it really come to this, then--that one
must die for having it inferred, from some act of his, that he held an
opinion on the subject of witchcraft different from that announced by
Mather and the magistrates?--It had come to precisely that, in a
community who were exiles in order to secure liberty to have what
opinions they liked. Then, it was time that the witchcraft persecutions
came to an end; and they did, as abruptly as they had begun. Mather,
indeed, and a few more, frightened lest the people, in their recovered
sanity, should turn upon them for an accounting, strove their best to
keep up the horror; but it was not to be. No more convictions could be
obtained. In February of 1693, Parris was banished from Salem; others,
except Stoughton, who remained obdurate, made public confession of
error. But Cotton Mather, the soul of the whole iniquity, shrouded
himself in a cuttle-fish cloud of turgid rhetoric, and escaped
scot-free. So great was the power of theological prestige in New
England two hundred years ago.
There is little doubt that the sincere believers in the witchcraft
delusion were very scanty. The vast majority of the people were simply
victims of moral and physical cowardice. They feared to exchange views
with one another frankly, lest their interlocutor turn out an informer.
They repeated, parrot-like, the conventional utterances--the
shibboleths--of the hour, and thus hid from one another the real
thoughts which would have scotched the mania at the outset. Once plant
mutual suspicion and dread among a people, and, for a time, you may
drive them whither you will. It was by that means that the Council of
Ten ruled in Venice, the Inquisition in Spain, and the Vehmgericht in
Germany; and it was by that means that Cotton Mather enslaved Salem.
The episode is a stain on the fair page of our history; but Cotton
Mather was the origin and agent of it; Parris may have voluntarily
assisted him, and some or all of the magistrates and others concerned
may have been his dupes; but beyond this handful, the support was never
more than perfunctory. The instant the weight of dread was lightened
everybody discovered that everybody else had believed all along that
the whole thing was either a delusion or a fraud. Until then, they had
none of them had the courage to say so--that was all. And let us not be
scornful: the kind of courage that _would_ say so is the very rarest
and highest courage in the world.
But though Cotton Mather is almost or entirely chargeable with the
guilt of the twenty murders on Witches' Hill, not to mention the
incalculable agony of soul and domestic misery incidentally occasioned,
yet it must not be forgotten that he was of Puritan stock and training,
and that false and detestable though his individual nature doubtless
was, his crimes, but for Puritanism, could not have taken the form they
did. Puritanism was prone to brood over predestination, over the flames
of hell, and him who kept them burning; it was severe in repressing
natural expressions of gayety; it was intolerant of unlicensed
opinions, and it crushed spontaneity and innocent frivolity. It aimed,
in a word, to deform human nature, and make of it somewhat rigid and
artificial. These were some of the faults of Puritanism, and it was
these which made possible such a monstrosity as Cotton Mather. He was,
in a measure, a creature of his time and place, and in this degree we
must consider Puritanism as amenable, with him, at the bar of history.
It is for this reason solely that the witchcraft episode assumes
historical importance, instead of being a side-scene of ghastly
picturesqueness. For the Puritans took it to heart; they never forgot
it; it modified their character, and gave a favorable turn to their
future. Gradually the evil of their system was purged out of it, while
the good remained; they became less harsh, but not less strong; they
were high-minded, still, but they abjured narrowness. They would not go
so far as to deny that the devil might afflict mankind, but they
declared themselves unqualified to prove it. There began in them, in
short, the dawn of human sympathies, and the growth of spiritual
humility. Cotton Mather, with all that he represented, sinks into the
mire; but the true Puritan arises, and goes forward with lightened
heart to the mighty destiny that awaits him.
As for bluff Sir William Phips, he is better remembered for his
youthful exploits of hoisting treasure from the fifty-year-old wreck of
a Spanish galleon, in the reign of King James, and of building with
some of the proceeds his "fair brick house, in the Green Lane of
Boston," than for his administration of government during his term of
office. He was an uneducated, rough-handed, rough-natured man, a
ship-carpenter by trade, and a mariner of experience; statesmanship and
diplomacy were not his proper business. A wise head as well as a strong
hand was needed at the helm of Massachusetts just at that juncture. But
he did not prevent the legislature from passing some good laws, and
from renewing the life of New England towns, which had been suppressed
by Andros. The new charter had greatly enlarged the Massachusetts
domain, which now extended over the northern and eastern regions that
included Maine; but, as we shall presently see, the obligation to
defend this territory against the French and Indians cost the colony
much more than could be recompensed by any benefit they got from it.
Phips captured Port Royal, but failed to take Quebec. The legislature,
advised by the public-spirited Elisha Cooke, kept the royal officials
in hand by refusing to vote them permanent salaries or regular
revenues. Bellomont succeeded Phips, and Dudley, in 1702, followed
Bellomont, upon the solicitation of Cotton Mather; who long ere this,
in his "Book of Memorable Providences," had shifted all blame for the
late tragic occurrences from his own shoulders to those of the
Almighty. Dudley retained the governorship till 1715. The weight of
what authority he had was on the side of restricting charter
privileges; but he could produce no measurable effect in retarding the
mighty growth of liberty. We shall not meet him again.
New Hampshire fully maintained her reputation for intractability; and
the general drift of colonial affairs toward freedom was so marked as
to become a common subject of remark in Europe. Some of the best heads
there began to suggest that such a consummation might not be
inexpedient. But before England and her Colonies were to try their
strength against one another, there were to occur the four colonial
wars, by which the colonists were unwittingly trained to meet their
most formidable and their final adversary.
CHAPTER TENTH
FIFTY YEARS OF FOOLS AND HEROES
When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own. The first clause
of this sentence may serve to describe the Colonial Wars in America;
the second, to point the moral of the American Revolution.
Columbus, and the other great mariners of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth
Centuries, might claim for their motives an admixture, at least, of
thoughts higher than mere material gain: the desire to enlarge
knowledge, to win glory, to solve problems. But the patrons and
proprietors of the adventurers had an eye single to profit. To make
money was their aim. In overland trading there was small profit and
scanty business; but the opening of the sea as a path to foreign
countries, and a revelation of their existence--and of the fortuitous
fact that they were inhabited by savages who could not defend
themselves--completely transformed the situation.
Ships could bring in months more, a hundred-fold more, merchandise than
caravans could transport in years; and the expenses of carriage were
minimized. Goods thus placed in the market could be sold at a vast
profit. This was the first obvious fact. Secondly, this profit could be
made to inure exclusively to that country whose ships made the
discovery, by the simple device of claiming, as integral parts of the
kingdom, whatever new lands they discovered; the ships of all other
nations could then be forbidden to trade there. Thirdly, colonists
could be sent out, who would serve a double use:--they would develop
and export the products of the new country; and they would constitute
an ever-increasing market for the exports of the home country.
Such was the ideal. To realize it, three things were necessary: first,
that the natives--the "heathen"--should be dominated, and either
converted or exterminated; next, that the fiat of exclusion against
other nations should be made good; and finally (most vital of all,
though the last to be considered), that the colonists themselves should
forfeit all but a fraction of their personal interests in favor of the
monopolists at home.
Now, as to the heathen, some of them, like the Caribbeans, could
be--and by Spanish methods, they were--exterminated. Others, such as
the Mexican and Central and South American tribes, could be in part
killed off, in part "converted" as it was called. Others again, like
the Indians of North America, could neither be converted nor
exterminated; but they could be in a measure conciliated, and they
could always be fought. The general result was that the natives
co-operated to a certain extent in providing articles for export
(chiefly furs), and on the other hand, delayed colonization by
occasionally massacring the first small groups of colonists. In the
long run however most of them disappeared, so far as power either for
use or for offense was concerned.
The attempt of the several colonizing powers to make their rivals keep
out of their preserves was not successful. Piracy, smuggling,
privateering, and open war were the answers of the nations to one
another's inhibitions, though, all the while, none of them questioned
the correctness of the excluding principle. Each of them practiced it
themselves, though trying to defeat its practice by others. Portugal,
the first of the foreign-trading and monopolizing nations, was early
forced out of the business by more powerful rivals; Holland was the
first to call the principle itself in question, and to fight in the
cause of free commerce; though even she had her little private
treasure-box in Java. Spain's commerce was, during the next centuries,
seriously impaired by the growing might of England. France was the next
to suffer; and finally England, after meeting with much opposition from
her own colonies, was called upon to confront a European coalition; and
while she was putting forth her strength to overcome that, her colonies
revolted, and achieved their independence. Such was the history and
fate of the colonial system; though Spain still retained much of her
American possessions (owing to peculiar conditions) for years afterward.
But England might have retained her settlements too, so far as Europe
was concerned; the real cause of her discomfiture lay in the fact that
her colonists were mainly people of her own blood, all of them with an
inextinguishable love of liberty, which was fostered and confirmed by
their marriage with the wilderness; and many of whom were also actuated
by considerations of religion and conscience, the value of which they
placed above everything else. They wished to be "loyal," but they would
not surrender what they termed innate rights; they would not be taxed
without representation, nor be debarred from manufacturing; nor consent
to make England their sole depot and source of supplies. They would not
surrender their privilege to be governed by representatives elected by
themselves. England, as we have seen, contended against this spirit by
all manner of more or less successful enactments and acts of despotism;
until at last, near the opening of the Eighteenth Century, it became
evident to a few far-seeing persons on both sides that the matter could
only be settled by open force. But this method of arbitrament was
postponed for half a century by the Colonial Wars, which made of the
colonists a united people, and educated them, from farmers and traders,
into a military nation. Then the war came, and the United States was
its consequence.
The Colonial Wars were between England on one side, and Spain and
France on the other. Spain was not a serious foe, or obstacle; England
had no special hankering after Florida and Mexico, and she knew nothing
about the great Californian region. But France harried her on the
north, and pushed her back on the west, the first collisions in this
direction occurring at the Alleghanies and along the Ohio River. France
had discovered, claimed, and in a certain sense occupied, a huge wedge
of the present United States: an area which (apart from Canada)
extended from Maine to Oregon, and down in converging lines to the Gulf
of Mexico. They called it Louisiana. The story of the men who explored
it is a story of heroism, devotion, energy and sublime courage perhaps
unequaled in the history of the world. But France failed to follow up
these men with substantial colonies. Colonies could not help the fur
trade at the north, and the climate there was anything but attractive;
and mishaps of various kinds prevented the colonizing of the great
Mississippi valley. There was a little French settlement near the
mouths of that river, the descendants of which still give character to
New Orleans; but the rest of the enormous triangle was occupied chiefly
by missionaries and trappers, and, during the wars, with the operating
military forces. France would have made a far less effective resistance
than she did, had she not observed, from the first, the policy of
allying herself with the Indian tribes, and even incorporating them
with herself. All converted Indians were French citizens by law; the
French soldiers and settlers intermarried to a large extent with the
red men, and the half-breed became almost a race of itself. The savages
took much more kindly to the picturesque and emotional Church of Rome
than to the gloomy severities of the Puritan Calvinists; the "praying
Indians" were numerous; and the Cross became a real link between the
red men and the white. This fact was of immense value in the wars with
the English; and had it not been for the neutrality or active
friendliness of a group of tribes whom the Jesuit missionaries had
failed to win, the English colonies might have been quite obliterated.
The policy of employing savages in warfare between civilized states was
denounced then and afterward; it led to the perpetration of sickening
barbarities; but it was France's only chance, and, speaking
practically, it was hardly avoidable. Besides, the English did not
hesitate to enlist Indians on their side, when they could. Had the
savages fought after the manner of the white men, it would have been
well enough; but on the contrary, they imposed their methods upon the
whites; and most of the conflicts had more of the character of
massacres than of battles. Women and children were mercilessly slain,
or carried into captivity. But it must be remembered that the American
continent, at that time, did not admit of such tactics as were employed
in Europe--as Braddock found to his cost; operations must be chiefly by
ambuscade and surprise; when the town or the fort was captured, it was
not easy to restrain the wild men; and if they plied the tomahawk
without regard to sex or age, the white soldiers, little less savage,
readily learned to follow their example. After all, the wars were
necessarily for extermination, and there is no better way to
exterminate a people--as Spain has uniformly shown from the beginning
to the end of her history--than by murdering their women and children.
They are "innocent," no doubt, so far as active hostilities are
concerned; but they breed, or become, men and thereby threaten the
future. Moreover, not a few of the women did deeds of warlike valor
themselves. It was a savage time, and war has its hideous side always,
and in this period seemed to have hardly any other.
The pioneering on this continent of the Spanish and the French, though
in itself a captivating story, cannot properly be dwelt on in a history
of the growth of the American principle. Ponce de Leon traversed
Florida in the first quarter of the Sixteenth Century, hunting for the
Fountain of Immortality, and finding death. Hernando de Soto wandered
over the area of several of our present Southern States, and discovered
the lower reaches of the Mississippi; he was a man of blood, and his
blood was shed. Some score of years later Spaniards massacred the
Huguenot colony at St. Augustine, and built that oldest of American
cities. Beyond this, on the Atlantic slope, they never proceeded,
having enough to do further south. But they lay claim, even in these
closing years of the Nineteenth Century, to the entire American
continent--"if they had their rights."
The French began their American career with an Italian employé,
Verrazano, who spied out the coast from Florida to Newfoundland in
1524. Then Cartier peered into the wide mouth of the St. Lawrence, and
tried to get to India by that route, but got no further than the
present Montreal. In the next century, Champlain, one of the great
explorers and the first governor of Canada, laid the corner-stone of
Quebec; it became at once the center of Canadian trade which it has
ever since remained. This was in 1608. In respect of enterprise as
explorers, the French easily surpassed the farm-loving, home-building,
multiplying colonists of England. But England took advantage of French
discoveries, and stayed, and prevailed. God makes men help each other
in their own despite.
Richelieu said in 1627 that the name, New France, designated the whole
continent of America from the North Pole down to Florida. The Jesuits,
who arose as a counteracting force to Luther and the Reformation,
supplanted the Franciscans as missionaries among the heathen, and
performed what can only be called prodigies of self-sacrifice and
intrepidity. Loyola was a worthy antagonist of Calvin, and the first
achievements of his followers were the more striking. But the
magnificent exploits of these men were not the preliminary of
commensurate colonization. The spirit of Calvin inspired large bodies
of men and women to establish themselves in the wilderness in order to
cultivate his doctrines without interference; the spirit of Loyola
embodied no new religious principle; it simply kindled individuals to
fresh exertions to promulgate the unchanging dogmas of the Roman
Church. The Jesuits were leaders without followers; their mission was
to bring the Church to the heathen, and the heathen into the Church;
and the impressiveness of their activity was due to the daring and
faith which pitted units against thousands, and refused to accept
defeat. They were the knight-errantry of religion. The fame of their
deeds inspired enthusiasm in France, so that noble women gave up their
luxurious lives, for the sake of planting faith in the inhospitable
immensities of the Canadian forests; but the mass of the common people
were not stimulated or attracted; the profits of the fur-trade employed
but a handful; and the blood of the Jesuit martyrs--none more genuine
ever died--was poured out almost without practical results. Our
estimate of human nature is exalted; but there are no happy communities
to-day which owe their existence to the Jesuit pioneers. The priests
themselves were wifeless and childless, and the family hearthstone
could not be planted on the sites of their immolations and triumphs.
Nor were the disciples of Loyola aided, as were the Calvinists, by
persecution at home. All alike were good Catholics. But had the Jesuits
advocated but a single principle of human freedom, France might have
been mistress of America to-day.