During nearly one hundred years, from about the middle of the eighteenth
to that of the nineteenth century, the American public has been content to
leave unlifted concealing drapery which the historian Hutchinson threw
over witchcraft. His treatment of that subject is plausible and soothing
to cursory readers, but superficial and unsatisfactory to minds which test
the competency of agents to produce effects ascribed to them. His views
have been so widely adopted and so long prevalent, that we must regard him
as having been more influential than any other writer in hiding the
gigantic limbs, features, and operations of what was with reason a
veritable monster in the eyes of its beholders. In him some reprehensible
qualities were conjoined with many admirable ones. Appleton's New American
Cyclopaedia states that "Thomas Hutchinson was born in Boston in 1711, and
died at Brampton, near London, 1780. He was graduated at Harvard College,
1727. He became Judge of Probate in 1752, was Councillor from 1749 to
1756, Lieutenant Governor from 1758 to 1771, and was appointed Chief
Justice in 1760, thus holding four high offices at one time. In the
disputes which led to the Revolution, he sided with the British
government.... He received his commission as Governor in 1771; and his
whole administration was characterized by duplicity and an avaricious love
of money, writing letters which he never sent, but which he showed as
evidence of his zeal for the liberties of the province, while he advised
the establishment of a citadel in Boston," &c.
The History of Massachusetts by the pen of this man has sterling merits,
and is of great value. That work and the bestowal of so many high offices
upon him indicate that his abilities, acquisitions, and performances were
of high order. His comments upon subjects which he discussed, and facts
which he presented, were prevailingly fair, and very instructive. When he
perceived--and he generally did--the genuine significance of his facts,
reasoned from them _all_, and allowed to each its proper weight, he was a
spirited, lucid, and valuable interpreter and guide. But when he
encountered and adduced extraordinary facts, which baffled his power to
account for in harmony with his prejudgments and fixed conclusions as to
where natural agents and forces cease to act, he could very skillfully
keep in abeyance the most distinguishing and significant aspects of such
troublesome materials. That damaging moral weakness which let him write
letters which he never sent, for the purpose of exhibiting them as
evidence of his support of the popular cause, perhaps also let him be
other than manly and frank when he encountered a certain class of facts
which seemed to him "more than natural." The whole subject of witchcraft
was nettlesome to him. His pen very often indicated a testy, disturbed,
and sometimes a contemptuous mover when it characterized persons who had
been charged with that crime; and concerning such he recorded many hasty
and unsatisfactory opinions and conclusions. A glimpse at the probable and
almost necessary state of public opinion and knowledge concerning
spiritual forces and agents about the middle of the eighteenth century,
will detect serious difficulties besetting any witchcraft historian's path
at that time, and dispose us to look in clemency upon his hypotheses and
conclusions, even though they be far from satisfactory.
The intense strain given to the prevalent monstrous creed concerning the
devil, when its requirements were vigorously enforced at Salem Village in
1692, ruptured that creed itself; and no substitute for it under which the
phenomena of witchcraft could be referred to competent authors and forces
had been obtained in 1767. The public formerly had believed that either
One Great Devil and his sympathetic imps, or embodied human beings who had
made a covenant with him, must be the authors of all mysterious malignant
action upon men, because no other unseen rational agents were recognized
as having access to man. All acts deemed witchcrafts, therefore, were the
devil's. But belief devil-ward had changed at Hutchinson's day. The Great
Devil's use of covenanted children, women, and men as his only available
instrumentalities, had ceased to be asserted; the fathering of all
mysterious works upon him and his had become an obsolete custom. Its
revival might not meet kindly reception by the public; it probably would
be distasteful to people whom tragic experience had not very long since
taught to distrust and disown his Black Majesty's sway over material
things, and were also chagrined that their fathers had held undoubting
faith in his powers and operations over and upon things temporal and
palpable. The devil had been credited with more than he performed or had
power to accomplish. Reflection had brought conviction that other
intermeddlers existed than purely Satanic ones. And yet the culture and
science of those times were incompetent to furnish an historian with any
satisfactory evidence that any intelligent actors excepting the devil and
human beings acted in and upon human society. Devil or man, one or the
other, according to the then existing belief, must have enacted
witchcraft. Whether the devil did, had been under consideration for more
than seventy years, and public judgment declared him not guilty. What,
therefore, was the historian's necessity? He was forced to make embodied
human beings its sole enactors. No wonder that the necessity made him
petulant when facts and circumstances forced from his pen intimations that
mere children and old women were competent and actual authors of some
manifestations which, to his own keen and philosophic intellect, seemed
"more than natural." "More than natural" in his sense they obviously
were. A distinct perception that the good _God's_ disembodied children, as
well as the devil's, can naturally traverse avenues earthward, and
manifest their powers among men, would have enabled him to account
philosophically for all the mysteries of those days. But "the fullness of
time" for that had not then come.