THE FIRST INTERCOLONIAL WAR, AND THE SALEM WITCHCRAFT.
The charter of Massachusetts being annulled in 1685, Joseph Dudley was
appointed president over the country from Narragansett to Nova Scotia.
The following year Sir Edmund Andros arrived at Boston as royal governor
of all New England. Andros was not only unpopular, as marking by his
governorship the epoch of the loss of independence, but still more so
from the arbitrary character of his proceedings; and as an evidence of
the feeling of the colony, it refused to hold the annual thanksgiving on
the day of his appointing. He was called the tyrant of New England; and
when, early in the year 1689, the news reached Boston, by way of
Virginia, of the revolution in England, an insurrection immediately took
place for his deposition. Andros, affecting to disbelieve the first
rumours of this event, imprisoned those who had brought them to the
city; and then, seeing the determined spirit of the people, who were
already organised under their old leaders, fled with precipitation to
Fort Hill, a fortified stronghold of the city. Simon Bradstreet, now
eighty-seven years of age, was re-chosen governor, while the former
magistrates and some of the principal inhabitants formed themselves into
a committee of safety. A declaration was drawn up by Cotton Mather, and
Andros summoned to surrender, which he did shortly; when, with his
principal officers, Dudley, Randolph, and others, he was sent to
England; and William and Mary having been joyfully proclaimed, the
former mode of government was “temporarily” resumed; and Sir Henry
Ashurst and Increase Mather, father of Cotton Mather, with two others,
hastened to England as agents of the colony.
William was so much occupied in establishing himself on his new throne,
that Massachusetts was for a while left to manage her own affairs. In
the meantime she was busy with her warfare against Canada and the French
Indian allies. In July, 1689, the Pennicook Indians in New Hampshire,
who had lost several of their number by the treachery of the whites,
were instigated by the Baron de St. Castine to take vengeance on the
British settlement at Dover in that state. One evening, therefore, two
Indian squaws, requesting the hospitality of a night’s lodging in the
house of the venerable Major Waldron, a magistrate and Indian trader,
were kindly received and allowed to sleep by the fire. In the dead of
the night they rose and admitted a war-party, who at once filled the
house. The old magistrate started forward, exclaiming, “What now? what
now?” and defending himself with a drawn sword, was stunned by a blow
from a hatchet. Then placing him in mockery at the head of a long table
in his hall, the savage intruders bade him “judge Indians again!” and
drawing gashes across his breast with their knives, said, “Thus I cross
out my account!” till at length he died. The Indians then burnt his
house and others that stood near, and, having killed twenty-three
persons, carried away with them twenty-nine prisoners.
In August the Jesuit father Thury, having established “a perpetual
rosary” in the chapel of the Indian village of Banibas, a hundred Indian
warriors, “purified by confession,” paddled in their birch-bark canoes
from the Penobscot towards Pemaquid, and surprised the settler Thomas
Gyles, who, with his sons, was at work in his fields at noontide,
getting up his hay. The struggle was short; the wounded father asked
merely leave to pray for his children, and then, commending them to God,
sank beneath the hatchets of the impatient Indians, who left his body in
the field covered with boughs. Hastening to Pemaquid, they took it after
two days’ resistance, and then, carrying away many prisoners, returned
to Penobscot.
Alarmed by this outrage, commissioners were sent from New England to the
Mohawks at Albany, asking their assistance. “We have burnt Montreal,”
returned the proud warriors; “we are allies of the English, and we will
keep the chain unbroken;” but they refused to march against the eastern
tribes, from whom the English were now suffering.
We have related already how a party of combined French and Indians in
the following January surprised the village of Schenectady. In March, a
party from Three Rivers, headed by Hertelle, consisting but of
fifty-three persons, three of whom were his sons and two his nephews,
surprised the settlement at Salmon Falls on the Piscataqua, and after a
bloody encounter, in which most of the men of the settlement were
killed, burnt the place, houses, barns, and cattle in their stalls, and
carried away fifty-four prisoners, mostly women and children. The
progress of the march was marked by outrage and murder. A more direful
chronicle does not exist; but we will not relate its horrors.
By the way, Hertelle met with another party from Quebec, which he
joined, and a successful attack was made in May on the settlement of
Casco Bay, in Maine.
Massachusetts was roused, and an expedition was hastily fitted out,
under the command of Sir William Phipps, against Nova Scotia. Sir
William Phipps was a native of Pemaquid, one of twenty-six children by
the same mother. His history, as one of the early “self-made men” of
America, is interesting and instructive. In his boyhood he kept sheep;
as he grew older, he worked as a ship-carpenter; then he was a sailor;
after which he rose to be a ship-master. He received knighthood from the
hand of James II. in consequence of his success in raising, by means of
the diving-bell, the buried treasure of an old Spanish galleon, on the
coast of St. Domingo, which produced a large fortune to himself and
several noblemen who were partners in the enterprise. Thus become a man
of rank and consequence, he returned to Boston, and now, in May 1690,
set sail against Acadia. The conquest of Port Royal was easy, and the
plunder of the neighbouring settlements defrayed the expenses of the
expedition. This success determined the people of New York and New
England to combine for the conquest of Canada. An armament destined for
the reduction of Quebec was placed under the command of Sir William
Phipps, and the land troops in two separate bodies marched to Montreal;
but the expedition was altogether unsuccessful. Sir William was
compelled to return from before Quebec, and of the land forces, one
party was repulsed, and the other stopped by the way, owing to small-pox
having broken out among them. Canada was triumphant, and the event was
celebrated in France by a medal struck for the occasion. But so great,
it is said, had been the fear of the French on the rumour of this
intended invasion, that the aged Frontenac “himself placed the hatchet
in the hands of his allies, and with the tomahawk in his grasp chanted
the war-song and danced the war-dance,” to inspire them with the frenzy
of war.
This unfortunate expedition involved Massachusetts in a great amount of
debt, and gave rise to the first paper money in the British colonies,
though “card money,” as we have said before, had already been made use
of by Canada.
During the summer, Colonel Church, so famous in King Philip’s war, led a
party against the eastern tribes, and attacked an Indian settlement, at
what is now Lewistown, where he burnt the corn and killed many, not
sparing women and children. But this only led to retaliation, which the
Indians understood but too well. Terror and dismay spread through all
the frontier settlements. The Indians lay in ambush, and the ploughman
was shot in the furrow by the unseen foe; it was necessary to go armed
to gather in the crop; every house became a garrison liable to attack at
any moment. The women were taught not only to load the musket, but to
fire it.
Sometimes the Indians killed all who fell into their hands, but most
generally their object was to make prisoners, especially of women and
children, who were sold as servants in Canada. These unhappy captives,
in their long and dreary travels through the woods in midwinter, often
with infants in their arms, suffered dreadfully, not only from hunger
and fatigue, but from the wanton cruelty of their captors. Arrived in
Canada, they were frequently treated with great kindness by their French
purchasers; partly from humane motives, but more commonly from a desire
to make converts of them to the catholic faith. Many who returned,
related that this was one of their sorest trials and temptations. Some
yielded; some children, captives among the Indians, became so accustomed
to the wild and adventurous life of the woods, as to return unwillingly
to civilised life when ransomed.[16]
Massachusetts continued to be governed by the aged Bradstreet until
1692, when the king refusing to confirm the restoration of the former
government, granted a new charter, which extended the limits of the
province, but restricted its privileges. Sir William Phipps, who had
been sent over to England to solicit aid in prosecuting the war against
Canada, as well as to second the other envoys in obtaining the
restoration of the charter, was returned to the colony as governor under
this new charter, which embraced under the title of the Province of
Massachusetts Bay, besides the former territory of Massachusetts,
Plymouth, Maine, and Nova Scotia. Plymouth, always anxious for a
separate government, was thus, contrary to her wishes, joined to
Massachusetts; and New Hampshire, which had only lately placed herself
under her protection, was forcibly dissevered, and that in consequence
of Mason’s claim to the soil having been purchased by a London merchant
of the name of Allen, who appointed as governor, his son-in-law, Usher,
the same bookseller and merchant of Boston who had been employed to
purchase Maine; and hence followed for New Hampshire a long, uneasy time
of disputed claims and lawsuits.
Almost the only privilege which the new charter allowed to the people,
was that of choosing their own representatives. The king reserved to
himself the right of appointing a governor, lieutenant-governor, and
secretary; and of repealing all laws within three years of their
passage.[17] Toleration was secured to all sects excepting Roman
Catholics, the hatred against whom was greatly increased by the
cruelties of the French and their Indian converts. Increase Mather, who,
unlike his colleagues, had yielded to the force of circumstances in
London, and accepted the charter spite of its curtailment of liberties,
was permitted to nominate the officers to be appointed by the crown. By
him Sir William Phipps, who was a member of Mather’s church, was named
as governor, and Stoughton his lieutenant.
A dark and awful cloud was lowering over Massachusetts. Not alone had
she to deplore the ravages of her frontiers and the abridgment of her
charter privileges; a new and direr calamity was now falling upon her,
and which, like so many of her other sorrows and all her mistakes, was
mainly attributable to her spiritual pride. The belief in witchcraft was
in this century prevalent in all Christian countries. The laws of
England, which admitted it and punished it with death, had been adopted
in Massachusetts, strengthened by the Scriptural Judaic command, “Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live;” and as early as 1645 the mania
commenced, several persons at Boston and other towns were taken up and
tried, and one individual executed, for this supposed crime.
“Among other evidences,” says Hildreth, “of a departure from the ancient
landmarks, and of the propagation even in New England of a spirit of
doubt, were the growing suspicions of the reality of that every-day
supernaturalism which formed so prominent a feature of the puritan
theology. Against this rising incredulity, Increase Mather had, in 1684,
published a book of ‘Remarkable Providences,’ which enumerated and
testified to the truth of all the supposed cases of witchcraft which had
occurred in New England, with arguments to prove their reality.”
As the sight of an execution for murder creates in the mind of the
debased a morbid passion for the committal of the crime, so did the
publication of this work soon give rise to a supposed case of
witchcraft. A house at Newbury was said to be haunted or bewitched, and
the wife of the occupant, a wretched old woman, was accused as a witch.
Seventeen people came forward on her trial to charge her with
misfortunes which had happened to them in the course of their lives, and
but for the firmness and good sense of Simon Bradstreet, and the
abrogation of the charter which just then took place, and gave people
something else to think of, she would have been executed on the charge.
Mather, however, had sown seed which fell into fruitful ground, and in
due course sprang up, being fostered in the meantime by the
re-publication, in Boston, of the works of Richard Baxter and the
authority of Sir Matthew Hale. In 1688, therefore, the morbid
imaginations of the people, already predisposed, being excited by this
mental food, cases of witchcraft were discovered. The four children of a
“pious family” in Boston, the eldest a girl of thirteen, began to be
strangely affected, barking like dogs, purring like cats, being at times
deaf, dumb, or blind; having their limbs distorted, and complaining of
being pricked, pinched, pulled, and cut. A pious minister was called in,
witchcraft was suspected, and an old Irish woman, an indented servant of
the family, who had scolded the children in Irish because her daughter
was accused of theft, was taken up on the charge. Five ministers held a
day of fasting and prayer, and the old woman was tried, found guilty,
and executed.
“Though Increase Mather,” says Hildreth, “was absent, he had a zealous
representative in his son, Cotton Mather, a young minister of
five-and-twenty, a prodigy of learning, eloquence, and piety, recently
settled as colleague with his father over Boston North Church. Cotton
Mather had an extraordinary memory, stuffed with all sorts of learning.
His application was equal to that of a German professor. His lively
imagination, trained in the school of puritan theology, and nourished on
the traditionary legends of New England, of which he was a voracious and
indiscriminate collector, was still further stimulated by fasts, vigils,
prayers, and meditations, almost equal to those of any catholic saint.
Like the Jesuit missionaries of Canada, he often believed himself,
during his devotional exercises, to have direct and personal
communication with the Deity. In every piece of good fortune he saw an
answer to his prayers; in every calamity or mortification, the especial
personal malice of the devil or his agents.”
In order to study these cases of witchcraft at his leisure, Cotton
Mather took one of the bewitched to his house, and the devil within her
flattered his religious vanity to the extreme. He preached and prayed on
the subject, calling witchcraft “a most nefandous treason against the
Majesty on High,” and wrote another book of “Memorable Providences
relating to Witchcraft and Possession,” in which he defied the modern
Sadducee any longer to doubt. Four ministers testified to the
unanswerable arguments which he thus set forth, as did also Richard
Baxter in London.
Public attention thus turned to the subject, other cases of the same
character soon occurred. Two young girls of Salem, the daughter and
niece of Samuel Parris the minister, began to be “moved by strange
caprices,” and being pronounced bewitched by a physician of Boston,
Tituba, an old Indian woman, the servant of the family, was suspected,
principally because she had volunteered to discover the witch by some
magical rites. Of course nothing was talked of but these girls; it was
quite an interesting excitement; ministers met to pray; the whole town
of Salem fasted and prayed, and a fast was ordered throughout the
colony. The rage for notoriety, or the effects of these cases on the
imagination of others of similarly nervous temperaments, soon produced
their results, and not only were several girls affected in the same way,
but also poor old John, the Indian husband of Tituba.
The whole of Salem was agog, and the magistrates took up the matter
solemnly. Accusations spread; two women, the one crazy, the other
bed-ridden, were suspected, in addition to the others. Parris preached
the next Sunday on the subject, and the sister of one of the accused
left the church, which was enough to throw suspicion upon her. The
deputy-governor of the colony came to Salem, and a great court was held
in the meeting-house, five other magistrates and “a great crowd being
present.” Parris was the general accuser. The accused were held with
their arms extended and their hands held open, lest by the least motion
of their fingers they might inflict torments on their victims, who
sometimes appeared to be struck dumb or knocked down by the mere glance
of their eye.
“In the examinations in Salem meeting-house, some very extraordinary
scenes occurred. ‘Look there,’ cried one of the afflicted, ‘there is
Goody Procter on the beam.’ (This Goody Procter’s husband, firmly
protesting the innocence of his wife, had attended her to the court,
and, in consequence, was charged by some of ‘the afflicted’ with being a
wizard). At the above exclamation, many if not all the bewitched had
grievous fits. _Question by the Court_: ‘Ann Putnam, who hurts you?’
_Answer_: ‘Goodman Procter, and his wife too.’ Then some of the
afflicted cry out, ‘There is Procter going to take up Mrs. Pope’s feet;’
and immediately her feet are taken up. _Question by the Court_: ‘What do
you say, Goodman Procter, to these things?’ _Answer_: ‘I know not, I am
innocent!’ Abigail Williams, another of the afflicted, cries out, ‘There
is Goodman Procter going to Mrs. Pope;’ and immediately the said Pope
falls into a fit. _A Magistrate to Procter_: ‘You see the devil will
deceive you; the children (so the afflicted were called) could see what
you were going to do before the woman was hurt. I would advise you to
repentance, for you see the devil is bringing you out!’ Abigail Williams
again cries out, ‘There is Goodman Procter going to hurt Goody Bibber;’
and immediately Bibber falls also into a fit. And so on. But it was on
evidence such as this that people were believed to be witches, and were
hurried to prison and tried for their lives.
“Tituba was flogged into confession; others yielded to a pressure more
stringent than blows. Weak women, astonished at the charges and
contortions of their accusers, assured that they themselves were
witches, and urged to confess as the only means of saving their lives,
were easily prevailed upon to admit any absurdities: journeys through
the air on broomsticks, to attend a witch sacrament—a sort of travesty
on the Christian ordinance—at which the devil appeared in the shape of a
‘small black man;’ signing the devil’s book; renouncing their former
baptism, and being baptized anew by the devil in ‘Wenham Pond,’ after
the Anabaptist fashion. Called upon to tell who were present at these
sacrifices, the confessing witches wound up with new accusations. By the
time Phipps arrived in the colony, near a hundred persons were already
in prison. Nor was the mischief limited to Salem; many persons were
accused in Andover, Boston, and other towns.”[18]
Phipps landed on the 14th of May; on the 16th the charter was published,
and he installed in office. On the 2nd of June, Stoughton was sitting as
chief judge, appointed by the governor, in a special court at Salem, on
the trial of a poor old friendless woman, one Bridget Bishop, who was
accused by Samuel Parris; another poor woman, Deliverance Hobbs by name,
among other things was accused, as Cotton Mather relates, “of giving a
look towards the great and spacious meeting-house of Salem, and
immediately a demon, invisibly entering the house, tore down a part of
it.” She protested her innocence, but was hanged on the 10th of June.
Cotton Mather and the other ministers of Boston and Charlestown were
loud in their gratitude and praise of the zealous Phipps and Stoughton,
and the accusations and trials and condemnations proceeded. It was a
chapter out of the history of the middle ages.
It remained for the science and better knowledge of the present day to
explain these witch phenomena according to psychological and natural
laws. At that time they were believed to be nothing less than the work
of the devil, and as such were punished. “We recommend,” said the
minister of that stern puritan religion which had now grown rampant in
severity, “the speedy and rigorous prosecution of such as have rendered
themselves obnoxious;” and the court accordingly, on the 30th of June,
condemned to death five women, of blameless lives, all protesting their
innocence. Of these five, Rebecca Nurse, whose sister had left the
church while Samuel Parris was preaching a violent sermon against
witches, was at first acquitted on insufficient evidence, and a reprieve
was granted by Phipps. But Parris, who seems to have been a man of a
virulent disposition, could not bear that an especial object of his
hatred, one against whom he had preached, and whom he had denounced from
the pulpit, should escape. The subservient governor recalled the
reprieve, and the following communion-day she was taken in chains to the
meeting-house, excommunicated, and hanged with the rest.
The frenzy increased. On August 3rd, six more were arraigned; and
John Willard, an officer who had been employed to arrest suspected
persons, declining to serve any longer, was accused by “the
afflicted,”—_afflicted_ indeed!—condemned and hanged. Among those
who suffered with Willard was Procter, the husband of Elizabeth
Procter, her execution having been delayed on account of her
pregnancy. He had truly and manfully maintained his wife’s
innocence, and, as we have already related, been himself accused;
others witnessed against him under the agony of torture, and he was
condemned. He was a man of firm and clear character, and petitioned
for trial in Boston, but to no purpose. The behaviour and execution
of this man sank deep into the public mind, and offended many. Still
greater was the effect produced by the execution of George
Burroughs, himself a minister, who was accused of witchcraft because
he denied its possibility. He was formerly the minister at Salem;
afterwards at Saco, whence he had been driven by the Indian war; and
was now, to his own sorrow, once more in Salem, where he had many
enemies. Among other things charged against him was the fact, that
though small of size, he was remarkably strong, whence it was argued
that his strength was the gift of the devil. “On the ladder,” says
Bancroft, “he cleared his innocence by an earnest speech, and by
repeating the Lord’s Prayer composedly and exactly with a fervency
that astonished all who heard him. Tears flowed to the eyes of many;
it seemed as if the spectators would rise up to hinder the
execution. Cotton Mather, on horseback among the crowd, addressed
the people, cavilling at the ordination of Burroughs as no true
minister; insisting on his guilt, and hinting that the devil could
sometimes assume the appearance of an angel of light; and the
hanging proceeded.”
On September 9th, six women were found guilty and condemned; and a few
days later again eight women; while Giles Cory, an old man of eighty,
who refused to plead, was pressed to death—a barbarous usage of the
English law, which, however, was never again followed in the colonies.
On the 23rd of this month, the afflicted are stated by Hildreth to have
amounted to about fifty; fifty-five had confessed themselves witches and
turned accusers; twenty persons had already suffered death; eight more
were under sentence. The jails were full of prisoners, and new
accusations were added every day. Such was the state of things when the
court adjourned to the first Monday in November. The interval was
employed by Cotton Mather in preparing his “Wonders of the Invisible
World,” containing a triumphant account of the trials, and vaunting the
good offices of the late executions, which he considered a cause of
pious thankfulness to God. Although the president of Harvard College
approved, the governor commended, and Stoughton expressed his thanks for
the work of Cotton Mather, yet a spirit was abroad in the colony and
becoming more demonstrative every day, which was very adverse both to
these outrages on humanity and to their promoters.
In the interim between the last executions and the sitting of the
adjourned court, the representatives of the people assembled, together
with the church of Andover, with their minister at their head, and
protested against these witch trials: “We know not,” said they, “who can
think himself safe, if the accusations of children and others under a
diabolical influence shall be received against persons of good fame.”
Very truly and reasonably did they say so; for even now one of the
Andover ministers was accused, and the wife of the minister of Beverley;
and when the son of old Governor Bradstreet refused as a magistrate to
grant any more warrants, he himself was accused, and shortly after his
brother, for bewitching a dog; and both were obliged to flee for their
lives, their property being immediately seized. And more than this, when
Lady Phipps, in the absence of her husband, interfered to obtain the
discharge of a prisoner from jail, accusations were whispered even
against her!
The frenzy of delusion becoming weaker, Cotton Mather wrote, and
circulated in manuscript, the account of a case of witchcraft in his own
parish in Boston. This called forth a reply from Robert Calef, a
clear-headed, fearless man, who, by the weapons of reason and ridicule,
overcame and put to flight, in an astonishingly short time, both witches
and devils. It was in vain that Cotton Mather denounced him as “a coal
from hell;” the sentiment of the people went with him; and though a
circular from Harvard College signed by the president, Increase Mather,
solicited from all the ministers of the neighbourhood a return of the
apparitions, possessions, enchantments, and all extraordinary things,
wherein the existence and agency of the invisible world is more sensibly
demonstrated, the next ten years produced scarcely five returns.[19]
The invisible world was indeed becoming really so; and as is always the
case, the superstition, when it ceased to be credited, lost its power of
delusion. Cotton Mather and his party were too self-righteous to follow
the example of William Penn and the Quakers of Pennsylvania, or they
might soon have cleared Massachusetts of its witches. The Swedes who
emigrated to the banks of the Delaware brought with them all the terrors
and superstitions which the wild and gloomy Scandinavian mythology had
engrafted upon Christianity, and a woman was accused by them of
witchcraft in 1684. The case was brought to trial; William Penn sat as
judge; and the jury, composed principally of Quakers, found the woman
“guilty of the common fame of being a witch; but not guilty as she stood
indicted.” No notoriety could be obtained by witchcraft in Pennsylvania;
it furnished the excitement neither of preaching, praying nor fasting;
and the psychological epidemic, not finding there a moral atmosphere
capable of sustaining it, died out. There were no more cases of
witchcraft in Pennsylvania.
Scarcely was this fatal delusion at an end, when Boston was visited by
the yellow fever, brought there by troops from the West Indies on their
way to co-operate in the attack on Canada, and to which the recently
excited state of the public mind made the city more susceptible.
In 1694 Sir William Phipps, who was a man of choleric temper, having got
into dispute with the royal collector at Boston, and afterwards with the
captain of a man-of-war, on whom he inflicted personal chastisement and
then committed to prison, was recalled to England to account for his
conduct, where he died shortly after his arrival. The general court
petitioned parliament that he might not be removed. The Earl of
Bellamont was appointed his successor; but his arrival being delayed,
Stoughton administered the government for several years.
The treaty which had been made with the eastern Indians at Pemaquid had
not remained unbroken; during the awful witch-delusion the horrors of
Indian warfare were renewed. In 1694 a party of Indians, again
instigated by the Jesuit Thury, and led by French officers, surprised
the settlement at Oyster Bay, now Durham, and killed or took captive
about 100 of the inhabitants. Port Royal was re-captured by Villebon;
and soon after the whole of Acadia returned to its ancient allegiance.
In the autumn of 1696 the fort of Pemaquid, being compelled to surrender
to a mixed force of French and Indians, was laid in ruins, and the
neighbouring country devastated. Colonel Church, on the other hand,
destroyed Beau Bassin, a French settlement on the Bay of Fundy.
Still instigated by the French, who excited in the hearts of their
Indian allies the utmost hatred of the English, the remoter territory of
Massachusetts was overrun by them, and early in 1697 they advanced as
far as the towns of Andover and Haverhill, to within twenty-five miles
of Boston, killing many of the inhabitants, and carrying others into
captivity.
We must be permitted to give here an incident from this terrible
frontier life, which will serve to show the horrors of the time and the
spirit of the frontier settler. On March 15th, 1697, a party of Indians
came to Haverhill, and began to burn and slay as usual, and so reached
the house of Hannah Dustan, who had been confined about a week, and was
there with her nurse, Mary Neff. Her husband, who was at work in the
distant fields with their eight children, hurried home with his loaded
gun for her defence. But the Indians were on his threshold; and he, with
his eight children, was in a strait what to do; whether to rush to the
rescue of his wife and leave the children, or secure their safety and
leave his wife and home to the care of Providence. The Indians came up
to him also, but he fired, and bidding his children flee, kept them
before him, until he had reached a place of safety, about two miles off;
here leaving the children, he returned to his home, which by this time
was a heap of burning ruins. The Indians, having entered the house,
compelled the mother and her infant to rise and prepare to accompany
them, together with the nurse and about half a score other English
captives. The brains of the infant were dashed out against a tree, that
the care of it might not impede the progress of the mother. For many
days they were driven on by their savage captors, until they were about
150 miles up the wilderness country. “The good God,” says Cotton Mather,
who relates this circumstance, “heard the sighs of the prisoners, and
gave them, favour in the eyes of their enemies.” The Indians were
converts of the French Jesuits, and very zealous in their devotions, in
which they would have compelled the women to join, ever threatening
them, as they went along, with having to run the gauntlet in the Indian
village to which they were bound. With the two women was a boy from
Worcester, Samuel Leonardson by name, and they three planned a scheme of
escape. The boy, conversing with his Indian master, inquired how the
Indian smote when he intended instant death; the savage warrior
instructed him. Accordingly, one night, when the Indians were soundly
asleep, the women and the boy arose, each armed with a tomahawk, and
smote as the Indian had taught them. Ten out of the twelve who occupied
the wigwam were slain; the other two, a boy and a squaw, escaped. After
this, embarking in a birchen canoe on the Merrimac which they had
followed, the three, with the ten scalps in a bag, and their tomahawks
as trophies, arrived at the English settlements, where they were
received by their friends as persons returned from the dead; and £50 was
voted to them by the General Assembly, while the whole colony rang with
the fame of their adventure.
The peace of Ryswick caused a temporary cessation of hostilities and the
restoration to each party of the conquests which the other had made.
Peace being established in England, government had now leisure to pay a
little attention to the colonies, and that attention, of course, was not
of the most agreeable kind. In answer to the reiterated complaints of
the English merchants, of the violation of the Acts of Trade, and
especially of direct intercourse being carried on between the colonies
and Scotland and Ireland, the Board of Trade and Plantations was
established, which continued a rigid and jealous oversight of the
American colonies until the time of the American Revolution. All direct
trade between Ireland and the colonies was now strictly prohibited, on
the plea that, if any trade were at all permitted with this unfortunate
island, which was just then smarting under the inflictions of the late
war, it would be a cover for the smuggling of colonial produce, known
under the term “enumerated articles.” The number of revenue officers was
increased, and the unpopular Randolph was appointed surveyor-general,
and placed at their head.
In 1699 the Earl of Bellamont arrived in Boston from New York. How
popular he made himself, we have already related. Bellamont was the
first governor who opened the General Assembly by a formal speech, and
from his time it has been continued.
“Neither Usher, the lieutenant-governor of New Hampshire, who fled to
Boston in alarm for his life; nor his successor, Partridge, who, being a
ship-carpenter, had the merit of introducing into that province a
profitable timber-trade to Portugal; nor the proprietary, Allen, who
presently assumed the government, were more successful than Cranfield
had been in extorting quit-rents from the settlers of that sturdy little
province. And New Hampshire, now included under Bellamont’s commission,
continued for the next forty years to have the same governors as
Massachusetts, though generally a lieutenant-governor was at the head of
the administration.”[20]
On the death of Lord Bellamont, Massachusetts had the mortification of
receiving the “apostate” Joseph Dudley, the friend of the hated Andros,
as governor, he having obtained the appointment through the influence of
Cotton Mather. The popular party, they who had opposed the tyranny of
Andros, now set themselves in opposition to the new governor, and
refused to comply with the royal instructions, which required them to
fix permanently the salaries of the governor and crown officers.
Although “a spirit of latitudinarianism” was gradually narrowing the
bounds of the theocratic power in Massachusetts, still her code retained
most of its rigid enactments. It was still forbidden “to travel, work,
or play, on the Sabbath;” and constables and tithingmen were commanded
to “prevent all persons from swimming in the waters; all unnecessary and
unreasonable walking in the streets or fields; keeping open of shops, or
following secular occasions or recreations on the evening preceding the
Lord’s-day, or on any part of the day or evening following.”
Atheism and blasphemy, under which was included the denying that any of
the canonical books of Scripture were the inspired word of God, were
punished with six months’ imprisonment; setting in the pillory;
whipping; boring through the tongue with a red-hot iron; sitting on the
gallows with a rope round the neck; or any two of these punishments, at
the discretion of the court. Adultery was punished by the guilty parties
being set on the gallows with a rope round their necks, and on their way
thence to the jail, to be severely flogged, not exceeding forty stripes;
and ever after to wear the capital letter A, of two inches long, cut out
of cloth of a contrary colour to their clothes, and sewed upon their
upper garments on the outside of their arm or on their back in public
view, and if caught without this, to be liable to fifteen stripes.[21]
This extraordinary mode of punishment has, it will be remembered by our
readers, furnished the subject for one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fine and
graphic stories, “The Scarlet Letter.”