“DOUBLE-TONGUED AND NAUGHTY WOMEN.”
I am much impressed in reading the court records of those early
days, to note the vast care taken in all the colonies to prevent
lying, slandering, gossiping, backbiting, and idle babbling, or, as
they termed it, “brabling;” to punish “common sowers and movers”--of
dissensions, I suppose.
The loving neighborliness which proved as strong and as indispensable a
foundation for a successful colony as did godliness, made the settlers
resent deeply any violations, though petty, of the laws of social
kindness. They felt that what they termed “opprobrious schandalls
tending to defamaçon and disparagment” could not be endured.
One old author declares that “blabbing, babbling, tale-telling, and
discovering the faults and frailities of others is a most Common and
evill practice.” He asserts that a woman should be a “main store house
of secresie, a Maggazine of taciturnitie, the closet of connivence,
the mumbudget of silence, the cloake bagge of rouncell, the capcase,
fardel, or pack of friendly toleration;” which, as a whole, seems
to be a good deal to ask. Men were, as appears by the records, more
frequently brought up for these offences of the tongue, but women were
not spared either in indictment or punishment. In Windsor, Conn., one
woman was whipped for “wounding” a neighbor, not in the flesh, but in
the sensibilities.
In 1652 Joane Barnes, of Plymouth, Mass., was indicted for
“slandering,” and sentenced “to sitt in the stockes during the Courts
pleasure, and a paper whereon her facte written in Capitall letters
to be made faste vnto her hatt or neare vnto her all the tyme of her
sitting there.” In 1654 another Joane in Northampton County, Va.,
suffered a peculiarly degrading punishment for slander. She was “drawen
ouer the Kings Creeke at the starne of a boate or Canoux, also the
next Saboth day in the tyme of diuine seruis” was obliged to present
herself before the minister and congregation, and acknowledge her
fault, and ask forgiveness. This was an old Scotch custom. The same
year one Charlton called the parson, Mr. Cotton, a “black cotted
rascal,” and was punished therefor in the same way. Richard Buckland,
for writing a slanderous song about Ann Smith, was similarly pilloried,
bearing a paper on his hat inscribed _Inimicus Libellus_, and since
possibly all the church attendants did not know Latin, to publicly beg
Ann’s forgiveness in English for his libellous poesy. The punishment
of offenders by exposing them, wrapped in sheets, or attired in foul
clothing, on the stool of repentance in the meeting-house in time of
divine service, has always seemed to me specially bitter, unseemly, and
unbearable.
It should be noted that these suits for slander were between persons
in every station of life. When Anneke Jans Bogardus (wife of Dominie
Bogardus, the second established clergyman in New Netherlands), would
not remain in the house with one Grietje van Salee, a woman of doubtful
reputation, the latter told throughout the neighborhood that Anneke had
lifted her petticoats when crossing the street, and exposed her ankles
in unseemly fashion; and she also said that the Dominie had sworn
a false oath. Action for slander was promptly begun, and witnesses
produced to show that Anneke had flourished her petticoats no more than
was seemly and tidy to escape the mud. Judgment was pronounced against
Grietje and her husband. She had to make public declaration in the Fort
that she had lied, and to pay three guilders. The husband had to pay a
fine, and swear to the good character of the Dominie and good carriage
of the Dominie’s wife, and he was not permitted to carry weapons in
town,--a galling punishment.
Dominie Bogardus was in turn sued several times for slander,--once
by Thomas Hall, the tobacco planter, simply for saying that Thomas’
tobacco was bad; and again, wonderful to relate, by one of his
deacons--Deacon Van Cortlandt.
Special punishment was provided for women. Old Dr. Johnson said gruffly
to a lady friend: “Madam, there are different ways of restraining
evil; stocks for men, a ducking-stool for women, pounds for beasts.”
The old English instrument of punishment,--as old as the Doomsday
survey,--the cucking-stool or ducking-stool, was in vogue here, was
insultingly termed a “publique convenience,” and was used in the
Southern and Central colonies for the correction of common scolds. We
read in Blackstone’s _Commentaries_, “A common scold may be indicted
and if convicted shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine
of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or cucking-stool.”
Still another name for this “engine” was a “gum-stool.” The brank, or
scold’s bridle,--a cruel and degrading means of punishment employed
in England for “curst queans” as lately as 1824,--was unknown in
America. A brank may be seen at the Guildhall in Worcester, England.
One at Walton-on-Thames bears the date 1633. On the Isle of Man,
when the brank was removed, the wearer had to say thrice, in public,
“Tongue, thou hast lied.” I do not find that women ever had to “run the
gauntelope” as did male offenders in 1685 in Boston, and, though under
another name, in several of the provinces.
Women in Maine were punished by being gagged; in Plymouth, Mass., and
in Easthampton, L. I., they had cleft sticks placed on their tongues
in public; in the latter place because the dame said her husband “had
brought her to a place where there was neither gospel nor magistracy.”
In Salem “one Oliver--his wife” had a cleft stick placed on her tongue
for half an hour in public “for reproaching the elders.” It was a high
offence to speak “discornfully” of the elders and magistrates.
The first volume of the _American Historical Record_ gives a letter
said to have been written to Governor Endicott, of Massachusetts, in
1634 by one Thomas Hartley from Hungar’s Parish, Virginia. It gives a
graphic description of a ducking-stool, and an account of a ducking in
Virginia. I quote from it:--
The day afore yesterday at two of ye clock in ye afternoon I saw this
punishment given to one Betsey wife of John Tucker, who by ye violence
of her tongue had made his house and ye neighborhood uncomfortable.
She was taken to ye pond where I am sojourning by ye officer who was
joyned by ye magistrate and ye Minister Mr. Cotton, who had frequently
admonished her and a large number of People. They had a machine for
ye purpose yᵗ belongs to ye Parish, and which I was so told had been
so used three times this Summer. It is a platform with 4 small rollers
or wheels and two upright posts between which works a Lever by a
Rope fastened to its shorter or heavier end. At the end of ye longer
arm is fixed a stool upon which sᵈ Betsey was fastened by cords, her
gown tied fast around her feete. The Machine was then moved up to ye
edge of ye pond, ye Rope was slackened by ye officer and ye woman
was allowed to go down under ye water for ye space of half a minute.
Betsey had a stout stomach, and would not yield until she had allowed
herself to be ducked 5 severall times. At length she cried piteously
Let me go Let me go, by Gods help I’ll sin no more. Then they drew
back ye machine, untied ye Ropes and let her walk home in her wetted
clothes a hopefully penitent woman.
I have seen an old chap-book print of a ducking-stool with a “light
huswife of the banck-side” in it. It was rigged much like an
old-fashioned well-sweep, the woman and chair occupying the relative
place of the bucket. The base of the upright support was on a
low-wheeled platform.
Bishop Meade, in his _Old Churches, Ministers, and Families of
Virginia_, tells of one “scolding quean” who was ordered to be ducked
three times from a vessel lying in James River. Places for ducking
were prepared near the Court Houses. The marshal’s fee for ducking was
only two pounds of tobacco. The ducking-stools were not kept in church
porches, as in England. In 1634 two women were sentenced to be either
drawn from King’s Creek “from one Cowpen to another at the starn of a
boat or kanew,” or to present themselves before the congregation, and
ask forgiveness of each other and God. In 1633 it was ordered that a
ducking-stool be built in every county in Maryland. At a court-baron
at St. Clements, the county was prosecuted for not having one of these
“public conveniences.” In February, 1775, a ducking-stool was ordered
to be placed at the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela Rivers,
and was doubtless used. As late as 1819 Georgia women were ducked in
the Oconee River for scolding. And in 1824, at the court of Quarter
Sessions, a Philadelphia woman was sentenced to be ducked, but the
punishment was not inflicted, as it was deemed obsolete and contrary to
the spirit of the times. In 1803 the ducking-stool was still used in
Liverpool, England, and in 1809 in Leominster, England.
One of the last indictments for ducking in our own country was that of
Mrs. Anne Royall in Washington, almost in our own day. She was a hated
lobbyist, whom Mr. Forney called an itinerant virago, and who became so
abusive to congressmen that she was indicted as a common scold before
Judge William Cranch, and was sentenced by him to be ducked in the
Potomac. She was, however, released with a fine.
Women curst with a shrewish tongue were often punished in Puritan
colonies. In 1647 it was ordered that “common scoulds” be punished
in Rhode Island by ducking, but I find no records of the punishment
being given. In 1649 several women were prosecuted in Salem, Mass.,
for scolding; and on May 15, 1672, the General Court of Massachusetts
ordered that scolds and railers should be gagged or “set in a
ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times,” but I do not
believe that this law was ever executed in Massachusetts. Nor was it in
Maine, though in 1664 a dozen towns were fined forty shillings each for
having no “coucking-stool.” Equally severe punishments were inflicted
for other crimes. Katharine Ainis, of Plymouth, was publicly whipped on
training day, and ordered to wear a large B cut in red cloth “sewed to
her vper garment.” In 1637 Dorothy Talbye, a Salem dame, for beating
her husband was ordered to be bound and chained to a post. At a later
date she was whipped, and then was hanged for killing her child, who
bore the strange name of Difficulty. No one but a Puritan magistrate
could doubt, from Winthrop’s account of her, that she was insane.
Another “audatious” Plymouth shrew, for various “vncivill carriages” to
her husband, was sentenced to the pillory; and if half that was told of
her was true, she richly deserved her sentence; but, as she displayed
“greate pensiveness and sorrow” before the simple Pilgrim magistrates,
she escaped temporarily, to be punished at a later date for a greater
sin. The magistrates firmly asserted in court and out that “meekness is
ye chojsest orniment for a woman.”
Joane Andrews sold in York, Maine, in 1676, two stones in a firkin of
butter. For this cheatery she “stood in towne meeting at York and at
towne meeting at Kittery till 2 hours bee expended, with her offense
written upon a paper in capitall letters on her forehead.” The court
record of one woman delinquent in Plymouth, in 1683, is grimly comic.
It seems that Mary Rosse exercised what was called by the “painful”
court chronicler in a triumph of orthographical and nomenclatory art,
an “inthewsiastickall power” over one Shingleterry, a married man, who
cringingly pleaded, as did our first father Adam, that “hee must doo
what shee bade him”--or, in modern phrase, that she hypnotized him.
Mary Rosse and her uncanny power did not receive the consideration that
similar witches and works do nowadays. She was publicly whipped and
sent home to her mother, while her hypnotic subject was also whipped,
and I presume sent home to his wife.
It should be noted that in Virginia, under the laws proclaimed by
Argall, women were in some ways tenderly regarded. They were not
punished for absenting themselves from church on Sundays or holidays;
while men for one offence of this nature had “to lie neck and heels
that night, and be a slave to the colony for the following week; for
the second offence to be a slave for a month; for the third, for a year
and a day.”
It is curious to see how long and how constantly, in spite of their
severe and manifold laws, the pious settlers could suffer through
certain ill company which they had been unlucky enough to bring over,
provided the said offenders did not violate the religious rules of the
community. We might note as ignoble instances, Will Fancie and his
wife, of New Haven, and John Dandy and his wife, of Maryland. Their
names constantly appear for years in the court records, as offenders
and as the cause of offences. John Dandy at one time swore in court
that all his “controversies from the beginning of the World to this
day” had ceased; but it would have been more to the purpose had he
also added till the end of the world, for his violence soon brought
him to the gallows. Will Fancie’s wife seemed capable of any and every
offence, from “stealing pinnes” to stealing the affections of nearly
every man with whom she chanced to be thrown; and the magistrates of
New Haven were evidently sorely puzzled how to deal with her.
I have noted in the court or church records of all witch-ridden
communities, save in the records of poor crazed and bewildered Salem,
where the flame was blown into a roaring blaze by “the foolish breath
of Cotton Mather,” that there always appear on the pages some plain
hints, and usually some definite statements, which account for the
accusation of witchcraft against individuals. And these hints indicate
a hated personality of the witch. To illustrate my meaning, let me
take the case of Goody Garlick, of Easthampton, Long Island. In
reading the early court records of that town, I was impressed with the
constant meddlesome interference of this woman in all social and town
matters. Every page reeked of Garlick. She was an ever-ready witness
in trespass, boundary, and slander suits, for she was apparently on
hand everywhere. She was present when a young man made ugly faces
at the wife of Lion Gardiner, because she scolded him for eating up
her “pomkin porage;” and she was listening when Mistress Edwards
was called a base liar, because she asserted she had in her chest a
new petticoat that she had brought from England some years before,
and had never worn (and of course no woman could believe that). In
short, Goody Garlick was a constant tale-bearer and barrator. Hence it
was not surprising to me to find, when Mistress Arthur Howell, Lion
Gardiner’s daughter, fell suddenly and strangely ill, and cried out
that “a double-tongued naughty woman was tormenting her, a woman who
had a black cat,” that the wise neighbors at once remembered that Goody
Garlick was double-tongued and naughty, and had a black cat. She was
speedily indicted for witchcraft, and the gravamen appeared to be her
constant tale-bearing.
In 1706 a Virginian goody with a prettier name, Grace Sherwood, was
tried as a witch; and with all the superstition of the day, and the
added superstition of the surrounding and rapidly increasing negro
population, there were but three Virginian witch-trials. Grace
Sherwood’s name was also of constant recurrence in court annals,
from the year 1690, on the court records of Princess Anne County,
especially in slander cases. She was examined, after her indictment,
for “witches marks” by a jury of twelve matrons, each of whom testified
that Grace was “not like yur.” The magistrates seem to have been
somewhat disconcerted at the convicting testimony of this jury, and
at a loss how to proceed, but the witch asserted her willingness to
endure trial by water. A day was set for the ducking, but it rained,
and the tenderly considerate court thought the weather unfavorable for
the trial on account of the danger to Grace’s health, and postponed the
ducking. At last, on a sunny July day, when she could not take cold,
the witch was securely pinioned and thrown into Lyn Haven Bay, with
directions from the magistrates to “but her into the debth.” Into the
“debth” of the water she should have contentedly and innocently sunk,
but “contrary to the Judgments of all the spectators” she persisted in
swimming, and at last was fished out and again examined to see whether
the “witches marks” were washed off. One of the examiners was certainly
far from being prepossessed in Grace’s favor. She was a dame who eight
years before had testified that “Grace came to her one night, and rid
her, and went out of the key hole or crack in the door like a black
cat.” Grace Sherwood was not executed, and she did not die of the
ducking, but it cooled her quarrelsome temper. She lived till 1740. The
point where she was butted into the depth is to this day called Witches
Duck.
Grace Sherwood was not the only poor soul that passed through the
“water-test” or “the fleeting on the water” for witchcraft. In
September, 1692, in Fairfield, Conn., the accused witches “Mercy
Disburrow and Elizabeth Clauson were bound hand and foot and put into
the water, and they swam like cork, and one labored to press them
into the water, and they buoyed up like cork.” Many cruel scenes were
enacted in Connecticut, none more so than the persistent inquisition of
Goodwife Knapp after she was condemned to death for witchcraft. She was
constantly tormented by her old friends and neighbors to confess and to
accuse one Goody Staples as an accomplice; but the poor woman repeated
that she must not wrong any one nor say anything untrue. She added:--
The truth is you would have me say that goodwife Staples is a witch
but I have sins enough to answer for already, I know nothing against
goodwife Staples and I hope she is an honest woman. You know not
what I know. I have been fished withall in private more than you are
aware of. I apprehend that goodwife Staples hath done me wrong in her
testimony but I must not return evil for evil.
Being still urged and threatened with eternal damnation, she finally
burst into bitter tears, and begged her persecutors to cease, saying
in words that must have lingered long in their memory, and that still
make the heart ache, “Never, never was poor creature tempted as I am
tempted! oh pray! pray for me!”
The last scene in this New England tragedy was when her poor dead body
was cut down from the gallows, and laid upon the green turf beside her
grave; and her old neighbors, excited with superstition, and blinded to
all sense of shame or unwomanliness, crowded about examining eagerly
for “witch signs;” while in the foreground Goodwife Staples, whose
lying words had hanged her friend, kneeled by the poor insulted corpse,
weeping and wringing her hands, calling upon God, and asserting the
innocence of the murdered woman.
It is a curious fact that, in an era which did not much encourage the
public speech or public appearance of women, they should have served on
juries; yet they occasionally did, not only in witchcraft cases such as
Grace Sherwood’s and Alice Cartwright’s,--another Virginia witch,--but
in murder cases, as in Kent County, Maryland; these juries were not
usually to render the final decision, but to decide upon certain
points, generally purely personal, by which their wise husbands could
afterwards be guided. I don’t know that these female juries shine as
exemplars of wisdom and judgment. In 1693 a jury of twelve women in
Newbury, Mass., rendered this decision, which certainly must have been
final:--
Wee judge according to our best lights and contients that the Death
of said Elizabeth was not by any violens or wrong done to her by any
parson or thing but by some soden stoping of hir Breath.
In Revolutionary days a jury of “twelve discreet matrons” of Worcester,
Mass., gave a decision in the case of Bathsheba Spooner, which was
found after her execution to be a wrong judgment. She was the last
woman hanged by law in Massachusetts, and her cruel fate may have
proved a vicarious suffering and means of exemption for other women
criminals.
Women, as well as men, when suspected murderers, had to go through
the cruel and shocking “blood-ordeal.” This belief, supported by the
assertions of that learned fool, King James, in his _Demonologie_,
lingered long in the minds of many,--indeed does to this day in poor
superstitious folk. The royal author says:--
In a secret murther, if the dead carkas be at any time thereafter
handled by the murtherer, it will gush out of blood.
Sometimes a great number of persons were made to touch in turn the dead
body, hoping thus to discover the murderer.
It has been said that few women were taught to write in colonial days,
and that those few wrote so ill their letters could scarce be read. I
have seen a goodly number of letters written by women in those times,
and the handwriting is comparatively as good as that of their husbands
and brothers. Margaret Winthrop wrote with precision and elegance. A
letter of Anne Winthrop’s dated 1737 is clear, regular, and beautiful.
Mary Higginson’s writing is fair, and Elizabeth Cushing’s irregular and
uncertain, as if of infrequent occurrence. Elizabeth Corwin’s is clear,
though irregular; Mehitable Parkman’s more careless and wavering;
all are easily read. But the most beautiful old writing I have ever
seen,--elegant, regular, wonderfully clear and well-proportioned, was
written by the hand of a woman,--a criminal, a condemned murderer,
Elizabeth Attwood, who was executed in 1720 for the murder of her
infant child. The letter was written from “Ipswitch Gole in Bonds”
to Cotton Mather, and is a most pathetic and intelligent appeal for
his interference to save her life. The beauty and simplicity of her
language, the force and directness of her expressions, her firm
denial of the crime, her calm religious assurance, are most touching
to read, even after the lapse of centuries, and make one wonder that
any one--magistrate or priest,--even Cotton Mather--could doubt her
innocence. But she was hanged before a vast concourse of eager people,
and was declared most impenitent and bold in her denial of her guilt;
and it was brought up against her, as a most hardened brazenry, that
to cheat the hangman (who always took as handsel of his victim the
garments in which she was “turned off”), she appeared in her worst
attire, and announced that he would get but a sorry suit from her. I do
not know the estate in life of Elizabeth Attwood, but it could not have
been mean, for her letter shows great refinement.