19th of April, 1775, reached the lower part of Danvers about nine
o'clock that morning. With a rapidity that is perfectly marvellous,
when we consider the distances from each other over which the[i.230]
inhabitants were scattered, five companies, fully organized and
equipped,—each of them containing men of the village,—rushed to the
field in time to meet the retreating enemy at West Cambridge. It was a
rally and a march without precedent, and never yet surpassed. The day
was extremely sultry for the season; and the distance traversed by many
of the men from the village, before they got into that fight, could not
have been less than twenty miles. Seven belonging to Danvers companies
were killed, and others wounded. A larger offering was made that day at
the baptismal sacrifice to American liberty by Danvers than by any
other town except Lexington; and no town represented in the scene was
more remote. Of the men who fell on this occasion, the following appear
to have been of the village: Samuel Cook, Benjamin Daland, and Perley
Putnam,—the last a descendant of John. Their bodies were brought home,
and buried with appropriate honors; two companies from Salem, and
military detachments from Newburyport, Amesbury, and Salisbury
participating in the ceremonies, and giving the soldier's tribute to
their glory, by volleys over their closing graves.
Moses Porter, when eighteen years of age, attracted attention by his
heroic courage and indomitable pluck at Bunker Hill. He was in an
artillery company, and would not quit his gun when almost every other
man had fallen. His country never allowed him to quit it afterwards.
From that day, he bore a commission in the army of the United States.
He was retained on[i.231] every peace establishment, always in the
artillery, and at the head of that arm of the service for a great
length of time, and until the day of his death. He was in the battle of
Brandywine, and wounded in a subsequent fight on the banks of the
Delaware. He was with Wayne in his campaign against the Western
Indians, and won his share of the glory that crowned it in the final
bloody and decisive conflict. He was at the head of the artillery when
the war of 1812 took place, in active service on the Niagara frontier,
and on the 10th of September, 1813, brevetted "for distinguished
services." He commanded at Norfolk, in Virginia, in 1814, and received
great credit for the ability and vigilance with which he held that most
vital point of the coast defence. At successive periods after the war,
he was at the head of each of the geographical military divisions of
the country. He died at Cambridge, Mass., in 1822, while in command of
the Eastern Department, near the scene of his youthful glory,
forty-seven years before. No man who fought at Bunker Hill remained so
long a soldier of the United States. No man had so extended a record,
and it was bright with honor from the beginning to the end. His
pre-eminent reputation, as a disciplinarian and artillerist of the
highest class, was uniformly maintained. He added to the sterner
qualities required by professional duty a polished urbanity of manners,
and a dignified and commanding aspect and bearing. His ashes rest
beneath the sod of his ancestral acres in Salem Village.[i.232]
When the great war for the suppression of the Southern Rebellion came
on, and the life of the Union was at stake, the same old spirit was
found unabated. A descendant of the family of Raymonds, emulating the
example of his ancestors, rallied his company to the front. At the end
of the war, Lieutenant-Colonel John W. Raymond brought back, in
command, the remnant of his veteran regiment, with its tattered
banners; two of his predecessors in that commission having fallen in
battle. The youthful patriot, William Lowell Putnam, who fell at Ball's
Bluff on the 21st of October, 1861, was a direct descendant of
Nathaniel Putnam. It is an interesting circumstance, that the names of
men who trained in the foot company and with the troopers on the fields
and roads about the village meeting-house two hundred years ago have
re-appeared in the persons of their descendants, in the highest lines
of service and with unsurpassed distinction, in the three great wars of
America,—Major-General Israel, and Brigadier-General Rufus, Putnam, in
the War of the Revolution; Brigadier-General Moses Porter, in the War
of 1812; and Major-General Granville M. Dodge, in the War of the
Rebellion. The last-named is a descendant of a hero of the Narragansett
fight, and was born and educated in Salem Village.
Several lawsuits, particularly in land cases, have been referred to.
They indicate, perhaps, to some extent the ingredients that aggravated
the terrible scenes we are preparing to contemplate. They served to
keep up the general intelligence of the community[i.233] through a
period necessarily destitute of such means of information as we enjoy.
Attendance upon courts of law, serving on juries, having to give
testimony at trials, are indeed in themselves no unimportant part in
the education of a people. Principles and questions of great moment are
forced upon general attention, and become topics of discussion in
places of gathering and at private firesides. Of this material of
intelligence, the people of the village had their full share. It was
their fate to have their minds, and more or less their passions,
stirred up by special local controversies thrust upon them. As a
religious society, they had difficult points of disagreement with the
mother-church, and the town of Salem. While they were supporting a
minister and trying to build a meeting-house for themselves, attempts
were made to tax them to support the minister and build a new
meeting-house in the town. There was a natural reluctance to part with
them, and it was long before an arrangement could be made. The great
distance of many of the farmers from the town prevented their
exercising what they deemed their rightful influence in municipal
affairs. They felt, that, in many respects, their interests were not
identical, and in some absolutely at variance. These topics were much
discussed, and with considerable feeling at times on both sides. The
papers which remain relating to the subject show that the farmers
understood it in all its bearings, and maintained their cause with
clearness of perception and forcibleness of argument and expression. At
one time, they were[i.234] very desirous to be set off as a distinct
town, but this could not be allowed; and, finally, a sort of compromise
was effected. A partial separation—a semi-municipality—was agreed upon.
Salem Village was the result.
In 1670, a petition, with twenty signers, was presented to the town to
be set off as a parish, and be allowed to provide a minister for
themselves. In March, 1672, the town granted the request; and, in
October following, the General Court approved of the project, and gave
it legal effect. The line agreed upon by the town and the village is
substantially defined by the vote of the former, which was as follows:
"All farmers that now are, or hereafter shall be, willing to join
together for providing a minister among themselves, whose habitations
are above Ipswich Highway, from the horse bridge to the wooden bridge,
at the hither end of Mr. Endicott's Plain, and from thence on a west
line, shall have liberty to have a minister by themselves; and when
they shall provide and pay him in a maintenance, that then they shall
be discharged from their part of Salem ministers' maintenance," &c. The
"horse bridge" was across Bass River. The "wooden bridge" was at the
head of Cow-House or Endicott River. Ipswich highway runs along from
one of these points to the other. The south line, beyond the wooden
bridge, is seen on the map. All to the north of this line, and of
Ipswich highway between the bridges, to the bounds of Beverly and
Wenham on the east; Topsfield, Rowley Village,—since Boxford,[i.235]
and Andover on the north; and Reading and Lynn on the west,—was the
Village. Middleton, incorporated afterwards, absorbed a large part of
its western portion; but, at the time of the witchcraft delusion, the
Village was bounded as above described, and as in the map. There was a
specific arrangement fixing the point of time when the farmers were to
become exempt from all charges in aid of the mother-church; that is, as
soon as they had provided for the support of a minister and the
erection of a meeting-house of their own. It was further stipulated,
that the villagers should not form a church until a minister was
ordained; and that they should not settle a minister permanently
without the approval of the old church, and its consent to proceed to
an ordination. This latter restriction was perhaps the cause of all the
subsequent troubles.
Owing, as has been stated in another connection, to erroneous notions
about the topography of the country; the incompetency perhaps, in some
cases, of surveyors; and the want of due care in the General Court and
the towns to have boundaries clearly defined,—uncertainties and
conflicting claims arose in various portions of the colony, but nowhere
to a greater extent than here. The village became involved in
controversies about boundaries with each one of its neighbors;
producing, at times, much exasperation. The documents drawn forth on
these questions, as they appear in the record-book of the village, are
written with ability, and show that there were men among them who knew
how to express and enforce their[i.236] views. The plain, lucid,
well-considered style of Nathaniel Ingersoll's depositions on the
court-files, in numerous cases, render it not improbable that his pen
was put in requisition. Sergeant Thomas Putnam, the parish recorder, as
he was sometimes entitled, was a good writer. His chirography, although
not handsome, is singularly uniform, full, open, and clear, so easily
legible that it is a refreshment to meet with it; and his sentences are
well-constructed, simple, condensed, and to the purpose. His words do
their office in conveying his meaning. No public body ever had a better
clerk. Somehow or other, he and others, brought up in the woods, had
contrived to acquire considerable efficiency in the use of the pen.
Perhaps, a few who, like him, had parents able to afford it, had been
sent to Ipswich or Charlestown to enjoy the privilege of what Cotton
Mather calls "the Cheverian education."
The southern boundary of the village was intended to run due west from
the Ipswich road to Lynn, and was accordingly spoken of as "on a west
line." As originally established, it was defined by an enumeration of a
variety of objects such as trees of different kinds and sizes, as
running through the lands of John Felton, Nathaniel Putnam, and Anthony
Needham, to "a dry stump standing at the corner of Widow Pope's
cow-pen, leaving her house and the saw-mill within the farmer's range,"
and so on to "the top of the hill by the highway side near Berry Pond."
From the changeable conditions of some of the objects, and a diversity
of methods adopted by surveyors,—many[i.237] of them being unacquainted
with, or making no allowance for, the variation of the
compass,—controversies arose with the mother-town: and some
proprietors, like the Gardners, were left in doubt how the line
affected them; and there was, in consequence, much disquietude. The
line was not accurately run until 1700.
It is observable, that the "saw-mill" is still in operation on the same
spot. The "cow-pen," then on the south side of the mill, was, more than
a century ago, removed to the north side, where it has remained ever
since. This estate has interesting reminiscences. It was an original
grant in January, 1640, to Edward Norris, at the time of his settlement
as pastor of the First Church in Salem. He sold to Eleanor Trussler in
1654. It then went into the possession of Henry Phelps, who sold to
Joseph Pope in 1664. His widow, Gertrude, owned it in 1672. In 1793,
Eleazer Pope sold to Nathaniel Ropes, son of Judge Ropes, of Salem. His
heirs sold it back to the Phelpses; and it is now in the possession of
the Rev. Willard Spaulding, of Salem. Originally given as an ordination
present to a minister of the old town, it has, after the lapse of two
hundred and twenty-six years, come round into the hands of another. The
house in which the Popes lived one hundred and twenty-nine years, and
the families that succeeded them for above half a century more,—a
venerable and picturesque specimen of the rural architecture, in its
best form, of the earliest times,—has, within the last ten years, given
place to a[i.238] new one on the same spot. In that old house, besides
unnumbered and unknown instances of the same sort, Israel Putnam
conducted his courtship; and there, on the 19th of July, 1739, he was
married to Hannah, daughter of Joseph Pope.
Contests for what they deemed their rights with the old church and the
border towns and their own town, as in the case just mentioned,
undoubtedly produced a bad effect upon the temper of the people, by
occasional expenses that consumed their substance, and incidents that
sowed the seeds of personal animosities; preparing the way for that
dreadful convulsion which was near at hand. At the very time when the
witchcraft frenzy broke out, they were in the crisis of an exasperating
conflict with Topsfield, occasioned by a wrong done them by the General
Court. This requires to be explained, as it can be, by a collation of
facts of record.
On the 3d of March, 1636, the General Court passed an order that the
bounds of Salem, Ipswich, and Newbury, should extend six miles into the
country. It was afterwards defined to mean that "the six-mile extent,"
as it was called, should be measured from the meeting-houses of the
respective towns. On the 5th of November, 1639, the General Court
passed an order in these words: "Whereas the inhabitants of Salem have
agreed to plant a village near the river that runs to Ipswich, it is
ordered that all the land near their bounds between Salem and the said
river, not belonging to any other town or person by any former
grant,[i.239] shall belong to the said village." On the strength of
this order, the farmers in that part of Salem pushed settlements out
beyond the "six-mile extent," over the ground thus pledged to them;
cleared off the forests, built houses, brought the land under culture,
erected bridges, made roads, and fulfilled their part of the contract
by preparing to establish their village. Four years after the General
Court had thus pledged to "inhabitants of Salem" the privileges of a
village organization on the lands between "Salem and the said river,"
they authorized some inhabitants of Ipswich, who had gone there, to
establish the village on the territory, independent of the Salem men.
This was an unjustifiable and flagrant violation of the stipulated
agreement on the part of the General Court; because it appears by their
own records, that Salem farmers had promptly fulfilled the condition on
their part by going directly upon the ground, and getting farms under
way there before 1643. This careless and indefensible procedure by the
General Court was the cause of interminable trouble and strife on the
tract between Salem bounds and the river, introduced the elements of
discord, and gave a color of legal justification to a conflict of
authority between Salem and Ipswich men. It sowed the seeds of
animosities which aggravated the scenes that occurred in Salem Village
in 1692. In 1658, the General Court passed an order creating the town
of Topsfield, including the larger part of these lands within its
limits. No heed was paid to the remonstrances, against these[i.240]
proceedings, of the Salem farmers, who found themselves, without their
consent, permanently bereft of the benefit that had been promised them,
cut off from all connection with the town of Salem, to which they
originally belonged, and put in the outskirts of another town. It was a
clear case of wrong, and ought to have been rectified. But public
bodies are more reluctant even than individuals to acknowledge
themselves in fault. The people of Salem Village joined in earnest
protests against the acts of the General Court. The old town of Salem
declared by a public vote, that they had always regarded the lands in
controversy as belonging to the village which, under the plighted faith
of the General Court, their inhabitants had been forming. But it was
all in vain. Neither remedy nor reparation could be obtained. The
struggle against this injustice lasted until some time after the
witchcraft occurrences had terminated, and was finally brought to a
close by an order of the Court, that the people on the territory might
maintain parish relations with Salem Village or with Topsfield, at
their individual option. Entire satisfaction was never realized until,
in 1728, they were incorporated, in accordance with their petition,
into a township, under the name of Middleton, with parts of Topsfield,
Boxford, and Andover added. During a period of half a century, this
grievance remained unadjusted. The proceedings on the part of the
village in its public action, as shown in the records, were conducted
with skill, ability, and firmness. But the col[i.241]lisions that
occurred between particular parties were violent and bitter. Salem
settlers were called to pay parish and town rates to Topsfield, but
refused to do it. Constables and tax-collectors were defied. Topsfield
went so far as to claim not only unoccupied lands, but lands within
fence, with houses on them, and families within them, and orchards and
growing fields around them, as part of its "commons;" and it disputed
the titles given by Salem. Of course, the question went, in various
forms, into the county courts; but sometimes, there is reason to
believe, it came to a rougher arbitrament, in the depths of the woods,
between man and man.
John Putnam had gone out and settled lands between the "six-mile
extent" of Salem and Ipswich River. Some of his sons had gone with him.
They had two dwelling-houses, cultivated meadows, orchards, &c. Isaac
Burton says, that, one day, when near John Nichols's house, he heard a
tree fall in the woods; and that he went to see who was chopping there.
It seems that Jacob Towne and John How, Topsfield men, had come in
defiance of John Putnam, and cut down a tree before his face. As they
were two to one, Putnam had to swallow the insult; but he was not the
man to let it rest so. He went out shortly after, accompanied by an
adequate force of sons and nephews, and proceeded to fell the trees.
The sound of the axes reached the ears of the Topsfield men; and Isaac
Easty, Sr., John Easty, John Towne, and Joseph Towne, Jr., undertook to
put a stop to the operation. On reaching the spot, they[i.242] warned
Putnam against cutting timber. He replied, "The timber now and here cut
down has been felled by me and my orders;" and he proceeded to say, "I
will keep cutting and carrying away from this land until next March."
They asked him, "What, by violence?" He answered, "Aye, by violence.
You may sue me: you know where I dwell;" and, turning to his company,
he said, "Fall on." The Putnams were evidently the stronger party; and
the Topsfield men, counting forces, concluded, in their turn, that
discretion, at that time, was the better part of valor. Such scenes
occurred on the disputed ground for a whole generation. It is not
wonderful that all sorts of animosities were kindled. The fact will be
borne in mind, that Isaac Easty and son, with John Towne and son,
constituted the Topsfield force on this occasion.
It cannot be doubted, that these controversies with the surrounding
towns, the mother-church, and the General Court itself, gradually
engendered a very bad state of feeling. The people were deeply
impressed with a conviction that they had been wronged all around and
all the way through. They felt that the whole world was against them;
and when, by a train of mischievous influences, hell itself seemed to
be let loose upon them, it is not strange that they were driven to
distraction.
We come, at last, to that chapter in the history of Salem Village which
will lead us directly to the witchcraft delusion. Its religious
organization was some[i.243]what peculiar; and, although instituted by
a particular arrangement made by the General Court, was, in one or two
features, a complete departure from the ecclesiastical polity elsewhere
rigidly enforced. It was a congregation forbidden, for the time being,
to have a church. It was a society for religious worship, administered,
not by professors of religion or by persons regarded at all in a
religious light, but by householders. The people of the village liked
it, perhaps, all the better for this; and they took hold of it with a
will. Joseph Houlton gave to the parish five and a half acres of land,
in the centre of the village, for the use of the minister. A
parsonage-house was built, "forty-two feet in length, twenty feet
broad, thirteen-feet stud, four chimneys, and no gable-ends." It was
the custom to have a leanto attached to their houses, generally on the
northern side; and one was finally added to the parsonage. There was a
garden within the enclosure. Joseph Hutchinson gave an acre out of his
broad meadow as a site for the meeting-house and it was erected;
"thirty-four feet in length, twenty-eight feet broad, and sixteen feet
between joints." Two end galleries were added, and a "canopy" placed
over the pulpit. The mother-church, having about the same time built a
new meeting-house, voted to give "the farmers their old pulpit and
deacons' seats," which were brought up and duly installed. In the
course of these proceedings, some slight differences arose among them
about matters of detail, but not more than is usual in such cases. In
order[i.244] to despatch at once all that may be required to be said
about the meeting-houses of the village, it may be allowable here to
mention, that the original building did not survive the century. In
1700, partly because the growth of the society began to require it, but
mainly, no doubt, to escape from the painful associations which had
become connected with it, a new meeting-house was built on another
site. The old one was dismantled of all its removable parts, and the
site reverted to Joseph Hutchinson. It is supposed that he removed the
frame to the other side of the road, and converted it into a barn; and
that it was used as such until, in the memory of old persons now
living, it mouldered, crumbled into powder-post, and sunk to the
ground. It stood, after being converted into a barn, on the south side
of the road, nearly in front of Joseph Hutchinson's homestead.
Hutchinson's dwelling-house was probably some distance further down in
the field, where the remains of an old cellar are still to be seen.
Nathaniel Ingersoll gave the land for the new meeting-house. The
records contain the vote, that it "shall stand upon Watch-House Hill,
before Deacon Ingersoll's door." The meeting-houses of the society have
stood there ever since. At that time, it was an elevated spot, probably
covered with the original forest; for the work of clearing, levelling,
and preparing it for occupancy was so considerable as to require a
special provision. The labor and expense of the operation were put on
that portion of the[i.245] congregation brought nearer to the
meeting-house by the change of the site.
In urging their petition to be set off as an independent parish,
distinct from the First Church in Salem, the people of the village
declared, that, if they could not have a ministry established among
them, they would soon "become worse than the heathen around them."
Little did they foresee the immediate, long-continued, and terrible
effects that were to follow the boon thus prayed for. The establishment
of the ministry among them was not merely an opening of Pandora's box:
it was emptying and shaking it over their heads. It led them to a
condition of bitterness and violence, of confusion and convulsion, of
horror and misery, of cruelty and outrage, worse than heathen ever
experienced or savages inflicted.