There had been misery enough caused by persecutions for witchcraft
within living memory to have warned Mr. Parris, one would think, how he
carried down his people into those troubled waters again; but at that
time such trials were regarded by society as trials for murder are by
us, and not as anything surprising except from the degree of wickedness.
William Penn presided at the trial of two Swedish women in Philadelphia
for this gravest of crimes; and it was only by the accident of a legal
informality that they escaped, the case being regarded with about the
same feeling as we experienced a year or two ago when the murderess of
infants, Charlotte Winsor, was saved from hanging by a doubt of the law.
If the crime spread--as it usually did--the municipal governments issued
an order for a day of fasting and humiliation, "in consideration of the
extent to which Satan prevails amongst us in respect of witchcraft."
Among the prosecutions which followed on such observances there was one
here and there which turned out, too late, to have been a mistake.
This kind of discovery might be made an occasion for more fasting and
humiliation; but it seems to have had no effect in inducing caution or
suggesting self-distrust. Mr. Parris and his partisans must have been
aware that on occasion of the last great spread of witchcraft, the
magistrates and the General Court had set aside the verdict of the jury
in one case of wrongful accusation, and that there were other instances
in which the general heart and conscience were cruelly wounded and
oppressed, under the conviction that the wisest and saintliest woman in
the community had been made away with by malice, at least as much as
mistaken zeal.
The wife of one of the most honored and prominent citizens of Boston,
and the sister of the Deputy Governor of Massachusetts, Mrs. Hibbins,
might have been supposed safe from the gallows, while she walked in
uprightness, and all holiness and gentleness of living. But her husband
died; and the pack of fanatics sprang upon her, and tore her to
pieces--name and fame, fortune, life, and everything. She was hanged in
1656, and the farmers of Salem Village and their pastor were old enough
to know, in Mr. Parris' time, how the "famous Mr. Norton," an eminent
pastor, "once said at his own table"--before clergymen and elders--"that
one of their magistrates' wives was hanged for a witch, only for having
more wit than her neighbors;" and to be aware that in Boston "a deep
feeling of resentment" against her persecutors rankled in the minds of
some of her citizens; and that they afterward "observed solemn marks of
Providence set upon those who were very forward to condemn her." The
story of Mrs. Hibbins, as told in the book before us, with the brief
and simple comment of her own pleading in court, and the codicil to her
will, is so piteous and so fearful, that it is difficult to imagine how
any clergyman could countenance a similar procedure before the memory
of the execution had died out, and could be supported in his course
by officers of his church, and at length by the leading clergy of the
district, the magistrates, the physicians, "and devout women not a few."
[Here are evidences of large Cautiousness, fear, and timidity, with the
vivid imagination of untrained childhood.]