“A strange infatuation had already begun to produce misery in private
families, and disorder throughout the community,” says an old American
writer, in allusion to the period of our story, 1691-2. “The imputation
of witchcraft was accompanied with a prevalent belief of its reality;
and the lives of a considerable number of innocent people were
sacrificed to blind zeal and superstitious credulity. The mischief
began at Naumkeag, (Salem) but it soon extended into various parts of
the colony. The contagion however, was principally within the county of
Essex. The æra of English learning, had scarcely commenced. Laws then
existed in England against witches; and the authority of Sir Matthew
Hale, who was revered in New England, not only for his knowledge in the
law, but for his gravity and piety, had doubtless, great influence. The
trial of the witches in Suffolk, in England, was published in 1684; and
there was so exact a resemblance between the Old England dæmons and
the New, that, it can hardly be doubted the arts of the designing were
borrowed, and the credulity of the populace augmented from the parent
country.
* * * * *
“The gloomy state of New England probably facilitated the delusion, for
‘superstition flourishes in times of danger and dismay.’ The distress
of the colonist, at this time, was great. The sea-coast was infested
with privateers. The inland frontiers, east and west, were continually
harassed by the French and Indians. The abortive expedition to Canada,
had exposed the country to the resentment of France, the effects of
which were perpetually dreaded. The old charter was gone, and what
evils would be introduced by the new, which was very reluctantly
received by many, time only could determine, but fear might forbode.
* * How far these causes operating in a wilderness that was scarcely
cleared up, might have contributed toward the infatuation, it is
difficult to determine. It were injurious however, to consider New
England as peculiar in this culpable credulity, with its sanguinary
effects; for more persons have been put to death for witchcraft, in a
single county in England, in a short space of time, than have suffered
for the same cause, in all New-England, since its first settlement.”
Another American writer who was an eye witness of the facts which are
embodied in the following narrative, says, “As to the method which
the Salem justices do take in their examinations, it is truly this: A
warrant being issued out to apprehend the persons that are charged and
complained of by the afflicted children, (Abigail Paris and Bridget
Pope) said persons are brought before the justices, the afflicted being
present. The justices ask the apprehended why they afflict these poor
children; to which the apprehended answer they do not afflict them.
The justices order the apprehended to look upon the said children,
which accordingly they do; and at the time of that look (I dare not
say _by_ that look as, the Salem gentlemen do) the afflicted are cast
into a fit. The apprehended are then blinded and ordered to touch the
afflicted; and at that touch, though not _by_ the touch (as above) the
afflicted do ordinarily come out of their fits. The afflicted persons
then declare and affirm that the apprehended have afflicted them;
upon which the apprehended persons though of never so good repute are
forthwith committed to prison on suspicion of witchcraft.”
At this period, the chief magistrate of the New-Plymouth colony, a
shrewd, artful, uneducated man, was not only at the head of those who
believed in witchcraft as a familiar thing, but he was a head-ruler
in the church. He was a native New-Englander of _low birth_--so
say the records of our country,--where birth is now, and ever will
be a matter of inquiry and solicitude, of shame perhaps to the few
and of pride to the few, but of inquiry with all, in spite of our
ostentatious republicanism. He was the head man over a body of men
who may be regarded as the natural growth of a rugged soil in a time
of religious warfare; with hearts and with heads like the resolute
unforgiving Swiss-protestant of their age, or the Scotch-covenanter
of an age that has hardly yet gone by. They were the Maccabees of the
seventeenth century, and he was their political chief. They were the
fathers of a new church in a new world, where no church had ever been
heard of before; and he was ready to buckle a sword upon his thigh
and go out against all the earth, at the command of that new church.
They were ministers of the gospel, who ministered with fire and sword
unto the savages whom they strove to convert; believers, who being
persecuted in Europe, hunted out of Europe, and cast away upon the
shores of America, set up a new war of persecution here--even here--in
the untrodden--almost unapproachable domain of the Great Spirit of
the Universe; pursued their brethren to death, scourged, fined,
imprisoned, banished, mutilated, and where nothing else would do, hung
up their bodies between heaven and earth for the good of their souls;
drove mother after mother, and babe after babe, into the woods for
not believing as their church taught; made war upon the lords of the
soil, the savages who had been their stay and support while they were
strangers, and sick and poor, and ready to perish, and whom it was
therefore a duty for them--after they had recovered their strength--to
make happy with the edge of the sword; such war as the savages would
make upon the wild beast--way-laying them by night, and shooting them
to death, as they lie asleep with their young, without so much as a
declaration of war; destroying whithersoever they went, whatsoever
they saw, in the shape of a dark man, as if they had authority from
above to unpeople the woods of America; firing village after village,
in the dead of the night--in the dead of winter too--and going to
prayer in the deep snow, while their hands were smoking with slaughter,
and their garments stiffening with blood--the blood, not of warriors
overthrown by warriors in battle, but of the decrepit, or sick, or
helpless; of the aged man, or the woman or the babe--set fire to in
their sleep.--Such were the men of Massachusetts-Bay, at the period of
our story, and he was their political chief.
He had acquired a large property and the title of _Sir_; a title which
would go a great way at any time among the people of New-England, who
whatever else they may be, and whatever they may pretend, are not
now, and were not during the governship of Sir William Phips, at the
period we refer to, and we dare say, never will be, without a regard
for titles and birth, and ribbons, and stars, and garters, and much
more too, than would ever be credited by those who only judge of them
by what they are pleased to say of themselves in their fourth-of-July
orations. His rank and wealth were acquired in rather a strange
way--not by a course of rude mercantile adventure, such as the native
Yankee is familiar with from his birth, through every unheard-of sea,
and along every unheard-of shore; but by fishing up ingots of gold, and
bars of silver, from the wreck of a Spanish hulk, which had been cast
away on the coast of La Plata, years and years before, and which he had
been told of by Mr. Paris, the minister of Salem,--a worthy, studious,
wayward man, who had met with some account of the affair, while
rummaging into a heap of old newspapers and ragged books that fell in
his way.
Another would have paid no attention, it is probable, to the advice of
the preacher--a man who had grown old in poring over books that nobody
else in that country had ever met with or heard of; but the hardy
New-Englander was too poor and too anxious for wealth to throw a chance
away; and having satisfied himself in some degree about the truth of
a newspaper-narrative which related to the ship, he set sail for the
mother country, received the patronage of those, who if they were not
noblemen, would be called partners in every such enterprise, with more
than the privilege of partners--for they generally contrive to take
the praise and the profit, while their plebeian associates have to put
up with the loss and the reproach; found the wreck, and after a while
succeeded in weighing a prodigious quantity of gold and silver. He was
knighted in “consequence,” we are told; but in consequence of what, it
would be no easy matter to say: and after so short an absence that he
was hardly missed, returned to his native country with a new charter,
great wealth, a great name, the title of Sir, and the authority of a
chief magistrate.
Such are a few of the many facts which every body that knew him was
acquainted with by report, and which nobody thought of disbelieving
in British-America, till the fury about witches and witchcraft took
possession of the people; after which they began to shake their heads
at the story, and getting more and more courage as they grew more
and more clear-sighted, they went on doubting first one part of the
tale, and then another, till at last they did not scruple to say
of their worthy Governor himself, and of the aged Mr. Paris, that
one of the two--they did not like to say which--had got above their
neighbors’ heads, after all, in a very strange way--a very strange way
indeed--they did not like to say how; and that the sooner the other was
done with old books, the better it would be for him. He had a Bible of
his own to study, and what more would a preacher of the Gospel have?
Governor Phips and Matthew Paris were what are called neighbors in
America. Their habitations were not more than five leagues apart. The
Governor lived at Boston, the chief town of Massachusetts-Bay, and the
preacher at Naumkeag, in a solitary log-house, completely surrounded
by a thick wood, in which were many graves; and a rock held in great
awe by the red men of the north, and avoided with special care by the
whites, who had much reason to believe that in other days, it had been
a rock of sacrifice, and that human creatures had been offered up there
by the savages of old, either to Hobbamocko, their evil deity, or to
Rawtantoweet, otherwise Ritchtau, their great Invisible Father. Matthew
Paris and Sir William Phips had each a faith of his own therefore, in
all that concerned witches and witchcraft. Both were believers--but
their belief was modified, intimate as they were, by the circumstances
and the society in which they lived. With the aged, poor and solitary
man--a widower in his old age, it was a dreadful superstition, a
faith mixed up with a mortal fear. With the younger and richer man,
whose hope was not in the grave, and whose thoughts were away from
the death-bed; who was never alone perhaps for an hour of the day;
who lived in the very whirl of society, surrounded by the cheerful
faces of them that he most loved on earth, it wore a less harrowing
shape--it was merely a faith to talk of, and to teach on the Sabbath
day, a curious faith suited to the bold inquisitive temper of the age.
Both were believers, and fixed believers; and yet of the two, perhaps,
the speculative man would have argued more powerfully--with fire and
sword--as a teacher of what he believed.
About a twelvemonth before the enterprise to La Plata, whereby the
“uneducated man of low birth” came to be a ruler and a chief in
the land of his nativity, Matthew Paris the preacher, to whom he
was indebted for a knowledge of the circumstances which led to the
discovery, had lost a young wife--a poor girl who had been brought up
in his family, and whom he married not _because_ of her youth, but
in spite of her youth; and every body knew as he stood by her grave,
and saw the fresh earth heaped upon her, that he would never hold up
his head again, his white venerable head, which met with a blessing
wherever it appeared. From that day forth, he was a broken-hearted
selfish man, weary of life, and sick with insupportable sorrow. He
began to be afraid with a strange fear, to persuade himself that his
Father above had cast him off, and that for the rest of his life he was
to be a mark of the divine displeasure. He avoided all that knew him,
and chiefly those he had been most intimate with while he was happy;
for their looks and their speech, and every change of their breath
reminded him of his poor Margaret, his meek beautiful wife. He could
not bear the very song of the birds--nor the sight of the green trees;
for she was buried in the summer-time, while the trees were in flower,
and the birds singing in the branches that overshadowed her grave; and
so he withdrew from the world and shut himself up in a dreary solitude,
where neglecting his duty as a preacher of the gospel, he gave up his
whole time to the education of his little daughter--the child of his
old age, and the live miniature of its mother--who was _like_ a child,
from the day of her birth to the day of her death. His grief would have
been despair, but for this one hope. It was the sorrow of old age--that
insupportable sorrow--the sorrow of one who is ready to cry out with
every sob, and at every breath, in the desolation of a widowed heart,
whenever he goes to the fireside or the table, or sees the sun set,
or the sky change with the lustre of a new day, or wakes in the dead
of the night from a cheerful dream of his wife--his dear, dear wife,
to the frightful truth; finding the heavy solitude of the grave about
him, his bridal chamber dark with the atmosphere of death, his marriage
bed--his home--his very heart, which had been occupied with a blessed
and pure love a moment before, uninhabited forever.
His family consisted now of this one child, who was in her tenth year,
a niece in her twelfth year, and two Indians who did the drudgery of
the house, and were treated as members of the family, eating at the
same table and of the same food as the preacher. One was a female who
bore the name of Tituba; the other a praying warrior, who had become a
by-word among the tribes of the north, and a show in the houses of the
white men.
The preacher had always a belief in witchcraft, and so had every
body else that he knew; but he had never been afraid of witches till
after the death of his wife. He had been a little too ready perhaps
to put faith in every tale that he heard about apparition or shadow,
star-shooting or prophecy, unearthly musick, or spirits going abroad
through the very streets of Salem village, and over the green fields,
and along by the sea shore, the wilderness, the rock and the hill-top,
and always at noon-day, and always without a shadow--shapes of death,
who never spoke but with a voice like that of the wind afar off, nor
moved without making the air cold about them; creatures from the deep
sea, who are known to the pious and the gifted by their slow smooth
motion over the turf, and by their quiet, grave, unchangeable eyes. But
though he had been too ready to believe in such things, from his youth
up, he had never been much afraid of them, till after he found himself
widowed forever, as he drew near, arm in arm with an angel, to the
very threshold of eternity; separated by death, in his old age, from a
good and beautiful, and young wife, just when he had no other hope--no
other joy--nothing but her and her sweet image, the babe, to care for
underneath the sky. Are we to have no charity for such a man--weak
though he appear--a man whose days were passed by the grave where his
wife lay, and whose nights were passed literally in her death-bed; a
man living away and apart from all that he knew, on the very outskirts
of the solitude, among those who had no fear _but_ of shadows and
spirits, and witchcraft and witches? We should remember that his faith
after all, was the faith, not so much of the man, as of the age he
lived in, the race he came of, and the life that he led. Hereafter,
when posterity shall be occupied with our doings, they may wonder at
our faith--perhaps at our credulity, as we now wonder at his.
But the babe grew, and a new hope flowered in his heart, for she was
the very image of her mother; and there was her little cousin too,
Bridget Pope, a child of singular beauty and very tall of her age--how
_could_ he be unhappy, when he heard their sweet voices ringing
together?