Superstition and Wickedness Hand-in-Hand
During the prevalence of this terror, all mutual confidence was suspended, and the noblest sentiments of human nature were trampled under-foot. The nearest blood relations became each other's accusers. One man was hanged on the testimony of his wife and daughter, who impeached him merely for the purpose of saving themselves. But this dreadful delusion was not an unmixed evil. "It is likely," wrote a contemporary, "that this frenzy contributed to work off the ill humors of the New England people--to dissipate their bigotry, and to bring them to a more free use of their reason."
The belief in witches did not end with the strange excitement. Cotton Mather and his clerical associates and others wrote in its defence. Mather's account of the delusion is unprofitable reading, because it deals in the absurd fancies of a man deluded by bigotry, superstition, and childish credulity. This may be seen in scores of sentences similar to the following:
"It is known that these wicked spectres [ghosts] did proceed so far as to steal several quantities of money from divers people, part of which individual money dropt sometimes out of the air, before sufficient spectators, into the hands of the afflicted, while the spectres were urging them to subscribe their covenant with death. Moreover poisons, to the standers-by wholly invisible, were sometimes forced upon the afflicted, which, when they have with much reluctancy swallowed, they have swollen presently, so that the common medicines for poison have been found necessary to relieve them; yea, some-times the spectres, in their troubles, have so dropt the poisons that the standers-by have smelt them and viewed them, and beheld the pillows of the miserable stained with them. Yet more, the miserable have complained bitterly of burning rags run into their forcibly distended mouths; and though nobody could see any such cloths, or indeed any fires in the chambers, yet presently the scalds were seen plainly by everybody on the mouths of the complainers, and not only the smell, but the smoke of the burning, filled the chambers."
"Once more, the miserable exclaimed extremely of branding-irons, heating at the fire on the hearth to mark them; now the standers-by could see no irons, yet they could see distinctly the print of them in the ashes, and smell them too, as they were carried by the not seen furies unto the poor creatures for whom they were intended; and these poor creatures were there-upon so stigmatized with them that they will bear the marks of them to their dying day. Nor are these [he had related many others] a tenth part of the prodigies that fell out among the inhabitants of New England.
"Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people, in a country where they have as much mother-with certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward spirit of sadducism [disbelief in spirits] can question them."
They were burlesqued. Robert Calef, a merchant of Boston, in a series of letters which he wrote and published, exposed Mather's credulity, and greatly irritated the really good man. Mather retorted by calling Calef a "weaver turned minister." Calef tormented him the more by letter after letter, when Mather, wearied with the fight, called his opponent "a coal from hell," and prosecuted him for slander. When these letters were published in book form, Mather's kinsman, then president of Harvard College, caused copies of the work to be publicly burned on the college grounds.
This strange episode in the history of Massachusetts astonished the civilized world, and made an unfavorable impression on the surrounding Indians, who despised a people that cherished a religion which sanctioned such cruelties toward their countrymen. It gave a large advantage to the French, whose Jesuit missionaries, then laboring among the savage tribes on the frontier, contrasted their own mild and beneficent system of religion as exhibited there with that of the Puritans, whose ministers had been so prominent in the fearful tragedy. It had a serious effect upon the future destiny of New England, for the barbarians on the frontiers were, hence-forth, strongly wedded to the fortunes of the French.
We paused to consider "Salem Witchcraft." Let us resume the narrative of general events.
"King William's War" continued in Europe and in America until it was closed by a treaty at Ryswick in 1697. Meanwhile the New England people had suffered much from the incursions of the French and Indians. Governor Phipps visited some of the tribes with whom he had made a treaty at Pemaquid, on Bristol Bay in Maine, and endeavored to secure their friendship and alliance with the English. They were willing to abide by the terms of their treaty, but, more attached to the French than ever, they refused to listen to any proposition for an English alliance, for Jesuits had told them that Protestants were enemies to the true religion of Christ. "The French," they said, "have driven witchcraft from among us, and we do not care to associate with a people who cherish it." Phipps returned disappointed, and soon afterward sailed to England, leaving the government in the hands of Stoughton, his deputy, who exercised the authority of chief magistrate about three years.