Untrust vestigation. few persons who were in the habit of acting as counsel had had no regular education in the law. The alleged witches had no counsel whatever. Nor worthiness had their judges the competency which that station of the indemands for instructing a jury on an intricate case of felony. Stoughton and Sewall had been educated for the pulpit; two of their five associates were physicians, i and one was a merchant; not one was a lawyer. When such men did cruel injustice, it was partly from imperfect knowledge of the rules of proof, and partly because their minds were prepossessed with misleading imaginations. On the whole, the court represented the sense of that portion of the people, with whom a merciful incredulity or a mere natural relenting was least likely to prevail against the bewildering theory of the age. The court was not constituted by the people of Massachusetts, but, without their authority, by the Governor set over them by the King; and it was constituted, not of persons possessing the confidence of the people, but largely of former functionaries recently discharged by the popular vote. Stoughton was its head and soul, and he was a man so stubborn that, when his theory had been adopted, any humane reluctance was to him only an impertinence and a sin. The timid conscientiousness of Sewall precisely prepared him for the sway of his positive and grim associate. Wait Winthrop was rather a feeble person, and something of a courtier. Saltonstall was disgusted with the proceedings from the outset, and refused to sit. Bradstreet's heaviness was wiser than the mercurial temperament of some of his eminent contemporaries. He had steadfastly refused to order the execution of a convicted witch some years before 1680. the Salem tragedy; he is not known to have done any thing to countenance the follies which had been rife in the last three months of his administration; and there is every probability that, had he continued to be Chief Magis 1 Upham, Salem Witchcraft, I. 450. trate, the misery and shame which inaugurated his successor's government would have been spared. Precedents The transactions which have been described have been visited by the severe reprobation of later times. Yet epidemic delusions, and delusions having tragical of popular issues, have not been so uncommon in history, fanaticism. as that their occurrence should excite surprise as monstrous deviations from the order of human things. Not fifteen years before the alarm of witchcraft in New England, large numbers of innocent men in England had fallen victims to a popular madness, excited by the flagitious fiction of the Popish plot; and in New York, half a century later than the tragedy at Salem, fifty persons were transported and sold, twenty-two were hanged, and eleven were burned to death, on regular legal conviction, for being concerned in a conspiracy, which no sane person has the slightest belief in at the present day, and the history of which only remains to confound the notions of those who desire to place confidence in the truth of testimony, the rectitude of magistrates, and the common sense of men. No doubt, such delusions are especially contagious and dangerous when they are associated with religious superstition and with the mysteries of the invisible world; but it needs not they should have that association, to make them capable of interfering with the righteous administration of justice. Judges and juries in the witchcraft trials did not appear more passionately bent on preposterous mischief than did the English courts which fourteen years earlier made themselves the bloody instruments of Oates and Dangerfield, or the New York court which fifty years later transported, hanged, and burned the confederates in a plot that never was made, or the officeholders and citizens who, more than a century later yet, busied themselves in the Free States of America in replacing the fetters of the escaping bondman. There is one class of thinkers entitled to take confidently 1 Chandler, American Criminal Trials, 222, 252. 1 Theories of the ground that an allegation, in any case, of demoniacal agency in human affairs is mere fraud or folly. It consists of those who, reasoning from the attributes of God and his relations to his world, as made known by nature and by Christianity, have arrived at the conviction so wisely maintained in the work of Hugh Farmer, that "all effects produced in the system of nature, contrary to the general laws by which it is governed, are proper miracles, and that all miracles are works appropriate to God." But this result of careful thought is certainly not the state of mind of the great majority of those who now demoniacal are swift to reject as essentially incredible all accounts of diabolical intervention. At all events, it is to the last degree improbable that instances of that state of mind were to be found in the seventeenth century. That belief in a possible demoniacal agency which, partly by force of thought and reasoning, and much more by force of a vague prevailing scepticism, has now to a large extent lost its hold on the popular mind, was the universal conviction of the earlier time. The person who, in a careless state of general distrust as to every thing but what he can see and touch, condemns the credulity 1 Farmer, Essay on the Demoniacs of the New Testament, Introduction, 1. Reginald Scot, who, according to the title-page of his Discovery of Witchcraft," "wrote and published in anno 1584," defined witchmongers" as "such as attribute to witches the power which appertaineth to God only." (Prefatory Epistle to Sir Roger Manwood, 7.) He speaks of the proofs brought against agency. High God. . . . . should be referred to a baggage old woman's nod or wish?" (Prefatory Epistle to Archdeacon Readman.) "Our fancy," he says, "condemneth witches, and our reason acquitteth, our evidence against them consisting in impossibilities, our proofs in unwritten verities, and our whole proceedings in doubts and difficulties." (Prefatory Epistle to the Readers.) And much more to the same effect. It is amazing to find such language used in the sixteenth century. The copy which I use of this extremely rare book belongs to James Russell Lowell. witches" as "'incredible, consisting of guesses, presumptions, and impossibilities, contrary to reason, scripture, and nature." (Prefatory Epistle to Sir Thomas Scot.) Is it not pity," he asks, that that which is said to be done I. 35 et seq. with the almighty power of the Most Lecky, History of Civilization, of believers in witchcraft, has certainly not as definite and respectable a foundation for his theory as they for theirs, however much nearer to the truth he may happen in this particular instance to be. of the super stition of witchcraft dom. later ages. 1484. The estimation of witchcraft as a crime equally real as murder and more heinous, and the practice of punishing it accordingly, were much older than the Puritan occupation of New England. They were much older than the Protestant Reformation. Treatises had been written upon it, laws against it had been enacted, persons charged with it had been tortured and killed, through ages of Christian history and in distant parts of ChrisPrevalence tian Europe. It had been punished with a wide carnage as early as the century when the in Christen- Roman empire became Christian.1 The superstition had shown no symptoms of decline in the In the century of the Revival of Learning a Bull of Pope Innocent the Eighth proclaimed the wide prevalence of the crime, and enforced on all good Catholics their responsibility for its extirpation, a measure which, as has been calculated, caused the death of not fewer than a hundred thousand persons in Germany alone. In the next century, in the district of Como in Lombardy, a thousand witches are related to have been slaughtered in one year, and one hundred in each of several years afterwards. In the next, five hundred persons charged with witchcraft were put to death in the home of Calvin, the enlightened republic of Geneva, which had then a population not more than half as great as was the population of Massachusetts at the time when the frenzy there cost twenty lives. Within twenty-five years of the popular infatuation in Massachusetts, Sweden. had been the scene of a similar delusion and misery, brought about by a similar instrumentality of some unnaturally wicked children. Eighty-eight witches in one 1524. 1615. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, &c., III. 75; comp. V. 126; Milman, Latin Christianity, I. 542, VIII. 202. 1669. 1670. Its preva Britain. neighborhood, including fifteen children, are said to have been executed; while large numbers, as has continually occurred elsewhere, saved their lives by confessing themselves to be guilty of the imaginary crime. As to the currency of the superstition among the British race, the executions for witchcraft in Scotland, in the reign of King James the Sixth, are believed to have been so numerous as to require to be reckoned by thousands.1 The coming of that monarch to England as James the First gave an impulse there to the study of a lence in department of learning and law in which espe- Great cially he prided himself on his proficiency. His treatise on Demonology discusses the character and diagnostics of witchcraft, with just as absolute a conviction of the reality of the crime described as would be felt by the author of a treatise on poaching; and in his reign an Act of Parliament was passed which gave vigor to the application of his theory. Nor in this matter was commonwealth wiser than royalty, - the sage Justice Matthew Hale than the foolish King James Stuart. In the days of the Long Parliament there were more than a hundred execu- 1645. tions for witchcraft in the English shires of Essex and Sussex, with the approbation of the ministers Baxter and Calamy, than whom there were no higher authorities for New England; and in the year of the decapitation of King Charles fourteen witches were burned, in a "village consisting of but fourteen families." The English statutes 1 Howell's Familiar Letters, 405, 438. 4 1646. Baxter, Certainty of the World of Spirits, 52 et seq. "I am so 24 Dæmonologie" in Workes, 94 much taken with your History of et seq. State Trials, VI. 641; comp. Campbell, Lives of the Chief Justices, I. 566; II. 170. Prodigies," wrote Richard Baxter to .... • Whitelock, Memorials, &c., 450. |