ground, was brought almost to a stand. The fear of real want impending was not simply imaginary.

Witchcraft

A yet worse trouble confronted the new Governor. He found a part of the people whom he was to rule in New in a state of distress and consternation by reason England. of certain terrible manifestations during the last few weeks before his coming, attributed by them to the agency of the Devil, and of wicked men, women, and children, whom the Spirit of Darkness had confederated with himself, and was using as his instruments.

The people of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, like all other Christian people at that time, at least, with extremely rare individual exceptions,- believed in the reality of a hideous crime called witchcraft. They thought they had Scripture for that belief, and they knew they had law for it, explicit and abundant; and with them. law and Scripture were absolute authorities for the regulation of opinion and of conduct.

1651.

But

In a few instances witches were believed to have appeared in the earlier years of New England. the cases had been sporadic. They appear to have first presented themselves among the planters at Springfield. In Plymouth Colony they fared well. There were two prosecutions, which resulted in acquit

1660, 1676.

1 Johnson, Wonder-working Providence of Sion's Saviour, 199; comp. Upham, Salem Witchcraft, I. 417420.

I am indebted to my learned friend, Mr. J. H. Trumbull, for the following extract from a letter published in the "Mercurius Publicus" (London newspaper), of Sept. 23, 1651. It is dated From Natick in New England, 4 July, 1651." It is neither signed nor addressed, but there can be no doubt that the writer was John, Eliot; and it was probably sent to Edward Winslow, then in London. It seems to settle the question of the exe

cution of Martha Parsons at Springfield in 1651. Hutchinson did not credit the fact (II. 16), which he erroneously supposed Johnson to report as belonging to the year 1645. Eliot writes:

"The state of things here amongst us seems more troublesome, and we have had sad frowns of the Lord upon us, chiefly in regard of fascinations, and witchcraft; for now God calls his people into near communion with himself in visible and explicit Covenant with him, only he doth not love it should be visible. Four in Springfield were detected, whereof

tals.1

1656.

Jane Walford, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was charged with being a witch; but she prosecuted one of her accusers for slander, and obtained a verdict. The first instance of an execution for witchcraft is said to have occurred in Connecticut, soon 1647. after the settlement; but the circumstances are not May 30. known, and the fact has been doubted. A year later, one Margaret Jones, of Charlestown, in Massachusetts, and, it has been said, two other women in Dorchester and Cambridge, were convicted and executed for the goblin crime.1 These cases appear to have excited no more attention. than would have been given to the perpetration of any other felony, and no judicial record of them survives. A case much more observed was that of Mrs. Ann Hibbins, the widow of an immigrant of special distinction. He had been agent for the Colony in England, and one of the

one was executed for murder of her own child and was doubtless a witch, another is condemned, a third under trial, a fourth under suspition."

A further extract from the same letter of Eliot I should have used in another connection, had I been acquainted with it in time.

"Here are also other sorts of Fascination by strange errors, not a few; and of late there are at Salon [Salem] a sort of people (some Church Members) whom they call Shakers, who seem to be taken with strange gripings and fits, and afterwards they speak foolish and strange words; but some speak wiser, and are conceited of revelations. The Church hath given some of them admonition."

Two weeks after this letter was written, John Clark, John Crandall, and Obadiah Holmes, coming to the region where these "fascinations" and "strange gripings" were going on, were arrested on a warrant from Salem; and it was a part of their offence that they did administer the

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66

7

Sacrament of the Supper to one excommunicate person, to another under admonition," &c. (See above, II. 352.) Is not here a gleam of cross-light on the history of Clarke's "Ill News from New England"? The brethren from Rhode Island came to help on the "fascination," at a season when magistrates and elders were trembling under "frowns of the Lord," and specially disinclined to open doors to emissaries of the evil one.

1 Sears, Pictures of the Olden Time, &c., 334.

2 N. H. Hist. Col., I. 255.

8 Winthrop, History of New England, II. 307; comp. Kingsley, Historical Discourse, &c., 53, 100; Conn. Rec., I. 171. Other executions for witchcraft appear to have taken place in Connecticut in 1651 (Ibid., 220), in 1654 (New Haven Col. Rec., II. 78), and in 1662 (I. Mather, Illustrious Providences, 137).

• Hutchinson, I. 150; II. 16; Winthrop, II. 326.

Assistants. He had lost his property, and the melancholy and ill-temper to which his disappointed wife gave way appear to have exposed her to misconstructions and hatred, in the sequel of which she was convicted as a witch, and after some opposition on the part of the Magistrates was hanged."

1656. June.

With three or four exceptions, -for the evidence respecting the asserted sufferers at Dorchester and Cambridge is imperfect, no person appears to have been punished for witchcraft in Massachusetts, nor convicted of it, for more than sixty years after the settlement, though there had been three or four trials of other persons suspected of the crime. At the time when the question respecting the colonial charter was rapidly approaching an issue, May. and the public mind was in feverish agitation, the ministers sent out a paper of proposals for collecting facts concerning witchcrafts and other "strange apparitions." This brought out a work from President Mather entitled "Illustrious Providences," in which that influential person related numerous stories of the performances of persons leagued with the Devil.5

1681.

1664.

The imagination of his restless young son was stimulated, and circumstances fed the flame. In the last year of the government of Andros, a daughter, thirteen years old, of John Goodwin, a mason living at the South End of Boston, — had a quarrel

Witchcraft in Boston.

613.

1688.

1 Winthrop, II. 321; see above, I.

2 According to a story which has come to us through Hutchinson (Hist., &c., I. 187), John Norton, of the First Church, said she was hanged" only for having more wit than her neighbours;" by which he explained himself to mean that she "unhappily guessed that two of her persecutors, whom she saw talking in the street, were talking of her."

The case, however, of Mary

with an Irish washerwoman about some missing clothes. The woman's mother took it up, and scolded provokingly. Thereupon, the wicked child, profiting, as it seems, by what she had been hearing and reading on the mysterious subject," cried out upon her," as the phrase was, as a witch, and proceeded to act the part understood to befit a bewitched person, in which behavior she was presently joined by three others of the circle, one of them only four or five years old. Now they would lose their hearing, now their sight, now their speech; and sometimes all three faculties at once. They mewed like kittens; they barked like dogs. "One while their tongues would be drawn down their throats; another they would be pulled out upon their chins to a prodigious length." The joints of their faces and limbs would be dislocated, " and anon they would clap together with a force like that of a springlock." "Sometimes they were kept from eating their meals by having their teeth set when they carried any thing into their mouths." They could read fluently in Popish and Quaker books, in the "Oxford Jests," and in the "Book of Common Prayer," but not in the "Westminster Catechism,” nor in books of President Mather, nor in John Cotton's "Milk for Babes." "Dr. Thomas Oakes

found himself so affronted by the distempers of the children, that he concluded nothing but an hellish witchcraft could be the original of these maladies." Through all this, "about nine or ten at night they always had a release from their miseries, and ate and slept all night for the most part indifferently well." Cotton Mather prayed with one of them; but she lost her hearing, he says, when he began, and recovered it as soon as he finished. Four Boston ministers and one of Charlestown held a meeting, and passed a day in fasting and prayer, by which exorcism the youngest imp was "delivered." The poor washerwoman, crazed with all this pother, if in her right mind before, - and defending herself unskilfully in

Nov. 27.

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HOUSE

her foreign gibberish and with the volubility of her race, was interpreted as making some confession. A gossiping witness testified that, six years before, she had heard another woman say that she had seen the accused come down a chimney. She was required to repeat the Lord's Prayer in English, - -an approved test of innocence; but, being a Catholic, she had never learned it in that language. She could recite it, after a fashion, in Latin; but she was no scholar and made some mistakes. The helpless wretch was convicted and sent to the gallows.

Cotton Mather took the oldest "afflicted" girl to his house, where she dexterously played upon his self-conceit to stimulate his credulity. She satisfied him that Satan regarded him as his most terrible enemy, and avoided him with especial awe. When he prayed or read in the Bible, convulsion fits. When he called to

she was seized with

Ho family devotion, she would whistle, and sing, and scream,

*OXFORD*

and pretend to try to strike and kick him; but her blows would be stopped before reaching his body, indicating that

LIBRARY he was unassailable by the Evil One.' Mather's account

of these transactions, with a collection of other appropriate matter, was circulated not only in Massachusetts, but widely also in England, where it obtained the warm commendation of Richard Baxter; and it may be supposed to have had an important effect in producing the more disastrous delusion which followed three years after. His conclusion was: "I am resolved after this never to use but just one grain of patience with any man that shall go to impose upon me a denial of devils or of witches. I shall count that man ignorant who shall suspect, but I shall count him downright impudent if he assert the non-existence

1 "There then stood open the study of one belonging to the family, into which entering, she stood immediately upon her feet, and cried out, 'They are gone; they are gone! They say that they cannot, God won't

let 'em come here.' She also added a reason for it, which the owner of the study thought more kind than true." (Cotton Mather, Late Memorable Providences, 27.)