University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

“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 fiit. 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 peacher—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 NewEnglander
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
sourrounded 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?