 | New-England legends |  |
SALEM.
When the traveler loses sight of Charlestown,
with its twin but incongruous monuments,
his train is passing out on the meadows
dotted with haycocks and alive with every tint
of red and russet, and presently is skirting the
shores of Swampscot and Lynn. Here, perhaps,
he glances up at the High Rock commanding
sight of the dim line of the Beverley
beaches, of the Cape Ann Shadows, the jagged
coast of Marblehead, the long sweep of the
Swampscot sands, the wild cliffs of Nahant,
and the immense horizon of the bay beyond—
a spot where Moll Pitcher for so many years
performed her mysteries; and twenty minutes
afterward the train is running into a region
where witch and warlock, once holding revel,
still haunt every inch of the ground. This region,
whose centre is known as the town of
Salem, is very lovely in the river-banks and
villas of its outskirts. For the town itself,
slight marks remain of the old Puritan domination,
and its days of East Indian glory and
spicy argosies are over. Reminiscences of that
glory, however, continue to give caste in
the place, and every lady in Salem has a
cachemire shawl, it is said, or else has no
passport to society; and great warehouses
and great fortunes remain to tell of the
state that has passed away. Among the
smaller towns along the coast, Salem is still the
most wealthy, and is therefore the target for
much ill-nature on the part of her poorer
neighbors. Nothing equals the contempt which
a Lynn man feels for a citizen of Salem, unless
it is the contempt which a Gloucester man feels,
or that which a Salem man not only feels but
manifests, for both of the others and the rest of
creation besides. In Marblehead this hostility
reaches more open expression, and the mutual
sentiments of both populations are uttered by
the urchins there when they cry: “Here
comes a Salem boy—let's rock him round the
corner!” Nevertheless, Salem contrives to
creep along, to found her museum, to become
headquarters for the Essex Institute, and to
make herself, in ever so slight a measure, a
centre of culture and advance. Lately the
Scientific Societies met there, and were—undreamed-of
thing—invited home to dinner:
in a town where, if necessity obliges you to
call upon a man at his club, he comes out and
shuts the door behind him, keeping a grasp
upon the handle as an intimation of the brevity
of your visit—where Choate and Webster,
pleading in court, have picked up a luncheon,
at noontide, in hotel or eating-house, as best
they might, and where Hawthorne all but
starved. Salem is conspicuous among New
England towns for the beauty of its women; a
plain face would be an anomaly there, and the
well-fed blood of wealthy generations is told
by the bloomy skins and abundant tresses, the
expression of sweetness and dignity, the soft
eyes and fine features, of the daughters of the
place. The town still preserves a few relics of
its memorable past; the House of the Seven
Gables was standing there a little while ago,
together with the Townsend-Bishop house,
famous for its share in the old witchcraft transactions,
and the Corwin house, at the corner of
North and Essex streets, where the Grand Jury
sat upon those transactions. There are some
handsome churches and public buildings of
more modern date, and a stone Court-house,
together with a fine Registry of Deeds. There
is an interest attaching to this latter structure,
not altogether archæological though concerning
itself with antiquities, but an interest in
one of the darkest problems ever presented by
human nature; for here are kept such documents
as have been preserved from the witchcraft
days, and among them the death-warrant
of Bridget Bishop. Very few indeed are these
papers; for, when the frenzy of the period
began to subside, those “Salem Gentlemen”
who petitioned the Government to grant no reprieve
to Rebecca Nurse, a woman who had lived
nearly eighty years of a saintly life, were overtaken
by remorse and shame, and hastened to
do away with all remembrance of their recent action,
exhibiting a better sense of the fitness of
things than their descendants do who to-day
display in a sealed vial a dozen bent and verdigrised
and rusty pins purporting to be the
identical ones with which their forefathers
plagued the witches; albeit, it is said, the
fashion of these pins was not known at the
time when those poor wretches were tormented.
Indeed to the stranger in the town
witchcraft is the one thought; he looks at
these people whom he meets upon the street,
and they become to him curious subjects of
obliterated the ancient feud and rancor, and
wonders in what way it is that in these individuals
the blood of afflicted, persecutor, and
accused, together, accommodates itself. One
would look for the birth of strong characteristics
here, possibly for terrible developments,
out of the opposition of such material; but
nothing notable ever happens in the tranquil
town, and not a ripple of distinction breaks its
history since those first dreadful days, unless
we recall the vanished figure of Hawthorne
walking all his life long in the shadow of that
old witch-prosecuting ancestor, the Magistrate.
But much inheritance of a thing dies with the
memory of it, and when the scales dropped
from the eyes of the persecutors of 1692, and
they saw themselves the shedders of innocent
blood, they destroyed all records that could be
found, reseated the church so that relatives of
the murderer and of the murdered sang their
hymns side by side from the same book, and
since those who had borne the stain of the
scaffold in their family were not likely to make
it subject of conversation, those who inflicted
that stain were glad to let it be forgotten; and
it came to pass that, when the historian sought
for it, he found less tradition existing relative
to the occurrences of that dark and
bloody period than of times of quadruple the
antiquity. It reached him, though, from all
unimagined avenues, from church-records, from
registries of wills and deeds, from family papers,
and we now have it in sufficient completeness
to make us detest, if not the people, at
least the influences that made the people
actors in that tragedy.
Like most things of magnitude, the Salem
Witchcraft had its beginnings in small things—
in so small a thing, indeed, as a circle of young
girls meeting together, on winter evenings, at
each other's houses, to practice palmistry and
such sleight-of-hand as parior-magic had then
attained. Perhaps it was as remarkable a
thing as any in the whole occurrences that
such meetings were countenanced at all in
that place of the Puritan, and more remarkable
still, that no connection was suspected
between these meetings and the subsequent
antics. These young girls were ten in number;
three of them were servants, and two of these
are believed to have acted from malicious
motives against the families where they were
employed, one of them afterward admitting
that she did so; and Mary Warren's guilt, as
capital witness securing the execution of seven
innocent persons, being—unless we accept the
hypothesis of spiritualism—as evident as it is
black and damning. In addition to these there
were the negro-slaves of Mr. Parris, the minister,
in whose household all the first disturbances
made their appearance, Tituba and her
husband.
It is worthy of remark, as the historian
urges, that Elizabeth Parris—a child of only
nine years, but of extraordinary precocity, the
daughter of the minister, himself the foremost
fomenter and agitator of the troubles — was
early removed by him from the scene, and
placed under shelter at safe distance. Of the
remainder, the most prominent were Abigail
Williams, aged eleven, a niece of the minister's,
and resident in his family; Ann Putnam,
aged twelve; Betty Hubbard and Mary Walcot,
both aged seventeen; and Mercy Lewis, of the
same age, a servant in the family of Ann Putnam's
mother, Mrs. Ann Putnam, aged thirty,
who afterward became as prominent as any in
the matter of afflictions. There were a Mrs.
Pope and a Mrs. Bibber, who joined the circle;
but the one was only hysterical, and the latter
was detected in a trick, and their connection
with the phenomena was brief. It is not unreasonable
to suppose that Tituba was at the
root of the whole business. Brought by Mr.
Parris, who had formerly been a merchant, from
the West Indies, and still but half-civilized, she
was full of her wild Obeah superstitions and
incantations, in which she had without doubt
interested the two children in her master's
family, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams.
Probably they invited Ann Putnam, a child of
nearly the same age as themselves, to witness
what they found so entertaining; and she,
confiding in her mother's servant, Mercy Lewis,
an ignorant girl of seventeen, Mercy in turn
interested her own companions in the matter.
Sitting over the winter fires, after growing
tired of their exercises in magic, it is likely
that they rehearsed to each other all the marvelous
tales of the primeval settlements, stories
full of sheeted ghosts, with wild hints of the
Indian goblin Hobbomocko, till they shuddered
and laughed at the shuddering, and their terrified
imaginations and excited nerves were
ready for something beyond. Perfecting themselves
in all they could discover of legerdemain,
taught by Tituba the secret of a species of voluntary
cataleptic fit, and improving on her
teachings by means of their own superior intelligence,
before the winter was over they
had become adepts in their arts, and were
ready for exhibition. It is likely that at first
their object was merely to display their skill,
to make amusement and arouse wonder, and,
possibly, admiration, in their beholders, who
singularly failed to perceive that it was a concerted
thing among them. Perhaps, too, they
were somewhat emulous of the fame of the
Goodwin children, whose exploits had lately
been on every tongue. When the crowds,
who afterward flocked to see those whom ministers
and doctors had pronounced bewitched,
witnessed their appalling condition, they were
overwhelmed with horror; for, “whatever
opinion may be formed,” says Mr. Upham, “of
the moral or mental condition of the afflicted
children, as to their sanity and responsibility,
there can be no doubt that they were great
actors. In mere jugglery and sleight-of-hand,
they bear no mean comparison with the workers
of wonders, in that line, of our own day. Long
practice had given them complete control over
their countenances, intonations of voice, and
the entire muscular and nervous organization
of their bodies; so that they could at will, and
on the instant, go into fits and convulsions;
swoon and fall to the floor; put their frames
into strange contortions; bring the blood to
the face and send it back again. They could
be deadly pale at one moment, at the next
flushed; their hands would be clinched and
held together as with a vice; their limbs stiff
and rigid or wholly relaxed; their teeth would
be set, they would go through the paroxysms
of choking and strangulation, and gasp for
breath, bringing froth and blood from the
mouth; they would utter all sorts of screams
in unearthly tones; their eyes remain fixed,
sometimes bereft of all light and expression,
"THE REV. GEORGE BURROUGHS WAS ACCUSED OF WITCHCRAFT ON THE EVIDENCE OF FACTS OF STRENGTH, TRIED, HUNG, AND BURIED BENEATH THE GALLOWS."
[Description: 693EAF. Page 017. In-line image. George Burroughs stands soberly on a platform with his hands shackled together. A crowd of people are looking at him. In the background, a judge stands at the judge's seat. In the background, also, a woman is standing raising her arm. ] cold and stony, and sometimes kindled intoflames of passion; they would pass into the
state of somnambulism, without aim or conscious
direction in their movements, looking
at some point where was no apparent object of
vision, with a wild, unmeaning glare. There
are some indications that they had acquired
the art of ventriloquism; or they so wrought
upon the imaginations of the beholders that
the sounds of the motions and voices of invisible
beings were believed to be heard. They
would start, tremble, and be pallid before apparitions
seen, of course, only by themselves;
but their acting was so perfect that all present
thought they saw them, too. They would
address and hold colloquy with spectres and
ghosts, and the responses of the unseen beings
would be audible to the fancy of the bewildered
crowd. They would follow with their eyes the
airy visions so that others imagined they also
beheld them.”
Mr. Upham calls this a high dramatic achievement;
but he goes on to state that the Attorney-General,
a barrister fresh from the Inns of
Court at London, was often present, together
with many others who had seen the world, and
were competent to detect trickery; and it is,
after all, difficult to believe that this parcel of
rude girls could have acquired so much dexterity,
and that no diseased condition of mind
and nerve assisted them, and that the fits,
which were at first voluntary, did not at last
Notwithstanding this doubt, it is plain that
their magic came in on such occasions as the
pin-pricking; as, for instance, when one of
them, not wishing to reply, had a pin apparently
run through both her upper and lower
lip, and no wound or festering following. On
such occasions, too, as that when they were
found with their arms tied, and hung upon a
hook, or their wrists bound fast with a cord,
after the manner of the Davenport Brothers of
to-day; as that, when an iron spindle, missing
for some time from a house in the village, was
suddenly snatched out of the air from the hand
of an apparition; or that, when one of them
being afflicted by a spectre in a white sheet, invisible
to other than herself, caught and tore
the corner of the sheet, and showed the real
cloth in her hand to the spectators, who received
it undoubtingly. Their catalepsy, though, or
whatever it may be called, was of use to them
throughout — whether they chewed soap till
they foamed at the mouth, and expertly twisted
their supple bodies into long-practiced contortions,
or whether what was feigned at first
grew real afterward, and they were seized by
the flame they had kindled, and became demented
by the contagious delirium. It is well
understood that the Shakers of the present
day are capable of producing similar conditions—fits,
distortions, trances in which visions
are imagined to be seen; and something of
the same sort is frequent in the camp-meeting
revivals, while shrieking hysterics are now
known to be as voluntary as winking; and it
has even been discovered that fixing the eyes
and the attention upon a bright spot at a short
distance away will induce a state of coma.
Whether they had learned the possibility of
such things, or merely simulated them, it is
almost impossible to believe that these girls,
in the depth of depravity to which they descended,
were not victims of a temporary insanity.
Their ready wit and make-shift would
lend a color to this supposition, as being only
the cunning of the insane, if there had not
been so much method in their madness, and
there were not too much evidence of a directing
hand behind them.
Mr. Upham thinks that they became intoxicated
with the terrible success of their imposture,
and having sowed the wind, were swept
away by the whirlwind; they appeared, he
says, as the prosecutors of every poor creature
that was tried, to such degree that their wickedness
seems to transcend the capabilities of
human crime; but he goes on to remark that
“there is, perhaps, a slumbering element in
the heart of man that sleeps forever in the
bosom of the innocent and good, and requires
the perpetration of a great sin to wake it into
action; but which, when once aroused, impels
the transgressor onward with increasing momentum,
as the descending ball is accelerated
in its course. It may be that crime begets an
appetite for crime, which, like all other appetites,
is not quieted, but inflamed by gratification.”
A large part of the difficulty in determining the
truth about these girls may vanish if we recall
the declaration of the British judge, a few years
since, upon the case of Constance Kent, confessing
the murder of her little half-brother,
where he remarked it to be a fact that there
was a point in the existence of the young, when,
just coming to the full sense of life, and occupied
with that, and generally with a nervous
system so delicately organized as easily to be
thrown out of balance, they seem to be destitute
of all natural feeling, of all moral perception,
and pliant to any wickedness. These young
girls of Salem Village, some of greater precocity
than others, were probably all of them
within the scope of this declaration, and at an
age when they needed careful shielding and
observation, instead of being left, as they were,
to the companionship of servants—servants
whose duller minds and lower breeding reduced
all difference of age to nothing; and the
written and signed confession of their ringleader
still remains to render one very cautious
in assigning the explanation of their misdeeds
to any preternatural or even abnormal cause.
It is known, at any rate, that they were several
times discovered in deception; once, on being
reproved for it, they boldly answered that they
must have a little sport; on another time, one
of them was plainly seen to be practising a trick
with pins; and, again, one of them crying out
that she was being stabbed with a knife, a
broken piece of a knife was found upon her, but
a young man in the audience immediately declared
that, on the day before, he had broken
his knife, this afflicted person being present,
and thrown the broken part away, and he produced
the haft and remaining portion of the
blade to prove it, and though the girl was reprimanded,
she was used, just the same, for witness
in other cases.
The state of feeling in the Colonies and elsewhere
could not have been more propitious to
their undertaking than it was at the time when
they opened their drama. Cotton Mather,
whose mind was a seething caldron of superstitions,
had just published the account of the
afflicted Goodwin children; Goody Morse was
living in her own house at Newbury, under
sentence of death, sentence pronounced in
Boston, it having been found impossible hitherto
to convict a person for witchcraft in Essex
County; and Margaret Jones, and Mistress
Anne Hibbins, a sister of Governor Bellingham
and one of the figures of the “Scarlet Letter,”
had, not long before, been hung for practising
the black art; they were the free-thinkers of
that day who doubted the verity of witchcraft—
Addison believed in it, Edmund Fairfax, the
translator of Tasso, believed in it, Sir Thomas
Browne gave in court his testimony in behalf of
its reality; Blackstone, the fountain of law,
asserted that to deny the existence of witchcraft
was to contradict the word of God; King James
had written diatribes on witches and had persecuted
them; Queen Elizabeth had persecuted
them; William Penn had presided at the trial
of two women for witchcraft; thirty years after
the executions in Salem, Dr. Watts expressed
his persuasion that there was much agency of
the devil and some real witches in that affair;
and so deeply rooted and long in dying was the
superstition, that in 1766 a Presbyterian synod
in Scotland denounced, as a national sin, the
repeal of the penal laws against witchcraft; in
1808 women were abused for witches by a
whole population within sixty miles of London,
and so lately as the beginning of this century
Father Altizzo was imprisoned at Rome for
sorcery, and there were prosecutions for witchcraft
in some of the interior districts of our own
Southern States. In the midst of such universal
the spirit of their age when fancying that their
village had become the battle-ground of Antichrist;
and possibly they recovered sooner
from their delusion than other communities of
less sturdy and self-asserting habits of thought
might have done. The village, too, presented
an excellent field of operation, for it had for
many years been torn with dissensions; there
had been violent jealousies, wrangles and lawsuits
over the acquisition of large property,
through industry and enterprise, by people
once in less prosperous circumstances, as for
example, the Nurses, and quarrels with the
“Topsfield Men,” connections of the Nurses, in
relation to boundaries, resulting in fisticuff encounters
and lasting enmities. There had,
moreover, been trouble in the parish in relation
to the impossibility of procuring a minister who
should please all parties, Mr. Bayley, Mr. Burroughs
and Mr. Deodat Lawson having been
obliged to leave, owing to the hostilities, and
Mr. Sam. Parris being settled in their place.
Mr. Parris, among several singular qualities,
seems to have been almost destitute of sympathy—he
once told some men whose mother's
execution he had been instrumental in procuring,
that while they thought her innocent and
he thought her guilty, the matter between them
was merely a difference of opinion; he was
possessed of great talent, and of an inordinate
ambition; passionately fond of power, and constantly
stirring up scenes that might lead to it,
during the whole time of his career he kept the
parish in a broil; he had at last grown so unpopular,
that some bold stroke became necessary
in order to regain lost ground, and when the
children in his family commenced their performances,
it is thought that he saw his advantage,
and used it, to the pulling down of
those who opposed him, and the setting-up of
the standard of the Church, in his person, over
all other authority. Probably, as Cotton Mather
did, he aspired to be the chief champion of
Christianity, and therefore the more exceedingly
he could inflame the people, and then
the more effectually quench the flame, the
greater glory must redound to him and his
ministry; and it is possible that neither he nor
the “afflicted children” had originally any idea
of the lenghts to which the thing would go; but
once committed, there was no retreat.
When now the girls began to exhibit their
new accomplishments at home, their frightened
parents gave them medicine; of course this
did not modify their symptoms, and presently
the physician was summoned. Finding that
none of his appliances changed their condition,
Dr. Griggs took refuge in a common saying of
the time, which had sheltered the ignorance of
many another doctor, and declared that an evil
hand had been laid upon them. Then Mr.
Parris scented his prey in an instant; he kept
the children in an agitation, noised the affair
abroad till it became the talk of town and
countryside, and the neighbors ran to see the
convulsions of the afflicted, shivered with awe
when the Sabbath meetings were disturbed by
their outbursts, believed they saw the yellow-bird
that Ann Putnam saw “sitting on the minister's
hat as it hangs on the pin in the pulpit;”
the families of the various afflicted ones fasted
and prayed, and finally Mr. Parris called a convocation
of the ministers to witness the proceedings
of these crazy children, half diseased,
half evil. Upon this the children brought out
all the scenes in their repertory at once, and
the ministers were astounded; always ready
for combats with Satan, here they had him on
open ground; they appointed a day of exhortation
over the afflicted, and increased the excitement
of the people to fury, so that nothing was
thought of but the sufferings of these victims of
the wrath of the Evil One, sufferings whose
reality no one disbelieved; all business became
suspended, all labor was left, and the whole
community was in a frenzy of fanaticism. A few
individuals did not join the outcry: Martha
Corey did not believe there were any witches—
presently she was accused for one and hung;
the Nurses and Cloyses and Joseph Putnam objected
to the minister's allowing the children of
his family to disturb the meeting without so
much as a rebuke, and withdrew from their
attendance at the church—Rebecca Nurse was
hung, Sarah Cloyse was imprisoned, and Joseph
Putnam escaped only by arming every member
of his family and keeping a horse under saddle
night and day for six months, determined, if the
marshal came for him with a small posse, to resist,
but if with an overwhelming force, to fly,
choosing rather the mercies of the savage
heathen of the forest than the barbarities of
these frantic Christians.
It is a common error to suppose that the
three learned professions lead the people in
point of intelligence. On the contrary, trained
in grooves not easy to leave, they remain as
they were in the beginning, and almost all advance
comes from the outside. This was never
better exemplified than in the Witchcraft delusion.
If the physicians then had possessed
either acuteness, skill, or candor, they would
have checked the girls in their first spasms; if
the ministers had been what they should have
been ere daring to undertake the cure of souls,
instead of lending countenance to their pretensions
and praying over the girls, they would
have punished them and made them fear the
consequences of their manœuvres; if the lawyers
had exercised any quality which a lawyer
should possess, they would have sifted their
testimony till it blew away in the wind, and
would have utterly cast out the evidence of
spectres, instead of greedily receiving it and
hounding on the poor wretches to their death.
When justices, deacons, doctors and gentry
hurried to wonder over and sympathize with
the young impostors, when their leaders came
to be mad, it is no marvel that the people lost
their head and followed after. In the faith
that the girls were bewitched, and that Satan
acted only through human agencies, they
clamored to know who it was that had bewitched
them; and thus beset, the girls, either
at random or because there was no one to befriend
her, or at Mr. Parris's half-hinted suggestion,
timidly pronounced a name. “Good,”
they said, “Good”—cheating their consciences,
perhaps, by making it only a surname; they
had no such timidity by-and-by; and Sarah
Good was consequently apprehended. When
she was examined, two others had been named,
arrested, and were examined with her.
Sarah Good was a poor creature—homeless,
destitute, deserted by her husband, with a
family of children to support by odds and ends
of work, by begging from door to door, and
scraping together in any way what little she
could. Doubtless she was a nuisance in the
people are, and her reputation was not
satisfactory. Her fate was certain from the
onset. The people—who were full of horror
and of pity for the tortured girls; who had
been told by the physicians that they were bewitched;
who had seen the ministers oracularly
confirm this statement; who had heard Mr.
Parris make it the subject of his vehement discourses
Sunday after Sunday, while the distemper
of the girls alarmed the congregation; who
had lately done nothing but look for the guilty
author of this diabolism, drew a breath of relief
when at last the witch was named; so plausible
a person, a vagrant and friendless; and it
must be admitted that Sarah Good and Mrs.
Osburne—an elderly person, sometimes bedridden,
sometimes distracted, who absented
herself from meeting—and the slave Tituba,
were the best possible selections that the cunning
hussies could have made; and the people
were satisfied. Mrs. Osburne died in prison
nine months afterward; Tituba confessed—as
she subsequently averred, under stress of beatings
from Mr. Parris—and, lying in jail a year
and a month, was finally sold for her fees; but
Sarah Good drank her cup, bitter all her life
long, to the bitter dregs. The meeting-house
was thronged at her examination; she was
placed on a platform in full sight of all there;
Mr. Parris had excited every one with his impassioned
opening prayer; the array of magistrates,
marshal and constable were enough to
strike awe into her soul at any time, much
more when her life was at stake. Acquainted
with want, with sorrow and obloquy, her heart
had been hardened, and she gave back no mild
answers to the catechising. The justices assumed
her guilt to be already established, endeavored
to make her involve herself, gave
leading questions to the witnesses, allowed all
manner of abominable interruptions, and browbeat
and abused her. When the afflicted children
were introduced, at a glance of her eye
they straightway fainted and went into spasms,
cried out that they were pinched and pricked
and throttled, and fell stiff as the dead. Upon
being taken to her and touched by her, the
color returned to their faces, their limbs relaxed,
they immediately became calm and well;
so that it seemed to be demonstrated before the
eyes of the credulous audience that the malign
miasm had been received back again into the
witch.
She herself could not tell what to make
of it, and never doubted the fact that the girls
suffered as they seemed to do; she only declared
that it was not she that caused it, and
must be the others—which simple exclamation
the justices used as a confession of her own
guilt, and accusation and evidence against the
others. “What is it that you say,” asked Hathorne,
“when you go muttering away from
persons' houses?” “If I must tell, I will tell,”
she answers. “Do tell us, then,” he urges.
“If I must tell, I will tell: it is the Commandments.
I may say my Commandments, I hope.”
“What Commandment is it?” Poor Sarah
Good could not for the life of her remember a
Commandment. “If I must tell you, I will
tell,” she ays then—“it is a psalm;” and after
a time she murmurs some fragment that she
has succeeded in recalling. Before long her
husband was brought in to testify against her.
She was sent to prison—thrice leaping off her
horse, railing against the magistrates, and
essaying to take her own life—and afterward
loaded down with iron fetters and with cords,
since it was supposed a witch needed double
fastenings, till led out, four months later, to
her execution. Meanwhile her child, five years
old, was apprehended for a witch; the marks
of her little teeth were shown on Ann Putnam's
arm; Mercy Lewis and the others produced
pins with which she had pricked them; she
was committed to prison and loaded with chains
like her mother. Outraged, oppressed, and
feeling there was no justice in the world unless
the Powers that rule it made her word true,
when, upon the scaffold, the cruel minister,
Nicholas Noyes, told Sarah Good she was a
witch, and she knew she was a witch, she
turned upon him and cried, “You are a liar!
and God shall give you blood to drink!”
Twenty-five years afterward, and unrepenting,
Nicholas Noyes died of an internal hemorrhage,
the vital torrent pouring from his mouth and
strangling him with his own blood.
After the first three witches had been proclaimed,
the business began in earnest, and the
girls “cried out upon” enough to keep the
magistrates' hands full; consternation and terror
ran like wildfire through the community,
which was unlettered and ignorant to a large
degree, the learning of the fathers having died
with them, and the schools not being yet established;
presently everybody was either accused
or accusing, there was a witch in every house,
the only safety for any was in suspecting
a neighbor. If one expressed doubt of
the afflicted children, he was marked from
that moment. The Rev. Francis Dane suspected
them; his family were cried out
upon, two of his children and many of his
grandchildren being imprisoned, and some
sentenced to death. The Rev. John Higginson
—of whom it was said, “his very presence
puts vice out of countenance, his conversation
is a glimpse of heaven”—disbelieved in them;
his daughter Anna was committed as a witch.
Husba ds were made to criminate their wives,
children, their parents; when one of the accusing
girls fell away, she was herself accused,
but knowing what to do, was saved by a confession
of impossibilities. Anything was taken
for evidence, the nightmares of this one, the
drunken fantasies of that, the hysterics of the
other, and any careless gossip that never
should have been uttered at all. If a prisoner
dared use any self-vindication, the vanity and
anger of the magistrates were kindled against
that one in especial. Hundreds were under
arrest; hundreds confessed to what they never
did, as the only means to save their lives,
though afterward frequently retracting their
confessions and going cheerfully to death;
the prisons were full, and executions began.
The accusations of the afflicted girls
mounted by degrees from simple witchcraft
and writing in the Black Man's book, with the
familiar of a yellow-bird suckling the fingers,
to that of a baptism and sacrament of blood
administered by the devil himself, and finally
to that of fell and terrible murders. Their
narratives were all of the same character, their
imaginations filthy and limited in flight, and
the only assertions in the whole of their rodomontade
of any brilliance was Tituba's reply as
to how they went to their place of meeting. “We
ride upon sticks, and are there presently,” and
tone to convene his witches—“a sound that
reached over the country far and wide, sending
its blasts to Andover, and wakening its echoes
along the Merrimack to Cape Ann and the uttermost
settlements everywhere.” Kindness
had no effect upon the girls; when Mrs. Procter—three
of whose children their representations
had cast into prison, and whom they had
torn away from her home, leaving her forlorn
“little maid” of four years old to come out
and scan the passers-by, in hopes each one
might be her father or her mother, her brother
or her sister come back—when Mrs. Procter
mildly said to one of them, “Dear child, it is
not so,” and solemnly added, “There is another
judgment, dear child,” they redoubled
their convulsions, and grew so outrageous that
John Procter, protecting his wife from their
insults, was himself accused and hung. The
prisoners, meanwhile, were crowded in such
noisome dungeons, that many died and many
lost their reason; some also were tortured to
procure confession—feet and head bound together
till the blood poured from eyes and
nose.
The accusations were by no means confined
to Salem; Andover, Beverly, Boston,
were ransacked to fill them—the girls had
tasted blood and were pitiless. A Mrs. Easty
was taken from the old Crowningshield Farm
in Topsfield (now owned by Mr. Thomas W.
Pierce, and brought to court; she was a woman
of station and character; even the magistrates
were affected by her mien; and though
Ann Putnam and others cried, “Oh, Goody
Easty, Goody Easty, you are the woman, you
are the woman!” she was discharged, having
endured several weeks' confinement; but upon
that there arose such an uproar among the
girls, such fresh fits and tormentings, that,
after having enjoyed her home for only two
days, she was again arrested by the brutal Marshal
Herrick, and presently hung. But even
in her last hour this noble woman sent to the
Governor a petition in behalf of her fellow-prisoners,
yet asking no favor for herself. Mr.
Upham describes a scene at the trial of Sarah
Cloyse, taken every incident from the record,
which perfectly illustrates the callousness of
these girls.
“Then Sarah Cloyse asked for water, and sat
down, as one seized with a dying fainting-fit;
and several of the afflicted fell into fits,
and some of them cried out, `Oh, her spirit
has gone to prison to her sister Nurse!'
“The audacious lying of the witnesses; the
horrid monstrousness of their charges against
Sarah Cloyse, of having bitten the flesh of the
Indian brute, and drank herself and distributed
to others as deacon, at an infernal sacrament,
the blood of the wicked creatures making these
foul and devilish declarations, known by her to
be utterly and wickedly false; and the fact
that they were believed by the deputy, the
council, and the assembly, were more than she
could bear. Her soul sickened at such unimaginable
depravity and wrong; her nervous
system gave way; she fainted and sank to the
floor. The manner in which the girls turned
the incident against her shows how they were
hardened to all human feeling, and the cunning
art which, on all occasions, characterized their
proceedings. That such an insolent interruption
and disturbance, on their part, was per
mitted without rebuke from the Court, is a
perpetual dishonor to every member of it. The
scene exhibited at this moment, in the meeting-house,
is worthy of an attempt to imagine.
The most terrible sensation was naturally produced
by the swooning of the prisoner, the
loudly uttered and savage mockery of the girls,
and their going simultaneously into fits, screaming
at the top of their voices, twisting into all
possible attitudes, stiffened as in death, or
gasping with convulsive spasms of agony, and
crying out, at intervals. `There is the Black
Man whispering in Cloyse's ear.' `There is a
yellow-bird flying found her head.' John Indian,
on such occasions, used to confine his
achievements to tumbling and rolling his ugly
body about the floor. The deepest commiseration
was felt by all for the `afflicted,' and men
and women rushed to hold and soothe them.
There was, no doubt, much loud screeching,
and some miscellaneous faintings through the
whole crowd. At length, by bringing the sufferers
into contact with Goody Cloyse, the diabolical
fluid passed back into her, they were all
relieved, and the examination was resumed.”
In fact, neither age nor condition had any
effect upon the prosecutors. Rebecca Jacobs,
partially deranged, was snatched from her four
young children, one of them an infant, and the
others who were able to walk following after
her, crying bitterly. Martha Carrier, who the
children said had promise from the Black Man
of being Queen of Hell, and who had sternly
rebuked the magistrates, and declared she had
seen no man so black as themselves, was made
to hear her children, seven or eight years
old, confess themselves witches who had set
their hands to the book, testify against her, and
procure her death. Rebecca Nurse, past three
score and ten, wife of a wealthy citizen, venerated
by high and low, was brought to trial in
her infirm condition, accused by the girls at the
very time when she was praying for them. On
the jury's bringing in a verdict of innocence,
they were reprimanded by the Chief-Justice,
and remanded to confinement till they brought
in a verdict of guilty; and though her neighbors
made affidavits and petitions in her behalf, she
was condemned; after which Mr. Parris, who
had long since gotten affairs into his own
hands, had intimidated outsiders, and was
having everything his own way, prepared one
of his most solemn scenes to further excite the
people; and Mrs. Nurse, delicate, if not dying
as it was, after her shameful trial, her cruel
and indecent exposures, was brought into
church, covered with chains, and there excommunicated
by her old pastor, Nicholas Noyes—
the crowd of spectators believing they saw a
woman not only lost for this life, but barred
out from salvation in the life to come. She
was thrown, after death, into a hole beneath
the gallows; but her husband and sons recovered
her body in the night, brought it home to
her weeping daughters, and buried it in her
own garden.
With that, the girls, grown bold, had flown
at higher game than any, the Rev. George
Burroughs, one of Mr. Parris's rivals and predecessors.
This person had suffered almost
everything in Salem ere leaving it for Casco
Bay; he had lost his wife and children there,
his salary had not been paid him, and he had
even been arrested in his pulpit for the debt
of his wife's funeral expenses, which he had
The malignities that he now endured
are only explicable by remembering his unpopularity
in Salem; he was cast into a black
dungeon, accused of witchcraft on the evidence
of such feats of strength as holding out a gun
by inserting the joint of a finger in the muzzle,
and after that accused of the murder of his two
wives and of his children, of Mr. Lawson's wife
and child, and of various others, covered with
all abuses, and finally hung, and buried beneath
the gallows, with his chin and foot protruding
from the ground. Mr. Upham gives a chapter
in his trial too graphically to escape quotation
here:
“The examination of Mr. Burroughs presented
a spectacle, all things considered, of
rare interest and curiosity: the grave dignity
of the magistrates; the plain, dark figure of
the prisoner; the half-crazed, half-demoniac
aspect of the girls; the wild, excited crowd;
the horror, rage, and pallid exasperation of
Lawson, Goodman Fuller, and others, also of
the relatives and friends of Burroughs's two
former wives, as the deep damnation of their
taking off and the secrets of their bloody graves
were being brought to light; and the child on
the stand telling her awful tales of ghosts in
winding-sheets, with napkins round their heads,
pointing to their death-wounds, and saying that
`their blood did cry for vengeance' upon their
murderer. The prisoner stands alone: all were
raving around him, while he is amazed, astounded
at such folly and wrong in others, and
humbly sensible of his own unworthiness, bowed
down under the mysterious Providence that
permitted such things for a season, yet strong
and steadfast in conscious innocence and uprightness.”
But though such countless arrests and trials
and condemnations were had, and so many
executions, the most startling incident among
them all was the death of old Giles Corey.
Giles Corey was a man of marked traits, not
the least marked of which was an unbending
will and a heart that knew no fear. In the
course of his long life he had never submitted
to a wrong without retaliation, he had suffered
no encroachments on his rights, he had cared
nothing for the speech of other people, but had
always spoken his own mind, let who would
stand at the door; he had quarreled with his
acquaintances, beaten his servants, sued his
neighbors for slander, and, such experience
tending toward small self-control, he had been
involved in ceaseless litigation, and as often
as not had been in the right. Late in life he
married, for his third wife, Martha, a woman of
intelligence beyond her time, and joined the
Church; and he was eighty years old when the
Witchcraft excitement began. With his ardent
and eager temperament, nothing abated by
age, he was immediately interested in the
afflicted children, and soon as fanatical as the
worst in regard to them. That his wife should
laugh at it all, should suppose those God-fearing
men, the magistrates, blind, should assert
there was no such thing as a witch at all, and,
when he had seen their agonies with his own
eyes, that the afflicted children did but dissemble,
and should hide his saddle that he might
stay at home, and no longer swell the press that
urged the matter on, filled him with amazement
and rage; he exclaimed angrily that the devil
was in her, and, for all he knew, she might be
a witch herself! When his wife was arrested,
these words of his were remembered; he was
piled in court with artful questions, whose replies
must needs be unfavorable to her; two of
his sons-in-law testified to his recent disagreement
with her, to his bewitched cattle, and
other troubles, and he was obliged to give a
deposition against her. But he could not be
forced to make the deposition amount to anything;
and, indignant with him for that contumacy,
his wife's accusers became his own,
and he was cast into jail for a wizard. Once
imprisoned, with leisure to reflect, conscious
that he had never used witchcraft in his life,
he began to believe that others might be as innocent
as he, to be aware of the hailucination
to which he had been subject, to see that his
wife, by that time sentenced to execution, was
a guiltless martyr, to feel his old love and tenderness
for her return upon him, to be filled
with remorse for his anger with her, for his
testimony and deposition, and with his old hot
wrath against his two sons-in-laws, whose word
had done her to deatn.
He comprehended the whole situation, that
unless he confessed to a lie nothing could save
him, that if he were tried he would certainly
be condemned, and his property would be confiscated
under the attainder. He desired in
his extremity some punishment on his two unfaithful
sons-in-law, some reward for his two
faithful ones. He sent for the necessary instruments
and made his will, giving all his large
property to his two faithful sons-in-law, and
guarding the gift with every careful form of
words known to the law. That properly done
and witnessed, his resolve was taken. He
determined never to be tried. If he was not
tried, he could not be condemned; if he was not
condemned, this disposition of his property
could not be altered. The only way to accomplish
this was by refusing to plead either guilty
or not guilty. And this he did. When taken
into court he maintained a stubborn silence, he
refused to open his lips; and till the prisoner
answered “guilty” or “not guilty,” the trial
could not take place. For this, also, there was
but one remedy, and old Giles Corey knew it;
but his mind was made up; it was the least
atonement he could make his wife—to requite
the sons that had been loyal to her, and to meet
himself a harder fate than he had given her.
Perhaps, too, he saw that it needed such a
thing to awaken the people, and he was the
voluntary sacrifice. He received unflinchingly
the sentence of the Peine forte et dure, and from
that moment never uttered a syllable. This
unspeakably dreadful torture condemned one
to a dark cell, there, with only a strip of clothing,
to be laid upon the floor with an iron
weight upon the chest, receiving the alternate
fare of three mouthfuls of bread on one day,
and on the next three draughts of the nearest
stagnant water, till obstinacy yielded or death
arrived. In Giles Corey's case — excommunication
having been previously pronounced on a
self-murderer by the inexorable church-members—the
punishment was administered in the
outside air, and the weights were of stone; he
was strong, in spite of years; the anguish was
long; pressed by the burden, his tongue protruded
from his mouth, a constable struck it
back with his staff, but not a word came with
it, and he died unflinching, never pleading
either guilty or not guilty. With this before
universal horror shuddered through the people
already surfeited with horrors, and all at once
their eyes opened to the enormity of these proceedings.
Three days afterward, the last procession
of victims, once hooted and insulted as
they went, jolted now in silence through the
long and tedious ways to the summit of Witch
Hill, and, taking their farewell look at the wide
panorama of land and sea, the last witches were
hanged. It was in vain for Cotton Mather to
utter his incendiary eloquence beneath the
gallows and endeavor to rekindle the dying
fires in the breasts of the sorry and silent
people; for Mr. Noyes to exclaim, as the bodies
swung off, “What a sad thing it is to see eight
firebrands of hell hanging there!” The ministers
exhorted, the frantic girls cried out on
one and another, and flew at so high a quarry
as the wife of the Rev. John Hale, a woman of
almost perfect life; and though Mrs. Hale's
husband had persecuted others, when the
thunderbolt fell on his own roof, he awoke to
his delirium: then the Commoners of Andover
instituted suits for slander, and with that the
bubble burst, and not another witch was hung.
The whole Colony was shaken with remorse,
and the reaction from the excitement was like
death. The accusing girls came out of their
convulsions unregarded; one or two afterward
married; the rest, with the exception of Ann
Putnam, led openly shameless lives. Seven
years afterward, bereft of her father and
mother, and with the care of a large family of
young brothers and sisters, and a constitution
utterly broken down by her career of fits and
contortions, Ann Putnam read in the open
church a confession of her crimes, partook of
the communion, and the tenth year following
she died. It is a brief and very strange confession;
in it all the sin is laid upon Satan, and so
artlessly that one can but give her innocence
the benefit of a doubt; and whether the girl
was the subject of delusive trances or of wickedness,
must remain a mystery until the science
of psychology has made further advances than
it has done to-day. When the people had fully
come to their senses, the jury that had passed
verdict on the accused wrote and circulated an
avowal of their regret; Judge Sewall rose in
his place in the Old South Church in Boston and
made a public acknowledgment of his error,
and supplication for forgiveness, and every year
thereafter kept a day of humiliation and prayer;
but Chief-Justice Stoughton remained as infatuated
at the last as at the first; and of the ministers
who had been active in the vile work,
Cotton Mather, Sam. Parris, Nicholas Noyes,
there is not a particle of evidence that one of
them repented or regretted it. But Salem
Village was ruined, its farms were neglected,
its roads broken up, its fences scattered, its
buildings out of order, industrial pursuits were
destroyed, famine came, taxes were due and
lands were sold to meet them, whole families
moved away, and the place became almost
depopulated. One spot there, says the historian,
bears marks of the blight to-day—the old
meeting-house road. “The Surveyor of Highways
ignores it. The old, gray, moss-covered
stone walls are dilapidated and thrown out of
line. Not a house is on either of its borders,
and no gate opens or path leads to any. Neglect
and desertion brood over the contiguous
ground. On both sides there are the remains
of cellars, which declare that once it was lined
by a considerable population. Along this road
crowds thronged in 1692, for weeks and months
to witness the examinations.”
It is a satisfaction to the vindictive reader of
the annals of this time to know that Sam. Parris
—guilty of divination by his own judgment, since
he had plainly used the afflicted children for
that purpose—was dismissed from his pastorate,
where he had played the part rather of wolf than
of shepherd, and finished his days in ignominy
and want. While every reader will be glad to
know that a good man, Joseph Green, came to
soothe the sorrows and bind up the wounds,
and destroy as much as might be all memory of
wrong and suffering in the place. But though,
for a few years, various Legislatures passed
small acts of acknowledgment and compensation,
yet, wars and other troubles supervening,
and possible shame at reopening the past, it so
happens that for several Legislatures the murdered people
the attainder has never been taken off to
the present day.
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