Read The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 Online

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (27 page)

BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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Page 146
assumptions about the phenomenon studied. Some men insisted upon the total validity of natural investigation because they denied the existence of evil spirits and witches. Increase was concerned to banish these skeptics whose skepticism threatened religion itself. As Joseph Glanvill, one of the compilers of witch stories from whom he drew, said, ''
Atheism
is begun in Sadducism: And those that dare not bluntly say,
There
is NO GOD, content themselves . . . to deny there are SPIRITS, or WITCHES."
18
Just who the skeptics were in New England is not clear; announcing themselves would have been a dangerous trespass against received opinion. A few years later during the outburst in Salem a few scoffers raised their voices. Martha Cory was oneshe did not think there were any witches, she saidand her sniffing at the whole affair helped hasten her way to the gallows.
19
Increase Mather rarely produced a major book for the local audience alone, and in the
Essay
he hoped to destroy the doubters in cosmopolitan Europe as well as in provincial New England. Not many genuine skeptics published their views in Europe, and Mather was reduced to attacking men who believed as seriously as he in the existence of witches but who had urged that only the most careful and scientific means of detecting them be used. The four Increase mentioned as deserving particular contempt were Reginald Scot, a sixteenth-century English author who inspired other critics for the next two centuries, Thomas Ady, John Wagstaffe, and John Webster, all well known in the seventeenth century. Increase either misread or misunderstood these men, or relied on secondhand information about the content of their books. None of them denied, as he charged, that witches and evil spirits abounded in this world.
20
The technique Increase used to cashier the "skeptics" throughout the
Essay
and in later studies of the invisible world, relied on a mass of data. His purpose apparently was to present so much evidencestories, attestations, testimonials, narrativesof the incursion of witches and apparitions in every corner of the world as to leave his reader no choice but to agree. As in the accounts of the remarkable use of thunder and lightning, to say nothing of earthquakes, floods, and storms, he attempted to convey a sense of the mysterious immediacy of the Devil and his dark spirits. The visible, the concrete, the stuff of ordinary ex-
 
Page 147
istence, paradoxically, was made to suggest the presence of another order of invisible, immaterial and dangerous being. Thus, the stories abound with ''evidence" of men being bitten by unseen teeth (the marks appear before the victim's astonished eyes); chairs are lifted into the air despite the best efforts of men to hold them against the floor; burning ashes are flung out of a fireplace by an unseen hand; children sicken and die at the command of a voice from an unseen mouth. Some afflicted men imagine that they have been turned into beasts; others speak in languages they do not know; still others receive dreadful information about the future. The people who endure these tortures all appear as normal Englishmen or Americans. The implication is that the same kinds of things might happen to Increase's readers, should Providence be disposed to lengthen the Devil's leash.
21
This type of demonstration surely convinced many of the power of the demonic in the world of men and things. It employed the conventional and it connected the visible and the invisible. Still it did not convince everyone, as Increase well knew. And one who doubted the existence of the invisible world might accept the truth of all Increase's descriptions and still insist that they all could be explained in natural terms.
Those savants and skeptics who resorted to science for explanations did not presume to suggest that the laws of physics accounted for the strange levirations reported in many cases; nor did they plot the orbits of witches riding on sticks. Rather they fastened on the extraordinary behavior of the accused witches and their victims. The convulsions, the fits, the Lycanthropiathe delusion of some men that they had been transformed into animalseven the confessions by practicing witches, all took their origin from the same source, they said: disease of the body and brain. These skeptics denied that supernatural creatures inserted themselves into men. Illness could produce all the symptoms of witchcraft and it could lead men to admit crimes they had not committed when they were accused by strong-willed investigators.
22
This argument baffled Increase who knew that calling it atheism did not constitute refutation. The best he could do was to point to the delusions of afflicted and accused, the terrors, the frightful ideas, their hatreds and enmities. How did these
 
Page 148
phenomena enter the mind? How could "meet natural Disease" produce them out of nothing, he asked. Consider, for example, the extraordinary capacity of some of the afflicted to speak with tongues, that is, to speak in languages, unknown to them. Surely what they spoke came from the mind; what baffled him was how anyone could explain "how should that be in the mind, which never came there through the outward senses." The conclusion seemed obvious to him: ''This cannot be without some supernatural influence." Perhaps recognizing the lameness of his argument, he charged that the "patrons of witchcraft'' favored the view that there was no mystery in the behavior that the vulgar attributed to the demonicdisease explained it all. And he added, in an opinion that had dangerous implications, witches themselves often put their godly pursuers off the scent by using this medical argument.
23
Because the
Essay
proved to be popular, these views must have been widely known. But there is no evidence that they contributed to the venomous atmosphere that swirled around Salem Village when witchcraft appeared there in 1692. Even so, they do help us understand Increase Mather's responses to the incursions of the witches that year.
The witches first appeared in Salem Village, now Danvers, which was a small parish on the edge of the town of Salem, then a small seaport of traders and fishing men. Salem Village did not enjoy much contact with the larger community, or with any other town in New England. Its isolation probably contributed to the propensities of its inhabitants to backbiting and tale-bearing; and perhaps it encouraged them to resort to the courts for other kinds of satisfaction. At any rate, the petty squabbles there over land and crops and animals often ended with the parties involved appearing before the local justices.
24
Salem Village also had a history of unhappy relations with its ministers. Two, the Reverend James Bayley and the Reverend George Burroughs, had departed the parish after quarrels with their parishioners over their salaries and a long list of lesser matters. Apparently sharing the local fondness for litigation, both ministers took their people to court in an attempt to collect, and both won judgments. But both had then left, happy to be free of such a tightfisted flock. A third minister, Deodat
 
Page 149
Lawson, avoided the worst of these struggles but he did not remain long.
25
The Reverend Samuel Parris who succeeded Lawson late in 1689, did not find his parishioners in a generous or charitable frame of mind. After hassling over his salary, they forced him to accept a meager sixty-six pounds a year, a third in provisions, and they refused to provide his firewood for the winter, a discourtesy that must have soured his coming. Parris was scarcely a sweet-tempered man under the best of conditions, not that he had the opportunity to enjoy the best of anything very often. He was thirty-eight years old in 1692, and he had come to the ministry not from Harvard College but after failure in the West Indian trade. His family in Salem Village included his wife, about whom almost nothing is known, his nine-year-old daughter Betty, his eleven-year-old niece Abigail Williams, and two slaves, John Indian and Tituba, apparently half Carib and half Negro.
26
The trouble started with Tituba who, in the long winter of 1691-92, began entertaining the two girls and a number of others in the village with stories of the occult. She also instructed them in fortune telling, a forbidden art in any Protestant community. Although historians have assumed that Tituba was innocent of any evil motive in these practices, she doubtless took herself seriously, and so, evidently, did the girls. The problem of how her practices induced the pathological reactions that began appearing in this circle of female adolescents is beyond the scope of this book. Whatever was involved, by January 1692. symptoms of morbidity and soon of hysteria began to appear. Samuel Parris first noticed the abnormalities in his daughter Betty. Early in her illness, Betty seemed withdrawn and preoccupied with her own secret thoughts; she was also forgetful and began to neglect the chores she performed for her mother. She lost interest in almost all her customary activites, including worship, to the point of forgetting prayer and then rejecting the Bible when it was offered to her. Fits began in the same months, dreadful convulsions accompanied by shrieking, screams, tears, and sometimes unconsciousness.
About this time the other girls began displaying similar symptoms. Parris and other frightened parents at first attempted to keep their children's illnesses quiet, consulting the village
 
Page 150
physician, who was baffled, and then seeking the advice of ministers in Salem proper and nearby Beverly. As one girl after another began to act as if she were possessed, the chances of a rapid cure or of maintaining secrecy disappeared. Like many parents in the village, Parris suspected that the disease had a supernatural origin, but he does not seem to have announced his fear until the village doctor suggested that the girls were suffering from demonic possession. This learned opinion may have emboldened the girls, for soon in answer to the question, "Who torments you?" they named Tituba, and two village women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.
27
The accusations made during these convulsions by the demented girls were that the spectres, or the shapes of these women, appeared to them demanding that they enter a compact with the Devil by signing his black book. The girls refused with the results visible to everyone. The spectres of the witches kicked and bit them, flung them around like rag dolls, and twisted them into rigid postures. All this suffering, the girls insisted, was their reward for resisting the blandishment of the Devil and his agents, the witches.
28
When the witches showed up in Salem, Increase was in England at the Court of William and Mary completing a successful appeal for a charter for Massachusetts Bay to replace the old one which had been withdrawn eight years earlier. He finished the last of his business in March 1692, and with the new Governor, Sir William Phips, sailed for home on the twenty-ninth. He had not seen New England since 1688. His ship anchored in Boston on Saturday night, May 14, 1692.
29
The return brought him joy until he recognized the danger of the distress at Salem. The jails bulged with the accused, whose numbers would certainly grow as the afflicted girls cast their nets more widely each day. The girls drew the sympathy of those who watched their torments, but the accused too had their supporters. Devout families could not comprehend the justice of having pious members snatched out of their houses on nothing more than the charges of the suffering girls. Of course, the Devil roamed this world; of course hypocrites sat in churches along with the saints. But these families also believed that when the charge of witchcraft was lodged at one's door, some caution and judiciousness had to be exercised. The whole matter belonged
 
Page 151
before the courts for trial, once and for all. And those who supported the girls agreed, at least they agreed that the courts must proceed against witchcraft and drive the Devil and his cohorts from New England. The supporters, who in the Spring included Lt. Governor Stoughton and most of the Council and a number of ministers outside Salem, did not clamor for the exoneration of the innocent, however. In May when the Governor arrived, they were more interested in discovering the guilty than in freeing the guiltless.
30
The Governor delayed any action until May 29, when he commissioned a special court to try the cases. The judges, who sat without a jury, included nine distinguished members of the Council. Lt. Governor William Stoughton presided.
Increase certainly approved referring the witch cases to the court; established procedures in England called for judicial decision, as he had noted years before in his studies of witchcraft. But the creation of the court did not assure equitable proceedings, and he watched the first two weeks of the court's actions with a growing sense that long established practices were not being followed. The first trial lasted one day, and the conviction was clearly based on "spectral evidence," testimony by the afflicted girls that the spectre of an accused person was doing the tormenting. Bridget Bishop, the defendant, was not an attractive character; common gossip had it that she was an immoral woman, fond of gambling, prone to keep unusual hours and receive company of doubtful reputation on doubtful business. Her neighbors dredged up stories of unpleasant encounters with her, several going back as far as fifteen years. The most telling evidence was the accounts of the horror her spectre wrought: it had beaten Deliverance Hobbs, mother of one of the girls, with iron rods. Bridget Bishop was also supposed to have murdered several children, and given suck to her familiar, which turned out to be a snake. The judges found this testimony convincing and at the end of the long day of the trial, Stoughton sentenced her to hang. Phips was preparing to leave about this time to lead the fight against the Indians and may not have followed the trial closely; on June 8, six days after the trial, Stoughton ordered the execution for June 10. Bridget Bishop hanged that day.
31
The trial troubled Nathaniel Saltonstall, one of the magistrates, so much that he resigned from the court as soon as it was
BOOK: The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728
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