American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  The events leading up to the Salem episode are thought to have begun with the case of the Goodwin children in Boston. The four Goodwin children, the eldest of whom was thirteen, began in the fall of 1688 to show signs of being bewitched. Led by the eldest girl, they fell into fits and convulsions in which they would complain of agonizing pains, now here now there. Their tongues would hang out, and they would simulate blindness and deafness and dumbness for periods of a couple of hours. In between seizures they would behave normally. The oldest Goodwin girl accused an old Irish woman with whom she had had a quarrel of bewitching them. And the woman was accordingly brought to trial.

  This pattern, incidentally, was common in witchcraft cases in England. The accused witch was usually someone with whom the accuser had had a quarrel, a quarrel in which the accuser was conscious of having in some way injured the accused. For example, a man might have turned away an old woman who came to his door begging a cup of milk. Later his cow would die, and he would accuse the old woman of having bewitched it in revenge for his failure to give her the milk. The accused person was usually poor and old, and since more women were poor and old than men, witches, at least in England, were most likely to be old and to be women.

  In the Goodwin case in Boston, the accused was indeed a poor and old woman, and upon search she was found to have the proper dolls in her possession and confessed to her crime and made many dark references to the devil. She apparently believed that she actually had done the job. She was tried, found guilty, and executed, but she warned her executioners that the children’s afflictions would continue, for there were others who would finish what she had begun. The children heard about this and perhaps decided that it would be a shame to give up their notoriety when the witch herself had suggested that they would continue to be attacked. Or perhaps the power of suggestion was itself sufficient to produce the seizures that they had been suffering. At any rate the convulsions continued.

  It was at this point that Cotton Mather stepped into the breach. He took the oldest girl into his family in order to see whether his own superior piety would not be able to defeat the devil. For a while the girl apparently enjoyed the prestige of living with the eminent minister, and her affliction continued for a few weeks. But living in the same house with Cotton Mather must have proved in itself something of a cross to bear, perhaps too high a price to pay for notoriety. Soon Mather was able to announce his triumph over the forces of darkness. And the girl, completely cured now, was able to escape the prayers of that pompous egotist.

  Mather had actually done the colony a great service, for the girl, after the execution of the Irish woman, had named a number of other persons who she said were now tormenting her. Mather kept the names of these persons secret and fought the devil, as was his wont, single-handed. When he had won his victory, however, he could not refrain from giving way to his most conspicuous weakness: he had to write a book about it. Mather would frequently rush into print on much smaller provocation than this anyhow, and now he came out with a book entitled Memorable Providences, in which he gave a full account of the Goodwin case and of his own spectacular part in putting a stop to it. From this narrative he drew two important conclusions: first, that there definitely is such a thing as witchcraft, for he observed it in action on the victim under his care, and, second, that it can be defeated by the method that he followed with the Goodwin girl, which consisted mainly of isolating the victim and praying.

  In later years Robert Calef, a merchant of Boston and a personal enemy of the Mathers, accused Cotton Mather of writing this book for the express purpose of arousing a witchcraft scare. Calef implied that Mather had taken a prurient interest in the girl and blamed him for the later outbreak in Salem. The charges, which Calef did not publish until several years after the Salem episode, were patently false, as anyone can tell by reading Mather’s book. If Mather’s recommendations had been followed, there would have been no epidemic of witchcraft at Salem. But for some reason Calef’s wild accusations have stuck, and Mather has gone down in popular legend as one of the instigators of the Salem troubles.

  The Salem episode actually began in much the same way as the Goodwin case in Boston. Perhaps Mather’s pamphlet caused discussion of witchcraft and was a cause in that way, but there is no direct connection. Early in 1692 a group of girls between the ages of nine and nineteen began to have symptoms resembling those of the Goodwin children. They accused Tituba, a Caribbean Indian slave woman in the family of the local minister, of having bewitched them. The slave was beaten into a confession and accused two old women of being her confederates. These in turn confessed and accused others, apparently in hope of gaining lenient treatment. The circle widened rapidly; and by the time the new governor, Sir William Phips, arrived in Boston with his commission under the new charter, there were several dozen persons awaiting trial. The provisional government had hesitated to try the cases, because it was uncertain of its authority. Now Phips appointed a special commission of oyer and terminer, composed of eminent former magistrates, among them Samuel Sewall, the diarist, and headed by William Stoughton, who proved to be a veritable caricature of the unbending, self-righteous Puritan.

  When the court proceeded to trial, he and the other judges apparently became infected with the panic that had already seized the Salem community. The devil seemed to be at large, winning more and more adherents, and the cause of God in New England, already visibly threatened in so many other ways, seemed to be at stake. The court, in the throes of this panic, began deciding cases and rendering judgments on the basis of a procedure that had long been recognized as invalid in witchcraft cases. They convicted accused persons on the ground of what was known as spectral testimony, unsupported by other evidence. Spectral testimony was testimony offered by the victim to the effect that he or she was being tormented by a specter in the shape of the accused. The assumption behind this form of evidence was that the devil could not adopt the form of an innocent person (which would thus be just about the only shape he could not take). The only human shape that the devil could take, according to this assumption, was the shape of a person who had confederated with him. If, therefore, a girl was tormented by someone who looked to her like, say, Goody Jones, then Goody Jones must have made a pact with the devil. Goody Jones, in short, must be a witch.

  Now, if this sort of evidence was accepted as sufficient for conviction, it would be easy for anyone, either out of malice or because of hallucinations, to accuse and obtain the conviction of an innocent person. Even people who believed in the reality of witchcraft could see that there were great dangers in such an unregulated procedure, and it had been established for some time that spectral evidence was not to be regarded as conclusive. The Mathers and other ministers were aware of this and cautioned the members of the court privately against placing too great a reliance on this kind of evidence. For they knew it was a matter of controversy whether it should be relied on at all. There were some experts on the subject who believed that it was possible for the devil to adopt the shape of an innocent person, and if this was so, then of course spectral evidence had no validity whatever.

  In any case, it was clear that some more objective evidence ought to be required for conviction, and the members of the court knew this perfectly well. If they had insisted on such evidence, if they had insisted that the regular, established procedures for trying witches be followed, they would have been able to prevent the Salem episode from turning into a general panic.

  Unfortunately they did not insist on the regular, established procedures. They admitted spectral evidence and convicted men and women solely on the basis of such evidence, which was offered in many cases by hysterical teenage girls who were perhaps enjoying the notoriety they had suddenly attained and who doubtless persuaded themselves, as they persuaded the court, that their fantasies were reality. The judges, like other members of the community, were alarmed at the size of the danger that appeared to face them. The devil with all his legions seemed to have invaded New Engla
nd, and it was no time, they felt, to be nice about methods of dealing with him. Fight him ruthlessly with no holds barred. Better that a few individuals suffer than that the whole community be endangered.

  Such a situation is all too familiar. When any group of people become sufficiently intent on attacking a particular evil, they are likely to discard as obsolete and ineffective any ground rules that society has developed for the peaceful or fair achievement of social objectives. When those on the right become exercised by the demons of anarchism, communism, or terrorism to the point where they feel themselves threatened, they call upon the government to ignore the normal procedures designed to protect the rights of individuals, or they resort to lynch law, kangaroo courts, or torture, or they persuade their legislatures to act as courts and in effect convict their enemies in wholesale fashion. Similarly, when those on the left come to feel that the duly elected officers of government have somehow betrayed them, the left also discards ordinary, orderly procedures and moves to direct action, to force, disdaining the old procedures except as they may be useful in hampering the establishment’s efforts to defend itself. When any of these groups become large enough to be intoxicated by their own apparent size or power and infatuated with their own righteousness, it is the rare individual who will stand up and loudly say no.

  In Salem it was not a party or faction but the whole local community that rose against the apparent legion of witches enlisted by the devil. God Himself, it seemed, surely approved of any methods used to stop them. Anyone who suggested otherwise was obviously a witch lover. Although procedures existed for trying witches, procedures that had been used in the past with seeming success, the situation appeared to call for extraordinary procedures against the devil’s massive onslaught. The majority of people were either egging the court on or keeping their mouths shut.

  Only after twenty persons had been executed in 1692 and hundreds more accused did a group of ministers, led by Increase Mather, have the courage to get together and point out firmly and unequivocally to Governor Phips what some of them had said privately and with reservations—namely, that the court was proceeding contrary to established practice. After they had done this, the terrible business came to an end. Phips, upon receipt of the memorial from the ministers, dissolved the special commission of oyer and terminer. The remaining cases were tried under the old, regular procedures by the newly appointed superior court. Spectral evidence was not admitted as a sufficient basis for conviction. And the result was acquittal of all but three, whom the governor promptly reprieved. So far as I know, no more trials for witchcraft were ever held again in New England, though the last trial in England was in 1712 and isolated trials and executions continued on the Continent through the eighteenth century.

  The New England ministers surely deserve credit for having spoken up to stop the trials, however belatedly. But if we look at the way the trials ended by comparison with the witch hunts that had afflicted German towns during the preceding century, it becomes apparent that the Salem trials were reaching the point where the civil authorities would probably have called a halt to them within a short time anyhow. A study of German witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests that witch hunts had a natural history that repeated itself in each of them.

  At the beginning we may expect the persons accused to have been generally poor and helpless, persons whose age and poverty and manner of living placed them outside the web of human relations that initially protected other members of a community against irresponsible charges. But as the confessions of the accused widened, the circle necessarily spread beyond the immediate neighborhood. The accused, pressed for more names, probably did not know the names of ordinary people outside their immediate neighborhood. The only names they could come up with would have been those of more prominent people, people known to them not by virtue of personal acquaintance but by social standing or political position in the province at large.

  As the accusations thus spread upward as well as outward, two powerful motives for doubt began to work. First, it became more and more difficult for anyone to believe that the devil had actually succeeded in confederating with such a large proportion of the population. And second, it became particularly difficult for those in power to believe accusations that touched their wives and friends and even themselves. If the trials proceeded, the whole structure of society as well as their own place in it would be threatened. Up to this point most trials would end in convictions. As doubts began to seize the members of the tribunal, acquittals would become more frequent and then suddenly become universal. Accusations and confessions would cease, and society would return to normal and lick its wounds. No one would have stopped believing in the devil or in the reality of witchcraft, but the authorities would have come to doubt the validity of their own methods of coping with it.

  The Salem horror came to an end in precisely this way, which again confirms the resemblance of the Salem trials to the continental rather than the English model. The accusations were reaching way beyond Salem and were beginning to extend to men and women of some prominence in the colony. They even reached to the wife of Governor Phips himself. Huge numbers of people were under suspicion. When Phips got the signal from the ministers, it served to crystallize a conviction that must surely have come to him shortly in any case. The colony he was charged to govern would have destroyed itself if the trials had been allowed to continue much longer.

  That a healthy skepticism had spread among other men in authority is evident from the way in which the Superior Court in Boston dealt out acquittals wholesale to those who were still awaiting trial when the special commission of oyer and terminer was dissolved. Not only Governor Phips but the whole colony had finally come to its senses, and the people, like those of so many German communities, could now lick their wounds. In a sense they have been doing it ever since, trying to place the blame for such horrendous events and trying to redeem them at least by learning from them.

  In these efforts it has been tempting, especially since Puritanism went out of fashion, to put all the blame on the clergy and especially on Cotton Mather. In a book published in 1936 Samuel Eliot Morison did his best to dispel this too easy way of disposing of the problem, which started in 1697 with Robert Calef. Morison, with his usual salty expression, explained how Calef “who had it in for Cotton Mather, tied a tin can to him after the frenzy was over: and it has rattled and banged through the pages of superficial and popular historians.” “Even today,” he went on, “the generally accepted version of the Salem tragedy is that Cotton Mather worked it up, aided and abetted by his fellow parsons, in order to drive people back to church.” Not so, said Morison, and demonstrated that Mather acted to stop the trials rather than promote them.

  Unfortunately, however, it is pretty hard to make Cotton Mather look attractive in any situation, and in this one, innocent though he may have been of any role in stirring up the witch trials, he himself believed that he was responsible for the extraordinary activity of the devil in Massachusetts. Why, he asked himself, should the devil have chosen this particular time and place to launch so formidable a campaign against the godly inhabitants of New England? And the answer was not far to seek. It was indeed so obvious that other men, he said, had pointed it out to him. The answer was that Cotton Mather’s superior godliness posed a challenge that hell itself could not ignore. And he wrote in his diary, “This assault of the evil angels upon the country was intended by Hell, as a particular defiance unto my poor endeavors to bring the souls of men unto Heaven.”

  Because Mather’s egotism is so revolting, Morison’s efforts to rescue his reputation have not been wholly successful. And Perry Miller, who considered Mather to be the most nauseous human being of his time, found particularly repulsive Mather’s attempt to defend the trials after they were over. In a book called Wonders of the Invisible World, which Mather rushed into print immediately after the trials, he tried to smooth things over, but that meant saying a few good words for the good inten
tions of the judges. By implication, at least, he justified their conduct, calling upon the people of Massachusetts to renew their covenant with God now that the devil had been defeated. Perry Miller, in commenting upon this proposal, returned Mather to the unhappy position from which Morison had tried to rescue him. The passage is so eloquent and so characteristic of Miller that I cannot forbear repeating it:

  Samuel Eliot Morison says that Robert Calef tied a tin can to Cotton Mather which has rattled and banged through the pages of superficial and popular historians. My account is not popular, and I strive to make it not superficial; assuredly, if by tin can is meant the charge that Mather worked up the Salem tragedy, it does not belong to him; but what Calef was actually to charge was that he prostituted a magnificent conception of New England’s destiny to saving the face of a bigoted court. In that sense, the right can was tied to the proper tail, and through the pages of this volume it shall rattle and bang.

  But in truth it is time to stop looking for scapegoats, even when we have ready to hand so attractive a candidate for the position as Cotton Mather. The Salem witch scare, as one reads the record today, was indeed a shameful performance, from which we would doubtless like to dissociate ourselves by putting the blame on a bunch of benighted and bigoted clergymen. But it is also necessary to look at the whole business with a greater degree of humility than was possible, say a hundred years ago, when the human race was congratulating itself on its progress toward perfection—through survival of the fittest, transcontinental railroads and flying machines, the gospel of wealth and the white man’s burden—Americans found the witch trials a difficult and repulsive topic.