American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  It was well enough to be making such wonderful progress, but a person of the early nineteenth century could actually, as a child, have known someone who, as a child, had witnessed the hanging of the Salem witches. It was a little embarrassing that there had been quite that much progress to make. Although one might grow accustomed to the existence of apes among one’s distant ancestors, it was unpleasant to contemplate the presence of witch-hunters almost within the family.

  In the last century, however, we have learned more familiarity with the outrageous and less contempt for the contemptible. Our own progress seems to be in the direction of an atomic holocaust, and we have also made great strides in the techniques of convicting the innocent. Salem accordingly seems a little déjà vu to us, and we can weigh with professional condescension these early experiments in the use of phony confessions, irregular procedures, and the admission of inadmissible evidence.

  But if our familiarity with the outrageous brings the Salem episode uncomfortably closer, some aspects of what happened at Salem remain more novel and cannot fail to arouse a certain admiration in those of us who dislike judicial murder, murder by order of court. We can take a little comfort, for example, in the fact that the trials were brought to an end when only twenty-odd people had been hanged. The people of Massachusetts did manage to get a grip on themselves, did manage to get over their hysteria before it had carried them beyond twenty murders.

  One can admire much more the courage of those who refused to confess. There was an enormous pressure on the accused to confess, for those who did so and turned state’s evidence by naming accomplices were almost invariably forgiven. The Puritan code always was very lenient on those who repented. If you read the records of New England courts throughout the seventeenth century, you will find that in nine cases out of ten in which a man was convicted of a crime, he had only to humble himself and say that he was sorry for what he had done in order to have his punishment remitted to a nominal fine. After all, the motive for punishing crime was mainly to testify to God that society did not approve. If a man confessed that he had done wrong, this consideration was already taken care of. Similarly with the witches, anyone who confessed that she had conspired with the devil, but was sorry for it, was willingly forgiven. Usually, in order to convince the judges that her confession was genuine, she would describe her confederates in the conspiracy. As we have seen, it was by means of these phony confessions that the witch hunt spread.

  The remarkable thing is that a number of men and women had the courage to deny the accusation at the price of their lives. They took their religion seriously enough to believe that if they confessed to a crime they had not committed, God would hold them guilty of the lie. One man, Giles Cory, was perhaps as brave a man as any in American history. Cory, accused of witchcraft, saw that he would be convicted by the unfair procedures of the court. When his case came up for trial, he simply refused to plead, that is, he refused to answer whether he was guilty or not guilty. The means prescribed by English law at that time for forcing a man to plead was that he should be placed between two wooden planks or platforms, while stones were piled on the upper one until he was ready to speak. Giles Cory was given this treatment and allowed himself to be pressed to death without saying a word. If he had pleaded guilty, confessed, and accused others, he would doubtless have been set free. If he had pleaded not guilty, he would surely have been found guilty and his property would have been forfeited to the state, for witchcraft was punished in Massachusetts not only by death but by forfeiture of property to the state, even though this was contrary to English law. By refusing to plead, Cory made it impossible for the court to convict him and thereby saved his property for his family. But he did not take the easier course of pleading guilty.

  Mary Easty showed an even greater sort of courage. She pleaded not guilty, knowing what the consequences would be. She believed in the reality of witchcraft, but she knew from her own knowledge that she was innocent and the court wrong. Her dying statement was a warning to the court that deserves to be remembered for its temperance, its courage, and its wisdom. “I Petition to your honours,” she wrote,

  not for my own life for I know I must die and my appointed time is sett but the Lord he knowes it is that if it be possible no more Innocentt blood may be shed which undoubtidly cannot be Avoydd In the way and course you goe in I question not but your honours does to the uttmost of your Powers in the discovery and detecting of witchcraft and witches and would not be gulty of Innocent blood for the world but by my own Innocencye I know you are in the wrong way the Lord in his infinite mercye direct you in this great work if it be his blessed will that no more Innocent blood be shed I would humbly begg of you that your honors would be plesed to examine theis Aflicted Persons strictly and keepe them apart some time and Likewise to try some of these confesing wichis I being confident there is severall of them has belyed themselves and others as will appeare if not in this wor[l]d I am sure in the world to come whither I am now agoing and I Question not but youle see an alteration of thes things they say my selfe and others having made a League with the Divel we cannot confesse I know and the Lord knowes as will shortly appeare they belye me and so I Question not but they doe others the Lord above who is the Searcher of all hearts knowes that as I shall answer it att the Tribunall seat that I know not the least thinge of witchcraft therfore I cannot I dare not belye my own soule.

  The courage of men and women like Giles Cory and Mary Easty, who stood up to their judges could probably be matched today. But there was another kind of courage displayed in connection with the witchcraft trials that would be hard to find a parallel for today. Five years after the trials, in 1697, the General Court of Massachusetts decided that the trials had sent innocent people to their deaths. January 15, 1697, was appointed as a day of public fasting in which the people of the colony should ask forgiveness from God for what they had done. And on that day Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, stood up before the congregation of the church to which he belonged, with bowed head, while the minister read a statement that Sewall had written, begging forgiveness of God and man for the part that he had played in the witchcraft trials, asking that “the blame and shame of it” be placed on him. On the same day the jury that had sat in the trials published a written expression of their “deep sense of sorrow” for their decisions, “whereby we fear we have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwillingly, to bring upon ourselves the guilt of innocent blood.”

  All this did not bring anyone back to life, though when the court reversed the sentences, the survivors were able to recover some compensation for the property that the state had seized and sold. But the remarkable thing is that a people as a whole had the courage to admit that they had been wrong. Mind you, they had not ceased to believe in the reality and danger of witchcraft; they had not suddenly been converted to a belief that the devil does not make compacts with human beings. They had simply become convinced that the trials were unfair. Can any modern people point to a similar willingness to remedy injustice, even after the event?

  Consider another trial, held in Massachusetts in 1927, in the midst of public hysteria over the red menace. Two men were convicted and executed after a trial that was as much a travesty of justice as those held at Salem in 1692. The men may have been guilty, just as some of the Salem witches may have been guilty, but the trial did not prove their guilt by regularly recognized procedures. In the 1690s it took the people of Massachusetts five years to admit that they had done wrong. It took fifty years for the governor of Massachusetts to do the same in regard to Sacco and Vanzetti. And when he did, the reaction of the people of Massachusetts was rather less contrite than that of their forebears. Members of the General Court this time made indignant protests against the governor’s acknowledgment that the state could ever have done anything wrong. One wonders how long it will be before the people of New England will measure up to the stature of their ancestors.

  And one wonders even more whether we as Americ
ans will ever recognize and accept our share of responsibility for transforming modern warfare from armed combat to mass murder of civilian populations. The Salem witch trials may one day look like one of the prouder episodes in our history simply because the whole society was then willing to recognize its complicity. In spite of Samuel Sewall’s desire to take the blame and shame on himself, it was the whole society that fasted and prayed in acknowledgment of guilt and did not seek to shuffle off the blame on the members of their duly constituted tribunal.

  The Massachusetts fast day was a fitting close to the Puritan era. Although people still believed in witches in 1697, a century later they were not so sure, as the postscript to this essay will show. But the currents were already stirring that have made our world so different from theirs. None of us, I hope, would wish to return to their superstitions, but I wonder whether we might not still have something to learn from them about the dangers of self-righteousness and the merits of contrition.

  —Unpublished

  CHAPTER TEN

  Postscript: Philadelphia 1787

  SEVENTEEN EIGHTY-SEVEN was not that long ago. What happened in Philadelphia that summer was the culminating achievement of the Enlightenment in America, if not in the world. Fifty-five men agreed on a way of government that has been more successful in almost every way than any other in a thousand years and more. Yes, the members of the Constitutional Convention all had their special interests to protect, among them the interests of slaveholders, not among them the interests of slaves. But they listened to each other. They reasoned together. And what they did was not unreasonable. It worked. It still works.

  It is hard to think that those fifty-five men were much closer in time to the Salem witch trials of 1692 than they were to us. It is still harder to think that in Philadelphia that summer, in the very week when they were hammering out the most crucial provisions of the Constitution, they could have witnessed, perhaps did witness, in the streets they daily walked, an event that tied them more closely to the dark world of superstition than to the Enlightenment they cherished.

  In 1787 Philadelphia was unquestionably the intellectual capital of the United States. It was not simply that Philadelphia was much larger in population than New York or Boston; it was the distinction of its citizens that made the city a magnet for foreign visitors and the obvious meeting place for men who thought, as Alexander Hamilton put it, continentally, men who could see beyond the boundaries of their town or parish or county or state. It was the city of Benjamin Franklin, the very symbol of the Enlightenment, of Benjamin Rush, America’s best-known physician, of David Rittenhouse, America’s leading astronomer, of Charles Willson Peale, painter and promoter, of William Bartram, the country’s foremost botanist. It was the home of the American Philosophical Society, the only significant learned society on the continent. It had a flourishing theater, where, despite lingering objections from Quaker moralists, ladies and gentlemen could laugh at a farce or weep at a tragedy. It had eight newspapers and two monthly magazines (the Columbian Magazine and the American Museum). It had Peale’s Museum with a display of waxworks, paintings, and scientific curiosities, the eighteenth-century prototype of the Smithsonian. It had Gray’s Tavern, with the most elaborate landscape gardens in the country, complete with waterfalls, grottoes, and Chinese pagodas. Philadelphia was the place to be, the place to go.

  During that summer the great Convention was not the only assemblage of notables to gather there. The Society of the Cincinnati (composed of the officers of Washington’s army) and two religious denominations, Presbyterian and Baptist, held their meetings there at the same time as the Convention. Throughout the summer troops of distinguished visitors passed through, including Indian chiefs on the way to negotiate with the lame-duck Congress in New York about incursions on their lands, and enterprising land speculators making plans for more incursions. Sooner or later, it seemed, everyone came to Philadelphia.

  The members of the Convention began arriving in May, the Virginians first. James Madison got there on the fifth, plans for a wholly new national government already forming in his head. George Washington rode in on the thirteenth, suffering from embarrassment that he had declined, on the pretext of his private affairs, to attend the meeting of the Cincinnati, and now was to be present in Philadelphia anyhow. Governor Randolph, with whom Madison concerted his plans, was there by the fifteenth. Benjamin Franklin, of course, was already on hand. He had just completed an addition to his house on Market Street, and on the sixteenth he entertained the new arrivals at an elegant dinner there, along with John Penn, grandson of the founder of Pennsylvania.

  The other delegates trickled in at intervals. It was May 25 before enough were present for the Convention to begin. What they said to each other on the upper floor of the State House has been preserved for us by Madison, in one of the most exciting journals of American history. What they said in the evenings as clumps of them dined together at their taverns and boardinghouses can only be guessed at. What was the conversation, for example, at the Indian Queen, where Madison roomed, along with Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, Luther Martin, Charles Pinckney, John Rutledge, and Hugh Williamson?

  Presumably they continued to talk, when no outsiders were present, about the things they had argued over during the day. But what did they think about the things that went on around them in the city? Were their daytime thoughts affected by the sights and sounds, the stench, the dangers, the alarms and excursions that confronted them when they stepped out of the State House? Although we cannot know the answer, we can know a little about the darker side of what they saw. Though it may not have affected the outcome of what they did, it may affect in some way our own understanding of the world they lived in and were trying to change.

  The members of the Convention were concerned, we know, about law and order. The times were hard, bankruptcies looming everywhere, mortgages foreclosing, beggars conspicuous in the city. In Massachusetts there had been open defiance of government; and in several other states too, including Connecticut, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, mobs had assembled to close the courts or to retrieve property seized for debts or taxes. Law and order were threatened, and walking the streets of Philadelphia that summer one could not escape meeting up with people who made defiance of law and order a way of life.

  The Philadelphia prison was right on the mall, a stone’s throw from the State House, and anyone who ventured to stroll by it got a taste of what kind of people were inside. They had provided themselves with poles, attaching a little cup at the end, which they thrust out to passersby to beg for coins. To refuse was to invite a barrage of curses by expert cursers. It was well known, what the prisoners did with the coins. The jailer sold drinks in the prison’s common hall, where men and women inmates cavorted together promiscuously.

  It was not possible to escape the curses of prisoners simply by shunning the vicinity of the prison. A new state law had prescribed labor on the city streets as a substitute for imprisonment in many cases. Convicts with shaved heads, shackled with ball and chain and an iron collar, were to be seen everywhere at work, or allegedly at work, under the supervision of overseers. The “wheelbarrow men,” as they were called, were also expert beggars and cursers. They wheedled drinks from passersby and, as the newspapers reported (three days before the Convention opened), “frequently exhibit the most horrid scenes on this side of the infernal regions—abusing the inhabitants, beating their keepers, and with drawn knives and other weapons, oblige them to fly for their lives, uttering horrid imprecations of death and destruction.”

  Criminals in chains were bad enough, but criminals who had not been caught were worse. In some areas of Philadelphia large numbers of houses were deserted and offered shelter to gangs of footpads. On Broad Street, south of Market, landlords even rented their aging buildings to thieves, who sallied forth to prey on unsuspecting strollers. And if poverty was a spur to crime, Philadelphia had it in large measure. During the year preceding May 14, 1787, the almshouse had admitted
196 men, 213 women, and 73 children. In addition, 19 children had been born there during the year.

  For a city with a total population of 40,000, these figures bespeak a sizable underclass of the poor and the criminal, enough to make law-abiding citizens uneasy, as they were uneasy about the people in the country who were taking action against the legal collection of debts and taxes. The Convention, it was hoped, would do something to cure the larger problem, something to restore prosperity and ease the pressure that drove people to crime. But even as the Convention sat, an uglier kind of crime made its appearance in the city.

  In 1787 witchcraft had long since ceased to be recognized in law. The English statute against it had been repealed in 1736, and prosecutions in both England and the colonies had ceased well before that. But belief in witchcraft could not be repealed. Fear of witchcraft continued, and so did popular methods of detecting and dealing with witches.

  Trial by water remained a favorite method. A witch, bound hand and foot, when thrown in deep water, was supposed to sink if innocent, float if guilty, a procedure calculated to dispose of the victim in either case. In 1751 a woman was subjected to this test in Hertfordshire, England, where a mob dragged her back and forth through a pond and then kicked her as she lay dying on the bank. A less drastic way of dealing with a witch was to cut or scratch her, preferably on the forehead, a procedure that was supposed to counteract any evil spells she might have cast. The church and the law had long frowned on these rituals, but they survived in popular memory. And one of them, cutting on the forehead, survived in Philadelphia.