by Edmund Burke
If men, merely for the moderation of their sentiments, were exposed to such severe treatment, it was not to be expected that others should escape unpunished. The very first colony had hardly set it’s foot on shore in America, when finding that some amongst them were false brethren, and ventured to make use of the common prayer, they found means of making the country so uneasy to them, that they were glad to fly back to England.
As soon as they began to think of making laws, I find no less than five about matters of religion; all contrived, and not only contrived, but executed in some respects with so much rigour, that the persecution which drove the puritans out of England, might be considered as great lenity and indulgence in the comparison. For in the first of these laws, they deprive every one who does not communicate with their established church, of the right to his freedom, or a vote in the election of any of their magistrates. In the second, they sentence to banishment any who should oppose the fourth commandment, or deny the validity of infant baptism, or the authority of magistrates. In the third, they condemn quakers to banishment, and make it capital for them to return. And not stopping at the offenders, they lay heavy fines upon all who should bring them into the province, or even harbour them for an hour. In the fourth they provide banishment, and death in case of return, for jesuits and Popish priests of every denomination. In the fifth they decree death to any who shall worship images. After they had provided such a complete code of persecution, they were not long without opportunities of reading bloody lectures upon it. The quakers, warmed with that spirit which animates the beginning of most sects, had spread their doctrines all over the British dominions in Europe, and began at last to spread them with equal zeal in America. The clergy and the magistrates in New-England took the alarm; they seized upon some of those people, they set them in the stocks and in the pillory without effect; they scourged, they imprisoned, they banished them; they treated all those who seemed to commiserate their sufferings with great rigour; but their persecution had no other effect than to inflame their own cruelty and the zeal of the sufferers. The constancy of the quakers under their sufferings begot a pity and esteem for their persons, and an approbation of their doctrines; their proselytes increased; the quakers returned as fast as they were banished; and the fury of the ruling party was raised to such a height, that they proceeded to the most sanguinary extremities. Upon the law they had made, they seized at different times upon five of those who had returned from banishment, condemned and hanged them. It is unknown how far their madness had extended, if an order from the king and council in England about the year 1661 had not interposed to restrain them.
It is a task not very agreeable to insist upon such matters; but in reality, things of this nature form the greatest part of the history of New England, for along time. They persecuted the anabaptists, who were no inconsiderable body amongst them, with almost an equal severity. In short, this people, who in England could not bear being chastised with rods, had no sooner got free from their fetters than they scourged their fellow refugees with scorpions; though the absurdity, as well as the injustice of such a proceeding in them, might stare them in the face!
One may observe, that men of all persuasions confine the word persecution, and all the ill ideas of injustice and violence which belong to it, solely to those severities which are exercised upon themselves, or upon the party they are inclined to favour. Whatever is inflicted upon others, is a just punishment upon obstinate impiety, and not a restraint upon conscientious differences. The persecution we have ourselves suffered, is a good ground for retaliation against an old enemy; and if one of our friends and fellow sufferers should prove so wicked as to quit our cause, and weaken it by his dissention, he deserves to be punished yet more than the old enemy himself. Besides this, the zealous never fail to draw political inferences from religious tenets, by which they interest the magistrate in the dispute; and then to the heat of a religious fervour is added the fury of a party zeal. All intercourse is cut off between the parties. They lose all knowledge of each other, tho’ countrymen and neighbours, and are therefore easily imposed upon with the most absurd stories concerning each others opinions and practices. They judge of the hatred of the adverse side by their own. Then fear is added to their hatred; and preventive injuries arise from their fear. The remembrance of the past, the dread of the future the present ill, will join together to urge them forward to the most violent courses.
Such is the manner of proceeding of religious parties towards each other; and in this respect the New England people are not worse than the rest of mankind, nor was their severity any just matter of reflection upon that mode of religion which they profess. No religion whatsoever, true or false, can excuse it’s own members, or accuse those of any other upon the score of persecution. The principles which give rise to it are common to all mankind, and they influence them as they are men, and not as they belong to this or that persuasion. In all persuasions the bigots are persecutors; the men of a cool and reasonable piety are favourers of toleration; because the former sort of men not taking the pains to be acquainted with the grounds of their adversaries tenets, conceive them to be so absurd and monstrous, that no man of sense can give into them in good earnest. For which reason they are convinced that some oblique bad motive induces them to pretend to the belief of such doctrines, and to the maintaining of them with obstinacy. This is a very general principle in all religious differences, and it is the corner stone of all persecution.
Besides the disputes with those of another denomination, the independents were for a long time harrassed with one in the bowels of their own churches. The stale dispute about grace and works produced dissentions, riots, and almost a civil war in the colony. The famous sir Henry Vane the younger, an enthusiastic, giddy, turbulent man, of a no very good disposition, came hither with some of the adventurers; and rather than remain idle, plaid at small games in New England, where the people had chosen him governor. It is not hard to conceive, how such a man, at the head of such a people, and engaged in such controversy, could throw every thing into confusion. In the very height of this hopeful dispute they had a war upon their hands with some of the Indian nations. Their country was terribly harrassed, and numbers were every day murdered by the incursions of the enemy. All this time they had an army in readiness for action, which they would not suffer to march even to defend their own lives and possessions, because
“many of the officers and soldiers were under a covenant of works.”
CHAP. IV.
WHEN the New England puritans began to breathe a little from these dissentions, and had their hands tied up from persecuting the quakers and anabaptists, they fell not long after into another madness of a yet more extraordinary and dangerous kind, which, like some epidemical disease, ran through the whole country, and which is perhaps one of the most extraordinary delusions recorded in history. This tragedy began in the year 1692.
There is a town in New England, which they fanatically called Salem. One Paris was the minister there. He had two daughters troubled with convulsions; which being attended with some of those extraordinary appearances, not unfrequent in such disorders, he imagined they were bewitched. As soon as he concluded upon witchcraft as the cause of the distemper, the next enquiry was how to find out the person who had bewitched them. He cast his eyes upon an Indian servant woman of his own, whom he frequently beat, and used her with such severity, that she at last confessed herself the witch, and was committed to gaol, where she lay for a long time.
The imaginations of the people were not yet sufficiently heated to make a very formal business of this; therefore they were content to discharge her from prison after a long confinement, and to sell her as a slave for her fees.
However, as this example set the discourse about witchcraft afloat, some people, troubled with a similar complaint, began to fancy themselves bewitched too. Persons in an ill state of health are naturally fond of finding out causes for their distempers; especially such as are extraordinary, and call the eye
s of the public upon them. There was perhaps something of malice in the affair besides. For one of the first objects whom they fixed upon was Mr. Burroughs, a gentleman who had formerly been minister of Salem; but upon some of the religious disputes which divided the country, he differed with his flock, and left them. This man was tried with two others for witchcraft by a special commission of oyer and terminer, directed to some of the gentlemen of the best fortunes, and reputed to be of the best understandings in the country. Before these judges, a piece of evidence was delivered, the most weak and childish, the most repugnant to itself, and to common sense, that perhaps ever was known upon any serious occasion. Yet by those judges, upon that evidence, and the verdict founded upon it, this minister, a man of a most unexceptionable character, and two others, men irreproachable in their lives, were sentenced to die, and accordingly hanged. Then these victims of the popular madness were stript naked, and their bodies thrown into a pit, half covered with earth, and left to the discretion of birds and wild beasts. Upon the same evidence in a little time after sixteen more suffered death, the greatest part of them dying in the most exemplary sentiments of piety, and with the strongest professions of their innocence. One man refusing to plead, suffered in the cruel manner the law directs on that occasion, by a slow pressure to death.
The imaginations of the people, powerfully affected by these shocking examples, turned upon nothing but the most gloomy and horrid ideas. The most ordinary and innocent actions were metamorphosed into magical ceremonies, and the fury of the people augmented in proportion as this gloom of imagination increased. The flame spread with rage and rapidity into every part of country. Neither the tenderness of youth, nor the infirmity of age, nor the honour of the sex, nor the sacredness of the ministry, nor the respectable condition of fortune or character, was the least protection. Children of eleven years old were taken up for sorceries. The women were stripped in the most shameful manner to search them for magical teats. The scorbutic stains common on the skins of old persons, were called the devil’s pinches. This was indisputable evidence against them. As such they admitted every idle flying report, and even stories of ghosts, which they honoured with a name, not found in our law books. They called them Spectral Evidence.
What these extraordinary testimonies wanted was compleated by the torture; by which a number of these unhappy victims were driven to confess whatever their tormentors thought proper to dilate to them. Some women owned they had been lain with by the devil, and other things equally ridiculous and abominable.
It is not difficult to imagine the deplorable state of this province, when all mens lives depended upon the caprice and folly of diseased and distracted minds; when revenge and malice had a full opportunity of wreaking themselves in the most dreadful and bloody manner, by an instrument that was always in readiness, and to which the public phrenzy gave a certain and dangerous effect. What was a yet worse circumstance, the wretches who suffered the torture, being not more pressed to own themselves guilty than to discover their associates and accomplices, unable to give any real account, named people at random, who were immediately taken up, and treated in the same cruel manner upon this extorted evidence. An universal terror and consternation seized upon all. Some prevented accusation, and charged themselves with witchcraft, and so escaped death. Others fled the province; and many more were preparing to fly. The prisons were crouded; people were executed daily; yet the rage of the accusers was as fresh as ever, and the number of the witches and the bewitched increased every hour. A magistrate who had committed forty persons for this crime, fatigued with so disagreeable an employment, and ashamed of the share he had in it, refused to grant any more warrants. He was himself immediately accused of sorcery; and thought himself happy in leaving his family and fortune, and escaping with life out of the province. A jury struck with the affecting manner, and the solemn assurances of innocence of a woman brought before them, ventured to acquit her, but the judges sent them in again; and in an imperious manner forced them to find the woman guilty, and she was hanged immediately.
The magistrates and ministers, whose prudence ought to have been employed in healing this distemper, and assuaging it’s fury, threw in new combustible matter. They encouraged the accusers; they assisted at the examinations, and they extorted the confessions of witches. None signalized their zeal more upon this occasion than Sir William Phips the governor, a New England man, of the lowest birth, and yet meaner education; who having raised a sudden fortune by a lucky accident, was knighted, and afterwards made governor of this province. Doctor Encrease Mather, and Doctor Cotton Mather, the pillars of the New England church, were equally sanguine. Several of the most popular ministers after twenty executions had been made, addressed Sir William Phips with thanks for what he had done and with exhortations to proceed in so laudable a work.
The accusers encouraged in this manner did not know where to stop, nor how to proceed. They were at a loss for objects. They began at last to accuss the judges themselves. What was worse, the nearest relations of Mr. Encrease Mather were involved, and witchcraft began even to approach the governor’s own family. It was now high time to give things another turn. The accusers were discouraged by authority. One hundred and fifty who lay in prison, were discharged. Two hundred more were under accusation; they were passed over; and those who had received sentence of death, were reprieved, and in due time pardoned. A few cool moments shewed them the gross and stupid error that had carried them away, and which was utterly invisible to them all the while they were engaged in this strange prosecution. They grew heartily ashamed of what they had done. But what was infinitely mortifying, the quakers took occasion to attribute all this mischief to a judgment on them for their persecution. A general fast was appointed; praying God to pardon all the errors of his servants and people in a late tragedy, raised amongst them by Satan and his instruments.
This was the last paroxism of the puritanic enthusiasm in New England. This violent fit carried off so much of that humour, that the people there are now grown somewhat like the rest of mankind in their manners, and have much abated of their persecuting spirit.
It is not an incurious speculation to consider these remarkable sallies of the human mind, out of it’s ordinary course. Whole nations are often carried away by what would never influence one man of sense. The cause is originally weak, and to be suppressed without great difficulty; but then it’s weakness prevents any suspicion of the mischief, until it is too late to think of suppressing it at all. In such cases the more weak, improbable, and inconsistent any story is, the more powerful and general is it’s effect, being helped on by design in some, by folly in others, and kept up by contagion in all. The more extraordinary the design, the more dreadful the crime, the less we examine into the proofs. The charge and the evidence of some things is the same. However, in some time the minds of people cool, and they are astonished how they ever came to be so affected.
CHAP. V.
THE events in the history of New England, their disputes with their governors, the variations in their charters, and their wars with the Indians, afford very little useful or agreeable matter. In their wars there was very little conduct shewn; and though they prevailed in the end, in a manner to the extirpation of that race of people, yet the Indians had always great advantages in the beginning; and the measures of the English to oppose them, were generally injudiciously taken. Their manner too of treating them in the beginning was so indiscreet (for it was in general no worse) as to provoke them as much to those wars, as the French influence has done since that time.
The country which we call New England, is in length something less than three hundred miles; at the broadest part it is about two hundred, if we carry it on to those tracts which are possessed by the French; but if we regard the part we have settled, in general, it does not extend any where very much above sixty miles from the sea coast.
This country lies between the 41st and 45th degrees of North latitude. Though it is situated almost ten degrees nearer the su
n than we are in England, yet the winter begins earlier, lasts longer, and is incomparably more severe than it is with us. The summer again is extremely hot, and more fervently so than in places which lie under the same parallels in Europe. However, both the heat and the cold are now far more moderate, and the constitution of the air in all respects far better than our people found it at their first settlement. The clearing away the woods, and the opening the ground every where, has, by giving a free passage to the air, carried off those noxious vapours which were so prejudicial to the health of the first inhabitants. The temper of the sky is generally both in summer and in winter very steddy and serene. Two months frequently pass without the appearance of a cloud. Their rains are heavy and soon over.
The soil of New England is various, but best as you approach the Southward. It affords excellent meadows in the low grounds, and very good pasture almost every where. They commonly allot at the rate of two acres to the maintenance of a cow. The meadows which they reckon the best, yield about a ton of hay by the acre. Some produce two tons, but the hay is rank and sour. This country is not very favourable to any of the European kinds of grain. The wheat is subject to be blasted; the barley is an hungry grain, and the oats are lean and chaffy. But the Indian corn, which makes the general food of the lowest sort of people, flourishes here. This, as it is a species of grain not so universally known in England, and as it is that of all others which yields the greatest increase, I shall give a short description of it.