American Heroes

by Edmund S. Morgan

  In view of these beliefs Wigglesworth’s zeal for correcting sin is entirely understandable and entirely in accordance with the strictest Puritan doctrine. Since the whole group had promised obedience to God, the whole group would suffer at the hands of God for the sins of any delinquent member. Manifestly every member must cooperate in avoiding such a fate. Incessant and universal vigilance was the price of prosperity. It was as if a district occupied by a military force were given notice that for any disorder the whole community—innocent and guilty alike—would be penalized. Every Christian society had received such a notice from God, and its effect upon the godly members, of whom we may account Wigglesworth one, was an extraordinary zeal for bringing others into the paths of righteousness.

  A thorough selfishness was by no means inconsistent with this kind of zeal. When the Puritan sought to reform his neighbor, he had no altruistic, humanitarian goal in sight, but simply the fulfillment of his own personal promise to his Creator and the prevention of public calamities in which he himself would be involved. Even Wigglesworth’s selfishness in the matter of marriage does not set him off from his contemporaries. All the evidence indicates that marriage in the seventeenth century was a business transaction to which the haggling over dowries and settlements gave more the air of an economic merger than of a psychological union. The Puritans, to be sure, regarded the relationship of husband and wife as one in which love should predominate, but the love was a duty that came after marriage, not a spontaneous passion that preceded it.

  In his sense of guilt Wigglesworth likewise exhibited the frame of mind that was expected of a good Puritan. When Anne Hutchinson lost her sense of guilt and declared that God had cast her loose from the bonds of sin, the orthodox members of the Massachusetts government banished her in 1637. No one, they felt, could escape from sin in this world, not even in Massachusetts; and anyone who thought such a thing possible was either insane or in the hands of the devil or both. Thomas Hooker, sometimes considered more liberal than other Puritans, advised his readers that “we must look wisely and steddily upon our distempers, look sin in the face, and discern it to the full.” The man who could take such a full view of sin could hardly be a happy human being, for according to Hooker he would be one who

  hath seen what sin is, and what it hath done, how it hath made havock of his peace and comfort, ruinated and laid wast the very Principles of Reason and Nature, and Morality, and made him a terror to himself, when he hath looked over the loathsom abominations that lie in his bosom, that he is afraid to approach the presence of the Lord to bewail his sins, and to crave pardon, lest he should be confounded for them, while he is but confessing of them; afraid and ashamed lest any man living should know but the least part of that which he knows by himself, and could count it happy that himself was not, that the remembrance of those hideous evils of his might be no more.

  Few persons in any time could exhibit a feeling of guilt as strong as that which Hooker here demands. That Wigglesworth did attain something like it is a sign not of eccentricity but of orthodoxy.

  If we examine, finally, the sins of which Wigglesworth most often finds himself guilty, we arrive at the origin of his hostility to pleasure and at the central meaning of Puritanism as Wigglesworth exemplifies it: the belief that fallen man inevitably estimates too highly the creatures and things of this world, including himself. Pride and the overvaluing of “the creature,” these are the sins of which Wigglesworth accused himself almost daily, and these are the sins involved in enjoyment of the senses. The Puritan was not exactly hostile to pleasure, but his suspicion was so close to hostility that it often amounted to the same thing. A man might enjoy the things of this world, provided that he did so in proportion to their absolute value, but since their absolute value was insignificant when placed beside the value of their Creator, the amount of pleasure that might lawfully be drawn from them was small indeed. It is not surprising, therefore, that Wigglesworth seldom recorded specific actions in which he had displayed too high a sense of his own or of the creature’s value. The sin did not lie in the action itself, but in the estimate that was placed upon it, as when he found himself too happy with having one of his sermons well received. His sins were sins of attitude, sins of judgment, sins of a will that had been debilitated and corrupted by the original fall of man. They were not particular sins but the essence of sin itself. For sin to the Puritan was not simply the breach of a commandment; it was a breach of the order that God had ordained throughout all creation, an order that was inverted by sin and restored by grace. The Puritan God had created the universe to serve His own glory, but He had directed that all parts of that universe, except man, should serve him only indirectly—through serving man. As long as man remained innocent in the Garden of Eden, so long did man enjoy dominion over the creatures and direct communication with his Maker. But sin had inverted the order of things and turned the whole creation topsy-turvy. As one Puritan minister put it, “Man is dethroned, and become a servant and slave to those things that were made to serve him, and he puts those things in his heart, that God hath put under his feet.” The only remedy was return to God through Christ, a return that would be completed at the last day and that would be partially consummated here and now through the operation of saving grace. “If sin be (as it is) an aversion or turning away of the soul from God to something else besides him…then in the work of grace there is a conversion and turning of the soul towards God again, as to the best and cheifest good of all.” Again and again Puritan ministers warned their listeners that “the onely sutable adequate ultimate object of the soul of man is god himselfe,” that “all true christians have Christ as the scope and End of their lives,” that “no creature that is finite, can be the end of the Soul nor give satisfaction to it.” Thus, in recognizing that he placed too high a value on the creatures, Wigglesworth was recognizing that in him the divine order was still inverted. No matter how often he told himself that God was the supreme good to which all else must be subordinated, no matter how loudly he called upon God to make him believe, he could not help overestimating himself and the world.

  In this undeviating scrutiny of his own corruption, Wigglesworth was probably not a typical Puritan, as he was not a typical human being; but he was closer to the ideals of Puritanism than were his more warm-blooded contemporaries who indulged the flesh and enjoyed the creatures.

  —1946

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Courage of Giles Cory and Mary Easty

  SALEM HAS NEVER BEEN ABLE to keep the story of the witch trials to itself. For nearly three centuries the story has excited the imagination and curiosity of men and women throughout the Western world. It somehow strikes a chord that we all respond to, whether with indignation or sorrow or sympathy. It opens a window not only on Salem, not only on Puritan New England, but on the human condition.

  I will not dwell on that part of the story that has been illuminated by the study of earlier social tensions within Salem Village and between Salem Village and Salem town. Without in any way diminishing the importance of those local forces in shaping the events of 1692, I want to focus on the larger tensions in New England of the time and on the wider significance of the trials for the history of Puritan New England and for later American history.

  The trials occurred at a time when the people of Massachusetts were passing through very difficult times. Cotton Mather, for whom those times were particularly difficult, called them “woeful”—and with reason. In 1685 Massachusetts had lost the royal charter that had given the colony virtual independence from England for fifty-five years, an independence that had made possible the Puritan experiment, an independence that had enabled Englishmen to create institutions that departed radically from those under which they had grown up in the mother country. In 1686 a Catholic king, James II, had sent Edmund Andros, a professional soldier, with absolute authority to govern Massachusetts and all the rest of New England, and without benefit of the representative assemblies that had hitherto been the
supreme power of government in every New England colony.

  Fortunately the people of England liked James II no better than the people of New England liked Andros. The people of Massachusetts sent Andros packing back to England in a bloodless revolution that accompanied the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England. And they sent Cotton Mather’s distinguished father, Increase Mather, the minister of Boston’s Second Church, to recover the old charter and the freedom from English control that went with it.

  In London, Mather was joined by William Phips, a Bostonian who had made a fortune by the very unpuritan method of raising sunken treasure from a Spanish galleon in the West Indies. Phips was not what people at the time would have called a proper Bostonian, even though he had attained a degree of respectability by marrying the widow of the town’s leading merchant. He was a rough-and-ready type, not very visibly a saint, and early in 1692 the people of Massachusetts learned that he and Mather had not succeeded in recovering the old charter. Instead, they had procured a new one, under which the king reserved to himself the appointment of the colony’s governor, and the first governor he appointed was William Phips.

  The colony had been limping along under a provisional government of old-time leaders who had participated in the expulsion of Andros. The old-timers had followed the old-time ways, but now there was no telling what the character of the new government would be like. Everyone felt a sense of uneasiness and insecurity. To add to this feeling, the old ways seemed to be threatened also by new religious developments. Increase Mather and his aspiring son Cotton, who were the self-proclaimed defenders of everything the founding fathers had done, seemed to others to be moving away from New England’s traditional Congregationalism toward Presbyterianism; and the Reverend John Wise of Ipswich was arrayed against them on this issue, while in the West, Solomon Stoddard of Northampton was challenging them with a much more outright Presbyterianism than their own. What was troubling was not so much the substance of the challenges as the fact that the intellectual and religious leaders of the colony seemed to be at odds with one another.

  At the same time the younger generation, as usual, was going to the proverbial dogs, frolicking in taverns instead of going to church. Women were wearing hoop skirts, which was shocking. Men were wearing wigs, which was equally shocking. Boston did not seem to be Boston any more. New England did not seem to be New England.

  It was in this atmosphere that the Salem witch scare began.

  In approaching it, we will do well to recall that New Englanders did not invent witchcraft or witch trials. In the seventeenth century virtually everyone in the Western world believed that the devil confederated with human beings and either enabled them to inflict harm by supernatural means or else did it for them. There were arguments about the extent of the powers that God allowed the devil. Some people held that the devil did not have much power beyond the ability to foresee events, so that he could get his witches to go through a lot of hocus-pocus just before, say, a big storm was coming. He could thus delude the witch—and everyone else—into thinking she had caused the storm. Others believed that both the devil and his witches could actually cause things like storms or sickness or fatal accidents. But virtually no one, whether learned or ignorant, doubted the existence of witchcraft, and very few doubted that it should be punished when detected.

  How little unusual the New Englanders were in this respect can be seen from the fact that throughout the colonial period there were 32 executions for witchcraft in New England, including those at Salem, while in Europe and England during the same period the numbers ran into the thousands. For example, in Germany in the two cities of Würzburg and Bamberg there were 1,500 executions in the eleven years between 1622 and 1633. The numbers involved in proportion to total population were probably higher than in New England. For example, in the town of Oppenau, in Germany’s Black Forest, with a population of 650, 50 persons were executed in less than a year and 170 more accused when the trials were stopped in June 1632. England did not have as much trouble with witches as Germany, but between 1563 and 1685 there were roughly 1,000 executions. The last execution in England was in 1685, the last in New England in 1692. But in England and on the Continent after formal executions stopped, popular lynchings of alleged witches continued until the nineteenth century. And I might add that during the height of the trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries popular demand for punishment of witches frequently outran official zeal everywhere. Even the high priests of the Inquisition in Spain often showed more compassion than the people at large.

  The outbreak of a witchcraft scare in Salem in 1692 was by no means the first instance of the kind in the American colonies. There had been twelve executions before that time, the earliest at Hartford in 1646, and another at Charlestown in 1648. In 1656 Ann Hibbins, widow of William Hibbins, a former merchant and magistrate of Boston, who had himself sat as a judge in the 1648 case, was executed. In 1662 Goodman Greensmith of Hartford was executed. Witches were not always women.

  None of these early cases, however, had caused any epidemic of witchcraft or any panic. And it is worth noting that in many of them, as in most of the later Salem cases, the accused persons confessed to their crimes. Some of the confessions were probably obtained under some kind of duress, either psychological or physical, but it is not unlikely that some of the persons executed actually thought that they were witches, thought that they did have supernatural powers obtained from the devil.

  Witchcraft is an ancient and in some societies a relatively respectable profession. In England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, witchcraft was widely used for benevolent as well as malevolent purposes. So-called white witches, sometimes called cunning women or cunning men, were to be found in nearly every community—there may have been as many of them as there were ministers—and people called upon them to cure diseases, both of human beings and of cattle, to recover lost property, to bring success in business or love, and for nearly every kind of enterprise in which normal means had proved insufficient. Such white witchcraft was frowned on by the authorities but was seldom interfered with. Indeed, white witchcraft was a part of everyday life, a way of trying to control the environment in a preindustrial, prescientific society. It was frowned on because it did constitute a kind of rival force to that of the church, but only when it turned malevolent was it likely to bring prosecution, and the persons who practiced malevolent witchcraft were usually different from the cunning men and women whom people turned to for the charms and spells that might assist them in legitimate enterprises.

  There seems to be no doubt that malevolent witchcraft was occasionally practiced in England and probably in New England. It is not impossible, perhaps not even improbable, that some of the persons accused at Salem believed themselves to be possessed of diabolical powers. Certainly some of them, upon being searched, were found to be in possession of the accepted paraphernalia of witchcraft.

  These paraphernalia consisted, as they still do where witchcraft continues to be practiced, of dolls that are supposed to represent the victims. When the witch strokes the doll or sticks pins in it, the person bewitched is supposed to undergo excruciating pains in the part of the body corresponding to the part of the doll the witch is touching or pricking. Many of the persons convicted at Salem were found to have dolls in their possession, a piece of circumstantial evidence that in itself was almost sufficient to convict them. But there were other ways of determining whether a person was a witch or not.

  Witches were thought to have witch-marks on some part of their bodies, an area of skin that was red or blue or in some way different from the rest. Furthermore, at some time during a twenty-four-hour period, it was thought, the devil or one of his imps would visit the witch and be visible to observers. He might come in the shape of a man or a woman or a child, or a cat, dog, rat, toad—indeed, any kind of creature. The devil could take nearly any shape he chose. So the usual procedure against a person accused of witchcraft was to search his or her belongings
for dolls, search his or her body for witch-marks, and then keep watch over the person in the middle of a room for twenty-four hours. God help anyone who had an old doll in his possession and in addition had some skin blemish. If there was that much evidence, it was easy enough in the middle of the night, after long hours of watching, to imagine that you saw some person or animal, perhaps a mouse, come near the witch.

  But this procedure could and did result in acquittals. In England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the majority of the accused witches brought to trial were acquitted. It is interesting to notice, however, that in the English cases the attention of the court centered mainly on the question of the alleged harm done by the witch rather than on her confederation with the devil. And in England the trials were usually isolated affairs, as were the trials in New England before 1692. One trial did not generate another. The Salem trials seem to have resembled European continental witch trials more than English ones, and in several ways.

  On the Continent the courts fastened their attention on the witch’s alleged pact with the devil, which they made sufficient cause for execution whether the witch was believed to have done harm to anyone or not. And pacts with the devil generally involved attendance at a witches’ Sabbath, where all the witches of a region gathered to perform rites prescribed by their Satanic master. Witches who confessed to their crimes accordingly were expected to name the other witches whom they saw at these gatherings. Thus the circle of the accused could widen rapidly, and a witch trial turn into a witch hunt. The same sort of thing happened at Salem. Here, too, the focus was on the pact with the devil. Here, too, the accusations multiplied with every confession. And there were other resemblances. In Salem as on the Continent, the accusers were frequently children or teenagers. On the Continent the great majority of trials resulted in convictions, and not infrequently one trial would generate another until a whole region broke out in a witch hunt like that which occurred at Salem in 1692.