The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596-1728 (28 page)

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

Authors: Robert Middlekauff

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over. Perhaps this resignation shocked Phips, for soon after he appealed to the leading ministers in Boston and nearby towns for advice as how best to proceed. The "Return of several ministers" to the Governor, issued from Cotton Mather's pen almost immediately, and was approved by Increase and twelve other ministers.
32
This report reeks of the awful tension the ministers felt between the dangers of convicting the guiltless, and of the opportunities of ridding the land of the witches. The ministers were clearly offended at the bedlam of the pre-trial hearings; such investigationsthey urgedshould be conducted as quietly and discreetly as possible so that "Noise, Company, and Openness" might be avoided. They were also perplexed by the indiscriminate accusations, commenting especially upon the girls' insensitivity to social status, which is what led to their fear that ''persons formerly of an unblemished Reputation" might be lightly accused. Nor, they declared, should the accused be convicted on the basis of spectral evidence, a clear rebuke to the court.
33
The opportunities presented by the affair were no less on the ministers' minds. And therefore while the disorder of the hearings and the quality of several of the accused dismayed them, they did not hesitate to exhort the Justices to a "
vigorous
Prosecution" of the witches. And if spectral evidence was inadmissible in court, it clearly had its uses in the pre-trial investigation of accused persons, and the ministers were careful to urge only that it not be admitted as convicting evidence.
34
Increase felt both dispositions which informed the ministers' "Return" and he continued to feel them as the trials resumed, convictions mounted, and executions took a toll. Five witches died on the gallows on July 19; another five on August 19; and eight on September 19, the last day of the hangings. Three days before, Giles Cory, an old man of steadfast courage, was pressed to death in a field by heavy stone in return for his refusal to answer the charges against him. His standing mute before the court protected his property for his heirs, but he experienced the terrible torture prescribed by English common law procedure.
35
Cory's brave death shook the watchers in the field. Increase did not witness it, nor any of the executions as far as we know. His alarm arose from the knowledge that the court continued to rely on spectral testimony. Governor Phips returned from the Indian Wars about this time to learn that the court and the executions
 
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had served neither to purge the land of the witches nor to persuade an increasingly large body of critics that justice was being rendered. No one could deny that the court continued to receive the most doubtful sort of evidence, nor could anyone doubt that a number of those cried out upon by the girls remained at large, untouched by the law, because they came from the best families. Among them were Saltonstalls, Thatchers, and even, it was rumored, Lady Phips, the wife of the Governor.
36
Bewildered, the Governor did the only thing left for him to dohe went to Increase Mather and several other leading ministers for a way out of this tangle. Increase delivered his answer almost immediately and in the following year published it as
Cases of Conscience
.
37
While Increase refrained from criticizing Stoughton and the other judges directly, indeed he disavowed "any Reflection on those worthy Persons who have been concerned in the late proceedings at Salem: They are wise and good Men, and have acted with all Fidelity according to their Light," his essay constituted a repudiation of their methods. For Increase insisted once more that the Devil could impersonate persons innocent of witchcraft and denied that evidence based on the claims of the afflicted that they could identify their tormentors' shapes should be admissible in court. He also branded the trial by sight and touch, which the magistrates had resorted to in the preliminary hearings, an inadmissible technique; its efficacy rested on the demonic power, Increase pointed out, and one using it compacted with the Devil. But the problem of what evidence was good remained. The free confessions of witches constituted solid grounds for conviction, Increase argued; there were still confessing witches in jail; and at the time he wrote the
Cases
he believed in their sincerity. But the evidence he found most reliable was the testimony of two credible witnesses, the sort of evidence required for conviction in any capital crime.
38
This argument persuaded Phips, who trusted Increase and who also was impressed by the array of ministers who subscribed to the views expounded in the
Cases of Conscience
. The Governor dismissed the court on October 29, freed on bail many of the imprisoned, and urged the judges to find other ways of relieving the remaining prisoners. Early in January, a Court of Assize and General Jail Delivery met in Salem and, proceeding along the lines suggested by Mather, exonerated almost fifty accused, and
 
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condemned three of witchcraft. Lt. Governor Stoughton regarded these proceedings with disfavor and ordered the "speedy" execution of these three along with five others, who had been convicted through special judicial action. Phips, now seeing the need to act with dispatch, stayed all these judgments, and thereby "inraged" Stoughton who, filled with ''passionate anger," left the bench of the court then sitting in Charleston. The special court charged with hearing the witch cases took up again the following year in April but there were no more convictions; and in May 1693 Phips granted a general pardon.
39
At several times while the hysteria over the witches convulsed New England, Increase Mather had acted to restore sanity. He declared privately that it was better for the witches to escape detection than that one innocent person be punished. He urged the court not to admit spectral testimony as evidence; and he pointed out that the ordeal by sight and touch was no more reliable. On one occasion he was able to discourge a prominent citizen of Boston who was seeking a warrant from the magistrates against a local woman named by the Salem girls. The Boston gentleman had taken his daughter, suffering from an undiagnosed illness, to Salem for treatment by the girls. They obliged him by proclaiming that far from having an ordinary disease, his daughter was bewitched. Increase disagreed with this mode of treatment and berated the gentleman for forsaking the Lord in Boston in favor of the Devil in Salem. The magistrates in Boston may have received some advice from Increase too. The most admirable act, of course, was the advice given to the Governor in
Cases of Conscience
. Increase, more than anyone else, had stopped the whole grisly business.
40
He did not do so out of scientific skepticism, or because he was a "liberal" in any sense, or because he doubted that witches were tormenting the people of Salem. Indeed, it was precisely because he entertained not a shred of scientific rationalism that he was able to argue that the methods of the court were unreliable. What he, and only a few others realized, was that the rationalists were the ones who had made the dreadful mistakes and perhaps had even shed the blood of the innocent. The court had proceeded on the assumptions that things in this world were what they appeared to be, that the world was orderly and reasonable and susceptible to understandings rooted in common sense. The court
 
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had denied that the Devil could take the shapes of men innocent of any compact with him and harm others, precisely because they believed such a situation could not be reconciled with God's government of the world. The judges saw chaos lurking in this doctrine of demonic power, the subversion of government, the "ruine" of society. There "would be no living in the World," if it were true, the court said. Reliance on spectral testimony was the fruit of the belief that the world conformed to men's reason, that things must be what they seemed, that appearances must be trusted. Increase, of course, could not accept ithe knew that appearance must not be confused with reality. Hence in his critique of the court's practices he returned to what he had found so fascinating in his studies of cometsthe unpredictability and mystery in life.
41
He could not rest his case on the simple assertion that the court's view of the demonic badly underestimated the Devil's power. Renewed demonstration was needed and in the
Cases
he provided it, along with a mass of data calculated once more to remind New England of the remarkable providences of the Lord. Therefore he filled the pages of the
Cases
with stories of men gifted with supernatural sight on Tuesdays and Fridays, but not on other days of the week, of fruit on plum and pear trees that shriveled up when the owners became mortally ill, of men who were offended by the stink of the corpses of men not yet dead but who died while apparently in good health a few days later, of an "inchanted pin" which could be run two inches into a man and not draw blood. This world did not begin to yield all of its secrets, these stories impliednot to natural philosophers, not to judges, not to ministers, nor to the shallow rationalists who denied the Lord because they could not see Him.
42
The same set of emphases appeared in Increase's selections from the array of scientific and Christian examinations of witchcraft. His preferences in this vast literature, which he studied with his usual dedication, were for the Protestant commentators who, while repudiating Popish superstition, also recommended means for the detection of witches that conceded the full mystery of Providential and demonic power. The "Return" of the ministers of June 15, prescribing methods for the eradication of witchcraft, endorsed the techniques outlined by the great William Perkins and the Reverend Richard Bernard of Batcombe in
 
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Somerset. Both Increase and Cotton Mather praised these authorities on several occasions, and explicitly drew from their works.
43
What Increase found valuable in these writers were the precise prescriptions for the identification and conviction of witches. Both Perkins and Bernard despised the ancient folk practices; no test by water nor by scalding for them (a suspect tossed into water who floated was guilty, as was one who was burned by a hot iron). And neither advised accepting spectral testimony for conviction. Yet each approved devices for detecting demons that seriously compromised seventeenth-century scientific views. Perkins and Bernard both agreed that charges of witchcraft by neighbors should be grounds for investigation; and a single witch in a family brought other members under suspicion, Perkins said, because the practice of demonology could be taught. A curse by one man of another, followed by some calamity, was also grounds for suspicion that ought to be officially probed. And unusual body marks such as those sucked by Satan and his demons should bring a formal probe. A magistrate whose suspicions were aroused by any of these "tests" ought to question the accused vigorously and even to use torture if confessions were not forthcoming, Perkins argued. Medical authorities, such as Dr. John Cotta, a Northamption physician who had taken an A.B. and an M.A. at Cambridge University and who was widely respected in the seventeenth century, were also willing to accept "Common defamation" and family association as grounds for pursuing an investigation of witches. But Cotta urged caution against credulous acceptance of rumor and the findings of unqualified examiners. And he left little doubt that what gave one expertise in such examinations was not a knowledge of theology but medical training. Grand juries, magistrates, town officials, ministers, all, he wrote, should have resort to medical opinion before bringing any charges. The problem in detectionhe impliedlay as much with the afflicted as with the accused. The problem was first to identify the bewitched. Since the identification came down to discriminating between natural disease and supernatural possession, a physician ought to be the only one to attempt it. A physician knew that disease sometimes produced horrible fits and delirium that closely resembled the attacks experienced by the bewitched. There were cases in medical records of dreadful symptoms, which seemed to indicate witchcraft; and indeed some
 
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suffers rolled, shrieked, and complained that they were being tortured by demons and witches. The credulous considered the symptoms and the claims of the afflicted and agreed that they were witnessing witchcraft. Then, according to Cotta, physicians took over and discovered the natural causesin one case, a boy who endured such torments and complained of witches was found to be suffering with nothing more than a bad case of worms! And in another case, the true disorder was so mild as to be cured in the most prosaic fashion by a stay at the baths. Increase read Cotta, praised him, and ignored all such deflationary prescriptions. He felt no doubt that the witches were abroad in Salem and that the girls were what they claimed to be, bewitched. To be sure, the girls were deceived by the spectres which did not usually represent the persons they seemed to resemble; but the girls' testimony about their own sufferings was to be trusted. Increase knew, of course, that scientific rationalism suggested skepticism of the girls' statements about both themselves and others. Only the evidence of the senses, rationally construed, could help in the identification of those tortured by demons and spirits, Cotta said. Though the girls' "evidence" was simply not accessible to anyone else's senses and the girls' rational faculties had obviously been disordered by the horror of their experiences, Increase persisted in taking their claims seriouslyon the grounds that the inaccessible "evidence" could indicate only one thing in this case, the operations of demonic forces. His opposition to the admission of spectral evidence in court arose not from scientific reasonableness, but from the traditional Christian belief in the Devil's capacity for trickery and deceit.
44
Still, following the prescriptions of Perkins and Bernard, he was willing to approve of convictions based on the confessions of guilt by witches. Here again he departed from medical opinion as given by Cotta and Merci Casaubon, another seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar, whom he praised and ignored. Casaubon emphasized the connections between disease and such disorders as enthusiasm. Perkins had urged that convictions of witchcraft should be obtained on only two bases: one, the confessions of guilt of suspected witches, and the other, the testimony of at least two witnesses that the accused had made a league with the Devil, or had performed some recognized demonic practice.

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