SOURCE: "Witchcraft," in Cotton Mather: The Puritan Priest, Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1891, pp. 88-123.

What happened in the next two years was of less consequence to New England than the matters we have been considering. To Cotton Mather, however, and to the cause which throughout his life he had most at heart,—the preservation, the restoration, of the pure polity of the fathers,—these two years were fatal. It was the great tragedy of witchcraft, I think, that finally broke the power of theocracy: it was almost surely the part Cotton Mather played in it that made his life, for the five and thirty years that were left him, a life—at least publicly—of constant, crescent failure. Tragic even if we join with those who read in the records left us no more worthy story than that of frustrated ambition, his career takes an aspect of rare tragic dignity if in his endless, undiscouraged efforts to do God's work we can honestly see what he tells us was there,—an allmastering faith that the fathers were divinely right, that all which tended away from their teaching was eternally wrong, and that his own failure meant nothing less than the failure of the kingdom of Christ in a land whither Christ's servants had come with high hopes that here, as nowhere else on earth, Christ's kingdom should prevail.

Sir William Phipps, the new Governor, is in certain aspects a most romantic figure. The obscure son of a settler in the wilds of Maine, he was first an apprentice to a ship-carpenter: coming to Boston early in manhood, he learned there to read and write, and soon married a widow of position and fortune decidedly above his own. Prospering for a while as a shipbuilder, he soon took to the sea; and by the year 1684 he had so distinguished himself that he was put in command of a frigate, in which he sailed to the West Indies in search of a wrecked Spanish treasure-ship. After various adventures and mutinies, he actually discovered the wreck. He brought back to England treasure to the amount of three hundred thousand pounds, in return for which feat he was knighted by James II. And in Sir Edmund Andros's time he came home to Boston with a comfortable fortune of his own and the office of High Sheriff of New England. By no means in sympathy with the Governor, he soon went back to England for a while, where he had more or less to do with Increase Mather. In 1690 he was again in Boston, where, as we have seen before, he took command of the successful expedition against Port Royal. The first real rebuff in the career of this archetype of self-made Yankees was the failure of the expedition which, too late in the same year, he led against Quebec. Undiscouraged, he went back to England with plans for a fresh expedition against the French. This came to nothing; but Increase Mather, who saw much of him in London, pitched on him, and obtained the approval of King William for him, as the man of men to be the first Governor of the royal Province of Massachusetts.

It would have been hard to find a governor who should promise more for the polity to which the Mathers gave every energy of their lives. A man of the people, conspicuous above any one else of his time for just that kind of material success which most touches the popular imagination, Sir William, though hotheaded and full of the pompous tyranny of the quarterdeck, seems to have had one of those big, hearty, human natures which command liking even where one cannot approve. He might be expected at once to command the sympathy of the people, who would see in him an example of what any one of them might become, and to be very firm in his determination to have his own way. If such a man be on the right course, he will carry things farther than any other kind. And, like most self-made Yankees, Sir William was on exactly the right course, from the point of view of the clergy. As a class, self-made men to this day grow up with a rather blind faith in the superiority to other men of ministers of the Gospel: in worldly moments they may smile at their spiritual advisers as impractical; but they go to church, and when it comes to spending their money they are very apt to spend it as the minister tells them to. And more than most self-made men Sir William looked up to the clergy, and most of all the clergy to the Mathers. It was Increase Mather's sermon on "The day of trouble is near," in 1674,¹ that first made him sensible of his sins; it was by Cotton Mather, just before the expedition to Port Royal, in 1690, that he was baptized and received into the communion of the faithful; it was to Increase Mather that he owed the office which crowned his worldly ambition. Clearly such a man as this might be trusted, if anybody might, to do the will of God as the Mathers expounded it. And the Mathers meant to expound it in the good old orthodox way; and the new Charter gave the Governor more power than he had ever had under the old; so there was never a moment when the hopes of Christ's kingdom looked brighter.

To understand what followed, we may well recall some things at which we have glanced already. In the view of the Puritans, the continent of America, whither they came to live in accordance with no laws but those of Scripture, had been until their coming the special territory of the Devil. Here he had ruled for centuries, unmolested by the opposing power of the Gospel: whoever doubted this had only to look at the degradation of his miserable subjects, the native Indians, to be pretty well convinced. The landing of the Puritans was a direct invasion of his territories. He fought it in all manner of ways,—material and spiritual. The physical hardship of the earlier years of the settlement was largely his work; so were the disturbances raised within the Colonies by heretics and malcontents; so, more palpably still, were the Indian wars in which his subjects rose in arms against the servants of Christ; so, too, were certain phenomena that every one at the present day would instantly recognize as natural: more than once Cotton Mather remarks as clearly diabolical the fact that the steeples of churches are oftener struck by lightning than any other structures. And from the very earliest days of the settlement the Devil had waged his unholy war in a more subtle way still: appearing in person, or in the person of direct emissaries from the invisible world, to more than a few hapless Christians, he had constantly striven with bribes and threats to seduce them to his service. Whoever yielded to him was rewarded by the possession of supernatural power, which was secretly exerted for all manner of malicious purposes; these were the witches: whoever withstood him was tortured in mind and body almost beyond the power of men to bear; these were the bewitched. There was no phase of the Devil's warfare so insidious, so impalpable, so dangerous, as this: in the very heart of the churches, in the pulpits themselves, witches might lurk. Their crime was the darkest of all,—deliberate treason to the Lord; but it was the hardest of all to detect and to prove,—the most horrible, both in its nature and in its possibility of evildoing. Mysterious, horrible, inevitable, it demanded every effort of Christians to withstand its subtle power.

To the Mathers, I believe, all this was very real. In 1684 Increase Mather had written a book against witchcraft. Two years later, as we have seen, Cotton Mather had had what he might well have believed a special message from Heaven that his chief mission for the moment was to fight the witches. The sins of the Colonists had brought on them the most terrible of their misfortunes: the Charter was gone, and Kirk was coming with his red-coats; and, in the deep agony of secret prayer, Cotton Mather was beseeching God to show mercy to New England, and promising, when such mercy came, what special services the Lord might see fit to demand. The good news came, at a moment when the Lord was rewarding his prayers by visions of a white-robed angel from whose lips he heard assurances of Divine favour. King Charles was dead, Kirk was coming no longer. His prayers had availed to save New England from the worst of her dangers. What should he do for the Lord? At that very moment, as we have seen, witchcraft was abroad. It was his duty to collect testimony against it, to denounce it, to fight it with all his might. From that moment, apparently, he began. And the more he studied it, the more real and terrible he found it. In 1688 there was a sad outbreak of it in Boston: Cotton Mather took into his own house one of the afflicted children, whose behaviour as he relates it was in all respects such as to increase his belief both in the reality of the Devil's work, and in the divine sanction of his own efforts against it. And now, in 1692, when the prayers of New England for a righteous charter had been granted, when the best of governors was come, ready to put into execution the best of policies, when at last the material prospects of Christ's kingdom were fairer than for years before, the Devil began such a spiritual assault on New England as had never before been approached.

The story of Salem Witchcraft has been told by Upham with a fulness and a fairness that leave nothing to be added. But he fails, I think, sympathetically to understand a fact which he emphasizes with characteristic honesty,—the tremendous influence on human beings of that profound realizing sense of the mysteries that surround us, to which those who do not share it give the name superstition.

At various periods of history epidemics of superstition have appeared, sometimes in madly tragic forms, sometimes, as in modern spiritualism, in grotesquely comic ones. These are generally classed as pure delusions, based on no external facts. But for my part, though I may claim none of the authority which would come from special study of the subject, I am strongly inclined to believe that from the earliest recorded times a certain pretty definite group of mysterious phenomena has, under various names, really shown itself throughout human society. Oracles, magic, witchcraft, animal magnetism, spiritualism,—call the phenomena what you will,—seem to me a fact. Certain phases of it are beginning to be understood under the name of hypnotism. Other phases, after the best study that has been given them, seem to be little else than deliberate fraud and falsehood; but they are fraud and falsehood, if this be all they are, of a specific kind, unchanged for centuries. The evidence at the trial of the Maréchal de Rais, a soldier of Joan of Arc and the original of the tale of Blue-Beard, relates phenomena that anybody can see to-day by paying a dollar to a "materializing medium." And some of them are very like what are related in the trials of the Salem witches. So specific is the fraud, if only fraud it be, that it may well be regarded, I think, as a distinct mental, or perhaps rather moral disorder.

With no sort of pretension to scientific knowledge, I have found that a guess I made in talk some years ago throws what may be a little light on many of the mysterious phenomena that in Cotton Mather's time were deemed indisputably diabolical. I shall venture, then, to state it here, to be taken for no more than a layman's guess may be worth. If, as modern science tends to show, human beings are the result of a process of evolution from lower forms of life, there must have been in our ancestral history a period when the intelligence of our progenitors was as different from the modern human mind—the only form of intelligence familiar to our experience or preserved in the records of our race—as were their remote aquatic bodies from the human form we know to-day. To-day we can perceive with any approach to distinctness only what reveals itself to us through the medium of our five senses; but we have only to look at the intricate wheelings of a flock of birds, at the flight of a carrier pigeon, at the course of a dog who runs straight home over a hundred miles of strange country, to see more than a probability that animals not remote from us physically have perceptions to which we are strangers. It seems wholly conceivable, then, that in the remote psychologic past of our race there may have been in our ancestors certain powers of perception which countless centuries of disuse have made so rudimentary that in our normal condition we are not conscious of them. But if such there were, it would not be strange that, in abnormal states, the rudimentary vestiges of these disused powers of perception might sometimes be revived. If this were the case, we might naturally expect two phenomena to accompany such a revival: in the first place, as such powers of perception, from my very hypothesis, belong normally to a period in the development of our race when human society and what we call moral law have not yet appeared, we should expect them to be intimately connected with a state of emotion that ignores what we call the moral sense, and so to be accompanied by various forms of misconduct; in the second place, as our chief modern means of communication—articulate language—belongs to a period when human intelligence has assumed its present form, we should expect to find it inadequate for the expression of facts which it never professed to cover, and so we should expect such phenomena as we are considering to be accompanied by an erratic, impotent inaccuracy of statement, which would soon shade into something indistinguishable from deliberate falsehood. In other words, such phenomena would naturally involve in whoever abandons himself to them a mental and moral degeneracy which any one who believes in a personal devil would not hesitate to ascribe to the direct intervention of Satan.

Now what disposes me, scientifically a layman I must repeat, to think that my guess may have something in it is that mental and moral degeneracy—credulity and fraud—seem almost invariably so to entangle themselves with occult phenomena that many coolheaded people are disposed to assert the whole thing a lie. To me, as I have shown, it does not seem so simple. I am much disposed to think that necromancers, witches, mediums,—what not,—actually do perceive in the infinite realities about us things that are imperceptible to normal human beings; but that they perceive them only at a sacrifice of their higher faculties—mental and moral—not inaptly symbolized in the old tales of those who sell their souls.

If this be true, witchcraft is not a delusion: it is a thing more subtly dangerous still. Such an epidemic of it as came to New England in 1692 is as diabolical a fact as human beings can know: unchecked, it can really work mischief unspeakable. I have said enough, I think, to show why I heartily sympathize with those who in 1692 did their utmost to suppress it; to show, too, why the fatally tragic phase of the witch trials seems to me, not the fact that there was no crime to condemn, but the fact that the evidence on which certain wretched people were executed proves, on scrutiny, utterly insufficient. It was little better than to-day would be the ravings of a clairvoyant against one accused of theft. And yet, if there be anything in my guess, this too is just what we might expect. Not knowing what they did, the judges would strain every nerve—just as in their rapt ecstasies the Mathers strained every nerve, along with their Puritan fellows, and the saints of every faith—to awaken from the lethargy of countless ages those rudimentary powers which can be awakened only at the expense of what we think the higher ones that have supplanted them. The motive may make a difference: he who strives to serve God may end as he begun, a better man than he who consents to serve the Devil. But, for all that, bewitched and judges alike, the startled ministers to whom the judges turned for counsel, and perhaps not a few of the witches too, who may well have believed in themselves, vie with one another in a devil's race, harking back to mental and moral depths from which humanity has taken countless centuries to rise.

Whoever cares to know in detail the story of 1692 may read it in Upham, or in Palfrey. In brief, the children of Mr. Parris, minister of Salem Village, were seized early in the year with disorders which seemed of no earthly origin. They accused certain neighbours of bewitching them; the neighbours were arrested. The troubles and the accusations spread with the speed of any panic. By the time Sir William assumed the government, the whole region was in an agony of superstitious terror; and whoever raised his voice against the matter fell under suspicion of league with the Devil. At that moment, as the old judicial system had fallen with the Charter, there were no regular courts. Within a few weeks, Sir William, full of the gravity of the situation, and probably under the direct advice of the Mathers, appointed a special Court of Oyer and Terminer to try the witches. William Stoughton, the Deputy Governor, was made Chief Justice: his six associates were gentlemen of the highest station and character in the Province: among them was Samuel Sewall, whose Diary I have so often quoted. On the 2d of June this court condemned one Bridget Bishop: on the 10th she was executed for witchcraft. Before proceeding further, the court consulted the ministers of Boston and the neighbourhood. The answer of the ministers is said to have been drawn up by Cotton Mather: in general terms it urged "the importance of caution and circumspection in the methods of examination," but "earnestly recommended that the proceedings should be vigorously carried on."²

It is largely on this document that the charge against Cotton Mather rests: he is believed by many deliberately to have urged the judicial murder of innocent people for the simple purpose of establishing and main taining his own ascendency in the state. To me, and what I have written already should show why, the paper seems the only possible thing for an honest, superstitious man—himself in direct communication with the blessed part of the invisible world—to have written. Witchcraft was to him the most terrible of realities; not to proceed against it would have been to betray the cause of Christ; but the Devil stood ready to beguile the courts themselves; the evidence must be carefully scrutinized, or who could tell what mischief might come?

Thus encouraged, the Court proceeded. How many wretched people were committed can never be quite known: Upham thinks several hundreds.³ Nineteen were hanged; one was pressed to death for refusing to plead to his indictment; at least two died in jail. By the end of September, a revulsion of popular feeling had come. The accusations had spread too far: the evidence on which the witches were executed was beginning to seem too flimsy. On the 22d of September came the last executions. In January, 1693,⁴ the special Court of Oyer and Terminer was supplanted by a regular Superior Court, consisting of much the same men. It threw out "spectral evidence,"—that is, it declined to consider the ravings of the bewitched: only three out of fifty indicted for witchcraft were condemned, and none of these was executed. In May, 1693, the panic was over. By proclamation, Sir William Phipps discharged all the accused. "Such a jail delivery," says Hutchinson, "has never been known in New England."

In all this matter Increase Mather seems to have played no conspicuous part. Four years of diplomacy in the capital of the British empire had perhaps taught him practical lessons of prudence not to be learned in any less arduous school. But while these were learning, his son, not yet thirty years old, had been surrounded by influences diametrically different. In the provincial Boston, which was at once the greatest city in America and the only home he ever knew, Cotton Mather had found himself, at an age when most men are still passed by as young, among the chiefs of the leaders. And then, as later, it had been his lot to meet hardly anybody whom he could honestly deem by his own standards superior to himself. As we shall see by and by, his later career was marked by what has often seemed, particularly when we remember his constant failure to achieve the public ends he strove for, a ridiculous and overweening vanity. But I think that few can rise from a careful study of his diary without feeling that this vanity was no blind self-approval; but at most a conviction, in his happier moments, that, far as he was from the attainment of his ideals, there were none about him who were any nearer the attainment of theirs, and that there were many—and year by year more—who were falling away from the ancestral traditions that he never gave up. In 1692 he was still in the flush of youth and of success. No one was more active in fighting the Devil's works as revealed in witchcraft. No one, for well on to two centuries, has borne so much of the odium of what was done as he.

We have seen how his books and his conduct in 1688 tended to stir up public feeling against the witches; we have seen how the letter of the ministers which he drew up encouraged the puzzled Court of Oyer and Terminer to proceed with its deadly work. On the 19th of August, 1692, the most eminent of the victims of the proceedings was hanged; this was the Rev. George Burroughs, a graduate of Harvard College, and for something like twenty years a minister of the Gospel. Four others died with him. One of Sewall's very few notes of this period describes this day.

A very great number of Spectators … present. Mr Cotton Mather was there…. All of them said they were inocent…. Mr. Mather says they all died by a Righteous sentence. Mr. Burroughs, by his Speech, Prayer, protestation of his Innocence, did much move unthinking persons, which occasions their speaking hardly concerning his being executed." In the margin Sewall has written "Dolefull Witchcraft!"⁵

Calef, of whom we shall hear more by and by, gives a fuller account of the scene:—

When [Mr. Burroughs] was upon the ladder, he made a speech for the clearing of his innocency, with such solemn and serious expressions, as were to the admiration of all present: his prayer (which he concluded by repeating the Lord's prayer⁶) was so well worded, and uttered with such composedness, and such (at least seeming) fervency of spirit, as was very affecting, and drew tears from many, so that it seemed to some that the spectators would hinder the execution. The accusers⁷ said the black man stood and dictated to him. As soon as he was turned off, Mr. Cotton Mather, being mounted upon a horse, addressed himself to the people, partly to declare that … [Burroughs] was no ordained minister, and partly to possess the people of his guilt, saying that the devil has often been transformed into an angel of light; and this somewhat appeased the people, and the executions went on. When he was cut down, he was dragged by the halter to a hole … between the rocks, about two feet deep, his shirt and breeches being pulled off, and an old pair of trowsers of one executed put on his lower parts; he was so put in … that one of his hands and his chin … were left uncovered.⁸

Just a month later, Giles Corey was pressed to death for refusing to plead to his indictment,—the solitary instance in America of this terrible barbarity of the old English criminal law.

Sept. 20, [writes Sewall], Now I hear from Salem that about 18 years agoe he was suspected to have stamped and press'd a man to death, but was cleared. Twas not remembered till Ane Putnam was told of it by said Corey's Spectre the Sabbath-day night before the Execution.⁹

On this very day, the 20th of September, two days before the last of the executions, Cotton Mather wrote to Stephen Sewall, clerk of the court at Salem, a letter which Upham deems conclusive of his artful dishonesty.¹⁰

That I may bee the more capable to assist, in lifting up a standard against the Infernal Enemy, [it runs,] I must Renew my most IMPORTUNATE REQUEST, that you would please quickly to perform, what you kindly promised, of giving me a Narrative of the Evidences given in at the Trials of half a dozen, or if you please a dozen, of the principal Witches, that have been condemned…. I am willing that when you write, you should imagine me as obstinate a Sadducee and Witch-advocate as any among us: address mee as one that Believ'd Nothing Reasonable; and when you have so knocked mee down, in a spectre so unlike mee, you will enable mee, to box it about, among my Neighbs, till it come, I know not where, at last.

Two days later, on that very 22d of September when the last witches were hanging, Sewall notes that "William Stoughton, Esqr., John Hathorne, Esqr., Mr. Cotton Mather, and Capt. John Higginson, with my brother St., were at our house, speaking about publishing some Trials of Witches."¹¹ The results this letter and conference seems to have been Cotton Mather's well known "Wonders of the Invisible World," published the next year both in Boston and in London.

A few of Sewall's notes show the course of popular feeling meanwhile. On the 15th of October he went to Cambridge to discourse with Mr. Danforth about witchcraft: Mr. Danforth

"thinks there ca ot be a procedure in the Court except there be some better consent of Ministers and People." On the 26th, "A Bill is sent in about calling a Fast, and Convocation of Ministers, that may be led in the right way as to the Witchcrafts. The reason and ma er of doing it, is such, that the Court of Oyer and Terminer count themselves thereby dismissed. 29 Nos and 33 yeas to the Bill." On the 28th, Sewall, "as had done several times before, desired to have the advice of the Governour and Council as to the sitting of the Court of Oyer and Terminer next week: said should move it no more; great silence, as if should say, do not go." Next day, "Mr. Russell asked whether the Court of Oyer and Terminer should sit, expressing some fear of Inconvenience by its fall. Governour said it must fall. Lieut.-Governour¹² not in Town."

It was nearly a year later, in September, 1693, that Cotton Mather, in Upham's phrase,¹³ "succeeded in getting up" the case of witchcraft that cost him dearest. One Margaret Rule, a young woman of Boston whose character seems to have been none of the best, was seized with all the symptoms of possession. One symptom, mentioned I think only in her case, throws considerable light on her disorder: the devils prevented her from eating, but permitted her occasionally to swallow a little rum. Both of the Mathers visited her, surrounded by her startled and credulous friends; they listened with full faith to her tales of black spirits and white who haunted her; they examined her person with what in less holy men might have savoured of indiscretion; they prayed with her and for her. And finally, the discouraged devils fled away; and she, returning perfectly to herself, though extremely weak and faint and overwhelmed with vapours, most affectionately gave thanks to God for her deliverance.¹⁴ This case, portending such a diabolical descent on Boston as had passed over Salem, attracted the attention among others, of one Robert Calef, a merchant of the town. He visited Margaret Rule when the Mathers were with her. A perfect matter-of-fact man, thoroughly honest and equally devoid of imagination, he saw in her sufferings only a vulgar cheat, and in the conduct of the Mathers something which seems to have impressed him as deliberate and not wholly decent connivance in her imposture. He made notes of what he had seen, and submitted them to Cotton Mather. The controversy that followed, which has been admirably summarized by Sibley,¹⁵ lasted in one form or another for six years. In 1700, Calef's book on the subject was published in London, and soon found its way to Boston.¹⁶

Calef's temper was that of the rational Eighteenth Century: the Mathers belonged rather to the Sixteenth,—the age of passionate religious enthusiasm. To me, both sides seem equally honest; and the difference between them seems chiefly due to the fact that, as in a thousand other cases in human history, a man of the future can rarely so rise above himself as to understand men of the past. In such a controversy, it is the man of the future that the future holds right. In the time that has passed since the Mathers and Calef have lain in their graves, the world has seen an age of reason, and not of imaginative emotion. And most of those who have concerned themselves about these dead men have deemed Calef all in the right, and the Mathers foolish, if not worse. But did Calef see all? Is there, after all, in a great epidemic of superstition nothing beyond what those who escape the contagion perceive? Are we not to-day beginning to guess that there may be in heaven and earth more things than are yet dreamt of in your philosophy? If there be, it may in the end prove the verdict of men that neither honest Calef nor the honest Mathers saw all that passed before their eyes; but that each in his own way caught a glimpse of truth, and that each believed that all the truth was comprised in the bit he saw.

But we are come now to a point where we must turn to Cotton Mather himself; where we must look to the diaries he has left us, and to the works he wrote later, for an account of what these critical years meant to him. The substance of his later writings seems to me adequately represented by the passages about witchcraft in the Magnalia and the Parentator. A few words of these, and we will pass to his diaries for 1692¹⁷ and 1693.¹⁸

The substance of his final view of the case, as shown in his published works, seems to have been this: The witchcraft was a real attack of the Devil, permitted perhaps as a punishment for dabblings in sorcery and magical tricks which people had begun to allow themselves.¹⁹ The afflictions of the possessed, which he details in all their petty absurdities, that seem nowadays as monstrously trivial, were really diabolical.

Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most sober people in a country where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward Spirit of Sadducism can question them.²⁰

The only doubtful question was whether the Devil had the power of assuming before the eyes of his victims the shape of innocent persons. The assumption on the part of the judges that he had no such power led to the conviction on spectral evidence of not a few victims of the court. The abandonment of this assumption led to the cessation of the prosecutions, and to the jail delivery of 1693. Mather asserts in substance that he always opposed spectral evidence; and it is certain that Increase Mather's Cases of Conscience, published in 1694, clearly condemns it. It is certain, too, that Cotton Mather's letter to John Richards, dated May 31, 1692,²¹ warns the judge in the most specific terms against the dangers of spectral evidence. Cotton Mather's own position, as he finally states it, then, seems to have been a persistent belief in witchcraft, a persistent determination to keep the public alive to all the horrors of the crime, and to oppose it by every means in his power, but a growing doubt as to how far so mysterious and terrible an evil can be dealt with by so material an engine as the criminal law. On the whole he inclines more and more to reliance on fasting and prayer. This was undoubtedly the view taken, when the panic was once over, by even the most strenuous advocates of the reality of witchcraft, and Cotton Mather undeniably takes to himself the credit of having held and urged it all along.

The part of the Magnalia in which these facts appear is the Life of Sir William Phipps, first published separately and anonymously in 1697. On the fact that this book was anonymous, Calef bases much of his charge that Mather wrote it dishonestly to praise himself, and to delude people into believing him free from the responsibility of having urged on the prosecutions. On this fact, on the feebleness of the caution addressed by the ministers to the Court of Oyer and Terminer, and on the letter to Stephen Sewall, rests most of the charge of dishonesty from which Mather's name has never been cleared to the satisfaction of his opponents. It seems to me that the anonymous publication—by no means the only example of it in Mather's voluminous works²²—may well have been due to no worse motive than a wish for a fair hearing, which might not have been accorded to a name which was held up to public execration. It seems to me, too, that the letter of the ministers may be taken for just what it purports to be,—an honest warning of a danger, in spite of which the Court has no moral right to hesitate in the performance of its official duty. And in the letter to Stephen Sewall I can see nothing inconsistent with the conclusion that what Cotton Mather wished to maintain unshaken was not the fatal penalty of the law, but that belief in the reality of witchcraft which he certainly never abandoned. Calef and posterity seem to me to have confused two distinct things,—this belief in the reality of witchcraft, and insistence on the validity of spectral evidence. But, when all is said, I think two facts against Mather remain: his conduct and his words had as much as any one man's could have to do with the raising of the panic; and in his final presentation of the matter, both in his diaries and in his published works, he never grants or meets the full strength of the case against him.

But before we agree with those who believe him to have been deliberately dishonest, it will be only fair to read what his diaries tell us of these troubled years; and to read it, too, with certain facts in mind that seem to me too little considered. In the first place, as we have seen, Cotton Mather had for years been a religious enthusiast whose constant ecstasies brought him into such direct communication with Heaven as he believed the witches to maintain with Hell; in other words, he had for years been, what he remained all his life, a constant victim of a mental or moral disorder whose normal tendency is towards the growth of unwitting credulity and fraud. In the second place, I grow to believe more and more that the ceaseless activity of mind and body, of thought, of emotion, of action, into which he never ceased to lash himself,—the activity which produced in actual words and deeds a lifework whose bulk to-day seems almost incredible,—never permitted him, in any act or word, to be really deliberate at all. Striving with all his might to do the Lord's work, believing that the Lord's will forbade him for a moment to relax a particle of his energy, he went through this world from beginning to end in a state of emotional exaltation, of passionate afflation and reaction, which left him in all the sixty years of his conscious life hardly an hour of that cool thoughtfulness without which any deliberation is impossible. It has been his fate—a man whose whole career was a storm of passion—to be judged, in the seclusion of libraries, by unimaginative, unimpassioned posterity. So cool sympathizers with old Calvinism who have sought to defend him, and cooler Protestants who have constantly condemned him, have alike failed to understand.

They have failed, too, adequately to emphasize what seems to me the most notable piece of contemporary evidence. On May 31st, 1692, we have seen,—three days before Bridget Bishop, the first victim of the Court, was sentenced,—Cotton Mather wrote to John Richards, one of the judges, a letter in which he takes, with the utmost decision, exactly the ground he occupied to the end of his life.

'Do not lay more stress upon pure Spectre evidence than it will bear," he writes…. "It is very certain that the divells have sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only innocent, but also very vertuous."

There should be confession, or unmistakable signs: he believes in witch-marks, to be sure, and in the water-ordeal. But at the very end he adds this caution:—

It is worth considering whether there be a necessity alwayes by Extirpacons by Halter or fagott [to punish] every wretched creature that shall be hooked into some degrees of Witchcraft. What if some of the lesser Criminalls, be only scourged with lesser punishments, and also put upon some solemn, … Publike … renunciation of the Divel? I am apt to thinke that the Divels would then cease afflicting the Neighbourhood.

So we come back to the diary for 1692.²³ As I have said already, this is far more abridged and less specific than most of his diaries. But I do not believe it untrue. The last entry I quoted was made in May, when his father had just returned, and the new Charter was just passing into operation. "And now," he wrote, "I will call upon the Lord as long as I live."

The rest of his entries for the year bear no date. He notes briefly that he has preached against temporal persecution of heresy; "And I hope the Lord will own me with a more Singular Success in the suppression of Haeresy by Endeavours more Spiritual and Evangelical." He notes that in his public ministry he has been largely handling the Day of Judgment, from texts in the 25th chapter of Matthew. Then comes a long note beginning, "The Rest of the Summer was a very doleful Time unto the whole Countrey." He tells how devils possessed many people, how witches were accused in the visions of the afflicted, how he himself testified both publicly and privately against the dangers of spectral evidence, and how it was he who drew up the letter from the ministers to the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

Nevertheless, [he goes on,]²⁴ I saw in most of the Judges a most charming Instance of prudence and patience, and I knew their exemplary pietie, and the Anguish of Soul with which they sought the Direction of Heaven: above most other people, whom I generally saw enchanted into a Raging, Railing, Scandalous and unreasonable disposition as the distress increased upon us. For this cause, though I would not allow the Principles, that some of the Judges had espoused, yet I could not but speak honourably of their Persons, on all occasions: and my Compassion upon the Sight of their Difficulties Raised by my Journeys to Salem, the Chief Seat of these Diabolical Vexations, caused me yett more to do so. And merely, as far as I can Learn, for this Reason, the mad people thro' the Countrey under a fascination on their Spirits equal to what the Energumens had on their Bodies, Reviled mee, as if I had been the Doer of all the Hard Things that were done in the prosecution of the Witchcraft.

He goes on to note how he offered to provide in his own family for six of the possessed, that he might try whether prayer and fasting "would not putt an End to their Heavy Trials"; how throughout the summer he prayed and fasted weekly for this heavy affliction to the country; how he visited witches in prison and preached to them; and how he wrote his "Wonders of the Invisible World." And at the end of this passage is a note in brackets, apparently made at some later time:—

[Upon the severest Examination, and the Solemnest Supplication, I still think, that for the main, I have Written Right.]

Later come less coherent notes. One remarks that the spectres brought books in which they urged the possessed to sign away their souls. Now, as Cotton Mather worked for God largely by writing books, this looked as if "this Assault of the Evil Angels upon the Countrey was intended by Hell as a particular Defiance unto my poor Endeavours to bring the Souls of men unto Heaven." Whereupon, he wrote "Awakenings for the Unregenerate," which he resolved, if he lived, to give away at the rate of two a week for two years. In the margin he notes that the evil angels, through a possessed young woman, reproached him for never having preached on Rev. 13. 8.²⁵ "I to oppose them," he goes on, "and yett not follow them, chose to preach on Rev. 20. 15."²⁶ Later he makes a memorandum: as the devils bid Energumens sign books, he will sign the best of books. On the fly-leaves of his favourite Bibles he wrote professions and confessions of his faith: for example, "Received as the Book of God and of Life by Cotton Mather."

"The Hearty Wishes of Cotton Mather," come next. "I have ever now and then gone to the good God with the most Solemn Addresses That I may be altogether delivered from Enchantments: that no Enchantment on my mind may hinder mee from seeing or doing any thing for the glory of God, or dispose mee to anything whereat God may be displeased. The Reason of this Wish is Because I beleeve, that a Real and proper Enchantment of the Divels do's blind and move the minds of the most of men: even in Instances of every sort. But I remember, That much Fasting as well as prayer is necessary to obtain a Rescue from Enchantments."

The last entry I have noted for the year, when I remember all the circumstances of the man's life, has for me real pathos: he would carefully avoid personal quarrels,

"Because no man can manage a personal Quarrel against another without Losing abundance of precious Time…. And one Likely to Live, so little a Time, as i, had need throw away, as Little of his Time, as ever he can."

The diary for 1693²⁷ is a little more full than that for 1692; but, like that, is an abridgement of the original, and omits most of the dates. On his birthday, he preached from the text, "O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days." Then he set to preaching over the whole Epistle of Jude,²⁸ "intermingled with occasional texts." A little later he notes that a young woman possessed of devils has been delivered after he has held three fasts for her. He holds a thanksgiving accordingly; but, her possession being renewed, falls again to fasting and prayer:—

"And unto my amazement, when I had kept my Third Day for her, shee was finally and forever delivered from the hands of the Evil Angels: and I had afterwards the satisfaction of seeing, not only Her so brought home unto the Lord that she was admitted into the Church, but also many others, even some scores, of young people Awakened by the picture of Hell exhibited in her Sufferings, to flee from the wrath to come."

The next note I have copied tells more than any other I have found of Cotton Mather's pastoral methods:—

The church having hitherto extended a Church Watch unto none but Communicants, and confined Baptism unto Them and Their Children, I was desirous to bring the church into a posture more Agreeable unto the Advice of the Synod, in the year, 1662." So he preached on the subject, and allowing no disputation, proceeded to circulate among the brethren of the church "an instrument containing my Sentiments and purposes." The brethren "generally signed a Desire and Address unto myself thereto annexed that I would act accordingly. As for the few … who were Disaffected unto my proceedings. I carried it so peaceably, and obligingly, and yett resolutely, towards them, that they patiently Lett me take my way: and some of them told mee, they thought I did well to do as I did: tho' they could not yett come to see as I did…. Thus was the church quietly brought unto a point, which heretofore cost no Little Difficulty. But my Charge of such as now submitt themselves to my Ecclesiastical Watch was exceedingly increased.—Lord, LETT THY GRACE BEE SUFFICIENT FOR ME.

He notes that during the spring his days of fast and humiliation were so frequent that he lost record of them; that he kept, too, one or two days of Thanksgiving in his study. On one of these days, he goes on,—

"My Special Errand unto the Lord was this: That whereas His Good Angels, did by His Order, many good offices for His people, Hee would please to grant unto mee the Enjoyment of all those Angelical Kindnesses, which are to bee done by His Order, for His Chosen Servants … in a manner and measure more Transcendent, than what the great Corruptions of the generalty of Good Men, permitted them to be made partakers of. Now that I might bee Qualify'd for this Favour, I… Entreated that I may not, and Engaged that I will not, on the Score of any Angelical Communications, forsake the Conduct of the Lord's Written Word."

He goes on to state certain lines of conduct which he proposes to follow, with the hope of making his behaviour as agreeable to that of angels as he can. And his closing purpose is this:—

'To Conceal with all prudent Secrecy whatever Extraordinary Things I may perceive done for mee, by the Angels, who love Secrecy in their Administrations. I do now believe," he adds, 'That some Great Things are to be done for mee by the Angels of God.'"

On the 28th of March his first son was born. The child had a malformation beyond the reach of contemporary surgery. On the 1st of April it died unbaptized. It was buried beneath the epitaph, "Reserved for a glorious Resurrection."

I had great reason," writes the bereaved father, "to suspect a Witchcraft, in this praeternatural Accident; because my Wife, a few weeks before her Deliverance, was affrighted with an horrible Spectre, in the porch, which fright caused her Bowels to Turn within her; and the Spectres which both before and after, Tormented a young woman in the Neighbourhood, brag'd of their giving my Wife that Fright, in hopes, they said, of doing mischief unto her Infant, at Least, if not unto the Mother: and besides all this the child was no sooner Born but a suspected Woman sent unto my Father a Letter full of Railing against myself, wherein shee told him Hee little knew what might quickly befall some of his posterity. However, I made little Use of, and laid little Stress on, this Conjecture: desiring to submitt unto the will of my Heavenly Father without which, Not a sparrow falls unto the Ground.

He notes how during the summer he testified against the sin of uncleanness, on the occasion of the execution of two young women for child murder. "I accompanied the wretches to their execution," he writes, "but extremely fear all the Labours were lost upon them: however sanctify'd unto many others." He notes how his preaching at Reading started a revival there; how he conceived the idea of writing the Church History which, under the name of Magnalia Christi Americana, remains by far the most notable of his publications; how in July a fleet arrived, and he started down the harbour to preach to it, but fell so ill that he had to go home; and how he recovered in the afternoon to find that there was yellow-fever aboard the ships, and to be convinced that an Angel of the Lord had upset his stomach for the purpose of preserving him from infection. He notes how he has prayed and preached against vices which are bringing judgments on the community, "and such of these vices as called for the Correction of the Magistrates, I hope, I did effectually stir up some of the Justices to prosecute." Then, very ecstatically, he notes how in these dying times he feels himself quite ready for death: yellow-fever was abroad now. He notes a resolution to visit widows and the fatherless: he tells how he wrote a "True and Brief Representation of the Country," which was transmitted "with all the Secrecy desirable, unto the KING'S own hand: who Read it with much Satisfaction, and I hope, formed from thence, in His own Royal Mind, those Characters of the Countrey whereof we shall reap the good Effects for many a day." He notes how he wrote a book called Winter Mediations, which when winter came on was published; and how towards the end of the summer he began his great commentary on the Bible,—a collection of every scrap of learning he can discover which has any bearing on Scripture. He worked at this for twenty years: it still remains in manuscript, under the name of Biblia Americana.²⁹

Early in September, he went to preach at Salem, where he sought "Furniture" for his Church History, and endeavoured "that the complete History of the Late Witchcrafts and Possessions might not be Lost." The notes from which he intended to preach were stolen "with such Circumstances, that I am … satisfy'd, the Spectres, or Agents in the Invisible World, were the Robbers." But he preached from memory, "so the Divel gott nothing." He had an interview with a pious woman, lately visited by shining spirits. Along with some things "to be kept secret," she prophesied a new "Storm of Witchcraft … to chastise the Iniquity that was used in the wilful Smothering … of the Last." On his return home, he found Margaret Rule down.

"To avoid gratifying of the Evil Angels, … I did … concern myself to use, and gett as much prayer as I could for the afflicted Young Woman; and at the same time, to forbid, either her from Accusing any of the Neighbours, or others from Enquiring anything of her.³⁰ Nevertheless, a Wicked Man wrote a most Lying Libel to revile my Conduct in these Matters, which drove me to the Blessed God with my supplications…. I did at first, it may bee, too much Resent the Injuries of that Libel; but God brought good out of it: it occasioned the multiplication of my prayers before Him: it very much promoted the works of Humiliation and Mortification in my Soul."

He resisted the temptation to desert, in consequence of the libel, the lecture at the Old Meeting-House. As for his missing notes, he adds, the spectres bragged to the possessed girl that they had stolen them, but confessed that they could not keep them. Sure enough,

"On the fifth of October following Every Leaf of my Notes…. tho' they were in eighteen separate … sheets, … were found drop't here and there about the Streets of Lyn; but how they came to bee so Dropt I cannot Imagine, and I as much wonder at the Exactness of their preservation."

On the 3d of October, his little daughter Mary³¹ was ill. He prayed for her

"With such Rapturous Assurances of the Divine Love unto mee and mine, as would richly have made Amends for the Death of more Children, if God had then called for them. I was Unaccountably Assured, not only that this child shall be Happy forever, but that I never should have any Child, except what should bee an everlasting Temple to the Spirit of God: Yea, That I and Mine should bee together in the Kingdome of God, World without End."

On the 6th, the child died: next day she was buried: her epitaph was "Gone but not Lost." On the 8th, in spite of his bereavement, he administered the sacrament;

"And, I hope, that I now so exemplify'd such a Behaviour as not only to embolden my Approaches to the Supper of the Lord, but also to direct and instruct my Neighbourhood, with what frame to encounter their Afflictions."

On the 10th, a military training day, he prayed and fasted, particularly for a possessed girl,—doubtless Margaret Rule. A white spirit appeared to her, with word that God had made Cotton Mather her father, and thereupon she was delivered.

He notes in detail how he drew up a plan for a Negro meeting, in which he carefully attended both to the spiritual welfare of the Africans and to their temporal duties in the station of slavery to which it had pleased God to call them; and how he prayed and preached at the almshouse. He tells then how he was himself accused of witchcraft: the tormentors of a possessed young woman made

"my Image to appear before her, and they made themselves Masters of her tongue so far, that she began in her Fits to complain that I Threatened her, … tho' when shee came out of them, shee owned that They could not so much as make my Dead Shape do her any Harm…. Her greatest outcries when shee was herself, were for my poor prayers."

Aware of the terrible danger to his influence, if these rumours should gain credence,

"I was putt," he writes, "upon … Agonies, and Singular … Efforts of Soul, in the Resignation of my Name unto the Lord; content that if Hee had no further Service for my Name, it should bee torn to pieces…. But I cried unto the Lord as for the Deliverance of my Name from the Malice of Hell, so for the Deliverance of the Young Woman whom the powers of Hell had seized upon. And behold! … the possessed person … was Delivered … on the very same day; and the whole plott of the Divel to Reproach a poor Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ was Defeated."

In January, his only surviving child, Katharine, was very ill; praying for her, he was assured that she should recover, and presently she did. His last note for the year tells how he offered to give up a part of his salary to some members of his church who lived at a distance, and were for starting a new meeting nearer home: but nothing came of it.

Meanwhile he had published nine works: two,—a volume of sermons, and some meditations on the last judgment,—in 1692; and seven,—a preface to Mosten's Spirit of Man, two volumes of sermons, his warnings against uncleanness, his Winter Meditations, a letter on Witchcraft, and his Wonders of the Invisible World, which was printed both at home and abroad,—in 1693.

I have cited with perhaps tedious detail his account of himself during these years that proved the most critical of his life, because I have not found it much noticed elsewhere, and without it he cannot, I think, be fairly judged. I have told enough, I hope, to enable whoever cares, to pass honest judgment on him. There remain two or three facts, without which our notion of the great tragedy of witchcraft would be incomplete.

Sewall, it will be remembered, was one of the judges who accepted spectral evidence. In the years that followed, he suffered many afflictions. In his diary for January, 1696-7, is this note:—

Copy of the Bill I put up on the Fast day; giving it to Mr. Willard as he pass'd by, and standing up at the reading of it, and bowing when finished; in the Afternoon.

Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family; and being sensible, that as to the Guilt contracted upon the opening of the late Comission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem (to which the order for this Day relates) he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, Desires to take the Blame and shame of it, Asking pardon of men, And especially desiring prayers that God, who has an Unlimited Authority, would pardon that sin and all other his sins; personal and Relative: And according to his infinite Benignity, and Sovereignty, Not Visit the sin of him, or of any other, upon himself or any of his, nor upon the Land: But that He would powerfully defend him against all Temptations to Sin, for the future; and vouchsafe him the efficacious, saving Conduct of his Word and Spirit.

It is said that when Stoughton, the Chief Justice of the Court of Oyer and Terminer, heard what Sewall had done, he declared that he had no such confession to make, having acted according to the best light God had given him.³²

In Cotton Mather's diaries for later years³³ are two entries that belong here. The first was made at this very time, January 15th, 1696-7.

'Being afflicted last Night," it runs, "with Discouraging Thoughts as if unavoidable marks of the Divine Displeasure must overtake my Family, for my not appearing with vigour enough to stop the proceedings of the Judges, when the Inextricable Storm from the Invisible World assaulted the Countrey, I did this morning in prayer with my Family, putt my Family into the merciful Hands of the Lord. And with Tears I Received Assurance of the Lord that marks of His Indignation should not follow my Family, but that having the Righteousness of the Lord Jesus Christ pleading for us, Goodness and Mercy should follow us and Signal Salvation of the Lord."

The other entry comes years later. On the night between the 15th and 16th of April, 1713, he held a vigil: in it he prayed that many books which he had published might do the good in the hope of which he had written them; and finally, in the troubled perplexity of spirit that had been growing during these long years, when his public influence and the public power of the church had been constantly waning, he wrote these words:—

"I also entreated of the Lord, that I might understand the meaning of the Descent from the Invisible World, which nineteen years ago produced in a Sermon from me, a good part of what is now published."

Notes

¹ Cf. page 26.

² Upham, II. 268.

³ Upham, II. 351.

⁴ Ibid., II. 349.

⁵Diary, I. 363.

⁶ It was believed that no witch could repeat the Lord's prayer without error.

⁷ The bewitched: a capital example of spectral evidence.

⁸ Page 213.

⁹Diary, I. 364. Upham, II. 341, seq., shows the charge against Corey to have been groundless. There is no more notable example of the popular infatuation.

¹⁰ Upham, II. 487, seq. Cf. Sibley, III. 11.

¹¹Diary, I. 365. Stoughton, Hathorne, and Sewall were judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer; Stephen Sewall, clerk of the Court, was the man to whom Cotton Mather had written on September 20.

¹² Stoughton.

¹³ Upham, II. 489.

¹⁴ Calef, p. 34.

¹⁵ Harvard Graduates, III. 12-18.

¹⁶ Cf. pages 150, 186.

¹⁷ In possession of the American Antiquarian Society.

¹⁸ In possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

¹⁹Parentator, XXVIII.

²⁰Magnalia, II. App. 16.

²¹ Mather Papers, 392, seq. See page 110.

²² What is more, he acknowledged the book in 1702, when the Magnalia was published.

²³ In possession of the American Antiquarian Society.

²⁴ This passage, and indeed the diaries concerning this matter in general, have been studied and cited by Peabody: Sparks's American Biographies, Vol. VI.

²⁵ "And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him [the beast], whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."

²⁶ "And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire."

²⁷ In possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

²⁸ A most minatory scripture.

²⁹ In possession of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

³⁰ In Calef himself I find nothing to contradict this.

³¹ Born in 1691.

³² Sewall's Diary, I. 446, note.

³³ Both diaries are in possession of the American Antiquarian Society.