SOURCE: "Cotton Mather and His Writings on Witchcraft," in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. 18, 1924, pp. 31-59.

Cotton Mather's entrance into the world's annals of witchcraft, in the character in which some of our historians have portrayed him, did not come about primarily through his two major works on that subject nor through the relative importance of his witchcraft writings as compared with his other works. It came about through that inconsiderable manuscript of his concerning the comparatively insignificant "witchcraft" case of Margaret Rule, and by his contact over it with Robert Calef.

Mather opponents have tuned their fiddles to Calef's key. Many a tune have they fiddled, out of harmony with truth, respecting Cotton Mather and the witch tragedies at Salem in 1692. It therefore may not be amiss to contribute our little aid toward the correction, if that is possible, of two minor strains among those errors.

First, I would invite you to a very brief survey of Mather's works, to effect a comparison of the whole of them with that portion of his writings devoted to the subject of witchcraft. Second, I hope to indicate evidence tending to show that, however the reaction from the witch frenzy first manifested itself, whatever were the immediate causes, the nature and extent of that reaction, which came all too slowly and too timidly—the development of which no one to this day has quite fully delineated—that reaction, did not involve Cotton Mather in any serious loss of public following, or in any serious diminution of his personal prestige. The contrary of this has been many times reiterated, as by W. R. Bliss, Side glimpses from the Colonial meeting house (Boston, 1894), page 199.

Before writing his trifle of a paper on Margaret Rule, Cotton Mather, then thirty years old, had published approximately 38 separate works. After it, and before he ceased his labor at the age of sixty-five, he published at least 399 more. A total of no less than 437 published works are to his credit, exclusive of reprints, prefaces, and unprinted manuscripts. The editors of the Cambridge History of American Literature, by including posthumous works, prefaces, etc., have compiled a list of 475 items. These probably could still be augmented.

Without attempting the difficult task of an exhaustive classification of these at this time, a hasty examination shows that among them are works on the following subjects:

For the popular light reading of the day, funeral sermons take the lead with fifty-one examples. Sixteen works deal with various aspects of New England history. On medicine there are ten, five of which are on small-pox, exclusive of three contributed papers and one circulated MS on that subject. There were ten biographies, five issued singly and five in one work. Of these there were eight reprinted in the Magnalia, which contains over sixty biographies as well as a large number of short memoirs. At least four works were devoted to psalms, hymns, singing. There were two elegies.

On each of the following themes he wrote one, two, or on some subjects three books: pirates, captives, criminals, thieves, impostors, evil customs, murder, drinking, taverns, dancing, cursing, anger, idolatry, hypocrisy, slothfulness, slander, the ark, the tabernacle, sacrifices, adversity, prosperity, fifth of November, new year, winter, summer heat, change, time, heavenly world, terrors of hell, natural science, Sabbath-keeping, antinomianism, arianism, quakerism, rules for right living, civic affairs, society to suppress disorders, commerce and trading, debtor and creditor, fidelity in engagements, masters, servants, parents, children, widows, orphans, youth, catechisms, oaths, calamitous fires, earthquakes, storms, rainbow, aurora borealis. No subject of possible interest in his day escaped his attention.

Books were especially addressed to farmers, soldiers, sailors, fishermen, negroes, Indians.

A great many of these works, though not all, were originally sermons, containing a good mixture of homily and theology. They were printed in small books varying from about twenty-four to one hundred and eight pages each. Some of the sermons were printed by request of some of the auditory. Some of the issues were simply tracts; though others were considerable works of two to three hundred pages, a few of which retain interest and value even to this day. Among such are his Manuductio ad ministerium, directions for a candidate of the ministry, and his Ratio disciplinae, a faithful account of the discipline professed and practised in the churches of New England. His Christian philosopher, a collection of the best discoveries in nature with religious improvements still has its usefulness in the history of science. The works just mentioned, though less known, are probably in some ways superior to the Magnalia, by which Mather's name is still best known in literature.

His works were in great measure the reflection of passing events, and the moods of that public of which Cotton Mather was popular preacher, writer, and idol. The works are not only formidably numerous but the originals are now rare and widely scattered. Some titles exist only in a single copy still remaining, so that their perusal is attended with no little difficulty. Therefore I have not minutely examined the entire contents of all of his works but have judged some of them by photographs of their titlepages only. I do not assume any dogmatic bellicose attitude in regard to my conclusions. The witch trials have already resulted in the fruitless shedding of much ink.

So far, then, I might say I have found that on witchcraft Mather published two complete works only, three chapters or portions of other works, and the text of a letter of advice to the governor. He probably also supervised the compilation and aided in the publication of one other complete work written in his defense. In addition to publishing these, he wrote on this subject five letters and three manuscripts that he did not publish, and the text of an unpublished proclamation. The list is given at the end of this paper, and comprises a total of 16 items on witchcraft as against over 475 on all subjects.

I think it is safe to say that if Cotton Mather had been the active, interested, conscious promoter of the persecutions that some historians seem to have thought and others still think he was, there should have been a much larger deposit from that sort of mental activity seen in his writings than the remains of his work now show.

In the twelve years from 1688 to 1700, during which the subject of witchcraft is commonly supposed to have eaten up Mather's mind almost completely, he wrote on other subjects than witchcraft a total of eighty-eight works.

During the four years from about the autumn of 1693 to that of 1697, in which Robert Calef and his several aids were engaged in distracting Mather with their activities and in concocting their book, More wonders of the invisible world, the harried one published twenty-six works, and did much toward preparing for the press his largest, his bestknown, and still useful work, the Magnalia.

In the five years or a little more immediately preceding this period, occurred those two chief groups of witchcraft cases that Mather recorded in his two books on the subject, and the books themselves were written and printed within this span of years. Yet we may safely assign to this period not less than thirty publications on other subjects; among them the Life of John Eliot, afterward four times reprinted.

Nor should it be forgotten that these five years embraced the greater part of the intercharter period, the revolution, and the two expeditions—one that gained Port Royal and the other that failed against Quebec and caused Sir William Phips, who led them, to seek aid in London.¹ It was a time of nerve-racking anxiety for all public men in the colony; which, in a triple sense, affected Cotton Mather. He was concerned about his father, then in London working for the charter. Upon him also rested added responsibilities and work of the North Church by reason of the father's absence.

That he carried his share, too, of the general public anxiety, and aided to some extent in the Revolution when the people took arms against Andros, is shown by the fact that it was he who wrote the rousing Declaration of the Gentlemen Merchants and Inhabitants of Boston and Country adjacent, which was read on April 18, 1689, from the gallery of the council-chamber to a "vast concourse of people." This Declaration gave voice to the provisional gov ernment, and justified the arrest of Andros and his minions.²

If we can obtain a correct impression of Cotton Mather during the development and passing of the witchcraft craze, busy on his pastoral visits, preaching his sermons in Boston and occasionally in adjacent towns and villages, conducting private meetings, and, in his turn, Thursday lectures, keeping fasts even to the endangering of his health, engaging in omnivorous reading and in the writing of his many books,³ and never once attending any of the witchcraft trials, we cannot but conclude that he gave comparatively little of his mind and time to the subject of witchcraft, and that it interested him far, far less than is usually supposed.

Then later, during the reaction from the witchcraft persecutions, when "Calef and the Brattles…. seized Mather by the throat," as Brooks Adams expressed it, and when Leverett, the Brattles, Coleman, and the young liberals were working against him at Harvard and elsewhere, and the diaries on various accounts were recording those humiliations before the Lord that nearly two centuries later were to be so helpful to the traducers of his good name⁴ how did Mather during those years stand with his public? After the witch trials and during the Margaret Rule affair was "public opinion…. arrayed solidly against him," as James T. Adams⁵ says it was? Let us see.

It has been usual to enlarge gleefully on Mather's quarrel with Governor Dudley, and on the loss by Increase Mather of the presidency of Harvard after the council order of 1701 required the president to live at Cambridge, and on the closing of the door to that office also against Cotton Mather. It has been usual to enlarge on these points, and to fortify them with confessions of disappointment from Mather's diaries and fulminations from his letters, in order to prove Mather's loss of public esteem. It is true that Cotton Mather was denied complete fulfilment of some of his ambitions, spiritual as well as temporal. He strove for that which in the changing times, perhaps even at any time, was unattainable.

In his personal inner life—and that must be noticed in the case of a man of Cotton Mather's type—in his inner life, he sought to realize and to perpetuate that mystical ecstasy which is possible for human beings to know if at all only in brief trances.⁶ The reaction from such efforts, like those of the saints of old, was a sense of sin, of great personal imperfection, which found its expression in utter self-abasement in many an overwrought passage in the diaries⁷—passages that too often have been misread and misused by the enemies of his good name.

In a temporal and outward sense, his success in life was not always and in all places as great as were his hopes—a common-enough human experience that should not have been counted against him as it has been. His disappointment reacted in many a hasty word and in more than one undignified letter that has since told to his disadvantage. He experienced rebuffs, and, in common with the best of men, met an occasional defeat, but that he suffered no great failure, no serious loss of public esteem, I hope to show presently.

Cotton Mather was not a traveled man. He probably never ventured from his native Boston farther, perhaps, than New Haven. His views might pardonably be provincial. His father had stood before kings and had nominated William Phips to be the first royal governor under the new charter. Such a son, who had in addition intimately consulted with God, the King of Kings, might easily make the mistake of offering advice or even reproof to Joseph Dudley, a mere governor of Massachusetts, whose very appointment was in some measure due to Mather's earlier and at that time friendly influence. Especially was Cotton Mather, the born teacher, liable to such error when the inner root and motive of the quarrel with Dudley concerned the government, not of Massachusetts, but of Harvard College.

Cotton Mather had no talents for diplomacy and skilful scheming. In his tilts with the self-seeking, intriguing, worldly wise Dudley he was worsted. But there was perhaps a more subtle force than Dudley working against the Mathers, father and son. It was the implacable Elisha Cooke, protagonist of the lost old charter and foe of the new charter that had been secured by the elder Mather's agency.

Then there were young men among the overseers of Harvard who held views about the Lord's Supper and church administration that were less strict than those taught by the early Fathers and held by the Mathers. The Mathers would prevent the sowing of what they thought was the seed of pernicious doctrine in the young minds at Harvard; but the temper of the times being less strict than at an earlier day, fostered perhaps by the liberal conditions under the new charter, seemed to favor the new ideas enough to give them a trial.

But these changes were fruiting after 1700—over seven years after the events of Salem. The changes were at heart almost wholly political in character. Even the ecclesiastical changes had their political aspects. They had nothing to do with the reaction from the witch frenzy, and they had apparently no great bearing on the personal popularity of either teacher Increase, or pastor Cotton Mather.

This paper concerns Cotton Mather. If Harvard, then, was lost to him, as he himself finally saw, was his public lost to him? Fortunately on this there exists unbiased, trustworthy evidence, that of experts in measuring public esteem, those who convert that esteem into cold unsentimental business. If Mather fell from public favor, the fall would be instantly reflected in loss of demand for his publications. If his public deserted him, his publishers—in spite of financial help on special occasion from father-in-law Phillips or friends like Thomas Bradbury and John Winthrop or his own ample purchases and his solicited subscriptions—if his public deserted him, his publishers must, by inexorable necessity, very speedily follow. To undertake the publication of even one book in those days of limited capital was a matter of consideration for the publisher. If composition by hand was relatively cheaper then than it is today, type, paper, ink, and presswork were expensive. Real money must come in from one book, or be fairly assured, before the next could be undertaken.

No author's works can be sold to, or successfully unloaded, in any period by any ruse, device, or stratagem known to the publishing craft, by title after title during year after year, upon a public that is arrayed solidly against him. A publisher's business thrives solely upon the popularity of his authors.

To judge how busy, impetuous, witty, outwardly cheerful though often inwardly despondent, generous, loquacious, pedantic, egoistic, yet in many ways adaptable and tolerant and withal mystical, Cotton Mather stood in his day with his public it should be necessary only to glance briefly at his published titles.

To afford a rapid survey, the following summary is grouped in five-year periods:

From 1682 to 1686, he published 4 titles
From 1687 to 1691, he published 23 new titles
From 1692 to 1696, he published 26 new titles
From 1697 to 1701, he published 51 new titles
From 1702 to 1706, he published 60 new titles
From 1707 to 1711, he published 46 new titles
From 1712 to 1716, he published 77 new titles
From 1717 to 1721, he published 68 new titles
From 1722 to 1726, he published 66 new titles
In 1727 and 1728, he published 16 new titles

Many of these works, first printed in Boston, were reprinted in London; some of them were reprinted more than once. Ornaments for the daughters of Zion had six editions, as also had his Monitor for communicants. The Family religion excited appeared at least seven or eight times. His Essays to do good, which proved helpful even to the practical-minded Benjamin Franklin, though not reprinted in Mather's lifetime, had eighteen editions, three of them published over a century after the author's death, two editions appearing as late as 1842 (London) and 1845 (Boston).

This unbroken cataract of new publications pouring forth to the last of Mather's days shows no diminution during the reaction from the witchcraft episode, no indications of serious defections of patronage contemporary with the liberal movement centered about Coleman and the Brattles from 1700 onward, no indications of a stampede from the ranks of his readers at any time. Whatever were the political or ecclesiastical developments of his time, whatever enemies he may have had—and who is without these?—we might even say whatever were his views over or connections with the witch persecutions, Cotton Mather, if continued avidity for his writings indicates anything, carried his great personal popularity during the whole of his life. How great that popularity was, may be conjectured from Increase Mather's statement⁸ that ordinarily fifteen hundred persons attended services in their church. If this is not acceptable as a proof of popularity, it could be confirmed in several other ways; perhaps most readily by Mather's Diary,⁹ if we care to accept that authority when quoted in his favor as it has been so often cited against him:

On Monday, September 5, 1698, he journeyed to Salem; on the next day, with a council of five churches, he went to Chebacco (i.e., Ipswich), where, on the day following, the council sat and rendered decision on a case before it. Thursday he "preached the Lecture at Ipswich." On Friday he returned to Salem, where on the following Sunday he preached in both the forenoon and afternoon, with a sense of great success. This in Salem, the center, six years earlier, of those tragedies and terrors by which the town had "lost, in one year, a quarter of its whole population."¹⁰

Upon his return to Boston after his few days' sojourn in Salem and in Ipswich, Mather records the following impression:

Finding that whenever I go abroad, the Curiosity and Vanity of the people discovers itself, in their great Flocking to hear mee; with no little Expectation; it still causes mee aforehand, exceedingly to humble myself before the Lord…. By this Method, I not only am in a comfortable measure kept from the foolish Taste of popular Applause in my own Heart, but also from the humbling Dispensations of Heaven, whereunto the Fondness of the People might otherwise expose mee.

It probably is no exaggeration to say that Cotton Mather as an entertainer was the seventeenth-century New England prototype of the present-day matinée idol. Granted that the compliments he received made him vain, may not a little vanity be allowed him as a professional perquisite?

The favorable view of Cotton Mather's character entertained by the public of his time did not die with him. "A fragrant memory of him remains to this day," said his biographer, Marvin (p. 218), and adds: "Among the many eulogies of Cotton Mather no immortelle cast upon his grave was sweeter or brighter than that of Benjamin Colman."

Even concerning the witchcraft frenzy, there are not wanting in earlier and in recent times studiously and carefully written accounts, having the cogency of truth, that exhibit sympathetic views of Mather's relation to the events of 1692; or in which his responsibility is held to have been of very minor importance. Among such accounts are those of John Fiske, New France and New England; E. B. Andrews, History of the United States, Volume I; D. Neal, History of New-England, chapter xii; W. F. Poole, Salem Witchcraft; W. S. Nevins, Witchcraft in Salem Village; A. P. Marvin, Cotton Mather; and B. Wendell, Cotton Mather. The most recent and perhaps most comprehensive discussion of the relationship of the Mathers, Cotton and Increase, to Salem witchcraft, however, is in K. B. Murdock, Life and Work of Increase Mather, chapter xvii, a doctoral thesis (1923) published by the Harvard University Press.

It will be seen, then, that concerning the historical figure of Cotton Mather there have flowed across two-centuries of his country's literature two utterly divergent streams of criticism; and it is not easy for the average reader, or even the busy writer of history, to decide which contains the water of truth and which the mud of error.

One of Mather's biographers, W. B. O. Peabody (1836), confessed:

It is very difficult to form a satisfactory estimate of a character like Cotton Mather's which abounds in contradictions; to tell the precise amount of blame due to his faults, which were many, and how heavily they should weigh against the credit due his virtues [p.345].

Peabody's quandary indicates how thoroughly the old Puritan's character has been slandered—not always with wilful malice—and how early the aspersion began.

The adverse criticism in literature concerning Cotton Mather goes back through C. W. Upham and Francis Hutchinson, diminishing at each remove toward its source in Robert Calef's More Wonders. Though Calef's conclusions were drawn as much from his theories, which can be seriously questioned, as from his reports of local facts which are his best title to credibility, still his chief criticism concerning the Salem tragedies—throughout his letters and Preface, the only portions ascribable with certainty to his pen—was directed against the underlying doctrines, the "Heathenish notions" and "the Slavery of a corrupt Education" whence he believed the evils had sprung.

He traces these pernicious witchcraft doctrines back to Perkins, Gaul, and Bernard—writing in England since the Reformation. "The Doctrine of the power of Devils, and Witchcraft as it is now, and long has been understood" he finds among the "pernicious weeds" that came into the church from the "Fables of Homer, Virgil, Horace and Ovid &c."¹¹

Calef speaks of "the received Opinions about Witchcraft,"¹² which I take to mean the opinions commonly held by people around him whom he knew and saw and conversed with daily. This would indicate that the people, the public, of Calef's day, held to a very wide extent those opinions that he criticized. Palfrey says:

The people of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, like all other Christian people at that time,—at least, with extremely rare individual exceptions,—believed in the reality of a hideous crime called witchcraft.¹³

Rev. William Bentley, D.D., Harvard, 1777, minister of the Second Church in Salem, 1783-1819, states:

Mr. Noyes…. believed in witchcraft, and so did every other person…. The doctrine of invisible agency, no one was bold enough utterly to deny…. The Salem judges…. were over ruled by the madness which was universal around them.¹⁴

The necessary support of that dreadful tribunal, said Dr. George H. Moore, "had been in the madness of the people, the poisoned breath of the mob."¹⁵ A mob spirit that has left its definite trace in history in the plundering by the multitude of the home of Mr. Philip English after first his wife then he himself had been accused of witchcraft and arrested.¹⁶

C. W. Upham says: "The whole force of popular superstition, all the fanatical propensities of the ignorant and deluded multitude, united with the best feelings of our nature to heighten the fury of the storm."¹⁷

Then, after the storm was over, said Dr. Bentley, "Few dared to blame other men, because few were innocent. They who had been most active, remembered that they had been applauded."¹⁸

Against some features of those generally diffused, popular conceptions of witchcraft of his time, Calef, then, worked out his ideas, embodied them in what he called his "doctrinals,"¹⁹ and with these opposed the "received opinions" of his day. If we read Calef aright, he set himself to pillory the witchcraft beliefs, held generally by the intellectual leaders, the ministers and writers, the magistrates and judges, and the public of his time, that had made possible the blind fury of 1692.

Though heat was generated and personalities involved, as was certain to be in any clash with popular notions, and though Calef said Mather's "Strenuous and Zealous asserting his opinions, has been one cause of the dismal Convulsions,"²⁰ he never regarded Mather as the singly responsible source.

It was during the nineteenth century that the idea gained force for holding Cotton Mather chiefly blamable for the Salem calamity of 1692—an idea that developed currency out of the strong bias of Upham's work as it relates to Cotton Mather, and that found ready reception in that critical, iconoclastic, realistic spirit of the nineteenth century that had very little sympathy with the ideals, very little patience with the faults, of the fervently religious, believing, seventeenth century—which in many ways Cotton Mather typified and represented.

In recapitulation, then, of the foregoing, I would submit for the consideration of any who may think it worth while, that Cotton Mather's works show that he was much less interested in witchcraft than is sometimes supposed, and that the time he is considered to have been giving to the study of that subject he was very strenuously devoting to quite different undertakings. Also I would submit that the statement occasionally repeated by Cotton Mather's opponents, that he was discredited by his public over and following the witch trials, cannot be true when the ever growing volume of his publications indicate an increasing popularity throughout the period of the witch trials, straight through the attacks by Calef and the differences with the liberals and with Dudley, and on down the years of his life.

With the fuller understanding of the underlying causes, character, and nature of the phenomena of witch persecutions in past ages²¹—which persecutions, sad though they were, were but one aspect of that universal woe and travail through which humanity has suffered and labored into partial enlightenment—and with a dispassionate examination of the original sources of the history of the New England outbreak, the present writer believes that those charges made against Cotton Mather concerning the originating and the promoting of the lamentable proceedings at Salem in 1692 will ultimately fall away. Then Mather will bear, in the work not only of some but of all future reputable writers of Massachusetts history, no more than his just small fractional share of indirect responsibility with the men of his time for the shortcomings of his community under the darkness of the age in which they lived.

Notes

¹ Palfrey, IV, 49-59.

² Neal, History of New England, pp. 430-42; Palfrey, III, 579.

³ See Diary, I, 147, and B. Wendell, Cotton Mather, pp. 79-87.

⁴ E.g., W. R. Bliss, Side Glimpses, pp. 199-203, and Upham, Salem Witchcraft, II, 503-5.

⁵Founding of New England, p. 455.

⁶Diary, I, 5-11, 187, 192-93, 254-55, 477-79; C. A. Bennett, Philosophical Study of Mysticism, pp. 10, 47, 48, etc.; B. Wendell, op. cit., p. 304.

⁷Diary, I, 479.

⁸ Letter to Stoughton (December 16, 1698), in Sewall, Diary, I, 493.

⁹ I, 272-73.

¹⁰ Bentley, Description of Salem, p. 234, in M.H.S. Coll., Vol. VI.

¹¹ Preface.

¹² Pp. 64, 83. Italics mine.

¹³Op. cit., IV, 96.

¹⁴ "Description and History of Salem," Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, VI, 266.

¹⁵Final Notes on Witchcraft in Massachusetts (New York, 1885), p. 81.

¹⁶ Bentley, Description of Salem, p. 270.

¹⁷Salem Witchcraft, II, 370-71.

¹⁸Op. cit., p. 271.

¹⁹More Wonders (1700), pp. 17, 18, 34, 42.

²⁰Ibid., p. 33.

²¹ Professor George L. Kittredge has pointed the way to that understanding in his "Notes on Witchcraft," Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., XVIII (N.S., 1907), especially in his summary in twenty-one brief theses of his conclusions (pp. 210-12). Professor George L. Burr made reply to this in his paper in Amer. Antiq. Soc. Proc., Vol. XXI (N.S.). In connection with Professor Burr's paper should be read an earlier one by him, "The Literature of Witchcraft," Papers of the Amer. Hist. Assoc., Vol. IV. See also Preface, introductions, and notes to his Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, New York, 1914. On the whole question, of course, see W. E. H. Lecky, Rationalism, chapter on "Magic and Witchcraft."

A new view of the question of witchcraft is set forth by Margaret Alice Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, Oxford, 1921. See also Ian Ferguson, The Philosophy of Witchcraft, New York, 1925.

Mather's account of Margaret Rule is discussed in "The Surreptitious Printing of one of Cotton Mather's Manuscripts," by Thomas J. Holmes, Bibliographical Essays, A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (1924), pp. 149-60.