USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Andover > Andover: symbol of New England; the evolution of a town > Part 9
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others who, although reprieved in September, still persisted in their confessions.
At this point the new royal governor, Sir William Phips, after a short period of natural bewilderment, investigated each case personally and signed reprieves for all the condemned prison- ers. Later at the April session of the court in Boston, the entire group were cleared, and in May, 1693, Phips issued a proclama- tion of general pardon. The comment of the fanatical Judge Stoughton was brief and positive: "We were in a way to have cleared the land of witches .... Who is it that obstructs the course of justice I know not. The Lord be merciful to the country."
Others, however, were ashamed of their part in the persecu- tions and became both remorseful and repentant. Largely through the efforts of the Reverend Samuel Willard, of Boston's Old South Church, January 15, 1697, was set apart as a day of fasting in Massachusetts; and Judge Samuel Sewall, standing be- fore his own congregation, acknowledged with penitence his share of responsibility for the wrong which had been done. The jurors who had condemned so many witches prepared a state- ment admitting that not being "capable to understand nor able to withstand the mysterious delusion of the power of darkness and prince of the air," they feared that they had been instru- mental with others, "though ignorantly and unwillingly," in shedding innocent blood. Honestly, if belatedly, they expressed to the survivors their "deep sense of sorrow" and begged for- giveness for their sins of omission and commission.
The Reverend John Hale, of Beverly, who had been a witness against Bridget Bishop, was troubled in his mind, especially after his own wife had been accused of witchcraft and he could see in his family the direct results of false testimony. In 1698 he published a volume entitled A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, in which he retracted his "errors" and furnished an intimate narrative of some of the incidents with which he was familiar. Hale was brought to his senses by several considera-
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tions, one of which he summarized as follows, "It cannot be imag- ined that in a place of so much knowledge so many in so small a compass of land should so abominably leap into the Devils lap at once." Even Cotton Mather confided to his Diary his regret for not appearing "with vigor to stop the proceedings of the judges when the inexplicable storm from the Invisible World assaulted the country."
The dead could not be restored to life, and nothing could com- pensate for the suffering which had been caused. What restitu- tion could be made to Giles Cory, who, on September 19, 1692, had been pressed to death in an open field beside the Salem jail by heavy rocks piled on his chest. He did not break even under this ordeal and, according to tradition, merely gasped as he died, "More weight!" Some persons of influence, like John Alden, of Boston, and Andover's Dudley Bradstreet, recovered from the shock to their families and lived out their lives in peace. But those who were poor or unprotected paid a heavy penalty for ignorance and weakness.
A few of the surviving "witches" from Andover and Topsfield complained in 1702 to the General Court that their names had been "exposed to infamy and reproach"; and their appeal for removal of the attainder was supported by strong representations from twelve ministers of Essex County. But legislators, still un- sure of their ground, took no action. In 1709, however, the pros- perous Philip English, who had fled for safety to New York, brought pressure to bear on the General Court, asking not only for the restoration of the good names of himself and his fellow sufferers but also for the reimbursement of their financial losses. Political expediency rather than the prick of conscience drove the legislature in 1711 to appropriate a small sum and distribute it among the surviving victims. A year before that the court had reversed the attainder of all those for whom petition was made.
The Reverend Mr. Parris, in whose house the delusion had first broken out and who had fostered it by his foolish conduct, had inevitably made enemies. He attempted to placate them by
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humbling himself before his congregation and offering his sym- pathy to those who had suffered through "the clouds of human weakness and Satan's wiles and sophistry." Eventually, however, he was forced to resign; and many citizens of Salem Village breathed more easily when he and his family had departed.
The precocious Ann Putnam, whose irrational behavior had brought so much misery to Andover people, appeared in August, 1706, when she was still only twenty-seven years old, in the little church at Salem Village, to repent publicly of her transgressions and ask to be admitted as a communicant. Full of contrition, she stood up and confessed, "It was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time. ... I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill will." She was officially forgiven and taken into the fold. Her health, however, was broken by the frenzy of which she had been the center. It is understandable why she never mar- ried, for young men must have shunned a woman with such a neurotic history. She died in Salem Village in 1716 and was the last to be buried in the old Putnam tomb in the Thomas Putnam burying ground.
What became of the other Salem Village wenches? In the re- versal of attainder in 1711 several of them were alleged to have "discovered themselves to be persons of profligate and vicious conversation," but no names were mentioned. "Betty" Parris, one of the youngest and least responsible, left the community with her father, probably taking with her Abigail Williams, her cousin. We have no information about Mary Walcott or Eliza- beth Booth or Martha Sprague, each of whom was an important actor in the dementia; and three domestic servants, Mary War- ren, Mercy Lewis, and Sarah Churchill, who often cooperated, have vanished into permanent obscurity. Out of the careers of these dim figures Thomas Hardy could have constructed a tragic novel stranger than fiction. I doubt whether any research, no matter how intensive, will enable us to follow them through the years.
In 1692, Thomas Carrier, husband of Martha Carrier, was
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sixty-six years old. His wife was condemned as the Queen of the Witches and hanged; his sons were cast into jail and suffered greatly; his daughter was induced to testify against her mother. But he survived all this misery, moved late in life to Colchester, Connecticut, and there died in 1735, at the mature age of one hundred and nine. It was reported by Abiel Abbot that Car- rier's head was not bald nor his hair gray, and that a few days before he died he walked six miles. Indeed on the morning of his death he was visiting with his neighbors!
The agitation in Andover started with great suddenness and spread with incredible rapidity. Few citizens had time to think or pause. What with the unceasing gossip, the confusion of the various arrests and trials, and the atmosphere of suspicion and fear, the community was tremendously stirred. The Reverend Mr. Dane, if he had known his Macbeth, could have quoted the lines,
Can such thing be And overcome us like a summer's cloud Without our special wonder?
When it was all over, and the casualties in sick and troubled and dead had been counted, how inexplicably crazy the whole delusion must have seemed! The town long since recovered from that wild hysteria, and it now seems incredible that our ancestors could have been so gullible and cruel. Fortunately we can be proud of Martha Carrier, who went to the gallows without a sign of weakness, and the Reverend Mr. Dane, who resisted the pressures around him and finally brought his parishioners back to sanity. These are Andoverians who deserve commemoration.
From time to time in recent years descendants of the victims of the witchcraft mania have sought some formal repudiation of the "shocking proceedings" under which their ancestors were condemned and hanged. Finally, on August 28, 1957, the Mas- sachusetts General Court, urged on by historians and editorial writers, passed a resolution declaring that Ann Pudeator, of
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Salem Town, and others, "may have been illegally tried, con- victed and executed" and that consequently no disgrace at- tached to them or their relatives. No recompense could have been made, or was expected; but the petitioners had at least the satisfaction of knowing that any implied stigma was now, two hundred and sixty-five years later, officially removed. It was probably the only available means of alleviating family distress; and while it could not help the innocent victims, it did put the Commonwealth on record.
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CHAPTER IX
The Church and the Community
E VEN in his semiretired position, the Reverend Mr. Dane was in a strategic position in the community. Massachusetts was essentially a theocracy, in which God's representatives, the clergy, were recognized and responsible leaders. A passing trav- eler asked the Reverend Samuel Phillips, of Andover's South Parish, "Are you, sir, the parson who serves here?" Back came the ready and far from humorous reply, "I am, sir, the parson who rules here!" Although chosen and paid by the citizens, the minister assumed as if by right the function of censor morum, never hesitating to reprove his parishioners for minor delin- quencies as well as for more serious offenses. Usually he was treated with deference, as one entitled to it by right and cour- tesy. When he entered the meeting house at the head of a stately family procession, the occupants of the pews rose and stood until he had taken his seat behind the pulpit. Naturally some person- alities were less impressive than others, and now and then an unpopular clergyman was dismissed in democratic fashion by a dissatisfied congregation. But a preacher of tact and judgment often remained throughout a long lifetime in a single parish.
Each separate Puritan community, as it acquired self-govern- ment, erected a meeting house which, before the town hall or the school was constructed, provided a place where gatherings could be held. This was also the center for much of the social life, affording an opportunity for men and women to get together for discussion and gossip at least once a week. There too in the early days reproofs and even punishments were meted out to of- fenders. For many years the church brought the various elements
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in the township together, the more so because under a law of 1635 no dwelling house could be built more than half a mile from the church. The time came, of course, when this edict was disregarded in Andover.
With the first settlers all work stopped at three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, and the remainder of the day was spent in preparation for the Sabbath, as Sunday was usually called. On Saturday evening the pious citizens devoted themselves to read- ing Holy Writ and to family prayers. In the Stevens and Osgood and Frye homes the scene must have been much like that de- scribed in Burns's The Cotter's Saturday Night:
The chearfu' supper done, wi' serious face, They, round the ingle, form a circle wide; The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace, The big ha-Bible, ance his father's pride. His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare; Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
He wales a portion with judicious care, And "Let us worship God!" he says, with solemn air.
On the Sabbath morning after breakfast the Bible was read until church time, and many children learned their "A.B.C.'s" through this process. Nothing resembling frivolity was tolerat- ed, and even travel, except that involved in going to and from church, was forbidden. Services, including sermons of an hour or more in length, were held in both morning and afternoon. Those who rode in from the outlying sections hitched their horses to the posts and spent all day at the church, eating a cold luncheon at noon. Women and children rode usually on pillions attached to the saddles. The journey which George Abbot and Nicholas Holt had to take each week from their farms in the south end was long and far from comfortable, even when car- riages were available. The men and women sat on separate sides of the meeting house, and when danger from the Indians threat-
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ened, the men brought their muskets and sat armed through the service. The building was poorly heated and badly ventilated, and the seats were hard, but what did that matter? It was the House of God!
The church was the institution organized and supported by the respectable elements in the Colony. Outside its pale were the antisocial, the disorderly, the indolent, and, of course, the criminal individuals and classes. In operation, it was sometimes narrow and bigoted, but with all its faults it served fairly well as an instrument of law and worship. It helped to educate the citi- zens, set authoritative standards for the weak and vacillating, and symbolized the highest idealism. It is easy, in focusing atten- tion on its shortcomings, to ignore its contribution to community unity and happiness.
The Reverend John Woodbridge, who was ordained as min- ister of Andover in 1645, was obviously one of the two central figures among the pioneer settlers, the other being Simon Brad- street. Why Woodbridge left Andover so soon after his arrival is unexplained; but we know that in 1647 he returned to Eng- land, where by a remarkable coincidence he became pastor at Andover, Hants, from 1648 to 1650, thus being an early link be- tween the Old World and the New. He then moved to Barford St. Martin, Wiltshire, where he remained until 1662, when, fol- lowing the accession of Charles II to the throne, he was ejected from his parish. Voyaging once more to America, Woodbridge settled in Newbury, where he had before been a resident, and once again became a helper to his aging uncle, Isaac Parker, the town minister. The two were the victims of factional strife, and in 1670 Woodbridge, apparently without too much regret, was dismissed from the ministry.
Undiscouraged and versatile, Woodbridge turned to bank- ing, wrote the first colonial treatise on banking and currency, and in 1683 was elected an assistant. He died on March 17, 1695, leaving eleven children and a considerable property. The Dic- tionary of American Biography states that his contemporaries "gen-
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erally revered him as an honorable and judicious magistrate, a great scholar, and a pattern of goodness." His brother, Benjamin Woodbridge, the first graduate of Harvard College, also secured house-lot rights in Andover, but apparently asigned them short- ly to Thomas Chandler and remained himself in residence in the township only a short period.
Under the direction of the Reverend John Woodbridge, the Andover proprietors erected a temporary meeting house, prob- ably on land now included in the burying ground at North An- dover. Miss Kate H. Stevens thought that it must have stood "where there is a slight hollow near the earliest graves." This was a makeshift structure, quickly outgrown, and the town fa- thers shortly appointed a committee to sell at their discretion "certain parcels of land" to an amount not exceeding one hun- dred pounds to pay for a new church. This was located across from the burying ground, on Academy Road, where the triangle plot now is. Miss Bailey discovered a few items showing that it had upper and lower galleries, like so many churches of that period in New England, and that the pulpit was cushioned, but we have no definite information regarding its size or architec- tural design. For many years it continued to be called the "new meeting house," and it was large enough to meet the needs of an increasing population.
The earliest contemporary reference to this meeting house, dated February 3, 1661, records that at a town meeting every freeholder who had helped to pay the charges of buying the plantation and building the minister's house, the mill, and the meeting house was to be given an acre and a half of "low and swamp land" for every "acre houselot" which he had previously been allotted. Thus the proprietors cheerfully declared them- selves an extra dividend in land.
John Woodbridge's ministry at Andover was so brief that he had little opportunity of displaying his admirable qualities. Not until 1648 did his successor, the Reverend Francis Dane, take over the parish. He has already been mentioned in connec-
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tion with the witchcraft delusion, but his career was so impor- tant to the town that it deserves further attention. In 1648, Mr. Dane was thirty-two years old, but we know nothing of his pre- vious life except that he was the son of John Dane, a pioneer in Ipswich and Roxbury, and was recorded in 1641 as one of the early settlers of Ipswich. He was named by Cotton Mather as one of the younger clergymen who completed their education in the Colony before Harvard conferred degrees. Not one of his ser- mons has survived the destructive action of time, and no trace of his grave exists today. But he was minister of Andover for almost half a century and had a potent influence in the town.
Mr. Dane's character appears in whatever he wrote and did. In his notebook he outlined his theological creed, one sentence of which reads as follows:
I believe yt ye Catholic or universall church consists of all those throughout the world that doe profess ye trew Religion, together with their children, and in ye Kingdom of ye Lord Jesus, and ye house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possi- bility of obtaining Salvation.
This broad-minded statement justifies the conclusion that Dane, although conventionally orthodox, was free from the bigotry which corroded the thought of some of his clerical con- temporaries. He had a tolerance and kindness of spirit which endeared him to most of his parishioners. Simon Bradstreet was a vehement hater of Quakers and was described as "a man hard- ened in blood and a cruel persecutor." On the other hand, a mysterious Andoverian named William Young suddenly ap- pears out of obscurity to say that he wished those hanged who were responsible for whipping dissenters. With this unknown Dane probably sympathized more than he did with the more ferocious Bradstreet, for he had a sincere Christian faith.
Mr. Dane's first spouse, Elizabeth Ingalls, died in 1676, after more than thirty years of married life, during which she bore him two sons and four daughters. He seems to have set out al-
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most at once in quest of another mate and even scribbled down in crude rhymed pentameters some of his requirements:
I sometimes heere and sometimes there have sought To see if I the thing could bring about
That might best suite mee in my pilgrimage
And match to one who's sober, chaste, and sage, That's loving, meeke, no tatler, not unruly,
That loveth goodness & yt hath a mind
To conjugal subjection inclined;
In such a blessing may I have a share For other things I need not much a whit to care.
After some months as a widower, Mr. Dane found his paragon in Mary Thomas, whom he married in 1677, when he was sixty- one. She died in 1689. A year later, when he was seventy-four, Dane married Hannah Abbot, widow of George Abbot, one of the first residents of the south end. She was then sixty-three. The elderly minister obviously did not intend to remain alone in his declining years.
Mr. Dane's small salary was paid one half in wheat and one half in corn, at the prevailing prices. His congregation were ap- parently satisfied with him until he reached the age of sixty-five, when a group of them felt that he was growing infirm and need- ed a younger colleague. Accordingly they invited Mr. Thomas Barnard, of Hadley, a graduate of Harvard in the class of 1679, to come as Mr. Dane's assistant, promising to "pay for his diet so long as he shall remain a single man among us." At the same time, wishing to be relieved of paying their regular pastor his "wonted maintenance," they used as an argument the fact that he was in comfortable financial circumstances and could pre- sumably get along without a salary. The pattern of thought has been a not uncommon one in New England history.
Mr. Dane, with his own views on the subject, objected to this penurious policy, and the controversy warmed up. Finally the town appealed to the General Court, the final arbiter in such
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disputes, which on October 12, 1681, passed the following vote:
In answer to the peticon of the church & towne of Andiver, this Court judgeth it meete to order, that Daniel Dennison, Nathaniel Saltonstall, & Samuel Appleton, Esq., with the reverend elders of the churches of Ipswich, Haverhill, Rowley, & Newbery, be a comittee from the Court to meet at Andiver, at the time appointed by Major Dennison, & give notice both to the Reverend Mr. Dane & the church & towne at Andiver, on a full hearing, to advise them as the case may require for a peacable settlement of the matters in contro- versy, & make report to this Court at the next opportunity.
At a meeting on November 15, 1681, with all the parties pres- ent, including Mr. Dane, the legislative committee were im- pressed with the latter's long and useful pastorate and refused to let him be mistreated. They advised the congregation to pay him at least 30 pounds a year, and even more "if his neces- sity should require a further supply." They urged Mr. Dane, on his part, "to improve his utmost diligence to carry on the public worship of God" and to "carry it to his people with that tender love and respect (forgetting all former disgusts) as becomes a minister of the gospel." Even from the meager extant entries on the subject it can be detected that some dissension existed in the parish and that the aging clergyman had his critics. It was finally voted to pay young Mr. Barnard 50 pounds, one quarter of it in money, together with the use of the parsonage and his fire- wood, so long as Mr. Dane should carry on a part of the work. Whenever Mr. Dane should be unable to meet his responsibili- ties, Mr. Barnard was to receive 80 pounds annually. Mr. Dane confounded his opponents and was still senior minister of the parish at the time of his death in 1697, at the age of eighty-one.
Mr. Barnard, who had come to Andover as a bachelor, was married in 1686 to Mrs. Elizabeth Price, and after her death ten years later, to Mrs. Abigail Bull. After the death of his second wife, he married in 1704 Mrs. Lydia Goffer. He himself died suddenly in 1718, after having been for thirty-seven years associ-
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ated with the North Parish Church. The congregation by that date had become accustomed to long pastorates and much- married parsons.
From various sources we learn something of the mores of the Puritans as revealed in the relationship of the minister to his parishioners. In 1679, the selectmen, in a strait-laced mood, or- dered that no persons entertain others in their houses after nine o'clock in the evening "without warrantable business," and fur- thermore that no young persons be abroad on Saturday or Sun- day nights except for an emergency. A year later, Mr. Dane, Mr. Dudley Bradstreet, and the senior George Abbot, among the leading citizens of the town, were appointed a committee to "seat the meeting house"-a very delicate operation indeed, for the most desirable pews were allotted to those of the highest social standing; and this was a matter on which even the most godly Puritans were sensitive. It was declared, furthermore, that if any person, male or female, should sit in any other place than that assigned by the committee, the offender should be fined 20 pence, "to be forthwith gathered by the constable for the said committee."
One member of the community was selected to beat the drum as the signal for the opening of church services and also for end- ing the daily labor in the fields. Later a bell was procured for the church and used for all such purposes. Young George Abbot was, in 1675, being paid 30 shillings a year for "sweeping the meet- ing house and ringing the bell." In 1679, he was instructed to ring the bell every night as a curfew signal, and also to give notice like a town crier of the day of the month-an important function in a period when calendars were less widely distributed than they are today. In 1690, the "Widdowe Rebekah Johnson" succeeded to the position, with the duties of cleaning the meeting house and ringing the bell.
The supervision of the congregation was entrusted to tything- men, who checked the behavior of those present and also took note of absentees and reported the cause of their absence to the
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