USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > Salem > Sketches about Salem people > Part 15
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were versed in the folklore and mysteries of the benighted regions from which they had come.
The children, who were all girls, ranged in age from nine to twenty years. Among those who later acquired special notoriety were Ann Putnam, aged twelve, the daughter of Sergeant Thomas Putnam and a mother of unstable mentality, and Mercy Lewis, a servant in the Putnam family. In all, there were some ten of them, and these are known as the "afflicted children." It may be mentioned that there were also some married women who acted with the children, among whom was Mrs. Put- nam,2 the mother of Ann.
Under the instruction of the Indians, as I have said, they learned about trances, incantations and the like and being interested they were quick to learn what they were taught. It should be borne in mind in connection with this that for some fifty years witchcraft had been a prob- lem with the colonists and it may be readily supposed that the matter was widely discussed and the popular mind much influenced by such discussions and by sermons as well. With this before them, it is very easy to understand how the children might come to absorb a great deal of knowledge concerning the practice of the black art and that with their youth and ignorance their conceptions would be much more distorted than were those of their elders. Thus there was an excellent preparation for the neurotic disturbance which the children were to exhibit later. They began to be moved by "strange caprices," that is to say, all sorts of strange antics, spasms, fits, roll- ing of the eyes, uttering incoherent sounds, and when these were seen by the older people there was great ex- citement and much concern. The news spread and the people of the village and the surrounding towns came to see them and to witness their strange behavior. The local physician, Dr. Griggs, whose niece, by the way, was one of the girls afflicted, was called in, and inasmuch as the
2 Mrs. Putnam was about thirty years of age. For six months she had been constantly absorbed in what was then, as now, regarded as spiritualism. Her house had been the scene of a perpetual series of wonders, supposed to be disclosures and manifestations of a supernatural character .- Upham.
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doctors of the time were in profound ignorance of matters pertaining to the mind and were also believers in witch- craft, he pronounced them bewitched./ Mr. Parris called a meeting of clergymen from the neighboring parishes for the purpose of investigation and for prayer, and when they saw the strange actions of the girls they agreed with the diagnosis of Dr. Griggs.
At some time in the affair it is stated that Tituba claimed to know how to discover witches and with the assistance of her husband, John Indian, she made a cake out of meal mixed with the urine of the girls for that pur- pose. Now, as we saw in the Witch Hammer that the devil could act only through witches, the girls were beset by the ministers and some of the prominent people to tell who had bewitched them. They named Sarah Good, a melancholy, distracted person; Sarah Osburn, a bed-rid- den old woman; and the Indian Tituba. On March 7, all three were sent to the jail at Boston. Sarah Good was later tried and convicted, and was among those hanged on July 19. Sarah Osburn died in the Boston jail. Tituba was never tried; it is stated that after lying thirteen months in jail she was sold to pay her prison fees.
The frenzy increased and accusations spread and in the trials which followed the children occupied a position of unusual distinction. They were repeatedly called upon to fix guilt upon the accused and were the chief witnesses in nearly all the trials. The evidence consisted of fits, convulsive seizures, claims of personal injury, bites and blows, in fact the whole category of hysterical manifesta- tions ; this was accepted as conclusive evidence and to the judges of that time could be accounted for by witchcraft alone. There is a similarity in all the trials in that the accused was not allowed to defend himself, the evidence varied little, the outbursts of the children constituting proof of guilt. Many of the accused confessed themselves witches for the reason "that so many people were positive the devil had appeared in their shapes they could not doubt it was true." Persons they did not suspect of falsi- fying intentionally testified under oath that such things had been done and they themselves could not doubt it.
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The safest way, they knew, was to confess. Others, no doubt, did not believe the testimony against them but acknowledged themselves to be witches because those who confessed were discharged and those who did not were eventually convicted and executed.
On June 10, Bridget Bishop, the first one to be exe- cuted, was hanged; on July 19, five others ; on August 19, five more and on September 22, eight. On September 19, Giles Corey was pressed to death for refusing to plead, a barbarous usage of the English law which was never again followed in the colonies. In all, twenty were put to death, while two, Sarah Osburn and Ann Foster, died in prison. After these convictions the court adjourned. The regular court held a session the following January and found about fifty indictments for witchcraft and twenty-one per- sons were tried. Three were convicted and sentenced to be hanged. They were never executed. Four were tried in Charlestown, one in Boston and five in Ipswich in May, but there were no more convictions. Finally, in May the governor issued a proclamation releasing all per- sons held on this charge-about 150 in number.
Only one case occurred thereafter in Massachusetts. This was in 1693. Cotton Mather says, "It was upon the Lord's Day, the 19th of Sept. in 1693, that Margaret Rule, after some hours of previous disturbance in the pub- lic assembly, fell into odd fits which caused her friends to carry her home where her fits grew in a few hours into a figure that satisfied the spectators of their being preter- natural." He says further that the young woman was as- saulted by eight cruel spectres. The afflictions lasted six weeks. At last the spectres flew out of the room and she, returning to herself, gave thanks to God for her deliver- ance. Calef says that in answer to a question, one of Margaret's friends said, "She does not eat at all, but drinks rum." Fowler says, "She had a bad case of de- lirium tremens."
Prosecution for witchcraft in the older countries con- tinued after they had been abandoned here; though it soon began to be difficult everywhere to procure the con- viction of a person accused of witchcraft. In 1720 an
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attempt was made to renew the Salem excitement in Lit- tleton, Massachusetts, but it failed.
There are some items concerning the trials which may be of interest :
An extraordinary case was that of Dorcas Good, the daughter of Sarah, who was between four and five years of age. She was called upon to testify against her mother and stated that her mother had three birds, of which one was black and one yellow and these birds hurt the children and afflicted persons. She was accused of being a witch herself and Ann Putnam, Mary Walcott and Mercy Lewis charged her with biting, pinching and almost choking them. The first two exhibited the customary symptoms in the presence of the witch. The marks of her teeth and the pins which they said she used in pricking them were found on their bodies. This was accompanied by shriek- ing on the part of the girls. The evidence was considered overwhelming and she was sent to join her mother in jail. The mother was kept in chains and it may be the child was as well.
The case of Nehemiah Abbott is of interest as being, so far as is known, the only person who was released after refusing to confess. He was arrested on April 21 and ex- amined on the following day. At first the accusing girls said he had afflicted them and fell into fits. Others iden- tified him as one who had appeared to them. He was asked to confess and refused. Suddenly, Mercy Lewis said, "He is not the man." Other accusers wavered. The case broke down completely and he was released.
Parris, in his account, says that when Abbott was "brought in again, by reason of much people, and many in the windows, so that the accusers could not have a clear view of him, he was ordered to be abroad and the accusers to go forth to him and view him in the light, which they did in the presence of the magistrates and many others, discoursed quietly with him, one and all acquitting him, but said, 'He was like the man but he had not the wen they saw in his apparition.' "
The only instance there is of relenting on the part of any of the afflicted children is contained in this deposition
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of Sarah Ingersoll, aged about thirty years: "Seeing Sarah Churchill after her examination, she came to me crying and wringing her hands, seemingly to be much troubled in spirit. . I asked her what she ailed. She an- swered, she had undone herself. I asked her in what. She said, in belying herself and others in saying she had set her hand to the Devil's Book, whereas she said, she never did. I told her I believed she had set her hand to the book. She answered crying, and said, 'No, no, no, I never did.' I asked her then what made her say she did. She answered because they threatened her, and told her they would put her into the dungeon, and put her along with Mr. Burroughs ; and thus several times she followed me up and down, telling me that she had undone herself, in belying herself and others. I asked her why she did not deny she wrote it. She told me, because she had stood out so long in it, that now she durst not. She said also that, if she told Mr. Noyes but once she had set her hand to the book he would believe her ; but if she told the truth, and said she had not set her hand to the book a hundred times, he would not believe her."
Winfield S. Nevins in his "Witchcraft in Salem Vil- lage" says: "The writer knows of a case in a Salem school within recent years, where a girl of eight or ten years would throw herself full length on the floor, and roll and writhe and pretend to be in the greatest agony. The teach- er eventually discovered the imposture, but the girl con- tinued the performances, to the amazement and con- sternation of other schoolgirls. When told by the teacher to get up, she would do so promptly, and go out to play."
"The reader who begins a tour of witchcraft books with 'The Witch Cult in Western Europe,' by M. A. Murray, is fortified against an error to which many modern read- ers are prone. Because the phenomena of bewitchment are handily explicable by modern psychiatry, it is often hastily assumed that the whole thing was only wholesale hallucination and hysterics. Now, that men and women, young and old, were ever really witches one may be per- mitted to doubt, but many men and women certainly thought they were; that witches ever did any damage with
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waxen images and incantations one may cheerfully deny, but one must admit that many of them tried to. That they flew through the air to Sabbats we need not credit, but they were going to them on Long Island as late as the forties, when the father of a friend of mine was taken by his nurse to peep through the cracks of a deserted barn and watch a circle of elderly ladies dancing widdershins around the 'head devil,' a masked man in a woman's pet- ticoat, playing the fiddle-to the end of his days the boy could whistle that tune. The dance concluded, they with- drew decorously enough to Connecticut, no doubt to New Haven, for there was a coven nearby-or was it Hart- ford ? I cannot admit the statement of one of his fam- ily's servants that they crossed the sound by changing a bone into a boat, though his account of his finding the bone buried in the sand ready for a return trip is quite precise. There certainly was a well-defined ritual of witch- craft, an extraordinary and fascinating survival; the cere- monies of the Sabbat, of the Beltane, are ancient, how- ever dishonorable. They are, according to Prof. Murray, debased forms of the prehistoric earth worship that took to earth when Christianity invaded and conquered Europe. Their fertility rites, come down from a day before agri- culture, are celebrated at the turns of the pastoral year."3
The same reviewer says that the statistics of Nicholas Rémy, the witch judge of Lorraine, based his book on 900 cases executed in 15 years; the total number executed in Germany in the 17th century is estimated at 100,000; France somewhat less, though Henry of Navarre had a heavy hand at it; there were 30,000 victims in Great Brit- ain, Scotland being especially given to it.
THE MEDICAL SIDE.
For the medical side of witchcraft, the following is an extract from an article by E. W. Taylor, A.M., M.D., James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology, Har- vard Medical School, on "Some Medical Aspects of Witchcraft" :
To us the matter presents itself essentially as a medical 3 From a recent book review in "The Reader's Guide," the Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. 15, 1928.
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or a medico-social problem of the utmost complexity, in- volving for its proper comprehension a study of the back- ground upon which witchcraft itself rests, its relations, broadly considered, to the development of scientific thought and to the growth of philosophic and religious ideals. The special dramatic outburst which, through a series of apparently fortuitous circumstances, developed at Salem, serves as an example merely of what, under different conditions, has occurred in every part of the world, and will continue to occur, modified only by what we call the progress of civilization and of liberal thought. To us the scenes at Salem in 1692, especially the mental condition of the "afflicted children," bear the stamps of "group hysteria," in which suggestion, self-protection, a feeling of domination, in an atmosphere of profound belief in the actuality of witchcraft, played a dominant role. The spirit of mischief and maliciousness was certainly subordinate. The elements entering into the composition of so complex a neurosis under conditions so extraordinary are naturally elusive and quite beyond the scope of this paper to discuss except in barest outline. The evidence, even somewhat superficially presented, suffices at least to advance our knowledge to a point from which a new at- tack may be made on the more fundamental problem, and this must evidently be the task of the future. It is some- what surprising that commentators and historical writers should have so definitely avoided a frank discussion of the obvious medical problems involved, in view especially of the minute analysis of the actual events. Certain allu- sions are made to hypnotism, to mental disorder of uncer- tain character, to hysteria in the popular sense, and to various hallucinatory conditions,4 but on the whole, those
4 See Wendell, B., Were the Salem Witches Guileless? (Hist. Collections Essex Institute, XXIX, 1892.) An ingenious attempt, colored by personal feeling, to place some of the blame on the witches themselves, on the ground that they had given them- selves up to what Wendell regards as the pernicious practice of trance-mediumship. The article is further interesting as showing the lay prejudice existing thirty years ago against hypnotism and all that it was supposed to entail. The possi- bility of the baleful use of hypnotic methods by certain of the executed witches leads him to make the astonishing query "Whether some of the witches may not, after all, in spite of
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who have been interested in the history and literature of witchcraft have not, with equal zeal, analysed the impor- tant medical bearings of the subject. Kittredge finds such discussion out of his province as indicated by his state- ment: "As to occult or supernormal powers and practices, we may leave their discussion to the psychologists." And yet just here lies one of the most important questions to be faced and solved if possible. Thanks to men like Char- cot, Janet, Freud and Prince, a body of exact knowledge has been accumulated, and has been available for many years, which should throw much light into the dark places of the witchcraft problem. We are, therefore, altogether justified in assuming that the descriptions given of the performances of those bewitched, of the sights seen and the sounds heard and the damage done, will find explanation on the basis of demonstrated laws of mental life, discount- ing always the perverted imaginations of the chief actors in the play. The appearances of imps and familiars so often described were doubtless actual animals or persons, transformed at times into satanic forms to satisfy the fear or fancy of the observer, an entirely analogous experience to the effect of fear under ordinary conditions, but natu- rally exaggerated through the emotional abnormality of the time. The children, ignorant, suggestible, important in their own eyes as they were in others, no doubt often fearful lest their disclosures should lead to their own un- doing, provided a perfectly normal soil for what appeared to be abnormal reactions. Their acts were purposive in the highest degree and yet involuntarily and often uncon- sciously performed, call it a splitting of consciousness, or the weakness and falseness of the evidence that hanged them, have deserved their hanging." This, so far as I am aware, is the only modern attempt to place the blame on the victims themselves, a reversion to the attitude of 1692.
Also, Beard, G. M., The Psychology of the Salem Witchcraft Excitement of 1692, and its Practical Application to our own Time. (Putnam, New York, 1882.) Beard finds a ready explana- tion for the persecutions in the conditions of "insanity, trance and hysteria," but he fails to get beneath the words to the ideas which they symbolize. His discussion is vehement but uncritical. The comparison of the state of public feeling which prevailed in the witchcraft trials and in that of Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, may be read with much interest in the per- spective of the intervening fifty years.
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dissociation, subconscious or co-conscious activity, or what one will. Herein lies the secret of the hysterical state, as manifested in the "afflicted children." The defence mech- anism naturally lay in the possibility through the fits and other unconventional behavior of diverting attention from themselves and fixing it upon the convenient person of the accused witch. That this was done involuntarily, as the paralysis or convulsion of a soldier under the stress of war is involuntary, in the sense of having no conscious rela- tion to the waking intelligence, must be accepted if we are to gain any insight into the workings of the "bewitched" mind. The children, forced into a position in which they were the arbiters of life and death, were consciously aware of the enormity of the crime of witchcraft, and had an ever-present dread, of which they were largely unaware, of being drawn into the fatal net.5 The self-preservative instinct was in conflict with a social situation in which they found themselves chief actors, and the result was the production of symptoms, which effected the usual compro- mise of saving them from being accusers of innocent per- sons, and at the same time protected them from their own imminent danger of being regarded as witches themselves. This in no way differs in principle from the hysterical reaction of the neurotic soldier, who faces death on the one hand and disgrace on the other, and, unbearable as both situations are, an hysterical compromise without vo- lition on his part is effected which saves him from both
5 It has been generally supposed that, as the excitement grew, many adults in the community, not knowing where the next blow might fall, became accusers as a simple means of self- protection. This presumably was done in many instances with conscious intent, and consequently was not accompanied by hysterical symptoms. The children, on the other hand, accord- ing to this view, protected themselves unconsciously from the same danger, through the ordinary mental mechanism of de- fence, namely, hysterical symptoms, which served to divert sus- picion from themselves, at the same time fixing the guilt on another person. Only in this way may be explained the out- standing fact that the elder accusers, with minor exceptions, spread rumors with no manifestations in themselves of violent hysterical symptoms, whereas the children, more impression- able, escaped through the now well-recognized unconscious and involuntary defence brought about through hysterical comprom- ise reactions. The elders described events of supposed super- natural character; the children had fits.
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alternatives, but at the expense of pronounced neurotic symptoms. The principle is one of wide application.
It requires no effort of the imagination to picture the scene at a Salem witch trial, the judges, the ministers, and people of all degrees crowding into a room much too small to accommodate all who sought admission, the morbidly curious who thronged outside, the usually mystified vic- tim, trying to protest her own innocence while believing wholeheartedly in the existence of witchcraft in others, and finally the "afflicted children," upon whom the final judgment rested, in a state of intense nervous excitement, prepared, at a word or a sign, to pass into an hysterical state. It is, indeed, difficult to imagine a more fitting setting for the development of hysterical reactions, and for this reason it is the more imperative to regard soberly and in the light of recently acquired knowledge, the ap- parently malicious acts of the children, who are not the least to be pitied among the various actors in the grim tragedy. The worst that may with justice be said of them is that they were ignorant, at the outset perhaps mischiev- ous, like other children, and in the end deluded and over- whelmed by the situation in which they found themselves. The only escape from this dilemma was through hysteri- cal reactions, for which they were in no way responsible. It will be remembered that in 1706, fourteen years later, Ann Putnam, one of the chief actors in 1692, acknowl- edged that what she supposed true then she had since come to regard as false, and that the devil was her tempter.6 Shifting the onus of the proceedings from the accused witches to the devil was apparently to many, at that time and for the succeeding century, a satisfactory explanation, though to our minds a small improvement on the original conception. The devil had lost little of his capacity for evil deeds, but his methods had become more indirect and less concerned with immediate human agents. In this be-
6 ". . . though what was said or done by me against any person, I can truly say before God and man, I did it not out of any anger, malice, or ill-will to any person, for I had no such thing against one of them, but what I did was ignorantly, being deluded of Satan." Nevins, Witchcraft in Salem Village, Lee & Shepard, Boston, 1892, p. 250.
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lief intelligent people continued to live, and, we may sur- mise, many are still doing so in no small measure.
A psychological analysis of the conduct of those actu- ally responsible, if, in fact, they were responsible for the prosecutions, as conducted in Salem and elsewhere, is a L matter as absorbing in interest as that of the "afflicted children." When the reaction came in 1693 it was rather an awakening to the unavailability and fruitlessness of methods employed to suppress witchcraft than a disbelief in its reality. Cotton Mather's half-hearted recantation, and even Judge Sewall's public acknowledgment of his error, was not and could not have been a complete re- nunciation of their beliefs, since the devil for them was an ever-present reality, after, as before, the year 1692. Chief Justice Stoughton remained obdurate to the end of his life in 1702, and doubtless many others.
The attitude of the victims themselves is a curious com- mentary on the general state of mind of the period. Probably, without exception, those who were executed be- lieved in the existence of witchcraft At least, none de- nied it even at the supreme moments immediately before their violent deaths. They equally believed themselves wholly innocent of the crimes with which they were charged. It is a remarkable and most noteworthy fact, confirmatory of the incredible belief of the time, that not one among them repudiated the doctrine in its entirely, but died apparently with a sense of the deep justice of the cause for which they were dying, but with natural and vehement protestations of personal innocence. Such a strange conflict may hardly be seen in any other type of persecution. They were not martyrs in the ordinary sense, since they personally died for no moral cause, and they had not the slightest conviction that by this sacrifice they were even remotely helping toward the extermination of a pernicious belief.
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