Defending the "Witch Burners"

EDMUND PEARSON

In 1692 the causes for lynching were different but the hangings were legal and in good faith

There will be written some day, it is to be hoped, a tragic drama upon one of the most terrible and mysterious events in American history: the witchcraft trials at Salem. Longfellow wrote a play in verse around them, while other authors have compiled histories or written poems. The subject still awaits adequate treatment in dramatic form.

Today, the witch-hunters of 1692 have only two functions. They afford a topic for jokes and playful allusions, as a kind of grotesque Hallowe'en party; or else they are used as a convenient stick with which to belabor the New England Puritans.

If a Broadway producer gets into conflict with the police, because, in his vocabulary, nudity is synonymous with Art, and smut with Sophistication, he usually founds his defence upon a reference to the "Salem witchburners." If a publisher brings out a notorious and usually unimportant book—hoping and praying with all his heart that Mr. Sumner's society, or the Watch-and-Ward, will give him the advertisement of an attempt at suppression—he is sure to be heard muttering something about "Salem witch-burners."

From folk whose information about history is so dim as to be non-existent, nothing else is expected. But a considerable number of writers who are careful to inform us that they are among the liberals or the intellectuals, have two pet weapons: the clubs they throw at old Queen Victoria, and the stones they hurl at Salem. When some patient and hopeful correspondent writes in to the papers, to inform these people, for the fourhundredth time, that the Salem witches were not burned, the information is treated with that contempt for historical accuracy which is the hallmark of this type of intellectual.

The liberality and tolerance of these liberals always end when they look over into the borders of New England. They are prepared to believe that some Boston policeman who is making an ass of himself (and who is named O'Halloran, or Ivanowski, or Repetti), is a lineal descendant of Cotton Mather or the Rev. Nicholas Noyes, and is all ready to drag a lot of old ladies off to a bonfire in the backyard of the House of the Seven Gables.

The playwright who is content to accept the tremendous dramatic possibilities of the witchcraft trials will have his incidents at hand. He cannot improve upon them. But he must indicate the atmosphere of the time. He must let his audience understand that this belief in the reality of Satan, and in the foul betrayal of Christ implied in the sale of a human soul, was not a sudden invention of the colonists, but something brought with them from England. He must show the people of Massachusetts as living on the edge of a wilderness which was inhabited by savages, who frequently descended upon the lonely settlements, and scalped women and children. And he must make it plain that the colonists were people who were accustomed to regard the salvation of their souls as at least as important as the safety of their bodies.

Today, this is reversed. We, or many of us, never worry about our souls at all, but give the most painful and minute care to the welfare of our bodies—make this, in fact, a religion. And here, perhaps, is the best parallel between our mental condition and that of our ancestors. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that two or three hundred years from now the germ theory of disease should be entirely discredited. With what scornful derision the folk of that time would look back upon us,—upon our vaccinations and inoculations, upon our elaborate and expensive sanitation, upon the punishments and social ostracism visited upon those who break sanitary laws. How they would jeer at the hysteric fears expressed when false rumours went about in 1898 that "Spanish agents" were infecting the water-supplies of cities with disease germs!

Well, just as science has proved to our satisfaction the possibility of contracting disease from bacteria, so the science of their day had proved to the men of 1692 that a human being could make a contract with the Devil, and acquire the power to torment and afflict innocent persons. The Bible commands the execution of witches; the laws of all Christian countries provided for it; belief in its necessity was not the. invention of New England Puritans, but was shared by all sects, by Catholic and Protestant alike. The great text-book of witch-finders, Malleus Maleficarum, was written by two German priests, at the command of the Pope.

The drama about the outbreak of persecution in America should begin, I think, on one of those dark, winter nights, around the fire in the kitchen of the Rev. Mr. Parris. Here are gathered ten or a dozen girls, one of them only nine years old, some of them twenty; most of them adolescent trouble-makers and neurotics. The little twelve-year-old hell-cat, Ann Putnam, was one of the few who could write her own name. They are learning palmistry, necromancy, magic and spiritism from Mr. Parris's West Indian negro-woman, Tituba. Things have gone so far, under Tituba's stories of obi, of witches and wizards, that the girls begin to see ghosts in the dark corners; begin to go into fits, to writhe on the floor and imitate animals. The hysteria is contagious, frightful, and it is the local doctor who says that these children are bewitched.

There can be little doubt that some of these victims lost control of themselves, and were not acting a part. Their contortions, later in the Court room, their distorted bodies and rolling eyes, their lips bitten until they bled, were not the result of acting, but were genuine and frightful. Some of them may have realized what they were doing, and were deliberately malicious, or fond of notoriety and power. Some must have been under the influence of older and more crafty persons, because when the accusations began there was many an instance of the deliberate satisfaction of an ancient grudge. Salem Village, like every other community, had its share of harmless folk, its share of the noble and courageous, and its share of the spiteful or even murderous.

For one of the trials, to show on the stage, the playwright might select that of George Jacobs. This tall old man, bent and leaning on two canes, had offended the Putnam family in a law-suit. He knew the enmity he faced; and the peril in which he stood. He looked with amazement and horror at the girls, convulsed on the floor; objects of pity and terror to all in Court. He knew he had no part in their agony. Yet they pointed at him, and screamed that he was tormenting them. It was the belief that if a witch could be made to touch his victim, the "witch fluid" went back into his body, and the victim was relieved. Jacobs was put through this farcical ceremony, and the girls became calm. All the judges were convinced, and the crowd, inside and out-doors, demanded a verdict against the prisoner.

Imagine a Court of today, into which had been brought four or five children dying of typhoid fever. Suppose that witnesses testified that the prisoner, an old man, had been detected in putting the germs of this disease into the children's milk. The wrath and detestation felt by the spectators would be something like that of the people in the Salem Court when Jacobs was on trial.

In one or two of his remarks he comes down to us as one of the first of the Yankees: a man of grim humour, disgusted by all this nonsense, even if he could not understand it.

"Here are them that accuse you of witchcraft," said a judge.

"Well," replied Jacobs, "let us hear who they are, and what they are."

Later, he laughed when one of the shrieking girls was produced, and asked the Court if they could believe this to be true.

"You tax me for a wizard," said he, "you may as well tax me for a buzzard." But his contempt did him no good; the delusion did not pass soon enough to save him, and he was carried off to execution. He, and three or four other men, and a number of women, most of them old, and some of them crazed, were carted up to Gallows Hill. Executions took place on two or three different occasions in that dreadful summer. Some of the victims spoke up with spirit. Old Sarah Good, being told by the Rev. Mr. Noyes, that she was a witch and she knew she was a witch, retorted:

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"You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink." The legend is that Mr. Noyes died from a "stroke" which caused a rush of blood into his throat. This incident was afterwards effectively used by Hawthorne.

The Rev. Mr. Burroughs, who had been dragged back from Maine to be convicted and executed, stood upon the scaffold and repeated the Lord's prayer with such solemnity that many in the crowd murmured against the officers of the law. But this did not trouble the Rev. Mr. Noyes (an active agent of the Devil, if one was present at all) who merely pointed at the bodies dangling from the beam and remarked:

"How sad to see eight firebrands of Hell hanging there!"

A living English author and exceedingly high-churchman, Dr. Montague Summers, devoutly believes in witchcraft, and is convinced that a "coven" of witches did exist in New England, and that the execution of the Rev. Mr. Burroughs, and of two or three others out of the nineteen, was therefore just. Professor Kittredge, a New Englander, who does not believe in the reality of witchcraft, puts it somewhat more rationally:

"Many persons who have been executed for witchcraft have supposed themselves to be guilty, and have actually been guilty in intent."

There were many confessions in Salem. Fifty-five are recorded. These came from people who had been trying some kind of black magic, or from those who noticed that if one confessed he escaped the gallows. The sufferers were, therefore, men and women who would not perjure themselves to save their necks.

Professor Kittredge further points out that witchcraft, in one form or another, is still believed in by a majority of the human race; that trials and one death sentence took place in England after the end of the Salem delusion, and that executions occurred in Europe for another hundred years; that the total number of persons executed in New England is inconsiderable, in view of what went on in Europe; and that the public repentance of judge and jury in Massachusetts has no parallel in history.

If we look upon what happened in one corner of America, more than two centuries ago, as an incident in the general history of us all, then we all share in its shame and disgrace. But if we practise the provincial custom of making attacks upon some one state or region, we must look to our own glass houses. We cannot afford to say much about the Salem witches, if we chance to live where the custom of lynching negroes, often innocent negroes, is allowed or extenuated today. Nor can we, in New York, say much about Salem, after we have considered the "negro plot" of 1741, fifty years after the end of the witchcraft trials. In an hysterical panic, eighteen negroes and four white men were hanged, fifty negroes were sent into slavery, and fourteen negroes were burned at the stake in the city of New York. When an editorial writer or columnist next prepares some stinging allusion to "Salem witch-burners", I recommend these events to his notice.