The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910 Page 27

  The Carolinas, no longer pestered by Grand Models, became another rustic paradise. Their suns were warm, their forests vast, their people delighting in a sort of wild civilization. When James II. went down, the Carolinians needed no care-taker, and declined to avail themselves of the martial law suggested by the anxious proprietors. But in 1690 they allowed Seth Sothel to occupy the gubernatorial seat, and sent up a legislature.

  The southern section was subjected to some superficial annoyance by the proprietors, who wished to make an income from the country, but were unwilling to put their hands in their pockets in the first place; they insisted upon their authority, and the colonists did not say them nay, but maintained freedom of action in all their concerns nevertheless. A series of proprietary governors were sent out to them--Ludwell first, then Smith; both failed, and retired. Then came Archdale, the Quaker, who struck a popular note in his remark that dissenters could cut wood and hoe crops as well as the highest churchmen; his policy was to concede, to conciliate and to harmonize, and he was welcome and useful. The Indians, and even the Spaniards, were brought into friendly relations. Liberty of conscience was accorded to all but "papists," who were certainly hardly used in these times. An attempt to base political power on possession of land was defeated in 1702. The Church of England was accepted in 1704, and though dissenters were tolerated, it remained the official dispenser of religion until the Revolution. All these things were on the surface; the colony, inside, was free, happy and prosperous; it had adopted rice culture, with a great supply of negro slaves, and it brought furs from far in the interior. The Huguenots had been enfranchised as soon as it was known that England had turned her back on Catholicism and James. None of the colonies had before them a future more peaceful and profitable than South Carolina.

  The slaves were her only burden; but at that period they seemed not a burden, but the assurance of her prosperity.

  North Carolina was as happy and as peaceful as her southern sister, but the conditions of life there were different. The proprietors attempted to control the people, but were worsted in almost every encounter. Laws were passed only to be disregarded. Here, as elsewhere, the Quakers became conspicuous in inculcating liberal notions, and were paid the compliment of being hated and feared by the emissaries of England. What was to be done with a population made up of fugitives of all kinds, not from Europe only, but from the other colonies, who held all creeds, or none at all; who lived by hunting and tree-cutting; who were as averse from towns as Virginia, and many of whom could not be said to have any fixed abode at all? If restraints were proposed, they ignored them; if they were pressed, they resisted them, sometimes boisterously, but never with bloodshed.

  Robert Daniel, deputy governor in 1704, tried to establish the Church of England; a building was erected, but in all the province there was but one clergyman, with an absentee congregation scattered over hundreds of miles of mountain and forest. In the following year there were two governors elected by opposite factions, each with his own legislature; and in 1711 Edward Hyde, going out to restore order, confounded the confusion. He called in Spotswood from Virginia to help him; but there were too many Quakers; and the old soldier, after landing a party of marines to indicate his disapproval of anarchy, retired. Meantime, fresh emigrants kept arriving, including many Palatinates from Germany. It was not a profitable country to its reputed owners, who, in 1714, received a hundred dollars apiece from it. But it supported its inhabitants all the better; and it was eight years more before they supplied themselves with a court house, and forty, before they felt the need of a printing press.

  In New England, Connecticut and Rhode Island, which had suffered comparatively little from the despotism of James, readily recovered such minor rights as they had been deprived of. There was a dispute between Fitz-John Winthrop and Fletcher as to the command of the local militia, the former, with his fellow colonists, demanding that the control be kept by the colony; Winthrop went to England and got confirmation of his plea; and from the people, on his return, the governorship. There were a score and a half of flourishing towns in Connecticut, each with its meeting house and school. Little Rhode Island recovered its charter, whether the original or a duplicate. An act was pending in England to abrogate all colonial charters, and was backed by the strong mercantile influence; but the French war caused it to go over. Lord Cornbury, and Joseph Dudley, the Massachusetts-born traitor, did their best to get a royal governor for these colonies, but they failed; though Dudley, at the instance of Cotton Mather, was afterward made governor of Massachusetts.

  But no son of Massachusetts has so well deserved the condemnation of history as Cotton Mather himself. Such political sins as his advocacy of Dudley, and his opposition to the revival of the old charter, are trifling; they might have been the result of ordinary blindness or selfishness merely; but his part in the witchcraft delusion cannot be so accounted for. In his persecution of the accused persons he was actuated by a spirit of inflamed vanity and malignity truly diabolic; and if there can be a crime which Heaven cannot forgive, assuredly Cotton Mather steeped himself in it. He was a singular being; yet he represented the evil tendencies of Puritanism; they drained into him, so to say, until he became their sensible incarnation. In his person, at last, the Puritans of Massachusetts beheld united every devilish trait to which the tenets of their belief could incline them; and the hideousness of the spectacle so impressed them that, from that time forward, any further Cotton Mathers became impossible. There is no feature in Mather's case that can be held to palliate his conduct. He had the best education of the time, coming, as he did, from a line of scholars, and out-Heroding them in the variety and curiousness of his accomplishments, and in the number of his published "works"--three hundred and eighty-three. Nothing that he produced has any original value; but his erudition was enormous. Of "Magnalia," his chief and representative work, it has been said that "it is a heterogeneous and polyglot compilation of information useful and useless, of unbridled pedantry, of religious adjuration, biographical anecdotes, political maxims, and theories of education.... Indeed, it contains everything except order, accuracy, sobriety, proportion, development, and upshot." This man, born in 1663, was not yet thirty years of age when his campaign against the witches began; indeed, he had given a hint of his direction some years earlier. In his multifarious reading he had become acquainted with all existing traditions and speculations concerning witchcraft, and his profession as minister in the Calvinist communion predisposed him to investigate all accessible details concerning the devil. He was passionately hungry for notoriety and conspicuousness: Tydides melior patre was the ambition he proposed to himself.

  A huge memory, stored with the promiscuous rubbish of libraries, and with facts which were transformed into rubbish by his treatment of them, was combined in him with a diseased imagination, and a personal vanity almost surpassing belief. His mental shallowness and consequent restlessness rendered anything like original thought impossible to him; and the faculty of intellectual digestion was not less beyond him. It is probable that curiosity was the motive which originally drew him to the study of witchcraft; a vague credence of such things was common at the time; and in France and England many executions for the supposed crime had taken place.

  Mather had no convictions on the subject; he was incapable of convictions of any kind; and the revelation of his private diary shows that at the very time he was wallowing in murders, and shrieking out for ever more victims, he was in secret doubting the truth of all religion, and coquetting with atheism. But men of no religious faith are prone to superstitions; the man who denies God is the first to seek for guidance from the stars. Suppose there should be a devil?--was Mather's thought. It is not to be wondered at that such a man should be fascinated by the notion; and we may perhaps concede to Mather that, if at any time in his career he approached belief in anything, the devil was the subject of his belief. Had his character been genuine and vigorous, such a belief would have led him to plunge into witchcraft,
not as a persecutor, but as a performer; he would have aimed to be chief at the witches' Sabbath, and to have rioted in the terrible powers with which Satan's children were credited. But he was far from owning this bold and trenchant fiber: though he could not believe in God, he dared not defy Him; and still he could not refrain from dabbling in the forbidden mysteries. Moreover, there was an obscure and questionable faculty inherent in certain persons, unaccountable on any recognized natural grounds, which gave support to the witchcraft theory. We call this faculty hypnotism now; and physiology seeks to connect it with the nervous affections of hysteria and epilepsy.

  At all times, and in all quarters of the earth, manifestations of it have not been wanting; and in Africa it has for centuries existed as a so-called religious cult, to which in this country the name of Hoodooism or Voodooism has been applied. It is a savage form of devil worship, including snake-charming, and the lore of fetiches and charms; and its professors are able to produce abnormal effects, within certain limits, upon the nerves and imaginations of their clients or victims. Among the negro slaves in Massachusetts in 1692, and the negro-Indian mongrels, there were persons able to exercise this power. They attracted the attention of Cotton Mather.

  Gradually, we may suppose, the idea took form in his mind that if he could not be a witch himself, he might gain the notoriety he craved by becoming the denouncer of witchcraft in others. Ministers in that day still had great influence in New England, and had grasped at temporal as well as spiritual sway, maintaining that the former should rightly involve the latter. What a minister said, had weight; what so well-known a minister as Cotton Mather said, would carry conviction to many. If Mather could procure the execution of a witch or two, it could not fail to add greatly to his spiritual glory and ascendency. It is, of course, not to be imagined that he had any conception, beforehand, of the extent to which the agitation he was about to begin would be carried. But when evil is once let loose, it multiplies itself and gains impetus, and rages like a fire. The only thing for Mather to do was to keep abreast of the mischief which he had created. If he faltered or relented, he would be himself destroyed. He was whirled along with the foul storm by a mingling of terror, malice, vanity, triumph and fascination: as repulsive and dastardly a figure as has ever stained the records of our country. He was ready to sacrifice the population of Massachusetts rather than confess that the deeds for which he was responsible were based on what, in his secret soul, he unquestionably felt was a delusion. For though he may have half-believed in witchcraft while it presented itself to him as a theory, yet as soon as he had reached the stage of actual examinations and court testimony, he could not fail to perceive that the theory was utterly devoid of reasonable foundation; that convictions could not be had except by aid of open perjury, suppression and intimidation. Yet Cotton Mather scrupled not to put in operation these and other devices; to hound on the magistrates, to browbeat and sophisticate the juries, and to scream threats, warnings and self-glorifications from the pulpit. Needs must, when the devil drives. Had he paused, had he even held his peace, that noose, slimy with the death-sweat of a score of innocent victims, would have settled greedily round his own guilty neck, and strangled his life.

  But Cotton Mather was too nimble, too voluble, too false and too cowardly for the gallows; he lived to a good age, and died in the odor of sanctity.

  Immediately after the news of William's accession was known in New England, Mather opposed the restoration of the ancient charter, because it would have interfered with the plans of his personal political ambition.

  He caused the presentation of an address to the king, purporting to represent the desire of the majority of reputable citizens of Boston, placing themselves at the royal disposal, without suggesting that the charter rights be revived. Cotton Mather's father, Increase, was the actual agent to England; but it was the views of Cotton Mather rather than his own that he submitted to his majesty. The blatant hypocrite had dominated his father. The king gave Massachusetts a new charter which was entirely satisfactory to the petitioners, for it took away the right of the people to elect their own officers and manage their own affairs, and made the king the fountain of power and honor. It was identical with all charters of royal colonies, except that the council was elected jointly by the people and by its own members. Sir William Phips, at Increase Mather's suggestion, was made governor, and William Stoughton lieutenant-governor.

  The members of the council were "every man of them a friend to the interests of the churches," and of Cotton Mather. He did not conceal his delight. "The time for favor is come, yea, the set time is come! Instead of my being made a sacrifice to wicked rulers, my father-in-law, with several related to me, and several brethren of my own church, are among the council. The governor is not my enemy, but one whom I baptized, and one of my own flock, and one of my dearest friends.--I obtained of the Lord that He would use me to be a herald of His kingdom now approaching." Such was the attitude of Cotton Mather regarding the political outlook.

  Obviously the field was prepared for him to achieve his crowning distinction as champion of God against the devil in Massachusetts. In February of the next year he found his first opportunity.

  There was in Salem a certain Reverend Samuel Parris who had a daughter, a niece, and a negro-Indian servant called Tituba. The children were about twelve years of age, and much in Tituba's society. Parris was an Englishman born, and was at this time forty-one years old; he had left Harvard College without a degree, had been in trade in Boston, and had entered the ministry and obtained the pastorship of the Congregational church at Danvers, then a part of Salem, three or four years before. He had not lived at peace with his people; he had quarreled bitterly with some of them, and the scandal had been noised abroad. He was a man of brutal temper, and without moral integrity. These were the dramatis personae employed by Cotton Mather in the first scene of his hideous farce.

  The children, at the critical age between childhood and puberty, were in a condition to be readily worked upon; it is the age when the nervous system is disorganized, the moral sense unformed, and the imagination ignorant and unbridled. Many children are liars and deceivers, and self-deceivers, then, who afterward develop into sanity and goodness. But these unhappy little creatures were under the fascination of the illiterate and abnormal mongrel, and she secretly ravished and fascinated them with her inexplicable powers and obscure devices. Their antics aroused suspicions in the coarse and perhaps superstitious mind of Parris; he catechised them; the woman's husband told what he knew; and Parris beat her till she consented to say she was a witch. Such phenomena could only be due to witchcraft. The cunning and seeming malignity of the children would tax belief, were it not so familiar a fact in children; and notable also was their histrionic ability. They were excited by the sensation they aroused, and vain of it; they were willing to do what they could to prolong it. But they hardly needed to invent anything; more than was necessary was suggested to them by questions and comments. They were quick to take hints, and improve upon them. Sarah Good, Martha Cory, Rebecca Nourse, and all the rest, must be their victims; but God will forgive the children, for they know not what they do. Presently, the contagion spread; though, upon strict examination of the evidence, not nearly so far as was supposed. Hundreds were bewildered and terrified, as well they might be; the magistrates--Stoughton, Sewall, John Hathorne, poor Octogenarian Bradstreet, Sir William Phips--these and others to whom it fell to investigate and pronounce sentence--let us hope that some, if not all of them, truly believed that their sentences were just. "God will give you blood to drink!" was what Sarah Good said to Noyes, as she stood on the scaffold. But why may they not have believed they were in the right? There was Cotton Mather, the holy man, the champion against the Evil One, the saint who walked with God, and daily lifted up his voice in prayer and defiance and thanksgiving--he was ever at hand, to cross-question, to insinuate, to surmise, to bluster, to interpret, to terrify, to perplex, to vociferate: surely, this paragon of learning an
d virtue must know more about the devil than any mere layman could pretend to know; and they must accept his assurance and guidance. "I stake my reputation," he shouted, "upon the truth of these accusations." And he pointedly prayed that the trial might "have a good issue." When Deliverance Hobbs was under examination, she did but cast a glance toward the meeting house, "and," cries the Reverend gentleman, in an ecstasy of indignation, "immediately a demon, invisibly entering the house, tore down a part of it!" No wonder a man so gifted as he, was conscious of a certain gratification amid all the horrors of the diabolic visitation, for how could he regard it otherwise than as--in his own words--"a particular defiance unto myself!" Such was the pose which he adopted before his countrymen: that of a semi-divine, or quite Divine man, standing between his fellow creatures and the assaults of hell. And then Cotton Mather would go home to his secret chamber, and write in his diary that God and religion were perhaps, after all, but an old wives' tale.

  Parris, as soon as he comprehended Mather's drift, ably seconded him. He had his own grudges against his neighbors to work off, and nothing could be easier. All that was needed was for one of the children, or any one else, to affirm that they were afflicted, and perhaps to foam at the mouth, or be contorted as in a fit, and to accuse whatever person they chose as being the cause of their trouble. Accusation was equivalent to condemnation; for to deny it, was to be subjected to torture until confession was extorted; if the accused did not confess, he or she was, according to Cotton Mather, supported by the evil one, and being a witch, must die. If they did confess, they were spared or executed according to circumstances. If any one expressed any doubt as to the justice of the sentence, or as to the existence of witchcraft, it was proof that that person was a witch. The only security was to join the ranks of the afflicted. In the course of a few months a reign of terror was established, and hundreds of people, some of them citizens of distinction, were in jail or under suspicion. Twenty were hanged on Witches' Hill, west of the town of Salem, while Cotton Mather sate comfortably by on his horse, and assured the people that all was well, and that the devil could sometimes assume the appearance of an angel of light--as, indeed, he might have good cause to believe. But the mass of the people were averse from bloodshed, and none too sure that these executions were other than murders; and when the wife of Governor Phips was accused, the frenzy had passed its height. It was perceived that the community, or a part of it, had been stampeded by a panic or infatuation. They had done and countenanced things which now seemed impossible even to themselves. How could they have condemned the Reverend George Burroughs on the ground that he had exhibited remarkable physical strength, and that the witnesses against him had pretended dumbness? "Why is the devil so loth to have testimony borne against you?" Judge Stoughton had asked; and Cotton Mather had said "Enough!" But was it enough, indeed? If a witness simply by holding his peace can hang a minister of blameless life, who may escape hanging by a witness who will talk? It was remembered that Parris had been Burroughs's rival, and instrumental in his conviction; and now that the frenzy was past it was easy to point out the relation between the two facts. There, too, was the venerable Giles Cory, who had been pressed to death, not for pleading guilty, nor yet for pleading not guilty, but for declining to plead at all. There, once more, was John Willard, to whom the duty of arresting accused witches had been assigned; he, as a person of common sense and honesty, had intimated his disbelief in the reality of witchcraft by refusing to arrest; and for this, and no other crime, had he been hanged. Had it really come to this, then--that one must die for having it inferred, from some act of his, that he held an opinion on the subject of witchcraft different from that announced by Mather and the magistrates?--It had come to precisely that, in a community who were exiles in order to secure liberty to have what opinions they liked. Then, it was time that the witchcraft persecutions came to an end; and they did, as abruptly as they had begun. Mather, indeed, and a few more, frightened lest the people, in their recovered sanity, should turn upon them for an accounting, strove their best to keep up the horror; but it was not to be.