Part 13

Here it seems according to the afflicted, the devil did not wish his man to escape; contrary to his allged conduct in the cases of Burroughs and Proctor.

Mrs. Mary Easty, hung on this occasion, was also the sister of Rebecca Nurse, and no doubt but that her connection with that ill-fated woman who was herself a victim to sisterly love, was the cause of her persecution and death. The three sisters were noted for their mutual love. Her’s was a hard case and excited great public commiseration. It was hoped that her spotless character and example would prove too strong on her trial, for the fictions and fits of the afflicted and their partizans. But they employed a jury of eight women, and a doctor to search her body for the devil’s marks, and an excresence was found which was pronounced to be a witch teat; and it turned the case against her.

Shortly before her execution, she called her husband, children and friends about her in prison, and gave them her last farewell, with such affectionate and pious exhortation, as drew tears from the eyes of all present. She also sent to the court the following petition, which presents a vivid picture of her case, and of the unhallowed times on which she had fallen.

“To the Honorable Judge and Bench, now sitting in Salem, and the Rev. Ministers; This petition humbly sheweth; That whereas your poor petitioner being condemned to die, doth humbly beg of you to take into your judicious and pious consideration, that your poor and humble petitioner knowing my own innocency (blessed be the Lord for it) and seeing plainly the subtility and wiles of my accusers towards myself, cannot but judge charitably of others, who are going the same way to death with me, if the Lord step not mightily in.

“I was confined a whole month, on accusation of witchcraft, and then cleared by the afflicted persons, as some of your Honors know, and in two days time I was cried out upon by them again, and have been since confined, and now am condemned to die. The Lord above knows my innocence, and it will be known at the great day by men and angels. I petition to your Honors, not for my own life, for I know I must die, and my appointed time is set. I question not but your Honors do to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witches, and would not for the world be guilty of innocent blood; but by my own innocency I know you are in the wrong way. May the Lord in mercy, direct you in this great work.

“I would humbly beg that your Honors would be pleased to examine some of those confessing witches; I being confident that there are some of them who have belied themselves and others, as will appear, if not in this world, I am sure it will in the world to come, whither I am going.

“They say that myself and others have made a league with the devil; we cannot confess. The Lord knows they belie me, as I question not they do others; the Lord alone who is the searcher of all hearts knows, as I shall answer at his judgment seat, that I know not the least thing of witchcraft, therefore I cannot, I durst not, belie my own soul.

“I beg your Honors not to deny this my humble petition, from a poor dying innocent person, and I question not but the Lord will give a blessing to your endeavors.

“MARY EASTY.”

This touching and modest declaration Mary Easty sealed with her blood. Her husband, Captain Isaac Easty, was a soldier, and then stood in arms against the French and Indians, and to defend the country and the same power which forced away his wife from her once happy home and family, and without regard to her known piety and virtue, carted her up Witch Hill and hung her on the limb of a tree.

Of the other persons hung on the 22d of September 1692, few particulars have come down to us, either in history or by tradition. It was the last execution and its atrocity manifestly weakened the authority of Phipps’ bloody witch court, and the credit of the Parris afflicted band. It swelled the number of victims to twenty, nineteen of whom had now been hung on that fatal gallows-tree, in after ages an object of peculiar superstitious dread; and their bodies, unhonored even by funeral decencies, though not unwept by private affection, were cast with public ignominy into untimely graves about its roots. But the tree withered, as was supposed, thunder-smitten, and stood for years with leafless, outstretched branches and shattered trunk, until burned to the ground by the descendants in the third and fourth generation of those who suffered on it. In superstitious minds tempests and torrents could not wash away the blood from the unhallowed hill whereon it grew, and the soil was cursed and barren of all wholesome vegetation.

But all were not executed who were tried and sentenced. Besides Elizabeth Proctor, Abigail Falkner of Andover was saved by her delicate family condition. At her trial the court took the confession of her little daughter, ten years old, against her. But Dorcas Hoar of Beverly, Rebecca Eams of Boxford, Abigail Hobbs of Topsfield, Mary Bradbury of Salisbury, and Ann Foster and Mary Lacy of Andover, all flattered their persecutors by a confession of the charges against them, and thus escaped death.

This whole slaughter of the innocent under the similitude of legal forms, was the work of little more than three short months. A sudden bereavement, indeed, of near and loved friends. When, however, a lawful court was established, this sham tribunal, happily for the country, came to an end. And it is some consolation to know that it was entirely discontinued with the regular jurisprudence of the country.

The last witch trials ever holden in Massachusetts were those five at Ipswich about the middle of May, 1693, and to which I have already referred.

By this time the spectre evidence, or the devil’s testimony through the mouths of the afflicted, had become so unpopular that none of the judges dared to sustain it, and the juries also disregarded it; and from this time forth it was manifest that there could be no more convictions for alleged witchcrafts.

And thus public opinion, operating through the jury and the only part of the government at that time through which it could operate, in effect annulled the bloody witch law, passed by false agents of the people, against common justice and in favor of the then ruling political interests and influences; or the old charter church and state aristocracy. And history rarely reveals to us a more bloody despotism. And shall it not stand forever as a warning against any interference by a people’s self-government with the religion or business of the community?

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Early in the year of 1727 the last witch-fire was kindled with which the air of bonnie Scotland was polluted. Two poor Highland women, a mother and daughter, were brought before Captain David Ross of Littledean, deputy-sheriff of Sutherland, charged with witchcraft and consorting with the devil. The mother was accused of having used her daughter as her “horse and hattock,” causing her to be shod by the devil, so that she was ever after lame in both hands and feet. The fact being satisfactorily proved, and Captain David Ross being well assured of the same, the poor old woman was put into a tar-barrel and burned at Dornoch in the bright month of June. “And it is said that after being brought out to execution, the weather proving very severe, she sat composedly warming herself by the fire prepared to consume her, while the other instruments of death were getting ready.” The daughter escaped. Afterward she married and had a son who was as lame as herself, and in the same manner; though it does not appear that he was ever shod by the devil and witch-ridden. “And this son,” says Sir Walter Scott, in 1830 “was living so lately as to receive the charity of the present Marchioness of Stafford, Countess of Sutherland in her own right.”

This then, is the last execution for witchcraft in Scotland; and in June, 1736, the Acts Anents Witchcraft were formerly repealed. Henceforth to the dread of the timid, and the anger of the pious, the English Parliament distinctly opposed the express Law of God: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live;” and declared the text upon which so much critical absurdity had been talked, and in support of which so much innocent blood had been shed, vain, superstitious, impossible and contrary to that human reason which is the highest Law of God hitherto revealed unto men. But if Parliament could stay executions it could not remove beliefs nor give rationality in place of folly.

Not more than sixty years ago an old woman named Elizabeth M’Whirter was “scratched” by one Eaglesham in the parish of Colmonel, Ayrshire, because his son had fallen sick, and the neighbors said he was bewitched. Poor old Bessie M’Whirter was forced over the hills to the young man’s house, a distance of three miles, and there made to kneel by his bedside and repeat the Lord’s Prayer.

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In offering this collection of witch stories to the public, I do not profess to have exhausted the subject, or to have made so complete a summary as I might have done, had I the space, but I do not think that I have left much untold.

Neither have I attempted to enter into the philosophy of the subject. It is far too wide and deep to be discussed in a few hasty words; and to sift such evidence as is left us―to determine what was fraud, what self-deception, what disease and what the exaggeration of the narrator―would have swelled my book into a more important and bulky work than I intended or wished. As a general rule, I think we may apply all four conditions to every case reported; in what proportion, each reader must judge for himself. Those who believe in direct and personal intercourse between the spirit-world and man will probably accept every account with the unquestioning belief of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; those who have faith in the uniform operations of nature, will hold chiefly to the doctrine of fraud; those who have seen much of disease and that strange condition called “mesmerism,” or “sensitiveness,” will detect the presence of nervous derangement, mixed up with a vast amount of conscious deception, which the credulity and ignorance of the time rendered easy to practice; and those who have been accustomed to sift evidence and examine witnesses will be dissatisfied with the loose statements and wild distortion of every instance on record.

The whole world was overrun with witches. From every town came crowds of those lost and damned souls; from every hovel peered out the cursing witch, or cried aloud for help the stricken victim. These poor and old and wretched beings, on whose heads lighted the wrath of a world, and against whom every idle lad or moping maid had a stone to fling at will, were held capable of all but omnipotence. They could destroy the babe in the womb and make the “mother of many children childless among women;” they could kill with a look and disable with a curse; bring storms or sunshine as they listed; by their “witch-ropes,” artfully woven, draw to themselves all the profit of their neighbor’s barns and breweries; yet ever remain poor and miserable, glad to beg a mouthful of meat or a can of sour milk from the hands of those whom they could ruin by half a dozen muttered words. They could take on themselves what shapes they would, and transport themselves whither they would. No bolt nor bar could keep them out; no distance by land or sea was too great for them to accomplish; a straw―a broomstick―the serviceable imp ever at hand―was enough for them; and with a pot of magic ointment, and a charm of spoken gibberish, they might visit the king on his throne or the lady in her bower, to do what ill was in their hearts against them or to gather to themselves what gain and store they would. Yet with all this power the superstitious world saw nothing doubtful or illogical in the fact of their own exceeding poverty, and never stayed to think that if witches and wizards could transport themselves through the air to any distance they chose, they would be but slippery holding in prison, and not very likely to remain there for the pleasure of being tortured and burned at the end. But neither reason nor logic had anything to do with the matter. The whole thing rested on fear, and that practical atheism of fear, which denies the power of God and the wholesome beauty of Nature, to exalt in their stead the supremacy of the devil.

This belief in the devil’s material presence and power over men was the dark chain that bound them all. Even the boldest opponent of the Witchcraft Delusion dared not fling it off. The bravest man, the freest thinker, could not clear his mind of this terrible bugbear, this phantasm of human fear and ignorance, this ghastly lie and morbid delusion, or abandon the slavish belief in Satan for the glad freedom of God and Nature.

Superstition dies hard; or rather, so far as we have yet gone, it does not die at all, but only changes its form and removes its locality. If educated people do not now believe in witches and Satanic compacts, as in the ignorant old times of which these stories treat, they do still believe in other things which are as much against reason and as incapable of proof. And perhaps it may give some cause to think that assertion does not necessarily include truth, and that skepticism may be at times a wiser attitude of mind than credulity, when they remember that the best brains in the world were once firmly convinced of the truth of Possession and the diabolical art of witchcraft, and realize how many innocent men and women were murdered on the strength of these beliefs and to vindicate the honor and glory of God. So long as one shred of superstition remains in the world, by which human charity is sacrificed to an unprovable faith, so long will it be necessary to insist on the dead errors of the past as a gauge for the living follies of the present.

But the snake is scotched, not killed. So far are we in advance of the men of the ruder past, inasmuch as our superstitions, though quite as silly, are less cruel than theirs, and hurt no one but ourselves. Yet still we have our wizards and witches lurking round area gates and prowling through the lanes and yards of the remoter country districts; still we have our mediums, who call up the dead from their graves to talk to us more trivial nonsense than ever they talked while living, and who reconcile us with humanity by showing us how infinitely inferior is spirituality; still we have the unknown mapped out in clear lines sharp and firm; and still the impossible is asserted as existing, and men are ready to give their lives in attestation of what contravenes every law of reason and of nature; still we are not content to watch and wait and collect and fathom before deciding, but for every new group of facts or appearances must at once draw up a code of laws and reasons, and prove, to a mathematical certainty, the properties of a chimera, and the divine life and beauty of a lie. Even the mere vulgar belief in witchcraft remains among the lower classes. And indeed so long as conviction without examination, and belief without proof, pass as the righteous operations of faith, so long will superstition and credulity reign supreme over the mind, and the functions of critical reason be abandoned and foresworn. And as it seems to me that credulity is a less desirable frame of mind than skepticism, I have set forth this collection of witch stories as landmarks of the excesses to which a blind belief may hurry and impel humanity, and perhaps as some slight aids to that much misused common sense which the holders of impossible theories generally consider it well to tread under foot, and loftily ignore.

Transcriber’s Note