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$Title{Our Country:  Volume 2
Chapter XXXII}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Lossing, Benson J., LL.D.}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{new
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french
accused
dustin
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witchcraft
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$Volume{Vol. 2}
$Date{1905}
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Book:        Our Country:  Volume 2
Author:      Lossing, Benson J., LL.D.
Volume:      Vol. 2
Date:        1905

Chapter XXXII

     Witchcraft - The Sad Story of "Salem Witchcraft" - Superstition and
Wickedness Hand-in-Hand - Result of the Delusion - King William's War - New
England's Sufferings - Capture of Pemaquid - The Baron De Castin - French and
Indians Make War Together - The Exploit of Hannah Dustin and Her Companions -
Treaty at Ryswick - The Pretender - Queen Anne - New England More Tolerant.

     IN the seventeenth century, a belief in witches and witchcraft was almost
universal.  The Church of Rome, more than three hundred years ago, sanctioned
punishments for the exercise of witchcraft and after that, thousands of
suspected persons were burned alive, drowned or hanged.  During the sixteenth
century, more than one hundred thousand accused and convicted persons perished
in the flames, in Germany alone.  In England, enlightened men embraced the
belief.  The eminent Sir Matthew Hale, who flourished during the civil war,
the commonwealth and the period of the restoration of monarchy, repeatedly
sentenced persons to death accused of witchcraft.  The Puritans brought the
belief with them to America.  They established laws for the punishment of
witches and before 1648, four persons had suffered death for the alleged
offence, in the vicinity of Boston.  The ministers of the gospel there were
shadowed by the delusion; and, because of their powerful social influence,
they did more to foster the wild excitement and produce the distressing
results of what is known in history as "Salem Witchcraft," than all others.

     In 1688, a wayward daughter of John Goodwin, of Boston, about thirteen
years of age, accused a servant girl of stealing some of the family linen. The
servant's mother, a wild Irish woman and a Roman Catholic, vehemently rebuked
the accuser as a false witness.  The young girl, in revenge, pretended to be
bewitched by the Irishwoman.  Some others of her family followed her example.
They would alternately become deaf, dumb and blind; bark like dogs and purr
like cats, but none of them lost their appetites nor sleep.  The Rev. Cotton
Mather, a credulous and egotistical clergyman (who seems to have believed,
with Hubbard, the Puritan historian, that America was originally peopled with
a crew of witches "transported thither by the devil"), hastened to Goodwin's
house to allay the witchery by prayer.  Wonderful were the alleged effects of
his supplications.  The devil was controlled by them for the time.  Then four
other ministers of Boston and one of Salem, as superstitious as himself,
joined Mather, and they spent a whole day in the house of the afflicted in
fasting and prayer, the result of which was the delivery of one of the family
from the power of the witch.  This was sufficient proof for the minds of the
ministers that there must be a witch in the case, and these deluded clergymen
prosecuted the ignorant Irish woman as such.  She was bewildered before the
court, and spoke sometimes in her native Irish language, which nobody could
understand, and which her accusers and judges construed into involuntary
confession.  Mather and his clerical associates had the satisfaction of seeing
the poor old Irish woman hanged as a witch, "for the glory of God."

     Skeptics ridiculed Mather.  He defended his cause by the assertion of
alleged facts.  He called the afflicted daughter of Goodwin to his study, when
the artful girl thoroughly deceived him.  The devil would allow her to read
Quaker books, the Common Prayer and Popish books, but a prayer from the lips
of Mather, or the reading of a chapter of the Bible, threw her into
convulsions.  The credulous parson believed all he saw and heard, and cried
from his pulpit, with outstretched arms and loud voice, "Witchcraft is the
most nefarious high-treason against the Majesty on High.  A witch is not to be
endured in heaven or on earth."  Mather's discourse on the subject was
scattered broadcast among the people by means of the printing press and with
it went out his narrative of the events in the Goodwin family, which led to
greater tragedies in the spring and summer of 1692, when an epidemic disease
resembling epilepsy broke out in Danvers (then a part of Salem), and spread
rapidly.  The physicians could neither control nor cure it and with the sermon
and statements of Mather before them, they readily ascribed the malady to the
work of witches.

     A niece and daughter of the parish minister at Danvers were first
afflicted.  Their strange and unaccountable actions frightened other young
women, who soon exhibited the same symptoms, such as convulsions and spasmodic
swellings in the throat, undoubtedly produced by hysterics.  A belief quickly
spread over Salem and throughout the province that evil spirits having
ministering servants on earth had been permitted to overshadow the land with
an awful visitation.  Terror took possession of the minds of nearly all the
people, and the dread made the malady spread widely.

     Other old and ill-favored women now shared with the Irish woman in the
suspicion of being witches, and several of them were publicly accused and
imprisoned.  "The afflicted," under the influence of the witchery, "professed
to see the forms of their tormentors with their inner vision," and would
forthwith accuse some individual seen.  At length the afflicted and the
accused became so numerous that no person was safe from suspicion and its
consequences.  Even those who were active in the prosecutions became objects
of suspicion.  A magistrate who had presided at the condemnation of several
persons, becoming convinced of the wrongfulness of the proceedings and
protesting against it, was himself accused and suffered much.  A constable,
who had arrested many and refused to arrest any more, was accused, condemned
and hanged.  Neither age, sex nor condition were considered.  Sir William
Phipps, the governor of Massachusetts, his lieutenant-governor, the near
relations of the Mathers, and learned and distinguished men who had promoted
the dreadful delusion by acquiescing in the proceedings against accused
persons, became objects of suspicion.  The governor s wife, Lady Phipps, one
of the purest and best of women, was accused of being a witch.  The sons of
Governor Bradstreet were compelled to fly to avoid the perils of false
accusations and near relatives of the Mathers were imprisoned on similar
charges.  Malice, revenge and rapacity often impelled persons to accuse others
who were innocent and when some statement of the accused would move the court
and audience in favor of the prisoner, the accuser would solemnly declare that
he saw the devil standing beside the victim whispering the touching words in
his or her ear. And the absurd statement would be believed by the judges on
the bench. Some, terrified and with the hope of saving tteir lives or avoiding
the horrors of imprisonment, would falsely accuse their friends and kinsfolk
while others, moved by the same instinct and hopes, would falsely confess
themselves to be witches.

     When the magnates in church and state found themselves in danger, they
thought of the golden rule, and suspected they had been acting unrighteously
toward others.  They cautiously expressed their doubts of the policy and
justice of further proceedings against accused persons.  A citizen of Andover,
who was accused, wiser and more bold than governor and clergy, immediately
caused the arrest of his accuser on a charge of defamation of character, and
laid his damages at five thousand dollars. The effect of this act was
wonderful.  The public mind was in sympathy with it.  The spell was instantly
broken, and witchcraft was no more heard of in Andover.  The impression then
made quickly spread over the province, and deluded and wicked persons hastened
to make amends for their errors and crimes.

     The abashed clergy were compelled to take action because of the
unexpected change in public opinion.  At a convention held in June, 1693, they
declared that it was not inconsistent with Scripture to believe that the devil
might assume the shape of a good man, and that he may so have deceived the
afflicted.  So his Satanic majesty as usual was conveniently made the
scapegoat for the sins and follies of magistrates, clergy, and people.  Many
of the accusers and witnesses came forward and published solemn recantations
or denials of the truth of their testimony, which had been given, they said,
to save their own lives.  Governor Phipps, after his wife was accused and the
Andover citizen had killed the monster delusion, give orders for the release
of all persons under arrest for witchcraft. The Legislature of Massachusetts
appointed a day for a general fast and solemn supplication that God would
pardon all the errors of his servants and people in a late tragedy raised
among us by Satan and his instruments. And Judge Sewall, who had presided at
many trials in Salem, stood up in his place in church on that fast day, and
implored the prayers of the people that "the errors which he had committed
might not be visited by the judgments of an avenging God on his country, his
family, or himself."  Mr. Paris, the parish minister in Danvers, in whose
family the delusion had its rise, and who, throughout the "reign of terror,"
was one of the most earnest prosecutors of alleged witches, was compelled to
resign his charge and leave the country.

     These recantations, acknowledgments of error and pleadings for mercy,
could not restore to the bereaved the spirits of those who had been hanged,
nor make amends for the pains others had suffered.  The delusion had prevailed
in greatest vehemence more than six months, and it was not allayed for more
than a year.  During that time nineteen persons had been hanged, and one had
been killed by the horrid process of pressing to death; fifty-five had been
tortured or frightened into a confession of guilt; one hundred and fifty had
been imprisoned, and full two hundred had been named as worthy of arrest.
Amongst those hanged was the Rev. Mr. Burroughs, an exemplary clergyman, whose
purity of character was conspicuous.  Others, whose innocence and good name
should have shielded them from harm, were coarsely assailed at the scaffold.
One aged citizen, as was afterward proven, was falsely accused by a malignant
enemy.  While declaring his innocence to the multitudes, smoke from the
executioner's pipe choked his utterances, then his accuser and his associates
brutally shouted "See how the devil wraps him in smoke!" A moment afterward he
was hanged.

     During the prevalence of this terror, all mutual confidence was
suspended, and the noblest sentiments of human nature were trampled under-
foot.  The nearest blood relations became each other's accusers.  One man was
hanged on the testimony of his wife and daughter, who impeached him merely for
the purpose of saving themselves.  But this dreadful delusion was not an
unmixed evil.  "It is likely," wrote a contemporary, "that this frenzy
contributed to work off the ill humors of the New England people - to
dissipate their bigotry, and to bring them to a more free use of their
reason."

     The belief in witches did not end with the strange excitement.  Cotton
Mather and his clerical associates and others wrote in its defence. Mather's
account of the delusion is unprofitable reading, because it deals in the
absurd fancies of a man deluded by bigotry, superstition, and childish
credulity.  This may be seen in scores of sentences similar to the following:

     "It is known that these wicked spectres [ghosts] did proceed so far as to
steal several quantities of money from divers people, part of which individual
money dropped sometimes out of the air, before sufficient spectators, into the
hands of the afflicted, while the spectres were urging them to subscribe their
covenant with death.  Moreover poisons, to the standers-by wholly invisible,
were sometimes forced upon the afflicted, which, when they have with much
reluctancy swallowed, they have swollen presently, so that the common
medicines for poison have been found necessary to relieve them yea, sometimes
the spectres, in their troubles, have so dropped the poisons that the
standers-by have smelt them and viewed them, and beheld the pillows of the
miserable stained with them.  Yet more, the miserable have complained bitterly
of burning rags run into their forcibly distended mouths; and though nobody
could see any such cloths, or indeed any fires in the chambers, yet presently
the scalds were seen plainly by everybody on the mouths of the complainers,
and not only the smell, but the smoke of the burning, filled the chambers.

     "Once more, the miserable exclaimed extremely of branding irons, heating
at the fire on the hearth to mark them now the standers-by could see no irons,
yet they could see distinctly the print of them in the ashes, and smell them
too, as they were carried by the not seen furies unto the poor creatures for
whom they were intended; and these poor creatures were there upon so
stigmatized with them that they will bear the marks of them to their dying
day.  Nor are these [he had related many others] a tenth part of the prodigies
that fell out among the inhabitants of New England.

     "Flashy people may burlesque these things, but when hundreds of the most
sober people, in a country where they have as much mother-wit certainly as the
rest of mankind, know them to be true, nothing but the absurd and froward
spirit of sadducism [disbelief in spirits] can question them."

     They were burlesqued.  Robert Calef a merchant of Boston, in a series of
letters which he wrote and published, exposed Mather's credulity, and greatly
irritated the really good man.  Mather retorted by calling Calef a "weaver
turned minister."  Calef tormented him the more by letter after letter, when
Mather, wearied with the fight, called his opponent "a coal from hell," and
prosecuted him for slander.  When these letters were published in book form,
Mather's kinsman, then president of Harvard College, caused copies of the work
to be publicly burned on the college grounds.

     This strange episode in the history of Massachusetts astonished the
civilized world, and made an unfavorable impression on the surrounding
Indians, who despised a people that cherished a religion which sanctioned such
cruelties toward their countrymen.  It gave a large advantage to the French,
whose Jesuit missionaries, then laboring among the savage tribes on the
frontier, contrasted their own mild and beneficent system of religion as
exhibited there with that of the Puritans, whose ministers had been so
prominent in the fearful tragedy.  It had a serious effect upon the future
destiny of New England, for the barbarians on the frontiers were,
henceforth, strongly wedded to the fortunes of the French.

     We paused to consider "Salem Witchcraft."  Let us resume the narrative of
general events.

     "King William's War" continued in Europe and in America until it was
closed by a treaty at Ryswick in 1697.  Meanwhile the New England people had
suffered much from the incursions of the French and Indians.  Governor Phipps
visited some of the tribes with whom he had made a treaty at Pemaquid, on
Bristol Bay in Maine, and endeavored to secure their friendship and alliance
with the English.  They were willing to abide by the terms of their treaty,
but, more attached to the French than ever, they refused to listen to any
proposition for an English alliance, for Jesuits had told them that
Protestants were enemies to the true religion of Christ. "The French," they
said, "have driven witchcraft from among us, and we do not care to associate
with a people who cherish it."  Phipps returned disappointed, and soon
afterward sailed to England, leaving the government in the hands of Stoughton,
his deputy, who exercised the authority of chief magistrate about three years.

     During Stoughton's administration, internal feuds disturbed, and border
wars distressed the province continually.  The French and Indians now
prosecuted their peculiar warfare with relentless vigor.  They spread death
and desolation over the frontier.  The French, by conquest, extended their
colonial dominion.  Nova Scotia submitted to the rule of France again and in
the summer of 1696, a strong force of French and Indians, under Colonel
Iberville, attacked and captured Fort William Henry, at Pemaquid. They were
accompanied by the Baron de Castin, a colonel of the French army, who came to
America with his regiment, remained, and in 1687, set up a trading-post at the
mouth of the Penobscot River, which spot yet bears his name.  There he married
a daughter of a powerful Indian chief, and exercised great influence over the
dusky tribes.  With two hundred of such followers, he joined Iberville,
assisted in the capture of the fort and with his own hands helped to level it
with the ground.  So Castin was avenged for the burning of his house by the
English.

     This severe blow mortified and alarmed the New Englanders and excited the
victors to a more distressing warfare.  The French and Indians penetrated New
England further than they had ever done before, destroying villages, and
dispersing settlements, and carrying away people into captivity.  Among the
places that felt the severest blasts of the storm was Haverhill, within thirty
miles of Boston, which was attacked by Indians in March, 1697, when forty
persons were killed or made captives.  Among the latter was a part of the
family of Thomas Dustin, who was in his field when the savages suddenly
appeared with horrid yells and gleaming knives and tomahawks.  Seizing his gun
and mounting his horse, he hastened to his house to bear away his wife, eight
young children and a nurse to a place of safety.  His youngest child was only
a week old.  He ordered the other seven to fly in a direction opposite to the
approach of the savages, and was lifting his wife from the bed when the
Indians attacked his house. "Leave me," cried the mother, "and fly to the
protection of the other children."  Seeing no chance to save his wife, Dustin
again mounted his horse and soon overtook his precious flock, who were filled
with joy when they saw their father.  The Indians had pursued.  Placing
himself between the savages and his precious charge, he defended his children
so valiantly as the foe pressed him back, that the savages gave up the
pursuit, and the children were saved in an unoccupied house.

     Meanwhile the scenes at Mr. Dustin's house were most distressing.  The
savages found Mrs. Dustin in bed, and the nurse attempting to fly with the
infant.  They ordered the feeble mother to rise instantly, while one of the
savages, taking the infant out of doors, dashed out its brains against an
apple-tree.  Then they plundered and set fire to the house; and before the
terrified mother was dressed, they compelled her to follow them in a hasty
retreat.  She was forced to walk twelve miles the first day, in the March
slush of snow and mud, without shoes, encounter the chilling winds half-clad,
and lie upon the ground, when resting, with no covering but the cold gray sky.
This was repeated day after day until, by a circuitous route, they reached the
island in the Merrimac River, at the mouth of the Contotook Creek, six miles
above Concord, New Hampshire, now known as Dustin's Island.  There was the
home of the chief, who claimed Mrs. Dustin and her nurse as his captives.
They were lodged with his family, which consisted of two men, three women,
seven children and a captive English lad, who had been with them more than a
year.  The savage pretended to be a Christian.  "When I prayed the English
way," he said, "I thought it was good; but I think the French way better."

     A few days after their arrival at the island, the prisoners were told
that they were soon to start for a distant Indian village, when they would be
compelled to "run the gauntlet"-that is, to be stripped naked and run for
their lives between two files of Indian men, women and children, who would
have the privilege of scoffing at them, beating them, and wounding them with
sharp hatchets.  The two women resolved not to endure the indignity and
danger, preferring death.  Mrs. Dustin planned a means for escape, and her
nurse and the lad leagued with her in the execution of it. The Indians
believed the lad to be faithful to them, and did not suppose the women would
have courage to attempt to escape.  So they did not keep watch.

     On the day before the plan was to be carried out, Mrs. Dustin
ascertained, through inquiries made by the lad, how to kill a man instantly,
and how to take off his scalp.  "Strike him here," said the Indian inquired of
placing his finger on his temple, "and take off his scalp so," showing the lad
how.  With this information, the plot was ripe. Before daylight the next
morning, when the whole family were in deep slumber, Mrs. Dustin arose,
awakened her nurse and the lad, and with their assistance instantly killed ten
of the twelve sleepers, she slaying her captor and the lad killing the man who
told him how to do it.  A squaw and a child fled to the woods and the
prisoners, after scuttling all the boats there but one, to prevent pursuit,
started in that one down the river, with provisions from the wigwam.  They had
not proceeded far when Mrs. Dustin, reflecting that they had not scalped their
victims, and that her friends might demand ocular proof of the truth of her
thrilling story, went back with her companions, took off the scalps, and
carried them away in a bag.

     With strong hearts the three voyaged down the Merrimac to their homes,
every moment in peril from savages or the elements, and were received as
persons risen from the dead.  Mrs. Dustin found her husband and children
saved.  Soon afterward she went to Boston, carrying with her a gun and
tomahawk which she had brought from the wigwam, and her ten trophies; and the
General Court of Massachusetts gave these brave sufferers fifty pounds as a
reward for their heroism.  Ex-Governor Nicholson, of Maryland, sent a metal
tankard to Mrs. Dustin and Mrs. Neff as a token of his admiration. That
tankard is now (1875) in the possession of Mr. Emery Coffin, of Newburyport,
Massachusetts.  During the summer of 1874, one hundred and seventy-seven years
after the event, citizens of Massachusetts and New Hampshire erected on the
highest point of Dustin's Island an elegant monument commemorative of the
heroic deed.  It displays a figure of Mrs. Dustin, holding in her right hand,
raised in the attitude of striking, a tomahawk, and a bunch of scalps in the
other.  On it are inscribed the names of HANNAH DUSTIN, MARY NEFF, and SAMUEL
LEONARDSON, the English lad.

     Other places suffered dreadfully during the summer of 1697.  Haverhill
was again attacked and desolated.  The treaty at Ryswick (a small village near
the Hague, in Holland), soon afterward stayed the flow of blood in Europe and
America.  There a peace was agreed upon between Louis the Fourteenth of
France, and England, Spain, Holland and the German Empire, which ended a war
of more than seven years duration.  Louis was compelled to acknowledge William
of Orange to be the sovereign of England.  That war cost Great Britain one
hundred and fifty million dollars in cash, besides a hundred million dollars
loaned.  The latter laid the foundations of the enormous national debt of
Great Britain, now a heavy burden to the English people.

     A little before the treaty at Ryswick a Board of Trade and Plantations
was established in England, whose duty it was to have a general oversight of
the affairs of the American colonies.  It was a permanent commission, the
members of which were called "Lords of Trade and Plantations." It consisted of
seven members, with a president, and was always a ready instrument of
oppression in the hands of the sovereign.  It became, as we shall see, a
powerful promoter of those discontents in the colonies which finally broke out
into a flame of rebellion in 1775.

     The lull in the storm of war, caused by the treaty at Ryswick, was of
short duration.  Aspirants for power again tormented the people with the evils
of war.  King James the Second died in France in September, 1701.  He had been
shielded by Louis after his flight from his throne to France, and now the
French monarch acknowledged James's son, James Francis Edward (who is known in
history as The Pretender), to be the lawful king of England. This act offended
the English because the crown had been settled upon Anne, James's second and
Protestant daughter.  Louis likewise offended the English by placing his
grandson, Philip of Anjou, on the throne of Spain, so increasing French
influence among the dynasties of Europe.  William was enraged, and was
preparing for war, when a fall from his horse, while hunting, caused his
death.  He was succeeded by Anne, and the causes already mentioned, with
others of less importance, impelled her to declare war against France after
her accession to the throne. Hostilities began in 1702, and, as before, the
colonies of the two governments in America became involved in the conflict.
In the war that ensued, and which lasted almost a dozen years, the New
Englanders again suffered dread - fully from incursions of the French and
Indians.  That contest is known in our annals as QUEEN ANNE's WAR.

     It may be observed that at this opening of a new era in the history of
New England, when the liberal and enlightened reign of William was making a
deep impression upon England and her American colonies, the people of our
present Eastern States were more united, more enlightened, and less bigoted
than they had ever been before.  The Earl of Bellamont, whom we have mentioned
as governor of New York, was made governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire
also.  When he visited Boston in 1699, he found controversies allayed,
passions cooled, and the prevalence of a general disposition to promote
harmony and good-fellowship.  Wisdom and moderation had taken the places of
folly and vehemence in thought and action and there was a happy toleration
abroad.  The printing-press was doing its beneficent work efficiently in
scattering the seeds of knowledge, thereby creating a sentiment of brotherhood
among separated religious communities.  From the beginning, the New Englanders
were distinguished for their appetite for knowledge and the ready reception,
when untrammeled by arbitrary restraints, of truths of every kind.  This
disposition formed the springs of that love for liberty which has always
distinguished the inhabitants of New England.