The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut Part 2

"But there was a certain man called Simon which beforetime in the same city used sorcery and bewitched the people of Samaria." Acts viii, 9.

"If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered, and men gather them and cast them into the fire, and they are burned."[C] John xv, 6.

[Footnote C: In the opinion of the eminent Italian jurist Bartolo, witches were burned alive in early times on this authority.]

These citations make clear the scriptural recognition of witchcraft as a heinous sin and crime. It is, however, necessary to draw a broad line of demarcation between the ancient forms and manifestations which have been brought into view for an ill.u.s.trative purpose, and that delusion or mania which centered in the theologic belief and teaching that Satan was the arch enemy of mankind, and clothed with such power over the souls of men as to make compacts with them, and to hold supremacy over them in the warfare between good and evil.

The church from its earliest history looked upon witchcraft as a deadly sin, and disbelief in it as a heresy, and set its machinery in motion for its extirpation. Its authority was the word of G.o.d and the civil law, and it claimed jurisdiction through the ecclesiastical courts, the secular courts, however, acting as the executive of their decrees and sentences.

Such was the cardinal principle which governed in the merciless attempts to suppress the epidemic in spreading from the continent to England and Scotland, and at last to the Puritan colonies in America, where the last chapter of its history was written.

There can be no better, no more comprehensive modern definition of the crime once a heresy, or of the popular conception of it, than the one set forth in the New England indictments, to wit: "interteining familiarity with Satan the enemy of mankind, and by his help doing works above the course of nature."

In few words Henry Charles Lea, in his _History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages_, a.n.a.lyzes the development of the Satanic doctrine from a superst.i.tion into its acceptance as a dogma of Christian belief.

"As Satan's princ.i.p.al object in his warfare with G.o.d was to seduce human souls from their divine allegiance, he was ever ready with whatever temptation seemed most likely to effect his purpose. Some were to be won by physical indulgence; others by conferring on them powers enabling them apparently to forecast the future, to discover hidden things, to gratify enmity, and to acquire wealth, whether through forbidden arts or by the services of a familiar demon subject to their orders. As the neophyte in receiving baptism renounced the devil, his pomps and his angels, it was necessary for the Christian who desired the aid of Satan to renounce G.o.d. Moreover, as Satan when he tempted Christ offered him the kingdoms of the earth in return for adoration--'If thou therefore wilt worship me all shall be thine' (Luke iv, 7)--there naturally arose the idea that to obtain this aid it was necessary to render allegiance to the prince of h.e.l.l. Thence came the idea, so fruitful in the development of sorcery, of compacts with Satan by which sorcerers became his slaves, binding themselves to do all the evil they could to follow their example. Thus the sorcerer or witch was an enemy of all the human race as well as of G.o.d, the most efficient agent of h.e.l.l in its sempiternal conflict with heaven. His destruction, by any method, was therefore the plainest duty of man.

"This was the perfected theory of sorcery and witchcraft by which the gentle superst.i.tions inherited and adopted from all sides were fitted into the Christian dispensation and formed part of its accepted creed."

(_History of Inquisition in the Middle Ages_, 3, 385, LEA.)

Once the widespread superst.i.tion became adapted to the forms of religious faith and discipline, and "the prince of the power of the air"

was clothed with new energies, the Devil was taken broader account of by Christianity itself; the sorcery of the ancients was embodied in the Christian conception of witchcraft; and the church undertook to deal with it as a heresy; the door was opened wide to the sweep of the epidemic in some of the continental lands.

In Bamburg and Wurzburg, Geneva and Como, Toulouse and Lorraine, and in many other places in Italy, Germany, and France, thousands were sacrificed in the names of religion, justice, and law, with bigotry for their advocate, ignorance for their judge, and fanaticism for their executioner. The storm of demonism raged through three centuries, and was stayed only by the mighty barriers of protest, of inquiry, of remonstrance, and the forces that crystallize and mold public opinion, which guides the destinies of men in their march to a higher civilization.

The flames burning so long and so fiercely on the continent at first spread slowly in England and Scotland. Sorcery in some of its guises had obtained therein ever since the Conquest, and victims had been burned under the king's writ after sentence in the ecclesiastical courts; but witchcraft as a compact with Satan was not made a felony until 1541, by a statute of Henry VIII. Cranmer, in his _Articles of Visitation_ in 1549, enjoined the clergy to inquire as to any craft invented by the Devil; and Bishop Jewell, preaching before the queen in 1558, said:

"It may please your Grace to understand that witches and sorcerers within these last few years are marvelously increased within your Grace's realm, Your Grace's subjects pine away even unto the death, their colour fadeth, their flesh rotteth, their speech is benumbed, their senses are bereft."

The act of 1541 was amended in Queen Elizabeth's reign, in 1562, but at the accession of James I--himself a fanatic and bigot in religious matters, and the author of the famous _Daemonologie_--a new law was enacted with exact definition of the crime, which remained in force more than a hundred years. Its chief provision was this:

"If any person or persons use, practice or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit, or shall consult, covenant with, entertain, employ, feed or reward any evil and wicked spirit to or for any intent or purpose, or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth or the skin, bone, or any part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment, or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined or lamed in his or her body or any part thereof: every such offender is a felon without benefit of clergy."

Under this law, and the methods of its administration, witchcraft so called increased; persecutions multiplied, especially under the Commonwealth, and notably in the eastern counties of England, whence so many of all estates, all sorts and conditions of men, had fled over seas to set up the standard of independence in the Puritan colonies.

Many executions occurred in Lancashire, in Suffolk, Ess.e.x, and Huntingdonshire, where the infamous scoundrel "Witch-finder-General"

Matthew Hopkins, under the sanction of the courts, was "p.r.i.c.king,"

"waking," "watching," and "testing" persons suspected or accused of witchcraft, with fiendish ingenuity of indignity and torture. Says James Howell in his _Familiar Letters_, in 1646:

"We have mult.i.tudes of witches among us; for in Ess.e.x and Suffolk there were above two hundred indicted within these two years, and above the half of them executed."

"Within the compa.s.s of two years (1645-7), near upon three hundred witches were arraigned, and the major part of them executed in Ess.e.x and Suffolk only. Scotland swarms with them more and more, and persons of good quality are executed daily."

Scotland set its seal on witchcraft as a crime by an act of its parliament so early as 1563, amended in 1649. The ministers were the inquisitors and persecutors. They heard the confessions, and inflicted the tortures, and their cruelties were commensurate with the hard and fast theology that froze the blood of mercy in their veins.

The trials were often held by special commissions issued by the privy council, on the pet.i.tion of a presbytery or general a.s.sembly. It was here that those terrible instruments of torture, the caschielawis, the lang irnis, the boot and the pilliewinkis, were used to wring confessions from the wretched victims. It is all a strange and gruesome story of horrors told in detail in the state trial records, and elsewhere, from the execution of Janet Douglas--Lady Glammis--to that of the poor old woman at Dornoch who warmed herself at the fire set for her burning. So firmly seated in the Scotch mind was the belief in witchcraft as a sin and crime, that when the laws against it were repealed in 1736, Scotchmen in the highest stations of church and state remonstrated against the repeal as contrary to the law of G.o.d; and William Forbes, in his "Inst.i.tutes of the Law of Scotland," calls witchcraft "that black art whereby strange and wonderful things are wrought by a power derived from the devil."

This glance at what transpired on the continent and in England and Scotland is of value, in the light it throws on the beliefs and convictions of both Pilgrim and Puritan--Englishmen all--in their new domain, their implicit reliance on established precedents, their credulity in witchcraft matters, and their absolute trust in scriptural and secular authority for their judicial procedure, and the execution of the grim sentences of the courts, until the revolting work of the accuser and the searcher, and the delusion of the ministers and magistrates aflame with mistaken zeal vanished in the sober afterthought, the reaction of the public mind and conscience, which at last crushed the machinations of the Devil and his votaries in high places.

CHAPTER IV

"Hence among all the superst.i.tions that have 'stood over' from primeval ages, the belief in witchcraft has been the most deeply rooted and the most tenacious of life. In all times and places until quite lately, among the most advanced communities, the reality of witchcraft has been accepted without question, and scarcely any human belief is supported by so vast a quant.i.ty of recorded testimony."

"Considering the fact that the exodus of Puritans to New England occurred during the reign of Charles I, while the persecutions for witchcraft were increasing toward a maximum in the mother country, it is rather strange that so few cases occurred in the New World." _New France and New England_ (pp. 136-144), FISKE.

The forefathers believed in witchcraft--entering into compacts with the Devil--and in all its diabolical subtleties. They had cogent reasons for their belief in example and experience. They set it down in their codes as a capital offense. They found, as has been shown abundant authority in the Bible and in the English precedents. They anch.o.r.ed their criminal codes as they did their theology in the wide and deep haven of the Old Testament decrees and prophecies and maledictions, and doubted not that "the Scriptures do hold forth a perfect rule for the direction and government of all men in all duties which they are to perform to G.o.d and men."

Ma.s.sachusetts, Connecticut, and New Haven, early in their history enacted these capital laws:

In Ma.s.sachusetts (1641):

"Witchcraft which is fellowship by covenant with a familiar spirit to be punished with death."

"Consulters with witches not to be tolerated, but either to be cut off by death or banishment or other suitable punishment." (_Abstract New England Laws_, 1655.)

In Connecticut (1642):

"If any man or woman be a witch--that is, hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit--they shall be put to death." Exodus xxii, 18; Leviticus xx, 27; Deuteronomy xviii, 10, 11. (_Colonial Records of Connecticut_, Vol. I, p. 77).

In New Haven (1655):

"If any person be a witch, he or she shall be put to death according to"

Exodus xxii, 18; Leviticus xx, 27; Deuteronomy xviii, 10, 11. (_New Haven Colonial Records_, Vol. II, p. 576, Cod. 1655).

These laws were authoritative until the epidemic had ceased.

Witches were tried, condemned, and executed with no question as to due legal power, in the minds of juries, counsel, and courts, until the hour of reaction came, hastened by doubts and criticisms of the sources and character of evidence, and the magistrates and clergy halted in their prosecutions and denunciations of an alleged crime born of delusion, and nurtured by a theology run rampant.

"They had not been taught to question the wisdom or the humanity of English criminal law." (_Blue Laws--True and False_, p. 15, TRUMBULL.)

Here and there in New England, following the great immigration from Old England, from 1630-40, during the Commonwealth, and to the Restoration, several cases of witchcraft occurred, but the mania did not set its seal on the minds of men, and inspire them to run amuck in their frenzy, until the days of the swift onset in Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut in 1692, when the zenith of Satan's reign was reached in the Puritan colonies.

A few words about the tragedy at Salem are relevant and essential. They are written because it was the last outbreak of epidemic demonopathy among the civilized peoples; it has been exploited by writers abroad, who have left the dreadful record of the treatment of the delusion in their own countries in the background; it was accompanied in some degree by like manifestations and methods of suppression in sister colonies; it was fanned into flames by men in high station who reveled in its merciless extirpation as a religious duty, and eased their consciences afterwards by contrition, confession and remorse, for their valiant service in the army of the theological devil; and especially for the contrasts it presents to the more cautious and saner methods of procedure that obtained in the governments of Connecticut and New Haven at the apogee of the delusion.

What say the historians and scholars, some of whose ancestors witnessed or partic.i.p.ated in the tragedies, and whose acquaintance with the facts defies all challenge?

"It is on the whole the most gruesome episode in American history, and it sheds back a lurid light upon the long tale of witchcraft in the past." (_Fiske's New France and New England_, 195.)

"The sainted minister in the church; the woman of the scarlet letter in the market place! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both." (_Scarlet Letter_, HAWTHORNE.)

"We are made partners in parish and village feuds. We share in the chimney corner gossip, and learn for the first time how many mean and merely human motives, whether consciously or unconsciously, gave impulse and intensity to the pa.s.sions of the actors in that memorable tragedy which dealt the death blow in this country to the belief in Satanic compacts." (_Among my Books--Witchcraft_, p. 142, LOWELL.)

"The tragedy was at an end. It lasted about six months, from the first accusations in March until the last executions in September.... It was an epidemic of mad superst.i.tious fear, bitterly to be regretted, and a stain upon the high civilization of the Bay Colony." (_Historic Towns of New England, Salem_, p. 148, LATIMER.)

What was done at Salem, when the tempest of unreason broke loose? Who were the chief actors in it? This was done. From the first accusation in March, 1692, to the last execution in September, 1692, nineteen persons were hanged and one man was pressed to death[D] (_no witch was ever burned in New England_), hundreds of innocent men and women were imprisoned, or fled into exile or hiding places, their homes were broken up, their estates were ruined, and their families and friends were left in sorrow, anxiety, and desolation; and all this terrorism was wrought at the instance of the chief men in the communities, the magistrates, and the ministers.