rest of my estate to my beloved wife, Sarah Kenney. I appoint my friends Henry Bartholomew and John Pickman of Salem overseers. Witnesses, William Flint, William Beale, John John Bayley. PHILIP ENGLISH. PART SECOND. of the true God to worship the false Gods or Devils of the Heathens, by whom the Israelites were surrounded. A belief in evil spirits, whose habitation is in the air, in deserts, ruins, and the waste places of the earth, forms a part of the creed of about all nations. In the days of Moses, deserts were considered the dwelling places of devils. The Saviour was led up of the spirit into the wilderness to be tempt The Prosecution of Philip English and his wife for ed of the Devil. Whether we construe this as Witchcraft. BY GEORGE F. CHEVER. In order to give a somewhat clear idea of this prosecution or persecution, we have deemed it best to make it a distinct article, and cast it into the shape of a second part of the Sketch of Philip English. By this means, the subject can be disconnected from the extraneous matter of the text, and be more clearly and effectually treated. The Salem witchcraft persecution is a study, and almost apart from the general history of that age; for its causes, existence, continuance and effects seem to have been outside the ordinary circle of human experience. Our endeavor will be to give some idea of those causes, as gathered from various authorities, together with certain documents illustrative of our more particular subject; and such general observations on the nature of witchcraft, as may appear pertinent, and susceptible of proof. A belief in witchcraft was no new thing, of course, with the men of 1692. From the earliest days of history such a belief has haunted the minds and souls of men. Witchcraft was denounced, indeed, in the Old Testament, but then the witchcraft of that day is believed by some to have been *Idolatry—the forsaking *It is evident from the Old Testament, that witchcraft, sorcery, and the like, were practised by the heathen nations, who surrounded the Israelites; though this practice among those nations seems to have partaken of a religious character-the worship of the Devil or false Gods-with peculiar rites and ceremonies appertaining thereto. Wizards, dreamers, sorcerers, astrologers, magicians, enchanters, diviners, charmers, soothsayers, consulters with a literal wilderness, or desert, or a retirement into the solitude of his own mind, wherein to examine his own thoughts and reflections, to meet and rebuke and conquer all the worldly questionings and ambitions which could be suggested to him, still we see the same belief, as in the days of Moses, viz., that the Devil inhabited the wilderness, that is, solitude.— The two men possessed of the Devil, whom the Saviour met in the country of the Gergesenes, came out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, and were dwellers, no doubt, in those lonely and desolate places. The man, whom he met and cured in the country of the Gadarenes, was a dweller in the tombs and in the mountains. The old Magicians retired to places destitute of inhabitants, where the Spirits told them those things which they should write. Lucian tells of a famous Magician who, with his companions, betook themselves into a desert, woody, shady region for a conversation with Spirits. It is evident that solitudes, deserts and waste places were ever believed to be the haunts of familiar spirits, false prophets, and necromancers,— all seem to have been known to the heathen nations, and to be included in the general condemnation of the Jewish Law, and as different branches only of one crime, viz., the forsaking of the true God for the worship of false ones. See Hale's "Modest Enquiry into the nature of withcraft," Chap. 13, for the Scripture authorities on this point; and for reference to various modern New England cases of witchcraft, see Calef's "More Wonders of the Invisible World," and particularly the authorities quoted by Cotton Mather in his "Wonders of the Invisible World," also in his "Magnalia," Book 7, Chap. 6, and in Upham's Lectures on Witchcraft. Spirits, and of a wide order and of various degrees; and that those who sought familiar spirits and intercourse with the Devil, or demons, went into the solitudes to seek them; while the possessed of the Devil were often driven into those solitudes, so congenial to the powers afflicting them. ers detected a close resemblance to the Devil of the Scriptures. The Indian Powahs prayed to Hobbamock for the removal of evils, and the common people joined or said Amen, some times breaking out in songs to him. It has been said that the Indians sometimes sacrificed even their own children to him. Such scenes reminded our Fathers of the old Heathens, and strengthened the parallel they drew. This wilderness had been given them of the Lord, as was Canaan to the Jews, and as wrested from the dominion of the Heathen, and more especially of the Devil they served; and whose reign, so long undisputed here, was now invaded by the Church of Christ. The solitudes which he had so long possessed and been worshipped in, were now to resound with the songs of Zion-a hateful music to his rebellious ear. The strict puritanism of the early settlers was supposed to be peculiarly offensive to him; and when witchcraft was discovered in New England, it was thought not strange that the Devil At the time the Pilgrims and Paritans sought these shores, the country was a wilderness of woods-the "American Desarts," as Cotton Mather describes them-and the natives were regarded as Heathens, and their Gods Devils. Our Fathers ran the parallel with, and were pleased to note the resemblance between themselves and the ancient Israelites. As the Jews had their Exodus of old, so had our Fathers in the latter day. As the heathen surrounded the latter, so did the Indians their own little band. If the Israelites had the old Canaan, they had the new. In the rites and ceremonies and worshipped Deities of the Indians, they beheld a resemblance to those of the ancient heathen, who begirt Israel. The Indians were polythe-should endeavor to afflict a people who most ists and practicers of witchcraft, as were the old Heathen; and in their "Hobbamock" our Fath "They (the Indians inhabiting these parts of America) generally acknowledged and worshipped many Gods; therefore greatly esteemed and reverenced their priests, powaws, or wizards, who were esteemed as having immediate converse with the Gods." Cotton Mather, History of New England, Book 6, p. 52. "That the Powaws, by the infernal spirits, often killed persons, caused lameness and impotency, as well as showed their art in performing things beyond hnmane, by diabolick skill; such who have conversed among them have had no reason to question." Idem. †Hobbamock,-who appears to have been the Devil of the Indians, and far more worshipped when our fathers landed in New England, than Kichtan, their good God, from whose worship they are said to have declined according to the priests, chief warriors, powahs, and Panieses, (counsellors of the King,) often appeared to them in the shape of a man, fawn or eagle, but generally of a snake, who gave them advice in their difficult undertakings. hated, him and whom he most hated. At the date It is obvious that the Indian powahs of America were fully equal, if not superior, to the wizards and wonder-workers of the East Indies. Cotton Mather says these "Powaws" often employed their demons to smite their neighbors with blindness, lameness, and other mischiefs, and sometimes to kill them, and sometimes to cure their mal adies. *Cotton Mather, who thought himself, perhaps, the champion of the Lord against the sin of witchcraft in 1692, thus states what reasons Satan had for The powabs, (the Indian wizards) according to the vexing New England, and especially Salom, with Colony; and, as an incentive to this belief, a credence in certain quarters in the fulfilment of the grand prophecies of Scripture, which added a religious or rather fanatical furor to the excitement, hard for us to realize, or even imagine. The Salem Witchcraft stands alone in history for the gravity of its illusions and delusions—having a breadth and depth and significaney which were deemed truly appalling at the time, and revealing to our later eyes a host of terrible and gloomy and sombre imaginations, only surpasssed by the mysteries and horrors and wonders of the Apocalypse. If Salem has had to bear the whole burden of the witchcraft tragedy, which first broke out at its village (now Danvers) in 1692, it is because that affair is not well understood. Various able writers have shown, that neither the his arts at that period. "The New Englanders are a people of God settled in those which were once the Devil's territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed when he perceived such a people here accomplishing the promise of old made unto our blessed Jesus, That he should have the utmost parts of the earth for his posses sion. There was not a greater uproar among the Ephesians when the Gospel was first brought among them, than there was among the Powers of the Air (after whom the Ephesians walked) when first the silver trumpets of the Gospel here made the joyful sound. The Devil thus irritated, immediately tryed all sorts of methods to overturn this poor Plantation, &c." Again he says:-"We have been advised, by some Credible Christians yet alive, that a Malefacfactor, accused of Witchcraft as well as Murder, and Executed in this place [Boston] more than forty years ago, [that is before 1653] did then give Notice of an horrible PLOT against the Country, by WITCHCRAFT and a foundation of WITCHCRAFT then Laid, which if it were not Seasonably Discovered, would probably Blow up and pull down all the Churches in the Country. And we have now with Horror Seen the Discovery of Such a Witchcraft! An Army of Devils is horribly broke in upon the place, [Salem] which is the Center, and after a sort, the First-born of our English Settlements, and the Houses of the good People there, are filled with doleful shrieks of their Children and Servants, Tormented by Invisible Hands, with Tortures altogether preternatural. After belief in witchcraft, nor its punishment originated with us, nor even in our Colony; and that witchcraft was a crime against which statutes had been enacted in England, and persons punished for the crime there before our fathers enacted laws against it in the Colony. Various parties had been punished for that *crime in the Colony itself, ere the Salem the Mischiefs there Endeavored, and since in part Conquered, the terrible plague, of Evil Angels, hath made its progress into some other places, where some other persons have been in like manner Diabolically handled."-Cotton Mather. Wonders of Invisible World--Article —“Enchantments Encountered." It appears that Cotton Mather wrote a work some few years before 1692, in which he made mention of a few "Memorable Witchcrafts" committed in New England. The famous Richard Baxter graced the second edition of this work with words like these:"If any are scandalized that New England, a place of as serious piety as any I can hear of under Heaven, should be troubled so much with witches, I think 'tis no wonder. Where will the Devil show most malice but where he is hated and hateth most." Seo "Enchantments Encountered." New England had been looked upon as "a true Utopia." Says Mather: -"A famous Person returning hence [from N. E.] could in a Sermon before the Parliament profess, I have now been seven years in a country where I never saw one man drunk, or heard one oath sworn, or beheld one beggar in the streets all the while.'" Men like Mather believed that N. E. had degenerated from her early standard of purity-that the Devil had taken advantage of the fact-would be therefore authorized to torment her with all the more fury, and that he hated the Colony with all the more malice for the past, or the present godliness in it. We must therefore read the witchcraft matter, in part, through the theological belief of that day. *The following order of the Gen'l Court in 1648 can be found in the Records of Mass., vol. 2, page 242: "The Corte desire the course wch hath bene taken in England for discovry of witches, by watching them a certaine time. It is ordred, that the best and surest way may forthwth be put in practice, to begin this night if it may be, being the 18th of the 3d mo., and that the husband may be confined to a private roome and be also watched." Of this case, Deane in his Hist. of Scituate says: tragedy began; and cognizance had been taken of the offence, even in our own County, long before 1692, as we shall in due time prove. The Salem tragedy owed its importance in public estimation to a cause or causes apart from the mere origin of witchcraft in the Colony, as we shall endeavor to show; and the severity of that tragedy, which gave it such a notoriety, was due to a combination of very extraordinary circumstances, which have given it also such a prominence, that all the other witchcrafts noted in New England are almost lost in the gigantic and deep shadow our Salem affair has cast over its history. lem, and this by the special command of the Governor. His thoughts and his words are thus rendered a part of the official history of the times, and represent, we may therefore conclude, the prominent, prevailing belief of that day. A somewhat careful perusal of his work induces us to believe that our Salem tragedy was especially based upon a religious belief— then influential, and we may suppose prevalent in the Colony, and exculpates Salem from the main burden of the tragedy. It began here, but then that was an only accident. The same fury might have characterized it, had it broken out elsewhere. It was expected and dreaded—at least some great work or ploť of Sa thought a peculiarly appropriate place for the first assault of Satan. The public mind-the body-politic were prepared for this contagion; which, like the visible plague, might indeed break out in one spot, but which found the whole community predisposed to the attack. We have quoted from Cotton Mather, (who published his work in 1693 by the special com-an-and when it broke out at Salem, it was mand of the Governor, and the approbation of Stoughton, the Lieut. Gov.) to show what a belief was prevalent in high quarters at that day. We shall have occasion to quote again from Mather as to other causes for the strength and severity of the tragedy in 1692: and it should be borne in mind that a good part of Mather's work-"Wonders of the Invisible World"—is taken up by a sermon he preached in August, 1692, when the delusion was raging, and is reproduced with additions in 1693, and published with his trials of the witches in Sa "The accused was Margaret Jacob (alias Jones.) Winthrop describes her confinement and gives some details of the evidence. The persons who were appointed spies alleged that "they saw a little child coming in and going out from her repeatedly, and when they pursued the child, it vanished." On such testimony the poor woman was condemned and executed. "The first indictment for witchcraft in New England was at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1647, when the first execution for that offence took place." The only two indictments in Plymouth Colony were in 1660 and 1676. In the first of these cases the accuser publicly retracted her charge. Both cases were discharged. See Deane. Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, Book 6, Chap 7, gives several supposed examples of witchcraft in the Colony from 1662 to 1688, and doubtless believed in them as genuine, as did the generality of people at that day. These things deserve to be said of the Salem Witchcraft, for many minds perhaps still believe that Salem ought to bear its burden, and that our witchcraft is the *only, as it un (before quoted) in 1697, says, (page 16 17) "Several *Rev. Mr. Hale, of Beverly, who wrote his work persons have been charged with and suffered for the crime of Witchoraft in the Governments of the Massachusetts, New Haven, Stratford or Connecticut from the year 1646 to the year 1692." He further says that the first was a woman of Charlestown in the year 1647 or 8. Mr. Hale himself went to her on the day of her execution, and with some neighbors, who endeavored to bring her to confession and to repentance. She denied that she was a witch to th, last. Some time after this a Dorchester woman suffered for the same offence, steadily denying her guilt. A Cambridge woman also suffered by the name of Kendall, who denied her guilt to the last, and the principal accuser of whom was afterwards put in prison for adultery. In 1656 another was executed in Boston. Two or three were executed at Springfield-one of whom (Hale says) confessed. Hale mentions the cases of some four in New England who confessed, but says, "all others denied it unto the death," (page 20), and further says:-"But it is not my purpose to give a full relation of al questionably is the most important delusion of the Colony. Our Salem Witchcraft will never be forgotten, and never ought to be-as a lesson of caution and wisdom for the future; but while its locality has been rendered so notorious, the causes which produced it should also be as well known, that we may not bear any burden but that which rightfully belongs to us; and the share Salem ought to bear is only her common proportion of the ignorance and fanaticism of the Colony at that day. It is almost a sufficient sorrow that the Salem of 1692 was the chosen locality, for the deed and the place are indissolubly joined together; but Salem was not the cause. That lay behind her and around her, and the Colony shared with her the madness of the hour, and sympathized with her, and drew from her trouble and calamity fresh lessons of persecution and reproach. If the remainder of the Colony had been sane, and Salem only bereft of her reason, our old town might bear the burden; but the share taken in the matter by the Government, the Clergy, the Courts, and the remainder of the Colony, proves that our burden is their burden-our mistakes their mistakes-our penitence their penitence-our sorrow and shame theirs theirs also. There appears to have been joined to the Salem Tragedy a still deeper belief even than that of the mere temporary affliction of Salem or the Colony by the Devil. If we are to judge by Cotton Mather's sermon preached in August, 1692, there was a belief then prevalent, that the latter days were at hand, and that the second coming of the Lord might be soon expected. that have suffered for that sin, or of all the particulars charged upon them, which probably now is impossible, many witnessing viva voce those particulars which were not fully recorded." (page 20). By this quotation it would seem that not a few persons had suffered in N. E. prior to 1692 for witohcraft, and more, probably, than are generally supposed. It will be seen by Hale, that Salem Village did not originate the witchcraft persecution, though it culminated there. VOL. II. 4 That this may remain in no doubt, we shall make a few quotations* from Cotton Mather's *At the witchcraft period of 1692 it was supposed the powers of the Devil and his angels had been enlarged and his chain lengthened. Cotton Mather in August of that year preached a discourse, in which he takes as his text Rev. 12 chap., 12 verse: "Wo to the inhabiters of the Earth and of the Sea, for the Devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time." Judging with additions in his "Wonders of the Invisible from the tenor of this discourse, which is inserted World," Mather supposed that at that day the Devil was to have dominion for a time over a woful and sinful world ere his eternal overthrow; that the second coming of the Lord was at hand, and that the church after fearful torments (witchcraft and the like) was to enter into its promised rest; and that as the Lord was about to set up His kingdom, Satan would "assay the like for himself with most apish imitation." Mather was suspicious "that that there will be again an unusual Range of the Devil among us a little before the Second Coming of our Lord, &c.," as there was at the first; and says further: "The Evening Wolves will be much abroad when we are near the Evening of the World." Mather thought that the Church was quite near its Golden Age-the the Israel of God, and particularly for His New thousand years of rest and peace. "Good news for England Israel. If the Devil's time were above a thousand years ago pronounced short, what may we suppose it now in our time? Surely we are not a Thousand Years distant from those Happy Thousand Years of rest and peace and [which is better] holiness reserved for the people of God in the latter days; and if we are not a Thousand Years yet short of that Golden Age, there is cause to think that we are not an Hundred. That the blessed Thousand Years are not yet begun is abundantly clear from this, We do not see the Devil bound. No, the Devil was never more let Loose than in our Days; and it is very much that any should imagine otherwise. But the same thing that proves the Thousand Years of Prosperity for the Church of God UNDER THE WHOLE HEAVEN to be not yet Begun, do's also prove that it is not very far off; and that is the prodigious Wrath with which the Devil do's in our Days Prosecute, Yea Desolate the World." Wonders of Invisible World, Edition of 1693, pp. 36—7. Such extracts might be indefinitely made from [Cotton Mather, and in part explain the furor of the |