Great Epochs in American History Volume II Part 9

(1633-1636)

BY ALEXANDER JOHNSTON[1]

During the ten years after 1620, the twin colonies of Plymouth and Ma.s.sachusetts Bay had been fairly shaken down into their places, and had even begun to look around them for opportunities of extension. It was not possible that the fertile and inviting territory to the southwest should long escape their notice. In 1629, De Rasieres, an envoy from New Amsterdam, was at Plymouth. He found the Plymouth people building a shallop for the purpose of obtaining a share in the wampum trade of Narragansett Bay; and he very shrewdly sold them at a bargain enough wampum to supply their needs, for fear they should discover at Narragansett the more profitable peltry trade beyond. This artifice only put off the evil day.

Within the next three years, several Plymouth men, including Winslow, visited the Connecticut River, "not without profit." In April, 1631, a Connecticut Indian visited Governor Winthrop at Boston, asking for settlers, and offering to find them corn and furnish eighty beaver skins a year. Winthrop declined even to send an exploring party. In the midsummer of 1633, Winslow went to Boston to propose a joint occupation of the new territory by Plymouth and Ma.s.sachusetts Bay; but the latter still refused, doubting the profit and the safety of the venture.

Three months later Plymouth undertook the work alone. A small vessel, under command of William Holmes, was sent around by sea to the mouth of the Connecticut River, with the frame of a trading house and workmen to put it up. When Holmes had sailed up the river as far as the place where Hartford was afterward built, he found the Dutch already in possession. For ten years they had been talking of erecting a fort on the Varsche River; but the ominous and repeated appearance of New Englanders in the territory had roused them to action at last.

John Van Corlear, with a few men, had been commissioned by Governor Van Twiller, and had put up a rude earthwork, with two guns, within the present jurisdiction of Hartford. His summons to Holmes to stop under penalty of being fired into met with no more respect than was shown by the commandant of Rensselaerswyck to his challengers, according to the veracious Knickerbocker. Holmes declared that he had been sent up the river, and was going up the river, and furthermore he went up the river. His little vessel pa.s.sed on to the present site of Windsor. Here the crew disembarked, put up and garrisoned their trading house, and then returned home. Plymouth had at least planted the flag far within the coveted and disputed territory.

In December of the following year a Dutch force of seventy men from New Amsterdam appeared before the trading house to drive out the intruders. He must be strong who drives a Yankee away from a profitable trade; and the att.i.tude of the little garrison was so determined that the Dutchmen, after a few hostile demonstrations, decided that the nut was too hard to crack, and withdrew. For about twenty years thereafter the Dutch held post at Hartford, isolated from Dutch support by a continually deepening ma.s.s of New Englanders, who refrained from hostilities, and waited until the apple was ripe enough to drop.

With respect to the claims of the Indians, the att.i.tudes of the two parties to the struggle were directly opposite. The Dutch came on the strength of purchase from the Pequots, the conquerors and lords paramount of the local Indians. Holmes brought to the Connecticut River in his vessel the local sachems, who had been driven away by the Pequots, and made his purchases from them. The English policy will account for the unfriendly disposition of the Pequots, and, when followed up by the tremendous overthrow of the Pequots, for Connecticut's permanent exemption from Indian difficulties. The Connecticut settlers followed a straight road, buying lands fairly from the Indians found in possession, ignoring those who claimed a supremacy based on violence, and, in ease of resistance by the latter, a.s.serting and maintaining for Connecticut an exactly similar t.i.tle,--the right of the stronger. Those who claimed right received it; those who preferred force were accommodated.

One route to the new territory by Long Island Sound and the Connecticut River, had thus been appropriated. The other, the overland route through Ma.s.sachusetts, was explored during the same year, 1633, by one John Oldham, who was murdered by the Pequots two years afterward. He found his way westward to the Connecticut River, and brought back most appetizing accounts of the upper Connecticut Valley; and his reports seem to have suggested a way out of a serious difficulty which had come to a head in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay.

The colony of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay was at this time limited to a district covering not more than twenty or thirty miles from the sea, and its greatest poverty, as Cotton stated, was a poverty of men. And yet the colony was to lose part of its scanty store of men. Three of the eight Ma.s.sachusetts towns, Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown (now Cambridge), had been at odds with the other five towns on several occasions; and the a.s.signed reasons are apparently so frivolous as to lead to the suspicion that some fundamental difference was at the bottom of them. The three towns named had been part of the great Puritan influx of 1630. Their inhabitants were "newcomers," and this slight division may have been increased by the arrival and settlement, in 1633, of a number of strong men at these three towns, notably Hooker, Stone, and Haynes at Newtown. Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown showed many symptoms of an increase of local feeling: the two former led the way, in October, 1633, in establis.h.i.+ng town governments under "selectmen;" and all three neglected or evaded, more or less, the fundamental feature of Ma.s.sachusetts policy,--the limitation of office-holding and the elective franchise to church-members. The three towns fell into the position of the commonwealth's opposition, a position not particularly desirable at the time and under all the circ.u.mstances.

The ecclesiastical leaders of Dorchester were Warham and Maverick; of Newtown, Hooker and Stone; of Watertown, Phillips. Haynes of Newtown, Ludlow of Dorchester, and Pynchon of Roxbury, were the princ.i.p.al lay leaders of the half-formed opposition. Some have thought that Haynes was jealous of Governor Winthrop, Hooker of Cotton, and Ludlow of everybody. But the opposition, if it can be fairly called an opposition, was not so definite as to be traceable to any such personal source. The strength which marked the divergence was due neither to ambition nor to jealousy, but to the strength of mind and character which marked the leaders of the minority.

Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone were of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Hooker began to preach at Chelmsford in 1626, and was silenced for non-conformity in 1629. He then taught school, his a.s.sistant being John Eliot, afterward the apostle to the Indians; but the chase after him became warmer, and in 1630 he retired to Holland and resumed his preaching. In 1632 he and Stone came to New England as pastor and teacher of the church at Newtown; and the two took part in the migration to Hartford. Here Hooker became the undisputed ecclesiastical leader of Connecticut until his death in 1647. John Warham and John Maverick, both of Exeter in England, came to New England in 1630, as pastor and teacher of Dorchester. Maverick died while preparing to follow his church, but Warham settled with his paris.h.i.+oners at Windsor, and died there in 1670. George Phillips, also a Cambridge man, came to New England in 1630, as pastor of the church at Watertown. He took no part in the migration, but lived and died at Watertown. Fate seems to have determined that Wendell Phillips should belong to Ma.s.sachusetts.

Roger Ludlow was Endicott's brother-in-law. He came to New England in 1630, and settled at Dorchester. He was deputy governor in 1634, and seems to have been "slated," to use the modern term, for the governors.h.i.+p in the following year. But this private agreement among the deputies was broken, for some unknown reason, by the voters, who chose Haynes, perhaps as a less objectionable representative of the opposition. Ludlow complained so openly and angrily of the failure to carry out the agreement that he was dropped from the magistracy at the next election. He went at once to Connecticut, and was deputy governor there in alternate years until 1654. Incensed at the interference of New Haven to prevent his county, Fairfield, from waging an independent warfare against the Dutch, he went to Virginia in 1654, taking the records of the county with him. It is not known when or where he died.

Pynchon, the third lay leader of the opposition, took part in the migration, but remained within the jurisdiction of Ma.s.sachusetts, founding the town of Springfield.

At the May session of the Ma.s.sachusetts General Court in 1634, an application for "liberty to remove" was received from Newtown. It was granted. At the September session the request was changed into one for removal to Connecticut. This was a very different matter, and, after long debate, was defeated by the vote of the a.s.sistants, tho the Deputies pa.s.sed it. Various reasons were a.s.signed for the request to remove to Connecticut,--lack of room in their present locations, the desire to save Connecticut from the Dutch, and "the strong bent of their spirits to remove thither;" but the last looks like the strongest reason. In like manner, while the arguments to the contrary were those which would naturally suggest themselves, the weakening of Ma.s.sachusetts, and the peril of the emigrants, the concluding argument, that "the removing of a candlestick" would be "a great judgment," seems to show the feeling of all parties that the secession was the result of discord between two parties.

Haynes was made governor at the next General Court. Successful inducements were offered to some of the Newtown people to remove to Boston, and some few concessions were made. But the migration which had been denied to the corporate towns had probably been begun by individuals. There is a tradition that some of the Watertown people pa.s.sed this winter of 1634-35 at the place where Wethersfield now stands. In May, 1635, the Ma.s.sachusetts General Court voted that liberty be granted to the people of Watertown and Roxbury to remove themselves to any place within the jurisdiction of Ma.s.sachusetts. In March, 1636, the secession having already been accomplished, the General Court issued a "Commission to Several Persons to govern the people at Connecticut."

Its preamble reads: "Whereas, upon some reasons and grounds, there are to remove from this our Commonwealth and body of the Ma.s.sachusetts in America divers of our loving friends and neighbors, freemen and members of Newtown, Dorchester, Watertown, and other places, who are resolved to transport themselves and their estates unto the river of Connecticut, there to reside and inhabit; and to that end divers are there already, and divers others shortly to go." This tacit permission was the only authorization given by Ma.s.sachusetts; but it should be noted that the unwilling permission was made more gracious by a kindly loan of cannon and ammunition for the protection of the new settlements.

If it be true that some of the Watertown people had wintered at Wethersfield in 1634-35, this was the first civil settlement in Connecticut; and it is certain that, all through the following spring, summer, and autumn, detached parties of Watertown people were settling at Wethersfield. During the summer of 1635, a Dorchester party appeared near the Plymouth factory, and laid the foundations of the town of Windsor. In October of the same year a party of sixty persons, including women and children, largely from Newtown, made the overland march and settled where Hartford now stands. Their journey was begun so late that the winter overtook them before they reached the river, and, as they had brought their cattle with them, they found great difficulty in getting everything across the river by means of rafts.

It may have been that the echoes of all these preparations had reached England, and stirred the tardy patentees to action. During the autumn of 1635, John Winthrop, Jr., agent of the Say and Sele a.s.sociates, reached Boston, with authority to build a large fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. He was to be "Governor of the River Connecticut" for one year, and he at once issued a proclamation to the Ma.s.sachusetts emigrants, asking "under what right and preference they had lately taken up their plantation."

It is said that they agreed to give up any lands demanded by him, or to return on having their expenses repaid. A more dangerous influence, however, soon claimed Winthrop's attention. Before the winter set in he had sent a party to seize the designated spot for a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River. His promptness was needed. Just as his men had thrown up a work sufficient for defense and had mounted a few guns, a Dutch s.h.i.+p from New Amsterdam appeared, bringing a force intended to appropriate the same place. Again the Dutch found themselves a trifle late; and their post at Hartford was thus finally cut off from effective support.

This was a horrible winter to the advanced guard of English settlers on the upper Connecticut. The navigation of the river was completely blocked by ice before the middle of November; and the vessels which were to have brought their winter supplies by way of Long Island Sound and the river were forced to return to Boston, leaving the wretched settlers unprovided for. For a little while some scanty supplies of corn were obtained from the neighboring Indians, but this resource soon failed. About seventy persons straggled down the river to the fort at its mouth. There they found and dug out of the ice a sixty-ton vessel, and made their way back to Boston. Others turned back on the way they had come, and struggled through the snow and ice to "the Bay." But a few held their grip on the new territory. Subsisting first on a little corn bought from more distant Indians, then by hunting, and finally on ground-nuts and acorns dug from under the snow, they fought through the winter and held their ground. But it was a narrow escape. Spring found them almost exhausted, their unsheltered cattle dead, and just time enough to bring necessary supplies from home. The Dorchester people alone lost cattle to the value of two thousand pounds.

The Newtown congregation, in October, 1635, found customers for their old homes in a new party from England; and in the following June Hooker and Stone led their people overland to Connecticut. They numbered one hundred, with one hundred and sixty head of cattle. Women and children were of the party. Mrs. Hooker, who was ill, was carried on a litter; and the journey, of "about one hundred miles," occupied two weeks. Its termination was well calculated to dissipate the evil auguries of the previous winter. The Connecticut Valley in early June!

Its green meadows, flanked by wooded hills, lay before them. Its oaks, whose patriarch was to shelter their charter, its great elms and tulip-trees, were broken by the silver ribbon of the river; here and there were the wigwams of the Indians, or the cabins of the survivors of the winter; and, over and through all, the light of a day in June welcomed the newcomers. The thought of abandoning Connecticut disappeared forever.

[1] From Johnston's "History of Connecticut." By permission of, and by arrangement with, the authorized publishers, Houghton, Mifflin Co. Copyright, 1887, by Alexander Johnston.

WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ENGLAND

(1647-1696)

BY JOHN G. PALFREY[1]

The people of Ma.s.sachusetts in the seventeenth century, like all other Christian people at that time and later,--at least, with extremely rare individual exceptions,--believed in the reality of a hideous crime called witchcraft. They thought they had Scripture for that belief, and they knew they had law for it, explicit and abundant; and with them law and Scripture were absolute authorities for the regulation of opinion and of conduct.

In a few instances, witches were believed to have appeared in the earlier years of New England. But the cases had been sporadic. The first instance of an execution for witchcraft is said to have occurred in Connecticut, soon after the settlement [1647, May 30th]; but the circ.u.mstances are not known, and the fact has been doubted. A year later, one Margaret Jones, of Charlestown in Ma.s.sachusetts, and it has been said, two other women in Dorchester and Cambridge, were convicted and executed for the goblin crime. These cases appear to have excited no more attention than would have been given to the commission of any other felony, and no judicial record of them survives....

With three or four exceptions,--for the evidence respecting the a.s.serted sufferers at Dorchester and Cambridge is imperfect,--no person appears to have been punished for witchcraft in Ma.s.sachusetts, nor convicted of it, for more than sixty years after the settlement, though there had been three or four trials of other persons suspected of the crime. At the time when the question respecting the colonial charter was rapidly approaching an issue, and the public mind was in feverish agitation, the ministers sent out a paper of proposals for collecting facts concerning witchcraft [1681]. This brought out a work from President Mather ent.i.tled "Ill.u.s.trious Providences," in which that influential person related numerous stories of the performances of persons leagued with the Devil [1684].

The imagination of his restless young son[2] was stimulated, and circ.u.mstances fed the flame. In the last year of the government of Andros [1688], a daughter, thirteen years old, of John Goodwin,--a mason living at the South End of Boston,--had a quarrel with an Irish washerwoman about some missing clothes. The woman's mother took it up, and scolded provokingly. Thereupon the wicked child, profiting, as it seems, by what she had been hearing and reading on the mysterious subject, "cried out upon her," as the phrase was, as a witch, and proceeded to act the part understood to be fit for a bewitched person; in which behavior she was presently joined by three others of the circle, one of them only four or five years old. Now they would lose their hearing, now their sight, now their speech; and sometimes all three faculties at once. They mewed like kittens; they barked like dogs.

Cotton Mather prayed with one of them; but she lost her hearing, he says, when he began, and recovered it as soon as he finished. Four Boston ministers and one of Charlestown held a meeting, and pa.s.sed a day in fasting and prayer, by which exorcism the youngest imp was "delivered." The poor woman, crazed with all this pother,--if in her right mind before,--and defending herself unskilfully in her foreign gibberish and with the volubility of her race, was interpreted as making some confession. A gossiping witness testified that six years before she had heard another woman say that she had seen the accused come down a chimney. She was required to repeat the Lord's Prayer in English,--an approved test; but being a Catholic, she had never learned it in that language. She could recite it, after a fas.h.i.+on, in Latin; but she was no scholar, and made some mistakes. The helpless wretch was convicted and sent to the gallows.

Cotton Mather took the oldest "afflicted" girl to his house, where she dexterously played upon his self-conceit to stimulate his credulity.

She satisfied him that Satan regarded him as his most terrible enemy, and avoided him with especial awe. When he prayed or read in the Bible, she was seized with convulsion fits. When he called to family devotion she would whistle, and sing, and scream, and pretend to try to strike and kick him; but her blows would be stopt before reaching his body, indicating that he was una.s.sailable by the Evil One. Mather published an account of these transactions,[3] with a collection of other appropriate matter. The treatise circulated not only in Ma.s.sachusetts, but widely also in England, where it obtained the warm commendation of Richard Baxter; and it may be supposed to have had an important effect in producing the more disastrous delusion which followed three years after. The Goodwin children soon got well: in other words, they were tired of their atrocious foolery; and the death of their victim gave them a pretense for a return to decent behavior....

Martha Corey and Rebecca Nourse were cried out against. Both were church-members of excellent character; the latter seventy years of age. They were examined by the same magistrates, and sent to prison, and with them a child of Sarah Good, only four or five years old, also charged with diabolical practises. Mr. Parris preached upon the text, "Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?" Sarah Cloyse, understanding the allusion to be to Nourse, who was her sister, went out of church, and was accordingly cried out upon, examined, and committed. Elizabeth Procter was another person charged.

The Deputy-Governor and five magistrates came to Salem for the examination of the two prisoners last named. Procter appealed to one of the children who was accusing her. "Dear child," she said, "it is not so; there is another judgment, dear child:" and presently they denounced as a witch her husband, who stood by her side. A week afterward warrants were issued for the apprehension of four other suspected persons; and a few days later for three others, one of whom, Philip English, was the princ.i.p.al merchant of Salem. On the same day, on the information of one of the possessed girls, an order was sent to Maine for the arrest of George Burroughs, formerly a candidate for the ministry at Salem Village, and now minister of Wells. The witness said that Burroughs, besides being a wizard, had killed his first two wives, and other persons whose ghosts had appeared to her and denounced him....

Affairs were in this condition when the King's Governor arrived. About a hundred alleged witches were now in jail, awaiting trial. Their case was one of the first matters to which his attention was called.

Without authority for so doing,--for by the charter which he represented, the establishment of judicial courts was a function of the General Court,--he proceeded to inst.i.tute a special commission of Oyer and Terminer, consisting of seven magistrates, first of whom was the hard, obstinate, narrow-minded Stoughton. The commissioners applied themselves to their office without delay. Their first act was to try Bridget Bishop, against whom an accusation twenty years old and retracted by its author on his death-bed, had been revived. The court sentenced her to die by hanging, and she was accordingly hanged at the end of eight days. Cotton Mather, in his account of the proceedings, relates that as she pa.s.sed along the street under guard, Bishop "had given a look toward the great and s.p.a.cious meeting-house of Salem, and immediately a daemon, invisibly entering the house, tore down a part of it." It may be guessed that a plank or a part.i.tion had given way under the pressure of the crowd of lookers-on collected for so extraordinary a spectacle.

At the end of another four weeks the court sat again and sentenced five women, two of Salem, and one each of Amesbury, Ipswich, and Topsfield, all of whom were executed, protesting their innocence. In respect to one of them, Rebecca Nourse, a matron eminent for piety and goodness, a verdict of acquittal was first rendered. But Stoughton sent the jury out again, reminding them that in her examination, in reference to certain witnesses against her who had confest their own guilt, she had used the expression, "they came among us." Nourse was deaf, and did not catch what had been going on. When it was afterward repeated to her she said that by the coming among us she meant that they had been in prison together. But the jury adopted the court's interpretation of the word as signifying an acknowledgment that they had met at a witch orgy. The Governor was disposed to grant her a pardon. But Parris, who had an ancient grudge against her, interfered and prevailed. On the last communion day before her execution she was taken into church, and formally excommunicated by Noyes, her minister....

In the course of the next month, in which the Governor left Boston for a short tour of inspection in the Eastern country, fifteen persons--six women in one day, and on another eight women and one man--were tried, convicted, and sentenced. Eight of them were hanged.

The brave Giles Corey, eighty years of age, being arraigned, refused to plead. He said that the whole thing was an imposture, and that it was of no use to put himself on his trial, for every trial had ended in a conviction,--which was the fact. It is shocking to relate that, suffering the penalty of the English common law for a contumacious refusal to answer,--the _peine forte et dure_,--he was prest to death with heavy weights laid on his body. By not pleading he intended to protect the inheritance of his children, which, as he had been informed, would by a conviction of felony have been forfeit to the crown.

There had been twenty human victims, Corey included; besides two dogs, their accomplices in the mysterious crime. Fifty persons had obtained a pardon by confessing; a hundred and fifty were in prison awaiting trial; and charges had been made against two hundred more. The accusers were now flying at high quarries. Hezekiah Usher, known to the reader as an ancient magistrate of fair consideration, was complained of; and Mrs. Thacher, mother-in-law of Corwin, the justice who had taken the earliest examinations. Zeal in pus.h.i.+ng forward the prosecution began to seem dangerous; for what was to prevent an accused person from securing himself by confession, and then revenging himself on the accuser by arraigning him as a former ally?...

The drunken fever-fit was now over, and with returning sobriety came profound contrition and disgust. A few still held out against the return of reason. There are some men who never own that they have been in the wrong, and a few men who are forever incapable of seeing it.

Stoughton, with his bull-dog stubbornness, that might in other times have made him a St. Dominic, continued to insist that the business had been all right, and that the only mistake was in putting a stop to it.

Cotton Mather was always infallible in his own eyes. In the year after the executions he had the satisfaction of studying another remarkable case of possession in Boston; but when it and the treatise which he wrote upon it failed to excite much attention, and it was plain that the tide had set the other way, he soon got his consent to let it run at its own pleasure, and turned his excursive activity to other objects....

Members of some of the juries, in a written public declaration, acknowledged the fault of their wrongful verdicts, entreated forgiveness, and protested that, "according to their present minds, they would none of them do such things again, on such grounds, for the whole world; praying that this act of theirs might be accepted in way of satisfaction for their offense." A day of General Fasting was proclaimed by authority, to be observed throughout the jurisdiction, in which the people were invited to pray that "whatever mistakes on either hand had been fallen into, either by the body of this people, or by any orders of men, referring to the late tragedy raised among us by Satan and his instruments, through the awful judgment of G.o.d, he would humble them therefor, and pardon all the errors of his servants and people."

[1] From Palfrey's "History of New England." By permission of, and by arrangement with, the authorized publishers, Houghton, Miffin Co. Copyright, 1873.

[2] Cotton Mather, son of Increase Mather, the president of Harvard College.

[3] This work was ent.i.tled "Wonders of the Invisible World." It is now much sought after by collectors of Americana.