Salem Witchcraft

Copyright

Copyright © 2000 by Dover Publications, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2000, is an unabridged reprint of a standard edition of the work, which was initially published in 1867. A new Foreword by Professor Bryan F. Le Beau has been written specially for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Upham, Charles Wentworth, 1802-1875.

Salem witchcraft: with an account of Salem village and a history of opinions on witchcraft and kindred subjects / Charles W. Upham; foreword by Bryan F. Le Beau.

p. cm.

Originally published: Boston: Wiggin and Lunt, 1867.

9780486145457

1. Witchcraft—Massachusetts—Salem—History—17th century. 2. Salem (Mass.)—History—17th century. I. Title.

BF1576.U56 1999

13.4’3’097445—dc21

99-088472

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

40899X04

www.doverpublications.com

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Foreword

Preface

Map and Illustrations

INDEX TO THE MAP

Volume One - SALEM VILLAGE

Introduction

PART FIRST - SALEM VILLAGE

PART SECOND - WITCHCRAFT

Volume Two

PART THIRD - WITCHCRAFT AT SALEM VILLAGE

SUPPLEMENT

APPENDIX

GENERAL INDEX

A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST

A CATALOG OF SELECTED DOVER BOOKS IN ALL FIELDS OF INTEREST

DEDICATED

TO

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES,

PROFESSOR OF ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY IN

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Foreword

BETWEEN JUNE 10 and September 22, 1692, nineteen people were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, on the coast north of Boston. In addition, one man was pressed to death and over 150 others went to jail, where four adults and one infant died. Some prisoners remained until the following May. Compared to other witch-hunts in the Western world, it was a small incident in the history of a great superstition, but it has never lost its grip on our imagination.¹

After over three centuries of analysis, historians continue to fill library shelves with books on the causes of the Salem witchcraft trials. They have pointed to the economic, political, social, and religious turmoil into which New England plunged at the end of the seventeenth century; to New Englanders’ belief that the turmoil from which they suffered resulted from their fall from grace as God’s chosen people; to the provocation of a Puritan clergy desperately seeking to retain its position in a growingly liberal society; to the Salem village youngsters who may have first fallen victim to some form of psychic affliction, but then turned accusers, prompting uncontrollable fear on the part of some and fraud on the part of others; to the court’s inappropriate use of evidence; to pressures brought to bear upon the accused to confess in order to escape almost certain execution; and to the failure of authorities to act earlier and more decisively when serious questions were raised regarding the conduct of the court.² Charles Wentworth Upham planted or cultivated the seeds of all of these interpretations in the first significant history of the Salem witchcraft trials, Salem Witchcraft, published in 1867. In a valuable contribution to the field, Dover Publications has chosen to make Salem Witchcraft more accessible to the contemporary reader by reprinting it in unabridged form.

For over 130 years Upham’s history has remained the most influential work on the events of 1692. It is certainly the book with which serious students’ reading of the secondary literature on the Salem witchcraft trials should begin. Salem Witchcraft is often cited as the first modern account of the trials of 1692, but it is also very much a product of its time and place of publication, a point the reader should consider before turning to the text.

Charles Upham—minister, politician, and historian—was born on May 4, 1802, in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada. He was a descendant of John Upham, who had migrated from England to Massachusetts in 1635. Charles’s father, Joshua, was born in Brookfield and was a Harvard graduate (class of 1763), lawyer, and businessman. He was a Loyalist during the American Revolution and served as a colonel in the British army. The Colonials confiscated his property, and when the war ended, he moved to New Brunswick. There he served in the provincial council and as a judge on the New Brunswick supreme court. He died in 1808 while in London on official business.³

Joshua Upham’s unexpected death left his family with little money to support young Charles’ education. His father’s public positions and friends in high places, however, brought the boy to the attention of some notable figures. Their proffered assistance, if successful, might have led Charles down quite a different career path than he eventually chose. British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval took an interest in the boy, sending clothes and books and promises of further assistance. So too did Captain Samuel Blythe of the British navy, who was prepared to secure for Charles a midshipman’s warrant aboard his vessel. Both men died before they could deliver on their promises, however—Perceval by assassination in 1812, Blythe in a naval engagement with an American frigate in 1813.⁴

At age twelve Charles was apprenticed to a St. John apothecary, who also worked as a physician and surgeon, but when the man’s death closed that avenue to him as well, he was placed on a farm in Nova Scotia. Finally, in 1816, his cousin Phineas Upham, a merchant, invited him to Boston. After a brief stint in his business, Phineas recognized the boy’s more scholarly propensities, hired a tutor to prepare him for college, and in 1817 enrolled him in Harvard College. Charles graduated second in the class of 1821.⁵

During the lengthy winter breaks of his sophomore, junior, and senior years at Harvard, Charles taught in district schools in Wilmington, Leominster, and Bolton, Massachusetts. Upon graduation, however, he opted to enroll in Harvard’s Divinity School, from which he earned his master’s degree three years later. On December 8, 1824, Charles Upham was ordained and installed as pastor of the First Church of Salem, Massachusetts. In 1826 he married Ann Susan Holmes, daughter of the Reverend Abiel Holmes and sister of Oliver Wendell Holmes of Cambridge. Charles and Ann brought fifteen children into the world, only two of whom survived as adults.⁶

As its name implies, the First Church of Salem had roots in Puritan Congregationalism. It was the first church in New England established by the Puritans, but it had recently moved into the ranks of Unitarianism. The congregation’s selection of a new minister formalized that movement, and conservatives withdrew to form their own church. Upham became an active proponent of Unitarianism, and it was in this capacity that he began his life of letters. In addition to a number of articles in newspapers and periodicals, he was the author of three major books on religion: Principles of the Reformation (1826), in which he urged his readers to move beyond the religious beliefs of their Puritan fathers; Letters on the Logos (1828), on the true meaning of the Word in the New Testament; and The Scripture Doctrine of Regeneration (1840), wherein he proclaimed the triumph of liberal Christianity and the abandonment of Calvinism.⁷ The theme of liberal Christianity triumphant over Puritan Calvinism would underscore Upham’s history of the Salem witchcraft trials.

Given Salem’s divided faith, it was perhaps inevitable that Upham’s efforts on behalf of Unitarianism would be challenged. In 1833 the orthodox Congregationalists of Salem’s Third Church called as their new pastor the Reverend George Cheever. Cheever, who had already earned a reputation for his edited collections of American prose and poetry, rallied to his faith’s cause by writing a series of newspaper articles critical of Unitarian theology. Upham responded to Cheever, denouncing him for attacking Unitarianism in the public press, for being more abusive than enlightening, for intellectual dishonesty, and for near fanaticism in heaping contempt upon his brother clergymen. The controversy peaked when the Salem Gazette collected Upham’s articles into a special supplement, The Charge of Ignorance and Misrepresentation Proved Against Reverend George B. Cheever.⁸

As minister of Salem’s First Church, Upham became an important civic personage, often being called upon to deliver public addresses on various holidays, on election days, and on days of mourning for the passing of locally prominent and nationally known figures. He also participated in the founding of the Salem Lyceum, which historians rank as second only to Concord in the quality of its speakers. On December 8, 1844, however, twenty years to the day after he was installed, he resigned his pulpit following a severe attack of bronchitis that left him without the use of his voice for public address.⁹ When he recovered, he embarked on the second phase of his public life, as politician.

From 1844 to 1861 this son of a Tory exile became active in the Whig and Republican political parties and managed to be elected to local, state, and national offices. In 1848 he was elected to a one-year term in the Massachusetts House of Representatives; he moved up to the state senate two years later. In 1851 he served on the Massachusetts Board of Education, in 1852 as mayor of Salem, and in 1853 his first term in the United States House of Representatives. While in the House, Upham became a free-soiler, opposed to the extension of slavery into the West. In 1856 he became a major supporter of the newly organized, antislavery Republican Party and was elected to two consecutive terms in the state senate, both as that body’s presiding officer. In 1859 he returned to the United States Congress.¹⁰

Upon his retirement from public office in 1861, Upham directed his energies to historical research and writing, an endeavor with which he was familiar. In 1835 he had written The Life of Sir Henry Vane, former governor of Massachusetts and proponent of moderation and religious toleration during the Anne Hutchinson case and later in England during the Puritan Revolution. He published a collection of George Washington’s letters in London, but the book was blocked from publication in the United States by Jared Sparks, editor of a more extensive set of Washington’s writings. Upham also completed the four-volume Life of Timothy Pickering (1867-73), fellow prominent Salem townsman, begun by Pickering’s son Octavius. Upham’s primary historical interest, however, was the Salem witchcraft trials.¹¹

His fascination with the trials had led to his delivering a series of lectures at the Salem Lyceum in 1831. The lectures proved so popular that Upham decided to publish them in expanded form.¹²

Upham’s lectures constituted the first substantial history of the Salem episode, but important accounts preceded his. Even before the trials officially ended, Cotton Mather provided a brief record of the episode. He had established himself as an authority on witchcraft by publishing Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions in 1689. Three years later the governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, asked Mather to report on the Salem trials. He did so in The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692).

The Reverend Mather opened Wonders by stating that he intended to report on the state of affairs not as an advocate but as an historian, but he made his thesis clear: The trials were merited and the executions just. The witches had been in league with the Devil and were therefore guilty as charged. That the outbreak occurred in Salem, Mather argued, was no accident. Salem was the center, and after a sort, the first-born of our English settlements, and it had turned its back on God’s will. New England had been a land ruled by the Devil until the Puritans had arrived to establish a Bible commonwealth. In 1692 the Devil launched a counterattack to regain his dominion, and because the people of New England had fallen away from the piety of their ancestors, God allowed the onslaught to occur and to nearly succeed. Those who questioned the trials, Mather insisted, were contributing to the Devil’s cause and the downfall of God’s kingdom in New England. Only unity in support of the trials would bring about the Devil’s defeat.¹³

Mather’s defense of the Salem trials was at best a meritorious effort in a losing cause. Governor Phips soon put an end to the trials and the Reverend John Hale of Beverly, who had been among the trial’s supporters until his own wife was accused, decided that it had all been a tragic mistake. Hale’s account, written five years after the trials, though not published (quite likely by his request) until two years after his death in 1702, was the first public acknowledgment by a New England clergyman that the principles of the witchcraft trials were in error.

Perry Miller has described Hale’s A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft as a sad, troubled, and honest book, in which one can see the tortured effort of a devout man who, lacking the zeal of Cotton Mather and the anger of critic Robert Calef (noted below), attempted to arrive at the truth and to provide an honest account of what had happened. It remained a mystery to Hale why Satan had brought the people of New England to such an unfortunate state, but, like Mather, he supposed it was the result of New Englanders having suffered the sins of lukewarmness in their love of God and in their faithfulness to the errand of their forefathers. The sealing ordinances of the covenant of grace in church-communion have been much slighted and neglected, he wrote, and the fury of this storm raised by Satan hath fallen very heavy upon many that lived under these neglects.¹⁴

Hale admitted that he and others had unwittingly encouraged the sufferings of the innocent and brought about the shedding of a great deal of innocent blood ... by proceeding upon unsafe principles in condemning persons for malefic witchcraft. He was not prepared to say that all who had suffered were innocent, but he did admit that the evidence used in many cases was too slender to justify their conviction and execution. I am abundantly satisfied, he wrote, that those who were most concerned to act and judge in those matters, did not willingly depart from the rules of righteousness. But such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former precedents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.¹⁵

If Hale was the first to call the witchcraft trials into question, Boston merchant Robert Calef was the first to launch a full-scale attack on them. In More Wonders of the Invisible World (a play on the title Mather had chosen for his defense of the trials), written in 1697 but not published until 1700, and then in London, Calef found Mather and other like-minded ministers and magistrates guilty, under the mask of zeal for God, of branding one another with the odious name of witch and causing brother to accuse and prosecute brother, children their parents, and pastors and teachers their immediate flock unto death. Shepherds had become wolves, he continued, wise men infatuated, and people hauled to prisons, with a bloody noise rising from the true sufferers at execution. Mather angrily labeled Calef’s book libelous and called its author a sort of Sadducee ... who makes little conscience of lying. When copies arrived in Massachusetts, Mather’s supporters publicly burned several in Harvard Yard, but the tide of criticism would not be turned.¹⁶

Although the Salem witchcraft trials are referred to in a number of histories published prior to 1867, none treated them in any substantive manner. One notable, if brief, account was provided by Thomas Hutchinson in The History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts-Bay (1764). Hutchinson focused on the culpability of the children and the complicity of the ministers and magistrates to whom they were entrusted, especially Salem village minister Samuel Parris. He pointed out how the children’s behavior so mimicked that of the Goodwin children, as portrayed in Cotton Mather’s Memorable Providences, that authorities should have suspected foul play. He complained that none of the pretenders was ever tried for fraud, but that when the trials ended some of them proved profligate persons, abandoned to all vice, [while] others passed their days in obscurity or contempt. ¹⁷ Missing from Hutchinson’s account is any particularly critical attack on Cotton Mather. By then, and even more so by Upham’s day, Mather had been substantially rehabilitated and reestablished as one of New England’s heroic progenitors.¹⁸

By the third decade of the nineteenth century the Salem witchcraft trials had became sufficiently embarrassing to some and marginalized to others to assume only a minor role in the nation’s and region’s history. Even congregational minister and historian Joseph Barlow Felt made little of them in his local history, Annals of Salem From Its First Settlement. Thus, Upham found a largely untold human drama for the subject of his Lyceum lectures.¹⁹ The purpose of his lectures was twofold. First, he intended to correct the inadequate and unjust views that had grown up around the trials. Second, he wished to point to the lessons that could be derived from the affair to guide and influence him [mankind] with reference to the cultivation and government of his own moral and intellectual faculties. Upham hoped that his history of the Salem witchcraft trials would press upon him [man] as a member of society to do what he may to enlighten, rectify and control public sentiment ... to diffuse the blessings of knowledge, to check the prevalence of fanaticism, to accelerate the decay of superstition, to prevent an unrestrained exercise of imagination and passion in the individual or in societies of men, and to establish the effectual dominion of true religion and sound philosophy.²⁰

Upham made his overall assessment of the Salem witchcraft trials clear: There are, indeed, few passages in the history of a people to be compared with it in all that constitutes the pitiable and tragical, the mysterious and awful. In general, he described late-seventeenth-century New England as the triumphant age of superstition, in which the Puritan imagination had expanded by credibility until it ... reached a wild and monstrous growth. More specifically, he pointed to the unsettled and troubled political, economic, social, and religious circumstances that weighed upon New England and the Salem community, especially reflected in the church of Salem village.²¹

Upham made the sources of sin and guilt clear and refused to relegate the affair to the distant past. Perhaps you are ready to exclaim that your ancestors were at once the greatest fanatics and the greatest barbarians the world ever knew, he wrote, that they have left a darker stain upon our annals than is to be found elsewhere on all the records of history. And that, instead of being proud of such forefathers, you would rather have been the descendants of any other people. Such a conclusion, though understandable, Upham continued, was not to draw the most important lesson from history. Without exonerating the Puritans of their guilt, he lessened their shame. He explained that human virtue never shines with more lustre, than when it arises amidst the imperfections or the ruins of our nature, arrays itself in the robes of penitence, and goes forth with earnest and humble sincerity to the work of reformation and restitution. Such virtue had arisen among those guilty of perpetuating the delusion. The spell that had led them to sin and perverted their behavior was broken, the result of which was a commendable string of acts of penitence and restitution. Upham praised and found hope in such acts, but he also condemned the unrepentant, like Cotton Mather.²²

Upham was immediately challenged in an article in the Christian Register on his charge that Cotton Mather had exerted himself to increase and extend the frenzy of the public mind and did so with the intent of promoting a revival of religion. Upham defended his position in the second edition of his Lectures, to which he added materials that further implicated Cotton Mather, including Mather’s letter to Stephen Sewall, Clerk of the Court at Salem, requesting information for his report to the governor on the trials. In that letter, written on September 20, 1692, Upham argued that the writer manifested an excessive earnestness to prevent the excitement from subsiding. Mather urged Sewall not only to furnish him with the evidence given at the trials, but to do so—in words he had used earlier to condemn Robert Calef—as if writing to as obdurate a Sadducee and witch-advocate as any among us. He directed Sewall to address him as one that believed nothing reasonable, so that when Sewall had so knocked [him] down, he would enable Mather to make the strongest possible case for the trials.²³

To Upham, Mather’s intentions were clear. He had no interest in providing an unbiased account of what had transpired in the preceding months, but instead wanted to convince authorities of the need to press on with the prosecutions. Reflecting his own disdain for orthodox Congregationalists, Upham argued that Mather’s actions were not only prejudicial to justice at the time, but also damaging to his church. The excitement that had been produced for the purpose of restoring and strengthening the influence of the clerical and spiritual leaders, he wrote, resulted in effects which reduced that influence to a still lower point. The intimate connection of Dr. Mather and other prominent ministers with the witchcraft delusion, brought a reproach upon the clergy from which they have never yet recovered.²⁴

Upham’s Lectures constituted only the start of a labor of love that lasted nearly four decades, culminating in his two-volume Salem Witchcraft. Expanded from his Lectures of 1832 to over 1,000 pages in two volumes, Salem Witchcraft was so detailed as to be described as an elaborate and minute record of the affair.²⁵ His principal themes, however, did not change. He continued to find Cotton Mather culpable, and once again he was challenged on this point—this time by William F. Poole, librarian and historian who was born in the area of Salem that is now part of Peabody. In his article Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather, which appeared in the April 1869 issue of the North American Review, Poole sought to defend Mather and his fellow Puritan clergy as having acted in a manner entirely consistent with what in their time was believed to be good and virtuous and in the best interests of the community.²⁶

Upham would have nothing of such qualifications on Mather’s behavior and reiterated his position within weeks in Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather, A Reply (1869). It can admit of no doubt, he wrote, that Increase Mather and his son, Cotton Mather, did more than any other persons to aggravate the tendency of that age to the result reached in the witchcraft delusion of 1692. They may have thought they were doing God’s service, but the influence they exercised, in this direction, remains none the less an historical fact. Restating his position that the delusion followed upon the public mind’s becoming so infatuated and drugged with credulity and superstition that it was prepared to receive every impulse of blind fanaticism, he singled out Cotton Mather for having created that public mind. The Mathers’ influence should not be underestimated, he pointed out, suggesting that they were a power behind the throne [a reference to the governor and his council] greater than the throne itself. Once again Upham included the text of Cotton Mather’s letter to Stephen Sewall.²⁷ The debate over the culpability of the Mathers continues today.

In Salem Witchcraft Upham established the standard position that the afflicted girls, who were the principal witnesses against the accused, had deliberately lied and were involved in a conspiracy with their elders to bring about the death of their neighbors. Like Robert Calef, Upham charged the adults in whose charge the children were placed—especially Salem village minister Samuel Parris—with acting out of revenge or personal gain. Those adults who were not directly involved but who refused to act to control the situation, Upham concluded, were blind or bewildered. The single exception to Upham’s blanket condemnation was Ann Putnam, Senior, whose cup of life had been so bitterly filled that she was likely half deranged.²⁸

If Parris, the other ministers, the magistrates, and the girls’ parents had done their duty, Upham argued, their mischief might have been stopped. The girls should have been rebuked for their dangerous and forbidden sorceries and divinations, their meetings broken up, and all such tamperings with alleged supernaturalism and spiritualism frowned upon. Instead, by inviting others to bear witness to their antics, Parris and the other ministers endorsed and gave countenance to their pretensions and encouraged public confidence in the reality of their statements. They pronounced the girls bewitched and pressed them to reveal who had bewitched them. Yielding to that pressure, the girls implicated an ever-widening circle of victims.²⁹

With few exceptions, Upham pointed out, there is no evidence that the afflicted were actuated by private grievances or by personal animosities. They did wreak vengeance on anyone who questioned their veracity or the propriety of the proceedings, but otherwise, Upham surmised, they followed the suggestions of the adults around them, if not directly, then at least by availing themselves of all the gossip and slander and unfriendly talk in their families that reached their ears. Put directly: There is reason to fear, that there were some behind them giving direction to the accusations and managing the frightful machinery, all the way through.³⁰

Upham insisted that the girls had lied, often callously, but he was somewhat less judgmental toward them than toward their parents. He suggested that the afflicted children, moreso than their adult co-conspirators, may have been caught up in the general prevalence of credulity, ignorance, superstition, and fanaticism at the time, as well as the wondrous tales of ghosts and spirits from the unseen world with which the Barbadian slave woman Tituba had filled their minds. Living in the constant contemplation of such things their minds became inflamed and bewildered. They grew expert in practicing and exhibiting the forms of pretended supernaturalism, revealing secrets of the past and future, beholding specters of people then bodily distant from them, and declaring in language, fits, dreams, or trances, the immediate operations upon themselves of the Devil, by the agency of his confederates. Their sufferings, while thus under an evil hand, he concluded, were dreadful to behold and horrible in their consequences.³¹

Upham allowed that the children probably had no idea of the tremendous length to which they were finally led. He guessed that at the start they may have sought notoriety, simply to cause mischief by creating a sensation and excitement in their neighborhood, or at worst to wreak their vengeance upon one or two individuals who had offended them. They soon became intoxicated by the terrible success of their imposture, however, and were swept along by the frenzy they had occasioned. Upham refused, however, to support John Hale’s more generous position that the children themselves had become victims of the Devil, or of the delusion. The youngsters’ deliberate cunning and cool malice—their art and contrivance—even when caught in what adults should have seen as outright lies, dissuaded him from such a conclusion.³²

Historians continue to praise Upham’s Salem Witchcraft, often citing it as the most important book on the subject. It is the first history to organize the episode’s scattered records into a coherent narrative. Among those elements of the study considered most useful to later scholars is Upham’s detailed reconstruction of the local family history of Salem village, highlighting antagonisms that predated the trials and boundary disputes and quarrels between Salem villagers and between villagers and townspeople, upon which later social historians would depend.³³ This account constitutes more than 300 pages (or over 60 percent) of Volume One. The actual history of the Salem witchcraft trials does not begin until Volume Two.

Salem Witchcraft, however, is not without its limitations and errors. In the first instance, contemporary readers may be exasperated by Upham’s persistent moralizing and redundant prose. Those used to simple narratives or monographs with evidence carefully selected and marshaled in support of a single thesis may find distracting Upham’s excessive detail and idiosyncratic organization—further complicated by the absence of chapter breaks. Those wishing to pursue to their origins any of Upham’s references to primary documents may lament the lack of modern documentation. Fortunately, he usually provides enough information in the text to find documents—with some diligence on the reader’s part—in published collections such as Paul Boyers and Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Salem Witchcraft Papers.³⁴

The drama and mystery that surround the events of 1692 were bound to generate myths or legends, especially where the evidence was slim and inquiring minds sought an explanation that was either consistent with the record or attractively romantic. Upham is responsible for his fair share of such fabrications, of which we will note just a few. In some cases Upham misread the record; in others he merely sought to fill lacunae.

An example of where Upham simply got it wrong is his conflating the records of two of the accused into one. Upham makes a concerted effort to describe Bridget Bishop, the first person to be executed in the Salem witchcraft trials, as a social deviant who fell prey to a community that devoured eccentrics on its margin. Upham described Bridget Bishop as a tavernkeeper who countenanced amusements that exposed her to scandal. She wore a red paragon bodice, he reported, quite showy for her time, and generally disregarded conventional decorum in her conversation and conduct.³⁵

Upham was working from the record, but he was confusing Bridget Bishop with Sarah Bishop, the actual tavernkeeper. The roots of the mistake can be traced to a similar error made by Bridget’s accusers during her examination and trial, but with Upham’s unwitting help the misidentification was not corrected until 1985.³⁶ Bernard Rosenthal points to the importance of this error by noting that based on Upham’s description, Bridget Bishop has long appeared as something of a folk heroine ... a spirited, feisty, perhaps lusty woman—an American Wife of Bath, sometimes—who flaunted Puritan mores, thereby becoming an innocent martyr to an intolerant people and age.³⁷

Other examples of mistaken identity include Upham’s account of Margaret Jacobs, whom he at times confused with her mother Rebecca,³⁸ and the legend of John Proctor’s arrest. According to Upham’s account, John Proctor was accused by the girls when he appeared in court. Standing by his wife during her examination, he called into question the antics of the young girls, in general, and Mary Warren, who lived with the Proctors, in particular. In fact, John Proctor had been accused several days earlier and was likely in court to defend himself as well as his wife.³⁹

An example of where Upham speculated on the course of events in order to close gaps in the record concerns developments in the Parris household during the winter of 1691-1692. Upham places Tituba at the center of those events and makes her largely responsible for igniting the flames of the witchcraft hysteria. With little actual evidence to go on, we will probably never know what happened in the Salem village parsonage during that winter. Nevertheless, from Elizabeth Parris’s charging of Tituba, the slave’s confession (later recanted), and John Hale’s reference to their possible dabbling in the forbidden occult arts, Upham constructed a scenario wherein Tituba familiarized the girls under her care—and later their friends—with the wild and strange superstitions of her homeland. Added to commonly received notions on such subjects in New England, these tales heightened the girls’ infatuation with the forbidden and inflamed their still impressionable imaginations. Upham suggested that Tituba met regularly with the young girls in the Parris home and that at least Betty’s and Abigail’s initial outbursts were in some way related to those illicit meetings. Upham’s explanation went unchallenged for over a century.⁴⁰

Upham is also responsible for establishing Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey as the best-known martyrs of 1692. Upham described Nurse as a loving Christian mother who, because of spite, revenge, and greed, bore the terror of accusation and condemnation. In our view now, Upham wrote, Nurse occupied an infinite height above her persecutors. Her mind was serenely fixed upon higher scenes and filled with a peace which the world could not take away, or its cruel wrongs disturb.⁴¹

The legend of Giles Corey found its way into the hagiography of Salem victims largely through the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His play Giles Corey of the Salem Farms (1868), written only one year after publication of Salem Witchcraft, was based upon Upham’s history. Upham made the point (recently challenged by historians who have examined the law in greater detail)⁴² that Corey had refused to enter a plea when brought to court in order to protect his property from confiscation, thereby incurring what was known as peine forte et dure.⁴³ Longfellow appropriated the scene and through his literary skills made Corey symbolic of the individual who is willing to defy authority, and even to be tortured to death on principle.

Reflecting on the actions of those he found responsible for the events of 1692, and in an attempt to derive meaning from the entire affair, Upham wrote that if indeed the accusers were conscious of what they were doing throughout the entire affair, their actions seem to transcend the capabilities of human crime. There is, perhaps, a slumbering element in the heart of man, he continued, that sleeps forever in the bosom of the innocent and good, and requires the perpetuation of a great sin to wake it into action, but which, when once aroused, impels the transgressor onward with increasing momentum, as the descending ball is accelerated in its course. It may be that crime begets an appetite for crime, he concluded, which, like all other appetites, is not quieted but inflamed by gratification.⁴⁴

Also of interest is the relationship between Charles Upham and Nathaniel Hawthorne, co-residents of Salem for several years. Hawthorne became reliant on Upham’s histories for his fiction, wherein witchcraft and/or the trials of 1692 are omnipresent. Nathaniel, who added the w to his name, was a direct descendant of William Hathorne, the Puritan soldier responsible for having a Quaker woman publicly whipped through the streets of Salem, and William’s son, John, who served as magistrate and judge at the Salem hearings of 1692.⁴⁵

Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s son, charged Upham with purposely and maliciously belittling John Hathorne in his work,⁴⁶ but there is little evidence that his father shared Julian’s view. Upham was critical of the unfairness practiced by the examining magistrates, including John Hathorne. He condemned Hathorne for taking for granted the guilt of those charged with being witches, seeking to entangle those he examined with leading questions, and failing to examine more carefully the testimony, especially that of the afflicted girls. Upham’s criticism of Hathorne, however, fell short of that he offered of Cotton Mather and others. He allowed, when all was said and done, that John Hathorne was otherwise a man of character and that the family name continued to be indelibly stamped on the hills and meadows of the region, most recently in the elegant literature of the family’s latest standard bearer.⁴⁷

It should be noted that Upham’s criticism of John Hathorne did not even meet the level of guilt Nathaniel himself felt for his ancestor. Evidence for this exists in many places. In his short story Young Goodman Brown (1835), to cite just one example, Hawthorne rejected any suggestion that his ancestor may have been acting in a manner deemed virtuous at the time, and in his introduction of The Scarlet Letter, The Custom-House, he offered an apology for his ancestors’ actions: I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, he wrote, and ask pardon of heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. As their representative, he offered, [I] hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now henceforth removed.⁴⁸

Witchcraft and the witchcraft trials were present in Hawthorne’s fiction from the start, but they became more substantially represented after publication of Upham’s Lectures. Hawthorne wrote Alice Doane before he read Lectures, for example, but he substantially rewrote the short story under its influence—even giving praise to Upham’s work in the revised text—and retitled it Alice Doane’s Appeal (1835). Edgar Allan Poe wrote that such references contributed to a strong undercurrent of suggestion in Hawthorne’s work. Later critics noted that they were increasingly associated with the irrational, the marvelous, and the unexplainable presence of evil in a variety of situations and experiences, while Neal Frank Doubleday argued that it was in the fictional treatment of witchcraft that Hawthorne found an American gothic in some sense his own.⁴⁹

Hawthorne also found a kindred spirit in Upham’s interpretation of the Salem witchcraft trials. He incorporated into his work Upham’s indictment of Cotton Mather—in Alice Doane’s Appeal, for example—including Upham’s report on Mather at the execution of George Burroughs. Placing the procession to Gallows Hill into the context of his own fictional account, Hawthorne wrote: Behind their victims came the afflicted; a guilty and miserable band; villains who had thus avenged themselves on their enemies—vile wretches and lunatics, whose ravings had chimed in with the madness of the land. In the rear of the procession rode a figure on horseback, so darkly conspicuous, so sternly triumphant, that he was mistaken for the visible presence of the fiend himself; but it was only his good friend, Cotton Mather.⁵⁰

Hawthorne also shared in many of Upham’s reflections on human nature. No one can have an adequate knowledge of the human mind, Upham wrote in his study of the Salem witchcraft trials, who has not contemplated its development in scenes like those related in these lectures.... We all know that, in the degradation and corruption to which he [man] can descend, he is the most odious and loathsome object in the creation. So it is with our spiritual nature.⁵¹ Upham and Hawthorne also shared a belief in the shocking capacity for evil at the very heart of the Puritan theocratic society, in particular, and in mankind in general. Where they differed was in Upham’s more optimistic view of man’s ability to rise above that capacity through repentance, reason, and liberal religion.

Upham and Hawthorne remained friends until politics intervened in 1849. Democratic President James Polk had appointed Hawthorne Surveyor for the District of Salem and Beverly and Inspector of Revenue for the Port of Salem in 1846. Hawthorne welcomed the appointment and the steady income and became much more involved in community affairs. In 1849, however, with the election of Whig President Zachary Taylor, he was fired. Upham, a local Whig leader, supported Hawthorne’s removal. He was identified as having written an anonymous letter to the Boston Atlas, which charged Hawthorne with using his office for partisan purposes, having signed a petition urging the new President to oust Hawthorne. Hawthorne took Upham’s actions personally, although Upham appears to have acted from political motives. As the Whig candidate for election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives—his first run for public office—Upham no doubt felt obliged to act in his party’s interests, even when those interests conflicted with his own personal feelings.⁵²

In a letter to his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hawthorne vowed revenge on those he held responsible for his removal from office, promising to immolate one or two of them with his pen.⁵³ He did so in two parts: in his introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850), The Custom-House, and in his characterization of Judge Pyncheon in The House of the Seven Gables (1851). In The Custom-House Hawthorne satirized some of his former associates at Salem and depicted the Whig leaders who had seen to his dismissal cruel merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.⁵⁴

Hawthorne immolated Upham in The House of the Seven Gables through the characterization of Judge Pyncheon. Henry James may have described Pyncheon best, when he wrote that the judge was a superb, full-blown hypocrite, a large-based, full-nurtured Pharisee, bland, urbane, [and] impressive, diffusing about him a sultry warmth of benevolence ... basking in the noontide of prosperity and the consideration of society, but in reality hard, gross, and ignoble. Others have described Pyncheon as the reincarnated Puritan leader in the modern [nineteenth-century] world. In the unkindest cut of all, however, Hawthorne quite likely intended both—a fusion of Upham, or how Hawthorne viewed Upham in 1851, and the man Upham detested, Cotton Mather. Upham could hardly have missed the point, nor did anyone else in Salem when the book was published.⁵⁵

The description is unfair to Upham, but it is understandable, given the unfortunate state of affairs between the two men at the time. The fictional Judge Pyncheon was one of the most respected members of the Salem community. In Hawthorne’s story, the judge arranged the evidence in the death of his uncle, the wealthy Jaffrey Pyncheon, so as to make his cousin Clifford appear guilty of murder, thereby securing his uncle’s estate for himself. Although in the end Pyncheon died under the curse Matthew Maule had placed on his ancestor, both Colonel Pyncheon, whose similarly greedy efforts during the Salem witchcraft trials had led to Maule’s condemnation, and Clifford Pyncheon would be exonerated. Clifford, however, continued to suffer in mind and body for the judge’s actions.

Despite their personal differences, Upham and Hawthorne found common ground on many issues connected with the Salem witchcraft trials. Writing in 1764, Thomas Hutchinson failed to find any meaning in the events of 1692 for future generations. It was, he concluded, only a great noise—an aberrant, even bizarre, event of a discredited and profligate people.⁵⁶ Upham disagreed. He appended to his Salem Witchcraft a reference to the bloody New York riots of 1741, suggesting that what had occurred in 1692 might not have been an isolated event—that even after Americans stopped believing in witches, witch-hunting continued. He explained how the rumored conspiracy among blacks in New York to murder whites resulted in a universal panic, like a conflagration [that] spread through the whole community. The results, Upham reminded his readers, were more than 100 imprisoned, 22 hanged, 11 burned at the stake, and 50 transported into slavery. As in the witchcraft prosecutions, Upham wrote, the lesson learned was that people given over to the power of contagious passion, may be swept by desolation and plunged into ruin.⁵⁷ With this allusion, Upham established the metaphoric role the Salem witchcraft trials—witch—hunting—would assume in American history and assured that the episode would never be dismissed as simply a small incident in the history of a great superstition.

In Salem Witchcraft Upham urged his fellow Salem townsmen to erect a monument to the victims of the Salem witchcraft trials. Hawthorne made a similar recommendation in Alice Doane’s Appeal. Neither sought merely to memorialize those who had died, but, in Upham’s words, to erect a monument out of a sense of justice, appreciation of moral firmness, sympathy for suffering innocence ... [and] a discriminating discernment of what is really worthy of commemoration among men—namely the light that surrounds and protects us against error, folly, and fanaticism shed by those who in 1692 preferred death to a falsehood.⁵⁸ Neither Upham’s nor Hawthorne’s recommendation would be honored until the 300th anniversary of the trials, but today the monument stands as a symbol of the triumph of truth over superstition and bigotry and tolerance over persecution. Appropriately, it was unveiled by Arthur Miller, author of The Crucible (1953), one of the most influential works on the Salem witchcraft trials and witch-hunting in modern times, and dedicated by human rights’ advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

Charles Wentworth Upham died on June 15, 1875, and was buried at Salem.

Bryan F. Le Beau

Creighton University

Preface

THIS WORK was originally constructed, and in previous editions appeared, in the form of Lectures. The only vestiges of that form, in its present shape, are certain modes of expression. The language retains the character of an address by a speaker to his hearers; being more familiar, direct, and personal than is ordinarily employed in the relations of an author to a reader.

The former work was prepared under circumstances which prevented a thorough investigation of the subject. Leisure and freedom from professional duties have now enabled me to prosecute the researches necessary to do justice to it.

The Lectures on Witchcraft, published in 1831, have long been out of print. Although frequently importuned to prepare a new edition, I was unwilling to issue again what I had discovered to be an insufficient presentation of the subject. In the mean time, it constantly became more and more apparent, that much injury was resulting from the want of a complete and correct view of a transaction so often referred to, and universally misunderstood.

The first volume of this work contains what seems to me necessary to prepare the reader for the second, in which the incidents and circumstances connected with the witchcraft prosecutions in 1692, at the village and in the town of Salem, are reduced to chronological order, and exhibited in detail.

As showing how far the beliefs of the understanding, the perceptions of the senses, and the delusions of the imagination, may be confounded, the subject belongs not only to theology and moral and political science, but to physiology, in its original and proper use, as embracing our whole nature; and the facts presented may help to conclusions relating to what is justly regarded as the great mystery of our being,—the connection between the body and the mind.

It is unnecessary to mention the various well-known works of authority and illustration, as they are referred to in the text. But I cannot refrain from bearing my grateful testimony to the value of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New-England Historical and Genealogical Register. The Historical Collections and the Proceedings of the Essex Institute have afforded me inestimable assistance. Such works as these are providing the materials that will secure to our country a history such as no other nation can have. Our first age will not be shrouded in darkness and consigned to fable, but, in all its details, brought within the realm of knowledge. Every person who desires to preserve the memory of his ancestors, and appreciate the elements of our institutions and civilization, ought to place these works, and others like them, on the shelves of his library, in an unbroken and continuing series. A debt of gratitude is due to the earnest, laborious, and disinterested students who are contributing the results of their explorations to the treasures of antiquarian and genealogical learning which accumulate in these publications.

A source of investigation, especially indispensable in the preparation of the present work, deserves to be particularly noticed. In 1647, the General Court of Massachusetts provided by law for the taking of testimony, in all cases, under certain regulations, in the form of depositions, to be preserved in perpetuam rei memoriam. The evidence of witnesses was prepared in writing, beforehand, to be used at the trials; they to be present at the time, to meet further inquiry, if living within ten miles, and not unavoidably prevented. In a capital case, the presence of the witness, as well as his written testimony, was absolutely required. These depositions were lodged in the files, and constitute the most valuable materials of history. In our day, the statements of witnesses ordinarily live only in the memory of persons present at the trials, and are soon lost in oblivion. In cases attracting unusual interest, stenographers are employed to furnish them to the press. There were no newspaper reporters or court calendars in the early colonial times; but these depositions more than supply their place. Given in, as they were, in all sorts of cases,—of wills, contracts, boundaries and encroachments, assault and battery, slander, larceny, &c., they let us into the interior, the very inmost recesses, of life and society in all the forms. The extent to which, by the aid of WILLIAM P. UPHAM, Esq., of Salem, I have drawn from this source is apparent at every page.

A word is necessary to be said relating to the originals of the documents that belong to the witchcraft proceedings. They were probably all deposited at the time in the clerk’s office of Essex County. A considerable number of them were, from some cause, transferred to the State archives, and have been carefully preserved. Of the residue, a very large proportion have been abstracted from time to time by unauthorized hands, and many, it is feared, destroyed or otherwise lost. Two very valuable parcels have found their way into the libraries of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Essex Institute, where they are faithfully secured. A few others have come to light among papers in the possession of individuals. It is to be hoped, that, if any more should be found, they will be lodged in some public institution; so that, if thought best, they may all be collected, arranged, and placed beyond wear, tear, and loss, in the perpetual custody of type.

The papers remaining in the office of the clerk of this county were transcribed into a volume a few years since; the copyist supplying, conjecturally, headings to the several documents. Although he executed his work in an elegant manner, and succeeded in giving correctly many documents hard to be deciphered, such errors, owing to the condition of the papers, occurred in arranging them, transcribing their contents, and framing their headings, that I have had to resort to the originals throughout.

As the object of this work is to give to the reader of the present day an intelligible view of a transaction of the past, and not to illustrate any thing else than the said transaction, no attempt has been made to preserve the orthography of that period. Most of the original papers were written without any expectation that they would ever be submitted to inspection in print; many of them by plain country people, without skill in the structure of sentences, or regard to spelling; which, in truth, was then quite unsettled. It is no uncommon thing to find the same word spelled differently in the same document. It is very questionable whether it is expedient or just to perpetuate blemishes, often the result of haste or carelessness, arising from mere inadvertence. In some instances, where the interest of the passage seemed to require it, the antique style is preserved. In no case is a word changed or the structure altered; but the now received spelling is generally adopted, and the punctuation made to express the original sense.

It is indeed necessary, in what claims to be an exact reprint of an old work, to imitate its orthography precisely, even at the expense of difficulty in apprehending at once the meaning, and of perpetuating errors of carelessness and ignorance. Such modern reproductions are valuable, and have an interest of their own. They deserve the favor of all who desire to examine critically, and in the most authentic form, publications of which the original copies are rare, and the earliest editions exhausted. The enlightened and enterprising publishers who are thus providing facsimiles of old books and important documents of past ages ought to be encouraged and rewarded by a generous public. But the present work does not belong to that class, or make any pretensions of that kind.

My thanks are especially due to the Hon. ASAHEL HUNTINGTON, clerk of the courts in Essex County, for his kindness in facilitating the use of the materials in his office; to the Hon. OLIVER WARNER, secretary of the Commonwealth, and the officers of his department; and to STEPHEN N. GIFFORD, Esq., clerk of the Senate.

DAVID PULSIFER, Esq., in the office of the Secretary of State, is well known for his pre-eminent skill and experience in mastering the chirography of the primitive colonial times, and elucidating its peculiarities. He has been unwearied in his labors, and most earnest in his efforts, to serve me.

Mr. SAMUEL G. DRAKE, who has so largely illustrated our history and explored its sources, has, by spontaneous and considerate acts of courtesy rendered me important help. Similar expressions of friendly interest by Mr. WILLIAM B. TOWNE, of Brookline, Mass.; Hon. J. HAMMOND TRUMBULL, of Hartford, Conn.; and GEORGE H. MOORE, Esq., of New-York City,—are gratefully acknowledged.

SAMUEL P. FOWLER, Esq., of Danvers, generously placed at my disposal his valuable stores of knowledge relating to the subject. The officers in charge of the original papers, in the Historical Society and the Essex Institute, have allowed me to examine and use them.

I cordially express my acknowledgments to the Hon. BENJAMIN F. BROWNE, of Salem, who, retired from public life and the cares of business, is giving the leisure of his venerable years to the collection, preservation, and liberal contribution of an unequalled amount of knowledge respecting our local antiquities.

CHARLES W PALFRAY, Esq., while attending the General Court as a Representative of Salem, in 1866, gave me the great benefit of his explorations among the records and papers in the State House.

Mr. MOSES PRINCE, of Danvers Centre, is an embodiment of the history, genealogy, and traditions of that locality, and has taken an active and zealous interest in the preparation of this work. ANDREW NICHOLS, Esq., of Danvers, and the family of the late Colonel PERLEY PUTNAM, of Salem, also rendered me much aid.

I am indebted to CHARLES DAVIS, Esq., of Beverly, for the use of the record-book of the church, composed of the brethren and sisters belonging to Bass River, gathered Sept. 20, 1667, now the First Church of Beverly; and to JAMES HILL, Esq., town-clerk of that place, for access to the records in his charge.

To GILBERT TAPLEY, Esq., chairman of the committee of the parish, and AUGUSTUS MUDGE, Esq., its clerk, and to the Rev. Mr. RICE, pastor of the church, at Danvers Centre, I cannot adequately express my obligations. Without the free use of the original parish and church record-books with which they intrusted me, and having them constantly at hand, I could not have begun adequately to tell the story of Salem Village or the Witchcraft Delusion.

C. W. U.

Map and Illustrations

THE MAP, based upon various local maps and the Coast-Survey chart, is the result of much personal exploration and perambulation of the ground. It may claim to be a very exact representation of many of the original grants and farms. The locality of the houses, mills, and bridges, in 1692, is given in some cases precisely, and in all with near approximation. The task has been a difficult one. An original plot of Governor Endicott’s Ipswich River grant, No. III., is in the State House, and one of the Swinnerton grant, No. XIX., is in the Salem town-books. Neither of them, however, affords elements by which to establish its exact location. A plot of the Townsend Bishop grant, No. XX., as its boundaries were finally determined, is in the State House, and another of the same in the court-files of the county. This gives one fixed and known point, Hadlock’s Bridge, from which, following the lines by points of compass and distances, as indicated on the plot and described in the Colonial Records, all the sides of the grant are laid out with accuracy, and its place on the map determined with absolute certainty. A very perfect and scientifically executed plan of a part of the boundary between Salem and Reading in 1666 is in the State House; of which an exact tracing was kindly furnished by Mr. H. J. Coolidge, of the Secretary of State’s office. It gives two of the sides of the Governor Bellingham grant, No. IV, in such a manner as to afford the means of projecting it with entire certainty, and fixing its locality. There are no other plots of original or early grants or farms on this territory; but, starting from the Bishop and Bellingham grants thus laid out in their respective places, by a collation of deeds of conveyance and partition on record, with the aid of portions of the primitive stone-walls still remaining, and measurements resting on permanent objects, the entire region has been reduced to a demarkation comprehending the whole area. The locations of then-existing roads have been obtained from the returns of laying-out committees, and other evidence in the records and files. The construction of the map, in all its details, is the result of the researches and labors of W. P. UPHAM.

The death-warrant is a photograph by E. R. PERKINS, of Salem. The original, among the papers on file in the office of the clerk of the courts of Essex County, having always been regarded as a great curiosity, has been subjected to constant handling, and become much obscured by dilapidation. The letters, and in some instances entire words, at the end of the lines, are worn off. To preserve it, if possible, from further injury, it has been pasted on cloth. Owing to this circumstance, and the yellowish hue to which the paper has faded, it does not take favorably by photograph; but the exactness of imitation, which can only thus be obtained with absolute certainty, is more important than any other consideration. Only so much as contains the body of the warrant, the sheriff’s return, and the seal, are given. The tattered margins are avoided, as they reveal the cloth, and impair the antique aspect of the document. The original is slowly disintegrating and wasting away, notwithstanding the efforts to preserve it; and its appearance, as seen to-day, can only be perpetuated in photograph. The warrant is reduced about one-third, and the return one-half.

The Townsend Bishop house and the outlines of Witch Hill are from sketches by O. W. H. UPHAM. The English house is from a drawing made on the spot by J. R. PENNIMAN of Boston, in 1822, a few years before its demolition, for the use of which I am indebted to JAMES KIMBALL, Esq., of Salem. The view of Salem Village and of the Jacobs’ house are reduced, by O. W. H. UPHAM, from photographs by E. R. PERKINS.

The man and other engravings, including the autographs, were all delineated by O. W. H. UPHAM.

INDEX TO THE MAP

DWELLINGS IN 1692

[The Map shows all the houses standing in 1692 within the bounds of Salem Village; some others in the vicinity are also given. The houses are numbered on the Map with Arabic numerals, 1, 2, 3, &c., beginning at the top, and proceeding from left to right. In the following list, against each number, is given the name of the occupant in 1692, and, in some cases, that of the recent occupant or owner of the locality is added in parenthesis.]

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THIS LIST

1. John Willard. c.

2. Isaac Easty.

3. Francis Peabody. c.

4. Joseph Porter.

(John Bradstreet.)

5. William Hobbs. t.r.

6. John Robinson.

7. William Nichols. t.r

8. Bray Wilkins. c.

9. Aaron Way.

(A. Batchelder.)

10. Thomas Bailey.

11. Thomas Fuller, Sr.

(Abijah Fuller.)

12. William Way.

13. Francis Elliot. c.

14.