We lead attention next to one who moved in the highest circle of Boston society—to an elderly lady of wit, culture, high connections socially, and of friendship with many of the most prominent and virtuous people of her day. So far as known, hers is meager as a case of witchcraft, attended by a less variety and extent of startling phenomena than most others; but it well reveals the force of the witchcraft creed, and the shifts of historians for explaining its only marvelous phenomenon which history hints at. Hutchinson says, “The most remarkable occurrence in the colony in the year 1655 [1656 ?] was the trial and condemnation of Mrs. Ann Hibbins for witchcraft. Her husband, who died in the year 1654, was an agent for the colony in England, several years one of the assistants, and a merchant of note in the town of Boston; but losses in the latter part of his life had reduced his estate, and increased the natural crabbedness of his wife’s temper, which made her turbulent and quarrelsome, and brought her under church censures, and at length rendered her so odious to her neighbors as to cause some of them to accuse her of witchcraft. The jury brought her in guilty, but the magistrates refused to accept the verdict; so the cause came to the general court, where the popular clamor prevailed against her, and the miserable old woman was condemned and executed. Search was made upon her body for teats, and her chests and boxes for puppets, images, &c.; but “It fared with her as it did with Joan of Arc in France. Some counted her a saint and some a witch, and some observed solemn marks of Providence set upon those who were very forward to condemn her, and to brand others upon the like ground with the like reproach.” The author of the above was born fifty-five years after the execution of Mrs. Hibbins, and his account of her was not published till 1764, that is, one hundred and eight years after her decease. In his youth he may have conversed with aged people who were living at the time of the trial and execution of this woman, and may have received from them their notions concerning her temper and character. But if he did, his informers, during more than half a century before he was old enough to be an intelligent listener, had been living in the midst of people who were ashamed of the treatment which they and their Whether Hutchinson, in his youth, received from any source special mental biases which inclined him to regard all who suffered for witchcraft as quarrelsome and vicious, cannot now be ascertained; but it is obvious from his epithets that his disposition let him very readily apply to such persons terms of very decided disparagement. He spoke of one Mary Oliver as “a poor wretch;” also of Mrs. Hibbins as “the miserable old woman,” and specified the “natural crabbedness of her temper which made her turbulent and quarrelsome.” He implies that such traits were both the grounds and the sum of the charge and proofs of her witchcraft, and does all this without adducing a particle of evidence that she possessed such a temper, or was either turbulent or quarrelsome. His allegations seem like the offspring of either blinding contempt or of deluded fancy,—yes, deluded,—for surely clear-eyed fancy must have foreseen that after ages could never believe that the highest court in the colony found natural crabbedness of temper, and consequent turbulence, satisfactory proof of an explicit compact with the devil, and therefore punishable by death. The insufficiency and probable inaccuracy of his reasons for the arraignment and condemnation of this person, will be more clearly exhibited further on, and mainly in extracts from a later historian. “It fared with her,” says Hutchinson, “as it did with Joan of Arc in France. Some counted her a saint and some a witch.” In these words the historian himself furnishes cause for distrusting the justice of ascribing to her a crabbed temper and habitual quarrelsomeness. For who, in any community, would ever count one a saint who manifested such offensive qualities to any great extent as he ascribed to her? Surely no one would. And yet he states that very many persons did so count Mrs. Hibbins. Doubtless among her advocates was “your famous Mr. Norton,” a very eminent, sagacious, and able minister in Boston. There was enough about her to draw out from Hutchinson the concession that the public here was divided in judgment concerning her character, as it formerly Crabbedness of temper and quarrelsomeness were not grounds on which any portion of the people would count her a saint. The historian refutes his own position. A more recent searcher for causes of her fate perceived, and very clearly pointed out, the inaccuracy and obvious insufficiency of Hutchinson’s grounds and reasons why Mrs. Hibbins was arraigned and convicted, but proceeded to assign others which are scarcely less inadequate and improbable. He writes as follows, vol. i. p. 422, Hist. of Witchcraft:— “While it is hardly worthy of being considered a sufficient explanation of the matter,—it being beyond belief, that, even at that time, a person could be condemned and executed merely on account of a ‘crabbed temper,’—it is not consistent with the facts as made known to us from the record-offices. She could not have been so reduced in circumstances as to produce such extraordinary effects upon her character, for she left a good estate.... The only clew we have to the kind of evidence bearing upon the charge of witchcraft that brought this recently bereaved widow to so cruel and shameful a death, is in a letter written by a clergyman in Jamaica to Increase Mather” (as quoted above). “Nothing,” Upham adds, “was more natural than for her to suppose, knowing the parties, witnessing their manner, considering their active co-operation in getting up the excitement against her, which was then the all-engrossing topic, that they were talking about her. But, in the blind infatuation of the time, it was Some of our quotations are introduced quite as much for the purpose of exhibiting the animus, short-comings, and over-doings of the historians themselves, as for elucidating the general subject of witchcraft. We learn from the pages of the work from which the above extract was taken, that Mrs. Hibbins was sister of Richard Bellingham, deputy-governor of the province at the very time of her trial, and that her highly-esteemed husband had left her an estate which placed her far above poverty. It may fairly be presumed that both her social and pecuniary conditions were very respectable. Upham perceives and forcibly comments upon the inadequacy of the grounds upon which Hutchinson attempted to account for her conviction and execution. That earlier historian evinced, on very many of his pages, his persuasion, or at least a purpose to persuade his readers, that all the peculiar and disturbing phenomena of witchcraft were of exclusively mundane origin, and that temper, trick, imposture, deception, and the like, produced them all. This persuasion made him somewhat impatient of the whole matter, uncareful to scan all the facts Upham, going to the probate records and finding the will of Mrs. Hibbins, which was made a few days after her sentence of death, is able to present her in a different aspect. His comments upon her, as she is revealed by the will and its codicils, are as follows, vol. i. p. 425:— “The whole tone and manner of these instruments give evidence that she had a mind capable of rising above the power of wrong, suffering, and death itself. They show a spirit calm and serene. The disposition of her property indicates good sense, good feeling, and business faculties suitable to the occasion. In the body of the will, there is not a word, a syllable, or a turn of expression, that refers to or is in the slightest degree colored by her peculiar situation. In the codicil Perusal and study of her will and its appendages induced the later historian to speak of Ann Hibbins as “this recently bereaved widow”—a phrase much more agreeable, and seemingly vastly more just in application to her, than “miserable old woman.” In that will she names as overseers and administrators of her estate, Captain Thomas Clarke, Lieutenant Edward Hutchinson, Lieutenant William Hudson, Ensign Joshua Scottow, and Cornet Peter Oliver; also in a codicil, she says, “I do earnestly desire my loving friends, Captain Johnson and Edward Rawson, to be added to the rest of the gentlemen mentioned as overseers of my will.” Upham, having stated the above, says, “It can hardly be doubted that these persons—and they were all leading citizens—were known by her to be among her friends.” Yes, the presumption is very fair, amounting to almost positive proof, that many of the prominent and best people of the town were her friends. The appearance is, that her social walk was wide away from the purlieus of common mundane diabolism and billingsgate. The vulgar would see her standing off beyond their reach, and waste no breath upon her. Only the respectable and influential could touch her to her essential harm. We commend and thank the later historian for bringing this persecuted woman out into such light as shows that she may have been equal in all good qualities to the best of her persecutors. But his His charge of slander is fictitious. He adduces no evidence that the lady was slandered, and we have met with none anywhere. And were it true, it is quite as much “beyond belief that even at that time a person could be condemned and executed merely on account of being” slandered, as it is that one could have then been thus treated on account of a “crabbed temper” solely. A much more probable cause of the persecution of Mrs. Hibbins than either of the historians drew forth and rested upon, lurks in that language of “famous Mr. Norton,” which says that she “having more wit Whether Mrs. Hibbins received on that occasion, and might have been accustomed to get, knowledge by other than man’s ordinary processes, and to such extent and of such kind as implied her possession of some faculties above or distinct from great powers at guessing, can best be inferred by looking at the views of her utterances which were taken by those who heard them. Their persecution of her unto death tells what those views were. Have historians made fair and full use of the very small historic basis extant, for accounting for the state and nature of public feeling among the neighbors of this woman? We think not. Her wit, the true corner-stone, has not been their basis of explanation. When she saw two known persecutors talking, the circumstances may or may not have been helpful to a correct guess at the topic of their conversation then. But—but these men, Upham assumes, were already known to her as her persecutors. Therefore something must have occurred before that time which had aroused persecution of her. These men are called “two of her persecutors,” which intimates that she already may have had more than two, and admits the supposition that she may have had very many such, both prior to and at the very time when she made the particular guess whose accuracy has been so plausibly commented upon. Something, antecedent to that guess, had set some minds against her. Yes, if we may trust the conjecture of Upham, something had We join with Upham in saying that “the only clew we have to the kind of evidence bearing upon the charge of witchcraft that brought this recently bereaved widow to so cruel and shameful a death, is in a letter written by a clergyman in Jamaica to Increase Mather in 1684.” That letter, already quoted, imputes to her more wit than others; wit, or penetration, by which she sensed correctly the conversation going on between two of her persecutors. That is the full sum of the direct historical evidence. And what is involved in that? Is crabbed temper there? No. Is slander there? No; but wit is. Standing alone and unexplained, this wit amounts, perhaps, to but little; and yet when interpreted by her sad fate it may To-day,—when observation is almost daily meeting with operations of faculties, in limited classes of men and women, which enable them to read, at times, the secret thoughts and hear the secret and hushed utterances of some afar off,—that Jamaica letter intimates enough to generate presumption that Mrs. Hibbins might have possessed like faculties, and that her exercise of such startled, alarmed, and almost frenzied a community in which such powers were deemed proof positive that their possessor had made a covenant with the Evil One, and received her surprising knowledge from him. Amid a people holding such faith concerning the devil as the colonists here entertained in 1656, the exercise of such powers called upon all God-fearing and true men to rid the world of such a devil-minion as the knowledge possessed by Mrs. Hibbins proved her to be. A sample of light which is now available shines forth from the following letter, and its rays are blended in those from the lamp that guides our feet while we move onward in tracing out the probable meaning reachable by following up the only historic clew to those powers of Mrs. Hibbins, her possession and exercise of which constituted a capital crime:—
“Allen Putnam, Esq., Roxbury. “Dear Friend: You solicit information in regard to hearing, from the inner ear, men and women speaking when miles away. I have always possessed that faculty in a remarkable degree. At one time, when building a steamboat in Southern Illinois, under peculiar circumstances, I would often hear men say, ‘That man has no money to build a boat with; he’s a fraud; and I pity those poor fellows who are working for him.’ This was soon after I commenced her construction; and although I did not want to hear it, and tried ever so hard not to, still I could hear them seemingly more distinct than though they were close to me. One day in particular, and at a time when I could see no way out of my difficulty, I heard a Mr. Cutting, who was building some miles up river, say to his foreman, ‘I wonder if Mr. Kimball realizes that his timber will be lost.’ (Mr. Kimball was the man who furnished my timber and plank.) After the tide turned in my favor, and it was known about town that I paid my men regularly, I heard the remark, ‘That man is the most reticent man I ever heard of,’ &c.” The author of the letter does not state distinctly that in those two cases the speakers were very much too far away for his external ears to hear their voices, yet such was his statement when he gave me, previously, a verbal account of the facts; and such was his meaning, therefore, in the letter—the remainder of which here follows:— “Now, if you can make use of this, or a part of it, “With high considerations I remain, The writer of the above, when in conversation with me in my own study, incidentally dropped a word which intimated that his inner ear was sometimes receptive of utterances put forth by embodied men and women, who, at the time, were far away from him. In response to my expressed wish to know whether such was the fact, he detailed a number of cases in which he had had such experience; I then asked him to give me one or two of them, briefly, on paper. That request shortly drew forth the foregoing letter. Much more of the emphatically educational period of Captain Densmore’s life was spent in forecastles and cabins of whaleships than in school on shore, and he perhaps expected me to reconstruct his sentences, in part at least, before presenting them in print. But such facts as his experience has encountered ought to be accompanied by the spirit of conscious knowledge and truth pervading his own vocabulary. His language is sufficiently perspicuous to convey his meaning, and possesses force which any considerable change would impair. That spirit makes rhetoric and grammar of secondary consequence in the narration of facts and experiences which show that there exist capacities in some embodied human beings for receiving intelligence-fraught impressions, in ways and under circumstances which the schoolmen and teachers of the world lack knowledge of, but ought to know and get When commenting upon what he assumed to be fact, viz., that Mrs. Hibbins made a correct guess, and only a guess, Upham says, that “in the blind infatuation of the time, it was considered proof positive of her being possessed, by aid of the devil, of supernatural insight.” Thus he assumed that the mass of people in Boston were under such an infatuation as could and did cause them to believe that very successful guessing required the devil’s help! They may have been infatuated, but their infatuation did not act in that direction. Their senses and judgments for Anything supernal was then deemed devilish. After public excitement had been aroused against her, a very successful guess might possibly be evidence that the devil was its author, but not till the excitement had acquired and exercised bewildering force. Some extraordinary sayings or doings of this lady obviously must have antedated the public furore, else it would never have raged. The nature and circumstances of the case indicate an almost certainty that minds around her, while in their ordinary calmness, must have witnessed sayings or doings by her which “seemed to them more than natural”—which were startling—were out of the usual course, and readily distinguishable Mrs. Hibbins lived among the Élite of a province, whose people were decidedly sagacious in matters of both private and public business, and were also probably possessed of as high moral and religious principles, as prevailed in any other community on the globe. As before stated, Richard Bellingham, one of the very eminent men of the country, and at that time deputy-governor of the province, was her brother; she was widow of one who had been among the most esteemed citizens of the town, and she is credited with having possessed more wit than her neighbors. Therefore we are hunting for a cause adequate to excite public indignation against a woman of bright intellect, of high position in society, and standing under the shelter of near kinship with those in authority. The cause must have been some strange one. Skill at guessing was too common and natural, and does not meet the requirements. We recur again to the only historical cause of excitement against this lady, viz., Norton’s hint that she possessed such marvelous wit for guessing, as Upham supposes the people around her considered “proof positive of her being possessed, by the aid of the devil, of supernatural insight.” That hint unlocks a door behind which may be found a more adequate and philosophical cause of her arraignment and condemnation than has hitherto been assigned. Since many persons now possess, she too may have possessed constitutional faculties, which, at times, enabled her to sense, comprehend, and enunciate facts and truths which it was impossible for her to learn by man’s ordinary processes. Admit simply that she may have possessed intuitive faculties which read the thoughts of others or sensed afar the spirit of sounds, and solution of all mysteries about her is made. Wide awake, keen-sighted, good people may have seen in her the exercise of such powers as were clearly, distinctly, and beyond all question, extraordinary,—yes, supermundane. What then? Why, by all fair logic from Christendom’s faith at that time, the devil must be her teacher, and she must be his covenanted servant. Such a helper of Satan, however high in character or station, must be deprived of power to work for him. Very wonderful revelations, such as disclosures of the secret thoughts and private conversations of other and distant persons, being a few times repeated by her, what could It gladdens the heart to find a view which legitimately permits Mrs. Hibbins to have been a bright, refined, high-toned, and most estimable lady; and at the same time lessens the blackness of the cloud which has long hung over her judges and executioners. They were not so weak and wicked as to doom one to die because of temper, nor so villainous as to slander away a lady’s life. Stern religious adherence and application of an honest, though deluded faith, made them executioners of all such as had exhibited powers which in the dim light of their philosophy and science seemed supernatural. Their weakness consisted of such strong faith as could, and We charge our ancestors with infatuation. People in all ages and nations have, no doubt, been subject to its influence. Perhaps every individual man and woman is more or less swayed by it. Each one in respect to some things may act without his usual good judgment, and contrary to the dictates of reason. The people of Boston were obviously debarred, by their infatuation devil-ward, from perceiving that Mrs. Hibbins might have received extraordinary gifts from some other giver than the great evil devil. And is it impossible that infatuation influenced her recent historian first to reject the historic wit, and substitute for it fancied slander, as cause for the excitement against her, and then put his substitution forth as the truth; though both common sense and sound philosophy see at a glance, first, that it is only a conjecture, and secondly, that it is entirely inadequate to produce the effects which it was fabricated to account for? In doing this he seemingly acted without his usual good judgment, and contrary to the appropriate dictates of his enlightened reason—was infatuated. Both of the two historians above quoted, virtually assumed that there never occurred here any phenomena, either mental or physical, which were not wrought out by agents, forces, and faculties purely mundane. Therefore the facts of history necessarily pushed them up to make implied, and often explicit, allegation that whole communities of resolute, Hers was not a case of necessary spirit co-operation, was perhaps only one of uncommon liberation of the internal perceptive faculties. Because highly illumined, her brilliancy was judged to be diabolical, and therefore must be extinguished. |