Members of the First Parish in Danvers, and all residents on the soil of Salem Village:—

About three years since it was my privilege to speak briefly concerning the marvels of 1692, on the spot where they transpired. Courtesy then required brevity, and some vagueness of statement resulted: my remarks on that occasion are embraced among the addresses appended to Rev. Charles B. Rice’s admirable “History of the First Parish in Danvers, 1672-1872”—a production of much more than ordinary merit.

The present occasion is embraced to point out a misprint. On pages 186 and 187 of those bi-centennial offerings, I am made to say that “the little resolute band of devil-fighters here in the wilderness became, though all unwillingly, yet became most efficient helpers in gaining liberty for the freer action of nobler things than any creed,” &c.—I never cherished a thought so derogatory to them as that they unwillingly became efficient helpers in gaining liberty. My spoken words were, that they unwittingly, that is, without knowing it, were being made instrumental in gaining mental freedom, or deliverance from the chains of error; and I believe that a large part of the preceding pages tends to make the truth of my actual statement apparent, while it shows the falsity of the one imputed to me.

The soil beneath you long has been and long will be either consecrated or damned to fame; damned, hereafter, if prevalent modern views of former actors there be correct; consecrated, if the ostensible actors be viewed as chosen combatants and instruments on witchcraft’s last and most widely renowned battle-field.

Many of you know that I first drew breath and also received my earlier training and unfoldment on the soil of your town. My relations to witchcraft soil were not of my own choosing, and I feel no responsibility for them—feel no sense of gratulation, and none of shame, because of them. Still, no doubt, they increase my desire to set forth the merits of former dwellers at the Village as having been as great and noble, and their faults as few and small, as authenticated facts fairly demand; and this not because of anything done or suffered by any one of my personal ancestors, no one of whom, so far as I have learned, was either accuser, accused, or witness in any witchcraft case. There, however, has been transmitted orally from sire to son what possibly indicates that one of them was exposed to arrest. Immediately after the prosecutions ceased, Joseph Putnam, father of General Israel, was a firm and efficient opponent to Mr. Parris’s retaining position as minister at the Village. Tradition says that when rage for arrestings was high, he, being then only twenty-two years old, and his still younger wife, kept themselves and their family armed, their horses saddled and fed by the door, day and night for six months. This was preparation for either resistance or flight, as circumstances might render expedient in case an arrest should be attempted there. Opposition to prevalent beliefs, therefore, may not be a new feature in the family history. The heretic to the notions of many to-day, may have had an ancestor heretical to the witchcraft creed in 1692.

But if heresy has come by inheritance, charity combines with it; for my heart is gladdened by each newly discovered indication that Joseph’s elder half-brother, Thomas Putnam, the great and impartial prosecutor, and Ann, daughter of Thomas the great witch-finder,—also that Mr. Parris and many other former villagers,—never, any one of them, acted any part in relation to witchcraft that was not prompted by devotion to the relief and good of their families and neighbors, or forced upon them by unseen and irresistible agents.

Your trusted teachers upon the subject—Upham, Fowler, Hanson, and Rice, all well informed in most directions, and well-intentioned—have severally favored the view that neither supermundane nor submundane agents were at all concerned in producing your witchcraft scenes. Their course throws tremendous and most fearful responsibilities upon both the fathers and daughters of a former age; and not responsibilities alone, but also accusations of deviltry upon the children, and of stupidity and barbarity upon the fathers, which make them all objects of aversion, and a stock from which any one may well blush to find that he has descended.

No one of these teachers went back to the commencement of the strange doings, and scanned the testimony of Tituba, that personal participator in them, and the best possible witness. No one of them used, and probably none but Upham had at command, her simple but plain statements, that a spirit came to her and forced her to help him and others pinch the two little girls in Mr. Parris’s family, at the very time when their mysterious ailments were first manifested. The keen and exact Deodat Lawson states that the afflicted ones “talked with the specters as with living persons.” Mention of spirits as being seen attendant upon the startling works is of frequent occurrence in the primitive records. Therefore, facts well presented and authoritative have been left unadduced by your teachers. They, however, are a part, and a very important part, of things to be accounted for. Any theory of explanation that fails to embrace such is essentially faulty, misleading, and not worthy of adoption. Fair respect for historic facts, and especially for the reputation of those men and young women who were prominently concerned in its scenes, very properly and forcefully demands a widely different and less humiliating and aspersory solution of your witchcraft than such as has been proffered in the present century.

My reading in preparation for this work failed to meet with either distinct mention of any meeting of a circle at Mr. Parris’s house, or with any statement which had seeming reference to the existence of such a one, till I got down to Upham, who dwells much upon it and its influences, but omits mention of the source of his information. Since the publication of his Lectures upon Witchcraft, many writers have followed his lead.

Knowledge of the locality and of the relative positions of the homes of those girls, and of their positions in those homes, is perhaps kept more steadily in view by a writer whose young days, and parts of his manhood, were passed there, than by others not so long familiar with the region; and perhaps he holds firmer conviction that gatherings, with the frequency and to the extent which are claimed, for the purpose of learning the arts of necromancy, magic, and spiritualism, under the roof of such a man as Mr. Parris, were very much nearer to an impossibility, than most others do who have of late had occasion to consider who enacted Salem witchcraft. If current assumptions, that the accusing girls, by study and practice, rendered themselves able to concoct and enact the vast and bloody tragedy imputed to them, and if their own minds and wills were properly authors there,—if the prevalent explanation of witchcraft be much other than fanciful,—then the magical skill and powers, and the brutal acts there manifested, loudly call for admission that wolfish fathers had begotten foxes, and were beguiled and spurred on by their own wily vulpines to commit such horrid havoc as must fix unfading and ineffaceable stain of infamy upon the spot where they prowled.

The blackest smooch on the pages of your history was dropped from the pen which virtually made the Village daughters incarnate devils, and their fathers gullible, stupid, and brutal mistakers of what their own girls performed for the marvelous doings of agents possessing more than mortal powers. God save the parish soil from the stain which modern fancy’s course tends to impress upon it! Its men were never beguiled and aroused to perpetration of monstrous barbarities by the self-willed actings and words of their daughters. But genuine and mysterious afflictions of their children found the sires ready to fight manfully and unflaggingly for God and the deliverance of their families from mundane hells, and that, too, with such force and persistency as never before was equaled in witchcraft’s long history, and with such success that no extension of that sad volume has since been possible.That was most emphatically a time that tried men’s souls; and the souls then there proved to be brave enough to wage conflict against the mightiest and most formidable of possible enemies, and strong and persistent enough to force him to such struggle as strained his vitals, and paralyzed his power to molest grievously in any future age. The Unique Devil of Witchcraft left that field of fight a Samson shorn of his locks; the source of his strength was there cut off, for the intensely indurated encasement of the delusion which centuries before had begotten him, and had ever since been feeding him abundantly, was then so thoroughly cracked, that its contents went the way of water spilled upon the ground, and he famished.

Blush not for the fathers. They were heroes, true to their creed, their families, and their neighbors; true servants of their God—true foes to their devil. And their fight purchased the freedom which lets me now speak in their defense, devoid of any fears of the hangman’s rope; and purchased, too, your no less valuable freedom to let me now speak without molestation,—which would be impossible were the creed of the fathers now prevalent, and if you equaled them in devotion to Faith,—because then my methods and processes for gaining knowledge would require you to hang either me or those through whom loved and wise ones speak back from beyond the grave, impart their hallowing lessons of experience in bright abodes, and their instructions in righteousness. Thank God yourselves that you hold no creed calling you to perpetrate such barbarity! Hutchinson’s statement, that our witch-prosecutors were more barbarous than Hottentots and nations scarcely knowing a God ever were known to be, involves a very significant comment upon the witchcraft creed. That creed made our fathers more barbarous than any tribe of men outside the Christian pale; and were that creed yours to-day, and were you true to it, you would be equally barbarous as they. Their struggle purchased for you and all Christendom exemption from their direful condition.

Adopt the view—and we believe it correct—that the accusing girls were constitutionally endowed with fine sensibilities and special organisms and temperaments which rendered their bodies facile instruments through which unseen intelligences acted upon visible matter and human beings, the supposition that God made them capable of being good mediums—good instruments for use by other minds and wills than their own, and that their bodies, either apart from or against their own minds and wills, were concerned in the enactment of witchcraft, and then you may look upon each and all of them as having been as pure, innocent, harmless, sympathetic, and benevolent as any females in that or in this generation; and no descendant from them need fear the cropping out of specially bad and disreputable blood thence inherited, and each may regard his or her native spot as deserving to be consecrated rather than damned to fame, because there true, conscientious men fought manfully and legitimately for rescue of both their own homes and the community from direst of all conceivable foes, while living instruments of rare efficiency existed there, by use of which the Christian world was delivered from dwarfing and hampering slavery to a monk-made devil. What other battle, of any nature, ever fought on American soil, purchased choicer freedom, or effected mental emancipation more widely over Christendom, than did your fathers’ conflict with their devil? May the year 1892 deem the spot worthy of a commemorative monument!

Your last historian poetically says, that your “witchcraft darkness is a cloud conspicuous chiefly by the widening radiance itself of the morning on whose brow it hung.” Shining traits, qualities, and deeds of New Englanders in the seventeenth century, including the dwellers at the Village, no doubt gave widening radiance to the morning of our nation’s day; and the abiding brilliancy of that morning may be what makes your “witchcraft darkness” far more conspicuous than any in other lands. But it surely required far other than begulled fathers and begulling daughters to emit the rays of a morning of such widening radiance as would make darkness more conspicuous there than elsewhere. That morning owed its brightness to far other traits than beguiled and beguiling ones. Clear perceptions of the demands of a creed, of duty to God, of duty to one’s family; prompt, vigorous action in obedience to God’s direction and the king’s law when the devil invaded one’s home; fearless and untiring conflict with man’s most powerful and malignant foe;—these, and other powers, qualities, and acts kindred to these, emitted the radiance which made the blackness of witchcraft more conspicuous at Danvers than elsewhere in the broad world.

No. Witchcraft did not rage with most marvelous fierceness, end enact its death-struggle, on your soil because of the weakness, but because of the strength of your fathers; not because of their cowardice, but of their courage; not because of their heartlessness and barbarity, but of tenderness toward their agonized families; not because of lack of faith in God, but because of faith in him so strong that it could put humaneness down, and keep it down till God’s call to put a witch to death could be obeyed.

Such properties gave to the morning of the Village an inherent brightness which first extinguished witchcraft’s dismal day, and now harbingers a brighter one, in which, no civil law molesting, spirits hold mutually helpful communings with mortals. That momentous and most valuable privilege was essentially won on your soil in 1692. Nation after nation, taught by results at the Village, has repealed its obnoxious statutes, and broad Christendom is the freer and more elevated because of light widely radiating forth from your “witchcraft darkness.”