The world-renowned and momentous display of extraordinary manifestations, known the world over as Salem Witchcraft, originated and was mainly manifested in what was then called Salem Village—territory distinct from Salem proper—embracing the present town of Danvers, together with parts of Beverly, Wenham, Topsfield, and Middleton, in the County of Essex and State of Massachusetts. There, in the family of the Rev. Samuel Parris, minister at the Village, on the 29th of February, 1692, mysterious causes had wrought strange maladies upon two young girls during the six preceding weeks, which excited great public alarm, and produced such mental agitation that the civil authorities were called upon to give the matter official attention. The true origin and the actual authors and enactors of that tragedy are among the prime objects of our present researches. It is not our purpose to furnish a full history, but to scrutinize and test the hypotheses of other writers; and give a solution of the origin and specification of the actors and effects of that tragedy different—widely different—from the prevalent modern ones. Upham, Drake, and Fowler all agree in fundamentals. All of them have assumed that the agents and forces which evolved those marvelous operations were scarcely, if anything, other than ten or twelve respectable girls, from nine to Upham states (vol. ii. pp. 2 and 386) that “for a period embracing about two months they” (certain girls and women) “had been in the habit of meeting together, and spending the long winter evenings, at Mr. Parris’s house, practicing the arts of fortune-telling, jugglery, and magic.” Drake says (“Annals of Witchcraft,” p. 189) that “these females instituted frequent meetings, or got up, as it would now be styled, a club, which was called a circle. How frequent they had these meetings Fowler remarks, in Woodward’s Series (vol. iii. pp. 204 and 205), that “Mary Warren, one of the most violent of the accusing girls, lived with John Proctor,” who, “out of patience with the meetings of the girls composing this circle,” &c. “It is at the meeting of this circle of eight girls, for the purpose of practicing palmistry and fortune-telling, that we discover the germ or the first origin of the delusion.” The position of each of these writers substantially is, that the accusing girls, at circle meetings which they held, qualified themselves for the parts they subsequently performed, wherein, Fowler says, “their whole course, as seen by their depositions, discloses much malignancy.” Upham has told us that these meetings were held “at Mr. Parris’s house,” and that they occurred within the space of “about two months ... during the winter of 1691 and 1692.” Drake found no statement as to “how frequent they had these meetings,” and Fowler finds in them “the germ ... of the delusion.” We have found no mention at all of this circle in the more ancient records and accounts, and not one of the authors named makes mention of the source of his information. Those men, two of whom are our personal acquaintances and friends, would not state anything which they did not believe to be true. We therefore shall not gainsay their allegations. Still, we feel privileged to doubt whether their uncertain number of meetings during the short space of two winter months, held at the minister’s own The general purpose of any stated meetings “at Mr. Parris’s house,” naturally and almost necessarily had his approbation; and the presumption from his general character is, that he was neither the good-natured indolent man who let others take their own course, however wayward, nor the absent-minded one whom children or even bright adults could easily and repeatedly deceive and hoodwink. The probability seems excessively small that such a one as he would permit repeated gatherings under his own roof for the special purpose of acquiring knowledge of and skill in practicing tabooed arts. Whatever their authority for it, the writers referred to imply that the members of a circle of girls and misses, meeting statedly “at Mr. Parris’s house,” there very expeditiously qualified themselves to become not only most efficient actors of long-continued dissimulation, imposture, cunning, devilish trickery, and fiendish malice, but also to be bona fide concoctors and successful executors of vastly complicated, deep, and broad schemes of hellish outrages upon parents, neighbors, and the country. Drake says, “They were generally very ignorant, for out of the eight but two could write their names. Such were the characters which set in motion that stupendous tragedy which ended in blood and ruin.” In vol. i. p. 486, Upham says, “How those young country girls, some of them mere children, most of them wholly illiterate, could have become familiar with such fancies to such an extent, is truly surprising.... In the Salem witchcraft proceedings, the superstition of the middle ages was embodied in real action. All its extravagances, absurdities, and monstrosities appear in their application to human experience.” Such, according to their own concessions, was the feebleness of the agents whom the historians credited with performances which seem superhuman, and required for their production intellect and forces above what any community has often witnessed. Notwithstanding the inherent and insuperable incompetency of such persons to voluntarily devise and perform what has been ascribed to them, those females have been earnestly set forth as the actual and almost impromptu devisers and enactors of as intricate and effective a scheme for inflicting tortures and misery upon a vast multitude of human beings as has rarely In his general history of Salem Village, introductory to that of its witchcraft, Upham, giving us the geographical positions of their several residences, and also their relations and positions in domestic life, furnishes ample grounds for very strong presumption that frequent attendance upon sportive meetings at the parsonage must have been so inconvenient and onerous to several of those girls, that they would not have been present many times in the short space of two months. Ann Putnam, a sensitive girl only twelve years old, and Mercy Lewis, a servant girl, or “the maid,” in the family of Ann’s father, two of the most efficient pupils in that necromantic school, resided together in a home situated not less than two and a half miles distant, in a north-westerly What, therefore, is the probability that these five girls, with any great frequency or regularity, went to and returned home from avowedly sportive or necromantic meetings at the parsonage? Each of them would have to travel, in going and returning, not less than five or six miles, mostly along separate routes, in winter’s shortest days, by lonely and crooked roads, through miles of dark forests, over winter’s snows, and amid its freezing airs. What is the probability that such persons, so circumstanced, would either desire to go, or be permitted by parents and employers to go, frequently and regularly to such meetings? Slight—very slight—because both natural and domestic obstacles must have been great. Were horses, vehicles, and drivers, or were even We should concede its probable correctness, were an historian to make the supposition that the two Indian slaves in Mr. Parris’s kitchen, John Indian and his wife Tituba, often amused themselves and any young folks or other visitors, who there basked in genial light and warmth from blazing logs in a huge New England fireplace on a cold winter’s evening, by rehearsing ghost stories and magic lore, and performing any such feats in fortune-telling or other mystical doings as they might be able to exhibit, or as might transpire through them. That the little girls, Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. Parris, and Abigail Williams, his niece, were accustomed to spend many cold winter evenings in the warm kitchen of their own home is very credible. Mary Walcut and Susanna Sheldon, who lived in the near neighborhood, perhaps dropped in frequently. But the Mediumistic capabilities are innate peculiarities, measurably hereditary, and nearly always amenable to special conditions and surroundings for conspicuous development. King Saul became a prophet, i. e., a medium, only when he met, mingled with, and imbibed emanations from prophets or mediums. Messengers whom he sent to the prophets succumbed to new and developing influences upon arriving at their destination, and became suddenly prophets themselves. Latent germs of spiritualistic capabilities, if permeated by quickening auras, which often emanate from positive mediums, frequently unfold into mediumship, as naturally as specific elements, reaching latent germs in many human systems, expand those germs into measles, or into whooping-cough; or as naturally as listening to soul-stirring music energizes latent capabilities in many who are acted upon by its strains, and helps The parsonage kitchen—that nestling-place of John Indian and his wife Tituba—may have been that winter a little Delphos, or a little Mount Horeb, that is, a spot where developing nourishments of mediumistic germs were collected in unusual abundance, and were unwontedly operative. We are not only ready to admit, but deem it probable, that any susceptible persons who came into the presence of John and Tituba, in their special room, may have there imbibed properties unsought and unperceived which fostered the development of such visitors into tools or instruments, by the use of which the genuine authors of Salem witchcraft brought out their work upon a public stage, and prosecuted its terrific enactment. Smothering our serious doubts whether any regular meetings at stated times were arranged for or held, we are entirely ready to let the supposition stand that gatherings, more or less extensive, occasionally occurred, at which fortune-telling, necromancy, magic, or Spiritualism, was made the subject of either sportive or serious attention, and we will let results indicate who managed the visible performers during the exercises or entertainments there. Upham’s beautifully rhetorical and eloquent efforts to show that because they, as he states, held a number of meetings for learning and practicing mystic arts, those rustic, illiterate girls thereby and thereat qualified themselves to concoct and accomplish of their own accord, and by their histrionic and malicious capabilities, all that mighty scheme or plan which his predecessor and himself lay to their charge, Fowler seems to have inferred from some statements ascribed to Proctor, that the latter threatened to go and force Mary Warren to leave the circle. We do not so read the account. The morning of March 25,—that is, the next morning after the examination of Rebecca Nurse,—John Proctor said “he was going to fetch home his jade” (Mary Warren); “he left her there” (at the village) “last night, and had rather given 40c than let her come up.” That is, apparently, he had rather have given that sum than to have had her be present at the examination of Mrs. Nurse; for, continued he, “if they were let alone, Sr., we should all be devils and witches quickly; they should rather be had to the whipping post; but he would fetch his jade home and thrust the devil out of her, ... crying, hang them—hang them. And also added, that when she was first taken with fits he kept her close to the wheel, and threatened to thrash her, and then she had no more fits till the next day” (when) “he was gone forth, and then she must have her fits again forsooth,” &c.—Woodward’s Series, vol. i. p. 63. It is obvious from the above that Proctor’s objection was to his jade’s attendance upon the examination of the accused—to her attendance at court—and not at the circle, which, according to Upham, should have closed its meetings a month at least before the 25th of March. And yet S. P. Fowler says (Woodward’s Series, vol. iii. p. 204), that “Proctor, out of all patience Proctor’s stopping the fits, by threats to thrash the girl, intimates that the fits were measurably controllable by the will of some one. That much may be true in relation to almost all diseases and maladies of the body, but probably not as much so in most other kinds as in those which are imposed by a will that has no natural alliance with the agitated body. Under the influence of threats, the girl would naturally struggle to get full possession of all her own powers and faculties, and the effort would put her own elements in such commotion that for a time no foreign will could get control over her form. Threats, medicines of certain kinds, and many other applications, may temporally render almost any medium’s system uncontrollable by spirits. Calmness, both of mind and body, and darkness, too, which is less positive and disintegrating than light, in action upon instruments made and used by spirits, are very helpful to control of borrowed forms. He might have known when he wrote, he ought to have known then, that Dr. Robert Hare, of Philadelphia, who was eminent, distinctly and broadly eminent, as a scientist, had in 1855 published to the world a rigidly scientific demonstration that some unseen agent, intelligent enough to understand and comply with verbal requests, repeatedly moved the arms of scale-beams contrary to the normal action of gravitation. Science, there and then, revealed the existence of some natural law or laws which permit unseen and impalpable intelligences, under some conditions, to put forth action upon matter, with force and to extent, which man can measure in pounds avoirdupois. That single achievement of modern science teaches the wisdom of exempting seemingly diabolized and mischievous children from charge of being devils incarnate, until we have determined whether some Obviously he who was cognizant that science had made recent discoveries, suffered himself to remain in ignorance of what to him, as witchcraft historian, were the most pertinent and important parts of the knowledge recently gained; ignorant of those parts which were most closely connected with philosophical solution of the mysteries which pervaded the history he was elaborating. His blindness to what science—yes, to what exact physical science—by her rigid processes of weighing and measuring had positively demonstrated, bespeaks his short-comings, and would bespeak the unphilosophical stand-point of any historian of, or critic upon, the world’s marvels, who, since the day of Hare, ignores the light radiating from his demonstration, and continues to grope on in darkness which use of that light would dispel. Take into the catalogue of natural agents and forces all those whose existence and action, science, as applied by Dr. Hare twenty years ago, and again by Mr. Crookes and others in England more recently, backed, too, by the observations and tests of thousands less erudite, has demonstrated, and then all occasion to look upon our fathers as numskulls, and their daughters as proficient devils, at once disappears. New England soil, two centuries ago, was not populated mainly by jack-asses; and even had it been, their offspring would have been neither monkeys nor hyenas. “A board, being about four feet in length, is supported by a rod, as a fulcrum, at about one foot from one end, and, of course, three feet from the other, which is suspended on a spring balance. A glass vase, about nine inches in diameter and five inches in hight, having a knob to hold it by, when inverted had this knob inserted in a hole made in the board six inches, nearly, from the fulcrum. Thus the vase rested on the board mouth upward. A wire-gauze cage, such as is used to keep flies from sugar, was so arranged by a well-known means as to slide up or down on two iron rods, one on each side of the trestle supporting the fulcrum. By these arrangements it was so adjusted as to descend into the vase until within an inch and a half of the bottom, while the inferiority of its dimensions prevented it from coming elsewhere within an inch of the parietes of the vase. Water was poured into the vase so as to rise into the cage till within about an inch and an half of the brim. A well-known medium (Gordon) was induced to plunge his hands, clasped together, to the bottom of the cage, holding them perfectly still. As soon as those conditions were attained, the apparatus being untouched by any one excepting the medium as described, I invoked the aid of my spirit friends. A downward force was repeatedly exerted upon the end of the board appended to the balance, equal to three pounds’ weight nearly;... the distance of the hook of the balance from the fulcrum on which the board turned was six times as The above experiment was performed in Dr. Hare’s own laboratory, in the presence and under the watchful scrutiny of John M. Kennedy, Esq., and was made with extraordinary care, because Professor Henry had just treated a similar result formerly obtained as incredible. Plate III. in the book furnishes a diagram illustrating Dr. Hare’s apparatus. This experimenter, whom Alfred R. Wallace calls America’s foremost chemist, had spent very many years in both constructing and in using, as a scientist, varied kinds of apparatus for testing the presence and action of subtile forces in nature, and he was competent to know, and did know as well as any other man whatsoever in the world’s great body of scientists, when results were obtained to positive certainty. He proved that some invisible and intelligent power moved his scale-beam contrary to the action of gravitation. The above demonstration, accompanied by many other evidences of spirit-action upon matter through mediums, had been published twelve years when Upham put forth his work. Therefore he was either ignorant of or he ignored late discoveries of science which had revolutionizing applicability to the very theories which he was putting forth. After having eloquently depicted the sad results of witchcraft, that author says (vol. ii. p. 427), “Let those results for ever stand conspicuous, beacon-monuments, warning us and coming generations against superstition in every form, and all credulous and vain attempts to penetrate beyond the legitimate boundaries Another question is suggested by the foregoing quotation. Would not positive knowledge that there are unseen agents and forces within the realms of nature that can legitimately exhibit the phenomena once deemed witchcrafts, transfer such phenomena from the domain of either superstition or crime into that of science or that of beneficence? Surely it would. And, therefore, how can one possibly work more efficiently for depopulating the domain of superstition, than by bringing its inhabitants forth and colonizing them on the lands of knowledge and science? Shall we comply with the historian’s advice, and still continue to leave what ignorance denominates hobgoblins and ghosts to remain shrouded in appalling mists, and thus aid them to continue to be to coming generations the same awful beings they were to the generations past? Or shall we, on the other hand, We choose to learn as much concerning the universe and its inhabitants as God gives us power and opportunities to acquire; not fearing his censure, but trusting to win his approbation, by so doing. When one learns that issuers from the vailed realms of spirit-land are only earth’s emancipated children revisiting their former homes, the cry that devils are coming lacks any startling power. Faith, and even knowledge, sometimes says, “It is my friends and loved ones and those who love me, who are in the circumambient hosts, and I will do what I may to facilitate their more sensible approach; will extend toward them a friendly and helping hand.” Only superstition and ignorance quail and skulk before visitants that come from unseen realms; knowledge stands fast and meets them with welcome and joy. The “legitimate boundaries of knowledge”! Where are they? Surely not within any domain where knowledge can supersede ignorance and its consequent superstitions. When man escapes from his gross and sluggish encasement, and becomes—as the reappearance of many of the race teaches that he does—a freed spirit, he does not escape from within the realm of nature, nor pass to where natural substances and forces cease to sustain and act upon him. The word “supernatural” as well as its equivalent phrase, “more than natural,” is often misleading; it tends to generate supposition that nature terminates where man’s external senses cease to take cognizance. Absolutely, however, as we believe, all beings, including even God, and all things whatsoever, are parts of nature; so that the word “supernatural” can scarcely find place for rigid, unqualified application. No objection to its usual application is here intended, provided it is not used to convey the idea that things to which it is applied are the work of intelligence above and beyond the control and restrictions of universal laws or forces; provided it does not intimate that the works are what theology has called miracles, i. e., acts “contrary to the established course of things.” All the marvelous works of both ancient and modern Spiritualism may have occurred, and yet none of them have been, in fact, “more than natural,” however much so some minds may be accustomed to deem them. Take psychic forces as natural instrumentalities, take both embodied and disembodied intelligences who had skill and power for the control of such forces, and with these take also others who had special susceptibilities for yielding to psychic action, and you will then have in your conceptions ample natural means for the production of each and every marvel that was ever described in human history, and all such may have been produced without any more help or hindrance in kind from either God or the devil, than we all receive in the ordinary acts of daily life. Bring in what is meant by either magnetism, or mesmerism, or psychology, or The position taken by Mr. Varley, whose observations were made mostly within his own domestic circle, and whose professional pursuits led him to be a constant and careful observer of the nature, properties, and actions of delicate forces, is worthy of much regard. His view is probably in harmony with the conclusion of most minds which have studied carefully the outworkings of mesmerism and Spiritualism. The two isms, in some views of them, are essentially one in nature, the latter being the butterfly or moth that came from out the former. The grub and its moth are the same being in different stages By means of this psychism, or this outworking of soul power, there may be kept up reciprocal action or intercommunion between what are usually called the material and spiritual worlds, both of which absolutely are natural, and are pervaded by interacting natural forces which are at the service of peculiarly endowed, or constituted, or unfolded persons, who are, or may become, competent and disposed to use them. A disembodied spirit no more needs special permission or aid from Omnipotence for acting upon men and matter, than the diver needs such for deep descents beneath the water’s surface. Natural permission for spirits to reincase themselves in, or to act upon, palpable matter, is as free and full as man’s is to put on submarine armor. This much we have said for the purpose of disclosing our stand-points of observations and reasonings pertaining to Salem witchcraft, and now come to more direct consideration of that special topic. At Salem Village about a dozen people, mostly the girls previously named, were strangely and grievously tormented, at short intervals, during several months. According to the faith of those times, no person could be bewitched in any other way than through some other embodied person who had entered into a covenant with the Devil, and voluntarily become his instrument or his agent. It was then assumed, also, that the afflicted ones could perceive who the person or persons were through whom the devil tormented them. Consequently the sufferers were teased, coaxed, or driven to name some one or more who was causing their sufferings. Those named by the sufferers as producers of their maladies were called the accused, or were said to be “cried out upon.” Belief in the ability of the afflicted to designate accurately their afflicters, was then prevalent; but though probably born of facts in human experience, and in itself fundamentally correct, it was indiscreetly and harmfully applied. The mediumistic or psychologized condition often renders its subjects practically independent of time, space, and gross matter, and makes them possessors of ability to feel, or rather to sense, contact with the properties of some peculiarly constituted mortals, even though If the inner or spiritual perceptive organs of Mr. Parris, Dr. Griggs, Thomas Putnam, and their consulting associates, of whom we shall speak hereafter, were inextricably interblended with their outer bodies, so that they were, par excellence, non-mediumistic, their presence near the bodies of persons infilled with abnormal properties by spirits might be imperceptible by the entranced, while either the poor, “melancholy, distracted” (?) Sarah Good, or “bed-rid” Mrs. Osburn (who will come into notice on a future page), if highly mediumistic, might, though being then in their distant homes bodily, be present as spirits, and their emanations might be distinctly felt by the suffering girls, and be by them visibly traced to their sources. Mediumistic states or entrancements, however induced, often bring their subjects into rapport with other mediumistic persons afar off, while they as often shut off sensibility to the presence of the physically imprisoned or very slightly impressible ones who are near by. The saying that “birds of a feather flock together” apparently has more constant application outside of gravitation’s dominating reach than within it—more among relatively freed spirits than among rigidly body-hampered ones. That there exist special occult forces, whose action frequently enables mediumistic persons, while under spirit manipulations, to know assuredly that emanations from special human organisms act upon them to The belief held by many of our forefathers, that the afflicted would generally know that afflicting forces came to them from the persons whom they named, though measurably correct in itself, was rendered most woefully disastrous in its application, because of its concomitant erroneous belief that such afflicting forces could go forth from none but such as were in covenant with witchcraft’s awful devil. The fact of one’s being a channel through which occult wonder-working forces could flow, was, in those days, proof positive that he or she had tendered allegiance to and made a compact with the Evil One. That was the specially great and disastrous error which engendered witchcraft. Susceptibilities which were in fact only nature’s boons, were looked upon as acquisitions obtained through a diabolical compact. Some laws of psychology partially revealed and comprehended now, were then not dreamed of; and deductions from false premises or from an erroneous belief, being then applied by clear-headed and good men for noble ends, yes, for God’s glory and man’s protection, caused out-workings of unspeakable woes. The persons most afflicted at Salem Village were Elizabeth, daughter of Mr. Parris, nine years old; Abigail Williams, his niece, eleven; Ann Putnam, twelve; Mercy Lewis, seventeen; Mary Walcut, History has said—no, not history—but invalid supposition has said that sportiveness, malice, love of notoriety, and the like, inherent in the minds and hearts of those young girls and women, were the chief incentives to and producers of the woeful, the We quote as follows from church records, penned by the Rev. Mr. Parris himself, in whose house the great and awful commotion originated:— “It is altogether undeniable that our Great and Blessed God, for wise and holy ends, hath suffered many persons in several families of this little Village to be grievously vexed and tortured in body, and to be deeply tempted to the endangering of the destruction of their souls, and all these amazing feats (well known to many of us) to be done by witchcraft and diabolical operations. “It is well known that when these calamities first began, which was in my own family, the affliction was” (had existed) “several weeks, before such hellish operations as witchcraft was suspected; Nay, it never broke forth to any considerable light, until diabolical means was used, by the making of a cake by my Indian man, who had his directions from our sister Mary Sibly. Since which time apparitions have been plenty, and exceeding much mischief hath followed. But by this means (it seems) the devil hath been raised amongst us, and his rage is vehement and terrible, and when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows.” The statements just presented have come down from one whose position and whose mental powers qualified him to be as important a witness as any other person whatsoever could be; they come from An acute observer, who was also a definite and methodical describer of a portion of the actions referred to, says the sufferers were “in vain” treated medicinally; that “they were oftentimes very stupid in their fits, and could neither hear nor understand, in the apprehension of the standers-by;” that “when they were discoursed with about God or Christ ... they were presently afflicted at a dreadful rate;” that “they sometimes told at a considerable distance, yea, several miles off, that such and such persons were afflicted, which hath been found to be done according to the time and manner they related it; and they said the specters of They affirmed that “they saw the ghosts of several departed persons,” and they did “discourse with the The above extracts describe a part only of the amazing feats. Mr. Parris apprehended that this extensive diabolism was inaugurated through the making of a peculiar cake by his Indian man John. Either a sneer or a smile will probably drape the reader’s face when he perceives that a clergyman in a former age deemed it probable that a compound offensive to refined taste (a cake made of meal mixed with urine from the suffering children) was so appetizing to the devil that it drew him from his wonted distance into close affinity with mortal forms, and increased his power to afflict them. Perhaps that clergyman had read what the reader may peruse by turning to the concluding portion of chap. iv. of Ezekiel, where preparation of food was prescribed for that prophet’s use while he was in process of being trained for pliancy under manipulations by some unseen intelligence—such preparation of food as was not less offensive than such a cake as John Indian furnished. We do not find a great producing cause of the amazing feats where Mr. Parris did, and are not prepared to regard Mary Sibley’s prescription as having been very efficacious. Still we might admit the possibility that the real author of the feats was present when John kneaded that cake, leavened it with supermundane yeast, and made use of it as an instrumentality for coming into closer contact than before with the human bodies from which part of the ingredients of the cake had been derived. Both spirits and unfolded mediums often either Who was “my Indian man”? Yes; who that baker whose cake raised the devil, and caused apparitions to become exceeding plenty? Mr. Parris, prior to being a minister of the gospel, had been a merchant in Barbadoes, and at the commencement of the strange feats alluded to, had in his family some servants, whom he called Indians; but they probably were natives either of some one of the West India islands or of the neighboring coast of South America, whom he had brought thence, and who were, doubtless, by nature less firm and self-reliant than our northern Indians usually are. Two of these servants, or slaves, viz., John Indian, the cake-baker, and his wife, Tituba, were among the first, if they were not the very first, persons there to succumb, and yield subjection to the peculiar influences which developed the terrible events we are considering. Those two humble, ignorant, weak-minded slaves may have been, and we regard them as having been, though unintentionally and unconscious of it, very efficient aids in the outward manifestation of what their master properly termed “amazing feats.” John seems, so far as records depict him, to have been only about as much of a medium as King Saul was; that is, one that could be made to tumble down and roll about in unseemly ways. There may, and This humble, illiterate slave, besides being apparently the chief focus or reservoir of supermundane forces that evolved the Salem wonders, was one among the first three persons who were arrested and brought before the civil tribunals under charges of practicing witchcraft. Her statements at her examination were recorded very fully by one of the two magistrates who conducted the proceedings. And the transmitted words of this simple-minded creature, whose intellect was incompetent to foresee the Tituba’s general, if not uniform frankness, and the extreme simplicity of her answers, tend strongly to beget confidence in the intentional and substantial truthfulness of her statements. We deem it unjust to doubt her truthfulness. And the general accuracy of her testimony is now rendered credible by its harmony with a mass of facts pertaining to Spiritualism. If the truth and accuracy of her words be conceded,—and they ought to be,—we learn distinctly that during the “several weeks” through which Mr. Parris’s afflicted daughter and niece were treated by their physician and cared for by the family and Such testimony as hers, by such a lowly person as she was, when given before a tribunal whose members were firm believers in such a devil and in such a creed as have been described in our Appendix, even if fairly comprehended by them, would cause her judges to believe that she was virtually confessing that she had made a covenant with the Evil One. From their premises they could not logically draw any other conclusion. Perhaps, unfortunately for her, but not for us at this day, her intellect was too feeble to perceive the inferences which would be drawn from her words. Fearing not consequences, she could frankly tell her experiences and observations; she let out the exact facts of the case, and furnished for us a sound historic basis for the assertion that the strange maladies which came upon the little girls in Mr. Parris’s house were designedly and deliberately imposed by a disembodied spirit or a band of spirits. The mouths of not only babes and sucklings, but of adults of feeble intellect, present facts, sometimes, better than those whose intellects are swayed by fears of dreaded consequences which might ensue from frank and full avowal of their knowledge. From Upham, though he had perused the minutes of testimony to which we allude, elected to use a briefer report of Tituba’s statements, which was made by Ezekiel Cheever. The more extended one he noticed thus: “Another report of Tituba’s examination has been preserved in the second volume” (we find it in vol. iii., appendix, p. 185) “of the collection edited by Samuel G. Drake, entitled the ‘Witchcraft Delusion in New England.’ It is in the handwriting of Jonathan Corwin, very full and minute.” It is “full, minute,” and abounding in facts which the faithful historian should adduce and comment upon. It was written out by one of the magistrates before whom Tituba was examined, and therefore its authority is good. It surprises us that the historian who noticed it as above failed to use much important matter contained in it which was lacking in the report that he preferred to this. Drake, under whose supervision this ampler report was first printed, says, in Woodward’s “Historical Series,” No. I. Vol. III. Appendix p. 186, that “it While Drake says this record of “the examination is valuable” for “the light it throws on the commencement of the delusion,” he also calls it a “record of incoherent nonsense.” The public very narrowly escaped loss of opportunity to get at the important and luminous facts contained in this document. Drake, in 1866, says, “The original (now That such as desire to do so may be enabled to peruse the whole of her testimony, which probably can now be found printed only in Woodward’s very valuable Series of original documents pertaining to witchcraft,—a work too voluminous and costly to obtain general circulation,—we shall do what we can to further public accessibility to Tituba’s statement, ungarbled and unabridged. Still, to both relieve and enlighten the reader, we shall break up its continuity by interjecting comments upon many parts as we go on, but do this in such form, that, if the reader chooses to peruse the whole unbiased by comment, he can; for this will require only an observance of our quotation marks. By skipping our comments he can read in their original collocations all parts of what Drake calls “incoherent nonsense,” but which to us, notwithstanding some perplexing incoherence of both questions and answers, is rich in instructive facts. Prior to March 1, the malady seems to have spread out beyond the parsonage and seized upon other persons, for on that day several afflicted ones were convened as witnesses, or accusers, or both, at the place where the magistrates then appeared for attending to the cases of three women who had been accused of witchcraft, arrested, and held for examination. Here was the commencement of reputed folly and barbarity so exercised as soon to redden that region with the blood of the innocent, the manly, the virtuous, and the devout. Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba were brought |