During nearly one hundred years, from about the middle of the eighteenth to that of the nineteenth century, the American public has been content to leave unlifted concealing drapery which the historian Hutchinson threw over witchcraft. His treatment of that subject is plausible and soothing to cursory readers, but superficial and unsatisfactory to minds which test the competency of agents to produce effects ascribed to them. His views have been so widely adopted and so long prevalent, that we must regard him as having been more influential than any other writer in hiding the gigantic limbs, features, and operations of what was with reason a veritable monster in the eyes of its beholders. In him some reprehensible qualities were conjoined with many admirable ones. Appleton’s New American CyclopÆdia states that “Thomas Hutchinson was born in Boston in 1711, and died at Brampton, near London, 1780. He was graduated at Harvard College, 1727. He became Judge of Probate in 1752, was Councillor from 1749 to 1756, Lieutenant Governor from 1758 to 1771, and was appointed Chief Justice in 1760, thus holding four high offices at one time. In the disputes which led to the Revolution, he sided with the British government.... He received his commission as Governor in 1771; and his whole administration was characterized by duplicity and an avaricious love of money, writing letters which he never sent, but which he showed as evidence of his zeal for the liberties of the province, while he advised the establishment of a citadel in Boston,” &c.

The History of Massachusetts by the pen of this man has sterling merits, and is of great value. That work and the bestowal of so many high offices upon him indicate that his abilities, acquisitions, and performances were of high order. His comments upon subjects which he discussed, and facts which he presented, were prevailingly fair, and very instructive. When he perceived—and he generally did—the genuine significance of his facts, reasoned from them all, and allowed to each its proper weight, he was a spirited, lucid, and valuable interpreter and guide. But when he encountered and adduced extraordinary facts, which baffled his power to account for in harmony with his prejudgments and fixed conclusions as to where natural agents and forces cease to act, he could very skillfully keep in abeyance the most distinguishing and significant aspects of such troublesome materials. That damaging moral weakness which let him write letters which he never sent, for the purpose of exhibiting them as evidence of his support of the popular cause, perhaps also let him be other than manly and frank when he encountered a certain class of facts which seemed to him “more than natural.” The whole subject of witchcraft was nettlesome to him. His pen very often indicated a testy, disturbed, and sometimes a contemptuous mover when it characterized persons who had been charged with that crime; and concerning such he recorded many hasty and unsatisfactory opinions and conclusions. A glimpse at the probable and almost necessary state of public opinion and knowledge concerning spiritual forces and agents about the middle of the eighteenth century, will detect serious difficulties besetting any witchcraft historian’s path at that time, and dispose us to look in clemency upon his hypotheses and conclusions, even though they be far from satisfactory.

The intense strain given to the prevalent monstrous creed concerning the devil, when its requirements were vigorously enforced at Salem Village in 1692, ruptured that creed itself; and no substitute for it under which the phenomena of witchcraft could be referred to competent authors and forces had been obtained in 1767. The public formerly had believed that either One Great Devil and his sympathetic imps, or embodied human beings who had made a covenant with him, must be the authors of all mysterious malignant action upon men, because no other unseen rational agents were recognized as having access to man. All acts deemed witchcrafts, therefore, were the devil’s. But belief devil-ward had changed at Hutchinson’s day. The Great Devil’s use of covenanted children, women, and men as his only available instrumentalities, had ceased to be asserted; the fathering of all mysterious works upon him and his had become an obsolete custom. Its revival might not meet kindly reception by the public; it probably would be distasteful to people whom tragic experience had not very long since taught to distrust and disown his Black Majesty’s sway over material things, and were also chagrined that their fathers had held undoubting faith in his powers and operations over and upon things temporal and palpable. The devil had been credited with more than he performed or had power to accomplish. Reflection had brought conviction that other intermeddlers existed than purely Satanic ones. And yet the culture and science of those times were incompetent to furnish an historian with any satisfactory evidence that any intelligent actors excepting the devil and human beings acted in and upon human society. Devil or man, one or the other, according to the then existing belief, must have enacted witchcraft. Whether the devil did, had been under consideration for more than seventy years, and public judgment declared him not guilty. What, therefore, was the historian’s necessity? He was forced to make embodied human beings its sole enactors. No wonder that the necessity made him petulant when facts and circumstances forced from his pen intimations that mere children and old women were competent and actual authors of some manifestations which, to his own keen and philosophic intellect, seemed “more than natural.” “More than natural” in his sense they obviously were. A distinct perception that the good God’s disembodied children, as well as the devil’s, can naturally traverse avenues earthward, and manifest their powers among men, would have enabled him to account philosophically for all the mysteries of those days. But “the fullness of time” for that had not then come.