A History of the American People

Edict of Nantes. The same decade, in Protestant London, there was a violent mob-led hunt for
Catholic subversives led by the renegade Titus Oates. The Salem hysteria was part of this
irrational, recidivist pattern.
The ostensible facts of the Salem case are not in dispute. Early in 1692, two children in the
household of the vicar of Salem, Samuel Parris-his daughter Betty, aged nine, and his niece
Abigail, elevenbegan to be taken with hysterical fits, screaming and rolling on the floor. Their
behavior affected some of their friends. Neither girl could write and they may not have been able
to read. They were fond of listening to the tales of Tituba, a black female slave who formed part
of the household. When the girls' behavior attracted attention, they were medically examined and
closely questioned by their credulous father and local busybodies. The girls finally named Tituba
as the source of their trouble and she, under pressure to confess witchcraft, admitted she was a
servant of Satan, and spoke of cats, rats, and a book of witchcraft, signed by nine in Salem.' Two names of local women were screamed out by the girls, and this set off the hunt. It soon attracted a great deal of interest, not just in Salem but in the entire neighborhood, including Boston. One of those who took a hand in it was Increase Mather's learned minister-son, Cotton Mather (1663-1728), a young but already prominent member of the Boston elite. The authorities, such as they were, also took a hand. In mid-May, the temporary governor, William Philips, arrived in Salem and, impressed by what he heard-perhaps horrified is a better word-set up a special court, under William Stoughton, to get to the bottom of the matter. This of course was a serious error. The ordinary law might or might not function fairly in sorcery cases, but a special court was bound to find culprits to justify its existence. And so it did. Its proceedings were outrageous. Accused persons, men and women, who confessed to using witchcraft, were released-as it were rewarded by the court forproving' the reality of the Devil's work in Salem.
The more sturdy-minded among the accused, who obstinately refused to confess to crimes they
had not committed, were judged guilty. The hysteria raged throughout the long New England
summer. By the early autumn, fourteen women and five men, most of them respectable people
with unblemished records, had been hanged. One man, who refused to plead at all, was pressed
to death with heavy stones, the old English peine forte et dure, for contempt of court-the only
time it was ever used in America's history. Over 150 people were awaiting trial in overcrowded
jails, and some of them died there. The reaction set in during October, when prominent people,
including the governor's wife, were named.' The authorities then came to their senses. The special court was dissolved. Those under arrest were released. The Salem trials can be seen as a throwback to an early age of credulity. In a sense they were. But they were more complicated than that. Belief in witches and the modern, sceptical mind were not opposite polarities. Cotton Mather who, at the climax of the hysteria in October, published a tract, Wonders of the Invisible World,proving' the existence of witchcraft and its
connection with the Devil, was not an obscurantist opponent of science. Quite the contrary. He
was descended from the Cottons and Mathers, two of Boston's leading intellectual families since
the inception of the colony. In the late 17th century, the new empirical science and older systems
of belief overlapped. Isaac Newton, greatest scientist of the age, was an example. He was
fascinated by all kinds of paranormal phenomena and his library contained large numbers of
books on astronomy. Cotton Mather was a learned man and a keen scientist. He was not only
awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity by Glasgow University but was also elected a Fellow
of the Royal Society, then the leading scientific body in the world. He popularized the
Copernican system of astrophysics in the colonies. He regarded the empirical study of nature as a
form of worship, a notion pursued by the New England Transcendentalists in the 19th century.