Mathers’ Attitudes Prepares Way for Salem Witchcraft Trials

In which Hildreth snarks both Mathers’ superstitious teachings and their real devotion to God.

Continuing Salem Witchcraft Trials,
our selection from History of the United States by Richard Hildreth published in 1877. The selection is presented in six easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Salem Witchcraft Trials.

Time: 1692
Place: Salem, Massachusetts

Though Increase Mather was absent on this interesting occasion, he had a zealous representative in his son, Cotton Mather, by the mother’s side grandson of the “Great Cotton,” a young minister of twenty-five, a prodigy of learning, eloquence, and piety, recently settled as colleague with his father over Boston North Church. Cotton Mather had an extraordinary memory, stuffed with all sorts of learning. His application was equal to that of a German professor. His lively imagination, trained in the school of Puritan theology, and nourished on the traditionary legends of New England, of which he was a voracious and indiscriminate collector, was still further stimulated by fasts, vigils, prayers, and meditations almost equal to those of any Catholic saint. Of a temperament ambitious and active, he was inflamed with a great desire of “doing good.” Fully conscious of all his gifts, and not a little vain of them, like the Jesuit missionaries in Canada, his contemporaries, he believed himself to be often, during his devotional exercises, in direct and personal communication with the Deity.

In every piece of good-fortune he saw a special answer to his prayers; in every mortification or calamity, the special personal malice of the devil and his agents. Yet both himself and his father were occasionally troubled with “temptations to atheism,” doubts which they did not hesitate to ascribe to diabolical influence. The secret consciousness of these doubts of their own was perhaps one source of their great impatience at the doubts of others.

Cotton Mather had taken a very active part in the late case of witchcraft; and, that he might study the operations of diabolical agency at his leisure, and thus be furnished with evidence and arguments to establish its reality, he took the eldest of the bewitched children home to his own house. His eagerness to believe invited imposture. His excessive vanity and strong prejudices made him easy game. Adroit and artful beyond her years, the girl fooled him to the top of his bent. His ready pen was soon furnished with materials for “a story all made up of wonders,” which, with some other matters of the same sort, and a sermon preached on the occasion, he presently published, under the title of Memorable Providences relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions, with a preface in which he warned all “Sadducees” that he should regard their doubts for the future as a personal insult.

Cotton Mather was not the only dupe. “The old heresy of the sensual Sadducees, denying the being of angels either good or evil,” says the recommendatory preface to this book, signed by the other four ministers of Boston, “died not with them, nor will it, whilst men, abandoning both faith and reason, count it their wisdom to credit nothing but what they see or feel. How much this fond opinion hath gotten ground in this debauched age is awfully observable; and what a dangerous stroke it gives to settle men in atheism is not hard to discern. God is therefore pleased, besides the witness borne to this truth in Sacred Writ, to suffer devils sometimes to do such things in the world as shall stop the mouths of gainsayers, and extort a confession from them.”

They add their testimony to the truth of Mather’s statements, which they commend as furnishing “clear information” that there is “both a God and a devil, and witchcraft.” The book was presently republished in London, with a preface by Baxter, who pronounced the girl’s case so “convincing” that “he must be a very obdurate Sadducee who would not believe it.”

Mather’s sermon, prefixed to this narrative, is a curious specimen of fanatical declamation. “Witchcraft,” he exclaims, “is a renouncing of God, and the advancement of a filthy devil into the throne of the Most High. Witchcraft is a renouncing of Christ, and preferring the communion of a loathsome, lying devil before all the salvation of the Lord Redeemer. Witchcraft is a siding with hell against heaven and earth, and therefore a witch is not to be endured in either of them. ‘Tis a capital crime, and is to be prosecuted as a species of devilism that would not only deprive God and Christ of all his honor, but also plunder man of all his comfort. Nothing too vile can be said of, nothing too hard can be done to, such a horrible iniquity as witchcraft is!”

Such declamations from such a source, giving voice and authority to the popular superstition, prepared the way for the tragedy that followed. The suggestion, however, that Cotton Mather, for purposes of his own, deliberately got up this witchcraft delusion, and forced it upon a doubtful and hesitating people, is utterly absurd. And so is another suggestion, a striking exhibition of partisan extravagance, that because the case of the four Boston children happened during the government of Andros, therefore the responsibility of that affair rests on him, and not on the people of Massachusetts. The Irish woman was tried under a Massachusetts law, and convicted by a Massachusetts jury; and, had Andros interfered to save her life, to the other charges against him would doubtless have been added that of friendship for witches.

Cotton Mather seems to have acted, in a degree, the part of a demagogue. Yet he is not to be classed with those tricky and dishonest men, so common in our times, who play upon popular prejudices which they do not share, in the expectation of being elevated to honors and office. Mather’s position, convictions, and temperament alike called him to serve on this occasion as the organ, exponent, and stimulator of the popular faith.

The bewitched girl, as she ceased to be an object of popular attention, seems to have returned to her former behavior. But the seed had been sown on fruitful ground. After an interval of nearly four years, three young girls in the family of Parris, minister of Salem village, now Danvers, began to exhibit similar pranks. As in the Boston case, a physician pronounced them bewitched, and Tituba, an old Indian woman, the servant of Parris, who undertook, by some vulgar rites, to discover the witch, was rewarded by the girls with the accusation of being herself the cause of their sufferings. The neighboring ministers assembled at the house of Parris for fasting and prayer. The village fasted; and presently a general fast was ordered throughout the colony. The “bewitched children,” thus rendered objects of universal sympathy and attention, did not long want imitators. Several other girls and two or three women of the neighborhood began to be afflicted in the same way, as did also John, the Indian husband of Tituba, warned, it would seem, by the fate of his wife.

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