CHAPTER XIV.

SALEM VILLAGE, AND '92.

_Banquo._ "Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten of the insane root, That takes the reason prisoner?"--_Macbeth._

Salem Village has a sorrowful celebrity. It would seem as if an adverse spell still hung over it, for in the changes brought by time to its neighbors it has no part, remaining, as it is likely to remain, Salem Village--that is to say, distinctively antiquated, sombre, and lifeless.

A collection of houses scattered along the old high-road from Salem to Andover, decent-looking, brown-roofed, though humble dwellings, a somewhat pretending village church, and pleasant, home-like, parsonage; old trees, partly verdant, partly withered, stretching naked boughs above the gables of houses even older than themselves, embody something of the impressions of oft-repeated walks in what is known as the "Witch Neighborhood."

The village contains one central point of paramount interest. It is an inclosed space of grass ground, a short distance from the principal and only street, reached by a well-trodden by-path. Within this now naked field once stood a house, with a garden and orchard surrounding. Of the house nothing remains except a slight depression in the soil; of the orchard and garden there is no trace; yet hard by I chanced on a bank of aromatic thyme once held of singular potency in witchcraft--as in the "Faerie Queen," the tree laments to the knight:

"I chanced to see her in her proper hue, Bathing herself in origan and thyme."

In this quiet, out-of-the-way little nook, Salem witchcraft had its beginning. The sunken cavity is what remains of the Ministry House, so called, pulled down in 1785 (not a day too soon); the den of error in which the plague-spot first appeared. No one would have thought, standing here, that he surveyed the focus of malevolence so deadly as the wretched delirium of '92.

The well-informed reader is everywhere familiar with the origin and development of Salem witchcraft.[134] It has employed the best pens as it has puzzled the best brains among us; until to-day the whole affair remains enveloped in a mystery which the theories of nearly two hundred years have failed wholly to penetrate.

The writer has had frequent occasion to know how wide-spread is the belief that witchcraft began in New England, and particularly in Salem. This is to be classed among popular errors upon which repeated denials have little effect. Nevertheless, witchcraft did not originate in New England; no, nor in old England either, for that matter. The belief in it was earlier than the _Mayflower_, older than the Norman Conquest, and antedated the Roman Empire. The first written account of it is contained in Scripture.[135]

Saul incurred the anger of God by consulting the Witch of Endor. Joan of Arc was burned as a witch in 1431. About fifty years later the Church of Rome fulminated a bull against witchcraft. The number of suspected persons already burned at the stake or subjected to the most cruel torments is estimated at many thousands.

In taking leave of the Dark Ages we do not take our leave of witchcraft. More than a hundred thousand victims had perished in Germany and France alone before the _Mayflower_ sailed from Delft. The Pilgrims, I engage, believed in it to a man.

Old England! Why, the statute against witchcraft was not repealed until 1736, in the second George's time, though it had lain dormant some years. The last recorded execution in the British Islands occurred in Scotland, as late as 1722. The sixth chapter of Lord Coke's "Third Institutes" is devoted to a panegyric on the statutes for punishing "conjuration, sorcery, witchcraft, or enchantment." The laws of England were the fundamental law of New England; witchcraft was in the list of recognized crimes throughout Christendom.

France, under Louis le Grand, whose style history will change, notwithstanding his famous "_L'etat c'est moi_," to Louis the Little, was immeshed in the net of superstition. The highest personages of the court resorted to the astrologers for horoscopes, charms, or philters. We might see later the magic and sorcery of the sixteenth century and of the seventeenth transformed into studies in chemistry under the Regency, and become experiments in magnetism in the eighteenth century.

The settlers in New England, who brought all their Old-World superstitions with them, were not surprised to find the Indians fully impregnated with a belief in magic equal to their own. The wonderful cures of the Indian magicians or medicine-men were thoroughly believed in, and are vouched for by white evidence. One of their favorite methods of revenging private injury was by enchanting a hair, which entered the bodies of their enemies and killed them while sleeping. It is noted that Tituba, an Indian, had much to do with the outbreak in Salem village.

Sir William Phips, an illiterate but not incapable man, had been appointed Governor of Massachusetts Bay, under the new charter of William and Mary. The charter conferred the power of civil government, and separated the legislative from the judicial authority. Sir William constituted a commission of seven to try the witchcraft cases at Salem. As he had no power to create such a court under the charter, one of the saddest reflections that arise from these bloody proceedings is that twenty persons suffered death for an imaginary crime, inflicted by an illegal tribunal. The province law of 1692 decreed death for "enchantment, sorcery, charm, or conjuration, or invocation, or to feed any wicked spirit."

The first authenticated case of witchcraft in New England, and also the first execution, took place at Boston, as early as 1648. The culprit, Margaret Jones, of Charlestown, was suspected of having and using the "malignant touch." She professed some knowledge of medicine, and probably availed herself of the awe in which she was held by the superstitious to ply her trade. Many other cases are mentioned in the other colonies, Connecticut bearing her full share, before the climax of 1692 is reached. Then, as afterward, the accusations fell chiefly upon women; the old, friendless, or half-witted bearing the burden of every accident in their neighborhood.

An English writer gravely says in 1690: "Several old women suspected for witches in and about Lancashire have been often noted to have beards of considerable growth, tho' that's no general rule, some of the reverend and virtuous being often liable to the same." Everywhere witchcraft was received as a stubborn fact. The criminal codes of nearly if not quite all the colonies recognized it. In Pennsylvania, if tradition may be believed, the fact was met by no less stubborn common sense. It is said, when Philadelphia was three years old, a woman was brought before Governor Penn, charged with witchcraft and riding through the air on a broomstick. Although the woman confessed her guilt, she was dismissed by the Quaker magistrate with the assurance that, as there was no law against it, she might ride a broomstick as often as she pleased.

[Illustration: CUSTOM-HOUSE, SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS.]

Could a full and candid confession be obtained of the present generation there would appear more superstition than we wot of, such as would show us legitimate descendants of credulous colonists. It is not long since a staid old town in Massachusetts was in consternation at the report of a ghost in a school-room. Signs and portents have been handed down and are religiously believed in by other than the ignorant and credulous, as has been already stated in a former chapter. A very small proportion of the skeptical could be induced to enter a church-yard at night. There is some subtle principle of our nature that gives ready adhesion to the mystical or the marvelous; and it is believed they were not differently constituted in 1692.

[Illustration: REBECCA NURSE'S HOUSE.]

Leaving the Witch Ground, the visitor, in retracing his steps, will pass near the old Nurse House, a memorial of one of the most damning of the innocent sacrifices to superstition. It is not easy to sit down and write of it with the indifference of the professional historian.

Rebecca Nurse, aged and infirm, universally beloved by her neighbors, was accused. The jury, moved by her innocence, having brought in a verdict of "not guilty," the court sent them out again with instructions to find her guilty. She was executed. The tradition is that her sons disinterred her body by stealth from the foot of the gallows, where it had been thrown, and brought it to the old homestead, laying it reverently and with many tears in the little burying-ground which the family always kept, and which is still seen near by.

But briefly to our history. We there discover that twenty persons lost their lives through the den