The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639–1723

CHAPTER 8. Massachusetts Under the New Charter [1692–1702]

CHAPTER 8 Massachusetts Under the New Charter [1692-1702] The long sea voyage gave Mather ample time to ponder the future. Thirty years ago he had fled England as an exile for his religion. Now circumstances were very different, and he was a different person. In the last four years in and around London he had experienced a world of wealth and power beyond anything remotely possible in Boston, and in that larger world he had received recognition and exercised influence to an extraordinary degree. Although he did not know it, Increase Mather was of that first generation of British colonials who would, over the next three centuries, be intoxicated by the wealth and sophistication of the mother country and the metropolis. By comparison his own small home and wooden meetinghouse were rustic. Harvard College was smaller than the school at Newington Green and its students few in comparison. Only in the context of the wilderness and the errand of the first fathers did Harvard and North Church seem significant. Puritan Massachusetts had in the past invariably turned against and voted out ofoffice its agents who had returned from London. Friends had warned Mather of that and tried to persuade him to stay in England. He had given it careful thought, enough so that Cotton had gotten wind of it and written a hurt and angry letter.' But the question was still on Mathers mind as he wondered for the second time in his life about his future on the American frontier. Was he onceagain going into some kind of exile? [256 The Last American Puritan WITCHCRAFT AND CASES OF CONSCIENCE IN SALEM In Massachusetts he met immediately a suffocating, morbid religious preoccupation that made Massachusetts this summer the greatest possible contrast to the London just left. While Mather had beenjourneying homeward, three women—Tituba, a half-Indian, half-African slave from the West Indies; Sarah Good, a hard-bitten, slatternly English woman eking out the roughest kind ofpeasant life; and SarahOsburne, a propertied, self-reliantfarm wife who had long since turned her back on the local church—had been accused of witchcraft and jailed. The accusations were brought by a group of girls and young unmarried women ranging in age from twelve to eighteen. By the time Mather reached Boston, wavesof hysterical accusations were radiating out from the poor farming village ofSalem. People had been accused ofwitchcraft before in New England and had been tried and executed, but never before had there been this kind of mass hysteria. Why did the frenzy over witchcraft, which started in Salem in the early spring of 1692 and quickly spread to other towns nearby, come at this particular time? Scholars have searched for an answer to that question forgenerations without a complete explanation. Certainly there had always existed in New England the folk culture of witchcraft, magic, charms, incantations, and curses. Most well-to-do families, the better educated, and the ministry accepted intellectuallythe existence ofwitchcraft , but they held this culture at arm's length asusually confined to the poorest and most illiterate segments of society. At this moment in the history ofAnglo-America, however, witchcraft and society'sresponses to it burst out like a wicked bloom in the New England garden.2 Underneath all the purely local circumstances that contributed to the frenzy lay the fact that for three years, ever since the overthrow of Sir Edmund Andros, New England, and particularly the maritime towns and villages, were in confusion. Legitimate government disappeared with Andros's arrest. Political insecurity was exacerbated by the collapse of the frontier in Maine and New Hampshire under attack from French, Roman Catholic Canada. The birthrate declined, and again as in King Philip's War fleeing refugees straggled along dirt roads leading toward Boston. Massachusetts bravely and naively sent an expedition by sea to capture Quebec in 1690. It struggled homeward miserably defeated, three or four hundred men lost their lives to smallpox, dysentery, and fever directly attributed to the mismanagement of the expedition. After that Massachusetts, waiting for legitimizationfrom England, was bank- Courtesy, AmericanAntiquarian Society William Stoughton, deputy governor from 1692 to 1701, chief justice at the Salem witchcraft trial of Bridget Bishop Cotton Mather's A Further Account of the Tryals of the New-England Witches, supporting witchcraft trials, published with Increase Mather's Cases of Conscience, i 693; Increase Mather (then president of Harvard) contended, in opposition to his son, "it...