exander Johnston.

WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ENGLAND

(1647-1696)

BY JOHN G. PALFREY[1]

The people of Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, like all other
Christian people at that time and later,--at least, with extremely
rare individual exceptions,--believed in the reality of a hideous
crime called witchcraft. They thought they had Scripture for that
belief, and they knew they had law for it, explicit and abundant; and
with them law and Scripture were absolute authorities for the
regulation of opinion and of conduct.

In a few instances, witches were believed to have appeared in the
earlier years of New England. But the cases had been sporadic. The
first instance of an execution for witchcraft is said to have occurred
in Connecticut, soon after the settlement [1647, May 30th]; but the
circumstances are not known, and the fact has been doubted. A year
later, one Margaret Jones, of Charlestown in Massachusetts, and it has
been said, two other women in Dorchester and Cambridge, were convicted
and executed for the goblin crime. These cases appear to have excited
no more attention than would have been given to the commission of any
other felony, and no judicial record of them survives....

With three or four exceptions,--for the evidence respecting the
asserted sufferers at Dorchester and Cambridge is imperfect,--no
person appears to have been punished for witchcraft in Massachusetts,
nor convicted of it, for more than sixty years after the settlement,
though there had been three or four trials of other persons suspected
of the crime. At the time when the question respecting the colonial
charter was rapidly approaching an issue, and the public mind was in
feverish agitation, the ministers sent out a paper of proposals for
collecting facts concerning witchcraft [1681]. This brought out a work
from President Mather entitled "Illustrious Providences," in which
that influential person related numerous stories of the performances
of persons leagued with the Devil [1684].

The imagination of his restless young son[2] was stimulated, and
circumstances fed the flame. In the last year of the government of
Andros [1688], a daughter, thirteen years old, of John Goodwin,--a
mason living at the South End of Boston,--had a quarrel with an Irish
washerwoman about some missing clothes. The woman's mother took it up,
and scolded provokingly. Thereupon the wicked child, profiting, as it
seems, by what she had been hearing and