BY
Reprinted from the
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society
Volume XVIII
WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS
THE DAVIS PRESS
1907
BY GEORGE LYMAN KITTREDGE.
We are all specialists now-a-days, I suppose. The goodold times of the polymath and the Doctor Universalisare gone forever. Yet signs are not wanting that some ofus are alive to the danger of building our party-walls toohigh. In one respect, at all events, there can be no doubtthat the investigators of New England antiquities are awareof their peril, though they occasionally shut their eyes toit,—I mean, the tendency to consider the Colonists as apeculiar people, separated from the Mother Country notonly geographically, but also with regard to those currentsof thought and feeling which are the most significant factsof history. True, there is more or less justification for thatkind of study which looks at the annals of America as ends-in-themselves;but such study is ticklish business, and itnow and then distorts the perspective in a rather fantasticway. This is a rank truism. Still, commonplaces areoccasionally steadying to the intellect, and Dr. Johnson—whoseown truths have been characterized by a brilliantcritic as “too true”—knew what he was about when hesaid that men usually need not so much to be informed asto be reminded.
The darkest page of New England history is, by commonconsent, that which is inscribed with the words Salem Witchcraft.The hand of the apologist trembles as it turns theleaf. The reactionary writer who prefers iconoclasm tohero-worship sharpens his pen and pours fresh gall into hisinkpot when he comes to this sinister subject. Let us tryto consider the matter, for a few minutes, unemotionally,and to that end let us pass in review a number of factswhich may help us to look at the Witchcraft Delusion of1692 in its due proportions,—not as an abnormal outbreakof fanaticism, not as an isolated tragedy, but as a mereincident, a brief and transitory episode in the biography ofa terrible, but perfectly natural, superstition.
In the first place, we know that the New Englanders didnot invent the belief in witchcraft.[1] It is a universallyhuman belief. No race or nation is exempt from it. Formerly,it was an article in the creed of everybody in theworld, and it is still held, in some form or other, and to agreater or less extent, by a large majority of mankind.[2]
Further, our own attitude of mind toward witchcraftis a very modern attitude indeed. To us, one who assertsthe existence, or even the possibility, of the crime of witchcraftstaggers under a burden of proof which he cannotconceivably support. His thesis seems to us unreasonable,abnormal, monstrous; it can scarcely be stated in intelligibleterms; it savors of madness. Now, before we can do anykind of justice to our forefathers,—a matter, be it remembered,of no moment to them, for they have gone to theirreward, but, I take it, of considerable importance to us,—wemust empty our heads of all such rationalistic ideas.To the contemporaries of William Stoughton and SamuelSewall the existence of this crime was not merely an historicalphenomenon