THE MOURNFUL DECADE

I am no more a witch than than you are a wizard. If you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink ~ Sarah Good, hanged for witchcraft

difficult times

As a new century began in 1700, the New England colonists had every reason to look back over the last seventy years and be proud of what they had accomplished. They had founded more than 75 villages, their children were educated, their life expectancy high and they had worked hard to create socially and economically successful communities. Though the future looked bright, the road to their success, as we have seen, had been fraught with hardship. And, as the ball dropped down to midnight of December 31, 1699, the colonists were still reeling from a decade that had brought them much misery in the form of war and witchcraft.

There were many forces at work in New England that helped create the misery of the 1690's. King Philip's War, in 1675-6, had begun a period of economic instability that was still being felt fifteen years later. It had destroyed a third of New England’s towns, devastated the economy and killed ten per cent of the adult male population. Endless attacks on frontier towns by angry, displaced Native Americans only added to the insecurity. Harsh winters, particulary in 1691-92, had led to destructive crop failure.

Many of New England's towns were perched on the edge of wilderness. A precarious position at any time, it was particularly dangerous for those towns after 1688 when King William's War began against the French and their Native American allies. To make matters much worse, the instability of the English monarchy left the colonies teetering, as one Boston merchant commented, "between goverment and no government."

Under King James II, an attempt had been made to control the upstart colony. In 1684, the Crown revoked the charter which had entitled the Massachusetts Bay Colony to a degree of autonomy. By the time James was overthrown in December of 1688, Europe was embroiled in another one of their endless wars. The events overseas spilled over into the colonies where an unstable border between French and English lands now seemed up for grabs.

Even though the English settlers were more than 154,000 at the beginning of the war, outnumbering the French 12 to 1, the French had forged strong relations with the Natives in the region. In addition, the separate colonies didn't seem able to cooperate as a united front. Governor Andros of New York with strong allegience to the mother country was a thorn in everyone's side. And finally, The English had a difficult on again off again relationship with their Iroquois allies.

For all of these reasons, King William's was a drawn-out war that lasted ten years, well into the last decade of the 1600's. Cotton Mather, probably the most influencial minister in New England, wrote a book about the effects of this war on the colonies. He titled it Decennium luctuosum, the Mournful Decade.

With the war creating untold hardship, the colonists had a new horror to contend with when

the witchcraft furor of 1692 created even more havok.

witchcraft!

Up until the 1690's, charges of witchcraft In Massachusetts had been relatively infrequent.  Between 1630 and 1690 there were only twenty-four indictments, seven convictions, and five executions.  In the skittish Puritan American Colonies, however, the threat of witchcraft seemed always to be lurking somewhere in the shadows. A mostly unnoticed event in 1688 proved to be a precursor to what would unfold in four short years

In the summer of that year, Bostonite John Goodwin's children fell ill. A doctor was called in to examine them. The good doctor, possibly flummoxed as to the cause of their ailment, told Goodwin that "nothing but a hellish Witchcraft could be the origin of these maladies." Like any God-fearing Puritan, John Goodwin looked to find the source of this "hellish Witchcraft." As it happened, a new housekeeper had recently been acquired for the Goodwin household. As far as Goodwin was concerned, his housekeeper, Ann Glover, fit the bill to a tee. Then, when Martha, the eldest daughter, claimed she had argued with Glover shortly before she became ill, that sealed the deal.

Glover was immediately arrested and tried. Cotton Mather, the most renowned preacher in the colony, was convinced she was guilty and had much to do with her subsequent conviction. To observe her symptoms more closely, Mather took Ann Glover into his own home. He reported that "she cantered, trotted, and galloped about the household on her aeriel steed, whistling through family prayer and pummelling anyone who attempted it in her presence." She allegedly hurled books at Mather’s head. When Glover was unable to recite the Lord's Prayer, that was taken as the ultimate proof. Ann Glover was hanged on Boston Common in November of 1688 when convictions for witchcraft were few and far between and executions even rarer.

In 1689, only two years before all hell broke loose, Cotton Mather wrote a book, Memorable Provinces, about Glover and her ordeal. His reason for writing the book was “to countermine the whole plot of the devil against New England.” Mather's intention, he insisted, was for the "detection and destruction of more belonging to that hellish knot." He achieved his purpose in spades. Mather's book was the most widely referenced during the arrests, trials and convictions of those accused of witchcraft which came about three years later.

Note: Twenty eight years after the witch trials, Mather had a trial of his own. When a smallpox epidemic raged through Boston, Mather "faced down the entire medical establishemt to advocate for something that seemed every bit as dubious as spectral evidence: inoculation." The masses turned on him for his "lunacy." In 1721, someone threw a homemade bomb through his window. His reputation never recovered.

fuel to the fire

Life in New England was particularly unstable in the winter of 1691-92. The crop failure had led to a shortage of food and the newly begun war was certainly taking its toll on the already beleaguered populace. But possibly the most compelling force at work which created the hysteria to follow was the severe Puritan moral code coupled with an irrational fear of the devil.

Most New Englanders, both lay people and the college educated clergy, lived in what one historian has called “worlds of wonder.” These “wonders” definitely included the belief in witches and the power of Satan to assume visible form. Satan, preached Cotton Mather and his many Puritan cohorts, thrived in the wilderness and was not pleased to be overrun by God's chosen people. Satan, they said, would not be satisfied with famine and war, but would go on to afflict regular folk to do his bidding. Further, they preached, those folks people must be weeded out and killed. Exodus implicitly commands "Thous shalt not suffer a witch to live."

the beginning

Samuel Parris, a minister living in Salem, would certainly have known about and read Cotton Mather's well-known work, "Memorable Providences," about the Goodwin family. So in early February of 1692 when his nine-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, and his eleven-year-old neice, Abigail Williams, began experiencing fits and other maladies, he had little doubt about the cause. Throughout the month of February, he watched as the girls "spouted gibberish and contorted their bodies into strange positions." At first, Parris did nothing but fast and pray. He finally called in a doctor, who confirmed Parris's worst fears. The doctor concluded that the girls had been afflicted by the “Evil Hand,” of witchcraft.

There was nothing for it but to find the cause of these afflictions. With guidance from the doctor and the good Reverend Parris, the two young girls eventually put a name to the one responsible for their suffering. Titibua, an African slave living in the Goodwin home, seemed a likely candidate. On February 26, 1692, both girls pointed to Titibua as their tormenter.

The majority of accused witches during the year long furor were people on the fringes of "respectable society" in New England. Many, if not most, of the witchcraft accusations were directed against people who were poor or in some way outside the norm. Outlyers were much less likely to find anyone to defend them. Titibua fit that criteria.

Only one day after Titibua was accused by Elizabeth and Abigail, two girls who would become major players in the witch hystera, Ann Putnam, Jr. and Elizabeth Hubbard, got into the act. They claimed that they were experiencing torments and blamed Sarah Good, a local woman who had become homeless and reduced to begging in the streets. Shortly afterwards, Ann and Elizabeth accused Sarah Osbourne, a woman who had been embroiled in legal disputes with Ann's father, Thomas Putnam, of tormenting them as well

Note: All these original participants in the turmoil that followed were made characters in Arthur Miller's famous play about the witch trials,"The Crucible."

Note: Thomas Putnam was brother-in-law to our cousin William Wyman. The Wymans and Putnams would intermarry many times over the years, even down to the early 1900's when Helen Mohney West's aunt, Olive Wyman (GA) married Clyde Putnam (HGA), a direct descendant of Thomas Putnam.

Clyde Putnam

Olive Wyman Putnam

Thomas Putnam would be responsible for forty-three of the accusations, his daughter Ann for sixty-three. In one particularly horrific case, Reverend George Burroughs of Salem Village borrowed money from Thomas Putnam. When Burroughs was not able to pay back the money he owed, Thomas sued him. Possibly to avoid paying up, Burroughs left Salem in 1685 and moved to Maine, eventually settling in the town of Wells (where our Littlefield family lived). Seven years later, Thomas obviously still held hard feelings toward Burroughs. In May of 1692, he accused Burroughs of practicing witchcraft. Poor Mr. Burroughs was arrested and dragged almost seventy miles back to Salem where he was tried for the crime of witchcraft. Burroughs was executed on August 19, 1692.

escalation

The fire had been lit. Accusations blazed throughout the colony. In all, the witch furor spread to nineteen towns with over one hundred and fifty people indicted. The youngest jailed was five and the oldest nearly eighty. The fear was very real, leading husbands to tesitify against their wives and children against their mothers. Accusations of multiple family members and extended family was common. Our aunt Deliverance Haseltine (9A) of Andover married into the Dane family. Her father-in-law, Reverend Francis Dane, found himself related by blood or marriage to twenty-eight accused witches, our Aunt Deliverance among them.

Fifty-six of the accused witches were evenutally indicted. Fifty of these confessed, under duress, to the crime of witchcraft. Twenty-six people were convicted and twenty were executed, nineteen of those by hanging. Those who were not executed were granted reprieves by Gov. William Phips in Mary of 1693 but the convictions remained on their records.

Few were the families in New England who didn't have at least one relative or friend who had been somehow stigmatized by the witchraft tempest of 1692. Our families were certainly not immune and their stories follow.