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| Field name | Value |
|---|---|
| Collection Reference Number | GLC00264 |
| From Archive Folder | Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Exploration and Settlement |
| Title | The Wonders of the Invisible world |
| Date | 1693 |
| Author | Mather, Cotton (1663-1728) |
| Document Type | Book |
| Content Description | One of the most famous of early New England books, here in the first British edition printed at London, following the first edition published in Boston the same year. Mather meant to expose witchcraft and to support his friends in the government. He gives detailed descriptions of each case, thus providing an invaluable record. All the early editions of this work are extremely rare, especially the Boston edition and the present one. Printed by John Dunton. |
| Subjects | Women's History Religion Law Death Penalty |
| People | Mather, Cotton (1663-1728) |
| Place written | London, England |
| Theme | Government & Politics; Religion; Law; Women in American History |
| Sub-collection | The Gilder Lehrman Collection, 1493-1859 |
| Additional Information | The Salem witch trials were not a unique event. Most people in the early modern world believed in the existence of witches who gained supernatural power by signing a pact with Satan. In continental Europe, where witch hunts were much more common than in America, thousands of people were executed, often isolated and impoverished older women who were regarded as a drain on community resources. As late as 1787, outside of Independence Hall where the framers were drafting the U.S. Constitution, a Philadelphia mob killed an accused witch. In the half century before the Salem trials, more than 80 people were put on trial for witchcraft in Massachusetts and Connecticut alone. During the seventeenth century, some 32 people were executed for witchcraft in the American colonies. What was unique about the Salem witch trials was the number of people who were accused and convicted. In previous witch trials, judges had imposed high standards of proof which resulted in a majority of the accused being acquitted. But when England revoked Massachusetts's charter in 1685, it threw the judicial system into disarray. The special court set up in Salem allowed the use of "spectral evidence": testimony from victims of a vision that they had of the person who was tormenting them. Further, the court permitted the use of psychological pressure and even torture to obtain confessions and ruled that anyone who confessed, identified fellow witches, and repented would go free. The Salem witch scare had complex social roots. It drew upon preexisting rivalries and disputes within the rapidly-growing Massachusetts port town: between urban and rural residents; between wealthier commercially-oriented merchants and subsistence-oriented farmers; and between Congregationalists and other religious denominations: Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers. The witch trials offer a window into the anxieties and social tensions that accompanied New England's increasing integration into the Atlantic economy. For the educated Puritan elite, there was double irony in the fact that the witch scare erupted in Salem. The word "salem" means peace, and the town's founders had hoped that Salem would be a village of peace. Further, they had drawn the word salem from Jerusalem, hoping that this new village would serve as a foundation for a new Jerusalem. In this selection, written a year after the Salem episode, Cotton Mather, one of New England's leading Puritan theologians, defends the trials, depicting New England as a battleground where the forces of God and the forces of Satan will clash. But guilt over this grizzly episode gradually ate into the New England conscience, and in 1697 Massachusetts held a public fast to mourn the blood that had been unjustly shed. A descendant of one of the witchcraft judges, the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), dwelt in his writings on hidden guilt--sexual, moral, and psychological. In an early tale, he wrote: "In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and dungeon, though the lights, the music, the revelry above us may lead us to forget their existence, and the...prisoners whom they hide." One might speculate that his preoccupation with the complexities of human motivation and his lack of faith in progress and human perfectibility stemmed in part from his awareness of his ancestor's involvement in the witchcraft affair. |
| Copyright | The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History |
| Module | Settlement, Commerce, Revolution and Reform: 1493-1859 |
| Transcript | Show/hide |