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Cotton Mather’s account of the Salem witch trials, 1693

Most Americans’ knowledge of the seventeenth century comes from heavily mythologized events: the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, Pocahontas purportedly saving Captain John Smith from execution in early Virginia, and the Salem witch trials of 1692. The myths surrounding what happened in Salem make the true story that much more difficult to uncover. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which forms the basis of many Americans’ knowledge of the trials, takes liberties with the story. Miller transforms Tituba, a young Native American girl, into an African slave who led a group of young women into the forest to participate in magic rites. He also portrays the accusers as teenagers when many were in fact much younger.

Cotton Mather, a prolific author and well-known preacher, wrote this account in 1693, a year after the trials ended. Mather and his fellow New Englanders believed that God directly intervened in the establishment of the colonies and that the New World was formerly the Devil’s territory. Cotton Mather’s account of the witch trials reinforced colonial New Englanders’ view of themselves as a chosen generation of men.

The Salem witch scare had complex social roots beyond the community’s religious convictions. It drew upon preexisting rivalries and disputes within the rapidly growing Massachusetts port town: between urban and rural residents; between wealthier commercial merchants and subsistence-oriented farmers; between Congregationalists and other religious denominations—Anglicans, Baptists, and Quakers; and between American Indians and Englishmen on the frontier. The witch trials offer a window into the anxieties and social tensions that accompanied New England’s increasing integration into the Atlantic economy.

A transcribed excerpt is available.

Excerpt

Wherefore The devil is now making one Attempt more upon us; an Attempt more Difficult, more Surprizing, more snarl’d with unintelligible Circumstances than any that we have hitherto Encountered; an Attempt so Critical, that if we get well through, we shall soon Enjoy Halcyon Days, with all the Vultures of Hell Trodden under our Feet. He has wanted his Incarnate Legions to Persecute us, as the People of God have in the other Hemisphere been Persecuted: he has therefore drawn forth his more spiritual ones to make an attacque upon us. We have been advised by some Credible Christians yet alive, that a Malefactor, accused of Witchcraft as well as Murder, and Executed in this place more than Forty Years ago, did then give Notice of, An Horrible PLOT & against the Country by WITCHCRAFT, and a Foundation of WITCHCRAFT then laid, which if it were not seasonably discovered, would probably Blow up, and pull down all the Churches in the Country. And we have now with Horror seen the Discovery of such a WITCHCRAFT!

Questions for Discussion

Read the document introduction and transcript and apply your knowledge of American history in order to answer these questions.

1. The events in Salem and other towns in New England took place in a region of isolated villages and towns. What part might this physical separation have played in turning neighbors against one another and stoking fears of demons?
2. According to Cotton Mather, what are the immediate and long-term goals of the Devil?
3. We now know that some of the accused were pre-teens. Why might their age make them particularly susceptible to accusations of strange behavior?
4. Describe a relatively recent historical event that resembles the situation that unfolded in Salem.

*** Beyond Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, numerous dramatic presentations offer insights into irrational human fear. For example, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” an episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone series, may provide students and teachers an opportunity to examine the phenomenon of mass hysteria.

Cotton Mather

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• Academia - "Cotton Mather and the Multifaceted Endeavors of American Puritanism"
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• The University of Virginia - Salem Witch Trials - Cotton Mather

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Cotton Mather (born February 12, 1663, Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony [U.S.]—died February 13, 1728, Boston) American Congregational minister and author, supporter of the old order of the ruling clergy, who became the most celebrated of all New England Puritans. He combined a mystical strain (he believed in the existence of witchcraft) with a modern scientific interest (he supported smallpox inoculation).

The son of Increase Mather and the grandson of John Cotton and Richard Mather, Cotton Mather lived all his life in Boston. He entered Harvard at the age of 12, easily passing entrance requirements to read and write Latin and to “decline the Greek nouns and verbs.” He devoted himself unremittingly to study and prayer. At 18 he received his M.A. degree from the hands of his father, who was president of the college.

Mather once noted that his life was “a continual conversation with heaven,” but he spent agonizing hours convinced that he was damned and equal time in ecstasies that he was not. For a while, he feared he could not enter the ministry because of a speech impediment, and he considered becoming a physician; the subject of medicine was of lifelong interest to him. After a friend persuaded him “to oblige himself to a dilated Deliberation in speaking,” he conquered his weakness and returned to religious studies. He preached his first sermon in his father’s church in August 1680 and in October another from his grandfather John Cotton’s pulpit. He was formally ordained in 1685 and became his father’s colleague.

He devoted his life to praying, preaching, writing, and publishing and still followed his main purpose in life of doing good. His book, Bonifacius, or Essays to Do Good (1710), instructs others in humanitarian acts, some ideas being far ahead of his time: the schoolmaster to reward instead of punish his students, the physician to study the state of mind of his patient as a probable cause of illness. He established societies for community projects.

He joined his father in cautioning judges against the use of “spectre evidence” (testimony of a victim of witchcraft that he had been attacked by a spectre bearing the appearance of someone he knew) in the witchcraft trials and in working for the ouster of Sir Edmund Andros as governor of Massachusetts. He was also a leader in the fight for inoculation against smallpox, incurring popular disapproval. He was introduced to the idea by Onesimus, an enslaved West African man in his household. When Cotton inoculated his own son, who almost died from it, the whole community was wrathful, and a bomb was thrown through his chamber window. Satan seemed on the side of his enemies; various members of his family became ill, and some died. Worst of all, his son Increase was arrested for rioting.

Mather’s interest in science and particularly in various American phenomena—published in his Curiosa Americana (1712–24)—won him membership in the Royal Society of London. His account of the inoculation episode was published in the society’s transactions. He corresponded extensively with notable scientists, such as Robert Boyle. His Christian Philosopher (1721) recognizes God in the wonders of the earth and the universe beyond; it is both philosophical and scientific and, ironically, anticipates 18th-century Deism, despite his clinging to the old order.

Mather was not against the institution of slavery, and he enslaved a number of people in his household. Many Puritans, including members of his own congregation, actively participated in slave trafficking and were involved in the selling of Native Americans overseas and the importation of Africans. He defended the practice as being biblically rooted and famously asserted that the souls of black-skinned slaves were washed white with baptism and that they become “the Free-men of the Lord” while still enslaved (A Good Master Well Served: A Brief Discourse on the Necessary Properties & Practices of a Good Servant in Every-Kind of Servitude [1696]). In The Negro Christianized (1706), a pamphlet widely attributed to Mather, he urged slave-owners to teach their “servants” Christianity, accepting them as spiritual brethren, and to treat them justly and kindly.

Cotton Mather wrote and published more than 400 works. His magnum opus was Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), an ecclesiastical history of America from the founding of New England to his own time. His Manuductio ad Ministerium (1726) was a handbook of advice for young graduates to the ministry: on doing good, on college love affairs, on poetry and music, and on style. His ambitious 20-year work on biblical learning was interrupted by his death.

He died only five years after his father, whose colleague he had been for 40 years. He was widowed twice and had 15 children by his three wives—Abigail Phillips, Elizabeth (née Clark) Hubbard, and Lydia (née Lee) George—only two survived him.

Cotton Mather’s heritage from his two grandfathers, Richard Mather and John Cotton, was both fortunate and unfortunate. Like them, he had an active mind and the will to use it. He lived in the shadow of their greatness and expected to carry on the tradition and to assume their role in the Puritan community. Unfortunately, he could not see that the old order was passing. As colonial communities became more secure from earlier hardships of settlements, they also became more complacent and less in need of a confining spiritual leadership. Cotton fought for the continuance of the old order of the ruling clergy, sometimes with frustration, sometimes in anger. His Diary was edited by W.C. Ford (1911–12).

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Melissa Petruzzello.

Increase Mather

Increase Mather was born on June 21, 1639 to Richard and Katherine Mather. He and four of his five brothers would follow Richard's call to guide the morality and spirituality of their fellow man, even as the family ventured with other Puritans to New England in the seventeenth century. There the Mathers settled, as Richard took up his ministry in Dorchester just south of Boston.

Increase graduated from Harvard College in 1656, an institution to which he would return as its President. His son, Cotton Mather was born into the third generation of Puritan Mather ministers, and after following in father's footsteps by studying at Harvard, Cotton would join his father as a leader in the Boston religious establishment.

In February 1674, Increase Mather delivered a sermon, entitled "The Day of Trouble is Near", the first of many great speeches to the faithful that would make him an influential Puritan leader in Boston and across the growing Massachusetts Bay Colony. By 1680-1681, Increase Mather had "established himself as the conservative champion of the New England church." His predominant role in Puritan society would call him across the ocean, as turbulent events in England led to the revocation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony's charter. Between 1688 and 1692, Increase Mather was in England advocating on behalf of the colony.

Mather returned to New England on May 14, 1692 with not simply a new charter, but also a new Governor, Sir William Phips. Increase Mather played a crucial role in securing Phips' appointment by the Crown, and therefore the Governor was indebted to him for his position.

When Mather and Phips arrived in Boston, events in Salem Village had already begun to swirl beyond the confines of that small community. The jails were beginning to fill with the accused witches, and interim Governor Bradstreet had kept courts from sitting in trial. The new Governor, empowered by a new charter, looked to clear the judicial backlog and established the special Court of Oyer and Terminer to "hear and determine" the witchcraft cases. On May 27, 1692 the Court was established, and Bridget Bishop was the first to be executed on Gallows Hill in Salem exactly two weeks later on June 10.

Governor Phips, apparently surprised at the speed and force which his actions had begun to unleash, looked to Increase Mather and other notable Boston ministers for guidance. Increase signed onto "The Return of Several Ministers," written by his son, Cotton Mather, which put the Boston ministers on record urging caution in the use of spectral evidence in the Salem court. Pre-occupied with preparations for an expedition to fight Indian forces in Maine, Phips did not pay sufficient attention to the mounting number of arrests and executions ordered by the Salem court, before he left Boston for Maine in mid-August 1692. With Phips went Increase Mather's highest patron in civil government and any hopes he might have had of restraining the court in Salem.

As June stretched into July, the pace of arrests, examinations, and imprisonments only quickened leading to the execution of five women on July 19. On July 31, Increase delivered a sermon at Simon Willard's Third Church in Boston in which he posed the question to the congregation: "O what makes the difference between the devils in hell and the angels of heaven?" Mather answered that the quality of holiness distinguished an angel in heaven from the devils below, and in doing so he "focused responsibility on the people of New England at large, and yet looked to individuals for the means to solve the problem. It encouraged the individual believer to attend to the state of his or her own soul regardless of what might be happening in the world." (Peterson, 93). The impact of such words from a Boston pulpit on views of the witchcraft problem is indirect, but clear nonetheless. Mather advised the congregation that they should focus their attention on their own shortcomings and not those that they saw in their neighbors and friends. Still, this was not a clear message to halt the trials, and they continued unabated in Salem.

Increase Mather attended only one trial in Salem, that of George Burroughs, Jr., and he seems to have fully agreed with the result. Bernard Rosenthal in his Salem Story focuses attention on the seeming contradiction between Increase Mather's overall opposition to the Court's methods and his support for the same methods in the case of Mr. Burroughs. Rosenthal writes that, "Burroughs, as a dissenting minister, offered so powerful a symbol of lost Puritan power that such moderate and influential ministers as Increase and Cotton Mather lost their way in confronting his case." Contradictions such as this continue to haunt comments on Mather by scholars of the period.

By late September 1692, the witchcraft trials had truly reached an hysterical pitch. Nineteen had been hanged, and Giles Cory had been tortured to death for refusing to enter a plea. Scores of people languished in the jails awaiting trial on the charges against them.

In Cases of Conscience Increase Mather forcefully related his distrust of spectral evidence to convict witches. He argued that it would be better that ten witches go free than the blood of a single innocent be shed. One Mather biographer wrote that, "No zeal to stamp out crimes ever drove him from his belief that, whatever the fate of the guilty, the innocent must never be in peril." His strong words of disapproval for spectral evidence so prominently used by the Court of Oyer and Terminer ended the trials after the directive from Governor Phips at the end of October, recently returned from his expedition in Maine.

Cases of Conscience, however, is not without its flaws, the chief one being Mather's attempt to absolve the judges of Salem of any wrongdoing and to praise them for their work. Bernard Rosenthal writes that, "Indeed, when the witch trials ended, he damned the prosecution and justified the prosecutors." Perry Miller, more forcefully, writes that "Without the postscript, Cases of Conscience would be a bold stroke; with it, the book is a miserable species of double-talk." Kenneth Murdock offers a more balanced approach when he writes of Mather's postscript, "Less could hardly be said in fairness. More approval of the trials Mather never expressed."

Increase Mather has been criticized for his delay in putting his considerable moral authority against the trials, but it would seem that from his endorsement of "The Return of the Ministers" through his own Cases of Conscience, Mather was continually seeking to lend caution to the hysteria without undermining the tenuous framework of the Puritan government in Boston and Salem. Others have criticized Mather for his seeming duplicity, in excoriating the trials in general but supporting that of Burroughs or in deriding the conduct of the Court but praising its overseers. It is important to note, as many have done, that Increase Mather very much believed in the evils and dangers of witchcraft and had no doubt that if the handiwork of the devil was proven, a Puritan society should "suffer no witch to live." Mather may very well have thought George Burroughs was a witch and been satisfied to hear of his hanging in August 1692. He likely admired to some degree the tenacity with which the Court of Oyer and Terminer took to the task of defending the covenanted community of the Massachusetts Bay from the devil.

Increase Mather, however, understood that innocent blood was being shed, and that the Salem court ran rampant without concern for the advice of the clerical guides, an unprecedented development in the Puritan Colony. In the witchcraft trials that grew out of the supposed afflictions of young girls in Salem Village, Mather may also have seen the symptoms of a fundamentally changing Puritan world. He was caught in the middle of it, along with the rest of New England, and no doubt agreed with his friend Thomas Brattle that, "ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land."

Bibliography

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province. Harvard University Press,. 1953.

Murdock, Kenneth Ballard. Increase Mather: the foremost American Puritan, 1971

Peterson Increase Mather

Rosenthal, Bernard. Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692, 1993

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