American History Online New Anxieties: 1660–1699

As Puritan New England passed through its second and third generations, some observers wondered whether spiritual laxity had overtaken its inhabitants. The "city upon a hill" seemed not so brightly lit as in the days of New England's infancy, and the children and grandchildren of believing parents did not appear to believe so fervently as had previous generations. Churches could no longer expect as much of their members, and the number of members in churches fell. Decline seemed to be the order of the day. William Bradford, governor of Plymouth, captured the sense of the period when he complained that the churches in the Plymouth Colony were like an "ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children."1 Moreover, New England orthodoxy had to contend with a flood of spiritual error that threatened to sweep up into its meetinghouses. First came the Baptists, "incendiaries of commonwealths," Massachusetts called them. Baptists—unlike Catholics and most other Protestants of the time—believed that baptism was not appropriate for infants, but only for those old enough to experience conversion themselves. Authorities tried to whip the Baptists back to the Providence Colony, from which they spread initially, but with little success. In fact, Massachusetts had to endure the indignity of seeing the president of its most illustrious center of learning, Harvard College, resign from his post in 1654 because he had become a Baptist. But the Baptists, alarming enough, were followed by the even more dangerous Quakers. These spiritual radicals, by their reliance on an inner spiritual voice, threatened the very foundations of the holy commonwealth. And what was worse, nothing seemed to keep the religious dissenters away, not fines or whippings or ear croppings or even hangings. They continued to flow into the colony, and their religious ideas and practices could not be contained. New England's ministers constantly warned their congregations that God would not tolerate sin among his people, and current events eventually gave them proof that their jeremiads were right. In the last half of the 17th century, when a vicious war erupted between American Indians and colonists of New England, many Puritan ministers saw the troubled times as evidence that God was judging the people for their individual and collective sins. New England suffered because it had turned away from the Lord, and unless it repented and turned back it could expect still greater judgment.

To punctuate the sense that New England had lost its way, the devil himself seemed prepared to establish an outpost in the very heart of the holy commonwealth. In the last decade of 17th-century New England, witches, it seemed, suddenly appeared in Salem, one of the colony's oldest towns. In the frenzy that followed 20 souls were executed before Massachusetts realized that it had new sins to confess, namely, the innocents killed and imprisoned in Salem. Satan, it seemed, could be even more devilish than New England imagined and could summon ministers and judges to his work as readily as witches.

But while New England was growing old, other parts of America were still inventing themselves. Dutch New Netherland resigned itself to British control in 1664 but maintained something of the pragmatic appreciation for religious diversity that had characterized its first generation. Although British oversight strengthened the position of the Anglican Church in the colony, other religious traditions continued to find in New Netherland more room to practice their faiths than in many other parts of America. New colonies also were planted in the last half of the 17th century. In 1663 Charles II, recently crowned king of England, granted a charter to new land in North America that would eventually become North and South Carolina. Anglicanism became the predominant religious tradition in the early years of the Carolina colony, though events in Europe made the colony home to other strains of Protestantism. One such event was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. This edict had served mainly to protect the religious freedom of French Calvinists, known as Huguenots. With this protection eliminated, many French Huguenots made their way to North America, and not a few settled in the Carolina colony. In addition to these developments, the Quaker William Penn established a new colony named Pennsylvania whose appreciation for religious freedom would contribute greatly to the diversity of America's religious experience during the colonial period.

Quaker Arrivals and Departures

In the late 1640s George Fox began a preaching ministry in England that eventually produced one of the most controversial religious groups of the 17th century—the Society of Friends, also known as the Quakers. They earned this nickname for claiming to "tremble at the Word of the Lord" and for sometimes shaking or dancing at their meetings. The core of Quaker belief was the insistence that true worship centered in the experience of the "inward Christ" or the "inner" light of Christ, rather than in conformity to external norms of conduct or belief. Furthermore, Quakers maintained that this inner light was available to every person, not just a privileged group of elect. Both propositions alarmed the Puritans. Quaker enthusiasm for the inner light seemed to undermine the authority of Scripture and lent itself to an impatience with external forms of conduct reminiscent of antinomianism. Quaker pursuit of an inward Christ available to all people both threatened the Reformed doctrine that only the elect are saved and seemed to diminish the historical gift of Christ's sacrifice on the cross. Consequently, when Quakers began to arrive in New England in the 1650s, the Puritans greeted them with all the enthusiasm that healthy people have for the prospect of being exposed to a deadly disease. The Puritan minister John Cotton had died by the time the first Quakers appeared in New England, but while alive he had helped to provide the justification for the banishments promptly visited upon the Quakers.

If [those holding false beliefs] be infectious, and leprous, and have plague sores running upon them, and think it their glory to infect others, it is no want of mercy, and charity, to set such at a distance. It is a merciless mercy, to pity such as are incurably contagious, and mischievous, and not to pity many scores or hundreds of souls of such as will be infected and destroyed by the toleration of the other.2

Cotton summed up the Puritans' perception of the Quaker arrivals: it was as though plague personified had stepped off the wharf in Boston and hurried to infect the town.

Not everyone shared the view that Quakers represented something like a spiritual virus from which the colonists of the New World needed to be quarantined. When Peter Stuyvesant, director general of New Netherland, acted on this view and tried to prevent Quakers from settling in the colony, his superiors at the Dutch West India Company reproved him. The colony needed settlers, they warned Stuyvesant in 1663, and he would be well served to think of New Netherland as a haven for religious dissent and to refrain from "vigorous proceedings" against the Quakers. Roger Williams, from his perch in the Providence Colony, did not doubt that the Quakers deserved the protections of religious liberty, and Providence, already home to a variety of spiritual misfits, generally practiced toleration toward the Quakers. In particular, Williams did not think Quakers posed any threat as a kind of spiritual virus. His conclusion in this regard, though, did not proceed from a benevolent regard for the views of Quakers; he thought their theology was a gross distortion of biblical truth and was happy to rail against it. When he was in his 70s, Williams thought it important enough to combat Quaker errors that he rowed three days to participate in a debate with three Quakers. But as wrong as the Quakers were—and Williams thought they were very wrong—they posed no risk of spiritual infection in his mind. Williams concluded that most people were already spiritually dead anyway and thus were as immune to infection by such as the Quakers as a corpse was immune to the possibility of catching a cold.

Roger Williams and the Dutch West India Company, though, held the minority view when it came to tolerating the Quakers. Elsewhere in the North American colonies, Quakers could count on far more inhospitable treatment. The speed with which Massachusetts Puritans reacted to the new Quaker presence in New England is some measure of the spiritual peril they associated with this presence. The first Quakers in Massachusetts, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, arrived via Barbados in 1656 and were promptly exiled to England. Three years later two Quaker men, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson, were executed by hanging. In 1660 Mary Dyer and William Leddra were added to the list of Quaker martyrs.

Present-day Rhode Island, New York, and New Jersey served as tolerable havens for Quakers, and when George Fox himself visited America in 1672 and 1673, he helped to establish Quaker meetings in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina as well. But an even more secure harbor for Quakers in America was provided by the founding of Pennsylvania by William Penn. The son of a wealthy English military hero, Penn earned his father's displeasure but an important place in American history when he became a Quaker in 1667. Prior to this conversion he had been trained as a lawyer in London, and he subsequently became a vigorous advocate for Quakers—so vigorous, in fact, that he shared the fate common to many Quakers of spending significant time in jail. He was thus well equipped to write one of the 17th century's important arguments for religious freedom: The Great Case for Liberty of Conscience, published in 1670. But William Penn was able to provide an even more tangible assistance to Quakerism when in 1681 Charles II repaid a debt he owed to Penn's father by making William Penn the proprietor of a new colony in America, Pennsylvania.

Like Providence and Maryland, the colony of Pennsylvania had as one of its foundations a significant devotion to religious liberty. The Frame of Government, enacted in 1682, provided that "All persons who profess to believe in Jesus Christ the saviour of the World, shall be capable to serve this government in any capacity, both legislatively and executively."3 Non-Christians, according to this language, could be excluded from participating in civic affairs but were not excluded from the colony itself. Though stunted by the standard of today's liberties, this restriction to the general principle of religious freedom was modest for its time. Its inclusion of Catholics and Quakers within the shelter of religious freedom was in advance of the more limited versions of this freedom recognized in most of the other American colonies. As a consequence, thousands of Quakers fled from England to enjoy the liberty granted to them in Pennsylvania, so many, in fact, that English Quakers complained that Penn's colony was stripping their meetings of members.

William Penn himself spent two years in Pennsylvania beginning in 1682, but dwindling fortunes and mounting debt eventually cast him ignominiously into debtor's prison for a time. His return to England did not radically improve the state of his financial affairs, and for most of the rest of his life, apart from a brief return visit to Pennsylvania in 1699, Penn had to content himself with overseeing the colony from a distance while he struggled with financial and political problems of his own. Not the least of the controversies he had to endure remotely was the schism that developed among Pennsylvania Quakers in the early 1690s, shortly after the death of Quaker founder George Fox in 1691. Prominent Philadelphia Quakers accused Quaker leader George Keith of various spiritual errors, and he responded with his own counteraccusations, which split Pennsylvania Quakers between the followers of Keith, known as "Christian Quakers" or "Keithites," and more mainstream Quakers. In spite of these disappointments, William Penn was able to witness the steady growth of a colony where Quakers, notoriously despised elsewhere in the American colonies, were able not only to practice their religion freely but maintain political and economic control of the colony's affairs until well into the 18th century.

Puritanism and Decline

By the beginning of the 1660s, the first generation of New England Puritans had made way for the second. Two events, especially, during the second half of the 17th century highlighted the general sense of decline that troubled many Puritans. These events revolved around controversies involving the two ordinances the Puritans recognized as central to Christian faith and practice: baptism and the celebration of the Lord's Supper. Controversy concerning baptism arrived in New England first. According to the original practice of Puritan churches, baptism was an ordinance administered only to the children of church members. To be a church member one had to give testimony to having been converted or regenerated. This testimony, if satisfactory, meant that one was recognized as being among the visible saints, those who were parties to God's covenant of grace. The children of church members were also thought to be members of covenant families and fit objects for baptism, which was understood as a sign of covenant membership. Children, though, once baptized, were not thought of as full church members in their own right. Becoming so required that they eventually experience God's saving grace themselves and give public testimony to this experience. Until then, they could not participate in the other central Christian ordinance, the Lord's Supper. By New England's second generation, however, it was clear that many of the children of believing parents who had been baptized as infants never became church members themselves as they grew older. They did, though, have children of their own and wished to see these children baptized. Accordingly, Puritan New England had to struggle with whether baptism was appropriate for the children of non–church members who had themselves been baptized as infants.

In 1662 New England's Congregational churches convened a synod to consider the issue of baptism. The issue created tensions among different churches and ministers and even, in one famous instance, between members of the same influential family. Two of Massachusetts's most prominent ministers were father and son, Richard and Increase Mather, and these two ministers, bound by ties of kinship, nevertheless found themselves divided for a time over the issue of baptism. The son, Increase Mather, believed at this time—though he later swung round to his father's views—that baptism should be reserved for the children of full communing church members. His father, Richard, however, sided with a majority of ministers who proposed what came to be known as the Half-Way Covenant. This doctrinal compromise permitted the baptism of children whose parents had themselves been baptized but had never subsequently testified to a conversion experience that would have qualified them to become full church members. Like their non–church member parents, however, children baptized under the terms of the Half-Way Covenant were not full church members. They were excluded from the church's most importance ordinance, the celebration of the Lord's Supper, until they could give satisfactory proof that they had been regenerated themselves. Although adoption of the Half-Way Covenant offered some relief against the spiritual decline that seemed prevalent in New England, it had a limited long-term impact. It served only to help incorporate into the life of churches colonists whose parents or grandparents had participated in this life. But it had no application to the many new settlers who arrived in New England during the second and third generations of European colonization. An alarming number of these new arrivals failed to become members of any church.

A further controversy centered around the ordinance of the Lord's Supper followed two decades later. In 1679 Puritan churches convened the Reforming Synod to discuss the general decline in spiritual purity and devotion that seemed to characterize New England's churches. At this synod Solomon Stoddard, the minister of the church in Northampton, Massachusetts, revealed that he had adopted ecclesiastical innovations a good deal more radical than even the innovation ratified by the Half-Way Covenant. The Half-Way Covenant retained the traditional practice of limiting church membership and participation in the ordinance of the Lord's Supper to believers who gave evidence of having been converted, not simply baptized as infants. But Stoddard threw open the doors of church membership both to those who had given evidence of conversion and to those who had received baptism as infants. Even more significantly, he applied the same standard to allow members who had not given proof of conversion to participate in the Lord's Supper if they had been baptized as infants. In fact, Stoddard argued that the Lord's Supper should be understood as a "converting ordinance." When participated in by those who formally assented to the truths of Christian doctrine and led moral lives, he insisted, the ordinance had the power to produce the inward acceptance of the Christian gospel necessary for true conversion. Unlike the synod that produced the Half-Way Covenant, the Reforming Synod of 1679 produced no clear consensus concerning Stoddard's innovations. Stoddard's views were vigorously opposed by Increase Mather, another influential Puritan minister. Nevertheless, Stoddard's liberalization of the requirements for church membership and participation in the Lord's Supper became especially influential in western Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Witnessing to and Warring against Native Americans

During the 17th century evangelistic activity by Europeans among American Indian tribes continued, especially among Spanish and French missionaries. The most famous Native American convert to Christianity during the colonial period was Kateri Tekakwitha, who was baptized into the Catholic faith in 1676. Jesuit priests had visited Tekakwitha's Mohawk village when she was an adolescent, and this initial contact appears to have paved the way for her subsequent conversion when another Catholic priest returned to the village. Afterward, she remained for a time in her village, where she suffered significant persecution for being known as "the Christian." Eventually, she made the 200-mile journey to the French mission of St. Francis Xavier at Sault St. Louis on the St. Lawrence River, near Montreal, Canada. Here she took a vow of chastity and poverty, and her pious example led to her becoming known as "the Lily of the Mohawks" and, sadly, to her early death as a result of the severity of her ascetic practices. In the 20th century she became the first American Indian proposed for sainthood within the Catholic Church. The late 17th century also saw the beginning of the long missionary career of the Jesuit priest Eusebio Francisco Kino, who labored across three decades to plant the Catholic faith in what is now the southwestern part of the United States. He established the first Catholic mission in California in 1683 at San Bruno, near present-day Loreto and in the decades after this event founded scores of missions across the Southwest.

Puritan missionary activity among the American Indians of the northeast proceeded along more modest lines. In theory, the Puritans were not insensible to the need for evangelistic efforts directed toward Native Americans. John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during most of its first generation, had sworn upon his first appointment to this position that he would "draw . . . the natives of this country . . . to the knowledge of the true God."4 The colony's charter stated that one of its principal aims was to "win and incite the natives of [the] country to . . . the Christian faith."5 In practice, however, Winthrop and the other New England Puritans focused their energies primarily on building and sustaining a godly commonwealth. Unlike the Spanish in Mexico and South America, the Puritans saw no place for the use of force in planting Christianity among American Indian populations. Thus, preoccupied with the work of colonization and fettered in their evangelistic efforts by language barriers, the Puritans did not place a priority on missionary activity among American Indians.

The Puritan minister John Eliot was a prominent exception to the general arrangement of priorities. Soon after his arrival in New England in 1631, he assumed a position as junior minister of the church at Roxbury. But history remembers him less for his pastoral work in this church than for his determined efforts to bring the Christian gospel to American Indians living in New England. Upon his appointment as the senior minister of the Roxbury church in 1641, he began to devote substantial energy to the study of the Algonquian language to facilitate his missionary efforts. He subsequently preached the first Puritan sermon in this language in 1646, and in later years his preaching yielded a number of American Indian converts. These he began to settle in separate villages as early as 1651, where they became known as "Praying Indians." The benevolent regard Eliot earns from many historians for his humane treatment of American Indians is tarnished somewhat by his willingness to encourage converts to adopt not only the teachings of Christianity, but to assume the cultural habits and mannerisms of Europeans. In addition to his founding of villages for American Indian converts, John Eliot's other important contribution was a translation of the Bible he prepared in the Algonquian language. The New Testament of this translation, published in 1661, was the first Bible printed in America. Eliot published a translation of the Old Testament as well two years later.

John Eliot's missionary efforts among the American Indians of Massachusetts suffered a sharp setback during King Philip's War. This conflict between the New England colonists and Native Americans led by Metacom (called King Philip by New Englanders), son of Massasoit and chief of the Wampanoag, raged from 1675 to 1676. Although Massasoit had enjoyed friendly relations with European settlers in New England, Metacom eventually bristled at the steady expansion of colonial settlements and forged an alliance with other tribes, including the Naragansett, to attack the colonists. All-out war between the colonists and Metacom and his allies erupted after Native Americans massacred several hundred settlers. Eventually, Metacom himself was killed in August 1676, and the main body of Native American military strength was defeated by the colonists. The end of King Philip's War brought with it the destruction of American Indian tribal life in southern New England. In the course of the war, the Indians who had been converted to Christianity under the ministry of John Eliot were driven from the villages in which he had settled them and dispersed. Although Eliot continued evangelistic efforts after King Philip's War, the success of these efforts was only a shadow of what they had been before the war.

The Devil and Salem

By the final decade of the 17th century, John Winthrop's vision 60 years earlier of establishing a city on a hill seemed to many New Englanders long ago and very far away. New England had lost the battle to keep religious diversity at bay, suffering the incursions of Baptists and Quakers and Catholics and even Jews. And the piety of second- and third-generation Puritans seemed not so fervent as that practiced by the original Puritan generation in New England. King Philip's War had appeared to many as God's judgment on a holy commonwealth that was no longer holy, but even this judgment did not rekindle Christian devotion or restrain the Babel of religious diversity. As they witnessed the decline of religious devotion and orthodoxy, many Puritans found it convenient to blame Satan and to look for his agents among them. In any event, from 1640 to 1690, the number of prosecutions for witchcraft climbed drastically. Before the 17th century ended these prosecutions culminated in one final burst of zeal for revealing the devil's nefarious schemes. It occurred in Salem Village in 1692.

What climaxed in the execution of 20 people convicted of witchcraft and the imprisonment of scores of other Salem inhabitants began in January 1692 with a strange illness suffered by two young girls, the daughter and niece of the local minister, Samuel Parris: nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams. When a local physician concluded that their malady had a supernatural source, some inhabitants of Salem began to suspect that devilry was afoot. In fact, a neighbor suggested that Parris's two slaves, one of them the West Indian woman Tituba, prepare a witch's cake—made out of rye and containing the urine of the afflicted girls—to be fed to a hound that might then lead to the identification of a witch. Inspired by this environment of suspicion, no doubt, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams claimed in late February that three women, including Tituba, had practiced witchcraft against them. This was a crime punishable by death under the codification of law adopted in 1648 in Massachusetts called the Book of the Laws and Liberties. It prescribed that "[i]f any man or woman be a WITCH, that is, has or consults with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death."6 Salem authorities responded to the allegations of the girls by arresting the three women and interrogating them. Although two of the accused denied that they had participated in witchcraft, Tituba confessed to being a witch. Intuitively, she grasped the perverse truth that ruled subsequent proceedings: citizens who admitted that they had sold themselves in servitude to Satan fared better than those who steadfastly affirmed their innocence in the face of witchcraft accusations. All those who confessed to witchcraft escaped the gallows; only those who insisted on their innocence were hung.

From this beginning accusations of witchcraft spiraled upward in number as other young girls and later other residents of the village leveled charges of witchcraft against their neighbors. At first, only individuals on the margins of Salem society were accused, but eventually more prominent citizens were also accused of having done the devil's bidding. At the end of May newly appointed colonial governor William Phips created a special court to preside over the witchcraft cases. The court heard evidence regarding various unusual occurrences alleged to have been caused by the activity, but it also considered "spectral evidence." This latter evidence included testimony from the girls and others to the effect that they had seen one person or another in the presence of Satan or that they had been invisibly tormented by the spectral, that is, invisible, forms of persons accused of witchcraft. The girls, for example, might claim to be pinched or pricked with pins by the specters of those appearing in court; they might appear struck dumb by an alleged witch whom they subsequently claimed stopped their tongues. The use of this evidence was the most controversial aspect of the Salem trials and ultimately sparked a disagreement between two prominent Puritan ministers who were father and son: Increase Mather and his son, Cotton Mather. Increase publicly opposed the use of spectral evidence in witchcraft prosecutions, while his son Cotton supported the admissibility and probity of this evidence.

Those who met their deaths at the hands of the Salem inquisition died, except in one instance, by hanging. One defendant, Giles Corey, was accused of witchcraft but refused to participate in the trial against him. For this act of insubordination he was found in contempt of court and sentenced to be pressed by large stones until he either renounced his contempt or died. He refused to accept the court's authority to the very end, when, after two long days of suffering, tradition records his last words as being "more weight." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow more than 150 years after the event gave poetic expression to Corey's death in his drama Giles Corey of Salem Farms. In Longfellow's version, Corey declares before he dies I will not plead. If I deny, I am condemned already, in courts where ghosts appear as witnesses, and swear men's lives away. If I confess, then I confess to a lie, to buy a life which is not a life, but only death in life. I will not bear false witness against any, Not even against myself, whom I count least . . . I come! Here is my body; ye may torture it, but the immortal soul ye cannot crush!7

After the final glut of executions on September 22, the tide of opinion in Salem began to change. The proceedings still had their defenders, not the least of whom was the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, who was given access to court records and eventually published a defense of the witchcraft proceedings titled The Wonders of the Invisible World. But Cotton's father, Increase Mather, published a critique of the Salem affair in early October—Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits. In this work Increase Mather subjected to particular criticism the use of spectral evidence at Salem. After publication of this work, Massachusetts governor William Phips received a copy of it and, convinced by its indictment of spectral evidence, forbade any further use of this form of evidence in subsequent witchcraft trials. Proceedings continued into the first part of 1693 under a new court. But either because general sentiment had turned decisively against the witchcraft allegations or because convictions were rarely possible without the use of now forbidden spectral evidence, most of those accused were acquitted of charges. Of more than 50 indictments for witchcraft, only three further convictions resulted. By May 1693 the colonial governor had pardoned and released all those in jail as a result of the witchcraft proceedings, thus officially closing the sordid affair.

The governor's pardons, however, could not close the wounds inflicted by the witchcraft trials. Surviving victims and family members of those who had been executed began to seek and were generally granted reparations. But the mere payment of money could not assuage the losses. In hindsight, it appeared that key participants in the madness had been motivated less by holy zeal than by mundane sinful desires: a weak minister desiring to halt the decline in his power and authority, accusers anxious to acquire the property of those they accused, a village tired of having to live side by side with strange or disagreeable neighbors. Participants in the Salem proceedings responded with varying degrees of remorse for their roles. Five years after the original trials, the Massachusetts general court appointed a day of fasting and prayer concerning the Salem incident, and in response one of the judges, Samuel Sewell, confessed to his church the sinfulness of his own judgments concerning the witchcraft allegations. His signed confession accepted responsibility for the part he played:

Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated stroke of God upon himself and family; and being sensible, that as to the Guilt contracted, upon the opening of the late [witchcraft proceedings] . . . he is, upon many accounts, more concerned than any that he knows of, Desires to take the Blame and Shame of it, Asking pardon of men.8

But even as the Salem participants scrutinized their own conduct, they did not wholly absolve Satan for his role in the affair. Satan may not have sent his agents to pinch and poke the upright citizens of Salem, as the girls had alleged, but, at least according to Salem's minister, Samuel Parris, the devil had surely been present in the village. God, he insisted, had "suffered the evil angels to delude us."9