15
AS A ROARING LION
Like the drawing back of a mighty war bow, tension mounted in the early summer of 1675. One way God’s blast of judgment might descend on a complacent, greedy, self-oriented people was so ominous that no one dared think about it, let alone put it into words: a general, coordinated Indian uprising.
Prior to this, the Indians’ ancient tribal rivalries had run so deep that there was never a serious possibility of a massed uprising. And because God’s people were living in obedience to their covenant with Him, His providential grace so covered them that such incidents as the one in 1639, which Winthrop relates, were not unusual:
At Kennebeck, the Indians wanting food, and there being stores in the Plymouth trading house, they conspired to kill the English there for their provisions. And some Indians, coming into the house, Mr. Willet, the master of the house, [was] reading in the Bible, his countenance more solemn that at other times, so as he did not look cheerfully upon them, as he was wont to do. Whereupon they went out and told their fellows that their purpose was discovered. They asked them, how could it be? The others told them, that they knew it by Mr. Willet’s countenance, and that he had discovered it by a book he was reading. Whereupon they gave over their design.1
But relations between the settlers and the Indians had been deteriorating for some time. Gone were the days of peaceful coexistence so prized by Bradford, Winslow, and the Wampanoag sachem, Massasoit. When the great chief died of old age in 1662, leadership of the Wampanoag fell to his eldest son, Wamsutta, and when he died shortly thereafter, it was assumed by Massasoit’s next oldest son, Metacomet, to whom the settlers had given the Christian name of Philip.
Philip, the new King of the Wampanoag, was being pressured from all sides. The Pilgrims wanted to buy more of his land, while to the west the Iroquois Confederation was pushing hostile tribes eastward. And then, the increasingly apprehensive Pilgrims demanded that the Wampanoag surrender all their weapons. Finally, the sudden rush of events in early June forced people to think the unthinkable.2
The arrow had been fitted to the bowstring back in January. Early one morning some men passing by a large frozen pond in the settlement of Middleborough (about fifteen miles southwest of Plymouth) happened to notice something out on the surface of the pond. It looked like a man’s hat, and nearby was what appeared to be a musket. Since neither item was the sort of thing a man would leave behind him, particularly in the dead of winter, and since the ice was clearly strong enough, they went out on the pond to take a closer look.
Sure enough, it was a hat and a gun. Suddenly one of the men gave a cry: there, beneath the clear ice, was a face, its eyes open wide, staring upward, its dark hair billowed out around it. One of the men ran to get an ax. The body that they chopped out of the ice was that of John Sassamon, a Christian Indian from the nearby Indian settlement of Nemasket. Presumably he had drowned while crossing, before the ice had fully hardened.
But something was wrong. Sassamon was an Indian; he would have known better than to try something so foolhardy. Closer examination revealed an acute swelling on the side of his head, which might have come from a blow. Moreover, no water had come out of the body to indicate death by drowning. But the most telling piece of evidence was that his neck was broken. Whatever else might happen to a man going through the ice, he would not break his neck. John Sassamon had been murdered, and the crime had been made to look like an accident.
The probability of murder became more likely when one considered the facts of John Sassamon’s life. Reared in a community of Christian Indians at Natick, fifteen miles west of Boston, he had studied at Harvard. But then, perhaps in a crisis of identity, he had rejoined the Indians in the wilderness, serving as the aide of King Philip. John Sassamon was a bright and quick young man, as fluent in English as in his native tongue. As such, he must have been invaluable to Philip—until Sassamon’s Christian conscience began to trouble him. God’s Spirit increasingly convicted him, till he finally returned to Natick and was readmitted to the congregation. He became such a model convert that he was given the responsibility of instructing other Indians. And so, when the Indian community at Nemasket sent for a native preacher, John Sassamon was the logical choice.
All of which could only have infuriated Philip, who was well known for his thinly veiled hatred of Christianity and especially of the Christian missionaries who were pulling away some of his best warriors. In this hostility he was fully supported by the powaws, or medicine men, who saw their own power and influence being drastically undercut by the settlers’ religion. To Philip, John Sassamon would have appeared to be the vilest sort of turncoat. That much was known.
What was not generally known was that shortly before his death, John Sassamon had come to Governor Winslow of the Plymouth Colony and secretly informed him and his magistrates that Philip and the Wampanoag were organizing a general conspiracy against the settlers. At the time, the Pilgrims discounted the warning—after forty-four years of unbroken peace, it was simply unthinkable. Nor did they change their minds when he insisted that he was risking his life to bring them this intelligence.
But now that it had actually cost him his life, they did take it seriously.
Incredibly, an eyewitness to Sassamon’s murder was found, an Indian who had observed the whole thing from the top of a nearby hill, near enough for him to recognize all three assailants, one of whom was a chief lieutenant to Philip. These men were apprehended, and the trial was set for June. To ensure the utmost fairness, there would be two juries: one composed of settlers, the other of the wisest Indians in the colony. Although the three defendants insisted upon their innocence throughout the trial, the verdict of both juries was unanimous: guilty as charged.
The sentence was death by hanging, and now the war bow was drawn fully taut. Philip was furious. He insisted that the witness was lying and was in collusion with the settlers in an obvious attempt to besmirch his honor (for if they were guilty, there could be no question who had given the order).
Such was Philip’s insistence and that of the defendants—who, even as they stood on the gallows, hotly denied that they had been at all involved with John Sassamon’s death—that there might have been real doubt in future years. Indeed, that would have been almost a certainty, had it not been for a reamarkable instance of divine providence. As the trap door beneath the last of the three Indians was sprung, the rope broke. The Indian fell to the ground, and in the terror of the moment he confessed that all three of them had done exactly what they had been convicted of. And though he maintained that he had only watched while the other two had done the actual killing, he was rehanged, and this time the rope did not break.
But Philip’s patience did. Now large bands of armed Indians were seen moving about the countryside, causing many settlers to abandon their far-flung homesteads and move into more densely populated areas, guarded by fortified houses called strong-houses. One wonders if perhaps they were reminded of the words of 1 Peter 5:8 (KJV): “Your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.”
Fear stalked the land; the tip of the arrow on the drawn war bow was seeking its aiming point. A few of the abandoned houses were looted and burned by the Indians, and armed bodies of militia went into the woods seeking the culprits, but they returned in frustration, having chased shadows. Shots were fired and returned, but the enemy was never seen. All through the first three weeks of June a terrified populace held its breath.
One can imagine the scene on the outskirts of the settlement of Swansea in the Plymouth Colony when the explosion finally came.3 In the half-light before dawn on the cool, clear morning of June 21, the first shot was fired. It would have been guided by the feathers of a wild turkey—feathers attached not to the tail of a plump fowl but to a lean willow shaft. At the other end was an arrowhead of pointed flint, and as the silent missile flew toward its mark, from well-concealed positions more than a hundred pairs of eyes watched its flight. On and on it flew, till it landed with a thunk in the stout oak door of the home of a settler we will call Isaac Trowbridge.
Hearing that sound and no other, Trowbridge opened the door. His eyes widened when he saw the arrow, but before he could slam the door shut, a second arrow sank into his chest, and a third pierced his throat. His oldest son took the fourth as he tried to drag his father inside. At that moment the surrounding woods erupted in an unholy din, as scores of braves gave vent to stored up hatred. The middle son barricaded the door and put the family table up against the front window, while the youngest loaded their father’s long-barreled flintlock. But it was futile, and the little family knew it. Before long an ugly column of black smoke was rising in the still morning air.
That day Indians from Philip’s nearby base at Mount Hope burned all the houses of Swansea, slaughtering and mutilating their inhabitants. When the colonial troops finally arrived, they were shocked and sickened at the horror of the scene. The main street of the little village was strewn with the dismembered corpses of men, women, and children. So hideous was the sight that at first it did not even register that it could have been done by human beings. It seemed as if Satan himself had unleashed his fury on New England.
Dartmouth was the next settlement to come under the tomahawk, a day later, and then Taunton and Middleborough and Sudbury. Fifty people were massacred in Lancaster. Forty homes were put to the torch in Groton. Now the Indians prepared to move on Marlborough, with King Philip himself taking personal command of some fifteen hundred braves, a far greater army than the colonists had ever been able to muster.
New England was totally unprepared strategically, mentally, and spiritually. A company of local militia would be hastily called out and dispatched to the relief of a beleaguered town or hamlet, only to be cut to pieces by a well-placed ambush waiting for it. A second column would be sent to the aid of the first, only to blunder into a separate ambush set for it. And so it went, until the settlers were afraid to go into the woods, let alone vigorously pursue the enemy. Throughout New England morale sank to its nadir, as survivors made their way to towns that had not yet come under attack. Some were in hysterics, and others were dumbstruck by atrocities beyond the human mind’s capacity to assimilate.
Almost immediately a fast day was declared in Massachusetts, but no sooner had the service ended than reports of fresh disasters arrived. Clearly this time God’s judgment was not going to be turned aside by one day’s worth of repentance.
Increase Mather and his son Cotton sounded the note that other clergymen soon picked up. They preached the most powerful sermons of their lives, based on Scriptures such as:
Behold, I am bringing upon you . . .
a nation whose language you do not know. . . .
Their quiver is like an open tomb,
they are all mighty men.
They shall eat up your harvest and your food;
they shall eat up your sons and your daughters . . .
they shall eat up your vines and your fig trees;
your fortified cities in which you trust
they shall destroy with the sword. . . .
They lay hold on bow and spear,
they are cruel and have no mercy,
the sound of them is like the roaring sea . . .
they . . . [are] set in array as a man for battle,
against you, O daughter of Zion.
Jeremiah 5:15–17; 6:23
It was manifestly clear to the Mathers that God was not going to be satisfied with superficial or temporary change. What He now demanded was what He had been calling for all along: nothing less than a complete amendment of life. This would necessitate a rooting out of sin and dealing with it to a degree that had not been seen on the eastern seaboard for nearly fifty years.
At first, the people, frightened and badly shaken though they were, still did not take the Mathers and their fellow ministers seriously; they had heard it all before so many times. But the war news got steadily worse. And it obviously was war now; practically every Indian tribe in New England had donned war paint and was collecting scalps.
Finally, the people began to heed their ministers. The Bay Colony’s churches filled, and people who had not attended church in years stood in the aisles and joined in the prayers. For they had come to see that the battle was a spiritual one, and even the most pragmatic among them had accepted that fact.
God’s patience with the colonists’ hypocritical ways had come to an end. He was not about to relent and restore the saving grace that had so long protected them and that they had so long taken for granted, unless New England had a change of heart.
In the meantime, it was now the forces of light that were reeling in confusion and disarray and falling back on all fronts. As Samuel Cooke would preach a century later, “Satan, whom the Indians worshipped . . . [raised] armies of fierce, devouring beasts.”4 The Prince of Darkness had waited patiently for the seeds of greed to do their work. And now he laughed in triumph as his counterattack reached the peak of its fury, and his own obedient servants did their savage best to make up for all the ground lost and the insults taken. They fought with reckless courage, knowing that this was their last chance. For they could not be pushed any further west by the advancing settlers. Their backs were to the Hudson River, beyond which the exceedingly hostile and powerful Iroquois nations held undisputed territorial rights. The time had come to push the colonists back—all the way back into the sea.
Many of the families and settlements now being hardest hit had long ago removed themselves from the churches, physically as well as spiritually. Moreover, many of these families had incorporated themselves into towns without first gathering a church. The Mathers and like-minded ministers were making it abundantly clear that their misfortune was no coincidence. John Cotton’s prophecy had come home to roost.
But where settlements, even the most isolated ones, had striven to keep faith with God and with one another, God kept faith with them. According to a history of the town of Sudbury, the reason that Sudbury rather than Concord was chosen by the Indians as their next point of attack was that the Indians feared the influence that Concord’s minister, Edward Bulkeley, had with the Great Spirit. The history quotes an old Indian chronicle as follows: “We no prosper if we burn Concord,” said they. “The Great Spirit love that people. He tell us not to go there. They have a great man there. He great pray.”5
Another case in point is the siege of Brookfield. There, by the grace of God, the townspeople had time to gather into their blockhouse, where with their muskets they were able to hold off a vastly superior number of Nipmuck Indians. A scout named Ephraim Curtis was among the besieged. Three times he tried to sneak through the Indian lines to get help. On the third attempt he succeeded, crawling through the darkness on his hands and knees, expecting at any moment to be discovered and killed. He made it on foot to Marlborough, some thirty miles distant, where he collapsed, exhausted.
Meanwhile, back at the blockhouse, the Nipmucks were strengthening their siege, occupying nearby barns and pouring musket fire into the windows of the blockhouse, which continued to hold out. Now the Indians resorted to bonfires, shooting flaming arrows into the roof of the house. But the people inside cut holes in the roof and extinguished the flames before they could spread. Next the Indians piled hay against a corner of the house and set it afire, but some of the settlers were able to dash out and quench the blaze.
Frustrated, the warriors built a mobile torch, using wheels from the farm vehicles, a barrel full of combustibles, and two extremely long shafts, made of poles spliced together. But just as this contraption was about to be set in motion, a sudden downpour drenched the combustibles and rendered the fire-wagon useless.
The siege had been under way for almost forty-eight hours when word of their plight finally reached Major Samuel Willard, who was on his way to Lancaster with a strong force of mounted troopers. The force wheeled about and rode at the gallop to Brookfield, where the Indians were making such a tumult besieging the blockhouse that they did not hear the shouts or warning shots of their sentries, who had sighted the fast-approaching horsemen. After a brief, hot skirmish, the Indians vanished. And when the bullet-riddled door swung open, the troopers received the welcome of their lives.
Even in New England’s darkest hour, God’s judgment could be seen to be tempered with mercy on behalf of His faithful. It was a miracle that Curtis got through, another that the cloudburst came when it did, and a third that Willard’s force just happened to be within reach and ready for combat when the word came.
Throughout King Philip’s War, as it came to be known, there were many recorded instances of God’s mercy in the form of divine providence. But perhaps none was more moving than the narrative of Mary Rowlandson, who was taken alive by the Indians when they raided Lancaster. Her husband, the local pastor, was in Boston on business when the attack came, and she and thirty-six others were in one of the village’s strong-houses, which the Indians succeeded in setting on fire.
Then I took my children and one of my sister’s to go forth and leave the house, but as soon as we came to the door and appeared, the Indians shot so thick that the bullets rattled against the house as if one had taken a handful of stones and thrown them, so that we were fain to give back. . . . The Lord hereby would make us the more to acknowledge His hand and to see that our help is always in Him. But out we must go, the fire increasing and coming along behind us, roaring, and the Indians gaping before us with their guns, spears and hatchets to devour us. No sooner were we out of the house, but my brother-in-law fell down dead, whereat the Indians scornfully shouted and hallooed, and were presently upon him, stripping off his clothes. The bullets flying thick, one went through my side, and the same through the bowels and hand of my dear child in my arms. One of my elder sister’s children, named William, had then his leg broken, which the Indians perceiving, knocked him on the head. Thus were we butchered by those merciless heathen, standing amazed, with the blood running down to our heels.6
God was with me, in a wonderful manner, carrying me along and bearing up my spirit, that it did not quite fail. One of the Indians carried my poor wounded babe on a horse. . . . I went on foot after it, with sorrow that cannot be expressed. At length, I took it off the horse, and carried it in my arms till my strength failed, and I fell down with it. [They put her and the child on a horse, until they made camp.] And now I must sit in the snow, by a little fire, and a few boughs behind me, with my sick child in my lap, calling much for water, being now through the wound fallen into a violent fever. . . . Oh, may I see the wonderful power of God, that my spirit did not utterly sink under my affliction. Still the Lord upheld me with His gracious and merciful Spirit, and we were both alive to see the light of the next morning.
For nine days Mary Rowlandson struggled on, as she was taken with the roaming band, until finally her child died. But her awesome faith in God remained undiminished: “I have thought since of the wonderful goodness of God to me, in preserving me in the use of my reason and senses in that distressed time, that I did not use wicked and violent means to end my own miserable life.”7
This was particularly meaningful because many of the women taken captive either went mad or committed suicide. For the Indians enjoyed inflicting mental torture almost as much as physical torture, and they never missed an opportunity to torment a captive whom they suspected of having a low threshold of fear. What was more, they seemed to recognize faith in Christ for what it was, and it either provoked them into a frenzy, or they left the Christian pretty much alone, possibly fearful of the source of the Christian’s inner strength. But other, less devout captives with only hope to sustain them had precious little of that commodity. All New England was plunged into darkness, the likes of which had not been seen, even in the first terrible winters.
But the light was never entirely extinguished. And the darker it became, the fiercer burned the few lights that were left. Not in twenty years had Increase Mather preached so often to such large crowds. And for the first time in even longer than that, people were listening to every word. In the face of the repeated successes of the Indians, the much-vaunted Yankee self-reliance and self-confidence melted away like a candle on a hot stove. A great many farmers and backwoodsmen, tasting fear for the first time in their lives, got down on their knees, some also for the first time. By April of 1676, there was scarcely a man or woman in all of New England who was not diligently searching his or her own soul for unconfessed or unrepented sin. In fact, it became unpatriotic not to do so—as if one were not doing one’s part for the war effort.
It was a time for poets to marshal their talents for the cause, as did Peter Folger, one of whose grandsons would be Ben Franklin:
If we then truly turn to God,
He will remove His ire,
And will forthwith take this His rod
And cast it in the fire.
Let us then search what is the sin
that God doth punish for;
And when found out, cast it away,
and ever it abhor.8
It was time for churches to renew their covenants. As one pastor put it, “We intend, God willing, . . . solemnly to renew our covenant in our church state according to the example in Ezra’s time. . . . This is a time wherein the Providence of God does, in a knocking and terrible manner, call for it.”
At last God’s wrath began to abate. Mary Rowlandson observed from behind enemy lines, as it were,
the strange providence of God in turning things about, when the Indians were at the highest and the English at the lowest. I was with the enemy eleven weeks and five days. . . . [They] triumphed and rejoiced in their inhumane and many times devilish cruelty to the English. They would boast much of their victories, saying that in two hours’ time they had destroyed such a captain and his company in such a place, and [would] boast how many towns they had destroyed, and then scoff and say [that] they had done them a good turn to send them to heaven so soon. . . .
Now the heathen begin to think all is their own, and the poor Christians’ hopes [begin] to fail (as to man), and now their eyes are more to God, and their hearts sigh heavenward. And [they begin] to say in earnest, “Help, Lord, or we perish.” When the Lord had brought His people to this, that they saw no hope in anything but Himself, then He takes the quarrel into His own hands. And though [the Indians] had made a pit in their own imaginations, as deep as hell for the Christians that summer, yet the Lord hurled themselves into it.9
Mary Rowlandson was miraculously released shortly before the cessation of hostilities. Not only that, but her son and daughter, held captive elsewhere, were also released, and the family was rejoined with her husband. “Thus hath the Lord brought me and mine out of that horrible pit, and hath set us in the midst of tenderhearted and compassionate Christians. It is the desire of my soul that we may walk worthy of the mercies received, and which we are receiving.”10
The tide of war had begun to turn. Some modern historians, loath to give God credit for anything, point out that time and numbers were on the colonists’ side, once they had regained their nerve. They had the weapons, and they had the supplies; all that was needed was for them to gain the courage to take the offensive. But the Puritans themselves knew from whom that courage finally came. They knew whom to thank, and they did, profusely.
In one of the exquisite ironies of divine justice, the instruments with which God chose to turn the tide were ones that had, until the coming of the settlers, belonged to Satan. These were none other than the “Praying Indians”—who had been converted to Christianity. These had remained loyal to the settlers, even though in the initial shockwave of panic they had been the focal point of much hatred, when badly frightened farmers suddenly decided that the only good Indian was a dead Indian.
Had these Praying Indians not been courageously protected by the Reverend John Eliot (who would become known as the Apostle to the Indians), Daniel Gookin, Daniel Henchman, and William Danforth, it is almost certain that there would have been counter-massacres that would have redounded to our shame for the next three hundred years. As it was, many Christian Indians were interned on Deer Island in Boston’s harbor for the duration of hostilities, with almost no shelter and wholly dependent on charity for their food. But they knew how to pray, and God looked after them.
When they were finally trusted enough to be given arms and combat assignments, these Christian Indians became scouts, the eyes and ears of the colonial forces whenever they had to maneuver in heavy cover, which was whenever they sought to carry the battle to the Indians. Only now instead of stumbling about helplessly, the colonials could move swiftly and stealthily through the densest forests. The Christian Indians also taught the settlers to fight like Indians, from cover wherever possible, being content to harass and vanish until they were strong enough in numbers to risk an open confrontation. And to prefer mobility to artillery—all the dictates of guerrilla warfare that a century later would confound and frustrate the British regulars under Howe and Burgoyne.
By the summer of 1676, the tide was definitely running in favor of the colonists. Now, instead of being fearful of going into the woods after their foes, the settlers were eager to close in combat with the enemy wherever they were. For they believed they were fighting the forces of hell itself, and now that they had purged their own hearts of unconfessed sin, they called on the Lord with confidence to join with them.
“Pray for us, and we’ll fight for you!” was their cheerful cry to those who had to stay behind, and the Indians noted their new aggressive spirit with dismay.
So many people had sincerely and publicly repented of their sinful ways, so many lives were truly reformed, so many broken relationships were restored, and so many churches solemnly renewed their covenants that God relented and poured out His mercy. There was a sense of freshness in the colonies, a sense of cleanness and new hope. The colonies were united in a common cause, while Satan’s house again was divided against itself along the lines of the ancient tribal rivalries. Indeed, “luck” now seemed to be running so much against the Indians that they began giving themselves up, first in small bands and then in droves.
On August 26, 1676, the final decisive action took place. An embittered Wampanoag deserter, whose kinsman King Philip had ordered killed for suggesting that the Indians should make peace with the settlers, met with the Indian fighter Captain Benjamin Church. He offered to lead Church and his company, who had been pursuing Philip all across southern New England, to the place where the renegade chieftain was encamped. For Philip had stolen back to the Wampanoag settlement at Mount Hope on the peninsula of Bristol Neck, Rhode Island, near where it had all begun.
In the dead of night Church moved his forces in canoes over to the peninsula and set up an ambush. A detachment would approach the Indian settlement from the north, getting near and lying still all night. At dawn they would rise up and attack, making as much noise as possible. Meanwhile, the main body of Church’s force would have formed a wide perimeter to the south. As the Indians fled in silence, their attackers yelling behind them, the circle of Church’s men would be lying in wait to pick them off.
The plan went like clockwork. At the first light of dawn the tremendous uproar terrified the Indians and sent them bolting in panic. As the charging settlers shouted and whooped, the Indians ran as swiftly and quietly as deer. One, fleeter than the rest, nearly broke through the cordon before he was felled.
It was Philip. For all intents and purposes, King Philip’s War was over.
Why had Philip returned to the seat of his power? Why had he, who knew as much about ambushes as any person alive, failed to post lookouts? Was it deliberate—the Indian equivalent of a soldier’s honorable death? Whatever the reason, it was over. The aftermath of the war that cost proportionately more lives than any other in America’s history and loaded the survivors with crippling debt, nonetheless proved salutary. Prosperity was indeed lost, but God’s “New Israel” was saved—for a season.
If God was trying to build a “New Israel,” Satan was doing everything he possibly could to thwart it. And the people who represented the greatest threat to him were those most dedicated to living the covenant way of obedience to the Savior who had conquered him. These were the Puritans. We have just seen how Satan waited patiently for two generations until affluence had so softened the Army of Light that he had an excellent chance to destroy them physically. But his willing servants were defeated through God’s providential intervention on behalf of His own repentant servants.
Scripture tells us that until Christ returns and destroys the devil, he will continue to wage war against the Kingdom of God. Satan would bide his time for another sixteen years before launching his second and last major assault against the Puritans. This time the battle would be waged not in terms of the flesh and blood of the physical realm, but in terms of the principalities and powers of the spiritual realm. For this final offensive Satan would loose a concentrated attack of demonic spirits, which in virulence has never been equaled in American history, before or since. We would rather not give it even this much recognition, since it was an episode that spanned only a few years in more than a century of Puritan history. Yet it has been so grossly mishandled in modern treatments that it has to be included.
The Bible makes it clear that there are only two sources of supernatural power: God and Satan. And in the spiritual realm, as in geopolitics, there is no such thing as a power vacuum: where light reigns, darkness is banished. But when the light grows dim, the shades of night gather in the wings, waiting. The candle flame grows weaker still and begins to flicker; the darkness holds its breath.
Christianity is a power religion. Christ has the power to re-create a man or woman from the inside out, as anyone who has ever met Him knows. One of the earliest lessons a new Christian learns through experience is that the power of Christ is greater than the power of the Enemy. When Jesus shed His Blood on the Cross, He broke the back of Satan’s power—then, now, and forever. One of the ways God teaches Christians this is by letting Satan harass them, to the point where they call out to their Savior and discover that in the name of Jesus, they have authority over the greatest powers of hell.
For that reason, Satan avoids open confrontations with seasoned Christians wherever possible. He will send his dupes and unwitting servants to do his dirty work, and he will concentrate his most cunning wiles on breaking down citadels of Light from within, on the ground of hidden sin. The only place where he can safely flaunt his power openly is where people do not know that he is a defeated foe—or where faith in Christ has grown dim.
As the seventeenth century drew to a close, the affluent Christianity of the Puritans had again become so enfeebled that the supernatural manifestations of Satan’s power—occultism, witchcraft, and poltergeist phenomena (demons at mischief)—were coming out into the open. Witches began to be bolder, letting it quietly be known that they could cure warts and straighten toes and mix love potions (all white magic for the come-ons; the black magic—the hexing, the curse-laying, and the spellbinding—would come later). With the gullible, the unwary, and the hopeless turning to this source of power, more and more people began to come for advice and counsel to “the known ones.”
As their influence grew, they became brazen, until there was an unacknowledged competition between them and the local pastors. All the while, demonic activity increased to the point where scarcely a village existed that did not have at least one house that was bedeviled by “haunts.”
Of the several contemporary accounts of this sudden onslaught of satanic activity, Cotton Mather’s is the most comprehensive. This was not because he was obsessed with the occult (as modern anti-Puritans would have us believe), but simply because he was one of the few ministers strong enough in the faith to confront Satan and remain supremely confident of victory. Because of this, everyone came to him with their supernatural problems—as if he was the only fireman in a town of straw houses.
As we went through these ancient accounts, we were stunned: cases of demonic possession or poltergeist activity were nothing new to us, but never had we heard of whole towns becoming literally infested with invisible beings, nor had we known anything to compare with the intensity of their malevolence. And God had allowed it all as a warning and to shake Christian settlers out of their acute spiritual apathy.
Typical were the goings-on in the house of William Morse at Newberry, described here by Cotton Mather:
In the night, he [Morse] was pulled by the hair and pinched and scratched . . . and blows that fetched blood were sometimes given him. . . . A little boy belonging to the family was the principal sufferer of these molestations, for he was flung about at such a rate, they feared his brains would have been beaten out. . . . all the knives which belonged to the house were one after another stuck into his back, which the spectators pulled out. . . . The poor boy was divers times thrown into the fire, and preserved from scorching there, with much ado. . . . once the fist beating the man was discernible, but they could not catch hold of it . . . and another time, a drumming on the boards was heard, which was followed with a voice that sang, “Revenge! Revenge! Sweet is revenge!” At this, the people being terrified, called upon God, whereupon there followed a mournful note, “Alas, alas, we knock no more, we knock no more!” and there was an end of all.11
The instances of possession were as violent and tenacious as any we had ever read or heard of. The thirteen-year-old daughter of John Goodwin of Boston was such a difficult case that it actually took weeks of battling to gain her deliverance. And the final struggle was won only after several ministers fasted and prayed at length together. Mather relates:
When we went into prayer, the demons would throw her on the floor at the feet of him who prayed, where she would whistle and sing and yell to drown out the voice of prayer, and she would fetch blows with her fist and kicks with her foot at the man that prayed. But still her fist and foot would always recoil when they came within an inch or two of him, as if rebounding against a wall. . . . At last the demons put her upon saying that she was dying, and the matter proved such that we feared she really was, for she lay, she tossed, she pulled, just like one dying . . . and then one particular minister . . . set himself to serve them [the Goodwin family] in the methods prescribed by our Lord Jesus Christ. Accordingly, the Lord being besought thrice in three days of prayer, with fasting on this occasion, the family then saw their deliverance perfected. And the children afterwards, all of them, not only proved themselves devout Christians, but unto the praise of God, reckoned these their afflictions among the special incentives of their Christianity.
Things finally reached the point where the Puritans felt that broad action had to be taken, as the Bible commanded that it must. Cotton Mather, in The Wonders of the Invisible World, comments aptly on the state of affairs:
The New Englanders are a people of God, settled in those which were once the Devil’s territories, and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such people here accomplishing the promise of old made unto our blessed Jesus—that He should have the utmost parts of the earth for His possession. . . . The Devil, thus irritated, immediately tried all sorts of methods to overturn this poor plantation. . . . Wherefore the Devil is now making one attempt more upon us—an attempt more difficult, more surprising, more snarled with unintelligible circumstances than any that we have hitherto encountered. . . . The houses of the good people there are filled with the doleful shrieks of their children and servants, tormented by invisible hands with tortures altogether preternatural.12
One of the most diabolical things about this attack of demonic spirits was that apparently they often assumed the form of innocent people in the town as they went about their foul practices, “framing” them, as it were, giving rise to accusations against these good people, and fomenting all manner of jealousies and hatred. This became so great a problem that Increase Mather and a conclave of ministers warned civil judges throughout the Bay Colony that this “spectral evidence” should not be accepted as the basis for conviction of witchcraft. But in spite of the fact that this kind of testimony was not admissible in an English court of law, the judges did not heed the warnings.
There certainly was no doubt in any Puritan’s mind that a massive frontal assault of satanic forces was indeed afoot. Mather reports that more than 120 then in custody freely confessed that the devil had appeared to them with a book in his hand for them to sign, agreeing to serve him.
In light of the modern tendency to judge the Massachusetts Bay Puritans as sin-obsessed religious neurotics who began hysterically hunting imaginary ghosts, it should be kept in mind that sober-minded pastors such as Cotton Mather carefully documented dozens of cases similar to those described above.
The climactic phase of the attacks of witchcraft on Massachusetts opened during the winter of 1692 in the town of Salem. The Reverend Samuel Parris, a failed merchant from the West Indies, was only three years into his first ministerial position as pastor of the small church on the outskirts of the town. Things were not going well. He had taken the position only on the condition that the congregation deed over to him possession of the parsonage and its two-acre lot. This had caused such anger that many church members were refusing to furnish him with firewood.
When he had arrived at Salem, Parris had brought with him two slaves—a married couple named Samuel and Tituba Indian. Without the pastor’s knowledge, Tituba began spending winter evenings in his warm kitchen initiating young girls into the occult and witchcraft. By the end of January his nine-year-old daughter, Betty, would not pray when she was supposed to, refused to do chores, and threw fits of kicking and screaming. His eleven-year-old niece, Abigail, and a playmate, Anne Putnam, had developed fits and pain spasms, and all three girls crept under tables, barking, mewing, and grunting.
When a doctor found nothing physically wrong with them and asked, “Who tortures you,” they said that three women were “afflicting” them, and named Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba. Now the same kinds of symptoms began to show up in other girls and women, and the Puritans became convinced that a massive attack of witches was indeed afoot. By late February, Salem was “alarmed to the highest degree.”13
Soon people began to be arrested and imprisoned on charges of witchcraft, for in Puritan New England witchcraft was a civil offense, not merely a religious one. By May, when Sir William Phips brought back from England a new charter for Massachusetts that named him as Governor, he found the jails filled with accused witches. The charter gave the Governor the authority to create new courts, so he called for one—the court of Oyer and Terminer (in Latin, “hear and determine”).
At her arraignment Tituba confessed to being a witch, but long after the subsequent trials had concluded, she said that Parris had flogged her and told her to confess and implicate the other women named by the girls—perhaps to lure the attention of the court away from him.
Throughout the summer, as Tituba remained chained to the wall of a rat-infested dungeon, dozens of suspects were brought to trial for witchcraft. In a complete collapse of the centuries-old procedures of the English system of justice, the court adopted a policy of convicting those who protested innocence and acquitting those who confessed to witchcraft, regarding the confession as a sign of hope that the accused would repent and come back to God.
Since the testimonies were taken under oath, innocent women were not about to swear before God that they had been involved in witchcraft when they had not. Yet the judges refused to listen to professions of innocence, choosing instead to accept the testimonies of demon-ridden accusers who were under the influence of the Father of Lies.
So horrifying was it all to Judge Nathaniel Saltonstall that he resigned from the court, saying, “I am not willing to take part in further proceedings of this nature.”14
Months later one of the bewitched girls admitted to authorities in the colony that the judges had told her that if she would not confess to being a witch, she would be put into a dungeon and then hanged, but if she did confess and name others, her life would be spared.
Not even multiple testimonies to one’s innocence swayed the judges. In August fifty residents of Andover wrote a letter to the court protesting that the local women accused of witchcraft were blameless. They said that “confessing was the only way to obtain favor” with the court, and that “might be too powerful a temptation for timorous women to withstand.”15 Their plea was ignored.
As the trials wore on, suspicion and dread gripped the colony, with many suspects being tortured until they confessed. Mary Clements of Haverhill confessed, but after the trials she recanted her confession before Puritan minister Increase Mather.
On September 22 eight persons were hanged for witchcraft—the last to be put to death in the Salem Witch Trials, and the last ever sentenced to death for witchcraft in America. On that same day the witch court adjourned, and in early October the governor disbanded it. In all, a total of twenty people had been executed, but the witch hunt was now over.
The trials had constituted a grievous failure to uphold the Puritan standards of the New England Way, a failure that would continue to prick the American conscience in future centuries. As tragic as they were, however, they should be judged in the perspective of what was happening in Europe at this time. During that same year, literally hundreds of witches were put to death. Between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, more than 100,000 Europeans were executed annually for witchcraft.16 In the light of this reality, the Massachusetts Puritans’ response might actually be considered conservative.
The witch trials had ended, but the judges had yet to become convinced that they had done anything wrong. Now public opinion was turning against them, and people were actively questioning the evidence against the accused. Thomas Brattle wrote: “There are several about the Bay, men for understanding, judgment, and piety . . . that do utterly condemn the said proceedings” and went on to name former Governor Simon Bradstreet, former Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth, the Reverend Increase Mather, the Reverend Samuel Willard, and Judge Nathaniel Saltonstall.17
A month later the sense that grievous wrongs had been committed in the trials had mounted to the point that the Governor’s Council called for a fast day on October 26, so that all Massachusetts “may be led in the right way as to the witchcrafts.” God was at work.
Samuel Sewall, one of the judges on the Oyer and Terminer court, observed a personal day of prayer and fasting on November 22. In his diary he recorded that he had prayed: “God, pardon all my sinful wandering, and direct me for the future. God, save New England as to enemies and witchcrafts, and vindicate the late judges [of the Court of Oyer and Terminer] with fasting [and] with your justice and holiness.”18
Sewall was still praying that the judges’ decisions would be vindicated, but he was also now entering a period of fervent Bible study and prayer that would last for five years. During that time God would radically change his heart.
Three days later Governor Phips established the Superior Court of Judicature and gave Samuel Sewall a seat on it. This was the first court in America to be independent of all other government institutions—a major step toward the separation of powers, which would become a hallmark of American government. That court is now the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the oldest continually functioning court in the Western Hemisphere.
As the months passed, Judge Sewall seemed to have an increasing sense of remorse. In August 1693 his wife Hannah gave birth to a daughter, but the baby died in September. Fourteen months later she almost died at her next childbirth, and in May of 1696 Sewall laid in the grave a stillborn son, the seventh child he had buried. That same month he was the only member of the General Court not invited to a wedding between prominent Salem families, and he became aware that he was the subject of gossip about the Salem Witch Trials.
During this time his daughter Betty was heavily convicted of her need of God’s grace. She told her father that she could not read the Bible without weeping, and six months later she burst into tears in his presence, crying that she was “a reprobate,” who “loved not God’s people as she should.”19
By the fall of 1696 everyone in New England seemed to be strongly in need of God’s grace. Bad weather had ruined the harvest, and grain was at its highest price ever. Many ships were being lost at sea, and the Indians and French were regularly raiding frontier towns. Moreover, the memory of the “late tragedy raised among us by Satan,” as the General Court termed it, hung over the colony like an oppressive fog.
Finally, the Governor and the General Court ordered a day of prayer and fasting for January 14 of the next year, the subject of which was to be the Witch Trials.
A little over a week before Christmas, two-year-old Sarah Sewall got sick. She was dead by December 22. Two days later during family devotions, Samuel Sewall, Jr. chose to read out loud Matthew 12:7: “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.” This Scripture was deeply impressed on Judge Sewall’s mind, and he wrote that the verse “did awfully bring to mind the Salem tragedy.”20
Church attendance on days of prayer and fasting in Puritan New England was mandatory—these meetings were not to be skipped. So, on January 14, 1697, when Bostonians trudged to their churches through the snow and ice to the beat of the town crier’s drum, Judge Samuel Sewall took his family to Third Church. Taking their accustomed seats in the front benches, his wife Hannah, still in mourning clothes for her daughter’s death, sat with their three daughters on one side of the center aisle, and Samuel and their two sons sat on the other.
When the minister, Samuel Willard, strode up the aisle to start the service, Judge Sewall handed him a note. After an opening prayer, Willard nodded to Sewall, and the judge rose to his feet and stood with his head bowed. To a hushed congregation the Puritan pastor read aloud Sewall’s confession of sin and heartfelt repentance.
Samuel Sewall, sensible of the reiterated strokes of God upon himself and family, and being sensible that as to the guilt contracted upon the opening of the late Commission of Oyer and Terminer at Salem, 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, and especially desiring prayers that God, who has unlimited authority, would pardon that sin and all his other sins, personal and relative. And according to His infinite benignity and sovereignty, not visit the sin of him or of any other, upon himself or any of his, nor upon the land. But that He would powerfully defend him against all temptations to sin for the future, and vouchsafe him the efficacious, saving conduct of His Word and Spirit.21
Judge Samuel Sewall did the only thing a committed Christian under deep conviction of sin can do: He publicly asked forgiveness of God and the people of the colony. He bowed deeply before resuming his seat.
It was done.
The prevailing attitude among modern historians tends to be that the Salem Witch Trials were the natural result of a mixture of Puritan religious fanaticism, superstition, and mob hysteria. The fact is that the tragedy of the Witch Trials was due to a failure of both the church and the colony’s judicial system—or, as we might say today, a failure on the part of both Church and State.
Had the Puritan ministers been operating in their usual close fellowship and pastoral oversight of the churches, they never would have allowed Samuel Parris to become the minister of the church at Salem. His unprecedented demand to own the parsonage property before he accepted the pastorate of the church was a clear indication that he did not have the right attitude of heart to be a minister of Christ. Had he and his slave Tituba not been welcomed at Salem, it is unlikely that the witchcraft troubles would have gotten out of hand.
On the other hand, the Oyer and Terminer judges were not following proper English court procedure. Several ministers registered strong objections with them during the trials, but the judges ignored them. When the demon-possessed girls were given the opportunity on the witness stand to accuse people of witchcraft, they did what the lying spirits oppressing them prompted them to do—they lied.
Long after the trials, Anne Putnam, one of the chief accusers of innocent people, was delivered of demonic influence through prayer. In 1706, now twenty-six years old and wishing to “lie in the dust” for what she had done, she publicly admitted that she had been deceived by Satan.
Finally, after a number of public statements of repentance like those of Samuel Sewall and Anne Putnam, the pall of guilt and gloom lifted from Massachusetts. It was as if the colony had awakened from a bad dream.
In the next decades, unparalleled commercial prosperity would come to the Puritans, and Salem would develop into a major seaport rivaling Boston. But spiritually, New England would close her eyes and go back to sleep again. The voices of the Mathers and a few others did their best to get her to bestir herself, but she would not budge.
As the years passed, the voices grew fainter, until at last they died away. A new generation of ministers who knew their theology, but for the most part did not know their Lord, would be content to let her sleep.