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conduct only where it directly affects other people; but in that day, all over Christendom, the state tried to regulate conduct purely personal. This was because state and church were so closely connected. In Virginia, the colonial law required attendance at church, and forbade traveling on Sunday.1 In the Puritan colonies such legislation was more minutely vexing, – and more rigorously enforced.

193. At the same time, the most common specific charges against New England are wholly false. It is still widely believed that in Connecticut the law forbade a woman to kiss her child on Sunday; that it prohibited playing on "any instrument of music except the drum, trumpet, and jewsharp"; and that it required "all males" to have their hair "cut round according to a cap." These "laws" are merely the ingenious vengeance of a fugitive Tory clergyman (S. A. Peters), who during the Revolution published in England a History of Connecticut. This quaint book contains a list of forty-five alleged "Blue Laws." Some are essentially correct, and most have some basis in fact; but a few are mere malicious inventions, and it is by these almost alone that the "code" is generally known.

The veracity of the Reverend Mr. Peters may be judged from other items in his History. He pictures the inhabitants of a Connecticut village fleeing from their beds, mistaking the croaking of an "army of thirsty frogs" (on their way from one pond to another) for the yells of an attacking party of French and Indians; and he describes the rapids of the Connecticut River thus, "Here water is consolidated without frost, by pressure, by swiftness, between the pinching, sturdy rocks, to such a degree of induration that an iron crow [bar] floats smoothly down its current "

194. Soon after 1650 there began a slow decay in Puritanism. The English historian, Freeman, complains that students of history go wrong because they think that "all the Ancients lived at the same time." It is essential for us to see the colonist of 1730 or 1700 as a different creature from his great grandfather of 1660 or 1630. Even in the first century in Massachu

1 Cf. § 37 and Source Book, No. 35.

setts, the three generations had each its own character. The first great generation of founders (the leaders, at least) were strong, genial, tactful men, broadened by European culture and by wide experience in camp and court, and preserving a fine dignity, sometimes tender graces even, in their stern frontier lives. Their Puritanism was sometimes somber, but never petty. It was like the noble Puritanism of Milton in his youth, the splendid enthusiasm of the "spacious Elizabethan days," sobered and uplifted by moral earnestness and religious devotion. Winthrop and Cotton and their fellows, who had left ancestral manor houses to dwell in rude cabins for conscience' sake, lived an exalted poem day by day in their unfaltering conviction of the Divine abiding within them and around them.

Their children could not easily rise to this height. As early as 1646, the Massachusetts General Court laments the desecration of the Sabbath by "youths and maydes ""uncivilly walkinge in the streets and fields . . . and otherwise misspending that precious time;" and in the records of Watertown for 1669 we read, –

"It was agreed that the selectinen shall take their turnes, every man his Day, to site upon the Gallary to looke to the youthes. . . in the time of publike exercises on the Lords Days, and that the two Constables shalbe desired to take their turnes to site there also."

Grown to manhood, these sons and grandsons of the founders laid aside frivolity, it is true, and became solemn and stern; but they show Puritanism in the sere. The necessities of frontier life made them nimble-witted, inquisitive, pushing, better able than their fathers "to find their way in the woods and to rear crops and children under New World conditions. But the unceasing struggle and petty privations (theirs not by choice now, but by compulsion), made their lives harsh and unlovely and bitter. Most of the finer thought and broad outlook of the first generation fell away, and they had never felt

1 See Winthrop's letters in the Source Book.

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its splendid self-sacrifice. Faith gave way to formula; inspiration was replaced by tradition and cant. The second generation lost the poetry out of Puritanism; the third generation began to lose the power.

Much that is vital to man always remained. Puritanism continued to teach the supremacy of conscience with emphasis never excelled in religious movements; and, in its darkest period, sweet and gentle lives sometimes blossomed out of it. But before 1700 it showed a great decline. That decay was associated with three other phenomena (§§ 195-197).

195. There was a marked increase in gloom in New England life. Gloom had been an incident of Puritanism in its best day now it became so dominant as to distort religion. The damnation scene of Wigglesworth's Day of Doom was long the most popular "poetry" in New England. Two extracts may indicate its character for literature and for thought:

But men of that day

preferred Wigglesworth's ghastly doggerel to Milton; and, as

1 Among these "damned," over whose fate the poet gloats in this way, he is careful to include all unbaptized infants as well as

"civil honest men,

That loved true Dealing and hated Stealing,

Nor wronged their brethren,"

but whose righteousness had not been preceded by "effectual calling," in the grotesque phrase of the day.

Lowell says with biting satire, the damnation scene was solace of every Puritan fireside."

"the

196. The second phenomenon connected with the fanaticism of Puritanism in its worst age is the "Salem witchcraft madness of 1692. Throughout the seventeenth century, all but the rarest men believed unquestioningly that the Devil walked the earth in bodily form and worked his will sometimes through men and women who had sold themselves to him. These suspected "witches," usually lonely, scolding, old women,

were objects of universal fear and hate. In Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, France, Great Britain, great numbers of such wretches were put to death, not merely by ignorant mobs, but by judicial processes before the most enlightened courts. In England, in 1603, parliament sanctioned this Common Law process by a statute providing the penalty of death for those who should have "Dealinges with evill Spirits," 1 and the New England codes contained similar legislation. In Virginia, Grace Sherwood was 66 swum for a witch in 1705, and the jury declared her guilty; but she escaped punishment through the enlightened doubts of the gentry Justices. In the more progressive Pennsylvania, the most that could be secured from a jury was a verdict against an accused woman of "guilty of haveing the Common fame of a witch, but not guilty as Shee stands Indicted." In Maryland a woman was executed on the charge of witchcraft. But most of the American persecutions occurred in New England.

Connecticut executed eleven witches, and about as many more suffered death in Massachusetts before 1690. Then came the frenzy at Salem; and within a few months twenty were executed, while the prisons were crammed with many scores more of the accused. The clergy took a leading part in the prosecutions; and the hideous follies of the trials are almost incredible. While the madness lasted, the flimsiest accusations

1 This law remained on the English statute books until 1735; and in 1711 Jane Wenham was convicted under it of "conversing with the Devil in the shape of a cat."

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were equivalent to proof. One neat woman had walked some miles over bad roads without getting herself muddy: "I scorn to be drabbled," she said. Plainly she must have been carried by the Devil! And so "she was hanged for her cleanliness."

Finally the common sense of the people awoke, and the craze passed as suddenly as it had come. With it, closed all

THE "WITCH HOUSE," SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS. The oldest house now standing in Salem, built about 1635. There is a tradition that examinations of accused persons were held here. It was the dwelling of Judge Jonathan Corwin of the Witchcraft trials.

legal prosecution for witchcraft in New England, rather earlier than in the rest of the world; but the atrocities of the judicial murders crowded into those few months must always make a terrible chapter of history.1

1 Good brief treatments of the witchcraft delusion are found in Eggleston's Transit of Civilization, 15-34, and in Channing's History of the United States, II, 456-462. Longer treatments, containing some exaggerations, are given in James Russell Lowell's "Witchcraft" in his Works, and in Lecky's History of European Rationalism.