Witchcraft in Illinois

A Cultural History

Michael Kleen

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781439662588
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

The hidden history of witchcraft in the Land of Lincoln is revealed in this unique study by the author of Haunting Illinois. Although the Salem Witch Trials have drawn focus to New England as the center of witchcraft in American history, the practice was widespread across the Midwest. In Illinois, witchcraft—and witch persecution—have been part of local culture since French explorers arrived in the 17thcentury. In Witchcraft in Illinois, historian Michael Kleen presents the full story of the Prairie State's dalliance with the dark arts. On the Illinois frontier, pioneers pressed silver dimes into musket balls to ward off witches, while farmers dutifully erected fence posts according to phases of the moon. In 1904, the quiet town of Quincy was shocked to learn of Bessie Bement's suicide, after the young woman sought help from a witch doctor to break a hex. In turn-of-the-century Chicago, Lauron William de Laurence's occult publishing house churned out manuals for performing bizarre rituals intended to attract love and exact revenge.

Part I

History

1

Witchcraft in England and
Colonial America

1640–1700

When Virginia Dare opened her eyes for the first time on an island off the coast of present-day North Carolina in 1587, she looked on the exhausted face of her mother, Eleanor Dare. Eleanor had just become the mother of the first English baby born in the Americas. Virginia’s father was Ananias Dare, a tiler and bricklayer from London. Eleanor and Ananias had come along with 115 other Englishmen and women to reestablish Sir Walter Raleigh’s colony on Roanoke Island. It was England’s second attempt to colonize America, and it was an utter failure.

When John White, Eleanor Dare’s father, arrived at Roanoke along with a supply ship in 1590—on his granddaughter’s third birthday—he found the colony abandoned. All 118 English colonists had disappeared. Their fate remains a mystery, but they were likely absorbed by Croatoan Indians, massacred by Powhatans (led by the father of Pocahontas), enslaved by the Eno or any combination of the three. In 1567, the Spanish conquistadors who built Fort San Juan in the interior of what became North Carolina fared no better. They were killed by Joara Indians shortly after they arrived.

Between 1607 and 1763, the sons and daughters of ancient Albion spread out along America’s East Coast, displacing native peoples, building villages, cities and plantations, felling forests and planting rich fields of wheat and tobacco. Over more than a century, and with the help of other western European refugees, they slowly turned the American coast from a wilderness into a place reminiscent of their homeland. But these colonists brought more than physical changes to the New World; they also brought their faith, language and culture. “With the English language came a rich though intangible body of thought and feeling,” historians T. Harry Williams, Richard Current and Frank Freidel wrote in their A History of the United States (to 1877). “There came a mass of folklore, myths and superstitions, songs and ballads, unwritten stories, proverbs, sayings, and all the wisdom of unlearned people.”

Those traditions included a strong popular belief in witchcraft, which accompanied the colonists from the Old World to the new. While captains Edward Wingfield and Christopher Newport founded Jamestown in 1607, printing presses back home churned out lurid details of witch trials, animal familiars and devils’ marks. The magical world that fascinated and terrified the English people eventually found its way to the shores of the Illinois River, over four thousand miles away from the British Isles.

The great period of witch trials in Europe began on December 5, 1484, when Pope Innocent VIII issued the Summis desiderantes affectibus, a papal bull (or decree) that many historians point to as the origin of early modern witch persecutions. It said, in part:

[M]any persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences, have slain infants yet in the mother’s womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine.…[T]hese wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen, herd-beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism.²³

The papal decree was meant to apply only to certain regions in Germany but was interpreted by “witch finders” as a blanket license to roam Europe looking for witches, even in places where Catholicism did not hold sway. These persecutions lasted for over two centuries. In the 1680s, objections by educated elites resulted in the repeal of most laws against witchcraft. In contrast to England and its colonies, the French monarchy was late to abandon laws against witchcraft, and witch trials continued in France into the eighteenth century. Bertrand Guilladot, a priest in Dijon who in 1742 confessed to making a pact with the devil, was one of the last to be executed for the crime. The gender of the accused was not a focus of witch trials in France as it was in England. According to historian Robin Briggs, “Of nearly 1,300 witches whose cases went to the parlement of Paris on appeal, just over half were men.…In around 500 known cases which did not reach the parlement, although there is a small majority of women, men still make up 42 per cent of the accused.”²⁴

American society incubated during a time of great social and political upheaval in England. Protestants and Catholics, Parliamentarians and Royalists, and alchemists and natural philosophers all fought over the hearts and minds of their fellow Englishmen. It was dissenters seeking to purify the Church of England from Catholic influence (Puritans) who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. The social rifts that chased the Pilgrims to America led to a series of civil wars in England between 1641 and 1651 that climaxed in the beheading of King Charles I on January 30, 1649. At the beginning of those wars, most clergy and commoners embraced a fundamentally supernatural worldview. They believed invisible forces could and did influence their lives. Charms and conjurations, though against the law, were regularly used in rural England. Witches were people who, with the help of the devil, manipulated the natural world to wreak havoc on the social and natural order. They used maleficium (malevolent or harmful magic) to spread blight and disease, poison food and kill livestock, all with the aid of occult powers.

By 1640, English elites were increasingly skeptical of the existence of magic and witchcraft. The days of Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum (1487) were long gone. Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic, argued that a growing number of mostly Protestant elites, during the seventeenth century in particular, rejected the idea that the devil could influence people, let alone grant them occult power.²⁵ Pamphleteers and so-called witch finders like shipping clerk turned amateur prosecutor Matthew Hopkins found themselves on the defensive, and they began producing accounts of witchcraft in order to convince their contemporaries of its reality. Sensationalism and profit also drove the printing presses to churn out lurid accounts of trials and alleged liaisons with the devil. Witchcraft in seventeenth-century England had become, essentially, a folk culture that both frustrated and fascinated the ruling elites, and those elites manipulated that culture for their own ends.

Hollywood and contemporary popular culture has distorted the nature of witchcraft in this period. According to historians Barry Reay and Alan Macfarlane, witchcraft accusations resulted from a breakdown in neighborly relations, not religious persecution or the deliberate suppression of an ancient nature religion. Violence and legal action usually occurred only after a long series of confrontations and only after several other recourses had failed. Reay suggested a lopsided power play was at work, in which the accused cultivated the witch persona to empower themselves against their neighbors, only running afoul of the law after several decades. Most witchcraft allegations “emerged from a context of household and neighborhood intervention, and from the inevitable frictions of community life.”²⁶ Robin Briggs, in his book Witches & Neighbors, went so far as to argue that witch beliefs in England were largely tolerated among the common folk and that courts acted with caution and restraint in the face of the fantastic evidence presented to them.²⁷

By the seventeenth century, men sold thousands of pages of ballads and stories from street corners, shops and taverns. In London workshops, a designated reader recited the latest news to her fellow spinners and weavers while they attended their craft. In taverns across England, men drank and sang the latest ballads off broadsides. Graphic woodcuts illustrated the text, and the lyrics—though telling a different tale each time—were usually sung to familiar tunes. Witchcraft was often the subject of this popular literature, and it reveals much about English attitudes toward maleficium and its practitioners.

The Divels Delusions was typical of these pamphlets. Printed in 1649, it related the story of two “notorious witches,” John Palmer and Elizabeth Knott, in Hartford County, England. Its author began the account by writing, “It had been very difficult to convince me of that which I find true, concerning the wiles of that old serpent the Divel” and offered Palmer’s and Knott’s confessions as proof. In his confession, John Palmer claimed he had been a witch for sixty years. He not only confessed to being a witch, he confessed “to be the head of the whole colledge of Witches, that hee knows in the world.” He had also given “suck to two familiars,” which was a sure sign that he had made a compact with the devil.²⁸

A familiar was a small animal (usually a cat) that helped the witch and served as a liaison between the witch and the devil. Witches supposedly fed their familiars through teats that appeared somewhere on their body, and female juries looked for these marks when someone stood accused of practicing maleficium. The presence of familiars set English witchcraft apart from witch beliefs in other parts of Europe.

Another unique (but not exclusive) feature of English witchcraft was the distinction by commoners between benevolent and malevolent witches. The author of The Divels Delusions informed his readers that the people of Hartford County were “long gratified [with John Palmer’s] conjurations, that time and ignorance stiles him a good witch, or a white witch.” Rejecting the distinction, he concluded by reminding his readers of the deceptive powers of Satan, whom he accused of “tempting and deluding those who are led captive by him, namely an inordinate desire to know more than his maker hath thought fit for him to know.”²⁹

In 1652, an incident regarding the so-called Witch of Wapping, a woman by the name of Joan Peterson, sparked controversy in London. The debate over the authenticity of the case—and the high social standing of the persons involved—illustrated the divide between popular and elite culture and showed how English elites manipulated common beliefs about witchcraft. The author of The Witch of Wapping (1652), one of the first pamphlets to describe the accusations against Joan Peterson, was all too ready to accept the testimony at face value. He began his relation by writing, “[M]any are of opinion, that there are no Witches” and then set out to educate his peers regarding what seemed to be common knowledge in the countryside. “There are two sorts of Witches,” he explained, “which the Vulgar people distinguish by the names of the Good Witch, (I wonder how that can be,) and the Bad; by reason, when one bewitcheth a party, the other unwitcheth him again.”³⁰ Joan Peterson appeared to be both.

At her trial, Joan was accused of committing several benevolent acts of witchcraft, such as curing a headache and revealing in a pot of boiling water the face of a woman who had bewitched cattle, as well as acts of maleficium, such as causing a man to go into fits after he withheld payment for having been cured of an ailment. One of Joan’s neighbors also related that a black cat (which vanished from plain sight when confronted) tormented her and her baby. Most fantastically, a maid in Peterson’s employment testified that one night, when they lay together in bed, a squirrel came and “her Mistress and it talkt together a great part of the night.” The author of the pamphlet then explained, “[B]ut being demanded what they discoursed on, she replied that…she was so bewitched by it, that she could not remember one word.” Joan’s son also had allegedly told his school friends about the squirrel. “These and other strange things being proved against her,” the author concluded, “she was condemn’d to be hanged at Tyborn of Munday the 12 of April, 1652.”³¹

Not long after, another pamphlet circulated, “A Declaration in Answer to several lying pamphlets concerning the Witch of Wapping,” (1652) that accused the plaintiffs in the trial of outright fraud. Its author alleged that in an elaborate plot, three men—Abraham Vandenbemde, Thomas Crompton and Thomas Collet—had manufactured the charges against Joan Peterson after she refused to help them accuse a different woman of witchcraft, who had also refused to do the same against one Anne Levingston. Levingston had been given an estate by the deceased Lady Powel that some of the men thought should have been willed to them. The “confederates,” as the three were called, were afraid of being prosecuted if Joan went to the authorities with the plot, so they traveled to Wapping, near to where Joan lived, and procured a warrant from a justice of the peace to “apprehend the said Petersons person, and to search her house for images of clay, hair, & nails…but upon strict search and diligent inquiry could find no such thing.”³²

This account suggests the three men were willing to exploit witch beliefs, even to the point of having a woman executed, to satisfy their greed. Not believing in witchcraft themselves, they conspired to pay someone who they thought would readily cooperate. Even after two women refused, they still persisted in their plot. Being of lower social standing, the judge thought nothing of believing the men and giving them access to Joan Peterson’s home. Joan denied the charges that she used witchcraft to murder the Lady Powel, saying she had “never used sorcery or Witch-craft, neither had she ever heard of the Lady Powel.”

Despite Joan’s denial, a group of women searched her for marks, but “the searchers could find nothing on her body which might create the least suspition in them of her being a witch.” After further questioning, she was “searched againe in a most unnatural & barbarous manner, by fower [four] women whom they [the confederates] themselves for that purpose had brought along with them, [one] of which women told the Justice that there was a Teat of flesh in her secret parts more then other women usually had.”³³

During Joan’s trial, several doctors testified that the Lady Powel died of “Dropsie, the Scurvey, and the yellow Jaundies,” not of witchcraft. Regardless, “many women persons of mean degree (and of ill fame and reputation) were produced against her.” The pamphlet’s author also related the testimony of a man who had sought out Joan Peterson’s help for his illness and recovered but “afterwards relapsed, and…was urged to induce the Court and Jury to believe that he was Bewitched.”³⁴

“Many other witnesses were produced,” the author continued, “but could only swear to generalities, hear-says, and most absurd and ridiculous impertinences.”³⁵ Several of the witnesses, he alleged, were strangers from the courtyard w...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword, by Owen Davies
• Introduction
• Part I: History
• 1. Witchcraft in England and Colonial America: 1640–1700
• 2. Witchcraft in the Illinois Country: 1701–1800
• 3. Witchcraft in Illinois: 1818–1885
• 4. Windy City Witches
• 5. Witchcraft in Contemporary Illinois
• Part II: Beliefs
• 6. Qualities of a Witch
• 7. Defeating Witches
• 8. Folk Magic
• 9. Witches in Illinois Folklore
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author