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Ebook has 1603 lines and 81554 words, and 33 pages

Release date: September 30, 2023

Original publication: Protland, Maine: Shirley and Hyde, 1828

RACHEL DYER:

A NORTH AMERICAN STORY.

BY JOHN NEAL.

PORTLAND:

PUBLISHED BY SHIRLEY AND HYDE.

DISTRICT OF MAINE.... TO WIT:

In conformity to the act of the Congress of the United States, entitled "An Act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned;" and also, to an act, entitled "An Act supplementary to an act, entitled An Art for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned; and for extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving and etching historical and other prints."

PREFACE

I do not pretend to say that the book I now offer to my countrymen, is altogether such a book as I would write now, if I had more leisure, nor altogether such a book as I hope to write before I die; but as I cannot afford to throw it entirely away, and as I believe it to be much better, because more evidently prepared for a healthy good purpose, than any other I have written, I have concluded to publish it--hoping it may be regarded by the wise and virtuous of our country as some sort of atonement for the folly and extravagance of my earlier writing.

The skeleton of this tale was originally prepared for Blackwood, as the first of a series of North-American Stories: He accepted it, paid for it, printed it, and sent me the proofs. A misunderstanding however occurred between us, about other matters, and I withdrew the story and repaid him for it. It was never published therefore; but was put aside by me, as the frame-work for a novel--which novel is now before the reader.

JOHN NEAL.

Portland, October 1, 1828.

J. N.

UNPUBLISHED PREFACE

These volumes are the last of a series which even from his youth up, he had been accustomed to meditate upon as a worthy and affectionate offering to his family and to those who have made many a long winter day in a dreary climate, very cheerful and pleasant to him--the daughters of a dear friend--of one who, if his eye should ever fall upon this page, will understand immediately more than a chapter could tell, of the deep wayward strange motives that have influenced the author to say thus much and no more, while recurring for the last time to the bright vision of his youth. And the little that he does say now, is not said for the world;--for what care they about the humble and innocent creatures, whose gentleness and sincerity about their own fire-side, were for a long time all that kept a man, who was weary and sick of the great world, from leaving it in despair? No, it is not said for them; but for any one of that large family who may happen to be alive now, and in the way of remembering "the stranger that was within their gates"--when to the world he may be as if he never had been. Let them not be amazed when they discover the truth; nor afraid nor ashamed to see that the man whom they knew only as the stranger from a far country, was also an author.

In other days, angels were entertained in the shape of travellers and way-faring men; but ye--had ye known every stranger that knocked at your door to be an angel, or a messenger of the Most High, could not have treated him more like an immortal creature than ye did that unknown man, who now bears witness to your simplicity and great goodness of heart. With you it was enough that a fellow-creature was unhappy--you strove to make him happy; and having done this, you sent him away, ignorant alike of his people, his country and his name.

To return to what I was about saying--the work now before you, reader, is the last of a series, meditated as I have already told you, from my youth. It was but a dream at first--a dream of my boyhood, indefinite, vague and shadowy; but as I grew up, it grew stronger and braver and more substantial. For years it did not deserve the name of a plan--it was merely a breathing after I hardly knew what, a hope that I should live to do something in a literary way worthy of my people--accompanied however with an inappeasable yearning for the time and opportunity to arrive. But so it was, that, notwithstanding all my anxiety and resolution, I could not bring myself to make the attempt--even the attempt--until it appeared no longer possible for me to do what for years I had been very anxious to do. The engagement was of too sacred a nature to be trifled with--perhaps the more sacred in my view for being made only with myself, and without a witness; for engagements having no other authority than our moral sense of duty to ourselves, would never be performed, after they grew irksome or heavy, unless we were scrupulous in proportion to the facility with which we might escape if we would.

This indeterminate, haunting desire to do what I had so engaged to do, at last however began to give way before the serious and necessary business of life, and the continually augmenting pressure of duties too solemn to be slighted for any--I had almost said for any earthly consideration. Yea more, to confess the whole truth, I had begun to regard the enterprise itself--so prone are we to self-deception, so ready at finding excuses where we have a duty to perform--as hardly worthy of much power, and as altogether beneath an exalted ambition. But here I was greatly mistaken; for I have an idea now, that a great novel--such a novel as might be made--if all the powers that could be employed upon it were found in one man, would be the greatest production of human genius. It is a law and a history of itself--to every people--and throughout all time--in literature and morals--in character and passion--yea--in what may be called the fire-side biography of nations. It would be, if rightly managed, a picture of the present for futurity--a picture of human nature, not only here but every where--a portrait of man--a history of the human heart--a book therefore, written not only in a universal, but in what may be considered as an everlasting language--the language of immortal, indistructable spirits. Such are the parables of Him who spoke that language best.

Again however, the subject was revived. Sleeping and waking, by night and by day, it was before me; and at last I began to perceive that if the attempt were ever to be made, it must be made by one desperate, convulsive, instantaneous effort. I determined to deliberate no longer--or rather to stand no longer, shivering like a coward, upon the brink of adventure, under pretence of deliberation; and therefore, having first carefully stopped my ears and shut my eyes, I threw myself headlong over the precipice. Behold the result! If I have not brought up the pearls, I can say at least that I have been to the bottom--and I might have added--of the human heart sometimes--but for the perverse and foolish insincerity of the world, which if I had so finished the sentence, would have set their faces forever against my book; although that same world, had I been wise enough--no, not wise enough but cunning enough, to hold my peace, might have been ready to acknowledge that I had been sometimes, even where I say--to the very bottom of the human heart.

Moreover--who was there to stand by the native American that should go out, haply with a sling and a stone, against a tower of strength and the everlasting entrenchments of prejudice? Could he hope to find so much as one of his countrymen, to go with him or even to bear his shield? Would the Reviewers of America befriend him? No--they have not courage enough to fight their own battles manfully. No--they would rather flatter than strike. They negociate altogether too much--where blows are wanted, they give words. And the best of our literary champions, would they? No; they would only bewail his temerity, if he were the bold headlong creature he should be to accomplish the work; and pity his folly and presumption, if he were any thing else.

Or had not before this was written. Look to the North-American Review before 1825, for proof.

I speak here of Goldsmith's prose, not of his poetry. Heaven forbid!

Islands and planets may still be found, we should say, and they that find them, are welcome to them; but continents and systems cannot be beyond where we have been; and if there be any within it, why--they are neither continents nor systems.

But enough on this head. The plan took shape, and you have the commencement now before you, reader. I have had several objects in view at the same time, all subordinate however to that which I first mentioned, in the prosecution of my wayward enterprise. One was to show to my countrymen that there are abundant and hidden sources of fertility in their own beautiful brave earth, waiting only to be broken up; and barren places to all outward appearance, in the northern, as well as the southern Americas--yet teeming below with bright sail--where the plough-share that is driven through them with a strong arm, will come out laden with rich mineral and followed by running water: places where--if you but lay your ear to the scented ground, you may hear the perpetual gush of innumerable fountains pouring their subterranean melody night and day among the minerals and rocks, the iron and the gold: places where the way-faring man, the pilgrim or the wanderer through what he may deem the very deserts of literature, the barren-places of knowledge, will find the very roots of the withered and blasted shrubbery, which like the traveller in Peru, he may have accidentally uptorn in his weary and discouraging ascent, and the very bowels of the earth into which he has torn his way, heavy with a brightness that may be coined, like the soil about the favorite hiding places of the sunny-haired Apollo.

And now the author repeats to the people of America, one and all, farewell; assuring them that there is very little probability of his ever appearing before them again as a novel-writer. His object has been, if not wholly, at least in a great degree accomplished. He has demonstrated that a bold and direct appeal to the manhood of any people will never be made in vain. Others may have been already, or may hereafter be incited to a more intrepid movement; and to a more confident reliance upon themselves and their resources, by what he has now accomplished--where it is most difficult to accomplish any thing--among his own countrymen: and most devoutly does he pray, that if they should, they may be more fortunate, and far more generously rewarded, than he has ever been; and if they should not, he advises them to go where he has been already--and trust to another people for that, which his own have not the heart to give him, however well he may deserve it. Abroad--if he do not get a chaplet of fire and greenness--he will, at least, get a cup of cold water,--and it may be, a tear or two of compassion, if nothing of encouragement--whatever he may do. At home--he may wear himself out--like one ashamed of what he is doing, in secrecy and darkness--exhaust his own heart of all its power and vitality, by pouring himself into the hearts of others--with a certainty that he will be called a madman, a beggar and a fool, for his pains--unless he persevere, in spite of a broken heart, and a broken constitution, till he shall have made his own countrymen ashamed of themselves, and afraid of him.

I have but one other request to make. Let these words be engraven hereafter on my tomb-stone: "WHO READS AN AMERICAN BOOK?"

RACHEL DYER.

The early history of New-England, or of Massachusetts Bay, rather; now one of the six New-England States of North America, and that on which the Plymouth settlers, or "Fathers" went ashore--the shipwrecked men of mighty age, abounds with proof that witchcraft was a familiar study, and that witches and wizards were believed in for a great while, among the most enlightened part of a large and well-educated religious population. The multitude of course had a like faith; for such authority governs the multitude every where, and at all times.

The belief was very general about a hundred years ago in every part of British America, was very common fifty years ago, when the revolutionary war broke out, and prevails now, even to this day in the wilder parts of the New-England territory, as well as in the new States which are springing up every where in the retreating shadow of the great western wilderness--a wood where half the men of Europe might easily hide from each other--and every where along the shores of the solitude, as if the new earth were full of the seed of empire, as if dominion were like fresh flowers or magnificent herbage, the spontaneous growth of a new soil wherever it is reached by the warm light or the cheerful rain of a new sky.

It is not confined however, nor was it a hundred and thirty five years ago, the particular period of our story, to the uneducated and barbarous, or to a portion of the white people of North-America, nor to the native Indians, a part of whose awful faith, a part of whose inherited religion it is to believe in a bad power, in witchcraft spells and sorcery. It may be met with wherever the Bible is much read in the spirit of the New-England Fathers. It was rooted in the very nature of those who were quite remarkable in the history of their age, for learning, for wisdom, for courage and for piety; of men who fled away from their fire-sides in Europe to the rocks of another world--where they buried themselves alive in search of truth.

We may smile now to hear witchcraft spoken seriously of; but we forget perhaps that a belief in it is like a belief in the after appearance of the dead among the blue waters, the green graves, the still starry atmosphere and the great shadowy woods of our earth; or like the beautiful deep instinct of our nature for worship,--older than the skies, it may be, universal as thought, and sure as the steadfast hope of immortality.

We may turn away with a sneer now from the devout believer in witches, wondering at the folly of them that have such faith, and quite persuading ourselves in our great wisdom, that all who have had it heretofore, however they may have been regarded by ages that have gone by, were not of a truth wise and great men; but we forget perhaps that we are told in the Book of Books, the Scriptures of Truth, about witches with power to raise the dead, about wizards and sorcerers that were able to strive with Jehovah's anointed high priest before the misbelieving majesty of Egypt, with all his court and people gathered about his throne for proof, and of others who could look into futurity with power, interpret the vision of sleep, read the stars, bewitch and afflict whom they would, cast out devils and prophesy--false prophets were they called, not because that which they said was untrue, but because that which they said, whether true or untrue, was not from above--because the origin of their preternatural power was bad or untrue. And we forget moreover that laws were made about conjuration, spells and witchcraft by a body of British lawgivers, renowned for their sagacity, deep research, and grave thoughtful regard for truth, but a few years ago--the other day as it were--and that a multitude of superior men have recorded their belief in witchcraft--men of prodigious power--such men as the great and good Sir Matthew Hale, who gave judgment of death upon several witches and wizards, at a period when, if we may believe a tithe of what we hear every day of our lives, from the mouth of many a great lawyer, there was no lack of wit or wisdom, nor of knowledge or faithful enquiry; and such men too as the celebrated author of the Commentaries on the Laws of England, which are, "as every body knows, or should know, and a man must be exceedingly ignorant not to know" the pride of the British empire and a pillar of light for the sages of hereafter; and that within the last one hundred and fifty or two hundred years, a multitude of men and women have been tried and executed by authority of British law, in the heart of England, for having dealt in sorcery and witchcraft.

We may smile--we may sneer--but would such things have occurred in the British Parliament, or in the British courts of law, without some proof--whatever, it was--proof to the understandings of people, who in other matters are looked up to by the chief men of this age with absolute awe--that creatures endowed with strange, if not with preternatural power, did inhabit our earth and were able to work mischief according to the popular ideas of witchcraft and sorcery?

We know little or nothing of the facts upon which their belief was founded. All that we know is but hearsay, tradition or conjecture. They who believed were eye-witnesses and ear witnesses of what they believed; we who disbelieve are neither. They who believed knew all that we know of the matter and much more; we who disbelieve are not only ignorant of the facts, but we are living afar off, in a remote age. Nevertheless, they believed in witchcraft, and we regard all who speak of it seriously, with contempt. How dare we! What right have we to say that witches and witchcraft are no more, that sorcery is done with forever, that miracles are never to be wrought again, or that Prophecy shall never be heard again by the people of God, uplifting her voice like a thousand echoes from the everlasting solitudes of the sea, or like uninterrupted heavy thunder breaking over the terrible and haughty nations of our earth?

In other days, the Lion of the desert would not believe the horse when he came up out of the bleak north, and told a story of waters and seas that grew solid, quiet and smooth in the dead of winter. His majesty had never heard of such a thing before, and what his majesty had never heard of before could not be possible. The mighty lord of the Numedian desert could not believe--how could he?--in a cock-and-a-bull-story, about ice and snow; for to him they were both as a multitude of such things are to the philosophy of our age, out of the course of nature.

A solid sea and a fluid earth are alike to such as have no belief in what is new or contrary to that course of nature with which they are acquainted--whatever that may be. There is no such thing as proof to the over-wise or over mighty, save where by reason of what they already know, there is not much need of other proof.--They would not believe, though one should rise from the dead--they are too cautious by half; they are not satisfied with any sort of testimony; they dare not believe their own eyes--they do not indeed; for spectres when they appear to the eye of the philosopher now, are attributed altogether to a diseased organ. They care not for the cloud of witnesses--they withdraw from the Bible, they scoff at history, and while they themselves reject every kind of proof, whatever it may be, such proof as they would be satisfied with in a case of murder, were they to hear it as a jury--such proof as they would give judgment of death upon, without fear, proof under oath by men of high character and severe probity, eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses of what they swear to--they ridicule those who undertake to weigh it with care, and pursue with scorn or pity those who shiver through all their arteries at a story of the preternatural.

As by the printer of Berlin. See also Beasley's Search after Truth.

As if it were a mark of deplorable fatuity for a babe to believe now as a multitude of wise and great and gifted men have heretofore believed in every age of the world! As if to think it possible for such to have been right in their belief, were too absurd for excuse now--such men as the holy Greek, the upright immovable Socrates, who persuaded himself that he was watched over by a sort of household spirit; such men too as the "bald" Caesar, and the rock-hearted Brutus, both of whom spite of their imperial nature and high place among the warlike and mighty of their age, believed in that, and shook before that which whether deceitful or not, substance or shadow, the very cowards of our day are too brave to be scared with, too full of courage to put their trust in--afraid as they are of that, which the Roman pair would have met with a stern smile and a free step; such men too of a later age, as the profound, wise and pure Sir Matthew Hale, who put many to death for witchcraft--so clear was the proof, and so clear the nature of the crime--while the nature of larceny, the nature of common theft was forever a mystery to him, if we may believe what we hear out of his own mouth; such men too as the celebrated Judge Blackstone, who after a thorough sifting of the law, says--"It seems to be most eligible to conclude that in general there has been such a thing as witchcraft, though we cannot give credit to any particular modern instance of it;" such men too as Doctor Samuel Johnson, L. L. D. who saw through all the hypocricy and subterfuge of our day, when he said, speaking of a superstitious belief, that men who deny it by their words, confess it by their fears--nothing was ever so true! we who are most afraid, want courage to own it; such men too as the Lord Protector of England, while she was a commonwealth; and such as he, the Desolator--

"........... From whose reluctant hand, The thunder-bolt was wrung"--

for they were both believers in what the very rabble of our earth deride now; such men, too, as the chief among poets--Byron--for he believed in the words of a poor old gypsey, and shook with fear, and faltered on the way to his bridal-chamber, when he thought of the prophecy she had uttered years and years before, in the morning of his haughty youth; such men too as the head lawgiver of our day, the High-Priest of Legislation, the great and good, the benevolent, the courageous Bentham, who to this hour is half afraid in the dark, and only able to satisfy himself about the folly of such fear, when his night-cap is off, by resorting with suitable gravity to his old refuge, the exhaustive mode of reasoning. If a ghost appear at all, argues he, it must appear either clothed or not clothed. But a ghost never appears not clothed, or naked; and if it appear clothed, we shall have not only the ghost of a human creature--which is bad enough; but the ghost of a particular kind of cloth of a particular fashion, the ghost of a pocket-handkerchief, or a night-cap--which is too bad.

Thus much for authority: and here, but for one little circumstance we should take up our narrative, and pursue it without turning to the right or the left, until we came to the sorrowful issue; but as we may have here and there a reader, in this unbelieving age, who has no regard for authority, nor much respect for the wisdom of our ancestors, what if we try to put the whole argument into a more conclusive shape? It may require but a few pages, and a few pages may go far to allay the wrath of modern philosophy. If we throw aside the privilege of authorship, and speak, not as a multitude but as one of the true faith, our argument would stand thus:

I have put a much stronger case than that on which the truth of the following story is made to depend; for no such contradiction occurs here, no such positive testimony, no such array of multitude against multitude of the same worth, or the same age, or the same people. On the affirmative side are a host here--a host of respectable witnesses, not a few of whom sealed their testimony with their blood; on the negative, hardly one either of a good or a bad character. What appears on the negative side is not by facts, but by theory. It is not positive but conjectural. The negative witnesses are of our age and of our people; the affirmative were of another age and of another people. The former too, it should be remarked were not only not present, but they were not born--they were not alive, when the matters which they deny the truth of, took place--if they ever took place at all. Now, if oaths are to be answered by conjecture, bloodshed by a sneer, absolute martyrdom by hypothesis, much grave testimony of the great and the pious, by a speculative argument, a brief syllogism, or a joke--of what use are the rules by which our trust in what we hear is regulated? our faith whatever it may be, and whether it concern this world or the next, and whether it be of the past, the present or the future? Are we to believe only so far as we may touch and see for ourselves? What is the groundwork of true knowledge? where the spirit of true philosophy? Whither should we go for proof; and of what avail is the truth which we are hoarding up, the truth which we are extracting year after year by laborious investigation, or fearful experiment? If we do not believe those who go up to the altar and make oath before the Everlasting God, not as men do now, one after another, but nation by nation, to that which is very new to us, or wonderful, why should posterity believe us when we testify to that which hereafter may be very new to them or very wonderful? Is every day to be like every other day, every age like every other age in the Diary of the Universe? Earthquake, war and revolution--the overthrow of States and of empires, are they to be repeated forever, lest men should not believe the stories that are told of them?

But before we go further into the particulars of our narrative which relates to a period when the frightful superstition we speak of was raging with irresistible power, a rapid review of so much of the earlier parts of the New-England history, as immediately concerns the breaking out, and the growth of a belief in witchcraft among the settlers of our savage country, may be of use to the reader, who, but for some such preparation, would never be able to credit a fiftieth part of what is undoubtedly true in the following story.

The pilgrims or "Fathers" of New-England, as they are now called by the writers of America, were but a ship-load of pious brave men, who while they were in search of a spot of earth where they might worship their God without fear, and build up a faith, if so it pleased him, without reproach, went ashore partly of their own accord, but more from necessity, in the terrible winter of 1620-21, upon a rock of Massachusetts-Bay, to which they gave the name of New-Plymouth, after that of the port of England from which they embarked.

They left England forever.... England their home and the home of their mighty fathers--turned their backs forever upon all that was dear to them in their beloved country, their friends, their houses, their tombs and their churches, their laws and their literature with all that other men cared for in that age; and this merely to avoid persecution for a religious faith; fled away as it were to the ends of the earth, over a sea the very name of which was doubtful, toward a shore that was like a shadow to the navigators of Europe, in search of a place where they might kneel down before their Father, and pray to him without molestation.

But, alas for their faith! No sooner had these pilgrims touched the shore of the new world, no sooner were they established in comparative power and security, than they fell upon the Quakers, who had followed them over the same sea, with the same hope; and scourged and banished them, and imprisoned them, and put some to death, for not believing as the new church taught in the new world. Such is the nature of man! The persecuted of to-day become the persecutors of to-morrow. They flourish, not because they are right, but because they are persecuted; and they persecute because they have the power, not because they whom they persecute are wrong.

The quakers died in their belief, and as the great always die--without a word or a tear; praying for the misguided people to their last breath, but prophecying heavy sorrow to them and to theirs--a sorrow without a name--a wo without a shape, to their whole race forever; with a mighty series of near and bitter affliction to the judges of the land, who while they were uttering the words of death to an aged woman of the Quakers, were commanded with a loud voice to set their houses in order, to get ready the accounts of their stewardship, and to prepare with the priesthood of all the earth, to go before the Judge of the quick and the dead. It was the voice of Elizabeth Hutchinson, the dear and familiar friend of Mary Dyer. She spoke as one having authority from above, so that all who heard her were afraid--all! even the judges who were dealing out their judgment of death upon a fellow creature. And lo! after a few years, the daughter of the chief judge, before whom the prophecy had been uttered with such awful power, was tried for witchcraft and put to death for witchcraft on the very spot where she stayed to scoff at Mary Dyer, who was on her way to the scaffold at the time, with her little withered hands locked upon her bosom ... her grey head lifted up ... not bowed in her unspeakable distress ... but lifted up, as if in prayer to something visible above, something whatever it was, the shadow of which fell upon the path and walked by the side of the aged martyr; something whatever it was, that moved like a spirit over the green smooth turf ... now at her elbow, now high up and afar off ... now in the blue, bright air; something whose holy guardianship was betrayed to the multitude by the devout slow motion of the eyes that were about to be extinguished forever.

Not long after the death of the daughter of the chief judge, another female was executed for witchcraft, and other stories of a similar nature were spread over the whole country, to prove that she too had gone out of her way to scoff at the poor quaker-woman. This occurred in 1655, only thirty-five years after the arrival of the Fathers in America. From this period, until 1691, there were but few trials for witchcraft among the Plymouth settlers, though the practice of the art was believed to be common throughout Europe as well as America, and a persuasion was rooted in the very hearts of the people, that the prophecy of the quakers and of Elizabeth Hutchinson would assuredly be accomplished.

Elizabeth Hutchinson was one of the most extraordinary women of the age--haughty, ambitious and crafty; and when it was told every where through the Plymouth colony that she had appeared to one of the church that expelled her, they knew that she had come back, to be seen of the judges and elders, according to her oath, and were siezed with a deep fear. They knew that she had been able to draw away from their peculiar mode of worship, a tithe of their whole number when she was alive, and a setter forth, if not of strange gods, at least of strange doctrines: and who should say that her mischievous power had not been fearfully augmented by death?

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