In 1699 the English teenager Deborah Smith was disowned by a family of puritans. Her mother, fearing for the family’s reputation, needed as much as possible to distance herself from what appeared to be satanic objects found in her room. Deboarah’s life was saved by Aunt Brigid, an old midwife, who stole her away and put her on a boat for New Jersey.
In the United States, women accused of witchcraft had been redeemed by an elderly judge named Increase Mather. At one point, the story goes, Mather had been ruthless to women who left their hair uncovered, who made up rhymes and fairy tales for children, or who had experimented with herbal teas from South America. Mather served a confused public, whose faith had been shaken by harsh winters, dry summers, and horrible losses in wars against the Indian nations. When women were disobedient, or failed to discipline children consistently, or were thought to be a bad influence on their sisters and nieces, accusations brought against them could go one of two ways. They could either be vaguely and ineffectively grounded in Christian doctrine and law, or, grounded in superstition about witches, and fears that the devil walked among us, they could release a firestorm of unbiblical religious sentiment, in a surge of clarity across the community.
Increase neared retirement as the Salem witch trials began, and his son Cotton Mather, a graduate of Harvard, carried the tradition of puritanism to even greater extremes. The young Cotton wrote his first book, the Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) describing Massachusetts, the American frontier, and the people who inhabited it, white, black, and red, as the unwitting servants of Beelzebub, who could only be saved from their pasts by the intervention of Christ. He also discussed, in its pages, the importance of combating witchcraft, and the likelihood that the Devil could show himself in human form, sometimes appearing to do good works. He defended the use of “spectral evidence” in the discovery of those who might be, or might soon become, a satanic influence on the families of New England. He required vigilance of his readers, and whipped them into a fervor to defend the sanctity of their ancient holy church of God.
Witch trials had meant the death of girls and women across the colonies, and a shaken society questioned itself. Recognizing the extremes of the tragedy, even Cotton Mather distanced himself from the trials, wrote about the history of the colonies in a way that sought to explain the Salem witch trials as an unfortunate outcome of colonial insecurity. But his book had been circulated widely, and religious fervor dominated the legal culture of the colonies until now. Upon reading the book, Increase Mather had a change of heart, and went out publically to defame his son, even going as far as to burn the book in Harvard yard. Dozens of judges and senior members of the commonwealth joined Increase in the act, and soon spectral evidence was widely dismissed in New England courts.
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Deborah would still not have been free to brew her teas and medicines, or recite her incantations to the good woodland spirits, or cast traditional celtic spells, had she not married a New Jersey Quaker named Leeds. Quakers were scientists, and accepted confusion in their lives without trying to divide it between good and evil.
Although Deborah was uneducated, set up practice immediately as a traditional doctor. By middle age she was a teacher of midwifery, known as Mother Leeds.
Mother Leeds’ twelve known children include Japhet, my great great great great great grandfather on Libby Brown’s side. (Libby Brown is also descended from Increase and Cotton Mather.) Conservative Christians in New Jersey will tell you that her thirteenth child—my great uncle, technically—was the Devil. He’s known as “the Jersey Devil” — a creature that, minutes after the umbillical cord was cut, sprouted wings and a tail, took to the air, circled the bedroom six times, and escaped up the chimney to terrorize colonial America.