October 31, 2025
Introduction: In this article, with today being Halloween, Melissa Davenport Berry tells tales of witches and warlocks from Massachusetts Bay Colony. Melissa is a genealogist who has a website, americana-archives.com, and a Facebook group, New England Family Genealogy and History.
“If any man or woman be a witch, that is, hath or consulted with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death.”
–Nathaniel Ward, Puritan minister
In seventeenth-century New England, a witch or warlock was defined as someone believed to have “familiarity with the devil” and was associated with various practices. Among them were healing through herbal knowledge and midwifery.
Colonial Woman Was First Faith Healer
The following newsclip cites Margaret Bell’s 1938 book Women of the Wilderness, which includes a Quaker midwife who practiced in the early Massachusetts Bay Colony and was subject to considerable scrutiny by Puritan authorities.
This article reports:
Jane Hawkins, Boston pioneer midwife who said, “If you believe that I can cure you, I can,” earned for herself the malodorous name of witch. Thomas Weld declared that Jane Hawkins was “notorious for familiarity with the devil.” It wasn’t long before the governor expressed himself in full agreement with this dictum on Jane Hawkins. For that prelude to treatment, “If you believe I can cure you,” stuck in the official throat. “If you believe what?” As far as can be gathered, that simple pronouncement by Jane Hawkins was the first expression in this land of the principle of mental healing; and for it she was banished from Boston and forbidden to indulge in her “heathenish practices.”
However, this is not the whole story.
From the12 March 1637-1638 record of the session of the Massachusetts General Court:
“Jane Hawkins, the wife of Richard Hawkins, had liberty till the beginning of the third month called May, and the Magistrates (if she did not depart before) to dispose of her; and in the meantime she is not to meddle in surgery, or physick drinks, plaisters or oyles; nor to question matters of religion, except with the elders for satisfaction.”
In his journal, Governor John Winthrop wrote a very descriptive narrative on Hawkins, who delivered a baby stillborn. The mother was Quakeress Mary Dyer.
Winthrop wrote:
“The wife [Mary Dyer] of one William Dyer, a milliner in the New Exchange, a very proper and fair woman, and both of them notoriously infected with Mrs. [Anne] Hutchinson’s errors, and very censorious and troublesome (she being of a very proud spirit, and much addicted to revelations), had been delivered of [a] child some few months before, October 17, and the child buried (being stillborn) and viewed of none but Mrs. Hutchinson and the midwife, one Hawkins’s wife, a rank familyist also; and another woman had a glimpse of it, who, not being able to keep counsel, as the other two did, some rumor began to spread that the child was a monster.”
A statue in honor of Mary Dyer was erected by the Art Commission of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from the legacy of Zenas Ellis of Fair Haven, Vermont. It was dedicated on 9 July 1959 and carries this inscription:
Mary Dyer
Quaker
Witness for Religious Freedom
Hanged on Boston Common – 1660
“My life not availeth me in comparison to the liberty of the truth.”
Winthrop also noted:
“The midwife, presently after this discovery, went out of the jurisdiction; and indeed it was time for her to be gone, for it was known that she used to give young women oil of mandrakes and other stuff to cause conception; and she grew into great suspicion to be a witch, for it was credibly reported, that, when she gave any medicines (for she practiced physic), she would ask the party, if she did believe, she could help her, etc.”
A Witch and Her Warlock
A midwife, Margaret Jones, and her husband Thomas were accused of witchcraft in 1646. Their plight is mentioned in this newspaper clip.
According to an article published in the Providence Journal titled “The Witches of New England,” authored by Stanley M. Aronson, healers – more specifically midwives – were often targeted as witches.
Here is a sixteenth-century woodcut of a midwife delivering a baby.
The Providence Journal article also reports:
Little is known about Margaret Jones except that she was the wife of [Thomas] Jones and that she was tried in Boston for witchcraft and duly hanged on June 15, 1648.
Margaret Jones was a midwife and a lay healer. According to the Rev. John Hale, she had exchanged some angry words with a neighbor and shortly thereafter “some mischief befell the neighbor.” The formal charges against Jones, however, pertained to her practice of medicine.
Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop accused her of dispensing medications that induced “extraordinary violent effects.” Winthrop observed further that those who had chosen not to take her prescribed herbs suffered grievously. “Their diseases and hurts continued, with relapse against the ordinary course, and beyond the apprehension of all physicians and surgeons.”
This judicial determination was rendered when there were no more than a handful of university-trained physicians in all of the Atlantic colonies. The great majority of so-called physicians were little more than self-taught practitioners or clergy.
The 17th Century New England physicians, while not in the forefront of witch-hunting, nonetheless tolerated it and frequently testified that both the cures and the harmful outcomes ascribed to the witches must surely have been proof of Satan acting through his surrogate, the midwife.
The Rev. John Hale, who played a major role in the Salem witch trials, witnessed the execution of Margaret Jones. He was 12 years old when he, along with other neighbors of Jones, visited her in prison on the day of her execution. In Hale’s Modest Enquiry he records the event.
Stay tuned for the story of Ann (Holland) Bassett Burt, a Quaker midwife who was accused of witchcraft in 1669, and according to sources this case left a taint in the memories of residents and may have contributed to Burt’s granddaughter Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor – and her husband John Proctor – being executed for witchcraft in 1692.
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Note on the header image: witch/healer/midwife, AI-generated image. Credit: Melissa Davenport Berry.
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