There’s a great story, almost certainly a tall tale, about Pennsylvania’s lone witch trial, in which the accused, a Swedish woman who couldn’t speak English, confirmed she flew on brooms. William Penn himself, presiding, replied “Well I know of no law against that!” and dismissed the case. The November issue of Friends Journal has a fictionalized account of this written by Jean Martin.
Friends Journal There’s no transcript of the actual trial so we don’t know the blow-by-blow. We know that Margaret Mattson was found guilty of having the reputation of a witch, a strange finding indeed.
The Swedes were the original European inhabitants of the Delaware River basin. Many were ethnic Finns who had brought folk remedies with them. They were close to the Native Lenape peoples and intermarried and allied themselves with one another against later Europeans rulers, the Dutch then English.
Being first amongst the Europeans, the Swedes/Finns had settled in some of the choicest land along the mouths of creeks and there was a lot of political pressure to move them out or hem them in. Accusations of witchcraft were part of this context. The English accusers might well have been engaging in classic scapegoating behavior meant to steal land and resources.
Like the Lenape, many Swedes/Finns eventually moved across the river to West Jersey, which had a strong Lenape presence, a much slower influx of English Quakers, and clearer boundaries between the two, such as Burlington County’s so-called “Indian Line” at the head of west-flowing creeks flowing into the Delaware. Margaret Mattson was part of this exodus. She might have won the trial but her Pennsylvania neighbors succeeded in bullying her out of the colony. The folksy story of Quaker toleration may be a lot shakier than later biographers made it out to be.
If you’re interesting in all this, Jean Soderlund’s work, esp. 2014’s Lenape Country, is fabulous and deconstructs a lot of myths promulgated by later Quaker settlers. She recently wrote about some of this for Friends Journal. There’s also a pretty good PDF of the trial here.
Some of this history lives on. I have to drive 1/2 hour to Quaker meeting because most of South Jersey’s Quaker meetings are located west of the long-forgotten “Indian Line.” Here’s the SJ Quaker map with the approximate line of watersheds toward the Delaware River. (The four outlier South Jersey Quaker meetings are all within a mile or two of Atlantic Ocean bays. Seafaring Quakers, often from Long Island/New England, settled them.)
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