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, acci­den­tal­ly 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.

Broomstick 

A colo­nial Quak­er witch trial.

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 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. 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.

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.)