Letter from Cotton Mather to William Stoughton, September 2, 1692

[1] Among the notable things about this letter is the provenance: it seems to be the last important correspondence from Mather to surface in the modern era, with the holograph manuscript not arriving in the archives for scholars to view, and authenticate, until sometime between 1978 and 1985.

[2] On August 19, 1692, five accused individuals had been executed in Salem, Massachusetts,[3] bringing the total to eleven (reaching twenty by the end of September).

[6][7] Accompanying his letter on September 2, Mather sends a lengthy portion of the book he has already written, telling Stoughton to feel free to skip the first 34 pages.

Writing in the same year as Levin, 1985, Harold Jantz had submitted an essay describing various frauds and fakes and he included the AAS typescript copy of what he calls the "Stoughton letter" (September 2, 1692) calling it a "nasty, pathological" forgery "intended to make Cotton Mather put his worst foot forward in connection with the witchcraft trials."

Also published in 1985, and written presumably before the holograph of the letter reached the archives, David D. Hall strikes a triumphant note for the revision led by GL Kittredge at Harvard.

"[23] Hall writes that whether the old interpretation favored by "antiquarians" had begun with the "malice of Robert Calef or deep hostility to Puritanism," either way "such notions are no longer... the concern of the historian."

Debate continues on the attitude and role of Cotton Mather... though none of his recent biographers is at all interested in making him responsible for Salem..." Hall mentions both Levin and Silverman.

According to Jantz, the original manuscript of the letter was sold by the widow of the collector who once owned it to the Boston College and David Levin had reaffirmed the authenticity and "double checked with some of the experts who had verified Mather's handwriting at the time of acquisition..." and found the paper "of the right age."

[27] Stacy Schiff, writing thirty years after Jantz and Levin, seems to be the first person on record to take notice of this fact, "Stoughton began his fulsome reply on the verso."

Schiff also might be the first scholar, following Jantz and Levin, to note the location of the holograph at the John J. Burns Library of Rare Books and Special Collections at Boston College.

[29] Writing in 2002, Mary Beth Norton seems to accept the Sept. 2 letter's authenticity and quotes some milder passages, citing the reprint in Silverman (1971).

[31] If Silverman was working within a lineage that distrusted the authenticity of the AAS typescript, as the 1985 essays by Jantz and Levin suggest, it would be understandable why his reprint of the letter in 1971 was truncated.