“The Devil and Tom Walker” Summary & Analysis

A few miles from Boston, Massachusetts, is a deep inlet that winds for miles inland and terminates in a swamp. This inlet is flanked by a beautiful grove on one side and a ridge on the other from which huge oaks grow, under one of which, as the old stories have it, Captain Kidd the pirate buried a great amount of treasure. It is also said that the devil (later referred to as Old Scratch) himself oversaw the hiding of the money and guards it even now, for the devil guards all buried treasure, especially treasure acquired immorally. But Kidd never recovered his wealth; shortly after burying it, he was seized at Boston, sent to England, and hanged there for piracy.

The narrative proper opens in the year 1727, when earthquakes are prevalent in New England, humbling many proud sinners to their knees. Near the inlet where Kidd buried his treasure there lives, in a forlorn house with an air of starvation about it and a starving horse in the field nearby, a poor miser named Tom Walker, who is married to a an ill-tempered, fierce, loud, strong wife as miserly as himself. So miserly are the two, in fact, that they even try to cheat each other, the wife hiding valuables like eggs, the husband prying to detect her secret hoard. The two fight often, and locals suspect that Tom’s wife even physically abuses her husband, though no one ventures to interfere between the two.

One day Tom Walker is taking an ill-conceived shortcut home through the nearby swamp; it is gloomy with pines and hemlocks and owls, full of pits and boggy areas which travelers sometimes plunge into, deceived into thinking them solid ground by the weeds and mosses which partly cover them. Tom navigates the treacherous swamp carefully, scared occasionally by the screaming and quacking of birds.

At length, late in the dusk of the evening, Tom arrives at a piece of firm ground in which slump the overgrown ruins of an old fort used by Indians in their war with the American colonists, a former haven for Indian women and children, the Indians’ last foothold. Here Tom decides to rest as no one else would, so troubled would they be by what they would have heard in stories from the Indian wars, about how “the savages” cast spells here and “made sacrifices to the evil spirit” (later called Old Scratch). Tom, however, is not afraid of such things.

Tom lies on the trunk of a fallen hemlock for some time, listening to the cry of the tree toad, delving with his walking staff into a mound of rich black earth. As he turns up the soil, however, he strikes something hard with his staff: it turns out to be a human skull, with a rusty Indian axe buried deep in the bone. Tom gives the skull a kick to shake the dirt from it, when a gruff voice commands him, “‘Let that skull alone!’”

Tom lifts his eyes and beholds a great black man (later identified as Old Scratch), seated opposite of him on a stump; Tom is “exceedingly surprised” to find himself in this stranger’s company, and perplexed because the man, though black, appears to be neither African nor Native American. Rather, the man looks as though he’s covered with soot, like someone who works among fire and forge; he has a shock of coarse black hair, glaring red eyes, and on his shoulder he bears an axe.

The black man (later identified as Old Scratch) demands to know what Tom is doing on his grounds; Tom retorts that the swamp belongs not to the black man but to Deacon Peabody. The black man says that the Deacon will be damned if he doesn’t look more to his own sins and less to his neighbor’s, and he then instructs Tom to see just how the Deacon is faring, pointing to a great tree which is flourishing on the outside but rotten on the inside. On the tree is carved the Deacon’s name. Tom looks around and sees that on most of the trees about are carved the names of the great men of the colony. Indeed, the fallen Hemlock that Tom is sitting on bears the name of Crowninshield; Tom recollects a man of that name (later identified as Absalom), mighty and vulgarly rich from buccaneering, as rumor has it. “‘He’s just ready for the burning,’” says the black man triumphantly

Tom asks the black man what right he has to burn Deacon Peabody’s timber. “‘Prior claim,’” the black man responds. He tells Tom that he is known as the Wild Huntsman in some countries, the Black Miner in others, and as the Black Woodsman in this country. It is to him that the Indians made their sacrifices of white men here, and since the whites killed all of the Indians, the Black Woodsman amuses himself now by overseeing the religious persecution in New England of Quakers and Anabaptists; he is the patron of slave dealers and the master of the Salem witches. Tom recognizes the black man as the one commonly called Old Scratch, that is, the devil himself. One would think that Tom would be terrified to meet this personage, but he is so hard-minded and has lived so long with an ill-tempered wife that he does “not even fear the devil.”

Tom and Old Scratch have a long and serious conversation together as the former makes his way home through the swamp. Old Scratch tells Tom of Kidd’s buried treasure, and offers to place it within Tom’s reach “on certain conditions,” which, though we might easily surmise them, remain unknown. These conditions must have been very demanding, however, for Tom needs time to think about them. At the edge of the swamp, Tom asks how can he know that the devil is telling him the truth. “‘This is my signature,’” the devil says, pressing his finger on Tom’s forehead before turning off among the thickets of the swamp and disappearing into the earth.

Tom arrives home to find a black, irremovable fingerprint burnt into his forehead. His wife’s first news for him is that the rich buccaneer Absalom Crowninshield has suddenly died: “‘a great man had fallen in Israel,’” as the newspapers announced it. This news reminds Tom of the hemlock he had been sitting on in the swamp earlier that evening with Crowninshield’s name carved into it, and he becomes convinced that all Old Scratch had told him is true.

Tom shares with his wife all that transpired in the swamp, and mention of Kidd’s hidden gold awakens the miserly woman’s greed. She urges her husband to accept Old Scratch’s conditions for securing the treasure. As much as Tom is prepared to sell his soul to the devil, though, he refuses his wife “out of the mere spirit of contradiction.” The two subsequently have many bitter quarrels, and Tom becomes more and more resolved not to be damned, the better to spite his wife. For her part, Tom’s wife decides to secure the bargain for her own account and, if successful, to keep all the gain for herself.

At the close of one’s summer day, then, Tom’s wife fearlessly treks to the ruined Indian fort herself. She is gone many hours, and returns home quiet and sullen. She tells Tom that she met Old Scratch hewing at the root of a tall tree in the swamp, but he would not come to terms with her. She is resolved to make him another offering, however. So, the next evening, her apron loaded with the silver teapot and spoons and the like, Tom’s wife goes back into the swamp. Midnight comes, then morning; two days pass, Tom uneasy now both for his wife’s sake and the sake of their silver. But his wife is never heard of again.

Nobody knows what fate actually befell Tom’s wife, but many theories circulate: some say she got lost in the mazy swamp and fell into a pit; others say that she ran off with the household’s silver to some other province; still others say that the devil, Old Scratch himself, had tricked her into a boggy area on top of which her hat was found lying. Indeed, it is said that late on the evening of the wife’s disappearance, a great black man was seen coming out of the swamp triumphantly carrying a bundle tied in an apron.

The most current and probable story, however, holds that Tom went out searching for his wife in the swamp, when owls and bats were on the wing. Soon enough his attention was drawn by the clamor of crows hovering around a cypress, in whose branches he found a bundle tied in an apron. He rejoiced to have found his silver, but upon recovering the bundle he found that it contained only a heart and a liver, the remains of Tom’s wife. The narrator says that, though “a female scold” is a match for Old Scratch, the devil himself, here it seems she was bested. Around the cypress, it is said, Tom found cloven footprints and handfuls of coarse black hair. “‘Old Scratch must have had a tough time of it,’” Tom says to himself.

Tom consoles himself for the loss of his property with the loss of his wife, feeling even grateful to Old Scratch. He consequently tries to meet up with the devil again, but without success for a time; the devil knows how to play his cards, after all. At length, however, when Tom is most desperate for Kidd’s treasure, willing to agree to anything, he meets the Black Woodsman again one night, at the edge of the swamp.

At first, Old Scratch pretends to be indifferent to Tom’s offers for the buried treasure, but soon enough the two begin haggling about the conditions on which Tom is to have it. There is one condition, of course, that goes without saying, but the devil also insists that Tom spend the money in the devil’s service, namely, by fitting out a slave ship. But this Tom adamantly refuses.

So instead Old Scratch proposes that Tom Walker become a usurer (someone who lends money and charges interest, especially at a high rate), which the miserly Tom finds just to his taste. He agrees to open a broker’s shop in Boston. When the devil proposes that Tom charges interest at a rate of two percent, Tom counters that he’ll charge at a rate of four percent. He also eagerly promises to drive merchants not only bankrupt but to the devil himself. The two seal the deal.

A few days pass. Tom is sitting in his counting shop in Boston, with a reputation for lending money already. This is during a time of scarcity, a time of paper credit: under Governor Belcher, the country had recently been deluged with government bills, people were receiving parcels of land to develop by the Land Bank, investors were betting wildly on this and that, settlers had gone mad with schemes to build cities in the wilderness. Everybody had been dreaming of making fortunes out of thin air. But by now the dreams have collapsed, and everybody is going through hard times.

As such, people are lining up to get a loan from Tom Walker, who acts like “a friend in need” indeed by lending at high interest rates and squeezing his debtors dry. So it is that he becomes rich and powerful, with a vast house, unfinished only because of Tom’s tightfistedness. He vainly sets up a carriage, only to almost starve to death the two horses that draw it.

The older Tom grows, however, the more thoughtful he becomes, especially about the afterlife. He at last regrets selling his soul to Old Scratch, and sets about trying to cheat the devil of his due by becoming a “violent” churchgoer, praying loud on Sundays in proportion to how much he had sinned during the week prior. Tom becomes as religiously as he is fiscally rigid, supervising and judging his neighbors for their trespasses, thinking each of their sins credit in his own bid for heaven. He even talks about renewing the persecution of the Quakers and Anabaptists. Still Tom dreads damnation, and for that reason keeps a Bible in his coat pocket and a Bible on his desk from which he reads when he’s not driving “some usurious bargain.”

Some people think Tom Walker went a little crazy in his old age. After all, he did have his horse newly equipped and buried feet-up when it died, thinking that during the apocalypse the world would turn upside down and he’d need to ride at full speed to escape Old Scratch’s clutches. However, this is probably an old wives’ fable, and burying the horse so would be superfluous anyway if we believe “the authentic old legend” which closes Tom’s story.

That legend goes like this. One hot afternoon in summer, Tom is sitting up in his counting house, wearing his morning gown; he is foreclosing a mortgage and thereby completing the ruin of an unlucky land speculator, or land jobber, “for whom he had professed the greatest friendship.” The land jobber is present, having just begged Tom to give him a few more months to pay, but Tom refused him even another day. The land jobber says that his family will be ruined, but Tom retorts that charity begins at home, that he must take care of himself during these hard times.

The land jobber then reminds Tom that he has already made a great deal of money in interest off of him. “‘The devil take me…if I have made a farthing!’” Tom cries. Just then there are three knocks at the door: it is a black man, presumably Old Scratch himself, holding a black horse. “‘Tom, you’re come for,’” the black man says gruffly. Tom shrinks back, but he has forgotten his one Bible in his coat pocket, and the other is under the mortgage he was about to foreclose. The black man whisks Tom up like a child astride the black horse, which gallops away with him in the midst of a thunderstorm; the clerks in the counting house stare as away their employer goes. When they turn back around, the black man is gone.

Tom Walker never returns to foreclose the mortgage. A man who lives on the boarder of the swamp reports that during the thunderstorm he heard the clattering of hoofs and saw from his window Tom’s figure on the back of a black horse, which was galloping madly toward the old Indian fort. Shortly thereafter, the man says, a thunderbolt fell in that direction which seemed to set the whole forest ablaze. After Tom’s disappearance, the people of Boston just shrug their shoulders, accustomed to witches and goblins and devilry even since the first settlement of the colony.

Trustees are appointed to administer to Tom’s estate, but all his bonds and mortgages are found reduced to cinders, and all his gold and silver to chips and shavings. In his stable are found not two half-starved horses but skeletons. The very next day, Tom’s house catches fire and burns to the ground.

Such is the end of Tom Walker and his immorally acquired wealth. All money brokers, the narrator says, should heed this true story. To this day one can see the hole under the oaks which Tom dug in recovering Kidd’s treasure, and even now the swamp and old Indian fort are haunted on stormy nights by a gowned figure on horseback, doubtless “the troubled spirit of the usurer.” In fact, the story is now a proverb, and the origin of a popular saying in New England, of “The Devil and Tom Walker.”