The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 19

Six-foot-long mermen: CM, July 5, 1716, in Silverman, Selected Letters, 211.

"the mischievous unChristian": A Faithful Narrative of the Proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Council Convened at Salem in 1734 (Boston: Henchman, 1735), 3.

Calef noted: Calef, More Wonders, 7.

smallpox epidemic: See Ernest Caulfield, "Pediatric Aspects of the Salem Witchcraft Tragedy," American Journal of Diseases of Children (1943): 788802; CM Diary, 2: 632, 657, for "cursed clamor" and the bomb. It is interesting that CM, who-while studying medicine at Harvard, claimed to contract "almost every distemper that I read of in my studies"-seemed not to ponder a psychosomatic angle in 1692. Naturally both IM and CM claimed to have foretold the 1721 epidemic.

a Westfield girl: Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints, 124.

"by instigation of": Francis, Judge Sewall's Apology, 321.

"a leprechaun": Delbanco, The Death of Satan, 6469; similarly, Reis, d.a.m.ned Women, 16493.

"little short of a proper satanical": CM Diary, 2: 749. For a fresh a.n.a.lysis of the marriage, see Virginia Bernhard, "Cotton Mather's 'Most Unhappy Wife': Reflections on the Uses of Historical Evidence," New England Quarterly (September 1987): 351. As she notes, it is not difficult to make the case that CM had a touch of paranoia. As Arthur Miller observed, paranoia however secretes its pearl around a grain of fact.

"wear off that reproach": Brattle in Burr, 190.

"foul stain": Cited in Adams, Specter of Salem, 36.

"The North": Ibid., 118.

Pilgrim feasts: See Peter Gomes's wonderful "Pilgrims and Puritans: 'Heroes' and 'Villains' in the Creation of the American Past," Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 95 (1983): 116.

"detestable and nefarious": Cited in Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 113.

"We must awake": Cited in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 2008), 20.

"diabolical conspiracy": Cited in Michael Heale, The United States in the Long Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 133.

obedience to G.o.d: Best on the point is Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 200.

John Adams: Adams, Specter of Salem, 35. He was voicing precisely the sentiment Phips and IM battled.

"the sense of heated": Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, 3. The line appeared in a November 1964 Harper's; it is reworked slightly.

"There are not two": Andros Tracts, 1: 37. The official reply and these a.s.sertions fell to Samuel Sewall.

American presidents: See Gary Boyd Roberts, "Notable Kin: The Progeny of Witches and Wizards," Nexus (June 1992).

"I think we stood": Cited in Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer (New York: Knopf, 2013), 50.

The Crucible was not a success: Miller, Timebends, 34749; Miller, "Why I Wrote 'The Crucible,'" New Yorker, October 21, 1996, 164.

"according to ancient": Independent Journal, July 18, 1787; Ma.s.sachusetts Centinel, August 1, 1787; Pennsylvania Evening Herald, October 27, 1787. For Edmund S. Morgan on the incident, "The Witch and We, the People," American Heritage 34 (August 1983), 611. The last colonial trial for witchcraft took place in Virginia in 1706.

"You couldn't get": Cited in Morrison and Schultz, Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory, 55. See also Miller, Timebends, 33549; Miller felt the town began exploring and exploiting its past only after The Crucible.

"What are you": Interview with Richard Trask, April 2, 2015.

tussle today over Sarah Wilds: I am grateful to Topsfield archivist Amy Coffin for the detail.

"fooling with history": Daniel Lang, "Poor Ann," New Yorker, September 11, 1954, 100. Lang follows the history of the remaining six unexonerated women. An earlier refusal to exonerate them seemed ridiculous; the 1959 Ma.s.sachusetts senate did not care to make itself "a laughing stock in the eyes of enlightened society all around the world." The 2001 Act (Session Laws, Acts of 2001, chapter 122) makes no reference to executions.

"Do you think" to "think they are": R, 230. In his draft, SP records Hathorne's question differently: "Do not you think they are bewitched?" he has the chief justice ask, R, 228. Her answer remains the same.

* Most accomplish only part of the job. As a proponent of the witchcraft theory conceded: "There are departments in twentieth-century American universities with as long and as vicious a history of factional hatreds as any to be found in Salem, and the parties to these hatreds accuse each other of all sorts of absurdities, but witchcraft is not one of them."

* To prepare his seventeen-year-old for a suitor, Sewall read her the story of Adam and Eve. It proved less soothing than expected; she hid from her caller in the stable.

* He was citing Caesar on the Scythians, from whom Mather understood the Native Americans descended. Others believed them in some vague way descended from a tribe of Israel.

* And some of those who t.i.ttered wound up thereafter in meeting with signs reading "I Stand Here for My Lascivious and Wanton Carriages" around their necks.

* In a Connecticut case later in 1692, the father of a convulsing girl encouraged callers; it was important they observe the unnatural happenings for themselves. He wanted to make it clear that no one was playacting.

* If a serious discussion of witchcraft versus possession took place, it is lost to us. Not everyone distinguished between them or so much as attempted to; the symptoms were largely the same. Mather noted their "near affinity," conjoining the two even in the t.i.tle of Memorable Providences. One could invite the other: "It is an ordinary thing," the minister at the center of the Groton case observed, "for a possession to be introduced by a bewitching." (In that he followed Mather's father, Increase, who believed one could simultaneously suffer from both.) Fumbling toward an explanation, Parris early on hinted at demonic possession. It was understood that the possessed experienced no bodily harm, however; visible marks bloomed on the girls' bodies. Soon enough apparitions corroborated the witchcraft, a diagnosis Parris had cause to prefer. Complicity made all the difference: a willing host to impurity, the possessed person was guilty. The bewitched was innocent.

* Many sympathized with a farmer whose home-just north of Salem village-straddled the Topsfield-Ipswich line. When a constable approached from one direction, the farmer removed to the far side of his house. (Constable Wilds finally settled the matter by force. Enlisting some st.u.r.dy friends, he seized a choice pig and declared the account settled. The collecting of witches, he was about to discover, was less straightforward.) * Harvard tuition-which ran about fifty-five pounds for the four-year course of study-was paid the same way, most commonly in wheat and malt. The occasional New England father sent his son to Cambridge with parsnips, b.u.t.ter, and, regrettably for all, goat mutton. A 141-pound side of beef covered a year's tuition. Translating in another direction, four years' tuition amounted to the cost of a small home.

* In the same vein, Cotton Mather felt it necessary to prepare his eight-year-old daughter for his imminent death. He went on to outlive her by twelve years.

* In the minds of most Indian captives, there was only one thing worse. An English settler would prefer to have his brains dashed out by a hatchet than to kiss a crucifix. Fearing for his soul, one starving youngster refused even a Jesuit-proffered biscuit. He buried it under a log.

* The phenomenon was not new. Under repeated interrogation, hardy details tend to blossom and grow more lush. The same had happened with an earlier "infernal nuisance," Joan of Arc.

* Following a p.r.i.c.kly conversation with the governor in which he a.s.serted that more drunkenness could be observed in six months in North America than in the course of an English lifetime, Increase Mather noted in his diary: "No wonder that New England is visited when the head is so spirited." At around the same time, his son complained that every other house in Boston was an alehouse. The Salem town minister shared their concern. The New England visitor eager to write the Puritans off as sanctimonious hypocrites found them "the worst of drunkards," muddy-brained at the end of each day but never so incapacitated as to desist from spouting Scripture. All exaggerated, to different ends. Strong cider was nonetheless as constant a feature of seventeenth-century New England as the belief in witchcraft. As one modern historian noted, "The 'Puritan' who shuddered at the very sight (or thought) of a gla.s.s of beer or wine, not to mention hard liquor, did not live in colonial Ma.s.sachusetts."

One New England witch did nearly sink a Barbados-bound ship. That witch was a man.

* The New England minister could barely entertain the possibility of an erotic encounter even when a witch confessed to it. When several such cases came to his attention, Increase Mather insisted that the devil had planted false memories. Those poor women hallucinated!

* The devil boasts a similarly catholic heritage, as he reminds Daniel Webster in Stephen Vincent Benet's 1937 story: "'Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself-and of the best descent-for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don't like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours."

* A Swedish volume that turned up in seventeenth-century Delaware included the warning that a cross be cut in brooms to prevent witch hijackings.

* This too Cotton Mather attributed to witchcraft. She had communicated with her employer perfectly well in English. Clearly a confederate had cast a spell on her "to prevent her telling tales, by confining her to a language which 'twas hoped n.o.body would understand." He certainly did not and spoke to her through interpreters.

* Logic worked some wonders of its own in the realm of witchcraft. Argued one German authority: "Many things are done in this world by the force of demons which we in our ignorance attribute to natural causes."

At the apogee of this coiled logic sits Thomas Hobbes, himself a vicar's son. The great political philosopher was a skeptic. He felt witches should however be prosecuted for perpetuating a blatantly false belief.

* He met his match in the Barnstable man who credited the devil with the law exacting ministers' maintenance.

* It says something about the relative expectations of a New England slave and a minister's daughter that the devil promised t.i.tuba "pretty things" and a pet canary. He enticed Betty with a visit to the "Golden City."

* And had a neighbor not peered through the window, the mystery of William Morse's haunted house-through which cats, hogs, spoons, stones, and chairs periodically flew-might never have been solved. There was Morse, deep in prayer. And there was the teenage grandson, flinging shoes at his grandfather's head. Having grown up nearby, Ann Putnam Sr. would have known every wrinkle of that long-running mystery, one that had produced an earlier witchcraft accusation.

* The great Enlightenment thinkers were not altogether different. Robert Boyle proposed interviews with miners who in their excavations had met with "subterraneous demons." Newton divided his time between the occult and physics, practicing alchemy and devoting 300,000 words to the book of Revelation; Keynes termed him "the last of the magicians." Isaac Newton identified the Antichrist. John Locke applied astrology to the harvest of medicinal herbs.

* The 1692 almanac warned that the March alignment of the stars portended feuds and skirmishes: "In short mankind in general are about this time inclined to violence."

* Rare was the New Englander who agreed with Samuel Sewall's suit-adverse father-in-law who remarked, "I observe the law to be very much like a lottery-great charge, little benefit."

* The saints who appeared to Joan of Arc also thoughtfully identified themselves.

* Consciously or not, Putnam deferred to two prophets who experienced trances and visions.

* Or as Dumbledore a.s.sures Harry Potter: "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

His verses, it was said, "certainly ought to establish the fame of Nicholas Noyes as the most gifted and brilliant master ever produced in America, of the most execrable form of poetry to which the English language was ever degraded." No surviving evidence contradicts that claim.

* The reluctance was particularly odd as Lewis did know Hobbs. Evidently she had more to lose by admitting as much than she did by feigning ignorance. We too are left squinting in the pewter light; there were many more agendas in Hathorne's courtroom than are visible to the twenty-first-century eye.

* One long-haired, severely pockmarked Topsfield man was released when the girls could not agree he was the witch in question. The authorities led him outside the meetinghouse, where the light was better. Still the girls hesitated. "How did you know his name?" Hathorne challenged, puzzled by their indecision. "He did not tell me himself, but other witches told me," one of them explained. Sixty-year-old Nehemiah Abbott would be the only accused witch to walk free from a Hathorne hearing.

* Excepting the work of Parris, Cheever, and a few others, the written record is a sampler of phonetic idiosyncrasies. Proper names appear in every conceivable variation, as if conjugated. Indeed "t.i.tuba" could be spelled eight different ways (three of them on the same day), but "Hollingworth" appeared in nearly as many mutations as well. The governor, his wife, and his son each spelled "Winthrop" differently. Individuals submitted affidavits that suggested their authors were, as was said of one Burroughs (or, as he sometimes wrote, "Burrough") accuser, "sublimely unaware of punctuation and a pioneer in spelling reform." Orthography proved as fluid as the Salem-Topsfield border.

* "When the devil finds an idle person," Cotton Mather warned in 1689, "he as it were, calls to more of his crew, 'Come here! Come here! A brave prize for us all!'"

* Betty's would not be the last meltdown in the pious Sewall household. In 1713 a servant knocked on her master's bedroom door after midnight; the day's sermon had left her too petrified to sleep. The Sewalls comforted her before the fire. She ill.u.s.trated a familiar Salem phenomenon: visions-whether in the form of suffocating women, apple-scattering goblins, or avenging ghosts-tended to appear on the Sabbath, when people had been (or should have been) in church.

* The Indians did childhood differently. Indian mothers bore fewer children, doled out liberties rather than punishments, and wept freely over the children they lost. The kids had leisure time! That pampering was not lost on the Puritans. "Let not English parents be as indulgent and negligent as they report the Indians are," warned Mather, defensive on the subject. A fair number of Indian captives elected to remain. One boy returned only when bound, arms and legs; he escaped soon afterward to rejoin his Indian family.

Mather however hesitated to share tales of evil angels with his children, a son remembered, lest they "entertain any frightful fancies about the apparitions of devils."

* By 1692 Justice Jonathan Corwin had lost seven children, among them three boys named John.

* The hired help was in no danger of disappearing. The moment anyone went missing, a Huguenot settler observed, you had only to notify the Indians, who for a modest fee would locate him for you. Flight was in any event rare, "for they would know not where to go, there being few trodden roads."

* Mather acknowledged their formidable force when, late in life, he griped that women had heaped more opprobrium on him than on any man alive. Were there more than twenty women in Boston who had not "at some time or other, spoken basely of me?" he asked.

* As Hilary Mantel writes retrospectively of her six-year-old self: "What I am experiencing is the beginning of compunction, but is it the awakening of a sense of sin, or is it the beginning of femininity?"

* It was a lousy bargain. Eager to discuss the area's defense, the newly installed New Hampshire lieutenant governor complained to Crown authorities in the fall of 1692 that he "could after tedious waiting get no other answer but neglect, slights, and reproaches" out of Ma.s.sachusetts governor William Phips, despite the enemy skulking in the woods. In April 1693, he warned that "by the next ships you will hear the province of Ma.s.sachusetts and the province of Hampshire are in civil war."

* To encourage others to settle among the ruins, town officials asked Burroughs if he might relinquish three-quarters of his waterfront tract. They could offer a hundred acres farther inland in exchange. Graciously Burroughs ceded an even greater part of the original property. And in an unprecedented move for a New England minister, especially one with a large family, he declined the offer of additional land, settling for thirty coastal acres of salt marsh.

* If indeed Burroughs said as much, he misspoke. He had baptized a second child in 1691.

* The 1656 offense of Ann Hibbins-said after her witchcraft execution to "have had more wit than her neighbors"-had been that she knew when others were speaking about her. Burroughs boasted of and demonstrated a cleverness that seemed clairvoyant.

* Sarah Ruck was unlucky in love. Her first husband entered simultaneously into two marriages. Having legally untangled herself from him in 1664, she married William Hathorne, Justice Hathorne's older brother. Burroughs was her third husband.

* "Deliver us from all evil" raised suspicions. "Hollowed be thy name" sounded like a sly curse, as Elizabeth Procter discovered.

* Whether or not Phips actually tended a flock is open to debate. Mather a.s.serted he did in a work conflating New England's history with that of the Promised Land; he had every reason to make the colony's savior a shepherd if he had not been one already.

* The sunken treasure was Spanish, from a forty-five-year-old wreck. Indian divers salvaged it, allegedly managing forty-five minutes underwater at a time, using tubs lowered over their heads.

* In fairness, these were years when you could die of smallpox in four days but word that you had done so could take fifteen months to cross an ocean, as would be the case with Queen Mary. When she had ordered Ma.s.sachusetts to establish a proper postal system, the letter took ten months to reach Phips. He ignored it.

He was fortunate in that a gentleman was not expected to write well. Penmanship remained a clerk's art.

* He had himself been against the new charter before he was for it. After having huffed that he would rather die than consent to a doc.u.ment that so cramped Ma.s.sachusetts liberties-the colony preferred to elect its own officers, as it had done earlier-he was reminded that he did not hail from a sovereign state.

* Some refused to a.s.sociate with those who did. One prominent New Englander in London in 1692 so violently disapproved of the new charter-the instructions had been to safeguard the old-that he refused to sail to North America on any vessel that carried Increase Mather.

* The brimstone appears to have been added between Salem and Boston. There is no trace of it in the court papers.

Phips would later hold that he had established a court to discern whether witchcraft or possession was at work. The word "possession" falls in and out of favor; whole months went by without its mention, although on the day of his Boston return Increase Mather used it too. He found the country in a dire state "by reason of witchcrafts and possessed persons."

* As a sixteenth-century French physician had a.s.sured Henry IV, those who said that it was difficult to distinguish a devil's mark from a natural blemish were not good doctors.

Ma.s.sachusetts never attempted that experiment, although the day after Mather wrote Richards, an accused Connecticut witch requested it. The method had a quirk: the innocent could exonerate herself only by near-drowning.

* There was some confusion as to what purpose the marks served. As the great seventeenth-century English witch-finder general explained, the devil was a spirit. He had no need for human blood. The teats served not for nourishment but to aggravate the witch, remind her of her covenant, and allow the devil to enter her body, the better to control it. The teat could look like any number of things, from the footprint of a hare to that of a mouse. Whole pamphlets were devoted to the subject, although it is unlikely that anyone in Salem had read them. Those who examined t.i.tuba found scratches, understood to have been left by the devil in the course of their bodily tussle.

The only member of the Ma.s.sachusetts bench with a legal education-instrumental in formulating Ma.s.sachusetts's first body of law-had left a will so convoluted that, after several years' dispute, the court chose to ignore it. Ma.s.sachusetts would not allow lawyers to practice for fees until 1704.

* The Bishop testimony reinforces Somerset Maugham's quip: "A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn't pretty it won't do her much good." Mather stamps out any smoldering innuendo in his account, where the kisses are nowhere to be found.

* We have the account solely from Mather, who has Bishop accomplish the deed with the help of an invisible demon.

* As if her fate were not grim enough, Bishop appears to have been confused with another uncooperative suspect. John Hale swore out testimony against that Bishop; it was mistakenly attached to Bridget.

* On the ladder, her skirts tied and face covered, the woman was reprieved. Sixty spectators suffered injuries on the bridge.

* As one scholar put it, the accepted wisdom appeared to be that if you sued, you were better off socioeconomically. "If you sued a lot, you were better off still."

* An Oxford MA in divinity presided over the 1692 trials while a minister with no degree preached in Salem village. Both were anomalies for the time.

* Mather could have an anxiety dream about an unprepared sermon and go on to compose it in his sleep. Between 1689 and 1691, he published twenty-two volumes. He knew people disliked him for publishing so much. He was unrepentant. On a 1699 list of "favors of heaven" came, in third place, "that I should be a more silly and shallow person than most in this country; and yet write and print more books, and have greater opportunities to do good by my published composures, than any man that ever was in this country, or indeed in all America."

* Milborne's younger brother had been beheaded for treason in New York a year earlier; he was the criminal not yet dead when cut down from the gallows. Thomas Newton had prosecuted the case.

* The doctor concluded that "some evil person" had bewitched her. In his account, Mather preferred "some devil had certainly bewitched her."

* It divided individuals too. Imperative as it was to take sides in 1692, some villagers took several. John Putnam Sr. seems to have been both for and against Nurse.

* By the laws of England, Stoughton a.s.sured Plymouth's governor in 1681, a jury's verdict of not guilty could mean nothing other than not guilty. In colonial practice, the prisoner could be dealt a grievous punishment regardless, commensurate with the magnitude of his crime.

* Stoughton had humbly protested the installation of that royal official in 1678. Given his lack of fortune, he was unlikely to be honest. It was a particularly rich remark under the circ.u.mstances. As the too-poor-to-be-principled official observed nine years later, Stoughton and his a.s.sociates had "ama.s.sed great quant.i.ties of this country."

As a British official informed Boston's wealthiest merchant in 1684, "I find all are mad in your country."

* The suspicion reached back a generation. In the 1660s, Sewall's father-in-law had fumed that the English had no right to come to North America to "seek the subversion of our civil and ecclesiastical politics."

There was no question that all was in disarray under Andros, especially for speculators. Land sales were impossible at the time, as no one knew if payment should be made to the proprietors or to the king.