In the Devil's Snare (14 page)
New Englanders, most notably Governor Simon Bradstreet, pondered the meaning of the terrible defeats and the potential peace. “The awfull Frowne of God” had caused the failure of the Quebec campaign, Bradstreet proclaimed, though some would blame those in charge of the expedition. God’s providence “appearing against us . . . [was] to be specially remarked,” he observed, citing the contrary winds and bad weather that delayed the invasion fleet, coupled with the retreat of the overland army that allowed men from Montreal to reinforce Quebec just before Phips arrived. These events “plainly” revealed “the finger of God therein, and shall our ffather Spit in our Face, and we not be ashamed?” Bradstreet inquired. Bay Colony residents had to humble themselves before God, seek out the cause of these disasters, “and reforme those sins that have provoked so great Anger to smoke against the prayers of his people.” Yet the truce held out some hope. “The Success of this, as all other our Affayres is with God, who we hope in all these darke dispensations of his providence, will at length cause light to breake forth upon us on whome alone is our dependance and Expectations.”
76
A WAR OF ATTRITION
The “halfe peace” (as the Indians called it) held until May, despite the continuing distrust on both sides. At least in part, the successful truce undoubtedly stemmed from the inability of either side to mount much of an offensive. Certainly Massachusetts was afflicted by “misery,” wrote one Cambridge resident in March, a result not only of the losses of men and money in the Quebec debacle but also of their longer-term consequences. To pay the public’s debts to the soldiers and suppliers of the expedition, the General Court voted to issue paper money that could be used for tax payments. Even with that infusion of currency, the heavy taxation “much Impoverished” everyone. On top of that, the returning soldiers had brought “small pox, & feaver” back with them, and many noncombatants also died. For example, in mid-February a Portsmouth resident reported that thirty-four local residents had already died from the disease, and another forty were ill. Surveying this scene, a Bostonian commented, “wee shall need noe Enimie to distroy us for wee shall doe Itt fast Enough of our selves.”
77
The Massachusetts authorities prepared carefully for the scheduled resumption of peace talks at Wells on May 1, naming an experienced team of negotiators: Thomas Danforth, William Stoughton, Bartholomew Gedney, Robert Pike, and two local militia leaders. But on the appointed day the sachems failed to appear. Instead, one man claimed to represent Edgeremet and two to represent Worombe. Other Indians attended only “in private capacity.” Those Wabanakis present assured the skeptical colonists that the others were hunting but would appear within twenty days; they turned over two young captives and insisted that “all the Sagamores are desirous to have a constant and Everlasting peace made with the English.” After some debate, the Massachusetts representatives agreed to continue the truce for the stated period. Before the team departed to return to Boston, Old Dony, the once-imprisoned Kennebunk leader, “made a very passionate speech . . . the design whereof was to expresse the joy of the Indians at what was done.”
78
But when the allotted time ended, no one appeared. The colonists feared the worst, and with reason. On June 13, shortly after the arrival of a militia troop from Essex County, the Kennebec sachem Moxis and perhaps two hundred Indians attacked Wells. The timely intervention saved the town; the assault was repelled; and Robert Pike, for one, breathed a sigh of relief: “the lord is gracious and . . . his mercy indures forever,” he penned immediately upon learning the good news.
79
What had happened? Old Dony and the others who went to Wells on May 1 might have represented a “peace party” among the Wabanakis, and they could well have been later overruled by the sachems, who were perhaps not quite so desirous of peace as had been alleged. Or what the Wabanakis told the leaders of Wells in a formal parley during the battle could have been accurate. They attacked first, the Indians declared, for three reasons. Castine had captured three Englishmen, and they expected the settlers to retaliate against them; they had lost four men, whom they thought the settlers had killed; and the English “gave them noe satisfaction for the two captivs which they brought into Wells at our last treaty with them.” All three revealed the Wabanakis’ deep-seated suspicions of the Anglo-Americans’ motives and behavior. Any action by an ally could result in assumptions of Wabanaki responsibility. Unexpected deaths meant English killers. Unreciprocated goodwill equaled bad faith. The arguments added up to a rationale for the resumption of a destructive war everyone would probably have preferred to halt.
80
In the weeks and months following the June raid on Wells, the Wabanakis altered their tactics—an adjustment probably dictated by limited resources. Rather than continuing to mount large-scale assaults, the Indians turned to small hit-and-run raids targeting farmers and livestock. Northern New England’s leaders quickly understood what was happening; as early as June 17 the Portsmouth magistrates concluded that the Wabanakis “are resolved to starve us, by allarming us every where, & keeping us from attending our corn & by Killing our cattell.” Two days later a Kittery magistrate warned that the “enymie” was “constantly killinge and destroyinge both fatt and lean cattell and it is taken for granted without some speedy help coms that they will not leave a beast alive in the whole province.”
81
Yet when an opportunity presented itself the Wabanakis could still come together on short notice. During the summer, Massachusetts dispatched yet another expedition to the eastward to locate and attack the Indians. Following long delays caused by inadequate personnel, the soldiers finally sailed from the Piscataqua on August 1. After futilely searching for signs of the enemy from Saco to Casco Bay, they were reembarking on their sloops when the Wabanakis struck. They “Appered in grete Nombers and violently Assaulted us Indeaoringe to sorrownd us beefore wee could Recover the slopes Killed & wounded sundery,” reported the expedition’s leaders, Daniel King and John March. “Wee Cannot Imagin there Number to be lese then Three Hondred & parte of them ffrench.” Once again, the enemy had materialized, seemingly from nowhere, at a moment when the English were most vulnerable. And once more the Bay Colony’s leaders contemplated “an awfull frowne of Providence, under which we have cause to be humbled.”
82
After a summer of constant raids that forced the settlers to stay in garrisons—so that the residents of Wells, for example, were able to grow only as much corn as would sustain them for half a year—the fall of 1691 brought the prospect of worsening conditions. The leaders of Wells, among them George Burroughs (who had moved there from Falmouth prior to the fall of Fort Loyal), told Massachusetts authorities in late September that “our Stockes both of Cattle & Swine are much diminished” and that the Wabanakis had been “a sore scourge to us . . [. by] dayly lying in wait to take any that goe forth.” Indeed, just a few days earlier a seventeen-year-old had been captured when he ventured no farther than a “gunn shott” from a garrison “to fetch a little wood in his armes.” Two months later the commander of the troops stationed at Wells revealed that “they have allready Killed So many Cattle for the Souldires, that they have hardly left where with to Sustain their one [own] family’s this winter & that many famylyes have hardly bread to eat.”
83
On October 30, citing the “growing Distresses of the Country,” the governor and council for the first time requested assistance from Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The enemy, they declared, was “flusht with Success,” and they needed to raise “a considerable fforce.” Till now, “the vast charge” of defense had rested solely on the Bay Colony, the other governments being “providentially more remote from the present Seat” of the war. But the “Common Cause” and the “Comon Enemy” should bring them together, Massachusetts’ leaders argued. Nothing came of their plea. Although Connecticut tried to recruit some volunteers, none were willing to serve, and both Plymouth and Rhode Island refused to help. Fortunately for the Bay Colony, the Indians too seemed to lack resources for warfare that winter, and after late October they ceased their raids. The frontier towns, Cotton Mather later observed, “a little Remit[ted] their Tired Vigilance” that winter.
84
Then, on January 25, 1691/2, the Wabanakis destroyed York in a surprise attack, shortly after Samuel Parris’s daughter and niece began having fits.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Dreadfull Apparition of a Minister
APRIL 19–MAY 9, 1692
WHEN ABIGAIL HOBBS confessed in mid-April that the devil had recruited her as a witch in Maine in 1688, northern New England was still reeling from the shock of the devastating attack on York. The war and Abigail’s earlier residence at Casco Bay appear to have had little to do with the initial accusation that she was a witch; those charges stemmed rather from widespread gossip about her recent irreverent behavior in Topsfield, which was recounted in chapter 2. Yet the remarkable consequences that quickly followed her confession resulted from the linkage she created between the specters’ assaults in Essex County and the Wabanakis’ attacks on the northeastern frontier.
In the days after the April 11 examinations of Sarah Cloyce and the Proctors, Abigail Williams had continued to be tortured by witches already jailed—Rebecca Nurse, both Proctors, Martha Corey. But first Ann Putnam Jr. and then Mercy Lewis named new suspects: not only Abigail Hobbs but also Giles Corey, who joined in tormenting them. In response to the renewed spectral activity, Ezekiel Cheever and John Putnam Jr.—the latter perhaps spurred into action by the death of his baby three days before—filed a complaint on Monday, April 18, against Abigail Hobbs, Giles Corey, Mary Warren, and Bridget Bishop.
1
Bridget Oliver Bishop, the only one of the four not previously connected publicly to the crisis, lived in Salem Town. A woman in her early fifties with a bad reputation, she had been tried and acquitted on witchcraft charges twelve years earlier. The evidence eventually presented in her case revealed that for decades her neighbors had suspected her of engaging in malefic practices. Yet Goody Bishop, as she stated at her examination (without contradiction from any of the many people in attendance), knew none of the suffering accusers personally, nor had she ever been in the Village meetinghouse before. The complaints against her, then, had a very different source from the preceding ones, which revolved around intra-Village relationships. Nothing reveals which of the afflicted named her first, or when that event occurred. Despite the formal charge registered with John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, the most important accusers of Bridget Bishop lived outside Salem Village.
2
Abigail Hobbs’s confession, and the gossip it and its similar successors aroused, had a dramatic impact on Bridget Bishop and others whom their Essex County neighbors had long suspected of malefic acts. If the devil was actively seeking new recruits for his war in the invisible and visible worlds, people concluded, his agents would most likely be the witches already resident in their midst.
In his later testimony during the prosecution of Dorcas Hoar of Beverly, John Hale inadvertently revealed the dynamic process involved in the cases of Bishop, Hoar, and numerous others. “When discourses arose about witchcrafts at the village,” Hale attested, “then I heard discourses revived of Goody Hoars fortune telling.” All the talk of witches in Salem Village in the first months of 1692, in short, stimulated the memories, and the mouths, of Hale’s neighbors. The resulting gossip in Beverly (or, in the case of Bridget Bishop, Salem Town) soon made its way to Salem Village, passed by eager talkers from farm to farm, tavern to inn.
3
In the weeks and months to come, after learning from such a chain of gossip that the residents of Beverly or Andover or other towns in the region believed that certain neighbors were possible allies of Satan, the core group of young Village accusers—Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Abigail Williams, Betty Hubbard, Mary Walcott, and (after April 24) a new addition, Susannah Sheldon—incorporated charges against those suspects into their complaints of spectral torturers. By corroborating accusations that originated elsewhere, the Village afflicted simultaneously validated the opinions of their fellow Essex County residents and reconfirmed their own position at the vortex of the crisis. Their affirmation of others’ charges encouraged the expression of even more accusations, thereby renewing and repeating what became seemingly endless cycles of suspicion, gossip, and complaints, leading to more suspicion, more gossip, and additional complaints.
Although the intervening conversations cannot be traced, occasionally it is possible to identify the origins of some of the tales that instigated accusations. For instance, the story that must have inspired Ann Jr.’s spectral vision in early May of the “gray-head” man she called “old father pharoah,” Thomas Farrar Sr., of Lynn, resulted from his behavior one night in the spring of 1690. Thoroughly drunk, Goodman Farrar stumbled into a neighbor’s house, insisted it was his, and prepared for bed despite the alarmed protestations of his hostess. He then announced that he would “goe to prayer” and “spake about the fallen Angels” before dozing off. Testimony in Farrar’s prosecution for drunkenness six months later showed that gossip about his mumbled prayer had spread far and wide. In the supercharged atmosphere of late spring 1692, this two-year-old story was transformed into the charge that Goodman Farrar had been overheard praying to Satan. Who changed it or how the mutation occurred is unknown. But Ann, like the other afflicted young people, turned snatches of gossip into formal accusations, and rumor-mongering in various Essex County towns thus became witchcraft charges in the Village.
4
The talk about local witches, fortune-tellers, and the like spread all the more widely and intensely through the region because Abigail Hobbs’s confession on April 19 caused Essex County residents to connect their fears of neighbors long suspected of malefic acts with their newer concerns about the consequences of the Second Indian War, a pattern that soon manifested itself in several different towns.
FOUR SUSPECTS AND ANOTHER CONFESSION
Giles Corey, who seems to have been the first person questioned on April 19, appeared among the accused primarily for the same reason that men usually did: his relationship with a female witch. Giles’s testimony against his wife, offered during and after her examination, had not sufficiently differentiated himself from her, and consequently he ended up facing witchcraft charges.
5
After Hathorne sternly enjoined Corey to tell the truth, he asked the afflicted, “Which of you have seen this Man hurt you?” Walcott, Putnam Jr., Lewis, and Williams answered in the affirmative, while Hubbard could not speak. Benjamin Gould stated cautiously that he had seen Giles’s specter and had then been hurt, but “cannot affirm that it was he.” Sarah Vibber, taking an active role in this interrogation (perhaps because Giles had termed her husband a “Damned Devilish Rogue”), repeatedly interpolated questions and comments of her own.
The interrogation focused largely on statements Giles had made about his wife: the charge, offered after her examination, that she had stopped him from praying, and a claim (reported by several witnesses) “that he knew enough against his Wife, that would do her Business.” Hathorne unsuccessfully asked for further explanations of both remarks. And “did you not say, when you went to the Ferry with your Wife, you would not go over to Boston now, for you should come yourself next Week?” Hathorne inquired. Giles responded that he meant he could not afford to travel all the way to the Boston prison with her, but Hathorne’s question implied quite another interpretation: had Giles not thereby accurately predicted his own arrest and imprisonment for witchcraft? In an experiment such as that employed with Martha, one of Giles’s hands was loosed, and (Samuel Parris recorded) “several were afflicted. He held his Head on one Side, and then the Heads of several of the Afflicted were held on one Side. He drew in his Cheeks, and the Cheeks of some of the Afflicted were suckt in.” The mimickry was yet another indication of guilt, so John Hathorne ordered Corey sent to jail.
After Abigail Hobbs offered her startling confession as described at the end of chapter 2, the third examinee of the day was the Proctors’ servant, Mary Warren.
6
“As soon as she was coming towards the Bar the afflicted fell into fits,” Parris noted. Warren proclaimed her innocence, but Hubbard “testifyed against her” before having “a violent fit.” (Presumably, Betty read a short statement she submitted in evidence, describing how Mary pressured her to sign the devil’s book while saying, “if you Sat your hand to the book you Shall be well for i did So and i am well.”) Justice Hathorne observed, “You were a little while ago an Afflicted person, now you are an Afflicter,” and inquired, “How comes this to pass?” Mary replied that she regarded her situation as “a great Mercy of God.” The magistrate, astonished, responded, “What[,] do you take it to be a great mercy to afflict others?” Betty then revealed that “a little while after this Mary was well, she . . . said that the afflicted persons did but dissemble,” a statement that caused all the complainants—including John Indian and Bathshua Pope, neither previously tormented that day—to be “grievously afflicted.” When Hathorne informed Warren about Abigail Hobbs’s confession, the examinee herself had a fit. “Some of the afflicted cryed out,” Parris commented, “that she was going to confess, but Goody Korey, & Procter, & his wife came in, in their apparition, & struck her down, & said she should tell nothing.”
From then on, Mary was rendered incapable of sustained speech. At first “she did neither see, nor hear, nor speak.” She eventually tried to talk, but Parris recorded that she repeatedly fell into fits after uttering such phrases as “Oh! I am sorry for it,” “Oh Lord help me,” “I will tell, I will tell,” and “they did, they did.” After some time the magistrates gave up on Warren, ordering her to be taken out of the meetinghouse.
Bridget Bishop was then brought in, and again “all fell into fits.”
7
Goody Bishop, “turning her head & eyes about,” announced that “I am clear.” But Mary Walcott insisted that her brother Jonathan had recently struck at Bishop’s specter with a sword, tearing her clothes, and, Parris noted, “upon some search in the Court, a rent that seems to answere what was alledged was found.” Hathorne confronted her with an accusation drawn from gossip: “they say you bewitcht your first husband to death.” Bishop, “verie angrie,” denied that charge, shaking her head and by that motion seemingly causing more torments.
The accused and the magistrate next engaged in a dialogue about what constituted witchcraft. If she had not signed the book, had she dealt with “familiar Spirits”? If not, how could her apparition hurt the afflicted? Hathorne observed that “you seem to act witchcraft before us, by the motion of your body.” When Bishop responded, “I know not what a Witch is,” Hathorne pounced. “How do you know then that you are not a witch?” Bewildered by the question, Bishop continued to assert her innocence. “I am not come here to say I am a witch to take away my life,” she exclaimed, indicating that she thought the consequence of confession would be conviction and execution. “Have you not heard that some have confessed?” inquired the examiner. No, replied Goody Bishop, but two men insisted that they had informed her of the confessions. “You are taken now in a flat lye,” asserted Hathorne, but Bishop denied having heard what the men said. As he frequently did, Parris ended the transcript with a note. After the examination, he observed, when a bystander asked the accused “if she were not troubled to see the afflicted persons so tormented, the said Byshop answered no.” In Parris’s eyes, Bridget Bishop, like John Proctor and Rebecca Nurse, apparently condemned herself by indifference to the sufferings of the afflicted.
The magistrates then returned to Mary Warren, who, brought back to the meetinghouse, was “immediately taken with fits.” Under questioning, she denied having signed the devil’s book, once more had fits, and was sent out again. After “a considerable space of time,” she was returned to the makeshift courtroom, but still could not speak. And so Hathorne and Corwin ended the public part of the examination. Later, “in private, before magistrates and Ministers,” Warren faced more questions. How far had she yielded? What had she been told to do, to be well? Again, however, she appeared unable to talk. At last, Parris noted, “her lips were bit so that she could not speak. so she was sent away.”
8
Over the next two days, out of the public eye, the magistrates and ministers examined Mary Warren further at Salem prison.
9
She was then better able to talk and, despite being interrupted by frequent fits, she offered further details of the Proctors’ witchcraft and her involvement in it. Elizabeth Proctor, she declared, had “puld me out of the Bed, and told mee that Shee was a witch, and had put her hand to the Book.” Her master had brought her a book to sign, but she had merely touched it with a wet finger, which nevertheless left a black mark. The examiners sternly instructed her “that it was he[r] own Vollantary act . . . she was told the devil could have done nothing: if she had not yeilded and that she for eas to her body: not for any good of her sould: [
sic
] had done it.” The maidservant was then “much grieved and cryed out,” insisting that she had touched the book only because her master and mistress had threatened to harm her if she did not comply with their request.
Asked whether she had seen the apparitions of others since she had been jailed, Mary named Sarah Good and Giles Corey. She had not disclosed the “wholle truth” earlier, she explained, “becaus she was thretned to be torn in peices: if she did,” but now she was prepared to tell all. Had she tormented the afflicted? the examiner inquired. No, she answered, “but when she heard: they were aflicted in her shape: she began to fear it was the devil” who did so. Still, she denied having consented to Satan’s employing her specter to afflict others. After Mary admitted that she had touched the devil’s book twice, Nicholas Noyes “asked her whether she did not suspect it to be the devils book before she toucht it the second time: she said she feare it was no good book: being asked what she ment by no good book: she said a book to deceiv.”
When Abigail Hobbs was examined in prison on April 20, she again revealed the devil’s interest in recruiting witch-allies in Maine. Abigail declared that prior to her initial examination she had been visited by the apparition of Judah White, “a Jersey maid that lived with Joseph Ingerson [Ingersoll] at Cascoe, but now lives at Boston,” with whom she was “very well formerly acquainted.” The maidservant, she indicated, had been wearing “fine Cloaths,” thus suggesting that she had successfully completed a diabolic pact. Moreover, the specter of her one-time friend had been accompanied by that of Sarah Good—a sure sign she had enlisted in Satan’s ranks. Together the two apparitions urged Abigail not to confess and disclosed that Sarah Osborne was also a witch. Abigail then obeyed the devil’s order to torture Ann Jr., Mercy, and Abigail Williams by sticking “thorns” into “images . . . in wood like them.” After Satan informed her she had been successful, her targets “Cryed out they were hurt by Abigail Hobbs.” Finally, Abigail acknowledged something she had previously denied: she had participated in the “great meeting in Mr. Parris’s Pasture,” where she “did Eat of the Red Bread and drink of the Red wine.”
10
By the close of these examinations, then, four more suspected witches had joined the nine already in prison, and two of them had acknowledged their complicity with Satan. Even more important, Abigail Hobbs’s confessions pointed everyone’s attention toward events in Falmouth and on the Maine frontier, with striking results.
Abigail Hobbs in Casco Bay
Abigail Hobbs’s confession on April 19 and her later testimony revealed that she had lived in Falmouth in 1688, probably longer. But with whom, and under what circumstances? Some have hypothesized that she was a servant in Maine, but she would have been very young (aged just ten or eleven that year) to have gone so far from home to work. Moreover, during her confessions she twice referred to “our house” in Falmouth; had she been a servant, she would have said, “my master’s house.”
11
Her use of the possessive pronoun “our” thus suggests she was living with her family or at least with relatives. Even though I have found no definitive proof of the Hobbs clan’s presence in Falmouth during the mid-1680s, I believe that William Hobbs, Abigail’s father, moved his household there between 1683 and 1689.
One genealogist has concluded that Abigail’s father was a son of Morris Hobbs of Hampton, New Hampshire. In 1660, William seems to have been living in Lynn, but in April 1668 a William Hobbs joined a group of men from Wells in petitioning Massachusetts about a controversial political matter (one of the other signers was Peter Cloyce, the eventual second husband of Sarah Towne Bridges). If William Hobbs was from Hampton, or if he was the Wells petitioner of the same name, the northeastern frontier would have been familiar territory to him.
12
Although Hobbs and a partner purchased land in Topsfield in 1660, his name first appears as a resident in November 1668, and so he could have signed the Wells petition the preceding spring. He and his wife, Avis, whose birth surname is unknown, called their first recorded daughter (born in Topsfield in 1670) “Avis” and their first recorded son “William.” Given common naming patterns in seventeenth-century families (in which oldest sons and daughters were usually named for their parents), the couple probably married shortly before coming to Topsfield. Their wedding is not noted anywhere in Essex County; accordingly, it might have occurred in Maine or New Hampshire, where many documents were lost during the two Indian wars. Hobbs failed to prosper in Topsfield: his property holdings were small, and he never held even the lowest elective office. After having children regularly from 1670 to 1682, William and Avis Hobbs disappear from the Topsfield church records, until he was assessed for the minister’s salary in late 1689. I therefore think that when Falmouth was resettled in the mid-1680s William took the opportunity to move to Maine.
13
The family probably rented property at Casco from approximately 1683 until after the Wabanaki assault in September 1689. By the time of the witchcraft crisis in 1692, Hobbs had been married to a new wife, Deliverance, for at least eighteen months. That no surviving document records Avis Hobbs’s death or William’s remarriage suggests again that those events occurred in another jurisdiction, perhaps in Maine, where so many records were lost. In addition, that Deliverance had never been baptized implies that she grew up where that rite was not available to her parents— for example, the Maine frontier, which had few ordained ministers. Most of the Hobbs children could also have died during the family’s residence in Maine, since only Abigail and one of her brothers can subsequently be traced in the extensive published records of Essex County. It is unlikely, however, that Avis Hobbs or her children were killed by the Indians; no deaths of women or children were described in the aftermath of the September 1689 attack on Falmouth, nor were there many prior to that date either.
14
If these speculations are correct, Abigail Hobbs lived in Falmouth with her family for about six years, from age six or seven to age twelve. Even if she did not reside there with her family or for that many years, she had to have known Mercy Lewis in the small frontier community. Moreover, if Abigail’s father was the son of Morris Hobbs, Abigail and Mercy were related by marriage: the mothers-in-law, respectively, of their aunts (Mary Hobbs Cass and Mary Lewis Skilling Lewis) were the sisters Martha and Hannah Philbrick. Unremarkably, therefore, the accusation of Abigail Hobbs initially emerged from the extended Putnam household, where Mercy Lewis had undoubtedly avidly discussed the irreverent behavior of her former Falmouth acquaintance and possible distant relative.
15