In the Devil's Snare (16 page)

By mid-April 1682, Burroughs was enmeshed in controversy with a parishioner who accused him of paying more attention to “pulpit preaching” than to the spiritual care of his flock. Perhaps that feeling was widespread; in any event, his salary was not paid on time, and in early March 1683 he left the Village, moving his family back to Falmouth. The clergyman, however, returned to Salem Village to settle accounts in late April. He and other Villagers were surprised when John Putnam Sr. then had him arrested for the unpaid debt from his wife’s funeral and other outstanding liabilities, because it was clear to everyone that Burroughs had no assets to seize until after his salary had been fully paid. In the end, although the minister had to come back once more for a court hearing in Salem Town in late June, Putnam withdrew the suit after Burroughs proved that he had ordered part of his salary arrears paid directly to Putnam to satisfy his remaining obligations.
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While George Burroughs lived in Salem Village, Falmouth was being resettled under the direction of Thomas Danforth, who formally established a new government in Maine in March 1680. Danforth supervised the construction of Fort Loyal to protect the rebuilt town, and in September he laid out new house lots, primarily to the west and north of the fort, “to make the Town compact,” as residents later explained. To advance the resettlement efforts, the town took possession of portions of the property previously granted to Burroughs and other large landowners on Cleeves’ Neck.
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In October 1683, the minister, offered 100 acres “further off” in exchange for the centrally located 170 that had been taken, declined to accept, informing the town that he “freely” surrendered the property, “not desiring any land any where else, nor any thing else in consideration thereof.” (The town did, however, later give him about 100 acres of marsh.) The remaining 30 acres of his original holding, which lay approximately half a mile west of the new fort, were confirmed to him. Later that year, he exchanged 7 acres of that land for John Skilling’s house and lot, conveniently located near the meetinghouse, which was sited to the east of the fort. John Skilling’s by-then-deceased brother Thomas had been Mercy Lewis’s uncle by marriage; and Philip Lewis’s own house lot in the resettled community lay near Joseph Ingersoll’s property approximately a quarter mile west of the fort. As will be recalled, Abigail Hobbs knew Joseph Ingersoll’s maidservant “very well.” Accordingly, Mercy Lewis and Abigail Hobbs probably lived in close proximity to each other in Falmouth village during the mid-1680s. Another quarter mile west of their homes lay Burroughs’s remaining 23 acres. Since he undoubtedly farmed or cut wood on that land, the clergyman would have regularly passed the Lewis and Hobbs households as he moved between his house (to the east of Fort Loyal) and his land on the west side of town. Thus, in Falmouth George Burroughs, Mercy Lewis, and Abigail Hobbs must have encountered each other frequently, perhaps on a daily basis.
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Life in Falmouth during the mid-1680s was difficult, for wholly rebuilding a previously abandoned community took considerable effort. The residents had few resources to spare, so Burroughs’s problems collecting his salary persisted. Moreover, local politics were acrimonious, especially during the regime of Sir Edmund Andros. Rejecting the legitimacy of all New England land titles that did not mention the Crown as the ultimate owner of the property, Andros insisted that settlers reregister and revalidate their deeds, in the process paying new fees. Many Maine residents resisted this requirement, which would have enriched Andros and his subordinates. In Falmouth, the opposition to the land policy was led by Robert Lawrence, whose family had deep roots in the area. By contrast, Edward Tyng, Sylvanus Davis, and Joshua Scottow, all of whom arrived in Maine during or after King Philip’s War, tried to win others’ compliance with the new procedures. Lawrence and Davis engaged in a long series of squabbles, legal and otherwise, with Davis arguing that Lawrence’s land titles were faulty because they did not derive from the “Right Saggamore,” and Lawrence countering that Davis had baldly announced that “it was free for any man to take a patent for anothers land notwithstanding hee had Improved it never soe much.” The conspicuous absence of the signature of George Burroughs from a May 24, 1689, Falmouth petition against Tyng, Davis, and their ally Lieutenant Thaddeus Clark implies that he took the side of those three men in the heated dispute.
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Whether because of a lack of funds or because once again (as in Salisbury and Salem Village) a deeply divided community produced a congregation difficult to handle, by 1686 George Burroughs had begun negotiating with Black Point (Scarborough) about possibly relocating there. On March 30 of that year he was even described as “Minister of Bla[ck] Poynt.” In November, Joshua Scottow, the settlement’s leading resident, donated ten acres to be given to a minister, and Burroughs accepted that land, planting some crops on it to confirm his title. In February 1686/7 Scarborough provided for “Coting & haling of the ministers wod for one yeare.” Yet Burroughs did not completely sever his ties to Falmouth, although in 1688 he sold the remaining twenty-three acres of his original grant. Evidently, he continued to preach in both places. As was pointed out in chapter 3, he was in Falmouth during the September 1689 attack, being commended for his conduct by Benjamin Church. At that time the commander also observed that Burroughs “had thoughts of removeing” because “his present maintainance from this Town by reason of thier poverty, is not enough for his livelihood.” So, Church commented, “I shall Encourage him to Stay promissing him an allowance from the publique Treasury for what Servis he shall do for the Army.”
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As already noted, the apparition of George Burroughs explained to Ann Jr. on April 20, 1692, that he killed Deodat Lawson’s child because Lawson “went to the eastward with Sir Edmon and preached soe: to the souldiers.” Church’s observation about trying to assist the impoverished minister by hiring him as an army chaplain suggests why Burroughs might have been angered by Lawson’s employment with Andros: perhaps he had wanted the job himself. It is easy to speculate that Burroughs could have expressed his jealousy or frustration about Lawson’s chaplaincy in the hearing of Mercy Lewis, the chief source of Ann Jr.’s information about Burroughs’s years in Maine. That is especially likely because Mercy actually lived for a time in George Burroughs’s household. Exactly when she did so is not clear, but she probably moved in with the clergyman and his family following her father’s death, which occurred some time after April 1689. He could well have been killed by the Wabanakis during the September 21 assault on the town.
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Burroughs’s specter also told Ann Jr. that “he had bewicthed a grate many souldiers to death at the eastword, when Sir Edmon was their.” Unlike the murder of Lawson’s child, which might have had a personal motive, the malevolent killing of soldiers in Maine during Andros’s campaign could have had only one purpose: assisting the devil-worshipping Indians in their war against God’s people. That George Burroughs had indeed spectrally allied himself to Satan and the Wabanakis might well have appeared likely to anyone who contemplated his uncanny ability to survive the attacks on Falmouth in August 1676 and September 1689, followed by his remarkably prescient decision to leave the Casco Bay region sometime in the winter of 1689–1690, mere months before both Falmouth and Black Point fell to the Wabanakis in May 1690. When nearly all the defenders of Fort Loyal were killed by the French and Indians, George Burroughs was no longer there. He had moved south to the relative safety of Wells, where he replaced another clergyman who had decided to seek an even more secure post still farther from the front lines of the war.

Before Burroughs left Casco, however, his wife Sarah died, and he sent her body back to Salem for burial. In Wells, he met and married a third wife, Mary; together they had a daughter, his last child. That Salem Villagers gossiped about the circumstances of Sarah’s death, and that George’s remarriage followed it fairly quickly, became evident in another of Ann Jr.’s spectral visions, this one occurring on May 5. Sarah’s apparition, the little girl revealed, “tould me that Mr Burrough and that wife which he hath now kiled hir in the vessell as she was coming to se hir friends because they would have one another.” In short, some people at least seem to have thought that Sarah Ruck Hathorne Burroughs was still alive when she boarded the ship that brought her body to Salem, and that Mary Burroughs as well as her husband had something to do with her predecessor’s death.
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George Burroughs, as befitted his position as one of the two remaining ministers in Maine—the other was Shubael Dummer, in York—became one of the leading residents of Wells, a member of the select group of men who regularly wrote to the Massachusetts governor and council to report on conditions in their beleaguered community and province. In July 1691, for example, he signed a joint letter seeking assistance that described Wells as “the front of all the Estern part of the Contrey Remoatly Scituated; for Strength weak; and the Enemie beating upon us.” When the Wabanakis attacked Wells the previous month, the men reported, they had killed or taken “upward of an hundred head of cattell beside Sheep and horeses,” and their corn too was “in great hazard” of being lost. To prevent further losses of men and resources, the leaders of Wells asked the authorities in Boston to adopt a policy that “the Inhabitants of this province may not Quit theire places with out liberty first obtayned from Leguel Authority.” Two months later, Burroughs and the others reported that the Indians “still distress us, by holding us off from our improvements, Keeping us in close Garrison.” The “heathen,” they wrote, were “a sore scourge to us.” The last letter Burroughs addressed to Boston, on January 27, 1691/2, described the destruction of York two days earlier. Writing of their “low condition, & eminent danger,” the leaders of Wells observed that “the course of God’s most sweet & rich promises, & gracious providences may justly be interrupted by the sins of his People.” They prayed, “The Lord set his eyes upon us for good, & build us, not pull us downe, & plant us, & not pluck us up.”
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Wells as a community would not be “plucked up,” but George Burroughs soon would be. In the days, weeks, and months following the revelations of April 19 and 20, he became the indispensable man, named over and over again as the leader of the devil’s sacrament and other witch meetings. That the “lettell black menester” would be regarded as “the Head & Ringleader of all the Supposed Witches in the Land” (to adopt a phrase coined by his descendants more than fifty years later) was entirely appropriate. It was both especially “dreadfull” and especially suitable that a clergyman lead the witches. Who better than a man of authority, with intricate knowledge of the Bible and of Satan’s ways, to bring more recruits into the devil’s legions? Who better than a man who had lived both on the Maine frontier and in Salem Village to unite the visible and invisible devil worshippers who were together assaulting New England? And who more likely to initiate his accusation than Mercy Lewis, a young woman who knew him well, and most of whose family had been killed in the attacks he so remarkably escaped unscathed?
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NINE ACCUSATIONS AND ANOTHER IMPORTANT CONFESSOR

Ann Putnam Jr.’s vision of a malevolent George Burroughs on the evening of Wednesday, April 20, set off a rash of spectral sightings over the next few weeks. The first came just a few hours later, “Att or about midnight” that very night, when Mercy Lewis too encountered an apparition. In her case it was a “very gray headed man,” who introduced himself as George Jacobs (Sr.) of Salem Village. He had had “two wives,” he revealed, and he beat Mercy with a stick while ordering her to write in his book, which she resolutely refused to do. The next day at about four in the afternoon, following Parris’s weekly Thursday lecture, Abigail Williams and Mary Walcott saw more visions in the great room at Ingersoll’s tavern. Abigail and Mary charged that the specter of Deliverance Hobbs “bitt mary walcot by the foot” and that Deliverance and her husband William “goe both of them a long the table.” Benjamin Hutchinson struck at the apparitions with his rapier, leading the girls to exclaim that he had “stabed goody hobs one the side.”
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Mary and Abigail went on to insist that “the roome was full of them.” Hutchinson and Eleazar Putnam (a cousin of Sergeant Thomas) both thrust their rapiers repeatedly at the specters. Finally the girls announced that the men had “killed a greet black woman of Stonintown and an Indian that come with her for the flore is all covered with blod.” A third apparition “they knew not” also lay dead. The witches and their Indian allies had not been vanquished, however: Williams and Walcott looked outside “& said they saw a greet company of them one a hill.”
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Those two were not alone in seeing witches as infesting Salem Village on April 21, for that same day Thomas Putnam and John Buxton filed complaints against nine people from Topsfield, Salem Village, and Salem Town “for high Suspition of Sundry acts of Witchcraft” aimed at Ann Jr., Mercy, Mary, and unnamed additional Villagers. Hathorne and Corwin duly ordered all nine arrested and brought in for examinations the next day, Friday, April 22. For the first time in the 1692 crisis, a large group was accused simultaneously. A pattern that would become commonplace thus emerged in the immediate aftermath of the initial identification of George Burroughs as the leader of the witches.
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The subjects of the formal complaints on April 21 were a varied lot, ranging from Mary Black, a slave belonging to Lieutenant Nathaniel Putnam of the Village, to Mistress Mary English, whose husband Philip was a wealthy merchant in Salem Town. Most, though, resided in Topsfield, which suggests that Abigail Hobbs’s confession had drawn people’s attention to malefic activity in that town. The Topsfield contingent comprised Abigail Hobbs’s father and stepmother; Sarah Averill Wilds, who had a long-standing reputation as a witch; Mary Towne Easty, the sister of Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Cloyce; and Nehemiah Abbott Jr., who seems to have resembled a male apparition described by some of the afflicted. With the exception of Sarah Wilds, whom surviving records identify as first named by Deliverance Hobbs on April 17, no one complained against on April 21 can be linked to an accusation recorded in Salem Village at an earlier date.
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A huge crowd attended the examinations in the Salem Village meetinghouse on April 22—“much people, and many in the windows,” remarked Parris in his notes on one of the interrogations. So many spectators attended, in fact, that the accusers had difficulty obtaining “a clear view” of the suspects, and at least one man had to be taken outside so they could “view him in the light” as they attempted to identify him. It is impossible to reconstruct the precise order in which the suspects were questioned, because the records of three of those examined on April 22 have not survived. Still, it appears that the first to be interrogated was Deliverance Hobbs, the stepmother of the confessed teenage witch.
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Hathorne and Corwin began with an experiment involving the suspect’s identity. Parris observed that “the Magistrates had privately ordered who should be brought in, & not suffered her name to be mentioned.” They then asked Mercy Lewis and another whom Parris did not identify, “Do you know her?” The two were “struck dumb,” but Ann Jr. offered the correct answer: “it was Goody Hobbs, & she hath hurt her much.” This unusual episode deserves comment, since it constituted one of the few recorded instances in which the magistrates tried to test the accusers. That Hathorne and Corwin ventured it with Deliverance Hobbs suggests that they thought the Village afflicted would not know the Topsfield woman by sight.
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Williams and Walcott, who said they had seen Deliverance’s specter the day before at Ingersoll’s tavern, did not speak up to identify her. Instead, Ann Jr., who could not initially put a name to Rebecca Nurse, a Village resident she must have seen regularly at Parris’s services,
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recognize Deliverance Hobbs of Topsfield on April 22. So how did Ann Jr. know her? The obvious answer to that question is that Mercy Lewis, although herself “struck dumb” when asked the identity of the suspect, was the source of the little girl’s information. Mercy had almost certainly known the entire Hobbs family in Falmouth in the 1680s and was perhaps their distant relative. Although William Hobbs’s Topsfield property lay near some of that claimed by Thomas Putnam, the two men (and their respective wives) had no documented feud or prior association. The only person in Ann Jr.’s life with probable knowledge of the “mystery” suspect’s identity was the Putnams’ maidservant.
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After Ann Jr. successfully named Deliverance Hobbs, both John Indian and Mary Walcott accused the examinee of tormenting them.
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Hathorne next posed a series of questions—starting with “Why do you hurt these persons?”—that elicited staunch denials from Goody Hobbs. So he adopted another tack, inquiring about
her
reported affliction by Sarah Wilds on April 17. In response, she described seeing apparitions of “a great many birds cats & dogs” and also admitted seeing “the shapes of severall persons.” Asked to name them, she mentioned only two: Goody Wilds and Mercy Lewis. The former, she said, had “tore me almost to peices,” but she denied that Lewis’s specter had done her any harm. Deliverance’s identification of Lewis’s apparitional form simultaneously threatened to convert Mercy from afflicted to afflicter (as had already happened with Mary Warren) and suggested that Deliverance and Mercy had indeed known each other previously. Pressed to produce the names of specters she could identify, the Topsfield woman, who undoubtedly had few acquaintances in the Village, chose a reputed witch from her own town and a local maidservant with whom she had probably been acquainted in Maine.

The examination then proceeded without reference to the naming of Mercy Lewis. The justice asked Goody Hobbs if she had signed the devil’s book, and if not, how could she explain her transformation from tormented to tormentor? The two little girls shouted that they saw her apparition “upon the Beam,” and John Indian and others had fits. Under what must have been extraordinary pressure, Deliverance began to give way. Instead of denying complicity in Satan’s deeds, she first indicated that she could not speak. Then, in reply to the repeated question, “Have you signed to any book?” she stammered reluctantly, “It is very lately then.” Pushed to give an exact date, she revealed she had signed “the night before the last” (April 20), and Parris noted that—as had happened before—the sufferings of the afflicted ceased when she began to confess.

In response to the insistent interrogation, Deliverance accused Sarah Wilds both of bringing the devil’s book to her and of joining with Sarah Osborne to supply her with “images” of those they wished her to torment. Yet, aside from an afflicted child named first by the magistrate in a leading question, Goody Hobbs could not identify any of her victims. Asked if Osborne and Wilds were accompanied by a man, she joined others in describing “a tall black man, with an high-croun’d hat.” The justices assayed another test after the examination, enlisting a group of women to search Deliverance’s body for evidence that her specter had been struck by Benjamin Hutchinson’s rapier the day before. She admitted having a “very sore” place caused by a “Prick” on her right side, which the searchers confirmed. Parris also remarked upon an injury to her left eye, “which agrees with what the afflicted farther said that Benjamin Hutchinson after wards toucht her eye with the same Rapier.” Following her confession and the apparent physical corroboration of Walcott’s and Williams’s vision the previous day, Hathorne and Corwin ordered her jailed.

When Deliverance declared that Goody Wilds “tore me almost to peices,” she adopted a phrase introduced by Ann Jr. on April 20 in describing her spectral encounter with George Burroughs and reiterated by Mary Warren on April 21.
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Such references to “tearing to pieces,” which would become nearly as ubiquitous in subsequent months as sightings of the “black man,” were exceedingly rare in the previous history of afflicted accusers and confessors in old and New England. In the past, tormented young people had tended to describe Satan’s beguiling promises of fine clothing, wealth, and “ease” from “burdensome” labor or had simply complained of current tortures, rather than emphasizing Satan’s warnings of greater suffering to come. The threat of dissection, although not wholly unique, assumed a greater prominence in 1692 than in comparable episodes in other times and places.
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The warning therefore appeared to have a particular resonance for the late-seventeenth-century residents of Essex County, and the context of the Second Indian War could well provide the explanation for its salience. Returning captives and witnesses to wartime atrocities told tales of how companions and family members had been brutally slain, scalped, and occasionally cut to shreds. That was the fate, for example, of Robert Rogers, one of the Salmon Falls prisoners, who tried but failed to escape his Wabanaki captors. He was stripped naked, tied to a stake, and partially burned. Then the Indians pulled the fire away from him and “Danc’d about him, and at every Turn, they did with their knives cut collops of his Flesh, from his Naked Limbs, and throw them with his Blood into his Face. When he was Dead, they set his Body down upon the Glowing coals, and left him tyed with his Back to the Stake.” Horror stories such as these spread rapidly through northern New England’s gossip networks. The fear of Indians that pervaded the region thus included not just apprehensions of death or captivity but also of torture and dismemberment. In light of the perceived alliance between Satan and the Wabanakis, such suffused dread could easily have been vocalized in what became the commonplace description of the devil’s threats to “tear [the afflicted] to pieces” if they did not comply with his demands. Indeed, in recounting a series of dissection narratives, Cotton Mather explictly termed the Wabanakis “Devils,” thus linking the Indians to Satan precisely in this context.
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After Deliverance Hobbs was taken away, the magistrates questioned the woman she said had recruited her into the devil’s legion: Sarah Averill Wilds. Sarah, who had been born in England and migrated as a child with her parents to Ipswich, became the second wife of John Wilds, a well-off Topsfield resident, in 1663. A member of the Topsfield church, she was about sixty-five years old in 1692. The magistrates’ perfunctory examination showed that Deliverance’s confession had convinced them of Goody Wilds’s guilt, and their order to hold her for trial seemed even more predetermined than the others issued that day. “Here is a clear evidence,” Hathorne proclaimed, “that [you have] been not only a Tormenter [but that] you have caused one to sig[n the] book, the night before last.” The sufferers had fits, cried out that they saw Wilds’s apparition on the beam in the meetinghouse, and “con[firmed] that the accused hurt th[em].” In addition, Parris reported, “she was charged by some [with] hurting John Herricks mo[ther].” Testimony taken later revealed the origin of that charge, which was obviously being much discussed by local gossipers. Sarah’s purported victim had been the deceased Mary Gould Reddington, sister of John Wilds’s first wife, Priscilla Gould. Nearly two decades earlier Mary had complained to many people (including John Hale) that Sarah Wilds “assaulted [her] by witchcraft . . . bewitched her & afflicted her many times greiviously.”
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Another examinee that day was more fortunate. Ann Jr. identified Nehemiah Abbott Jr., a Topsfield weaver in his late twenties, after a naming test like that employed with Goody Hobbs. Ann then declared that she saw his specter “upon the beam.” Just such a vision of Deliverance had preceded
her
confession, Hathorne informed Abbott, “and if you would find mercy of God, you must confess.” Abbott nevertheless proclaimed his innocence “in all respects.” Hathorne admonished the afflicted, “charge him not unless it be he,” and doubts seemed to arise in their minds. “This is the man say some, and some say it is very like him,” Parris recorded in his transcript. Ann reiterated her identification, but Walcott retreated: “He is like him, I cannot say he is he.” Lewis then insisted, “it is not the man.” With Ann now asking, “be you the man?” and an impasse apparently developing, the magistrates decided that Abbott should be sent out of the room while they questioned “several others.” When he returned following the additional examinations, the afflicted (Parris noted) “in the presence of the magistrates and many others discoursed quietly with him, one and all acquitting him, but yet said he was like that man, but he had not the wen they saw in his apparition.” The justices then dismissed Nehemiah, who thus became the one person known to have been freed permanently in 1692 after formal questioning. Mercy’s decisive role in creating the outcome by declaring Ann Jr.’s initial identification faulty revealed that she had effectively assumed the leadership of the primary group of accusers.
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One of those interrogated in Abbott’s absence was Mary Easty, the third Towne sister to be accused. Williams, Walcott, Hubbard, Lewis, and Putnam Jr. all charged her with afflicting them on the spot, while John Indian cried that he “saw her with Goody Hobbs.” In the face of her accusers, who alternately could not speak, mimicked her movements, and suffered from fits, Mary Easty proclaimed her innocence. Then what had caused these torments? Hathorne pressed her. “It is an evil spirit, but wither it be witchcraft I do not know,” Easty replied. Hathorne, pronouncing it “marvailous” that she should not think them bewitched “when severall confess that they have been guilty of bewitching them,” ordered that she join her sisters in jail.
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