In the Devil's Snare (19 page)
And that, even more than the continuing reorientation of the afflicted girls’ households around their needs, constituted a role reversal of major proportions. The magistrates had by now come to rely almost wholly on the core group of accusers (Lewis, Putnam Jr., Walcott, Hubbard, Williams, Sheldon) for evidence of witchcraft during the examinations. Time and again Hathorne had done his best to interrogate suspects carefully in order to expose the contradictions and falsehoods in their stories that would reveal their involvement with the devil. Yet he rarely succeeded. Instead of being uncovered by the magistrates’ questioning, even before May 9 witches were being revealed by the fits, visions, and mimicking movements of the afflicted Villagers. In the weeks and months after the examination of George Burroughs, the process moved even farther along the same path, as spectral confessions to the bewitched and appearances of the dead turned into witchfinding, and as the magistrates ceased all attempts to conduct meaningful examinations of the accused. Moreover, on May 14 Governor William Phips finally arrived to implement the new charter. A new phase of the crisis began, involving not only examinations but also trials.
NATHANIEL SALTONSTALL (HAVERHILL) TO [MASSACHUSETTS GOVERNOR AND COUNCIL], APRIL 30, 1692:
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Capt Daniel Lad came to my lodging & . . . informed [me] that Joseph Ayers a Beaver Hunter belonging to this Towne, who had been from home about 6 weekes upon this or some other designe, hunting, was return’d, & before severall 6 or 7 persons, he being himself present, did declare & affirm, that in his rang[e] he was at Quabaug, & there divers times did see Indians at that place, & mett 3 men there, whome he called Indian Traders, who had frequent Correspond[ence] with the Indians; & traded with them Amunition, & brought in Beaver from them often times. . . .
I charg’d Daniel Lad with this report as a falshood; He then told me, He had it as abovementioned, & That he did purposely acquaint me with it, as a matter grevious to him, so that farther enquirie might be made, & our own people not suffered to supply the enimie with materialls for the destruction of this Country, & keeping the Warr on foot.
If this report be true, There is no hopes of an end of this vicious Warr, as it now lies upon the Outward frontier Townes, & may, before it is over, peirce our verey bowells.
CHAPTER FIVE
Many Offenders in Custody
APRIL 30–MAY 31, 1692
THROUGHOUT LATE APRIL and early May, the specters of those already in jail continued to appear regularly to the afflicted. For instance, on Saturday evening, April 30, Sarah Vibber saw Sarah Good standing near her bed. The apparition, she said, “Looked upon my child 4 years old and presently upon it the child was stracke into a great fit.” Just two days later, Goody Vibber accused Good of attacking her “by presing my breath almost out of my body” and of again tormenting the child, which “cried out and twisted so dreadfully by reson of the torture . . . that it gott out of its fathers Armes.” So too on May 2 and 3, Rebecca Nurse’s apparition came to torture Mary Walcott. On her second visit Goody Nurse’s specter readily admitted having had “a hand in” the deaths of several people, including Benjamin Holton and Rebecca Sheppard of the Village.
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Despite such repeated appearances, the most important developments during May pertained not to existing complaints but to new ones.
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The month saw a dramatic increase in the number of suspects in jail, as the pace of accusations quickened following the identification of George Burroughs as the witches’ leader. The arrival of Governor William Phips in midmonth generated further waves of complaints. As Massachusetts officials finally began to prepare for conducting trials, more charges flooded in to the Essex County magistrates. Although the names of “usual suspects” resembling Bridget Bishop and Dorcas Hoar appeared among the newly accused, the afflicted persons also began to target prominent men and women, who might best be termed “unusual suspects.” Such accusations have not received much attention from scholars, in part because they have appeared so incongruous and in part because they have not fit easily within common categories of analysis.
For example, some of these people, although arrested and jailed, were never tried for witchcraft, and so legal historians (who study trials) have ignored them. Many were men, and so feminist historians (who have focused on accused women) have also overlooked them. Further, the names of some were recorded only by the later critics of the trials. If from the outset male gatekeepers found accusations wholly lacking in credibility, those initially named were never formally charged with malefic practices. Because legal proceedings against almost all such people were attenuated for one reason or another—some who were arrested, for instance, broke out of jail before they could be tried—surviving court records contain little information about them. Thus researchers must look elsewhere for insight into their accusations.
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Historians have frequently characterized the complaints against wealthy and prominent figures as examples of “overreaching” by the afflicted late in the crisis. Many accounts then interpret such charges as helping to discredit the core group of young accusers, contending that the iconoclastic complaints were a key factor in bringing the crisis to a close. As Bernard Rosenthal has pointed out, however, such arguments are mistaken. The relevant accusations actually began to emerge in mid- to late May, soon after the examination of Burroughs, and they continued to be offered regularly, if sporadically, thereafter. What linked them all—and what nearly all historians have failed to recognize—was the relationship of their targets to the Indian wars on the Maine frontier. Scattered among other accusations of more stereotypical “witches,” and lacking the extensive documentation of prosecutions more vigorously pursued, these crucial allegations of complicity with Satan have never received the attention they deserve. Several will be discussed at length in this chapter in the appropriate chronological context.
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TWO MALE WITCHES AND TWO MORE CONFESSORS
At the end of April, the specter of John Willard, a Village resident who had earlier helped to “tend” the child Ann Putnam, began to appear to his former charge, to whom he revealed his culpability for a horrid crime. After tormenting her for several days in a row, Ann Jr. declared, Willard not only “sett upon me most dreadfully” but also indicated that “he had whiped my little sister sarah to death and he would whip me to death if I would not writ in his book.” Subsequently, Ann saw the infant Sarah’s apparition. The baby, who died at approximately six weeks of age in December 1689, appeared to her “crieing out for vengance against John Willard,” along with the specter of “John Wilknes first wife,” who declared that Willard had caused her death as well. (John Wilkins, whose young wife Lydia died in January 1688/9, was a cousin of Willard’s wife, Margaret.)
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Facing these disturbing charges and the prospect of examination and jail, Willard sought assistance from his wife’s grandfather, the eighty-one-year-old Bray Wilkins. After Ann Jr. named him, Willard “came to my house greatly troubled,” Wilkins later recalled, “desiring me with some other Neighbours to pray for him.” Wilkins explained to his grandson-in-law that he was on his way out of the house on business, but would comply with his request “if I could come home before night.” Unfortunately, his return was delayed, and so Wilkins did not act on his promise. No noticeable consequences ensued immediately, but on May 4 Wilkins encountered Willard in Boston at a dinner at a relative’s house attended by “many friends,” including the Reverend Deodat Lawson and his second wife. During the dinner, Wilkins reported, Willard “lookt after such a sort upon me as I never before discerned in any,” and almost immediately Wilkins was “taken in a strange condition,” finding himself in utter “misery,” unable to urinate and feeling pain “like a man on a Rack.” Lawson and the other dinner guests were “all amazed,” but Wilkins believed he knew the cause of his sudden illness: “I was afraid that Willard had done me wrong.”
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Wilkins’s suspicions could only have been confirmed in the days that followed. While he remained in Boston, a woman thought to be “skilfull” in medical matters called to help him. Well aware of the events in Salem Village, she inquired “whither none of those evil persons had done me damage,” then expressed her fear that witchcraft was creating his mysterious ailment. Three or four days later Bray Wilkins chose to return home, even though he was afraid the journey would endanger his life. There he learned that his seventeen-year-old grandson Daniel, who had earlier declared that “it were wel If the sayd Willard were hanged,” had also fallen ill. An unnamed physician (later described as “the french Doctor”) declared the sickness “preter natural” and would not prescribe any remedies. On May 9, Susannah Sheldon reported a vision of four dead people, who “turned As Red As blood” when they accused John Willard of murdering them. The next day, she saw Willard’s apparition suckling “two black piggs on his breasts” while Elizabeth Colson of Reading (first accused a month earlier by Mary Marshall) “suckled As it Appeared A yellow bird.” Susannah asked Willard how long he had been a witch. After he replied “twenty years,” she said that the specters “kneelled to Prayer to the Black man with a loung Crouned hat” before vanishing.
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That same May 10, without a formally recorded complaint, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin issued a warrant for John Willard’s arrest on a charge of witchcraft. Anticipating such an order, Willard had already fled the Village and could not be located. That day, also without a recorded complaint, the magistrates additionally ordered the arrest of a seventeen-year-old Villager, Margaret Jacobs, and her grandfather, George Jacobs Sr., the old man whose specter had tormented Mercy Lewis on the night of April 20.
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Those additional arrests stemmed from a confession the magistrates elicited in the late afternoon or early evening of May 9, after the examination of George Burroughs. Sarah Churchwell, George Jacobs’s maidservant, confessed to having signed the devil’s book. Her statement, no longer extant, implicated her elderly, crippled master, who walked with the aid of two canes, and it must have named his granddaughter as well. Mercy Lewis later claimed that at Sarah’s examination she “perswaded her to confess” and that consequently on the night of the ninth Jacobs had tortured her “most cruelly” by beating her with his canes. In a later confession, Sarah indicated that, like Mary Warren, she had once been afflicted. When she was “unable to doe her service as formerly,” her angry master called her “bitch witch & ill names.” Although Sarah did not say so, George Jacobs Sr. (like John Proctor under similar circumstances) had probably beaten her severely.
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In all likelihood, Sarah Churchwell’s experience paralleled Mary Warren’s. As an afflicted maidservant with a skeptical master, she was never formally listed as tormented. When her condition improved, the other accusers would have insisted that she had surrendered to the devil, signing his book in order to escape from torture. The day after Sarah’s confession, Abigail Williams thus declared that George Jacobs Sr.’s specter had disclosed to her having recruited six people—his maidservant Sarah Churchwell, his granddaughter Margaret, her parents, and Philip and Mary English—into the ranks of the witches.
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FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1675; SACO.
Warned of an impending attack, John Bonython and his family abandoned his imposing house on the north side of the Saco River to take refuge with Major William Phillips in his fortified garrison on the opposite bank. They left just in time. The next morning, Richard Waldron later reported, “the Indians rifled and burnt Severall houses,” including Bonython’s. The party of about forty Wabanakis then crossed the river and moved half a mile upstream to set fire to Phillips’s valuable grist- and sawmills, planning “thereby to draw them out of the house, and soe to Surprise both them & itt.” But Major Phillips, forewarned, instead prepared to defend his garrison house, now filled with about fifty people: fifteen men and thirty-five women and children. Among them were Bonython’s daughter and son-in-law Eleanor and Arthur Churchwell and his granddaughter, Sarah, who was then about eight years old.
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The Wabanakis surrounded the house and, “Creeping deckt with ffearns and boughs,” began to shoot at any movement they saw inside. They wounded several men, including Major Phillips himself, but otherwise made little progress in their aim of capturing the garrison. Major Waldron vividly described the Indians’ plan to burn the house and how it was thwarted purely by chance: they gott a pair of old truck wheels and ffitted them up with boards & Slabbs ffor a barricadoe to Safeguard the Drivers thereby Endeavouring to burn the house haveing prepared combustible matter as birch rinds pitchwood Turpentine & powder . . . before they came at the house there was a little wett ground into which the Wheels sunk & that obstructed their driveing itt fforward they Endeavouring to gett it out of the dirt again by turning a little on one Side thereby layeing themSelves open to them in the house which oportunity they Improved & made them quitt their work and ffly.
Despite the failure of their attempt to burn the settlers out of the garrison, the Wabanakis continued to shoot at it all night, then finally marched away the next morning, Sunday, September 19. Although everyone in the house survived, their fortuitous escape from a terrible death must have been one of the major reasons they, including William Phillips and his family, quickly sought havens elsewhere. The Bonythons and the Churchwells moved to Marblehead, where John died in February 1676/7. Whether the Churchwells returned to Saco in the 1680s is unknown, as is the fate of Sarah’s mother; Arthur survived until 1710. Sarah probably ended up in Salem Village because she was related by marriage to the Ingersoll family and thus to Mary Walcott.
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Wartime losses had accordingly transformed the granddaughter of one of the wealthiest and most distinguished men in Maine into an unmarried maidservant in a backwater village. She had good reason to resent her fate and to blame both the Wabanakis and inept colonial leaders for her unenviable existence.
On May 10, 1692, although the constable could not find John Willard, he brought in Margaret Jacobs and her grandfather. That same day the magistrates examined George Jacobs Sr., apparently at Thomas Beadle’s tavern in Salem Town. “Here are them that accuse you of acts of witchcraft,” the justices began, referring to Abigail Williams and Sarah Churchwell. The latter charged that Jacobs had afflicted her at Ingersoll’s inn the previous night. She also acquiesced in the examiner’s statement that “when you wrote in the book you was showed your masters name.” Jacobs insisted on his innocence, and when asked to explain the reported actions of his specter he contended, like Susannah Martin, that “the Devill can go in any shape.” Sarah took an active part in her master’s interrogation, calling on him to confess, telling him he had led “a wicked life,” and revealing that he did not conduct family prayers. When asked why, he responded that he could not read, an answer the magistrates deemed unacceptable. Directed to say the Lord’s Prayer, “he mist in severall parts of it, and could not repeat it right after Many Trialls,” which was seen as a nearly certain sign of guilt. Yet the old man still resolutely denied being a witch, or having persuaded his son George Jr. and granddaughter Margaret to sign Satan’s book.
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The next day, also at Beadle’s tavern, Margaret Jacobs confessed that “she was a witch or that she had Set her hand to the Devil’s booke.” Months later, she explained that at her examination the sight of the afflicted falling down “did very much startle and affright me,” and that when she exclaimed that she “knew nothing, in the least measure, how or who afflicted them,” the magistrates told her, “without doubt I did, or else they would not fall down at me.” The justices also warned her, she revealed, that “if I would not confess, I should be put down into the dungeon and would be hanged, but if I would confess I should have my life.” Accordingly, her “own vile wicked heart” had led her to try to save her life not only by confessing but also by identifying both George Burroughs and her grandfather as fellow witches.
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Margaret’s recollection of what Hathorne and Corwin told her at her May 11 examination marks the earliest explicit record of what eventually became one of the magistrates’ most controversial tactics: preserving the lives of confessors so that they could testify against others, while simultaneously prosecuting people who refused to admit their guilt. That the justices adopted this procedure about three weeks after Deliverance Hobbs became the first to name many names indicates that they quickly realized how important such confessions could prove to be in building cases against the suspects.
While Margaret was admitting her guilt on May 11, a man named Joseph Flint went to inform George Jacobs Sr., who was being held in another room at the tavern, about what his granddaughter was saying. Flint later described the old man’s reaction to that news. “She was charged not to confess,” Jacobs exclaimed, then hastily explained that he meant “if she were Innocent and yet Confest she would be accessary to her owne death.” But both Flint and the magistrates interpreted the outburst as an indication of guilt, and it led Hathorne and Corwin to interrogate Jacobs again immediately. At that second examination, Ann Jr. and Abigail Williams “had each of them a pin stuck in their hands, and they said it was this old Jacobs,” Parris noted. Ann also claimed that Jacobs’s specter told her he had been a witch for forty years, and that he promised “she should be as well as his Grand daughter” if she would write in his book. The magistrates asked for Jacobs’s reactions to the testimony of Lewis and Williams that he had afflicted them on April 20 and May 10, respectively. Those statements were “false,” he declared; “I know not of it, any more than the child that was born to night.”
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Parris’s observation that pins were found stuck into the hands of two of the afflicted during George Jacobs Sr.’s second examination constitutes the first point in the trial records that such manifestations can be precisely dated. Physical effects of the apparitions had been noted before, but teeth marks or even bleeding from a pinch differed from actual pins. Some historians have cited such incidents as evidence of fraud on the part of the core group of accusers. As Rosenthal has remarked, if a specter did not jab the pins into the girls’ bodies, then either the girls themselves or a confederate had to have done so. Yet the afflicted, if sufficiently mentally disturbed, could have stuck themselves with pins (or injured themselves in other ways) without conscious or rational intent, so the appearance of pins in their bodies does not necessarily prove consistently fraudulent behavior on their part. Still, it does indicate that some complainants may have been deliberately faking on some occasions.
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With George Jacobs Sr., his granddaughter, and Sarah Churchwell safely in custody and the constable out searching for John Willard—whose apparition nevertheless reemerged that same May 11 to torment both Lewis and Hubbard—Hathorne and Corwin decided the next day to return to the Salem Town jail to reexamine earlier confessors. The magistrates thereby learned many new details about the spectral conspiracy they believed was confronting New England.
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