In the Devil's Snare (2 page)
Yet beyond those similarities lie many unique elements. Initially, the sheer numbers of accusers and accused alone cry out for explanation, because the next-largest New England witchcraft incident, in Hartford in the early 1660s, involved at most eleven formally accused malefactors.
18
In this regard the Salem outbreak rivaled the major seventeenth-century witch-hunts in England or Scotland, all but one of which it also postdated—another singular characteristic.
19
Likewise, the geographical reach of the accusations was remarkable; all prior episodes in the region involved only one or two adjacent towns, whereas the 1692 accused came from twenty-two different places, fifteen of those in Essex County. Although the crisis began in Salem Village and the trials took place in Salem Town, a plurality of the accused (more than forty) lived in Andover. Thus the term
Salem witchcraft crisis
is a misnomer;
Essex
County witchcraft crisis
would be more accurate. 20
Moreover, key accusers in previous witchcraft cases had most often been adult men; at Salem, the key accusers were women and girls under the age of twenty-five. And those accusers then charged witches not with committing maleficium, but rather with torturing and tempting them spectrally, complaints only rarely before heard in New England. Accusers most commonly lived near those they targeted; in 1692, by contrast, the Salem Village accusers had frequently never previously encountered the people they said had been tormenting them in spectral form.
21
Notably, a small but significant number of the accused also failed to fit the well-established patterns identifying likely witches: some belonged to the church, and a few prominent men and women broke the mold entirely.
22
Then there is the matter of the many convictions and executions. As other scholars have demonstrated, judges in Massachusetts (and, for that matter, in England and the other colonies) commonly expressed skepticism about witchcraft prosecutions and proved reluctant to convict—or subsequently to execute—accused witches. The special Court of Oyer and Terminer established to handle the first set of witchcraft prosecutions not only convicted every defendant but also oversaw the executions of almost all of them (see appendix 1). Such a result also requires explanation.
23
The conviction and execution rates are rendered even more difficult to interpret because the young women who instigated the Salem witchcraft outbreak were precisely the sort of people commonly given short shrift by the high-status men who served as magistrates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Indeed, the lower-status men who sat on grand and petty juries also usually paid little attention to complaints registered by youthful females.
24
Why, then, would judges and jurors find these young women’s extraordinary accusations credible? As daughters and servants who occupied the lower ranks of household hierarchies, their normal role was to be seen and not heard, to tend to others’ needs, and to acquiesce in all tasks required of them. Yet during the crisis others tended to
them,
and magistrates and clergymen heeded
their
words. As the historian Jane Kamensky has observed, they turned their society and the courtroom “topsy-turvy,” assuming roles denied to young women under normal circumstances.
25
What could have led to such a remarkable result?
One more element of the Salem crisis is equally notable: the relative speed with which opinions of the investigations and prosecutions reversed themselves. Usually, witchcraft suspicions lingered for years after the allegations were first raised in courtrooms. Even when defendants were acquitted, their neighbors commonly continued to believe in their guilt and initiated new charges against them. But within just a few short weeks in October 1692 a considerable share of the once-significant support for the trials seems to have evaporated. Few doubted the existence of witches or accused the afflicted persons of dissembling, but even so the validity of the convictions was called into question soon after the completion of the fourth session of the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Within five years, one judge and twelve jurors formally apologized for their roles in the affair, and within two decades the Massachusetts government also acknowledged its responsibility for what were by then viewed as unjust proceedings. The legislature at that time voted to compensate both survivors of the trials and the descendants of people who had been jailed or executed.
26
To explain these anomalies it is necessary to abandon the intense focus on Salem Village common to most studies and to place the witchcraft crisis in the broader context of Essex County and northern New England. As the northeasternmost jurisdiction of the Bay Colony, Essex and its primary port, Salem Town, were deeply involved in the affairs of neighboring frontier settlements. In the 1660s and early 1670s, English outposts in coastal Maine and New Hampshire were at once prosperous, small, and isolated. Fishermen, farmers (especially raisers of livestock), fur traders, and sawmill operators resided quite peacefully alongside the Wabanaki peoples who farmed, hunted, and fished in the interior river valleys. But then King Philip’s War (1675–1678) despoiled the northeastern frontier as well as southern New England, and just a decade later, late in the summer of 1688, another violent conflict erupted in Maine.
What the northern settlers called the First and Second Indian Wars dramatically changed their circumstances for the worse. Flourishing communities were wiped out and people and their property holdings destroyed. Families that had lived in Maine for two or three generations and had sunk deep roots in the soil were either killed or forced to abandon their homes, leaving behind houses, livestock, cultivated fields, and treasured possessions. The consequences were all the more devastating because they happened twice in quick succession: war broke out again just as refugees who had originally fled Maine in 1676 had successfully reestablished themselves and were once more expanding their settlements. In 1690, colonial forces suffered one defeat after another, and the frontier was again largely abandoned. It took decades before northern Maine was fully resettled, because although the second war ended in 1699, a third began just three years later.
The now-brittle pages of
York Deeds,
which contain depositions offered in the first decades of the eighteenth century, vividly convey a sense of the calamitous losses suffered by Maine families during the two wars. The elderly deponents laconically described a once-familiar world torn asunder by lethal conflict. Hannah Hazelton (York, 1728): “two of my Brothers . . . were both killed by the Indians as they were looking after their Cattle.” Mary Cock (Boston, 1719): John Layton lived at Kennebec River for “many Years before the Indians drove him from thence as they did many Famalies at the Eastward at the same time.” John Lane (Gloucester, 1734): Henry Donel “made Fish” on an island in Casco Bay for more than fifteen years “untill he was Prevented by the Indian War.” Henry Libby (Scarborough, 1726): Joseph Whinek “was killed & his Daughter with him by the Indians & was buried on his own Land.” James Ross (Salem, 1734): he was born and raised in Falmouth “till drove from thence in the first Indian Warr & that he removed thither again between the First & Second Warr and lived there about Six Years untill he was taken [captive] in the Second Warr.”
27
The proximity of Essex County and Salem to Maine and New Hampshire necessarily involved their residents in both Indian wars. The county’s towns served as temporary havens for many of the refugees during and after the first war and as permanent residences after the second. Essex County militiamen were frequently pressed into service on the Maine frontier; the county’s vessels and sailors transported men and supplies to northeastern harbors, often bringing fleeing families back; its local military and political officials conveyed messages back and forth between Boston and the frontier, sometimes appending their own observations to the texts they forwarded in either direction.
28
Not surprisingly, therefore, many people involved in the witchcraft crisis had intimate experience with the Indian wars (see appendix 2). Some of the accused, including two people who were executed, had lived in Maine, and some prominent accused men had regularly traded with or fought against the Indians. Judges, jurors, and witnesses alike had links to the northeast; among them were investors in frontier lands and leaders of militia units, all of whom had personal knowledge of northeastern affairs. Many of those involved in the crisis, it turns out, had known each other previously on the frontier. Most notably, as already mentioned briefly, a significant number of the key accusers and confessors came from Maine. Refugees from one or both wars, they— like many others who fled the frontier with them—sought shelter in Salem Village and nearby Essex County towns. Their families and lives shattered by the vicious frontier warfare, several of these young women were residing as servants in other people’s households. For them, even more than for the longtime residents of Essex County, fears of Indian attack were ever-present, reviving terrifying memories of sudden raids that had killed relatives and friends and obliterated prosperous settlements.
In the Devil’s Snare, then, contends that the witchcraft crisis of 1692 can be comprehended only in the context of nearly two decades of armed conflict between English settlers and the New England Indians in both southern and northern portions of the region. The ongoing frontier war, and the multiple fears it generated—in Maine and New Hampshire, in Essex County, and in Boston itself—thus supplies the answer to the question I posed earlier: why was Salem so different from all previous witchcraft episodes in New England?
A NOTE IN WHICH THE AUTHOR ADDRESSES THE NATURE OF PORTIONS OF HER ARGUMENT AND EXPLAINS THE REASON THEREFOR
At several points in this book I employ such phrases as “they must have thought,” or “they could well have concluded,” or “they must have discussed. . . .” Although the overall evidence for my thesis is, I believe, convincing, for certain aspects of the argument I have only inferences, not the references to letters or diaries I would have preferred to cite. One reason for that lack of crucial pieces of evidence has been alluded to in this introduction: opinion swiftly and sharply turned against the trials. Based on my experience in searching for documents pertinent to the 1692 crisis, I believe that certain key pieces of evidence must subsequently have been destroyed, either by the participants themselves or by their descendants.
In support of that contention, I offer two examples. I posit herein the existence of extensive contemporary notes kept by adult observers of the “afflicted girls,” especially the Reverend Samuel Parris.
29
Yet just one page of such a notebook survives today, and only because it seems to have been seized as evidence by an official immediately after it was composed. The other notes are no longer extant, and few of Parris’s papers have survived at all. Nor, for that matter, have the papers of a majority of the judges apparently survived, despite the fact that they were among the most powerful and prominent men in the colony. Those papers that still exist reveal little about the trials.
Most significant, one of those judges, Waitstill Winthrop, corresponded regularly with his brother, Fitz-John Winthrop, in the 1680s and 1690s. But letters from 1692 and 1693 are mysteriously missing from the large Winthrop family collection in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Francis Bremer, editor of the Winthrop Papers, concurs with me that a descendant most likely purged the collection of “embarrassing” material before donating it to the MHS.
30
I do not argue that Massachusetts officials engaged in a concerted conspiracy of silence, but rather that participants or their descendants decided individually, at different times and places, to remove traces of involvement in the trials from the written record.
31
I am convinced, for example, that Samuel Parris himself must have burned his notes, and that some officials almost certainly had a hand in the destruction of records that implicated them in dubious decisions. The eradication of the rest of the vanished material could have occurred at any time. But happen it did. The holes in the documentary record are too consistent and specific to be explained in any other way.
32
CHAPTER ONE
Under an Evil Hand
JANUARY 15–MARCH 6, 1691/2
MONDAY, JANUARY 25, 1691/2; York, Maine. About noon, in heavy snow, when (in the words of a contemporary historian) “the Inhabitants were in their unguarded Houses, here and there scattered, Quiet and Secure,” about 150 Indians led by Madockawando, a sachem of the Penobscot band of the Wabanakis, took York completely by surprise. One by one they captured most of the town’s garrisoned houses and split into small parties to burn houses and to kill livestock and people. Captain John Floyd, who with a small troop of militia rushed to the scene from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, found on his arrival that “the greatest part of the whole town was burned & robed,” with nearly 50 killed and another 100 captured. Among the dead was the Reverend Shubael Dummer, who was, Floyd reported, “barbarously murthered stript naked Cut & mangled by these sons of Beliall.” The Indians seemed to have known when and where to strike, and help had arrived much too late.
1
From the neighboring town of Wells, the Reverend George Burroughs described “the Sorrowfull tideings” from York for the leaders of Massachusetts. “The beholding of the Pillours of Smoke, the rageing of the mercyless flames, the insultations of the heathen enemy, shooting, hacking, (not haveing regard to the earnest supplication of men, women, or Children, with sharpe cryes & bitter teares in most humble manner,) & dragging away others, (& none to help) is most affecting the heart.” Burroughs concluded that “God is still manifesting his displeasure against this Land, he who formerly hath set to his hand to help us, doth even write bitter things against us.”
2
When he wrote that letter George Burroughs would not have known that about a week before the attack on York, two little girls living in the house of the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem Village—a house Burroughs had once occupied—had begun to have strange fits. Nor, unless he had the occult powers eventually attributed to him, would he have known that as a result just three months later he too would personally experience “bitter things.”
SALEM VILLAGE
In the winter of 1691–1692, Salem Village, a thinly populated rural precinct bordering the crowded, bustling seaport of Salem Town, simmered with contention, much of it revolving around the church. Its pastor, the Reverend Samuel Parris, had become the focal point for considerable discontent, which his actions in the coming months would magnify rather than dampen. Indeed, the strange behavior of the girls in his household beginning in mid-January would, as he later reflected, set off a “horrid calamity (which afterwards, plague-like, spread in many other places).”
3
Land grants in the mid to late 1630s had initiated movement into the area that eventually became known as Salem Village, which was located north and west of the town center. Salem, the first permanent settlement in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was founded in 1626 on a peninsula commanding a superb natural harbor, and the town quickly became the focal point of the area around Cape Ann. Immigrants flowed in during the 1630s, and furs and fish flowed out. The newcomers moved inland to found new towns and to settle in Salem’s own hinterland, first referred to simply as “the Farms.”
4
As the decades passed, friction developed between the Town and the Farms. Residents of Salem Town wanted the tax revenues contributed by residents of the Farms; for their part, the Farmers, though usually outvoted by the more numerous Town dwellers, sought to avoid civic obligations in the distant Town. By the early 1670s the Farmers’ fight for greater autonomy focused on their desire to build their own meetinghouse and to support their own minister. Like other residents of outlying areas of colonial New England settlements, they complained of the long weekly journey to the town center to attend church services, arguing that they should be able to establish their own parish. In October 1672 the Massachusetts General Court agreed to their request. For years thereafter, however, Salem Town still claimed the right to assess Farmers for ecclesiastical expenses, and the Farms, later Salem Village, did not become the independent town of Danvers until 1752.
5
Ironically, the long-sought meetinghouse and minister—the subject of so much contention with Salem Town—also proved to be a major source of discord within Salem Village itself. Whether because strife in the Village came to focus on the church or because the Villagers made inappropriate choices of clergymen, each of the first four ministers who served the Village failed to earn consistent support from his parishioners. The first minister, James Bayley—a young Harvard graduate when hired in 1672—lasted the longest, until 1680. George Burroughs, who had fled Falmouth, Maine, in 1676, during the First Indian War, succeeded Bayley, but in early 1683 agreed to return to his former congregation. Deodat Lawson, an English immigrant, served in Salem Village only from 1684 to 1688; in the winter of 1688–1689 he ministered to troops on a campaign against the Indians in Maine, then settled in Boston. Finally, the Reverend Samuel Parris, whose ministry would prove the most controversial of them all, was hired in June 1689 and resigned approximately seven years later after a long and bitter struggle within the Village. Thus when one of the Andover men who confessed to witchcraft in the late summer of 1692 explained to the examining magistrates that the devil and his witches had targeted Salem Village for destruction “by reason of the peoples being divided & theire differing with their ministers,” no one would have been surprised by his statement.
6
Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have argued persuasively that the Village was so contentious because of its anomalous status, neither wholly independent of nor wholly dependent on Salem Town. “Structural defects in its organization,” they observe, “rendered the Village almost helpless in coping with whatever disputes might arise.” The two hundred or so adult residents of Salem Village, in short, did not differ from settlers in other New England towns in being more cantankerous, but rather in not having any local means of resolving their quarrels. Deprived of formal decision-making bodies controlled by Villagers, they always had to appeal to outside authorities—to Salem Town, to the General Court, to synods of ministers, to arbitrators or mediators—to achieve solutions to their conflicts. Furthermore, persistent boundary disputes with neighboring towns kept tempers flaring on all sides.
7
When some Villagers formally organized a church in November 1689, leading to Samuel Parris’s ordination by neighboring clergy, they added fuel to the fire. Parris, born in England but raised largely in Barbados, attended Harvard for several years in the early 1670s but before completing his studies returned to Barbados to settle his deceased father’s estate. After failing to establish himself as a merchant first in Barbados and later, in the 1680s, in Boston, he accepted the post as Salem Village pastor and sought ordination.
8
Before his arrival, although successive Village ministers preached regularly to the congregation, the precinct had no “church” as Puritans understood it—a covenanted body of saints selected from the wider community. A clergyman could only be ordained by a church, and only an ordained clergyman could administer communion to its members or baptize babies. The organization of a church, with twenty-six original members in addition to Parris himself, created a formal, lasting division in the ranks of Villagers. Nothing more dramatically symbolized that division than the dismissal of nonmembers from the meetinghouse after the sermon on sacrament days, before the members took communion together. Adding to the exclusionary atmosphere was the church’s decision in early 1690 to reject the so-called Halfway Covenant, which permitted the baptism of infants born to parents who had themselves been baptized but who had not formally joined a church. In Salem Village, the much-desired sacrament of infant baptism, already denied to those Villagers who did not belong to other nearby churches, would be limited to children who had at least one church-member parent. In his sermons, Parris likewise tended to stress the sharp distinctions between church members and other folk. Perhaps understandably, therefore, by late 1691 discontent with Parris’s ministry permeated the nearly three-fourths of adult Villagers who had not joined the local church. That discontent took the form of refusing to contribute to his salary or to supply him with firewood, and of organizing for his removal. Parris responded primarily by sharpening his attacks on his opponents.
9
Beginning in November 1691, Samuel Parris preached a sermon series on the first verse of Psalm 110: “Sit thou at my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool.” Emphasizing spiritual warfare between the saved and the damned, he told his congregation on January 3, 1691/2, that “the Church is separated from the world,” and that “it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it all down.” The devil, he asserted, was “the grand enemy of the Church,” assisted by “Wicked & Reprobate men,” presumably including his many detractors in Salem Village.
10
That was the last sacrament-day sermon Parris’s nine-year-old daughter Betty and his somewhat older niece Abigail Williams heard before they began to behave strangely.
11
“SADLY AFFLICTED”
A few days after January 15, Abigail Williams fell ill. Her cousin Betty may have sickened first or, more likely, soon thereafter.
12
In any event, Samuel Parris, his wife Elizabeth, and other observers quickly realized that this was no ordinary illness. The girls were “sadly Afflicted of they knew not what Distempers,” wrote the Reverend John Hale of neighboring Beverly, the only independent eyewitness to these events who later described them in print. The children “were bitten and pinched by invisible agents; their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any Epileptick Fits, or natural Disease to effect.” Further, “sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choaked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move an heart of stone, to sympathize with them, with bowels of compassion for them.”
13
Parris, like any concerned parent or guardian under such circumstances, consulted physicians, “yet still they grew worse,” Hale recalled. Finally, after what Parris described as a period of “several weeks,” a doctor—believed to be William Griggs—concluded that the girls were “under an Evil Hand.” The neighbors “quickly” accepted the diagnosis, according to Hale, deciding that the children were bewitched.
14
William Griggs, an elderly, probably self-taught medical practitioner, was the only physician in Salem Village in 1692. He and his second wife, Rachel, lived in Rumney Marsh (Revere) during the 1660s, then spent more than a decade in Gloucester before moving to Salem Village sometime between 1685 and 1689. Although neither joined the Salem Village church, they almost certainly supported Samuel Parris. Rachel (though not her husband) had been a member of Boston’s First Church, the same church Samuel Parris joined during his years in Boston; moreover, William Griggs Jr., the oldest son of his father’s first marriage, also a First Church member after 1670, undoubtedly knew and associated with Parris while both resided in the town. Accordingly, it seems likely that Parris would have consulted William Griggs and trusted his judgment.
15
Two years later, Samuel Parris reflected that the appearance of such afflictions “first in my family” was “a very sore rebuke, and humbling providence.” That he also thought so in early 1692, and that Dr. Griggs had diagnosed witchcraft by mid-February, is suggested by the contents of Parris’s two sacrament-day sermons on February 14. Continuing to preach on Psalm 110, verse 1, he spoke of how God was “sending forth destroyers” as a consequence of men’s “slighting of Christ.” He reminded his congregants—who certainly knew of the girls’ fits—that Jesus “Governs his church, not only by his word & spirit, but by his Rod, & afflictions: therefore we are to beware of fainting when we are chastened, or despising the Rod.” Undoubtedly reassuring himself as well as his listeners, Parris described the “eternal life” Christ promised to believers; “Satan would pluck them out of my hand,” he intoned, “but . . . shall never be able to do it.” He thus informed Villagers, and himself, that his faith would allow him to bear God’s afflicting rod and that he understood that God “chastens us for our profit.”
16
During these weeks, Parris, following the standard religious advice in such cases, engaged in “Fasting and Prayer,” not only by himself but also in conjunction with others. Hale described “two or three private Fasts at the Ministers House, one of which was kept by sundry Neighbour Ministers” (surely including himself).
17
Unknown to the clergymen, however, Mary Sibley, a church member who lived near the parsonage and who therefore saw the children’s sufferings in person, decided to try some traditional countermagic rather than rely on the spiritual methods pursued by Parris and his colleagues. She directed Parris’s Indian slave couple, Tituba and John, in the making of a witchcake. Mixed from the children’s urine and rye meal, baked in the ashes, it was then fed to the family dog. The ingestion of such a witchcake, it was believed, would lead to the discovery of a witch’s identity. And that indeed appeared to happen. Hale and other contemporaries concur that, after the countermagic was employed, “the Afflicted persons cryed out of the Indian Woman . . . that she did pinch, prick, and grievously torment them, and that they saw her here and there, where no body else could.”
18
Parris was horrified when he learned what had been done without his knowledge. Somewhat more than a month later, before communion on March 27, he admonished Goodwife Sibley in front of the church, charging that “by this means (it seems) the Devil hath been raised amongst us, and his rage is vehement and terrible, and when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows.” She—a church member!—had, he exclaimed, gone “to the Devil for help against the Devil,” an action “accounted by godly Protestants . . . as diabolical.” Abashed and repentant, Sister Sibley acknowledged “her error and grief for it”; the church accepted her apology.
19
Still, Samuel Parris now confronted an even more pressing problem than before, for his daughter and niece had accused his female Indian slave of bewitching them. According to John Hale, after the witchcake incident and the initial accusation, Parris sought the best advice available to him, summoning “some Worthy Gentlemen of Salem, and some Neighbour Ministers [again surely including Hale himself] to consult together at his House.” The men “enquired diligently into the Sufferings of the Afflicted,” concluding along with Dr. Griggs that the fits were “preternatural,” displaying “the hand of Satan.” But they counseled Parris against taking hasty action; he should instead “sit still and wait upon the Providence of God . . . and to be much in prayer for the discovery of what was yet secret.” And they took a further step, questioning Tituba herself. She admitted making the cake and said that “her Mistress in her own Country was a Witch” who had taught her some countermagic. But, she declared, “she herself was not a Witch.”
20
Who was Tituba, and what was “her own Country”? Many scholars have addressed those questions, some at great length. Every surviving piece of contemporary evidence identifies her as an Indian. Later tradition transformed her into an African or half-African slave, but the contemporary unanimity is convincing.
21
No late-seventeenth-century source describes her geographic origins, though a mid-eighteenth-century one does. Thomas Hutchinson, who in composing his history of the Bay Colony in the 1760s had access to documents that no longer exist, declared unhesitatingly that she was “brought into the Country from New Spain.” More precision than that is probably impossible. Still, Hutchinson’s statement might well mean that Tituba came from Florida or the Georgia Sea Islands, where most of the people termed “Spanish Indians” in early New England originated.
22
Tituba, then, was almost certainly not born in New England, although her husband John might have been (nothing is known of his background). She was thus not of Wabanaki origin. Yet the surviving records consistently refer to her as “Tituba Indian,” “the Indyen woman,” “titibe an Indian Woman,” or the like, implying that Villagers viewed her ethnicity as an inseparable part of her identity. Less than a month after the devastating raid on York and following more than three years of unrelenting frontier warfare, in other words, the first person identified as a witch in the Salem crisis of 1692 was someone known to all primarily as an Indian. The girls, asked who tormented them, thus named a woman with whom they were intimately acquainted, and who could be seen as representing the people who were then “tormenting” New England as a whole.
23
According to Hale, just “a short time” after the “Worthy Gentlemen” questioned Tituba and advised Parris to await God’s providence, “other persons who were of age to be witnesses, were molested by Satan, and in their fits cryed out upon Tituba and Goody O[sborne] and S[arah] G[ood] that they or Specters in their Shapes did grievously torment them.” If the surviving documents accurately indicate the date of those others’ initial fits, they took place on February 25. Hale’s qualifying phrase “persons who were of age to be witnesses” revealed an important aspect of the crisis hitherto unremarked upon by the participants. In the 1690s, following legal doctrines laid down by Sir Matthew Hale about two decades earlier, English jurists had begun to hold that, as a general rule, children under fourteen were incapable of testifying under oath in court in capital felony cases, although exceptions could be made and adults could describe young children’s behavior. The youth of Parris’s daughter and niece made them possibly questionable witnesses, and so no legal steps were taken against Tituba or other possible witches until older sufferers emerged.
24
The Salem Village residents who had their first recorded fits on February 25 and who attributed them to an apparition of Tituba were Ann Putnam and Elizabeth (Betty) Hubbard. Ann (often called Jr.), the twelve-year-old daughter of Thomas and Ann Carr Putnam, church members and staunch supporters of Samuel Parris, also failed to meet the standard age criterion for testimony in capital cases. Her father, generally known as Sergeant Thomas because of his post in the local militia, was a veteran of King Philip’s War and the oldest male of the third generation of Putnams in Salem Village. Collectively, the Putnam family had prospered in the Village, its branches controlling substantial property by the 1690s. Yet subdivisions through inheritance had led to decreasing sizes of individual landholdings. The afflicted girl’s mother, also Ann (usually called Ann Sr.), had been born in the northern Essex County town of Salisbury, the daughter of George Carr, a wealthy shipbuilder. Probably initially drawn to Salem Village because her older sister Mary was the wife of James Bayley, Ann Carr married Sergeant Thomas Putnam in 1678.
25
Because Betty Hubbard was the first afflicted person older than fourteen, her torments could well have tipped the balance toward legal action. A seventeen-year-old indentured maidservant of Dr. William Griggs, she was also most likely an orphaned or impoverished great-niece of his wife, Rachel Hubbard Griggs. Betty had for a time lived in Boston as a servant of Isaac Griggs, a son of the doctor’s first marriage. But when Isaac and his wife died in 1689, William paid his son’s executor for the time remaining on Betty’s contract. As a member of the household of the man who had originally diagnosed witchcraft, Betty—although not living as close to the parsonage as were the Putnams—would have been intimately familiar with the fits experienced by Abigail Williams and Betty Parris.
26
Between February 25 and February 28, Betty and Ann Jr. identified not only Tituba but also Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good as their tormentors. They described being “most greviously tortor[ed]” by the apparitions of Osborne and Good by “pinching and pricking . . . dreadfully.” Those who witnessed Betty’s and Ann’s agonies surely felt the same compassion for them as Hale and others had felt for the initial sufferers.
27
The two additional women thus named as possible witches had both lived in Salem Village for years, although neither was born there. Sarah Warren Prince Osborne, aged about forty-nine in 1692, had moved to Salem Village from Watertown when she wed Robert Prince (whose sister married into the Putnam clan) in 1662. After her first husband’s death, she scandalized Villagers by marrying Alexander Osborne, a young servant whose indenture she purchased. She and her second husband then became involved in a prolonged dispute (still unresolved in 1692) with the father and uncle of Sergeant Thomas Putnam, who were the executors of Robert Prince’s estate. Prince had wanted to pass some land on to his two sons, who were Ann Jr.’s second cousins, while the Osbornes sought to acquire it for themselves. Sarah Solart Poole Good, born in Wenham, was only thirty-eight years old, but she otherwise fit the classic stereotype of a witch. From a prosperous family, she had become impoverished as a consequence of two unfortunate marriages and an unfairly withheld inheritance. Known to be dissatisfied with her lot in life, she had antagonized even those who tried to help her and had aroused suspicions that she was engaging in malefic practices, bewitching her neighbors and their livestock.
28
The first three accused witches, then, could be characterized thus: one (Sarah Good) who had been previously suspected of witchcraft by her neighbors; one (Sarah Osborne) who was involved in a legal battle with the family of an accuser; and one (Tituba) who was linked to the Indian war. Similar patterns would appear again and again throughout the crisis.
The Afflicted Girls and Fortune-Telling
Readers of In the Devil’s Snare who are familiar with the traditional story of Salem witchcraft will have recognized that something has been missing from my narrative: an account of the afflicted girls’ fortune-telling circle in the winter of 1691–1692. Usually, authors begin books on Salem with a tale of bored children and teenagers experimenting together with occult practices, especially a venus glass, sometimes under the guidance of the slave Tituba. As Bernard Rosenthal has definitively shown, however, no contemporary source links Tituba to fortune-telling by the afflicted.
29
Furthermore, the contemporary evidence for group fortune-telling by the young women who eventually were afflicted in Salem Village cannot withstand scrutiny. Aside from a vague comment by Cotton Mather, the entire interpretive superstructure rests on one passage from John Hale’s
Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft
(1702)
.
In 1692, he tells us, “I knew one of the Afflicted persons, who (as I was credibly informed) did try with an egg and a glass to find her future Husbands Calling; till there came up a Coffin, that is, a Spectre in likeness of a Coffin. And she was afterward followed with diabolical molestation to her death; and so dyed a single person.” Hale follows that story immediately with another tale, of a woman he was “called to pray with, being under sore fits and vexations of Satan,” who had “tryed the same charm,” and whom his prayers released from “those bonds of Satan.”
30