In the Devil's Snare (25 page)

The English statute, entitled “An Acte against Conjuration Witchcrafte and dealinge with evill and wicked Spirits,” defined as a capital offense occult practices that employed “any Witchcrafte Inchantment Charme or Sorcerie, wherebie any person shalbe killed destroyed wasted consumed pined or lamed in his or her body, or any parte thereof.” Anyone who used similar charms or sorcery to locate hidden treasures or lost items, to hurt livestock or other property, or to try but fail to injure a victim, would be liable for a jail term of a year and a stint in the pillory. A second such offense would make this lesser crime capital. Benefit of clergy was not allowed in these cases, but a widow could still receive her dower and children their inheritance.
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Joseph Keble’s
An Assistance to Justices of the Peace,
published in London in 1683, constituted the most up-to-date law book available to the judges. Keble’s discussion of witchcraft incorporated wholesale Michael Dalton’s language in
The Countrey Justice,
and Dalton’s analysis in turn rested on material he had compiled from Richard Bernard and another book published early in the century, Thomas Potts’s
The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster
(1613). Dalton dealt not only with the subject already discussed in chapter 1—“presumptions” that could properly lead to the interrogation of a suspected witch—but also with the much more difficult conundrum of how to find adequate
legal
proof of a suspect’s guilt. Keble reprinted Dalton’s summary of the magistrate’s dilemma in such cases: “Now against these Witches being the most cruel, revengeful, and bloudy of all the rest, the Justices of the Peace may not alwayes expect direct evidence, seeing all their works are the works of darkness, and no witnesses present with them to accuse them.” And so Keble/Dalton offered “certain observations” (based primarily on conclusions drawn from Bernard and Potts) to assist in the “better discovery” and conviction of such malefactors.
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Keble/Dalton first addressed the issue of familiar spirits, commonly in the shape of animals, which sucked a teat on the witch’s body. “And besides their sucking, the Devil leaveth other marks upon their body,” Keble observed— perhaps blue or red spots or other anomalies, which were “insensible, and being pricked will not bleed.” Devil’s marks would often be found “in their secretest parts, and therefore require diligent and careful search,” but when located would prove that a person had indeed made “a league with the Devil.” A witch’s property should be searched for “Pictures of Clay or Wax,” charms or potions, or books about witchcraft. Also important would be “the Testimony of other Witches, confessing their own Witchcrafts, and witnessing against the suspected, . . . that they have been at their meetings; that they have told them what harm they have done, &c.” So too, “the examination and Confession of the children (able & fit to answer), or Servants of the Witch,” concerning the witch’s malefic activities, would carry great weight. But best of all would be “their owne voluntary Confession . . . of the hurt they have done, or of the giving of their souls to the Devil, and of the Spirits which they have.”
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Reading such directives, the judges would have recognized that Hathorne and Corwin had made an excellent start on compiling evidence necessary for conviction. Several people had admitted their guilt, identifying other witches who also attended the specters’ malefic meetings. Some children and servants had, under questioning, implicated their parents or employers. The existence and use of images (poppets) had also been described. Yet a nagging problem loomed: many suspects did not confess directly to the magistrates. Instead, their specters had admitted guilt to the afflicted Villagers. How should such spectral confessions be assessed? And could the torments the accusers said they had suffered at the hands of apparitions be accepted as evidence of witchcraft? Reassuringly, the great Sir Matthew Hale had answered yes to that last question in the Lowestoft case in 1662, and he had also employed a touch test to indicate guilt. But legal counsel alone could not address all the issues the court would have to consider.

When the newly appointed justices Samuel Sewall, Wait Winthrop, and Peter Sergeant attended Sabbath services on May 29, they accordingly surely looked to their pastor, Samuel Willard, for further guidance on these difficult matters. Willard, a member of the same Harvard class as Nathaniel Saltonstall, succeeded Thomas Thacher as the minister of Old South after Thacher’s death in 1678. The following year, he married his second wife, Eunice, the daughter of Edward Tyng, the magistrate and wealthy landowner with whom George Burroughs was aligned in Casco. In the 1660s, as previously noted, Willard served as minister at Groton, and in that capacity he had observed and reflected upon the diabolic possession of his servant, Elizabeth Knapp. Consequently, the Reverend Mr. Willard appeared remarkably well positioned to speak authoritatively on the 1692 witchcraft crisis: not only was he a learned and respected preacher who had had past experience with an afflicted girl, but he also had at least secondhand knowledge of George Burroughs, believed to be the witches’ leader.
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His expectant congregation would not have been disappointed, because on the afternoon of Sunday, May 29, Samuel Willard began a sermon cycle based on the text 1 Peter 5:8–9: “Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour: whom resist steadfast in the faith.”
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In that sermon, which Sewall carefully recorded in his notebook, Willard asserted that “there is a Devil,” indeed “innumerable” devils, although the word was “used in the singular nu[m]ber.” Proof of the existence of devils came from the scriptures, from the fact that “diabolical operations” have been “evident to such who are intelligent,” and from “the Confession of those who have been in covenant with the Devil.” Satanic “evil angels” were “individual, rational or intellectual beings” whom God had banished from heaven to live in this world. Willard instructed his listeners that “they are invisible substances they do oft assume shapes which they do present to us.”

Only through “Errour or folly” would people deny that devils existed, the clergyman insisted. Skeptics gave Satan “great advantage against men,” for “none are more led captive by the Devil then such who believe there are no such beings.” The “innumerable company of Devils” strove to “turn the world up side down,” but people should take heart from the fact that “God overules & enlarges or Stratons their Power as he pleases.” Satan, Willard warned, “is allwayes setting himself to do man harm,” because he envies God and hates Christ’s gift of salvation to humanity. In pursuit of his goals, the devil even “employes men to mischief one another. There are witches to tempt others to the same diabolical art & to afflict others.”

Willard ended his sermon with a disquisition on “the woful condition of all unregenerat men,” who were uniformly “under the Power of the Devil.” Perhaps he selected the text from 1 Peter, which related so directly to current events, as a means of reaching this conventional conclusion in a way that would have an unusually powerful effect on his congregation. But for Sewall, Winthrop, and Sergeant, their pastor’s words could well have had quite a different primary resonance. He had assured them in the strongest possible terms that devils existed, that they commonly employed witches to “mischief” their targets, and that devils, although usually invisible, “do oft assume shapes which they do present to us.” If the judges contemplated those statements carefully over the next few days (as the faithful were supposed to do while rereading their sermon notes), they would have approached their judicial responsibilities with confidence in the righteousness of the enterprise.

The same must also have been true of John Richards, their colleague on the bench, who a few days later received a thoughtful letter dated May 31 from
his
pastor, Cotton Mather, about the “noble service” to which God had called him: “the service of encountering the wicked spirits of our air, and of detecting and confounding of their confederates.”
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Predicting that “our good God will prosper you in that undertaking,” Mather informed Richards that the congregation of the Second Church had been “fasting and praying before him for your direction.” In such cases, God “doth usually answer with the most favorable assistances,” the clergyman assured his congregant, citing a comparable instance where a fast had brought “a remarkable smile of God upon the endeavors of the judges to discover and extirpate the authors of that execrable witchcraft.”

Mather began the substance of his missive with the central issue, advising Richards not to “lay more stress upon pure specter testimony than it will bear.” When he was certain or had “good, plain, legal evidence that the demons which molest our poor neighbours do indeed represent such and such people to the sufferers,” that constituted a “presumption,” but not yet sufficient proof that the suspects were witches. The judges should not proceed upon “the bare supposal of a poor creature’s being represented by a specter,” for they would thereby be granting too much “credit” to “diabolical representations.” That admonition seemed clear and straightforward enough, but Mather undercut his argument by contending that God would “ordinarily” quickly vindicate an innocent person whom an apparition falsely represented. Mather pointed out the “dreadfully real” impact of the witchcraft: “our dear neighbors are most really tormented, really murdered, and really acquainted with hidden things, which are afterwards proved plainly to have been realities.” The witches responsible for such effects were just as guilty as a man who killed his neighbor by stabbing him in his heart. But how to prove who had employed devils “in this work of darkness”?

Like Dalton and Keble, Cotton Mather indicated that a “credible confession” was the best evidence of guilt (and he assured Richards that a man of his “sagacity” would have no difficulty distinguishing reliable from unreliable confessions). Obtaining such confessions could be difficult, however, Mather admitted. Even though God might “thunder-strike their souls” and cause witches to confess unexpectedly, the magistrates should not rely solely on that providence. “Cross and swift questions” might work, or interrogating witches in a way that would expose and thereby forfeit their dependence on the devils for answers. Revealing their inability to recite the Lord’s Prayer properly could be helpful because subsequently asking witches to explain that failure could well cause them to confess. But even without confessions all was not lost. Witches’ own words—if they demonstrated “such a knowledge of woeful circumstances attending the afflicted people, as could not be had without some diabolical communion”—could prove guilt. So, too, wounds given to specters and found on the bodies of suspects provided “very palpable” evidence. Poppets, if located, constituted more proof, and beyond that: “I am thinking that some witches make their own bodies to be their puppets.” Thus if their movements caused “the same thing, presently, and hurtfully, and more violently done by an unseen hand unto the bodies of the sufferers,” then that too exposed the malefice of witches. Finally, witch marks, if identified as “magical” by expert physicians, were worth considering.
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Although Cotton Mather cautioned Judge Richards against relying too heavily on “pure specter testimony,” his summary of acceptable evidence encompassed certain spectral phenomena—for example, a witch’s seemingly innocuous movements injuring the afflicted, or wounds appearing on the body of a suspect after an apparition had been struck with a weapon. Then, too, while remarking that an inability to repeat the exact words of the Lord’s Prayer alone should not be regarded as conclusive, Mather thought that interrogating suspects about such a failure could reveal guilt. In his willingness to employ searches for witch’s marks, the minister furthermore validated traditional means of identifying witches. His position on the latter test accorded with the advice the judges received from reading Joseph Keble’s treatise, but Mather went beyond Keble (and Dalton) in endorsing a reliance on physical manifestations with spectral origins. In the absence of the best evidence, confession, the clergyman clearly hoped to identify “palpable” proof of invisible phenomena. In general, the justices would follow Keble’s prescriptions, but they would also adopt Mather’s expansive definition of the admissible proofs of witchcraft.

THE TRIAL AND EXECUTION OF BRIDGET BISHOP

After calling the Court of Oyer and Terminer into session at the Salem Town courthouse on Thursday, June 2, Chief Judge William Stoughton administered the oath of office to Thomas Newton and Stephen Sewall. And then the proceedings began with a meeting of the “Grand Enquest” (the grand jury). Probably because the evidence against Bridget Bishop seemed the most compelling, Newton decided to start with her. Witnesses were also summoned to testify against Rebecca Nurse and John Willard; a group of men examined the bodies of Willard and John Proctor, unsuccessfully searching for witch marks; and a women’s jury was convened to similarly examine several female suspects.
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The women’s jury, led by a Salem Town chirurgeon and apothecary, Dr. John Barton, issued two reports on June 2. After inspecting the bodies of Bridget Bishop, Rebecca Nurse, and Elizabeth Proctor “by dilligent search,” the jurors initially explained that they found “apreternathurall Excresence of flesh between the pudendum and Anus much like to Tetts & not usuall in women . . . & that they were in all the three women neer the same place.” By contrast, they saw nothing unusual on the bodies of Alice Parker, Susannah Martin, or Sarah Good, whom they also searched. Several hours later, a reexamination revealed that the strange teatlike “piece[s] of flesh” on the first three women had disappeared, being replaced by “dry skin,” and also that Susannah Martin’s breast, which in the morning “appeared to us very full,” was now “all lancke & pendant.” The jurors’ findings implied that in the interim the four women had all been sucked by their animal familiars.
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While the women’s and men’s juries were looking closely at the suspects’ bodies, the grand jury was hearing testimony from witnesses who told stories about Bridget Bishop’s bewitchments in years past.
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The afflicted Villagers and their adult male supporters (Thomas Putnam, Nathaniel Ingersoll, Samuel Parris) must also have testified before the grand jury, describing the torments the girls suffered on the day of Bishop’s examination, because the five surviving indictments all refer to April 19. Drawing on the words of the English witchcraft law, the jury charged that Goody Bishop had during her interrogation “Tortured Afflicted Pined, Consumed, wasted: & tormented” Mercy Lewis, Abigail Williams, Betty Hubbard, Ann Putnam Jr., and Mary Walcott.

The precedent thereby established was to be followed throughout the trials. Although testimony on a variety of topics would be accepted as evidence against suspects, the indictments, which consistently invoked the phrasing of the 1604 statute, commonly pertained to spectral torments visited upon the afflicted in the presence of witnesses, which usually meant during examinations. Undoubtedly Thomas Newton, experienced lawyer that he was, chose this method of proceeding because the indictments thus appeared to satisfy the legal requirement for at least two witnesses to the same act of witchcraft. Although some historians have questioned the validity of the form of these indictments, they resembled others issued by English courts about the same time.

After the grand jury had issued the indictments, a trial (petty) jury convened to hear the case against Goody Bishop.
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Cotton Mather, who did not attend the proceedings but who had access to documents no longer extant, described the trial in
Wonders of the Invisible World.
“There was little occation to prove the
Witchcraft,
” he wrote, “it being evident and notorious to all beholders.” The problem was “to fix the
Witchcraft
on the Prisoner at the Bar.”

First, he indicated, the bewitched people testified that “the
Shape
of the Prisoner did oftentimes very grivously Pinch them, Choak them, Bite them, and Afflict them, urging them to write their Names in a
Book,
which the said Spectre called,
Ours.
” One of the afflicted further attested that Bishop’s specter had transported her to the side of a river and threatened to drown her if she would not sign the book, while others affirmed that Bishop’s apparition had bragged of killing “sundry Persons, then by her named.” Susannah Sheldon revealed having that very day witnessed a confrontation between Bishop’s specter and the
“Ghosts”
of a pair of twins, who told her “to hir face that she had murthered them in setting them into fits wher of they dyed.” As to the truth of this charge, Mather observed, “there was in the Matter of Fact but too much suspicion.”

Various witnesses then described the torments of the afflicted at Bishop’s April 19 examination, recounting how they were “struck down” if she looked at them and how they “painfully” mimicked the movements of her body. “Many of the like Accidents now fell out, while she was at the Bar,” Mather reported. One man recounted the incident in which Jonathan Walcott’s sword thrust at Bishop’s apparition had seemingly torn her coat. And then the confessor Deliverance Hobbs attested that Goody Bishop had tried to persuade her to deny her confession and to that end had “whipped her with Iron Rods.” She also placed Bishop at “a General Meeting of the Witches, in a Field at
Salem-
Village,” revealing that Bishop “partook of a Diabolical Sacrament in Bread and Wine then administred.”

To make it “unquestionable” that Bridget Bishop had committed the acts charged in the indictments, Mather wrote, “there were produced many Evidences of OTHER
Witchcrafts,
by her perpetrated.” Ten witnesses attested at the trial to Goody Bishop’s past malefic practices. Some of the tales dated back to the late 1670s; they involved disappearing money, strange accidents, spectral appearances by Bridget Bishop in her own or animal shapes (especially to men at night when they were in bed), the unexplained sickness of livestock, and the mysterious deaths or chronic illnesses of children after acrimonious encounters with her. A man and his son also testified that in 1685, while working to “take downe the Cellar wall of The owld house she formerly Lived in,” they had discovered “Severall popitts made up of Raggs And hoggs Brusells with headles pins in Them with the points out ward.” (Mather remarked that Bishop could not give a “reasonable or tolerable” explanation of the poppets.)
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After all the witnesses had testified, the jury of women reported finding “a preternatural Teat” on Bridget Bishop’s body. She was then given a chance to defend herself (no criminal defendant was allowed an attorney under English law at the time) but, Mather insisted without going into detail, was caught in
“gross Lying”
seven times during her statement. Chief Justice Stoughton then turned the case over to the jury, instructing them thus about the law: “they were not to mind whether the bodies of the said afflicted were really pined and consumed, as was expressed in the inditement; but whether the said afflicted did not suffer from the accused such afflictions as naturally
tended
to their being pined and consumed, wasted, etc. This, (said he,) is a pining and consuming in the sense of the law.” How long the jury deliberated is unknown, but Bridget Bishop was convicted and sentenced to hang.
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Reconstructing the Trials

Because the official records of the Court of Oyer and Terminer have been lost, it has been thought impossible to know how the witch trials themselves were conducted. As has been seen in this book, surviving transcripts of preliminary examinations reveal much about the early phases of the crisis. Many historians, though, have equated examinations, or the investigation of what the participants called “presumptions,” with the later search for sufficient legal proof of guilt, which was another task entirely. Piecing together existing fragments of information can allow at least a partial reconstruction of the actual trials. Cotton Mather and Thomas Brattle— supporter and critic of the proceedings, respectively—concur, for example, on the standard sequence of events in the courtroom. First the afflicted were questioned (and frequently suffered from fits, just as they had during the examinations). Then confessors were brought in, and next, witnesses to past acts of maleficium by the defendant were permitted to tell their stories. The results of searches for witch’s marks would be presented, and finally the accused folk would offer whatever defense they could. Further details also emerge from the accounts of people (notably Deodat Lawson) who attended and later wrote about specific trials.
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But what, precisely, was said to grand and petty juries by all those witnesses? When the foreman of the grand jury or Stephen Sewall, clerk of the court, wrote on the surviving documents “sworn before the grand inquest” or “jurat in curia” [sworn in court], the answer is obvious. The response to that question is much less clear when the document at issue has no notation or only one. What does such an absence mean? Does no notation indicate that this statement was never presented to either jury? Does one mean that it was heard by one body, but not the other?

Interpretation is both assisted and complicated by Stephen Sewall’s “Memorandum” on a document in the case of Rebecca Nurse: “There were in this tryall as well as other Tryalls of the Same Nature Severall Evidences viva voce which were not written & so I can give no Copies of them Some for & Some against the parties Some of the Confessions did also mention this & other persons in their Severall declarations.” In short, even if all the written records survive for a particular case (which itself is nearly impossible to determine), some testimony was probably presented orally and its contents cannot now be recovered.
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But to say that any narrative of the trials constructed today is therefore necessarily incomplete is not to say that the exercise is meaningless. In analyzing the legal material for this book, I have reached the following conclusions, which are reflected in all the trial narratives herein.

First, most of the informal narratives prepared by the complainants or their adult supporters, although they may have been read to the accused at examinations, were
not
later introduced into evidence in court. Very few such narratives have notations indicating they were presented to either grand or petty juries. Notably, for example, Susannah Sheldon’s many lurid visions seem not to have been recast as depositions, which could well indicate prosecutorial skepticism about the validity of her testimony. Second, formal statements sworn at the grand jury could also have been presented “viva voce” to the petty jury, even though Sewall did not consistently write “jurat in curia” on all of the records. Third, and conversely, evidence labeled as “sworn in court” but carrying no notation by the grand-jury foreman was probably not considered by that body. Since the petty jury sometimes heard cases a month or two after the grand jury (see appendix 1), the prosecutor had time to recruit additional witnesses to fill in gaps in his case. Most documents in this category contain maleficium stories.

Fourth, confessors probably appeared in most cases, testifying orally rather than in writing. I have assumed that such people repeated to the petty jury the contents of previously recorded confessions. Fifth, sworn testimony by adult supporters of the afflicted children and teenagers probably carried great weight in the trials, for many of their statements are recorded as “jurat in curia.” Sixth, since criminal defendants were never allowed to swear to their innocence (for fear they would lie and endanger their immortal souls), exculpatory evidence was probably also not presented under oath and thus would not have been designated as “sworn.” That, coupled with Sewall’s comment about oral testimony for defendants, has led me to assume that any pro-defense statements found today in the surviving documents were in fact considered by the petty jury.

During the June 2 court session, probably after Goody Bishop was convicted and taken away, Ann Carr Putnam publicly described under oath yet another remarkable vision. Several people had appeared “in winding sheets” at her bedside to accuse John Willard, Martha Corey, and/or William Hobbs of killing them and to threaten to “tare Me to peices” if “I did not Goe & tell mr Hathorne.” Subsequently, Willard’s apparition admitted to her having caused thirteen deaths, one of them that of his wife’s relative, Lydia Wilkins. Six of those he admitted killing were children, including the Putnams’ baby, Sarah. (Ann’s spectral vision thus reconfirmed accusations first broached by her daughter in late April.) But even though the grand jury the next day took additional testimony and issued indictments against both Rebecca Nurse and John Willard, the Court of Oyer and Terminer adjourned its first session on June 3 without conducting another trial. Perhaps Thomas Newton had decided that he needed more time to collect evidence in these and other pending cases.
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Following Bridget Bishop’s conviction, the number of reported bewitchments and accusations declined significantly, and people in Salem Village must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. Yet the afflictions did not stop completely. The very day Bishop was found guilty, a Village woman named Joanna Childin reported seeing the ghosts of two people who accused Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Good of killing them. The next day, Sarah Vibber described how John Proctor’s apparition came to her “urging me to drink: drink Red as blood.” On Saturday, June 4, several witnesses attested that Job Tookey, a sailor who had served in King Philip’s War and had once been stationed at Black Point, boastfully told them that “he had Learneing and could Raise the divell when he pleased.” Moreover, Tookey (who had probably encountered George Burroughs in Maine) asserted that “he would take mr Burrows his part.” When he was questioned three days later by the Salem magistrates, Tookey declared that “I knew not then what I said”; perhaps he was claiming to have been drunk. After being charged with a number of murders by Elizabeth Booth and three other afflicted persons (each describing visions of ghosts accusing Tookey and “cryeing out for vengeance”), he was sent to jail.
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Then, on June 8, Booth saw eight apparitions of dead people accusing the Proctors, John Willard, or Martha Corey of having caused their deaths. Unlike most ghosts, who simply made charges, these explained to Elizabeth why they had been killed. The deaths stemmed either from neighborly exchanges gone wrong or, in three cases, from people’s failure to follow Elizabeth Proctor’s advice on medical matters. For example, the specter of Booth’s stepfather, Michael Shaflin, charged that Goody Proctor killed him because she had not been consulted soon enough during Shaflin’s fatal illness, nor had the family subsequently followed her advice. Other disagreements caused by “som diferance in a rekninge,” by failures to supply or pay for certain items, or to mend a broken spinning wheel rounded out the list. That such minor, commonplace disputes and differences of opinion could end up being interpreted as motives for murder—at least when one of the parties was a suspected witch—reveals a great deal about the mindset of people in Essex County in early June 1692. Residents saw the potential for malefice everywhere, and petty quarrels now appeared serious enough to describe formally to the august Court of Oyer and Terminer.
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