In the Devil's Snare (39 page)

The attention scholars have paid to that core group of afflicted Villagers has largely obscured the significant role played by confessors. With the exception of Tituba and the partial exception of Mary Warren, historians have missed the centrality of confessions during the crisis. That of Abigail Hobbs created the link to the Maine frontier; that of her stepmother, Deliverance Hobbs, provided the template for later similar revelations; and the torrent of confessors from Andover and elsewhere convinced Cotton Mather (and surely many others), if he or they still needed convincing, that the afflicted were telling the truth about their spectral visions. Certain people (Warren, Churchwell, both Hobbs women, and many Andover residents) were both afflicted and confessors, as the two groups in effect merged into one in the latter stages of the crisis. Moreover, such confessors as Mary Post and Samuel Wardwell actively encouraged others to join them in admitting guilt.

Recall that English legal experts pronounced confessions the best evidence of complicity with the devil; that confessions uniformly appeared to confirm the afflicted accusers’ descriptions of diabolic sacraments; and that Mather in
Wonders of the Invisible World
declared that if so many confessions were false, “all the Rules of Understanding Humane Affayrs are at an end.” Indeed, Thomas Brattle in his October critique of the trials observed that “many of our neighbours” continued to insist that the confessions were truthful. Thus in attributing responsibility for the crisis, if that is one’s goal, the confessors cannot be overlooked. (See appendix 4 for the confessors.)

An inquiry focusing specifically on the afflicted people must be split into two parts: the role played in initial accusations and that in convictions. Here the ages of the accusers mattered because of legal questions about the validity of sworn statements by witnesses under fourteen years of age. This narrative has shown that in several instances charges brought by children had to be supported by statements from older sufferers before authorities moved to arrest and question the suspects.
The children and
teenagers o fered initial accusations, but without support from other teenagers
and adults the charges would not have led to trials and convictions.
When the trials began, age (and general credibility) then meant more than at earlier stages of the proceedings.

Thus, John Indian, an afflicted slave of unknown age, played an important role at several examinations, but never appeared before a grand or petty jury. A tormented teenager with lurid visions, Susannah Sheldon, rarely testified, whereas another offering stories that fit only the standard patterns, Betty Hubbard, was repeatedly called on to speak in court. Even more significant, the legal proceedings relied heavily on several adult witnesses: Ann Carr Putnam (whose descriptions of her March afflictions seem to have been critical in establishing the credibility of the accusations), Sarah Vibber (who frequently offered sworn testimony), and the adult male Putnams and Samuel Parris, who under oath repeatedly described the sufferings of the afflicted Villagers.

There still remains an assessment of those I have termed herein the core group of accusers. Seventeenth-century observers declared them, and others like them in previous decades, to be possessed, obsessed, or bewitched; in the eighteenth century, as Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum pointed out in
Salem Possessed,
religious fervor and the conversion experience seemed a more likely explanation; and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “hysteria” (for the earlier era, a phenomenon centered in women’s sexual organs) appeared an appropriate diagnosis. Recently, people seem more attracted to biological or medical explanations—hence the persistent search for some sort of “natural” or chemical cause of the afflictions, a search I believe to be misdirected. Even if the afflicted had ingested a hallucinogen, that would explain nothing of significance about the
content
of their visions. And there is always the possibility of fraud, as Bernard Rosenthal has forcefully argued in
Salem Story.

Where, in the end, do I stand on such issues? The first afflictions of the little children, I have no doubt, were genuine (that is, not deliberately or rationally faked). What caused the girls’ fits is unknown and probably unknowable, but such behaviors had been previously recorded and similarly handled at other times in the preceding century, and earlier, too, they had spread to other youngsters in the same or nearby households. Many subsequent afflictions also—especially those experienced by frontier refugees—were at least arguably genuine. Certainly with respect to Mercy Lewis, Susannah Sheldon, Sarah Churchwell, Mercy Short, and perhaps others as well, the phenomenon known today as post-traumatic stress disorder comes to mind as a plausible explanation for their behavior.

Then there are the physical manifestations (bleeding, pins, teeth marks) to consider. On the origins of those, I am an agnostic. Did witnesses like Deodat Lawson
really
see teeth marks on the bodies of the afflicted, or were they merely too suggestible? Surely the reports of bleeding and pins stuck in flesh can be believed, but what caused such phenomena? If the afflicted injured themselves, did they necessarily do so with conscious intent? Since I have no claims to psychological expertise, I cannot answer that question definitively, nor will I offer even a speculative response. But, as Rosenthal has contended, Susannah Sheldon in all likelihood could not have tied her own hands so tightly they could not be easily released. And the actions of
some
of the afflicted for
some
of the time (most obviously Sarah Vibber, and possibly Mary Walcott) do indeed seem contrived. Prearranged collusion is probably the only explanation for the reported unanimity of the afflicted in separately reporting seeing the ghosts of George Burroughs’s first two wives during his trial.

Whatever their mental state at the beginning of the crisis, it is plausible to hypothesize that as the months went on some of the afflicted accusers, reveling in the exercise of unprecedented power, began to augment and enhance their stories. That retrospectively they told tales of being afflicted by non-Village witches in statements
not
supported by the sworn testimony of adult relatives who had observed and taken notes on their earlier behavior suggests that such enhancements were in fact occurring. None of them, however, ever admitted fraud, in contrast to some falsely “afflicted” predecessors in England.

The little girls, then, initiated the crisis, but it would not have persisted without the participation of the older teenagers and (especially) the afflicted and confessing adults, whose age and maturity lent weight to the children’s accusations. And ultimately, whatever the reasons for the behavior of afflicted and confessors alike, the governor, council, and judges of Massachusetts must shoulder a great deal of the blame for allowing the crisis to reach the heights that it did. As In the Devil’s Snare has argued, they attempted to shift the responsibility for their own inadequate defense of the frontier to the demons of the invisible world, and as a result they presided over the deaths of many innocent people.

Epilogue

The Second Indian War
dragged on until 1699. A peace agreement negotiated by Sir William Phips in August 1693 lasted only a year. Major attacks by the Wabanakis and the French on Oyster River (1694), Pemaquid (1696), and Andover and Haverhill (1697) followed before the war ended. A European treaty (the Peace of Ryswick), proclaimed in Boston in December 1697, halted most but not all of the fighting. A local truce was negotiated once again in Maine.
¹

Sir William Phips,
beset by critics on all sides for his actions as governor, was recalled to England and left Massachusetts in mid-November 1694. He died in London in February 1694/5, shortly after his arrival and before the Lords of Trade and Plantations could consider either the complaints against him or his defense. In 1701, his widow married Peter Sergeant, formerly one of the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
²

Samuel Parris
was forced to leave Salem Village in the summer of 1697 by a campaign led by the Nurse family and other relatives of the executed. He moved first to Stow, then to five other Massachusetts communities, alternately preaching, teaching school, farming, and running retail establishments. Properties owned by a well-to-do second wife (his first wife, Elizabeth, died in 1696) helped to support his growing family. He died in Sudbury in February 1719/20.
³

Thomas and Ann Carr Putnam
died within two weeks of each other in 1699. His intestate estate was small and heavily encumbered by debt, although he left enough for his surviving children to inherit small legacies.
⁴

Elizabeth Booth
married Israel Shaw in Salem on December 26, 1695. They had at least two children. Her younger sister
Alice,
another afflicted accuser, married Ebenezer Marsh in Salem on November 25, 1700.
⁵

Sarah Churchwell
married Edward Andrews, a weaver, on August 11, 1709, in Berwick, Maine, after they had been fined for premarital fornication. She survived him and was still alive in 1731.
⁶

Rose Foster died in Andover on February 25, 1692/3.
⁷

Abigail Hobbs
married Andrew Senter (or Center) of Ipswich on June 18, 1709; he came from a family with links to the Maine–New Hampshire frontier. They later lived in Wenham and had at least two sons, Andrew and Thomas. Her widowed stepmother
Deliverance
was probably living with the Senters when she died in Wenham in 1715.
⁸

Betty Hubbard
moved to Gloucester, probably to live with one of the three married children of William Griggs who had remained in that town when the doctor relocated to Salem Village. In late 1711 she married John Bennett in Gloucester; they eventually had four children. He died in February 1724/5, but her death date is unknown.
⁹

Mary Lacey Jr.
married her cousin Zerubbabel Kemp on January 27, 1703/4. They lived in his home town of Groton, Massachusetts, and may have had as many as seven children.
¹⁰

Mercy Lewis
went to Greenland (an outlying area of Portsmouth, N.H.) to live near her aunt, Mary Lewis Skilling Lewis, who before 1685 had married Jotham Lewis of Greenland (probably a second cousin). In 1695, Mercy bore a bastard child at the home of Abraham Lewis, Jotham’s brother. Charles Allen, who testified when Mercy was prosecuted, and whom she married before 1701, probably fathered her child. They later lived in Boston.
¹¹

Betty Parris
married Benjamin Barron in Sudbury in 1710. They had five children; he died in 1754, she in 1760.
¹²

Ann Putnam Jr.
died unmarried in May 1715. When she joined the Salem Village church in August 1706, she asked forgiveness and “to be humbled before God for that sad and humbling providence” in 1692 that “made [her] an instrument for the accusing of several persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away.” She now believed them to be innocent, she declared, “and that it was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time.” She had, though, done it “ignorantly,” without “anger, malice, or ill-will to any person,” and she particularly “desire[d] to lie in the dust” for her accusation of Rebecca Nurse and her two sisters, which caused “so sad a calamity to them and their families.”
¹³

Susannah Sheldon
went to Providence, R.I., to live with John Sheldon, who was probably a cousin of her father’s. On May 8, 1694, as a “person of Evill fame,” she was ordered to appear before the Providence town council later that month, at which time she was almost certainly warned out of town. She probably died unmarried before 1697 and was most likely the “distracted” afflicted girl whose experimentation with a venus glass was described by John Hale.
¹⁴

Mercy Short
joined Boston’s Second Church. Cotton Mather married her to Joseph Marshall on July 29, 1694, but in May 1698 excommunicated her for adultery with an unnamed man. She died before 1708; her husband subsequently remarried.
¹⁵

Martha Sprague
alias Tyler married Richard Friend in Andover on June 5, 1701. What happened to her after that is unknown.
¹⁶

Mary Walcott
married Isaac Farrar in Salem on April 29, 1696. They first settled in Woburn, his home town, then moved to Ashford, Connecticut, in 1713. They had six children born between 1699 and 1717.
¹⁷

Mary Warren
and
Abigail Williams
could not be traced. Although several young women of those names and approximately the right ages are recorded in New England in the late seventeenth century, all can be excluded from consideration because of known details of their lives. Perhaps these two died unmarried.

Samuel Sewall
publicly apologized for his role on the Court of Oyer and Terminer on a fast day observed on January 14, 1696/7 to acknowledge “the Anger of God” against Massachusetts for the witchcraft trials and other offenses. In a statement read in church by his pastor, Samuel Willard, he asked “pardon” of both God and men and “Desire[d] to take the Blame and Shame of it.” He was apparently the only judge who ever changed his mind about the trials. He died in 1729.
¹⁸

Thomas Fiske
and eleven other petty jurors who had heard cases in the Court of Oyer and Terminer publicly admitted, probably also on the January 1696/7 fast day, “that we ourselves were not capable to understand, nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the Powers of Darkness, and Prince of the Air” in 1692. Acknowledging that they now “justly fear[ed]” they had an “insufficient” basis for conviction, they asked forgiveness and expressed “to all in general (and to the surviving Sufferers in especial) our deep sense of, and sorrow for our Errors, in acting on such Evidence to the condemning of any person.”
¹⁹

John Hale,
who once had insisted with Stoughton that specters could not represent innocent parties, changed his mind (reported Robert Calef) after his wife appeared spectrally to Mary Herrick in November 1692. Before he died in 1697, he wrote
A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft . . . ,
which was published in 1702. The book detailed his conclusion that the Salem prosecutions had been based on “unsafe principles” and that “following such traditions of our fathers, maxims of the Common Law, and Presidents [precedents] and Principles” had been an error. “Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way,” Hale memorably wrote.
²⁰

Deodat Lawson
returned to England in 1696. In 1704, he published new editions of his 1692 sermon and his
Brief and True Narrative.
By 1714, he was enduring deep financial distress, and in 1727 he was described as “unhappy.”
²¹

Cotton Mather
went on to become the most celebrated clergyman in Massachusetts Bay, famed for his sermons and prolific writings. Late in life he was involved in another major controversy when he supported the efficacy of smallpox inoculations over the objections of prominent Boston physicians; his position was vindicated in the epidemic of 1722. He died in 1728, outliving his celebrated father, Increase, by only five years.
²²

Nicholas Noyes
died from a hemorrhage, thus fulfilling Sarah Good’s curse that he would have blood to drink (or so Thomas Hutchinson learned from Salem residents in the mid eighteenth century).
²³

George Burroughs
’s reputation as a witch spread even to Wabanakia. Captain John Hill of Saco reported in 1693 that an Indian told him “that the
French
Ministers were better than the English, for before the
French
came among them there were a great many Witches among the
Indians,
but now there were none, and there were much Witches among the
English
Ministers, as Burroughs, who was Hang’d for it.”
²⁴