In the Devil's Snare (43 page)

Burr,
Narratives,
137–39; Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting,
208, 205 (see 197–212 passim for Willard’s detailed account of Knapp’s torments). Karlsen also discusses Knapp (
Devil in the Shape of a Woman,
236–41).

Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting,
199, 211–12.

Mather,
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:141. John Hale listed both
Memorable Providences
and the 1682 account of the trial presided over by Matthew Hale among the works the judges consulted in 1692; see
Modest Enquiry,
in Burr,
Narratives,
416.

A Tryal of Witches, at the Assizes Held at Bury St. Edmunds for the County of
Su folk; on the Tenth Day of March, 1664. Before Sir Matthew Hale Kt. . . .
(London, Eng., 1682), passim (quotations 2, 41, 16, 20, 23–24, 28–29). The date in the title was incorrect, as was the surname of one of the witches; given in the book and by Cotton Mather as Duny, it was actually Denny. See Gilbert Geis and Ivan Bunn,
A Trial of Witches: A Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Prosecution
(London and New York, 1997), which reprints a facsimile copy of
Tryal
as an appendix.

Tryal of Witches,
12–14, 43.

Ibid., 46–47. Mather’s summary is in
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:142–51. He described the fits at some length, mentioned peculiar incidents involving toads and other creatures, quoted the doctor’s testimony, and remarked that “Good Men have sometimes disputed” the validity of touch tests. He termed the father’s statement “a small Reason” that only “attempted” to explain away the failed test. Mather’s narrative makes clear that the maleficium stories told by neighbors, coupled with the fits of the afflicted, were more convincing to him than touch tests.

Tryal of Witches,
55–59.

Ibid., unpaginated introduction. On Hale, see Geis and Bunn,
Trial of
Witches,
22, 156–71 passim. Thomas Hutchinson in 1765 described New England’s reverence for Hale as based on “his gravity and piety” as well as his knowledge of the law; see
History of Massachusetts
2:27. In England, by contrast, Sir Matthew Hale’s conduct of the Bury St. Edmunds trial aroused considerable negative comment, and his approach to the evidence was seen as aberrant. It is unclear whether New Englanders were aware of such criticisms; see Shapiro,
Probability and Certainty
, 206–208.

Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting,
266; Mather,
Memorable Providences,
in Burr,
Narratives,
100.

Mather,
Memorable Providences,
in Burr,
Narratives,
100–103, 105.

Ibid., 103–106. For Dudley as chief judge: Cotton Mather,
The Life of Sir
William Phips,
ed. Mark Van Doren (New York, 1929), 138; for the date of execution, Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:183. On other probable judges, see chapter 6, n. 7, below.

Mather,
Memorable Providences,
in Burr,
Narratives,
123, 95–96 (quotations); for the naming of other witches, ibid., 107, 117. In 1765, Thomas Hutchinson wrote that the Goodwins’ neighbors had informed him of the “great consternation” caused by the children’s afflictions. He also commented that he personally knew one of the daughters (either Martha or her younger sister Mercy) as an adult; she “had the character of a very sober virtuous woman” and never admitted to having committed any “fraud.” See Hutchinson,
History of Massachusetts
2:25–26.

The trials’ critic Robert Calef, for one, asserted in 1700 that
Memorable
Providences
had “conduced much to the kindling those Flames, that . . . threatned the devouring this Country” in 1692 (
MWIW,
in
WDNE
3:154).

Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary,
1:287–88. Historians who have attributed elements of the witchcraft crisis in part to uncertainties over the new charter have not paid sufficient attention to the arrival of this definitive news in late January and early February. On the overthrow of Andros, see below, chapter 3.

William Perkins,
Discourse of Damned Art,
200–203; John Gaule,
Select
Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts
(London, 1646), 80. Gaule also listed “unwarrantable” signs of witches that came from “Ignorance” or “superstition,” among them identifications through countermagic; see 75–79. In 1692 the Connecticut magistrates confronting a witchcraft outbreak contemporaneous to the one in Essex County seem to have relied on Perkins’s list; see their summary of it as printed in Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting,
351–53.

Gaule,
Select Cases,
80–81; Perkins,
Discourse of Damned Art,
203; Bernard,
Guide to Grand-Jury Men,
228–40 passim (quotations 237–38).

SWP
2:363.

Bernard,
Guide to Grand-Jury Men,
228, 239.

DHSM
5:326–27.

CHAPTER TWO GOSPEL WOMEN

This and the next two paragraphs are based on
SWP
1:260–61. For Putnam’s post and Corey’s church membership: Salem Village church records, in Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds.,
Salem-Village Witchcraft
(1972; reprint, Boston, 1993), 272–73. When disputes arose between church members, Puritans usually tried to resolve them without going to court. Biographical information on the Coreys from Enders A. Robinson,
The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692
(New York, 1991), 271.

SWP
3:752–53.

This paragraph and the next draw on
SWP
1:261–62. Quotations in the fifth sentence come from the original document, SWP/SJC/PEM 1:39 (lines omitted in the published version of the conversation).

This paragraph is speculative, but Corey’s is the only well-documented case in which the court records do not hint at the cause of the initial witchcraft accusation, with the exception of a brief comment during her examination that “Parker some time agoe thought this woman was a Witch” (
SWP
1:253). For the other incident, see Mary Beth Norton,
Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the
Forming of American Society
(New York, 1996), 91–94. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 146–47, both discusses Corey’s bastard son and argues—unconvincingly, I believe—that the complaint against Corey accorded with a Putnam family agenda.

SWP
2:595, 603. The conclusion that the identification took place within a day is based on John Tarbell’s statement in late March that the exchange quoted in the next paragraph occurred “be fore any was afflicted at thomas putnams beside his daughter” (
SWP
2:603). If Tarbell spoke accurately, then Nurse’s specter was positively identified before Mercy Lewis was afflicted on the afternoon of 14 March (see below).

SWP
2:603. On the Towne and Nurse families and the Topsfield boundaries, see Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds.,
Salem-Village Witchcraft,
148–54, 235–37. For the disputes: EC Ct Recs/WPA, ser. 2, 47:42/1–43/4; and Persis McMillen,
Currents of
Malice: Mary Towne Esty and Her Family in Salem Witchcraft
(Portsmouth, N.H., 1990). Boyer and Nissenbaum,
Salem Possessed,
147–50, make an elaborate psychological argument about Nurse serving as a surrogate for Thomas Putnam’s stepmother, but given the history of enmity between the Putnam and Towne families, that seems unnecessary to explain the accusation.

This paragraph and the next are based on
SWP
1:264–65.

Mather,
Memorable Providences,
in Burr,
Narratives,
108. For the story of how one young captive was terrified by just such a threat of being roasted alive, see Mather,
DL,
in Lincoln,
Narratives,
201. See also Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, eds., Puritans among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and
Redemption, 1676–1724
(Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 105.

The only detailed contemporary description of the attack, used as a basis for this paragraph and the next, is William Hubbard,
A Narrative of the Troubles with
the Indians in New-England . . .
[part 2]
From Pascataqua to Pemmaquid
(Boston, 1677), 31–34 (quotation 32). For a map of Falmouth and Casco Bay, see pp. 126–127.

Thaddeus Clark to Elizabeth Harvey, 16 August 1676, in Samuel G. Drake, ed., The Aboriginal Races of North America, 15th ed., rev. by H. L. Williams (New York, 1880), 747n.

All biographical information on the extended family of Philip Lewis in the preceding paragraphs comes from
GDMNH,
passim
.
Precisely where Philip Lewis resided in Casco during the 1670s is not clear; the family lived “a considerable time” after 1663 on Hog Island, but he also owned land on the mainland. For his residence on the island and that quotation, see William Willis,
The History of
Portland, from 1632 to 1864
(Portland, Me., 1865), 134.

SWP
1:265.

Ibid., 1:258, 263; 2:667, 597. For the first two weeks of Mercy’s fits, only Ann Jr. identified her spectral tormentor as Martha Corey (ibid., 1:265).

Quotations: ibid., 1:265, 258. Earlier accounts of afflicted children in old or New England also mention the large number of spectators who came to observe them or to assist in caring for them. Other such references appear in the Salem records, too (e.g., ibid., 2:483, 674). On the demands of housework in seventeenth-century New England, see Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
Good Wives: Image and Reality
in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750
(New York, 1982)
,
chapter 1; for daughters’ contributions to housework later in the colonial era, see Mary Beth Norton,
Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American
Women, 1750–1800
(Boston, 1980), 15–18, 23–26.

For evidence of Parris’s note-taking, see the discussion on pp. 56–57. On household hierarchies, see Norton,
Founding Mothers & Fathers
, section 1.

SWP
2:604. Her fit, perhaps not coincidentally, occurred on the second anniversary of a Wabanaki raid on Salmon Falls (see chapter 3, pp. 102–103).

Many thanks to Jane Kamensky for allowing me to see and cite her unpublished paper, “The Devil’s Book: The Material Culture of Witchcraft in Early New England,” delivered at the January 1998 meeting of the American Historical Association. Abigail Williams and Betty Hubbard both later claimed to have seen Martha Corey’s copy of Satan’s book when her specter tortured them prior to March 18, but I strongly suspect that they retrospectively added a sighting of the book to the afflictions they suffered at the time. When they testified in early August, references to the book had become commonplace, which was not the case in mid-March. See
SWP
1:258, 263.

SWP
1:247. Mercy’s sister Priscilla married Henry Kenney Jr. in 1691. The complainant was probably his father, Henry Kenney Sr., rather than Mercy’s brother-in-law.

Lawson,
A Brief and True Narrative of . . . Witchcraft, at Salem Village . . .
(1692)
,
in Burr,
Narratives,
147–48.

Ibid., 152–54.

A Tryal of Witches, at the Assizes Held at Bury St. Edmonds for the County of
Su folk; on the Tenth Day of March, 1664. Before Sir Matthew Hale Kt. . . .
(London, 1682), 28–29; Mather,
Memorable Providences,
in Burr,
Narratives,
108, 111–12; Thomas Hutchinson,
The History of Massachusetts from the First Settlement Thereof
in 1628, until the Year 1750
(3d ed., Boston, 1795), 2:27.

For church attendees, see Lawson,
Brief and True Narrative,
in Burr,
Narratives,
154. Joseph Pope was forty-one (
SWP
2:683); women were usually a year or two younger than their husbands. John and Sarah Vibber’s surname is today rendered as Vibert; he is believed to have come from Sark. Theirs was a second marriage for both, but her birth name and the name of her first husband are unknown. (Thanks to Ben Ray for forwarding information on the likely Vibert connection from the Salem witch trials descendants e-mail list on
rootsweb.com
.)

For biographical information on Nathaniel Ingersoll and Jonathan Walcott: Robinson,
Devil Discovered,
72–74, 76; for John Walcott’s military service in Maine:
DHSM
5:109. For the Ingersolls’ departure from Falmouth:
DHSM
4:348–49; for their admission to residency in Salem on 11 January 1675/6, “Salem Town Records,”
EIHC
48 (1912): 21; and
GDMNH,
q.v. “Ingersoll, George.” A petition complaining that George Ingersoll was an incompetent militia officer, dated 2 February 1675/6, is printed in
DHSM
4:351–54.

Lawson,
Brief and True Narrative,
in Burr,
Narratives,
154.

On Puritan practices and the Hutchinsonian challenge, see Norton,
Founding Mothers & Fathers,
23, 370. In court, female witnesses and defendants were called upon to speak, but in church women could seldom, if ever, voice their opinions.

SWP
2:604, 596.

Ibid., 1:263 (Hubbard); 1:258, 2:597, 667, 688 (Williams).

Lawson,
Brief and True Narrative,
in Burr,
Narratives,
154. Parris and the senior male Putnams frequently submitted supporting depositions confirming dates of afflictions; see, e.g.,
SWP
1:164, 167; 2:598. Bernard Rosenthal, in
Salem
Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692
(New York, 1993), speculates repeatedly about the possibility that adult witnesses at the trials were lying (chapter 3 and passim). But people took oaths very seriously at the time, because they believed that both their reputations and their immortal souls depended on their telling the truth. (See Norton,
Founding Mothers & Fathers,
159–61, 208–10, 385–86.) Moreover, in such a small community everyone knew everyone else’s business, and outright lies could readily have been exposed. Therefore, I think it highly unlikely that any seventeenth-century adult witnesses—especially clergymen—lied knowingly and systematically under oath in the Salem trials. People told the truth as they saw it at the time. Later, admittedly, some of them reevaluated their earlier statements.