In the Devil's Snare (48 page)

For evidence of rented property in Falmouth in the 1680s, perhaps even a house occupied by William Hobbs (although the tenant is unnamed), see
DHSM
6:313. The landlord was Thomas Cloyce, Mercy Lewis’s uncle by marriage and brother of Peter Cloyce.

See
GDMNH,
q.v. “Philbrick,” for the possible relationship of Abigail Hobbs and Mercy Lewis.

SWP
1:165.

Ibid., 164. This account is from her deposition offered in early August, first at grand-jury proceedings and then at the trial of George Burroughs. Thomas Putnam and two other men at that time attested that they had been present on 20 April during her spectral encounter. If Thomas Putnam did not dispatch this exact document to the magistrates on April 21, he sent one very like it.

Mather,
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:152; Increase Mather,
Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, Witchcrafts, . . .
(Boston, 1693), unpaginated afterword. Only Bernard Rosenthal and John McWilliams have also argued for Burroughs’s centrality. Rosenthal interprets Burroughs’s significance primarily in terms of the minister’s probable religious heterodoxy; see
Salem Story,
chapter 7. McWilliams, while linking Burroughs’s importance to the war, does not appear aware of the minister’s extended residence in Falmouth. See McWilliams, “Indian John and the Northern Tawnies,”
NEQ
69 (1996): 592–97.

John McWilliams too identified a chronological turning point related to the frontier during the 1692 crisis, but he chose a different one: the Wabanaki attack on Wells in June, discussed in chapter 6, below. His argument, however, has two flaws: he misdates that attack, erroneously employing an N.S. date of June 20 rather than the accurate O.S. date, June 11/12; and regardless of which calendar is used, no explosion of accusations followed that battle. By contrast, in April the effects were immediate, as observed in the text. See McWilliams, “Indian John,” 584–85.

Mather,
DL,
in Lincoln,
Narratives,
242.

SWP
1:171–72.

Basic biographical information about Burroughs in this and subsequent paragraphs is from
GDMNH; Sibley’s Harvard Graduates
2:323–34; and Robinson,
Devil Discovered,
78–81, 90–91, 325–26. Thanks to David Greene for alerting me to Neil D. Thompson’s identification of Burroughs’s first wife, as reported in the January 2001 issue of
The American Genealogist.
Other men who attended Harvard with Burroughs, and who later had relatives involved in the Salem crisis, were Samuel Mather (1671), cousin of Cotton Mather; Peter Thacher (1671), step-brother-in-law of Jonathan Corwin; and Nathaniel Higginson (1670), son of the Reverend John Higginson of Salem Town. Cotton and Increase Mather, Corwin, and Higginson thus all could have had personal knowledge of Burroughs’s Harvard years.

DHSM
6:97–99 (gunpowder);
DHSM
4:351–54 (petition signed by Lewis, Cloyce, and eighteen other men; quotation 352); Leverett to Sir Joseph Williamson, 18 December 1675, CO 1/35, f 265; Samuel Symonds to same, 6 April 1676, CO 1/36, f 75.

Remonstrance of General Court, 13 September 1677, MA 10:63, MSA, as quoted in James E. Kences, “Some Unexplored Relationships of Essex County Witchcraft to the Indian Wars of 1675 and 1689,”
EIHC
120 ( July 1984): 202. The fullest account of the Pike-Wheelwright dispute may be found in Roland Warren,
Loyal Dissenter: The Life and Times of Robert Pike
(Lanham, Md., 1992), 114–25. I here adopt an interpretation developed in Molly A. Warsh, “Memories of the Eastward: Reexamining the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 in the Context of King William’s War” (unpub. honors thesis, History, Cornell University, 1999),

Ironically, in 1698 Robert Pike’s granddaughter Elizabeth Stockman married John Wheelwright’s grandson Jacob Bradbury; I am descended from that marriage.

Quotation:
SWP
1:176. For Burroughs’s negotiations with Salem Village, see Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds.,
Salem-Village Witchcraft
, 173–74, 319. Bayley had lived on property given him by Village supporters; see ibid., 240, 254.

Quotations:
SWP
1:162, 163; examination: ibid., 153. For the funeral debt, see Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds.,
Salem-Village Witchcraft,
177–78. Alexander Osborne (husband of Sarah) went to Salem Town to purchase the wine for Burroughs.

Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds.,
Salem-Village Witchcraft,
170–79, reprints documents covering both controversies; quotation, 171.

DHSM
4:389–93, 400–22 (reestablishment of government in Maine);
York
Deeds
12, pt. 1:170 (quotation and compensation to other landowners); William Willis,
The History of Portland, from 1632 to 1864
(Portland, Me., 1865), 200 (statement from town records about taking Burroughs’s land). One of those granted a house lot in Falmouth (although he never seems to have occupied it) was the Massachusetts magistrate Bartholomew Gedney. See the house lot list in ibid., 226–28; the original (or an early copy) is in Collection S-1357, misc. box 65/14, MeHS.

Willis,
History of Portland,
245 (Burroughs’s statement, from town records);
York Deeds
4:77 (exchange with Skilling); ibid., 17:311, 316 (sale of the 100-plus acres of marsh). Philip Lewis’s lot adjoined Lt. George Ingersoll’s property: “Book of Eastern Claims,”
MHGR
5(1888): 156–57. George Sr.’s land lay near that of his sons, George and Joseph, and Joseph’s son later attested that his father lived for “many years” on two acres of land in the town center of Falmouth “about a Quarter of a mile from the fort,” until he was “driven therefrom by the Indin Enemy”:
MHGR
6 (1889): 279. Willis,
History of Portland,
230–33, sites the original claims on Portland’s street grid in 1865; most Portland street names have not changed since the mid nineteenth century.

Quotations:
DHSM
6:362, 382; see also 218–19, 294, 302–303, 377–79, 481–83, and Willis,
History of Portland,
258–64 passim, on the Lawrence-Davis dispute. And see p. 163 for more on Burroughs’s reputed hostility to Lawrence and his family.

Sibley’s Harvard Graduates
2:326 (1686 description); Scarborough Town Records, vol. 1:34–36, 38–39 (quotation 39), Collection 1229, MeHS; DHSM 6:346 (Burroughs petition about his Scarborough land, c. 1688);
York Deeds
17:311 (sale of remaining land);
DHSM
4:457 (Church on Burroughs). Another statement placing Burroughs in Falmouth in September 1689 is in
SWP
1:161. Although Scarborough made plans to build a house for its minister, there is no record of one being constructed, so perhaps Burroughs failed to relocate for that reason.

SWP
1:165; ibid., 168, for Mercy’s comment about living with Burroughs’s family; and “Book of Eastern Claims,”
MHGR
5(1888): 156–57, for proof that her father was alive in April 1689. Why Burroughs would have killed Lawson’s wife because “she was so unwilling to goe from the village” is, however, unclear. Some historians have speculated that Mercy lived with the minister when she was a little girl after the August 1676 destruction of Falmouth, and that he took her to Salem Village with him in 1680, leaving her there in 1683. Because her parents survived King Philip’s War to return to Falmouth, though, they are highly unlikely to have left a useful older daughter behind in Essex County. Since in the passage cited above Mercy mentioned having been in Burroughs’s “study,” she also had to have lived with him somewhere other than in John Putnam Sr.’s house, where surely there would not have been sufficient space for such a room. Moreover, if Mercy had lived in Salem Village during the 1680s, it is unlikely that she would have been a servant in Beverly in early 1690 (see
SWP
2:537).

SWP 1:166. On what is known of Mary Burroughs, see David L. Greene, “The Third Wife of the Rev. George Burroughs,”
The American Genealogist
56 (1980): 43–45.

Burroughs et al. to Massachusetts Governor and Council, 21 July 1691, 28 September 1691, 27 January 1691/2,
DHSM
5:274, 294, 316–17. Among the other signatories were sons of the Rev. John Wheelwright, and men of the Littlefield and Cloyce families (Peter Cloyce’s first wife, before he married Sarah Towne Bridges, was Hannah Littlefield).

Quotation: Memorial of Thomas Newman et al., 31 May 1749, as printed in George H. Moore, “Notes on the Bibliography of Witchcraft in Massachusetts,”
AAS Procs,
new ser., 5 (1887–88): 270.

SWP
2:483, 1:172.

Ibid., 1:172. That in this statement Abigail and Mary distinguished between a “black” woman and “an Indian” does not conflict with my argument in chapter 2 that the word “black” was employed to designate both “Negro” and “Indian” skin colors in the seventeenth century. Precisely because the word “black” encompassed an Indian’s skin tone, the girls had to describe both the “black [Negro] woman” and the “Indian” explicitly to explain the exact nature of their vision to Hutchinson and Putnam.

Ibid., 3:805–806.

Ibid. For the naming of Sarah Wilds by Deliverance Hobbs on Sunday, April 17, see ibid., 2:407. As was noted in chapter 2, Ann Putnam Jr. claimed in late June to have been afflicted by Goody Wilds’s specter as early as the beginning of March, but that dating cannot be verified. Nor is Mary Walcott’s claim of affliction by her in early April supported by independent evidence (see ibid., 3:810–11). Still, the existence of these two statements suggests that Sarah Wilds’s name might have surfaced in Village gossip prior to mid-April.

Quotations: ibid., 1:49–50 (case of Nehemiah Abbott Jr.). The missing examinations are those of Mary English of Salem Town and Sarah and Edward Bishop of Salem Village. That the examinations occurred in the meetinghouse is evident from ibid., 2:420.

Ibid., 2:419–20, for the quotations in this and the following paragraph. Note, though, that by her own account (offered during the examination) Deliverance had come to church in Salem Village the previous Sunday, and she had probably attended her stepdaughter’s public examination three days before. On either occasion she might have attracted attention to herself, thus making identification by the girls easy and the experiment either moot or obviously rigged. But if that were the case, the magistrates would have understood their test to be meaningless, and therefore it is unlikely they would have tried it.

On the locations of the Hobbs landholdings and that claimed by Putnam: Dow, ed., “Early Records of Topsfield,”
HCTHS
2 (1896): 10. If my hypothesis that Deliverance was born in Maine (most likely Falmouth) is correct, then Deliverance and Mercy could have known each other quite well.

This and the next two paragraphs draw from
SWP
2:419–22. In contrast to his wife and daughter, when questioned on 22 April, William Hobbs insisted on his innocence (ibid., 2:425–28).

Ibid., 2:421, 1:164, 3:798 for these phrases. In late May, Ann Carr Putnam employed the phrase to describe what Martha Corey had done to her on 18 March (ibid., 2:603), but March records do not confirm that she used it at that time. Ann Jr. thus seems to have introduced it into the Salem lexicon.

For two earlier examples of the unusual threat of tearing to pieces, see John Darrell,
A True Narration of the Strange and Grevous Vexation by the Devil, of 7 Persons in Lancashire, and William Somers of Nottingham
(n.p., 1600), 22 [incorrectly numbered 32]; and esp. Cotton Mather’s narrative of the Tocutt boy, in
Memorable Providences
(1690), in Burr,
Narratives,
138–40. The Tocutt boy, who employed the phrase four times in his narrative, was however also told “he should live deliciously, and have Ease, Comfort, and Money” (138). The quoted words of temptation in the text come from Samuel Willard’s account of the agonies of Elizabeth Knapp in 1671, in David D. Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New
England,
2d ed. (Boston, 1999), 203, 207.

Mather,
DL,
in Lincoln,
Narratives,
208. See also ibid., 209–10, 212–13, for other accounts of the “tearing to pieces” of Salmon Falls captives. By 19 May 1690—two months after the Salmon Falls raid—gossip originating with an escapee had already carried the story of Rogers’s death to Portsmouth, N.H. See “The Report of Captain John Holmes . . . ,” CO 5/855, f 331.

SWP
3:806, 810. The original court document, SWP/SJC/PEM 1:164, contains the examination records of Sarah Wilds and William Hobbs. It is badly torn; words in brackets are conjectural. Biographical information: Robinson,
Devil Discovered,
294–95. John Wilds was deeply involved in the Topsfield/Salem Village land dispute. Mary Gould Reddington, John Herrick’s mother-in-law, was also Sgt. Thomas Putnam’s first cousin once removed. My discussion of Sarah Wilds, here and later in this book, rests in part on the analysis in Jesse Souweine, “Word of Mouth: How Gossip Informed the Salem Witchcraft Accusations” (unpub. honors thesis, American Studies, Cornell University, 1996), chapter 2. For the equally perfunctory 22 April examination of the slave Mary Black, see
SWP
1:113–14.

SWP
1:49–50. How Ann Jr. could identify him is not clear. Biographical information about Abbott from Robinson,
Devil Discovered,
300. He points out that Abbott was related by blood and marriage to the Reverend Francis Dane of Andover, several of whose close relatives were later accused of witchcraft. Peter Hoffer too concluded that Lewis was the leader of the accuser group; see
The
Devil’s Disciples: Makers of the Salem Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore, Md., 1996), 98–99.

SWP
1:288–89. Mary, born in England about 1634, married Isaac Easty of Topsfield in 1655; they had seven children. The family was among those involved in the land dispute with the Putnams. See Robinson,
Devil Discovered,
273.

Biographical information from Carol F. Karlsen,
The Devil in the Shape of a
Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
(New York, 1987), 106–107. The defamation of her mother in 1679 is recorded in
EC Ct Recs
7:238. Oral history descending in the family, reported a century later by a Salem clergyman, described the circumstances of her arrest but not what occasioned it. See
The Diary of William Bentley, D.D., Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts
(Gloucester, Mass., 1962), 2:24. This vivid narrative, relied on heavily by Bryan F. Le Beau in his “Philip English and the Witchcraft Hysteria,”
Historical Journal of Massachusetts
15 (1987): 1–20, is unreliable on many details. For example, it claims that while Mary English was being detained in the Salem Town tavern (rather than the jail) her husband visited her frequently, and also that she “kept a journal of the examinations held below, which she constantly sent to Boston.” Because of her high status she might have been held initially at Thomas Beadle’s tavern, but that would have contravened the magistrates’ explicit order that she be jailed (
SWP
2:429). And since her husband fled shortly after she was arrested, he could not have visited her anywhere more than once or twice. Some of the examinations between 22 April and 12 May, when she was sent to prison in Boston (ibid., 2:474), were indeed conducted at Beadle’s tavern, but to whom she would have addressed accounts of them and to what purpose are both unclear.