In the Devil's Snare (50 page)

Ibid., 1:171, 174. The Walcott quotation has been corrected by consulting the original, in Salem, Mass., Witchcraft Papers, MHS.

SWP 1:167, 171, 169. Birth records (see GDMNH) list only one death of a Burroughs child in infancy, but
GDMNH
also notes the surprising absence of a son named for George’s father, Nathaniel. That Susannah Sheldon referred to two deaths of children without contradiction discloses her knowledge of his life in Maine (the birth in question would have been to Sarah Ruck Hathorne Burroughs in Falmouth). Mercy’s account of being taken by Burroughs’s apparition to a high mountain and offered “all the kingdoms of the earth” echoed Christ’s temptation by the devil (Matthew 4:8–9) and again demonstrated her familiarity with the Bible. Perhaps George Burroughs himself had instructed her in Falmouth.

M. Halsey Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729
(New York, 1973), 1:85; and see chapter 3, above, on Stoughton at Casco. That the examination occurred in the Village rather than the Town is evident from Sarah Vibber’s testimony (
SWP
1:167) and from the fact that another examination was held in the Village that day (ibid., 277), but whether it took place in the meetinghouse or in Ingersoll’s tavern is not recorded.

This and the next two paragraphs are based on
SWP
1:153–54. The original document is in the MHS. Some scholars believe it is in Cotton Mather’s handwriting; in that case, he might have prepared it while writing his account of George Burroughs in
Wonders of the Invisible World.
Rosenthal hypothesizes in
Salem Story,
130–35, that Burroughs could have been a Baptist, and that a lack of religious orthodoxy could have contributed to his condemnation. The evidence against Burroughs will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 7, below.

Increase Mather,
Remarkable Providences Illustrative of the Earlier Days of
American Colonisation,
intro. by George Offor (London, 1856), 155–75, passim (quotation, 156); see also 162.

Miscellaneous Manuscripts, MHS.

CHAPTER FIVE MANY OFFENDERS IN CUSTODY

SWP
2:375–76, 596–97. Sheppard (a cousin of Sgt. Thomas Putnam) and Holton both died in September 1689; see “Rev. Samuel Parris’s Record of Deaths at Salem Village during his Ministry,”
NEHGR
36 (1882): 188. (On this source, see chapter 2, n. 73.) Mary Walcott also named John Harwood as a victim of Goody Nurse, but his death is not recorded in
SVR.
And on 10 May Betty Hubbard saw the ghosts of two dead children who accused Sarah Bishop of killing them (
SWP
1:111).

On May 8, e.g., Thomas Putnam and his cousin John Putnam Jr. complained against three women from Woburn (Ann Sears, the recently widowed Bethia Carter, and her daughter of the same name) for afflicting Putnam Jr., Lewis, and Walcott. That same day they registered a similar complaint against Sarah Dustin of Reading, adding the name of Abigail Williams to the list of victims. All four suspects were summoned to Salem Village for questioning on May 9, but the records of that day’s examinations (other than the summary for Burroughs) have not survived. Little is known about any of these accused women, but Sarah Dustin was the unmarried adult daughter of Lydia Dustin. Bethia Carter Jr. successfully fled from the authorities and never seems to have been arrested. For biographical information on Sears and the Carters: Enders A. Robinson,
The Devil Discovered: Salem Witchcraft 1692
(New York, 1991), 346–47. The sparse documentation on these cases is in
SWP
1:205–206, 277; 3:729–30.

So the legal historian Peter Hoffer, in The Devil’s Disciples: Makers of the
Salem Witchcraft Trials
(Baltimore, Md., 1996), does not mention John Floyd or Margaret Thacher and refers only briefly to John Alden, all considered later in this chapter. The feminist historian Frances Hill, in
A Delusion of Satan: The Full
Story of the Salem Witch Trials
(New York, 1995), names all three, but only in passing (Floyd appears in a list of names in a footnote). Bryan Le Beau’s
The Story of
the Salem Witch Trials
(Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1998) devotes two pages to summarizing Alden’s account of his examination (discussed below), but entirely omits Thacher and Floyd.

For classic examples of the argument that late, overreaching accusations ended the crisis, see Hill,
Delusion of Satan,
195–96, and Richard Weisman,
Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th-Century Massachusetts
(Amherst, Mass., 1984), 146–47. See Rosenthal,
Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692
(New York, 1993), 178–79, for the rejection of such an interpretation. Only Carol F. Karlsen, in
The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England
(New York, 1987), 245–46, understands the potential significance of the Maine ties of Floyd and Alden. Although she mentions Thacher, she does not place her in the same category.

SWP
3:850–51; “Parris’s Record of Deaths,”
NEHGR
36 (1882): 188. The tangled relationships of John Willard and the Wilkins clan, of great importance in his accusation and trial, are sorted out in David L. Greene, “Bray Wilkins of Salem Village, MA, and His Children,”
The American Genealogist
60 (1984): 1–18, 101–13 (see esp. 11, 15).

SWP
3:847. Peter Hoffer speculates, undoubtedly correctly, that Bray Wilkins was suffering from a stone in his urinary tract or possibly an inflamed prostate (Hoffer, Devil’s Disciples, 70–71).

SWP
3:848, 846, 821, 837–38. Of the four victims named by Sheldon on May 9, only one—Judith Cooke, widow of Henry—has a recorded death date (September 1689); see
SVR
5:176. The others were the first wife of William Shaw (Elizabeth) and Goodman (Hugh) Jones and his child.

SWP
3:819, 2:473.

Ibid., 2:483, 1:211; see also 2:475. Sarah’s surname is more commonly rendered as “Churchill,” but appears as Churchwell in the Maine records, so I have selected that spelling. Mercy’s recurrent statement that Jacobs beat her spectrally with his sticks could well imply that he did the same to his own maidservant in reality. The servants Mercy and Sarah would surely have discussed how their respective masters treated them when they encountered each other in the Village.

Ibid., 2:484–85.

Quotations: Richard Waldron to MG&C, 25 September 1675, in DHSM 6:94. The only recorded birth to Eleanor Bonython, later the wife of Arthur Churchwell, was a bastard child in September 1667; and her only known child is Sarah. No age is ever given for Sarah Churchwell in the Salem records. Accordingly, I am assuming that Sarah was born in 1667 (and thus was twenty-five at the time of the trials). See
GDMNH,
q.v. “Bonython,” “Churchwell”; and Charles E. Banks, “The Bonython Family of Maine,”
NEHGR
38 (1884): 54–55. For the locations of these houses and mills on the Saco: G. T. Ridlon,
Saco Valley Settlements . . .
(Portland, Me., 1895), 21.

Waldron to [MG&C?], 25 September 1675, in DHSM 6:94–95. For the death of John Bonython:
NEHGR
34 (1880): 99. He was later said to have been “Killed by the Indian Enemy”; possibly he died a lingering death from wounds suffered in the Saco attack or a later one (see “Book of Eastern Claims,”
MGHR
4 [1887]: 281). Winifred Bonython, Sarah Churchwell’s aunt, was married to Robert Nichols (or Nicholson), whose sister Catherine was the wife of George Ingersoll Jr., cousin of Jonathan Walcott. See
GDMNH,
q.v. “Nichols” and “Ingersoll.”

SWP
2:473–76. No site is given for the examination of George Jacobs Sr. on May 10, but his second examination the next day took place at Beadle’s tavern; the records are on the same sheet of paper, both in Parris’s handwriting (SWP/SJC/PEM 1:224).

SWP
2:484, 491. At Margaret Jacobs’s examination and confession on May 11, Hubbard and Walcott were afflicted, according to later indictments in her case (ibid., 2:489, 3:905–906).

Ibid., 2:484, 476–77.

Rosenthal’s argument about pins refers specifically to manifestations at the examination of Elizabeth Howe later in May; see
Salem Story,
37–38, and also 17–18.

SWP
3:841, 849, for the afflictions of Hubbard and Lewis.

This paragraph and the next two are based on ibid., 2:410–12. Abigail’s statement that her victims lived away from Ft. Loyal “toward Capt. Bracketts” suggests that she was judging directions from a spot located between the fort and Anthony Brackett’s farm (situated on the mainland to the west of Cleeves’ Neck), or approximately where the Ingersoll and Lewis families’ properties lay. James Andrews’s property lay still farther to the west on the mainland. See the map of seventeenth-century landholdings in the Casco region tipped into William Willis,
The History of Portland, from 1632 to 1864
(Portland, Me., 1865), unpaginated. See
GDMNH
on Robert Lawrence, who died at the fall of Ft. Loyal in May 1690; his wife, Mary, survived him, but
GDNMH
does not know of the existence of a daughter with that name. The magistrates also questioned Abigail about a statement she had made on 11 May about “Davis’s Son of Cascoe” (who could have been a son of Sylvanus, or of Lawrence Davis, a Falmouth resident during the 1680s). That same 11 May, Abigail declared that Burroughs had brought her the devil’s book to sign (
SWP
1:154).

Thus Abigail Hobbs was evidently not familiar with the details of Burroughs’s malefic activity described in visions reported by the afflicted after she was jailed, although she did now identify him as a witch (which she did not do on April 19 or 20).

This and the next two paragraphs are based on
SWP
3:799–802. The specters mentioned five deaths and several accidents; one death, referred to as having happened “lately,” had indeed occurred just five days previously (Michael Chapliman, 7 May 1692 [
SVR
5:145]). Westgate and a “lost” crew member, John Lapthorne, were from Marblehead, although their deaths are not listed in the town’s published vital records.

SWP
3:701, for the May 12 warrant for the two women.
SWP
erroneously intermingles documents about Alice Parker of Salem and the widow Mary Parker of Andover; see Rosenthal,
Salem Story,
167–71, on distinguishing the two women. Karlsen,
Devil in the Shape of a Woman,
315 n. 122, speculates that Alice Parker might have been Giles Corey’s daughter. Biographical information on Ann Greenslade (or Greenslit) Pudeator from the Salem witch-descendants e-mail discussion list on
rootsweb.com
(communication from Helen Graves, 26 July 2000, forwarded to me by Ben Ray). After she married Jacob, Ann was suspected of complicity in his first wife’s death; see
EC Ct Recs
8:59–60. See also Robinson,
Devil Discovered,
186, 317. Testimony about both women’s reputations as witches was offered at their September trials; see below, chapter 8.

This paragraph and the next are based on
SWP
2:623–24. Ann Pudeator was arrested and almost certainly examined on May 12; see ibid., 3:701–702 (a reference at her later examination to a previous one). It has proved impossible to trace the death of Warren’s mother or the illness of her sister, or even her father’s name. I think it likely that Mary referred to a stepfather, and that her mother, perhaps even her sister, had a different surname.

SWP
2:474, 662, 3:953–54; trial of Robert Swan, 17 July 1691,
EC Ct Recs,
ser. 2/WPA, 51:70/1–74/3 passim (quotations 74/1). Osborne died on May 10.

This and the next two paragraphs draw from
SWP
3:733–36. On Abigail Soames and the links between Quakers and some of those accused of witchcraft in 1692, see Christine Leigh Heyrman, “Specters of Subversion, Societies of Friends: Dissent and the Devil in Provincial Essex County, Massachusetts,” in David D. Hall et al., eds.,
Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History
(New York, 1984), 38–74 passim, esp. 54–55. Robinson,
Devil Discovered,
359–60, gives basic biographical information. Heyrman speculates that Soames’s relationship to her Quaker mother and brother lay behind Warren’s accusation, yet the peculiarities of Soames’s personal circumstances (as an unmarried woman in her late thirties who ventured out in public only at night) could also have called attention to herself as a potential witch.

“Letter of Thomas Brattle, F.R.S., 1692,” in Burr, Narratives, 171.

The warrant is printed in
SWP
2:487; the magistrates also renewed their earlier order to arrest Bethia Carter Jr. The previously identified group comprised George Jacobs Jr. and his wife Rebecca; Sarah Buckley and her daughter Mary Witheridge; and Elizabeth Colson, the granddaughter of Lydia Dustin. The additions were Elizabeth Hart and Thomas Farrar Sr., both of Lynn, and Daniel Andrew of Salem Village, the wealthy brother of Rebecca Jacobs. The fugitives were Colson, Andrew, and Jacobs Jr. The constables’ reports on the arrests and escapes are in ibid., 2:381, 493–94; 1:237. Useful biographical information is available in Robinson, Devil Discovered: 288–89 (Hart), 336–41 (Jacobs and Andrew), 344 (Colson). Robinson points out that Hart was related by marriage to John Proctor and, more distantly, to the family of Samuel Wardwell, members of which were accused later. Heyrman (n. 24, above) identifies Quaker connections for Hart, Farrar, and the Proctors.

M. Halsey Thomas, ed.,
The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729
(New York, 1973), 1:291. Knowing that Phips was en route with the new charter, the colony had elected him earlier in the month to the council of the ad hoc government, with the highest vote total (ibid.). That the examinations of Witheridge and Rebecca Jacobs occurred on the 18th is evident in
SWP
2:495, 3:858. Of this group, only Buckley’s examination transcript still exists (ibid., 1:145).

Worthington C. Ford, ed., Diary of Cotton Mather (New York, 1957), 1:148. Cotton Mather baptized Phips on 23 March 1689/90, the same day he was admitted as a member of the Second Church. This step cleared the way for Phips to become a political and military leader of the colony. On Increase Mather in London, see Richard Johnson,
Adjustment to Empire: The New England Colonies,
1675–1715
(New Brunswick, N.J., 1981), chapters 3–4. Negative letters about the interim Massachusetts government received by the Lords of Trade and Plantations, 1689–1691, in CO 5/855, 856, passim, vividly show the difficulties Mather had to surmount to achieve his goals. Stephen Foster,
The Long Argument: English
Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1991)
,
253, points out that Mather carefully balanced the councilors between supporters and opponents of the Dominion of New England.