In the Devil's Snare (57 page)

SWP
2:403–404. See also Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:296. That Phips sailed on 16 September is evident from council minutes, CO 5/785, f 97; he informed the councilors he was leaving that day “to give orders for the disposal of the Forces, and Setling of the Garrisons” at Pemaquid.

Calef,
MWIW,
in
WDNE
3:45, 46, 48.

Mather to Sewall, 20 September 1692, partly published in Silverman, ed.,
Selected Letters,
44–45, with the first and last quotations in this paragraph from the full version as printed in
NEHGR
24 (1870): 107–108 (original in NEHGS); Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:297.

For an excellent summary of these points, see Emerson W. Baker and John G. Reid,
The New England Knight: Sir William Phips, 1651–1695
(Toronto, 1998), 147–51. For Phips’s return: Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:297. See also John Whiting,
Truth and Innocency Defended . . .
(London, 1702), 140; Calef,
MWIW,
in
WDNE
3:159; and
A Letter from New-England
(London, 1694), 6, in CO 5/858, f 125. In a letter printed in
Some Few Remarks upon a Scandalous Book . . .
(Boston, 1701), 47, Cotton Mather denounced as “a putrid slander” Calef’s charge that Phips halted the trials because his wife had been accused but, significantly, he did
not
deny that Lady Mary had been named in the first place. Whiting claimed that Cotton Mather’s mother was accused as well. The legal records are so incomplete that it is impossible to determine which defendant might have been freed by Lady Phips.

Brattle comment: “Brattle Letter,” in Burr,
Narratives,
185; Easty petition:
SWP
1:303–304. Even if some of the testimony offered in these late trials has not survived, the evidentiary base for the convictions appears to have been much less than that compiled in the earlier prosecutions.

Jacob Melijn to Johannes Kerfbijl, 28 October 1692, Jacob Melijn Letterbook, AAS (in Dutch, trans. by Evan Haefeli). The S. and B. of Willard’s title were “Salem” and “Boston”; Willard, of course, was
B.
He probably published it anonymously because Governor Phips issued an order before 12 October forbidding the printing of essays on either side, to avoid “needless disputes”; see Phips to William Blathwayt, 12 October 1692, in Burr,
Narratives,
197. On the timing of the publications in the fall of 1692, see Mary Rhinelander McCarl, “Spreading the News of Satan’s Malignity in Salem: Benjamin Harris, Printer and Publisher of the Witchcraft Narratives,”
EIHC
129 (1993): 54–58, an account which must be partially modified because of the date of Melijn’s letter (McCarl argues that
Cases
of Conscience
was published in early November and Willard’s
Some Miscellany
Observations
after that). Mather did deliver a sermon on 31 July addressing the question “what makes the diference between the devills in hell & the Angells of heaven”; see Mark Peterson, “ ‘Ordinary’ Preaching and the Interpretation of the Salem Witchcraft Crisis by the Boston Clergy,”
EIHC
129 (1993): 93–94.

Samuel Sewall read the manuscript of Willard’s preface to Mather’s work on 11 October (Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:298). McCarl notes that Increase Mather finished his book (except for the postscript) by 3 October, and that Willard’s dialogue circulated in manuscript before its publication; see “Spreading the News,”
EIHC
129 (1993): 54, 56.

All quotations in this paragraph except the last are from Mather,
Cases of
Conscience concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men . . .
(Boston, 1693), 49, 59, 65. See also ibid., A2 (premises, from Willard’s preface, which was also signed by thirteen other clerics); 38–41 (possible possession or obsession). For similar positions, see Willard,
Some Miscellany Observations . . .
(“Philadelphia, 1692”), 5–7 (confessions or testimony by two witnesses), 7–8 (possible possession of the afflicted), 10–12 (diabolical representations of the innocent). The last quotation is from ibid., 15 (see also Mather, Cases of Conscience, 62–65). And see David C. Brown, “The Salem Witchcraft Trials: Samuel Willard’s
Some Miscellany Observations,” EIHC
122 (1986): 207–36.

This paragraph and the next are based on Mather,
Cases of Conscience,
21, and unpaginated afterword (after p. 67). In letters to Johannes Kerfbijl, Jacob Melijn declared on 5 October that the Mathers’ “opinions differ greatly from each other,” and then a week later said that “the Mathers reconciled their pamphlets in press” (Melijn Letterbook, AAS, trans. by Evan Haefeli). But see n. 50, below, on the problem of dating the second letter.

This paragraph and the next are based generally on “Brattle Letter,” in Burr,
Narratives,
167–90 passim (quotations in this paragraph: 169, 178, 181); see 177–78, 180–81, 184 for the comments on named individuals. Brattle did not identify Willard by name, but he is unquestionably the person meant (no other church had three members on the court). Jacob Melijn thought that all the clergymen, including Increase Mather, erred by attributing “too much . . . to the devil and the ‘witch’ or sorcery”; see Melijn to Johannes Kerfbijl, 5 October 1692, Melijn Letterbook, AAS (trans. by Evan Haefeli).

“Brattle Letter,” in Burr,
Narratives,
187, 183. Brattle indicated that Stoughton still thought the woman Knapp accused to be a witch “to this day” (ibid., 183–84). Cotton Mather later claimed that he had volunteered to care for six of the afflicted in order to see if “
Prayer
with
Fasting
would not putt an End unto these heavy Trials,” but that his offer had not been accepted (Worthington C. Ford, ed.,
Diary of Cotton Mather
[New York, 1957], 1:152).

“Brattle Letter,” in Burr,
Narratives,
174, 179, 186–88; Phips to Blathwayt, 12 October 1692, in ibid., 196–97; Mather,
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:27.

Quotation: Mather,
Cases of Conscience,
unpaginated afterword following p. 67. See n. 33, above, for Phips’s order. In a letter dated 20 October that accompanied a copy of
Wonders,
Cotton explained why he did not reciprocally endorse his father’s book and described the resulting criticism; see Silverman, ed.,
Selected
Letters,
45–46; see also Ford, ed.,
Mather Diary
1:152–54. For the conclusion that Cotton sent a copy of the published version of
Wonders of the Invisible World
to London on the
Samuel and Henry,
which sailed from Boston on 14 October, see George H. Moore, “Notes on the Bibliography of Witchcraft in Massachusetts,”
AAS Procs,
new ser., 5 (1887–88): 258; and McCarl, “Spreading the News,”
EIHC
129 (1993): 58. Cf. David Levin, “Did the Mathers Disagree about the Salem Witchcraft Trials?”
AAS Procs,
95, pt. 1 (1985): 19–37, which contends that father and son essentially concurred.

Mather,
WIW,
in
WDNE
1:1–25 passim (quotations, in order: 1, 3, 15–18, 25).

Ibid., 29, 34–35, for quotations. The summaries of Perkins, Gaule, and Bernard are on 37–46; the Bury St. Edmunds trial, 140–51; Mora, 212–17 passim (quotations, 212). An excellent brief account of the Mora trials is Bengt Ankarloo, “Sweden: The Mass Burnings (1668–1676),” in Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen, eds.,
Early Modern European Witchcraft: Centres and Peripheries
(Oxford, U.K., 1990), 285–317.

The trial summaries, all from
WIW,
in
WDNE
1: Burroughs, 152–63; Bishop, 163–74; Martin, 175–87; Howe, 188–94; Carrier, 194–200. The Stoughton-Sewall endorsement: ibid., 211.
WIW
itself closed with a prolix, unremarkable discussion entitled “The Devil Discovered” (ibid., 217–46).

Samuel Sewall noted in his diary discussions with people with varying opinions on the subject: on 7 October, the Rev. Samuel Torrey of Weymouth advocated continuing the Court of Oyer and Terminer, after “regulating any thing that may have been amiss,” whereas Thomas Danforth told him on 15 October that “there cannot be a procedure in Court except there be some better consent of Ministers and People” (Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:297–98).

Most of the quotations in this paragraph and the next are from Phips to William Blathwayt, in Burr,
Narratives,
196–98. The others come from the additional 12 October letters: Phips to Earl of Nottingham, CO 5/751, f 21; Phips to Blathwayt, vol. 5, fol. 1, William Blathwayt Papers, CW (two different letters in same location). The original of the letter printed by Burr is in CO 5/857, with a copy in CO 5/904. See also Isaac Addington to Blathwayt, 4 October 1692, in Sir Thomas Phillipps Collection, LCMD, for more information about Phips’s activities in Maine. In his 21 February 1692/3 further report to London about the crisis, Phips continued to lie about his whereabouts in the summer of 1692; see Burr,
Narratives,
199.

Abner C. Goodell Jr., “Letter from Sir William Phips and other Papers relating to Witchcraft, including Questions to Ministers and their Answers,”
MHS Procs,
ser. 2, 1 (1884): 353–58 passim (quotations 355–58, translated from Latin).

John Miller,
New York Considered and Improved, 1695,
ed. Victor Hugo Paltsis (Cleveland, 1903), 123–25 passim (first quotation 124). I located this source thanks to a note in the George Lincoln Burr Papers, Misc. Witchcraft notes, box 38, Cornell University Archives, Kroch Library. A photocopy of the Latin original (now in the N.Y. Public Library) is in the Cornell witchcraft collection. My thanks to my colleague James J. John for translating much of the document and providing the wording of the second quotation.

SWP
3:877; Jeremy Belknap, ed., “Recantation of Confessors of Witchcraft,”
MHS Colls,
13 (1815): 223 (see 221–25 passim); for Brattle’s presence at the interviews,
SWP
1:284. Sarah Churchwell and Hannah and Mary Post, though, did
not
recant when they spoke with Mather. Confessors like Goody Barker evidently apologized directly to those they had accused; see Abigail Faulkner, petition to Sir William Phips, 3 December 1692, in ibid., 1:333–34. Several recanters indicated they were threatened with Samuel Wardwell’s fate (ibid., 3:971–72).

The ministers’ statement is printed in David D. Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting
in Seventeenth-Century New England,
2d ed. (Boston, 1999), 348. See the records of these cases, ibid., 315–54, passim. During the course of the summer four women from Fairfield had also been accused of witchcraft by Branch or others, but the grand jury indicted only one of the four, and she was quickly acquitted. The additional defendants were Mary and Hannah Harvey, Mary Staples, and Goody Miller (who was tried and acquitted). Little is known about these women, but see John M. Taylor,
The Witchcraft Delusion in Colonial Connecticut, 1647–1697
(New York, 1908), 140–41, 154, and 117–18 (on Hugh Crosia, a Fairfield man accused later in the fall, but also not indicted); and Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting,
345–47.

Council minutes, 14 and 22 October, CO 5/785, ff 97, 98; 25–26 October are on ff 98, 99. Four decades earlier, Pike had been removed from office and disfranchised by the colony for his adamant opposition to certain policies of the government (see
EC Ct Recs
1:366–68). The only judge missing on 14 October was Wait Winthrop, who was out of town; on 22 October, the absentees were Winthrop and Sewall. Two Dutch sources claimed that the letters from New York were decisive; see Jacob Melijn to Johannes Kerfbijl, 12 October 1692, Melijn Letterbook; and Hugh Hastings, ed.,
Ecclesiastical Records, State of New York
(Albany, 1901), 2:1046. Despite considerable brainstorming, Evan Haefeli and I have been unable to resolve definitively the chronological question raised by Melijn’s letter being nominally dated
before
the Dutch clergy’s letter could have been received in Boston. The most likely explanation, I believe, is that Melijn added the date to his letterbook some weeks after he actually wrote the rough draft of the missive recorded there, and that “12 October” was a retrospective, inaccurate guess on his part. Other letters in the book appear to carry correct dates.

Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:299. The closeness of the assembly vote confirmed that the trials still had many supporters. For the bill proposing the fast day and the information that the council did not agree to it: George H. Moore, ed., “Notes on the History of Witchcraft in Massachusetts; with Illustrative Documents,”
AAS Procs,
new ser., 2 (1882–83): 172–73. But the council did eventually call a fast for Thursday, 29 December 1692, in response to “War, Sickness, Earthquakes, and other Desolating Calamities,” especially because God had permitted “Witchcrafts and Evil Angels to Rage amongst this his People.” See council minutes, 20 December 1692, CO 5/785, f 105; and CO 5/857, f 97 (a broadside announcing the fast).

Mary Herrick, Declaration before Mr. Hale and Mr. Gerrish, 14 November 1692, in J. Wingate Thornton, comp., “Witchcraft Papers—1692,”
NEHGR
27 (1873): 55. Some historians contend that this accusation of his wife changed John Hale from a supporter to a critic of the trials: see the epilogue for further details.

On the debates and the election of judges, see council minutes, CO 5/785, ff 175–81, 102–103; and Thomas, ed.,
Sewall Diary
1:301–302.

See Moore, ed., “Notes on History of Witchcraft,”
AAS Procs,
new ser. 2 (1882–83): 168–70; Rosenthal, Salem Story, 195–201, 219–20; and David C. Brown, “The Forfeitures at Salem, 1692,”
WMQ,
3d ser., 50 (1993): 85–111. Phips later claimed that Stoughton had ordered such confiscations “without my knowledge or consent” (Phips to Earl of Nottingham, 21 February 1692/3, in Burr,
Narratives,
201). The text of the law is published in
SWP
3:885–86.