The Enemy Within (26 page)

By now, “objections” were being raised, and “objectors” heard, at the highest levels of provincial governance: among members of the Council, for example, and within the clergy as well. The key issue, as before, was spectral evidence, about which much of the leadership inclined toward doubt, or outright denial. And if the previously incriminating specters were now considered fraudulent, how should the “afflicted” accusers be viewed? Did they bear some personal responsibility for initiating, and spreading, a deadly series of false charges? The predominant view supported them; both their “complaints” and their “torments” seemed genuine enough. However, in some quarters suspicion was growing that “they do but counterfeit.” Several of the accused had suggested as much long before; at least one had charged them with telling “lies,” another with using “wiles and subtlety,” yet another with resort to “juggling tricks, falling down, crying out, and staring in people's faces.” In fact, it seems probable that skepticism about the trials—most of it covert, ambivalent, checked by fear and doubt—had been present virtually from the start. To express such attitudes directly was, of course, to risk being accused oneself. Still, as summer passed into fall, the skeptics were becoming both more numerous and more emboldened. Governor Phips, upon returning from a trip to the Maine frontier, found Boston and the surrounding towns in “a strange ferment of dissatisfaction.” And the region was soon to witness an open print war between critics and supporters of the trials.

First, though, there would be one more round of prosecutions, with Lieutenant Governor Stoughton and his fellow judges determined to press ahead regardless. Indeed, this fourth and (as it turned out) final session of the Court of Oyer and Terminer claimed more victims than any of its predecessors. Within a span of eleven frenetic days, the court tried 15 suspects, and convicted them all; then it brought another group out for indictment and subsequent trial. For the first time, the convicts included several confessors; all but one of these, however, were eventually reprieved. (The exception was a man who recanted his confession.) Among the more notable defendants was old Giles Corey, who “stood mute” before the bar and refused to enter a plea. The court then ordered him to undergo an ancient procedure known as
peine fort et dure
(strong and hard pain) designed to force a response. He was laid flat while large stones were piled on his chest; this would continue until he spoke as required or died. According to legend, his only words before succumbing were a whispered but defiant “more weight.”

In very short order, death warrants were issued for most of the others, and September 22 brought the largest of the mass executions. The process was delayed when a cart carrying the condemned became temporarily stuck in the roadway; some thought “the Devil hindered it.” Then, as one after another was finally “turned off,” there were solemn prayers and affecting farewells; according to an eyewitness, “Tears [flowed] from the eyes of almost all present.” But not entirely all. Reverend Noyes, of the Town church, is said to have remarked with evident scorn, “What a sad thing it is to see eight fire-brands of hell hanging there!”

By the end of the summer, fourteen women and six men had been executed, and accusations were still coming in. (Among the new names mentioned was that of Lady Phips, wife of the governor.) Examinations continued, with many of the accused languishing in prison for weeks, even months, more. Several escaped in nighttime jailbreaks with the active assistance of family and friends. Meanwhile, Boston and the adjacent towns were abuzz with witchcraft debate, “in the coffee-houses and elsewhere.” The talk was fed by a spate of fresh writings, some in published form, others in manuscript but intended for general circulation. Two of these were by Boston ministers, Increase Mather (father of Cotton) and Samuel Willard. Both men sought to straddle the jagged fence between opposing viewpoints on the trials. They questioned the use of spectral evidence, believing as they did that the Devil could assume the shape of innocent persons; by the same token, they disapproved touch tests as amounting to “the Devil's testimony.” Yet they drew back from criticizing the current court in any direct way. It seemed possible, even probable, that Satan had used the trials as a means of “deluding and imposing on the imaginations of men”; this meant that “the witnesses, judges, and juries were all to be excused from blame.”

Another careful observer (and author), the Boston merchant Thomas Brattle, drew a more sharply negative picture. He, too, discounted spectral evidence and such “superstitious methods” as touch tests. But he added strong criticism of the court's reliance on the testimony of confessors, whom he viewed as “deluded . . . and under the influence of an evil spirit,” and thus “unfit to be evidences against themselves or anyone else.” He noted a troubling compromise of “distributive justice,” in that several persons of high social rank had escaped persecution even though “much complained of by the afflicted”; this, he said, had occasioned “much discourse and many hot words” among more ordinary folk. He concluded by listing various “men of understanding, judgment, and piety . . . that do utterly condemn the said proceedings,” including a former governor, a former lieutenant governor, and several justices, as well as “reverend elders almost throughout the country.”

Against such critics stood the redoubtable Cotton Mather, whose impassioned defense
The Wonders of the Invisible World
was published in mid-October. But Mather was swimming against a steadily rising tide. The momentum for prosecution did not collapse all at once; rather, it disintegrated piece by piece, day by day, person by person. Petitioners urged that those still in jail be released; confessors recanted their previous testimony; and at least one of the afflicted accusers came forward to say that “now she believeth it is all a delusion of the Devil.” The Court of Oyer and Terminer was scheduled to resume prosecutions at the start of November. However, the Council had begun, in the meantime, to debate its future, and the assembly declared a public day of fasting, with a “convocation of ministers” appointed to reflect on the entire crisis. On October 29, Governor Phips responded to a questioner by stating flatly that the court “must fall.”

In fact, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had been from the start a special creation, designed to meet the exigencies of the witchcraft “outbreak” in particular. There was always an expectation that its duties would someday be taken over by one or another part of the regular judicial system. And that is what happened in December, when the Superior Court of Judicature (freshly constituted following a renewal and revision of the colony's charter) went into full operation.

Even now the witch-hunt mentality had not fully abated; prosecutions would continue under new auspices. In fact, when the superior court was officially convened in early January, with Lieutenant Governor Stoughton again in charge and other members of the previous court sitting alongside him, it confronted a backlog of more than 50 cases from the previous summer and fall. To be sure, the rules had changed; from now on, spectral evidence would be effectively disallowed. There was also a sense, among some of the judges themselves, that “their former proceedings were too violent, and not grounded upon a right foundation.” Thus many in the latest group of defendants were quickly dismissed without even an indictment, while others were tried and acquitted. Only three were found guilty. Each of these had previously confessed, so spectral evidence was not at issue. Stoughton was perhaps the last holdout for an inflexibly hard line: almost immediately he signed death warrants for the newly convicted trio, plus five others (from earlier trials) whose sentence had not yet been carried out. A date of execution was set—February first—and preparations begun. And workmen began hacking fresh graves out of the frozen ground.

In the meantime, however, the king's attorney for Massachusetts had given the governor an advisory opinion that the case against those under sentence seemed little different from what had been alleged with others now freed. Phips thought it over for the next two weeks, and then, with just a day to spare, revoked the execution orders and issued a set of reprieves. Predictably, Stoughton responded with fury. “We were in a way to have the country cleared of these,” he exclaimed; but now, thanks to the governor's ruling, “the kingdom of Satan is advanced.” He stormed from the court and refused for a while thereafter to take any part in its regular work.

And still it dragged on. The jails in Salem and Boston housed perhaps two dozen additional suspects, most of them under indictment and awaiting trial. Five of these would be acquitted in early February. (In one case, the verdict contravened some 30 witnesses, ready even now to attest to “malicious and felonious” acts of witchcraft.) Over the weeks and months that followed, several more would be released, quietly and without official formalities. A final burst of court proceedings came in mid-May, some resulting in simple dismissals, some in trials, but none in convictions. Among this group of defendants was Tituba, Reverend Parris's Indian slave, who had remained in jail since the time of her extraordinary and explosive confession more than a year earlier. Upon being released, she was (according to later reports) put up for sale and purchased by a new owner, since Parris declined responsibility for the costs of her imprisonment. The inability to reimburse such costs, assessed for meals and other necessaries provided by the prison-keeper, kept a few more unlucky souls confined until midsummer. The last such case was concluded only at the end of August, when Mary Watkins, a onetime accuser and subsequent confessor, went off to Virginia as an indentured servant.

Reverend John Hale of Beverly had been both an observer and a participant in the trials; his little book
A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft
(published several years later) provided a kind of postmortem on the entire crisis. His view of its ending commands attention even now. Alongside the learned debate about questions such as spectral evidence and the extent of Satan's power, Hale noted a widespread public perception of “going too far in this affair.” It had become harder and harder to believe that “so many in so small a compass of land should so abominably leap into the Devil's lap at once.” Moreover, “the quality of several of the accused was such as did bespeak better things, and things that accompany salvation.” In sum: on grounds of both quantity and quality, “those that were concerned . . . grew amazed”—and finally disbelieving. The witch-hunt had overreached, and, in effect, destroyed itself.

Trials finished, jails emptied, time at last to reckon the costs. Twenty dead, over a hundred imprisoned, dozens more cast under suspicion; neighbors set bitterly against one another, families sundered, property and reputations lost or destroyed. It was, by any measure, a heavy, shattering toll. Recovery would proceed in small increments over long periods of time.

Bits and pieces of the aftermath lie scattered through local and provincial records, beginning with the homecoming of dozens among the accused. Many of them had been in prison for months; some had fled to escape prosecution; a few had gone into hiding. Their reintegration cannot have been easy; imagine, for example, the situation of a woman whose husband or other relatives had joined the list of her accusers. (Imagine, too, the situation of such a husband.) In some cases, especially those involving the joint prosecution of a married couple, household property had been confiscated by the authorities (or simply pilfered by neighbors); now there would be lawsuits to gain restitution. When the wealthy Salem importer Philip English and his wife returned to their home in the spring of 1693, having been forced previously “to fly for our lives,” they found “a considerable body of household goods . . . taken away,” including family portraits, wines, clothing, five pigs, and “a certain cow with a bob tail.” Moreover, the warehouses from which English had carried on his extensive trade were stripped almost bare. The list of his losses went on for pages, and amounted in value to more than £1,000; his efforts to obtain redress, through the courts, would continue for decades. At the opposite end of the social scale, an impoverished widow from Lynn named Mary deRich—also accused and long imprisoned—had “lost her bed and pot”; she, too, would seek legal remedy. Elizabeth Proctor, meanwhile, had been tried and convicted along with her husband, John; he was executed, but she was spared because she was pregnant. Her eventual release ignited a bitter struggle with her stepchildren over the terms of John's will; years later she petitioned the General Court for relief, saying that “they [the stepchildren] will not suffer me to have one penny of his estate.” The courts were also a logical site for handling many smaller
residua
of the trials, such as payments to constables, sheriffs, and jail-keepers, and even to tavern-keepers who had supplied judges and jurors with needed “refreshment” as they went about their grim task.

Doubtless the trials remained for years a lively, if painful, topic of both public and private conversation; references to such moments appear from time to time in Samuel Sewall's diary. In June 1693, for example, Sewall went to see his old friend John Alden, who had recently come home to Boston following prosecution, escape from prison, and several months of life on the lam in New York. “I was sorry,” Sewall told Alden and his wife, “for their sorrow and temptations, by reason of his imprisonment, and I was glad of his restoration.” Some time later Sewall reported visiting with another Bostonian named Jacob Melyen, who “spoke to me very smartly about the Salem witchcraft.” In particular, Melyen ridiculed the accusations touching Reverend George Burroughs's supposedly supernatural strength, saying that “if a man should take Beacon Hill on his back, carry it away, and then . . . set it in its place again, I should not make anything of it.” In November 1697, Sewall wrote that “Mr. Hale and I lodged together. He discussed with me about writing a history of witchcraft.” (The reference was to Reverend John Hale, minister in the town of Beverly.)