The Witches: Salem, 1692 (27 page)

In the village Hathorne and Corwin meanwhile continued to issue warrants and hear complaints. The Salem constable that week found a new suspect at her spinning wheel and delivered her posthaste to the authorities. Forty-year-old Ann Dolliver would have been especially easy to locate as she lodged, with her children, at the home of her father, Salem town’s seventy-six-year-old senior minister, round-faced, beak-nosed John Higginson. (A Gloucester sea captain, Dolliver’s husband had abandoned the family.) Dolliver was not only the daughter but also the
granddaughter and great-granddaughter of ministers. The three men who signed the warrant for her arrest were her father’s parishioners, as were her examiners. Her brother was a newly appointed magistrate. Like Abigail Hobbs, Dolliver was a wanderer, at odds with her stepmother. Long crippled by melancholy, she seemed, as one Salem resident put it, “crazed in her understanding.”

Presumably out of deference to her family—a minister’s daughter, she was Mrs. Dolliver in the eyes of the court—Hathorne interrogated her gently, in private. Had she ever practiced witchcraft? “Not with intent to hurt anybody” came the troubling reply. She may have been simple; she was certainly naive. She had slept in the woods late at night. She had run away from home to avoid her stepmother. After some coaxing from the girls, she revealed some additional oddities. Had she any poppets? Hathorne asked. She had two, of wax. She had made them about fourteen years earlier, when she had believed herself bewitched. She had felt the telltale pinches. (Everyone seemed to know what a witch’s tweak felt like.) She read in a book that she could reverse the spell.

On the page as in person, her father was flinty and direct, a man of “soft words but hard arguments.” He had forcefully expressed himself in the past, in his attacks on Quakers, on points of doctrine, an epidemic of drinking, the abuses of a royal governor, the obstreperous Salem villagers. He had had no particular use for the diabolical in his sermons, which included none of the sense of siege, the alarmist, assaultive sparks that lit up a Parris or Mather performance. Six years earlier, reconciled to the fact that he would never see the five hundred pounds of back salary the town owed him, Higginson had arranged for Salem to keep the funds but provide for his adult children, an arrangement to which the town had agreed, perhaps less cheerfully than it seemed at the time. He was not the last minister in 1692 to find his daughter accused of witchcraft. Nor does he appear to have objected to the proceedings, even when they reached his doorstep. He had not a thing to say about witchcraft, despite an unassailable position in his community, which he had energetically served for thirty-two years. Having jousted with Andros, having tangled
with angry, obstinate Baptists, he went silent in 1692. He labored, he explained later, “under the infirmities of a decrepit old age.” He made no mention of his daughter, imprisoned on June 6.

Three days later, Chief Justice Stoughton ordered the Salem sheriff to conduct Bridget Bishop on Friday, between eight o’clock and noon, to the appointed place of execution, “and there cause her to be hanged by the neck until she be dead.” He was afterward to attest he had done so. The sheriff, Stoughton added—in an uncommon turn of phrase; there seemed some fear of escape—was to fail only at his peril.

AT SOME POINT
on the morning of June 10 George Corwin—Justice Corwin’s nephew, who was also one witchcraft judge’s son-in-law and another’s nephew—removed Bishop from prison. He arranged for her to travel by open, two-wheeled cart from the prison on what is today St. Peter Street, west along Essex Street, through central Salem, turning sharply north on the Boston road, a route of about fifteen minutes on foot. The idea was to dispense with the convicted witch as publicly as possible; Bishop rode to her death as an enchantress and an example. A full panoply of marshals and constables accompanied the procession as it rattled across a tidal inlet, up the steep path, and to a rocky ledge along a pasture overlooking the town. There a rope hung from a freshly installed gallows. Beyond lay a panoramic view of fields and marshes, inlets, headlands, and sparkling ocean.

No eyewitness account of the hanging survives, though plenty might have. So many had streamed to a 1659 execution of a Quaker woman that the bridge over which they returned to Boston collapsed under their weight.
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The stampede to a lecture before a murderer’s execution in 1686 nearly brought down the First Church gallery. Five thousand turned out for that execution, some traveling from more than fifty miles away; they began to assemble a week in advance. Female malefactors were especially
compelling, only more so in Bishop’s case: Who doesn’t care to know what a witch looks like? There had been no such execution since Mary Glover, hanged four years earlier on Boston Common for having bewitched the Goodwin children. Not only was the event so horrible as to be irresistible, but it was intended as moral instruction. It was the kind of thing to which you took the children, the well-schooled of whom learned, among other five-syllable words, “abomination,” “edification,” “humiliation,” “mortification,” “purification.” A carnival atmosphere prevailed.

Ministers attended eagerly to the condemned, who on the scaffold reliably attested to the beauties of family discipline or the wisdom of the court and admonished the crowd against following in their wicked footsteps. It was not easy to rival those last-ditch expressions of remorse; a condemned pirate’s regret that he had scorned his parents, embraced vice, and entangled himself with foul company made an impression. A witch merited no such treatment, however. She offered no stirring lessons in deterrence, no soul-purifying shame. Meanwhile the onlookers ached with suspense. In her final minutes would she at least confess?

Under the gallows, an officer of the court read Bishop’s death warrant. Had she anything to say? She insisted on her innocence even as she climbed the ladder. There was to be no tidy satisfaction like that offered by a Connecticut witch who—repenting for her sins—“died in a frame extremely to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it.” (She was the first New Englander to confess to a devil’s pact.) Though not her minister, at her request John Hale seems to have offered a few last words at the foot of the gallows. A Salem shopkeeper scoffed that were he asked to pray at her execution, he would not do so; Hale heard the comment as a reproach. No doubt speaking for many, the shopkeeper excoriated Bishop. She had covenanted with the devil. He would happily have testified against her. (His wife had.) We do not know if Parris was present, although it is difficult to believe that any local minister could have absented himself, much less one who had signed four indictments against Bishop. Many of her accusers stood in the crowd, along with at least some of the bewitched girls and much of the village. A few unexpected parties
turned up as well. A Salem matron watched the devil help George Jacobs up to a perch on the gallows. Mary Walcott saw Jacobs too; he beat her with his spectral walking sticks. The members of the court were themselves in Boston, at a meeting of the governor’s council.

We know nothing of Bishop’s last words, of who tied her skirts around her ankles or her hands behind her back, who urged her up the ladder, placed the cloth over her head, or fitted the noose around her neck. Hangmen were not easy to come by. Sheriff Corwin may himself have delivered the push that left her suspended by the neck, thrashing desperately, twitching spasmodically, finally dangling, still and silent, in midair. She died by slow strangulation; the end could have taken as long as an hour. It was not necessarily quiet. It could be preceded by bloodcurdling groans and—in one case—a shocking request: Having hung for some time, a 1646 malefactor asked what her executioners proposed to do next. Someone stepped forward “and turned the knot of the rope backward, and then she soon died.” In New York a year earlier, the condemned was still alive when he was cut down from the gallows. The blow of an ax finished the job. Agonized cries went up from the spectators; at a later hanging, the screeches as the body dropped could be heard a mile away. Afterward it swayed in the air for some time, the crowd dispersing slowly. Bishop’s could be seen across the fields for miles around and from the far side of Salem town. She died before noon; Corwin arranged for the corpse to be buried nearby, a detail he added to his report and later crossed out, presumably as he had exceeded his instructions. It is difficult to imagine who might have claimed the body. Bishop’s husband appears to have absented himself from the scene. From an earlier marriage, she had a twenty-five-year-old daughter, who could only have kept her distance that season.

Across both Salems, villagers and townsfolk breathed a collective sigh of relief. They had dispatched a nuisance and a notorious sinner. Together they had engaged in a cathartic, calming ritual. They had discharged their fear; there would be no more confounding bedroom intrusions. As would be observed much later, such things were “painful, grotesque, but
a scandal was after all a sort of service to the community.” The wise magistrates whose praises Mather sang in his charter-selling sermon—the authorities who were to clear the woods of Indians and the sea of pirates—were on their way to clearing the air of evil; the charter enjoined those men to “kill, slay, destroy, and conquer” anyone who attempted to invade or annoy Massachusetts. Wrongs were righted and reason returned—in one case, quite literally. A decade earlier Bishop had pried a woman from her bed and nearly drowned her. The woman was thereafter insane, “a vexation to herself and all about her.” With Bishop’s arrest, her condition improved. And as Bishop swung from the gallows, the woman miraculously emerged from her decade of madness. The execution worked a spell of its own over Essex County, where—Mather would note—many “marvelously recovered their senses.” Accusations ceased over the next weeks, as did arrests. The girls appeared symptom-free, the jailed witches incapacitated. Both Salems had reason to believe themselves safe.

One other person might have as well. The day after Bishop’s execution, five hundred Wabanaki and French descended upon Wells, Maine, with shouts, shots, and flaming arrows, “a formidable crew of dragons, coming with open mouth upon them, to swallow them up at a mouthful,” as Mather later described it. Over two days a band of fifteen men managed to hold off the attackers. The Wabanaki all the same made off with a captive. In full view of the settlers, just beyond musket range, they stripped, scalped, and castrated him, slicing open his fingers and toes and inserting burning coals under the skin before leaving him to die. George Burroughs was spared that sight and the horrific, two-day siege of his parishioners, safe as he was in the eternal dark of Boston’s dungeon.

The remainder of the summer was, Mather noted in his diary at some indeterminate point later in the year, “a very doleful time, unto the whole country.”

GOVERNOR PHIPS SPOKE
accurately when he hailed the Salem justices as the best and brightest. Well-read, widely traveled, they were men of integrity, familiar with the workings of the court, an inevitable stop on the way to a New England fortune.
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Many had handed down unpopular decisions. Several had witnessed trials in London. They lived in the finest brick mansions and gabled homes in their respective towns. The burden of proof rested on the prosecution, but the prosecution enjoyed a few seventeenth-century advantages. An English trial of the time was inquisitorial, an informal, free-form, hectic, rapid-fire contest best described as “a relatively spontaneous bicker between accusers and accused.” Across the board, standards of proof were imprecise. A suspect had no idea of the evidence against her until she stepped into the courtroom, where she could be convicted of a different crime than the one for which she stood
indicted. She had the right to defend herself but no guarantee she would be heard. Protests of innocence carried little weight. “I am no thief,” a defendant in a larceny case insisted two generations later. “You must prove that,” replied the judge. A valued legal treatise recommended deposing the defendant’s adversaries, for such people “will pry very narrowly into everything.” As only witnesses for the prosecution testified under oath, their word carried greater weight. Hearsay was perfectly acceptable, which explained how—at Bishop’s trial—Samuel Shattuck could testify about a stranger who divined that Bishop had bewitched a child. That was the guest who insisted a quarrelsome witch lived nearby. Only then did Shattuck recall a tense encounter between his wife and Bishop, who had stalked off, muttering. Soon afterward, Shattuck’s son fell ill. The stranger had acted no differently from the fortune-teller who intuits that you have recently suffered a setback; she is unfailingly correct. Witchcraft merely supplied the culprit, sometimes in advance of her crime, often many years later. There was in 1692 a certain amount of relitigating ancient offenses. It was not a summer when you wanted to appear in your neighbor’s dreams.

No fewer than five men sat in judgment over Bridget Bishop. We can be certain of the identities of only three. They did not hear the case the same way. All had graduated from Harvard, approximately a decade apart. Each had opted for a more secular career than the one for which he had been educated.
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Amiable, heavyset Samuel Sewall was the only one of the three courteous enough to leave a diary. Salem witchcraft was something one talked of endlessly but wrote about very little; Sewall made no entries over the month of June, remaining silent until mid-July. He would write more expansively on Salem later. The kind of father who devoted his morning to a teenager’s spiritual crisis, Sewall worried always that he did “much harm and little good,” an equation he struggled to invert. He shrank from the censure of friends; he was appalled in 1701
when, at the top of his lungs, Cotton Mather excoriated him—Mather could be heard from the street—in a bookstore. (Sewall the next day attempted to placate his irate friend with a fine haunch of venison. He failed.) He wrote even a cordial dunning letter. He compared himself unfavorably to his mother-in-law. Sewall moved at a deliberate pace; with reason, colleagues accused him of temporizing. He did not naturally oppose authority, something that on occasion also discomfited him. He had been displeased with himself for having bowed to pressure when—his dear friend and fellow witchcraft justice Wait Still Winthrop forcing his hand—agreed at the last minute to reprieve a pirate. Never before had he adjudicated a witchcraft case.

Two days after Bishop’s hanging, Sewall took his place in the pews of Boston’s Old South Church for Samuel Willard’s afternoon sermon. Several other justices joined him there. The son of one of Massachusetts’s founding families, Wait Still Winthrop, sat nearby, as did Peter Sergeant. What Willard had to say that afternoon both reassured and disturbed. Taking 1 Peter 5:8 as his text, he reminded his congregants that they were to be sober-minded and watchful. The devil ranged among them, eager to pounce. He reserved his greatest malice for the pious. Willard confirmed Mather’s millennial note; the fiend was at his most violent when his time was short. The devil, noted Willard, could represent anyone he pleased; he required no pact. Willard appealed for charity and compassion. Some matters, he held, should be left to divine adjudication.

That possibility—that one might well work witchcraft without having consented, much less contracted, to do so—struck Chief Justice Stoughton as unlikely. The eldest of the three Harvard-educated judges, sixty-year-old Stoughton demonstrated a gift for extracting himself from controversies that tended to sink lesser men. Far steelier than Sewall, he knew a great deal about law enforcement. Massachusetts legal code carefully and clearly enumerated crimes but could be opaque regarding court procedures. On the one hand, leniency was preferred. On the other hand, offenses that undermined society as a whole demanded swift prosecution. And the province faced a crisis of unprecedented proportions.
Never before had it suffered a witchcraft epidemic. Even those unsympathetic to the Puritan establishment were astonished. To a half-amused New York Anglican, it seemed as if Cotton Mather had been prescient two years earlier when he had warned that Satan schemed to wrench the colony from Puritan hands. The devil indeed now seemed on the verge of depopulating Massachusetts. There were over one hundred suspects in jail, most of them church members, elders, and deacons, reported the New Yorker. A minister rotted in prison, as did another’s daughter. The wife of a third had been named. The wretches betrayed one another so quickly that “now they say there is above seven hundred in all.” (That was untrue, although it was true that more witches were jailed than had been convicted in all the years of New England history combined.) To someone like Stoughton, it seemed as if everything in which he believed stood in jeopardy. That fear galloped across New England. On June 22, Connecticut established a witchcraft court to address an epidemic of its own.

Enforcing the laws of New England qualified as a sacred duty. The justices approached it scrupulously, consulting authoritative legal texts and following the letter of the law. Some dissension nonetheless arose among the ranks. Within days of Bishop’s hanging, fifty-three-year-old Nathaniel Saltonstall, the third Harvard-educated justice, resigned from the Court of Oyer and Terminer. An Ipswich native, the grandson of an early Bay Colony leader, Saltonstall sat regularly on the Massachusetts bench. He had lobbied in London on New England’s behalf alongside Increase Mather. A highly popular militia captain, he had served on the Maine frontier. Principles had tripped him up before and may have done so again; in 1687 he had refused to cooperate with Andros, an offense for which he spent fifteen days in prison. It is unclear if Saltonstall caviled with the Bishop verdict or the execution. An observer later allowed simply that “he has left the court, and is very much dissatisfied with the proceedings of it.” He was not replaced.

Although he excused himself from the court, Saltonstall does not seem to have offered a public statement. When you questioned the
proceedings, specters had a habit of assuming your shape; it was a short step from urging caution to fending off accusation. Already Mather peered nervously over his shoulder, wondering when the devil would begin to masquerade in his guise. (It would not be long.) An Andover constable would balk at further arrests, dubious about the charges; he landed in prison. Indeed, within the year, a report of Saltonstall’s specter began to circulate. More than ever it was true that—as Baxter had it, paraphrasing Luke, in a line Parris would adapt—“If you are not for Christ and his works, you are against him.”

Skepticism tended to burst forth, execute a few mincing steps, then burrow underground, spooked by its shadow. No one pointed out that thirty-six-year-old Sarah Bibber—whom the spectral Burroughs had accompanied to his hearing and who now writhed alongside the girls—was a known scandalmonger, double-tongued and mischief-making. On no front were lips more suddenly pursed than when it came to countersuits. Prior to 1692, defamation had represented a lively New England business. In one of the earliest Massachusetts witchcraft proceedings, a woman received twenty lashes for calling another a witch. The Salem woman of whom it had been said that “she was a witch and if she were not a witch already she would be one and therefore it was as good to hang her at first as last” sued successfully for defamation. Often the cases pitted men against each other, one having lobbed an accusation at the other’s wife. Susannah Martin’s husband had filed and won a defamation suit after her 1669 witchcraft trial.

Francis Nurse had sued successfully both for defamation and slander. He brought no such action in 1692, when it might too easily have misfired. What prevailed instead was Mather’s admonition that “if the neighbor of an elected saint sins, then the saint sins also.” There was no odium attached to delivering up your fellow villager; in 1692 it was better to accuse than be suspected of complicity. To fail to report an offense constituted an offense of its own. Moreover, by informing, you did your part for the community. Hostile words that had earlier produced slander suits seemed in 1692 diverted to witchcraft accusations.

A rustle of doubt all the same made itself felt. Three days after Bishop’s execution, Phips met with his council, which included Chief Justice Stoughton. They requested some guidance. Over the next days, twelve ministers conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their joint reply, delivered on June 15. While pages seemed to issue from Mather in his sleep, “The Return of Several Ministers Consulted” was a circumspect, eight-paragraph document over which he labored.
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In two paragraphs Mather acknowledged the enormity of the crisis and issued a paean to good government. In two more he urged “exquisite caution.” He addressed procedural issues: The courtroom should be as quiet and neutral as possible. Susceptible as they were to abuse by the “devil’s legerdemains,” practices like the touch test should be deployed carefully. The same went for the evil eye, by no means infallible. Yet again Mather held up English authorities Perkins and Bernard as the gold standard. He sounded a more tentative note than he had two weeks earlier in his discursive letter to John Richards.

In the lines that surely received the greatest scrutiny, Mather reminded the justices that convictions should not rest purely on spectral evidence, to which only the enchanted were privy. He had said as much already; he would insist on the point through the summer. Other considerations must weigh against the suspected witch, “inasmuch as ’tis an undoubted and a notorious thing” that a devil might impersonate an innocent, even a virtuous, man. In a contorted penultimate paragraph, Mather wondered if the entire calamity might be resolved were the court to discount those very testimonies. With a sweeping “nevertheless”—a word that figured in every 1692 Mather witchcraft statement—he then executed an about-face. His “very critical and exquisite caution” became, five
paragraphs later, a vote for a “speedy and vigorous prosecution.” The ministers endorsed the prosecution of those who had “rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God, and the wholesome statutes of the English nation, for the detection of witchcrafts.” Equivocal though he remained, Mather came down emphatically on two points: Their case was extraordinary. The New England magistrate was no less so. Mather would apologize several times for his incoherence on a devilish subject.

Other clergymen were more cogent. In June a Baptist preacher named William Milborne submitted two petitions to the Massachusetts General Assembly. Milborne had preached for some time in Saco, Maine; Burroughs’s plight may have occasioned his protest. (In all ways, one had to be wary of one’s friends. Milborne’s defense may have encouraged the idea that Burroughs was a Baptist, considered heretics and nearly as dangerous as Quakers.) “Several persons of good fame and of unspotted reputation,” Milborne pointed out, were jailed on witchcraft charges. They had committed imaginary crimes. He urged the justices to discount specious evidence; they stood in grave danger of convicting innocents. Milborne had come to the ministry with a legal degree and a background in whaling. He was also a known troublemaker who hailed from a family of troublemakers. He tussled with both congregants and political authorities.
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Phips ordered Milborne’s arrest, yet another acknowledgment of the churning tide in 1692; the two had previously been allies, having made common cause with common friends. Milborne had helped foment the rebellion against Andros. On June 25, the minister found himself summoned to explain his “seditious and scandalous papers.” For his potent “reflections upon the administrations of public justice,” the court offered him his choice between jail and a crushing two-hundred-pound bond. Cotton Mather had bought his home and a tract of land for the same
sum. Milborne was not heard from again. Two days after his arrest—by which time it was clear the New England ministers might differ from the magistrates but would entrust witchcraft to their better judgment—the Court of Oyer and Terminer called its next eight suspects.

THE PURITAN MINISTER
in an apocalyptic frame of mind, the Crown prosecutor preparing his case, and the Massachusetts farmer pondering the sudden death of his cow all engaged in the same exercise. Mind quickening, pulse hammering, each went into analytic overdrive. How to make sense of the ominous and inexplicable without clobbering the dog that was really a child? Rummaging about for the pattern that had to be there somewhere, he ventured into the coincidence-free sector between faith and paranoia, both invested in global, half-visible designs. And he did so as only a fundamentalist, a prosecutor, or an adolescent will: with the heady conviction that he was incontestably, blindingly right.