The Witches: Salem, 1692 (35 page)

All of Boston turned out that Thursday for a citywide fast. Sermons on such occasions adhered to a formula; matching sins to afflictions, they warned of greater terrors were reform not in the offing. Mather worked effectively with the news. The people of Jamaica had been “pulled into the jaws of the gaping and groaning earth, and many hundreds of the inhabitants buried alive.” More, he prophesied, was to come: “You shall oftener hear about apparitions of the devil, and about poor people strangely bewitched, possessed, and obsessed by infernal fiends.” Addressing the events in Salem, he supplied details that had never turned up in court testimony, including more primitive practices than those to which a wily villain would need to reduce himself, like stolen money that floated into the palms of his recruits. More than twenty witches had now confessed, some as young as seven. They berated the parents who had sold them to the devil. “It would break a heart of stone to have seen what I have lately seen,” Mather allowed, the first hint that he had visited Salem, though he did not attend a court session, for which he seemed strategically to be setting the scene. Multitudes of devils, swarms of devils, droves of devils descended upon “the distressed county of Essex.” With invisible instruments of torture, they nearly ruined the site of the
first gathered church in the colony. The plague, he warned, was spreading from town to town, near and wide.

Mather addressed a related peril. There was much “agitated controversy among us,” he allowed, nodding to the skeptics, not as quiet in 1692 as they seem to have been today. He urged moderation. Passion and rumor had run away with the story. He denounced the slandering and backbiting that encouraged the devil in the first place. Tipping his hand, he called once for compassion for the accused, twice for pity for the judges. They were up against the greatest sophist in existence. He appeared to have entwined New England in a finer thread than had ever been used before. The worthy judges labored to restore the innocent while excising the diabolical; it made for an arduous, hazardous operation. Mather was satisfied with the brand of evidence with which the magistrates had thus far prosecuted the “witch gang.” But what of those for whom only spectral evidence existed? So snarled was the question that the honored magistrates had reason to cry, like Jehoshaphat, “We know not what to do!” The devil obscured matters by the minute so that they were all “sinfully, yea hotly, and madly, mauling one another in the dark.”

Where the clergy assisted in escapes one minute and endorsed prosecutions the next (even Mather’s August 4 sermon reads as both admonishment and encouragement); where a villager accused a neighbor, later to sign a petition defending her; where a justice of the peace could submit his examination of a witch to the authorities with the proviso that he was entirely out of his depth; where an accused witch could not determine if the voice in her head was God’s or the devil’s—in short, where everyone else remained lost in the mist, one man continued entirely clear-eyed. It was incumbent on him to perform the hazardous procedure Mather described, excising the diabolical without lopping off innocents in the process. And as of August 1, when preparations for a new Maine expedition consumed Phips, that man happened to be both the head of the witchcraft court and the acting governor of Massachusetts. Phips authorized him to proceed in his absence, although he
remained in Boston that week. Having made an art of exceeding orders, he shrugged off the Salem mauling, which he left in the hands of his lieutenant governor and former political enemy, the ever-capable William Stoughton.

ON AUGUST 3
Martha Carrier appeared before a large crowd, one that included a flock of black-suited ministers, Lawson, Hale, Parris, and surely Noyes among them. We know nothing of her appearance, though—given her two months in an airless prison—Mather may well have been within his rights immortalizing the thirty-eight-year-old as a “rampant hag.” Called to the bar, she acknowledged her identity with a raised hand. The court charged her with having “wickedly and feloniously” practiced witchcraft. She pleaded not guilty. If she again expressed the magnificent disdain she had in May, it went unrecorded. Court officers led in a group of village girls, whose depositions paled beside the eye-rolling fits that accompanied them. Carrier apparently had manifested little sympathy. She seemed to feel as she had in May, when she had chided the justices: “It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.” Ann Foster’s fifty-five-year-old son revealed that Carrier had said that it made no difference to her if the girls’ heads twisted right off. There seem to have been some poisonous looks on all sides.

The evidence against Carrier had piled up steadily since her May hearing. Her older sister, two of her children, and a niece had confessed to having attended satanic meetings in her company. Susannah Shelden turned up to testify with her wrists again soldered together. They could not be separated. Thomas Putnam described the tortures his daughter and four other Salem girls had endured at Carrier’s hands since May; their limbs nearly dislocated. Ann Foster’s daughter dolefully confessed that she and Carrier had together taken the diabolical sacrament. Carrier had undone her entire family “by enticing them into the snare of the devil.” Short-tempered and sharp-tongued, she tended to claw at the social fabric; she clapped her hands in young men’s faces and wished
graphic misfortunes on neighbors. Those curses worked wonders; a land dispute produced a swollen foot or a boil on the groin. Carrier’s twenty-two-year-old nephew had returned to Andover from the war with a gaping, four-inch-deep wound. Before his aunt’s arrest, he could sink a four-inch knitting needle into it. She assured him it would never heal; since her arrest, it miraculously had. (The neighbor’s groin sores had as well.) He made no mention of church-toppling plots. He could however be said to have shed some light on a phenomenon Beverly’s John Hale observed: “The more there were apprehended, the more still were afflicted by Satan.” That may not only have been the result of a creeping diabolical plot. Carrier’s nephew had lost his accused father; he had died in prison six weeks earlier. His mother and sister had been detained. A cousin had confessed to witchcraft. As suspicions puddled around whole families, an accusation was an effective means of escaping the toxic spill. The fears went both ways. Even those who insisted their families were innocent pointed crooked fingers elsewhere. A Nurse relative testified against Carrier.

Both Procters stood trial as well that week. Very little testimony against them survives. What does survive implicates Elizabeth—now nine months pregnant—rather than John. In the wake of their appearance, a powerful petition went to Boston. A separate appeal went to the court. Ipswich minister John Wise drafted the Boston document and presumably solicited the signatures. Yet again, he reminded the authorities of the devil’s habit of impersonating innocents. God’s ways remained unsearchable. The most punctilious court could discern only so much; a little charity was in order. None of the petition’s thirty-two signers had detected the slightest glimmer of wickedness in the couple, who enjoyed “the clearest reputation as to any such evils.” They were good neighbors and dedicated churchgoers. Their case might have raised the greatest doubts about their accusers, had anyone been listening. Skepticism had led directly to accusation. It was after accusing Elizabeth Procter that one of the girls had explained that they spun their tales for sport. Two men testified they had overheard the Putnams feeding Mercy Lewis her
lines. It made little difference. The court found both Procters guilty of witchcraft.

A contemporary of Parris, whom he had known at Harvard, John Wise ministered in Ipswich to a flock of about the same size and on similar terms. He had blazed a very different trail, applying his contentious spirit to the commonweal rather than to his forty cords of wood and eight loads of marsh hay. Wise had some original ideas about the role of government and about taxation without representation. An appealing man with a sprightly sense of humor, he easily succeeded in enlisting others to his cause; five years earlier, he had led Ipswich in a protest against Andros-imposed taxes. They infringed on New England liberties, contended Wise. He incited neighboring towns to resist, getting as far as Topsfield before his arrest. As he later made clear, Wise believed that very little separated aristocracy and monarchy. From there it was but one small step to tyranny. For his principles he spent twenty-one days in prison. Stoughton headed the court that heard his case; it was he who delivered the guilty verdict, one that Wise believed the justices imposed on the jury. It may well have been Stoughton who informed Wise and his friends that they were mistaken if they thought the laws of England followed them to the ends of the earth. They had, the court informed them, “no more privileges left you than not to be sold as slaves.”
^*

Sensitive to liberties infringed and juries coerced, Wise had particular reason to speak out. He mistrusted authority. He believed cowardice a difficult word to pronounce but a more egregious thing of which to be guilty. He had reason to challenge Stoughton, for whom he may have felt some residual animosity. Certainly the tenor of the Ipswich minister’s later remarks was very different from the chief justice’s; Wise believed government owed its existence to the community that submitted to it, not the other way around. In his discourse he preferred “the very
native dress of matter of fact” to any brand of oratorical finery. Wise was immensely popular, considered by his congregants a match for Cotton Mather. He sounds as if he had swallowed a healthy dose of John Locke.

Chains dangling from his wrists, John Procter that week rewrote his will. George Burroughs did not. Even while “a vast concourse of people” journeyed to Salem for his August 5 trial, even while each of the confessed witches designated him their leader, he had reason for confidence. On the eve of the trial, seven men examined him for witch marks. They found nothing. Burroughs held firm to his faith, encouraging his children—to whom he wrote with “solemn and savory instructions”—to do the same. He had supporters, some of whom persuaded a potential witness for the prosecution to make himself scarce that Friday. (The tenor of the times was such that he showed up anyway.) Friends visited Burroughs in prison to confer about his case. He did not intend to rely on the shoulder-shrugging of his May hearing. He knew enough about village affairs to impeach the credibility of his accusers; he had faith in the system. That confidence was all the greater as he knew not only some of his judges but also the attorney general; Burroughs had worked thirteen years earlier for the father of Checkley’s first wife, the mother of the attorney general’s five children. Burroughs was to appear before his equals. He expressed himself easily. And he sounded like his judges, speaking in the educated, variegated, Anglo-American accent of the day. He thought in—and could readily interpret—Scripture. All else aside, he was a Harvard-educated minister. In his pocket he carried a scrap of paper that would moreover clinch his defense.

Having been named over and over as the ringleader, Burroughs would have known that his trial was the one all awaited; he walked that Friday afternoon into a packed Salem courtroom. He assumed an active role, challenging prospective jurors as they stepped forward to be sworn in, a right other defendants do not appear to have exercised. He may have called witnesses as well. Narrow-faced, high-cheekboned, ethereal-looking Increase Mather was in the room, an event in itself. Burroughs could reassure himself that the elder Mather had, in
Illustrious Providences,
expressed his doubts about witchcraft. Devils got altogether too much credit.

Sixteen people had given evidence at Burroughs’s May hearing; nearly twice as many testified on August 5. Eight confessed witches revealed that Burroughs had been promised a kingship in Satan’s reign. Nine other witnesses credited the short, muscular minister—that “very puny man”—with feats that would have taxed a giant. Elizabeth Hubbard, the doctor’s niece, reported that Burroughs bragged of his rank. He was a conjurer, “above the ordinary rank of witches.” Mercy Lewis, his former servant, emerged from a trance to share her Matthew-inflected account of Burroughs having carried her to the high mountain, to promise her the “mighty and glorious” kingdoms below. It is not easy to shake the sense that a sturdy, canny man, one who fascinated the village girls, was on trial for having survived wives and resisted Indians.

The bewitched delivered up their accounts with difficulty, falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that the forty-two-year-old minister bit them. They had the teeth marks to prove it! They displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected Burroughs’s mouth. The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings; the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover. During one such delay Stoughton appealed to the defendant. What, the chief justice asked his prisoner, did he think throttled them? Burroughs replied plainly; he assumed it was the devil. “How comes the Devil then to be so loath to have any testimony born against you?” challenged Stoughton, a brainteaser of a question and one that left Burroughs without an answer. He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about the overcrowded room. They unsettled more than did the specters; some who were not bewitched saw them too. Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight; she stared, she explained, at his dead wives. Their faces bloodred, the ghosts demanded justice. Stoughton called in several other bewitched children. Each described the apparitions. What, Stoughton inquired, did Burroughs make of this? The minister was appalled but could himself see nothing.

If those in the court did not already know that, as Mather would put it later, Burroughs “had been infamous for the barbarous use of his two late wives, all the country over,” they did soon enough. It was asserted that he kept them “in a strange kind of slavery.” He had brought them “to the point of death.” Adding Lawson’s wife and daughter to the list of casualties, one of the girls provided a motive for their murders: Burroughs resented his Salem successor for tending to a congregation that had mistreated him. The farrago of charges ultimately came together: someone testified that Burroughs had coerced his wives into swearing never to reveal his secrets. His former brother-in-law, a town tavern owner, testified—the entire family in the room—about the strawberry-picking expedition when Burroughs was said to have read his wife’s mind. What did he have to say to that? asked Stoughton. The two had left a man with him, Burroughs explained. His brother-in-law objected. Stoughton demanded the man’s name. A cloud crossed Burroughs’s face. He had no answer. Burroughs may not have been conjurer material after all; either he was half starved and debilitated after three months in a damp, dark hole or someone exaggerated his might. He stammered and wavered. Was it possible, suggested the chief justice, that that man—a black man, at least in Mather’s retelling—had stepped aside with Burroughs to fit him, along the path, with some sort of invisibility cloak?