The Witches: Salem, 1692 (45 page)

From a lofty altitude, Increase Mather indicated that he had heard that some believed the two books at odds. What strange things men imagined! He had vetted
Wonders
before its publication. He had not endorsed it only out of an aversion to nepotism. If he was containing his distaste for his son’s runaway book, he did so convincingly. On one issue father and son were in perfect accord: whatever the fate of the witchcraft court, civil order must not suffer. The justices—and the government, which the trials jeopardized, inviting the new charter’s critics to pounce—must not be compromised. Increase Mather offered not a word on court procedures. Only later, in his diary, would Cotton Mather assert that while he spoke honorably of the judges, he could not abide their methods. It was a difficult balancing act all around. At the head of the court sat after all the most trusted legal authority in Massachusetts, a chief justice altogether intent on his mission, confident he was on the side of the angels, and delighted that young Mather was, with his forthcoming account, not only to allay doubts but, in his zeal and wisdom, “to lift up a standard against the infernal enemy, that hath been coming in like a flood upon us.” Stoughton borrowed most of the line from the volume’s author.

HOW RADICALLY THE
wind had shifted was clear from Samuel Parris’s October 23 sermon. That Sunday he delivered a sweet, sensual discourse
on reconciliation. He worked hard on the address, pouring a good deal of himself into it. We know nothing of the circumstances under which he wrote, if in the parsonage Abigail continued to convulse, if Betty Parris had yet returned from the Sewalls, how the two healthy Parris children weathered a crisis in which they played an imperceptible part, how Ann Putnam Jr. fared. Changing his tune more nimbly than had Mather, Parris ventured beyond words, to embraces. He took the Song of Solomon as his text, offering a rapturous catalog of kisses: There were lustful kisses, holy kisses, treacherous kisses, kisses of valediction, of subjection, of approbation, of reconciliation. A kiss betokened love and goodwill. Kisses were sweet among friends “after some jars and differences.” The imagery was not uncommon; divine love translated naturally enough into a full-body immersion in grace.
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But nothing could have constituted more of an about-face from Parris’s divisive September 11 sermon than that singular, radiant discourse. It came as close to a tonic as one could expect from a man whose home and parish had been turned upside down, whose pews had been depleted, who contended still with a group of rogue parishioners and who had lost others permanently. Only in his conclusion did Parris revert to form. The Lord had sent Christ into the world to offer his love. Who would deny him? “His kisses are most sweet,” lectured Parris. “If you will not be kissed by him, you shall, you must, be cursed by him.” At those curses even devils roared.

Three days later, the legislative assembly considered a bill that contained a loaded disclaimer of its own. Satan roamed about Massachusetts “with a great rage and serpentine subtlety.” A sterling commission had done its best to contain him. “Notwithstanding the indefatigable endeavors of those worthy gentlemen,” the plague continued unabated. The colony remained under “dismal clouds of darkness.” Was a fast day not in order, to apply for divine direction? It seemed prudent for a group of
ministers to meet with Phips’s council to determine a course of action. They stood sorely in need of wisdom, the devil’s rage threatening “the utter ruin and destruction of this poor country.” A vote for the bill constituted a direct attack on the Court of Oyer and Terminer. The session proved highly contentious; the question neatly divided the assembly. After a bruising debate, the bill passed, by a vote of thirty-three to twenty-nine. Some of those who had complimented Cotton Mather on his pages did so sincerely.

Sewall—who had voted against the bill—supposed that the court should immediately consider itself dismissed. Not everyone agreed. The assembly had addressed the matter only obliquely; the court was scheduled still to reconvene in six days. Stoughton pressed Phips for a decision. He found it elusive. Cotton Mather might well have been speaking for Stoughton when he discoursed that Thursday on perseverance. Both men agreed that the court’s fall would be destabilizing, an admission of error and an invitation to further witchcraft. Both believed its work unfinished. Stoughton made regular trips to Boston in an attempt to pry an answer out of Phips; lieutenant governor and chief justice though he was, he could not extract one. The two men had not been close but on this issue the bluff governor seemed downright cowed by his deputy, a man of great political dexterity who could run intellectual circles around him. On one such effort amid storms on October 28, Stoughton wound up drenched after his ride from Dorchester over a flooded causeway. Not for the first time he sought refuge in the Sewall household. He sent home for a change of clothes. If he did not recognize the torrent as an omen he should have: in his absence the following day Phips officially disbanded the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

The petitions continued to pile up. Ten accused Ipswich witches pleaded for their release. They were unlikely to be tried that winter; already they were freezing. They would soon “perish with cold.” Some were nearly eighty. One was pregnant, another nursing a nine-week-old. In the year that his daughter had languished in prison, a Chelmsford
father had had sole charge of her two-and five-year-old children. He was without resources. A young Ipswich man suddenly recanted his May testimony against Elizabeth Procter. On January 27 she gave birth on the floor of the Salem prison. She named the infant John, after her dead husband. Sentenced in August to hang, she had been reprieved only on account of her pregnancy. She awaited an execution date. Also convicted, Reverend Dane’s daughter applied directly to Phips for a pardon. She had spent four months in close confinement. Her accusers admitted they had lied; she was pregnant. (She believed she would already have been hanged were she not.) She was entirely innocent, with an incapacitated husband and six children. On December 14 Abigail Hobbs’s father walked free when two Topsfield neighbors posted a two-hundred-pound bond for him.

Not everyone had yet finished with the visionary girls. Gloucester sent for them early in November. On November 7 three more witches were arrested, including a Higginson in-law. Fresh indictments turned up amid the old. On the last day of 1692 Elizabeth Colson—who had led the constables on the wild-goose chase through the fields, confounding even their dog—was finally imprisoned in Cambridge. Elizabeth Hubbard continued to convulse and accuse into November. Pinched, pricked, and hauled under tables, Mary Warren was still testifying against suspects in January of 1693.

On a particularly dark and biting December day, the Massachusetts councillors seated a new court to try the remaining witchcraft suspects. By unanimous vote, they named Stoughton its chief justice. Three of his former Oyer and Terminer colleagues joined him, as did Thomas Danforth, who in April had elicited the first mention of the witches’ meeting. On December 22 Phips swore in the newly established superior court. Each man took the oath to, as Sewall summed it up, “impartially administer justice according to our best skill.” In accordance with the new charter, the December jurymen consisted of men whose estates rather than church membership qualified them for service. As such they
were less likely to bow to the whims of the justices. While not intimately acquainted with Salem village affairs, they had all the same been touched by the crisis; some had entered accusations, while others were related to witches. Once seated, they applied to the bench for guidance. What use should they make of spectral evidence? None, came the answer. The court tried fifty-two cases early in January and acquitted all but three of the accused. Reverend Dane’s twenty-two-year-old granddaughter was convicted. His daughter was not. The jury found the widow of fortune-telling Samuel Wardwell guilty but his daughter innocent. (Both had accused the dead father and husband.) The court cleared Margaret Jacobs, whose plea survives. She alone refers to her accusers as “possessed persons.”

Stoughton continued to hold tenaciously to the validity of spectral evidence. He considered himself on a crusade, one he fully intended to finish. Hurriedly he signed three execution warrants, adding five for those suspects convicted in 1692, Elizabeth Procter, Dorcas Hoar, and Mary Lacey Jr. among them. He scheduled a hanging for February 1 and ordered graves to be dug. He seemed intent on proving that the laws of England indeed reached North America and indeed followed the guilty to the ends of the earth. Phips meanwhile conferred with attorney general Checkley, who feared he could no longer distinguish innocents from the guilty. Phips countermanded the execution, reprieving the eight convicted witches. It is unclear how Stoughton learned as much; he did not hear the news directly from Phips. Flying into a rage, he fumed: “We were in a way to have cleared the land of these!” He did not know who had obstructed justice but warned that the accused delivered the colony into diabolical hands. As he stormed off the bench, he spat, “The Lord have mercy on this country,” his last recorded words on witchcraft. He did not appear on February 2, when Danforth took his place. Among the suspects who appeared over the next days was an eighty-year-old widow, the grandmother of the fleet-footed Reading girl. She uttered barely a word in her defense. Thirty witnesses testified against her. Paranormal
things tended to happen to those who crossed her, exactly as she predicted they would. “If any in the world were a witch,” noted Lawson, on hand for the trial, “she was one.” She walked free.

By February 21, 1693, Phips was ready to declare the epidemic over. And he made plain to whom he had alluded in his earlier letter to London when he suggested that some public servants had overreached. It was on one man’s account alone that the 1692 trials had been “too violent and not grounded upon a right foundation.” That was the justice who had stomped off the court weeks earlier, “enraged and filled with passionate anger.” Stoughton had been reckless, overly precipitous, possibly even corrupt. He had authorized unlawful seizures of estates and disposed of them without Phips’s knowledge or consent. Phips had questioned his methods; Stoughton proceeded despite multiple warnings and a vigorous outcry. Where earlier Phips had followed the sage counsel of his deputy governor, he now seemed as much beleaguered by Stoughton as by witchcraft. He sounds as if he is squealing to their parents about the misdeeds of a gifted, favored older sibling. Phips shut down the trials until someone better versed in law might weigh in, he reported, crediting Increase Mather and the New York ministers with his decision. (Over the intervening weeks Stoughton boycotted council meetings. He reported that he had taken a fall.) Phips had stepped in decisively, every bit the savior the Mathers would later advertise. “The black cloud that threatened the province with destruction” was, he assured Their Majesties’ secretary of state, behind them. Given the danger to lives, estates, reputations, and official business, the matter, Phips huffed, “has been a great vexation to me!” All was now well. Their Majesties’ business could continue unimpeded. “People’s minds before divided, and distracted, by different opinions concerning this matter, are now well composed,” he exulted.

Phips and the council had already designated Thursday, February 23, as a colony-wide day of thanksgiving, for, among other happy events, the “restraint of enemies with the check given to the formidable assault of witchcrafts.” The administration returned to focusing on the original
“source of all our mischiefs”—the French. They began to reimburse Essex County for the extraordinary costs of the trials; they would raise taxes to cover bills from innkeepers, constables, jail keeps, blacksmiths. A year of false witness, false confessions, false friends, false dichotomies, and false books published to prevent false reports had come to an end. The jails emptied. Accusations ceased. Most afflictions abated. As early as April 3, 1693, Phips referred to the events of 1692, to which he had put a stop, as “a supposed witchcraft.” That month a letter applauding his leniency began winging its way from London to New England, that far-off terrarium. It arrived in July. Phips was by then more than ever convinced that a little backslapping seemed in order. He had, in halting the proceedings, single-handedly saved New England from ruin.

Still, the confessions tugged at some. There was a reason the October vote on the future of the court had been so close. Cotton Mather continued to fret that not enough had been done to exterminate witches. When he visited Salem in September 1693, he was unsurprised to hear a churchwoman predict a new storm of witchcraft, a punishment for the court having been dissolved before its work was complete. Well-informed, mild-mannered men subscribed to the same fear. Had the times proved more stable, a second inquest would, asserted John Hale, have been in order. “Yet considering the combustion and confusion this matter had brought us into, it was thought safer to underdo rather than overdo,” he concluded. They preferred to rest their case. They could correct any mistakes later. “Thus the matter ended somewhat abruptly,” noted Hale, who knew that it had begun in the same fashion. Grappling alongside Parris for a diagnosis, he had observed Abigail and Betty in their initial fits. He had heard Tituba’s rock-solid prison confession. He had testified against Dorcas Hoar and Bridget Bishop; he had coaxed the particulars of her flight and crash-landing from Ann Foster. “I inquired what she did for victuals,” Hale would remember. Foster had then explained about the bread and cheese and described the refreshing stream.

It was to Hale as well that Foster confided her fears of George Burroughs and Martha Carrier, not yet established as the king and queen of
hell. She believed they would murder her, as their specters threatened. She outlived them both, barely. Among the last casualties, Foster died in prison on December 9, 1692. Her son paid six pounds and ten shillings—the price of a fine cow—to recover her body. The first to sign a diabolical pact, Tituba was the last to be released. Having lent the previous year its shape, having introduced flights and familiars into the proceedings, having illuminated New England with her pyrotechnic confession but neither questioned nor so much as named since, she appeared before the grand jury for having covenanted with the devil on May 9, 1693. It declined to indict her.