The Witches: Salem, 1692 (57 page)

For the best portraits of the uncomfortable edge on which the Puritan lived: David D. Hall, “The Mental World of Samuel Sewall,”
Proceedings of the MHS,
vol. 92 (1980), 21–44; Edward Eggleston,
The Transit of Civilization: From England to America in the Seventeenth Century
(Boston: Beacon, 1959); Eve LaPlante,
Salem Witch Judge: The Life and Repentance of Samuel Sewall
(New York: Harper, 2007); Silverman,
Life and Times of Cotton Mather;
Richard P. Gildrie,
The Profane, the Civil, and the Godly
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). For the dark, the cold, and the external climate: Carroll,
Puritanism and the Wilderness;
Ekirch,
At Day’s Close
. For the liturgical details, Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe,
The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-
Century New England
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). No one has ransacked the historical record for the texture of day-to-day life better (if with less notation) than Alice Morse Earle in her various works. See also George Francis Dow, “Domestic Life in New England in the Seventeenth Century,”
Topsfield Historical Collections
29 (1928); Jonathan L. Fairbanks, ed.,
New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century
(Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982); Roger Thompson,
Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649–1699
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich,
Good Wives
(New York: Vintage, 1991); and Winslow,
Meetinghouse Hill
. For the lay of the land, Katherine Alysia Grandjean, “Reckoning: The Communications Frontier in Early New England” (PhD diss., Harvard, 2008). The sound: Richard Cullen Rath,
How Early America Sounded
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). To Danvers town archivist Richard B. Trask, I owe countless other details.

“But who can tell”:
CM Diary,
1: 144.

Skimming groves: The flight is reconstructed from Foster and Carrier’s testimony and that of their children and grandchildren: R, 467–75; Hale in Burr, 418;
WOW,
158. The landscape derives from Cronon,
Changes in the Land,
22–31; Joshua Scottow,
A Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony, Anno 1628
(Boston, 1694); Hull,
Diaries
, 225; interviews with Richard Trask, November 28, 2012, and February 8, 2015. Glanvill reprinted the Swedish crash from Anthony Horneck,
An Account of What Happened in the Kingdom of Sweden
(London: St. Lownds, 1682), 10. Charles MacKay,
The Witch Mania
(extracted from
Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
[London, 1841]), 550, adds the tremendous height. On Andover and the Scots, Abbot,
Our Company
. The impassable path: RFQC, 9: 69.

Sound echoed: For the eerie quiet, Ekirch,
At Day’s Close
. The beaver’s tail is from John Giles,
Memoirs of Odd Adventures, Strange Deliverances, Etc. in the Captivity of John Giles
(Cincinnati: Spiller and Gates, 1869), 40; “hideous noise with roaring”: John Josselyn,
New-England’s Rarities
(Boston: William Veazie, 1865), 48; screech of the crowd, SS
Diary,
1: 509; flock of pigeons, CM in Silverman,
Selected Letters,
34. Josselyn reported they were so thick they could obscure the sun. The freakish bellow: SS
Diary,
1: 288; crack of timber, Gildrie,
The Profane
, xi; RFQC, 9: 580–84; tortoises propagating: Giles,
Memoirs
, 42.

phantom Frenchmen:
Magnalia,
2: 537–40. See also Marshall W. S. Swan, “The Bedevilment of Cape Ann,”
EIHC
117 (July 1981): 153–77.

glow-in-the-dark jellyfish: R, 244; moved the landmarks: R, 258–59; a saucer: R, 412; the broom: R, 409.

lame Indian: SS
Diary,
2: 750. The blinking went both ways. CM claimed that when Indians first saw a man on horseback, they took the “man and the horse to be one creature”;
MP
, 7.

The Sewall incident: SS
Diary,
1: 331. Baxter had long before noted that lightning more often struck churches than castles, an observation to which CM would refer in
A Midnight Cry
(Boston, 1692). He insisted on its preference for ministers’ homes in
Magnalia,
2: 313.

“Horrid sorcerers”:
Magnalia,
2: 537. Four armed Indians: RFQC, 4: 230. House in ashes: Charles H. Lincoln, ed.,
Narratives of the Indian Wars, 1675–1699
(1913; repr., New York: Barnes and Noble, 1959), 83.

“It is harder to find”:
Magnalia,
2: 515.

“Our men could see”: Daniel Gookin, cited in Carroll,
Puritanism and the Wilderness,
207. Essex County suffered proportionately more casualties than the rest of the colony. “I believe no town in this province has suffered more by the war than Salem,” John Higginson Jr. wrote his brother in 1697; Higginson Family Papers, MHS Collections, 1838, 202. For King Philip’s War, see Jill Lepore’s superb
The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity
(New York: Vintage, 1999).

devastating raids: See Emerson W. Baker and James Kences’s fine “Maine, Indian Land Speculation, and the Essex County Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692,”
Maine History
40 (Fall 2001): 159–89. Casualties on the other side were yet more dreadful. By the best estimates, the Indian population of NE numbered around 100,000 in 1600. By the century’s end—with some 90,000 Englishmen in America—it had fallen to about 10,000.

“The whole race”: John Dunton,
John Dunton’s Letters from New England
(Boston: Prince Society, 1867), 293.

“I Stand Here”: RFQC, 5: 290.

murderer repented: Hugh Stone in
Magnalia,
2: 356–62.

“spread the distemper”: Cited in Karlsen,
The Devil
, 100; earlier suspicions of Carrier, R, 734.

late January: Tituba testified on March 2, 1692, that the enchantment had begun just over six weeks earlier; R, 135.

“invisible agents”: JH in Burr, 413. JH reported the symptoms conformed exactly to those of the Goodwins; CM makes them more acute in
Magnalia,
2: 409.

“foolish, ridiculous speeches”: Robert Calef in Burr, 342.

“exemplary temper” to “intolerable anguish”:
Magnalia,
2: 396–403. Such epidemics had broken out at least three times previously; Koehler,
Search for Power
, 175. Since CM had set down the Goodwin history, another case of witchcraft had emerged. The Goodwin children had also relapsed. The “aerial steed”:
MP
, 29. “Grievous fits” were not uncommon: see RFQC, 3: 54, and Demos,
Entertaining Salem
, 166–72; they were assumed to be sent by the devil. According to Joshua Moody, both Glover women were accused and jailed; letter to IM, MHS. The convicted Glover appears to have been Mary; Massachusetts Archive Series, vol. 35, 95–96, 254, Massachusetts State Archives.

“agitations, writhings”: Richard Bernard,
A Guide to Grand-Jury Men
(London: Felix Kyngston, 1629), 45.

knitting, spooling: For Puritan chores, see Alice Morse Earle,
Child Life in Colonial Days
(Stockbridge, MA: Berkshire House, 1993); David Freeman Hawke,
Everyday Life in Early America
(New York: Harper and Row, 2003).

Others allotted: “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,”
Proceedings of the MHS,
vol. 5 (1836), 187. SP would not be remembered today for his sermons alone.

In a Connecticut case: See Richard Godbeer’s concise and elegant
Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25. In a post-Salem case CM too made a point of rounding up “disinterested witnesses.” For how seldom the sick were left alone, see for example Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS. On sickbeds, Hall,
Worlds of Wonder,
197.

“odd postures”: Calef in Burr, 242. CM noted that as many as fifty observers gathered around Mercy Short in 1693. The prayer and psalms, CM in Burr, 276.

“perniciously bad”: Sanford J. Fox,
Science and Justice: The Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 55. There were “wise, tender, and faithful” physicians, but they were physicians of the soul; doctors had often trained for the ministry.

basic medical kit: Harriet S. Tapley, “Early Physicians of Danvers,”
Historical Collections of the Danvers Historical Society
4 (1916): 73–88. The hedgehog fat is from Lawrence Hammond,
Diary Kept by Captain Lawrence Hammond, 1677–1694
(Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1892). For the raw state of medicine: George Francis Dow,
Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
(Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1935), 174–98; Patricia A. Watson,
The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); and “Z. Endicott Book of Remedies,” Frederick Lewis Gay Papers, Ms. N-2013, MHS.

William Griggs: See Anthony S. Patton, “The Witch Doctor,”
Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin
(Winter 1999): 34–39. See also Robinson,
The Devil Discovered,
117–18.

“Am I bewitched”: Thomas Ady,
A Candle in the Dark
(Boston, 1656), 120.

seizing, strangled Groton girl: Samuel Willard, “Samuel Willard’s Account of the Strange Case of Elizabeth Knapp in Groton,” Mather Papers, MHS.

“evil hand”: JH in Burr, 413.

witchcraft versus possession: Mather on the affinity, Burr, 136; “It is an ordinary thing,” David C. Brown, “The Salem Witchcraft Trials: Samuel Willard’s
Some Miscellany Observations,
”
EIHC
122 (1986): 228. IM in
IP,
198, asserted that you could suffer the two simultaneously. David Harley, “Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession,”
American Historical Review
101 (April 1996): 307–30, is best on the subject; as he notes, “New England at this time had no tradition of demonic possession” (313). Michael Dalton,
The Country Justice
(Boston, 1678), listed seven signs of bewitchment; IM offered six of possession. They overlap. Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle, in “Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern England,”
Journal of British Studies
47 (October 2008): 738–67, note that the symptoms are identical.

“angry and sending” to “spiritual enemies”:
SPN,
188–90.

“I am a man”:
CM Diary,
1: 471.

“If we want” and “den for devils”: Goodwin in Burr, 131; “school of piety”:
CM Diary,
2: 265.

the concoction: John resorted to an old English recipe cited in previous cases on both sides of the Atlantic (and explicitly denounced by IM in
IP
). See Roger
Thompson, “Salem Revisited,”
Journal of American Studies
6 (December 1972): 332. A variation on the experiment would come up again in Salem testimony, R, 318 (in that version, the healer suggested you would find the witch dead the next morning). SP was explicit; the idea was Sibley’s and the execution John’s. He had no reason to minimize Tituba’s role, especially as she was at the time he discussed the incident already in prison. She nonetheless comes down to us as a witch-cake baker, beginning with JH in Burr, 413, and Lawson in Burr, 162. JH either misremembered or elicited some information from Tituba on his own; see JH, 44. SP would later apologize for the behavior of his servants—plural.

“going to the devil”: Parris in B&N, 278; “she has done”: SP in the church record book for March 27.

town of Salem: See Richard Trask’s invaluable “The Devil Amongst Us: A History of the Salem Village Parsonage,”
Danvers Historical Society
(1971): 1–12; Richard P. Gildrie,
Salem, Massachusetts, 1626–1683: A Covenant Community
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975); and Gildrie, “Salem Society and Politics in the 1680s,”
EIHC
114 (October 1978): 185–206. There is much granular detail in the Higginson Family letters, MHS, 1838.

“in a wilderness” to “have been absent”: B&N, 229–31. The petition dates from 1667.

“not seldom great”:
SPN,
184. For CM’s twist,
CM Diary,
2: 581.

Bayley meanwhile filed a slander suit: RFQC, 7: 248–49.

“that in case any difference”: Salem Village Book of Transactions, November 25, 1680, DAC. See Hall,
Faithful Shepherd,
187–94, on the rise of contractualism in ministers’ contracts.

John Putnam had lent Burroughs funds: RFQC, 9: 30–32, 47–49. “When brother”: B&N, 171; see also Perley,
History of Salem,
vol. 2, 172. Burroughs was not alone in borrowing money from the congregants who elected not to pay him.

“given to God”: Lawson, October 6, 1713, Ms. Rawlinson, D839, Bodleian Library. There is no record of Lawson’s having studied at or graduated from Cambridge, Oxford, or Trinity College, Dublin, although he claimed he had attended Cambridge, the center of Puritan learning. I am grateful to Suzanne M. Stewart of the NEHGS and Tim Wales in England for extensive Lawson research. For his turns of phrase, see May 22, 1680, Massachusetts Archives Collections, vol. 39, 658, Massachusetts State Archives. “God is not moved”: Lawson,
The Duty and Property of a Religious Householder
(Boston, 1692). See also Charles Edward Banks,
The History of Martha’s Vineyard
(Boston: George H. Dean, 1911), vol. 2, 149–50.

“uncharitable expressions” to “If you will unreasonably”: B&N, 344–45.

pastor and flock: Silverman,
Life and Times of Cotton Mather,
332.

warming pan: RFQC, 9: 448.

the Topsfield-Ipswich line: See George Francis Dow,
History of Topsfield, Massachusetts
(Topsfield, MA: Topsfield Historical Society, 1940), 320–30.

the demoralized clergy: Willard to IM, July 10, 1688, MHS; cheating and starving: CM, “New England’s Choicest Blessing,” 1679, 8; CM, “A Monitory Letter Concerning the Maintenance of an Able and Faithful Ministry, 1700; Konig,
Law and Society,
98–108.