The Witches: Salem, 1692 (58 page)

Harvard tuition: Samuel Eliot Morison,
Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 1: 103–6.

“Are you, sir, the parson”: From Claude M. Fuess,
Andover: Symbol of New England
(Andover, MA: Andover Historical Society, 1959), 105. Hall,
Faithful Shepherd,
thinks the story apocryphal. The sentiment was very real.

“some nebulous and distant”: Gildrie,
The Profane,
148. Also on the ministers’ maintenance, see Samuel Swett Green,
The Use of the Voluntary System in the Maintenance of Ministers
(Worcester, MA: Charles Hamilton, 1886).

“that might render”:
CM Diary,
1: 351.

“sit and sleep”: IM, “Practical Truths Tending to Promote the Power of Godliness,” 1682.

“useless whispering” and “unnecessary gazing”:
SPN,
290.

hours of sermons: Stout,
New England Soul,
4. Stout estimates the average to have been 7000 sermons in a lifetime, for 15,000 listening hours.

On Parris: See Gragg,
Quest for Security,
and Gragg, “The Barbados Connection,”
New England Historical and Genealogical Record
140 (April 1986): 99–113; Gragg, “Samuel Parris: Portrait of a Puritan Clergyman,”
EIHC
119 (October 1983): 209–37. For the economic climate, Carl Bridenbaugh,
Cities in the Wilderness
(New York: Capricorn Books, 1964); Richard S. Dunn, “The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,”
William and Mary Quarterly
26 (1969): 3–30. In fairness, Parris’s timing was lousy. The Barbados years were ones of devastating weather and, at the end of his stay, a smallpox epidemic. NE trade was next to impossible under Andros, who had strangled it with strict enforcement of the Navigation Acts. Interviews with David Hall, November 29, 2012, and September 21, 2013.

“The work was weighty”: Cited in Samuel P. Fowler,
An Account of the Life, Character, Etc. of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village
(Salem: William Ives, 1857), 1. It was not unusual to emphasize the enormity of the task, though generally one did so differently, to point up one’s inadequacies. See “Memoir of Rev. John Hale,”
Proceedings of the MHS,
vol. 7 (1838), 257.

The Puritan mind: Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds.,
The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings
(New York: Harper, 1963), 1: 60. For the NE palette, see David Hackett Fischer,
Albion’s Seed
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 140. He credits it with Harvard’s muddy crimson.

“this poor little”:
SPN,
84.

“rather discouraging”: “A General Account of the Transaction between the Inhabitants of Salem Village and My Self, Samuel Parris,” W. L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

“Isn’t that pretty soft”: Alice Morse Earle,
The Sabbath in Puritan New England
(Charleston, SC: Bibliolife, 2008), 140. With two fireplaces, you needed 30 cords of wood—or an acre of standing timber—to survive the year; Hawke,
Everyday Life,
55. The fine for cutting a tree of more than 24 inches in diameter was 100 pounds, or twice the annual ministerial salary. Journal of Lords of Trade, 2 September 1691, CO 391/7, 42–4, PRO. The new charter reserved all trees of that size for the Royal Navy.

“After much urging”: SP, “A General Account,” W. L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

“You are to bear” to “love me best”:
SPN,
51. Interview with David Hall, September 21, 2013.

“consolations dropped”: Dunton,
Dunton’s Letters,
255. He was citing Noyes. For Higginson, see
Proceedings of the MHS,
vol. 16 (1902), 478–520.

longtime ministerial service: Hall,
Faithful Shepherd,
193. Beverly granted Hale a much smaller parsonage and two acres after three decades.

“I cannot preach” to “some other place”: SP’s October 28, 1690, list of proposals, Simon Gratz Collection, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. On SP’s church record book, Marilynne K. Roach’s superb “Records of the Rev. Samuel Parris,”
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
157 (January 2003): 6–30. The record book is in the DAC.

“had scarce wood”: Record book, 18 November 1691, DAC. The rattling coughs: Earle,
The Sabbath,
53–63; Winslow,
Meetinghouse Hill,
56.

too cold to go on: SP may well have dismissed the January congregants on account of the cold. Or he may have done so on account of the distractions in the pews, which could already have begun.

“So perplexing”: Cited in David H. Flaherty,
Privacy in Colonial New England
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 135. Squirrel-killing: Joseph Green diary, DIA 72, PEM. See also Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS; “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” 219, 233; CM, “A Monitory Letter,” 1700.

the Cambridge meeting:
Proceedings of the MHS,
vol. 17 (1879), 263.

“one chief project”: The Old Deluder Act of 1647, in the
Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in NE
(1853), vol. 2, 203.

the delinquent father: RFQC, 5: 378.

three times through the Bible: “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” 178. The dozen readings: William L. Joyce et al., eds.,
Printing and Society in Early America
(Worcester, MA: AAS, 1983), 22.

“Wise parents”:
SPN,
236 on food, 318 on rod. For CM, see for example “Some Special Points, Relating to the Education of My Children,” in Miller and Johnson,
The Puritans,
2: 724–27. Exercises for his children recur throughout CM’s diaries.

“seeing their young” to “farther off”:
SPN,
183, 193.

“I have seen too much”: Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” in
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes
(New York: Norton, 2005), 183.

rainstorms: For the apocalyptic weather, Hammond diary, P-363, MHS. The farmers filed charges in all four names, although the Putnam household alone was affected.

Sin and crime: See Eli Faber, “Puritan Criminals: The Economic, Social, and Intellectual Background to Crime in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,”
Perspectives
in American History
11 (1978): 83–144; David Flaherty, “Law and the Enforcement of Morals in Early America,”
Perspectives in American History
5 (1971): 203–53.

local menace: Good fit even the skeptic’s idea of a witch. See Reginald Scot’s 1584 description of “these miserable wretches” in Katherine Howe, ed.,
The Penguin Book of Witches
(New York: Penguin, 2014), 20; RFQC, 9: 579–80.

“turbulent a spirit” to “unusual manner”: R, 423; similarly R, 411. The Herrick testimony: R, 424.

“shameful vanity”: Sewall in 1714, cited in Richard Francis,
Judge Sewall’s Apology
(New York: Harper and Row, 2005), 326. There does not appear to have been a copy of Shakespeare yet in America; no estate inventory included a painting. The organ: Thomas Wertenbaker,
The Puritan Oligarchy
(New York: Scribner’s, 1947), 128.

seating was nearly toxic: See Abbot,
Our Company
, 181–82, for the baroque formulations; Robert J. Dinkin, “Seating the Meeting House in Early Massachusetts,”
New England Quarterly
43 (September 1970): 450–56.

Hathorne presided: See J. M. Beattie,
Crime and the Courts in England
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); John H. Langbein,
The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 43; Langbein, “The Criminal Trial Before the Lawyers,”
University of Chicago Law Review
45 (Winter 1978): 263–316. Beattie points out that the emphasis in hearings was on preserving the witness’s words rather than the defendant’s, and that the task was less to prove the charges than the suspect’s guilt; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 29, 2014. R, 127–30, for Good’s hearing. Mercy Short would later describe her as having been in tatters. For the hearing choreography, R, 46.

evaluate Indian defenses:
Documentary History of the State of Maine
(Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1869), 5: 92–93.

“What day of the week”: RFQC, 9: 398–99; reduced responsible men to gibberish: RFQC, 3: 398.

Sarah’s muttering: See Matthew Hopkins,
The Discovery of Witches
(Essex, UK: Charles Clark’s, 1837), 2; CM,
Optanda, Good Men Described and Good Things Propounded
(Boston: 1692), 88; Samuel Willard,
The Character of a Good Ruler
(Boston: 1694), 30; CM,
Fair Weather, or Considerations to Dispel the Clouds and Allay the Storms of Discontent
(Boston: 1692), 33, 37; CM,
The Present State of New England
(Boston: 1690), 42. “The devil’s music” is from
Fair Weather,
49.

“Her answers”: R, 127. In her sleep: Ibid., 127–28.

“Order in the court”: Interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014.

diligent search: JH, 73.

Tituba: See Chadwick Hansen, “The Metamorphosis of Tituba, or Why American Intellectuals Can’t Tell an Indian Witch from a Negro,”
New England Quarterly
47 (March 1974): 3–12. Rosenthal, “Tituba’s Story,” is especially clear-minded about how Upham dismantled CM and installed Tituba, working in part from fictional sources. For a fine-grained study of Tituba and a case for her South American origins, see Elaine G. Breslaw,
Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem
(New York: New York University Press, 1996). On Tituba’s testimony: See Matti Rissanen, “‘Candy No
Witch, Barbados,’” in
Language in Time and Space,
ed. Heinrich Ramisch and Kenneth Wynne (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997), 183–93. Rissanen, 191, notes that we have 130 words of Good’s versus 700 of Tituba’s; Dawn Archer, “‘Can Innocent People Be Guilty?,’”
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
(2002): 220, notes that in all, Hathorne asked Tituba 39 questions; Kathleen L. Doty, in “Telling Tales: The Role of Scribes in Constructing the Discourse of the Salem Witchcraft Trials,”
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
(2007): 35, notes that the justices treat Tituba more gently than they had Sarah Good. See also Risto Hiltunen’s excellent “‘Tell Me, Be You a Witch?’: Questions in the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692,”
International Journal for the Semiotics of Law
9 (1996): 17–37. Tituba had provided some clues to her testimony already: the court had enlisted a number of reporters, as if they expected something momentous; R, 128–36.

show more love: Alan Macfarlane,
The Family Life of Ralph Josselin
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 145.

William Allen and John Hughes: R, 141; Sibley, R, 425. Rosenthal,
Salem Story,
17–19, points out the inconsistencies in the accounts. Sibley strikes Tituba’s back in one, her arm in the other.

“He tell me”: R, 135.

actual pact with the devil: They turned up rarely in NE, but they had turned up; see David D. Hall, ed.,
Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 119. None had played a central role in a witchcraft case before. After Tituba, pacts were everywhere.

“a grave of the living”: Dunton,
Dunton’s Letters,
119–20.

Prison breaks: RFQC, 4: 275; RFQC, 8: 31–32; RFQC, 9: 26.

“And it was thought”: JH in Burr, 415.

mentioned God only once: The point is Kahlas-Tarkka’s in “‘I Am a Gosple Woman,’”
Studia Neophilologica
84, 58.

“And thus”: JH in Burr, 415.

“A witch is one”: Joseph Glanvill,
Saducismus Triumphatus
(Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1966), 268. The volume dates from 1681. The etymology is of interest: “wizard” derives from the German root
wissen,
“to know,” while “witch” derives from
wiccian,
“to bewitch.”

toad into the family milk: RFQC, 4: 57.

the witch’s mark: For the authority, see Dalton,
The Country Justice,
73; Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic,
530; Koehler,
Search for Power,
270. The witch’s mark was a fairly new arrival.

what enchantment looked like: See Bernard,
A Guide to Grand-Jury Men,
for a description of the gnashing, frothing, and tumbling. Other signs align perfectly with the description in Dalton,
The Country Justice,
a copy of which Sewall carried about with him on the circuit;
EIHC
129 (1993): 68–69.

the Cheshire cat: IM in
IP,
165. For the taverns, see Richard P. Gildrie’s excellent “Taverns and Popular Culture in Essex County, MA, 1678–1686,”
EIHC
124 (1988): 162.

“No wonder that”: Cited in Louise A. Breen,
Transgressing the Bounds
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 178; “the worst of drunkards,” Gildrie, “Taverns and
Popular Culture,” 163. The modern historian is Emil Oberholzer Jr.,
Delinquent Saints: Disciplinary Action in Early Congregational Churches of Massachusetts
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), 152.

Witches had troubled New England: The literature is vast. I have relied especially on Robin Briggs,
Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft
(London: Penguin, 1998); Fox,
Science and Justice;
Christina Larner,
Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief
(London: Blackwell, 1984); Brian P. Levack,
The Witchcraft Sourcebook
(New York: Routledge, 2010); Alan Macfarlane,
Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England
(New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Brian A. Pavlac,
Witch Hunts in the Western World
(Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009); Thomas,
Religion and the Decline of Magic
. There were exceptions on the orgies; a 1662 Connecticut case involved dancing and sex with the devil. The first known prosecution is from Fox,
Science and Justice,
who points out that there is no recorded history without witches. For the traditional witches’ Sabbath: Carlo Ginzburg,
Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath
(New York: Pantheon, 1991).

false memories: IM cited in Koehler,
Search for Power,
271.

witch’s ultimate target: Or as Samuel Willard put it in a June 1692 sermon, the devil “aims at the soul but if he cannot succeed there he will do his utmost against the body” (Sewall sermon notebook, Ms. N-905, MHS).

greatest hunts: Numerically speaking, Catholic Germany and northern France executed the greatest number of witches. The Channel island of Guernsey: Levack,
The Witchcraft Sourcebook,
185. Though ecumenical, witches had their predilections. As John Gaule put it in his 1646
Select Cases of Conscience,
a volume familiar to New England: “There has been, are, and are likely still to be more witches under the Popish than in the Protestant religion. For not only their popes, priests, friars, nuns (many of them) have been notorious witches: but their prestigious miracles and superstitious rites little better than kinds of witchcrafts.”

The devil boasts: Edward K. Trefz, “Satan in Puritan Preaching,”
Boston Public Library Quarterly
8 (1956): 71–84; Trefz, “Satan as the Prince of Evil,”
Boston Public Library Quarterly
(1955); 3–22; Andrew Delbanco,
The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); Paul Carus,
The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil
(La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974).

Swedish girl who had plummeted from her stick: Demos,
The Enemy Within,
90.

a pact with Satan: See Hall,
Witch-Hunting,
24. For a NE history, see Demos,
Entertaining Salem,
401–9.

disseminated an instructive account of her compact:
MP,
1–44. The problem may have been CM’s Gaelic; he concluded that the Irish used the same word to mean both “spirits” and “saints,” 11. Martha Goodwin did name additional tormentors; CM kept the information to himself.

“never been in a place”:
Journal of Jasper Danckaerts
(New York: Scribner’s, 1913), 290.

“You have a neighbor”: R, 370.

accused witch languishing: Rosenthal discovered her; R, 16.

Connecticut had been more troubled: Godbeer,
Escaping Salem
.

“We inclined to”: JH in Burr, 412. On the leniency of the system, see David D. Hall,
A Reforming People
(New York: Knopf, 2013), 87. On the other hand, of the fifty-six people executed in Massachusetts between 1630 and 1692, the greatest number—by a factor of two—were for witchcraft.

spectral bear: Koehler,
Search for Power,
291.

“Many things are done”: Albert Kyper, cited in Stuart Clark,
Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 233.

to doubt the sun: William Perkins,
Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft
(Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1618), 31. The colonists returned to Perkins again and again with their questions.

“We have the attestation” to “times and places”: Glanvill,
Saducismus Triumphatus,
67.

“Flashy people”:
Magnalia,
1: 187.

official 1692 version: CM in Burr, 261. The description, he noted, tallied with what they had heard from abroad. Interestingly, in Catholic countries, the devil interfered with the reading of “Popish books,” where in NE, he made it impossible for a Puritan girl to read Mather volumes.

more devils than men: See, for example, IM,
Angelographia; or, A Discourse Concerning the Nature and Power of the Holy Angels
(Boston, 1696), 111.

“was nothing to him”: RFQC, 8: 272. Epithets appear to have been different in other colonies, where you might be written off as a noodle, an ape, an old rogue; see John Demos,
Remarkable Providences
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 288. John M. Murrin notes similarly that the NE court record is all sin and evil, sin and pollution, where other colonies counted in felonies and misdemeanors; see David Hall et al., eds.,
Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 188. See also Hall,
Witch-Hunting,
87; Hall,
Worlds of Wonder,
74. “had so much”: RFQC, 7: 362. On the Indians and the devil, David S. Lovejoy, “Satanizing the American Indian,”
New England Quarterly
67 (December 1994): 603–21.

“the devil take you”: David Hall, “The Uses of Literacy in New England, 1600–1850,” in
Printing and Society in Early America,
36.

foreigner in an unusual hat: From Bernard Bailyn,
The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century
(New York: Harper, 1955), 110. The overbearing English official was, in IM’s estimation, “a child of the devil.” Edward Randolph Papers, III: 329.

“it is the main drift”:
SPN,
184.

“Where will the Devil”:
WOW,
10.

“infernal fiends”: CM in Levack,
The Witchcraft Sourcebook,
112.

prosecutions stuttered: Carus,
The History,
379–90.

the Apocalypse: In the 1640s, it was prophesied for the 1650s; Hall,
Faithful Shepherd,
86; it had been imminent since 1655 according to David E. Stannard,
The Puritan Way of Death
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 123.

Mather defied anyone: CM in Burr, 143.

“they would act”: Lawson in ibid., 342. There may have been an additional reason to send off Betty. As Moody noted of the Goodwins in 1688: “If any step home they are immediately afflicted, and while they keep out are well.”

That was the devil: Cited by Lawson in Burr, 160. Betty would not be mentioned again in a 1692 witchcraft complaint.