The Witches: Salem, 1692 (70 page)

*
It is unclear where the monies went. Stoughton took care to exempt Corwin and his heirs from liability in 1694, shielding them from restitution claims. Corwin evidently did not share any proceeds with Herrick, the impoverished undersheriff.

*
Even Cotton Mather executed an about-face, one he knew would sow confusion. To his father-in-law several years after Salem he admitted that “they who are usually look’d upon as
enchanted
persons, are generally, properly really
possessed
persons.” As a consequence they made for unreliable witnesses.

*
Freud relied on Virgil to introduce
The Interpretation of Dreams
with a line particularly suited to Salem: “If I cannot move the upper world,” vows Juno, “I will move the underworld.”

†
Samuel Willard was in the half-destroyed Sewall kitchen that sultry 1695 afternoon as well. Eleven years later he baptized Benjamin Franklin, who would solve the lightning mystery.

*
Vampiric practices could be conjured even without a teenage imagination. Reporting to the Lords of Trade on atrocities in 1689, a Dominion official claimed that the Indians made bloody sport of the colonists, “having killed 500 of them, roasting by slow fire more than 80 poor Christians, whose warm blood they drink, and sometimes eat their flesh, laying their sucking infants to the bleeding veins of their captives.”

*
An ingenious seventeenth-century English physician noted a correlation between the intruders that his mad patients believed leaped on or gnawed at their bodies and witches’ familiars. The pests tended to be winged creatures, mice, rats, and dogs. Mather compared the imp that darted across Margaret Rule’s 1693 pillow to a rat.

*
Calef noted that when families welcomed the Salem girls in their witch-hunting roles, “it was ordinary for other young people to be taken in fits, and to have the same spectral sight.”

*
“These prayer meetings are about the only entertainment we have,” complained a twentieth-century mill worker for whom religion—and religious enthusiasm—alone allowed for self-expression.

†
“I have been wicked in my day, but I never thought a little girl like you would ever be able to melt me and end my wicked deeds,” the Wicked Witch chides Dorothy, as she melts away.

*
And as would be said of Mather’s monumental New England history, the
Magnalia
would have been a better book if he had had a smaller library.

†
When Calef and Mather began exchanging insults, each mocked the other for being the kind of men “who think that they have engrossed all the learning in the world.” Calef suggested the Massachusetts ministers had gorged on the fables of Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Brattle indicted the Harvard curriculum, heavy on Greek and Roman mythology.

‡
His father helped. In
Cases of Conscience,
Increase Mather granted that “it is not usual for devils to be permitted to come and violently carry away persons through the air, several miles from their habitations. Nevertheless, this was done in Swedeland, about 20 years ago, by means of a cursed knot of witches there.”

*
Several marked gender differences emerged in the course of the trials. Men crafted more elaborate stories. They rarely saw ghosts, who were primarily female. Long lists of ancient oddities did not attach themselves to men. Women tended to hallucinate more, or at least to point more often to figures others could not see who violently ripped out their bowels. Men appeared to have more difficulty accusing one another, although women arguably acted more stoically. Mary Esty pleaded for the lives of others. John Procter did not. Women neither incriminated husbands nor abandoned old friends. The men however attracted more attention. Sewall mentions only suspected or convicted wizards in his diary; Brattle singles out two men for their dignity en route to the gallows.

*
In the end only three Salem villagers were hanged. No original village covenant signer was accused.

*
He had a counterexample in his discredited political ally Joseph Dudley. “They look upon me,” Dudley explained to an English correspondent in February 1692, “as a strange creature in their forests.” Gedney too had been voted out of office “with great contempt and scorns” for his pro-English stance.

†
William Barker dated his world-turned-upside-down pact with the devil to the year of the coup. Abigail Hobbs hinted at the same date, although she supplied several. There is as well a curious and perhaps wholly coincidental correlation between the length of a diabolical contract—generally between six and eight years—and that of an indenture agreement.

*
The median age of the core accusers was seventeen. Even including thirty-year-old Ann Putnam Sr., the median age of sixteen of the nineteen who hanged was fifty-six. (We have no birth dates for three.)

*
The sense that the devil had made them do it would find its echo years later in Hawthorne. As the traveler with the twisted staff informs Goodman Brown: “I have a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen, of diverse towns, made me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too—but these are state secrets.”

*
Salem town reversed those of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey in 1712.

*
When in 1712 a Westfield girl accused her mother of witchcraft, the court found her guilty of having violated the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Commandments.

*
In the just-deserts department, he wound up with a high-strung third wife whose tantrums he deemed “little short of a proper satanical possession.” Lydia Mather made scenes, ran off to live at the neighbor’s, cursed her husband, and at one point stole and defaced his diary.

*
Brattle married a daughter of Wait Still Winthrop and helped to found the more liberal Boston congregation that bears his name. Having blamed his alma mater for the “slips and imperfections” in his calculations, he endowed a Harvard fellowship in mathematics.

*
God would persist in testing the colonies, the colonies in interpreting those strikes as salutary. “I think we stood in need of a frown from heaven. I should have suspected that our cause had not been owned as a divine one if we had prospered without it,” Benjamin Rush, the founder of American psychiatry, wrote in September 1776, recasting British victories as colonial godsends.

*
He changed the spelling of his name, by some accounts adding the
w
to distance himself from the man who had branded Salem. That was unnecessary: Hawthorne also descended from Philip English, who went to his grave cursing Hathorne, never to know that his daughter would marry his persecutor’s son.

*
Ipswich and Topsfield tussle today over which town can properly claim the hayenchanting Sarah Wilds, an undesirable in 1692.

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Copyright © 2015 by Stacy Schiff

Cover photograph by José Picayo

Cover design by Mario J. Pulice

Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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Detail of Massachusetts Bay, 1692, by Debra Lill.

Samuel Parris's notes for his March 27, 1692, sermon, “occasioned,” he noted, “by dreadful witchcraft broke out a few weeks past.” With the announcement of his text—“Have not I chosen you, and one of you is a devil”—Sarah Cloyce stormed out of the meetinghouse. A week later she was accused of witchcraft. (MS 101740 Samuel Parris sermon notebook, 1689–1695. Connecticut Historical Society.)

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