Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem (10 page)

E
ven though the almanacs continued to predict rain and snow and phases of the moon, and even though Salem’s town clerks still registered new births and collected taxes as usual, not all of the troubles came to an end once the witchcraft hysteria began to die down. Some people still thought the trials should continue. Others who had been afraid to speak up were mortified by the hangings. Newly freed “witches” and their families were embittered and impoverished. The church fell into disrepair due to lack of funds, and divisions among its members continued to fester. And despite Governor Phips’s attempts to achieve a much wider peace with the French and Indians, the Second Indian War would grind on and on until 1699.

But when a 22-year-old Harvard graduate named Joseph Green was ordained as the minister of the Salem Village Church in 1698, things began to look up. A natural negotiator, Green initiated a “Meeting of Peace” so that families who had left the church could reconcile with those who had stayed, and a sense of normality finally began to return.

Eighteen long years later, on October 17, 1711, the Province of the Massachusetts Bay signed a Reversal of Attainder, an act that declared a general amnesty and removed the witchcraft charges against George Burroughs and certain others. This was both good and bad. The good part was that it restored the rights and good names of some (but not all) of the living and dead “witches” and awarded some money to their heirs.

There were two bad parts. One was that the legislature only gave money to people who asked for it or whose names were included on a list that left lots of people out. The other bad part was that not one single person would ever be prosecuted for any of the crimes they had committed during the witch trials, whether they had falsely accused their neighbors of being witches, hanged the innocent, ruined their reputations, or stolen all of their property.

Meanwhile, here’s what happened to a few of the people who were tangled up in witchcraft’s wicked web.

THE OFFICIALS

Chief Justice William Stoughton

Stoughton believed he had done a great job of ridding the land of witches and was furious that Governor Phips had set them free. On January 3, 1693, he ordered the hanging of everyone who had been exempted because they were pregnant. But Governor Phips—whose wife was among those accused of witchcraft—blamed Stoughton for the entire tragedy and wouldn’t allow him to hang the women. So Stoughton angrily quit his job as a judge.

Phips’s slap in the face to the chief justice didn’t hurt Stoughton’s career one bit, though. When Phips was ordered to return to London later that year, Stoughton became the acting governor of Massachusetts, serving until his death in 1701 and even doing double duty as chief justice until 1699. He never once apologized for his role in the trials.

The Other Judges

On January 14, 1697, Judge Samuel Sewall took “the blame and shame” for his role in the witch trials and asked for the people’s pardon. The same day, 12 other jurors signed a document apologizing for unwittingly shedding innocent blood, and the Massachusetts legislature declared the first annual Fast Day as everyone’s penance for all the sins committed during the trials. Each year after that, Sewell made sure to observe a fast and to pray for forgiveness.

High Sheriff George Corwin

On May 15, 1694, Justice Stoughton’s court helped out Sheriff Corwin once again by exempting him and his heirs from any liability for his failure to return all the goods he had stolen. Sheriff Corwin died at home of a heart attack in 1696. He was only 31 years old. Not one cent he extorted or stole from his innocent victims was ever turned over to the Crown, or the Colony, or the victims themselves during his lifetime.

THE ACCUSERS

Reverend Samuel Parris

Parris was the only person who offered any restitution to the accused witches and their families. In an attempt to keep his job by appeasing church members who had lost their loved ones because of the trials, he offered to subtract six pounds from his salary for 1692 and six pounds for 1693. The offer seems strange indeed: His total yearly salary was supposed to have been 66 pounds sterling (22 in money and the rest in provisions), but ever since 1691, the church committee had refused to pay him a cent. In 1694, he apologized for his mistakes and tried to make peace with the congregation. Placing the blame on his servants and “Satan the devil, the roaring lion, the old dragon, the enemy of all righteousness,” he said, “I do humbly own this day before the Lord and his people that God has been righteously spitting in my face.”

But in the end, neither Parris’s offer of restitution nor his apologies comforted his opponents. In fact, after Rebecca Nurse’s son and son-in-law and Sarah Cloyse’s husband directly accused Parris of destroying the innocent people in their families, they withdrew from his church. On May 3, 1695, 16 young men, 52 householders, and 18 church members sent a petition to Reverend Increase Mather and eight other area ministers, requesting that they advise Parris to quit and find a job someplace else. Parris refused, even though the ministers offered him a good job elsewhere if he would leave gracefully.

On July 14, 1696, Parris’s wife, Elizabeth, died, but by then most of the townspeople had lost all sympathy for him. Forced out of his job in 1697, he finally left town, but his reputation preceded him. Though he remarried and had two more children, the only jobs he could find were in the impoverished little frontier towns of Stow, Concord, and Dunstable. He died in Sudbury in 1720.

Betty Parris

During the trials, Mrs. Parris had been worried sick about her daughter Betty’s fits and absolutely refused to keep using the child to find witches. Toward the end of March 1692, Reverend and Mrs. Parris sent Betty off to Salem Town to live with Stephen Sewall,
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Parris’s distant cousin. Most of Betty’s symptoms stopped practically right away, but not all of them. One night, Betty told Mrs. Sewall that “the great Black Man came to her and told her if she would be ruled by him, she should have whatsoever she desired, and go to a Golden City.” New England Puritans believed that the Devil was dark skinned like the Indians. So Mrs. Sewall warned Betty that she had just seen the Devil “and he was a Lyar from the Beginning, and bid her tell him so, if he came again: which she did.” In 1710, Betty married Benjamin Baron of Sudbury. She was 27 years old. Baron was a yeoman farmer, a trader, and a shoemaker. The couple had four children, one boy and three girls. We still don’t know whether Betty was really sick from the dread disease back in 1692, though she was one of the two people who were most likely to have truly been ill. Did she ever admit, even to herself, the damage she had done when she testified against her slave Tituba and against her neighbors? We will never know.

Abigail Williams

Parris’s niece Abigail stopped giving testimony against the accused witches by June 1692, long before the trials ended. Nobody knows why she disappeared from the hearings, but Abigail is the other accuser who may actually have been sick. She never did fully recover from the fits she had suffered and was no older than 17 when she died.

Ann Putnam Jr.

When Ann was 19 years old, her parents died within two weeks of each other, and she was left alone to raise her nine brothers and sisters. Putnam never got married, but in 1706 when she was 29 years old, she asked to join the Salem Village Church. Always the peacemaker, Reverend Joseph Green offered his help. He guided her efforts to write an apology for lying in court, and he read it aloud in front of his congregation on August 25. Here’s a part of her confession: