Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem (7 page)
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Authors: Rosalyn Schanzer
Tags: #Juvenile Nonfiction, #Witchcraft - Massachusetts - Salem - History, #Witchcraft, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Puritans, #Puritans - Massachusetts - Salem - History, #Witchcraft & Wicca, #General, #United States, #Religion, #Salem, #Colonial & Revolutionary Periods, #Massachusetts, #Christian Church, #Salem (Mass.) - Church History, #Christianity, #History
OYER & TERMINR
O
n May 14, Royal Governor of Massachusetts William Phips sailed home to Boston after a long visit to London, only to discover that throngs of people were rotting in jail, awaiting their formal trials for witchcraft. So far, nobody in Massachusetts had set up an official court of law that could sentence witchcraft suspects to death. As the King of England’s royal representative in America, Governor Phips took immediate action. He asked his council to nominate some new judges so that he could establish a Court of Oyer and Terminer.
*
Only then could the fates of all those prisoners be determined.
Governor Phips approved the nominations right away and officially established the court in Boston on the hot, steamy afternoon of May 27. Not one of the judges was schooled in the law. The few trained lawyers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had studied law in England, and most of them were so frustrated by the legal process in America that they went back home. The first lawyer trained in America wouldn’t even be admitted to study law at Harvard until October 18, 1692, almost five months away. What’s more, even back in England, men with very little education sometimes served as justices. English people (including American colonists) accused of criminal acts were not allowed to have a lawyer to defend them in a serious criminal trial, and neither were the accused witches.
The court’s new chief justice was a thin-faced Harvard graduate and politician from Dorchester who had been educated to become a minister. Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, a wealthy, 61-year-old bachelor with long white hair, had inherited a lot of land and had often served as the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s chief justice between 1674 and 1686. A staunch Puritan, Stoughton was absolutely unbending about his belief in witchcraft.
These were the other judges:
Samuel Sewall—
Harvard graduate from Boston, educated for the ministry; merchant and militia officer in the Second Indian War
Nathaniel Saltonstall—
Harvard graduate and wealthy gentleman from Haverhill; active militia officer for Essex County during the Second Indian War; justice of the peace
Peter Sergeant—
Wealthy Boston gentleman without a profession
Wait-Still Winthrop—
Boston physician and active militia leader in the Second Indian War; attended Harvard but did not graduate
Jonathan Corwin—
Wealthy merchant and military advisor from Salem; a magistrate during the preliminary witchcraft investigations
Bartholomew Gedney—
Owner of a wharf and shipyard in Salem Town, mills north of Casco Bay, and land in Maine; former justice of the peace; magistrate who had occasionally acted as an interrogator during the preliminary witchcraft investigations
John Hathorn—
Salem magistrate who often acted as an interrogator during the preliminary witchcraft investigations; military advisor during the Second Indian War
John Richards—
Former servant from Boston who worked his way up to become a wealthy merchant and a major in the militia during the Second Indian War
B
ack before this new court was formed, almost every single person who had landed in jail had been locked up because of evidence from the Invisible World of spirits. The legal term for this was “spectral evidence,” which meant evidence related to supernatural beings that were invisible to everybody except the afflicted accusers. Hardly a scrap of evidence had come from the Natural World of real things that everyone could touch and see.
So how would the judges of the new Court of Oyer and Terminer conduct their trials? Would they do anything differently this time around and get rid of spectral evidence? At Sabbath services in Boston on May 29, three of the new judges listened attentively as their pastor, Samuel Willard, compared the Devil to a roaring lion who could send forth innumerable other devils to devour the innocent. His witches were so cruel and bloody, said the pastor, that it was the judges’ duty to use every weapon in the book—including spectral evidence—to see that they were hanged.
To be sure, a number of people had always been leery about the use of spectral evidence in court, and a few brave souls were not afraid to say so out loud. But when the new court was formed, these skeptics were in the minority. The majority still agreed with Willard; to them, spectral evidence provided unvarnished proof that someone was a witch.
And another circumstance did not bode well for the accused witches. Several of the judges had served together on the Maine frontier as councillors or officers during the Second Indian War. The English were losing the war in a big way, often because of the judges’ own blunders—blunders that had gotten people killed. But instead of taking the blame, they attributed their defeats to “the awfull Frowne of God,” for it was God who had loosened the Devil’s chains to let him work his evil deeds upon New Englanders as a punishment for their sins. Therefore all those lost battles—and even the attacks by witches—must have been the fault of sinners in their midst, not the fault of the judges’ military errors. Why? If the Puritans had behaved themselves, God would have been on their side, the war would have been won, and witchcraft would never have erupted. To the judges, it apparently made sense to blame the lost battles on witches, who were the Devil’s representatives in the Natural World.