by Stacy Schiff
Salem village consisted of some ninety families; it had one practicing physician that January. William Griggs was new to the community, having recently bought a farm about a mile and a half from the parsonage. An active, pious citizen, he had complained of taverns near meetinghouses; he had testified against those who absented themselves from worship. Griggs owned nine medical texts. He could read but not write. He is the likely candidate—or among the likely candidates, as Parris evidently reached out to several—to have examined the girls. Years earlier Griggs had been a member of Parris’s Boston congregation; the two were close to the same Salem families. There is at least one concrete reason to assume Parris called for the seventy-one-year-old: the contagion followed Griggs home. Better traveled, more sophisticated physicians had examined the Goodwin children, who had turned blue in the face and complained of being roasted alive on invisible spits. Prolonged, violent fits were assumed to be sent by the devil; the first question a victim asked under the circumstances was “Am I bewitched?” The doctor who had examined a seizing, strangled Groton girl a generation earlier initially diagnosed a stomach disorder. On a second visit he refused to administer to her further. The distemper was diabolical; he prescribed a town-wide fast. Whoever examined Abigail and Betty came to the same conclusion. Clearly the supernatural explanation was already the one on the street. The “evil hand” was a diagnosis “the neighbors quickly took up,” noted Reverend Hale, the only chronicler to observe the girls’ initial pinches and pricks. It likely terrified the cousins, whose symptoms worsened.
Hale had some experience in that realm, having as a child joined a delegation that visited a jailed witch on her execution day in the hope of eliciting a confession. The suspect was a neighbor, the first woman to be hanged for witchcraft in Massachusetts. She denied her guilt all the way to the gallows. Hale had spoken with another accused witch after her 1680 reprieve. Officiating in nearby Beverly, the amiable fifty-six-year-old counted himself as among Parris’s closest colleagues. As did most everyone in New England at the time, he believed in witches, if not also in angels, unicorns, and mermen. How did he receive the diagnosis? He could not have been surprised; he may well have been relieved. “Hellish operations,” as he termed them, dissolved any doubts about the girls’ souls and absolved him of responsibility. He had every reason to prefer satanic mischief to a divine frown; possession would have been more problematic.* As alarming as was the diagnosis, it was also pulse-quickening. Witchcraft was portentous, a Puritan favorite. Never before had it broken out in a parsonage. On the scale of ministerial humiliations, a diabolical invasion was at least more exciting than the birth of an illegitimate grandson, a stain with which Cotton Mather would later contend. A decade younger than Parris, Mather was only twenty-nine in 1692. He was also already ubiquitous, on his way to becoming the best-known man in New England, which is what happens when you are handsome, tall, gifted, and tireless, enter Harvard at eleven, preach your first sermon at sixteen, and combine in your very name two legends of the early Massachusetts ministry.
Parris made no attempt to shrink from the celestial drama in which he found himself; divine love could be glimpsed behind every misfortune. From his upstairs study in a bewitched house he continued his meditations on the 110th Psalm. God was “angry and sending forth destroyers,” he alerted his parishioners. It was essential to persevere, “to beware of fainting when we are chastened,” to battle bravely against “all our spiritual enemies.” The explanation was to some degree satisfying. It was perversely flattering to be singled out to combat evil; there was a reason for those selective lightning strikes, the bolts from the blue, through the window, down the chimney. “I am a man greatly assaulted by Satan,” Mather would observe privately, sounding nearly boastful. “Is it because I have done much against that enemy?” Or as the father of the Goodwin children had phrased it, playing the adversity-shouldering game with grace, a dangerous condition was—spiritually speaking—a profitable one. “If we want afflictions we shall have them, and sanctified afflictions are choice mercies,” concluded the godly mason. Simultaneously he wrung his hands over a question that must have haunted Parris as well: What had he done to incite this heavenly rebuke? A minister’s home was meant to be a “school of piety,” not “a den for devils.”
How the village received the diagnosis was clear from what came next. On February 25, Parris and his wife left Salem under teeming rain. In their absence a close neighbor paid a call. The Parrises presumably asked Mary Sibley to look in on Abigail and Betty, roaring now for over a month. The mother of five, Mary Sibley was six months pregnant. Among the wealthier couples in the community, she and her cooper husband were pillars of the church; Samuel Sibley stepped in when an estate needed to be settled or a bond guaranteed. His wife felt comfortable in the Parris household. Less comfortable with the pace at which her minister resolved the mystery there, she arranged a furtive experiment. The question was no longer what afflicted the children but who; Sibley determined to catch a witch. At her instruction, John, the Parrises’ Indian slave, mixed the girls’ urine into a rye-flour cake, baked amid the embers on the hearth. Sibley then fed the concoction to the family dog. There was some fogginess about how the countermagic worked—by drawing the witch to the animal, by transferring the spell to it, or by scalding the witch—but the old English recipe could be trusted to reveal the guilty party.
Parris was livid to learn of the experiment. Countermagic had no place in a parsonage. He remained intent on the scourge not escaping his home; in his place, Boston ministers had taken great pains to suppress the names of alleged witches. Sibley courted greater perils as well. She had favored superstition over religion, a practice Parris decried as “going to the devil for help against the devil.” Her meddling unleashed occult, little-understood forces; she had set up a kind of satanic lightning rod. A month later—the intervening weeks proved tumultuous—the beleaguered minister would summon her to an interview in his study. He reproached her severely. Sobbing, she offered abject apologies. She had acted only unthinkingly, Sibley explained, “from what she had heard of this nature from other ignorant, or worse, persons.” She would be circumspect in the future. Parris read her the stiff reprimand he intended to share with the congregation after Sunday’s sermon. Her cake had occasioned much mischief. “By this means (it seems) the Devil has been raised amongst us,” Parris announced before administering communion on March 27, “and his rage is vehement and terrible, and when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows.” He warned his congregants to be on the alert against “Satan’s wiles and devices.” From the pulpit, in a dark gown and a flat white linen collar, Parris asked them to bear collective witness to Mary Sibley’s misdeed, to call “our sister to deep humiliation for what she has done.” Might he have a show of hands? All agreed. Turning to the heavily pregnant Sibley, Parris asked if—assuming she admitted to her sin and repented for it—they might hear as much from her own mouth. Public expiation was essential. Sibley offered an emotional apology. Parris continued: “Brethren, if herein you have received satisfaction, testify by lifting up your hands.” Every (male) hand in the room went up, the last time a consensus would prove possible in the 1692 village meetinghouse.
At the parsonage Parris reproached the servants as well. Already charged, the atmosphere there must have crackled with resentment. By that time the minister had larger matters with which to contend, however. While his niece and daughter made a great deal of noise, it had been impossible to decipher what precisely they meant to say. The cake worked its diabolical magic; within days, Betty and Abigail named names. Not one but three witches were loose in Salem. The girls could see them perfectly. And by the sodden end of February—sheets of rain fell all week, flooding fields and turning the village into a coursing river of mud—those witches were on a pole flying through the air.
SALEM VILLAGE OWED its existence in part to its fear of ambush. The oldest settlement in Massachusetts Bay and very nearly New England’s capital, the town of
Salem had been named in 1629. A fine, flourishing community about a mile long, scented by salty sea air and the rich, crisp hint of pine, it counted among the most agreeable addresses in the colony. Salem’s gem of a harbor was second only to Boston’s; the town enjoyed a brisk trade with Europe and the West Indies. Built on a peninsula, surrounded by velvety green hills and idyllic coves, it was home to thriving fisheries and shipyards. When a new king ascended to the English throne in 1685, he did so with acclamations and celebrations in Boston but with proclamations as well in Salem, the only other Massachusetts town of more than two thousand people. Quieter and less cosmopolitan, Salem was every bit as refined as Boston, with an array of painted, gabled, multiple-storied homes and a number of newly minted fortunes.
As early as 1640, farmers had begun to venture north and west, away from the prosperous port, beyond the town’s rolling hills, in search of more arable land. Their loose-limbed settlement became Salem village (and modern-day Danvers). Soon enough, those enterprising villagers—known locally as the Salem farmers—began to lobby for institutions of their own. While their families disliked making the five-to ten-mile trek through driving snow to attend meeting, there were additional considerations as well. In 1667 the villagers petitioned the general court in Boston. Did it really make sense for them to trudge to Salem town to take their turns at military watch? It was awfully far for them, particularly onerous after dark, “in a wilderness that is so little cleared and [by] ways so unpassable.” Many of them lived a full mile from their nearest neighbors. The farmers’ departures struck terror in the hearts of their wives, “especially considering what dreadful examples former times have afforded in that respect, in this country, from Indians (and from others also), in the night season, when their husbands have been absent.”
Moreover, they continued with unassailable logic, was it not profaning the Lord to travel so far armed to watch a town in peacetime? The older community insisted on the unceasing danger. (Its leaders preferred to reduce neither its tax base nor its territory.) But were the farmers—in a rustic settlement of fifty isolated farmsteads, then without even a meetinghouse at their center—not more vulnerable than those in the compact, commercial lanes of Salem, with its larger population and its many fine homes? Surely the town could keep watch without the villagers. Its leaders balked, countering that only recently a French ship had somehow managed to sail undetected into port after nightfall. How was that possible? scoffed the farmers, who knew well that the innocuous ship had been sighted well before dark. They occupied the front lines. Would it not make more sense for the townspeople to come watch them rather than the other way around? The farmers prevailed, though not without Nathaniel Putnam, one of the wealthiest villagers, being fined for “bitterly affronting and abusing” the town officials.
Tempers flared anew several years later when the town of Salem proposed to build a larger meetinghouse. We won’t pay for it, announced the defiant villagers, unless you help pay for one of our own. Repeatedly they lobbied for an independent parish, succeeding in the last days of 1672. Salem town supplied a hand-me-down pulpit along with a deacon’s seat, probably of riven oak, like the pews. The two Salems continued to annoy each other, the village because it was obliged to appeal to the town for legislation, extracted only with difficulty; the town because the villagers remained perpetually at odds, unable to resolve their disputes. Meanwhile the town could not seem to liberate itself from the farmers’ pesky questions about their church affairs. Could they not keep their antipathies to themselves? They seemed intent on devouring one another. Shortly after the Parris family settled into the parsonage, the town leaders essentially advised the villagers to leave them alone.
The village officially hired its first minister in 1672. Sixteen years later, with Samuel Parris, it hired its fourth. Each would prove indelibly involved in the events of 1692, when their paths crossed with varying degrees of awkwardness. One man literally haunted those proceedings, while another recorded them. The third would return as a powerful wizard. A recent Harvard graduate, James Bayley preached his first Salem sermon in October 1671. He had turned twenty-two and married weeks earlier. The community did not unanimously take to him. Bayley was unqualified; he was offensive; he was negligent; he imagined his post to be more permanent than it was. A guest who spent three weeks at his home swore in court that she had never heard Bayley read or expound on any part of the Scripture with his family. His home life was doubtless tense. His congregants had agreed to build him a parsonage, an offer on which they failed to make good. The minister constructed a house himself; he and his new wife evidently lost two daughters in it before 1677. Meanwhile the community divided along party lines. Matters proved so incendiary that the parishioners could not agree on so much as who might arbitrate. Thirty-nine church members supported Bayley. Sixteen did not, including several of the most influential men in the community.
Bayley’s tenure caught something of the flavor of Salem village. With him came his wife’s twelve-year-old sister, who at seventeen would marry into the redoubtable Putnam clan. Her husband was Thomas Putnam Jr., a son of the richest man in the village and a nephew of the elderly Nathaniel. Salem was composed in large part of Putnams, to whom both Mary Sibley, the impulsive baker, and William Griggs, the physician, were related by marriage. The two young couples—the Bayleys and the Thomas Putnams—grew close. That did not prevent other Putnams from attacking Bayley. It might even have encouraged them in their campaign. Samuel Parris knew of what he spoke when, on a Sunday afternoon in 1692, just before his home erupted in chaos, he observed from the pulpit that “not seldom great hatred ariseth even from nearest relations.” He took as his text Mark 13:12: “Brother will betray brother to death, as father his child. Children will rebel against their parents and have them put to death.”
The Salem farmers carried their bitter allegations and implacable grudges to the mother church in Salem, ultimately to court. Bayley meanwhile filed a slander suit. The court ruled in his favor and ordered that he continue in his position. It could not enforce its decision; while the majority of his congregants continued to support him, by late 1679 Bayley understood that he had no future in Salem. He moved across the village. Within a year the committee formed to name his successor settled on George Burroughs, a handsome, diminutive, dark-haired man who, though older, had been just behind Bayley at Harvard, where he had earned a master’s degree. The grandson of an eminent minister, Burroughs had since served at a number of frontier parishes, at the last of which he had heroically endured an Indian attack. He was twenty-eight.
Again the Putnams played a crucial role. Burroughs and his family lived with a Putnam family for much of 1681, moving into the parsonage—the Parrises’ future address—only in the fall. Keenly aware of the collisions and disappointments that vexed New England ministries, Burroughs attached an arbitration clause to his contract. He would serve on the condition “that in case any difference should arise in time to come, that we engage on both sides to submit to council for a peaceable issue.” He landed in court all the same; it seemed an obligation of one church faction to make the life of the other faction’s choice miserable. From the start, Burroughs’s salary was not collected. When his young wife died shortly after the move to the newly built parsonage, he could not afford the funeral. On April 10, 1683, the villagers complained in county court that Burroughs had not preached for a month. He was hastily packing to leave—he expected to be gone that very week—but refused to explain himself. (His reluctance may have had something to do with the fact that John Putnam had loaned Burroughs funds, then threatened to have the minister arrested for debt when Burroughs could not reimburse him. The village was to blame on both counts, having neglected to pay its minister in the first place.) Burroughs continued unresponsive, preferring to wash his hands of the fractious community. What I had wanted to ask when I called on you, explained one parishioner, an obsessive, outspoken potter, was how a village might prosper “when brother is against brother and
neighbors against neighbors, all quarreling and smiting one another?” Their minister, the potter reminded Burroughs, was meant to be their spokesman and guardian, an intellectual light. Burroughs had been unwilling to organize private meetings or cool village tempers. He preached what he felt like. For his lucid if indelicate analysis, the potter was admonished by the court. Burroughs departed that spring.
In February 1684 the Salem church committee brought Reverend Deodat Lawson to Salem. Unlike his predecessors, Lawson was British-born. He had arrived in the colony some five years earlier from Norfolk, where his father was a Cambridge-educated minister. Intended from birth for the clergy—Deodat, he explained, meant “given to God”—Lawson had somewhere acquired a formal education, although he took no degree. He wrote easily in Latin and Greek, in an exquisite hand. He benefited from some socially prestigious family connections in London, where he had worked briefly as an apprentice to a prosperous ironmonger and even more briefly as a royal physician before emigrating, early in the 1670s. Having served fewer than two of the expected seven years of a pastorate on Martha’s Vineyard, Lawson returned in 1682 to secular pursuits, in Boston. With his wife and two young children he settled in Salem. He was then in his early thirties. A third child, a daughter, was born and died in the village, where Lawson suddenly lost his wife as well. Given to drama and formal turns of phrase, he had a keen ear for nuance. He could be pragmatic; he praised family prayer so long as it was not overtedious. “God is not moved by a multitude of words,” he would note, though one wishes Lawson had felt differently. He supplied the only contemporaneous account of the events of 1692.
