The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  The villagers voted to deliver firewood to their new minister but in the end paid him and advised him to forage for his own. If the decision rankled, Lawson left no record of ill will. He preferred to please. Two years into his tenure, his future divided the community. Were he ordained, Salem would constitute a covenanted church at last. It would also relinquish the land on which the parsonage sat, a New England sticking point. The Putnams supported the ordination, which several other families opposed on theological ground, because Lawson disappointed in some way, or simply because he was the Putnams’ man. Again the farmers submitted the matter to cooler minds in Salem town, where the authorities professed themselves heartsick to witness such a vast supply of “uncharitable expressions,” “settled prejudice and resolved animosity.” Why did they persist in making one another miserable? It was at this juncture that the town fathers asked again not to be disturbed by the villagers’ recriminations. “If you will unreasonably trouble yourselves, we pray you not any further to trouble us,” they scolded. Lawson opted to leave before relations deteriorated completely. The villagers were not unembarrassed by their behavior. They voted to purge the record book, which in 1687 Thomas Putnam rewrote, the squabbling of the Burroughs and Bayley decade omitted. It was thought those toxic entries might prove damaging in the future.

  Without an independent church and with no civic authorities of its own, the village was hamstrung when it came to settling communal differences. It was far from alone in its troubled church politics. The relationship between pastor and flock, it was said, should be like that between husband and wife. Indeed it proved as contentious as cordial. A Puritan devoted himself to examination and interrogation; he held his minister in a similar embrace. Plenty of clergymen inserted escape clauses into their contracts. Increase Mather, the most conspicuous cleric in New England and Cotton’s illustrious father, allowed that he was free to leave his Boston parish if the Lord called him elsewhere, if his pay proved insufficient, or if he suffered “persecution” by his congregation. Jobs were difficult to come by, as was job security; ministers were dismissed and ordinations delayed. One patient cleric waited twenty-seven years. At a 1720 ordination, malcontents launched water and missiles from the gallery. Arguments erupted even when a congregation liked its minister. Two years before he kept vigil with the Parrises at a larger and more lavishly furnished home than his own, Beverly’s John Hale was ordered to serve as chaplain on a Quebec expedition against the French and Indians. His congregation objected. The case went to court. Hale sailed with the militia.

  Ministerial salaries ranged from sixty to a hundred pounds a year, more than sufficient—it put the minister among the topmost ranks of his parishioners—if collected. Voluntary contributions had given way to compulsory ones, resented by many in the community, a minority of them church members, all of them taxed. Regularly maligned and occasionally mauled, the fee-collecting constable fled from axes and vats of boiling water. The Salem constable suffered a painful run-in with a warming pan.* The people’s reluctance to support the clergy demoralized them; the ministers, Mather would thunder in 1693, felt cheated and starved. In the course of a protracted campaign to secure his salary, Topsfield’s minister announced to a town meeting that he hoped the parsonage would burn to the ground—with certain members of his congregation inside. Clergymen were keenly aware of what they earned, which they could not help but translate into self-worth. Cotton Mather at one point calculated his daily wage. Expectations were precariously high on both sides. In the mutual recriminations it was difficult to say which came first, the difficulties in collecting the ministerial salary or the griping about getting what one paid for from the pulpit. What felt like ingratitude to one party felt like extortion to the other.

  The spirited Salem potter who had queried Burroughs deplored the fact that the minister delivered what he liked, for which the community paid. The reverse was also true. Parishioners contributed whatever was on hand, which could mean a barrel of oysters, a bushel of peas, a pound of linen, a beehive.* Congregants paid in labor as well, planting a minister’s beans or slaughtering his cow. This rather blurred the lines of command, terrifically distinct though they appeared to some. “Are you, sir, the parson who serves here?” asked a visitor to nearby Rowley. “I am, sir, the parson who rules here” came the reply. While the community rose when the minister entered the meetinghouse, where his family occupied a special pew, while farmers felt intimidated by their learned minister, it was unclear who precisely worked for whom. As a modern scholar put it, there was some confusion as to whether the pastor was the congregation’s employee, spiritual companion, or representative from “some nebulous and distant ecclesiastical galaxy.”

  While railing against the barbarous starving of clergymen, Cotton Mather had to admit that—in his plea for their maintenance—he artfully included passages “that might render the ministers themselves more deserving persons than, it may be, some of them are.” Even with a surfeit of pastors, a great deal of mediocre preaching went on. So did a lot of sleeping in the pews. The Puritan was intensely alert, preternaturally attentive, neurotically vigilant about the state of his soul. He was not invariably so at meeting. Some would “sit and sleep under the best preaching in the world,” clucked Increase Mather. Doubtless someone slumbered through that 1682 sermon too. (In fairness there may have been no better place to rest for a New England farmer, who had few opportunities to do so.) Mary Rowlandson, whose account of her 1675 Indian captivity electrified New England, occasionally nodded off during her husband’s preaching.

  Two months into his tenure Samuel Parris complained of the inertia of his parishioners, senseless before him. He chided them for “useless whispering, much less nodding and napping.” While he noted the “unnecessary gazing to and fro,” he made no mention of the walnuts that flew from the galleries; the antics on the stairs; the spitting, laughing, flirting, and whittling; the elbows in the ribs and the knees in backs and the occasional punch in the nose; the woman who installed herself in her neighbor’s lap when the neighbor refused to make room for her in the pew. The New England meetinghouse was a decorous but lively place; that spring, Martha Carrier roughly jostled a twelve-year-old girl there mid-psalm. It was at meeting that you learned why your sister’s eyes were puffy from crying, that a pirate had been captured, a lion killed in Andover. The sermon, the centerpiece of the week, represented its social and spiritual touchstone. The sole regular means of shared communication, it served educational and journalistic purposes as well. Over the course of a lifetime, the average New England churchgoer absorbed some fifteen thousand hours of sermons. Seldom if ever had so many people literally been on the same page. Many took notes. Others discussed those homilies for days afterward. Bits and pieces of Parris’s addresses from the pulpit would surface in the weeks to come; the audience was listening. Attention was not always so rapt, however, that when your neighbor yawned in the next pew, you failed to notice the devil’s mark under his tongue.

  SAMUEL PARRIS PREACHED his first Salem sermon in November 1689. He came to the village with little pastoral experience. Born in 1653 in England, he spent his youth largely in Barbados, where his family flourished as merchant-planters. While the ministry may once have been Parris’s profession of choice—he attended Harvard for several years but left in 1673, on the death of his father—his background was in business. At twenty, having inherited a plantation and seventy slaves, he returned to Barbados. Parris fared only adequately, struggling to maintain both the 170-acre estate and a generous inheritance from an uncle. Within a few years he sold the property at a loss. By 1680 he had reappeared in Boston, where he set himself up as a West Indies merchant. He married. He thrived initially, but while Massachusetts offered a more favorable economic climate than Barbados, his career remained one of misfires and false starts. Parris spent a year in and out of court over a disputed loan. He grew as accustomed to financial scrambling as to deal-making. Opportunities regularly came his way. Each got the better of him.


  When the Salem delegation found him in 1688, Parris was a member of Boston’s First Church and the father of three. It is unclear how or why he made the decision to enter the ministry; clergymen more often left the pulpit for mercantile pursuits than the other way around. He had previously thought of himself as a merchant and a gentleman, enough so to have his portrait painted in miniature. Just this side of handsome, with crisp, angular features, wide-set eyes, dark hair to his shoulders, and a voluptuous mouth, he bore a distinguished air. He is the only villager to whom we can put a face. His older brother was a minister in England; an uncle had preached at Boston’s First Church. Parris had served briefly in a remote Massachusetts hamlet. He spoke at informal prayer groups. He was on intimate terms with several local clergymen, including his Milton cousin. The Salem overture made, Parris stalled. “The work was weighty,” he explained. The farmers would have his decision in due course. He had any number of reasons to hesitate even if he knew nothing of Salem history, which was unlikely. His immediate predecessor, Deodat Lawson, was a member of the same Boston congregation. The two had mutual friends. The long courtship of Parris, a reluctant candidate without a bachelor’s degree at a time when Harvard MAs could not find pulpits, says as much about Salem village as about its future minister. Neither qualified as anyone’s first choice.

  When finally it began, the negotiation was long and arduous. While he demonstrated little aptitude for business, Parris relished negotiation. At thirty, he was more seasoned than the ministers Salem had worn out before him. He had seen more of the world; he had limited experience of life in a backwater, of what he would term “this poor little village.” A bustling town of about eight thousand, Puritan Boston—with its ruffles and ribbons, silver lace coats and scarlet petticoats—dazzled by comparison with rustic Salem, of a very different palette altogether, all muted greens, muddy purples, and deep reddish browns. Both contrasted vividly with Barbados. The village presented its best offer, entirely in line with the going rate. A hard-bitten bargainer, Parris was unimpressed. Deeming the terms “rather discouraging than encouraging,” he countered with eight conditions. The most onerous concerned firewood. If a minister’s battle for respect translated into a salary discussion, the battle for wood served as the combustive flash point. Its delivery burdened the community; a message was conveyed when it failed to arrive or proved substandard. “Isn’t that pretty soft wood?” observed a later parson as a congregant unloaded his cart. “And don’t we sometimes have pretty soft preaching?” came the response.

  Parris wanted his firewood delivered. Again the villagers preferred to contribute to a fund from which he might arrange for his own. They had no village commons; wood was difficult to come by. Already scarce by 1692, timber represented a persistent, pervasive New England concern. Its use and misuse, its felling and export, were tightly regulated. Village proposal and counterproposal followed, relations fraying. An obstinate man with a rickety ego, Parris objected to the preferred fund. The price of firewood might well rise. Discussion persisted through much of 1689, a year that saw the overthrow of the colony’s Crown-imposed Anglican governor followed by profound political unrest, the intensifying Indian skirmishes, and the publication of Memorable Providences, the Mather volume that included the account of the bewitched Goodwins. “After much urging,” Parris remembered later, “I replied I would try them for one year. And so debate upon this point was ended.”

  Even as negotiations continued, Parris, Elizabeth, their three children, and slaves moved into the parsonage at the village crossroads. A comfortable two-story home on two acres of land, it was configured around a cavernous chimney with four fireplaces. Parris constructed a large lean-to behind the parsonage’s four whitewashed rooms; the children presumably lodged upstairs with the help. Eighteen months after their arrival, the family lost the young black slave who had moved with them. In a momentous step for both the village and its new minister, on a windy mid-November Tuesday, Parris was ordained in the presence of several neighboring clergymen, John Hale and Salem town’s two reverends among them. Parris discoursed on Joshua and a new era. With his ordination, the village could now offer the all-important sacrament. Acknowledging the villagers’ travails, he reassured them. The years in the wilderness were over. God that day rolled away his reproach; the farmers could move forward compatibly and constructively. In that undertaking the new minister included himself. His work was great but he would be zealous in its exercise. In conventional terms, he acknowledged that he would administer cordials to some but corrosives to others. “You are to bear me a great deal of love,” Parris instructed his congregants. In a less orthodox vein, he leaned on the homage part. “You are indeed highly to love every minister of Christ Jesus but (if you can, notwithstanding the vast disproportion between myself and others) you are to love me best.”

  Some did, and some did not. He did not make it easy. Plenty of towns made life miserable for plenty of ministers, but few of them dealt as severely with their congregants as did Parris. He could be tedious, mulish, sulky. In possession of standards, he liked for things to be done properly. He applied great energy to small matters; he had the proclivity for tidiness that creates a shambles. When the wife of tailor Ezekiel Cheever went into labor early in 1690, Cheever impulsively borrowed a horse from his neighbor’s stable without permission, presumably to summon a midwife. The neighbor protested. Resolving the matter fell to Parris, who required three meetings to do so. He demanded a public apology. Cheever readily submitted one. Parris deemed the effort “mincing”; he ordered the new father to repent again in the meetinghouse the following week. He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped. He could be petty, unlike the elderly Salem town minister who had ordained him, from whom it was said “consolations dropped like dew.”

  Parris tried to cram a great deal into a sermon; he could belabor, and exhaust, a point. He knew he often fell short but did not like to concede. The pewter tankards on the communion table were an eyesore. Could they not be replaced? (Wealthier congregations used silver communion pieces.) To the parsonage he brought a number of items rare in Salem village: his own silver tankard, a writing desk, and a mirror. He boasted a coat of arms, a rarity among Massachusetts ministers. Parris had come of age in Barbados, the richest colony in English America, at the height of its power. He knew splendid homes and sumptuous hospitality. Salem looked shabby and—given the size of the Barbados household staff—doubtless also lonely to him. He quickly began lobbying for ownership of the parsonage and its land. The request was not inappropriate but it was premature; towns made such grants to their ministers after longtime service. The Salem villagers demurred.

  Less than a year after his ordination, Parris compiled a numbered list of complaints, which he attempted to read to his congregants. Tempers twice prevented him from finishing. He managed finally to air his grievances at a special meeting in his parlor. Neither the house nor the fence and pasture nor the salary nor the firewood supply met with his approval. Already the eight-year-old parsonage was in dire need of repairs. His fence was rotten and on the verge of collapse. Brush overran two-thirds of his pasture. He could not subsist on an unpaid salary. Firewood he left until last. After much trouble on his part, he had received two small loads in three weeks. It was now the end of October. Without wood, he warned his congregants, they would hear no further Scripture. “I cannot preach without study. I cannot study without fire. I cannot live quietly without study,” Parris explained. He demanded a speedy consideration of each matter and “a loving and Christian answer, in writing.” The air was icy with grievances, taut with apprehension and frustration, discomforts his family inevitably shared. They greeted the disgruntled parsonage visitors and heard the raised voices, the outraged stomp of boots. The minister found his congregants insulting in the extreme. To his petition Parris affixed a line in his signature brand of high-handed self-pity: “Let me add if you continue contentious
, your contentions will remove me either to the grave, or some other place.” He understood that his parishioners had been kinder to his predecessors. None had fared as poorly. Nor presumably were his predecessors as sensitive to the cold as was he, after nearly a decade in the tropics.

  The villagers met repeatedly to discuss their minister’s predicament. Within months of his ordination, his salary was in arrears; as early as the fall of 1690, a movement was afoot to dismiss him. The committee to collect his salary voted late in 1691 not to do so. He was also out of wood. A bitterness seeped into the sermons. The parsonage meanwhile grew colder and colder, as he emphasized from the pulpit. Were it not for a visiting Salem town deacon who made a last-minute delivery, Parris informed his congregants on October 8, he would have frozen. He made no appeal for the relief of his family, acutely aware of the challenges to his authority and presumably shivering as well in the rabid weather; November brought heavy snows and howling winds. Parris informed the committee that came to see him early that month that they should be more mindful of him than of other people. Having dug out from banks of snow, he complained on November 18 that he “had scarce wood enough to burn ’til tomorrow.” It did not help that the winter of 1691–1692 was especially arctic. Bread froze in communion plates, ink in pens, sap in the fireplace. The chimney delivered icy blasts. Parris preached to a chorus of rattling coughs and sniffles, to the shuffling of cruelly frostbitten feet. For everyone’s comfort he curtailed his afternoon sermon of January 3, 1692. It was simply too cold to go on.

  Village quarrels aside, Parris had ample reason to complain. His was grueling work for which he was little prepared. He had taken on several occupations at once. The minister in a “little village” read divinity one minute and trimmed his mare the next, left off repairing the garden fence to preside over a prayer meeting. Parris might well hang a map of the world in his parsonage, he might appear to be the village intellectual, having at Harvard translated the Old Testament into Hebrew and Greek, but he devoted himself equally to turnip-sowing, cider-making, and squirrel-killing. “So perplexing it is to have the affairs of the ministry and of a farm to manage together,” lamented one Massachusetts minister. Parris—who speculated in real estate and came late in life to tending his own fields—could only have felt similarly. The pastoral work alone was arduous and endless. “Now of all the churches under heaven there are none that expect so much variety of service from their pastors as those of New England,” wailed Cotton Mather, who did not thrill to the pastoral visit. Parris called on parishioners to inquire after religious instruction at home. He served as scribe, judge, counselor, confidant. He kept fasts and performed baptisms, arranged lectures and conferred with neighboring congregations. He comforted the sick and the bereaved, which over the summer of 1689 included four families who had lost sons to Indian attacks. Marblehead’s minister calculated that he went eight years at one stretch without so much as a half a day off. There was cause to be bone-tired under the best of circumstances, which Parris’s were not. Already primed for affront, he came increasingly to harp on Christ’s wounds and bruises. Well before the pitiless winter of 1692, he sounded better suited to a calamity than a ministry.