by Stacy Schiff
Salvation depended on communal virtue, the reason that Mary Sibley and Ezekiel Cheever offered apologies to the village as a whole and the reason that hesitating to identify a witch might seem tantamount to abetting the devil. “If the neighbor of an elected saint sins, then the saint sins also,” Mather reminded his congregants. As a result you wound up intimately acquainted with your neighbor’s wardrobe, feuds, temper, inheritance, and idiosyncrasies, as well as the state of his cider supply and the brand on his cow’s ear. No one was monitored as closely as the children, whose moral well-being was not yet assured and seemed at times distinctly improbable. The surveillance was not always malignant. Had a passerby not peered into the Mathers’ Boston windows one autumn evening, he might not have noticed the daughter whose bonnet had caught fire and who, alone at home, would seconds later have been consumed by flames.*
The Massachusetts Puritan also knew—or devoutly hoped—that he was being watched. If you inhabited a city on a hill, by definition you stood onstage. That gaze did not discomfort the settlers. It made them—in the words of former deputy president William Stoughton, who helped the colony define itself and would soon define Salem witchcraft—a civilization of which great things were expected. “If any people in the world have been lifted up to heaven as to advantages and privileges,” Stoughton proclaimed, “we are the people.” That was one way to put it. A modern historian suggested a less exalted one. Having traveled three thousand miles, New Englanders “had willingly risked life and property to come to the wilderness so they could sit on benches in drafty, gloomy barns for three to six hours on Sundays hearing the Word as it should be preached.” The combination was in other words ideal. The Puritan was wary and watchful. His faith kept him off balance and on guard. And if you intended to live in a state of nerve-racking insecurity, in expectation of ambush and meteorological rebuke—on the watch for every brand of intruder, from the “ravening wolves of heresy” to the “wild boars of tyranny,” as a 1694 narrative had it—seventeenth-century Massachusetts, that rude and howling wilderness, was the place for you.
So far as what Mather in March termed “fiery rebukes from heaven” went, the Lord had amply delivered. Since the Puritans’ 1630 arrival, the Almighty had sent them immoderate rains and blasting mildew, caterpillars and grasshoppers, drought, smallpox, and fire. For several decades he had spoken only with displeasure. Over the first two generations, the colonists had assumed a de facto independence from England, which in 1684 had led King Charles II to revoke their charter, a document of near-sacred status; decades of prosperity came to a shuddering halt. The settlers had been refractory and disruptive, coining their own money, ignoring the Navigation Acts, oppressing Quakers. They seemed to believe the laws of England did not extend across an ocean; they had taken it upon themselves to found a self-governing republic while no one was looking. Several years later, the Crown imposed a royal governor on Massachusetts to address the settlers’ irregularities, resolve “the petty differences and animosities” among the colonial administrations, and coordinate defenses. When Edmund Andros arrived to head up a Dominion government in 1686, he exercised absolute authority over all territory from Maine to New Jersey. He curtailed town meetings and abolished the Massachusetts legislature. He threw Puritan hegemony and land claims into question—and left a Boston congregation to wait outdoors for several hours, in March, while he appropriated their meetinghouse for an Anglican service. To many New Englanders, he qualified as both a wolf of heresy and a boar of tyranny.
In March 1689 the uniformed Andros passed through Salem with a large retinue. Throwing down the gauntlet, he asked John Higginson, the town’s vigorous senior minister, if all the land in New England did not rightfully belong to the king. His conversation described as “a glimpse of heaven,” Higginson was too tactful a man to gratify his visitor with an answer. He replied that he could speak only as a curate; Andros had broached a matter of state. That was all the more reason he should like an answer, persisted the iron-fisted governor. Higginson allowed as how he felt the lands belonged to those who occupied them and who had bartered with the Indians for them. At great expense to themselves, over two generations, the settlers had subdued a wasteland. They had tamed what an early visitor termed a “remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness.” The Salem minister and the royal governor went back and forth for some time, weighing the laws of God and Englishmen. The king, Higginson argued, had had no stake in North American lands before the settlers arrived. At which Andros exploded, positing another binary choice, if eighty-seven years prematurely: “Either you are subjects or you are rebels.”
Andros lasted until April of 1689, when the colonists removed him in a military coup. Instigated by the Boston ministers, it was led by many of the men who would exterminate witches three years later. Even before that revolt Increase Mather had secretly sailed to London—he narrowly avoided arrest—to clarify the colony’s grievances and plead for a new charter. The negotiation took the better part of three years, during which time Massachusetts knew no political authority. Only in April 1692 was it emerging from what Topsfield’s minister called its “fears and troubles.” A disgruntled official was not wrong when he noted that Massachusetts was as close to establishing a viable government as it was to building the Tower of Babel; civil affairs remained in a shambles. There was much fear that a royal punishment was forthcoming, that Anglicanism would be imposed. Massachusetts felt acutely vulnerable, the more so as Bay Colony calamities registered as verdicts. Each time God frowned—whether in the form of a hailstorm, plague, overbearing English officials, or witchcraft—he was assumed to do so for a reason.
The settlers watched then for many things in 1692 besides marauding Indians and nonphantom Frenchmen. They watched for a charter that would restore their rights and for the return of the indispensable, accomplished Mather. They watched for an explanation of and a deliverance from their misery. For some time, Cotton Mather and others had been on the lookout as well for the Second Coming. Given the calamities that had visited New England, it felt imminent. Witchcraft in Salem further proved that time was short; Mather calculated the golden age to be five years in the future. His exactitude points up another feature of the seventeenth-century mind. Described as “that strange agglomeration of incongruities,” it consisted of a crazy quilt of erudition and superstition.* The natural bordered on the supernatural—one eminent minister received the news that his wife had given birth not from the midwife but from the Lord—as medicine blurred into astrology, science into nonsense.
Plenty of clergymen dabbled in alchemy while inveighing against the occult; popular magic was one thing, elite magic another. A great deal of bet-hedging and base-covering went on; just because you were eminently pious did not mean you hesitated to serve up a witch cake. Like any people under a sentence of predestination, the Puritans developed an obsession with fortune-telling. Almanacs sold briskly, offering astrological wisdoms.* Harvard’s 1683 commencement was postponed due to an eclipse. By any account the Puritans were very far from kitchen-sink realism; God spoke to them in rolls of thunder, in what sounds like dragon smoke, in glittering comets. It said something about Samuel Sewall that where others looked for heaven’s artillery, Sewall, whose brother had taken in little Betty Parris, kept particularly close track of rainbows—comforting rainbows, noble rainbows, perfect rainbows, a rainbow directly out of the book of Revelation. Sewall installed angel-head carvings on the gate before his home as protective cover. In the anxious murk, religion sometimes seemed a kind of halfway house between reason and superstition.
The Bay Colony may have constituted the best-educated community in the history of the world before 1692. Rarely have so many been able to parse a sentence in the presence of so few books. The majority of adolescent girls in Salem village could read, even if they could not sign their names. (Ann Putnam Jr. numbered among the few who could.) Theirs was also a society in which the most literate happened to be the most literal. The New England clergy coll
ected proofs of the supernatural in part to fend off the surging forces of rationalism. Increase Mather had harvested prodigies and portents in his 1684 Illustrious Providences, the precursor to his son’s Memorable Providences, the pulpy volume through which news of the Swedish flight and satanic rescue reached New England. A grab bag of apparitions, possessions, earthquakes, shipwrecks, and flying candlesticks, Illustrious Providences was a stunning hybrid of folklore and erudition, produced to satisfy the ministers who in 1681 requested a collection of “prodigious witchcrafts, diabolical possessions, remarkable judgments.” Those “native wonder tales” served a political purpose, reaffirming God’s commitment to the New England mission in the face of royal incursions.
The Puritan overlooked nothing by way of sign or symbol. When he headed into the marsh with a gun to hunt waterfowl for dinner and his best pig followed him, it meant something. The fury of hailstones that would shatter Sewall’s new kitchen windows delivered a providential message. (Mather assured his disconsolate friend that the damage was Apocalypse practice.) The thirst for meaning introduced an obsession with causality; explanations were a regular feature of Puritan life. A comet was never simply a comet. A burn in the linen was ripe with meaning. As the Goodwin children twisted and writhed, their father naturally assumed he was being punished for his sins. If Parris read a rebuke in his convulsing children he did not say so publicly. It was the obvious conclusion, however. Cotton Mather would infer as much when another daughter—the Mather home was a dangerous place—fell into the fire.
Human frailty was thought to account for inclement weather; teeth chattering, toes numb, the Massachusetts Puritan had every reason to believe he sinned flamboyantly. Immoderate behavior claimed a fair number of casualties; Increase Mather suggested that King Philip’s War followed from excessive silk-and wig-wearing. A Connecticut cleric wrote down his widowhood to the fact that he had too much enjoyed sex with his wife. Others attributed the deaths of children to their outsize affections for them. Negligence constituted the workhorse of explanations, especially for a generation convinced of its inferiority. They were not the pious men their fathers had been; the idyllic age was behind them. The Cambridge minister who went hoarse was being chastised for his poor preaching. Was his left knee lame, Increase Mather wondered, in the thirty-fourth year of his sixty-four-year ministry, as witches began to fly through the air, because he had been insufficiently diligent in his service to God? (He spent no fewer than sixteen of every twenty-four hours in his study.) One could not be too careful; Cotton Mather accidentally omitted a daughter’s name from his morning prayer. He finished to discover that an hour earlier the child’s nurse had accidentally suffocated her. When in 1690 Samuel Parris attributed New England’s suffering to lapses in family devotions, he took the problem to a Cambridge ministers’ meeting. The solution was simple: the Massachusetts clergymen were to do their utmost to call on each of their parishioners to “inquire, instruct, advise, warn, and charge, according to the circumstances of the families.”
The full-scale embrace of causality sent the Puritan in two seemingly opposite directions. On the one hand it made of him an enthusiastic litigant. Prior to the 1690s, there were no lawyers in the Bay Colony. There were no accidents either. Every conceivable offense found its way to court, as, it seemed, did most Massachusetts residents, seduced by the irresistible idea—when things fall apart, disappoint, go awry or astray—that someone, somewhere, must be to blame.* (Much of what we know about the upright Salem villagers comes from the court records, a catalog of their misdeeds. It is at once a dazzling compendium of major and minor infractions and a tribute to a hypertrophied faith in reason.) The residents of seventeenth-century Massachusetts were not more given to transgression than others, only more in love with justice. Even when they rewrote the official record, they remained ledger-keepers and score-settlers. A testifying people whose salvation depended on a public confession, they made for natural witnesses. There seemed never to be a shortage of volunteers to report on what had been said, or what they had heard had been said a generation earlier. Mutual surveillance could sound like something else altogether in the courtroom. What Cotton Mather had in mind when he exhorted his congregation in 1692 to remain one another’s eagle-eyed guardians was probably not what William Cantlebery’s wife had in mind when—standing in a tree—she invited a friend to join her in spying on the neighbor who shoved Cantlebery off her property, pelting him with a rain of objects.
Vigilant though the settlers were, many things went missing, from mares to fences to virtue. Debt and drunkenness were the popular legal favorites, but trespass in all its forms came close behind. That was unsurprising when land grants were defined as “beginning at a stump and running east four rods, to a stake” or bounded “easterly to a tree ‘pretty big’ either black oak or yellow oak, upon a ridge by the highway.” Even where borders were exact, livestock chose not to respect them. Freewheeling New England pigs sowed havoc for generations; the neighbor’s swine seemed perpetually to be rooting in the peas. Serene Rebecca Nurse had erupted in fury one Saturday morning when the next-door neighbor’s pigs turned up in her garden. She had called to her son to bring his gun. (It would not help her case that the pig owner died soon thereafter.) When Parris petitioned the village to repair his rotten, decomposing fence, he described it as a “make-bait” between himself and his neighbors. Every spring his livestock ventured to their side, their hogs, cows, and sheep to his. Year in and year out, Salem discussed the minister’s pasture fence, which—joining fears of impiety, famine, and invasion—crammed the New England conundrum into a three-word nutshell.
Locks do not appear to have functioned in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, where all kinds of boundaries were trampled and thresholds penetrated. The Salem villagers had every reason to advertise their wives’ fears when left alone; a woman risked assault from a visiting neighbor when her husband descended to the cellar for more cider. Consciously and not, men slipped into beds not their own. (It is interesting that spectral women so frequently disturbed men in their beds throughout 1692 when in the visible world the opposite occurred with some frequency.) Dark barns proved especially perilous places. The candle knocked from her hand, a Newbury girl informed the assailant who lured her into the stable that “she would as soon be gored by the cows as to be defiled by such a rogue as he.” There was a conflagrative nature to those complaints; angry words between two parties regularly begat angrier exchanges among their relatives, who handed them down, intact and still smoldering, from one generation to the next. In such a way the Putnams’ feud with several Topsfield families had gathered legendary force over the decades; Rebecca Nurse’s family and the Putnams had sued and countersued each other in an epic land dispute. The courts functioned efficiently, with English procedures and remarkable speed. Prison sentences were rare. The workforce beckoned, as did redemption—or a renewed court case.
While the punishments were highly original, the catalog of offenses was less so. Servants suffered regular verbal and physical abuse. They sought revenge by raiding the cellar, stealing the kettle, or planting stones in beds. Before running away with his master’s shoes and horse, one servant informed his mistress she was “an ordinary whore, burnt-tail bitch and hopping toad.” Few were as creative as the girl who slipped the toad into the milk pitcher. Hauled into court over and over—he had an irritating Quaker habit of working, and requiring his help to work, on the Sabbath (he was spotted through a shop window)—Salem merchant Thomas Maule landed there in 1681 for abuse of his maid. He had taken to delivering thirty or forty lashes with a horsewhip to her naked back. She spat blood for two weeks. Why did he so cruelly beat the girl, he was asked, when he could just as easily have sold her? “Because she was a good servant,” explained Maule, who largely sat out the events of 1692 but did not mince words afterward.
What a court could not always do was make sense of things. Sometimes, in the headlong pursuit of reason, the best explanation turned out to be the otherwo
rldly one. Sometimes, the most eminent of New England ministers collectively pointed out, it was the only explanation. Certainly it was the most versatile. One husband blamed his impotence on witches in the woods outside. If Sarah Good had not enchanted them, how to construe the death of those village cattle? Witchcraft tied up loose ends, accounting for the arbitrary, the eerie, and the unneighborly. As Samuel Parris was discovering, it deflected divine judgment and dissolved personal responsibility. The devil not only provided a holiday from reason but expressed himself clearly; for all their perversity, his motives made sense. You did not need to ask what you had done to deserve his disfavor, preferable to celestial rebuke—or indifference. And when diabolical machinations were what you were watching for, they quickly became what you saw. Amid glaring accountability, witchcraft broke up logical logjams. It ratified grudges, neutralized slights, relieved anxiety. It offered an airtight explanation when, literally, all hell broke loose.
