The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  At every turn he opted for leniency. Rather than shackle every wretched witch, why not consider lesser punishments? Surely those might exact “some solemn, open, public, and explicit renunciation of the devil” sufficient to chase the Old Deluder from the neighborhood. Here Mather caught himself; he was writing his elder and a family benefactor. With a bow and a scrape, he apologized for getting ahead of matters. He would pray that Richards and his venerable colleagues sagely resolve the “thorny affair” before them. He rambled a little, although he was on one point perfectly explicit. He distrusted spectral evidence, visible only to the bewitched. An innocent could be used unwittingly to diabolical ends. No one should be convicted for a crime he committed in someone else’s imagination.

  Unsurprisingly for a man who had already met with a shimmering, winged, white-robed angel in his study—and who over the next years would note that the heavens advised, assured, and irradiated him—Mather also cast a vote for the invisible world. “Our dear neighbors are most really tormented, really murdered, and really acquainted with hidden things. Which are afterwards proved plainly to have been realities,” he asserted. It was perfectly just to execute an individual “who in the sight of men shall with a sword in his hand stab his neighbor into the heart.” In other words, Mather assured the justices, they could very well believe their eyes. Visible wounds—John Indian’s scars, Mercy Lewis’s bite marks—could not be ignored. Richards had every reason to share Mather’s wisdoms with his colleagues, who in the weeks that followed consulted precedent in witchcraft cases, reading in Richard Bernard’s Guide to Grand-Jury Men and Joseph Keble’s treatise on common law, studying Glanvill, Baxter, and Perkins, as well as Mather’s Memorable Providences. Their orders were to uphold the laws of England; they had paid a price for having deviated from them in the past. Richards reached out for an ecclesiastical opinion not from any shortage of legal manuals but because the senior justice knew he had an authority at hand. His minister would never sound more assured on the subject. As for Richards and his colleagues, they represented the best minds in America. The events in Salem utterly confounded them.

  PREVIOUS CAPITAL CASES had been heard in Boston. Given the number of suspects and the multitude of witnesses, it made more sense to hear the witchcraft cases in Salem’s town house, a spacious, two-story brick structure on an open square. Richards traveled there the day after Mather composed his letter so as to be on hand for the early-morning opening of the court. As the sheriff impaneled grand jurors, Newton’s nine suspects—seven women and two men—returned to Salem. We do not know how they were transported or where room was found for them in an already congested prison, but they quickly made their presence felt. As the jail transfer took place that Wednesday a transparent Rebecca Nurse tackled Ann Putnam Sr. She boasted of various murders, claims buttressed by the huddle of ghosts around her. Ann Jr. reported on a set of matching apparitions.

  Speculation must have run rampant throughout the village: With which witch would Newton begin? If the Putnams supposed it to be Nurse, they were mistaken. Newton did not select the criminal mastermind who posed the greatest danger, whom he left to molder in Boston. Nor did he choose the first accused witch, against whom he inventoried the evidence. His initial suspect was neither a confessed witch nor even a Salem villager. Newton was a level-headed civil servant, discerning and decisive. He acted as would any seasoned prosecutor, choosing what appeared from every angle an open-and-shut case, one that would ease the way for future prosecutions and deliver a clear signal to all. Cooperation was prudent, he could remind perpetrators. Guilt was easily determined, he could reassure the nervous jurors. Conviction was handily obtained, he could demonstrate to the judges. The star attraction could wait.

  Since Newton’s arrival in Salem, one name had recurred repeatedly. He heard it even from girls who had not mentioned it previously. Though in chains, his first defendant continued to afflict. She had attended the meeting in Parris’s pasture. She had murdered six people, including a husband. A confessed witch had implicated her. Her case could be argued without recourse to spectral evidence. She had threatened a justice, assuring Hathorne that if she were a witch, he would know it. She had little family and none of the combative Nurse variety. Newton could call up a body of evidence against her from an earlier witchcraft trial. While judges and an assembly of minor officials journeyed to Salem, Newton prepared formal indictments against Bridget Bishop, charging her with having practiced her black art on five girls. What would be said of a Charlestown woman in 1693 applied equally to the ornery, peace-disturbing petty thief who had been walking around with a gash in her coat that corresponded perfectly to a lunge made at her specter; “If there were a witch in the world, she was one.”

  With the break of dawn on Thursday, ghosts alighted all over Salem. Soon thereafter a crowd began to assemble in the second, galleried floor of Salem’s town house. A school occupied the ground floor; the large chamber above was fitted with benches. The justices presided from raised seats above a long table. Shortly after eight that morning, Newton stood before Chief Justice William Stoughton. Did the attorney general swear, asked Stoughton, “that according to your best skill, you will act truly and faithfully on Their Majesties’ behalf, as to law and justice doth appertain, without any favor or affection, so help you God?” Newton did. Stephen Sewall took the oath to serve as clerk. A court officer, most likely the sheriff, swore in eighteen grand jurors, men of local influence who were to determine if sufficient evidence existed for the case to proceed. Newton laid out his evidence against Bishop, charging her with having “hurt, tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted, and tormented” the village girls. With little fuss, the girls testified to their statements. Newton may have presented evidence from Bishop’s prior case as well; she was on trial as much for her character as her crime. The grand jury—its foreman was Burroughs’s onetime brother-in-law—handed down five formal indictments against Bishop.

  She submitted meanwhile to an intimate and invasive examination. Either under the supervision of a male surgeon or at his direction, a group of women scoured the bodies of the six female suspects for witch’s teats. Several of the examiners were experienced midwives, although that was not saying a good deal. Where available, seventeenth-century treatises on childbirth tended to omit the finer details; its practitioners—usually older women from prominent families—knew relatively little about bodily functions. Nor was there much guidance as to what the women were looking for. A fleabite, a wart, a mole, anything raised or discolored could qualify as a teat. A panel of Connecticut women engaged in the same task scanned a woman three times but could not agree on their findings; they were unconvinced the suspect’s anatomy differed from theirs. A bystander felt similarly at a Connecticut hanging. After close inspection of the body cut down from the gallows, she announced that if the victim’s marks were preternatural, she too was a witch. Knowledge of anatomy was still primitive enough in New England that at a 1676 autopsy, a heart removed from a corpse was affirmed to be the stomach.

  The midwives probed and pressed in tender areas, gauging sensitivity with pins or needles; you had to hope you would bleed when the three-inch pin went in. A Quaker woman subjected to the indelicate procedure swore that she had suffered greater abuse at the hands of church members than she had in bearing five children. While the Salem examiners did not entirely agree among themselves, they did locate several incriminating signs; three of Newton’s suspects turned out to have “a preternatural excrescence of flesh between the pudendum and anus.”* These were abnormal protrusions, unnaturally positioned. They appeared in precisely the same place on all three women, which by some logic indicated sorcery. At least some of her examiners were surely known to Bishop, among the three suspects with unusual growths.

  The justices seated, officers escorted her into the courtroom for her arraignment. A court clerk called out her name; she stepped forward and held up her hand to acknowledge her identity. The indictments against her were read. How
did she plead? Bishop had no choice but to speak for herself, there being no counsel for the defense. Early New England did not like lawyers. (More to the point, lawyers did not like early New England. Their value had been recognized only seven years earlier, when a call went to London to send over a few honest attorneys, if such a thing existed.†) Newton was the only trained lawyer in the room. It was felt that the innocent could make her case better than anyone else; left to her own devices, the guilty would prove unable to conceal the truth. Then in her late fifties, Bishop had spent six weeks on meager rations in a foul, dank jail. She had been threadbare from the start. She stood before the court filthy and haggard, under intense scrutiny, a sour woman in a cloud of sour air. She pleaded not guilty. “Culprit, how will you be tried?” the clerk then asked, to which Bishop replied with the formulaic, mandatory phrase: “By God and my country.”

  By law, court cases were to be scrupulously documented; Stephen Sewall sat before the judges stabbing his quill in his ink bottle, transcribing as furiously as had Parris during the preliminary hearings. Nothing Sewall set down that day—or during any other 1692 witchcraft trial, for which Bishop’s set the precedent—has come down to us. Three decades of evidence against Bishop has. She had been tried and reprieved before; while the stakes appeared greater this time—she had never before witnessed such a formidable gathering—she did not believe herself to be a witch. Once she had entered her plea, witnesses were sworn in, taking the oath to speak “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” One told of having been carried from her spinning wheel to the river, in which Bishop threatened to drown her. Another reported on murders of which Bishop boasted; a third described a ghost of one of her victims. Many—little Betty Parris and Ann Putnam Jr. among them—recounted tortures they had endured at the April hearing. Bishop’s touch had revived the girls, others testified, fulfilling the crucial Deuteronomy-determined requirement of two witnesses to a crime. Deliverance Hobbs swore that Bishop had whipped her with iron rods to force her to retract her confession. Together they had attended the “general meeting of the witches” in Parris’s field. The jurors heard testimony from the villager who had stabbed at Bishop’s shape to produce the gash displayed in her coat. She and her specter were manifestly one and the same.

  Any number of suspects could have been said to have enchanted neighbors and afflicted the village girls. Bishop alone could be convicted of having lied in court, several times, during her preliminary hearing. Her history represented such a prosecutorial gold mine that some testimony never made its way to court. Susannah Shelden reported that Bishop had been a witch for more than twenty years; that she knelt and prayed before a black man in a high-crowned hat; that a snake familiar had crept “into her bosom.” Newton did not use that deposition. The court may have heard of a more earthly incident: not only had Bishop stood before Hathorne four years earlier when accused of theft, but she had spent several weeks in jail that year. A town miller accused her of having stolen a piece of brass. She returned it and twice begged his forgiveness, on her knees. Asked at her 1688 trial to confirm as much, she had denied all. She had stumbled upon the brass in a corner of her garden while weeding. She had never apologized. A most irritating woman, she on that occasion drove Hathorne to frustration.

  The court heard other charges that had nothing to do with demonic conspiracies, red books, or petty theft. Newton summoned a sailor who recounted having been awoken one Sabbath at sunrise to find Bishop standing by his bed. With a smile, she struck him on the head and melted out the window. At about noon the same day she caused an apple to fly from his hand and travel more than six feet across the room. Twelve years earlier, “muttering and menacing,” she had thrown hatter Samuel Shattuck’s son around the house, bludgeoning him and separating him completely from all reason. (This was the unsuspecting family warned by a visitor—after one look at the child—that a witch lived in their vicinity.) She had paid the son of the miller with whom she tangled in 1688 in disappearing currency. She had caused his cart to sink into a hole that appeared out of nowhere and afterward vanished. She had bewitched a bag of corn. She slipped through locked doors and closed windows. None of those charges was remotely recent; many clustered around her earlier trial. One involved three generations. These were the ancient, dredged-up, multiply resurrected accusations that the New England air seemed to stimulate and sustain, that defied the laws of nature by growing hardier with age.

  Bishop knew she occasioned whispering and that townspeople believed her a witch. She could not have been unaware that she unsettled for other reasons as well. In April the Salem marshal had cited a nocturnal visit; the June jury heard of at least five more. Bishop seemed to have a habit of hopping around young men’s bedrooms, incapacitating them and striking them dumb, symptoms commonly associated with a different form of enchantment. Wanton or flirtatious, she burned bright in men’s minds; they tended to recall her wardrobe precisely. When she visited the miller’s son years earlier, she had professed a great affection for him, more, he testified, than was proper. He described her flashy red coat with the multicolored edging; Bishop had clapped it around her legs as she jumped into his bed. Samuel Shattuck reported that she called on him frequently for trumped-up reasons and in a “smooth, flattering manner.” She pressed her lips to those of defenseless young men. Although she could not have looked it on June 2—Sewall saw her only as “an old woman”—she may once have been very beautiful.*

  Salem tailor John Louder testified to a protracted, moonlit tangle with Bishop. Confronted afterward, she claimed no knowledge of that bedroom tryst; she did not intend to be held responsible for men’s dreams. Shortly thereafter, home sick on a Sabbath afternoon, Louder received a terrifying visitor: a black monster leaped through his window, to stand inches away from him. A cousin of Tituba’s hearthside goblin, it had the face of a man, the body of a monkey, and the feet of a cock. It had come, it announced, to rule Louder. In exchange, it promised to satisfy his every desire. “You devil, I will kill you,” the tailor swore, attempting to clasp the creature but grasping only thin air. The flying monkey and Louder went a few rounds, Louder injuring his arm in the process. Lunging through a window, the creature reappeared through a locked porch door. It lured the tailor outside. As he struggled to chase it away—“The whole armor of God be between me and you!” he cried—he spied Bishop in her orchard. Ultimately the goblin launched itself over the trees, churning up a storm of dirt and fruit; Bishop would several times find herself mixed up with snakes and apples.

  In her April 19 hearing Bishop had shaken her head in disbelief, grown hot under interrogation, and appealed to those in the room to clear her name. (No one volunteered.) In the case of the stolen brass, she had quarreled with testimony before a justice. Once Louder delivered up his account of the apple-scattering goblin—it left him dumb for three days!—she weighed in. Though without counsel, she had the right to question her accusers. She did not even know Louder! She was reminded that their orchards adjoined. They had quarreled over the years. Here she stumbled upon a Catch-22 of the seventeenth-century system. Self-incrimination was not yet an issue. Questioning evidence was risky. As a justice had chided an earlier suspect, his “answer was thought overbold and uncomely for a man under such apparent guilt.”

  Among the reheated charges against Bishop was one piece of testimony that trumped all. It happened also to be the most ancient. Seventeen years earlier, she had hired two workmen to demolish a wall of her house. Buried within it were several rag-and-bristle poppets, headless and stuck through with pins. Pressed to explain, Bishop could offer up no reasonable explanation. She made as little progress in attempting to defend herself on June 2. Urged to confess, she insisted on her innocence. The gross lying in court, the muttering and menacing, the various enchantments, the murders, the bedroom visits, were one thing. With the poppets, with the rent in her coat, with the news that Bishop bore a supernatural mark on her body, Newton had material evidence. He received a supplement
ary gift as well. Probably the day before the trial, as she rode under guard past the empty town house, Bishop glanced up at the stately, heavy-timbered building. A plank crashed down from an upper story, later turning up some distance away.*

  The trial proceeded smoothly and swiftly. While she could challenge the choice of jurors, Bishop could not probe them for their views. In the absence of lawyers, there were no points of procedure to be discussed. There was no voir dire, no cross-examination. The justices represented both parties, interrogating the suspect as well as her accusers. Testimony went according to plan, not only because much of it had been delivered before; Bishop appeared unable to dispute or derail it. Though distressed, the bewitched girls seem to have been relatively quiet. In his account—written later, from court papers—Mather suggested there was more evil on hand than the court knew what to do with. He did not bother to describe the charges that had landed Bishop in the courtroom in the first place for a similar reason: “There was little occasion to prove the witchcraft, it being evident and notorious to all beholders.”

  A seventeenth-century magistrate did not hesitate to tell jurors what they thought or how to evaluate evidence. He might direct them to find a defendant guilty. In the absence of sufficient evidence, strong suspicion would do. Reputation carried great weight, which explained how so many ostensibly nongermane testimonies against Bishop wound up in court. If guilt seemed likely but not certain—“reasonable doubt” was still nearly two centuries in the future—a sentence might be adjusted accordingly. You could be convicted of a lesser crime than that for which you had been indicted. In a closing statement, Stoughton summarized the case and reminded the jury that they were to prove the evidence. He offered some instruction that June afternoon. The jurors were to disregard the girls’ robust good health. Bishop’s intention alone mattered. The court did not need to prove that witchcraft had been inflicted, only that it had been deployed. That, explained the sober, much-respected chief justice, was the meaning of the law. His instructions surprised at least one observer. They flew in the face of Mather’s May 31 advice; in the face of Perkins, the authoritative English expert; and in the face of New England judicial history.