by Stacy Schiff
That possibility—that one might well work witchcraft without having consented, much less contracted, to do so—struck Chief Justice Stoughton as unlikely. The eldest of the three Harvard-educated judges, sixty-year-old Stoughton demonstrated a gift for extracting himself from controversies that tended to sink lesser men. Far steelier than Sewall, he knew a great deal about law enforcement. Massachusetts legal code carefully and clearly enumerated crimes but could be opaque regarding court procedures. On the one hand, leniency was preferred. On the other hand, offenses that undermined society as a whole demanded swift prosecution. And the province faced a crisis of unprecedented proportions. Never before had it suffered a witchcraft epidemic. Even those unsympathetic to the Puritan establishment were astonished. To a half-amused New York Anglican, it seemed as if Cotton Mather had been prescient two years earlier when he had warned that Satan schemed to wrench the colony from Puritan hands. The devil indeed now seemed on the verge of depopulating Massachusetts. There were over one hundred suspects in jail, most of them church members, elders, and deacons, reported the New Yorker. A minister rotted in prison, as did another’s daughter. The wife of a third had been named. The wretches betrayed one another so quickly that “now they say there is above seven hundred in all.” (That was untrue, although it was true that more witches were jailed than had been convicted in all the years of New England history combined.) To someone like Stoughton, it seemed as if everything in which he believed stood in jeopardy. That fear galloped across New England. On June 22, Connecticut established a witchcraft court to address an epidemic of its own.
Enforcing the laws of New England qualified as a sacred duty. The justices approached it scrupulously, consulting authoritative legal texts and following the letter of the law. Some dissension nonetheless arose among the ranks. Within days of Bishop’s hanging, fifty-three-year-old Nathaniel Saltonstall, the third Harvard-educated justice, resigned from the Court of Oyer and Terminer. An Ipswich native, the grandson of an early Bay Colony leader, Saltonstall sat regularly on the Massachusetts bench. He had lobbied in London on New England’s behalf alongside Increase Mather. A highly popular militia captain, he had served on the Maine frontier. Principles had tripped him up before and may have done so again; in 1687 he had refused to cooperate with Andros, an offense for which he spent fifteen days in prison. It is unclear if Saltonstall caviled with the Bishop verdict or the execution. An observer later allowed simply that “he has left the court, and is very much dissatisfied with the proceedings of it.” He was not replaced.
Although he excused himself from the court, Saltonstall does not seem to have offered a public statement. When you questioned the proceedings, specters had a habit of assuming your shape; it was a short step from urging caution to fending off accusation. Already Mather peered nervously over his shoulder, wondering when the devil would begin to masquerade in his guise. (It would not be long.) An Andover constable would balk at further arrests, dubious about the charges; he landed in prison. Indeed, within the year, a report of Saltonstall’s specter began to circulate. More than ever it was true that—as Baxter had it, paraphrasing Luke, in a line Parris would adapt—“If you are not for Christ and his works, you are against him.”
Skepticism tended to burst forth, execute a few mincing steps, then burrow underground, spooked by its shadow. No one pointed out that thirty-six-year-old Sarah Bibber—whom the spectral Burroughs had accompanied to his hearing and who now writhed alongside the girls—was a known scandalmonger, double-tongued and mischief-making. On no front were lips more suddenly pursed than when it came to countersuits. Prior to 1692, defamation had represented a lively New England business. In one of the earliest Massachusetts witchcraft proceedings, a woman received twenty lashes for calling another a witch. The Salem woman of whom it had been said that “she was a witch and if she were not a witch already she would be one and therefore it was as good to hang her at first as last” sued successfully for defamation. Often the cases pitted men against each other, one having lobbed an accusation at the other’s wife. Susannah Martin’s husband had filed and won a defamation suit after her 1669 witchcraft trial.
Francis Nurse had sued successfully both for defamation and slander. He brought no such action in 1692, when it might too easily have misfired. What prevailed instead was Mather’s admonition that “if the neighbor of an elected saint sins, then the saint sins also.” There was no odium attached to delivering up your fellow villager; in 1692 it was better to accuse than be suspected of complicity. To fail to report an offense constituted an offense of its own. Moreover, by informing, you did your part for the community. Hostile words that had earlier produced slander suits seemed in 1692 diverted to witchcraft accusations.
A rustle of doubt all the same made itself felt. Three days after Bishop’s execution, Phips met with his council, which included Chief Justice Stoughton. They requested some guidance. Over the next days, twelve ministers conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their joint reply, delivered on June 15. While pages seemed to issue from Mather in his sleep, “The Return of Several Ministers Consulted” was a circumspect, eight-paragraph document over which he labored.* In two paragraphs Mather acknowledged the enormity of the crisis and issued a paean to good government. In two more he urged “exquisite caution.” He addressed procedural issues: The courtroom should be as quiet and neutral as possible. Susceptible as they were to abuse by the “devil’s legerdemains,” practices like the touch test should be deployed carefully. The same went for the evil eye, by no means infallible. Yet again Mather held up English authorities Perkins and Bernard as the gold standard. He sounded a more tentative note than he had two weeks earlier in his discursive letter to John Richards.
In the lines that surely received the greatest scrutiny, Mather reminded the justices that convictions should not rest purely on spectral evidence, to which only the enchanted were privy. He had said as much already; he would insist on the point through the summer. Other considerations must weigh against the suspected witch, “inasmuch as ’tis an undoubted and a notorious thing” that a devil might impersonate an innocent, even a virtuous, man. In a contorted penultimate paragraph, Mather wondered if the entire calamity might be resolved were the court to discount those very testimonies. With a sweeping “nevertheless”—a word that figured in every 1692 Mather witchcraft statement—he then executed an about-face. His “very critical and exquisite caution” became, five paragraphs later, a vote for a “speedy and vigorous prosecution.” The ministers endorsed the prosecution of those who had “rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God, and the wholesome statutes of the English nation, for the detection of witchcrafts.” Equivocal though he remained, Mather came down emphatically on two points: Their case was extraordinary. The New England magistrate was no less so. Mather would apologize several times for his incoherence on a devilish subject.
Other clergymen were more cogent. In June a Baptist preacher named William Milborne submitted two petitions to the Massachusetts General Assembly. Milborne had preached for some time in Saco, Maine; Burroughs’s plight may have occasioned his protest. (In all ways, one had to be wary of one’s friends. Milborne’s defense may have encouraged the idea that Burroughs was a Baptist, considered heretics and nearly as dangerous as Quakers.) “Several persons of good fame and of unspotted reputation,” Milborne pointed out, were jailed on witchcraft charges. They had committed imaginary crimes. He urged the justices to discount specious evidence; they stood in grave danger of convicting innocents. Milborne had come to the ministry with a legal degree and a background in whaling. He was also a known troublemaker who hailed from a family of troublemakers. He tussled with both congregants and political authorities.*
Phips ordered Milborne’s arrest, yet another acknowledgment of the churning tide in 1692; the two had previously been allies, having made common cause with common friends. Milborne had helped foment the rebellion against Andros. On June 25, the minister found himself summoned to
explain his “seditious and scandalous papers.” For his potent “reflections upon the administrations of public justice,” the court offered him his choice between jail and a crushing two-hundred-pound bond. Cotton Mather had bought his home and a tract of land for the same sum. Milborne was not heard from again. Two days after his arrest—by which time it was clear the New England ministers might differ from the magistrates but would entrust witchcraft to their better judgment—the Court of Oyer and Terminer called its next eight suspects.
THE PURITAN MINISTER in an apocalyptic frame of mind, the Crown prosecutor preparing his case, and the Massachusetts farmer pondering the sudden death of his cow all engaged in the same exercise. Mind quickening, pulse hammering, each went into analytic overdrive. How to make sense of the ominous and inexplicable without clobbering the dog that was really a child? Rummaging about for the pattern that had to be there somewhere, he ventured into the coincidence-free sector between faith and paranoia, both invested in global, half-visible designs. And he did so as only a fundamentalist, a prosecutor, or an adolescent will: with the heady conviction that he was incontestably, blindingly right.
No other witchcraft suspect could rival Bridget Bishop for supernatural activity or bedroom disturbances. One other could account for yellow birds, cats, stalking wolves. Five confessed witches—including her own daughter—had named her. Her husband noted the strange mark on her shoulder. She had suckled a familiar on her finger. Her name turned up in the devil’s book. She had ridden on a pole to the parsonage meadow for Burroughs’s “hellish meeting.” On a fresh sheet of paper, Thomas Newton outlined his case against Sarah Good, the Salem beggar, noting with satisfaction that the testimony of the bewitched and the confessors regarding the witches’ Sabbath conformed. Newton relied on a detailed abstract he had made of Tituba’s account, tidy in its cause and effect: Good visited the parsonage. She mumbled under her breath. The children fell ill. Moreover, only their victims and their confederates could see the witches. Good had seen Osborne, whose powers did not level her. Good, reasoned the attorney general, “must consequently be a witch.” The pieces fit together seamlessly.
The call for jurors had hardly gone out when Sarah Good began afflicting again. On June 28 Susannah Shelden contorted before the grand jury to whom she submitted testimony that, as recently as two days earlier, Good had pricked, pinched, and nearly choked her to death. Good had lashed her hands together so tightly that two men had had to rescue her; they understood it was the fourth time in two weeks the eighteen-year-old had found her wrists bound. It was on one such occasion that the broom had wound up in the apple tree; between fits, Shelden told of invisible hands that had stolen a saucer from the table. She had watched Good carry it outside. The Procters’ maid also writhed before the grand jurors; Shelden explained that Good assaulted her. Under oath Sarah Bibber swore that Good had bewitched her four-year-old. Parris swore to the sufferings of the girls during the March preliminary hearing. The grand jury handed down at least three indictments against Good, whose trial began immediately. Although she was about Bibber’s age, she looked decrepit. For weeks already her clothes had been in shreds. If earlier she had mumbled like a witch, she had come to resemble one. She had been in jail since February with a nursing child, and, for some length of time, with the dying Osborne.
Good tended to seize opportunities to speak her mind, a reason she stood before a panel of black-gowned justices in the first place. It is more likely that she entered a screed into the record than a hopeless, halfhearted denial. A guilty plea at this juncture would in any event have accomplished little. Between the girls’ flailing and the mountain of evidence, her arraignment and trial extended over two days. At its end, the jury delivered a guilty verdict. It little surprised one Boston observer, who commented on the formulaic, one-size-fits-all approach in Salem. As he saw it, “The same evidence that served for one would serve for all the rest.”
Neither John Hale nor Deodat Lawson, both present, wrote about Sarah Good. Nor did Cotton Mather. A burden to her community, a menace and a malcontent, she was not noteworthy. The case against her was largely spectral. The two accused witches who followed—over the course of the week the grand jury heard eight cases and the trial jury five—interested Mather more. No confederate had implicated Susannah Martin, the tart-tongued, seventy-one-year-old Amesbury woman who had scoffed at the idea that the girls were bewitched, suggesting that they practiced black magic themselves. Martin had stood accused once already for witchcraft, however. Evidence suggested that in the course of Bishop’s trial, she had nursed an imp. As in that case, Newton could appeal not only to the bewitched girls but to a procession of afflicted men as well. Constables located a dozen in all. They had no need to resort to fits to express themselves, testifying straightforwardly, persuasively, and without interruption.
Martin too pestered men in their beds. She bit fingers and transformed herself into a black hog. She specialized in animals; the justices heard of drowned oxen, crazed cows, blighted cattle, flying puppies, dogs transformed into kegs, killer cats. Martin made sense of other oddities as well, having had several decades to do so. Over two years, a Salisbury man had been carried about by demons. For six months of that time, they rendered him mute. He now swore that at their hellish meetings, meetings at which he was offered a book to sign in exchange for “all the delectable things, persons, and places that he could imagine,” he had seen Martin. A fifty-three-year-old who many years earlier could not find his way home one Saturday night—although he was but three miles away and walking in bright moonlight—attributed his disorientation to Martin. Just beyond her field he stumbled into a ditch that he knew full well was not there.
Susannah Martin had quibbled over church seating. She drove a hard bargain. She exchanged cross words with her brother-in-law. She scorned those who had testified against her in 1669, as many colorfully recalled. When a Salisbury carpenter allowed in the course of that trial that he believed her to be a witch, Martin had promised “that some she-devil would shortly fetch him away.” The killer cat had pounced the next night, lunging at his throat as he lay in bed. After a Salisbury woman had appeared before the earlier grand jury, Martin startled her while she was out milking the cow. “For thy defaming me at court,” she swore, “I’ll make thee the miserablest creature in the world.” Two months later, out of the blue, the woman began to spew nonsense. Physicians declared her bewitched, as she remained for two decades.*
It is difficult to say which came first: Was Martin, like Bridget Bishop, strident because she had stood trial previously, or had she stood trial previously because she was strident? Witchcraft inscribed a vicious circle, its allegation generating witchlike behavior. There appeared no other response to an accusation than a malediction, which explained at least some of Martin’s unminced words. Singled out earlier, she attracted charges; 1692 was a good time to revive old ones. Once questions arise we sift for answers. And when it comes to blame, none of us draws a blank; only after Bridget Bishop told the miller’s son of the rumors swirling around her did odd things begin to happen to him. We have no record of what Martin said—to her accusers or the magistrates—on June 29, though she remained defiant throughout the proceedings. “Her chief plea,” Cotton Mather noted, based on pages lost to us, “was that she had led a most virtuous and holy life.” That struck him as blasphemous. The jurors agreed, returning a guilty verdict. Months later, the court documents in hand, Mather offered the last word on Susannah Martin, whom he had not met and no longer could: “This woman was one of the most impudent, scurrilous, wicked creatures in the world.”
Two other cases that week turned on natural grudges and preternatural pranks. The evidence against Topsfield’s Elizabeth How featured a full collection of fairy-tale marvels: leaping pigs, poisoned turnips, self-emptying vessels, dissolving fence posts, amnesia-inducing apples. Her case differed from Martin’s in two crucial respects. The ox sacrificed to the turnip belonged to one brother-in-law, the leaping sow to anothe
r. When named in May, Elizabeth How had applied to the first brother-in-law for assistance. Might he accompany her to Salem? Her blind husband could not make the trip; she had no desire to go alone. She too discovered how difficult it was to outrun the cloud of suspicion that, once raised, wafted about the neighborhood. For any other reason he would readily accompany her, the in-law replied. Here he drew the line. He bargained with her: “If you are a witch, tell me how long you have been a witch and what mischief you have done and then I will go with you.” The next day his sow leaped three to four feet in the early-evening air, “turning about, squeaking, falling, and dying.”
In his account of her trial Cotton Mather did not note a significant advantage fifty-five-year-old Elizabeth How had over the previous suspects: No fewer than twelve people testified in her defense, two ministers among them. She had never been anything other than a good Christian, faithful in her promises, just in her dealings, pious in her beliefs. Her husband’s family did not abandon her entirely; her ninety-four-year-old father-in-law described her devotion to his blind son, whom she gently led about by the hand. She tended their farm. She cared for their six children. An Ipswich shoemaker testified that How spoke no ill of her accusers, who she thought harmed themselves more than they did her. All kinds of alarm bells sounded in the How testimony. The Rowley assistant minister took it upon himself to join How on a visit to a ten-year-old girl whom she had allegedly bewitched. The child said nothing of her, in her convulsions or afterward. She managed even to take How’s hand in the minister’s presence. Had she hurt her? “No, never,” replied the child. The minister later sat outdoors with the girl. From an upstairs window her brother called down: “Say Goodwife How is a witch, say she is a witch!”
The Salem jurors heard of enchanted hay and bewitched rope when Sarah Wilds came before them the same day. Her case prominently featured malicious relatives. She had been an easy target, arriving too promptly in a family that still mourned Wilds’s previous wife. Though confined to the home, women were the geographically mobile ones in New England; they were the strangers who came to town. The Topsfield constable had weeks earlier rounded up and delivered the Hobbses to Salem; he was Wilds’s son. “I have had serious thoughts many times since,” twenty-eight-year-old Ephraim Wilds told the court, “whether my seizing of them might not be some cause of her thus accusing my mother.” Retaliation seemed likely; in arresting Hobbs, he “almost saw revenge in her face, she looked so maliciously on me.” At a time when it still seemed possible to walk out of court with a reprieve, How and Wilds no doubt insisted on their innocence. Generally the courtroom rejoinders seem to have fallen somewhere between Joan of Arc’s straight-spined “People have been hung for telling the truth before now,” and Dorothy’s wide-eyed, back-in-Kansas “Doesn’t anybody believe me?” No demonic Sabbaths or diabolical pacts figured among the charges against either woman. Both had defenders. Wilds was a full church member. Flying pigs, bewitched hay, and misbehaving scythes made indelible impressions, however. The jury found both women guilty of witchcraft.
