by Stacy Schiff
A good magistrate, Stoughton had preached in 1668, dared to follow his conscience. It was incumbent on him to remain alert to Satan’s devices, to redirect divine wrath, to preserve unity and eradicate evil. He knew New England to be suffering under divine probation. It had been a season of terrible trials; they had stalled in their mission. He had proved correct about those evil forces in the middle distance. In conjunction with the ministry, the magistrates could prove that—as Stoughton put it twenty-four years earlier—New England had not “abated in our love and zeal, in our wise, tender and faithful management of that great duty of mutual watchfulness and reproof.” On a natural stage, the ocean and woodlands and marshes and the orderly town of Salem spread out beneath them, they had reason to believe that they restored a community to grace, conducting evil to the ground. Speaking for the crowd that clambered up the steep hill, Mather agreed. The five, he would write later, were sorceresses, “impudently demanding of God a vindication of their innocence.” Any trickle of doubt evaporated in the heat of the morning. A haze of free-floating spite alone remained. We have no hint of what the afflicted girls thought.
There was another possible way to make sense of the procession laboring up the scraggy hill, the eyes of all people upon them. It may not have been as conspicuous that stifling Tuesday as it is today. Fifty-three years earlier, a sloppy Massachusetts clerk had drawn Topsfield’s boundary over that of Salem village. As a result, a portion of southwestern Topsfield was, by some reckonings, a portion of northern Salem. A pitched battle ensued, largely on account of the precious resource already in short supply, as Parris so well knew: timber. A New England family consumed thirty to forty cords of wood a year, which translated into over an acre of forest. A long-standing feud divided the Putnams of Salem and the Townes of Topsfield over the issue, inviting regular acts of trespass. On one occasion Topsfield men felled trees as a helpless Putnam farmer looked on; a tribe of ax-wielding Putnams shortly thereafter appeared on the disputed land. The Essex County courts heard again and again from the Putnams. They ruled four times in favor of the Townes. It was the same sturdy brand of family feud that had kept ministers rotating through Salem village, one faction undermining the other’s candidate.
Rebecca Nurse had grown up in Topsfield. Her maiden name—like that of Sarah Cloyce and Mary Esty, both in prison that scorching Tuesday—was Towne. Many of the men who complained against Nurse had years earlier brandished axes on her brother’s land. The Hows and the Estys were intimate; Elizabeth How and Rebecca Nurse were sisters-in-law. Sarah Wilds’s husband had helped establish the contested boundary. In 1660 he allied himself with the Nurse, Towne, and Esty men in a suit over a missing mare, a bright bay with a black mane, later to turn up in the wrong barn. All occupied land claimed by Salem village. Was there a connection? Certainly the spine-tingling procession to the granite ledge cannot have been what the four men who braved a tempest to press the initial witchcraft charges anticipated; one was a Nurse son-in-law. Not a syllable concerning the long-standing dispute turned up in court testimony, although already New England was a place where certain things went unsaid, even in the midst of violent assaults. Half of the witchcraft complaints filed before July had been Thomas Putnam’s, however. His daughter had accused each of the sallow women now blinking in the bright sunlight. Putnam filed his last complaint on July 1. Parris’s niece Abigail also disappears from the scene at this time. Something had clearly been resolved, though that may have been a different matter from the one the judges had in mind. By July other wheels within wheels had taken over.
For a second time a grim procession paused at the edge of the outcropping. In the absence of a path, the condemned presumably walked the scruffy last yards to the summit of the hill, where from the distance they had glimpsed a simple oak gallows. Given their infirmities it cannot have been a speedy affair. As their skirts were bound around their ankles, as hoods were lowered over their eyes, all five women insisted on their innocence. Noyes persisted in a tense contest. He remained hell-bent on confessions, crucial to both the civil and ecclesiastical narratives. Susannah Martin was unlikely to let Noyes’s badgering pass unacknowledged. We know Sarah Good did not. Between the time she arrived on the hill and the moment she blindly climbed the ladder, Noyes reminded Good that she had engaged in great wickedness. She was a witch; it was high time she admitted as much. He underestimated his shabby opponent. Under the gallows from which she was to hang, Sarah Good shot back: “You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard!” Having lost an inheritance, a home, and a child, she added a shrill curse. “And if you take away my life,” she threatened, “God will give you blood to drink.” It was a line familiar to a man who feasted on Revelation.* Never before had Good sounded so magnificently witchlike.
From a few rungs below, the executioner edged each woman’s feet off the ladder. The crowd recoiled from their terrible moans. The witches remained on display long enough to make an impression but not much longer. It was an oppressively hot summer; they were buried quickly, at least initially among the rocks on the hill.† Good’s curse hung longer in the air; Sewall could not get it out of his mind. He was not alone. While the first hanging had resulted in a pause in afflictions and accusations, the second provoked more. In downtown Salem men encountered specters in the street, where they flew past, swift as birds. The next day at the village parsonage not only Parris’s niece but, for the first time, Mrs. Parris too suffered fits. Fortunately Hathorne and Corwin had not relaxed their efforts. They had spent three days interrogating old Ann Foster, who had made the ill-fated flight from Andover. She divulged precise details of the conspiracy, affixing her mark—an uncertain, inverted C—to her epic account. To some it seemed as if God were working in miracles: no sooner had they executed five witches than the Lord sent in a new crew, who confessed to their depravity and revealed their lurid designs.
By week’s end the new parsonage culprit revealed himself. He was eighteen years old, hardy and appealing. He lived in Andover. Hathorne got farther with him than Noyes had with Sarah Good. “Sometimes,” confessed the abashed teenager, “the devil stirred me up to hurt the minister’s wife.” He had rolled up a handkerchief and imagined it to be Mrs. Parris. How had he come to work for the devil? That was his mother’s doing. Not only had she flown to Salem on an unreliable pole with Ann Foster, she had made him a witch. Though in prison, she had visited him recently, as a cat. The devil had promised her she would be queen of hell, a position for which there is no biblical precedent but that, to a hierarchy-minded New England teenager, made perfect sense.
VIII
IN THESE HELLISH MEETINGS
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
—VOLTAIRE
BY THE END of July it was clear that the devil was not up to his usual tricks, preying on the occasional malcontent. Having established himself in Massachusetts, having recruited widely, he had grandiose plans. He intended to topple the church and subvert the country. Certain patterns had begun to emerge as well, some familiar, others strikingly new. To cast aspersions on a bewitched girl, to visit one’s imprisoned spouse too regularly, was to risk accusation. Questioning the validity of witchcraft, the legitimacy of the evidence, or the wisdom of the court bordered on the heretical; the more you resisted, the deeper you dug yourself in. Imputations proved impossible to outrun. The word of two ministers could not save an accused parishioner. Neither age, fortune, gender, nor church membership offered immunity. Prominent men stood accused alongside homeless five-year-old girls. Many braced for the knock at the door.
Accusations tended to begin at rural addresses—notably in pious, well-ordered homes—and radiate to the towns. They did not migrate in the opposite direction. Servants accused mistresses, but mistresses did not accuse servants. When adolescents named peers, they tended to name those of the opposite gender. Wives did not incriminate husbands, although they had earlier, examining them as they slept for telltale marks. Husbands filed no sla
nder suits to vindicate wives. Few slaves stood accused; no Indian stood trial. For all their diabolical behavior, Quakers escaped prosecution. Families divided in their loyalties. Increasingly you slept under the same roof, if not in the same bed, as your accuser.* Old friendships dissolved instantaneously. Others fractured messily. A Salem villager both defended and accused John Procter; his father signed the petition for Rebecca Nurse while complaining of Elizabeth How. The trials seemed to reactivate and ratify doubts quietly stored in the cellar. They often involved trivial matters, although as Mather noted, the trivial matters added up. Contact with the frontier proved hazardous. By 1692 New England prosecuted women for spousal abuse as often as it did men; cruel husbands and disputatious wives wound up accused. Bewitched women choked with fits, where men—who stepped forward only once the trials had begun—tended to submit to paralyzing bedroom visits. (Ann Putnam Sr. alone managed both.) As a group, young men suffered most imaginatively, supplying the most outlandish testimony. No one ever experienced pains without being able to name a witch. And Stoughton did not issue reprieves. Never before, in North America or England, had a court managed a perfect conviction rate.
On May 11, puckish George Jacobs had exhorted his seventeen-year-old granddaughter not to admit to witchcraft. To do so, he warned, was to wind up complicit in her own death. He was wrong. With one exception, no confessor was so much as arraigned. Abigail Hobbs, Tituba, and Margaret Jacobs remained safely in jail along with nine other self-described witches, a break with all precedent. And while in the past the spellbound often found herself under clinical study, she had not before played an interpretive role. Justices and ministers alone unriddled witchcraft. In 1692 so did afflicted girls, with the farsighted, diagnostic powers that since Thomas Putnam’s insinuating April letter were day after day visible to all.
Late in July a Salem man noted that God had lifted a scourge: there had been no case of smallpox in a year. The Lord had however sent down a new plague. Its agent of contagion appears to have been a well-meaning Andover farmer desperate to save the dying wife who in twenty years had borne him ten children. Joseph Ballard first confronted a forty-nine-year-old relative. Had he anything to do with the peculiar “pains and pressures” that had incapacitated Elizabeth since the spring? The in-law dabbled in fortune-telling and black magic but could not help. He knew nothing of the matter. Ballard applied to the authorities, who—reprising an early-sixteenth-century Spanish practice—encouraged him to send a horse and escort for the Salem visionaries. The group almost certainly included Parris’s niece and Mary Walcott. At Elizabeth Ballard’s bedside the girls fell into fits. Directly or indirectly, they named frail Ann Foster, the seventy-two-year-old Andover widow who had crashed in flight.
Shortly thereafter a constable carried Foster to Salem village, a more arduous trip on horseback than by air. A Ballard neighbor on the southern edge of town, Foster was the widow of a much older, kindly Andover farmer. On July 15 she submitted to the first of several interrogations. Beginning just after Stoughton had sentenced five witches to death, she finished two days after their execution. Initially she denied any involvement with sorcery. She soon enough began to unspool a Tituba-worthy tale. The devil had appeared to her as an exotic bird. He promised prosperity, along with the gift of the evil eye. She had not seen him in six months, but her neighbor Martha Carrier had been in touch on his behalf. If anyone remembered even to ask Foster about the ailing Elizabeth Ballard the record bears no trace.
At Carrier’s direction, Foster had bewitched several children and a hog. She worked her sorcery with poppets. Carrier had announced the devil’s Sabbath in May and arranged their trip. They were twenty-five in the meadow where Reverend Burroughs officiated. Three days later, from the Salem jail, Foster added the malfunctioning pole and the crash. She mentioned that two other men had attended the meeting, where she overheard a witch say they were three hundred and five in all. They would destroy the village. Stoughton had scheduled a hanging for the following morning; it was a hectic day for the justices, who ran out of time. John Hale asked if he might remain behind with the suspect. He was curious about a few particulars. By what conveyance, he asked, had Foster flown to Salem? How long had the trip taken? Where precisely was the meeting? It was Hale who heard first about the bread and cheese in Foster’s pocket, details that do not appear in the court papers. He heard too of her anxiety: she shivered at the thought that George Burroughs and Martha Carrier would murder her for having spilled their secrets. Both sat chained nearby. They had appeared spectrally, with a sharp weapon; they intended to stab her to death. (Foster’s son-in-law had slit her daughter’s throat with a knife. And she hailed from a community that—unlike Salem—had suffered Indian attacks.) Confessing to witchcraft could save your life. It also proved taxing.
Both alone with Hale and before the justices, Foster appeared entirely cooperative. Soon enough they discovered that she had failed to come clean with them, however. It seemed that she and Carrier had flown and crashed on that Salem-bound pole with a third rider, who traveled silently behind Foster. So divulged forty-year-old Mary Lacey, a newly arrested Andover suspect, on July 20. Lacey lived on the north end of Andover; a search of her home turned up rag and quill bundles that looked suspiciously like poppets. Foster had also withheld the details of a chilling ceremony. Dipping their heads in water, six at a time, the devil baptized his recruits; henceforth they were his. He performed the sacrament in a nearby river to which he had carried Mary Lacey in his arms. On July 21 Ann Foster appeared before the magistrates for a fourth time, to account for the omissions in her story. It made for a particularly sensational hearing: Mary Lacey, who supplied the missing details, was her daughter.
July 21 was a lecture day, the first after the mass hanging; the weather continued hot and uncommonly dry. The justices spoke as if from a great height, with a condescension veering into derision. “Goody Foster,” one began—it was likely Hathorne—“you remember we have three times spoken with you, and do you now remember what you then confessed to us?” An officer read her statement aloud. She swore to its every word. The justice commended her; she could expect more mercy than the others for having admitted to her part in the “very great wickedness.” But she had hardly been forthright. Why had she not mentioned that her daughter had flown with her? How long had her daughter been a witch? Here she was flustered. “Did not you know your daughter to be a witch?” persisted Hathorne. She did not, and was taken aback to hear as much. Would she recognize her confederates if she saw them? Had there been two companies of witches in the field? She knew only that Carrier had been at the meeting. Mary Warren helpfully chimed in; a specter affirmed that Foster had recruited her own daughter.
The authorities understood that she had done so about thirteen years earlier. Was that correct? “No, and I know no more of my daughter’s being a witch than what day I shall die upon,” replied the Andover widow, sounding as firm on the subject as she had been on the details of the misbegotten Salem flight. Again she was reminded of the value of unburdening herself: “You cannot expect peace of conscience without a free confession,” coaxed a magistrate. If she knew anything more, Foster swore, she would reveal it. At this the magistrates called her youngest daughter. Forty-year-old Mary Lacey had barely entered the meetinghouse when she berated her mother: “We have forsaken Jesus Christ, and the devil hath got hold of us. How shall we get clear of this evil one?” Under her breath, Foster began to pray. “What God do witches pray to?” a justice needled. “I cannot tell, the Lord help me,” replied the befuddled old woman as her daughter delivered up fresh details of their flight to the village green and of the satanic baptism, a staple of Andover witchcraft; the fear of Baptists seemed as ingrained there as that of Indian ambush. Her mother, Mary Lacey clarified, rode first on the stick. She elaborated on the satanic ceremony. Questions fertilizing answers, she supplied the “queen of hell” appellation.
Court officers removed the two older women, to escort their fresh-fac
ed daughter and granddaughter into the room. Ballard had also accused lovely, strong-minded eighteen-year-old Mary Lacey Jr. of having bewitched his wife. Mary Warren fell at once into fits; Mary Lacey Jr. was instructed to touch the arm of the convulsing girl, two years her senior. The Procter maid recovered. At first the Andover teenager was unhelpful. “Where is my mother who made me a witch, and I knew it not?” she cried, a yet more disturbing question than the one posed in June, when a suspect wondered whether she might be a witch and not know it. Asked to smile at Warren without hurting her, Mary Lacey failed; Warren collapsed to the floor. “Do you acknowledge now that you are a witch?” Lacey was asked. She could only agree, although she seemed to be working from a different definition. A recalcitrant child, she had caused her parents plenty of trouble. She had run away from home for two days; she gave her mother regular cause to wish that the devil would carry her off. But she had, she insisted, signed no pact. The justices reminded her of her options: if she desired to be saved by Christ, if she expected mercy, she would confess. “She then proceeded,” noted the court reporter. She was more profligate with the details than her mother or grandmother; it was a hallmark of Salem that the younger generation—Cotton Mather included—could be relied upon for the most luxuriant reports. Mary Lacey Jr. had some practice already with flights of fancy. It appeared easier to describe satanic escapades when an adolescent had already been told, or believed, that she cavorted with the devil. The record allows a fleeting glimpse of her sense of herself. “I have been a disobed—” she began, after which the page is torn. She gave naughty Abigail Hobbs a run for her money.
