by Stacy Schiff
If the occult, religion, folklore, and medicine tended to overspill their bounds, they did so as profligately in wealthy households as anywhere. A December 1692 statute would deem locating hidden treasure a kind of witchcraft; the Massachusetts governor owed his career to that very pursuit. Phips had consulted a London fortune-teller who predicted a glorious future, a prediction not altogether different from the assurances Cotton Mather received from a glimmering, winged angel in his study. Several Salem judges owned volumes of astrology. Many dabbled in alchemy. All read almanacs. Wait Still Winthrop’s library was particularly rich in mystical literature, in tables of astrological houses and treatises on magic. He shared the ministerial addiction to portents and prodigies.
The message could moreover be mixed. Increase Mather railed against various countercharms while acknowledging that they worked. Samuel Sewall consulted a minister as to whether the timing was propitious for an addition to his home. The supernatural hovered always nearby, in and out of religious dress. On his sickbed, at age twelve, the future Marblehead minister had spoken with an ethereal figure who supplied three magical pills. They cured him; he thereafter assumed his visitor to have been an angel. When another young woman who had communed with an angel began to terrorize those around her with divine edicts, Mather declared the spirit a devil for the sake of neighborhood peace. The Massachusetts ministers conjured with the question still in 1694, when they settled on it for their September meeting: How to differentiate a diabolical from an angelic visitation? Witchcraft and divine providence could easily be confused, as could a scowl and the evil eye, a prophecy and an educated guess, sin and diabolical collusion.
When it came to writing up the trials, when it came to hawking his beloved Swedish blueprint for Salem, Cotton Mather gave the folkloric a free pass. He knew the hidden world was there somewhere; he would relinquish no tool to exhibit it. He performed scientific calculations with the Bible to determine the date of the end of the world. In 1705 he applied Mosaic history to a mastodon tooth unearthed in New York. The angelic visitations in the study and demonic ones in the parlor spoke to the same anxieties and served similar ends. Sarah Good seemed to put curses on her neighbors. Cotton Mather so wished an odious son-in-law ill that he prayed for his death for three days on end. The entreaties worked; Mather took full credit for having dispatched the wicked young man, previously in the pink of health. His demise was “a wondrous thing.”
AS SALEM PREPARED to execute five additional witches, four of them men, one a minister, misgivings made their way to the authorities from likely and unlikely addresses. Seventy-six-year-old Robert Pike had missed Phips’s May swearing-in because he was busy taking testimony against Amesbury widow Susannah Martin. He lost part of his summer to the case against the Salisbury minister’s mother-in-law, Mary Bradbury, who—transforming herself into a blue boar—scrabbled under a horse’s hooves, upsetting the rider. A popular Massachusetts council member, Pike was a longtime militia captain and Salisbury’s most eminent citizen. The previous spring he had traveled to Maine with Stoughton and Gedney to negotiate an Indian truce. He was acquainted with Burroughs, having quarreled with him years earlier. Pike’s son had been a Harvard classmate of Parris’s; he was married to Joshua Moody’s daughter. And his daughter had married a Putnam, which put him in a delicate position as far as the blue boar was concerned. Mary Bradbury’s accusers were family, as, briefly, she had been as well; a fellow selectman, her husband was among Pike’s closest friends. Pike was a devout man of wide reading and firm, fearless convictions. Decades earlier he had challenged a ruling on religious freedom. Found guilty of defaming the court, he was banned from public office.*
As mid-August crowds began to converge on Salem, Pike may have been the first public official to register qualms about the proceedings. In a long letter to Justice Corwin, he reviewed the logic of the case. He believed in witches, though observed that they were rare in the Old Testament. (As others had pointed out, most were also men.) Not for a minute did he doubt the devil’s powers. The Old Deluder had made off with the Lord himself, torturing him with “temptations of horrid blasphemy.” Surely any good man could suffer the same fate? For that matter, faulty character should not prove grounds for conviction. There were, Pike pointed out, plenty of “innocent persons that are not saints.” He had particular trouble with ghosts; people simply did not return from their graves. And how could a man be simultaneously at Salem and Cambridge? Pike hinted that some fraud might be afoot. Personally he did not believe so. He agreed that their case was exceptional.
Which brought him to the oracular girls. Pike had not seen them in action but had heard plenty, as had everyone in Massachusetts. Here he stuttered a little. Whatever they were doing was either divine or diabolical. But for the record, communing with those who had been publicly and plainly buried happened to be unlawful. Leviticus warned specifically against consulting mediums or spirits. Why was it less likely that God racked and tormented the girls than that Satan did, “especially when some things that they tell are false and mistaken”? Pike wondered who might be abetting whom. The devil could work his art without human help; the opposite was not true. The visionary girls could know what they did only from the father of lies. How could they bear valid witness? The same went for the confessors, whom he was the first to skewer. Then there was that other logical pothole: it made no sense whatever that the accused should practice witchcraft in court while pleading innocent. “Self-interest,” noted Pike, “teaches every one better.” Whatever his perversities, the devil had no incentive to purge the world of witches. Pike worried that superstition played too great a role in the matter. He did not subscribe to witch marks. Hardly the first to do so, he wished Scripture were more clear. To his mind, it was better to allow a guilty man to live than execute an innocent, for two reasons: The heavens managed these matters better than did men. And a guilty person could be prosecuted later, on better evidence, while an innocent “cannot be brought again to life when once dead.”*
If Pike received a response, it has not survived. Cotton Mather wrangled with a similar query on August 17, over a quiet week, as anticipation of a hanging registered as a pause in the proceedings.† One of Boston’s wealthiest merchants, council member John Foster, appealed to Mather. Did he still believe a horrid witchcraft was afoot? Mather feared he did. Ten weeks had elapsed since he had set out his freewheeling thoughts for Justice Richards. Six witches had been executed in the interim. Five more were scheduled to hang in forty-eight hours. Again Mather warned against spectral evidence. Nevertheless, he saw that some use could be made of it. Its effects, he conceded, could well serve to “strengthen other presumptions.” All Protestant writers agreed that the devil abused innocents. As if heading off a jinx, Mather twice mentioned that he should not be surprised were his specter to begin to molest his neighbors. Again he stressed that neither the touch test nor the evil eye should offer grounds for conviction. Again he opted for lesser punishments. Why not set bail, at least for those imprisoned solely on spectral charges? (That category did not include a malefactor against whom God had “strangely sent in other, and more human, and most convincing testimonies.” The allusion was clear: the court had not sentenced Burroughs on invisible evidence alone.) He would be happier if reprieves were offered, if those under suspicion were simply deported. Again he could not write a letter on the subject without recourse to the word “nevertheless.” With reason, he apologized for the “incoherency of my thoughts.” They had grown no more lucid since May.
Mather steered clear of the illogic that so troubled Pike. He added a new refrain, however, harping on the virtues of the magistrates, “so eminent for their justice, wisdom, and goodness,” discerning men for whom no one had “a greater veneration” than he. Whatever their personal beliefs, they would not, he assured Foster, proceed on a contested principle. A master of inconsistency, the devil might act the same way nineteen times, only to reverse course the twentieth. “It is our singular happiness,” Mather
assured Foster, “that we are blessed with judges who are aware of this danger.” He hoped Foster would strengthen their hands. He broadly hinted that the court might include a minister or two. In an English case a generation earlier, a clergyman had seen to it that an outbreak of witchcraft was extinguished. (No fewer than eighteen, including a vicar, had been executed in that outbreak.) “Our case is extraordinary,” he too concluded.
The following day another Harvard-trained minister heard of a different set of misgivings. Seventeen-year-old Margaret Jacobs had been shackled in the foul Salem prison since early May, when Parris’s niece had accused her. Margaret may have been on hand when her grandfather had guffawed that Hathorne and Corwin could burn him or hang him, he was as likely a buzzard as a wizard. Arrested the same day, she had quickly confessed at Beadle’s Tavern. She was a witch. She had signed the devil’s book. (Held next door, Jacobs was appalled to learn as much. He had urged her not to make herself an accessory to her own death, an outburst that further incriminated him.) The following day Margaret accused a Salem woman. She became a regular at that week’s hearings; she watched an iridescent Burroughs bite the Procters’ maid. She had been in manacles ever since. Her father and uncle had fled. Her half-crazed mother was in chains, awaiting trial.
On August 18 she could bear it no longer. Her grandfather was scheduled to hang the next morning, along with Burroughs and John Willard, whom she had helped to convict. There was a problem with her confession, the teenager announced on the eve of their execution; it was “altogether false and untrue.” At her hearing, the afflicted girls had crumpled at the sight of her, startling Margaret. The justices had offered her a choice. “They told me, if I would not confess, I should be put down into the dungeon and would be hanged, but if I would confess I should have my life,” she explained. She had opted for her life. She had since suffered “in such horror of conscience that I could not sleep for fear the devil should carry me away for telling such horrid lies.”
Miserable, she requested permission to speak with Burroughs, whom she would have known as a child. She begged her former minister’s forgiveness. Burroughs prayed “with and for her,” in chains, as ever resolute in his faith. Margaret was a conscientious, emotional girl with a lively mind. She shared her grandfather’s facility with language. She was also one of the “false witnesses” whom Burroughs blamed for his conviction. It is unclear when the news that she had recanted escaped the prison; she was one of only two suspects to do so. (The fortune-telling Wardwell would be the other.) It did Margaret little good; the magistrates would not believe her. For her reversal, they consigned her to the stifling dungeon. Fortunately she discovered that she preferred “death with a quiet conscience” to a load of crippling guilt. From the dungeon she wrote her father. She had seen her mother, who remained insane but sent her love. She knew her family was effectively ruined. She was wretched, not knowing how soon she would hang. She assured her father that she anticipated “a joyful and happy meeting in heaven.” She remained his dutiful daughter.
Others remembered the evening of August 18 differently. While in the dungeon Burroughs comforted the sobbing teenager who had helped convict him, he managed to preside over a witches’ meeting in central Andover, where he administered the sacrament. Removing his hat, he took solemn leave of his recruits. He urged them to continue steadfast; they should admit nothing. He does not appear to have explained why he elected not to torture the confessors who had betrayed him. An old farmer warmly expressed his hope that he would see Burroughs again. The spectral minister demurred. He did not think that likely.
Early the next morning officials led George Burroughs, John Willard, John Procter, and George Jacobs through the Salem prison yard and into a cart. Martha Carrier—Ann Foster’s flying guide, the queen of hell, and the intemperate mother of five children, all but one of whom were now incarcerated—joined them, convicted for having served alongside Burroughs, whom she had no reason ever to have met before their trials. Though sentenced to die on the same day as her husband, Elizabeth Procter did not. Stoughton had granted a stay of execution in light of her pregnancy. The largest throng to date turned out to inspect the first men Massachusetts was to execute for witchcraft. Two Boxford constables carrying a suspect to her village examination crossed paths with the procession as it wound its way up the rocky slope; they dropped the accused witch at a house at the foot of the hill so as not to miss the affecting spectacle. As Parris had noted in a 1689 sermon: “To see a man taking his last steps, and going to the place of execution (though worthily) moves everyone whose heart is not harder than adamant.” Unlike the pirates and murderers whose hangings had attracted crowds and whose execution sermons thousands had flocked to hear, all five insisted as the cart creaked up the hill that they were falsely accused. They hoped the real witches would soon be revealed; they “declared their wish that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed upon that account.” Willard and Procter struck one onlooker as especially dignified. So “sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances” did they remain that they provoked tears all around. They forgave their accusers, the justices, the jury. They did not snarl that suffering children would continue to suffer after their death, as had Glover in 1688. They prayed they would be pardoned for their actual sins.
They did so before an especially distinguished crowd. As Increase Mather had made a courtroom appearance to observe the Burroughs conviction, so Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for his execution. The presence of Mather—tall, clear-eyed, handsome, an imposing figure at any time—spoke to the significance of the occasion. At least some of the condemned appealed to him, in heartrending terms. Would he prepare them spiritually for the journey ahead? It is unclear if Mather did so or if he held to the same hard line as Noyes, who did not pray with witches. Some hearts remained adamantine.
By a corollary to the logic that determined that he should be tried last, forty-two-year-old Burroughs was executed first. He mounted the ladder with composure, pausing midway to offer what many expected to be a long-delayed confession. Again the dark little man—a wisp of his former self after fourteen weeks in the dungeon—proved a contrarian. Perched above a crowd that included his former in-laws and parishioners, a noose around his neck, he burst into an impassioned speech. He had a full command of Scripture; he had had time to prepare. He outdid himself. Burroughs knew how to deliver a sermon, gravely and fervently, his voice rising for emphasis and sinking for effect, producing an awe “like that would be produced on the fall of thunderbolts.” Those he cast down that Friday earned, noted an eyewitness, “the admiration of all present.” He spoke genuinely, heart-meltingly, the hangman a few steps below him on the ladder. With his last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some heart-stoppingly familiar lines. “Our Father, who art in Heaven,” he began, continuing, from the ladder, with a blunder-free recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, an impossible feat for a wizard, one any number of other suspects had not managed. Burroughs left his audience flustered. For a few moments it seemed—tears welling in the eyes even of prominent men—as if the crowd would obstruct the execution.
That feat on the part of a bona fide wizard called for an explanation, one his accusers speedily furnished. The devil stood beside Burroughs, dictating to him. Who else could preach so eloquently? Minutes later the minister dangled from a semi-finished beam. The life had not gone from his body when Mather stepped in to smother the sparks of discontent. He spoke firmly, always with much deliberation. From his horse, the lanky, light-haired twenty-nine-year-old reminded the spectators that Burroughs had never been ordained. (That was also true of Bayley and Lawson, at least one of whom was on the hill that day, but made the dying minister seem unorthodox.) What better disguise might the devil choose on such an occasion than to masquerade as “an angel of light”? It was a time-honored tactic. In the encyclopedia of backhanded compliments, that one qualified among the greatest; to the last,
George Burroughs was to be condemned for his gifts. His sentence had been a just one, Mather assured the crowd. The protests quieted, as did the minister who dangled in midair. He may have heard a portion of Mather’s remarks. Willard and Procter climbed the ladder next, followed by Martha Carrier and glib George Jacobs, Margaret’s grandfather.
When cut down, the bodies were apparently dragged by their nooses to a common grave, about two feet deep, between the rocks. According to the sole surviving account, Burroughs’s shirt and pants were removed and his corpse fitted with a shabbier set; one did not waste a fine pair of pants. The man who eleven years earlier, in the presence of Ann Putnam’s father, had agreed to settle among the villagers and “live and die in the works of the ministry among them” was then buried carelessly, with Willard and Carrier, “one of his hands and his chin, and a foot of one [of] them being left uncovered.”
THE EXECUTION OF a beguiling, articulate, Scripture-spouting minister who protested his innocence to the end created nearly as much disquiet as the idea that a beguiling, articulate, Scripture-spouting minister had actively recruited for the devil. The material facts—as even Procter and Willard acknowledged en route to their deaths—were not in dispute. Only the question of liability was. Did John Higginson, who had seen nearly everything there was to see in his fifty-three years in the Salem ministry, who had resisted offering Andros the answer the royal governor sought, and who had reprimanded the Salem villagers in 1687 for their “uncharitable expressions and uncomely reflections,” their “settled prejudice and resolved animosity,” truly believe his jailed daughter to be a witch? Evidently so. While she acknowledged that she had helped to convict innocents, even Margaret Jacobs thought witches flew about Salem. The August executions sent Cotton Mather to his desk, scrambling to make sense of the story. Samuel Sewall had been elsewhere that Friday, but in his diary entry for August 19, he almost unconsciously allowed his former schoolmate the last word. “Mr. Mather,” Sewall wrote of the executed five, “says they all died by a righteous sentence.” He continued, in a less comfortable vein: “Mr. Burroughs, by his speech, prayer, protestation of his innocence, did much move unthinking persons.” Sewall permitted himself no note of sympathy for a colleague he and his family had entertained at their table over the years, who was never to see the refurbished Sewall kitchen. Nor did he allow a hint of doubt to creep into his lines.
