The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Six days after the Burroughs execution, Hathorne and Corwin examined an eighteen-year-old Andover girl, a niece of Elizabeth How’s. She denied any knowledge of witchcraft until, learning that her older sister had accused her, she admitted she had met the devil the previous winter. She submitted to a satanic baptism, flew on a pole, and attended a meeting of two hundred witches. (The older sister confirmed that figure but warned that five hundred witches infested Massachusetts.) The eighteen-year-old incriminated two additional sisters in the process. She also fielded several questions not posed before Burroughs had been hanged: Did she know of any innocents in jail? (She did, but only one.) And was it possible, the magistrates asked, suddenly rounding an unfamiliar corner, that the bewitched girls were themselves witches? “No,” the teenager assured them. “They were honest persons that helped to bring out the witches.” Either flustered by Pike’s queries or for their own reasons, the Salem justices cast about for reassurance.

  It arrived in floods of confessions. As the summer wore on they grew quicker, the poles more crowded. More witches were named in August than in July. Yet more identified themselves in September, in uniform accounts that continued prominently to feature Reverend Burroughs. Forty-six-year-old William Barker and forty-nine-year-old Samuel Wardwell, the Andover fortune-teller, confessed within days of each other. Both were financially strapped Andover farmers. Wardwell made no mention of the diabolical Sabbath, only of the afflictions he had caused. He had signed a decades-long pact with the devil. It would expire when he was sixty. Barker was a newer recruit. He supplied one of the largest estimates of the diabolical crew—in his version, it was more than half as large as Salem village—and the most compelling story line. He too fielded the court’s unsettling new questions, to which he provided new answers. Did he know of any jailed innocents? He did not. What did he make of the girls? They performed an invaluable service. He warned the court against misinterpretation. Furious at having been discovered, the witches connived to make the bewitched appear guilty.

  As Stoughton prepared to empanel jurors for the next court session, Barker delivered up additional riches. Little notoriety rivals courtroom notoriety; a rapturous moment in the spotlight was another diabolical lure. And Barker considered himself on a mission. Begging forgiveness of the honorable magistrates and all God’s people, he pledged “to set to my heart and hand to do what in me lyeth to destroy such wicked worship.” He offered a rationale for the choice of the Salem meadow for the infernal assembly, an explanation that gratified the authorities, Parris in particular: the devil aimed to destroy the villagers because they bickered among themselves and with their ministers. (In fairness, were those the criteria, Satan would have had his choice of New England congregations.) He confirmed what the court had warned the villagers seventeen years earlier: in their incessant squabbling, they had given Satan a leg up.* Barker revealed the devil’s plan, one that demanded urgent attention all around: the archfiend intended to see to it that “there should be no day of resurrection or judgment and neither punishment nor shame for sin.” He promised that “all persons should be equal,” an equally heretical notion in 1692.

  Andover meanwhile could not seem to get enough of the Salem soothsayers. They sent for the village girls on multiple occasions, stationing them in sickrooms, at the head and the feet of the ailing. Probably early in September, the junior Andover minister, Thomas Barnard, convened them for another purpose. Without explanation, he assembled seven local women in the meetinghouse. They included a thirteen-year-old girl and her mother, as well as Dane’s forty-one-year-old daughter. Barnard led the group in prayer, then blindfolded them. As the Salem girls twitched and tumbled, Barnard instructed the Andover women to lay their hands upon the visitors. Each calmed immediately. The seven were arrested and carried off, trembling. “We were all exceedingly astonished, and consternated and affrighted even out of our reason,” they reported. Their examiners hectored them, “telling us that we were witches, and they knew it, and we knew it.”

  As the confessions piled up, the accusations did too, which meant new arrests and more intricate accounts. The first time she confessed, fifty-one-year-old Rebecca Eames had not been baptized by the devil; had been in his employ for seven years; was reluctant to agree her son was a wizard; did not name names. After twelve days in prison, she had practiced witchcraft for twenty-six years and been baptized. She revealed her son had been a wizard half as long. She named names. Five Andover sisters confessed. It had been a long time since anyone dared ask if the justices were all out of their wits or chuckled that he was as likely to be a buzzard as a wizard; Martin and Jacobs had both hanged. Just as everyone had known a victim of King Philip’s War, everyone now knew an accused witch. In the free-for-all men accused women, girls their elders, children their mothers. Eleven members of one family stood accused, nine by relatives. The newly accused ranged in age from seven to eighty; nearly half were teenagers. Husbands continued to prove ready to believe the worst of their wives. Elizer Keyser, whose fireplace Burroughs had enchanted, accused another man, a Manchester cordwainer.

  From the outset there were holes in the record. As Stephen Sewall explained, it was simply impossible to get everything down on paper. Several scribes were minimalists to begin; any number of accusations went unrecorded. After a point in the summer, denials barely materialized on the page. The toll of the trials registered across the judicial system, which—its magistrates tied up in daily witchcraft hearings—deferred all less pressing business. Exhaustion made itself felt from the highest levels on down; it was “difficult and troublesome work,” the attorney general himself pointed out, the more so because he enjoyed no settled salary. The wealth of detail was too much for anyone. Even Hale, writing later, grew “weary with relating particulars.”

  For the jail keeps and for tavern keepers like the Ingersolls, the trials were good business. For everyone else, they introduced a season of hardships. Local constables worked overtime as they rode great distances to deliver warrants, escort suspects to and from hearings, track down escapees, and arrange jail transfers. The strain—at once brain-teasingly epistemological and entirely mundane—manifested in different ways. The Andover justice of the peace who had worried that he was unfit for the service he had entered upon signed his last arrest warrant toward mid-September. He had issued nearly forty summonses. Whether doubt or fatigue cramped his hand is unclear; he simply refused to sign another. The result was predictable, similar to what had happened after (the late) John Procter scoffed that the girls should be returned to their spinning and (the late) John Willard hesitated to round up suspects: the official and his wife were accused of witchcraft. His brother was named as well, along with his nonspectral dog accomplice, on which he was seen riding about. Both families—the men descended from Governor Bradstreet and poet Anne Bradstreet and could claim any number of minister relatives—fled north. The dog was put to death, one of Andover’s two canine victims. The other sent the girls into frenzies each time it looked at them. It was shot.

  All around hay went unhayed, corn unharvested, fences unrepaired, crops untended. Orchards were neglected and woodpiles depleted. Meanwhile a breeze began to lift off the water; the nights grew brisk. The most labor-intensive weeks of the year lay ahead. Fall was cider-making season, the time to dry and salt and pickle winter stores, to pick turnips and apples, husk corn and gut carcasses. It was difficult to do so among divided families, between prison visits—Mary Esty’s husband rode to see her twice every week for five months—short-handed, after long days in court, or while tending to bewitched, or bewitching, relatives. (It was yet more difficult to do so in custody. As Stoughton’s closest political associate complained in the wake of the Andros coup, how was he to run his farm, on which his family depended, from prison?) Many found themselves near ruin, having sold off livestock at bargain prices to support jailed relatives. It is almost impossible not to feel sorry for the deputy sheriff who at the end of the year pleaded not only exhaustion but penu
ry. Since March he had done nothing but serve warrants, apprehend suspects, attend arraignments and trials, and convey witches from prison to prison. Those activities had “taken up my whole time and made me incapable to get anything for the maintenance of my poor family.” He was now impoverished. (It did not help that Massachusetts believed paying public servants to be optional.) The sheriff begged Phips and Stoughton for assistance “this hard winter that I and my poor children may not be destitute of sustenance and so inevitably perish.” He was depleted from serving his king and country, the more so as—having been bred a gentleman—he was “not much used to work.” The Middlesex county sheriff and the Cambridge jail keep had paid for horses and men on the road and wood for the prison, for guards to accompany carts and for the constables who raised a hue and cry to pursue suspects, all from their own funds. They had devoted countless hours to those in their custody, for whom they bought provisions. They received no reimbursement. John Higginson Jr., the minister’s son serving as clerk, found himself in debt solely given the expense of his public appearances.

  It is more difficult to sympathize with Justice Corwin’s twenty-five-year-old nephew, the Essex County sheriff. George Corwin wore himself out dismantling the households of the accused. He would have been within his rights emptying them after convictions; he did not always wait so long. Even as she begged Reverend Burroughs’s forgiveness, Margaret Jacobs knew that Corwin had ransacked her grandfather’s riverside estate. He and his men stripped the household bare, confiscating cattle, hay, barrels of apples and bushels of corn, a horse, five pigs, the beds and blankets, two brass kettles, a quantity of pewter, the chickens, and the chairs. They removed even the gold wedding ring from the finger of Margaret’s mother. She managed to reclaim it but was left with no choice but to buy provisions from Corwin. While the Englishes safely escaped, their gabled mansion did not. Corwin unblushingly looted the property, afterward leaving it open to plunder. Furniture, household goods, and family portraits disappeared, a haul worth some fifteen hundred pounds. Only a single servant’s bed remained. (Here Corwin was surely overeager. The Englishes had not been convicted, having fled before they could be tried.) After a sixty-one-year-old woman hanged in September, a deputy rode to her central Andover home. He seized the family’s cattle, corn, and hay, and advised her sons to speak with Sheriff Herrick to avoid the sale of what remained of their possessions. In that conversation, Herrick—the born gentleman—kindly offered “an opportunity to redeem” the property, suggesting the sum of ten pounds. He settled for six, so long as the bribe materialized within the month.

  The seizures introduced another complication. What to do with the orphaned children? Many were left to shift for themselves, the Procters’ without a scrap of food or a pot in which to cook. Soon after Burroughs’s arrest, his third wife “laid hands on all she could secure,” including her husband’s library. She then sold the family’s goods and loaned out money, at interest. With her daughter she headed south, deserting her seven stepchildren, of whom the eldest was sixteen. “We were left, a parcel of small children of us, helpless,” they petitioned later. They retained not even a token by which to remember their father. Late in September, the Andover selectmen turned for guidance to the Ipswich court. Both the fortune-telling Wardwell and his wife were in prison.* What to do with the couple’s seven children? They were in “a suffering condition,” one the town could not alleviate. The court ordered that most or all of them be placed with “good and honest families.” The youngest had just turned five. The eldest wound up with his uncle, John Ballard, whose brother had accused Wardwell and conducted him to jail.

  Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney devoted the greatest number of hours to witchcraft. They conducted hearings every week and sat on the court through September. Parris made the five-mile trip to town countless times a week, devoting what has been estimated to be fifty days between late March and early September to witchcraft. He neglected duties at home to do so; family prayer must have fallen regularly to overtaxed, overwrought Elizabeth Parris. At night he returned to a disordered household, resounding still with Abigail’s shrieks. He would not write in his sermon notebook for months. (Nor did he bleat about his salary, which went unpaid.) He accompanied his niece to court, testifying against ten suspects. He felt it his duty to assist in the mission at hand, a mission in which no one proved as tireless as Chief Justice Stoughton. Laboring to clear the land of witches once and for all, Stoughton convened the Court of Oyer and Terminer for a third session, to begin at noon on Tuesday, September 6.

  The court that week indicted nineteen witches, the greatest number to date. It did so on more meager evidence and at an accelerated pace; Stoughton had a crisis to contain. He also met with several complications. While her own niece testified against her, Mary Esty confounded the court, which had already once found it difficult to reconcile the gentle fifty-eight-year-old with witchcraft charges. In September even the Ipswich prison keepers defended the mother of seven, a model prisoner, unfailingly civil and sober. In nearly the same words—there were campaigns on all sides—the Boston jailers weighed in as well. Esty submitted a petition to the bench. She had been removed from her vast Topsfield farm in April, arrested and rearrested. Her eldest sister had been hanged in July. She and her sister Sarah Cloyce had but three requests. The court allowed them neither counsel nor the privilege of pleading their case under oath. Would the judges advocate for them? Second, might they call witnesses on their behalf? Topsfield’s minister stood ready to swear to their innocence. Echoing Robert Pike, they asked if they might be tried by some other evidence than—the wording is notable—“the testimony of witches, or such as are afflicted, as is supposed, by witches.” The women requested “a fair and equal hearing of what may be said for us, as well as against us.” With each demand they subtly censured the court; English law guaranteed those rights. Stoughton sentenced both sisters to hang.

  He met with another headache as the grand jury heard the attorney general’s case against Giles Corey. At least seven Salem girls attested to the village farmer’s supernatural gifts. (“I verily believe in my heart that Giles Corey is a dreadful wizard,” swore Mercy Lewis. “I verily believe that Giles Corey is a dreadful wizard,” swore Ann Putnam Jr. “I verily think he is a wizard,” swore Elizabeth Hubbard.) He had turned up spectrally in their beds, in the meetinghouse (where he claimed a prime seat; witches attended a surprising number of sermons), at Bishop’s hanging. When called before the grand jury on September 9, Corey stepped forward, raising his hand. The charges read, he pleaded not guilty. The court then inquired: “Culprit, how will you be tried?” Only with the words “By God and my country” could the trial proceed. Corey had uttered those five words in front of sentencing magistrates before; that September Friday he withheld them, stalling his case. Corey proved no more amenable to the attorney general’s demands than he had to those of his wife when in March she had attempted to unsaddle his horse. (The court had convicted Martha the previous day.)

  Fortunately for Stoughton, a few men remained ready to rally the troops and circle the wagons. On September 2 Cotton Mather wrote to the chief justice. The world knew well of his “zeal to assist” in Stoughton’s weighty, worthy task. Already Mather had done more behind the scenes than Stoughton could possibly know. (The claim rather upended the muddled, equivocal letters to Foster and Richards.) He had been fasting almost weekly through the summer for an end to the sulfurous assault. He felt the ministers ought to support the court on its extraordinary mission; none had yet done so. He volunteered to step into the breach. He had begun to write up a little something, partially “to set our calamity in as true a light as I can.” He promised to dispel any doubts about endangered innocents, a passage he underlined. He hoped to “flatten the fury, which we now so much turn upon one another.” Mather promised to submit every syllable of his narrative to Stoughton so that “there may not be one word out of point.” (He knew full well that he could publish nothing without permission, but had in
mind an official history.) He would recount the Swedish epidemic, stressing those aspects that most resembled Salem’s, an exercise analogous to reconstituting a person from his shadow. Might Stoughton and his colleagues sign off on his little labor, which would remind the people of their duties in such a crisis? As he knew how many momentous matters weighed on the chief justice, he troubled him with only a partial manuscript. He could skip its first thirty-four pages. In a singular valediction, Mather wished Stoughton “success in your noble encounters with hell.” Unlike Mary Esty, Mather got the answer he wanted. Stoughton began his fulsome reply on the verso. The best account we have of 1692 comes down to us then—shaped by the swelling public outcry in August—as a propaganda piece.

  Parris knew firsthand of the furies of which Mather spoke. As Stoughton pressed ahead, the village minister sounded very much like a man who understood that the destruction of the church was to begin at his home. He chose Revelation 17:14 as his September 11 text. Surveying the battle at hand, he cribbed shrilly and liberally from Cotton Mather. The war in which they engaged had long been prophesied. It pitted “the devil and his confederates” against Christ and his followers. They were the chosen; they would prevail. Besieged by doubters as much as by devils, Parris tamped down dissent; those who opposed the court were no better than those “mutinous and murmuring Israelites” who rebelled against Moses, wondering if it might be better to return to Egypt than die in the wilderness. To resist the magistrates was to side with the devil. A call to unity as much as piety, Parris’s was a fiery address and doubtless a rousing one. In its wake Parris asked for a vote to excommunicate Martha Corey, who in March had derided Parris’s niece and her coevals as “poor, distracted children.” The vote carried but was not unanimous.