The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  That Wednesday Parris visited Martha Corey in prison, accompanied by Nathaniel Putnam and the church deacons, two of them uncles of afflicted girls. Corey greeted her callers coolly, without the eagerness with which she had received them six months earlier, when she had looked forward to enlightening magistrates and ministers. She was no less forthright; Parris—who had transcribed the record of her husband’s hearing—found her “very obdurate, justifying herself and condemning all that had done anything to her just discovery and condemnation.” He suggested they pray. The self-described gospel woman had no interest; her callers did so largely for themselves. Afterward Parris pronounced “the dreadful sentence of excommunication” against his embittered parishioner, cutting her off from all church privileges and expectations and delivering her soul to Satan, perhaps a redundant exercise. The visit was brief.

  ON SEPTEMBER 1, three days after William Barker exposed Satan’s depraved scheme to make all men equal, witchcraft judge John Richards married in Boston. A little rough around the edges, Richards was a relative newcomer to Massachusetts, if a vastly successful one. He took as his bride Ann Winthrop, Wait Still Winthrop’s sister. Stoughton performed the ceremony, which Samuel Sewall attended. Two other justices likely joined them; the shipbuilder Bartholomew Gedney was a Winthrop relative by marriage. The bride’s sister was Mrs. Jonathan Corwin.* That no fewer than four witchcraft judges found themselves related by marriage and together on a Thursday afternoon was not unusual. Narrow to begin, the Massachusetts power base was yet more attenuated at the top. Just as the same men served as deacons and selectmen, the colony’s largest taxpayers, its most storied names, dominated civic, legal, and religious affairs. Drawn from a tiny cohort, they made for a self-perpetuating elite precisely because of unions like the Richards-Winthrop one. The marriage was Richards’s second. His first wife had also been a Winthrop, an aunt of his new bride.*

  Ministerial circles overlapped and intersected in the same ways. The wife of Salem court clerk Stephen Sewall, the woman who cared for Betty Parris, was the daughter of an influential, conservative Cambridge minister, a longtime friend of the Mathers. Reverends Noyes and Hale were related by marriage, as were Hale and Gloucester’s John Emerson, as were Samuel Parris and the Milton minister. As a group, the clergy—like the court—was somewhere between close-knit and inbred, a fraternity as much as a family.† They shared beds when they gathered for meetings. They laid relatives to rest in one another’s tombs. Nicholas Noyes felt so close to the family of senior Salem minister John Higginson that he plunged directly into their personal affairs with but the barest-boned of apologies.

  As Chief Justice Stoughton had taken nearly every political side over the previous tumultuous decade, it could not be said that the members of the court always saw eye to eye politically. Politics and business—and the politics of defending their commercial interests—joined the justices, however. Nearly every one had sizable interests in the frontier. They had suffered the greatest financial losses in 1689 and 1690, when Indians destroyed their mills. Stoughton and Sewall had traveled to New York together to enlist support for a joint attack on Montreal; Hathorne and Corwin had traveled to Maine and New Hampshire to review frontier defenses. In 1681 Stoughton was chosen to sail again to London to attempt to negotiate a new charter, an errand that fell to Richards—Stoughton had heard enough about New England insolence—when he refused.

  Samuel Sewall socialized regularly with most of the other justices. Stoughton and Winthrop figured among his closest friends; he was more intimate yet with Noyes. The frantically busy Sheriff Corwin—on October 7 attempting another confiscation—was the nephew of Justice Winthrop and the son-in-law of Justice Gedney. The same pattern prevailed all over New England, where a tight weave bound a small number of families. The witchcraft judges—and the ministers to whom they appealed, whose salaries they largely paid—observed fasts and debated the meaning of Revelation together, prayed, dined, swam, and sailed together. They baptized, taught, and mourned one another’s children (Willard would baptize and bury seven of Samuel Sewall’s); courted one another’s widows; settled one another’s estates. They would bear one another’s coffins.

  Together they had conspired against and toppled a government. Cotton Mather had written the declaration justifying the revolt against Andros, read to a vast crowd from the council chamber gallery. Surrounded by several future witchcraft judges, Stoughton had censured the deposed governor inside the town house. In London Increase Mather had lobbied hard for the new charter; he would defend himself for having betrayed his compatriots in agreeing to it for some time. Lieutenant Governor Stoughton—who also happened to be the chief justice and the senior Massachusetts statesman—had every reason to prove that they had returned the colony to a stable footing. Having agitated for the coup, having advertised cabals well in advance of a coven, those men needed to demonstrate that New England could regulate its own affairs. It could repel invaders. For a bunch of nonconformists, they took well to lockstep; it was some time before a hint of disaffection escaped the court. They had every inclination to fall in line and every political incentive to do so. Increase Mather’s 1691 boast that “there is not a government in the world that has been laid under greater obligations by a particular man than the government here has been by me” had as much to do with what happened in Salem as any flying monkeys or chimney jellyfish. Writing in October, a critic of the court prefaced his remarks with a disclaimer: he would prefer to chew off his own fingers than “willingly cast dirt on authority, or anyway offer reproach to it.” A member of Willard’s congregation, he was a Sewall intimate. He would soon be related to Winthrop by marriage.

  Through the parched summer, the story belonged purely to those who accused and confessed. Their accounts hung together. As of mid-September, the court repeatedly hit snags. Around midmonth, Reverend Hale’s wife was named; the mother of three young children, she was seven months pregnant. Hale had raised some unpleasant questions, as he did at the Burroughs trial. (The charge introduced another awkwardness as well; Mrs. Hale was Reverend Noyes’s first cousin.) It was about now that Andover justice of the peace Dudley Bradstreet, finding no reason to detain another witch, rested his pen. Nor had Stoughton heard the last from Mary Esty, who submitted a second petition. This time she addressed herself to the bench and beyond it, to Governor Phips. Scheduled to hang in a week, she was reconciled to her fate. “I petition to your Honors not for my own life,” she wrote, “for I know I must die.” The court was doing its best to eradicate witchcraft. But it proceeded wrongly. She ventured a few thoughts. Might the justices carefully depose the afflicted girls—and separate them for an interval? She recommended they try a confessed witch. Several had perjured themselves.

  It remained to be seen what to do with old Giles Corey, with whom the court made no progress. Late in July, in the Ipswich prison, “very weak in body but in perfect memory,” he had written his will, leaving his hundred-acre farm to two of his sons-in-law. John Procter, the neighbor with whom Corey alternately tussled in court and drank conciliatory toasts, had been hanged. Excommunicated Martha was to hang in a matter of days. Her husband had no intention of confessing, less of gratifying the justices, before whom he appeared several times, refusing on each occasion to deliver up the essential phrase. Obstinate to begin, he was all the more so having made the tour of New England prisons. He knew that anyone who set foot in Stoughton’s courtroom was doomed. The girls would prattle on about his turtle familiars and his see-through knives all over again.

  Entirely the man who boasted that he had never had recourse to the term “frightened” in his life, Corey declined to utter the obligatory five words. Failure to do so, Stoughton warned him, would result in the dreadful, medieval sentence of peine forte et dure, or “painful and severe punishment.” Stones and lead would be piled atop him; the procedure was to be repeated until the suspect relented or died. It was a punishment invoked but never before used in New England. When last it had been threate
ned the 1638 defendant—a woman accused of having murdered her three-year-old—opted for the gallows.

  Probably on September 17 guards led Corey either to the enclosed Salem prison yard or across the street to a field. He removed his shoes and stripped to near nakedness before stretching out spread-eagled on the cool ground. Officials covered him with a plank, on which they piled rocks; Dounton, the overemployed jail keep, presumably assisted. The authorities worked directly from established legal code. It called for the defendant to be pressed under “as great a weight as he could bear, and more.” Corey was to “have no sustenance, save only, on the first day, three morsels of the worst bread, and, on the second day, three draughts of standing water, that should be nearest to the prison door.” In its earliest hours the torture could yield results. After a certain point it was too late. Spectators clustered around, among them a friend of Corey’s, a prosperous, truculent Nantucket sea captain. Salem-born, he had served as a selectman. He understood the situation as well as the odds; a brother-in-law counted among the fugitives. He attempted to reason with Corey.

  While Giles Corey no doubt had a great deal to say between labored breaths, the sacrosanct phrase did not figure among his pronouncements. He repented but would not reconsider his obstinacy. For a second time that week the church excommunicated a Corey; the sentence appears to have been delivered in the midst of the torture. As he could not be declared guilty of witchcraft, he was excommunicated as a suicide. In the last moments of his multiple-day ordeal, his tongue protruded from his mouth; evidently Sheriff Corwin “with his cane, forced it in again.” The old man expired soon after, at about noon on September 19. Corwin ventured out immediately to claim his estate, a curious irony as forty-three years earlier Giles Corey had made his first court appearance for having stolen wheat, tobacco, bacon, and a host of other goods from the sheriff’s family. A son-in-law managed to hold off Corwin by agreeing to a ruinous fine.

  As George Burroughs won the distinction of being the sole Harvard graduate to hang for witchcraft, Giles Corey would prove the only individual pressed to death in America. We have no record of how Martha—who could not have guessed where a quarrel over a saddle was to lead—received the news or if, in prison, the condemned woman heard her husband’s groans. Others shrank from the abominable ordeal as they had shuddered at the execution of a minister. The extent of the revulsion can be read in a letter dispatched the following day to Justice Sewall. As Corey gasped under boulders, witches again assaulted Ann Putnam Jr. They threatened to press her to death that Sabbath evening, even before Corey expired. She finally had some respite when—reported her father—a ghost materialized. It delivered a convoluted tale that Putnam felt compelled to share with Justice Sewall. The ghost was that of the man Corey had allegedly murdered years earlier. He reported that while the devil had promised Corey that he would not hang, God decreed he would suffer a painful and appropriate death. Ann’s ghostly conversation, Putnam marveled, was unusual for two reasons. He himself had known Corey’s victim. The report was true! Yet it had all happened before his daughter was born. The twelve-year-old seemed to be in charge of the past as well as the future.

  Why had no one mentioned this earlier? wondered Putnam. “Now, Sir, this is not a little strange to us; that nobody should remember these things, all the while that Giles Corey was in prison, and so often before the court.” The earlier jury had found him guilty of murder, “but as if some enchantment had hindered the prosecution of the matter, the Court proceeded not against Giles Corey.” (Putnam explained that magic: the verdict had cost Corey a hefty sum.) Sewall read the letter just after Corey’s death and in precisely the spirit in which it was intended. The righteous had prevailed. The Sabbath-evening apparition reassured; again, the pieces fit together with a satisfying click, though Sewall only half grasped them. From the letter, he took the ghost to be Corey’s. And Sewall understandably inferred that Corey had “stamped and pressed a man to death.” (Putnam had written that he had murdered his victim “by pressing him to death with his feet.”) What the jury had heard in 1676 was that Corey had delivered nearly a hundred blows with a stick. It had also found him not guilty.

  Martha Corey was to be a widow for only two days. Under colorless skies on the morning of September 22 she made the plodding trip across Salem to what would be known much later as Gallows Hill. It was a lecture day, probably chosen as such. Mary Esty rode with her, as did Samuel Wardwell and five others. Although scheduled to join them, Dorcas Hoar did not. Shorn of her elf-lock, Hoar was still very much alive. She preferred to remain so; days earlier, she had confessed to “the heinous crime of witchcraft.” Noyes and Hale intervened on her behalf, appealing to Phips or Stoughton—they were unclear as to whether the governor or his deputy was in charge—for a stay of execution. Hale could not explain why Hoar had signed the devil’s book but was sensitive to her confession. Given her distress, might she have a month, pleaded the ministers, “to perfect her repentance” and “prepare for death and eternity”? She posed no further danger. They dangled some bait, adding that Hoar was divulging names of her confederates. The stay was granted. Sewall noted that this was the first time a condemned witch confessed. It would also be the only time.

  Others displayed more concern for their souls than their lives in the days leading up to the September execution. Fortune-telling Samuel Wardwell too experienced a change of heart. He had no interest in hearing further reports that he had attended a June sermon, muscling his way into the middle of the men’s pews, when he had been roasting in prison that day. He was not a witch. How could the court convict him solely on spectral evidence? He recanted, only to discover that it was not as easy to renounce a diabolical baptism as a proper one. By the logic of the day, Dorcas Hoar—declaring herself guilty—remained in prison, while Wardwell—maintaining his innocence—rode to the gallows.* He discouraged those who might have considered following in his footsteps; Wardwell would be the sole confessor to hang. He may have guessed as much but preferred, like Margaret Jacobs, not to live with a mutilated conscience. Corwin’s men swooped in to seize Wardwell’s livestock, carpenter’s tools, eight loads of hay, and six acres of corn, which they presumably picked themselves. A little prematurely, Corwin showed up at the Hoar address as well. He rode off with the curtains and bed.

  As the ox-drawn cart trundled up the path that parched, dull Thursday, a wheel stuck. It was some time in being liberated. The girls narrated: the devil hindered its progress. (The truth may have been more prosaic. Wheeled vehicles tended to be useless outside town on rough, rutted paths. This one was overloaded.) Asserting her innocence to the end, Martha Corey, the Salem gospel woman, ended her life with an ardent prayer, delivered from the ladder. As Wardwell addressed the crowd, a cloud of smoke from the executioner’s pipe drifted into his face. He began to choke; the devil interrupted him, sneered his accusers, who could not have liked what the freewheeling Wardwell had to say. He was innocent. No court could prove otherwise. The extended Nurse family sobbed as Mary Esty climbed the ladder, bidding husband, children, and friends farewell. She spoke in the selfless, sober tones of her petition. Nearly all present found themselves in tears as the executioner fixed a hood over Esty’s head and nudged her from the rung.

  Nicholas Noyes remained dry-eyed. Turning to the bodies dangling from the primitive structure, he scoffed: “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there!” None left a trace in Mather’s history, on which he was already well advanced; they died a little out of time. They denied any part of witchcraft, as had, over four sessions, every one of the twenty-seven suspects who had come before the court, each of whom it sentenced to death. All were convicted for having tortured the Salem village girls, of whom some had never heard, and upon whom most had never before set eyes. Many in the Bay Colony kept careful count. With less exactitude but much relish, Puritan enemies marveled at the Massachusetts frenzy. They were eagerly “hanging one another” for precisely the crime, noted two Quaker merchants
who visited Salem that fall, of which they liked to accuse their supposedly devil-worshipping sect. Indeed they were “hotly and madly, mauling one another in the dark,” as Cotton Mather wailed. Witch-hunting seemed to encourage you to act like the very creatures—Catholics, Frenchmen, wizards—you abhorred.

  X

  PUBLISHED TO PREVENT FALSE REPORTS

  For prophecy is history antedated; and history is postdated prophecy: the same thing is told in both.

  —NICHOLAS NOYES, 1698

  ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY soiled, underfed witch suspects were that fall in custody. Some were pregnant. Several had fallen dangerously ill; others had nursed now-dead suspects. Living atop one another in squalid hives of rumor, they made for unruly company. Nearly half had confessed. Reverend Dane’s daughter-in-law and William Barker’s sister-in-law described frantic, exhausting accusations, impossible for “timorous women to withstand.” They had agreed to all that was imputed to them, “our understandings, our reason, our faculties almost gone.” Bewildered and ashamed, they had little idea what to expect. Should confessed and accused witches anticipate the same fate? Some had insisted as fiercely on their innocence as others had testified to diabolical pacts. The satanic recruits hissed and spat at the holdouts. They knew perfectly well they were witches too! The confessors meanwhile reinforced one another’s accounts. But where through the summer their uniformity had corroborated a diabolical plot, by late September it began to strain credibility. The scope of the crisis disconcerted as well. Was it truly possible, John Hale would wonder, his disquiet growing, “that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the devil’s lap at once?” The court met with mounting resistance. They needed an authoritative version of the invasion, one that would validate their hard work, underscore the present danger, and ease all doubts. Fortunately, they already had their volunteer.