The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Early in September Cotton Mather had requested the court transcripts from Stephen Sewall. The Salem clerk agreed to provide them but did not deliver. It is difficult to read anything into his hesitation. The court sat almost continuously through mid-September; Sewall’s wife was pregnant with their fourth child. He fielded all kinds of requests and queries, including those from Parris, regularly in town, and the Nurses, repeatedly on his doorstep. He had enough paperwork to manage without transcribing additional copies of trial documents. Impatiently, cloyingly, Mather attempted again to wink the pages out of him days before the September 22 hanging. So that he might prove “the more capable to assist in lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy,” he begged Sewall to make good on his promise. He needed accounts of only six or—were Sewall feeling indulgent—a dozen of the principal cases. The additional effort would pale in light of its benefits.* Mather reminded him that he was going out on a limb for the sake of their friends. He did not need to point out that one of those friends was Sewall’s elder brother.

  Recasting a favor as a command, Mather dictated his terms. The court recorder should submit the pages to him in narrative form. At the very least, he should elaborate on what he had so often related; would Sewall repeat what he had said about the confessors’ credibility, about the dumbfounded jurors and their interpretation of spectral evidence? Mather did not sound like a man who had repeatedly inveighed against it. He wanted the most convincing morsels; he would take Sewall’s account and run with it. Witchcraft was after all more difficult to disbelieve now that eleven witches had hanged. (He had an additional reason to jump promptly into the fray: Both Hale and Noyes contemplated books of their own. Whatever they were witnessing, the Salem participants recognized it to be historic.) In a postscript Mather pulled out the heavy artillery: He worked at the command of their governor. He hinted at dire political repercussions.

  Sewall had little opportunity to delay further; he and his family traveled the following day to Boston. He may have delivered a clutch of documents then, although he was never to furnish the eyewitness account. That Thursday found Stephen Sewall at his brother’s richly appointed mansion—the decor was all oak and mahogany—with Stoughton, Hathorne, John Higginson Jr., and Cotton Mather. On September 22, as Salem hanged eight witches, the men wrangled with criticisms of the court. All continued fully satisfied with their work, including even Higginson, whose sister was jailed and who had signed a warrant for the arrest of a new Gloucester suspect days earlier. It was imperative that the justices, rather than Mary Esty or Giles Corey, remain the heroes; they were in the business of exterminating witches, not creating martyrs. It was a lecture day; they joined in prayer. If they were looking for a nod of divine approval, it arrived that evening in the form of a torrential, much-needed downpour.

  Although on his May arrival Governor Phips had found his constituents miserably plagued by “a most horrible witchcraft or possession of devils,” he had left the infestation entirely to Stoughton, preferring visible enemies, or at least those he could properly bludgeon. He could afford to ignore it no longer. On September 29 he returned to “agitated controversy.” It impeded all other business. Those inclined to malign the new charter and administration exploited the trials to discredit Phips, coaxing the “strange ferment of dissatisfaction” into an open contest. Even if he had expected politically to sidestep the issue, he could not personally escape it; by fall he found himself related to an afflicted child and an accused witch. In his absence, his wife too had been named.* Phips grappled with the future of the court, scheduled to reconvene in October.

  The justices labored, Mather had noted, “under heart-breaking solicitudes, how they might therein best serve God and man,” another way of saying that they were downright confused. A squeak of dissent soon escaped the court; several justices shared their concerns with the governor. They feared they had been overly severe. Were they to sit again, they allowed, “they would proceed differently.” (We do not know the names of the dissenters. They were most likely the newlywed Richards, or both Richards and Boston merchant Peter Sergeant. Richards—whose mother had fended off a witchcraft accusation years earlier—had already applied for direction. Sergeant was protected by a large fortune and free from the web of business associations that bound the rest of the court. Sewall deferred to Stoughton; Winthrop did not take stands. The three Salem justices remained steadfast.) Eminent churchmen posed good and pointed questions. Other esteemed citizens stood accused, even while a prominent Bostonian carried his ailing child the twenty miles to Salem, suddenly the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by the village girls. He incurred the wrath of Increase Mather. Was there “not a God in Boston,” exploded Harvard’s president, the most illustrious of New England ministers, “that he should go to the Devil in Salem for advice?” Things were wholly out of hand when a Boston divine was up against an adolescent oracle.

  Again a golden age of witchcraft coincided with a golden age of witchcraft literature; both Mathers toiled away at books. Increase Mather finished first. On Monday, October 3, the association of ministers assembled in the bright Harvard library, just above the hall where most of them had years earlier attended chapel and lectures. They had expected to tackle a question of propriety: Might a clergyman administer communion to a neighboring congregation that found itself without a minister? More urgent matters had intervened. As moderator, Cotton Mather read aloud late that morning from his father’s newly completed Cases of Conscience, pages that had grown out of the association’s August discussion. The essay constituted a nod to a 1646 English work that Increase Mather recommended to witchcraft jurors. He enlarged upon and urgently reiterated his May argument, dismantling spectral evidence. For a third time he insisted that although the devil could impersonate innocents, his ruse rarely succeeded.* Courts seldom convicted wrongfully, “so that perhaps there never was an instance of any innocent person condemned in any court of justice on earth” through sheer satanic delusion, a sentence contorted in its syntax—it included another court-clearing, twelve-ton “nevertheless”—if not its logic. Nor did the devil ordinarily arrange for persons to fly for miles through the air. Indeed he had done so in Sweden. But the visible and invisible worlds tended not to intermingle so freely.

  Increase Mather set out to countenance a court; he dealt largely with forensics. While spectral sight existed, it was by no means certain that the Salem girls enjoyed it. Nor was it even clear that they were bewitched. He suspected possession.† (Except in his son’s pages, the two words would be conjoined from this point on.) Possession easily accounted for the convulsions, the elastic limbs, the prophetic statements, the lunges into fireplaces, and the girls’ blooming health. In his estimation, the evil eye was “an old fable.” If witches emitted a physical venom from their eyes, all within their range of vision would be affected. (Alden had made the same point in vain.) As for the touch test: “Sometimes the power of imagination is such as that the touch of a person innocent and not accused shall have the same effect.” He rejected those “magical experiments” as he did the witch cake, a “great folly.” (Mary Sibley could have had no idea how an idle afternoon’s experiment would be immortalized.) Familiar with every detail of the proceedings, Mather knew even of the diabolical dog, shot for having afflicted a bewitched girl. “This dog was no devil,” he explained, “for then they could not have killed him.” He mentioned no other Massachusetts fatality in the body of his text. Nor did he mention that the court had disregarded every shred of the minister’s June advice.

  What constituted sufficient proof of witchcraft? A “free and voluntary confession” remained the gold standard. That said, some innocent blood had been shed in Sweden several years after their great epidemic, when a youngster accused her mother of having flown her to nocturnal meetings. The woman burned. The daughter afterward came before the court “crying and howling.” She had accused her mother falsely, to settle a score. Evidence of spell-casting or secret-divining was dispositive,
as were feats of unusual strength. (Both Mathers went out of their way to squelch doubts about Burroughs, who raised a special flurry of them.) When credible men and women in full possession of their faculties attested to these things, the evidence was sound; fifty-three-year-old Mather had no patience for mewling teenage girls. If one did not accept testimony from “a distracted person or of a possessed person in a case of murder, theft, felony of any sort, then neither may we do it in the case of witchcraft.”* He cast a vote for clemency: “I would rather,” he wrote that fall, “judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch.”

  Eight ministers endorsed Mather’s October 3 statement. By the time the pages went to press, six more had joined them, including some whose parishioners had been executed and others whose parishioners awaited trial. On the morning that Cotton Mather read his father’s cogent essay aloud, the Salem justices heard testimony against a thirty-four-year-old Lynn witch. Oversize cats galloped ferociously across a roof. A grown man had for three nights been too terrified to sleep in his own home. “A black thing of a considerable bigness” brushed past a woman as she dressed. The justices summoned a writhing Mary Warren. A touch of the suspect’s hand calmed her. With two glances the woman struck Mary to the floor. Warren went home, the Lynn witch to jail. The wind had shifted but gusted still in two countervailing directions at once. Around this time, Phips or someone in his confidence dispatched a series of questions to a group of New York clergymen, applying for a crash course in witchcraft. At least some believed the Massachusetts ministers out of their depth.

  For the first time, seven suspects went home on bail the following day. All were under the age of eighteen. The youngest were Carrier’s seven-year-old daughter and Reverend Dane’s eight-year-old grand-daughter. Among the eldest was Mary Lacey Jr., Ann Foster’s headstrong, voluble eighteen-year-old granddaughter. Not everyone felt reassured by those releases; three suspects escaped from the Boston prison that week. William Barker, the Andover farmer who revealed the diabolical plan to make all men equal, seized the moment, as did a couple who had spent over nine months in custody. Sheriff Corwin promptly turned up to confiscate what was left of their Salem village estate. He had already once paid a call, rounding up cattle with which to settle their prison bill. Twelve children remained on the farm; on October 7 an elder son managed to hold off Corwin with a ten-pound bribe. It was the last attempted forfeiture. Wrote a Boston merchant that week to a friend in New York: “We here hope that the greatest heat and fury has stopped.”

  THROUGH OCTOBER, ONLY the silence had proved as eerie as the caterwauling girls. Even men who had boldly deposed English governors and landed in prison for civil disobedience went mute. Skeptics kept to themselves. Former deputy governor Thomas Danforth had conducted the April hearing at which Parris’s niece first mentioned the assembly of witches in her backyard, at which the girls thrust hands into mouths rather than identify Elizabeth Procter, at which Mrs. Pope had levitated and Abigail’s hand was singed. Since that time Charlestown’s largest landowner had had his doubts. He seems to have remained quiet, allowing only in mid-October that he did not believe the court could continue without the support of the people and the clergy. Its practices were dangerously divisive. Michael Wigglesworth, the renowned sixty-one-year-old clergyman, author of the much-read The Day of Doom, endorsed Cases of Conscience on October 3 but voiced no opinion on the trials until much later. The cost was high, the confidence in intelligent, able-bodied Stoughton higher still. All too often dissenters wound up named or fined. Fifty-two-year-old Samuel Willard, Increase Mather’s only equal among ministers, had sounded notes of caution all along. He assisted the Englishes in their escape; he participated in the private fast for John Alden. In exchange, he met with “unkindness, abuse, and reproach”—and with a witchcraft accusation.

  When finally the tide turned, it did so abruptly. Those who had flinched silently exhaled loudly. Fingers were pointed; tempers flared. Husbands berated themselves for having bullied wives into confessions. As soon as it was safe to do so, all began to speak at once, rarely with Increase Mather’s circle-squaring, institution-sparing delicacy. When accused, a distinguished Bostonian filed a thousand-pound defamation suit. Cotton Mather observed that as the witchcraft intensified it was as if they fell under a spell, “enchanted into a raging, railing, scandalous and unreasonable disposition.” As that spell lifted, they were more than ever “like mad men running against one another.”

  The shift came about less for any single reason than for twenty of them. Terror had worn out its welcome; the system and men’s spirits were exhausted. The court had moved too aggressively and too expansively. It was a tricky business; the government was after all an Increase Mather creation. When the justices applied for advice, they reached out to him. No one had a greater investment in the Phips administration. Nor had the colony any more accomplished civil servant than the masterful, Mather-appointed Stoughton. He seemed now to stand with the more orthodox rural ministers, Reverends Parris, Noyes, Barnard, and Hale, who rejected all doubts about spectral evidence. The lack of modulation surprised some; how could “any man, much less a man of such abilities, learning and experience as Mr. Stoughton,” subscribe to such a belief? a London correspondent, following events at a distance, would inquire in January. It was destitute of all reason and counter to the facts of history. Anyone who asked the kind of probing question Justice Richards had in May was unlikely to look on equably as a minister hanged; Burroughs’s speech on the gallows rattled more even than had Corey’s stubborn silence. The monolith shuddered a little.

  Few could have felt so wholly torn as Samuel Sewall, who heartily endorsed the motto that “agreement makes kingdoms flourish,” who skittered away from the controversial or confrontational. Early in October, his brother Stephen fell ill with a serious and prolonged fever. It is impossible not to wonder about causation; there may have been some soul-searching all around. The illness did not abate. Late in the month the Salem court clerk pledged to serve the Lord better if his life were spared. In and around Boston, his older brother spent October talking and reading about witchcraft, a subject on which everyone had an opinion. Some of the commentary was solicited. Much was not. Quakers predicted that witches would continue to prey on Massachusetts until the colony repented for having hanged their co-religionists.

  On a damp Friday morning at the end of the first week of October, Sewall and Samuel Willard rode north to call on a trusted colleague. Sewall regularly appealed to Wenham minister Samuel Torrey for career advice, about legal matters, even about a trip to England. Widowed a month earlier, Torrey was lonely; in his kitchen, the three men discussed the crisis decimating the colony. The Wenham minister believed there had been irregularities. Those could be corrected, he felt, after which the court should resume its vital work. Heartened, Sewall left under a wintry drizzle. Strong winds moved in by morning. A hard frost fell the following night. Snow followed behind as Sewall settled in for some difficult reading. He may have had a preview of the pages Willard had composed to preface Mather’s Cases; he already knew the opinion of his minister. It was not what a judge who had sent eleven to their deaths cared to hear.

  As early as April, Willard had lectured on a celebrated instance of Satan abusing an innocent; the serpent in the Garden of Eden had been a mere instrument in his hands. The creature could not be blamed for actions “besides its nature, and beyond its apprehension.” (As Willard exonerated the snake in Boston, Hathorne in Salem ensnared Bridget Bishop with his timeless logic—how could she claim she was not a witch when she did not know what a witch was?) Willard did not doubt the diabolical mischief. When detected, witches were to be exterminated. But the God who had declared as much (Exodus 22:18) also mandated two witnesses to a capital crime (Deuteronomy 17:6). Given the severity of the punishment, more rather than less proof was in order; Willard made an impassioned case for innocent until proven guilty. Nor was prosecution always desirable. Nowhere did God decree that eve
ry capital case be pursued. To do so was to “subvert this government” and “reduce a world into chaos”—a Puritan nightmare. In his preface to Mather’s pages can be heard the roiling October objections to the crisis: “overhasty suspecting” “too resolute conclusions,” “too precipitant judging,” “bold usurpations,” the dangers of “being misinformed.”

  Sewall had only admiration for his minister. He preached with uncommon genius; he delivered even a substandard sermon with aplomb. A man of discretion and equanimity, he did not pause in the pulpit when a parishioner fainted dead away. He came running when you had a teenager in despair; Sewall would appeal to him for assistance with his fifteen-year-old’s heart-stabbing crisis of faith. Among Massachusetts ministers, only Cotton Mather would exceed Willard’s literary output. When it came to experience with “evil angels” and “hellish designs,” no one in New England could rival that of Boston’s Third Church minister. As a young clergyman in remote Groton—fifty miles west of Salem village and yet more isolated, also in a snowy season—Willard had found himself contending with some earlier oddities. In 1671, his sixteen-year-old servant had begun to roar and shriek, erupt in “immoderate and extravagant laughter,” engage in “foolish and apish gestures,” and leap about the house. She fell wailing to the ground. She found herself alternately strangled and senseless. She endured forty-eight-hour-long fits of such intensity that six men could not restrain her. Elizabeth Knapp too saw enchanted creatures in the fireplace.