The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  In the record book over these months Parris’s hand grows steadily more crabbed and cramped. The strain on him was great; the pressure to settle immense. On the afternoon of November 18, 1694, he returned to the meetinghouse to read aloud a statement several colleagues had vetted, the first public avowal that mistakes had been made in 1692, a paper he termed his “Meditations for Peace.” (It included nine points, in contrast to his seventeen grievances.) Parris considered it a “very sore rebuke and humbling providence” that the witchcraft had broken out in his household. His family included both accusers and accused; he confessed that “God has been righteously spitting in my face.” He denounced the superstitious practices to which others had resorted in his absence. Acknowledging that he had erred in his “management of those mysteries,” he conceded that he had been wrong about spectral evidence; the devil could well afflict “in the shape of not only innocent but pious persons.” The girls who saw Rebecca Nurse torturing them spoke accurately. So did Rebecca Nurse when she disclaimed responsibility. Here a rustle must have gone through the room; Nurse was both dead and excommunicated. He should not have relied on the girls as diagnosticians. He regretted any inadvisable remarks he had made from the pulpit as well as any mistakes he had committed in recording testimony, a job for which he had not volunteered. He extended his sympathy to all who had suffered. Humbly he beseeched the Lord’s pardon for “all of my mistakes and trespasses in so weighty a matter.” He did the same of his congregants. Might they put “all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil-speaking” behind them, to move forward in love?

  Parris expressed his desire that the congregation “heartily, sincerely, and thoroughly” forgive one another, which is different from extending an apology. He added too the deal-breaking disclaimer that undercuts all such demands: he begged forgiveness for offenses his parishioners believed he had committed rather than for those he believed he had. As a peace offering however the statement was substantial. Visibly moved, Nurse’s son-in-law allowed that if their minister had acknowledged half as much earlier, a great deal of unpleasantness might have been averted. A public meeting was called for November 26. The dissenters took seats together, joined by a few outsiders. Pressed to share their reasons for withdrawing from the church, the men produced their paper, again refusing to allow it into the minister’s hands. They had no intention of retailing the charges against him until they stood before the proper authorities. Parris prevailed.

  On November 26, 1694, more than two years after the witchcraft court had fallen, Parris read a scathing condemnation of his ministry from the pulpit, Francis Nurse following along with the original on his lap to make sure that his reverend omitted nothing. Parris had fostered a climate of accusation. The girls made prayer impossible; the aggrieved families preferred to attend meeting where they might actually hear the sermon. Given the reckless allegations, they had feared for their lives. They refused to accept communion from the hand of a man so at odds with accepted doctrine, one who expressed no charity and who pursued unfounded methods with the “bewitched or possessed persons.” (They made Parris seem like a bit of a madman, out of step with the rest of the clergy. They nowhere accused him of having manufactured a crisis, however.) He had testified against the accused. His court accounts were faulty, his doctrine unsound, his self-justifications offensive. When he had finished, Parris asked—needlessly—if the issues were solely with him. They were. Did the parishioners withdraw from communion on account of anyone else? inquired a deacon. They did not. Amid frantic whispering and scurrying, Parris launched for a second time into his “Meditations for Peace.” Were they satisfied with his remarks? After an agitated conference, Tarbell replied that they would need to reflect a little. Four nights later they called at the parsonage, to insist on a church council. They found Parris’s apology mincing.

  Parris was not alone in being called upon to justify himself that fall. In November 1694 William Phips sailed for London to answer to charges of misconduct. They ranged from embezzlement to assault; in thirty months as governor, he had failed to satisfy a single Boston faction. Stoughton threw him a farewell dinner, one the guest of honor boycotted. Parris’s travails continued well after. In April 1695 an arbitration council that included Willard, both Mathers, and the ministers from Parris’s former Boston congregation assembled in the village. They found fault on all sides. Parris had taken any number of “unwarrantable and uncomfortable steps” in the “late and dark time of the confusions.” He needed to extend some compassion to the Nurse families. Unless the congregation wished to continue to devour one another—it was the 1687 advice of the Salem elders turned witchcraft judges all over again—they needed to accept his apology. Should reconciliation prove impossible, Parris must go.

  A month later a different group of ministers made themselves more explicit. It was time Parris move on. (He was at least making out better than Phips, who died shortly after arriving in London. Stoughton—who did a wizardly job compiling the charges against him—stepped in as acting governor, in which office he served almost without interruption until his death.) Having performed Mary Walcott’s April wedding ceremony, Parris preached his last Salem sermon on June 28, 1696. Weeks later, forty-eight-year-old Elizabeth Parris died. The third minister to lose a wife in the parsonage, her husband buried her in the village, where her stone remains.* Most of the community remained behind Parris, who refused to leave Salem without his salary. They had lost three pastors already; losing a fourth would only exacerbate matters. They petitioned for him to remain. Suit and countersuit followed. In July 1697 the matter went to three arbitrators, including two former witchcraft judges. To them the Nurse family complained that Parris led his congregants into “dangerous errors, and preached such scandalous immoralities” that he ought be dismissed from his profession. He had stifled some accusations while encouraging others. He had sworn to falsehoods. Both sides reached to hyperbole; as his critics saw it, Parris had “been the beginner and procurer of the sorest afflictions, not to this village only, but to this whole country, that did ever befall them.” The arbitrators ruled against him. Parris returned to Stow, the remote hamlet where he had preached earlier. Immediately embroiled in a salary dispute, he lasted a year.

  ON AUGUST 12, 1696, Samuel Sewall, burly, flushed-faced, his gray hair thinning, was stung by a sharply worded comment. Out of the blue, an Amsterdam-born friend remarked that he would not think twice about it were a man to claim he had hoisted Boston’s Beacon Hill on his back, carted it off, then returned it to its rightful place. The gullibility of witchcraft judges and the claims of “foolish people” who believed in diabolical pacts had long astonished him. He was a Boston constable; his implication was clear and pointed. The inexplicably athletic George Burroughs had hanged almost exactly four years earlier. The comment set in motion a process that Parris’s slow fade may have delayed. However grudgingly it had been extracted and at whatever cost to his congregation, Parris’s apology still qualified as the sole public admission of wrongdoing. A dark cloud of shame hung about.

  Sewall was not alone in shuddering at the unfinished business. On Sunday, September 16, 1696, Stoughton, the council, and the Massachusetts assembly met for a day of prayer in the Boston town house. Five ministers officiated. When his turn came, Reverend Willard castigated the authorities. Innocents had perished. Why had no official order been promulgated to entreat God’s pardon? The cumulative, collective sin weighed all the more heavily in a dispirited season, when God frowned on New England in crop failures, in swarms of flies, in epidemic illness, in Indian ambushes, in failed expeditions against the French. Mather’s prediction that the millennium would begin in 1697 began to feel misplaced. That winter proved the most brutal in New England memory. Thick ice paralyzed Boston Harbor. With trade at a standstill, grain prices rose to unprecedented heights. Food was scarce. The momentum to address 1692 grew, urged along by the occasional scold.

  In mid-November Samuel Sewall rode north for a disconcerting tri
al. Even before Thomas Maule had built Salem town’s small Quaker meetinghouse, he had taken it upon himself to inform Reverend Higginson that he preached lies. The shrewd merchant seemed to have been sent to New England expressly to irritate its authorities; in a society that afforded little room to flex a nonconformist muscle, he exercised every one. It had been Maule who preferred to beat his servant rather than sell her, Maule who had chastised Hale when the minister prayed for Bridget Bishop at the gallows. She had killed one of Maule’s children!* In 1695 Maule published a book, printed in New York, lambasting Massachusetts for its Quaker persecutions. With delight, he noted that the volume created “a great hurly-burly of confusion.” Stoughton ordered his home searched for the offending publication; Sheriff Corwin saw to the task, removing thirty copies and arresting its author, transported to the Salem jail, a less crowded address than it had been earlier. The books burned.†

  By the time the case came to trial in November, Maule was on the stand for both his blasphemous publication and his obstreperous, insulting behavior at his preliminary hearing. Sewall joined two other justices for a headache of an afternoon. It did not help that Maule—the kind of man who showed up for a hearing with a Bible under his arm and who breezily referred to the “High Court of Injustice”—hastened to equate Quaker persecutions with witch-hunting. The authorities were as odious as they had made Burroughs out to be. They had fought witchcraft with witchcraft. He mocked the village girls, with their absurd visionary powers. How could anyone imagine them to be “the true martyrs of Jesus Christ”? In November Maule went further, ridiculing the magistrates. Five times imprisoned and twice whipped, he was fearless. Did the court truly dare to sit in judgment of him, decrying his wickedness, when it had executed innocents? Those sanctimonious souls preferred their children to wind up “rogues and whores” rather than Quakers. And presto! Here was Reverend Higginson’s daughter transformed into a witch.

  The king’s case presented, Maule addressed the jury. The court, he reminded them, had brought the wrath of God down upon the province. How could they prosecute him for his “notorious wicked lies” when they had murdered innocents and never repented? They had squandered all credibility; he did not need to point out that they had done so in that very room. It was no easier to speak or publish freely in 1696 than it had been earlier. But it was more difficult to be convicted. Maule had a rather novel defense as well, one that could work only that dismal winter. Indeed his name appeared on the offending volume. But the jurors would need to confer with the New York printer. How else to prove that the words “Thomas Maule” on the title page corresponded to the man who stood before them any more than a man did to his specter?

  Maule cautioned the jury: They should deliberate with care. They did not want to incur the same load of guilt under which other Essex County jurors now squirmed. Any ruling was theirs alone, the judges but their clerks, a biting allusion to the reversed Nurse verdict. To the shock of the bench, the twelve men found Maule not guilty. How was that possible, exploded a Sewall colleague; Maule’s odious book sat before them! Patiently the jurors explained that they found the evidence insufficient. The printer had set Maule’s name to the page. Mere mortals could not corroborate what those words represented. The justice sputtered that Maule might have escaped the judgment of man but would not escape that of God, to which the defendant, aglow with triumph, had a retort: the jury delivered him from unrighteous men who worked unrighteous deeds.

  In December, momentum built—under conditions similar to those that had produced a witchcraft scare; New England appeared to be “upon the brink of ruin”—for a public acknowledgment. The task of drafting the bill fell to Cotton Mather. He continued to hold that while he could not support their principles, he could speak only honorably of the judges. (There was a “nevertheless” in that statement too.) They had been prudent, pious, patient. They had comported themselves far better than the common people, who had entirely succumbed to delirious brains and discontented hearts. He drew up a laundry list of impieties for the fast day, inserting “wicked sorceries” about midway through the thicket of drinking, cursing, and insubordinate children, the embarrassing item you buried among sundries at the pharmacy counter. They had brought down storms from the invisible world that had led “unto those errors whereby great hardships were brought upon innocent persons, and (we fear) guilt incurred, which we have all cause to bewail.” To Mather’s draft others appended language acknowledging “neglects in the administration of justice.” The council—on which sat every Salem justice—erupted in fury; Sewall had never seen it so incensed. The “wicked sorceries” could remain. The miscarriage of justice must go. It fell to him to rewrite the bill. In the end the much abbreviated proclamation included neither references to injustice nor the word “witchcraft” or “sorcery.” Massachusetts would repent for whatever errors had been committed on all sides in “the late tragedy.”

  The wrangling, and Maule’s imputations, weighed on Sewall. So did the chapter of Revelation he turned over in his mind those weeks, as heavy snow blanketed Boston. Through it he trudged two days after the debate, in distress, to fetch his minister. Both Sewall’s wife and his two-year-old daughter, Sarah, were ill. The former witchcraft judge was that winter more susceptible to guilt, just as the Maule jury had been less susceptible to evidence; the same week a Boston woman upbraided him regarding another verdict, one into which he knew he had been “wheedled and hectored.” The following morning at dawn little Sarah Sewall unexpectedly died in her nurse’s arms. In the family’s grief, the tiny corpse still in the house, Sewall’s sixteen-year-old son read from Matthew 12, in Latin. His father shuddered at the seventh verse, with its reference to innocents condemned.* It “did awfully bring to mind the Salem tragedy,” he brooded, his first private use of that word in connection with the witchcraft. After the funeral he spent a few melancholy minutes alone, underground, in the bitter cold, communing with the dead in the family crypt. Sarah was the second child he buried in 1696. In five years he had suffered repeated losses. He was miserable.

  On January 14, 1697, the colony observed the province-wide fast of repentance. All work ceased as communities beseeched the Lord to “pardon all the errors of his servants and people,” with special reference to Salem. As the minister passed Sewall on his way to the pulpit that afternoon, the witchcraft judge handed him a note. It may have been extracted; Sewall had sensed Willard’s disfavor through the gloomy season. He was stung by slights; he felt himself ostracized. Midway through the service, the open-faced minister signaled to Sewall, who stood in his pew, head bowed. Before the full congregation, in the presence of Sewall’s grieving wife and children, his minister read his words aloud. Given the “reiterated strikes of God upon himself and his family,” Sewall was acutely aware of the guilt he had contracted on the witchcraft court. He beseeched God to forgive his sin and punish neither anyone else nor New England for his misstep.* When Willard had finished reading what was in effect a single, jam-packed sentence—one that included “blame,” “shame,” “sin,” and “guilt,” four words Parris had studiously avoided—Sewall bowed from the waist. He then took his seat.

  It must have been an agonizing moment for a man who shrank from criticism and who preferred not to stand alone; his was an act of public penance of which he knew Stoughton, at the very least, disapproved. The chief justice snubbed him afterward. Evidently he felt an apology unnecessary; the bill ordering the fast sufficed. In condemning the Andros administration, Stoughton had pointed to unreasonable, ensnaring judicial procedures. Out of favor afterward, he had declared himself “willing to make any amendment for the miscarriages of the late government.” He saw no need to address off-kilter contests or legal missteps in 1697. That evening Sewall transcribed the text of the note carefully in his diary. A few blocks away, Mather fretted at his desk over “divine displeasure.” Might it “overtake my family, for my not appearing with vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the judges, when the inextricable storm from
the invisible world assaulted the country?” The guilt lifts from the page. He prayed to the same end the following morning, receiving heavenly assurances that there would be no retribution.

  Others also took advantage of the fast day to unburden themselves. Twelve Salem jurors—including at least some of the men who had found Rebecca Nurse not guilty before Stoughton suggested they reconsider—that afternoon begged pardon of God and of all those they had offended. They would never do “such things again on such grounds for the whole world.” Inching toward a justification, they acknowledged that they had been “under the power of a strong and general delusion.” They had made poor decisions. Their statement carries light notes of reproach. No one had managed to enlighten them on the woolly matter; others had joined in shedding innocent blood. Cotton Mather preached that afternoon on the subject to the North Church congregation, including a salute to the magistrates and ministers who had suffered for their righteous service. Afterward Robert Calef, a Boston merchant and constable, accosted him. The two had already been in correspondence for some time. In his remarks Mather defined witchcraft as a pact with the devil. What, demanded Calef, was his source? Mather doubtless knew that Calef had posted Thomas Maule’s bail. He could not have imagined the troubles the exasperating forty-eight-year-old Boston wool dealer was to cause him.