The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  While there is a consistency to the indignities, there is little discernible pattern to the charges. Much of what happened in Salem in 1692 had been written when tempers flared over the Topsfield border generations earlier, or in 1679 when the Putnams and Bradburys clashed, or in 1683 when Burroughs abandoned his congregants. To stare at it for too long is to clamber down the rabbit hole, to ask more of miasmic events than they will yield. If you spend enough time in seventeenth-century Salem, you begin to see patterns that are not necessarily there, like a hyper-perspicacious assassination buff or an eminent minister in a renovated Boston kitchen or, for that matter, like a witchcraft judge.

  More than half the women who were hanged in 1692 had previously been accused. Rebecca Nurse’s, Mary Esty’s, Elizabeth Procter’s, and Mary English’s mothers had been rumored to be witches. Samuel Wardwell had a Quaker uncle; the Nurses had raised a Quaker orphan; Alden had Quaker relations. Abigail Hobbs was happy to sell her parents down the river as only a fourteen-year-old will. She initiated the violent targeting in which the Willard and Wilds clans would engage, though intrafamilial treachery well predated 1692. Philip English and George Jacobs’s brother-in-law had been voted Salem town selectmen weeks before they were accused; elections produce losers too. As the crisis widened, so did the reasons to name names. It became less dangerous to accuse than to object. Guilt played an active role in many denunciations, bursting in by any number of trapdoors. It explained why prayer—why the very word “prayer”—might grate on the ears, why so many seemed afraid of their own shadows. It may have powered the Sabbath-day afflictions, either because you were at home that afternoon (when Louder met the flying monkey), or because you crossed paths at meeting with someone who unsettled you (and seemed to appear afterward in your bed in her Sunday clothes), or because you heard terrifying things there.

  DID ANN PUTNAM SR. name Rebecca Nurse because of the border dispute, because her husband opposed Parris and had opposed James Bayley, because—although relative latecomers—the Nurses had managed to secure a large tract of village land, because Rebecca hailed from an intolerably harmonious family, or because she took the sacrament in Salem town, occupying a former Putnam pew in the village when she did not? Would she have been named had she visited the parsonage girls, which she did not do from fear of contagion?

  Antipathies and temptations are written in invisible ink; we will never know. Everyone was on edge. Witchcraft localized anxiety at a dislocated time, as atomic war powered McCarthy rumors in the 1950s. Even those who knew themselves to be innocent believed a diabolical plot afoot. Might Ann Putnam Sr. have named Rebecca Nurse simply because the Nurses prospered where the Putnams did not? It is because Miss Gulch owns half the property in town that Auntie Em cannot say what she thinks of her to her face; witchcraft permitted a good Christian woman to speak her mind. It was the men in Salem who complained of being silenced, suffocated, and paralyzed in their beds—and who in their testimony delivered the most outlandish tales.*

  If you round up the old enemies, the skeptics, the deviants, the scolds, the daughters of witches, the abusers and bullies, the arrivistes and the overly advantaged, only George Burroughs remains.* Of the five men who hanged—and every man who remained in prison was executed—most were related to witches. Burroughs traveled the farthest, to play the largest role. No other member of his family was accused. At the Mather household as on the Putnam farm, special animus was reserved for him. What was the minister’s crime? He stood in the way of no one’s inheritance. He had no designs on anyone’s land. He was related to no female suspect. The Putnams carried a long-standing grudge, Burroughs having replaced their brother-in-law in the village pulpit. The minister was a difficult man and a secretive, disorderly houseguest, as much sinned against as sinning. More people testified against him than against anyone else. They were unlikely to have had the same reasons. Mather claimed that he had been requested specifically to include Burroughs in Wonders. He was happy to oblige; the loathing drips from his pen. Sewall may not have forgiven Burroughs for having had the temerity to survive when Maine’s only ordained minister, a cousin, had not.

  Hathorne had reason to dislike the Maine minister, his ex-brother-in-law, a dangerous man on another count. It was for the sake of frontiersmen like Burroughs that Massachusetts communities were left defenseless. His triple brush with heroism seems to have passed without comment before the justices, who may not have been able to forgive him their failures. They had removed militiamen from Maine in 1690; Casco had burned as a result. In indicting Burroughs, it has been suggested, the justices exonerated themselves. Burroughs had pleaded in 1691 for frontier troops and a commander. He no doubt had a great deal more to say off the page. The Dominion better protected Maine than did the post-Andros regime. Within weeks of the revolt, the frontier, deserted by troops, was overrun by Indians; its settlers had reason to feel as if they had been thrown to the wolves. Burroughs indeed appears to have been lax in his religious practices, but his was just as likely a political infraction. He had cause to regret the Andros regime. If he said as much, he did so plainly. In either event there is as little evidence that he was the dreaded Baptist he posthumously became as there was that Tituba was black. He may well have voiced his displeasure before the abrupt departure from his parishioners, who had reason to expect a reprisal.

  Across the board, strength of character fared poorly. Even when they did not thumb noses at authority, those who challenged the justices hanged. With one exception, those who confessed did not. (Here New England diverged not only from Sweden but from every other witchcraft trial on record.) More than fifty people falsely incriminated themselves, some purely to save their lives. But it was not difficult to believe in your monstrous powers when your glance knocked a child clear off her feet. Something lurked somewhere in the inner reaches, even if what you dredged up from the muck was not exactly sorcery. Sometimes what surfaced was simply a leaden feeling, the worry that one was impervious to faith. Someone or something stood in the way. “The design of the devil,” Cotton Mather noted in 1695, “is to affright you into a hard and harsh opinion of yourselves.” The boundary between a guilty conscience and diabolical collusion was not yet in place.

  Accusers grasped at the names frequently bandied about: alleged witches, a minister’s family, the woman whose daughter had been savagely murdered. (They had adult help. As Increase Mather observed in 1684: “It is evident that the peculiar antipathies of some persons are caused by the imaginations of their parents.”) Andover caught the fever partly because the town suffered tensions of its own. It was on the verge of splitting in two; generations strained against one another in a community that had outgrown its land. But any town with a touch test–endorsing minister would have served just as well. By the time the witchcraft reached Andover, the justices had refined their methods of locating it. Confessions by no means require torture, although torture tends to produce the desired answers. Some were relieved to be spared from sharing a dungeon with Burroughs; others were happy to avoid humiliating public trials. Many cared only to please. From the tone of the reparations claims it is clear in what esteem the villagers held the authorities. John Hale was not the only one who felt, as he put it, “that the reverence I bore to aged, learned, and judicious persons caused me to drink in their principles.”

  A magistrate too can make you believe things of yourself that are not true. With a suggestible witness and an authority figure, it is not uncommon to wind up with a planted, potted memory. In the hands of the right adult, a child will swear that his day-care worker slaughtered rabbits, an elephant, a giraffe or “turned him into a mouse while he was in an airplane on the way to visit his grandmother.” No one rested easily in a seventeenth-century prison; sleep deprivation also produces hallucinations. Where did Ann Foster find the details of her fantastic flight? For three well-spoken, well-dressed men she recycled familiar imagery. Satanic baptisms were all too credible, even if they were in short supply in Massachusetts, where no w
itch had flown before 1692. As for the aerial crash, what greater fear hounds the flier? Foster may not even have known that such things had happened, or been said to happen, in Sweden. She did not need to fabricate the aching leg. No seventy-two-year-old New England farm woman was without a pain somewhere.

  What sets Salem apart is not the accusations but the convictions. At other times raving women had been said to be witches and men dreamed of the devil without anyone thinking twice about it. Why the unsparing prosecution in 1692? Mather implied that the Glover case played a role, the laundress having displayed her spells for all to see. Several on the Court of Oyer and Terminer were better at executing orders than at formulating them; they bent easily to the greater will. Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney—the prime movers—acted in the interests of the orthodoxy, which happened to align with their personal agendas. They knew who the troublemakers were, having been called upon to mediate in Salem village for years. As its “uncharitable expressions and uncomely reflections,” its “settled prejudice, and resolved animosity” fermented into witchcraft, they promoted that transformation. Parris, Noyes, Barnard, and Hale eagerly backed them up. All signs point to their having been in the thrall of William Stoughton, their elder by a generation, nearly a father to young Mather.

  With the question of why Stoughton—a political contortionist for over a decade—remained inflexible on witchcraft, one comes closest to the riddle of Salem. No documentation survives; it is more difficult to make sense of his intransigence than of Foster’s flight to a satanic Sabbath. Both followed to some extent from their faith. Stoughton embraced spectral evidence, contrary to legal opinion; he departed from all precedent. After the hastily rearranged political allegiances, he took and held a stand. One may well account for the other. Firm hands were in order; Stoughton responded with clenched fists. He had known disfavor. He had no interest in returning to it.* Along with two other witchcraft justices, Stoughton had collaborated actively with the “alien incubus” that was Dominion rule.† Here was an opportunity for those men to rehabilitate themselves, to prove their mettle by dispelling a new intruder. They were now the righteous enforcers, the ones lifting that “standard against the infernal enemy.” The only individual who could easily have slowed or reversed Salem’s course, Stoughton elected not to do so. He believed as firmly in spectral evidence in 1693 as he had in 1692, or at least claimed to. He worked under an absent, weak governor who displayed little interest in the trials. Hathorne handed Stoughton a situation that was out of control well before Phips arrived and in which the new governor had no cause to involve himself. Afterward—as with the half-read May commission—he fumbled in attempting both to prove his piety to Massachusetts and his competence to London.

  Stoughton labored to prove not only his constancy but a new government’s legitimacy. He was as aware as anyone that to the Crown the colony appeared lax, impertinent, disorderly. They had paid a crushing price for having deviated from the laws of England. In prosecuting witches he simultaneously redeemed himself at home and broadcast New England’s proficiency abroad; the colonists could govern themselves, in an orderly, Old World way. They were no riotous, irresponsible teenagers after all. They prosecuted subversives. They could show up those English officials who sniffed that Massachusetts was without law, courts, justice, or government. The crisis provided a great number of people—Barnard, Noyes, Cotton Mather, several adolescent girls, many Massachusetts authorities, the colony itself—a chance to show up their elders, all too happy to remind them, as the king assured New England, that they existed only by someone else’s grace and favor.* What they had been given could also be taken away, nails on the blackboard of the adolescent mind.

  The new charter reconstituted the judicial system, of which Andros had made a travesty and on which a new administration depended. The colony reeled still from those “barbarous usages.” Stoughton may have set out to prove that New England was not, as the deposed governor had scoffed, “a place where none do and few care to understand (if they can help it) the laws or methods of England.” They had much to lose, a reputation for civil disobedience to live down. Coursing public anger played a role; men who had overthrown a despot had no desire to face a mob. As an ousted Dominion official had warned in 1689, those who removed Andros were “like young conjurers, who had raised a devil they could not govern.” Indeed the New England clergy had promoted the tale of that earlier implacable invader, the red-coated one with his sinister designs who had been heard to sneer that Puritans “were a people fit only to be rooted off the face of the earth.” They lent it to a witch gang intent on establishing “perhaps a more gross diabolism, than ever the world saw before.” They did not have to imagine that story, having themselves participated in it. The trials allowed them to dispel a stain of their own.

  The clergy could resist in no meaningful way. They were known to have blown the bellows of sedition against the previous administration, to have preached up a rebellion, to have craftily incited a mob. They could not undermine a government that, at great cost, they had themselves installed. To vindicate the court was to vindicate the new charter; they too looked to prove themselves not in Boston but in London, where Mather aimed Wonders. Three years of anarchy and five of Dominion rule had been costly. The justices were moreover their patrons and sponsors, the men who paid their salaries. The ministers were as blindsided by the crisis as everyone else. But witchcraft allowed them to prove God’s special stake in New England. It must be awfully important if Satan stood so intent on destroying it! The assault on Salem allowed a younger generation of clergymen to prove their worth in a cosmic battle. It fulfilled a prophecy too; here was the storm before the much advertised millennial calm, a last-ditch showdown with the devil.

  For all of his 1692 fast days, for all of his warnings against spectral evidence, torture, and touch tests, for all of his hand-wringing, Cotton Mather did not find the assault of evil angels entirely unwelcome. In a 1693 document not meant for public consumption, he offered what may qualify as his most genuine assessment of the episode. It was certainly the most damning. Mather wrestled mightily with this statement; it is heavily blotted and redacted. What had Salem witchcraft yielded? No one of worth had been compromised. The “lively demonstrations of hell” had awakened many souls—young souls, especially, of both genders. Mather knew that calamity reliably filled the church; evangelically speaking, little rivaled an earthquake. “The devil got just nothing,” reasoned Mather, as he meditated on the crisis, “but God got praises, Christ got subjects, the Holy Spirit got temples, the Church got addition, and the souls of men got everlasting benefits.” Reversing his position on his own involvement, he preened a little: “I am not so vain as to say that any wisdom or virtue of mine did contribute unto this good order of things, but I am so just as to say I did not hinder this good.” Any discomfort for having failed to shut down the trials had vanished. He decried only one monstrous injustice: the assault on his reputation.

  Cases of Conscience, the advice of the New York ministers, Mary Esty’s petition, and Giles Corey’s gruesome death may have helped to extinguish the witchcraft. But as the casualties piled up, the terror rushed toward the authorities’ front doors. When it did, the moment had passed. (The skeptic Robert Calef credited whoever had accused Mrs. Phips.) Blame could not be attributed, belonging as it did to too many addresses. Mystification yielded to mortification. It is unclear who actually heard Thomas Brattle’s wise, unwelcome words; by October too many had been recalling (or inventing) twenty-five-year-old slights to be able to accuse anyone else of delusion. Firmly established, witchcraft exerted a magnetic pull on every glinting irritation, fear, grudge, peculiarity, offense; there was as much stray odium and animosity in Essex County as there were mangy dogs and marauding pigs. The community played the chorus, striking at empty air with canes, rapiers, and staffs, marveling as moths flew through the meetinghouse, chipping in oddities and old tales, rumored, recovered, invented. Everyone had his reasons.

  The
irony that they had come to the New World to escape an interfering civil authority was lost on the colonists, who unleashed on one another the kind of abuse they had deplored in royal officials. So was the fact that the embrace of faith, meant to buttress the church, would tear it irrevocably apart; the wonder tales harvested to prove New England’s special status undermined it in the end. Political concerns outweighed all others, as political concerns had produced both Illustrious Providences and Memorable Providences. Mather’s account of the witchcraft would be inseparable from his life of Phips; the authorities believed they protected a fledgling administration. They had contracted a kind of autoimmune disorder, deploying against themselves the very furies they so feared. There were in 1692 no perpetrators, and no consequences. Only a small, supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.* He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.

  Witchcraft effectively aroused a lapsed, sluggish generation, though not as the clergy had anticipated. When the spell broke, the torrent of recriminations swept away a rich layer of faith. Massachusetts leaders would never again apply to the church for advice. Nor would an additional hint surface of a witches’ meeting or an aerial mishap. As for the phantom Frenchmen and Indians, by 1698 the nattily dressed invaders were understood to be satanic agents, “demons in the shape of armed Indians and Frenchmen.” The best minds in Essex County continued to believe them implicated somehow in the witchcraft. They never reappeared, fading imperceptibly away, like the indelible scene in the book you read as a child and never manage to find again.