by Stacy Schiff
“she would as soon”: RFQC, 3: 54–55.
They sought revenge: Lawrence W. Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom’: Servant Protest in Puritan Society,” William and Mary Quarterly 19 (April 1962): 212; Roger Thompson, “Adolescent Culture in Colonial Massachusetts,” Journal of Family History (Summer 1984): 133; RFQC, 3: 66. “Because she was”: RFQC, 8: 222–24. Maule was Quaker, the servant Irish Catholic; there was no contest. The case was dismissed.
the only explanation: CM in Burr, 95.
Ben Gould: R, 188.
A roll call: R, 172–73.
“stupendious revolution”: CM, Midnight Cry, 21. The sermon—in which CM referred to devil’s compacts and lawful convictions for them—was published immediately.
less rustic, better-lit town meetinghouse: Perley, History of Salem, vol. 3, 430–34.
blots on the page: See Meredith Marie Neuman, Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 66.
Thomas Danforth: See Roger Thompson’s expert sleuthing, especially “The Transit of Civilization: The Case of Thomas Danforth,” in The Transit of Civilization, ed. Winfried Herget and Karl Ortseifen (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1986), 37–44, and Thompson, Cambridge Cameos.
Salem town meetinghouse: Town Records of Salem, MA, vol. 3 (Salem: Essex Institute, 1934), 201–2. Interview with Richard Trask, January 21, 2015.
On the imperfect records: Rosenthal, Salem Story, 125; Doty, “Telling Tales”; Gibson, Reading Witchcraft, 12–49. SP later acknowledged his mistakes.
“When did” through “dying fainting fit”: R, 173–74.
“visionary girls”: Letter appended to Deodat Lawson, A Further Account of the Trials of the New England Witches (Boston, 1693), 1.
“he would soon”: R, 182.
He lurched forward and bit: Calef in Burr, 348.
“Oh you old witch”: R, 181. Rosenthal thinks Procter may have been arrested; Salem Story, 110–11. No warrant survives.
Constable Herrick rounded up four more witches: R, 710–11.
Corey was an obvious target: RFQC, 1: 152, 172; RFQC, 7: 90–91, 134. The stinking water episode: RFQC, 1: 208–9. The “evil hand”: RFQC, 7: 90. For some marvelous Corey detective work, David C. Brown, “The Case of Giles Corey,” EIHC 121 (1985): 282–99; also Spiller, “Giles Corey.”
“Which of you” to “temptation to witchcraft”: R, 187–88.
Bridget Bishop: R, 184–85. In 1679 she had also appeared before someone who pointed to her and swore she had bewitched him “as now she stands before the court,” RFQC, 7: 329; RFQC, 4: 90, 386. On the two Bishops, David L. Greene, American Genealogist 227 (July 1981): 131–38. It did not help that—as Marilynne Roach points out—there were no fewer than four Edward Bishops in the area. Even JH could not keep them straight.
“You were a little”: R, 197; “torn in pieces”: R, 203.
“I will speak”: R, 189–94. Abigail does not mention Burroughs until her subsequent examination; see Rosenthal, Salem Story, 42–43. She had attended a great witches’ assembly: R, 198.
“great care” to “high and dreadful”: R, 204. Benjamin C. Ray, in Satan and Salem (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), calculated that Thomas Putnam wrote over 120 depositions and complaints, or one-third of the total; according to Ray, the signature Putnam phrase “most grievously” occurs 172 times in his documentation. Putnam filed the first complaint as well as the last, on September 17.
V: THE WIZARD
“In the terror”: Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 65.
Any number of discrepancies: Breslaw, Tituba, 118, points out that one court reporter did not think Tituba’s tall man from Boston even worthy of mention. Abigail and Deliverance Hobbs produced different versions of the witches’ Sabbath, with different presiding deacons.
“not a tooth”: Robert Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible World (London: Nath. Hillar, 1700), 165. Edward J. Ward was not impressed with Massachusetts dentistry; see Ward, Boston in 1682 and 1699, 53.
“managed in imagination”: CM to John Richards, May 31, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.
Reverend Nicholas Noyes: Dunton, Dunton’s Letters, 255; Higginson Family Papers, MHS. On his verse, see Sibley, 245. The burning poppets: R, 464.
“cross and swift questions”: CM to Richards, May 31, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.
“with the doleful shrieks”: WOW, 14. Joshua Scottow reported that the shrieks made it appear “as if hell and his furies had been let loose,” A Narrative, 47.
“It is no rare thing”: Bernard, Guide to Grand-Jury Men, cited in Trask, “The Devil Hath Been Raised,” 135. On the twofold importance of confession, Hall, A Reforming People, 86.
he designed an experiment: R, 211. The “tall black man”: R, 213.
bloody battle waged: R, 207.
“I can deny it” to “are bewitched”: R, 215. William Hobbs too hesitated to interpret the epidemic at hand.
“How did you know”: R, 205. David C. Brown, in A Guide to the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria of 1692 (self-published, 2000), suggests the girls did this on purpose to bolster their credibility.
agreed but steadily increased: R, 237; Lawson in Burr, 163; R, 555, 561–63.
“red bread”: R, 220. Ten days later, Deliverance added roast and boiled meat; R, 237.
“What, are ministers witches”: R, 505–6. In The Country Justice, Dalton recognized the distinction between conjurers and witches. The former claimed they could actually raise the devil.
little black man: R, 243. Elizabeth Hubbard was yet more helpful. He was “a little black-haired man” who wore “blackish apparel.” 129 “as if the blood”: Lawson’s appendix to Christ’s Fidelity, 99; cf. R, 246. If Burroughs failed to confess, the two women threatened they would reappear in court; see Magnalia, 1: 189, for the greater fear of ghosts. IM had said the difference between ghosts and specters was unclear; IP, 204. On Burroughs’s wives, David L. Greene, “The Third Wife of the Rev. George Burroughs,” American Genealogist 56 (1980): 43–45.
“a child of God”: R, 243–44.
the devil promised: I am indebted to David Hall for a copy of his unpublished September 12, 2012, Huntington Library talk.
For the spelling: Upham, Salem Witchcraft, 143; Roach, Six Women of Salem, 29; “sublimely unaware”: Henry Alexander, “The Language of the Salem Witchcraft Trials,” American Speech 3 (June 1928): 392; Grund, “Editing the Salem Witchcraft Records,” 158.
“did most grievously”: R, 336–37.
tireless industry: CM, Ornaments, Eureka: The Virtuous Woman Found; the “prince and judge”: Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (London: Weidenfeld, 1965), 190; “Well; and what if I am”: CM in Burr, 270. Margaret Rule detains the young men, Burr, 327; “come to the gallows”: Cited in Michael Hall, The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 143. “Charm the children”: Cotton Mather, Small Offers, 48; “penal and wrathful”: SPN, 117. Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 7–32. Also see Thompson, “The Case of Thomas Danforth,” 34.
work diligently: The 1680 mother is cited in Earle, Child Life, 100.
“When the devil finds”: CM, “A Discourse on the Power and Malice of the Devils,” in MP, 15.
“put away childish”: Ross W. Beales Jr., “In Search of the Historical Child,” American Quarterly 27 (October, 1975): 384.
Betty’s first yelp of terror: SS Diary, 1: 345–46, 348–49, 355, 359–60. Dunton on the furnishing, Dunton’s Letters, 254. Stannard, “Death and the Puritan Child,” 473. Betty would go on to marry, bear seven children, and die at thirty-four.
“I had rather”: Thomas White, A Little Book for Little Children (Boston: 1702), 13; Faber,
“Puritan Criminals,” 91. Or as James Janeway had it, “They are not too little to die, they are not too little to go to hell.” For the Sewall maid: SS Diary, 2: 731. For “that she was in the dark”: MP, 46. Apocalyptic scenes could sound oddly like black Sabbaths, as women flew into the wilderness to wrangle with mythical beasts, Stout, New England Soul, 48. The blood-vomiting dragons: Cited in Joyce, Printing and Society in Early America, 42.
“To fail to be”: Stannard, Puritan Way of Death, 70.
“lively and pungent”: CM Diary, 2: 359. He fretted that the admonitions were not pungent enough. From the evidence, the children had more occasion to fear their birthdays than their father.
Indians did childhood differently: Peter Charles Hoffer, Law and People in Colonial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 71; Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 8; James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, ed. Stanley N. Katz and John M. Murrin (New York: Knopf, 1983), 43. “Let not English”: Cotton Mather, Small Offers, 44; Stannard, “Death and the Puritan Child,” 476; James E. Kences, “Some Unexplored Relationships of Essex County Witchcraft to the Indian Wars of 1675 and 1689,” EIHC 120 (July 1984): 186.
“entertain any frightful”: Samuel Mather, “The Home Life of Cotton Mather,” in A Library of American Literature, ed. Edmund Stedman and Ellen Hutchinson (New York: Charles Webster, 1891).
grisly tales: See Kathryn Zabelle Derounian, “The Publication, Promotion and Distribution of Mary Rowlandson’s Indian Captivity Narrative in the Seventeenth Century,” Early American Literature 23 (1988): 239–61. David Hall thinks these tales had seeped into the groundwater; interview with Hall, October 19, 2012.
Samuel Sewall dreamed: SS Diary, 1: 328.
Sewall children wept: Ibid., 145. Mary Rowlandson could not bear to be in the room with a corpse. On children and corpses, Michael MacDonald’s highly original Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 76.
reordered affections and complicated successions: RFQC, 8: 355, 424, 430; “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” 179.
“art, craft, and mystery”: Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 33.
“Binding out”: See Katz and Murrin, Colonial America, 136; Stannard, “Death and the Puritan Child,” 466; Thompson, “Adolescent Culture,” 129. Some aspects of the indenture agreements had a familiar ring: The apprentice was to serve his master faithfully, keep his secrets, obey his lawful commandments. In turn, the master agreed to provide the apprentice with “sufficient meat, drink, apparel, lodging, and washing.” Those agreements were for seven years; diabolical ones were often said to last for six or eight.
“Puberty,” it has been said: Adam Phillips, Going Sane (New York: Harper, 2007), 121. Demos notes, in A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford, 1999), 145, that a NE childhood was short-lived and that no seventeenth-century word existed for that period between puberty and adulthood.
a full inventory of harassments: Beales, “In Search of the Historical Child,” 398; Faber, “Puritan Criminals,” 101; RFQC, 8: 103; RFQC, 2: 238.
“A married man”: William E. Nelson, “The Persistence of Puritan Law: Massachusetts, 1660–1760,” Willamette Law Review (2013): 389.
“She is so fat”: Cited in Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fashions in Old New England (New York: Scribner’s, 1896), 101. See also Faber, “Puritan Criminals”; RFQC, 7: 419; Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS; Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom,’” 208.
“for they would know not”: E. T. Fisher, The Report of a French Protestant Refugee in Boston, 1687 (Boston, 1868), 21.
“this orphan plantation”: Hull, Diaries, 130; Bowle, Diary of John Evelyn, 235. See Stout, New England Soul, 105–30, on the insubordination of the 1690s. Richard S. Dunn is incisive on the settlers’ attempts to retain their dignity while following orders, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962).
“disobedient, disobliging”: Joshua Scottow, Old Men’s Tears for Their Own Declensions (Boston: 1691), 12.
one of his servants had been stealing: RFQC, 7: 44–50.
Ministers devoted sermons: Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom,’” 205–6; Cotton Mather, A Good Master Well Served (Boston, 1696), 5, 52.
“Pray sooth”: From Sarah Knight’s journal, in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 2: 434. For the best account of Puritan hooligans and practical jokers, Thompson, “Adolescent Culture,” 134–35. The ideal adolescent—deferential, disciplined, sober, and chaste—remained a mythical creature.
“exceedingly addicted”: RFQC, 7: 42–55.
“who were much given”: Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 22 (Boston: Colonial Society, 1920), 274.
“could not tell ink” and “upon her head”: RFQC, 1: 390; RFQC, 4: 108. Koehler, Search for Power, is best on the misbehavior; also see Ulrich, Good Wives, 184–202. A “flustered Cotton Mather”: CM Diary, 1: 457. The “lousy slut”: RFQC, 2: 10. They landed in court with regularity: N.E.H. Hull, Female Felons: Women and Serious Crime in Colonial Massachusetts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). They managed to suffocate: R, 256–57, 372.
“has a better faculty”: SS Diary, 1: 496. The biblical precedent: Cotton Mather, Small Offers, 30, 44. A group of Ipswich men petitioned: Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill, 128.
Cotton Mather said she did: With nine daughters on whom he doted, CM devoted a great deal of time to pondering women and their worth. They were no more evil or immoral than their male counterparts, though he could not help but note that they gossiped avidly and tended to be more lewd and vain. He knew however who filled his pews. Adapting Luther in A Good Master Well Served, 34, he preached that “the work of a poor milk maid, if it is done with an exercise of grace, is more glorious than the triumphs of Caesar.”
the Holy Ghost: Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 41; “It amazes me”: Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints, 228; “in a worse condition”: Cited in Elizabeth Reis, Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 43. CM practically reveled in his depravity. As he explained: “By loathing of himself continually, and being very sensible of what are his own loathsome circumstances, a Christian does what is very pleasing to Heaven.” Women blamed their souls: See Reis, Damned Women, 121–64, and Reis, “Confess or Deny? What’s a ‘Witch’ to Do?,” OAH Magazine of History (July 2003): 11–13. She makes the fine point that in conversion narratives women tended to focus more on their vile nature while men cited drinking or gambling. For “ready to draw up,” Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS. The non-eater, David Hall, ed., Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 131.
The captivity narrative: E-mail with David Hall, December 27, 2013; Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, eds., Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
kept a horse saddled: Harriet S. Tapley, Chronicles of Danvers (Danvers, MA: Danvers Historical Society, 1923), 28.
Dorcas Hoar: R, 225–27, 593–94, for the hearing; R, 315, for stamping her feet. See also Barbara Ritter Dailey, “‘Where Thieves Break Through and Steal’: John Hale Versus Dorcas Hoar,” EIHC 128 (1992): 255–69. The elf-lock is from Lawson, appendix to Christ’s Fidelity, 112.
Susannah Martin: See Karlsen, The Devil, 89–95; R, 228–29, 256, 392, 426; RFQC, 4: 129–35; Jesse Souweine, “Word of Mouth” (thesis, Cornell, 1996), 53–62.
“No, I do not think”: A number of suspects stopped short of diagnosing witchcraft. Wilmott Reed would say only that the afflicted “were in a sad condition”; R, 209, 344.
Sarah Bibber: R, 242–43.
“or the other” to “If ever there were”: SPN, 202–3. CM would also evoke the Baxter passage.
“Well, what will” to “take your prisoner”: RFQC, 9: 48–49.
grandson of a Cambridge-
educated: On Burroughs, Gilbert Upton, The Devil and George Burroughs (London: Wordwright, 1997); Mary Beth Norton, “George Burroughs and the Girls from Casco: The Maine Roots of Salem Witchcraft,” Maine History 40 (Winter 2001/2002): 258–77; Edward E. Bourne, The History of Wells and Kennebunk (Portland: B. Thurston, 1875), 171–78. GB appears to have preached for IM in 1675. On Burroughs and Church, see Francis Baylies, An Historical Memoir of the Colony of New Plymouth (Boston: Wiggin and Lunt, 1866), 75–78. For the raids, Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars, 218–40; Benjamin Bullivant journal, Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 16 (1878), 103–8. For the Casco 1690 raid, John Usher and Colonel Lidget correspondence, CO 5/855, nos. 100, 101, PRO.
“could after tedious”: Usher to the Earl of Nottingham, October 20, 1692, John Usher Papers.
“It is taken”: Roland L. Warren, Loyal Dissenter: The Life and Times of Robert Pike (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 167. As London heard it, Thomas Danforth informed the poor Maine settlers that if the Lord Jesus could not help them, he could not; Bullivant letter, April 11, 1690, CO 5/855, no. 103, PRO.
They were well armed: Josselyn, in Baker and Reid, New England Knight, 8.
“pillars of smoke” to “pluck you up”: Burroughs letter of January 27, 1692, Massachusetts Archives Collection, vol. 37, 259, Massachusetts State Archives. See also Kences, “Some Unexplored Relationships,” 190.
“barbarously murdered”: Captain Lloyd letter of January 27, 1692, Massachusetts Archives Collection, vol. 38, 257, Massachusetts State Archives.
encouraged the enemy: Andros Tracts, 1: 176–78.
“no peace, order or safety”: Bullivant letter, July 1690, CO 5/855, no. 103, PRO.
careful case against Burroughs: R, 241. The documentation for the preliminary examination is scant. Some of the charges against Burroughs may have surfaced only at the August trial, though the hearing notes indicate that all the themes were touched upon in May. Trask points out that some testimony was rewritten; R, 47. On the back of his account, SP scrawled a series of scriptural passages about purification.
