by Stacy Schiff
“had as good be hanged”: RFQC, 4: 78–82.
Alden’s friends: SS Diary, 1: 293; interview with David Hall, May 18, 2014.
airy, second-floor library: Morison, Harvard College, vol. 2, 428–30; the August answer: R, 392. “rare and extraordinary”: Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 17 (1879), 268.
Joshua Moody: Calef in Burr, 371; R, 918. Moody had been Willard’s Harvard tutor; he had coauthored an appeal for the charter restoration with IM and supplied wonder tales in the past, reporting on the Goodwins. See Sibley, 374–77.
Philip English: Katharine Dana English, “Facts About the Life of Philip English of Salem,” typescript, 1943, PEM; William Bentley, The Diary of William Bentley (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), vol. 2, 22–25; George F. Cheever, “Philip English,” EIHC (1860), vol. 1, 67–181; vol. 2, 21–204, 237–72; vol. 3, 17–120; Henry W. Belknap, “Philip English, Commerce Builder,” Proceedings of the AAS 41 (1931): 17–24; Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 40–52; Bryan F. Le Beau, “Philip English and the Witchcraft Hysteria,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts (January 1987): 1–20. Le Beau, 4, beautifully unpacks the Beale testimony vs. R, 500 and supplies the figure of seventeen court appearances. See also RFQC, 6: 346–48, for an English suit, and RFQC, 7: 108, on his conviction that debtors should pay their debts. On the French in Salem, Gildrie, “Salem Society,” 192. Susannah Shelden appears to have handled the campaign against the Englishes, although that may be an illusion of the surviving documentation, which is meager.
a nosebleed so severe: R, 500; the Salem servant, R, 523. Haefeli, “Dutch New York,” 306, has the Aldens and Englishes in New York by early October.
“as much divided”: Fletcher to Blathwayt, November 10, 1693, CO 5/1083, PRO. Fletcher knew something of persecution himself, having, as a Protestant, been dismissed from the Irish army seven years earlier.
“in all times”: John Winthrop, A Model of Christian Charity (Boston, 1630).
“some are stewards”: Stoughton, New England’s True Interest, 14. As Winthrop had it, “For once in the history of the world, the sovereign places were filled by the sovereign men.” On the tiers of servitude, Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom,’” 202. “There is a monarchy”: CM, Batteries Upon the Kingdom of the Devil, 6, also WOW, 45. Gildrie, “Salem Society,” 186, observes that wealth and status were not coterminous.
on the clergy and social status: The point is David Hall’s in Faithful Shepherd, 68, 152. Ministers ranked among the top 15 percent of colonists (183). It helped, notes Hall, that they constituted fine matches for merchant daughters.
“altogether unbecoming”: RFQC, 4: 136.
“the second seat”: Cited in Warren, Loyal Dissenter, 33.
“Whoever is for a parity”: William Hubbard, The Happiness of a People in the Wisdom of Their Rulers (Boston, 1676), 8.
a distinct elite: See Dunn, “The Barbados Census,” 10. Generally on the Barbados planters, Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
Exceeding one’s rank: Boston dog-owning too was regulated, by a 1697 edict.
piece of silk: Barbara Ritter Daily, “‘Where Thieves Break Through and Steal,’ John Hale vs. Dorcas Hoar, 1672–1692,” EIHC 128 (October 1992): 258.
“it being so cold”: Moody in Sibley, 373.
One Rowley man: R, 675.
Elizabeth Colson: R, 626.
Martha Tyler and “Well, I see” to “did not confess”: R, 694. To confuse matters, Martha Sprague was also known as Martha Tyler; R, 773.
“than say anything” to “from the Indians”: R, 491–94. She was not alone in her anxiety; IM worried that his faith itself might be a delusion.
“a flock in the wilderness”: Scottow, A Narrative, 14.
“a branch of the plot”: Andros Tracts, 1: 18.
“flying rabble”: Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars, 80; in “a corner of the world,” CM, The Present State, 38; “dragons of the wilderness,” CM, Fair Weather, 91; “juice of toads,” CM, Little Flocks, 15.
“apt to believe”: Cited in Grandjean, “Reckoning,” 152. On inventing enemies for harmony’s sake, Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 245–47; similarly, James Axtell, The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 35.
“O do not quarrel”: CM, The Present State, 40.
“distress and danger”: Ibid., 28. Richard Godbeer underlines the similarity between a Mather sermon and an anti-Andros tract in The Devil’s Dominion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 189.
“The most rigid discipline”: Thomas Macaulay, History of England (London: Heron Books, 1967), 1: 129–30.
“the poor people”: WOW, 81.
“bloody and barbarous”: Stoughton to the Council of Trade and Plantations, September 30, 1697, CO 5/859, no. 124, PRO.
Anthony Checkley: He later claimed to be generally in the dark regarding his powers and duties and pleaded for better instructions; R, 829. The salary too was all vagueness. Checkley added a line that every NE minister could have borrowed: “I am willing to serve you if you do not starve me.” See Anne Powell, “Salem Prosecuted: The Role of Thomas Newton and Anthony Checkley in the Salem Witchcraft Crisis” (undergraduate paper for Mary Beth Norton, Cornell, 1993).
a massive earthquake: CM very much had Revelation on his mind these months; e-mail with David Hall, July 6, 2014; CM to John Cotton, August 5, 1692, in Silverman, Selected Letters, 40–41. “pulled into the jaws”: WOW, 61.
“You shall oftener hear”: WOW, 82–83.
“It would break”: WOW, 102. The expression was formulaic; he used it as well of the Goodwin children in their fits, as did his father, of the imprisoned Andover matrons.
Tipping his hand: WOW, 100, 104. Like so many images, the fine infernal thread turns up in Lawson as well. CM and Lawson shared the “brand plucked from the burning,” an uncommon phrase; they were in close touch over these months. In Magnalia, 1: 187, CM included court details that had appeared nowhere else, among them burned rags in mouths and poison stains on pillows.
“We know not” to “in the dark”: WOW, 84.
out of his depth: R, 540.
“rampant hag” and the Carrier trial: CM in Burr, 241–44. Her indifference: R, 512.
wrists seemingly soldered: From Wigglesworth comes a thrilling description of hell: “With iron bands they bind their hands and cursed feet together”; see Bruce C. Daniels, Puritans at Play (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 39.
“The more there were”: Hale in Burr, 421.
a powerful petition: R, 533–36. They included the names of some who had signed depositions against them; R, 534, 539.
Ipswich minister John Wise: R, 334. “the clearest reputation”: R, 535. On Wise, see George Allan Cook, John Wise: Early American Democrat (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), especially 50–57. Also Hall, Ways of Writing, 182; Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 15 (1902): 281–302; Wise in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 1: 256–69. Evidently his works would inspire some eighteenth-century crusaders who thrilled to his rousing anthem: “The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity, and promote the happiness of all, and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, etc. without injury or abuse done to any.”
“no more privileges”: Cited in Emory Washburn, Sketches of the Judicial History of Massachusetts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1840), 106. The court fined and suspended Wise, although he was rehabilitated in time to serve as chaplain on Phips’s 1690 expedition. See “Revolution in New-England Justified,” 10, for Wise’s heroism. The insults bore repeating; IM repeated them when petitioning the Crown; 1688, CO 1/65, no. 52, PRO; CM reproduced them in Magnalia, 1: 161.
“a vast concourse”: CM to John Cotton, August 5, 1692, in Silverman, Selected Letters, 40.
“solemn and savory”: B&N, 88.
/> his trial was the one: CM in Burr, 215–22. Anne Powell, “Salem Prosecuted,” for the relationship with the Checkleys and for Checkley distancing himself from the trial; see Lawson, appendix to Christ’s Fidelity, 114–15. Several members of the extended Nurse family had been in the Wells garrison during the 1691 siege; none appears to have stepped forward to defend Burroughs. We have the Burroughs account only from Lawson, who was present for it, and from CM, who accurately summarized those depositions to which his version can be compared. He also inserted flourishes, freely editorialized, and elided. For Burroughs’s reply to the question about reading his wife’s mind, Mather leaves us with “The prisoner now at the bar had nothing to answer unto what was thus witnessed against him that was worth considering.” Lawson reported that nothing that Burroughs said sounded convincing; appendix to Christ’s Fidelity, 99, 115. Testimony regarding GB’s miraculous feats with the musket and the molasses barrel was enhanced by court reporters nearly a month after he hanged, R, 646–47; evidently some uneasiness lingered. The Salem man who entered those charges had seen his mother hang for witchcraft.
“tergiversations, contradictions”: CM in Burr, 222. CM evidently had Gaul’s 1646 Select Cases of Conscience at his elbow; he used passages of it verbatim to malign Burroughs.
“there never was”: CM in Burr, 222. See Ady, A Candle in the Dark, 142–64; I am grateful to Kent Bicknell for his notes on IM’s edition of Ady. CM trips over Burroughs the plagiarist as he does over Burroughs the skeptic. He was himself a master compiler and copyist, never above retailing—and improving upon—the work of his closest friends.
“You are one” to “he is alive”: Hale in Burr, 421.
Hale did but did not: CM makes clear JH’s dissatisfaction in Magnalia, 2: 537.
character of one: As Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 192, makes clear, that was perfectly acceptable. You might well enter court as “a notorious cheat and shoplift,” to leave convicted of fraud.
“Had I been one”: IM, Cases of Conscience, in Proceedings of the AAS 10 (1896), postscript.
“The course of God’s”: George Burroughs to the governor and council at Boston, January 27, 1692, vol. 37, 259, Massachusetts State Archives.
IX. OUR CASE IS EXTRAORDINARY
“WITCH, n.”: Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1944), 367.
“the chief of all”: R, 244. Richard Latner is especially good on Andover and on the syncopated, geographic rhythm of the accusations, which spike suddenly and just as suddenly subside; Latner, “The Long and Short of Salem Witchcraft: Chronology and Collective Violence in 1692,” Journal of Social History 42 (Fall 2008): 137–56. Richard Gildrie, “Visions of Evil: Popular Culture, Puritanism, and the Massachusetts Witchcraft Crisis of 1692,” Journal of American Culture 8 (1985): 27, provides the one-in-fifteen-accused figure for Andover. By some calculations the figure is closer to one in ten.
“hellish obligations”: IM, Cases of Conscience, postscript.
“being unadvisedly entered”: R, 540.
“And how old” to “cat told me so”: R, 539.
“You are a witch”: R, 686–87. Others glowered: R, 543.
a revised narrative: Rosenthal, Salem Story, 132–36, tracks the change in narrative direction. Abigail Hobbs mentioned no meeting and no subversion. She did not fly; she had signed a covenant with the devil in now-forgotten Maine.
“Had you any hot”: R, 479. “Did you used”: R, 473. “But doth not the”: R, 548. No more than six or seven accused Andover witches denied the allegations.
“buzzings and chuckings”: Brattle in Burr, 189.
“mocking me”: R, 705–6.
“hope he will”: R, 474–75.
Confession came naturally: On the centrality of confession to NE life, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 174–96, and Reis, Damned Women, 131. Reis is especially good on sin and women and on how men and women confessed differently; 121–64. “she knew she was”: Mintz, Huck’s Raft, 25. On confession generally, see Kathleen Doty and Risto Hiltunen, “‘I Will Tell, I Will Tell’: Confessional Patterns in the Salem Witchcraft Trials, 1692,” Journal of Historical Pragmatics (2002): 299–335. Margo Burns’s superb “‘Other Ways of Undue Force and Fright’: The Coercion of False Confessions by the Salem Magistrates,” Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 24–39. In his Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft, Perkins suggested that a confession is all the more substantial when it contains an accusation. Rosenthal cannily observes that some of the remembered slights may have been invented ones; “Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 57 (December 1984): 601.
“in a cold dumpish”: R, 568. On the spiritual torpor and confessions, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 144–47. Similarly, see R, 367–68, 576, 608–9, 630, 680.
“Methinks,” moaned Cotton: CM Diary, 1: 22.
“for the credit” to “look with an evil”: R, 542–43; a Reading woman confessed: R, 585.
no fewer than twenty witches: Again, the number is fluid. Depending on how one defines members of the Dane clan, it varies from nineteen to forty-five. Baker, in A Storm of Witchcraft, 10, notes that nearly a third of the accused belonged, directly or indirectly, to ministerial families.
simultaneously as village schoolmaster: RFQC, 7: 100. Barnard and the pigsty: Sibley, 175.
“The Lord would not”: R, 608.
“was his for ever”: R, 571.
“He is not an old”: R, 788.
“But afterwards”: R, 530.
“a pin run through”: R, 578.
a swarm of superstitions: On the interpenetration of superstition and religion, all roads lead to Hall, Worlds of Wonder. It would have come as quite a shock to IM to learn that he was written off by his English political enemies in the 1680s as “that star-gazer, that half distracted man” (Randolph to Bradstreet, September 4, 1684, Letters and Official Papers, 3: 322).
“much addicted”: R, 644. For Wardwell’s background, Marjorie Wardwell Otten, Essex Genealogist 21 (May 2001): 85–88.
careful with those imprecations: “Discourse on Witchcraft,” MP, 28; R, 576–77.
sieve and scissors: R, 573. The same week, Mary Warren swore that an Andover man had both practiced witchcraft and experimented with the sieve; R, 598.
“charm away witchcraft”: Lawson, Christ’s Fidelity, 73.
“burnings, and bottles”: “Discourse on Witchcraft,” MP, 29.
“charms and spells”: George Keith, A Refutation of Three Opposers of Truth (Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1690), 72.
Wait Still Winthrop’s library: Winthrop, “Scientific Notes”; three magical pills: “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” 181.
“a wondrous thing”: CM Diary, 2: 349.
Robert Pike: Warren, Loyal Dissenter; Kences, “Some Unexplored Relationships”; “Journal of Reverend John Pike,” Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 14 (1875), 121–50. Pike took depositions when the Carr estate was contested from those who insisted that Ann Putnam Sr.’s father had been in perfect possession of his faculties on his deathbed and those who swore he had not; RFQC, 8: 353.
“temptations of horrid” to “when once dead”: Pike, in Upham, Salem Witchcraft, 697–705.
“strengthen other” to “case is extraordinary”: CM to John Foster, August 17, 1692, in Silverman, Selected Letters, 41–42.
“altogether false” to “such horrid lies”: R, 743.
“a joyful and happy”: R, 549. A sixteen-year-old boy would accuse her weeks later of threatening to run a skewer through him if he refused to sign her book. Teenage confessors in prison accused her as well. As her grandfather had, John Willard had tried to dissuade her from confessing; she had survived tremendous strain.
spectral minister demurred: R, 558.
“To see a man”: SPN, 76.
“declared their wish” to “upon that account”: Brattle in Burr, 177.
“like that would be”: Sibley on IM.
“admiration of all present” to “angel of light”: Calef in Burr, 360–61. Murrin, “The Infernal Conspiracy,” 342, reads the account as indicating that the crowd nearly surges forth to rescue Burroughs. I have followed Sewall’s order for the hangings. Lawson too reported that some saw the devil on the gallows prompting the condemned “when they were just ready to be turned off; even while they were making their last speech.”
“live and die”: RFQC, 9: 31.
“one of his hands”: Calef in Burr, 361.
several questions: R, 553.
“to set to my heart” to “shame for sin”: R, 562–64. Barker was distantly related to Ann Foster. Of the Andover fliers, he was the best raconteur.
“We were all”: R, 738. On the manhandling: Brattle in Burr, 180, 189.
Sewall explained: R, 374–75.
“difficult and troublesome”: R, 828–29.
“weary with relating”: Hale in Burr, 421.
dog was put to death: Calef in Burr, 372; IM, Cases of Conscience, 60.
“taken up my whole” to “used to work”: R, 711. Dounton too waited for his salary; R, 839.
dismantling the households: See David C. Brown’s excellent “The Forfeitures at Salem, 1692,” William and Mary Quarterly 50 (January 1993): 85–111. He finds that Corwin acted in most cases in accordance with English (if not colonial) law; the escapees were the only exceptions. Corwin did not confiscate land.
“laid hands on all” to “helpless”: R, 914.
“a suffering condition”: R, 674.
Parris made the five-mile trip: Gragg, Quest for Security, 132; on ministers’ overtaxed wives: Earle, The Sabbath, 133.
had but three requests: R, 620. They had help with their petition. As Rosenthal points out, R, 36n, their language comes very close to Bernard’s and other experts’.
“I verily believe”: R, 617–19; Brown, “The Case of Giles Corey”; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014. Corey knew what he was doing. Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 279, notes that in over a century and thousands of cases, no one exercised the right to remain silent. As he puts it, “The right to remain silent was literally the right to commit suicide.” A Massachusetts man had attempted to do so, refusing to plead in a 1689 piracy case. The bench begged him to reconsider, and “he at last came to and pleaded to his indictment”; Samuel Melyen Commonplace Book, Ms. SBd-7, MHS.
