The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  * Baptists too were few and far between. Cotton Mather referred to the French monarch as “Louis le loup.”

  † When in 1676 Nathaniel Saltonstall, the onetime witchcraft judge, wrote of the Indian ambush that carried off Mary Rowlandson, he reported on a “flying rabble of barbarous heathens.” He might just as well have been describing the heretics who swarmed into Salem village on poles.

  * The Native Americans fully exploited that gullibility. Every year since they had arrived, the settlers heard of Indian conspiracies, often from opposing factions of Indians.

  † Or as Macaulay has it in his History of England: “The most rigid discipline that can be enforced within a religious society is a very feeble instrument of purification, when compared with a little sharp persecution from without.”

  * With Andros’s demise, Wise’s insubordination mutated into heroism. His court case is gloriously reprised in the pamphlets justifying the coup against royal authority without any hint that the sentencing magistrate had been Stoughton.

  * Ady’s denunciation of “witch-mongers”—and of “the wrongful killing of innocents under the name of witches”—was well known to Increase Mather. He had bought the volume a year earlier in London; he annotated it closely as he read.

  * It is unclear what Stoughton meant to do with the confessors, all of whom returned to prison. It made sense to keep them on hand to corroborate evidence and identify confederates as the trials proceeded. At least some of them expected to hang.

  * There appeared to be some confusion about swearing. If you metaphorically wished the devil to carry off someone or something—a cow, a daughter—did that actually constitute an invitation? You had to be careful with those imprecations, Cotton Mather would warn. When you call the devil, he comes.

  * Reverend Dane would disclaim all knowledge of such charms and experiments. And after forty-four years in the village, living in close contact with his parishioners, he would, he insisted with some embarrassment, have known of such things!

  * It caused the child agonies. And it brought to the door a neighbor who purported to be selling chickens. Assumed to have been conjured by the experiment, she would be accused, tried, and hanged on September 22.

  † Mather would later be called on to defend himself for having conjured the devil in order to cure the Goodwins. In a detractor’s view, his prayers resembled less divine revelation than the “charms and spells of superstitious persons.”

  * Salisbury could not live without him. It disregarded the order.

  * Pike was not the only person to note that there are few witches in the Old Testament, fewer still in the New Testament. He also observed that Old Testament sorcerers were not so very clever. They could not even interpret Pharaoh’s dream!

  † In Salem village, Parris was of a very different mood. Following the psalm on Sunday, August 14, he dismissed his congregation with a prayer and a blessing. He asked that the men remain behind. Had they noticed that several parishioners had recently forgone communion, rarely bothering even to attend meeting? He called for volunteers to look into the matter, one that hardly required an investigation: The empty pews belonged to the families of Rebecca Nurse’s son and sons-in-law. The volunteers had trouble locating Peter Cloyce, rarely at home, the church record drily notes, “being often with his wife in prison, at Ipswich, for witchcraft.”

  * Cotton Mather spun a similarly ego-bolstering theory: it was because the justices were so great that the devil had touched down in Essex County, where he could be assured of a fair match.

  * In fact Wardwell had gone to his death four days earlier. He did not live to be sixty, when his pact with the devil was set to expire.

  * The festivities took place at the home of Bridget Usher, whose husband was then or was about to be in hiding, having been accused of witchcraft.

  * The relations stretched back a generation as well. Sewall’s parents had been married by Saltonstall’s father. Stoughton had served for years alongside Hathorne’s father. Winthrop settled Corwin’s father’s estate. Sewall’s and Cotton Mather’s fathers were friendly; Winthrop’s and Stoughton’s had come to blows.

  † Some carried this to extremes. Increase Mather lost his wife, who was also his stepsister, in 1714. He afterward married his nephew’s widow.

  * One wonders if the result would have been different were the genders reversed. Men tended to fare less well once in the clutches of the witchcraft court.

  * That argument came easily to Cotton Mather, who wrote as naturally as he breathed. His biographer has cause for gratitude, his bibliographer for paralysis. While he claimed his life was “almost a continual conversation with heaven,” Mather managed to produce 437 books, 26 of them between 1692 and 1696.

  * As her trial date approached, a prisoner had appealed to Lady Phips for help. She took it upon herself to sign a release warrant, which the jail keep honored. The retaliation was swift; the governor’s wife was immediately accused.

  * The argument went like this: If the devil assumed the guise of innocents to work witchcraft, then he might just as well borrow their forms to commit theft and murder. And if he did, reasoned Mather, “there would be no living in the world.”

  † Martha Corey had come the closest to making that point in March, when—to Hathorne’s and Noyes’s fury—she had suggested that the girls were “distracted.”

  * Montaigne’s terse, sixteenth-century corollary: “It is, after all, putting a rather high price on conjecture to roast a man alive for it.”

  * In September 1674 Elizabeth Knapp married a young man who worked for a next-door neighbor. We do not know what she thought of the events of 1692, by which time she was the mother of eight.

  † “What will you do for a house to pray in now we have burnt your meetinghouse?” they taunted Willard at the parsonage.

  * Willard appears to have used the touch test with Elizabeth Knapp. He in any event claimed that the sixteen-year-old could distinguish the accused neighbor’s hand from that of all others. New England knew Knapp’s story from Illustrious Providences, in which Increase Mather also used the word “touch.” By the time Cotton Mather included Elizabeth’s story in his Magnalia, she merely sensed—her eyes shut tight—the afflicting woman’s approach; the two do not come in physical contact.

  * Although he demolished the idea that witches revealed their secrets to adolescent girls, he did not suggest that the devil might masquerade as a minister. Those who defended the court tended to steer clear of Burroughs; those who criticized it did not. Burroughs was somehow tainted goods. The attack on York created a martyr of Sewall’s cousin, the butchered Maine minister. It worked the opposite effect on Burroughs.

  * John Miller was happy to offer an opinion. He was less than pleased with New England ways. His advice, he later noted, was requested and “generously given” though no one was so civil as to thank him for it.

  * He had in mind a threefold mission: to enlighten the public and remind them of instances of divine providence; to help them better understand public affairs; and to cure “the spirit of lying, which prevails amongst us.” Included in the offending materials was a report that Andros had armed the Indians. Massachusetts would wait another fourteen years for its first newspaper.

  * How did cats come in for such abuse? Their association with the devil goes back to antiquity, though possibly not as far back as their association with overdeveloped female sexuality, which dates to Aristotle. Black cats in particular bound themselves up with the diabolical; “the archenemy of mankind himself,” they made for the perfect witches’ familiars. Black dogs too recur in the Salem literature, although historically British witches tended to prefer feline to canine form. Cats arguably make the more fitting (and feminine) sorcerers’ apprentices; fickle, undeferential, unpredictable, coy, they go limp with pleasure one minute and brandish their claws the next. By turns purring and predatory, they spring into action at night, slinking through locked doors and pouncing on chests. They detach themselves from
the darkness where least expected.

  * No executed witch precisely fits his description, nor does the prophecy survive. It is not impossible Margaret Jones made one; a healer rumored to have a malignant touch and a gift for forecasting, she was the likely candidate, at the right time. Like Ann Putnam Jr., Cotton Mather was, in any case, reporting on events that had occurred before he was born.

  * Wonders of the Invisible World was in print before the end of the year in London. Even in 1692 some words sold books more effectively than others; on the title page, the English publisher cannily enlarged “trials,” “New England,” and “several witches.” He subsequently advertised the work as “The Trials of Several Witches Lately Executed in New England,” discarding Mather’s original title along with most of his theology. By the time a second edition appeared in February, “Mather’s witch book”—shorn of its sermons and much of its supporting matter—had shrunk to its sensationalistic details. Its publisher hawked it as a sort of oddity from those curious, credulous colonists.

  * If indeed the Mathers’ work was a clumsy case of good cop/bad cop, they might have reversed the assignment. It fell to Cotton, the less gifted politician, to address public order. He overstepped too in his starry-eyed defense of the chief justice, a man his father wholly supported but was less inclined to gush over.

  * He was not the first to catalog kisses. The great English preacher Richard Sibbes had done so decades earlier, in a sermon Parris may have known. Sibbes ends on a note of sweet communion. Parris ends with a choice between Christ’s kisses or curses.

  * In its permanence, a witchcraft accusation resembled an Internet rumor. The majority of the women who were hanged had faced earlier accusations or were daughters of women who had. Indelible stains did not attach themselves to accusers in 1692.

  * Normality took some unusual forms. Eleven months after her husband was hanged, Reverend Burroughs’s widow remarried. Having sworn months earlier that he wished he had never so much as heard Burroughs’s name, Cotton Mather performed the ceremony.

  * The villagers were not alone in believing that destroying paper reverses history. Raiding Indians made off with Andover’s land deeds in 1676 in the hope they might send the Englishmen home.

  * The court papers are thought to have disappeared on August 26, 1765, when a mob ransacked the home of Massachusetts’s last royal governor, splitting open Thomas Hutchinson’s doors and tossing his books into the street. If indeed the papers met that muddy end, it was by the greatest of ironies: the Stamp Act had occasioned the riot. The cost of colonial defense prompted the tax on official documentation, England’s attempt to recoup expenses of the French and Indian War. The colonists resisted the continued English military presence; no foreign enemies plagued them. They had no use for overinvolved paternal authorities. In any event, the trial records were not seen again.

  * Maria Mather suffered a fright when she met a horrible apparition on her porch in her last weeks of pregnancy; the specters that tormented the newly afflicted Boston girl claimed responsibility. Immediately after the birth, Increase Mather also received a venomous letter in which a woman—probably one accused in 1692—warned that Cotton “little knew what might quickly befall some of his posterity.” It was Sarah Good all over again.

  * The funeral was far more elaborate than the one Burroughs had held for his wife and for which he was to pay such a high price. Parris too was slow in paying off the debt.

  * Maule himself backtracked. His wife had testified against Bishop, whom the couple believed a witch. At Bishop’s June hanging, he announced that most of those in prison were as well.

  † Naturally Maule went on to write about his imprisonment and trial in the 1697 New England Persecutors Mauled with Their Own Weapons. For their oppressive tactics, he compared the Massachusetts authorities to Jesuits, monks, and friars. They did the devil’s work, while living regally on plundered estates. And he proposed an alternative interpretation: it was for crimes like those of 1692 that the Lord afterward delivered New England into the hands of barbarous Indians.

  * “If ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless.”

  * Among the “reiterated strikes” that year was fifteen-year-old Betty Sewall’s spiritual meltdown. Weeks earlier the self-proclaimed reprobate was still weeping so profusely she could barely read. Newly returned from Salem, she sat across the aisle from her father on January 14.

  * Of the male victims’, only Burroughs’s estate escaped Corwin’s pillage. Part of it rode off with Mrs. Burroughs instead.

  * He was not unaware of those labors. “And why,” he wondered later, “after all my unwearied cares and pains, to rescue the miserable from the lions and bears of hell which had seized them, and after all my studies to disappoint the devils in their designs to confound my neighborhood, must I be driven to the necessity of an apology?” He made none, comparing the thankless service he had rendered to “ten thousand steps over a rocky mountain filled with rattlesnakes.” He registered only one regret: he should not have invited so many viewers into the “haunted chambers” of the Boston afflicted.

  † The more he considered the matter, the more he resolved to battle the devil. Naturally that required the composition of another volume, in which he explicitly set out a covenant for his readers to sign. He planned to distribute copies of the text weekly where it might prove most beneficial. He was not unaware that—in pressing a book upon the unsuspecting and demanding their signatures—he was himself imitating Satan.

  * One of the few that does is from Wait Still Winthrop. In 1699 he classed Stoughton among men “who are fast to their own interest, but I know not to whose else.” Any man who left the ministry for worldly affairs was, Winthrop huffed, by definition greedy, grasping, and untrustworthy.

  * The William Stoughton Fund continues to support several Harvard students a year, in accordance with his 1701 wishes.

  † Wigglesworth appears to have gone quiet throughout the crisis, though the defecting Salem villagers shared their criticisms of their minister with him in 1693. Wigglesworth favored their appeal. He signed the letter insisting Parris depart a full year before the village minister did so.

  * It is unclear where the monies went. Stoughton took care to exempt Corwin and his heirs from liability in 1694, shielding them from restitution claims. Corwin evidently did not share any proceeds with Herrick, the impoverished undersheriff.

  * Even Cotton Mather executed an about-face, one he knew would sow confusion. To his father-in-law several years after Salem he admitted that “they who are usually look’d upon as enchanted persons, are generally, properly really possessed persons.” As a consequence they made for unreliable witnesses.

  * Freud relied on Virgil to introduce The Interpretation of Dreams with a line particularly suited to Salem: “If I cannot move the upper world,” vows Juno, “I will move the underworld.”

  † Samuel Willard was in the half-destroyed Sewall kitchen that sultry 1695 afternoon as well. Eleven years later he baptized Benjamin Franklin, who would solve the lightning mystery.

  * Vampiric practices could be conjured even without a teenage imagination. Reporting to the Lords of Trade on atrocities in 1689, a Dominion official claimed that the Indians made bloody sport of the colonists, “having killed 500 of them, roasting by slow fire more than 80 poor Christians, whose warm blood they drink, and sometimes eat their flesh, laying their sucking infants to the bleeding veins of their captives.”

  * An ingenious seventeenth-century English physician noted a correlation between the intruders that his mad patients believed leaped on or gnawed at their bodies and witches’ familiars. The pests tended to be winged creatures, mice, rats, and dogs. Mather compared the imp that darted across Margaret Rule’s 1693 pillow to a rat.

  * Calef noted that when families welcomed the Salem girls in their witch-hunting roles, “it was ordinary for other young people to be taken in fits, and to have the same spec
tral sight.”

  * “These prayer meetings are about the only entertainment we have,” complained a twentieth-century mill worker for whom religion—and religious enthusiasm—alone allowed for self-expression.

  † “I have been wicked in my day, but I never thought a little girl like you would ever be able to melt me and end my wicked deeds,” the Wicked Witch chides Dorothy, as she melts away.