by Stacy Schiff
* And as would be said of Mather’s monumental New England history, the Magnalia would have been a better book if he had had a smaller library.
† When Calef and Mather began exchanging insults, each mocked the other for being the kind of men “who think that they have engrossed all the learning in the world.” Calef suggested the Massachusetts ministers had gorged on the fables of Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Brattle indicted the Harvard curriculum, heavy on Greek and Roman mythology.
‡ His father helped. In Cases of Conscience, Increase Mather granted that “it is not usual for devils to be permitted to come and violently carry away persons through the air, several miles from their habitations. Nevertheless, this was done in Swedeland, about 20 years ago, by means of a cursed knot of witches there.”
* Several marked gender differences emerged in the course of the trials. Men crafted more elaborate stories. They rarely saw ghosts, who were primarily female. Long lists of ancient oddities did not attach themselves to men. Women tended to hallucinate more, or at least to point more often to figures others could not see who violently ripped out their bowels. Men appeared to have more difficulty accusing one another, although women arguably acted more stoically. Mary Esty pleaded for the lives of others. John Procter did not. Women neither incriminated husbands nor abandoned old friends. The men however attracted more attention. Sewall mentions only suspected or convicted wizards in his diary; Brattle singles out two men for their dignity en route to the gallows.
* In the end only three Salem villagers were hanged. No original village covenant signer was accused.
* He had a counterexample in his discredited political ally Joseph Dudley. “They look upon me,” Dudley explained to an English correspondent in February 1692, “as a strange creature in their forests.” Gedney too had been voted out of office “with great contempt and scorns” for his pro-English stance.
† William Barker dated his world-turned-upside-down pact with the devil to the year of the coup. Abigail Hobbs hinted at the same date, although she supplied several. There is as well a curious and perhaps wholly coincidental correlation between the length of a diabolical contract—generally between six and eight years—and that of an indenture agreement.
* The median age of the core accusers was seventeen. Even including thirty-year-old Ann Putnam Sr., the median age of sixteen of the nineteen who hanged was fifty-six. (We have no birth dates for three.)
* The sense that the devil had made them do it would find its echo years later in Hawthorne. As the traveler with the twisted staff informs Goodman Brown: “I have a very general acquaintance here in New England. The deacons of many a church have drunk the communion wine with me; the selectmen, of diverse towns, made me their chairman; and a majority of the Great and General Court are firm supporters of my interest. The governor and I, too—but these are state secrets.”
* Salem town reversed those of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey in 1712.
* When in 1712 a Westfield girl accused her mother of witchcraft, the court found her guilty of having violated the Fifth, Sixth, and Ninth Commandments.
* In the just-deserts department, he wound up with a high-strung third wife whose tantrums he deemed “little short of a proper satanical possession.” Lydia Mather made scenes, ran off to live at the neighbor’s, cursed her husband, and at one point stole and defaced his diary.
* Brattle married a daughter of Wait Still Winthrop and helped to found the more liberal Boston congregation that bears his name. Having blamed his alma mater for the “slips and imperfections” in his calculations, he endowed a Harvard fellowship in mathematics.
* God would persist in testing the colonies, the colonies in interpreting those strikes as salutary. “I think we stood in need of a frown from heaven. I should have suspected that our cause had not been owned as a divine one if we had prospered without it,” Benjamin Rush, the founder of American psychiatry, wrote in September 1776, recasting British victories as colonial godsends.
* He changed the spelling of his name, by some accounts adding the w to distance himself from the man who had branded Salem. That was unnecessary: Hawthorne also descended from Philip English, who went to his grave cursing Hathorne, never to know that his daughter would marry his persecutor’s son.
* Ipswich and Topsfield tussle today over which town can properly claim the hayenchanting Sarah Wilds, an undesirable in 1692.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Detail of Massachusetts Bay, 1692
Samuel Parris’s notes for his March 27, 1692, sermon
Cast of Characters
I: The Diseases of Astonishment
II: That Old Deluder
III: The Working of Wonders
IV: One of You Is a Devil
V: The Wizard
VI: A Suburb of Hell
VII: Now They Say There Is Above Seven Hundred in All
VIII: In These Hellish Meetings
IX: Our Case Is Extraordinary
X: Published to Prevent False Reports
XI: That Dark and Mysterious Season
XII: A Long Train of Miserable Consequences
Photos
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Stacy Schiff
Selected Bibliography
Notes
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Stacy Schiff
Cover photograph by José Picayo
Cover design by Mario J. Pulice
Cover copyright © 2015 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Detail of Massachusetts Bay, 1692, by Debra Lill.
Samuel Parris's notes for his March 27, 1692, sermon, “occasioned,” he noted, “by dreadful witchcraft broke out a few weeks past.” With the announcement of his text—“Have not I chosen you, and one of you is a devil”—Sarah Cloyce stormed out of the meetinghouse. A week later she was accused of witchcraft. (MS 101740 Samuel Parris sermon notebook, 1689–1695. Connecticut Historical Society.)
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ISBN 978-0-316-20061-5
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