Six Women of Salem

by Marilynne K. Roach

  Besides the linen and plate the English family would keep as trophies, the late Captain Corwin’s estate, once the widow died, delivered £44:00:6 worth of miscellaneous goods to Philip on December 28, 1704.

  Sometime after their 1696 lawsuit, Mary died, before Philip’s marriage to widow Sarah Ingersoll on September 20, 1698. Mary was probably buried in Burial Point, but no stone survives, and Salem’s vital records have no notice of her death.

  At least one of her daughters was educated in Boston. Along with other young gentlewomen, Susanna attended Mistress Mary Turfrey’s boarding school, where her lessons included needlework. There she embroidered a two-foot-by-three-foot apron embellished with a crewel-work vase of flowers and birds worked in gold thread, far more decorative than her mother’s sampler of practical stitches. She would marry Jerseyman John Touzel, one of her father’s business associates, in 1700. By then Philip was not only back in the top 1 percent of Salem taxpayers but had also been elected to serve Salem in the House of Representatives.

  Nine years later he joined with twenty-one others, including Nurse and Procter kin, to petition the government to help those “Blasted in our Reputations and Estates” by the witch trials. When the General Court moved to pay restitutions in 1710, Philip submitted a long list of items taken from his warehouses and his home—over £1,100 worth. He concluded by asserting,

  The foregoing is a true Account of what I had seized tacking away Lost and Embazeld whilst I was a prisoner in the Yeare 1692 & whilst on my flight for my Life besides a Considerable quantity of household goods & other things which I Cannot Exactly give a pertickolar Acc[ount] off for all which I Never Resived any other or further satisfacon for them then sixty Pounds 3s payd Me by the Administrators of George Corwine Late sherife deses’d.

  And he did not neglect to mention the bobtailed cow.

  The legislature had set aside only so much for restitution payments, and the other families, who had less to begin with, lost far more proportionately than Philip had. They refused his petition, yet Philip persisted, and in 1717 the government offered £200.

  Once an Episcopal congregation formed St. Michael’s Church in Marblehead, Philip sailed across Salem Harbor to attend services there until he helped found St. Peter’s parish in Salem. In 1722 his temper flared into not only a denunciation of the late Reverend Noyes as the murderer of Rebecca Nurse and John Procter but also a declaration that the Salem Church was the “Devil’s church.” Sued for slander, he pled not guilty but again lost his temper, launching “vile” and “abusive language” against both the church and the justices he faced. A night in jail convinced him to apologize. However, the same thing happened again in 1724. His wife, Sarah, died around that time, his business was declining, and his family realized that Philip had become “clouded in mind.” In 1727 Philip granted son-in-law John Touzel power of attorney to enact his business matters and went to live with him and Susanna, paying them twenty shillings a week for room, board, and washing (far more than the two shillings and six pence of the basic jail charge).

  But his mind continued to dim, with his “estate greatly wasted and daily wasting,” according to his son Philip Jr., even with Touzel handling the finances. The Salem selectmen granted guardianship of Philip English in 1732 to his friend Mr. Thomas Manning of Ipswich and to son Philip English, “innholder.”

  Matters came to a head again “when Mr Touzel turned Father out of doors,” as son Philip complained when he had to take in the difficult old man. Philip lived with Philip Jr. until he died on March 10, 1736.

  Philip’s mind may have been clouded, but he never forgot a grudge. During his last years—if not on his deathbed—when urged to forgive his enemies before he faced the next life, Philip reluctantly agreed, then added at one instance, “But if I get well, I’ll be damned if I forgive him!”

  Philip’s body was buried on March 15, 1736, in St. Peter’s churchyard on land the family had donated. The church bell tolled his passing. Unfortunately, no stone remains to mark the spot.

  The family was then left to settle his estate and, now that the widower was deceased, Mary’s estate as well. Philip’s outstanding debts triggered a flurry of lawsuits, including one from the family of George Hollard, who had not only hidden him in 1692 but also provided for him and Mary while they lived in the Boston jailer’s house as well as cared for their daughter Mary when they fled to New York.

  Philip’s daughter Susanna Touzel made sworn statements about these episodes but, “by reason of Sickness & bodily Infirmity,” was unable to travel to Boston or even to the Probate Court’s sittings in Salem. As Francis Ghatman “Churgion” wrote, “she hath an ulcerous bone in her legg and by [that] reason it is much inflamed.” Both she and her husband, John, soon died, leaving three minor children.

  Susanna seems to have passed the Corwin spoils to her daughter Susanna, who married John Hathorne, a grandson of Judge John Hathorne. When elderly, Widow Hathorne regaled her minister William Bentley with the family stories, showing him the Corwin silver along with the sampler worked so long before by her grandmother. Mary English, Bentley noted on May 6, 1783, “had the best education of her times. Wrote with great ease & has left a specimen of her needlework in her infancy, or Youth. It is about 2 feet by 9 inches, like a sampler. It concludes with an Alphabet & her name, in the usual form. The figures are diversified with great ease & proportion, & there are all the stitches known to be then in use, & an endless variety of figures in right lines, after no example of nature.”

  After Widow Susanna (Touzel) Hathorne died in 1802, Bentley helped appraise the family possessions in the old English Mansion, marveling that this was probably “the last time the remains of the first generation were to be seen together in any town of Massachusetts. The singular pride of this family has rendered them tenacious of the lands & of the moveables of their ancestors, & a more curious sight was not to be seen in America.”

  Ownership of the mansion was divided among the heirs, with the “spoils” from Corwin passing to Mary’s great-granddaughter Susanna (Hathorne) Ingersoll and later to her only surviving child, Susanna. (Another branch of the family kept Mary’s acrostic poem. In 1859 it belonged to “a lady of Boston, one of her descendants.”) Like her parents, this Susanna Ingersoll lived in the former Turner Mansion, later remembered as the House of the Seven Gables after her cousin Nathaniel Hawthorne depicted a similar house in his novel of that name. She also came into possession of the whole of the English Mansion, now run down—a tavern in the basement, roof ornaments lost, and facade gables replaced by rows of small attic dormers. When workmen demolished it in 1833, they discovered the secret garret room.

  Susanna Ingersoll, who never married, adopted the cook’s son Horace Connolly and, on her death in 1868, left her estate to him. Although he was then the Episcopal rector of St. Mark’s in Boston, he undertook several other careers in his lifetime with little success, eventually losing his inheritance—the prized family silver, including the pieces from Corwin, melted for scrap—before dying in poverty.

  The sampler, however, survived. Connolly may have sold it to someone more concerned with preserving artifacts of Salem’s past. When Salem antiquarian George Curwen died in 1900, he willed a large part of his collection to Salem’s Essex Institute—including Mary English’s sampler. Curwen is a variant spelling of the name Corwin, and George Rea Curwen was descended from Judge Jonathan Corwin of the witchcraft court. The piece remains in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, the Essex Institute’s successor, an example of history’s ironies.

  Ann Putnam Sr.

  Once the trials wound down, ANN PUTNAM receded into obscurity, with hints about her life tied to the recorded activities of her husband, her fortunes rising and falling with his.

  Thomas had to make up for the losses on his farm incurred during the growing seasons of 1692, when he spent so much time absent, in town on court business—the £5 the court paid him in December 1693 for his writing duties would not go far. He certain
ly paid close attention to the Village’s problems with the rates committee, which still refused to collect the taxes needed both to pay Reverend Parris and to mend the meeting house, which had received such hard use by the crowds during the witch hearings. Thomas’s half-brother Joseph Putnam was on that committee along with once-suspected Daniel Andrews and Rebecca Nurse’s husband Francis.

  The next rates committee was no help either, as it included Rebecca Nurse’s sons-in-law Thomas Preston and John Tarbell and Nurse in-law James Smith. When the Village sued this committee for dereliction of duty, Tarbell and Preston each defiantly paid the forty shilling fine plus twelve shillings six pence court costs. And still the rates remained uncollected.

  Ann, meanwhile, was with child again and gave birth to a daughter on December 26, 1693. They named her Sarah, the same as the child who had died painfully some years before, whose death Ann had blamed on the malice of witches.

  Thomas served throughout 1694 on the committee trying to get a written deed and bills of sale for the parsonage house and land—that Parris thought he already owned—from their donors Hutchinson, Holton, and Ingersoll. In addition, the Village remained nervously alert upon news of Indian attacks at Groton in Massachusetts, then further off in Maine and New Hampshire, then suddenly as close as Haverhill. On the day before an assault on Spruce Creek in August, eight-month-old Sarah died—another sorrow. Ann could not blame Rebecca now. If Goody Nurse truly had been a witch, then she could not reach them from Hell. If she had never been a witch after all, then that fact may have opened a distressing line of thought.

  The following winter Thomas’s widowed stepmother, Mrs. Mary Putnam, who shared her husband’s last homestead with Thomas’s half-brother Joseph and his family, began to fail in health. “I thought she was not a woman long for this world,” Dr. William Griggs would testify, “by the disease that was upon her.” He did not specify what disease, but he was not so quick to diagnose “an evil hand.” In fact, reputable doctors no longer diagnosed the Invisible World as a cause for illness. As time passed, Mary Putnam suffered fits of unconsciousness that “stupified her understanding and memory.” She was sometimes lucid and sometimes unable to recognize even the familiar people around her.

  Mary Putnam signed and dated her will on January 28, 1695, then died on March 17, after suffering days and nights of reoccurring fits. With Widow Putnam dead, the estate of Thomas Putnam Sr. could now be settled.

  Thomas Jr., meanwhile, continued to be plagued by the dissenters’ commotions, the stubborn rates committee, the petitions to remove Parris, and the counterpetitions from those who wanted Parris to remain. In May 1695 Thomas and 105 other Villagers—many of them his relatives—petitioned to retain Parris. Fifty-one women signed, but Ann’s name was absent. She gave birth to a son, Seth, the day before and would have been recovering from the effort, though her husband could have signed for her. Although Parris would baptize Seth, the omission suggests a possible change of mind. Did Ann regret her former adherence to the minister’s views in 1692? Without Rebecca Nurse to blame and fear, might she now doubt her own actions and, by extension, the true state of her soul?

  Spring also brought details of Mary Putnam’s will, including the disturbing news that Israel Porter had steadied—or controlled—her hand while she signed it. “To my husband Putnam’s children” she left small amounts: five shillings to Thomas Putnam, five to Edward, five to Deliverance Walcott, and ten each to Elizabeth Bailey and Prudence Wayman. “Unto all which I have done something already according to my ability and might, and would have done more but that some of my husband’s children and relations have brought upon me inconvenient and unnecessary charges and disbursements at several times.”

  Everything else she gave to her son Joseph.

  Furious, Thomas and Edward and brother-in-law Jonathan Walcott petitioned the probate court in June not to accept the will before they could contest it and to require the executor—half-brother Joseph—to take an inventory of their late father’s estate. The widow had had no right to dispose of Putnam property beyond what her husband—their father—had specified in his will.

  A week later, on June 10 (the anniversary of Bridget Bishop’s death), Thomas Putnam journeyed to Salem town, where he “accidentally”—as he claimed—found Joseph preparing to have his mother’s will probated that very day. Thomas immediately dashed off another petition to Probate Judge Bartholomew Gedney, protesting Joseph’s move and asking for time to clarify the state of Mary Putnam’s mind when she signed: “For it seemith very hard for flesh and blood to bear, for those who know not what an oath means in a word to swear away three or four hundred pounds from the right owners thereof, when the law also requires credible witnesses in so weighty [an] affair.” He signed his name and that of his kinsmen.

  Gedney evidently complied, for several depositions survive from people who visited Mrs. Putnam during her last illness and found her state of mind varying from ordinary to dazed. The evidence that scuttled the stepson Thomas’s claim may have been that of Rebecca Nurse’s son-in-law Thomas Preston: Thomas Putnam himself had commented in February that Mrs. Putnam was a very sick woman, unlikely to recover due to the many fits but that he thought she was then as clear minded as she ever was.

  So Thomas and Ann were further impoverished, left with five shillings when they expected to have £300 to £400, whereas half-brother Joseph inherited the bulk of their father’s estate.

  In April 1696 the male church members met in Thomas and Ann’s home. There Parris announced his intent to leave, and no one persuaded him to stay.

  The year stumbled on while Indians attacked nearby towns and Thomas’s prospects faded. He sold “about eight acres of upland, swamp and meadowland” bordering the Ipswich River in Topsfield to a group of Boxford and Topsfield men, joint owners of a new mill. Both he and Ann signed the document on June 4, 1696, and so let that land pass to outsiders, some of them Rebecca Nurse’s kinsmen.

  In January of the following winter Massachusetts held the public fast largely to apologize for the witch trials. Unfortunately, how that service proceeded in Salem Village—with Ann and Annie and the other once-afflicted folk present in the congregation, Thomas who had been so busy writing the testimony, and Parris sitting among the rest as a private inhabitant while someone else substituted in the ­pulpit—passed unrecorded.

  Thomas, meanwhile, taking stock of his finances, collected a quantity of old lumber and reused it to build a smaller house in the north part of his farm on a road leading to his brother Edward’s place. He sold their fine home on the Andover road to the weaver Samuel Braybrook in June 1697 along with the land immediately about the house, but he retained 160 acres of his farm. Ann now had to pack her possessions and move her children to this smaller, lesser home and make the best of it.

  Throughout the remainder of the summer the mediators, including Samuel Sewall and Wait Winthrop, considered the Village quarrel with Parris. Finally acting on their advice, the Village paid Parris, who returned the parsonage deed. Once he moved away with the remains of his family—his wife having died in July 1696—the Village voted to ask young Joseph Green to be their minister.

  Green was ordained nearly a year later, on November 10, 1698, and ten days later performed his first baptisms: four children, all Putnam kin. Thomas Putnam presented the first two, daughters Experience and Susanna. Thomas apparently made no protest over Green’s obliging him and Ann to share benches with Samuel and Mary Nurse.

  In the spring, not long after the Nurse kin made the last payment on the family farm, illness crept into Thomas and Ann Putnam’s family. The children—or most of them—seem to have survived, but whatever malady seized Thomas overcame him, carrying him off at last on April 25, 1699.

  Ann herself was also struck, becoming weaker from whatever the illness was. She must have been aware at some point that she was dying, yet she was unable to blame the misfortune on Rebecca Nurse. In her last days she had time to wonder again about the state of her soul,
whether she was really elect or not, whether she had despoiled her hopes of Heaven with her accusations of Rebecca Nurse and the others, whether she had, however unwittingly, furthered the Devil’s work. Two weeks after her husband’s death, on June 8, Ann also died, age thirty-seven.

  The sparse inventory of Thomas’s estate amounted to £437:9:0, not counting the debts. It took little space to record the livestock and less to list the furniture. Yet for all his losses, Thomas had retained his “cane with a silver head and ferule,” a gentleman’s walking stick appraised at £1:15:0.

  Annie, the eldest, was nineteen and, by family tradition, assumed care of her siblings. In time the minors chose various uncles as guardians, and the farm seems to have been rented out to others, at least until the sons were old enough to work it.

  Eight years later Annie, now twenty-seven, conferred with Reverend Green about joining the church. By this time the requirements for full admission had relaxed to being a strong heartfelt desire for the sacraments and a generally good Christian life rather than a conviction that one was elect. The assumption was that mortals could not really know such a thing. But she and the Village—and God—knew of the chaos and deaths to which Annie had contributed in 1692, how she had furthered the Devil’s work.

  Reverend Green counseled her, drafted her confession, and consulted with Samuel Nurse, who was still trying clear his mother’s name. And Samuel, to Annie’s relief, did not object. Green wrote the text of her confession in the church record book, and to this Annie signed, one evening at the parsonage, her whole name—Ann Putnam—not just the mark she had scrawled on some of the witch trial documents.