The Witches: Salem, 1692 (20 page)

While ministers paid infrequent attention to maternal roles, they tended closely to female piety. They had compelling reason to do so: the majority of every congregation was female. Twenty percent of Mather’s were widows. And although no Puritan lacked for cause to berate herself, there is evidence that women found their faith more disabling than did men, even if they did not always show it with the blazing display of a Betty Sewall. Generally it is a woman who is so convinced of her iniquity that she chooses to drown herself in a puddle, who worries she has sinned against the Holy Ghost, who fears she is “in a worse condition than any toad.” She took a very personal religion very personally. “It amazes me to think one so young as I, scarce 20 years old, should have heaped up so much sin and guilt,” one woman rebuked herself in 1727. Men blamed their sins for corrupting their souls. Women blamed their souls, which is to say themselves. With dismay Reverend Thacher noted that his wife was “ready to draw up deadly conclusions against herself” for having tripped over a chair while pregnant.
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A seven-year-old girl could not eat for fear of damnation.

Well before screams disrupted the Salem parsonage, women had a lock on the captivity narrative, accounts of Indian abductions that inflamed the popular imagination. Rich in lurid detail and crackling
with sexual undercurrents, those tales matched satanic savages with the unlikeliest of adversaries: plucky women who met with—and mastered—every manner of hardship. Recast as religious allegory, the melodramas would not have worked as well with male heroes. Their protagonists were pricked with stones and pinched with ice, as Hannah Swarton would note in describing the harrowing ordeal that swept her from Casco Bay in 1690, an attack George Burroughs survived as well. Swarton’s account of being carried over mountains and swamps by demonic Indians was broadcast by Mather, initially from the pulpit, in 1697 in print. (Here the accounts parted company with traditional fairy tales. Captivity narratives inverted the tale of the rescued princess to celebrate resourceful, resilient women rather than damsels in distress.) The wrinkle with Salem’s infernal onslaught of 1692 was that both the spirited victims and their oppressors were predominantly female. And in a New England first, women’s voices proved so commanding that the spectral testimony of two dead wives could prevail in court against an articulate, Harvard-educated minister.

THE BOSTON AUTHORITIES
issued a warrant for the arrest of George Burroughs on April 30. Burroughs then lived seventy miles north of Salem, in Wells, on the Maine frontier. Though he did so “with all speed,” the Maine and New Hampshire constable was several days in conveying the minister to the village. He arrived on May 4. Hathorne and Corwin had issued fifteen warrants as they awaited his delivery, doubling the number of witch suspects; it was a season when you had more than the usual cause to worry about the stains on your conscience or the wart on your chest. One of Ann Putnam Jr.’s uncles was said to have kept a horse saddled at all times. Again allegations jumped town lines; the early-May arrests included several Beverly suspects. The Salem justices worked overtime to process the complaints, testimonies, and prisoners. They must have felt as beleaguered as the minister dislodged from his home and transported—against his will and as fast as rocky horse paths would allow—to his former parish.

As Burroughs rode south, as Deliverance Hobbs settled into the prison on what is today Salem’s Washington Street, Hathorne and Corwin interrogated several new suspects, all accused by the village girls. Fifty-eight-year-old Dorcas Hoar was well known to the court. A practiced palm reader, she had predicted deaths and infirmities. She had a tendency to appear just before people fell ill. Decades earlier she had consulted a borrowed book of fortunes; she apologized to John Hale when he discovered as much. That was before she became an accomplice of her minister’s thieving servant, so devoted to Hoar that she called her “Mother.” The maid further terrorized Hale’s daughter with reports that old Dorcas Hoar would kill or bewitch her should Rebecca reveal their larceny. Rebecca Hale supplied a convincing digest of Hoar’s witchcraft; she had worked all kinds of sorcery in the Hale household. A singular-looking character, Hoar fit the part, a middle-aged woman who trimmed her gray hair short save for a dark, matted, four-and-a-half-foot-long ponytail. Even to a minister, it appeared “like an elf-lock.” Hoar’s fisherman husband had died suddenly the previous winter. When the coroner’s jury called to examine the body, she had insulted the men, stamping her feet for effect. They were wicked wretches if they took her for a murderer! Like Sarah Good, Hoar was downwardly mobile, having lost out on an ample estate.

As she entered the meetinghouse on May 2 the girls greeted her with convulsions. They explained that she had admitted to the murder of her husband; she boasted that she had killed a Boston woman as well. A new accuser had joined in the chorus. Like Mercy Lewis and Abigail Hobbs, eighteen-year-old Susannah Shelden had grown up largely on the Maine frontier, from which Indians twice drove her family. In the process, she had lost a father, a brother, and an uncle. The brother’s body was recovered, scalped and mutilated. In 1688 the remaining Sheldens had settled in Salem; the village contributed to their support. It seemed that Dorcas Hoar had visited Susannah as well, with her book and two black cats. As Hoar denied the litany of charges, two girls cried that a bluebird melted
into her body. A marshal struck furiously at the air; several saw a pale gray moth fly through the meetinghouse.

Hathorne met his two most combative suspects that spring Monday. As the girls described Dorcas Hoar’s cats, the book, the black man whispering in her ear, she exploded: “Oh! You are liars, and God will stop the mouth of liars.” Hathorne reprimanded her: “You are not to speak after this manner in the court.” Hoar was unmoved. “I will speak the truth as long as I live,” she spat back. Hathorne denounced her “unusual impudence”; it paled next to that of Susannah Martin, a blacksmith’s widow. The tiny, seventy-one-year-old Amesbury woman could hardly take Hathorne’s proceedings seriously. She had already once been accused of witchcraft decades earlier. Her husband had sued for slander; he won, although the accusations continued. Martin was said to have bewitched a woman to insanity, murdered her own infant, borne an imp. On a more pedestrian plane, she had accused a man of theft and quarreled freely with her children. She challenged her seat in the meetinghouse. Disinherited once by a stepmother and again by a nephew-in-law, she had sued, unsuccessfully. Eight accusers contorted as Martin took her place before them on May 2; Ann Putnam managed nonetheless to throw a glove at the older woman. Martin chuckled. “What?” gasped Hathorne, startled. “Do you laugh at it?” “Well I may at such folly,” scoffed Martin. Hathorne upbraided her: “Is this folly? The hurt of these persons?” She had hurt no one, Martin contended, Mercy Lewis tumbling to the ground at her feet.

Precise and self-assured, Martin could only laugh anew at the girls’ antics. “Do you not think they are bewitched?” asked Hathorne. “No, I do not think they are,” Martin replied. Hathorne challenged her to provide a better explanation. Perhaps they dealt in black magic, she suggested. Did Hathorne not remember the Witch of Endor? She too had disguised herself as a saint; the devil could wrap himself in any shape. Martin’s truculence elicited more agitation and some jeering. “You have been a long time coming to the court today, you can come fast enough in
the night,” taunted the Putnams’ maid. “No, sweetheart,” replied the elderly woman, injecting a rare note of sarcasm into the proceedings. If they were going to toss gloves at her, she would hurl words back. “Have you no compassion for these afflicted?” asked Hathorne. “No, I have none,” she snapped. It was believed that if a witch touched a victim, her spell would flow back into her, reabsorbed, like electricity. The authorities ordered the afflicted to approach Martin. Four did so, John Indian vowing as he stepped forward to kill the sorceress. Repelled by her power, he collapsed to the floor.

The entire community believed her guilty, Hathorne informed Martin. “Let them think what they will,” she sniffed as a litany of incomprehensible events were dredged up and laid at her feet. Witchcraft worked a tidying effect: Not only had Martin bewitched cows and drowned oxen, she had transformed herself into a black hog. Eighteen years previously she had walked several miles by foot in the muddiest of seasons without getting so much as her shoes wet. (How had she managed the feat? her accuser asked. She should have been muddy to the knees after such a journey! Martin had been matter-of-fact. She did not enjoy being wet. Swift, nimble traveling—especially travel that sounded to be airborne—was suspect. It was what Indians did. Martin’s crime was worse: heavy, sodden skirts kept women confined; she had slipped her moorings.) On a clear moonlit night, Martin had appeared as a ball of fire. She had turned a dog into a keg. It was she who—disguised as a cat—had leaped through a window to strangle a man in his bed. More than anyone else, the seventy-one-year-old seemed to allow men to reveal that they were scared out of their wits, in fields, in forests, at night in their beds. Did she truly believe the girls dissembled? Hathorne prodded. She could not say. But did she? “I dare not tell a lie if it would save my life,” Martin replied, again acknowledging what, by May, was rumored to be at stake. Others had arrived at the same conclusion; for the first time that week constables failed to locate a suspect. On Monday Salem merchant Philip English actually did vanish into thin air. A wealthy man, he would manage over a month in hiding.

Hathorne had scheduled Burroughs’s examination for May 9; the
minister’s specter flew about madly in anticipation. When not enchanting Keyser’s fireplace, Burroughs tempted Mercy Lewis with a fashion book—she swore it had not been in his study when she worked in his household—and carried her up an exceedingly high mountain. Below her stretched “all the kingdoms of the earth.” They were hers, promised the specter, if she would but sign over her soul. (Burroughs had taught Lewis well: she drew the description nearly verbatim from the book of Matthew, in which the devil tempts Christ, a text Lawson had cited in his March 24 sermon.) Burroughs assaulted the doctor’s niece, one of the few accusers who had not met him before. He was unknown as well to thirty-six-year-old Sarah Bibber when, in somber minister’s garb, he pinched her and proposed she accompany him as she made her way to the village for that morning’s hearing. He introduced himself neither as a conjurer nor as a wizard; only in the meetinghouse would she realize who her dark-suited escort had been.

The day before Burroughs’s hearing, Parris administered the village sacrament, warning that those who partook of the devil’s fare were not to drink of the Lord’s cup. Through the summer, he reminded his congregants that there were but two parties in the world: “Everyone is on one side or the other,” he would warn, unnecessarily. As those in his household well knew, each member of the community was already either with him or against him. The village was in the thick of a cosmic battle, one the devil and his troops would wage as long as they could. By the fall Parris compared their siege to biblical trials, cataloging enemies from Herod to Louis XIV, who seven years earlier had revoked the Edict of Nantes, depriving Protestants of their liberties; the Puritan devil reliably enjoyed a French connection, whether to kings, dragoons, priests, or fashion. Parris reproved anyone who doubted the conspiracy. “If ever there were witches, men and women in covenant with the devil, here are multitudes in New England,” he proclaimed. Those infernal fiends occupied the most civilized and the most remote precincts. They had evolved from their traditional form. Where previously “some silly ignorant old woman” might have pestered, now highly knowledgeable,
ostensibly devout sorcerers of both sexes preyed upon the settlers, a most pernicious state of affairs.

Less than twenty-four hours later, George Burroughs walked into the same raftered room, wearing a sober black suit and waistcoat if not the distinctive flat, white collar of his profession. Having preached in the meetinghouse three times weekly for over two years, he knew its every plank intimately; he could not have retained fond memories of the building. In a contentious discussion there nine years earlier, he and John Putnam had attempted to settle their accounts, a resolution that eluded both men. In the course of that meeting Putnam encouraged a skittish marshal to extract payment from his former houseguest. Burroughs shrugged him off. He had nothing with which to settle his debt apart from his body. He then issued a challenge: “Well, what will you do with me?” The marshal appealed to Putnam. “What shall I do?” he asked, quailing a little before a clergyman. Thomas Putnam signaled to his brother; the two conferred outside. On their return, they were firm. “Marshal,” John commanded, “take your prisoner.” He secured Burroughs overnight at Ingersoll’s. Ultimately the level-headed innkeeper saved the day; Ingersoll managed to persuade the Putnams that the debt had been paid. Burroughs could not have expected ever again to set foot in the village meetinghouse as either a minister or a wizard.

Hathorne and Corwin approached Burroughs’s 1692 hearing differently from that of any previous suspect. By the time they deposed him on May 9 they had collected formal testimony and sat flanked by two additional justices. The first was forty-year-old Samuel Sewall, round-faced, with small, glinting eyes, thin lips, and a tumble of gray-brown curls. His brother, Stephen, housed Parris’s daughter down the street from the town meetinghouse. The second was William Stoughton, former Massachusetts deputy president. The presence of the two men spoke to the gravity of the situation. It also made it more ticklish. Burroughs and Sewall had known each other at Harvard. They had socialized over the intervening years; Sewall had loaned Burroughs money. Both Hathorne and Corwin knew Burroughs from their 1690 trip to Maine.

The grandson of a Cambridge-educated, Suffolk County rector, Burroughs grew up in Maryland, to which his parents had immigrated. The family was small and itinerant. An only child, Burroughs moved with his mother to Massachusetts, where she joined the Roxbury church in 1657. His father, a merchant mariner, traveled the coast. Burroughs graduated from Harvard in 1670, a year behind Sewall and Bayley, the village’s first minister. (He narrowly missed Parris, who arrived in Cambridge as he left.) Both parents returned to England, leaving Burroughs on his own. At least initially, he fell in with the Massachusetts establishment. Sewall would journey to hear Burroughs lecture as late as 1691, eighteen months before he sat in judgment of him. In 1674, having married and served as a schoolmaster, Burroughs joined the Roxbury church and became a father. Shortly thereafter he accepted a pulpit in Casco, a prosperous settlement slightly smaller than Salem village, today a part of Portland, Maine. It was not a plum posting. Generally relations were frosty between eastern Maine and the Puritan establishment. Irregularities tended to creep into the preaching there, as Maine clergymen made concessions to their heterogeneous flocks. On a large bay, amid miles of farm-and marshland, Burroughs ministered to a collection of Anglicans, Baptists, and Puritans, to frontiersmen, seagoing traders, and recent immigrants. The frontier towns submitted to Massachusetts’s jurisdiction at about the time that Burroughs moved to Roxbury; in the process, they traded religious freedom for military protection. That did not relieve them of the need to appeal to provincial authorities for their scant share of resources. Massachusetts delivered grudgingly and desultorily, despite the fact that much of the colonial elite—the Salem justices included—had large financial interests in Maine fishing and lumber industries. Over and over officials washed their hands of the vulnerable frontier.
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In 1690, Corwin and Hathorne had recommended that Massachusetts withdraw its soldiers, with disastrous results.