The Witches: Salem, 1692 (34 page)

Ann Foster could fly across Essex County at high speed, but—the widow of an Andover farmer, even a prosperous one—she could not escape. One Rowley man broke his sister-in-law out of the Ipswich prison. She did not get very far; he paid a fine. When a warrant went out for sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Colson, accused by the village girls in May, she was nowhere to be found. Word had it that, poised to flee Massachusetts, she hid in Boston or Cambridge. Early in September the constable and his men tracked her to the home of her Reading grandmother. (Her mother, grandmother, and aunt had been rounded up in the meantime.) When they came for Elizabeth on a Sabbath morning, the men found the house locked tight. The deputy constable called to a colleague for assistance; suddenly they heard the back door fly open. Out sprinted the teenager. Sticks in hand, the constables gave chase, bounding across a neighbor’s field. Nearly upon Elizabeth, one breathlessly called out: Why did she bother to run when he would surely catch her? He got no reply. The sixteen-year-old continued as fast as her legs would carry her and her skirts would allow, stumbling in the field, picking herself
up again, shaking her hand behind her as if striking at her pursuers. Outrun, the two men sent their dog ahead. He leaped around the teenager but did not attack. The chase continued to a stone wall at the edge of some brush. By the time the constable reached the thicket Elizabeth had vanished. He beat the scrub; a great cat raced toward him, to stare him in the face. It scrambled off when the official attempted to strike it with his stick. It took little to understand that Colson had transformed herself. Hers was a daring escape, a fox hunt in which the fox prevailed. It left two grown men scratching their heads. Colson nonetheless wound up in the Cambridge jail ten days later. Meanwhile the whereabouts of Mary and Philip English appears to have been an open secret. No one tracked the couple—dogs at their heels and sticks in hand—as had been the case with fugitives in earlier capital cases.

Nor were arresting officers a suspect’s worst enemies. When the authorities came for sixteen-year-old Martha Tyler, an Andover blacksmith’s daughter, she attempted no headlong lunge for the back door. A pious girl, she had no crime to which to confess. That was before the ride to Salem, which she made with her brother or stepbrother. He spent the three-hour trip goading her. She begged him to stop; she knew nothing of witchcraft. On their Salem arrival she was led into a room, her brother on one side of her and John Emerson, the Gloucester minister, on the other. Emerson could see the devil before her. He swatted him away with his hand. The two men pressed her, Emerson mercilessly: “Well, I see you will not confess! Well, I will now leave you; and then you are undone, body and soul, forever.” A schoolmaster, he knew something about extracting truths from adolescents. Her brother commanded Martha to stop lying. She was a witch. “Good brother,” she pleaded, “do not say so; for I shall lie if I confess, and then who shall answer unto God for my lie?” He stood firm, insisting that her complicity was established, “that God would not suffer so many good men to be in such an error about it, and that she would be hanged if she did not confess.” Martha capitulated. She preferred any dungeon to more psychological bludgeoning, as others
would discover that they preferred to confess than to suffer long periods on their feet, without sleep, under ruthless interrogation. Many no longer knew what to believe. Others came to believe what they were told.

As the August court session approached, time seemed to accelerate; apprehensions built all around. Even as the grand jury assembled in Salem town, to which there was a general migration, Hathorne and Corwin continued their village hearings. On the Saturday that Elizabeth Cary escaped from prison, they interrogated Mary Toothaker in the village. A midwife, she had been widowed six weeks earlier, when her husband of thirty-seven years—an accused Billerica folk healer—had died in jail. Her eldest daughter had already confessed. Given the fact that Toothaker’s younger sister was Martha Carrier, the justices must have examined Toothaker intently. She resisted their allegations, having promised herself twenty times over that she would prefer to die on the gallows “than say anything but that she was innocent.” But perhaps, she now realized, wavering, that had been the devil speaking? With no clobbering minister or relative at her side, she pummeled herself. Was she having trouble confessing because she was innocent, she brooded, or because the devil silenced her? He sometimes interfered with her prayers. Might she unwittingly have covenanted with him? Warily she felt her way, trying to satisfy the authorities without mutilating the truth. To stand firm on her innocence was, she understood, to prove guilty of sinful intractability. Bewitched girls meanwhile tumbled about her. She finally confessed. By gripping a dishcloth tight in her hands, she had afflicted a long-suffering Andover man. She was convinced—or she convinced herself—that she was a witch. She had been one for just under two years. The devil promised her happy days with her son.

In the course of her July 30 confession Toothaker implicated eleven others, including her sister, her nephew, her daughter, and Burroughs, whose meetings she had twice attended in the Parris pasture. More than anyone she illuminated how those accounts came about. She proceeded by fits and starts, as if she were choking or hyperventilating. Throughout she has her doubts. She
thought
she was at the meetings. She
thought
she
set her hand to a book there. She
thought
the idea was to topple the church; she
thought
she heard the sound of a trumpet. She could not be certain as to which eminence deposed her. “The devil is so subtle that when she would confess he stops her,” noted the court reporter. Satan deluded her with Scripture. Which verse? asked a magistrate. The psalm that included the line “Let my enemies be confounded,” Toothaker replied. It led her uncharitably to wish her accusers dead.

Her approach to her faith was equally instructive; against the riptide of piety ran an undertow of doubt. Toothaker felt herself worse off for her baptism. She had not improved substantially since. The fear of Indians paralyzed her that spring; she woke regularly from nightmares in which she fended off assaults. In the throes of her anxieties, a tawny man appeared. He would protect her, after which she was to pray to him. She readily consented. Perhaps, she now realized, she had been doing business with Satan all along! There was much confusion as to who the enemy was and if he might well be you. In the end Mary Toothaker made her deal with the devil, because he promised “to deliver her from the Indians,” a rescue she mentioned three times. It turned out to be a brilliant bargain. Forty-eight hours after she confessed to witchcraft, Indians attacked Billerica.

WHEN YOU DESIGNATE
yourselves “a flock in the wilderness,” you are very nearly advertising for predators. A host of them had preyed—or been expected to prey—on New England since its founding. In the words of Mary Rowlandson (who may have had ministerial help with them), the Indians were “ravenous wolves,” “roaring lions and savage bears.” In Mather’s pages Native Americans regularly turned up as tigers, the devil as a tiger or a roaring lion. The Quakers comported themselves as “grievous wolves.” They joined the French and Indians to complete New England’s diabolical menagerie, its lions, tigers, and bears. Bewitched at her May hearing, Ann Putnam Sr. went stiff as a plank. Only outside the meetinghouse did she find relief from the “paws of those roaring lions and jaws of those tearing bears”—words she borrowed from Lawson’s
March 25 sermon. As physical and moral boundaries blurred, so did the rampaging, ravaging predators. (Parris was far from alone in his thinking when, in a May sermon, he lumped together Louis XIV, his Catholic confederates, and a witch-and-wizard-instigating devil, at least two of whom were nowhere in the neighborhood.)
^*
In most statements you could substitute the word “Indian” for “Catholic” without altering the meaning of the phrase. Inevitably it entailed subversion.
^†

The Indians were of course also “horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers.” That made sense; the wilderness qualified as a sort of “devil’s den.” Since the time of Moses, the Prince of Darkness had thrived there. He was hardly pleased to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans, in “a corner of the world where he had reigned without any control for many ages.” In fact he was livid about it, asserted Mather, who regularly muddied the zoological waters. Indians, wolves, and devils constituted the “dragons of the wilderness.” To join the Church of England was, in Mather’s estimation, to be bewitched. Quakers were a leprous people in the devil’s snare. He deemed their religion every bit as wholesome as “juice of toads.” Given the symbiotic relationship of an oppressed people and an inhospitable climate, it was from there but a short step to a colluding axis of evil.

The muddled fears produced a snarl of blame. When fire broke out in Boston, it was said to be the work of Baptists. Who slit the throats of the sheep grazing late on Cambridge Common? It had been wolves, but it made sense, late in 1691, to ban Frenchmen anyway. In 1689, agitating against Andros, Mather referred to the (fictitious) decade-old Popish Plot, still vivid in the New England mind. The new Indian war seemed “a branch of the plot to bring us low.” Mather ascribed Phips’s disastrous Quebec campaign to the Anglican presence in Boston; it made the Lord
angry. It helped that conspiracies came as naturally as did covenants to a New Englander, with his sense of sanctified mission and his insistence on purity. As an Indian informant put it, the colonists were as “apt to believe as children.”
^*
They felt themselves stalked on all sides. The Puritans had a natural Anglo-Saxon love of plot; as religion stood at the center of their lives, those became diabolical plots. Reverend Moody commented, in 1688, on the “unaccountable intrigues” that were afoot. Samuel Willard and Salem’s John Higginson, moderate, prudent men, fiercely contended that Papist cabals either targeted or would soon target Massachusetts. Well before spectral Frenchmen infiltrated Gloucester, rumors flew that a crew of Irishmen headed to Massachusetts to establish Roman Catholicism in New England. Of course the shape-shifting, satanic saboteurs served an additional purpose: New England’s enemies were its church’s friends. They filled the pews. Particularly after a season of political storms, the common fears provided solid reason to band together. “O do not quarrel any more,” pleaded Mather in 1690, “but unite immediately against your more united enemies.”
^†

In deposing Andros, the colonial elite had charged that their governor schemed to deliver them to “a foreign power.” (That conspiracy too featured menacing redcoats and a crown, if not a high-crowned hat.) Cotton Mather spoke to the same fears in 1690, when he preached on New England in a state of “distress and danger as it never saw before.” His was a law-enforcing, discipline-endorsing address; in their sins and discontents they had brought down “whole armies of Indians and Gallic blood hounds.” The authorities had failed in protecting the flock. Without a charter, New England stood at the mercy of wild beasts. A Mather sermon on witchcraft could sound indistinguishable from a tirade against a royal governor, as was clear early in August when Mather addressed the
Salem crisis head-on. He borrowed Mary Rowlandson’s Indian imagery wholesale; en route to their “hellish rendezvous,” the diabolical monsters dragged “the poor people out of their chambers, and carry them over trees and hills, for diverse miles together.” What exactly did an “army of devils” look like? Imagine “vast regiments of cruel and bloody French dragoons,” Mather urged his parishioners, and they would get the idea. There was a crucial difference, however. When it came to marauding Indians, to “bloody and barbarous heathens,” as Stoughton would term the French, you were gut-wrenchingly helpless. Witches you could do something about. When Indians raided Billerica on August 1, they butchered two women, their infants, and their teenage daughters, ages thirteen and sixteen. The judges traveled the same day to Salem, where all roads seemed that sweltering week to lead.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer reconvened in August with a new attorney general. For political reasons, Thomas Newton was replaced by Anthony Checkley, twenty-five years his senior and a friend of Justice Corwin’s. Newton was a level-headed, affable, and conscientious civil servant, though not a barrister by training. Checkley had greater experience of the courts. He had prosecuted an earlier witchcraft case; he had served as attorney general in the Dominion government. He transferred at least eight suspects to Salem. They included no widows, folk healers, or acid-tongued beggar woman. Checkley instead prepared to prosecute four men, one of whom had attempted to elude arrest (John Willard) and one of whom had petitioned the authorities for a change of venue (Procter). George Jacobs, who guffawed that he was as much a buzzard as a wizard, joined them, as did Reverend Burroughs, the conjurer. Yet again it was clear where to begin. At ten in the morning on August 2, Stoughton opened the court with the case against Martha Carrier, the caustic queen of hell, Ann Foster’s Andover flying companion, a woman so guilty she had been a witch two years before she was born, who had alleged the girls were dissembling and out of their wits, whose own sons had accused her, and who had last been seen on May 31 as she was
escorted off, hands and feet bound, from the tumultuous hearing that had left the outgoing attorney general slack-jawed in disbelief.

Carrier’s grand jury was only just under way when word reached Massachusetts that a massive earthquake had weeks earlier devoured Jamaica. A third of the island’s population perished; the town of Port Royal disappeared into the sea. Houses had been swept away and mountains overturned. The calamity had a biblical dimension to it, the more so in Cotton Mather’s retelling: Forty ships capsized, though none from New England. Jamaica’s Puritan minister escaped with his life. Mather had already decided to preach that Thursday from the book of Revelation. Hastily he incorporated the newest scourge into his August 4 sermon. Earthquakes too had diabolical origins; the devil raged among them, knowing his time to be short.