Six Women of Salem (33 page)

Mary Warren, left behind in Salem jail, fought off specters. When the convulsions passed and Mary seemed to be in a trance, she was heard conversing with the spirits.

“[W]ho ar the[e] what is your name[?]” asked Mary. “[W]hat totheker[?] Doktr toothekers wiffe[?] I wont i wonte i will not touch the book.”

When she came out of her trance she explained that the specters of Goodwives Mary Ireson and Mary Toothaker had tried to make her sign the Devil’s book, threatening her with a coffin and a winding sheet—threatening to kill her.

Although the legislature was still sitting in Boston, word of their deliberations trickled back to Salem. One of their first decisions was to appoint Thursday, May 26 as a fast day due to the troubles of the times. Salem Village appears to have hosted the Thursday lecture on this occasion, but afflicted fits interrupted the day throughout.

A flock of specters, including that of Mistress Mary Bradbury, attacked Annie Putnam, Mary Walcott, and Mercy Lewis. Mrs. Mary Marshall from nearby Reading also convulsed, targeted by a specter of her neighbor Goodwife Sarah Rice. (That Mrs. Bradbury would assail Annie would be no surprise to her mother, for Ann and several of her kin had suspected that woman for years.) The afflicted also reported the specters of Goodwives Wilmot Read of Marblehead and Elizabeth Fosdick of Malden. The latter, said Annie, boasted of hurting her uncle Mr. Peter Tufts’s slave woman.

The magistrates returned from Boston to Salem by May 28 to a flurry of additional complaints from Villagers Joseph Houlton and John Walcott against even more suspected witches, including John and Elizabeth Procter’s fifteen-year-old son, William. The magistrates themselves could report how the new government was reestablishing itself and how, while that slow process proceeded, there was at last an official, if temporary, court of Oyer and Terminer to handle the crowd of cases overwhelming Essex County and spilling into Middlesex and Suffolk as well.

Thomas Putnam, who had served as scribe to write down many statements and complaints—for others as well as for his own family—made out the paperwork for an official complaint against Mrs. Cary, who had been arrested earlier after her visit to the Village. From there she had been taken first to the Boston jail then, after much effort from her husband, transferred to the Cambridge jail in their own county of Middlesex. After her first night there the jailer fastened eight pounds of leg irons on her body to subdue her reported specter. This distressed her so that she fell into “Convulsion Fits.” Her husband thought she would die of them, but pleading with authorities to remove them for the sake of her health did nothing to change the order.

Also on May 28 Thomas Putnam wrote a list of the thirteen recently accused suspects along with the corresponding victims of each. He wrote Mary Walcott’s name beside each entry and Annie’s name by three (though she may be included with “& the rest” afflicted by Captain Flood). In addition to the suspects named in the complaint—Martha Carrier, Elizabeth Fosdick, Wilmot Read, Sarah Rice, Elizabeth How, John Alden, William Procter, John Flood, Mary and Margaret Toothaker, and Arthur Abbott—he wrote the names of Elizabeth Paine and Mary Warren, who were not in the official complaint. Their victims were listed as Mary Walcott, Abigail Williams, Mercy Lewis, and Ann Putnam (his daughter). Evidently the afflicted still did not fully trust Mary Warren’s confession.

Mary continued to act afflicted, however, for Nathaniel Putnam and Joseph Whipple made out a second complaint against Goodwives Elizabeth Fosdick of Malden and Elizabeth Paine of Charlestown for tormenting Mercy Lewis and Mary Warren of Salem Village. They presented the paper to Hathorne and Corwin in Salem on May 30, but for some reason the magistrates did not order arrest warrants yet for either of these suspects. The magistrates did, however, record statements the same day relating to the spectral activities of Bridget Bishop, including one from miller William Stacy.

Philip English’s specter was also reportedly active. Susanna Sheldon had stated on May 23 that his and other specters threatened to cut her throat or cut off her legs if she would not sign his book or if she told the magistrates that he had drowned John Rabson. When she resisted, Philip’s specter rushed away to Boston, vowing to kill several folk there and to try to kill the governor, “the gretes ininemy he had,” within six days “if he wos not tacken up [i.e., arrested].” But the real Philip English’s luck ran out, for the law finally found him in Boston on May 30 during a second search of the home of merchant George Hollard, one of his colleagues, where he had hidden all along.

Although the paperwork ordered the prisoner be committed to the marshall of Essex, that office had just been replaced by a sheriff when the government began to be reorganized. George Herrick was now a deputy sheriff under Sheriff George Corwin, Jonathan Corwin’s twenty-five-year-old nephew. It took a while for people to get used to the new terms and remember which to write on the official papers.

Sheriff Corwin’s duties with the newly established Court of Oyer and Terminer began with an order dated in Boston on May 30 and signed by Deputy Governor William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall. It ordered him “in their Majesties’ Names” to publicize the sitting of that court:

[U]pon Thursday next the Second of June next at Eight in the morning, for the tryal of all Crimes and Offences done and perpetrated within the sd County, Requiring all persons concerned as prosecutors or Evidences to give their attendance; And to Return Eighteen honest and lawfull men of yor Bailywick to Serve upon the Grand Enquest, and fforty Eight alike honest and lawfull men to Serve upon the Jury of Tryals at the said Court.

The witch trials had begun.

But first the local magistrates had to examine the latest batch of suspects in the Salem Village meeting house on Tuesday, the last day of May.

John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin brought Mary Warren to the Village along with the rest of their entourage to join Annie Putnam and the other afflicted witnesses: Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Hubbard, Elizabeth Booth, Sarah Bibber, and John Indian.

Although his name does not appear on the official documents of this day, a new magistrate, Bartholomew Gedney (father-in-law of George Corwin, the new county sheriff), was evidently present in addition to Hathorne and Corwin. Reverend Parris prepared to take notes as usual, and Stephen Sewall served as the new court clerk. Thomas Newton, the new king’s attorney, attended as an observer, for this was still a preliminary hearing. Once the trials began he would represent the government’s side of the cases as he had against old Goody Glover in Boston when Sir Edmund Andros was governor—the same Goody Glover who was found guilty of witchcraft and hanged. But for now he watched, as astonished by the goings-on as the other out-of-town gentlemen who came to observe. Reverend Nicholas Noyes of Salem was present and probably offered the opening prayer. Mrs. Ann Putnam was among the onlookers.

Captain John Alden, “Mariner,” lived in Boston when in port. Evidently his accusation caused some stir among the authorities, for he frequently served in the defense of Massachusetts, largely as a privateer. His recent expedition to ransom captives, including his own son, from the Baron de Sainte Castine in the Eastward territory had failed, however, and public opinion already thought him more interested in private trade than public defense. In fact, Marbleheaders had nearly rioted a few years earlier when he tried to remove that town’s cannon—as ordered—for colony use elsewhere.

The authorities had ignored other suspicions against the better sort before, apparently dismissing them as mistaken before anyone entered a formal complaint.

According to Alden’s own account of the matter, after “a company of poor distracted or possessed Creatures or Witches” accused him, the Salem magistrates “sent for” him on May 28, and he was “sent by Mr. Stoughton” to Salem, where he arrived May 31. Perhaps he traveled north from Boston with the group bringing Philip English, but as he still wore his sword, evidently he was not yet under arrest.

Once in the Village meeting house, he regarded the afflicted with contempt. “Wenches . . . ,” he later wrote about the girls—Mary Warren and Annie Putnam among them—”who plaid their juggling tricks, falling down, crying out, and staring in Peoples Faces.” One of the girls pointed wordlessly at another military man, Captain Hill, when the magistrate asked her who hurt her. The officer standing behind the girl had to tell her which man was Alden. She had never seen the man in the flesh, she explained, but her hesitation made the magistrates order defendant and witnesses out of the dim building into the light of day for a better view. This had happened before with Nathaniel Abbott, who had been released, so Alden may have felt encouraged.

The afflicted circled Alden in the road outside the meeting house, and the same girl—again, not named—pointed at him. “[T]here stands Aldin, a bold fellow with his Hat on before the Judges, he sells Powder and Shot to the Indians and French, and lies with the Indian Squaes, and has Indian Papooses.”

At this point Alden was taken into custody, his sword confiscated because the afflicted said his specter menaced them with it. Thomas Newton then wrote out the arrest warrant for Alden, which Hathorne and Corwin signed. Both Annie Putnam and Mary Warren were listed among his supposed victims.

The magistrates set Alden’s case aside for a time while they questioned Elizabeth How of Topsfield. Although her neighbors suspected her of bewitching one of their children to death, the afflicted girls made the greatest impression against her. Annie Putnam and Mary Warren were stuck with pins. They fell at her glance, beginning with Mary Warren, and recovered, though with some difficulty, at her touch. They appeared repelled when they tried to get near the woman and claimed that her specter stepped from her body to belabor them. John Indian and others said her specter bit them.

“I am not able to give account of it,” Goody How protested. “I cannot tell, I know not what it is.”

But one of her neighbors had seen her specter in the company of Bridget Bishop’s specter: “goode ollever of Sallam that hurt william stace of Sallam the millar.”

Martha Carrier from Andover was more defiant. She had endured neighborhood suspicions for years, especially after a smallpox outbreak that killed several of her relatives. When Susanna Sheldon said, “[S]he looks upon the black man”—meaning the Devil—Annie Putnam agreed, and Mary Warren cried that something pricked her.

“What black man did you see?” one of the magistrates asked.

Goody Carrier shot back: “I saw no black man but your own presence.” (Black hair ran in both the Hathorne and Corwin families.)

Asked if she could look at the accusers and
not
knock them down, she said, “They will dissemble if I look upon them.” The screaming and flailing continued to escalate, with pins again pricking Mary Warren. Goody Carrier held to her innocence and insisted she did
not
see the reported ghosts of her supposed murder victims flocking throughout the room. “It is a shamefull thing,” she lectured the magistrates, “that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.”

The afflicted fell in such severe seizures that the court not only held her for trial but also carried her out bound hand and foot. At this the afflicted relaxed, able to resume their duties.

Most of the afflicted went into a frenzy at the sight of Wilmot Read, a long-suspected Marblehead woman, and had to be carried to her for touch-test relief, even John Indian.

During the examination, according to Parris’s notes, Annie said that although she had often seen the woman’s specter hurting the others, it had never hurt her before. Parris’s notes did not mention Mary Warren at all, who would later state that, although she believed the woman was a witch, Goody Read had
never
hurt her.

“I cannot tell,” said Goody Read when the magistrates asked what she thought ailed the afflicted if
she
were not the cause. “I cannot tell.” The most she could say to their relentless questions was, “my opinion is they are in a sad condition.”

Captain Alden was more forthright when he was marched back into the meeting house and made to stand on a chair so the witnesses could have a better look at him. Why, he demanded, did they think he would come all the way to Salem Village to hurt people he did not even know? Herrick, meanwhile, held Alden’s hand still to prevent any further pinching of the afflicted with magical gestures. When Magistrate Bartholomew Gedney, an old friend and fellow merchant, urged him to confess, Alden replied that confession to these false accusations would only gratify the Devil. He dared anyone to bring any
real
proof against him. Gedney said that, as Alden later remembered, “he had known Aldin many Years, and had been at Sea with him, and always look’d upon him to be an honest Man, but now he did see cause to alter his judgment.”

The court told Alden to look at his accusers, at which the afflicted fell at his glance. Alden turned to look meaningfully at Gedney and asked why
he
did not fall over, but Gedney did not answer. Instead the magistrates ordered the afflicted to be carried to Alden for his touch. In exasperation, Alden wondered why Providence allowed “these Creatures to accuse Innocent persons
.”

Reverend Noyes interrupted him, to lecture, with no little sarcasm, on Alden’s reference to the Almighty, who governed the world in peace and order, in contrast to the uproar and disorder surrounding Alden. When he could get a word in, Alden snapped to Gedney that there was “a lying Spiritt” in the girls. “I can assure you that there is not a word of truth in all these say of me.”

Deputy Marshall Jacob Manning brought Philip English, who had been passed from the custody of one county to another, before the magistrates. Unfortunately notes for his questioning are lost. Known for his temper, Philip was presumably no more cooperative than was fellow mariner-merchant Alden. Like Alden, he probably called his accusers liars. But like Willard, he had fled and been captured, and the magistrates saw his avoidance of the law as an admission of guilt.