Six Women of Salem (59 page)

Jonathan Tarbell, Thomas Wilkins, and their wives plus Samuel Nurse’s wife, Mary, all joined with the rest of the full members in taking communion on February 5, 1699, “which,” Green wrote, “is a matter of thankfulness.” (Samuel Nurse was
not
named among the day’s communicants.)

Yet neither Samuel nor the other dissenters objected to Reverend Green’s rearrangement of the meeting house seating, even though it placed John Tarbell with John Putnam, Thomas Wilkins with John Putnam’s sons James and John, and Samuel Nurse with Thomas Putnam. Samuel’s wife, Mary, now sat beside Ann Putnam and Sarah Houlton, both of whom had accused Rebecca, and placed Rebecca’s widowed daughter Rebecca Preston with widow Deliverance Walcott, the step-mother of the once-afflicted Mary Walcott.

The following spring the Nurse heirs, with a stake in their parent’s homestead, finished paying for the farm. Samuel Nurse and other surviving sons and sons-in-law traveled to Boston, made the last payment, and received the discharge on April 25, 1699. The land for which they and Francis had worked for so many years was theirs, free and clear at last.

But Rebecca’s family still wanted their mother exonerated. Petitions to clear the names of the condemned began in 1700. In 1703 several members of Rebecca’s family—Isaac Esty Sr. and Jr., Samuel and John Nurse, John Tarbell, and Peter Cloyce—joined with “severall of the Inhabitants of Andover, Salem village & Topsfield” to petition the legislature on behalf of Rebecca Nurse, Mary Esty, Abigail Faulkner Sr., Mary Parker, John Procter, Elizabeth Procter, Elizabeth How, Samuel Wardwell, and Sarah Wardwell:

Your Petitioners being dissatisfyed and grieved, that (besides what the aforesaid condemned persons have Sufferred in their persons and Estates) their Names are Exposed to Infamy and reproach, while their Tryall & condemnation stands upon Publick Record. We therefore humbly Pray this Honored Court, that Something may be Publickly done to take off Infamy from the Names and memory of those who have Suffered as aforesaid, that none of their Surviving Relations, nor their Posterity may Suffer reproach upon that account.

The legislature considered all this, and in May 1703 ordered that the attainders of Abigail Faulkner, Sarah Wardwell, and Elizabeth Procter to be “reversed repealed . . . and made Null and Void.” The other names remained unprotected.

Three years later Reverend Green made a surprising proposal to Samuel Nurse. Annie Putnam, now grown, had applied to join the Village Church. To do so she first needed to confess former faults—in her case the great error of accusing Rebecca Nurse. How Green put the question is not recorded, but Samuel agreed not to oppose the woman’s acceptance.

That same year the government also came to a decision about the witch trials:

Ordered, That a Bill be drawn up for Preventing the like Procedure for the future, and that no Spectre Evidence may hereafter be accounted valid, or Sufficient to take away the life, or good name, of any Person or Persons within this Province, and that the Infamy, and Reproach, cast on the names and Posterity of the sd accused, and Condemned Persons may in Some measure be Rolled away.

Nevertheless, by May 1709 people who had been arrested but not tried and condemned, as well as the families of those hanged, submitted petitions for restitution of their “Damnified . . . Estates.” The “sorrowfull and Distrest Supliants” included Samuel Nurse, Isaac Esty, and their kin. Consequently, a committee of five, including Stephen Sewall, former Oyer and Terminer clerk, met at Salem in 1710 to consider the requests.

Isaac Esty, age “about 82 years,” wrote of caring for his imprisoned wife Mary, Rebecca’s sister. Before her execution “my wife was near upon 5 months imprisoned all which time I provided maintenance for her at my own cost & charge went constantly twice a week to provide for her what she needed.” Three weeks of those five months she was in the Boston prison, “& I was constrained to be at the charge of transporting her to & fro.” He estimated his expenses “in time & mony” worth £20 “besides my trouble & sorrow of heart in being deprived of her after such a manner which this world can never make me any compensation for.”

Samuel Nurse enumerated the damage done to Rebecca Nurse’s family:

1. They had paid all of her prison expenses for four months, while she was incarcerated in Salem and in Boston.

2. They spent considerable time journeying to Boston and Salem and elsewhere gathering testimony in their mother’s favor.

3. “And altho we produced plentifull testimony that my honoured and Dear Mother had led a blameless life from her youth up—yet she was condemned and executed upon such Evidence as is now Generally thought to be Insufficient, which may be seen in the court record of her tryall.”

4. Because of the guilty verdict, “her name and the name of her Posterity lyes under reproach the removeing of which reproach is the principal thing wherein we desire restitution.”

5. They cannot express their “loss of such a Mother in such a way” or know “how to compute our charge.” This they left to the committee.

Samuel Nurse, “In the name of my brethren,” signed the document and added, “Altho fourty pounds would not repair my loss and dammage in my Estate, yet I shall be Satisfyd if [we] may be allowed, five and twenty pounds. Provided the Attainder be taken off.”

On October 17, 1711, Governor Joseph Dudley, long a political opponent of the late William Phips, signed “An Act to Reverse the ­Attainders of George Burroughs and others for Witch-craft.” In 1692, the document began, “Several Towns within this Province were Infested with a horrible Witchcraft or Possession of devils,” to combat which the government instituted “a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer.” The act listed twenty-two individuals this court “severally Indicted convicted and attainted of Witchcraft, and some of them put to death, others lying still under the like Sentance of the said Court, and liable to have Executed upon them.” (The court had actually condemned twenty-eight people, but not everyone’s name had appeared in the petitions.)

The act blamed “The Influence and Energy of the Evil Spirits . . . upon those who were the principal Accusers and Witnesses,” which was so great that when it caused “a Prosecution . . . of persons of known and good Reputation,” the government put a stop to the trials “until their Majesty’s pleasure should be known.” (The implied timing ignores the early accusation of Rebecca, a woman of “known and good Reputation.)

The late Queen Mary’s advice, which actually arrived after the worst of the witch scare was over, graciously approved the court’s “care and Circumspection” and “requir[ed] that in all proceedings ag[ains]t persons Accused for Witchcraft, or being possessed by the devil, the greatest Moderation and all due Circumspection be used, So far as the same may be without Impediment to the Ordinary Course of Justice.”

To this the legislature added that “Any Law Usage or Custom to the contrary notwithstanding . . . no Sheriffe, Constable Goaler or other Officer shall be Liable to any prosecution in the Law for any thing they then Legally did in the Execution of their Respective ­Offices.”

Rather than casting any blame on the judiciary or the legislature, the act put all the responsibility on the accusers, for “Some of the principal Accusers and Witnesses in those dark and Severe prosecutions have since discovered themselves to be persons of profligate and vicious Conversation.” Therefore,

Upon the humble Petition and Suit of several of the sd persons and of the Children of others of them whose Parents were Executed,

Be it Declared and Enacted by his Excellency the Governor’s Council and Representatives in General Court assembled and by the Authority of the same That the several Convictions Judgements and Attainders against the said George Burroughs, John Procter, George Jacob, John Willard, Giles Core and [Martha] Core, Rebeccah Nurse, Sarah Good, Elisabeth How, Mary Easty, Sarah Wild, Abigail Hobbs, Samuel Wardell, Mary Parker, Martha Carrier, Abigail Falkner, Anne Foster, Rebecca Eames, Mary Post, Mary Lacey, Mary Bradbury and Dorcas Hoar and every of them Be and hereby are Reversed made and declared to be Null and void to all Intents, Constructions and purposes wh[atsoever], as if no such Convictions, Judgments or Attainders had ever [been] had or given. And that no penalties or fforfeitures of Goods or Chattels be by the said Judgments and Attainders or either of them had or Incurr’d.

Once news of this development spread, dozens of interested parties, including Samuel Nurse and his kinsmen, requested copies of the ­document.

The reparations committee allotted the sums of £20 for Mary Esty to her husband, Isaac Esty, and £25 for Rebecca Nurse to her son Samuel Nurse. When the committee paid in the spring of 1712, Samuel distributed the £25 among the family.

Likewise, the First Church of Salem voted to restore the membership of Rebecca Nurse, as well as Giles Corey, reversing the earlier excommunication, “that it may no longer be a reproach to her memory, and an occasion of grief to her children.”

Samuel Nurse continued to live on and work the family farm, which was passed upon his death in 1716 to his son Samuel. His descendants sold the farm in 1886 to a branch of the Putnam family that had also descended from Rebecca. Her descendants continued to keep Rebecca’s memory green, her innocence a byword, and, in 1875, to plan a more public memorial. They commissioned a monument of polished Quincy and Rockport granite. One side of the monument bore a poem composed especially for it by John Greenleaf Whittier:

O Christian martyr, who for Truth could die

When all about thee owned the hideous lie,

The world redeemed from Superstition’s sway

Is breathing freer for thy sake today.

The other side’s inscriptions acknowledged that forty neighbors had petitioned for her and included some of Rebecca’s own words:

I am innocent and God will clear my innocency.

This they dedicated July 30, 1885. After a service at Danvers First Church (which had begun as the Salem Village Church, Salem Village having become the independent town of Danvers around 1758), which six hundred or more of Rebecca’s descendants from across the nation attended, four hundred of them walked to the homestead burying ground for a ceremony and a group photograph.

“It is believed,” the
Danvers
Mirror
reported, “that this is the first service of the kind ever rendered to any person (certainly in this country) who was put to death for alleged witchcraft.”

Once ownership passed out of the family in 1908, the Rebecca Nurse Memorial Association acquired the farm, restored the house, and opened the place to the public. Reduced in size and surrounded by growing suburbia, the homestead, house, and remaining fields passed into the protection of other preservation organizations. Rebecca Nurse’s memory—and innocence—remain duly honored.

B
RIDGET
B
ISHOP
’
S
third husband, Edward Bishop, is largely absent from the surviving court papers, named only occasionally as a way of identifying his wife. Even then, she was often called Goody Oliver or Goody Bishop alias Oliver. Bishop still owned the house he had built on Thomas Oliver’s land, the home from which Bridget had been arrested.

Over a year after Bridget’s death, probate judge Bartholomew Gedney, a member of the former Court of Oyer and Terminer, ordered an inventory of the Oliver estate that, as of August 1693, appraised the land at £20 and “the house which stands on the said land” at £9. Gedney granted administration to Oliver’s grandson Job Hilliard, a Charlestown shoemaker, on condition he pay certain sums within the year to the Oliver heirs, including £9 to Bridget’s daughter Christian Mason plus £9 to “Edward Bishop for his disbursement on the house.”

If Christian Mason was still alive as of the payment order, which was dated August 11, 1693, she did not live long, for her husband, Thomas, remarried on November 1, 1693, to widow Abigail Greenslett, widow of Thomas Greenslett, one of hanged Ann Pudeator’s sons.

Hilliard paid Bishop his £9 by April 12, 1694, when Bishop signed his X to signify that he had been compensated for his “Charges In building a house on land belonging to the Estate of Thomas Oliver.” On that same day the court appointed Bishop guardian of granddaughter Susanna Mason, on whose behalf he took control of the £9 originally granted to the child’s deceased mother. The following July Bishop paid £10 toward the £16 purchase price of a house and land owned by one Matthew Butman, land that bordered some of Philip English’s property and was not far from English’s Great House. With Bishop moved from the Oliver property, appraised at £29, Hilliard sold it the following January to shoemaker Benjamin Ropes for £65.

With both her father, Thomas Mason, and stepmother, Abigail, associated with families of the accused and with no one stepping forward to clear Bridget’s name, we can only speculate how much of her grandmother’s story Susanna heard, to be preserved and passed down among her own descendants.

Unlike the Nurse family, neither Edward Bishop nor Thomas Mason petitioned for redress along with the other families whose relatives had been condemned, neither to clear Bridget’s name nor to recoup court and jail expenses. Perhaps they had not contributed to her prison room and board. Maybe Edward distanced himself as much as he could from his former wife and her difficult history of witch accusations.

Susanna married shipwright John Becket in September 1711 (a month before the witch suspects’ attainders were reversed—but not Bridget’s). The Beckets lived near his shipyard, in the same neighborhood as Edward Bishop and Philip English.

Ten years later, when John and Susanna Becket sold their share in her father’s estate, she was called a daughter of Thomas and Abigail Mason. This, however, was a common way of referring to the stepmother-stepdaughter relationship and gives no hint as to how the family regarded Bridget’s memory. Susanna herself lived on until at least 1769. As John and Susanna Becket came to own Edward Bishop’s new home, she evidently remained on good terms with her stepgrandfather.