The Witches: Salem, 1692 (13 page)

Amid the “terror, amazement, and astonishment,” Lawson entreated all to sympathy and compassion on March 24. While the two ministers
conferred closely, while they invoked similar imagery, Parris delivered a different message in the meetinghouse three days later. That Sunday he tangled with a definition of who precisely the devil was. He could be a wicked angel or spirit, the prince of evil spirits, or simply “vile and wicked persons, the worst of such, who for their villainy and impiety do most resemble devils and wicked spirits.” Where Lawson invoked Job, Parris favored Judas. He took as his text John 6:70; as there had been a devil among the disciples, so, too, were there devils “here in Christ’s little church.” He was vehement to the point of accusatory. “One of you is a devil,” Parris lectured his tense congregants, making a singular leap and arriving at an exclusionary, door-closing extreme. It provoked an immediate echo. “We are either saints or devils; the Scripture gives us no medium,” Parris preached. He dispelled any doubts that had begun to crystallize around another question too. Hathorne remained perplexed as to whether the devil could assume an innocent’s form, but the minister was certain: he could not. Parris drew no distinction between those who covenanted with Satan and those whose bodies he appropriated.

The remarks were pointed, transparently so to some. No sooner had Parris announced his text—“Jesus answered them, ‘Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?’”—than forty-four-year-old Sarah Cloyce rose and stormed out of the meetinghouse. To the amazement of the congregation, she either slammed the outer door behind her or left the wind to do so. The heavy door banged shut, its metal latch grating. She would miss Mary Sibley’s tearful confession that afternoon but had already heard enough; Cloyce was Rebecca Nurse’s much younger sister. Her husband had joined the Nurse delegation. All eyes followed her, although it would be three weeks before anyone connected the conspiratorial hints in Parris’s sermon with her exit. And while many villagers understood her to have stomped off in rage, only one sharp-eyed eleven-year-old saw Cloyce curtsy to the devil just outside the meetinghouse entry.

A few misgivings surfaced before Lawson left the village. Probably on the morning of March 25, John Procter, a sixty-year-old tavern owner
and farmer, fell into conversation with Mary Sibley’s husband. Procter stopped for a drink on his way into town to pick up his maid, Mary Warren, who would become one of the more unusual witnesses for the prosecution. A straight shooter, earnest and forthright, Procter had no patience for either the inquest or the afflictions. He would rather have paid Mary, he roared, than allow her to attend a hearing. Why did he rail so? Sibley asked. Mary had suffered fits too, Procter explained, but he had handily dispensed with them. He had kept her at her spinning wheel and threatened to beat her if she misbehaved again. Only in his absence had she started all over with her nonsense. He intended now to “thresh the devil out of her.” (He partly succeeded. Mary soon suggested that the girls were acting.) Were the malingerers to continue, Procter informed his startled friend, they would all wind up charged with witchcraft. The girls should hang! Dutifully Sibley reported every word of that rant to their minister.

The morning after Sarah Cloyce’s resounding exit, Rebecca Nurse’s son-in-law Jonathan Tarbell headed to the Thomas Putnams. He had a number of questions for the women of the house. By this point, interrogations and accounts of interrogations were so frequent in Salem village it is difficult to believe dinner appeared regularly on the table. In a household crowded with well-wishers and small children, Tarbell asked the Putnams: Had Ann Jr. been the first to name his mother-in-law? The girl had after all initially noted only that her tormentor was the pallid woman in her grandmother’s pew. She could not identify her. Mercy Lewis, the maid who had struck the specter on Ann Jr.’s behalf, confirmed that Ann Sr. had first named Rebecca Nurse. Ann Sr. claimed Mercy had done so. No one seemed willing to assume responsibility, thirty-eight-year-old Tarbell reported. The same day a group of young men discussed new allegations over drinks at Ingersoll’s. Several afflicted girls were on hand. Suddenly one cried out that Procter’s wife, Elizabeth, was in the room. She was a witch. She deserved to hang! Objecting that he could see nothing, a man accused the youngster of lying. Ingersoll’s wife reprimanded her as well; this was no laughing matter. The teenager conceded she had
misspoken, with a heavy admission: she did it for “sport, they must have some sport.” The same day two young men helping to care for the bewitched Putnams claimed they overheard the family putting words in nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis’s mouth.

Lawson returned to Boston soon thereafter to write up his notes on the diabolical descent. He missed the fast of March 31, a Thursday the farmers spent in prayer for the afflicted. Over the next month accusations flew throughout and beyond the village, their tempo accelerating wildly. Five witches were accused in March. Twenty-five would be accused in April. The next hearing would be conducted by a Boston magistrate before a larger crowd in Salem town’s more comfortable meetinghouse. Among the first of the new arrests were Sarah Cloyce and Elizabeth Procter.

LAWSON’S ACCOUNT OF
the Salem witches was published nearly as soon as he finished it, on April 5. The rush to narrative was not solely the work of an enterprising bookseller, although Benjamin Harris was very much that. (He billed the ten-page pamphlet as an account of “the mysterious assaults from hell.”) The rush to narrative was a Puritan proclivity, the reflex of a logic-loving, literal-minded people, questing and causation-obsessed. Scripture provided the bedrock of New England law and served as its fundamental text; all answers could be found there. You fortified yourself, restored and refreshed yourself with those passages, familiar to all; at a moral or practical crossroads, you might turn to a page at random. At the same time, God was silent and maddeningly inscrutable. To discern his will, to decode his purpose, was the lifework of a Puritan, who grappled with the terrible, impenetrable riddle at the heart of his faith: One was selected before birth for salvation or damnation; to which camp did one belong? That puzzle left the Puritan on edge, inwardly focused, worrying his way through the world. Long before Lawson’s March instructions, he was an ardent, unsparing observer, a compulsive self-examiner.

Watching stood at the heart of the enterprise, whether that meant scanning the heavens, scouring the self, or scrutinizing the neighbors. The word figured in all church covenants. The minister was himself a seer and watchman. Together parishioners joined in “holy watchfulness” over one another. Very little went unnoticed, as the couple who had a child five months after their marriage inevitably discovered. There was every reason the villagers should have scoffed at the assertion that a ship could dock undetected in Salem town. All was supervised; in addition to fence viewers and wheat surveyors, every community supported a surveillance team in its tithing men. The tithing man monitored families and taverns, where he intervened if liquor ran too freely. (He risked attack by chair and andiron.) He served as tax collector and moral guardian, enforcer and informer. He was to examine anyone out after ten p.m. He encouraged catechism at home and confiscated flying walnuts at meetings. He watched for Indians and, on Sundays, for delinquent parishioners. The town watch was itself watched, twice a week. One could never be too sure, as an insecure people perched on the uncomfortable edge of an unpredictable wilderness—squinting into the murk of their parlors, through the woods, into their uncooperative souls—well knew.

Salvation depended on communal virtue, the reason that Mary Sibley and Ezekiel Cheever offered apologies to the village as a whole and the reason that hesitating to identify a witch might seem tantamount to abetting the devil. “If the neighbor of an elected saint sins, then the saint sins also,” Mather reminded his congregants. As a result you wound up intimately acquainted with your neighbor’s wardrobe, feuds, temper, inheritance, and idiosyncrasies, as well as the state of his cider supply and the brand on his cow’s ear. No one was monitored as closely as the children, whose moral well-being was not yet assured and seemed at times distinctly improbable. The surveillance was not always malignant. Had a passerby not peered into the Mathers’ Boston windows one autumn evening, he might not have noticed the daughter whose bonnet had caught
fire and who, alone at home, would seconds later have been consumed by flames.
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The Massachusetts Puritan also knew—or devoutly hoped—that he was being watched. If you inhabited a city on a hill, by definition you stood onstage. That gaze did not discomfort the settlers. It made them—in the words of former deputy president William Stoughton, who helped the colony define itself and would soon define Salem witchcraft—a civilization of which great things were expected. “If any people in the world have been lifted up to heaven as to advantages and privileges,” Stoughton proclaimed, “we are the people.” That was one way to put it. A modern historian suggested a less exalted one. Having traveled three thousand miles, New Englanders “had willingly risked life and property to come to the wilderness so they could sit on benches in drafty, gloomy barns for three to six hours on Sundays hearing the Word as it should be preached.” The combination was in other words ideal. The Puritan was wary and watchful. His faith kept him off balance and on guard. And if you intended to live in a state of nerve-racking insecurity, in expectation of ambush and meteorological rebuke—on the watch for every brand of intruder, from the “ravening wolves of heresy” to the “wild boars of tyranny,” as a 1694 narrative had it—seventeenth-century Massachusetts, that rude and howling wilderness, was the place for you.

So far as what Mather in March termed “fiery rebukes from heaven” went, the Lord had amply delivered. Since the Puritans’ 1630 arrival, the Almighty had sent them immoderate rains and blasting mildew, caterpillars and grasshoppers, drought, smallpox, and fire. For several decades he had spoken only with displeasure. Over the first two generations, the colonists had assumed a de facto independence from England, which in
1684 had led King Charles II to revoke their charter, a document of near-sacred status; decades of prosperity came to a shuddering halt. The settlers had been refractory and disruptive, coining their own money, ignoring the Navigation Acts, oppressing Quakers. They seemed to believe the laws of England did not extend across an ocean; they had taken it upon themselves to found a self-governing republic while no one was looking. Several years later, the Crown imposed a royal governor on Massachusetts to address the settlers’ irregularities, resolve “the petty differences and animosities” among the colonial administrations, and coordinate defenses. When Edmund Andros arrived to head up a Dominion government in 1686, he exercised absolute authority over all territory from Maine to New Jersey. He curtailed town meetings and abolished the Massachusetts legislature. He threw Puritan hegemony and land claims into question—and left a Boston congregation to wait outdoors for several hours, in March, while he appropriated their meetinghouse for an Anglican service. To many New Englanders, he qualified as both a wolf of heresy and a boar of tyranny.

In March 1689 the uniformed Andros passed through Salem with a large retinue. Throwing down the gauntlet, he asked John Higginson, the town’s vigorous senior minister, if all the land in New England did not rightfully belong to the king. His conversation described as “a glimpse of heaven,” Higginson was too tactful a man to gratify his visitor with an answer. He replied that he could speak only as a curate; Andros had broached a matter of state. That was all the more reason he should like an answer, persisted the iron-fisted governor. Higginson allowed as how he felt the lands belonged to those who occupied them and who had bartered with the Indians for them. At great expense to themselves, over two generations, the settlers had subdued a wasteland. They had tamed what an early visitor termed a “remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness.” The Salem minister and the royal governor went back and forth for some time, weighing the laws of God and Englishmen. The king, Higginson argued, had had no stake in North
American lands before the settlers arrived. At which Andros exploded, positing another binary choice, if eighty-seven years prematurely: “Either you are subjects or you are rebels.”

Andros lasted until April of 1689, when the colonists removed him in a military coup. Instigated by the Boston ministers, it was led by many of the men who would exterminate witches three years later. Even before that revolt Increase Mather had secretly sailed to London—he narrowly avoided arrest—to clarify the colony’s grievances and plead for a new charter. The negotiation took the better part of three years, during which time Massachusetts knew no political authority. Only in April 1692 was it emerging from what Topsfield’s minister called its “fears and troubles.” A disgruntled official was not wrong when he noted that Massachusetts was as close to establishing a viable government as it was to building the Tower of Babel; civil affairs remained in a shambles. There was much fear that a royal punishment was forthcoming, that Anglicanism would be imposed. Massachusetts felt acutely vulnerable, the more so as Bay Colony calamities registered as verdicts. Each time God frowned—whether in the form of a hailstorm, plague, overbearing English officials, or witchcraft—he was assumed to do so for a reason.

The settlers watched then for many things in 1692 besides marauding Indians and nonphantom Frenchmen. They watched for a charter that would restore their rights and for the return of the indispensable, accomplished Mather. They watched for an explanation of and a deliverance from their misery. For some time, Cotton Mather and others had been on the lookout as well for the Second Coming. Given the calamities that had visited New England, it felt imminent. Witchcraft in Salem further proved that time was short; Mather calculated the golden age to be five years in the future. His exactitude points up another feature of the seventeenth-century mind. Described as “that strange agglomeration of incongruities,” it consisted of a crazy quilt of erudition and superstition.
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The natural bordered on the supernatural—one eminent minister received the news that his wife had given birth not from the midwife but from the Lord—as medicine blurred into astrology, science into nonsense.