The Witches: Salem, 1692 (24 page)

It was impossibly cold in the prisons, so arctic in midwinter that the authorities had not always been able to justify holding an inmate there. They had sent a shivering 1678 constable attacker home. In December 1685, Hathorne’s father had dispatched a horse thief to Barbados as a servant, convinced that if the man remained in prison, he would freeze to death before he could be tried. The wind whipped through the ramshackle structures; ocean humidity penetrated all. While the winter of 1692 was colder still, witches did not sail for Barbados. Mercy was not generally in great supply. (The irascible Boston jailer was said to resemble a man but to manifest “the fierceness and currishness of a tiger.” He twice reinforced his facility with extra lumber and with additional locks.) By law a prisoner was to be supplied with flax or hemp for bedding and with bread and water. No one had counted on a Tituba or a Sarah Good spending months behind bars under conditions that made the noxious, lice-infested pen—by no means designed for extended stays—“a grave of the living.” In the most sophisticated of New England facilities, the deposed Andros and his attorney general could count, in 1689, on at least six inches of water in their cell when it rained. In the dark much of the time, famished at all times, the witch suspects set a miserable colonial
record. At considerable expense, some family members—including the Topsfield constable—made regular daylong trips to deliver food, drink, and fresh linen to incarcerated relatives. The daughters of an accused Ipswich woman led their blind father to visit twice weekly.

Salem’s jail was little better. The four-hundred-square-foot facility included an unlit dungeon, in which George Burroughs spent his spring and summer; he could only have felt “buried alive,” as had an Andros official in a larger space. In an earlier incarnation, the jail had been described as “a noisome place not fit for a Christian man to breathe in.” A minister’s son who found himself rotting there thought he would die of cold, already “almost poisoned with the stink of my own dung and the stink of this prison.” No human being, he contended, could bear “so pestiferous a stink.” In ten freezing weeks he had not enjoyed a breath of fresh air. William Dounton, a town carpenter, presided over the Salem facility. Dounton seemed to wind up with all the unpleasant civic chores: he stood watch over the boys who attempted to escape meeting early, served on coroner’s juries, and collected taxes. He and his family resided in the Washington Street building, where his wife sold refreshments to the prisoners. Security had been stepped up since the day a year earlier when, fetching the pot of beer, she had inadvertently assisted in an escape. (The days of jailbreaks were not over, though they proved impossible for those with eight-pound shackles on their legs.) To sixty-four-year-old Dounton fell the unsavory task of searching the bodies of wizards for telltale marks and jabbing at blemishes with a pin. Unflappable George Jacobs felt nothing, additional proof of guilt.

Nathaniel Cary managed to spare his wife a Boston incarceration. Special privileges were extended to the wealthy, not only because jail keeps tended to be eminently bribable; Boston’s jailer did nothing to disprove the notion that such men could exact more from their operations than from the best acre of English corn land. When finally he was apprehended, Philip English would pay four thousand pounds to lodge in the jailer’s house rather than in the prison itself. Elizabeth Cary wound up transferred on the morning of May 24 across the river to the Cambridge
prison, closer to home. The weights on her legs brought on convulsions. Her husband did not think she would survive to the following day, when the province joined in a fast to rebuke Satan. Repeatedly Cary petitioned for the eight-pound irons to be removed. Repeatedly he learned that his wife must remain shackled, even at the risk of her life. She posed a dreadful public danger.

By the end of May at least sixty suspects had been jailed, more than the Massachusetts prisons had ever accommodated. Those who had frozen through the winter began to roast in the sweltering spring. The situation cried out for resolution, as did the accused. Earlier in the month, a petition had circulated for pious Rebecca Nurse; thirty-nine villagers had affixed their names. She would have heard news of it from her family, who visited regularly, as from the fresh arrivals that week, which included her rearrested sister. The torrent of complaints meanwhile continued. Two weeks after his arrival, in an order that made reference to the stifling prisons but not to the multitude of witches, Phips established a special court to try the cases in Salem. He appointed nine justices; a quorum of five was required at any session. Most had served on the bench at one time or another; all sat on the governor’s council. Merchants and landowners, they constituted the leading men of Massachusetts Bay. Their fortunes and influence entitled them to the prize meetinghouse pews. No rabble-rousing treasure hunters figured among them. The usual suspects, they would manage to wreak as much havoc as a cabal of church-toppling witches.

ONE OF THE
reassuring things about witchcraft was that it answered to certain neat and immutable laws. It ran in families, primarily along matrilineal lines. Tainted reputations remained stubbornly so; the infamy endured long after the offenses had been forgotten. One Scotswoman preferred to burn rather than live as even an acquitted witch. Her family had disowned her and her friends deserted her. Unable to draw water from neighborhood wells, an acquitted Charlestown woman found herself reduced to drinking from puddles. Bridget Bishop, the
occasional thief, could not escape the name she had already made for herself. To most of her accusers she remained Goody Oliver. Totaling her expenses at two shillings, five pence a week, the Boston jailer referred to her as “Bridget Bishop alias Oliver.” The new Massachusetts governor notwithstanding, status too descended to a large extent genetically. Civic leaders produced civic leaders. At least a few selectmen in every town were raised by selectmen, as were nearly three-quarters of Salem’s. Almost without exception, the witchcraft judges were the sons of merchants or ministers. Cotton Mather, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and William Stoughton all reprised roles their fathers had played. The prominent, accomplished parent proved nearly as difficult to sidestep as the one who, three decades earlier, had warned that a pig would keel over before dawn, and who had the misfortune to prove correct.

In establishing a Court of Oyer and Terminer—literally, “to hear and determine”—Phips assembled the “people of the best prudence and figure that could be pitched upon,” as he put it. No member of that panel had any formal training in the law. Two had trained as ministers. Three were Harvard graduates. At least five were merchants, one an amateur physician. Most bore long lists of civic titles. The enterprising Bartholomew Gedney, who early on visited the parsonage girls and had attended a number of preliminary hearings, owned a Salem wharf and shipyard as well as several Maine sawmills. As Salem town residents, Hathorne and Gedney assured the court of a connection to—and a tenor consonant with—the hearings of the previous four months. They sat feet from each other among the front pews in Salem’s First Church before the deacons, where together they absorbed Higginson’s and Noyes’s homilies. They had attended Parris’s ordination; they fielded the villagers’ unremitting complaints. Possessed of a flowing and elegant round hand, Stephen Sewall continued, with his pot of ink and his goose-feather quill, as court clerk. He organized the paperwork, which went home with him in a document box at night to the address he presumably still shared with Parris’s daughter. Parris returned to preaching. At the
court’s head, Phips installed lieutenant governor William Stoughton, who weeks earlier had traveled to Salem for the Burroughs hearing.

For their pains, the justices earned about what an eminent schoolmaster did, or twice what the survivor of a 1694 Indian raid received for the ten scalps she redeemed in Boston. That was of little import to the magistrates, all men of wealth. No one would have quibbled with Phips’s choices. He had assembled an irreproachable cast. At a time when much was in flux—when even the New England vocabulary was evolving, the colony now a province, its marshals sheriffs, its twenty-eight assistants councillors—this was reassuring. These were Massachusetts’s well-traveled, civic, economic, and militia leaders, the sons (and in several cases also the sons-in-law) of its first families, men of established rank with distinguished names, each of which figured in New England’s new charter. Among them they owned hundreds of thousands of New England acres. Nearly all had prior experience adjudicating witchcraft cases, if none with an outbreak of 1692 proportions.

Newly sworn in, the justices applied for guidance. It did not help that their orders were to determine what crimes had been perpetrated according to the laws of both England and Massachusetts, two bodies of law that differed. They turned naturally to the available expert. Four of the nine members of the court—including sixty-seven-year-old John Richards, the Boston merchant who solicited the advice—were close friends of Cotton Mather. He more than anyone grasped the slender dimensions of the administration. As he exulted that month in his diary, not only was the governor one of his dearest friends and someone he had personally baptized, but “all the councilors of the province are of my own father’s nomination; and my father-in-law, with several related unto me, and several brethren of my church, are among them.”

Eleven new warrants went out even before jurors could be assembled. The plaintiffs appeared only half acquainted with most of the accused, identified by surnames alone. Among the May 28 suspects, however, one name boldly jumped out, familiar to all: that of sixty-six-year-old John
Alden, a hard-edged Boston sea captain and merchant, the firstborn son of Plymouth’s founding family. Among the sturdiest soldiers in Massachusetts, Alden was newly returned from Maine, where he had negotiated for the release of the captives carried off from York. Alden belonged to the same church as did three members of the witchcraft court. He was especially close to Samuel Sewall, having long done business with his father-in-law. On May 31, accused by several villagers, the enterprising Alden appeared before his friends and peers in the makeshift Salem courtroom.

The newly appointed king’s attorney, Thomas Newton, traveled to that hearing as well, to glean a sense of what the Court of Oyer and Terminer might contend with at its first session, scheduled for June 2. It fell to Newton to decide the order of the trials. Stephen Sewall may have advised him; he knew the Salem cast and cases better than anyone. Already Chief Justice Stoughton had summoned eighteen “honest and lawful men” to serve as grand jurors and forty-eight men to serve as regular jurors. All hailed from the neighboring communities. They were to appear at the town house that Thursday morning at eight. The word “witchcraft” appeared nowhere in their summons but the men knew the nature of their charge. They were courtroom veterans drawn from a familiar cohort of local leaders. Their experience rather than their impartiality recommended them; they brought an invaluable knowledge of the community to the job. They would hear no other cases.

An Anglican and a trained barrister, Thomas Newton was fairly new to the colony. Like Deodat Lawson, the former village minister, Newton was a worldly man. Also like Lawson, he was dumbfounded by the scene before him. Possibly for his benefit, Hathorne again tested the accusers, arranging for Alden to attend his hearing without a guard. The sea captain strode into the village meetinghouse, his sword at his side, and took his place discreetly in the crowd. Hathorne then challenged the girls to identify their afflicter. They hesitated before pointing to another military man in the room. A little adult prompting, Alden noted later, helped. (He left an account of his hearing, not something many would have the
opportunity to do.) As it had earlier, the dark meetinghouse further obscured matters. Alden was ordered outside, where the girls formed a circle around him, snapping and sneering. One—most likely Ann Putnam Jr.—taunted him for his lack of deference. He was awfully bold not to remove his hat before the justices!

The girls had absorbed plenty of reports on Alden in Massachusetts and in Maine, where he spent a great deal of time; it has been estimated that he had made at least sixteen round trips to the frontier since late 1688. He knew the territory well. His father-in-law had owned Maine sawmills; Alden had served valiantly in King Philip’s War. He traded with the Wabanaki and had negotiated the truce that had indirectly precipitated the York raid. He supplied the Maine garrisons. He had long been suspected of preferring arms sales to captive redemptions, putting his own business before that of the public; he had been ordered to travel with only restricted quantities of ammunition. Certainly Alden did not see the Wabanaki purely as “bears and wolves,” as his February instructions on the York exchange described them. Sure enough, the bewitched accused Alden of selling munitions to the enemy. He slept, they jeered, with Indian women! And he afflicted the girls with his sword, of which, to his chagrin, Alden was relieved. A marshal led him out to await his interrogation, probably at Ingersoll’s. Whatever the truth to the charges of profiteering, he had thrived in Maine, amid dense fogs and bloodthirsty Indians where others had lost families.

Alden spent several hours in suspense while Hathorne summoned Martha Carrier, accused by Parris’s niece and eighteen-year-old Susannah Shelden. Carrier hailed from a hot-headed family whose reputation she upheld. When Hathorne inquired about the spectral black man with whom the girls accused her of consorting, Carrier snorted. She saw no black man aside from the dark-haired, dark-gowned magistrate himself. As instructed, she locked eyes with him upon entering the room. Hathorne challenged her to turn to the girls without incapacitating them. “They will dissemble,” she objected—it was the first use of the word—“if I look upon them.” From a trance, Susannah Shelden, the
fatalities expert, asked how Carrier had managed to murder thirteen people. The girls trembled as they described the spirits in the room; they complained of pins in their flesh, which they produced. Did Carrier not see the ghosts? Hathorne inquired. “If I speak you will not believe me,” she scoffed, accurately enough. The girls shrieked that she lied.