The Witches: Salem, 1692 (25 page)

No word had yet emerged regarding Carrier’s flights or recruits. Nor was it yet clear that, as her own children would testify, the devil had promised their imperious mother that “she should be Queen of Hell.” Still, the attorney general blinked in disbelief at the girls’ visions, their pins, their agonies. “Staring in people’s faces,” they roamed about. “It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits,” Carrier observed before the disorder reached crisis proportions, the flailing so severe that some thought the girls’ lives in peril. Hathorne ordered Carrier to be tied, hand and foot, and carted away. Newton may or may not have managed in the pandemonium to hear Mary Walcott, who months earlier had displayed the bites on her wrist for Deodat Lawson, tell the justices that Carrier had boasted she had been a witch for forty years. Carrier was thirty-eight.

John Alden returned to the meetinghouse later that afternoon. To facilitate viewing, Hathorne instructed him to stand on a chair, another humiliation in itself; the girls appeared to be disciplining their elder. A marshal then restrained his hands. Alden was not as easily silenced. Why in the world, he protested from his awkward perch, would he come all the way to Salem village to hurt people he neither knew of nor had ever met? Bartholomew Gedney, the fifty-two-year-old Salem merchant, pressed him to confess. Alden answered that he had no intention of gratifying the devil with a lie. He challenged the assembly to supply a shred of evidence that he practiced witchcraft. Hathorne arranged for a touch test; a bewitched girl calmed the minute Alden set a finger on her. Among the remarkable things Newton observed that day the most remarkable may have been what came next. From his seat at the front of the room, Gedney allowed that he had known Alden for years. The two
had sailed together. They were business associates. Gedney had defended his opportunistic colleague from earlier charges of collusion with a different enemy. He informed Alden that he “had always looked upon him to be an honest man, but now he did see cause to alter his judgment.” He could not disregard that touch test. It was the height of a crisis when decades-long loyalties crumbled or proved inconvenient. A member of the same exclusive Boston prayer group, Samuel Sewall elected not to rise to Alden’s defense either. His family had entrusted Alden to sail their ships across the ocean. Some sort of seismic shift had occurred.

Alden could say nothing more to his former colleague than that he was sorry. He trusted God would clear his name. For his part, he would, “with Job, maintain his integrity till he died.” He was a man who—permitted a few minutes with Indian hostages—reinforced their faith, assuring them, when their captors barred them from prayer, that they suffered for Christ. Ordered to look upon his accusers, he watched them tumble to the ground. What could explain the fact, he challenged, that his gaze had no deleterious effect on Gedney? His old friend did not deign to answer. Alden launched into a spirited discourse on the plight of innocents, only to be silenced by Reverend Noyes, who offered a long speech of his own. What did the sea captain know of divine providence? Alden managed a final appeal to Gedney. “I can assure you,” he insisted, “that there is not a word of truth in all these say of me.” Sword confiscated, hands bound, he traveled that evening to Boston’s prison.

It had been a long and exhausting day, not one, Thomas Newton marveled, anyone would believe had he not observed it with his own eyes. “I have beheld most strange things scarce credible but to the spectator,” he reported to the secretary of the province. They made a convert of him. He left convinced that Alden was as deeply implicated as anyone else; the conspiracy, he feared, extended even to persons of quality. The long day of hearings also caused Newton to rethink his trial strategy. The very names of the accused elicited strangling, trances, yowls. The girls lay for prolonged periods as if dead. It made for slow going. He had sent for nine
suspects; he now saw he could not possibly prosecute so many. He submitted two requests to the secretary. He asked that the confessors—Tituba and a servant who worked in the household of Justice Corwin’s extended family—travel separately from the accused. And he asked for the records of Bridget Bishop’s 1680 witchcraft trial.

The same day, in one headlong burst and with a minimum of corrections, Cotton Mather composed a thoughtful, seven-part letter. So eager was he to commit his thoughts to paper that he did not bother even to consult his vaunted library. The Court of Oyer and Terminer would convene in forty-eight hours; he labored to shed some light on its assignment. It was not unusual for a court to solicit advice from the clergy, even less for John Richards, the eldest member of the court, to have appealed to his pastor. Others clearly had questions as well. The previous Sunday, Samuel Willard—the only Boston minister to rival Increase Mather in his influence—went out of his way to expound on the devil and how to recognize him. Willard affirmed that the Old Deluder tempted, afflicted, and worked his infernal art through witchcraft. He missed no opportunities to recruit. He did so handily, given that he promised—Willard cited Matthew 4:8, as had Mercy Lewis—“all the kingdoms of the world.”

Like most of his colleagues, sixty-seven-year-old Richards held many titles: He was a selectman and militia captain. He did not shrink from unpopular assignments. He had accepted a 1681 charter-negotiating mission to London that William Stoughton had managed to dodge, engaging while abroad in the requisite colonial groveling: the Massachusetts Bay irregularities had arisen only inadvertently! Long among the most influential members of the North Church, Richards contributed more than any other parishioner to his ministers’ salaries. In turn Cotton Mather consulted him regarding church matters, on which Richards was a staunch conservative. He was as well a close and accommodating North End neighbor, having lodged the Mathers in his stately brick mansion when their home burned. Cotton Mather was a teenager at the time; a decade later, Richards officiated at his wedding. Understandably, then,
Mather was at his service; Richards’s desires were always, Mather assured him, his commands. He offered up his thoughts concerning the mysterious matter. The entire province fasted and prayed on the justices’ behalf; it placed itself in their righteous hands. Mather invoked his favorite analogies, trotting out the “stupendous witchcraft, much like ours,” in Sweden. Personally he had begun to fear that devils worked more mischief than was generally understood. The “murmuring frenzies of late” provided ample opportunities for the great deluder to present himself and inquire: “Are you willing that I should go do this or that for you?” By accepting a simple favor, an innocent all too easily found himself ensnared. “And yet I must humbly beg you,” cautioned Mather, loud and clear, sending up a crimson flag, “that in the management of the affair in your most worthy hands, you do not lay more stress upon pure specter testimony than it will bear.”

He touched there on the heart of the matter, addressing the question with which the Salem justices wrestled from the start: Could the devil pass himself off as an innocent—and could a defendant be prosecuted on evidence only some could see? Mather rejected the idea, which had discomfited the justices in the 1676 Newbury case. They had not been able to bring themselves to convict a suspect for mischief caused in her likeness. The devil had disguised himself as an innocent before. Those who indulged in “malignant, envious, malicious” behavior might all too easily be taken for his confederates without ever having caught sight of him, much less having signed any kind of pact. To presume guilt, warned Mather, was to play into devious, diabolical hands.

He offered a few tips. A credible confession was worth its weight in gold, although, warned Mather, there was credible and credible. A “delirious brain, or a discontented heart” could produce false results. As for eliciting confessions, he could not condone torture. He recommended clever storms of cross, swift questions. Otherwise he subscribed to the traditional tactics. Could the accused recite the Lord’s Prayer? Interestingly for an anguished ex-stutterer, he placed a great deal of faith in “confounding the lisping witches.” He trusted in hard evidence, such as
poppets. A witch could as well use her own body as a poppet, inducing suffering in her victim’s eye, for example, by touching her own. While he had never seen one himself, a good physician could recognize a witch’s mark.
^*
He endorsed the water test; devils infused their recruits with a venom that rendered them buoyant.
^†
He addressed neither the touch test nor the evil eye.

At every turn he opted for leniency. Rather than shackle every wretched witch, why not consider lesser punishments? Surely those might exact “some solemn, open, public, and explicit renunciation of the devil” sufficient to chase the Old Deluder from the neighborhood. Here Mather caught himself; he was writing his elder and a family benefactor. With a bow and a scrape, he apologized for getting ahead of matters. He would pray that Richards and his venerable colleagues sagely resolve the “thorny affair” before them. He rambled a little, although he was on one point perfectly explicit. He distrusted spectral evidence, visible only to the bewitched. An innocent could be used unwittingly to diabolical ends. No one should be convicted for a crime he committed in someone else’s imagination.

Unsurprisingly for a man who had already met with a shimmering, winged, white-robed angel in his study—and who over the next years would note that the heavens advised, assured, and irradiated him—Mather also cast a vote for the invisible world. “Our dear neighbors are most really tormented, really murdered, and really acquainted with hidden things. Which are afterwards proved plainly to have been realities,” he asserted. It was perfectly just to execute an individual “who in the sight of men shall with a sword in his hand stab his neighbor into the heart.” In other words, Mather assured the justices, they could very well believe their eyes. Visible wounds—John Indian’s scars, Mercy Lewis’s
bite marks—could not be ignored. Richards had every reason to share Mather’s wisdoms with his colleagues, who in the weeks that followed consulted precedent in witchcraft cases, reading in Richard Bernard’s
Guide to Grand-Jury Men
and Joseph Keble’s treatise on common law, studying Glanvill, Baxter, and Perkins, as well as Mather’s
Memorable Providences
. Their orders were to uphold the laws of England; they had paid a price for having deviated from them in the past. Richards reached out for an ecclesiastical opinion not from any shortage of legal manuals but because the senior justice knew he had an authority at hand. His minister would never sound more assured on the subject. As for Richards and his colleagues, they represented the best minds in America. The events in Salem utterly confounded them.

PREVIOUS CAPITAL CASES
had been heard in Boston. Given the number of suspects and the multitude of witnesses, it made more sense to hear the witchcraft cases in Salem’s town house, a spacious, two-story brick structure on an open square. Richards traveled there the day after Mather composed his letter so as to be on hand for the early-morning opening of the court. As the sheriff impaneled grand jurors, Newton’s nine suspects—seven women and two men—returned to Salem. We do not know how they were transported or where room was found for them in an already congested prison, but they quickly made their presence felt. As the jail transfer took place that Wednesday a transparent Rebecca Nurse tackled Ann Putnam Sr. She boasted of various murders, claims buttressed by the huddle of ghosts around her. Ann Jr. reported on a set of matching apparitions.

Speculation must have run rampant throughout the village: With which witch would Newton begin? If the Putnams supposed it to be Nurse, they were mistaken. Newton did not select the criminal mastermind who posed the greatest danger, whom he left to molder in Boston. Nor did he choose the first accused witch, against whom he inventoried the evidence. His initial suspect was neither a confessed witch nor even a Salem villager. Newton was a level-headed civil servant, discerning and
decisive. He acted as would any seasoned prosecutor, choosing what appeared from every angle an open-and-shut case, one that would ease the way for future prosecutions and deliver a clear signal to all. Cooperation was prudent, he could remind perpetrators. Guilt was easily determined, he could reassure the nervous jurors. Conviction was handily obtained, he could demonstrate to the judges. The star attraction could wait.

Since Newton’s arrival in Salem, one name had recurred repeatedly. He heard it even from girls who had not mentioned it previously. Though in chains, his first defendant continued to afflict. She had attended the meeting in Parris’s pasture. She had murdered six people, including a husband. A confessed witch had implicated her. Her case could be argued without recourse to spectral evidence. She had threatened a justice, assuring Hathorne that if she were a witch, he would know it. She had little family and none of the combative Nurse variety. Newton could call up a body of evidence against her from an earlier witchcraft trial. While judges and an assembly of minor officials journeyed to Salem, Newton prepared formal indictments against Bridget Bishop, charging her with having practiced her black art on five girls. What would be said of a Charlestown woman in 1693 applied equally to the ornery, peace-disturbing petty thief who had been walking around with a gash in her coat that corresponded perfectly to a lunge made at her specter; “If there were a witch in the world, she was one.”

With the break of dawn on Thursday, ghosts alighted all over Salem. Soon thereafter a crowd began to assemble in the second, galleried floor of Salem’s town house. A school occupied the ground floor; the large chamber above was fitted with benches. The justices presided from raised seats above a long table. Shortly after eight that morning, Newton stood before Chief Justice William Stoughton. Did the attorney general swear, asked Stoughton, “that according to your best skill, you will act truly and faithfully on Their Majesties’ behalf, as to law and justice doth appertain, without any favor or affection, so help you God?” Newton did. Stephen Sewall took the oath to serve as clerk. A court officer, most likely
the sheriff, swore in eighteen grand jurors, men of local influence who were to determine if sufficient evidence existed for the case to proceed. Newton laid out his evidence against Bishop, charging her with having “hurt, tortured, afflicted, pined, consumed, wasted, and tormented” the village girls. With little fuss, the girls testified to their statements. Newton may have presented evidence from Bishop’s prior case as well; she was on trial as much for her character as her crime. The grand jury—its foreman was Burroughs’s onetime brother-in-law—handed down five formal indictments against Bishop.