The Witches: Salem, 1692 (36 page)

Burroughs’s answer is lost not because he failed to make one but because Mather deemed it not “worth considering”; the evidence dwarfed the objections. Burroughs does seem to have bungled his defense. Asked to account for his preternatural strength, he explained that an Indian had assisted him in firing the musket as if it were but a pistol. It was foolish to suggest an accomplice who could so easily be turned into a “black man”; Mather tended to insert demons casually into the literature and did here. Moreover, no one else had seen Burroughs’s assistant. Called upon to explain his prowess with the barrels, Burroughs discovered himself without his best defense. He had managed that feat four years earlier at the home of his patron, the attorney general’s father-in-law. Checkley
was nowhere to be found; he appears to have kept his distance. Nor did Burroughs make more than a feeble attempt at discrediting his accusers. He was less eager to engage in gossip than the parishioners of whom he had abruptly taken his departure, who had sued him, and who transformed a minister into a wizard. His contrary streak remained on display; he reached instinctively to Scripture in the wake of a devastating Indian attack but was not going to gratify a hectoring official with an account of his children’s baptisms.

He repeatedly stumbled, offering contradictory answers, a luxury afforded only the accusers. As for “his tergiversations, contradictions, and falsehoods,” chided Mather, “now there never was a prisoner more eminent for them.” Lawson found his Salem predecessor unconvincing on every score. Despite the senseless fits and the multitude of witnesses, the trial moved quickly; Burroughs stood before the bench for several hours at most. Out of excuses, he reached finally for the deal-clincher in his pocket. Extracting the scrap of paper, he handed it to the jury. The forty-two-year-old minister did not contest the validity of spectral evidence. With a few lines he proposed something more inflammatory still: Burroughs asserted that “there neither are, nor ever were witches, that having made a compact with the devil can send a devil to torment other people at a distance.” It was a shot across the bow and the most objectionable thing he could have suggested. If diabolical compacts did not exist, if the devil could not subcontract out his work, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had sent six innocents to their deaths.

A tussle ensued over not only the substance of the lines but their source. Stoughton—who had graduated from Harvard the year Burroughs was born—recognized them at once: Burroughs had lifted the lines from the work of Thomas Ady. A leading English skeptic, Ady argued that witchcraft and the Bible were different things. He seemed to believe the latter an allegory. He inveighed against “groundless, fantastical doctrines,” fairy tales and old wives’ tales, the results of middle-of-the-night imaginings, excessive drinking, and blows to the head. Witches
existed but they were rare; Ady believed them a convenient excuse for the ignorant physician. He suggested that one should not, when misfortune struck, try to remember who had last come to the door.
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Burroughs denied having borrowed the passage, then emended his answer; he tended to be forthright at the most inconvenient moments. A visitor had passed him the text in manuscript. He had transcribed it. Burroughs had already several times agreed that witches plagued New England; it was too late in the day for such a dangerous gambit, about which we have but a portion of the story in the form of Mather’s redacted version. The jury arrived promptly at a verdict. It was one that gratified the chief justice.

As he left the courtroom that afternoon, John Hale felt a tug of doubt about his former colleague, whose ordination he had witnessed and with whom he had worked closely for several years. Hale pulled aside a confessed witch. She swore she had attended a meeting at which Burroughs exhorted his confederates to topple the church and establish a kingdom of the devil. “You are one that bring this man to death,” the equable minister reminded her. The situation was grave. “If you have charged anything upon him that is not true, recall it before it be too late, while he is alive.” The woman had no misgivings. Hale clearly did but did not commit them to paper. Cotton Mather would himself glide past church-subverting schemes, which Hale understood to be the reason for his colleague’s conviction. They seemed inconclusive proof of witchcraft. The same went for the ghosts and the expert marksmanship. Mather stipulated that neither played a role in the case, laboring so hard to keep spectral evidence in its place and out of the picture that he essentially concluded that Burroughs was found to be a wizard for having had the character of one. For his part, Increase Mather found Burroughs’s superhuman strength damning; the minister had performed too many acts no man could manage without diabolical help. He believed the case airtight.
“Had I been one of his judges,” the elder Mather would allow, “I could not have acquitted him.”

The convicted wizard did not disagree. At some point after the verdict had been announced Burroughs spoke with Hale. The minister might not respect wives but he did respect authority; he could quibble with neither the judges nor the jury that had convicted him. The evidence against him indeed appeared overwhelming. The only problem, Burroughs contended, was that it was all false. We do not know how he reconciled himself to his plight. In an equally dire situation he had bowed to divine displeasure. “The course of God’s most sweet and rich promises and gracious providences may justly be interrupted by the sins of his people,” he had noted seven months earlier, after the York atrocities. Along with both Procters, John Willard, George Jacobs, and Martha Carrier, Stoughton sentenced the minister to hang.

THE CONVICTION OF
the mastermind behind the demonic conspiracy—“the chief of all the persons accused of witchcraft or the ringleader of them all,” as the terrified Salem village tanner saw him—might have been thought to spell an end to witch-hunting. It did nothing of the sort. A blaze of confessions consumed August; the flames shot higher still over the first weeks of September. On the morning of Burroughs’s trial, Increase Mather visited the Salem prisoners, interviewing several witches. Massachusetts’s most distinguished minister pronounced himself satisfied with their reports of “hellish obligations and abominations.” Days later, Martha Carrier’s ten-year-old son admitted he had been a witch for a week. His mother had arranged for his demonic baptism, dipping him, naked, in the river that ran between the Carrier and Foster properties. He had flown to a meeting with three men and six women. They traveled on two poles. He did not mention his little sister but by August 10
did not need to; the Andover justice of the peace who deposed him spoke with her the same day. The conversation left him uneasy, though it would be some time before the distaste fully registered. He submitted his notes to Hathorne and Corwin with a rattled disclaimer, apologizing for “being unadvisedly entered upon service I am wholly unfit for.” He hoped his account would prove helpful all the same.

Indeed it did. Sarah Carrier rode to Salem the following day. She chatted amiably along the way with the constables or before her hearing with Hathorne, who knew her story before he questioned her. She had been a witch since she was six. “And how old are you now?” Hathorne asked, for the record. “Near eight years old, brother Richard says,” she replied brightly. “I shall be eight years old in November next.” Sarah afflicted her victims with the spear her mother had given her and in the company of the same individuals her brother had named. Though bodily in prison, Martha Carrier appeared to her in the guise of a black cat. “How did you know that it was your mother?” inquired Hathorne. “The cat told me so,” chirped the seven-year-old, more certain that she was a sorceress than that she was seven.

Plenty of black cats and red books had emerged in Salem too, but Andover witchcraft was to be substantially different. For starters, there was more of it. Witchcraft engulfed much of eastern Massachusetts and, briefly, a corner of Connecticut in 1692. It spread from Salem to twenty-four other communities. None succumbed so completely to it as Andover, where the epidemic moved faster and more furiously and produced more accused witches than both Salems combined. Between the time Martha Carrier stood trial and the time the Andover official’s distaste finally caught up with him a month later, fifty witches turned up in a town of six hundred people. A family affair, Andover witchcraft moved in a less haphazard fashion. Children incriminated grandparents and mothers their sons. Siblings turned on one another. Nearly all of the witches belonged to five clans; in concert with the Salem girls, a dozen people named all the names. Accusations outflew even rumors, as cries
of “You are a witch!” and “You are guilty!” ricocheted about town. Some gloated about who would be carried off next. Others glowered, further compromising themselves.

Along with a fresh cast, Andover provided a revised narrative. Ghosts tended not to disturb that community. Andover preferred satanic baptisms—in rivers, ponds, wells, or pails of water—something that had played no previous role in New England, although they had in Sweden. Nor in more prosperous Andover did neighbors normally enchant one another’s hay or pigs; they focused on the diabolical, preferring spears, satanic sacraments, and witches’ meetings, things of which Tituba had never dreamed. Forgotten and in her sixth month in prison—she had neither testified nor been indicted—she set the Salem stage. Andover’s story tumbled fully formed out of Mary Lacey Jr.’s devil-toppling conspiracy. At its heart was Burroughs’s diabolical sacrament, of which nearly every Andover confessor supplied some account and of which a consistent picture emerged, even if in Andover the devil could still appear as, depending on the witness, a colt, a mouse, a fly, a bird, a cat, a woman, a pig, a black man, a bear. Tituba aside, only Andover witches knew how to fly.

What had happened? Burroughs’s conviction had unsettled, inviting a gritty dust of suspicion to permeate Andover. Closer to the frontier, the town was more vulnerable to Indian raids, to the unorthodox, and to smallpox. But it was also true that by August the authorities knew better what they were looking for. Both the questions and the answers were familiar after the Court of Oyer and Terminer’s third session. From the beginning, Hathorne had engaged in skillful prompting. By August, he knew what he wanted to hear; it aligned neatly with what some wanted to say. The satanic bread grows visibly red and redder as, under questioning, his witness warms up. “Had you any hot irons or knitting needles?” Hathorne asked Foster’s daughter. She obliged with an iron spindle. “Did you used at any time to ride upon a stick or pole?” he quizzed Foster’s granddaughter. She had. “But doth not the devil threaten to tear you in pieces if you do not do what he says?” he challenged a Boxford woman.
“Yes, he threatens to tear me in pieces,” she agreed. Only rarely did a witness disappoint. Were there not two ministers at the witches’ meeting? Hathorne asked Mary Lacey Jr., who could not say and who never helped him find his man.

Partly as a result, something happened in Salem that had not happened before. Prior to 1692, only four New Englanders had admitted to witchcraft, one of whom probably had only a dim idea as to what she was saying. In the first three months of the trials, only eight confessed, including a four-year-old, Tituba, two suspects who would later recant, and cheeky Abigail Hobbs. By August, confessions bloomed faster than afflictions, accompanied by credit-bolstering displays of self-flagellating and hand-wringing. Nearly every one of the accused Andover witches confessed to the crime. Judicial coercion—“buzzings and chuckings of the hand,” as one observer termed them; chains removed in exchange for confessions, dungeons threatened if they were withheld—was not the sole means to extract them. The fifty-two-year-old Boxford woman conceded she had been in the devil’s employ for seven years. She later revealed that Abigail Hobbs and Mary Lacey Jr. had taunted her for days, “mocking me and spitting in my face, saying they knew me to be an old witch and if I would not confess it, I should very speedily be hanged.” They frightened her out of her wits. She had no idea what she said at her trial and little of what was said to her; she caught only the formidable words “Queen Mary.” There was little need for the brand of arm-twisting that, though it left no trace on paper, had in April led Mary Warren to yowl: “I will tell, I will tell!”

At the outset of her fourth interrogation, Hathorne had reminded Ann Foster that she could expect no peace without a full confession. Trading mercy for material, the bench encouraged her granddaughter, proffering something the family had not: God would forgive her if she confessed, a justice assured the wayward teenager. “I hope he will,” she replied sincerely. Seventeen-year-old Margaret Jacobs was offered either the dungeon or her life. In his May letter, Cotton Mather early on recommended lesser punishments for those who renounced the devil; after
mid-July, no one needed to be reminded of the price of noncompliance. In a strange Salem twist, Stoughton spared confessed witches, convicting only those who refused to acknowledge guilt.
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If you could save your life by admitting that you flew through the air on a pole, wouldn’t you?

Confession came naturally to a people who believed it the route to salvation, who submitted spiritual autobiographies when they entered into church membership, who did not entirely differentiate sin from crime. It stood at the heart of the New England enterprise; there was an art and a form to it, as witch-cake baker Mary Sibley demonstrated. By the craggy logic of the day, if you were named, you must have been named for a reason. Little soul-searching was required to locate a kernel of guilt. A sagging conscience bordered in any event on satanic complicity; to wrestle with one’s faith was to wrestle with the devil. It was not difficult to get an eleven-year-old girl to confess to consorting with diabolical accomplices when already “she knew she was made up of all manners of sin,” something she might perfectly well conclude on her own, without the advantage Mary Lacey Jr. had of regular maternal reminders. Learning of the extraordinary charge hurtling her way, Rebecca Nurse had racked her brain: For what sin had she possibly failed to atone? As had been true in Sweden, women, children, and young men tended to confess most readily. It was easier to extract confessions from women, less certain of their worth and more convinced of that of the magistrates, one reason why four middle-aged men—one of whom had suggested he was as likely to be a buzzard as a wizard—were scheduled to hang on August 19.

Something else haunted those who came before the Salem authorities. Mary Toothaker felt unworthy of her baptism. It imposed an expectation of progress; inevitably, one came up short. Many desperately wished themselves more receptive to Scripture, a yearning the devil
never offered to satisfy. They dreaded spiritual numbness, a condition akin to what a suspect described when her specter went off to afflict, leaving her “in a cold dumpish melancholy condition.” “Methinks,” moaned Cotton Mather, “I am but a very parrot in religion!” In the snow, her body raw, her dying six-year-old in her lap, Mary Rowlandson meditated before the campfire on how she had not used her Sabbaths to best effect. Mary Toothaker had no name other than the devil for the doubting, carping, tempting voice in her head. If you tried to pray and could not, who else could be stopping you? She, anyway, had no better answer. Any number of confessors lamented that they had wrung less than they wished from their devotions. An Andover carpenter may have had the same spiritual torpor in mind when he reported that the devil interrupted as he led his family in prayer.

While women tended to lament their vile natures, earlier misdeeds tumbled out too: an attempted suicide, a theft, a bout of drinking, an abortion, an adulterous liaison. Margaret Jacobs’s mother wailed in prison about a daughter, drowned in a well seven years earlier. She believed she had killed the child. The hand-wringing, soul-baring confessing not only cleared one’s name but promised to assist jailed relatives. The Laceys may have believed they were doing one another a favor as each fell in turn upon her narrative sword. And if you were going to confess, doing so in religious terms—if inverted religious terms—made sense. It put you on the road to grace. Renouncing the devil spelled relief, even if your confession had little to do with the charges at hand.

As the mystery reader knows, denials tend toward the convoluted. Confessions are refreshingly simple. Nothing is more expedient for a prosecutor, spared a time-consuming trial. From a 1692 witchcraft judge’s point of view, confessions took pressure off tenuous spectral evidence. They were eagerly received and deeply reassuring, the more so as almost by definition, folded into each one—a sort of certificate of authenticity—came a gleaming bit of shrapnel in the form of an accusation. Not everyone was as careful as Tituba had been to name as coconspirators only
those already under arrest. When Richard Carrier returned from his harrowing, upside-down ordeal, he delivered eleven names. On one count he remained stalwart: he did not incriminate his mother.

Martha Carrier and Ann Foster, across-the-river neighbors as well as flying companions, went their separate ways under interrogation. Foster buckled. Carrier gave no quarter. Both made their homes on the southern edge of Andover, very nearly in Middlesex rather than Essex County, at the town’s newer, less desirable end. They lived as far as one could live from the meetinghouse and still remain in Andover. With the confessions of August 11, witchcraft crept into the heart of the community. Both of Carrier’s younger children implicated twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who supplied a familiar version of the witch meeting: they were about eighty in all, bent on dismantling Christ’s kingdom. Johnson was a granddaughter of Andover’s longtime minister, Francis Dane. That day Dane’s pregnant forty-year-old daughter appeared before Hathorne and Corwin. Although a touch of her hand delivered the Procters’ maid from her fits, Abigail Faulkner Sr. would not confess. Her niece urged her on “for the credit of her town.” Faulkner stood her ground, according to the court report, insisting that “God would not require her to confess that she was not guilty of.” She held out even after invisible forces yanked lovely Mary Warren under the examiners’ table. Again Faulkner’s hand delivered the Procter servant from her distress. But, objected Faulkner, she had looked at those girls when they had visited Andover earlier without affecting them in the least! That, the justices informed her, had been before she had begun to practice witchcraft.

Fifteen days later she would admit to having been furious at her niece’s arrest. She “did look with an evil eye” on the bewitched. She hoped they would suffer; they were destroying her family. Again witchcraft inscribed a vicious circle. (In a similar sort of spell-casting, a Reading woman confessed that she had wished ill of her accusers.) It did not help that—though she expressed compassion for the girls—Abigail Faulkner Sr. shed no tear on their account. Nor could it have helped that she was a cousin of both Martha Carrier and Mary Toothaker and related
by marriage to Elizabeth How, who had hanged on July 19. Within weeks, Faulkner’s seven-and twelve-year-old daughters were detained as well. Both confessed. By mid-September, two of Reverend Dane’s daughters, a daughter-in-law, four grandchildren, and various nieces and nephews would be in custody. Dane was to discover that he was related to no fewer than twenty witches.

Having married into one of Andover’s foremost families, Francis Dane had served as Andover’s minister since before Samuel Parris was born. He had taken it upon himself to serve simultaneously as village schoolmaster; most of the adult men in Andover who learned to write had done so under his tutelage. Andover knew few fractious land disputes; ministerial wars had not trampled local egos. Still, the town had reason to resent its autocratic, arthritic senior minister who refused to retire. Half lame, he could manage only some of his duties. The town hired a younger, more orthodox man, a Parris schoolmate, to replace their sixty-five-year-old preacher. Dane sued. Andover wound up paying both men, immediate neighbors, two generations apart, who shared a pulpit if not a worldview. Dane ruled with a strong hand, Thomas Barnard with a sharper edge. Barnard had complained that the schoolhouse in which he taught prior to his Andover ordination could have doubled as a pigsty. And ultimately the younger man would cost the town more than the seasoned one. No one accused Barnard or his young family, while over the next weeks Dane’s family would be systematically targeted. He could not have shrugged off the sense that an accusation headed his way; Massachusetts now sentenced ministers to death. At least one congregant attempted to ride to his rescue. Before a September grand jury, an Andover matron recounted the flight to her diabolical baptism. She and a church deacon shared a pole with two other witches. Did she know if the devil could afflict in the shape of an accomplice without that accomplice’s consent? asked the magistrates. She assured them he could not. Only the Monday before, she and Mrs. Dane had borrowed the reverend’s specter in an attempt to implicate him. Their ploy had not worked. What hindered it? asked the authorities. “The Lord would not
suffer it so to be, that the devil should afflict in an innocent person’s shape,” she explained.