The Witches: Salem, 1692 (41 page)

Others displayed more concern for their souls than their lives in the days leading up to the September execution. Fortune-telling Samuel Wardwell too experienced a change of heart. He had no interest in hearing further reports that he had attended a June sermon, muscling his way into the middle of the men’s pews, when he had been roasting in prison that day. He was not a witch. How could the court convict him solely on spectral evidence? He recanted, only to discover that it was not as easy to renounce a diabolical baptism as a proper one. By the logic of the day, Dorcas Hoar—declaring herself guilty—remained in prison, while
Wardwell—maintaining his innocence—rode to the gallows.
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He discouraged those who might have considered following in his footsteps; Wardwell would be the sole confessor to hang. He may have guessed as much but preferred, like Margaret Jacobs, not to live with a mutilated conscience. Corwin’s men swooped in to seize Wardwell’s livestock, carpenter’s tools, eight loads of hay, and six acres of corn, which they presumably picked themselves. A little prematurely, Corwin showed up at the Hoar address as well. He rode off with the curtains and bed.

As the ox-drawn cart trundled up the path that parched, dull Thursday, a wheel stuck. It was some time in being liberated. The girls narrated: the devil hindered its progress. (The truth may have been more prosaic. Wheeled vehicles tended to be useless outside town on rough, rutted paths. This one was overloaded.) Asserting her innocence to the end, Martha Corey, the Salem gospel woman, ended her life with an ardent prayer, delivered from the ladder. As Wardwell addressed the crowd, a cloud of smoke from the executioner’s pipe drifted into his face. He began to choke; the devil interrupted him, sneered his accusers, who could not have liked what the freewheeling Wardwell had to say. He was innocent. No court could prove otherwise. The extended Nurse family sobbed as Mary Esty climbed the ladder, bidding husband, children, and friends farewell. She spoke in the selfless, sober tones of her petition. Nearly all present found themselves in tears as the executioner fixed a hood over Esty’s head and nudged her from the rung.

Nicholas Noyes remained dry-eyed. Turning to the bodies dangling from the primitive structure, he scoffed: “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there!” None left a trace in Mather’s history, on which he was already well advanced; they died a little out of time. They denied any part of witchcraft, as had, over four sessions, every one of the twenty-seven suspects who had come before the court, each of whom it sentenced to death. All were convicted for having tortured
the Salem village girls, of whom some had never heard, and upon whom most had never before set eyes. Many in the Bay Colony kept careful count. With less exactitude
but much relish, Puritan enemies marveled at the Massachusetts frenzy. They were eagerly “hanging one another” for precisely the crime, noted two Quaker merchants who visited Salem that fall, of which they liked to accuse their supposedly devil-worshipping sect. Indeed they were “hotly and madly, mauling one another in the dark,” as Cotton Mather wailed. Witch-hunting seemed to encourage you to act like the very creatures—Catholics, Frenchmen, wizards—you abhorred.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY
soiled, underfed witch suspects were that fall in custody. Some were pregnant. Several had fallen dangerously ill; others had nursed now-dead suspects. Living atop one another in squalid hives of rumor, they made for unruly company. Nearly half had confessed. Reverend Dane’s daughter-in-law and William Barker’s sister-in-law described frantic, exhausting accusations, impossible for “timorous women to withstand.” They had agreed to all that was imputed to them, “our understandings, our reason, our faculties almost gone.” Bewildered and ashamed, they had little idea what to expect. Should confessed and accused witches anticipate the same fate? Some had insisted as fiercely on their innocence as others had testified to diabolical pacts. The satanic recruits hissed and spat at the holdouts. They knew perfectly well they were witches too! The confessors meanwhile reinforced one another’s accounts. But where through the summer their uniformity had corroborated a diabolical plot, by late September it began to strain credibility.
The scope of the crisis disconcerted as well. Was it truly possible, John Hale would wonder, his disquiet growing, “that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the devil’s lap at once?” The court met with mounting resistance. They needed an authoritative version of the invasion, one that would validate their hard work, underscore the present danger, and ease all doubts. Fortunately, they already had their volunteer.

Early in September Cotton Mather had requested the court transcripts from Stephen Sewall. The Salem clerk agreed to provide them but did not deliver. It is difficult to read anything into his hesitation. The court sat almost continuously through mid-September; Sewall’s wife was pregnant with their fourth child. He fielded all kinds of requests and queries, including those from Parris, regularly in town, and the Nurses, repeatedly on his doorstep. He had enough paperwork to manage without transcribing additional copies of trial documents. Impatiently, cloyingly, Mather attempted again to wink the pages out of him days before the September 22 hanging. So that he might prove “the more capable to assist in lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy,” he begged Sewall to make good on his promise. He needed accounts of only six or—were Sewall feeling indulgent—a dozen of the principal cases. The additional effort would pale in light of its benefits.
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Mather reminded him that he was going out on a limb for the sake of their friends. He did not need to point out that one of those friends was Sewall’s elder brother.

Recasting a favor as a command, Mather dictated his terms. The court recorder should submit the pages to him in narrative form. At the very least, he should elaborate on what he had so often related; would Sewall repeat what he had said about the confessors’ credibility, about the dumbfounded jurors and their interpretation of spectral evidence? Mather did not sound like a man who had repeatedly inveighed against
it. He wanted the most convincing morsels; he would take Sewall’s account and run with it. Witchcraft was after all more difficult to disbelieve now that eleven witches had hanged. (He had an additional reason to jump promptly into the fray: Both Hale and Noyes contemplated books of their own. Whatever they were witnessing, the Salem participants recognized it to be historic.) In a postscript Mather pulled out the heavy artillery: He worked at the command of their governor. He hinted at dire political repercussions.

Sewall had little opportunity to delay further; he and his family traveled the following day to Boston. He may have delivered a clutch of documents then, although he was never to furnish the eyewitness account. That Thursday found Stephen Sewall at his brother’s richly appointed mansion—the decor was all oak and mahogany—with Stoughton, Hathorne, John Higginson Jr., and Cotton Mather. On September 22, as Salem hanged eight witches, the men wrangled with criticisms of the court. All continued fully satisfied with their work, including even Higginson, whose sister was jailed and who had signed a warrant for the arrest of a new Gloucester suspect days earlier. It was imperative that the justices, rather than Mary Esty or Giles Corey, remain the heroes; they were in the business of exterminating witches, not creating martyrs. It was a lecture day; they joined in prayer. If they were looking for a nod of divine approval, it arrived that evening in the form of a torrential, much-needed downpour.

Although on his May arrival Governor Phips had found his constituents miserably plagued by “a most horrible witchcraft or possession of devils,” he had left the infestation entirely to Stoughton, preferring visible enemies, or at least those he could properly bludgeon. He could afford to ignore it no longer. On September 29 he returned to “agitated controversy.” It impeded all other business. Those inclined to malign the new charter and administration exploited the trials to discredit Phips, coaxing the “strange ferment of dissatisfaction” into an open contest. Even if he had expected politically to sidestep the issue, he could not personally
escape it; by fall he found himself related to an afflicted child and an accused witch. In his absence, his wife too had been named.
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Phips grappled with the future of the court, scheduled to reconvene in October.

The justices labored, Mather had noted, “under heart-breaking solicitudes, how they might therein best serve God and man,” another way of saying that they were downright confused. A squeak of dissent soon escaped the court; several justices shared their concerns with the governor. They feared they had been overly severe. Were they to sit again, they allowed, “they would proceed differently.” (We do not know the names of the dissenters. They were most likely the newlywed Richards, or both Richards and Boston merchant Peter Sergeant. Richards—whose mother had fended off a witchcraft accusation years earlier—had already applied for direction. Sergeant was protected by a large fortune and free from the web of business associations that bound the rest of the court. Sewall deferred to Stoughton; Winthrop did not take stands. The three Salem justices remained steadfast.) Eminent churchmen posed good and pointed questions. Other esteemed citizens stood accused, even while a prominent Bostonian carried his ailing child the twenty miles to Salem, suddenly the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by the village girls. He incurred the wrath of Increase Mather. Was there “not a God in Boston,” exploded Harvard’s president, the most illustrious of New England ministers, “that he should go to the Devil in Salem for advice?” Things were wholly out of hand when a Boston divine was up against an adolescent oracle.

Again a golden age of witchcraft coincided with a golden age of witchcraft literature; both Mathers toiled away at books. Increase Mather finished first. On Monday, October 3, the association of ministers assembled in the bright Harvard library, just above the hall where most of them had years earlier attended chapel and lectures. They had expected to tackle a
question of propriety: Might a clergyman administer communion to a neighboring congregation that found itself without a minister? More urgent matters had intervened. As moderator, Cotton Mather read aloud late that morning from his father’s newly completed
Cases of Conscience,
pages that had grown out of the association’s August discussion. The essay constituted a nod to a 1646 English work that Increase Mather recommended to witchcraft jurors. He enlarged upon and urgently reiterated his May argument, dismantling spectral evidence. For a third time he insisted that although the devil could impersonate innocents, his ruse rarely succeeded.
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Courts seldom convicted wrongfully, “so that perhaps there never was an instance of any innocent person condemned in any court of justice on earth” through sheer satanic delusion, a sentence contorted in its syntax—it included another court-clearing, twelve-ton “nevertheless”—if not its logic. Nor did the devil ordinarily arrange for persons to fly for miles through the air. Indeed he had done so in Sweden. But the visible and invisible worlds tended not to intermingle so freely.

Increase Mather set out to countenance a court; he dealt largely with forensics. While spectral sight existed, it was by no means certain that the Salem girls enjoyed it. Nor was it even clear that they were bewitched. He suspected possession.
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(Except in his son’s pages, the two words would be conjoined from this point on.) Possession easily accounted for the convulsions, the elastic limbs, the prophetic statements, the lunges into fireplaces, and the girls’ blooming health. In his estimation, the evil eye was “an old fable.” If witches emitted a physical venom from their eyes, all within their range of vision would be affected. (Alden had made the same point in vain.) As for the touch test: “Sometimes the power of imagination is such as that the touch of a person innocent and not
accused shall have the same effect.” He rejected those “magical experiments” as he did the witch cake, a “great folly.” (Mary Sibley could have had no idea how an idle afternoon’s experiment would be immortalized.) Familiar with every detail of the proceedings, Mather knew even of the diabolical dog, shot for having afflicted a bewitched girl. “This dog was no devil,” he explained, “for then they could not have killed him.” He mentioned no other Massachusetts fatality in the body of his text. Nor did he mention that the court had disregarded every shred of the minister’s June advice.

What constituted sufficient proof of witchcraft? A “free and voluntary confession” remained the gold
standard. That said, some innocent blood had been shed in Sweden several years after their great epidemic, when a youngster accused her mother of having flown her to nocturnal meetings. The woman burned. The daughter afterward came before the court “crying and howling.” She had accused her mother falsely, to settle a score. Evidence of spell-casting or secret-divining was dispositive, as were feats of unusual strength. (Both Mathers went out of their way to squelch doubts about Burroughs, who raised a special flurry of them.) When credible men and women in full possession of their faculties attested to these things, the evidence was sound; fifty-three-year-old Mather had no patience for mewling teenage girls. If one did not accept testimony from “a distracted person or of a possessed person in a case of murder, theft, felony of any sort, then neither may we do it in the case of witchcraft.”
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He cast a vote for clemency: “I would rather,” he wrote that fall, “judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch.”

Eight ministers endorsed Mather’s October 3 statement. By the time the pages went to press, six more had joined them, including some whose parishioners had been executed and others whose parishioners awaited trial. On the morning that Cotton Mather read his father’s cogent essay aloud, the Salem justices heard testimony against a thirty-four-year-old Lynn witch. Oversize cats galloped ferociously across a roof. A grown man had for three nights been too terrified to sleep in his own home. “A black thing of a considerable bigness” brushed past a woman as she dressed. The justices summoned a writhing Mary Warren. A touch of the suspect’s hand calmed her. With two glances the woman struck Mary to the floor. Warren went home, the Lynn witch to jail. The wind had shifted but gusted still in two countervailing directions at once. Around this time, Phips or someone in his confidence dispatched a series of questions to a group of New York clergymen, applying for a crash course in witchcraft. At least some believed the Massachusetts ministers out of their depth.

For the first time, seven suspects went home on bail the following day. All were under the age of eighteen. The youngest were Carrier’s seven-year-old daughter and Reverend Dane’s eight-year-old grand-daughter. Among the eldest was Mary Lacey Jr., Ann Foster’s headstrong, voluble eighteen-year-old granddaughter. Not everyone felt reassured by those releases; three suspects escaped from the Boston prison that week. William Barker, the Andover farmer who revealed the diabolical plan to make all men equal, seized the moment, as did a couple who had spent over nine months in custody. Sheriff Corwin promptly turned up to confiscate what was left of their Salem village estate. He had already once paid a call, rounding up cattle with which to settle their prison bill. Twelve children remained on the farm; on October 7 an elder son managed to hold off Corwin with a ten-pound bribe. It was the last attempted forfeiture. Wrote a Boston merchant that week to a friend in New York: “We here hope that the greatest heat and fury has stopped.”

THROUGH OCTOBER, ONLY
the silence had proved as eerie as the caterwauling girls. Even men who had boldly deposed English governors and landed in prison for civil disobedience went mute. Skeptics kept to themselves. Former deputy governor Thomas Danforth had conducted the
April hearing at which Parris’s niece first mentioned the assembly of witches in her backyard, at which the girls thrust hands into mouths rather than identify Elizabeth Procter, at which Mrs. Pope had levitated and Abigail’s hand was singed. Since that time Charlestown’s largest landowner had had his doubts. He seems to have remained quiet, allowing only in mid-October that he did not believe the court could continue without the support of the people and the clergy. Its practices were dangerously divisive. Michael Wigglesworth, the renowned sixty-one-year-old clergyman, author of the much-read
The Day of Doom,
endorsed
Cases of Conscience
on October 3 but voiced no opinion on the trials until much later. The cost was high, the confidence in intelligent, able-bodied Stoughton higher still. All too often dissenters wound up named or fined. Fifty-two-year-old Samuel Willard, Increase Mather’s only equal among ministers, had sounded notes of caution all along. He assisted the Englishes in their escape; he participated in the private fast for John Alden. In exchange, he met with “unkindness, abuse, and reproach”—and with a witchcraft accusation.