The Witches: Salem, 1692 (44 page)

It was a charade all around. Mather claimed he had been enlisted to write a book by which Stoughton professed himself abashedly gratified
at a time when the governor pretended to have banned all books on witchcraft. Conceived as a propaganda piece, billed as a felicitous accident, advertised in the author’s own words,
Wonders of the Invisible World
was published when books on witchcraft could not be. Indeed there were wheels within wheels, if not the kind which Thomas Putnam had envisioned.

PHIPS MIGHT WELL
have wished himself in Sweden over the next weeks. Every sort of appeal came his way. Even as he reported to London, nine Andover men petitioned on behalf of their starving wives and children. Might they be sent home? “Penitent confessors,” they could surely be trusted to remain under house arrest until their cases were called. As it was they suffered horribly, given the hardships of prison life, the hunger, the cold of the season, “their inward grief and trouble.” The expense weighed heavily on their families. In exchange for a bond very few in Andover could have afforded, one twelve-year-old girl walked out of Salem prison three days later. A different kind of appeal went to Phips on October 18, from many of the same men and their relations. Their minister joined them. Twenty-six Andover men fervently wished that the land might be cleared of witches. But “distempered persons” had misrepresented their blameless friends and neighbors who had confessed only under duress, pounded by friends and interrogators. (Changing tack, Reverend Barnard signed the petition, which either he or Reverend Dane presumably wrote.) Their town’s troubles stood only to increase if the court did not reconsider its methods. Already more witches were named. “And we know not who can think himself safe,” pleaded the men, “if the accusations of children and others who are under a diabolical influence shall be received against persons of good fame.” They too gently hinted that the court might have it backward. Might the girls themselves be the diabolical agents? From Ipswich, from Reading, others weighed in on behalf of miserable relatives. Might they have their wives back? “It is deplorable,” wrote a Lynn man of his spouse, “that in old age
the poor decrepit woman should lie under confinement so long in a stinking jail when her circumstances rather require a nurse to attend her.” She had been in custody for nearly five months.

Brattle in tow, Increase Mather set out to investigate. In Salem’s jail, struggling not to gag, they learned a great deal both about court methods and the human imagination. From eight aggrieved, ashamed, unkempt, and very hungry women, they heard the same story. The prisoners had afflicted no one, signed no pacts, attended no meetings, submitted to no diabolical baptisms. They had however been frightened out of their wits. Their confessions, they sobbed, had been “wholly false.” William Barker’s thirty-six-year-old sister-in-law was especially inconsolable. Repeatedly her examiners had promised her “she
did
know of their being witches, and
must
confess it, that she did know of their being baptized, etc., and must confess it.” She had at last surrendered. She found the shame unbearable, as did sixteen-year-old Martha Tyler, bludgeoned by her brother on one side and her minister on the other. To save her eternal soul (and to save her life, as her brother reminded her), Martha had agreed to every allegation. The prisoners wept bitterly for having implicated others.

But how—the women faced a new barrage of queries in October, from friendlier interrogators—had they invented those vivid details? Brattle too was interested in specifics, although he asked different questions than had Reverend Hale, so curious about the mechanics of Ann Foster’s flight. A fifty-five-year-old Andover woman who had flown on a pole to her satanic baptism elucidated; it was like watching the Wicked Witch of the West molt back into Miss Gulch. Forced to choose a date for her diabolical baptism, she had settled on one twelve years earlier. She had just had her last child. She had been ill and melancholy, “and so thought that that time might be as proper a time to mention as any.” But why confess that Satan appeared as a cat? Having convinced her she was a witch, the magistrates pressed her to say what shape the devil assumed. Shortly before her arrest she had seen a cat outside her front door. It was
the first thing that popped into her mind.
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Most of the women had been blindfolded in Barnard’s touch test, an experiment the junior minister now regretted. It left one forty-nine-year-old still in doubt. She assured the visitors that she had never spoken with the devil or afflicted anyone. As to whether she might be a witch, she remained of two minds. The howls of the girls rang still in her ears; she could not discount them. And three of the younger women in prison told an entirely different tale. They persisted in their accounts of flying, of choking victims, of stabbing poppets with thorns. Before their visitors, George Jacobs’s servant convulsed, tortured, a cellmate explained, by Margaret Jacobs. For good reason Samuel Sewall wrote that day to an English cousin: “We desire your prayers for us relating to the witchcraft.”

It was into that volatile, muddled, intemperate climate that Cotton Mather introduced
Wonders of the Invisible World
. Well aware of the “mire and mud” into which he trudged, Mather prefaced the volume with a tribute to his own courage. It was however crucial that proper use be made of the “stupendous and prodigious things that are happening among us.” He did so only, he professed, because no one else volunteered. (Weeks earlier he had promised that his work would in no way interfere with that of Noyes or Hale, whom he effectively cut off at the pass.) He outlined his intentions: He set out “to countermine the whole plot of the devil against New England.” He aimed his account abroad. And he published to head off “false reports.” He said nothing about vindicating the court but did not need to; the objective is clear on every page, as in Stoughton’s fulsome preface.

The two Mather volumes went their own ways. Where his father dealt in the abstract, defending innocents, Cotton Mather reveled in the occult, condemning witches. He took as much pride in the assault on New England as he had in observing a Goodwin girl reeling from a Mather volume. He wrote to prove that catastrophe remained possible—he was at his best when anticipating the worst—and, as crucially, that the storm had been foretold. More than forty years earlier, a condemned witch had predicted a “horrible plot against the country by witchcraft, and a foundation of witchcraft then laid, which if it were not seasonably discovered, would probably blow up, and pull down all the churches in the country.”
^*
That fate was now upon them, exactly as forecast! The acid test of a prediction is whether it comes true, as fortune-telling Dorcas Hoar knew. She had warned that various children would die; the families who suffered losses alone remembered her words. In 1676 Increase Mather had quickly turned out a history of King Philip’s War as proof that his prophecies had been correct, an agile, efficient use of terror. It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.

Mather confessed he would not be surprised if the witchcraft reached even farther than was suspected; he hardly sounded like a man intent on putting out a fire. Into his volume he folded a gloss on the experts, his August 4 sermon, and an account of a celebrated thirty-year-old English case, similar to Salem’s, except perhaps for a combusting toad. He chose that trial with reason: it was one in which the prosecution rested on spectral evidence. Only in the second half of his pages does Mather launch into the account he has been, as he asserts, commanded to provide, a claim as disingenuous as Stoughton’s introductory purr of surprise. Mather either received fewer cases than he had hoped for or found fewer
that fit his narrative needs. Occasionally he seems to have embroidered on court reports, with details that appear nowhere in the surviving papers: the smell of brimstone, money raining down, a corner of sheet ripped from an invisible specter, pins the justices themselves removed from the girls’ flesh. Otherwise he adhered closely to the evidence at hand while working some magic with his pages. No Nurse acquittal, no Esty petition, no witness in Elizabeth How’s defense figures in
Wonders
. Mather included all the crowd-pleasing spectral stories while issuing regular reminders that flights and pacts played only supporting roles in the convictions.

He expressed his fervent hope that some of the accused might prove innocent. They deserve “our most compassionate pity, till there be fuller evidences that they are less worthy of it.” That was a falsehood. Sixteen pages later he wrote of George Burroughs: “Glad should I have been if I had never known the name of this man.” His very initials revolted Mather. (Burroughs alone remained so powerful a wizard that he could not be named.) He was essential to the story, its linchpin and mastermind, as Mather acknowledged in his next line: the government had specifically requested that he include that case in his volume—a claim that may even have been accurate. The about-face with Burroughs was nothing compared to the rest of the book. Mather had previously denounced the touch test and the evil eye. He had written off spectral evidence. He had called for exquisite caution. In
Wonders
he suggested that the touch of a hand, the ocular effects, the flights through the air, the vanishing acts, were part of the devil’s blasphemous imitations of Christ. How the brute delighted in mocking church sacraments!

Having discharged his obligations, Mather tossed in a few more “matchless curiosities.” In went a précis of Sweden, New England’s blueprint. The devil’s red beard and long gartered stockings did not travel. Nor did the satanic feasting and dancing. Mather sifted out the more memorable passages, enlisting some typographical help. In bold he emphasized the details that accorded precisely with Salem. The words “suffering children,” “cut finger,” “enchanted tools,” “freely confessing,” and “attempted to murder the judges but could not” leap from the page.
He included the late Swedish story of the little girl who recanted, a Mather family favorite. In as well went Thomas Putnam’s incriminating letter about Giles Corey and the murder charge.
^*
Mather claimed to have labored over the pages as he had labored over nothing before. If so, the artful design he had promised Stoughton is little in evidence; the work is jumbled, lumpy, at times deliriously incoherent. Mistakes had surely been made. But how to manage more adroitly when Satan toyed with them, injecting falsehood and cheats into the proceedings? The devil burned with jealousy at New England’s wise magistrates. He raged at their fine new government. Spectral evidence might not be sufficient for conviction, but nor was it negligible.

As quickly as Cotton Mather had worked,
Wonders of the Invisible World
arrived as a case of too much too late. Conceived as a justification, published to prevent false reports, the pages read as a full-throated apologia. Between mid-September and mid-October—as Phips weighed disbanding the court, or weighed breaking the news that he had disbanded the court—the churning tide had turned. There was another problem as well. Where the father had no taste for the trials, the son appeared to urge them on. Cotton Mather worried less about condemning an innocent than about allowing a witch to walk free. He found himself under immediate fire, not only for his fawning embrace of the court but for an adolescent infraction to which New England was particularly sensitive: filial disrespect. He had not endorsed his father’s volume; he undermined his position. Among all the freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a son or a son implicated a father. “With what sinful and raging asperity I have been since treated, I had rather forget than
relate,” Mather wailed, days after the publication of
Wonders
. A cataract of “unkindness, abuse, and reproach” roared his way. People said lovely things to his face and hideous things behind his back. He had meant only to tamp down dissent at a critical time! How could he be said to oppose his father and the rest of the New England ministry when his critics were themselves madly impaling one another? He could see little to do but die. (He was twenty-nine.)

As he explained it, the two had made a concerted effort to cover all bases. Cotton Mather had worried that
Cases
on its own would undermine the court and “everlastingly stifle any further proceedings of justice.” He dreaded an open attack on the magistrates, whose work might expose them to “the rashest mobs.” (He added the “rashest” afterward, for emphasis.) Father and son shared the Second Church pulpit. They saw each other daily and collaborated closely. Earlier, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, they had worked in concert to justify a coup, one man urging moderation on the restless colony, the other playing for sympathy in the mother country; they were unlikely to have forgotten their careful choreography now. More plausibly Cotton Mather felt the two books to be logical extensions of the same equivocal statement. “The Return of Several Ministers” was nothing if not elastic, a document that simultaneously extended goodwill to the court and mercy to the accused. Increase’s
Cases
became the plea for “exquisite caution”; Cotton’s
Wonders
the overgrown “nevertheless.”
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As Mather saw it, he made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing?

Wonders
was published under what Mather felt was Stoughton’s protection. It proved insufficient. His father rode to the rescue; the Phips administration could ill afford a rift at this juncture. As his pages went to press and probably hours before they did so, Increase Mather appended a backtracking postscript to
Cases,
to bring the two books into closer alignment.
He may have heard from Stoughton personally. The elder Mather remained fully convinced that witches roamed the land; the confessions he had heard while visiting the imprisoned confirmed as much. He meant not to deny witchcraft, only to make its prosecution more exact. Nor did he intend to cast aspersions on the ever-worthy justices. They deserved “pity and prayers rather than censure.” He was most grateful to his son for having established that no one had been convicted on spectral evidence alone. Increase Mather too made a point of mentioning Burroughs, the only witch he cited by name. The minister had deserved to hang. Burroughs had, Mather assured his readers, accomplished things that no one who “has not a devil to be his familiar could perform.”