The Witches: Salem, 1692 (59 page)

“I know what you are” to “nothing that was good”: R, 149–50. On the previous marriage, see Eleanor V. Spiller, “Giles Corey,”
Essex Genealogist
5 (February 1985): 11–14.

“I will come” to “iron rod”: R, 152–53. Martha Goodwin was propelled in much the same way through Mather’s house, “dragged wholly by other hands.”

“the people who make”: CM,
Ornaments for the Daughters of Zion
(Boston, 1692). See Jane Kamensky’s
Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). In her “Words, Witches, and Women Trouble: Witchcraft, Disorderly Speech, and Gender Boundaries in Puritan New England,”
EIHC
128 (October 1992), she provides a marvelous tour of the lexicon, with a chart of the forms of speech associated with the accused, 307.

Ann Putnam Sr.: Rosenthal believes she was not yet thirty;
Salem Story,
229n and RFQC, 8: 348, 424.

“helping to tend” to “black pen”: R, 160–61.

“I have perceived” to “heard nothing”: R, 155.

“Two errors”: Blaise Pascal,
Thoughts
(New York: Collier Press, 1910), 220.

“as rare an history”: Lawson in Burr, 152. Lawson and SP could not have been out of touch; the copy of Perkins on SP’s desk came from a deacon at Lawson’s congregation. Lawson, CM, and SP regularly invoked the same imagery over these months.

could not have returned: Interview with David Hall, January 23, 2013.

“after I was removed”: Lawson in Burr, 148.

“‘Whish, whish, whish’”: The cry resembled a 1637 German spell for takeoff: “Whoosh! Up the chimney, up the window hole!” Levack,
The Witchcraft Sourcebook,
207.

“ought I know”: Calef in Burr, 148–53.

“Now stand” to “enough of that”: Lawson in Burr, 154.

Quaker women: Earle,
The Sabbath,
96–97. Women spoke so often at Quaker meetings you might as well call them ministers, CM huffs in
Little Flocks Guarded Against Grievous Wolves
(Boston: 1691), 94.

“I know no doctrine” to “pathetic prayer”: Lawson in Burr, 154–55.

“distracting and disturbing”: B&N, 296.

“We did not send” to “prove she was a witch”: R, 146; Lawson in Burr, 156.

delegation assembled: R, 162. Roach thinks the Nurse family requested the neighbors call: See Marilynne Roach,
Six Women of Salem
(New York: Da Capo, 2013), 130. On the family, see Lee Shai Weissbach, “The Townes of Massachusetts,”
EIHC
118 (1982): 200–220; RFQC, 5: 341.

Lawson called on Ann Putnam Sr.: Lawson in Burr, 157–58. Lawson had reason to hesitate; bibliomancy was strongly discouraged. The passage in question offered a
sort of litmus test as to where one stood on Judgment Day; it was a text designed to make the impious squirm; e-mail with David Hall, September 24, 2013. Ann was six weeks pregnant. In her trances Mercy Short tended to offer remarkably apt passages, CM in Burr, 275.

Rebecca Nurse stood before Hathorne and Corwin: R, 157–58, 160–61; Lawson remarks on her indifference in
Christ’s Fidelity: The Only Shield Against Satan’s Malignity
(London: J. Lawrence, 1704), 109.

shed only three tears: MacKay,
The Witch Mania,
510.

He had prepared carefully: Lawson in Trask,
“The Devil Hath Been Raised,”
65–106. He may have added to the sermon after its delivery and before publication, as he would again later.

Martha Corey’s husband: The only men convicted of witchcraft in Massachusetts prior to 1692 had been married to witches. There was a reason for a husband to offer up incriminating remarks.

the arrest of Dorothy: R, 155–56, 163.

“terror, amazement”: Lawson in Trask,
“The Devil Hath Been Raised,”
95; “vile and wicked” to “is a devil”:
SPN,
194–98. On the sudden, sweeping swerve from hypocrisy to devils, interview with David Hall, November 29, 2012. By March, SP did not believe anyone colluded unwillingly with the devil. The door-slamming is from Lawson in Burr, 161, and interview with Richard Trask, November 28, 2012. Cloyce’s exit: R, 415.

“thresh the devil”: R, 538.

“sport, they must have”: R, 537. The reporter had married into the Cloyce family.

rush to narrative: CM wrote his account of the Goodwins’ enchantment in real time, which allowed Martha to read it over. She did so repeatedly, ridiculing the work and warning the author that he “should quickly come to disgrace by that history.”

Scripture provided the bedrock: David D. Hall, “Toward a History of Popular Religion in Early New England,”
William and Mary Quarterly
41 (January 1984): 49–55. John Dane appealed to the Bible to decide to come to NE, where he would be safer from temptation; “John Dane’s Narrative,”
New-England Historical Genealogical Record
(April 1854): 154; the Sewalls retreated to bedrooms with the Bible after harsh words were exchanged. One woman used hers to deck a New Hampshire sheriff’s assistant; Koehler,
Search for Power,
372.

seer and watchman: See CM,
Midnight Cry;
Roger Thompson, “‘Holy Watchfulness’ and Communal Conformism,”
New England Quarterly
56 (December 1983): 504–22; and Earle,
The Sabbath,
75–77, for the watchful deacons. To mind other people’s business was, asserted Edmund Morgan, to be a good Puritan.

the daughter’s bonnet:
CM Diary,
1: 369.

“If any people”: Cited in Miller and Johnson,
The Puritans,
1: 245.

“had willingly risked”: Stout,
New England Soul,
31. If one reviewed the record, God had been frowning on NE from the beginning. He would continue to do so; in 1701 you could still title a sermon “Prognosticks of Impending Calamities.”

“ravening wolves” and “wild boars”: Scottow,
A Narrative,
28.

revoke their charter: David S. Lovejoy is especially fine on the period,
The Glorious Revolution in America
(New York: Harper and Row, 1972). For the end of prosperity, Timothy H. Breen and Stephen Foster, “The Puritans’ Greatest Achievement: A Study of Social Cohesion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,”
Journal of American History
60 (June 1973): 16.

“the petty differences”: “Letter from New England,” November 11, 1694, CO 5/858, PRO.

Andros asked John Higginson: Cited in
The Andros Tracts
(New York: Burt Franklin, 1868), 1: 26. Dunton described Higginson’s speech as “a glimpse of heaven” in
The Life and Errors of John Dunton
(London: J. Nichols, 1818), 127.

“remote, rocky, barren”: Edward Johnson,
Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence
(New York: Elibron Classics, 2005), 210.

in a military coup: Historians have happily noted that that revolt took place eighty-six years to the day before Paul Revere’s ride. The Tower of Babel: Edward Randolph to the governor of Barbados, May 16, 1689,
Edward Randolph: Letters and Official Papers
(Boston: Prince Society, 1899), 4: 267.

“that strange agglomeration”: Aldous Huxley,
The Devils of Loudun
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953), 39. The annunciation is from Ann M. Little, “Men on Top? The Farmer, the Minister, and Marriage in Early New England,”
Pennsylvania History
64 (Summer 1997): 134.

great Enlightenment thinkers: See Lawrence Stone, “The Disenchantment of the World,”
New York Review of Books,
December 2, 1971, and David Stannard, “Death and the Puritan Child,”
American Quarterly
(December 1974): 472.

Almanacs sold briskly: John Partridge,
Monthly Observations and Predictions for This Present Year, 1692
(Boston: Benjamin Harris, 1692), 4. The almanac’s prediction for April was even more ominous: “If there is any roguery now against the government, be sure there is a woman up to the ears in it; but be it what it will, a woman is at the bottom, and the thing is villainous.” On the overlap of science and magic, folklore and erudition, Hall’s seminal 1990
Worlds of Wonder;
Walter W. Woodward,
Prospero’s America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); John Winthrop et al., “Scientific Notes from the Books and Letters of John Winthrop, Jr.,”
Isis
11 (December 1928): 325–42; Jon Butler, “Magic, Astrology, and the Early American Religious Heritage,”
American Historical Review
84 (April 1979): 317–46; and Ann Kibbey, “Mutations of the Supernatural: Witchcraft, Remarkable Providences, and the Power of Puritan Men,”
American Quarterly
34 (Summer 1982): 125–48. As a rule, the more intently you immersed yourself in science, the more interest you displayed in the supernatural.

best-educated community: Cremin,
American Education,
189–207. There were more educated men in Massachusetts than in any other colony. There was also more witchcraft.

“prodigious witchcrafts”: Harley, “Explaining Salem,” 315.

best pig followed him: Michael P. Winship, “Encountering Providence in the Seventeenth Century,”
EIHC
126 (1990): 35. Luck had not yet entered the picture; it was
divine providence when the woodpile collapsed just after you had called the children away from it. Apocalypse practice: SS
Diary,
1: 331.

inclement weather: Karen Kupperman, “Climate and Mastery of the Wilderness in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in
Seventeenth-Century New England,
ed. David Hall and David Allen (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1984), 9. The overenjoyable sex: Edward Taylor, cited in Koehler,
Search for Power,
80. The lame knee: “The Autobiography of Increase Mather,”
Proceedings of the AAS
(Worcester, 1961), 350. See also Kibbey, “Mutations of the Supernatural.”

“inquire, instruct, advise”: “Records of the Cambridge Association of Ministers,” October 13, 1690,
Proceedings of the MHS,
vol. 17 (1880), 264.

“I observe the law”: Hull,
Diaries,
136.

Cantlebery’s wife: RFQC, 2: 101. Cantlebery had paid the call to complain that the neighbor’s swine were in his peas. The neighbor’s initial response had been to inform him he was a “rogue, whelp and toad.”

land grants were defined: George Lee Haskins pointed out that the initial charter was based on two rivers parallel to each other only if you squinted;
Law and Authority in Early Massachusetts
(New York: Macmillan, 1960), 9.

rotten, decomposing fence: SP’s October 28, 1690, list of proposals, Simon Gratz Collection, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. CM described the devil as “the make-bait of the world” in “Things to Be Look’d For,” 1691, 18.

“she would as soon”: RFQC, 3: 54–55.

They sought revenge: Lawrence W. Towner, “‘A Fondness for Freedom’: Servant Protest in Puritan Society,”
William and Mary Quarterly
19 (April 1962): 212; Roger Thompson, “Adolescent Culture in Colonial Massachusetts,”
Journal of Family History
(Summer 1984): 133; RFQC, 3: 66. “Because she was”: RFQC, 8: 222–24. Maule was Quaker, the servant Irish Catholic; there was no contest. The case was dismissed.

the only explanation: CM in Burr, 95.

Ben Gould: R, 188.

A roll call: R, 172–73.

“stupendious revolution”: CM,
Midnight Cry,
21. The sermon—in which CM referred to devil’s compacts and lawful convictions for them—was published immediately.

less rustic, better-lit town meetinghouse: Perley,
History of Salem,
vol. 3, 430–34.

blots on the page: See Meredith Marie Neuman,
Jeremiah’s Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 66.

Thomas Danforth: See Roger Thompson’s expert sleuthing, especially “The Transit of Civilization: The Case of Thomas Danforth,” in
The Transit of Civilization,
ed. Winfried Herget and Karl Ortseifen (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1986), 37–44, and Thompson,
Cambridge Cameos
.

Salem town meetinghouse: Town Records of Salem, MA, vol. 3 (Salem: Essex Institute, 1934), 201–2. Interview with Richard Trask, January 21, 2015.

On the imperfect records: Rosenthal,
Salem Story,
125; Doty, “Telling Tales”; Gibson,
Reading Witchcraft,
12–49. SP later acknowledged his mistakes.

“When did” through “dying fainting fit”: R, 173–74.

“visionary girls”: Letter appended to Deodat Lawson,
A Further Account of the Trials of the New England Witches
(Boston, 1693), 1.

“he would soon”: R, 182.

He lurched forward and bit: Calef in Burr, 348.

“Oh you old witch”: R, 181. Rosenthal thinks Procter may have been arrested;
Salem Story,
110–11. No warrant survives.

Constable Herrick rounded up four more witches: R, 710–11.

Corey was an obvious target: RFQC, 1: 152, 172; RFQC, 7: 90–91, 134. The stinking water episode: RFQC, 1: 208–9. The “evil hand”: RFQC, 7: 90. For some marvelous Corey detective work, David C. Brown, “The Case of Giles Corey,”
EIHC
121 (1985): 282–99; also Spiller, “Giles Corey.”

“Which of you” to “temptation to witchcraft”: R, 187–88.

Bridget Bishop: R, 184–85. In 1679 she had also appeared before someone who pointed to her and swore she had bewitched him “as now she stands before the court,” RFQC, 7: 329; RFQC, 4: 90, 386. On the two Bishops, David L. Greene,
American Genealogist
227 (July 1981): 131–38. It did not help that—as Marilynne Roach points out—there were no fewer than four Edward Bishops in the area. Even JH could not keep them straight.

“You were a little”: R, 197; “torn in pieces”: R, 203.

“I will speak”: R, 189–94. Abigail does not mention Burroughs until her subsequent examination; see Rosenthal,
Salem Story,
42–43. She had attended a great witches’ assembly: R, 198.

“great care” to “high and dreadful”: R, 204. Benjamin C. Ray, in
Satan and Salem
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), calculated that Thomas Putnam wrote over 120 depositions and complaints, or one-third of the total; according to Ray, the signature Putnam phrase “most grievously” occurs 172 times in his documentation. Putnam filed the first complaint as well as the last, on September 17.