The Witches: Salem, 1692 (64 page)

“a vast concourse”: CM to John Cotton, August 5, 1692, in Silverman,
Selected Letters,
40.

“solemn and savory”: B&N, 88.

his trial was the one: CM in Burr, 215–22. Anne Powell, “Salem Prosecuted,” for the relationship with the Checkleys and for Checkley distancing himself from the trial; see Lawson, appendix to
Christ’s Fidelity,
114–15. Several members of the extended Nurse family had been in the Wells garrison during the 1691 siege; none appears to have stepped forward to defend Burroughs. We have the Burroughs account only from Lawson, who was present for it, and from CM, who accurately summarized those depositions to which his version can be compared. He also inserted flourishes, freely editorialized, and elided. For Burroughs’s reply to the question about reading his wife’s mind, Mather leaves us with “The prisoner now at the bar had nothing to answer unto what was thus witnessed against him that was worth considering.” Lawson reported that nothing that Burroughs said sounded convincing; appendix to
Christ’s Fidelity,
99, 115. Testimony regarding GB’s miraculous feats with the musket and the molasses barrel was enhanced by court reporters nearly a month after he hanged, R, 646–47; evidently some uneasiness lingered. The Salem man who entered those charges had seen his mother hang for witchcraft.

“tergiversations, contradictions”: CM in Burr, 222. CM evidently had Gaul’s 1646
Select Cases of Conscience
at his elbow; he used passages of it verbatim to malign Burroughs.

“there never was”: CM in Burr, 222. See Ady,
A Candle in the Dark,
142–64; I am grateful to Kent Bicknell for his notes on IM’s edition of Ady. CM trips over Burroughs the plagiarist as he does over Burroughs the skeptic. He was himself a master
compiler and copyist, never above
retailing—and improving upon—the work of his closest friends.

“You are one” to “he is alive”: Hale in Burr, 421.

Hale did but did not: CM makes clear JH’s dissatisfaction in
Magnalia,
2: 537.

character of one: As Langbein,
Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial,
192, makes clear, that was perfectly acceptable. You might well enter court as “a notorious cheat and shoplift,” to leave convicted of fraud.

“Had I been one”: IM,
Cases of Conscience,
in
Proceedings of the AAS
10 (1896), postscript.

“The course of God’s”: George Burroughs to the governor and council at Boston, January 27, 1692, vol. 37, 259, Massachusetts State Archives.

“WITCH, n.”: Ambrose Bierce,
The Devil’s Dictionary
(Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1944), 367.

“the chief of all”: R, 244. Richard Latner is especially good on Andover and on the syncopated, geographic rhythm of the accusations, which spike suddenly and just as suddenly subside; Latner, “The Long and Short of Salem Witchcraft: Chronology and Collective Violence in 1692,”
Journal of Social History
42 (Fall 2008): 137–56. Richard Gildrie, “Visions of Evil: Popular Culture, Puritanism, and the Massachusetts Witchcraft Crisis of 1692,”
Journal of American Culture
8 (1985): 27, provides the one-in-fifteen-accused figure for Andover. By some calculations the figure is closer to one in ten.

“hellish obligations”: IM,
Cases of Conscience,
postscript.

“being unadvisedly entered”: R, 540.

“And how old” to “cat told me so”: R, 539.

“You are a witch”: R, 686–87. Others glowered: R, 543.

a revised narrative: Rosenthal,
Salem Story,
132–36, tracks the change in narrative direction. Abigail Hobbs mentioned no meeting and no subversion. She did not fly; she had signed a covenant with the devil in now-forgotten Maine.

“Had you any hot”: R, 479. “Did you used”: R, 473. “But doth not the”: R, 548. No more than six or seven accused Andover witches denied the allegations.

“buzzings and chuckings”: Brattle in Burr, 189.

“mocking me”: R, 705–6.

“hope he will”: R, 474–75.

Confession came naturally: On the centrality of confession to NE life, see Hall,
Worlds of Wonder,
174–96, and Reis,
Damned Women,
131. Reis is especially good on sin and women and on how men and women confessed differently; 121–64. “she knew she was”: Mintz,
Huck’s Raft,
25. On confession generally, see Kathleen Doty and Risto Hiltunen, “‘I Will Tell, I Will Tell’: Confessional Patterns in the Salem Witchcraft Trials, 1692,”
Journal of Historical Pragmatics
(2002): 299–335. Margo Burns’s superb “‘Other Ways of Undue Force and Fright’: The Coercion of False Confessions by the Salem Magistrates,”
Studia Neophilologica
84 (2012): 24–39. In his
Discourse on the Damned Art of Witchcraft,
Perkins suggested that a confession is all the more substantial when it contains an accusation. Rosenthal cannily observes that some of the remembered slights may have been invented ones; “Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,”
New England Quarterly
57 (December 1984): 601.

“in a cold dumpish”: R, 568. On the spiritual torpor and confessions, see Hall,
Worlds of Wonder,
144–47. Similarly, see R, 367–68, 576, 608–9, 630, 680.

“Methinks,” moaned Cotton:
CM Diary,
1: 22.

“for the credit” to “look with an evil”: R, 542–43; a Reading woman confessed: R, 585.

no fewer than twenty witches: Again, the number is fluid. Depending on how one defines members of the Dane clan, it varies from nineteen to forty-five. Baker, in
A Storm of Witchcraft,
10, notes that nearly a third of the accused belonged, directly or indirectly, to ministerial families.

simultaneously as village schoolmaster: RFQC, 7: 100. Barnard and the pigsty: Sibley, 175.

“The Lord would not”: R, 608.

“was his for ever”: R, 571.

“He is not an old”: R, 788.

“But afterwards”: R, 530.

“a pin run through”: R, 578.

a swarm of superstitions: On the interpenetration of superstition and religion, all roads lead to Hall,
Worlds of Wonder
. It would have come as quite a shock to IM to learn that he was written off by his English political enemies in the 1680s as “that star-gazer, that half distracted man” (Randolph to Bradstreet, September 4, 1684,
Letters and Official Papers,
3: 322).

“much addicted”: R, 644. For Wardwell’s background, Marjorie Wardwell Otten,
Essex Genealogist
21 (May 2001): 85–88.

careful with those imprecations: “Discourse on Witchcraft,”
MP,
28; R, 576–77.

sieve and scissors: R, 573. The same week, Mary Warren swore that an Andover man had both practiced witchcraft and experimented with the sieve; R, 598.

“charm away witchcraft”: Lawson,
Christ’s Fidelity,
73.

“burnings, and bottles”: “Discourse on Witchcraft,”
MP,
29.

“charms and spells”: George Keith,
A Refutation of Three Opposers of Truth
(Philadelphia: William Bradford, 1690), 72.

Wait Still Winthrop’s library: Winthrop, “Scientific Notes”; three magical pills: “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” 181.

“a wondrous thing”:
CM Diary,
2: 349.

Robert Pike: Warren,
Loyal Dissenter;
Kences, “Some Unexplored Relationships”; “Journal of Reverend John Pike,”
Proceedings of the MHS,
vol. 14 (1875), 121–50. Pike took depositions when the Carr estate was contested from those who insisted that Ann Putnam Sr.’s father had been in perfect possession of his faculties on his deathbed and those who swore he had not; RFQC, 8: 353.

“temptations of horrid” to “when once dead”: Pike, in Upham,
Salem Witchcraft,
697–705.

“strengthen other” to “case is extraordinary”: CM to John Foster, August 17, 1692, in Silverman,
Selected Letters,
41–42.

“altogether false” to “such horrid lies”: R, 743.

“a joyful and happy”: R, 549. A sixteen-year-old boy would accuse her weeks later of threatening to run a skewer through him if he refused to sign her book. Teenage confessors in prison accused her as well. As her grandfather had, John Willard had tried to dissuade her from confessing; she had survived tremendous strain.

spectral minister demurred: R, 558.

“To see a man”:
SPN,
76.

“declared their wish” to “upon that account”: Brattle in Burr, 177.

“like that would be”: Sibley on IM.

“admiration of all present” to “angel of light”: Calef in Burr, 360–61. Murrin, “The Infernal Conspiracy,” 342, reads the account as indicating that the crowd nearly surges forth to rescue Burroughs. I have followed Sewall’s order for the hangings. Lawson too reported that some saw the devil on the gallows prompting the condemned “when they were just ready to be turned off; even while they were making their last speech.”

“live and die”: RFQC, 9: 31.

“one of his hands”: Calef in Burr, 361.

several questions: R, 553.

“to set to my heart” to “shame for sin”: R, 562–64. Barker was distantly related to Ann Foster. Of the Andover fliers, he was the best raconteur.

“We were all”: R, 738. On the manhandling: Brattle in Burr, 180, 189.

Sewall explained: R, 374–75.

“difficult and troublesome”: R, 828–29.

“weary with relating”: Hale in Burr, 421.

dog was put to death: Calef in Burr, 372; IM,
Cases of Conscience,
60.

“taken up my whole” to “used to work”: R, 711. Dounton too waited for his salary; R, 839.

dismantling the households: See David C. Brown’s excellent “The Forfeitures at Salem, 1692,”
William and Mary Quarterly
50 (January 1993): 85–111. He finds that Corwin acted in most cases in accordance with English (if not colonial) law; the escapees were the only exceptions. Corwin did not confiscate land.

“laid hands on all” to “helpless”: R, 914.

“a suffering condition”: R, 674.

Parris made the five-mile trip: Gragg,
Quest for Security,
132; on ministers’ overtaxed wives: Earle,
The Sabbath,
133.

had but three requests: R, 620. They had help with their petition. As Rosenthal points out, R, 36n, their language comes very close to Bernard’s and other experts’.

“I verily believe”: R, 617–19; Brown, “The Case of Giles Corey”; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014. Corey knew what he was doing. Langbein,
Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial,
279, notes that in over a century and thousands of cases, no one exercised the right to remain silent. As he puts it, “The right to remain silent
was literally the right to commit suicide.” A Massachusetts man had attempted to do so, refusing to plead in a 1689 piracy case. The bench begged him to reconsider, and “he at last came to and pleaded to his indictment”; Samuel Melyen Commonplace Book, Ms. SBd-7, MHS.

“flatten the fury”: CM to WS, September 2, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Reproduced in part in Silverman,
Selected Letters,
43–44. CM prayed for the release of NE from the “evil angels” who had ensnared them. He prayed as well that the Lord would direct him in publishing “such testimonies as might be serviceable to the occasion.”

“zeal to assist” to “encounters with hell”: CM to Stoughton, September 2, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

“mutinous and murmuring”:
SPN,
203–5.

“very obdurate” to “of excommunication”: B&N, 280.

witchcraft judges found themselves related: For the web of relations among the justices, see Baker,
A Storm of Witchcraft,
168, and his fine chart, 163. CM had dedicated
MP
to Winthrop; Sergeant and Sewall were partners in a Braintree ironworks and a sawmill. An alliance that may have proved crucial in 1692 was that between Willard and Joseph Dudley, twice related by marriage. It was evidently Dudley, Stoughton’s disgraced political ally, who applied to the New York ministers for some answers to Massachusetts’s witchcraft questions. Also not incidentally, Mrs. Parris was related to court recorder Stephen Sewall.

Together they had conspired: Eight years earlier Dominion officials had ordered Winthrop to arrest CM for sedition; he neglected to do so. On Stoughton greeting Andros, Lustig,
Imperial Executive,
196. As the English saw it, the coup had been encouraged by “crafty ministers”; the Mathers were its prime movers. Indeed NE preferred to answer to God than to a king.

“there is not a government”: IM, “The Autobiography of Increase Mather,” 351. He felt the charter with which he returned was one for which his countrymen would, a few years earlier, have happily traded half their estates.

“willingly cast dirt”: Brattle in Burr, 169.

“I petition”: R, 658.

guards led Corey: By some accounts the torture began on September 16; it lasted several days. For the details, C. L’Estrange Ewen, ed.,
Witch Hunting and Witch Trials
(New York: Dial, 1929), 28; “have no sustenance”: Brown, “The Case of Giles Corey,” 288. On repenting for his obstinacy, Richard D. Pierce, ed.,
The Records of the First Church in Salem
(Salem, MA: Essex Institute, 1974), 218. The Salem-born Nantucket friend was a brother-in-law of an accused man then in hiding.

“with his cane”: Calef in Burr, 367.

“Now, Sir” to “against Giles Corey”: R, 671. For the earlier Corey case, RFQC, 6: 190. 317 “stamped and pressed”: SS
Diary,
1: 296. A quiet note of resistance sounded about now. Instructed at her hearing to recite the Lord’s Prayer, a Gloucester suspect provided a variation. To the line “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us,” she added a plucky “So do I”; R, 672.

“the heinous crime” to “death and eternity”: R, 673.

“hanging there”: Calef in Burr, 367–69. The careful account-keepers included Lawrence Hammond,
Diary,
Ms. SBd-98, MHS. “hanging one another”: Thomas Wilson and James Dickinson, November 11, 1692, in the Library of the Society of Friends, vol. 1, portfolio 31/93, partly summarized in
The Epistle to the monthly and Quarterly Meetings of Friends of England, Wales and Elsewhere, from Our Yearly Meeting
(London, 1693).

“hotly and madly”:
WOW,
84. The English seemed forever to undo themselves quarreling, far more than did other peoples, clucked CM, a statement that revealed him to be a man who, for all his erudition, traveled little.