At her examination, Rebecca Nurse made a pitiful sight. “I can say before my eternal father that I am innocent,” she pleaded before the judges, “and God will clear my innocence.” Even the normally stern and unforgiving magistrates seemed moved by the aged and infirm woman before them. “Here is never a one in the assembly but deserves it,” said Magistrate John Hawthorne gently. “But if you be guilty, I pray God discover you.” The testimony then began, and no longer was it just young hysterical girls pointing fingers and swooning. Henry Kenny reported that when Rebecca came to his house he was “seized with an amazed condition.” Edward Putnam said that she had tormented his niece in his presence. To this Rebecca responded: “I am innocent and clear and have not been able to get out of doors these eight-nine days. I never afflicted no child, no, never in my life.” Hawthorne seemed moved by this, and wondered aloud if the accusers might be mistaken. Perhaps he forgot that, bedridden as she may have been, Rebecca Nurse still had her “shape” to do her bidding. In any event, the girls’ frenzied response to his wavering quickly settled any doubts.
Out of the crowd, Ann Putnam’s mother yelled, “Did you not bring the Black Man with you? Did you not bid me tempt God and die? How often have you eat and drunk to your own damnation?” Hawthorne turned to Rebecca for a response. “What do you say to them?” he demanded. She probably never heard him in the din of the room. “Oh, Lord help me!” she cried, spreading her hands helplessly. The girls did the same. If this wasn’t proof enough of witchcraft, her failure to weep cinched it. Everyone knew witches could not cry. “It is awful for all to see these agonies,” said the magistrate, pointing to the girls, “and you an old professor thus charged with the devil by the effects of it, and yet to see you stand with dry eyes when there are so many wet.”
“You do not know my heart,” Rebecca answered quietly.
“You would do well if you were guilty to confess,” said the judge. “Give glory to God.”
This was asking too much. Rebecca Nurse was no Tituba. “Would you have me belie myself?” she asked. With that, Hawthorne read the most serious charge against her. Ann Putnam had sworn that a succession of dead children had come to her in their burial sheets and told her that it was Witch Nurse who had killed them.
“What think you of this?” Hawthorne asked.
“I cannot tell what to think,” she responded, still steadfast. “The devil may appear in my shape.” After several more questions, Rebecca was led away to make room for the Lecture Day sermon to be held that afternoon in the meetinghouse.
It was an edifying sermon. Satan had come to Salem because he worked most effectively through the righteous, pronounced Reverend Deodat Lawson. In carrying out his purposes, he needed human mediums; these he sought among “the adopted children of God . . . for it is certain that he never works more like the Prince of Darkness than when he looks most like an angel of light.” This answered that nagging question as to why seemingly good people like Martha Cory and Rebecca Nurse could embrace such evil. Satan wanted to undermine the entire community through its most devout and pious members. “You are therefore to be deeply humbled and set down in the dust,” cried Lawson, “considering the signal hand of God in singling out this place, this poor village, for the first scene of Satan’s tyranny, and to make it . . . the rendezvous of devils. . . . I thus am commanded to call and cry . . . to you. Arm! Arm! Arm! Let us admit no parley, give no quarter. Prayer is the most proper and potent antidote against the old Serpent’s venomous operations. . . . What therefore I say unto one, I say unto all—Pray! Pray! Pray!”
Reverend Lawson may have been preaching to the converted, but there were still a few in Salem who believed the wrong people were being targeted. If anyone was doing the devil’s work, it was those godforsaken girls making all the accusations. “They should be at the whipping-post!” exclaimed John Proctor. “If they are let alone we should all be devils and witches.” There was a simple solution, he said: “Hang them! Hang them!” But what would be considered good common sense today was blasphemy in the Salem Village of 1692, and John Proctor would pay dearly for making such a suggestion. He and his wife Elizabeth were both called out, with John Proctor named “a most dreadful wizard” by the girls he sought to expose.
The arrest of John and Elizabeth Proctor was followed by a brief lapse into sanity, however. The Proctors’ servant, Mary Warren, had been among the girls pointing their fingers at the witches all around them. But when the Proctors, the people closest to her, were swept up in the frenzy, Mary had a conversion of sorts. She distanced herself from the howling pack of girls who were causing such misery. Her betrayal was costly, as Mary went from accuser to accused.
“You were a little while ago an affected person; now you are an afflicter,” said John Hawthorne when Mary was brought before him after her arrest. “How comes this to pass?” The girl was almost speechless with fear, but believed she was on the path of righteousness in renouncing her false ways. “I look to God,” she quavered, “and I take it to be a mercy of God.”
“What!” Hawthorne shouted. “Do you take it as a mercy to afflict others?”
Mary Warren saw her former companions’ contrived agony for what it was—she had been part of the troupe, after all—but the situation in which she found herself now was becoming untenable. A stint in jail with the other witches she had helped identify only made it more so. It didn’t take long for Mary Warren to recognize where safety lay. She was no martyr. In front of the judges, Mary pretended to fight off the shape of Elizabeth Proctor. “I will tell! I will tell!” she howled. “Thou wicked creature, it is you that stopped my mouth. . . . It shall be known, thou witch. Hast thou undone me body and soul?” Soon after this catharsis, the judges declared Mary Warren free from sin and allowed her to rejoin the girls in their place of honor. And though she never again took a leading role in their hysterical demonstrations, neither did she ever again lapse into what Marion Starkey calls “the dangerous, unbelievable world of reality.”
With Mary Warren now restored to the ranks of the accusers, the business of identifying witches could resume once again. And indeed it did—with a vengeance. Three had been indicted with Mary Warren: Martha Cory’s slow-witted husband, Giles, Bridget Bishop, a tavern keeper who offended Puritan sensibilities with her flashy way of dressing, and Abigail Hobbs, a wild child from the adjacent town of Topsfield. Abigail had always unsettled people with her peculiar behavior, like walking alone through the woods at night. One of her accusers claimed she was unafraid because “she had sold herself body and soul to ye old boy [the devil].” Perhaps unbalanced to begin with, Abigail pulled a Tituba and eagerly admitted to everything, including the names of nine other witches who had attended unholy sabbaths with her in Reverend Parris’s own pasture. She also confessed to murder in a private session with the judges.
“Were they men or women you killed?”
“They were both boys and girls,” came the answer.
“Was you angry with them yourself?”
“Yes, though I don’t know why now.”
The judges seem to have forgotten to ask whom specifically Abigail Hobbs had murdered, but the day after her alarming testimony an unprecedented nine arrest warrants were sworn out—two of them for her parents.
It was beginning to seem that almost the entire village of Salem was part of a wicked coven, yet there were still many more arrests to come. And the contagion was spreading. In Maine, the grand wizard of all the witches was identified: George Burroughs, who happened to have been Salem Village’s minister a decade before, was dragged away from his dinner table, leaving behind his third wife and a large brood of children. Mrs. Burroughs was familiar enough with the law to know that all the property and goods of a convicted witch would be forfeit, and wasted no time in selling them off herself. Loyal to the end, she took the one daughter she had with Burroughs and moved away, leaving all her stepchildren to fend for themselves.
Given his status as a minister, Burroughs was well pr
ovided for in Salem, though he was still stripped naked before a panel of jurors looking for the telltale “devil’s mark” on his body. A special session of the magistrates that included Massachusetts deputy governor William Stoughton, a Harvard graduate, was called to conduct a hearing. During the examination Burroughs was instructed to face the gang of girls, most of whom had been babies or young children when he had served as Salem’s minister. They immediately launched into their now familiar (except to Burroughs) routine. The minister showed no evidence of the “devil’s mark,” but the girls’ reaction to him was damning evidence indeed, as was the subsequent testimony that he—or rather his shape—was a murderer.
The judges were informed that whenever a soldier died during the Indian trouble in “the eastward country,” where Burroughs lived, it wasn’t the Indians who did the killing. It was the minister standing before them. Not surprisingly, Burroughs had no answer for this or any of the other accusations. “It is amazing and humbling evidence,” he stammered at one point. “But I understand nothing of it.” The judges did understand, though. The man was clearly a wizard and was sent to prison to await trial with all the rest. There would be no more cushy accommodations for this spawn of Satan. And just to be sure that neither he nor his fellow prisoners practiced their black arts from their cells, Massachusetts Governor William Phips ordered them all chained, with the added cost of such confinement billed to the witches.
George Burroughs, supreme wizard though he may have been, was still relatively inconsequential next to John Alden. This son of John and Priscilla Alden, whose romance in the early days of the Plymouth Colony was later immortalized by Longfellow, was identified as Tituba’s elusive “tall man.” Curiously, he had never met the girls who accused him—“the Salem wenches,” as he came to call them. But they had certainly heard of him, for Alden had earned an impressive reputation as a sea captain and soldier fighting in the wars against the Indians. Because the girls had never seen Alden before, only his shape, they had a little trouble identifying him when he came into the courtroom from Boston. They pointed to the wrong man, in fact, but the judges helped clarify the situation and the accusers redirected their fingers. “There stands Alden,” shouted one of them. “A bold fellow with his hat on before the judges. He sells powder shot to the Indians and French and lies with Indian squaws and has Indian papooses.” All this on top of being the devilish “tall man” of Boston.
The girls gave extra-strong performances befitting such a dangerous man. When he was ordered to look at them, they screamed that he was hurting them. Alden was indignant. “Just why do your honors suppose I have no better things to do than come to Salem to afflict these persons that I never knew or saw before?” he asked the judges. It was a good question, and Alden followed it with an even better one: “What’s the reason you don’t fall down when I look at you? Can you give me one?” Later, before being led away to jail, he gave vent to his frustration. “I wonder at God in suffering these creatures to accuse innocent people.” Other than those charged, few shared the sentiment.
Most citizens were grateful to the girls for helping deliver them from the evil infestation and eagerly anticipated the upcoming trials that would rid Salem of such wickedness once and for all. Any hope the accused may have had that justice would prevail when their cases came before a new panel of trial judges—most of whom were not from Salem—was quickly dashed. As far as the court was concerned, the facts were already established during the pretrial examinations. “There was little occasion to prove witchcraft,” noted Cotton Mather, “this being evident and notorious to all beholders.”
Bridget Bishop, the flashy tavern keeper, was among the first to stand trial. She didn’t stand a chance. For starters, a panel of female examiners had discovered a “witch’s tet” between “ye pudendum and anus.” She also visited witnesses in various shapes, like a black pig, and once with the body of a monkey, the feet of a cock, and the face of a man. There was other horrifying evidence as well, and Bridget Bishop was duly condemned and hanged from the branches of a great oak tree.
Rebecca Nurse was next. The jury seemed to have the same reservations about her guilt as Magistrate John Hawthorne initially had several months before at the preliminary examination. She just didn’t seem like witch material. The jury’s doubts were fueled by the recommendations of a group of ministers who had been consulted after Bridget Bishop’s trial. They established some new, more enlightened standards of judgment, recommending, for instance, that “exquisite caution” be taken in considering spectral evidence, and that conviction should be based on something “more considerable than the accused persons being represented by a spectre unto the afflicted.” They also urged “an exceeding tenderness” toward “persons formerly of an unblemished reputation.”
Rebecca Nurse certainly met the new guidelines; her piety and goodness were attested to by more than a score of respectable citizens. The jury was convinced and voted for acquittal. The girls, however, were not pleased with the verdict. It meant their witch radars were being called into question. Their displeasure was made known by furious roars and convulsions, and the spectacle was enough to give the judges pause. Perhaps the jury had made a mistake. “I will not impose on the jury,” announced Chief Justice William Stoughton, “but I must ask you if you considered one statement made by the prisoner. When Deliverance Hobbs was brought into court to testify, the prisoner, turning her head to her, said, ‘What, do you bring her? She is one of us.’ Has the jury weighed the implications of this statement?” As a matter of fact, they had not, mainly because none of them remembered hearing it. The only thing to do now was to ask the defendant to explain herself. Only problem was, with the continuing uproar of the girls, the buzz in the courtroom, and the fact that Rebecca Nurse was practically deaf, she failed to hear the question directed at her. Oblivious, she stared straight ahead. This was eerie-enough behavior in the minds of the jury, already becoming more and more convinced by the agonized reaction of the girls that they had made a terrible misjudgment in acquitting this strange woman. It was now apparent to the panel that the defendant’s “one of us” reference had been an involuntary admission of guilt. Accordingly, they revised their verdict.
Now that she had been condemned under the law, the leaders of her church made sure she was condemned by God as well. In a formal ceremony, into which the old lady had to be carried, they excommunicated her, thereby insuring her soul’s eternal damnation. Yet while the rest of the community abandoned her to her fate, her children did not. They appealed to the governor, laying before him all the evidence of their mother’s innocence. Phips took pity on them and signed a reprieve. Rebecca Nurse had been saved from a hideous fate, or so it seemed. After signing the reprieve, Phips received some distressing news from Salem. Rebecca Nurse had sent her shape to kill her accusers, and some were already on the verge of death. Did the governor really want to spare the source of such wickedness? the people wanted to know. Could he live with the deaths of these innocent children while this guilty witch went free? The answer was no, and the reprieve was canceled. Rebecca Nurse would hang after all.
The execution took place on Saturday, July 19, 1692. Five women were hanged that day, including Sarah Good, the feisty pipe smoker who had been among the first accused. She did not go quietly. The attending minister appealed to her to save her soul and confess, reminding her that she knew very well that she was a witch. “You’re a liar!” Sarah shouted back. “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard! If you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink.”
After the corpses were taken down from the gallows, they were buried in a shallow grave nearby. But the children of Rebecca Nurse dug up her body later that night and took it home for a dignified, though secret, burial. It was their final act of kindness to the mother they loved and fought in vain to save.
Seeing the fate of their fellow defendants convinced some of the accused that there would be no mercy when their time came. They had to act immediately to sav
e themselves. Some, like John Alden, managed to escape from prison and flee Massachusetts. Mostly poor and without resources, many were quickly recaptured. John Proctor tried to save his life by addressing a petition to five ministers in Boston on behalf of himself and the others. In it he appealed to them to use their influence and have the trials moved to Boston, or, if that were not possible, at least to substitute other judges, the present incumbents “having condemned us already before our trials.” Proctor also advised the ministers that “full and free confessions” were being wrung out of the male suspects by torture. “These actions,” he wrote, “are very like the Papish cruelties.” This odious comparison to the Church of Rome would be enough to rile any good Puritan, and resulted in several of Proctor’s relatives being hauled in as witches.
The petition did get the interest of some powerful people in Boston, though. Increase Mather, the president of Harvard (and Cotton’s father), called a conference of several ministers in Cambridge to discuss the pesky question of spectral evidence. His proposition was, “Whether the devil may not sometimes have permission to represent an innocent person as tormenting such as are under diabolic manifestation.” The ministers, pondering the question with all their collective wisdom, agreed that the shapes of innocent people might be manipulated by Satan, but “that such things are rare and extraordinary.” Increase Mather traveled to Salem to check out the witch trials for himself, though the fate of his petitioner John Proctor was not his primary interest. George Burroughs was. “Had I been one of his judges,” Mather later noted of the Burroughs trial, “I could not have acquitted him.” And neither could the jury. Burroughs and Proctor, along with three others, were sentenced to hang.
A Treasury of Great American Scandals Page 22