The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Piety correlated to literacy; especially in religious homes, mothers taught the children, servants, and slaves of the house to read. Writing came later, if it came at all. Elizabeth Parris could write, a skill she likely passed on to the parsonage dependents. The village girls freely deciphered the diabolical books proffered them. Mary Warren could write well enough to fix the news of her (short-lived) recovery on the meetinghouse post. Young minds were suffused with the language and imagery of the book they knew best. And the disquieting sermons and baleful visions endured, as they were meant to; one did not easily tame the apocalyptic horses and blood-vomiting dragons of one’s youth. The great error came not in fixating on one’s miserable condition but in feeling secure. As ever, the thorny paradox of Puritanism loomed: to be confident of one’s salvation was to prove unworthy of it. As a modern scholar has noted, “To fail to be frightened was a sure sign that one was either spiritually lost, or stupid, or both.”*

  The orthodox childhood may have been particularly steeped in fear; it is difficult to say if pious homes bore higher-strung children, as the ministers are the ones who left the diaries. Certainly the girls of the Salem village parsonage would have felt especially constrained, held to a higher standard by Parris’s expectations and the village’s attention. They made for a little city on a hill unto themselves, even if Parris did not devise the kind of incessant exercises Mather did. He never left the house without a parable or crossed a youngster’s path without a monitory word. He saw his children’s birthdays as occasions to offer up “lively and pungent admonitions”: What were their earthly errands, and how had they addressed them? When he warned five-year-old Katy that she should prepare for his imminent death he cautioned too that, as an orphan, she should brace herself for far greater trials.† Like any besieged minority, the Puritans paid emphatic, extravagant attention to their progeny, on whom their survival rested. They wrote compulsively on the subject.

  Along with the apocalyptic imagery and the vivid descriptions of hell (if one night’s toothache was painful, imagine what it would feel like to roast for millions upon millions of years over everlasting fire!) were grisly tales like Mary Rowlandson’s, a kind of martyrdom porn to the impressionable youngster. Everyone knew a story about a dismembering or an abduction. That was especially true of the convulsing Salem girls, of whom at least half were refugees from or had been orphaned by attacks in “the last Indian war.” Mercy Lewis, the Putnam maid, had twice known tragedy, at three, when the Wabanaki torched her Maine town and abducted the women and children, again at sixteen, when she was orphaned in a second raid. (She dated her compact with Satan to just before that crisis.) A two-year-old might well recite stories from Scripture. But a three-year-old was sufficiently schooled in adult anxieties that he was said to warn from his cradle that the French—at war with England after 1689—were coming.

  Terror rumbled close to the surface, erupting regularly. A neighbor who came to the doorstep with a carpet over his head could send the panicked children screaming through the house to their mother. And a full catalog of dangers beckoned close to home. As obsessively attentive as was a New England parent, she was also short-armed. Children swallowed pins, fell down wells, through ice, beneath barrels, under horses, upon knives, into fires, ponds, washtubs. For good reason, parents had nightmares about their children. (Samuel Sewall dreamed in 1695 that all but one were dead. He would bury eight.) Though healthier than their English counterparts, they regularly succumbed to disease; a Salem mother could count on losing two or three of her sons and daughters. Rebecca Nurse was a remarkable, possibly unforgivable, exception to that rule.

  Thrifty with names, the Puritans bestowed few and recycled often; several children in a family might bear the name of a parent. It was not uncommon to share one with a dead sibling.* If that did not make you feel replaceable, the brother or sister who came along just behind you might. At twelve, Ann Putnam had lost her mother’s attention to younger siblings six times. She had viewed and sat vigil over miniature corpses and attended funerals, most recently one late in 1691 for her six-week-old sister. They were no less emotional for their regularity; the Sewall children wept freely on the return from burying a baby brother. A village girl could ably describe the dead as they lay in their coffins.

  In her day, in her earth-toned wardrobe, the New England girl resembled her mother in painstaking miniature. Surrounded by siblings, she had before her as well advertisements for the endless round of childbearing, nursing, and burying to which she could look forward. Childbirth produced plenty of orphans, along with great gushers of guilt for the child who dispatched his mother in the act of being born. This introduced what could prove an especially earthly terror to the mix: the malignant stepmother. She reliably reordered affections and complicated successions. Reverend Bayley and the Putnam household charged that Ann Putnam’s stepmother cheated her daughters out of the inheritance their father had intended for them; the trouble began the night of the funeral and continued for a decade. (Ann received twenty pounds of an estate valued at fourteen hundred.) Widowers remarried quickly, given the families to be raised and the work to be done. At times stepmothers were not much older than the eldest of their new children. Deliverance Hobbs wondered aloud what she had done to deserve Abigail, who, after pelting her with water, announced that she had now baptized her heathen of a stepmother. Cotton Mather sent a daughter away to escape his tempestuous new wife. At the time of George Burroughs’s arrest, his Maine household included seven children under the age of sixteen. Their stepmother left all but her own daughter to fend for themselves.

  Mather’s daughter was far from alone in having been farmed out. Neither Mercy Lewis, the orphaned Putnam maid, nor Mary Warren, the orphaned Procter maid with the dramatic bent, lived at home. Of the initial accusers, only Ann Putnam and Betty Parris did. For reasons that made sense at the time but have not been adequately explained since, a third of New England children left home to lodge elsewhere, usually as servants or apprentices, often as early as age six. (The servant had no contract; the apprentice typically served seven years.) As a result, most households included several unrelated adolescents. Boys learned a trade while girls mastered what was advertised to a later nine-year-old as the “art, craft, and mystery of housewifery.” All were sent off to be disciplined by adults other than their parents; it was understood that they might learn better manners elsewhere. “Binding out,” as it was called, occurred across the social spectrum. Rebecca Nurse’s enterprising husband began as a servant, as did any number of future ministers and at least one witchcraft judge. Often the children landed in families no more privileged than their own. Some left in tears. (One Sewall son fainted at the very prospect.) A surrogate family introduced new rules and expectations; the separation felt like—was perhaps intended to feel like—practice for the more traumatic one to come. If nothing else, binding out reinforced discipline at a hot-blooded, high-spirited, self-intoxicated, notoriously subversive, devilishly difficult time of life. “Puberty,” it has been said, “is everyone’s first experience of a sentient madness.”

  Binding out introduced a fresh set of perils. Servant girls fended off groping hands and unwanted embraces from lascivious swineherds, from the men of the house, and from visitors to the house, often at appallingly early ages. Isolated, semi-orphaned, they seldom knew someone to whom they could appeal to wield pitchforks or pray at dawn on their behalf; the daughters of one Salem magistrate, the elder of whom was six, were for two years routinely sexually abused by their master. Removed to the home of an upstanding church member, they were molested all over again before the elder girl had turned ten. The court record reveals a full inventory of harassments, from stolen kisses to lunging assaults. They occurred while women were bringing in linen or lending canoes or riding to help an assailant’s wife give birth. A nineteen-year-old servant boy attempted to rape a ten-year-old maid in the same house. Women retired for the evening to stumble over piles of clothes on the floor and to find strange men
in their beds. They bit attackers’ noses. One Massachusetts man sat in a cage with a paper around his neck reading “A married man for committing fornication in his own house with his servant maid.”

  Abuse came in other forms as well. Masters and mistresses beat servant girls for being disrespectful, disorderly, abusive, sullen, saucy; for not caring properly for their mistresses; for crimes no greater than laziness, which—given the amount to be done—was surely a relative term. An exasperated husband defended his wife’s brutal treatment of their maid. The girl slipped out after dark, slept in, never learned to milk the cow or goat, was slatternly, could not be trusted to so much as feed the pigs: “She is so fat and soggy she can hardly do any work.” The Newburyport preacher whipped his servant at the slightest provocation, tying her tongue to her big toe. When his hired girl let the baby fall on her head, Reverend Thacher, a Parris intimate, beat her with a sturdy walnut stick. Servants ran away, to be swiftly returned. Flight was difficult.* With greater success they petitioned the courts. More often than not, rulings came down in their favor.

  In the 1690s, with insubordination on the rise all around, the problem the New England adolescent faced was that of the colony writ indecipherably small. For decades Massachusetts had distinguished itself for its misdemeanors. London accused the settlers of lurching toward independence and disciplined them accordingly. They had no choice, moaned a prominent Bay Colony merchant, railing at onerous trade regulations; were they to comply with all English demands—with the kind of restrictions that had hobbled Parris’s Boston business—“this orphan plantation will be crushed.” Having ousted Andros, the colonists lived in a state of sullen suspension, expecting life to return to normal. Stubbornly it would not. The far-off government to which they were incomprehensible was to them unintelligible. Was it, wondered the author of a 1691 tract, because they had been “disobedient, disobliging, and disingenuous children” that God rained calamities down upon them, leaving them to be “tormented and butchered by bloody barbarians?” Unmoored from the mother country, regularly scolded for insubordination, the vulnerable, intractable New Englanders bargained for their self-respect, struggling to reconcile autonomy with the demands of a clueless authority, one that struck them less as a beneficent guardian than a protection racket.

  IN DIFFERING WAYS, servants and the children of the house absorbed family confidences. They disseminated slanders and perpetuated neighborly grudges, a form of filial loyalty. As ever, the servants imbibed the secrets; to the psychological perils was added the fact that these children knew too much. Though he thrashed Mary Warren, John Procter also consulted with her about a land deal and complained of his temperamental wife. The woman nearly drove him to suicide! The servant—and seven of what would ultimately be thirteen bewitched girls were domestics—knew where the money was kept, the bedcovers unrumpled, the fires of contention smoldered. She could in turn pose a terror to the children of the house. In the spring of 1678 Reverend John Hale discovered that one of his servants had been stealing from him. She disappeared at night to deliver her haul, which included flour, butter, jewelry, money, oatmeal, candles, silk, and colored ribbon. His wife confronted the girl, Margaret Lord, so defiant that Mrs. Hale thought it best to hide the kitchen knives. Upon investigation, it turned out that twelve-year-old Rebecca Hale had known all along of Margaret’s thieving. Every one of the Hale children did. Margaret had threatened to throw Rebecca into the fire or hang her from the barn rafters if she breathed a word; she held her over the well, dropping her to the bottom in the bucket. She assured Rebecca she had a book with which she could summon the devil, who would kill her little sister. Flourishing an ax, she wondered aloud if she should murder Mrs. Hale; the children begged her to reconsider. She threatened to burn another Hale child with a red-hot iron. Rebecca was no pushover. “I told her if she killed me it would be discovered,” she reported. In her response Margaret hinted that not everyone was impressed by colonial law enforcement: “She said that was in England but it could not so easily be discovered here.” Further details of the reign of terror came to light in May, when one of Margaret’s accomplices appeared before the Salem magistrates for witchcraft.

  Ministers devoted sermons to masters, who were to issue orders humanely, and servants, who were to follow them cheerfully. Seven years was hardly an eternity, a Boston cleric reminded the apprentices in his audience. As for the maids, if they comported themselves well, they might find that their mistresses counted them among their children, clearly a thing to be desired. All the same, when summoned to a dark room, not every servant girl saw the shimmering creatures in the chimney to which her master frantically pointed. Nor was every girl summoned for that purpose. Saucy maids and disrespectful daughters choked on authority, proving anything but the voiceless, noiseless creatures of a Mather sermon. At home or in the households of others, they catapulted past guilt, shame, and self-loathing to land in trouble, if rarely with Abigail Hobbs’s strapping insouciance. Teenage daughters spoke impertinently to fathers, as did the eighteen-year-old who—having spent a day complaining—exploded: “Pray sooth, Father, are you deaf?” Hale described the pilfering Margaret to be “exceedingly addicted to lying and very obstinate to stand in her lies.” She turned up in the barn when she was meant to be at meeting. She stayed out until two in the morning. Her accomplices lurked in the pigsty, spooking the children. A Mather maid got pregnant. And, clearly, despite the parental attention, the continual employment, the inhospitable climate, girls arranged to congregate at the local inn, where their masters might collect them for a ride home or where they might divert the attentions of a few eligible men in the long hours between witchcraft hearings. Two days after the Boston jailer had affixed chains to Good, Osborne, and Tituba, Plymouth voted unanimously to apply itself to the reformation of its children, “who were much given to sensuality, intemperance, long tarrying, drinking, and gaming at ordinaries.”

  Women too had troubled New England since its founding; they claimed starring roles as heretics and rebels. Beginning with Anne Hutchinson, the charismatic religious leader who encouraged women to walk out of sermons and who disputed church doctrine, they had been speaking their minds, otherwise known as disturbing the peace. At her 1640 trial, Ann Hibbins cited the Old Testament, a text she claimed exhorted husbands to heed their wives. She also took the opposite tack; sixteen years earlier, she refused in court to answer her accusers on the grounds that God demanded silence of women. Defying repeated orders to leave Massachusetts, Mary Dyer, an outspoken Quaker, would hang as well. A Salem church member claimed she hoped to live long enough to tear the flesh off Justice Hathorne’s father. The New England woman had no political rights. She neither voted nor served on juries. Officially voiceless, she nonetheless found plenty of ways to make herself heard and demonstrated a vaulting need to speak her mind. In legal records she hectors, shrieks, quarrels, scolds, rants, rails, tattles, and spits.*

  Massachusetts women turned their backs on the ministers who excommunicated them. They informed magistrates who sentenced them to hang that they preferred to be beheaded. They drank until they “could not tell ink from liquor”; one woman returned from Salem so inebriated it was unclear if she had traveled “upon her head or her feet.” They dragged men from taverns or punched the Salem market inspector in the chest until he could barely breathe. They beat and clawed husbands, in one case breaking a skull open with a pot of cider. They threw themselves at widowed ministers twice their age, as a flustered Cotton Mather would discover three months after his wife’s death. They shredded warrants before the officers who delivered them. Two women fell to fighting after one called the other a “lousy slut,” mocked her for owning only one dress, and, her daughter in tow, assaulted her with a stick. They threw stones at mothers-in-law and scratched sons-in-law. They landed in court with regularity, a trend that increased through the 1690s when—the events in Salem aside—women participated in more crimes than they had in any other decade. Even when they did not scrabble at th
e late-night windowsill or materialize as balls of light, they managed to suffocate and paralyze the men in their lives.

  While women were understood to be more susceptible to witchcraft because of their weaker wills, the evidence remains inconclusive. For every Giles Corey who defied his wife and resaddled his horse, there was a beguiling Mary Warren who won an argument with her master over whether she could attend a witchcraft hearing. The original wonder-workers, women transformed milk into cheese and thread into lace. They could coax pudding from dry moss. They ran taverns, assisted cobbler husbands, and haggled with craftsmen. They conferred with husbands on land deals and represented them in court. Boston justice Samuel Sewall entrusted the household management to his wife, who he thought “has a better faculty than I at managing affairs.” Women sued fathers, brothers, stepsons over estates. In a land where labor was infinite and the workforce small, they could be assured of their value; absent women, sick women, jailed women, cost a household dearly. Mothers led prayer when fathers were busy; Mather pointed to a biblical precedent for the practice. While a group of Ipswich men petitioned for the right to build a meetinghouse, their wives raised it by themselves.