The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Studded with two-story, thick-walled garrison houses, extending over both sides of a river thick with sturgeon and salmon, handsome Wells was the best-defended town in Maine. That was fortunate, as the summer of 1691 amounted to a protracted siege. Burroughs spent it behind rows of pickets while nearby settlements went up in flames. As a visitor noted of the Wabanaki, “It is taken for granted, without some speedy help coming, that they will not leave a beast alive in the whole province.” In a sustained mid-June siege, they destroyed the Wells livestock and trampled the fields. (They were well armed thanks to the business-minded colonists. It was a poor Indian, noted a visitor, who did not own two guns.) Burroughs joined in signing an abject, late-July appeal for provisions to the Massachusetts council. He pleaded anew for clothing in September. They were in rags, and without salt; the corn supply would last six months. They expected the enemy daily. Indians captured a seventeen-year-old who ventured out that week for wood. The winter was an agony and got worse; in a predawn raid on February 5, 1692, a hundred and fifty Indians plundered and burned the prosperous town of York, Wells’s closest neighbor. Burroughs submitted an apocalyptic account to the provincial authorities late that afternoon. As the first witchcraft accusations emerged fifty miles south, Indians killed or carried off half of York, marching fifty captives through the snow to Canada. They slaughtered sheep, cattle, and horses. Having spoken with an escaped youth, Burroughs painted a hellish picture of “pillars of smoke, the raging of merciless flames, the insults of the heathen enemy, shouting, shooting, hacking (not having regard to the earnest supplications of men, women, or children, with sharp cries and bitter tears in a most humble manner), and dragging away others (and none to help).”

  The ravages reminded him of the passage in Samuel in which David and his people discover their families taken hostage at Ziklag. Viewing the blackened, leveled city, they “lifted up their voices and wept, until they had no more power to weep.” Evoking the destruction of Jerusalem, Burroughs switched to Lamentations: “And saith Jeremiah, mine eye affecteth mine heart, because of all the daughters of my city.” He read the devastation as divine rebuke. “God is still manifesting his displeasure against his land,” he wrote three months before his arrest. “He who formerly hath set to his hand to help us, doth even write bitter things against us.” He closed with a variation on God’s promise of deliverance in Jeremiah, which he hoped the Massachusetts council might share: “If you will remain in this land, then I will build you up and not pull you down; I will plant you and not pluck you up.” Burroughs stressed the “low condition and eminent danger” in which the settlers found themselves. Wells was next, and would soon have no choice but to surrender. The York raid had moreover claimed an eminent casualty. Shubael Dummer, the only ordained minister in Maine and a Sewall cousin, stepped out that Friday morning to be butchered on his doorstep, “barbarously murdered, stripped naked, cut, and mangled,” as an eyewitness reported. Dummer’s wife was carried off. She would not survive.

  Cotton Mather too reported on York, in an address on the corruption of New England manners. The details and the atrocities were the same. Families were butchered, hostages in danger of being roasted alive. Hearts, Mather preached, should bleed over the carnage. But congregations should also wake, with a start, to York’s warning. Where Mather wrote allegory, Burroughs submitted an SOS, if one ripe with biblical allusions. Like Sarah Good, he was both ferocious and needy, a musket-wielding man of the cloth and a public-spirited supplicant. He might well have observed that the hated Andros had better protected Maine than the inept, homegrown government that had ousted him; the insurrection—and the subsequent chaos—had only encouraged the enemy. Boston had withdrawn its forces, leaving men like Burroughs to beg for protection. Some went so far as to petition the king after the Boston coup, there being, under the interim government, “no peace, order or safety in New England.”

  HATHORNE AND CORWIN built a careful case against Burroughs, soliciting evidence from sixteen people. They also took the exceptional step of deposing their suspect privately. That interview took place at Ingersoll’s, although on this occasion the sixty-year-old innkeeper—familiar with the Maine skirmishes, which had sent his own family scurrying south as well—made no move to defend his former minister. To some extent we are left to extrapolate the charges from Burroughs’s denials. The first was the gravest and surely weighed as heavily against him as the slaughtered wives. When, inquired the justices on the morning of May 9, had Burroughs last taken communion? The Maine frontier was thinly populated; fewer than four thousand English settlers made their homes there. They were not always eager to expose themselves to the dangers of travel for the sake of the Sabbath, a day on which much ceased but Indian ambushes did not. If only out of necessity, Burroughs was less orthodox than his inquisitors. He was also either blunt to the point of self-destruction or Parris—who recorded his testimony—made him seem so. When had he last taken communion? It had been so long he could not say exactly, Burroughs replied, though on a recent Sabbath, he had attended a morning meeting in Boston and an afternoon one in Charlestown. He remained a full member of the Roxbury church. He had baptized only the eldest of his children, among the original residents of the Salem parsonage. Parris did not note that the minister lived far from any address at which he might conceivably have baptized the others.*

  The interrogation veered swiftly from the orthodox to the occult. Burroughs’s second wife had complained of visitations in the night. What of the terrifying creature that had bolted from the roof, raced along the chimney, and flown down the stairs? A slave swore it had been a white calf. On another occasion something rustled by the bed, breathing on Sarah Burroughs while she lay at her husband’s side. It dematerialized when he woke. Burroughs denied that his house was haunted although—he had a perverse habit of raising questions, if not hackles—he could not help but add that there were toads. He sounds nearly to have been amusing himself. He had no particular reason to think himself vulnerable; witches were women of sour disposition and humble circumstances. They were more often acquitted than convicted. Massachusetts did not try ministers for witchcraft; he still had his champions. As recently as three months earlier he had been holed up, half starved, in a lice-infested garrison surrounded by several feet of snow, a vicious enemy bearing down. He had twice barely escaped with his life. He had witnessed appalling sights; he knew of ears and noses hacked off and stuffed into mouths. He had little time for diabolical toads.

  The dead wives came next. There was some reason why various Burroughs women might be flying about Salem posthumously denouncing the minister. The Putnams were far from alone in testifying that over the weeks their minister had lodged with them, “he was a very sharp man to his wife.” In Maine, Sarah Burroughs had lived in a fear that had nothing to do with enchanted white calves. Her husband scolded mercilessly and controlled obsessively. He convinced her that he heard every word she uttered in his absence. It was reported that, returning from a strawberry-picking expedition with Sarah and his brother-in-law, Burroughs had vanished into the brush. His companions hollered for him. He was nowhere to be found. They rode home; somehow he had preceded them, on foot and with a basket of berries. He afterward admonished his wife for the vile things she had said about him in his absence. The devil could not know as much, protested the brother-in-law, to which Burroughs cryptically replied: “My God makes known your thoughts unto me.”*

  A week after his wife had given birth, Burroughs kept her on her feet to berate her at length. When his daughter blamed him for the resulting illness he chided her as well. (The night before Burroughs’s hearing, Shelden testified, the spectral wizard told her that he had killed two of his own children. The charge may have seemed plausible to those who knew the family, in which daughters sided with a stepmother.) While Burroughs had neither choked nor smothered his wives—or stabbed them, as others maintained; again the discrepancies tended to flit about unnoticed—the choice of verbs was interesting. Burroughs believed i
n secrets, something that sat poorly with a community dedicated to mutual surveillance. It would emerge that he had attempted even to silence the woman to whom his daughter complained. Should his wife fail to survive, the neighbor was not to mention the tongue-lashing. Burroughs may have mistreated Mercy Lewis as well; a special violence crept into her accounts of her former employer. She would not write in his book, she insisted, “if he threw me down on 100 pitchforks.” Avenging females hovered everywhere in 1692 Salem.

  A fairly consistent portrait emerges, if not of a sinister black man who abducted girls on whom he pressed diabolical books, then of a tyrannical husband. During their stay with the Putnams, he and his first wife had quarreled so violently that they appealed to their hosts to arbitrate. (The request may have amounted to mere politeness. It would have been impossible to argue privately, even in the comfortable Putnam home.) Again roguish Burroughs either kept or hoped to keep secrets. He had insisted his wife sign an agreement that she would reveal none of his private affairs, a request that in itself sounded incriminating, the more so at a time when document signing assumed a diabolical taint. He discovered as much that morning. The justices had done their homework: Had he made his wife swear that she would write her father only those letters of which he approved? Burroughs denied the charge, of special interest to Hathorne. Sarah Ruck, the second Mrs. Burroughs, currently flitting about in her funeral shroud, was his brother’s widow.* Her father lived in Salem, where he was about to serve as foreman of a grand jury.

  The Salem marshal led the compact, dark-haired Burroughs into the meetinghouse, where he was instructed to look only at the justices. Susannah Shelden, the Maine refugee who had buried more relatives than any of the other girls and whose father had died months earlier, offered up her conversation with the two dead wives. The justices asked Burroughs to face his accuser, standing several feet from him. As he turned, all or nearly all of the bewitched fell screaming to the ground; Parris could not properly say how many contorted amid the mayhem. What, the justices asked, did Burroughs make of all this? He agreed they had before them “an amazing and humbling providence.” He understood nothing of it. He doubtless cited Scripture; he was as fluent in biblical wonders as anyone in the room, something Parris had no reason to indicate in his notes and that Reverend Noyes did his best to suppress. Burroughs did point up one irregularity—“Some of you may observe that when they begin [to] name my name, they cannot name it,” he observed of his accusers—but was drowned out.

  A very different set of incriminating reports followed. Several men testified to Burroughs’s strength. It was legendary, especially as he was a small man, even “a very puny” one, in the estimation of statuesque Cotton Mather. Burroughs had hoisted a barrel of molasses with two fingers. He had fired a seven-foot shotgun with one hand. While a companion had gone off to the fort for help, he had unloaded an entire canoe of provisions. In September 1689, a time when a prodigiously strong, stouthearted leader came in handy, many had admired his fortitude; it was that month that the minister won praise for his role in the Casco battle. “None of us could do what he could do,” recalled a forty-two-year-old Salem weaver, who had attempted to lift the shotgun but—even with two hands—could not steady the weapon. What had inspired awe at the time appeared as wizardry now. Many had heard secondhand of Burroughs’s exploits; others had heard directly from him. He displayed as prodigious a talent for boasting as did his specter. Where once he might have solicited those tributes, Burroughs now disowned his feats. (He had, he explained, merely rested the shotgun on his chest.) Lurking behind the accounts was what may have been the most pertinent charge against him. He had survived every devastating Indian attack unscathed. Abigail Hobbs, Mercy Lewis, and Susannah Shelden had not been so lucky; others who might have testified about Burroughs’s wielding an impossibly heavy musket could not do so because they were dead. By no account an agreeable man—plenty of supercilious baiting and blustering accompanied the domestic cruelty—Burroughs managed to join abusive behavior at home with miraculous feats abroad. All evidence pointed to the same conclusion: he was a bad man but a very good wizard.

  Though he rode to jail in Boston directly from the hearing, Burroughs continued to haunt the week’s proceedings. He may still have been in transit when toothless, gray-haired George Jacobs hobbled into his hearing the next day, his long figure bent over two canes. Jacobs was at least seventy and possibly closer to eighty, in the eyes of his neighbors an exceptionally old man. A prosperous, longtime Salem farmer, Jacobs sounds like nothing so much as an aging rascal. Before his interrogators, he chortled and quipped. As the justices introduced his accusers, Jacobs invited the girls to speak up. He eagerly awaited their story. Parris’s niece offered her testimony. Jacobs could only laugh. Asked to explain himself, he interrogated his interrogators: “Your worships, all of you, do you think this is true?” Their credulousness struck him as incredible. He did not shy from a challenge; he would admit to witchcraft if they could prove it!

  Like George Burroughs and the take-no-prisoners John Procter, Jacobs had been firm with his servant, whom he very likely beat. A sixteen-year-old boy would later testify that Jacobs had threatened to drown him. The charge resonated. A generation earlier, Jacobs had been prosecuted for having drowned several horses, trapping them in a river with a barrage of sticks and stones. (He claimed he had simply attempted to run the trespassing animals off his property.) Over two days of hearings, it emerged that the spectral Jacobs had beaten the girls with his canes. Several produced pins that the old man had stuck into their hands. Sarah Churchill, his former servant, urged Jacobs to confess. “Have you heard that I have any witchcraft?” he asked, looking not at her but at the magistrates, as directed. “I know you have lived a wicked life,” Sarah chided, which seemed sufficient.

  Did Jacobs tend to family prayer? inquired Hathorne and Corwin. He did not. A prayerless house was understood to be a haunted one; the magistrates pressed the old farmer to account for his negligence. He did not worship with his family, Jacobs explained, because he could not read. That was no impediment; “Can you say the Lord’s Prayer?” prompted the justices. “Let us hear you.” All understood those lines to be a sort of talisman before which evil fled. Jacobs made multiple attempts, stumbling every time. Nearly every witness who appeared before Hathorne and Corwin would do the same; as another wizard nervously quipped a week later, himself mangling a clause, the accused appeared to be every bit as bewitched as their accusers.* Otherwise words came easily to Jacobs. He bantered with the justices. He could not help them with their inquiry, he feared. They could burn him or hang him; he knew nothing of witchcraft. He was no more guilty than his examiners. “You tax me for a wizard. You may as well tax me for a buzzard,” he protested. “I have done no harm.” Having been beaten black and blue by the elderly farmer, having been urged to write in his book, having been offered gold and many fine things—all before she had yet learned his name or set eyes on his nonspectral self—Mercy Lewis offered a more convincing explanation: Women were if anything more dangerous in 1692 than the men who claimed that they flew into bedchambers to lie heavily on their chests for hours, were aware. “I verily believe in my heart that George Jacobs is a most dreadful wizard,” swore Lewis. Along with nine additional witches, Jacobs that week followed Burroughs to jail in Boston, where the old man who beat girls with his canes and the minister who abused wives had occasion to get to know each other intimately, enough so that Burroughs may even have caught sight of the triangular witch’s teat that officials discovered below Jacobs’s right shoulder.

  Accusations exploded in the wake of a minister’s imprisonment; hearings and prison depositions could barely keep pace. Mercy Lewis took the lead in testifying, to become the most active accuser. Ultimately she would be afflicted by fifty-one people. A retentive girl, she wove psalms and sermons into her visitations, offering the most imaginative testimony. (Maine refugee Susannah Shelden tended to divulge murders. She emphasized witches who suckled birds,
hairless kittens, pigs, turtles at their breasts. Ann Putnam Sr. made a sideline of dead infants. Her daughter introduced new suspects.) At some point, Lewis moved to the household of Constable Jonathan Putnam, who had just lost a baby to what the family assumed to be witchcraft. Mary Warren, the Procter maid, waffled as recently as the day of Burroughs’s Salem return, when she was heard to say that the magistrates might just as well listen to Keyser’s crazy daughter as to any of the afflicted girls. Within the week she reversed course again; she would prove the most sensational witness for the prosecution. She plucked pins from her body. She spat blood in the meetinghouse. Her tongue protruded from her mouth for so long it turned black. Her legs locked together and could not be separated by the strongest of men. The court reporter did not elaborate on this unconventional intercession: here were grown men attempting to pry apart a twenty-year-old girl’s knees.

  Phantoms and specters meanwhile commingled. Ann Putnam Sr. reported on several milky-white figures at her bedside. Two were ghosts, but the third was John Willard, her dark-haired neighbor. Willard had evidently helped to round up several initial suspects until he tired of the girls and swore they should all hang. In spectral form he confided in Ann that he had murdered at least thirteen villagers, whom she named. The litany of unfortunate explanations left everyone scrambling to reexamine domestic misfortunes and mysteries, of which there is never a shortage. All over Essex County, stomach cramps, bladder problems, numbness, deafness, and every brand of deviance—including unexpected kindness—suddenly made sense.