The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Not every terror was airborne. Sarah Churchill, George Jacobs’s principal accuser, left the May 10 hearing in tears, wringing her hands. She took her distress to Ingersoll’s niece. Though she had sworn as much, she sobbed, she had never set her hand to the devil’s book. What she had testified was “altogether false and untrue.” Her confidante would not accept her recanting. In tears, Churchill insisted. Why on earth then had she lied? asked the older woman. The justices had threatened to lock her in the Salem dungeon with Burroughs, Sarah explained. She preferred to perjure herself than be chained in a dark hole with a wizard. The problem, she moaned, was one of disbelief rather than credulity. If she told Reverend Noyes a single time that she had signed the devil’s book, he would believe her, “but if she told the truth and said she had not set her hand to the book a hundred times, he would not believe her.”

  Late in May, as eighty-one-year-old Salem farmer Bray Wilkins prepared to ride to Boston, his granddaughter’s husband paid a call. Would Wilkins pray for him? The young man—it was John Willard, the Putnam neighbor—was frantic. He had been accused. Wilkins put him off as politely as he could. The two had long been at odds; the Wilkins clan had not taken to Willard. Who should turn up just as Bray Wilkins sat down to table days later in Boston but the young man. He cast an evil eye on the family patriarch; for days afterward the old man suffered an excruciating urinary blockage. On the painful return to Salem—Wilkins felt “like a man on the rack”—he appealed to Mercy Lewis. By May the girls served as traditional witch-finders; parents of ailing children made pilgrimages to consult with them. They might only be eleven or twelve, but under Parris’s supervision, they could explain how several head of cattle a community away had come to freeze to death six years in the past. Mercy saw Wilkins’s grandson-in-law pressing on the old man’s stomach, clear as day.

  The witchcraft claimed its first fatality that month. Early in May, Bray Wilkins’s seventeen-year-old grandson Daniel also ranted about John Willard. Daniel may have been among those who knew that Willard beat his wife. He may already have heard rumors of witchcraft. He swore that Willard should hang. Several days later, the teenager fell ill. He was soon unable to eat or speak. A doctor attributed the sickness to preternatural causes, a diagnosis with which the visiting Mercy Lewis agreed. At Daniel’s bedside at dusk she watched a gauzy Willard torture the limp, dazed boy. He gasped for breath. Over the next day Lewis, Mary Walcott, and Ann Putnam Jr. all reported Willard at his throat and chest, choking him. The specter spoke with the three girls. On Saturday the fourteenth, he announced he would shortly murder Daniel “if he could.” He had not, he explained, strength enough; he would apply to Burroughs for renewed powers. On Tuesday, the specter vowed he would kill Wilkins that moonless evening. Three hours later, he breathed his last. “Bewitched to death,” Parris wrote after the seventeen-year-old’s name in the village church record.

  The culprit turned up forty miles away, having eluded arrest for nearly a week. His flight seemed to confirm his guilt; he caused such a stir in the watch house that the marshal had no choice but to shackle him. Alarmed, the marshal urged the justices to press ahead in their investigations, to prevent further casualties. Hathorne and Corwin examined the suspect promptly. “What do you say to this murdering and bewitching your relations?” they challenged the young man. Willard insisted he wished no harm to any human being. The girls’ testimony was read aloud. It was familiar, down to the charges of wife-beating. Several relatives—and nearly all who testified against Willard were family—recalled the sticks he had broken while thrashing his wife. He had left her cowering under the stairs; she had not expected to recover from the blows. Through the hearing, ghosts flew about the room, clustering around Willard. Did he believe the girls were bewitched? Hathorne inquired. “Yes, I really believe it,” replied Willard, the next to trip, perilously and five times, over the Lord’s Prayer.

  Quietly, having been wrenched from her sickbed in February and mentioned only occasionally since, Sarah Osborne—the frail villager who had worried Indians might drag her off by her hair—died that week in prison. It took a sturdier soul to survive nine weeks and two days in a raw, rank cell through the coldest months of the year on scant rations and in heavy irons. On May 10 Boston’s jailer removed Osborne’s body from among the villagers who had watched her slip away, none of whom would have quibbled with the 1686 description of the Court Street lockup as a “suburb of hell.” At the time no one ascribed her death to witchcraft. She, rather than Wilkins, would be Salem’s first casualty.

  VI

  A SUBURB OF HELL

  Hell seems a great deal more feasible to my weak mind than heaven. No doubt because hell is a more earthly-seeming thing.

  —FLANNERY O’CONNOR

  AT AN IDEOLOGICALLY fraught moment, a group of children suffer from an incapacitating disorder. Their bewildered families cast frantically about for a diagnosis; meanwhile the symptoms intensify under observation and the disorder spreads. A group of experts—ministers, in this case—weigh in, an unverifiable explanation gains favor, allegations bloom left and right, and seventy people find themselves clapped in airless cells, accused of offenses they can only half imagine. These things happen, and not only in the seventeenth century. What could not yet happen in 1692 was any resolution. Hathorne could investigate the charges and incarcerate the suspects. Neither he nor any Massachusetts magistrate could advance to the next steps—grand jury hearings and formal indictments—until the acting governor allowed the Salem cases to proceed to trial. An eighty-nine-year-old political moderate, very much a placeholder, he seems to have elected to stall. Sixteen years earlier he had reprieved an accused Newbury witch, the woman with whom John Hale spoke after her pardon. The colony teetered between governments or, more exactly, “between government and no government.” It awaited the charter it knew to be en route. It awaited its new governor. All was in a holding pattern. “Salem is one of the few dramas in history with a beginning, a middle, and an end,” Arthur Miller observed in 1953. The middle act opened now, as the panic gathered force and the jails of Essex County bulged with shackled witches.

  Deliverance—or at least judicial relief—arrived at dusk on May 14 in the rotund and improbable form of an erstwhile Maine shepherd.* Sir William Phips, the new Massachusetts governor, sailed past the spray of islands and into Boston’s majestic harbor late that Saturday. The snap of New England spruce met him even before he set foot on shore. Built on the slope of three rolling hills, the town—of handsome churches, extensive wharfs, a two-story town house, and a marketplace packed with well-furnished shops and tradesmen of all kinds—was surrounded by water on nearly every side. Boston was small enough still that you could walk easily from one end to the other in search of your lost cow. Brick, pitched-roofed mansions had begun to rise among its tight huddle of wooden homes. Still, you were more likely to meet a hog than a coach in its narrow streets. The interim administration had assembled at the wharf to welcome Phips; shouting acclamations, well-wishers thronged the pebble-stone streets, which echoed with celebratory cannon shots. Along with the new governor sailed Increase Mather and the colony’s revised charter. The three were to rescue Massachusetts, that “shaken and shattered country,” from its post-Andros anarchy, from the “thousand perplexities and entanglements” that beset its people.

  The rugged forty-one-year-old who made his way to the town house, accompanied by several hundred flag-bearing militiamen, some wielding muskets and pikes, others in breastplates or heavy leather doublets, was an odd man for the job. A burly, pleasant-faced gunsmith’s son, Phips had spent his early years in the remote reaches of Maine; at twenty-two, he moved to Boston as a shipwright. Rough-hewn and wildly ambitious, he could not settle for being merely one of the first self-made men in American history. As Samuel Parris was setting up shop next door, Phips determined to seek his fortune, sailing to the West Indies in search of sunken treasure. An initial expedition yielded only two mutinies, the first of which he essentia
lly suppressed with his bare hands. A third journey yielded a cache of gold, silver, and precious stones off the coast of Haiti. English patrons had underwritten the voyage; to London Phips sailed with thirty tons of silver. Writing centuries later, Keynes deemed his feat “one of the most extraordinary records of improbable success.” The haul altered England’s financial future, triggering an early stock-market boom and leading directly to the foundation of the Bank of England. At a time when five hundred pounds constituted a small fortune, Phips’s share alone came to eleven thousand pounds.*

  While the exploit won him medals and a knighthood, it did nothing to burnish his manners. Phips might be compared to Jason fetching the Golden Fleece, as a minister asserted before Harvard’s 1688 graduates, but he remained a rude and rascally frontiersman who proceeded by brawn and bluster, colorful overreaching and vigorous head-bashing, earning reprimands from many, as he had done even from the aged provisional governor he now replaced. A decade earlier constables attempted to break up Phips’s men, brawling late in a Boston bar. He stepped in on their behalf. When the constables threatened to notify the authorities, Phips roared that he “did not care a turd for the governor, for he had more power than he had,” a sentiment he expressed less decorously on other occasions. Brought to trial, he flung his papers at the justices. (Stoughton, about to become Phips’s deputy governor, sat on the court that fined him.) His swearing and cursing impressed even veteran sailors. The fortune did nothing to suppress an appetite for bribery and extortion.

  It took a great deal to transform a rabble-rousing adventurer into an angel, but New England’s preeminent mythmaker managed to do so, later describing Phips arriving in Boston at this critical juncture as if “dropped from the machine of heaven.” While his contemporaries would have choked on the celestial equation, the timing was more problematic yet. “We are in daily expectation of Sir William Phips,” Samuel Sewall had noted—nearly four months earlier, as the Parris girls shuddered with their first convulsions and weeks before the new governor had so much as embarked.* The charter Phips carried was already six months old, months that had worn down Massachusetts, that “distressed, enfeebled, ruined country.”

  For all his recklessness, Phips could be said to have been a habitual late-arriver. Having learned to read and write at twenty-two, his grasp of both skills remained shaky.† He apparently could not distinguish Dutch from English on the page and may or may not have been able to decipher his own December 1691 commission. It established him as governor by royal prerogative; under the old charter, his had been an elected position. In March of 1689 Phips had raced from London to Boston to deliver the news of England’s Glorious Revolution, in which William III overthrew James II, a Protestant king supplanting a Catholic one. Aboard ship, Phips crowed that he would personally unseat Andros, the reviled royal governor; he arrived to discover the job had been done six weeks earlier. A year later Phips found his way to the North Church, where Cotton Mather baptized him, clinching his political future. In his case, the delayed rite raised no eyebrows. There had been, Mather explained, no settled minister on hand in Maine to perform the task.

  In 1690 Phips led a combined naval and land expedition against Quebec, the capital of French Canada. Rumors of a Wabanaki-French alliance haunted New England, as they would continue to do; word flew that the enemy intended to destroy every town in the colony. Phips had enjoyed an earlier success against a French outpost in Nova Scotia, a success only slightly soiled by his men’s pillaging. The 1690 expedition was rashly planned and repeatedly delayed; the French greeted him with heavy fire. He sacrificed hundreds of men to a ruinously expensive campaign, one London deemed “a shameful and cowardly defeat.” Phips would play a role in altering North American financial history too; without funds to pay the returning soldiers and sailors or recruit new ones, the colony issued paper currency. Crippling inflation ensued. The economy in tatters, a French retaliation expected, trade at a standstill, a state of near-anarchy prevailed. The “poor people,” noted a Boston visitor, “are ready to eat up one another.” None of which stopped Phips from sailing to London to ask William III to bankroll an attempt to dislodge the French from North America once and for all. Maine’s fur trade and fisheries stood in peril. (England would have cause for regret too, argued the settlers, should the French get their hands on the Massachusetts shipyards.) It was on that trip that Phips and Increase Mather joined forces in the charter negotiation.

  As Phips walked that late-spring Saturday afternoon from the Boston wharf the light drained completely from the sky. A hush fell on the city. From the town-house balcony he delivered half a speech—God had sent him to preserve his country, where all prior laws and liberties would obtain—then paused. The light was gone. He would not infringe upon the Lord’s Day. The acclamations, the salutes, would have to wait until Monday. By candlelight the militia accompanied him to his red-brick mansion at the corner of today’s Salem and Charter Streets, a beautifully appointed home with a brilliant harbor view. The crowd continued around the corner to the home of Increase Mather, to whom Phips owed his appointment. On Monday morning the authorities reconvened in the pillared town house, where they engaged in a six-hour debate as to whether the reading of Phips’s commission should be resumed where it had been left off or whether it should be read anew, politics and religion stumbling over each other. At the same ceremony sixty-year-old William Stoughton, a veteran of two decades of civil service and of four regimes, took the oath as deputy governor.

  Published two days later, the charter failed to accomplish all the colony—henceforth a province—had hoped. The colonists were to pay the price for having arrogated powers not their own; the Crown expanded Massachusetts boundaries but curtailed its privileges. The charter demolished the political basis of the first decades, granting religious tolerance to all (except Catholics). Any man with substantial income could vote, irrespective of church membership. The colonists lost the right to choose their own governor; the installation of Phips was a compromise worked out in London by Increase Mather. Surely the province could overlook a royal appointment if its governor was a New England Puritan, reasoned Mather, who knew that the king preferred a military man at the Massachusetts helm. Meanwhile, various Crown advisers lobbied for someone who shared their economic interests. Phips proved acceptable to all parties, in part because he belonged to none. Nor had he any political experience. He replaced what the Mathers referred to as “a knot of people that had no design but to enrich themselves on the ruins of this flourishing plantation.” The province could now count on better protection, the vacuum of authority having proved more traumatic than the royal invasion, the “alien incubus” that was Andros. Most important, the charter put an end to three years of gnawing uncertainty.

  Increase Mather set about selling the document aggressively; he knew he proffered an imperfect bill of goods.* His countrymen might wonder how he had not obtained more. The real wonder, he proclaimed, was that he had secured so much. Indeed autonomy was a thing of the past. But their governor and lieutenant governor hailed from their ranks. Spared a Crown-imposed Anglican aristocrat, Massachusetts got a Mather-baptized native son. The new document had its defects. But was not half a loaf better than none? Mather challenged in a spring sermon. Property rights were confirmed, religious rights guaranteed, political liberties and regular town meetings restored. Their governor could not pass laws or levy taxes unilaterally, as had Andros, whose courts were a mockery, who extorted monies, and who had exercised more power over New Englanders than did the king over Englishmen. Pleading and shaming, Increase Mather beseeched his compatriots to be happy with their lot and—appreciative, obedient children—to support their sovereigns. The last thing Massachusetts needed was “an unthankful murmuring generation of men.” Cotton Mather jumped on the bandwagon, selling the charter to the Second Church congregation, Boston’s largest. He had already reminded his fifteen hundred parishioners that the Lord had spared them three years earlier. He had rescued them from thos
e who declared them “a people fit only to be rooted off the face of the earth.” Mather meant Englishmen rather than Indians.

  A roar of dissatisfaction could be heard in the propagandizing. A people disobliged God, Cotton Mather submitted, in a sermon delivered on a day of thanksgiving for his father’s safe return, when they comported themselves like “vultures and harpies.” Men who had shown “unfainting industry” for their countrymen should not be thanked with infamy. In that sunny address Mather extolled ministers, magistrates, and civic leaders of all kinds, hardworking, underappreciated public servants, each of whom “must carry two handkerchiefs about him, one to wipe off sweat of travail, another to wipe off the spit of reproach.” He reminded his audience of their good fortune and ample privileges. They should avoid divisions and contentions. Those invited malignant “breaches in God’s hedge about us,” allowing devils to break in, of which there was currently a “stupendous instance” nearby.

  Two disgruntled camps weighed in: those who would settle only for the restoration of the original charter (the orthodox, for the most part), and those who preferred a return of Dominion rule to an ineffectual New England regime (the merchants). Many felt the colony had been shortchanged, that something had been irretrievably lost, always a summons to conservatism. The interregnum had taken its toll; not everyone was eager to fling himself into the arms of the new administration.* Prominent men who endorsed the charter bristled at Phips, who had so often run afoul of the law in his pre-angelic incarnation. Grumbling could be heard throughout the city of eight thousand, to the delight of the remaining Andros supporters. Increase Mather conveyed none of that disappointment to London, reporting instead on June 23 “that the people are very well pleased with their new charter.” For his part, Phips had his hands full not only with the discontent but with Indians who ravaged the frontier—the devastating raid Burroughs described had taken place fourteen weeks earlier—and French privateers who ravaged the coast. The restoration of order, the dire need for sailors, a strategy by which to foil French and Indian designs, constituted his immediate concerns, as did the empty Massachusetts treasury. For a loan the government turned to the ever-obliging Samuel Sewall, who had bailed out Burroughs several years earlier.