The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  By the end of May at least sixty suspects had been jailed, more than the Massachusetts prisons had ever accommodated. Those who had frozen through the winter began to roast in the sweltering spring. The situation cried out for resolution, as did the accused. Earlier in the month, a petition had circulated for pious Rebecca Nurse; thirty-nine villagers had affixed their names. She would have heard news of it from her family, who visited regularly, as from the fresh arrivals that week, which included her rearrested sister. The torrent of complaints meanwhile continued. Two weeks after his arrival, in an order that made reference to the stifling prisons but not to the multitude of witches, Phips established a special court to try the cases in Salem. He appointed nine justices; a quorum of five was required at any session. Most had served on the bench at one time or another; all sat on the governor’s council. Merchants and landowners, they constituted the leading men of Massachusetts Bay. Their fortunes and influence entitled them to the prize meetinghouse pews. No rabble-rousing treasure hunters figured among them. The usual suspects, they would manage to wreak as much havoc as a cabal of church-toppling witches.

  ONE OF THE reassuring things about witchcraft was that it answered to certain neat and immutable laws. It ran in families, primarily along matrilineal lines. Tainted reputations remained stubbornly so; the infamy endured long after the offenses had been forgotten. One Scotswoman preferred to burn rather than live as even an acquitted witch. Her family had disowned her and her friends deserted her. Unable to draw water from neighborhood wells, an acquitted Charlestown woman found herself reduced to drinking from puddles. Bridget Bishop, the occasional thief, could not escape the name she had already made for herself. To most of her accusers she remained Goody Oliver. Totaling her expenses at two shillings, five pence a week, the Boston jailer referred to her as “Bridget Bishop alias Oliver.” The new Massachusetts governor notwithstanding, status too descended to a large extent genetically. Civic leaders produced civic leaders. At least a few selectmen in every town were raised by selectmen, as were nearly three-quarters of Salem’s. Almost without exception, the witchcraft judges were the sons of merchants or ministers. Cotton Mather, John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and William Stoughton all reprised roles their fathers had played. The prominent, accomplished parent proved nearly as difficult to sidestep as the one who, three decades earlier, had warned that a pig would keel over before dawn, and who had the misfortune to prove correct.

  In establishing a Court of Oyer and Terminer—literally, “to hear and determine”—Phips assembled the “people of the best prudence and figure that could be pitched upon,” as he put it. No member of that panel had any formal training in the law. Two had trained as ministers. Three were Harvard graduates. At least five were merchants, one an amateur physician. Most bore long lists of civic titles. The enterprising Bartholomew Gedney, who early on visited the parsonage girls and had attended a number of preliminary hearings, owned a Salem wharf and shipyard as well as several Maine sawmills. As Salem town residents, Hathorne and Gedney assured the court of a connection to—and a tenor consonant with—the hearings of the previous four months. They sat feet from each other among the front pews in Salem’s First Church before the deacons, where together they absorbed Higginson’s and Noyes’s homilies. They had attended Parris’s ordination; they fielded the villagers’ unremitting complaints. Possessed of a flowing and elegant round hand, Stephen Sewall continued, with his pot of ink and his goose-feather quill, as court clerk. He organized the paperwork, which went home with him in a document box at night to the address he presumably still shared with Parris’s daughter. Parris returned to preaching. At the court’s head, Phips installed lieutenant governor William Stoughton, who weeks earlier had traveled to Salem for the Burroughs hearing.

  For their pains, the justices earned about what an eminent schoolmaster did, or twice what the survivor of a 1694 Indian raid received for the ten scalps she redeemed in Boston. That was of little import to the magistrates, all men of wealth. No one would have quibbled with Phips’s choices. He had assembled an irreproachable cast. At a time when much was in flux—when even the New England vocabulary was evolving, the colony now a province, its marshals sheriffs, its twenty-eight assistants councillors—this was reassuring. These were Massachusetts’s well-traveled, civic, economic, and militia leaders, the sons (and in several cases also the sons-in-law) of its first families, men of established rank with distinguished names, each of which figured in New England’s new charter. Among them they owned hundreds of thousands of New England acres. Nearly all had prior experience adjudicating witchcraft cases, if none with an outbreak of 1692 proportions.

  Newly sworn in, the justices applied for guidance. It did not help that their orders were to determine what crimes had been perpetrated according to the laws of both England and Massachusetts, two bodies of law that differed. They turned naturally to the available expert. Four of the nine members of the court—including sixty-seven-year-old John Richards, the Boston merchant who solicited the advice—were close friends of Cotton Mather. He more than anyone grasped the slender dimensions of the administration. As he exulted that month in his diary, not only was the governor one of his dearest friends and someone he had personally baptized, but “all the councilors of the province are of my own father’s nomination; and my father-in-law, with several related unto me, and several brethren of my church, are among them.”

  Eleven new warrants went out even before jurors could be assembled. The plaintiffs appeared only half acquainted with most of the accused, identified by surnames alone. Among the May 28 suspects, however, one name boldly jumped out, familiar to all: that of sixty-six-year-old John Alden, a hard-edged Boston sea captain and merchant, the firstborn son of Plymouth’s founding family. Among the sturdiest soldiers in Massachusetts, Alden was newly returned from Maine, where he had negotiated for the release of the captives carried off from York. Alden belonged to the same church as did three members of the witchcraft court. He was especially close to Samuel Sewall, having long done business with his father-in-law. On May 31, accused by several villagers, the enterprising Alden appeared before his friends and peers in the makeshift Salem courtroom.

  The newly appointed king’s attorney, Thomas Newton, traveled to that hearing as well, to glean a sense of what the Court of Oyer and Terminer might contend with at its first session, scheduled for June 2. It fell to Newton to decide the order of the trials. Stephen Sewall may have advised him; he knew the Salem cast and cases better than anyone. Already Chief Justice Stoughton had summoned eighteen “honest and lawful men” to serve as grand jurors and forty-eight men to serve as regular jurors. All hailed from the neighboring communities. They were to appear at the town house that Thursday morning at eight. The word “witchcraft” appeared nowhere in their summons but the men knew the nature of their charge. They were courtroom veterans drawn from a familiar cohort of local leaders. Their experience rather than their impartiality recommended them; they brought an invaluable knowledge of the community to the job. They would hear no other cases.

  An Anglican and a trained barrister, Thomas Newton was fairly new to the colony. Like Deodat Lawson, the former village minister, Newton was a worldly man. Also like Lawson, he was dumbfounded by the scene before him. Possibly for his benefit, Hathorne again tested the accusers, arranging for Alden to attend his hearing without a guard. The sea captain strode into the village meetinghouse, his sword at his side, and took his place discreetly in the crowd. Hathorne then challenged the girls to identify their afflicter. They hesitated before pointing to another military man in the room. A little adult prompting, Alden noted later, helped. (He left an account of his hearing, not something many would have the opportunity to do.) As it had earlier, the dark meetinghouse further obscured matters. Alden was ordered outside, where the girls formed a circle around him, snapping and sneering. One—most likely Ann Putnam Jr.—taunted him for his lack of deference. He was awfully bold not to remove his hat before the justices!

>   The girls had absorbed plenty of reports on Alden in Massachusetts and in Maine, where he spent a great deal of time; it has been estimated that he had made at least sixteen round trips to the frontier since late 1688. He knew the territory well. His father-in-law had owned Maine sawmills; Alden had served valiantly in King Philip’s War. He traded with the Wabanaki and had negotiated the truce that had indirectly precipitated the York raid. He supplied the Maine garrisons. He had long been suspected of preferring arms sales to captive redemptions, putting his own business before that of the public; he had been ordered to travel with only restricted quantities of ammunition. Certainly Alden did not see the Wabanaki purely as “bears and wolves,” as his February instructions on the York exchange described them. Sure enough, the bewitched accused Alden of selling munitions to the enemy. He slept, they jeered, with Indian women! And he afflicted the girls with his sword, of which, to his chagrin, Alden was relieved. A marshal led him out to await his interrogation, probably at Ingersoll’s. Whatever the truth to the charges of profiteering, he had thrived in Maine, amid dense fogs and bloodthirsty Indians where others had lost families.

  Alden spent several hours in suspense while Hathorne summoned Martha Carrier, accused by Parris’s niece and eighteen-year-old Susannah Shelden. Carrier hailed from a hot-headed family whose reputation she upheld. When Hathorne inquired about the spectral black man with whom the girls accused her of consorting, Carrier snorted. She saw no black man aside from the dark-haired, dark-gowned magistrate himself. As instructed, she locked eyes with him upon entering the room. Hathorne challenged her to turn to the girls without incapacitating them. “They will dissemble,” she objected—it was the first use of the word—“if I look upon them.” From a trance, Susannah Shelden, the fatalities expert, asked how Carrier had managed to murder thirteen people. The girls trembled as they described the spirits in the room; they complained of pins in their flesh, which they produced. Did Carrier not see the ghosts? Hathorne inquired. “If I speak you will not believe me,” she scoffed, accurately enough. The girls shrieked that she lied.

  No word had yet emerged regarding Carrier’s flights or recruits. Nor was it yet clear that, as her own children would testify, the devil had promised their imperious mother that “she should be Queen of Hell.” Still, the attorney general blinked in disbelief at the girls’ visions, their pins, their agonies. “Staring in people’s faces,” they roamed about. “It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits,” Carrier observed before the disorder reached crisis proportions, the flailing so severe that some thought the girls’ lives in peril. Hathorne ordered Carrier to be tied, hand and foot, and carted away. Newton may or may not have managed in the pandemonium to hear Mary Walcott, who months earlier had displayed the bites on her wrist for Deodat Lawson, tell the justices that Carrier had boasted she had been a witch for forty years. Carrier was thirty-eight.

  John Alden returned to the meetinghouse later that afternoon. To facilitate viewing, Hathorne instructed him to stand on a chair, another humiliation in itself; the girls appeared to be disciplining their elder. A marshal then restrained his hands. Alden was not as easily silenced. Why in the world, he protested from his awkward perch, would he come all the way to Salem village to hurt people he neither knew of nor had ever met? Bartholomew Gedney, the fifty-two-year-old Salem merchant, pressed him to confess. Alden answered that he had no intention of gratifying the devil with a lie. He challenged the assembly to supply a shred of evidence that he practiced witchcraft. Hathorne arranged for a touch test; a bewitched girl calmed the minute Alden set a finger on her. Among the remarkable things Newton observed that day the most remarkable may have been what came next. From his seat at the front of the room, Gedney allowed that he had known Alden for years. The two had sailed together. They were business associates. Gedney had defended his opportunistic colleague from earlier charges of collusion with a different enemy. He informed Alden that he “had always looked upon him to be an honest man, but now he did see cause to alter his judgment.” He could not disregard that touch test. It was the height of a crisis when decades-long loyalties crumbled or proved inconvenient. A member of the same exclusive Boston prayer group, Samuel Sewall elected not to rise to Alden’s defense either. His family had entrusted Alden to sail their ships across the ocean. Some sort of seismic shift had occurred.

  Alden could say nothing more to his former colleague than that he was sorry. He trusted God would clear his name. For his part, he would, “with Job, maintain his integrity till he died.” He was a man who—permitted a few minutes with Indian hostages—reinforced their faith, assuring them, when their captors barred them from prayer, that they suffered for Christ. Ordered to look upon his accusers, he watched them tumble to the ground. What could explain the fact, he challenged, that his gaze had no deleterious effect on Gedney? His old friend did not deign to answer. Alden launched into a spirited discourse on the plight of innocents, only to be silenced by Reverend Noyes, who offered a long speech of his own. What did the sea captain know of divine providence? Alden managed a final appeal to Gedney. “I can assure you,” he insisted, “that there is not a word of truth in all these say of me.” Sword confiscated, hands bound, he traveled that evening to Boston’s prison.

  It had been a long and exhausting day, not one, Thomas Newton marveled, anyone would believe had he not observed it with his own eyes. “I have beheld most strange things scarce credible but to the spectator,” he reported to the secretary of the province. They made a convert of him. He left convinced that Alden was as deeply implicated as anyone else; the conspiracy, he feared, extended even to persons of quality. The long day of hearings also caused Newton to rethink his trial strategy. The very names of the accused elicited strangling, trances, yowls. The girls lay for prolonged periods as if dead. It made for slow going. He had sent for nine suspects; he now saw he could not possibly prosecute so many. He submitted two requests to the secretary. He asked that the confessors—Tituba and a servant who worked in the household of Justice Corwin’s extended family—travel separately from the accused. And he asked for the records of Bridget Bishop’s 1680 witchcraft trial.

  The same day, in one headlong burst and with a minimum of corrections, Cotton Mather composed a thoughtful, seven-part letter. So eager was he to commit his thoughts to paper that he did not bother even to consult his vaunted library. The Court of Oyer and Terminer would convene in forty-eight hours; he labored to shed some light on its assignment. It was not unusual for a court to solicit advice from the clergy, even less for John Richards, the eldest member of the court, to have appealed to his pastor. Others clearly had questions as well. The previous Sunday, Samuel Willard—the only Boston minister to rival Increase Mather in his influence—went out of his way to expound on the devil and how to recognize him. Willard affirmed that the Old Deluder tempted, afflicted, and worked his infernal art through witchcraft. He missed no opportunities to recruit. He did so handily, given that he promised—Willard cited Matthew 4:8, as had Mercy Lewis—“all the kingdoms of the world.”

  Like most of his colleagues, sixty-seven-year-old Richards held many titles: He was a selectman and militia captain. He did not shrink from unpopular assignments. He had accepted a 1681 charter-negotiating mission to London that William Stoughton had managed to dodge, engaging while abroad in the requisite colonial groveling: the Massachusetts Bay irregularities had arisen only inadvertently! Long among the most influential members of the North Church, Richards contributed more than any other parishioner to his ministers’ salaries. In turn Cotton Mather consulted him regarding church matters, on which Richards was a staunch conservative. He was as well a close and accommodating North End neighbor, having lodged the Mathers in his stately brick mansion when their home burned. Cotton Mather was a teenager at the time; a decade later, Richards officiated at his wedding. Understandably, then, Mather was at his service; Richards’s desires were always, Mather assured him, his commands. He offered up his tho
ughts concerning the mysterious matter. The entire province fasted and prayed on the justices’ behalf; it placed itself in their righteous hands. Mather invoked his favorite analogies, trotting out the “stupendous witchcraft, much like ours,” in Sweden. Personally he had begun to fear that devils worked more mischief than was generally understood. The “murmuring frenzies of late” provided ample opportunities for the great deluder to present himself and inquire: “Are you willing that I should go do this or that for you?” By accepting a simple favor, an innocent all too easily found himself ensnared. “And yet I must humbly beg you,” cautioned Mather, loud and clear, sending up a crimson flag, “that in the management of the affair in your most worthy hands, you do not lay more stress upon pure specter testimony than it will bear.”

  He touched there on the heart of the matter, addressing the question with which the Salem justices wrestled from the start: Could the devil pass himself off as an innocent—and could a defendant be prosecuted on evidence only some could see? Mather rejected the idea, which had discomfited the justices in the 1676 Newbury case. They had not been able to bring themselves to convict a suspect for mischief caused in her likeness. The devil had disguised himself as an innocent before. Those who indulged in “malignant, envious, malicious” behavior might all too easily be taken for his confederates without ever having caught sight of him, much less having signed any kind of pact. To presume guilt, warned Mather, was to play into devious, diabolical hands.

  He offered a few tips. A credible confession was worth its weight in gold, although, warned Mather, there was credible and credible. A “delirious brain, or a discontented heart” could produce false results. As for eliciting confessions, he could not condone torture. He recommended clever storms of cross, swift questions. Otherwise he subscribed to the traditional tactics. Could the accused recite the Lord’s Prayer? Interestingly for an anguished ex-stutterer, he placed a great deal of faith in “confounding the lisping witches.” He trusted in hard evidence, such as poppets. A witch could as well use her own body as a poppet, inducing suffering in her victim’s eye, for example, by touching her own. While he had never seen one himself, a good physician could recognize a witch’s mark.* He endorsed the water test; devils infused their recruits with a venom that rendered them buoyant.† He addressed neither the touch test nor the evil eye.