The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Stoughton likely had his verdict by midafternoon. While the jurors had no confession, they had much else. The evidence was overwhelming. Their foreman stood to announce the decision: for having practiced witchcraft on the five village girls on April 19 and “on diverse other days and times before and after,” they found Bishop guilty. The goblin in the apple tree, the bedroom visits, the poppets may have done the trick. The jury convicted however for the afflictions. The ancient histories could not be corroborated. The courtroom tortures had been witnessed by all. In one of Salem’s more unusual twists, the court found Bishop guilty for enchanting village girls she did not know, as opposed to the men in town she did.*

  Doomed, she returned to prison, where just before four o’clock, the women submitted to a second strip search. Bishop’s unnatural growth was nowhere to be found, proof that she had communicated with an evil spirit in the course of the day. All three suspects’ marks had in fact mysteriously vanished. The protuberance discovered on the body of Rebecca Nurse had by afternoon deflated to a spot of dry skin. Its variation proved its diabolical origin; she had evidently suckled a demonic imp. (During her preliminary hearing, Hathorne had asked about any wounds. “I have naught but old age,” the village great-grandmother had replied.) As for Susannah Martin, the tiny, contemptuous Amesbury widow, where her breasts had appeared full in the morning, they were lank and flattened by afternoon. She too had suckled a familiar in the course of the day. Nurse was outraged; the most practiced midwife disagreed with her colleagues. And Nurse could account for her deformities, the result of difficult labors. They had caused her trouble for years. She had not visited men’s bedrooms, transformed herself into a goblin, or pried boards from public buildings with a glance. For having practiced “certain detestable arts called witchcrafts and sorceries” on four village girls, the court however indicted her on June 3.

  In the village Hathorne and Corwin meanwhile continued to issue warrants and hear complaints. The Salem constable that week found a new suspect at her spinning wheel and delivered her posthaste to the authorities. Forty-year-old Ann Dolliver would have been especially easy to locate as she lodged, with her children, at the home of her father, Salem town’s seventy-six-year-old senior minister, round-faced, beak-nosed John Higginson. (A Gloucester sea captain, Dolliver’s husband had abandoned the family.) Dolliver was not only the daughter but also the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of ministers. The three men who signed the warrant for her arrest were her father’s parishioners, as were her examiners. Her brother was a newly appointed magistrate. Like Abigail Hobbs, Dolliver was a wanderer, at odds with her stepmother. Long crippled by melancholy, she seemed, as one Salem resident put it, “crazed in her understanding.”

  Presumably out of deference to her family—a minister’s daughter, she was Mrs. Dolliver in the eyes of the court—Hathorne interrogated her gently, in private. Had she ever practiced witchcraft? “Not with intent to hurt anybody” came the troubling reply. She may have been simple; she was certainly naive. She had slept in the woods late at night. She had run away from home to avoid her stepmother. After some coaxing from the girls, she revealed some additional oddities. Had she any poppets? Hathorne asked. She had two, of wax. She had made them about fourteen years earlier, when she had believed herself bewitched. She had felt the telltale pinches. (Everyone seemed to know what a witch’s tweak felt like.) She read in a book that she could reverse the spell.

  On the page as in person, her father was flinty and direct, a man of “soft words but hard arguments.” He had forcefully expressed himself in the past, in his attacks on Quakers, on points of doctrine, an epidemic of drinking, the abuses of a royal governor, the obstreperous Salem villagers. He had had no particular use for the diabolical in his sermons, which included none of the sense of siege, the alarmist, assaultive sparks that lit up a Parris or Mather performance. Six years earlier, reconciled to the fact that he would never see the five hundred pounds of back salary the town owed him, Higginson had arranged for Salem to keep the funds but provide for his adult children, an arrangement to which the town had agreed, perhaps less cheerfully than it seemed at the time. He was not the last minister in 1692 to find his daughter accused of witchcraft. Nor does he appear to have objected to the proceedings, even when they reached his doorstep. He had not a thing to say about witchcraft, despite an unassailable position in his community, which he had energetically served for thirty-two years. Having jousted with Andros, having tangled with angry, obstinate Baptists, he went silent in 1692. He labored, he explained later, “under the infirmities of a decrepit old age.” He made no mention of his daughter, imprisoned on June 6.

  Three days later, Chief Justice Stoughton ordered the Salem sheriff to conduct Bridget Bishop on Friday, between eight o’clock and noon, to the appointed place of execution, “and there cause her to be hanged by the neck until she be dead.” He was afterward to attest he had done so. The sheriff, Stoughton added—in an uncommon turn of phrase; there seemed some fear of escape—was to fail only at his peril.

  AT SOME POINT on the morning of June 10 George Corwin—Justice Corwin’s nephew, who was also one witchcraft judge’s son-in-law and another’s nephew—removed Bishop from prison. He arranged for her to travel by open, two-wheeled cart from the prison on what is today St. Peter Street, west along Essex Street, through central Salem, turning sharply north on the Boston road, a route of about fifteen minutes on foot. The idea was to dispense with the convicted witch as publicly as possible; Bishop rode to her death as an enchantress and an example. A full panoply of marshals and constables accompanied the procession as it rattled across a tidal inlet, up the steep path, and to a rocky ledge along a pasture overlooking the town. There a rope hung from a freshly installed gallows. Beyond lay a panoramic view of fields and marshes, inlets, headlands, and sparkling ocean.

  No eyewitness account of the hanging survives, though plenty might have. So many had streamed to a 1659 execution of a Quaker woman that the bridge over which they returned to Boston collapsed under their weight.* The stampede to a lecture before a murderer’s execution in 1686 nearly brought down the First Church gallery. Five thousand turned out for that execution, some traveling from more than fifty miles away; they began to assemble a week in advance. Female malefactors were especially compelling, only more so in Bishop’s case: Who doesn’t care to know what a witch looks like? There had been no such execution since Mary Glover, hanged four years earlier on Boston Common for having bewitched the Goodwin children. Not only was the event so horrible as to be irresistible, but it was intended as moral instruction. It was the kind of thing to which you took the children, the well-schooled of whom learned, among other five-syllable words, “abomination,” “edification,” “humiliation,” “mortification,” “purification.” A carnival atmosphere prevailed.

  Ministers attended eagerly to the condemned, who on the scaffold reliably attested to the beauties of family discipline or the wisdom of the court and admonished the crowd against following in their wicked footsteps. It was not easy to rival those last-ditch expressions of remorse; a condemned pirate’s regret that he had scorned his parents, embraced vice, and entangled himself with foul company made an impression. A witch merited no such treatment, however. She offered no stirring lessons in deterrence, no soul-purifying shame. Meanwhile the onlookers ached with suspense. In her final minutes would she at least confess?

  Under the gallows, an officer of the court read Bishop’s death warrant. Had she anything to say? She insisted on her innocence even as she climbed the ladder. There was to be no tidy satisfaction like that offered by a Connecticut witch who—repenting for her sins—“died in a frame extremely to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it.” (She was the first New Englander to confess to a devil’s pact.) Though not her minister, at her request John Hale seems to have offered a few last words at the foot of the gallows. A Salem shopkeeper scoffed that were he asked to pray at her execution, he would not do so; Hale heard the commen
t as a reproach. No doubt speaking for many, the shopkeeper excoriated Bishop. She had covenanted with the devil. He would happily have testified against her. (His wife had.) We do not know if Parris was present, although it is difficult to believe that any local minister could have absented himself, much less one who had signed four indictments against Bishop. Many of her accusers stood in the crowd, along with at least some of the bewitched girls and much of the village. A few unexpected parties turned up as well. A Salem matron watched the devil help George Jacobs up to a perch on the gallows. Mary Walcott saw Jacobs too; he beat her with his spectral walking sticks. The members of the court were themselves in Boston, at a meeting of the governor’s council.

  We know nothing of Bishop’s last words, of who tied her skirts around her ankles or her hands behind her back, who urged her up the ladder, placed the cloth over her head, or fitted the noose around her neck. Hangmen were not easy to come by. Sheriff Corwin may himself have delivered the push that left her suspended by the neck, thrashing desperately, twitching spasmodically, finally dangling, still and silent, in midair. She died by slow strangulation; the end could have taken as long as an hour. It was not necessarily quiet. It could be preceded by bloodcurdling groans and—in one case—a shocking request: Having hung for some time, a 1646 malefactor asked what her executioners proposed to do next. Someone stepped forward “and turned the knot of the rope backward, and then she soon died.” In New York a year earlier, the condemned was still alive when he was cut down from the gallows. The blow of an ax finished the job. Agonized cries went up from the spectators; at a later hanging, the screeches as the body dropped could be heard a mile away. Afterward it swayed in the air for some time, the crowd dispersing slowly. Bishop’s could be seen across the fields for miles around and from the far side of Salem town. She died before noon; Corwin arranged for the corpse to be buried nearby, a detail he added to his report and later crossed out, presumably as he had exceeded his instructions. It is difficult to imagine who might have claimed the body. Bishop’s husband appears to have absented himself from the scene. From an earlier marriage, she had a twenty-five-year-old daughter, who could only have kept her distance that season.

  Across both Salems, villagers and townsfolk breathed a collective sigh of relief. They had dispatched a nuisance and a notorious sinner. Together they had engaged in a cathartic, calming ritual. They had discharged their fear; there would be no more confounding bedroom intrusions. As would be observed much later, such things were “painful, grotesque, but a scandal was after all a sort of service to the community.” The wise magistrates whose praises Mather sang in his charter-selling sermon—the authorities who were to clear the woods of Indians and the sea of pirates—were on their way to clearing the air of evil; the charter enjoined those men to “kill, slay, destroy, and conquer” anyone who attempted to invade or annoy Massachusetts. Wrongs were righted and reason returned—in one case, quite literally. A decade earlier Bishop had pried a woman from her bed and nearly drowned her. The woman was thereafter insane, “a vexation to herself and all about her.” With Bishop’s arrest, her condition improved. And as Bishop swung from the gallows, the woman miraculously emerged from her decade of madness. The execution worked a spell of its own over Essex County, where—Mather would note—many “marvelously recovered their senses.” Accusations ceased over the next weeks, as did arrests. The girls appeared symptom-free, the jailed witches incapacitated. Both Salems had reason to believe themselves safe.

  One other person might have as well. The day after Bishop’s execution, five hundred Wabanaki and French descended upon Wells, Maine, with shouts, shots, and flaming arrows, “a formidable crew of dragons, coming with open mouth upon them, to swallow them up at a mouthful,” as Mather later described it. Over two days a band of fifteen men managed to hold off the attackers. The Wabanaki all the same made off with a captive. In full view of the settlers, just beyond musket range, they stripped, scalped, and castrated him, slicing open his fingers and toes and inserting burning coals under the skin before leaving him to die. George Burroughs was spared that sight and the horrific, two-day siege of his parishioners, safe as he was in the eternal dark of Boston’s dungeon.

  The remainder of the summer was, Mather noted in his diary at some indeterminate point later in the year, “a very doleful time, unto the whole country.”

  VII

  NOW THEY SAY THERE IS ABOVE SEVEN HUNDRED IN ALL

  Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON

  GOVERNOR PHIPS SPOKE accurately when he hailed the Salem justices as the best and brightest. Well-read, widely traveled, they were men of integrity, familiar with the workings of the court, an inevitable stop on the way to a New England fortune.* Many had handed down unpopular decisions. Several had witnessed trials in London. They lived in the finest brick mansions and gabled homes in their respective towns. The burden of proof rested on the prosecution, but the prosecution enjoyed a few seventeenth-century advantages. An English trial of the time was inquisitorial, an informal, free-form, hectic, rapid-fire contest best described as “a relatively spontaneous bicker between accusers and accused.” Across the board, standards of proof were imprecise. A suspect had no idea of the evidence against her until she stepped into the courtroom, where she could be convicted of a different crime than the one for which she stood indicted. She had the right to defend herself but no guarantee she would be heard. Protests of innocence carried little weight. “I am no thief,” a defendant in a larceny case insisted two generations later. “You must prove that,” replied the judge. A valued legal treatise recommended deposing the defendant’s adversaries, for such people “will pry very narrowly into everything.” As only witnesses for the prosecution testified under oath, their word carried greater weight. Hearsay was perfectly acceptable, which explained how—at Bishop’s trial—Samuel Shattuck could testify about a stranger who divined that Bishop had bewitched a child. That was the guest who insisted a quarrelsome witch lived nearby. Only then did Shattuck recall a tense encounter between his wife and Bishop, who had stalked off, muttering. Soon afterward, Shattuck’s son fell ill. The stranger had acted no differently from the fortune-teller who intuits that you have recently suffered a setback; she is unfailingly correct. Witchcraft merely supplied the culprit, sometimes in advance of her crime, often many years later. There was in 1692 a certain amount of relitigating ancient offenses. It was not a summer when you wanted to appear in your neighbor’s dreams.

  No fewer than five men sat in judgment over Bridget Bishop. We can be certain of the identities of only three. They did not hear the case the same way. All had graduated from Harvard, approximately a decade apart. Each had opted for a more secular career than the one for which he had been educated.* Amiable, heavyset Samuel Sewall was the only one of the three courteous enough to leave a diary. Salem witchcraft was something one talked of endlessly but wrote about very little; Sewall made no entries over the month of June, remaining silent until mid-July. He would write more expansively on Salem later. The kind of father who devoted his morning to a teenager’s spiritual crisis, Sewall worried always that he did “much harm and little good,” an equation he struggled to invert. He shrank from the censure of friends; he was appalled in 1701 when, at the top of his lungs, Cotton Mather excoriated him—Mather could be heard from the street—in a bookstore. (Sewall the next day attempted to placate his irate friend with a fine haunch of venison. He failed.) He wrote even a cordial dunning letter. He compared himself unfavorably to his mother-in-law. Sewall moved at a deliberate pace; with reason, colleagues accused him of temporizing. He did not naturally oppose authority, something that on occasion also discomfited him. He had been displeased with himself for having bowed to pressure when—his dear friend and fellow witchcraft justice Wait Still Winthrop forcing his hand—agreed at the last minute to reprieve a pirate. Never before had he adjudicated a witchcraft case.

  Two days after
Bishop’s hanging, Sewall took his place in the pews of Boston’s Old South Church for Samuel Willard’s afternoon sermon. Several other justices joined him there. The son of one of Massachusetts’s founding families, Wait Still Winthrop, sat nearby, as did Peter Sergeant. What Willard had to say that afternoon both reassured and disturbed. Taking 1 Peter 5:8 as his text, he reminded his congregants that they were to be sober-minded and watchful. The devil ranged among them, eager to pounce. He reserved his greatest malice for the pious. Willard confirmed Mather’s millennial note; the fiend was at his most violent when his time was short. The devil, noted Willard, could represent anyone he pleased; he required no pact. Willard appealed for charity and compassion. Some matters, he held, should be left to divine adjudication.