The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Mather elected not to write of another case tried that Wednesday or of a suspect to whom the adjectives “impudent, scurrilous, and wicked” had never been applied. No one had accused Rebecca Nurse of witchcraft before 1692. She had never so much as appeared in court. Nor since the arrival of the marshal on her doorstep, weeks earlier, had anyone launched as concerted a defense as the large and influential Nurse clan. Theirs was a family in which brothers-in-law rode to the rescue rather than prodding the accused to confess to witchcraft. Francis Nurse had energetically canvassed the village, riding door to door with a petition asserting that his wife was, as she had claimed in March—five girls and two grown women flailing about her—as innocent “as the child unborn.” Thirty-nine villagers signed Nurse’s petition, although it did nothing to free his wife from jail or exempt her from two brutal physical examinations. Samuel Sibley, husband of the witch-cake baker, signed, as did seven Putnams (including one of Nurse’s original accusers), the father of an afflicted eleven-year-old, and three of the four church members who had called on Nurse to tell her of her plight, a group that included Justice Hathorne’s sister. (Parris remained staunchly on the other side, his niece among the four signatories to the indictments.) No case so sharply divided the community.*

  Francis Nurse launched a more targeted offensive as well. On June 29 the jury heard evidence not only against his wife but also her accusers. A villager swore that Dr. Griggs’s maid had lied about having attended meeting the previous month. Having sat at Rebecca’s bedside over the previous weeks, a neighbor pointed out several inconsistencies in Susannah Shelden’s story. The witches had hauled Susannah through the grass and over stone walls on her belly, like a snake. No; she had surmounted the wall herself. She had flown on a pole to Boston. No; the devil had carried her through the air. A Beverly couple who had employed the Putnams’ maid several years earlier observed that the nineteen-year-old enjoyed an arm’s-length relationship with the truth. Francis Nurse had no trouble discrediting spiteful Sarah Bibber; for all the love of her neighbors, she sounds like someone who, had she not joined the girls, would have been accused of witchcraft herself. She had a testy relationship with her husband. She wished her child ill. She spoke obscenely; she had long taken to falling into fits when crossed. Three different villagers denounced her as an “unruly, turbulent spirit.” The resolute Nurses corroborated what witchcraft allegations tended to prove: No one was misdemeanor-free.

  The case against Rebecca Nurse was thin on the occult; her husband did his best to tug the supernatural rug wholly out from under it. The parents of an alleged victim testified that their child’s death was due purely to “a malignant fever.” They entertained no witchcraft suspicions. Nathaniel Putnam, who had waged an interminable battle against the Nurses over their neighboring lands, testified in Rebecca’s defense, although his nephew had pressed the initial charges. Putnam had known the pious great-grandmother for years. She had raised and educated a good and godly family. While she had differed with neighbors, he had never heard a whisper regarding sorcery. The defendant did what she could to return common sense to the scene. Before the court reconvened, she submitted a request. She had endured two invasive physical examinations. The experienced woman on that panel—“the most ancient, skillful prudent person of them all”—had disagreed with the rest. Might the authorities dispatch a professional? Nurse suggested a few names. Two of her daughters confirmed that their mother had been troubled for years by complications from childbirth, though “the jury of women seem to be afraid it should be something else.”

  In the jittery courtroom the girls impressed their infirmities on the jury. Already pins punctured their lips, in one case binding them together; Ann Putnam plucked another from her hand at the How hearing. During Rebecca Nurse’s trial, Sarah Bibber clasped her hands to her knees and howled in pain: the witch had pricked her! Unfortunately Nurse’s daughter had kept an eye on Bibber; she saw her pull pins from her clothing and jab herself. At one point court officers escorted Abigail and Deliverance Hobbs into the room. Nurse knew the Topsfield mother and daughter from prison. What were they doing there? she asked, startled. The question would return to haunt her. And it did nothing to derail the account of the occult Sabbath at which Nurse had officiated, seated, asserted Parris’s niece, in the place of honor, at the devil’s side.

  Some discreet backpedaling took place. Ann Putnam Sr. figured among Nurse’s original accusers. She had disputed Scripture with the spectral Nurse in Deodat Lawson’s presence. Ann’s husband had carried her out of Nurse’s March hearing, at which Ann had gone stiff as a plank. She was nowhere near the Salem courtroom that Wednesday. Nurse’s case involved no flying apples and, at best, one malediction: she had railed against a wandering pig. The family had stature in the community; there was a solid sliver of hope. After a short deliberation—the suspect presumably remained in the courtroom, dimly aware of the clamor and clatter around her—the jury returned to their seats. Stoughton called for their verdict. It sent a ripple of astonishment through the room. Standing, the foreman declared the defendant not guilty. Any cries of relief on the part of the Nurse clan were drowned out by the accusers, who erupted in hideous roars. An echo rose to meet them from outside. Not everyone had expected the Nurses to prevail, least of all the judges, who made their irritation known. One openly declared himself disappointed. Another swore to re-indict Nurse, as he well could.

  Stoughton turned to the jurors. He had no intention of imposing his opinions on them. But had they duly considered Nurse’s reaction to Deliverance Hobbs? At the sight of her, the prisoner had let slip something along the lines of “She is one of us,” always loaded words. Hobbs was by her own admission a witch. With that remark, had Nurse not acknowledged, Stoughton wondered, that she was one too? Perhaps that was a confession they had heard? (Judges did not hesitate to question jury decisions, although they more often challenged, and commuted, convictions. It was exceedingly rare for one to question an acquittal.) Distressed by the pandemonium they had created, the jurors asked to re-deliberate. It is impossible to know how the strain felt to the Nurse family, much less to the stunned, half-deaf defendant, an invalid well before her nine weeks in prison.

  Behind closed doors the jury did its best to parse Rebecca Nurse’s outburst. Had she meant that she and Hobbs were fellow prisoners or fellow witches? The twelve men could not agree; the court awaited not only a decision but a unanimous one. The foreman remained mystified. “I could not tell how to take her words,” he afterward explained. By themselves, they did not appear to incriminate. The jurors reassumed their seats for some clarification. Nurse stood at the bar. The foreman repeated the baffling line to her. As recorded, she had asked: “What? Do these persons give in evidence against me now? They used to come among us.” What exactly, he asked, had Nurse meant? She stood silently, in an unresponsive daze. The jury waited for but received no elucidation, “whereupon,” the sixty-year-old foreman revealed days later, “these words were to me a principal evidence against her.” For a third time the jury deliberated. They handed Stoughton a guilty verdict.

  Francis Nurse pressed them: What could account for their reversal after twelve men had agreed they had insufficient evidence to convict? And Rebecca Nurse explained herself soon enough, having conferred with someone familiar with the law. She submitted a paper to the court; she had intended nothing by her remark other than that the Hobbs women were her fellow prisoners. She had been taken aback. How could accused criminals provide legal evidence against another? (They could, as accomplices.) She may have meant only that the two women—with whom she had shared every minute of a shameful, terrifying incarceration—were her friends. It had not occurred to her that her remark could be interpreted differently. As for her silence, she was, she reminded the magistrates, “hard of hearing, and full of grief.” Not having grasped that they had misconstrued her words, she had had no opportunity to set the matter straight. Even at her March examination she had had difficulty understanding p
recisely what was asked, hardly the first defendant to report as much. (Of course she had not heard the magistrates, sneered her accusers. The devil whispered at her ear!) She remained deaf not only to the proceedings but to any nuance in her statement. From the jury’s point of view, she had baldly incriminated herself.

  Francis Nurse lost no time in requesting the court transcripts. Sewall provided what he could. Some testimony was oral, as Hobbs’s must have been; Sewall had nothing on paper. His wife’s statement and the villagers’ signatures in hand, Nurse prepared a fresh appeal, petitioning Governor Phips for a reprieve. Meanwhile Reverend Noyes arranged for Rebecca to make another public appearance. The following Sunday, he brought her to the meetinghouse in which she had prayed for decades. It was a communion day; the portly, stiff-necked minister had a full house. Should a convicted witch remain a member of the congregation? Phrased as such, the answer was entirely obvious. It was the church’s godly duty to purify their ranks; Nurse defiled them all with her crimes. After the sacrament, with a unanimous show of hands, the Salem congregation voted to issue a formal sentence of excommunication, something of a rarity by 1692. It carried no legal ramifications; a parishioner was excommunicated for trampling the laws of God, not man. Under normal circumstances the penalty was temporary. A sinner could repent, be absolved of his sin, and rejoin the parish. A witch could not.

  On the afternoon of July 3 the Salem elders assumed their seats before the congregation, the deacons in the first rows. Nurse stood in the center aisle, chained. Her minister pronounced her an unclean person, an admonition that could be lengthy and that detailed her offenses all over again. He then delivered some version of the vituperative sentence handed to Ann Hibbins and Anne Hutchinson a half century earlier: “I do here and in the name of Christ Jesus and His Church deliver you up to Satan and to his power and working.” The sentence was a dreadful one; the shame for a woman whose life had revolved around her faith, whose neighbors now reviled her as a witch, whose two sisters lay in chains in Boston, would have been excruciating, the more so as Noyes did vituperation well. He barred Nurse from the congregation, a formality given her current prison address though an insult to her crusading husband, who had demonstrated that many in no way shunned his wife. The fragile seventy-one-year-old who had assured her March callers that she felt closer to the Almighty in her sickness than she did in good health was henceforth to withdraw herself, like a leper, from the parish. She would never again be allowed to take communion. Noyes consigned her soul to everlasting hell.

  THE COURT OF Oyer and Terminer proceeded with all five late-June suspects as they had with Bridget Bishop three weeks earlier. In the intervening weeks, the justices had hanged a witch and solicited counsel; the ministers submitted their recommendations. Where they warned against “noise, company, and openness,” the Salem town house reverberated with cries. The clergy denounced the touch test and the evil eye. They expressed doubt about spectral evidence, a matter that continued to preoccupy them; late in June, as the court reconvened, the Massachusetts ministers settled on that question for their late-summer meeting. Might the devil disguise himself as an innocent in order to work his diabolical art? If he could, those who afflicted did so involuntarily. The judges meanwhile had moved on. Ultimately the clergymen’s counsel carried as much weight as the remark of a young citizen who preferred the evidence before his eyes to the wisdom of the crowd. The emperor, cried the little boy, wore no clothes! Indeed he did not. But he stiffened his spine as his procession continued, a page holding high the imaginary, multicolored mantle.

  A Puritan minister appeared black in dress from head to toe; plenty of somber suits graced the Salem courtroom. Deodat Lawson returned for some portion of the June trials. A Watertown minister—he happened to be Jonathan Corwin’s stepson—made the trip to Salem to observe the extraordinary events. He left utterly flummoxed. The only lessons he could extract were to tread gently and demonstrate great care for those around him. Parris was in the courtroom daily. He and John Hale testified against both Topsfield witches, Sarah Wilds and Elizabeth How. Noyes was unlikely to have missed a session; for weeks he had interrogated witnesses, gathered evidence, and challenged testimony. Along with pin-wielding Sarah Bibber, the girls held the room rapt; they continued to be “struck dumb, deaf, blind, and sometimes lay as if they were dead for a while,” noted an observer. The eyeballs rolling back in the heads, the flailing limbs made all acts of malfeasance seem plausible. By June the bewitched were themselves instruments in more expert hands, however; the narrative had swallowed them up. They could be sidelined or corrected. The bench openly reprimanded one girl for lying. Another accused Samuel Willard, minister to three of the justices, a signatory to Mather’s June 15 letter, and among the most respected men in Boston. Over the searingly hot, uncommonly dry summer, Willard preached a cycle of sermons on the devil. He expertly elicited false confessions and conjured false reports; his quarry might be oblivious to—and therefore innocent of—the abuse. Willard’s point was unmistakable. His reward was to be accused of witchcraft. The bench dismissed his accuser from court, letting it be known that the girl “was mistaken in the person.”

  As was clear from Rebecca Nurse’s short-lived acquittal, jurors arrived freely at their decision. The afflicted indeed shrieked in response. But it was the bench that officially frowned on the verdict. And it was the chief justice who stepped in to ask if those twelve upstanding men might have overlooked a clue. He drew their attention to crucial bits of evidence. He may well have interpreted Nurse’s silence for them; it was in his power to elicit a response from the bewildered defendant, whom he did not pursue. His disapproval weighed heavily on the jurors, much in the thrall of “the honored court” to which they submitted their decision. There was no question to whom the Salem courtroom belonged.

  Sixty-year-old William Stoughton assumed the ego-trampling, alibi-crushing role of John Hathorne, a decade his junior. To the job Stoughton brought more judicial experience than anyone in the province. As deputy governor, he was second only to Phips in the new administration. Pale and long-faced, with a high forehead, deep-set eyes, and a collection of chins, he was among the court’s eldest members. A fine orator, persuasive and widely admired, he summed up evidence for the jurors at trial’s end and issued their instructions. We have no sense of Stoughton’s voice, though we know it impressed his peers. Presumably he spoke with the harsh, high-pitched scrape of New England. Whether one desired a speedy and vigorous prosecution, to resolve a dispute over the location of a meetinghouse, to effect a prisoner exchange with the Wabanaki, or to discipline an obstreperous political official, Stoughton was the man to call. With a crisp command of both old and New England code, he had for years been the go-to person for legal advice.* He was specifically requested when tempers flared. English officials repeatedly bemoaned the dearth of qualified civil servants in Massachusetts; they cited Stoughton as a rare exception. He knew how to proceed with exquisite caution, dampening explosions, tacking gracefully among egos and administrations. He would smooth the waters when, in council, William Phips informed the New Hampshire lieutenant governor he was “an impudent, saucy, pitiful jakanapes.”

  A lifelong bachelor, Stoughton was the second son of an early Massachusetts magistrate, a leading colonial light and early Harvard benefactor, a founder of Dorchester, a pleasant town of about two hundred homes, scenically spread along two lazy rivers, lush with orchards and gardens. Socially, Stoughton ranked highest in his Harvard class. He completed a master’s degree at Oxford. He afterward preached part-time in Dorchester but resisted regular calls to accept its pulpit. Well-connected, beautifully educated, he was a choice candidate. Six attractive ministerial offers came his way; he declined each, opting instead for a political career. He enjoyed a meteoric rise. He settled into a Dorchester mansion surrounded by extensive pastures, meadows, orchards, cornfields, and a salt marsh.

  At thirty-six, the first of his generation to do so, Stoughton preached the influential 1668 e
lection sermon in Boston, essentially a state of the union address, distributed afterward to town leaders. In a cool-headed discourse, Stoughton ably burnished New England’s founding myth. It reverberated; his words were still being cited twenty-four years later. American exceptionalism was not born with him, but—forty-eight years after the landing of the Mayflower—Stoughton articulated it as well as anyone. They were God’s firstborns, his favorites, his most privileged; “What could have been done more for us than hath been done?” Stoughton dilated on divine expectation and paternal example, a cramped combination for a generation that preferred to luxuriate in their unworthiness. The colonists represented, Stoughton reminded his compatriots, the choice grain. A torrent of celestial blessings and expectations, mercies, advantages, privileges, liberties rained down upon them. Did they intend to flower or to molder in the wilderness? In light of the occasion, Stoughton cast a lordly vote for hierarchy. His compatriots submitted wisely to their “civic and spiritual guides.” Also by necessity—it was the second-generation theme song—he despaired of a people who had grown less vigilant, “sermon-proof and ordinance proof.” He injected the obligatory millennial note; the Lord would soon “finish his great works in the world.” He nodded vaguely to adversaries in the murky middle distance. The Antichrist and his brood were on the march, for what promised to be a close battle. A generation before Parris had, Stoughton stressed “that this is the time wherein he that is not with Christ is against him.” There were to be no neutral parties.