The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  From the age of forty, Stoughton devoted himself to public office and land speculation, a traditionally lucrative combination, more so at a time when a thousand square miles of Connecticut could be purchased for fifty pounds and a coat. With English partners, usually in association with his closest political ally, Joseph Dudley, briefly president of the colony, Stoughton went on a land-accumulating spree through the 1680s. (As a royal agent groused, it was impossible to contest the Crown’s claim to land titles when Massachusetts justices inevitably turned out to be the owners of those lands.)* While settling Indian land claims in 1681, Stoughton and Dudley carved out two thousand acres—dense with stands of massive white pine—for themselves. Five years later they presided over a (failed) venture to secure one hundred thousand acres along the Merrimack River.

  In the two decades between the time he was appointed to the bench and the time he addressed Rebecca Nurse’s jurors, Stoughton proved that while there might well be no neutrals, there are men who will flourish in any regime. At the outset of King Philip’s War, he sailed to London, among the earliest in a century-long series of colonial agents who were to defend the independent-minded colony against charges of noncompliance and overreaching. He heard firsthand of their impertinence; in English eyes they were, as an official put it, all adolescents—and intemperate, bigoted adolescents at that.† Stoughton made little headway. He listened with humiliation to accounts of colonial misdemeanors and to the earliest discussions of the voiding of the charter. He returned to Boston—by which time Burroughs had been driven from Casco and Salem’s first minister from his pulpit—to a chilly reception. A moderate in English eyes, Stoughton appeared an appeaser at home.

  Over the next years he executed a feat of acrobatic agility. He practically seemed a traitor when in 1684 the Crown revoked the Massachusetts charter. Even Increase Mather declared him an enemy of the people. Stoughton served as deputy president under the temporary Dominion government, against the counsel of Willard and Increase Mather, who opposed that regime. (He would not, however, land in prison for ten months afterward, as did the less pliable Dudley.) He cooperated with Andros when the scarlet-coated governor arrived in December of 1686 to rein in wayward New England.

  Displaying the gift for which he truly deserves his place in history and that must have kept the Nurse family monitoring his every move through July, Stoughton managed three years later to help unseat the royal governor on whose council he sat and whose courts he headed. He was the first to address Andros in the aftermath of the coup, informing his prison-bound superior that “he might thank himself for the present disaster that had befallen him.” A year before the Parris girls began to twitch, Stoughton helped to outline the people’s grievances against the regime they had toppled. The excesses, the intrusions, the humiliations, the abuses of power were such that a level-headed man would skid off topic for a long digression when reminded of Andros even a decade later.

  In “The Revolution in New-England Justified,” the only self-exculpating document in which Stoughton would have a hand, he celebrated colonial liberation from its years of oppression. It now turned out that that “rascally petty tyrant” under whom he had served had paid his council no heed. Andros had allowed Harvard to fall into decay, framed legislation in private (and then ignored it), curtailed town meetings, levied arbitrary taxes, subjected the people to venal fees. Justice had come to a standstill under a corrupt administration that stacked juries, toyed with due process, and solicited bribes. Rumors flew that Andros had bribed the Wabanaki to attack the colonists; that he provided them with gunpowder and bullets; that he had converted them to Catholicism. It was sabotage.* The Indians themselves assured the settlers that Andros conspired with the French and Irish to destroy Boston. And of course in invalidating land titles, Andros disrupted speculative ventures, seizing property from Stoughton’s closest friends, leaving them without legal recourse, and redistributing their lands to cronies.†

  From London’s point of view, the colonists recognized no authority, mismanaged their affairs, and suffered a thousand divisions. The Anglican Church had felt the Puritans’ fury “by having the windows broke to pieces, and the doors and walls daubed and defiled with dung.” New Englanders were hopeless at self-defense; they eagerly sold powder and ammunition to the French and Indians. Had they refrained from doing so, the Wabanaki would long before have sued for peace. It was sabotage. Whoever incited it, the new conflict—to be known as King William’s War—took an immediate toll. Captain Higginson, the Salem town minister’s son, had been a comfortable man in 1689. Since that time, trade having decayed, he knew only losses. Of Salem’s sixty ketches, six remained. No Massachusetts town, he believed, had suffered so acutely.

  Out of favor after the Andros coup, Stoughton had the Mathers to thank for his resurrection. It required a certain amount of artistry. In the course of six convulsive years, Stoughton had served in four different regimes. He resigned, recused himself, sidestepped, and turned coat more than anyone else of his time; in seventeenth-century New England terms, it was as if, through the years of captivity, he had played both Moses and Pharaoh’s adviser. The Nurses could not have had an easy time second-guessing him. The shortage of Massachusetts manpower worked in Stoughton’s favor. By 1692 he had held nearly every exalted position Massachusetts could offer and may already have had his eye on the governorship, for which he was inarguably better qualified than Phips. Even when he ascended to that office he continued as chief justice, a position he would hold to the end of his life. Political offices had a habit of attaching themselves to him in clumps.

  Second generations distinguish themselves for being more orthodox than their fathers, as new regimes tend to be more oppressive; both have something to prove. High-minded and doctrinaire, Stoughton nonetheless understood the value of dexterous accommodation. It may have been impressed upon him early. When he was very young, his father, Israel, published a pamphlet pressing for a more representative Massachusetts government. The result was a bitter attack from Governor Winthrop, Wait Still’s father, who termed Stoughton “a worm” and “an underminer of state.” Israel Stoughton issued a craven apology, in which he pressed the authorities to burn his offensive, wrongheaded book. He found himself barred from political office for three years. Stoughton had no intention of landing in that wilderness. As an English official had noted of him approvingly, Stoughton sided with the Puritan ministers but—a nimble man—could be counted on to attend to the king’s interests. He was also a pious, eminently able public servant; a Mather did not hesitate to indulge in a certain amount of contortionism on his account. As Cotton reminded his father late in 1691: “Mr. Stoughton is a real friend of New-England, and willing to make any amendment for the miscarriages of the late government.” He should be restored to favor.

  If there was a spot on Stoughton’s record, it was not the hastily reconstituted loyalties or the hoard of titles. In 1688, the year that Parris preached his first Salem sermon, Stoughton traveled to Maine to negotiate a prisoner exchange with the Wabanaki. He bungled the assignment, leaving the Wabanaki incensed. Sixteen English settlers died afterward in retaliatory attacks. Here was cause for some legitimate concern about measuring up to earlier generations; as militia captain, Stoughton’s father had massacred an Indian tribe in 1637, returning to Dorchester in triumph. It was from the Maine fiasco that the Mathers and the revised charter saved Stoughton in 1692.

  Known as someone who “never yields a point without a protest,” Stoughton was short-tempered. He could be contemptuous. He had been setting high moral standards since 1668, when he first reminded his compatriots that—as the elect—they could count on Satan nipping at their heels. He did not believe God would allow the righteous to work evil against their will; he recognized no grounds on which the spectrally represented could fail to be guilty. If the girls saw Rebecca Nurse choke Ann Putnam Jr., then Rebecca Nurse must be a witch. He had judged such cases before; he sat on the court that sent Glover to her death for ha
ving enchanted the Goodwin children. He had warned earlier of invisible enemies; by July 1692 they seemed to be everywhere. Sixty miles from Salem, a Lancaster man returned home to find his wife and three children lying in a pool of blood, tomahawked to death. Nocturnal invasions began to plague nearby Gloucester in midsummer, when, over a series of moonless nights, scuffling could be heard near the town garrison. A dozen men soon materialized, alternately dressed as Frenchmen and as Indians. At times they spoke English, at others a foreign tongue. Impervious to gunshot, they jammed firearms and dissolved into bushes. They left no tracks. After two terrifying weeks, Gloucester called for reinforcements; a unit of sixty militiamen fared no better. Bullets turned up in trees, just as, in court, crochet needles materialized in aprons. Salem shuddered at that assault, which did nothing to divert the Nurse clan from its tireless campaign. They looked anxiously to Boston for their reprieve.

  Impressive even to his enemies, Stoughton was—with his fiery temper, starched presence, and fluid command of ideas—intimidating to his peers. To someone like Francis Nurse, his was a towering presence. Unfailingly conscientious, Samuel Sewall was often at Stoughton’s side; Sewall may have had the best attendance record of all the justices. If only because they lived a short walk from the Salem town house, Hathorne and Corwin seem to have been consistently in the room. Fifty-two-year-old Bartholomew Gedney, the wealthy Salem landowner with Maine interests, had also urged accommodation with England. He too had served under Andros before joining to oust him. A physician, Gedney had a taste for the finer things. He may have been the best dressed of the justices; he owned one of the few velvet saddles in Salem town. All three Salem men made their leanings clear in the preliminary hearings. Much-respected John Richards had applied to Cotton Mather and received his answer. Wait Still Winthrop too remained an Andros councillor until the day of the revolt. Public office did not overly tax his attention, which tended more toward real estate, litigation, and fashion.* He was neither an energetic nor an original thinker; he tended to wilt before imposing men. Justice Peter Sergeant, a fabulously rich Boston merchant, remains something of a cipher, possibly because he kept his distance from Stoughton’s courtroom.

  As were several of his colleagues, Stoughton was in Cambridge on July 6, 1692, for the festivities surrounding Harvard’s commencement, a raucous civic holiday complete with peddlers despite the Latin, Greek, and Hebrew orations. The celebration could include salmon and capers, oranges and pineapples; so much did it incline to excess that graduates had been restricted to three gallons of wine. As university president, Increase Mather that morning bestowed bachelor’s degrees on six young men. At least one celebrated in his father’s absence: among the graduates was a son of John Alden, the indefatigable trader, then jailed on witchcraft charges. (The new graduate’s brother too missed the revelry. He remained in Indian captivity, from which his father had not managed to rescue him.) In Salem village, the Nurse family engaged in its own celebration, without dignitaries or delicacies: days after her excommunication, Governor Phips overruled Stoughton, to reprieve Rebecca Nurse.

  Phips did so as he prepared a new Maine expedition, ordering provisions and returning several hundred militiamen to active duty. He arranged to leave Stoughton in charge in his absence. The deputy governor had no doubt expected from the start to take over for the blustering, semiliterate governor under whom he served. There was no particular affection between the two men, who had nearly come to blows in the past and would again. (Stoughton reported in 1692 to a man he had been discreetly asked to lock up in case of treachery years earlier. There had been some concern that Phips might defraud the Crown, something Stoughton agreed seemed likely.) In pardoning Nurse, Phips expressed doubt if not about witchcraft then about the courts’ ability to identify it. He was not entirely alone. In mid-July a prominent Dutch merchant wrote Increase Mather directly with his qualms. Surely God was again punishing New England. But satanic pacts struck the merchant as implausible, as did the idea that witches could torment victims at a distance or topple a church. Meanwhile the bewitched acted “as if they were deprived of their sanity and unable to come to their senses.” If not downright lunatic, were they perhaps possessed? Might Mather supply some text to refute their “superstitions and mistakes”?

  The Nurse reprieve eased the breathing in a fair number of village households. In others it provoked a clamor. So great were the “dismal outcries” on the part of her accusers that a Salem justice—Hathorne or Gedney—persuaded Phips to reconsider his pardon. Nurse women did not remain easily behind bars. To some that proved that they lobbied most effectively; to others it confirmed their iniquity. No other family caused such distress, a point Mercy Lewis had nearly died making on Mary Esty’s brief release in May. The Nurse family was to know another reversal: shortly after its issue, Rebecca’s pardon was revoked. The timing is unclear. The Salem justice may have presented Phips with a convincing case. As acting governor, Stoughton may have seized the opportunity to reinstate his court’s verdict. On July 17 he drafted a death warrant: Sarah Good, Elizabeth How, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wilds having been found guilty of “the horrible crime of witchcraft,” the Salem sheriff was to arrange for their execution. Stoughton this time gave him a week to prepare, ordering that the five women hang the following Tuesday morning.

  There were some ironies, beginning with the fact that Stoughton—a dispassionate man who viewed New Englanders as the intemperate children of a beneficent father—was a lifelong bachelor. Few men in the colony had as little firsthand familiarity with teenage girls or, for that matter, with women.* While in the years since he had so forcefully preached that it was time to “declare for whom we are, and choose our side,” he had proved an opportunistic shape-shifter, nearly invertebrate in his loyalties, Stoughton was in 1692 obdurate and uncompromising. In unseating Andros he had deplored the judicial practices of that administration. It acted high-handedly, plumped up charges, ignored respectful petitions, and leveled “inexorable persecutions.” It detained suspects for long periods without cause. It decided verdicts in advance. It held hearings that—charged the chief justice who redirected the Nurse jury and sentenced her to death—were “unreasonably strict, and rigorous and very unduly ensnaring to plain unexperienced men.”

  EARLY ON THE stifling morning of July 19, the Salem sheriff and his deputies loaded five women in a wooden cart. They rode slowly west, along Essex Street, under armed guard. To the modern eye, the cart trundling through central Salem—past the meetinghouse, past Hathorne’s home, past Stephen Sewall’s and Corwin’s homes, past gaping, hooting crowds of spectators—carried five shabbily dressed women, colorless and middle-aged if not older, their hands identically bound. They in fact made for a disparate group. At thirty-nine (she had celebrated a birthday in jail), the rancorous Sarah Good was the youngest. Her five-year-old daughter remained that morning shackled in Boston, where Good had lost the infant she nursed at the time of her arrest. At seventy-one, Rebecca Nurse and the vitriolic Amesbury widow Susannah Martin were the eldest. The five had spent the most wretched weeks of their lives in close confinement but had not all been acquainted previously. None was a member of Parris’s congregation. One was impoverished, one well-off. Good and Martin were downwardly mobile, having sued over elusive inheritances. Martin was the sole widow. Sarah Good’s husband had quickly agreed his wife was a witch; Francis Nurse devoted whole days to proving that his was not. Prosecuted for a very different set of miscellaneous crimes, they had little in common apart from their gender and their untidy appearance. Save for Rebecca Nurse, all had been in court before, which left them vulnerable. Galileo too had answered to charges of having missed Mass before his telescope troubles began.

  “The widow Glover is drawn by to be hanged,” Samuel Sewall had noted in his diary on November 16, 1688; five witches riding to their execution was not something one missed or was meant to miss. All awaited the clatter of hooves and cart wheels. All witnessed the same sight. Many made sens
e of it differently. When they looked at one another, the five women saw a band of innocents, some more conspicuously guiltless than others. Martin had questioned whether anyone other than the afflicted girls practiced witchcraft. For weeks the women had been stretched on that most pernicious of psychological racks: You are not what you think you are, they were hectored; you are what we think you are. What did those in the Salem street see as the cart creaked to the edge of town, to turn north over the town bridge? Some saw five benign, wretched, and disheveled older women. Many watched resolutions to nagging mysteries trundle by, disturbers of the peace, thorns in the side. A great majority saw five powerful witches. Plump with righteousness, they knew this to be what justice looked like. They found what they were looking for: an end to affliction, uncertainty, impurity. As Martha Corey herself had said of the first suspects, it was no wonder the devil recruited them. They were idle, slothful, malicious souls. Plenty of Rebecca Nurse’s defenders believed her cart mates guilty. Some no doubt shrank with fear as the dusty procession passed. Others vowed to redouble their devotions. If Rebecca Nurse could wind up in the devil’s snare, who was safe?