The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  Among themselves the clergy wrangled still with the question that so perplexed the Salem magistrates that they were reduced to soliciting advice from an eighteen-year-old girl. Might the devil impersonate someone without his knowledge or cooperation? They had settled on that question for discussion at the end of June; it acquired a greater urgency by the time they climbed to Harvard’s airy, second-floor library on the morning of August 1. Their participation in the Alden fast would seem to suggest that some indeed believed an innocent could be abused. Eight ministers attended the August meeting, including three to whom Procter had appealed. Increase Mather moderated in a room strongly redolent of tobacco. All agreed: the August answer to the question of whether you might be a witch and not know it was yes. (In June the Salem justices had said no.) At the same time, the ministers wriggled a little. While such a thing was possible, it was “rare and extraordinary.” The heist of an innocent was unusual, “especially when such matters come before civil judicature.” In other words, the blameless infrequently wound up in court. That statement validated the justices and their proceedings. It also provided a loophole through which the ministers could, if necessary, drag someone they might need to exonerate.

  At least a few of those men exerted themselves to see that some cases never landed in court. If only tacitly, they agreed with John Procter: while there were witches in Massachusetts, there were no reprieves in Stoughton’s courtroom. (More cynically, there were witches in Massachusetts, but not among their friends.) Two days after the Salem justices ordered a new set of Andover arrests, Captain Cary’s wife somehow managed to slip her eight-pound Cambridge chains. It is noteworthy that we have the report from Sewall, who expresses neither outrage at her escape nor fear that a murderous witch, whom his court was meant to prosecute, might be on the loose in the Boston area. Already a few Salem men had vanished into thin air. (John Alden would disappear in mid-September, to be hidden in Duxbury.) Before the court reconvened for its next session, Joshua Moody, among the ministers to whom Procter appealed, assisted in another escape.

  Although repeated warrants had gone out for his arrest, forty-one-year-old Philip English could not be found through the month of May. A hulking, heavyset man, Salem’s most prominent shipowner spent at least some of that time crouching behind bags of dirty laundry at a Boston home, where officials failed to locate him.* Born Philippe l’Anglois on the Channel island of Jersey, English had flourished in Salem, where by 1692 he had acquired fourteen buildings, a warehouse, a wharf, and a fleet. A devout, especially well-educated thirty-nine-year-old, his wife, Mary, descended from one of the town’s first families. She was arrested on April 21, the day Thomas Putnam dispatched his portentous letter. Until that time the couple occupied an ornate, many-gabled home, among the finest in Salem town. They employed a large staff, unsurprising as the entrepreneurial Philip English imported Jerseyan servants to Massachusetts. He traded extensively with French, Spanish, and West Indian ports; his twenty-one ships plied the coast from Nova Scotia to Virginia. English was a leader of the community, if one who interpreted his constabulary duties as he saw fit, a matter the hard-driving businessman had found himself explaining to the court years earlier. Until July he had occupied the town pew next to Stephen Sewall’s. He did business with Justice Sewall. He was as well the landlord of a relative of Ezekiel Cheever, the sometime court reporter.

  A glint in the eye, English was not above offering up a corner of one neighbor’s land to another, only to explode when afterward accused of fraud. He proved among the more inexhaustible of New England litigants, suing aggressively and rapaciously. By one count he had appeared in court as a plaintiff at least seventeen times over the previous two decades; by any count he displayed a fierce faith in Massachusetts justice. A conspicuously successful immigrant with an unapologetically independent spirit, English spoke with an accent, hailed from an Anglican island that belonged to a Catholic country, and contributed to the support of a Huguenot refugee community on whom the Dominion government smiled where the local populace did not. He preferred the Andros regime to Phips’s, in part because he admired competence. He had made the familiar ascent from juryman to constable to selectman, a post to which the town had elected him in March. English might have been accused of many things, but—aside from his seemingly magical money-minting ability—he could hardly have imagined witchcraft to figure among them.

  Thomas Putnam filed the original complaint against Philip English on behalf of four Salem village girls, but Susannah Shelden, the eighteen-year-old orphan, nearly single-handedly carried on the campaign against the couple. English lunged over the pews to pinch her in meeting. He bit her; he threatened to slit her throat. He consorted with a figure in a high-crowned hat. He had drowned a man at sea. It was English who intended to kill their governor. Shelden saw Mary English with a yellow bird at her breast. She had been a witch for twenty years. By June, six weeks after the initial warrant, English joined his wife in custody. His name came up regularly in court over those weeks. While in the nonspectral world he did business with several justices, in the spectral world he routinely consorted with Burroughs and Procter.

  English too may have been—or was expected to be—on the docket for August 2. In any event as the details of the diabolical Sabbath emerged, the Salem merchant and his wife consulted with Reverend Moody. A senior clergyman, Moody was an especially warm, witty man. He had experience with the frontier—where he had served as both a minister and a Phips army chaplain—and the supernatural. He had supplied tales for Increase Mather’s volume. He too had been hunted by the authorities for an ungodly infraction. Under the Dominion government eight years earlier, he had refused to offer communion in New Hampshire according to Church of England rites. Friends attempted to persuade him “providentially to be out of the province.” He had ignored them, to wind up with a six-month prison sentence for contempt of His Majesty’s laws. (He remained in custody for thirteen weeks, longer than English had now been.) Late in July Moody preached from Matthew 10:23, a text that includes the line, “If they persecute you in one city, flee to another.” His message was transparent, though subjected to some debate by the prisoners, who reviewed it with Moody and Samuel Willard. Had they absorbed his message? asked Moody, probably on July 31. English wondered if he might elaborate. The minister insisted he escape. English hesitated. He had known life on the lam. He had his principles. His business affairs were already in a state of disarray. “God will not permit them to touch me,” he is purported to have said. His wife demurred. Did he believe, she asked, that the six who had hanged were witches? Her husband did not. What was to prevent their deaths too? “Take Mr. Moody’s advice,” she pleaded. More commonly a stickler for discipline, Moody evidently insisted that if English did not carry his wife to safety, he would do so himself. Already he had arranged for several Bostonians to convey the couple out of Massachusetts. The suspects fled.

  Days after they had done so, the grand jury heard testimony that English had murdered a neighbor’s son with witchcraft. (The neighbor could also report that, while riding home after having informed a friend of English’s designs on his land, he had suffered a nosebleed so severe that it soaked his handkerchief and sullied his horse’s mane.) A sixteen-year-old Salem servant swore that the couple had threatened to tear him to pieces. By the time he testified, the fugitives were miles from Salem, en route to New York, where Governor Benjamin Fletcher was said to have offered them asylum. That was entirely possible, although Fletcher did not arrive until August 30. New York would play a crucial role in the crisis but not yet. The two colonies were in close touch if on an uncordial footing, their agendas very much at odds. Fletcher would observe that the North American colonies were “as much divided in interest and affection as Christian and Turk.” They had little inclination to extend any favors to the new Massachusetts administration.*

  PHILIP AND MARY ENGLISH submitted the same questions to the Boston clergy that John Procter had so eloquently posed a week earlier.
They got different answers. They escaped because they had the ear of moderate, influential ministers, men who could privately circumvent a system they publicly supported. But Alden, Cary, and the Englishes escaped as well for the same reason that so many stumbled and stammered and went blank before the Salem magistrates. Even in 1692, the rich were different. From the beginning New England’s founders had harped on hierarchy. Still aboard ship, John Winthrop had in 1630 declared that the Lord had seen to it in his wisdom that “in all times some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in submission.” While all served under the Lord, Stoughton had reminded his 1668 audience, “some are stewards in higher, some in inferior ranks and capacities.” As some enjoyed greater abilities, so some stood to prosper more fully. We were not born equal, and we would not die so. Why, then, pretend to be in the course of our lives?*

  There was an elite even among servants. (Tituba figured amid the lowest of the low.) Providence occupied various tiers, with cherubim and seraphim, archangels and angels. All devils were not created equal; there were trifling and dominant ones, mighty fiends and base goblins, some better qualified and more accomplished than others. “There is a monarchy among them,” noted Cotton Mather, apishly copying the visible world. As Philip English, or Massachusetts’s self-made governor, or even John Richards, the witchcraft judge who had arrived in Massachusetts as an immigrant servant, demonstrated, financial ranks could be fluid. Largely static and self-perpetuating, caste was less so. And as uncertain as you might be of your place in the universe, you rarely lost sight of your standing in society. The social register of meetinghouse seating—inviting feuds and grudges, invasions of laps and elbows in the ribs—was but one manifestation of that hierarchy. So serious was that business that Woburn required a committee to seat its seating committee. A Newbury woman would proceed, in a manner “altogether unbecoming her sex, to climb, ride, or stride over” a five-foot pew, disturbing the congregation, to make her point, in a seat by the wall. Those who assumed places not their own paid heavy fines.† There was every reason why a middle-aged Andover farmer with a large family should hunger for an equal society as there was every reason to associate one with the devil. “Whoever is for a parity in any society, will in the issue reduce things into an heap of confusion,” warned an early Ipswich minister. Parris was acutely sensitive to class for a reason: in Barbados he hailed from a distinct elite. The island concentrated power and property in a very few hands. In the same way, his daughter—and her afflictions—attracted an attention no other village girl could have commanded.

  Status was on abundant display at all times: at home, in the seating arrangement around the table, on the street. The village girls knew well who enjoyed social distinction and who did not, as they knew who was worth what. Pride in apparel was a privilege reserved for the rich; the devil promised silks and fine clothes as much for what they advertised as for how they looked. Only a gentleman could sport a gold-laced coat. Exceeding one’s rank in apparel was an offense for which men answered in court as often as women.* Infractions occurred with regularity. Any number of women defended themselves against the charge of illegally donning silk hoods, a privilege afforded to those whose husbands’ estates were worth above two hundred pounds, a category that did not include the wives of John Procter, Samuel Parris, or Thomas Putnam. (It did include the mother of Nicholas Noyes, who successfully challenged an accusation that she dressed above her station. The number who fended off such charges spoke less to sumptuous Puritan dress than to lavish New England envy.) Social rank determined the order of Harvard graduates. Cotton Mather took second place to a cousin, the then governor’s grandson. Stoughton led his class. Higginson’s eldest son was first among the 1670 graduates, Burroughs last. The alphabet did not suggest itself as an alternative means of ranking students until 1769.

  Justice was even-handed but punishments contingent on social rank. Unless his crime was particularly egregious, a gentleman was not whipped; a master and his servant accomplice received different sentences. When convicted in 1684, Reverend Moody requested he be spared the common jail, “it being so cold and nasty a place, that it would be cruelty to send me thither, considering my education and manner of living.” He served his sentence in a private home. Sumptuary laws existed to keep people in their place. A witchcraft trial did too, while jostling the social order. Indian servants did not normally tussle on the ground with ship captains’ wives any more than adolescent girls normally tutored learned men on jurisprudence. At the same time, no one who escaped in 1692 was without a fortune or a close relationship with a minister willing to collude on his behalf, essentially the same thing. Witchcraft too proved hierarchical and patriarchal. Witches drew their powers from a figure who was above a wizard. He was, as Ann Putnam Jr. early on revealed, a conjurer. He also happened to be a man who never, in all his many mutations, changed gender.

  Ann Foster could fly across Essex County at high speed, but—the widow of an Andover farmer, even a prosperous one—she could not escape. One Rowley man broke his sister-in-law out of the Ipswich prison. She did not get very far; he paid a fine. When a warrant went out for sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Colson, accused by the village girls in May, she was nowhere to be found. Word had it that, poised to flee Massachusetts, she hid in Boston or Cambridge. Early in September the constable and his men tracked her to the home of her Reading grandmother. (Her mother, grandmother, and aunt had been rounded up in the meantime.) When they came for Elizabeth on a Sabbath morning, the men found the house locked tight. The deputy constable called to a colleague for assistance; suddenly they heard the back door fly open. Out sprinted the teenager. Sticks in hand, the constables gave chase, bounding across a neighbor’s field. Nearly upon Elizabeth, one breathlessly called out: Why did she bother to run when he would surely catch her? He got no reply. The sixteen-year-old continued as fast as her legs would carry her and her skirts would allow, stumbling in the field, picking herself up again, shaking her hand behind her as if striking at her pursuers. Outrun, the two men sent their dog ahead. He leaped around the teenager but did not attack. The chase continued to a stone wall at the edge of some brush. By the time the constable reached the thicket Elizabeth had vanished. He beat the scrub; a great cat raced toward him, to stare him in the face. It scrambled off when the official attempted to strike it with his stick. It took little to understand that Colson had transformed herself. Hers was a daring escape, a fox hunt in which the fox prevailed. It left two grown men scratching their heads. Colson nonetheless wound up in the Cambridge jail ten days later. Meanwhile the whereabouts of Mary and Philip English appears to have been an open secret. No one tracked the couple—dogs at their heels and sticks in hand—as had been the case with fugitives in earlier capital cases.

  Nor were arresting officers a suspect’s worst enemies. When the authorities came for sixteen-year-old Martha Tyler, an Andover blacksmith’s daughter, she attempted no headlong lunge for the back door. A pious girl, she had no crime to which to confess. That was before the ride to Salem, which she made with her brother or stepbrother. He spent the three-hour trip goading her. She begged him to stop; she knew nothing of witchcraft. On their Salem arrival she was led into a room, her brother on one side of her and John Emerson, the Gloucester minister, on the other. Emerson could see the devil before her. He swatted him away with his hand. The two men pressed her, Emerson mercilessly: “Well, I see you will not confess! Well, I will now leave you; and then you are undone, body and soul, forever.” A schoolmaster, he knew something about extracting truths from adolescents. Her brother commanded Martha to stop lying. She was a witch. “Good brother,” she pleaded, “do not say so; for I shall lie if I confess, and then who shall answer unto God for my lie?” He stood firm, insisting that her complicity was established, “that God would not suffer so many good men to be in such an error about it, and that she would be hanged if she did not confess.” Martha capitulated. She preferred any dungeon to more psychological blud
geoning, as others would discover that they preferred to confess than to suffer long periods on their feet, without sleep, under ruthless interrogation. Many no longer knew what to believe. Others came to believe what they were told.

  As the August court session approached, time seemed to accelerate; apprehensions built all around. Even as the grand jury assembled in Salem town, to which there was a general migration, Hathorne and Corwin continued their village hearings. On the Saturday that Elizabeth Cary escaped from prison, they interrogated Mary Toothaker in the village. A midwife, she had been widowed six weeks earlier, when her husband of thirty-seven years—an accused Billerica folk healer—had died in jail. Her eldest daughter had already confessed. Given the fact that Toothaker’s younger sister was Martha Carrier, the justices must have examined Toothaker intently. She resisted their allegations, having promised herself twenty times over that she would prefer to die on the gallows “than say anything but that she was innocent.” But perhaps, she now realized, wavering, that had been the devil speaking? With no clobbering minister or relative at her side, she pummeled herself. Was she having trouble confessing because she was innocent, she brooded, or because the devil silenced her? He sometimes interfered with her prayers. Might she unwittingly have covenanted with him? Warily she felt her way, trying to satisfy the authorities without mutilating the truth. To stand firm on her innocence was, she understood, to prove guilty of sinful intractability. Bewitched girls meanwhile tumbled about her. She finally confessed. By gripping a dishcloth tight in her hands, she had afflicted a long-suffering Andover man. She was convinced—or she convinced herself—that she was a witch. She had been one for just under two years. The devil promised her happy days with her son.