The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  In the course of her July 30 confession Toothaker implicated eleven others, including her sister, her nephew, her daughter, and Burroughs, whose meetings she had twice attended in the Parris pasture. More than anyone she illuminated how those accounts came about. She proceeded by fits and starts, as if she were choking or hyperventilating. Throughout she has her doubts. She thought she was at the meetings. She thought she set her hand to a book there. She thought the idea was to topple the church; she thought she heard the sound of a trumpet. She could not be certain as to which eminence deposed her. “The devil is so subtle that when she would confess he stops her,” noted the court reporter. Satan deluded her with Scripture. Which verse? asked a magistrate. The psalm that included the line “Let my enemies be confounded,” Toothaker replied. It led her uncharitably to wish her accusers dead.

  Her approach to her faith was equally instructive; against the riptide of piety ran an undertow of doubt. Toothaker felt herself worse off for her baptism. She had not improved substantially since. The fear of Indians paralyzed her that spring; she woke regularly from nightmares in which she fended off assaults. In the throes of her anxieties, a tawny man appeared. He would protect her, after which she was to pray to him. She readily consented. Perhaps, she now realized, she had been doing business with Satan all along! There was much confusion as to who the enemy was and if he might well be you. In the end Mary Toothaker made her deal with the devil, because he promised “to deliver her from the Indians,” a rescue she mentioned three times. It turned out to be a brilliant bargain. Forty-eight hours after she confessed to witchcraft, Indians attacked Billerica.

  WHEN YOU DESIGNATE yourselves “a flock in the wilderness,” you are very nearly advertising for predators. A host of them had preyed—or been expected to prey—on New England since its founding. In the words of Mary Rowlandson (who may have had ministerial help with them), the Indians were “ravenous wolves,” “roaring lions and savage bears.” In Mather’s pages Native Americans regularly turned up as tigers, the devil as a tiger or a roaring lion. The Quakers comported themselves as “grievous wolves.” They joined the French and Indians to complete New England’s diabolical menagerie, its lions, tigers, and bears. Bewitched at her May hearing, Ann Putnam Sr. went stiff as a plank. Only outside the meetinghouse did she find relief from the “paws of those roaring lions and jaws of those tearing bears”—words she borrowed from Lawson’s March 25 sermon. As physical and moral boundaries blurred, so did the rampaging, ravaging predators. (Parris was far from alone in his thinking when, in a May sermon, he lumped together Louis XIV, his Catholic confederates, and a witch-and-wizard-instigating devil, at least two of whom were nowhere in the neighborhood.)* In most statements you could substitute the word “Indian” for “Catholic” without altering the meaning of the phrase. Inevitably it entailed subversion.†

  The Indians were of course also “horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers.” That made sense; the wilderness qualified as a sort of “devil’s den.” Since the time of Moses, the Prince of Darkness had thrived there. He was hardly pleased to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans, in “a corner of the world where he had reigned without any control for many ages.” In fact he was livid about it, asserted Mather, who regularly muddied the zoological waters. Indians, wolves, and devils constituted the “dragons of the wilderness.” To join the Church of England was, in Mather’s estimation, to be bewitched. Quakers were a leprous people in the devil’s snare. He deemed their religion every bit as wholesome as “juice of toads.” Given the symbiotic relationship of an oppressed people and an inhospitable climate, it was from there but a short step to a colluding axis of evil.

  The muddled fears produced a snarl of blame. When fire broke out in Boston, it was said to be the work of Baptists. Who slit the throats of the sheep grazing late on Cambridge Common? It had been wolves, but it made sense, late in 1691, to ban Frenchmen anyway. In 1689, agitating against Andros, Mather referred to the (fictitious) decade-old Popish Plot, still vivid in the New England mind. The new Indian war seemed “a branch of the plot to bring us low.” Mather ascribed Phips’s disastrous Quebec campaign to the Anglican presence in Boston; it made the Lord angry. It helped that conspiracies came as naturally as did covenants to a New Englander, with his sense of sanctified mission and his insistence on purity. As an Indian informant put it, the colonists were as “apt to believe as children.”* They felt themselves stalked on all sides. The Puritans had a natural Anglo-Saxon love of plot; as religion stood at the center of their lives, those became diabolical plots. Reverend Moody commented, in 1688, on the “unaccountable intrigues” that were afoot. Samuel Willard and Salem’s John Higginson, moderate, prudent men, fiercely contended that Papist cabals either targeted or would soon target Massachusetts. Well before spectral Frenchmen infiltrated Gloucester, rumors flew that a crew of Irishmen headed to Massachusetts to establish Roman Catholicism in New England. Of course the shape-shifting, satanic saboteurs served an additional purpose: New England’s enemies were its church’s friends. They filled the pews. Particularly after a season of political storms, the common fears provided solid reason to band together. “O do not quarrel any more,” pleaded Mather in 1690, “but unite immediately against your more united enemies.”†

  In deposing Andros, the colonial elite had charged that their governor schemed to deliver them to “a foreign power.” (That conspiracy too featured menacing redcoats and a crown, if not a high-crowned hat.) Cotton Mather spoke to the same fears in 1690, when he preached on New England in a state of “distress and danger as it never saw before.” His was a law-enforcing, discipline-endorsing address; in their sins and discontents they had brought down “whole armies of Indians and Gallic blood hounds.” The authorities had failed in protecting the flock. Without a charter, New England stood at the mercy of wild beasts. A Mather sermon on witchcraft could sound indistinguishable from a tirade against a royal governor, as was clear early in August when Mather addressed the Salem crisis head-on. He borrowed Mary Rowlandson’s Indian imagery wholesale; en route to their “hellish rendezvous,” the diabolical monsters dragged “the poor people out of their chambers, and carry them over trees and hills, for diverse miles together.” What exactly did an “army of devils” look like? Imagine “vast regiments of cruel and bloody French dragoons,” Mather urged his parishioners, and they would get the idea. There was a crucial difference, however. When it came to marauding Indians, to “bloody and barbarous heathens,” as Stoughton would term the French, you were gut-wrenchingly helpless. Witches you could do something about. When Indians raided Billerica on August 1, they butchered two women, their infants, and their teenage daughters, ages thirteen and sixteen. The judges traveled the same day to Salem, where all roads seemed that sweltering week to lead.

  The Court of Oyer and Terminer reconvened in August with a new attorney general. For political reasons, Thomas Newton was replaced by Anthony Checkley, twenty-five years his senior and a friend of Justice Corwin’s. Newton was a level-headed, affable, and conscientious civil servant, though not a barrister by training. Checkley had greater experience of the courts. He had prosecuted an earlier witchcraft case; he had served as attorney general in the Dominion government. He transferred at least eight suspects to Salem. They included no widows, folk healers, or acid-tongued beggar woman. Checkley instead prepared to prosecute four men, one of whom had attempted to elude arrest (John Willard) and one of whom had petitioned the authorities for a change of venue (Procter). George Jacobs, who guffawed that he was as much a buzzard as a wizard, joined them, as did Reverend Burroughs, the conjurer. Yet again it was clear where to begin. At ten in the morning on August 2, Stoughton opened the court with the case against Martha Carrier, the caustic queen of hell, Ann Foster’s Andover flying companion, a woman so guilty she had been a witch two years before she was born, who had alleged the girls were dissembling and out of their wits, whose own sons had accused her, and who had last been seen on May 31 as she was escorted off, hands and fe
et bound, from the tumultuous hearing that had left the outgoing attorney general slack-jawed in disbelief.

  Carrier’s grand jury was only just under way when word reached Massachusetts that a massive earthquake had weeks earlier devoured Jamaica. A third of the island’s population perished; the town of Port Royal disappeared into the sea. Houses had been swept away and mountains overturned. The calamity had a biblical dimension to it, the more so in Cotton Mather’s retelling: Forty ships capsized, though none from New England. Jamaica’s Puritan minister escaped with his life. Mather had already decided to preach that Thursday from the book of Revelation. Hastily he incorporated the newest scourge into his August 4 sermon. Earthquakes too had diabolical origins; the devil raged among them, knowing his time to be short.

  All of Boston turned out that Thursday for a citywide fast. Sermons on such occasions adhered to a formula; matching sins to afflictions, they warned of greater terrors were reform not in the offing. Mather worked effectively with the news. The people of Jamaica had been “pulled into the jaws of the gaping and groaning earth, and many hundreds of the inhabitants buried alive.” More, he prophesied, was to come: “You shall oftener hear about apparitions of the devil, and about poor people strangely bewitched, possessed, and obsessed by infernal fiends.” Addressing the events in Salem, he supplied details that had never turned up in court testimony, including more primitive practices than those to which a wily villain would need to reduce himself, like stolen money that floated into the palms of his recruits. More than twenty witches had now confessed, some as young as seven. They berated the parents who had sold them to the devil. “It would break a heart of stone to have seen what I have lately seen,” Mather allowed, the first hint that he had visited Salem, though he did not attend a court session, for which he seemed strategically to be setting the scene. Multitudes of devils, swarms of devils, droves of devils descended upon “the distressed county of Essex.” With invisible instruments of torture, they nearly ruined the site of the first gathered church in the colony. The plague, he warned, was spreading from town to town, near and wide.

  Mather addressed a related peril. There was much “agitated controversy among us,” he allowed, nodding to the skeptics, not as quiet in 1692 as they seem to have been today. He urged moderation. Passion and rumor had run away with the story. He denounced the slandering and backbiting that encouraged the devil in the first place. Tipping his hand, he called once for compassion for the accused, twice for pity for the judges. They were up against the greatest sophist in existence. He appeared to have entwined New England in a finer thread than had ever been used before. The worthy judges labored to restore the innocent while excising the diabolical; it made for an arduous, hazardous operation. Mather was satisfied with the brand of evidence with which the magistrates had thus far prosecuted the “witch gang.” But what of those for whom only spectral evidence existed? So snarled was the question that the honored magistrates had reason to cry, like Jehoshaphat, “We know not what to do!” The devil obscured matters by the minute so that they were all “sinfully, yea hotly, and madly, mauling one another in the dark.”

  Where the clergy assisted in escapes one minute and endorsed prosecutions the next (even Mather’s August 4 sermon reads as both admonishment and encouragement); where a villager accused a neighbor, later to sign a petition defending her; where a justice of the peace could submit his examination of a witch to the authorities with the proviso that he was entirely out of his depth; where an accused witch could not determine if the voice in her head was God’s or the devil’s—in short, where everyone else remained lost in the mist, one man continued entirely clear-eyed. It was incumbent on him to perform the hazardous procedure Mather described, excising the diabolical without lopping off innocents in the process. And as of August 1, when preparations for a new Maine expedition consumed Phips, that man happened to be both the head of the witchcraft court and the acting governor of Massachusetts. Phips authorized him to proceed in his absence, although he remained in Boston that week. Having made an art of exceeding orders, he shrugged off the Salem mauling, which he left in the hands of his lieutenant governor and former political enemy, the ever-capable William Stoughton.

  ON AUGUST 3 Martha Carrier appeared before a large crowd, one that included a flock of black-suited ministers, Lawson, Hale, Parris, and surely Noyes among them. We know nothing of her appearance, though—given her two months in an airless prison—Mather may well have been within his rights immortalizing the thirty-eight-year-old as a “rampant hag.” Called to the bar, she acknowledged her identity with a raised hand. The court charged her with having “wickedly and feloniously” practiced witchcraft. She pleaded not guilty. If she again expressed the magnificent disdain she had in May, it went unrecorded. Court officers led in a group of village girls, whose depositions paled beside the eye-rolling fits that accompanied them. Carrier apparently had manifested little sympathy. She seemed to feel as she had in May, when she had chided the justices: “It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.” Ann Foster’s fifty-five-year-old son revealed that Carrier had said that it made no difference to her if the girls’ heads twisted right off. There seem to have been some poisonous looks on all sides.

  The evidence against Carrier had piled up steadily since her May hearing. Her older sister, two of her children, and a niece had confessed to having attended satanic meetings in her company. Susannah Shelden turned up to testify with her wrists again soldered together. They could not be separated. Thomas Putnam described the tortures his daughter and four other Salem girls had endured at Carrier’s hands since May; their limbs nearly dislocated. Ann Foster’s daughter dolefully confessed that she and Carrier had together taken the diabolical sacrament. Carrier had undone her entire family “by enticing them into the snare of the devil.” Short-tempered and sharp-tongued, she tended to claw at the social fabric; she clapped her hands in young men’s faces and wished graphic misfortunes on neighbors. Those curses worked wonders; a land dispute produced a swollen foot or a boil on the groin. Carrier’s twenty-two-year-old nephew had returned to Andover from the war with a gaping, four-inch-deep wound. Before his aunt’s arrest, he could sink a four-inch knitting needle into it. She assured him it would never heal; since her arrest, it miraculously had. (The neighbor’s groin sores had as well.) He made no mention of church-toppling plots. He could however be said to have shed some light on a phenomenon Beverly’s John Hale observed: “The more there were apprehended, the more still were afflicted by Satan.” That may not only have been the result of a creeping diabolical plot. Carrier’s nephew had lost his accused father; he had died in prison six weeks earlier. His mother and sister had been detained. A cousin had confessed to witchcraft. As suspicions puddled around whole families, an accusation was an effective means of escaping the toxic spill. The fears went both ways. Even those who insisted their families were innocent pointed crooked fingers elsewhere. A Nurse relative testified against Carrier.

  Both Procters stood trial as well that week. Very little testimony against them survives. What does survive implicates Elizabeth—now nine months pregnant—rather than John. In the wake of their appearance, a powerful petition went to Boston. A separate appeal went to the court. Ipswich minister John Wise drafted the Boston document and presumably solicited the signatures. Yet again, he reminded the authorities of the devil’s habit of impersonating innocents. God’s ways remained unsearchable. The most punctilious court could discern only so much; a little charity was in order. None of the petition’s thirty-two signers had detected the slightest glimmer of wickedness in the couple, who enjoyed “the clearest reputation as to any such evils.” They were good neighbors and dedicated churchgoers. Their case might have raised the greatest doubts about their accusers, had anyone been listening. Skepticism had led directly to accusation. It was after accusing Elizabeth Procter that one of the girls had explained that they spun their tales for sport. Two men testified they had overheard th
e Putnams feeding Mercy Lewis her lines. It made little difference. The court found both Procters guilty of witchcraft.

  A contemporary of Parris, whom he had known at Harvard, John Wise ministered in Ipswich to a flock of about the same size and on similar terms. He had blazed a very different trail, applying his contentious spirit to the commonweal rather than to his forty cords of wood and eight loads of marsh hay. Wise had some original ideas about the role of government and about taxation without representation. An appealing man with a sprightly sense of humor, he easily succeeded in enlisting others to his cause; five years earlier, he had led Ipswich in a protest against Andros-imposed taxes. They infringed on New England liberties, contended Wise. He incited neighboring towns to resist, getting as far as Topsfield before his arrest. As he later made clear, Wise believed that very little separated aristocracy and monarchy. From there it was but one small step to tyranny. For his principles he spent twenty-one days in prison. Stoughton headed the court that heard his case; it was he who delivered the guilty verdict, one that Wise believed the justices imposed on the jury. It may well have been Stoughton who informed Wise and his friends that they were mistaken if they thought the laws of England followed them to the ends of the earth. They had, the court informed them, “no more privileges left you than not to be sold as slaves.”*