by Stacy Schiff
Sensitive to liberties infringed and juries coerced, Wise had particular reason to speak out. He mistrusted authority. He believed cowardice a difficult word to pronounce but a more egregious thing of which to be guilty. He had reason to challenge Stoughton, for whom he may have felt some residual animosity. Certainly the tenor of the Ipswich minister’s later remarks was very different from the chief justice’s; Wise believed government owed its existence to the community that submitted to it, not the other way around. In his discourse he preferred “the very native dress of matter of fact” to any brand of oratorical finery. Wise was immensely popular, considered by his congregants a match for Cotton Mather. He sounds as if he had swallowed a healthy dose of John Locke.
Chains dangling from his wrists, John Procter that week rewrote his will. George Burroughs did not. Even while “a vast concourse of people” journeyed to Salem for his August 5 trial, even while each of the confessed witches designated him their leader, he had reason for confidence. On the eve of the trial, seven men examined him for witch marks. They found nothing. Burroughs held firm to his faith, encouraging his children—to whom he wrote with “solemn and savory instructions”—to do the same. He had supporters, some of whom persuaded a potential witness for the prosecution to make himself scarce that Friday. (The tenor of the times was such that he showed up anyway.) Friends visited Burroughs in prison to confer about his case. He did not intend to rely on the shoulder-shrugging of his May hearing. He knew enough about village affairs to impeach the credibility of his accusers; he had faith in the system. That confidence was all the greater as he knew not only some of his judges but also the attorney general; Burroughs had worked thirteen years earlier for the father of Checkley’s first wife, the mother of the attorney general’s five children. Burroughs was to appear before his equals. He expressed himself easily. And he sounded like his judges, speaking in the educated, variegated, Anglo-American accent of the day. He thought in—and could readily interpret—Scripture. All else aside, he was a Harvard-educated minister. In his pocket he carried a scrap of paper that would moreover clinch his defense.
Having been named over and over as the ringleader, Burroughs would have known that his trial was the one all awaited; he walked that Friday afternoon into a packed Salem courtroom. He assumed an active role, challenging prospective jurors as they stepped forward to be sworn in, a right other defendants do not appear to have exercised. He may have called witnesses as well. Narrow-faced, high-cheekboned, ethereal-looking Increase Mather was in the room, an event in itself. Burroughs could reassure himself that the elder Mather had, in Illustrious Providences, expressed his doubts about witchcraft. Devils got altogether too much credit.
Sixteen people had given evidence at Burroughs’s May hearing; nearly twice as many testified on August 5. Eight confessed witches revealed that Burroughs had been promised a kingship in Satan’s reign. Nine other witnesses credited the short, muscular minister—that “very puny man”—with feats that would have taxed a giant. Elizabeth Hubbard, the doctor’s niece, reported that Burroughs bragged of his rank. He was a conjurer, “above the ordinary rank of witches.” Mercy Lewis, his former servant, emerged from a trance to share her Matthew-inflected account of Burroughs having carried her to the high mountain, to promise her the “mighty and glorious” kingdoms below. It is not easy to shake the sense that a sturdy, canny man, one who fascinated the village girls, was on trial for having survived wives and resisted Indians.
The bewitched delivered up their accounts with difficulty, falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that the forty-two-year-old minister bit them. They had the teeth marks to prove it! They displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected Burroughs’s mouth. The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings; the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover. During one such delay Stoughton appealed to the defendant. What, the chief justice asked his prisoner, did he think throttled them? Burroughs replied plainly; he assumed it was the devil. “How comes the Devil then to be so loath to have any testimony born against you?” challenged Stoughton, a brainteaser of a question and one that left Burroughs without an answer. He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about the overcrowded room. They unsettled more than did the specters; some who were not bewitched saw them too. Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight; she stared, she explained, at his dead wives. Their faces bloodred, the ghosts demanded justice. Stoughton called in several other bewitched children. Each described the apparitions. What, Stoughton inquired, did Burroughs make of this? The minister was appalled but could himself see nothing.
If those in the court did not already know that, as Mather would put it later, Burroughs “had been infamous for the barbarous use of his two late wives, all the country over,” they did soon enough. It was asserted that he kept them “in a strange kind of slavery.” He had brought them “to the point of death.” Adding Lawson’s wife and daughter to the list of casualties, one of the girls provided a motive for their murders: Burroughs resented his Salem successor for tending to a congregation that had mistreated him. The farrago of charges ultimately came together: someone testified that Burroughs had coerced his wives into swearing never to reveal his secrets. His former brother-in-law, a town tavern owner, testified—the entire family in the room—about the strawberry-picking expedition when Burroughs was said to have read his wife’s mind. What did he have to say to that? asked Stoughton. The two had left a man with him, Burroughs explained. His brother-in-law objected. Stoughton demanded the man’s name. A cloud crossed Burroughs’s face. He had no answer. Burroughs may not have been conjurer material after all; either he was half starved and debilitated after three months in a damp, dark hole or someone exaggerated his might. He stammered and wavered. Was it possible, suggested the chief justice, that that man—a black man, at least in Mather’s retelling—had stepped aside with Burroughs to fit him, along the path, with some sort of invisibility cloak?
Burroughs’s answer is lost not because he failed to make one but because Mather deemed it not “worth considering”; the evidence dwarfed the objections. Burroughs does seem to have bungled his defense. Asked to account for his preternatural strength, he explained that an Indian had assisted him in firing the musket as if it were but a pistol. It was foolish to suggest an accomplice who could so easily be turned into a “black man”; Mather tended to insert demons casually into the literature and did here. Moreover, no one else had seen Burroughs’s assistant. Called upon to explain his prowess with the barrels, Burroughs discovered himself without his best defense. He had managed that feat four years earlier at the home of his patron, the attorney general’s father-in-law. Checkley was nowhere to be found; he appears to have kept his distance. Nor did Burroughs make more than a feeble attempt at discrediting his accusers. He was less eager to engage in gossip than the parishioners of whom he had abruptly taken his departure, who had sued him, and who transformed a minister into a wizard. His contrary streak remained on display; he reached instinctively to Scripture in the wake of a devastating Indian attack but was not going to gratify a hectoring official with an account of his children’s baptisms.
He repeatedly stumbled, offering contradictory answers, a luxury afforded only the accusers. As for “his tergiversations, contradictions, and falsehoods,” chided Mather, “now there never was a prisoner more eminent for them.” Lawson found his Salem predecessor unconvincing on every score. Despite the senseless fits and the multitude of witnesses, the trial moved quickly; Burroughs stood before the bench for several hours at most. Out of excuses, he reached finally for the deal-clincher in his pocket. Extracting the scrap of paper, he handed it to the jury. The forty-two-year-old minister did not contest the validity of spectral evidence. With a few lines he proposed something more inflammatory still: Burroughs asserted that “there neither are, nor ever were witches, that having made a compact with the devil can send a devil to torment other people at a di
stance.” It was a shot across the bow and the most objectionable thing he could have suggested. If diabolical compacts did not exist, if the devil could not subcontract out his work, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had sent six innocents to their deaths.
A tussle ensued over not only the substance of the lines but their source. Stoughton—who had graduated from Harvard the year Burroughs was born—recognized them at once: Burroughs had lifted the lines from the work of Thomas Ady. A leading English skeptic, Ady argued that witchcraft and the Bible were different things. He seemed to believe the latter an allegory. He inveighed against “groundless, fantastical doctrines,” fairy tales and old wives’ tales, the results of middle-of-the-night imaginings, excessive drinking, and blows to the head. Witches existed but they were rare; Ady believed them a convenient excuse for the ignorant physician. He suggested that one should not, when misfortune struck, try to remember who had last come to the door.* Burroughs denied having borrowed the passage, then emended his answer; he tended to be forthright at the most inconvenient moments. A visitor had passed him the text in manuscript. He had transcribed it. Burroughs had already several times agreed that witches plagued New England; it was too late in the day for such a dangerous gambit, about which we have but a portion of the story in the form of Mather’s redacted version. The jury arrived promptly at a verdict. It was one that gratified the chief justice.
As he left the courtroom that afternoon, John Hale felt a tug of doubt about his former colleague, whose ordination he had witnessed and with whom he had worked closely for several years. Hale pulled aside a confessed witch. She swore she had attended a meeting at which Burroughs exhorted his confederates to topple the church and establish a kingdom of the devil. “You are one that bring this man to death,” the equable minister reminded her. The situation was grave. “If you have charged anything upon him that is not true, recall it before it be too late, while he is alive.” The woman had no misgivings. Hale clearly did but did not commit them to paper. Cotton Mather would himself glide past church-subverting schemes, which Hale understood to be the reason for his colleague’s conviction. They seemed inconclusive proof of witchcraft. The same went for the ghosts and the expert marksmanship. Mather stipulated that neither played a role in the case, laboring so hard to keep spectral evidence in its place and out of the picture that he essentially concluded that Burroughs was found to be a wizard for having had the character of one. For his part, Increase Mather found Burroughs’s superhuman strength damning; the minister had performed too many acts no man could manage without diabolical help. He believed the case airtight. “Had I been one of his judges,” the elder Mather would allow, “I could not have acquitted him.”
The convicted wizard did not disagree. At some point after the verdict had been announced Burroughs spoke with Hale. The minister might not respect wives but he did respect authority; he could quibble with neither the judges nor the jury that had convicted him. The evidence against him indeed appeared overwhelming. The only problem, Burroughs contended, was that it was all false. We do not know how he reconciled himself to his plight. In an equally dire situation he had bowed to divine displeasure. “The course of God’s most sweet and rich promises and gracious providences may justly be interrupted by the sins of his people,” he had noted seven months earlier, after the York atrocities. Along with both Procters, John Willard, George Jacobs, and Martha Carrier, Stoughton sentenced the minister to hang.
IX
OUR CASE IS EXTRAORDINARY
WITCH, n. (1) Any ugly and repulsive old woman, in a wicked league with the devil. (2) A beautiful and attractive young woman, in wickedness a league beyond the devil.
—AMBROSE BIERCE
THE CONVICTION OF the mastermind behind the demonic conspiracy—“the chief of all the persons accused of witchcraft or the ringleader of them all,” as the terrified Salem village tanner saw him—might have been thought to spell an end to witch-hunting. It did nothing of the sort. A blaze of confessions consumed August; the flames shot higher still over the first weeks of September. On the morning of Burroughs’s trial, Increase Mather visited the Salem prisoners, interviewing several witches. Massachusetts’s most distinguished minister pronounced himself satisfied with their reports of “hellish obligations and abominations.” Days later, Martha Carrier’s ten-year-old son admitted he had been a witch for a week. His mother had arranged for his demonic baptism, dipping him, naked, in the river that ran between the Carrier and Foster properties. He had flown to a meeting with three men and six women. They traveled on two poles. He did not mention his little sister but by August 10 did not need to; the Andover justice of the peace who deposed him spoke with her the same day. The conversation left him uneasy, though it would be some time before the distaste fully registered. He submitted his notes to Hathorne and Corwin with a rattled disclaimer, apologizing for “being unadvisedly entered upon service I am wholly unfit for.” He hoped his account would prove helpful all the same.
Indeed it did. Sarah Carrier rode to Salem the following day. She chatted amiably along the way with the constables or before her hearing with Hathorne, who knew her story before he questioned her. She had been a witch since she was six. “And how old are you now?” Hathorne asked, for the record. “Near eight years old, brother Richard says,” she replied brightly. “I shall be eight years old in November next.” Sarah afflicted her victims with the spear her mother had given her and in the company of the same individuals her brother had named. Though bodily in prison, Martha Carrier appeared to her in the guise of a black cat. “How did you know that it was your mother?” inquired Hathorne. “The cat told me so,” chirped the seven-year-old, more certain that she was a sorceress than that she was seven.
Plenty of black cats and red books had emerged in Salem too, but Andover witchcraft was to be substantially different. For starters, there was more of it. Witchcraft engulfed much of eastern Massachusetts and, briefly, a corner of Connecticut in 1692. It spread from Salem to twenty-four other communities. None succumbed so completely to it as Andover, where the epidemic moved faster and more furiously and produced more accused witches than both Salems combined. Between the time Martha Carrier stood trial and the time the Andover official’s distaste finally caught up with him a month later, fifty witches turned up in a town of six hundred people. A family affair, Andover witchcraft moved in a less haphazard fashion. Children incriminated grandparents and mothers their sons. Siblings turned on one another. Nearly all of the witches belonged to five clans; in concert with the Salem girls, a dozen people named all the names. Accusations outflew even rumors, as cries of “You are a witch!” and “You are guilty!” ricocheted about town. Some gloated about who would be carried off next. Others glowered, further compromising themselves.
Along with a fresh cast, Andover provided a revised narrative. Ghosts tended not to disturb that community. Andover preferred satanic baptisms—in rivers, ponds, wells, or pails of water—something that had played no previous role in New England, although they had in Sweden. Nor in more prosperous Andover did neighbors normally enchant one another’s hay or pigs; they focused on the diabolical, preferring spears, satanic sacraments, and witches’ meetings, things of which Tituba had never dreamed. Forgotten and in her sixth month in prison—she had neither testified nor been indicted—she set the Salem stage. Andover’s story tumbled fully formed out of Mary Lacey Jr.’s devil-toppling conspiracy. At its heart was Burroughs’s diabolical sacrament, of which nearly every Andover confessor supplied some account and of which a consistent picture emerged, even if in Andover the devil could still appear as, depending on the witness, a colt, a mouse, a fly, a bird, a cat, a woman, a pig, a black man, a bear. Tituba aside, only Andover witches knew how to fly.
What had happened? Burroughs’s conviction had unsettled, inviting a gritty dust of suspicion to permeate Andover. Closer to the frontier, the town was more vulnerable to Indian raids, to the unorthodox, and to smallpox. But it was also true that by August the authorities k
new better what they were looking for. Both the questions and the answers were familiar after the Court of Oyer and Terminer’s third session. From the beginning, Hathorne had engaged in skillful prompting. By August, he knew what he wanted to hear; it aligned neatly with what some wanted to say. The satanic bread grows visibly red and redder as, under questioning, his witness warms up. “Had you any hot irons or knitting needles?” Hathorne asked Foster’s daughter. She obliged with an iron spindle. “Did you used at any time to ride upon a stick or pole?” he quizzed Foster’s granddaughter. She had. “But doth not the devil threaten to tear you in pieces if you do not do what he says?” he challenged a Boxford woman. “Yes, he threatens to tear me in pieces,” she agreed. Only rarely did a witness disappoint. Were there not two ministers at the witches’ meeting? Hathorne asked Mary Lacey Jr., who could not say and who never helped him find his man.
Partly as a result, something happened in Salem that had not happened before. Prior to 1692, only four New Englanders had admitted to witchcraft, one of whom probably had only a dim idea as to what she was saying. In the first three months of the trials, only eight confessed, including a four-year-old, Tituba, two suspects who would later recant, and cheeky Abigail Hobbs. By August, confessions bloomed faster than afflictions, accompanied by credit-bolstering displays of self-flagellating and hand-wringing. Nearly every one of the accused Andover witches confessed to the crime. Judicial coercion—“buzzings and chuckings of the hand,” as one observer termed them; chains removed in exchange for confessions, dungeons threatened if they were withheld—was not the sole means to extract them. The fifty-two-year-old Boxford woman conceded she had been in the devil’s employ for seven years. She later revealed that Abigail Hobbs and Mary Lacey Jr. had taunted her for days, “mocking me and spitting in my face, saying they knew me to be an old witch and if I would not confess it, I should very speedily be hanged.” They frightened her out of her wits. She had no idea what she said at her trial and little of what was said to her; she caught only the formidable words “Queen Mary.” There was little need for the brand of arm-twisting that, though it left no trace on paper, had in April led Mary Warren to yowl: “I will tell, I will tell!”