The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  At the outset of her fourth interrogation, Hathorne had reminded Ann Foster that she could expect no peace without a full confession. Trading mercy for material, the bench encouraged her granddaughter, proffering something the family had not: God would forgive her if she confessed, a justice assured the wayward teenager. “I hope he will,” she replied sincerely. Seventeen-year-old Margaret Jacobs was offered either the dungeon or her life. In his May letter, Cotton Mather early on recommended lesser punishments for those who renounced the devil; after mid-July, no one needed to be reminded of the price of noncompliance. In a strange Salem twist, Stoughton spared confessed witches, convicting only those who refused to acknowledge guilt.* If you could save your life by admitting that you flew through the air on a pole, wouldn’t you?

  Confession came naturally to a people who believed it the route to salvation, who submitted spiritual autobiographies when they entered into church membership, who did not entirely differentiate sin from crime. It stood at the heart of the New England enterprise; there was an art and a form to it, as witch-cake baker Mary Sibley demonstrated. By the craggy logic of the day, if you were named, you must have been named for a reason. Little soul-searching was required to locate a kernel of guilt. A sagging conscience bordered in any event on satanic complicity; to wrestle with one’s faith was to wrestle with the devil. It was not difficult to get an eleven-year-old girl to confess to consorting with diabolical accomplices when already “she knew she was made up of all manners of sin,” something she might perfectly well conclude on her own, without the advantage Mary Lacey Jr. had of regular maternal reminders. Learning of the extraordinary charge hurtling her way, Rebecca Nurse had racked her brain: For what sin had she possibly failed to atone? As had been true in Sweden, women, children, and young men tended to confess most readily. It was easier to extract confessions from women, less certain of their worth and more convinced of that of the magistrates, one reason why four middle-aged men—one of whom had suggested he was as likely to be a buzzard as a wizard—were scheduled to hang on August 19.

  Something else haunted those who came before the Salem authorities. Mary Toothaker felt unworthy of her baptism. It imposed an expectation of progress; inevitably, one came up short. Many desperately wished themselves more receptive to Scripture, a yearning the devil never offered to satisfy. They dreaded spiritual numbness, a condition akin to what a suspect described when her specter went off to afflict, leaving her “in a cold dumpish melancholy condition.” “Methinks,” moaned Cotton Mather, “I am but a very parrot in religion!” In the snow, her body raw, her dying six-year-old in her lap, Mary Rowlandson meditated before the campfire on how she had not used her Sabbaths to best effect. Mary Toothaker had no name other than the devil for the doubting, carping, tempting voice in her head. If you tried to pray and could not, who else could be stopping you? She, anyway, had no better answer. Any number of confessors lamented that they had wrung less than they wished from their devotions. An Andover carpenter may have had the same spiritual torpor in mind when he reported that the devil interrupted as he led his family in prayer.

  While women tended to lament their vile natures, earlier misdeeds tumbled out too: an attempted suicide, a theft, a bout of drinking, an abortion, an adulterous liaison. Margaret Jacobs’s mother wailed in prison about a daughter, drowned in a well seven years earlier. She believed she had killed the child. The hand-wringing, soul-baring confessing not only cleared one’s name but promised to assist jailed relatives. The Laceys may have believed they were doing one another a favor as each fell in turn upon her narrative sword. And if you were going to confess, doing so in religious terms—if inverted religious terms—made sense. It put you on the road to grace. Renouncing the devil spelled relief, even if your confession had little to do with the charges at hand.

  As the mystery reader knows, denials tend toward the convoluted. Confessions are refreshingly simple. Nothing is more expedient for a prosecutor, spared a time-consuming trial. From a 1692 witchcraft judge’s point of view, confessions took pressure off tenuous spectral evidence. They were eagerly received and deeply reassuring, the more so as almost by definition, folded into each one—a sort of certificate of authenticity—came a gleaming bit of shrapnel in the form of an accusation. Not everyone was as careful as Tituba had been to name as coconspirators only those already under arrest. When Richard Carrier returned from his harrowing, upside-down ordeal, he delivered eleven names. On one count he remained stalwart: he did not incriminate his mother.

  Martha Carrier and Ann Foster, across-the-river neighbors as well as flying companions, went their separate ways under interrogation. Foster buckled. Carrier gave no quarter. Both made their homes on the southern edge of Andover, very nearly in Middlesex rather than Essex County, at the town’s newer, less desirable end. They lived as far as one could live from the meetinghouse and still remain in Andover. With the confessions of August 11, witchcraft crept into the heart of the community. Both of Carrier’s younger children implicated twenty-two-year-old Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who supplied a familiar version of the witch meeting: they were about eighty in all, bent on dismantling Christ’s kingdom. Johnson was a granddaughter of Andover’s longtime minister, Francis Dane. That day Dane’s pregnant forty-year-old daughter appeared before Hathorne and Corwin. Although a touch of her hand delivered the Procters’ maid from her fits, Abigail Faulkner Sr. would not confess. Her niece urged her on “for the credit of her town.” Faulkner stood her ground, according to the court report, insisting that “God would not require her to confess that she was not guilty of.” She held out even after invisible forces yanked lovely Mary Warren under the examiners’ table. Again Faulkner’s hand delivered the Procter servant from her distress. But, objected Faulkner, she had looked at those girls when they had visited Andover earlier without affecting them in the least! That, the justices informed her, had been before she had begun to practice witchcraft.

  Fifteen days later she would admit to having been furious at her niece’s arrest. She “did look with an evil eye” on the bewitched. She hoped they would suffer; they were destroying her family. Again witchcraft inscribed a vicious circle. (In a similar sort of spell-casting, a Reading woman confessed that she had wished ill of her accusers.) It did not help that—though she expressed compassion for the girls—Abigail Faulkner Sr. shed no tear on their account. Nor could it have helped that she was a cousin of both Martha Carrier and Mary Toothaker and related by marriage to Elizabeth How, who had hanged on July 19. Within weeks, Faulkner’s seven-and twelve-year-old daughters were detained as well. Both confessed. By mid-September, two of Reverend Dane’s daughters, a daughter-in-law, four grandchildren, and various nieces and nephews would be in custody. Dane was to discover that he was related to no fewer than twenty witches.

  Having married into one of Andover’s foremost families, Francis Dane had served as Andover’s minister since before Samuel Parris was born. He had taken it upon himself to serve simultaneously as village schoolmaster; most of the adult men in Andover who learned to write had done so under his tutelage. Andover knew few fractious land disputes; ministerial wars had not trampled local egos. Still, the town had reason to resent its autocratic, arthritic senior minister who refused to retire. Half lame, he could manage only some of his duties. The town hired a younger, more orthodox man, a Parris schoolmate, to replace their sixty-five-year-old preacher. Dane sued. Andover wound up paying both men, immediate neighbors, two generations apart, who shared a pulpit if not a worldview. Dane ruled with a strong hand, Thomas Barnard with a sharper edge. Barnard had complained that the schoolhouse in which he taught prior to his Andover ordination could have doubled as a pigsty. And ultimately the younger man would cost the town more than the seasoned one. No one accused Barnard or his young family, while over the next weeks Dane’s family would be systematically targeted. He could not have shrugged off the sense that an accusation headed his way; Massachusetts now sentenced ministers to death. At least one congregant attempted
to ride to his rescue. Before a September grand jury, an Andover matron recounted the flight to her diabolical baptism. She and a church deacon shared a pole with two other witches. Did she know if the devil could afflict in the shape of an accomplice without that accomplice’s consent? asked the magistrates. She assured them he could not. Only the Monday before, she and Mrs. Dane had borrowed the reverend’s specter in an attempt to implicate him. Their ploy had not worked. What hindered it? asked the authorities. “The Lord would not suffer it so to be, that the devil should afflict in an innocent person’s shape,” she explained.

  Salem’s whirlwind of a third act began now as—doubts and cavils nipping at the proceedings—the pace of arrests, confessions, and convictions accelerated wildly. There were to be no steely John Procters or dismissive Martha Carriers after August 19. When Carrier’s children were called in, they confessed. The avowals touched on a fundamental New England problem. When could you deem yourself sufficiently reformed? Once you began confessing, there was no end in sight. The Salem magistrates sat nearly daily from the end of August through September, to hear a litany of variations on a familiar, harrowing tale. If a common jail did not guarantee that the particulars would agree, the method of interrogation and the price of resistance did. It is unclear if Ann Foster volunteered that she had flown through the air or if she was first asked if she had. She embellished as she went. She did not mention that flight in her initial hearing. She predated her pact and described the crash in her second, adding the Sabbath in the third. An Andover woman denied any part of witchcraft until she did not. A farmer belatedly inserted a satanic baptism into his confession; the devil had dipped his head in water and announced that he “was his for ever and ever.” Somehow he had forgotten that detail earlier. It helped that no one knew precisely how a witch worked; Hale’s curiosity was understandable. A part-biblical, part-folkloric, vaguely Swedish and less vaguely Indian construct, a witch was someone who in July pinched and strangled but in August toppled kingdoms.

  By September, only minor matters failed to align. Had the argument been over a barn or a scythe? Did witches need an ointment to fly? (In New England they did not.) Was John Willard an old man or a young man? Hathorne inquired of Richard Carrier, testing his witness. Eighteen-year-old Carrier did not want to disappoint: “He is not an old man,” he answered carefully. Asked how she had traveled to the Salem witches’ meeting, Reverend Dane’s daughter confessed she had done so on horseback. “But afterwards,” notes the court reporter, she emended her answer, revealing that “she was carried thither on a pole.” The “afterwards” is left to our imaginations. Tituba’s hairy imp and flying monkey vanished, as did subversive plots against governors. Blue boars, bewitched oxen, dead cows, and even another ornery laundress turned up, but by September, satanic conspiracy took center stage. In court daily, with parents and guardians, the Salem girls assisted with the continuity. The star attraction, Mary Warren, fell into violent fits, on September 2 approaching the justices with “a pin run through her hand, and blood running out of her mouth.” Before the court, a red stain spread across her bonnet; the mere mention of a suspect’s name could level her. It was impossible to deny witchcraft in the girls’ presence, tantamount to a corpse in the courtroom. You might well refute your neighbor’s claim that he had seen your head on the body of a dog. But you could not discredit the bloodcurdling screams, the acrobatic postures, or counter the effect of Mary Warren crashing lifeless to the floor. Those displays sent even a self-assured twenty-nine-year-old man toward a confession. And the confessions agreed, with near-scientific accuracy, deeply reassuring to the hardworking Salem justices. It would be some time before their self-replicating nature would appear suspect rather than as proof that a deadly conspiracy had taken hold. Meanwhile, most of Essex County seemed to be flying through the air, on very crowded sticks.

  WHILE THE AUTHORITIES flushed out the demonic conspiracy in Andover, they exposed something else in the process: a swarm of superstitions nested under the plain Puritan floorboards. Dane’s daughter ultimately confessed to witchcraft but first squelched the rumor that she had practiced folk magic. She had decidedly not conjured with a sieve, a sort of seventeenth-century Ouija board. Weeks later a Dane in-law acknowledged that a bit of sieve-turning had indeed taken place in her household; she knew the incantation from Reverend Barnard’s maid. On August 11 Faulkner’s sister-in-law produced for the court a full collection of poppets, two of rag, a third of birch bark, one with three pins still stuck in it. Andover turned out to be rife with not only sorcery but also folk magic, religion’s popular, wayward stepsister. It settled comfortably into parsonages. The Barnard and Dane households, like those of Higginson and Hale, were infested. Ironically, only the Parris household seemed immune.

  If women were traditionally the wonder-workers—and excitable adolescent girls the fortune-teller’s bread and butter—Andover turned those conventions too on their heads. The town’s most gifted soothsayer proved to be a forty-nine-year-old Exeter-born carpenter, the feckless, free-spirited father of seven, something of a local celebrity. Samuel Wardwell peered into palms, casting his eyes meaningfully to the ground as he delivered his forecasts. He had predicted that the constable’s wife would bear five girls before she delivered a boy. He had announced that Elizabeth Ballard would succumb to witchcraft before she did. A fair amount of expiation rippled through the testimony against Wardwell. None of those whose futures he so eerily foretold had minded at the time, not the young man whom Wardwell warned would fall from his horse, nor the one whose underage love he had divined, nor the one who learned that his sweetheart would betray him. All had gathered closely around the silver-tongued carpenter. Even in the presence of their adolescent daughters, Andover farmers begged him to reveal their fates. The sixty-five-year-old blacksmith who testified that Wardwell was “much addicted” to soothsaying had himself eagerly pulled up a chair.

  Wardwell reluctantly confessed to witchcraft on September 1. Perhaps he had too often invoked the devil. It was difficult not to when cursing the stray animals that wreaked havoc in his fields.* He admitted he had met the prince of the air. Wardwell—whose affairs suffered while he pursued more frivolous interests—was the Andover man whom the devil had assured of a militia captaincy. Soon enough the constable returned to the isolated Wardwell farm to arrest his wife of twenty years, their two eldest daughters, and an infant. The family disclosed that one brand of sorcery invited the other; Wardwell’s stepdaughter allowed that she had experimented with a sieve and scissors in the spring. The devil had appeared to her, with propositions. She had subsequently met him three times, including once at the village meeting, where she had seen a dozen people riding on poles. The dabbling in the occult further fueled the confessions; many admitted easily to folk magic, about which they already felt guilty and at which they had been caught red-handed.*

  Protestantism reared from magic, but—especially when it came to witch-hunting—the two had a tendency to blur. Lawson had inveighed in March against most of the practices to which Andover residents would confess, warning against the temptation to “charm away witchcraft.” Mary Sibley’s experiment had earned her a very public rebuke. Martha Carrier’s niece had earlier attempted to kill a witch by bottling and baking an afflicted person’s urine. Mary Toothaker consulted a book of astrology. On September 6 Reverend Hale testified to Dorcas Hoar’s regular fortune-telling. Years earlier he had insisted she get rid of her book of palmistry, which his children had seen. Hoar had also taught herself to make predictions based on marks around the eye. At her trial the court measured her (four-foot-seven-inch-long) elf-lock. They ordered the matted tail cut off. Hoar quailed; if they did so, she protested, she would fall ill if not die. The court prevailed.

  Mather acknowledged that in the presence of evil, many turned to illicit “burnings, and bottles and horseshoes and I know not what magical ceremonies” for relief. At the same time, the seventeenth-century minister distinguished more ably than do we between �
��Catholic nonsense” (horseshoes, urine cakes, touch tests) and proper Puritan theology. The line proved not so much unclear as perforated. Too late for George Jacobs, Increase Mather denounced sticking witch suspects with pins. What if the pin was itself enchanted? He wrote off the swim test used to identify witches as idle superstition. (His son endorsed the practice.) Was it faith healing to call in the girls to ask what ailed someone, as Parris did in mid-June when he sent for Mercy Lewis, who, in a trance, diagnosed a bewitched Putnam? Did boiling a lock of an afflicted child’s hair in a skillet over the fire constitute medicine or superstition?* What was the difference between Samuel Wardwell warning that Ballard’s wife would fall ill and Increase Mather growling—after Sewall’s altercation with his son—that harm would befall the Sewalls? In 1676, Increase Mather set aside a day of prayer on which to beg the Lord to smite the stalwart Indian leader, King Philip. It worked, like a charm and within the week. How to distinguish between a prayer and a spell—or between a spell and an alchemical balm that cured wounds from a distance? The Lord’s Prayer was understood to be a sort of “holy charm” before which ghosts and goblins fled.†