The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  It was all a reprise of Salem, except that it had occurred twenty-one years earlier, seventeen years before the Goodwin children. Where those youngsters had barked like dogs and purred like cats, Elizabeth Knapp barked like a dog and bleated like a calf. She drowned out prayer. She struck at and spit in the faces of the adults who tended her. She met with Satan. Anticipating Cotton Mather, she could report that there were more devils than men in this world, a claim that sounded especially plausible in an outpost like Groton. Willard called in a doctor to treat Elizabeth. He diagnosed a stomach disorder, “occasioning fumes in her brain and strange fancies.” After a second examination, he refused to administer to her further. Whatever ailed the teenager was diabolical in origin.

  Elizabeth was much visited that winter—Willard noted that her afflictions peaked under observation and grew more violent as the crowd increased—but no one spent as much time at her side or came in for as much abuse as her master himself. He devoted full days to the sixteen-year-old, praying with her, reasoning with her, consoling her. She too accused a respectable neighbor of having bewitched her. She too acknowledged having signed a satanic pact. The devil had promised “money, silks, fine cloths, ease from labor, to show her the whole world.” He gathered firewood for her even after she refused his help. In the reprieves between fits she wept uncontrollably. She confessed to a cascade of sins: she had snarled at her parents, neglected prayer, contemplated suicide. Willard remained calm throughout, even when Elizabeth revealed that the devil had instructed her to murder the minister and his children; she was to toss the youngest in the fire. Elizabeth was by turns incoherent, violent, accusatory, apologetic, “sottish and stupid,” entranced, and utterly lucid. She too suffered from a magnetic pull into the fireplace. She nearly dove into a well. She contradicted herself hourly. It was the devil; it was the neighbor; it was the devil disguised as the neighbor; it was all fancies; she met the devil on the parsonage stairs; she had signed a seven-year compact in blood; she had signed no such thing.

  It had just been affirmed that she was not possessed when—on a dark Sabbath afternoon in December—a low, male growl began to emanate from her body. Elizabeth’s family rushed to her side from meeting. Willard followed, directly from the pulpit. “Oh! You are a great rogue,” she greeted him, in a husky, adult voice, her lips motionless. Willard’s blood ran cold. “Daunted and amazed,” he called for a light. Some gimmick was surely at work. He challenged the devil to show himself, conversing with the gruff spirit through the teenager for some time. “You tell the people a company of lies,” it taunted him. Willard answered, “Satan, thou art a liar and a deceiver, and God will vindicate his own truth one day.” Ultimately he asked the company to kneel in prayer at Elizabeth’s bedside. Louder this time, the devil growled, “Hold your tongue, hold your tongue, get you gone, you black rogue.” Willard took careful, copious notes but resisted conclusions. One could counterfeit a great deal but this, he was certain, one could not. (Deodat Lawson had sworn the same of the Salem girls. No one could screw her body into such positions by natural means.) As to whether or not Elizabeth had truly covenanted with the devil, “I think,” Willard concluded, “this is a case unanswerable.” More comfortable with irresolution than Parris or either Mather, Willard stopped there, noting, among other curiosities, Elizabeth’s ability to pronounce Ps and Ms without the slightest motion of her mouth. He kept her under close observation at an inconvenient time of year. And he did something more taxing yet: he suspended belief.

  Elizabeth eventually recovered. No one hanged. Willard’s fine-grained, clinical study of what seemed in the end a clear case of demonic possession circulated widely. Increase Mather would refer to it in Cases; he had included it earlier in Illustrious Providences. (He added a few Matherian twists to that infernal assault. In his 1684 version, the devil “belched forth most horrid and nefandous blasphemies.”) Elizabeth Knapp would turn up again thirty years later in Cotton Mather’s epic Magnalia, by which time her case was iconic, one of fourteen preternatural wonders of the invisible world. Under different circumstances, the Parris children too might have wound up in a condition that merited only compassion and that created no ripples beyond Salem village.* Willard assigned no blame, though he did wring evangelical mileage from the episode. Satan had targeted Groton for a reason. The inhabitants needed to examine how they had invited that cloven foot into their village; together they needed to drive it out. In 1692 Samuel Willard was one of the few men in Massachusetts who understood, firsthand, the trials of Samuel Parris, who had equal cause to ask himself what he had done to bring down a plague on his own home.

  Four years after the Knapp case, Indians descended upon Groton, burning part of the town.† Willard and his family fled to Boston. Already published, a tireless preacher with a mellifluous voice, he had little difficulty finding employment. Willard was newly associated with the Third Church when in 1677 several Quaker women rushed, half dressed, their hair flying, faces black with ash, into the meetinghouse, causing “the greatest and most amazing uproar” Samuel Sewall had yet witnessed. A decade later Andros appropriated Willard’s congregation, Boston’s wealthiest, for Anglican services. In short order then, light-haired, even-featured Willard, a cool, logical thinker with a deeply philosophical bent, had known demonic, Indian, Quaker, and Anglican invasions. He had reason to be as orthodox as anyone. A Book of Common Prayer had sullied his pulpit. His meetinghouse had been reduced to ash. He had conversed if not with the devil then with some spirit in his employ.

  Willard served on Harvard’s governing board alongside Increase Mather. He was happy to endorse a text that questioned the court’s methods without undermining its verdicts. But he found he had more to say than he could insert into the introduction to his colleague’s essay. At some point before October, Willard penned a few additional pages. He expressed himself in the only way a distinguished Massachusetts minister could that fall: by tiptoeing into print with a piece of samizdat literature, passed hand to hand and attributed to P.E. and J.A., the initials of two accused wizards Willard had helped to escape. Willard wrote to illuminate rather than indict, crafting an imaginary dialogue between two level-headed adversaries working from the same texts. Published anonymously in Boston, the pages bore a false Philadelphia imprint.

  In Some Miscellany Observations on Our Present Debates Respecting Witchcrafts, S. and B.—presumably Salem and Boston, as the Bostonians had begun to separate themselves from their rural colleagues—agree on two matters: witchcraft plagues New England. And dissatisfaction regarding the court fosters treacherous animosities. Willard reinforced the points he had made in his Mather preface but went much further, reiterating warnings against state subversion. Judicial restraint alone could avert it. S. objects: But good men might well be sacrificed to the devil in the meantime! B. reminds his interlocutor that wherever the blame ultimately falls, graver matters are at stake. As he could not do elsewhere, Willard questioned the trial evidence. Preternatural knowledge, argues B., has no place in an earthly courtroom. Whether bewitched, possessed, or both, the girls were in league with the devil. How else could they offer their eerie predictions, report on things that had happened before they were born, or accuse people they had never met?

  Does B. really mean to “altogether invalidate the testimony of our afflicted?” objects S. Indeed, B. does. How could a distracted, discontented person qualify as a competent witness or testify about people she did not know? And how could the court trust a witness who did not even face the prisoner at the bar, as was required by law? (“That was because the witches smite them down with their poisoned looks,” S. explains.) The two-witness rule happens to be crucial, B. reminds S., who disagrees. “If one man say that he saw lions in Africa last year, and another comes and says that he saw lions there this year; though it was not at the same time, nor likely the same individual lions: why then may it not do in this case?”

  Although neither man has attended a trial, S. assures B. that no suspect has wound up in
carcerated solely on spectral evidence. B. begs to differ. S. consoles himself that the touch test and the evil eye never fail; B. quibbles with both practices.* But what of the baptisms, the meetings, the sacraments? persists S. Again B. asks how a confessed witch might offer credible testimony. “Do you really believe that all the persons accused are witches?” he challenges. Because the scale of the attack seems implausible. S. agrees, leading B. to attempt to persuade him that the accusers either lie or suffer delusions. The two ultimately, fearfully agree to disagree. S. cannot resist a parting shot. “You are an admirable advocate for witches,” he informs B., who sighs. He has heard the charge before. It was the label that attached itself to anyone who dared question the court before October.

  HOW OFTEN WILLARD had been so labeled—and how often he had been pilloried for his views—became clear in another paper that began to circulate privately, probably among very few hands, on October 8. From it we know more of what Willard could not express but was by that fall everywhere discussed. The paper’s author was thirty-four-year-old Thomas Brattle, an Anglican-leaning, Harvard-educated merchant, son of one of the richest men in Massachusetts. Brattle wrote to an unnamed minister who, midstorm, solicited his views. Thoughtfully Brattle provided them. He was uniquely well positioned to do so, as one of the best-read men in Massachusetts who neither preached nor held government office. On close terms with the court, he had no familial ties to the Phips administration. Like many of Boston’s ministers, he was a man of science. Unlike many of them, he had regularly observed Salem arraignments and trials. He had been on hand for Stoughton’s initial jury instructions, for Mary Bradbury’s September 9 turn as a blue boar, and for the August 19 hanging.

  Nearly a generation younger than Sewall, the youngest of the witchcraft judges, Brattle sounded like the kind of man who had had to teach himself Euclidean geometry at Harvard, as indeed he was; the subject was beyond the ken of his tutors. He had taken precise measurements of a comet sighted in New England over a decade earlier. As critically, to Brattle a comet was just a comet. He had missed the commotion over the Goodwin children, having spent much of the 1680s in England, in part working with chemist Robert Boyle. Even before that trip, Brattle had chafed at New England provincialism. He tended to believe simple solutions the best ones, a novel idea in Boston; in many ways he seemed to have parachuted into 1692 from another century altogether. As much as he today makes his compatriots sound like an extinct species engaging in a medieval rite, he was no rabble-rouser. It was Brattle who prefaced his remarks with the caveat that he preferred to bite off his fingertips than cast aspersions on authority. He did not however believe men to be infallible. When they erred, it was essential to speak up. He dissociated himself from the fractious types stirring up Boston. He had no political agenda; he did not oppose the new charter. But sometimes silence was unconscionable. Covering himself as he waded ahead—he hoped he was not walking into a snare by speaking his mind; Reverend Milborne had been arrested for far less—he undermined every assumption of Stoughton’s court. He also avoided signing his letter.

  As Brattle saw it, the trials were remarkable for irregularities of all kinds. How could a worldly, longtime associate of John Alden’s—a captain of industry, Bartholomew Gedney had made and lost fortunes—turn on Alden because his touch appeared to relieve a poor child of her suffering? How could Reverend Noyes, “a learned, a charitable, and a good man,” trust in the evil eye? It was all claptrap, the kind of village nonsense practiced by “the ruder and more ignorant sort.” Who did not have an unusual mark somewhere on his body? Since when did a failure to cry indicate guilt? (Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney were particularly fierce on that point.) The bulk of the charges moreover had nothing to do with witchcraft. Brattle balked at judicial procedures: The court was partial, its methods benighted, its hearings a travesty. Did the magistrates really claim they had never convicted on spectral evidence alone? That was patently untrue. And only a man out of his wits would accept it as legal evidence. Why was Justice Corwin’s mother-in-law—accused several times—still at large? The court allowed confessed witches, who had renounced God and Christ, to swear under oath; Brattle quibbled over the very term “confessors.” Testimony had been extracted by force, and from some of the most pious women in New England.

  He went far beyond Willard, who could not bring himself to criticize the court. Brattle stressed the human cost: whole families had been torn apart. Those miserable Andover husbands who had believed the words of the village children over those of their own wives! They could now only “grieve and mourn bitterly.” Indeed, fifty-five had confessed to diabolical plots. But some had maintained their innocence for over eighteen hours, “after most violent, distracting, and dragooning methods had been used with them.” They thought themselves near death. He made clear how it was that “most would have chosen to have fallen into the hands of the barbarous enemy than”—as a later critic phrased it—“the hands of their brethren in church fellowship.”

  Brattle did not inquire how this remarkable mishap had come about, more dismayed by where events were leading. He had a few ideas as to culprits, however. While he choked on court procedures, he reserved special scorn for the bewitched. Who had deemed them visionaries? For the record, if they named people they had never met, that information could only come from the devil. (The same went for the confessors, their accounts riddled with contradictions.) If truly they suffered, how—here he specifically contradicted Stoughton’s instructions to the jury that the intent to work witchcraft alone mattered—did they appear “hale and hearty, robust and lusty” day after day? As for spectral sight, the scientist in Brattle railed. It did not require an education in optics to grasp that it was “an utter impossibility” to see with one’s eyes shut. That was not vision. It was imagination. There was as much reason to imprison Elizabeth Knapp as to countenance Salem’s “blind, nonsensical girls.” They were just as likely to turn out to have been delusional. At worst they were possessed. He was not the only one who thought of Knapp, whose history hung heavily over the proceedings. Willard alone left her out of both his public pronouncements and his underground one, even while the possession thesis continued to clunk around. Others had raised the Knapp case with Stoughton. The chief justice spoke of her uncharitably, “as though,” reported Brattle, “he believed her to be a witch to this day.”

  Like everyone else, he had the greatest of respect for Stoughton and for the chief justice’s wisdom and integrity. But as everyone who had observed him agreed, he was on this issue a brutal zealot, impatient with anything that challenged his opinions. Along with Stoughton, the Salem justices (or “the Salem gentlemen,” as Brattle had them) constituted the prime movers. Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney—and, at their sides, Reverends Noyes, Parris, and Higginson—frowned on queries, even those posed by their closest friends. Criticism of any kind rankled, eliciting irate answers.

  Brattle found risible the idea of an unprecedented, infernal assault on New England’s churches. He feared a different diabolical design. Turning the tables, he suggested—one wonders who his correspondent was, as Brattle was well beyond sedition by his sixth paragraph—that the court participated in “an hellish design to ruin and destroy this poor land.” He had no time for Willard’s chary, painstakingly open-ended conclusions. If people were imprisoned purely on complaints of the afflicted, and the afflicted acted on information provided by the devil, then the justices themselves collaborated with the devil. The infernal agents sat, in their dark gowns, on the bench; the Salem gentlemen were actually the ones possessed, “with ignorance and folly.” Brattle reserved his compassion not for the convulsing girls, as did the authorities, or the hardworking justices, as did the Mathers, but for the husbands who had mistrusted and misled wives, for John Willard and John Procter, who had displayed such nobility in their last minutes, and for New England itself.* He alone voiced several wider concerns. How might anyone involved in the trials not later “look back upon these things without the gr
eatest of sorrow and grief imaginable?” He trembled at the thought, the first to anticipate an indelible stain on New England, one that ages would not remove.

  Brattle knew the future of the court was among the first matters to be discussed at the meeting of the legislative assembly on October 12, four days after he wrote. He hoped the assembly would disband it. If not, “I think we may conclude that N.E. is undone and undone.” Just before that session, Phips received the second opinion he had sought in New York. Its Protestant clergymen fielded eight concise questions, moving from the global—did witches exist?—to the particular. What proof served to convict, what role did a fine reputation or a prior transgression play, and was spectral evidence sufficient for conviction? It is clear from the queries what the sticking points had become; Brattle was not alone in wondering about the village girls. Could the French Huguenot and three Dutch Calvinist ministers explain how those daily fending off diabolical assaults remained in such strapping good health?

  The New York ministers and the Massachusetts ministers communicated in their sole common language, which was Latin. Fellow Calvinists, they saw eye to eye. The New Yorkers shared the Massachusetts missive as well with an especially learned, idealistic young Trinity graduate, newly arrived in New York as chaplain to the English forces and, at that point, the sole working Episcopal clergyman in the province.* All agreed; the devil indeed made cunning use of “lies, miracles, promises, fictitious or real sensual indulgences, honors, riches, and other innumerable allurements.” He lured some into commerce with him; witchcraft consisted of that very pact. As to prior malice and unblemished reputations, the ministers had better news for the late Sarah Good than for the late Rebecca Nurse. The first was immaterial. Even a good man could find cause to dislike his neighbor. A fine reputation was worth little. Yet again a panel of experts deemed spectral evidence insufficient for conviction. To rely on that evidence alone “would be the greatest imprudence.” As for the girls, their robust health should give no pause. The devil, explained the New York ministers, could see to it that his victims grew stronger under their affliction, craving and swallowing “greater quantities of nourishment than before.” He operated as a kind of steroid. He could reverse all effects of torture.