The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  The Sunday after Alden absented himself from the Third Church pews, Deodat Lawson preached in Charlestown. He spoke of family discipline, reminding the heads of households of their obligations to children, servants, slaves. Lawson warned against distraction and the rote discharge of duties. Parents should be neither overly formal nor overtedious. Ministers could be as remiss as anyone on those fronts; they too could prove “saints abroad and devils at home.” For whatever reason, he aimed his lament specifically at children “twelve, fourteen, or sixteen years of age,” a neglected and indulged cohort. Were those youngsters not the cause of New England’s afflictions? No wonder Satan managed to frighten them “into subjection to him, and covenant with him.” Their parents had forsaken them; confusion, rebellion, disobedience, and diabolical pacts followed. Lawson published the text—armored with an Increase Mather endorsement and a Sewall dedication—in 1693. The pages could only have discomfited Samuel Parris. Lawson had strayed some distance from his earlier claim that the pious home was the vulnerable home.

  There was as much cause for soul-searching at the Salem village parsonage as anywhere; five accusers and four of the afflicted lived at that address, more than at any other. Parris was not insensitive to the burdens his family had placed on the community. (One wonders what the villagers thought as they passed his much-contested, much-discussed meadow.) Weeks after Lawson’s sermon, Parris offered to forgo six pounds of his 1692 salary, “to gratify neighbors and to attempt the gain of amity.” He would do the same again the coming year. (He could not resist adding that he made the sacrifice although events had cost him dearly, too.) He made no move to retrieve Tituba, an embarrassment and an expense. As the court was disbanded, as prisons emptied and families reunited, she remained behind bars. Someone paid her jail costs at the end of 1693, effectively buying her. She left Massachusetts.

  For some, the return to normality proved impossible. The taint of witchcraft endured; one forever carried about one an “indefinable peculiarity.”* Before his death, John Procter had warned that suspects were condemned before their trials. They remained so after their acquittals. His widow’s case was worse than most: he had made no provision for Elizabeth in his will, which left her contending in vain with her relatives, “for they say,” she informed the court, “I am dead in the law.” They had ample reason to want to wash their hands of a temperamental and tainted stepmother. (She moved to Lynn, where she remarried.) Reverend Dane’s daughter—also reprieved on account of pregnancy—returned to her ailing husband and her six older children. She lived “only as a malefactor.” Having been accused of “the most heinous crime that mankind can be supposed to be guilty of,” her life was in tatters, her family, she feared, vulnerable to new charges. Nor was what she termed the “perpetual brand of infamy” the sole burden. Martha Carrier’s strapping sons had survived torture. Having confessed to flying through the air to a witch meeting, they had helped convict their mother. Orphaned, they discovered themselves to be related to a woman immortalized as the queen of hell.

  While the hangings relieved afflictions, the trials crippled many more. Sarah Cloyce emerged from prison decrepit, having spent five months with irons on her hands and legs. Mary English returned from exile an invalid, to die in 1694, at forty-two. At least four witch suspects perished in prison. At the time of her release, little Dorothy Good had spent eight and a half months in miniature manacles. Her infant sister died before her eyes. She had watched her mother, against whom she had testified, head defiantly off to the gallows. Dorothy went insane; she would require care for the rest of her life. Mary Esty and Susannah Martin each left seven children. There were a great number of orphans.

  Witchcraft demanded long memories and accountability; no one had a taste for either in 1693, when villagers who once forgot nothing suddenly found themselves amnesiac. Insofar as any of them searched for reasons, they asked what had brought down the “damned crew of devils or witches” in the first place. Their descent called for piety rather than apologies; Andover and Salem must not become as notorious as Sweden. New England did not care to be remembered as “New Witch-land!” It would be some time before anyone asserted that you could not possibly fly through the air to a remote destination and return in an hour or so (for one thing, you would not be able to breathe, John Hale would point out in 1697), far longer before anyone suggested that twenty innocents had been put to death. (Hale went to his grave believing otherwise.)

  As for Brattle’s assertion that when men err, we are duty-bound to point out as much, it too evaporated. Shame obliterated blame; few agreed that there is nothing so honorable as admitting a mistake. The passive tense has rarely had such a workout; in the end the only one who dared point a finger was unruly Governor Phips. He reproached his crusading, calculating chief justice. Stoughton felt no need to defend his decisions, nor did anyone care for him to. Confessors disavowed their stories, some claiming that they had invented them in order to save their lives. Several accusers and witnesses were, it was revealed, “persons of profligate and vicious conversation.” A few admitted they had lied; others insisted that they remembered nothing of what they had testified. It was as if all simply, suddenly awoke, shaking off their strange tales, from a collective preternatural dream.

  The Mathers would go on prophesying the Second Coming and calculating its date, which in mid-1693 Cotton Mather promised was but a few years in the future. In the same sermon he railed against Salem’s “matchless enchantments and possessions.” The two words henceforth traveled in tandem. Witches reverted to “evil angels.” Only occasionally did anyone allude to cheats or “distempered creatures,” to “wicked and malicious people who feigned themselves bewitched, possessed or lunatic.” Unneighborly behavior was again just unneighborly behavior; wives could again drag husbands from taverns without being accused of witchcraft. You could be lewd, just plain wicked, or raving mad. Women disturbed men in their sleep and transformed themselves into cats—as they had done for decades and would continue to well into the nineteenth century—but they no longer wound up in court for these offenses. It has been noted that in the years immediately following the trials women did not have an easy time getting convicted for anything. Villagers scratched their heads over enchanted fireplaces, ambulatory trees, and misplaced saucers but were more circumspect about those oddities, participating in another New England specialty: that of leaving things unsaid. After the acoustical runaway of the witchcraft crisis—the voices rising to a fever pitch—1692 left in its wake a thundering reticence. Naturally most of what Essex County labored to forget is precisely what we want to know.

  Some wrongs were immediately righted. In June 1693, John Ruck, the grand jury foreman, became the guardian of George Burroughs’s orphaned, abandoned sons. He arranged for their baptisms. Also that month, the widow of George Jacobs, the salty, stooped wizard, married the widower of Sarah Wilds, the hay-enchanting Topsfield misfit. Their spouses had traveled together to prison in the same mid-May convoy. John Willard’s widow, who had cowered under the stairs after his beatings, married a Towne in 1694.* Much remained the same. Released from prison, Mary Toothaker had no home to which to return, Indians having destroyed Billerica. Two years later they returned to slaughter her, carrying her twelve-year-old daughter into captivity. The fall of 1693 meant renewed carnage in Maine as well. Massachusetts girls continued to disrupt sermons and convulse; by the fall of 1693 Cotton Mather was at work on a new case of possession, the first of two with which he conjured post-Salem.

  The only brooms that played a role in the witch hunt were wielded afterward by men, to sweep the year under the carpet. The authorities who had fallen all over themselves to vindicate the ouster of a royal governor four years earlier felt no need to justify themselves in 1693. On May 31, every member of the witchcraft court was reelected to the Massachusetts council—Stoughton by the widest margin, and Sewall with more votes than Saltonstall, who had stepped off the court. (Hathorne, Sewall, and Corwin still sat together on the bench tw
enty years later.) In his blundering fashion, Phips would continue to alienate every Massachusetts constituency. By 1693 many had come to agree with the New York governor’s description of him, as “a machine moved by every fanatical finger, the contempt of wise men and sport of the fools,” a state of affairs that would soon land the lieutenant governor, his popularity undimmed, in Phips’s office. Having prosecuted witches and then advised Phips against the proceedings, Checkley remained attorney general for at least a decade.

  Maniacal record keepers, New Englanders did not like for things to fall “in the grave of oblivion.” They made an exception for 1692, as they had for the Burroughs years, when Thomas Putnam retranscribed the village book of transactions, omitting those entries that “have been grievous to any of us in time past or that may be unprofitable to us for time to come.” That account jumps from January 27, 1692, to December 7, leapfrogging over all arrests and trials.* The eagerness to forget was as great as, for nine months, had been the strong-arming to remember. Parris kept a scrupulous record of village deaths. They included two he attributed to witchcraft and one that others did, but no mention of Giles Corey or any villager who had hanged. One family lopped an accuser off the family tree. Others camouflaged themselves with alternate spellings of their names, not altogether difficult given the extant variations. No one noted precisely where the hangings took place. (It appears to have been the triangle of land bounded today by Proctor, Pope, and Boston Streets.) For a hundred and fifty years, Giles Corey’s ghost would haunt the field in which he was thought to have been pressed to death. A monument to the events of 1692 would wait another hundred and fifty.

  Sewall practically bypasses the events in his diary, an omission he would address five years later. The 1692 pages of the Milton minister—who recorded every thunderclap and haircut—are lost. Even critics of the trials, even men who in the clearest of hands preserved every detail of colonial life—Thomas Danforth was both—left no record. Willard’s sermons for the summer disappeared from his published body of work and from an attentive churchgoer’s notebook. Wait Still Winthrop’s 1692 and 1693 letters are missing from his family correspondence. In what has been described as retrospective glosses, Mather collapsed his account of the trials into a few pages. His writing about 1692 is all rewriting. (He so much aimed his remarks at posterity that he referred to himself in the third person, a different brand of transparent, out-of-body experience.) Anyone looking for a true ghost story might ask what happened to the court’s official record book, of which Stephen Sewall took special care and which he surely kept close at hand. That silence would be the real conspiracy of 1692.*

  Even those who had reason to believe themselves unpardonably wronged remained tongue-tied. Petitioning for redress, the Corey children noted that their father had been pressed under stones. They could bring themselves to say about their mother only that she was “put to death also, though in another way.” The word “witches” figures nowhere in the heaps of pasteurized reparations claims. Families referred instead to the “sufferers of the year 1692,” to loved ones who had endured the “late troubles at Salem,” to events precipitated by “the powers of darkness” in the course of “that dark and mysterious season.”

  LIKE THE MINISTER’S fence, pastoral relations in Salem village appeared beyond repair. Phips had not yet written London of his expert management of the witchcraft crisis when Parris invited five churchmen to meet with representatives from the disaffected Nurse clan at the parsonage on the afternoon of February 7. He needed to coax them back into the fold; their refusal to participate in the sacrament spiritually compromised the entire congregation. After a prayer, he inquired into the men’s grievances. They were unforthcoming. Parris suggested they return in two weeks’ time. He knew their position perfectly well; the three had called unexpectedly earlier that morning, when he heard them out in his study. (On that occasion he took pains to separate the parties.) In appealing to the girls to name witches, Parris indulged in the same brand of shameless superstition practiced by witch-cake bakers. How could he have sworn in court that anyone had been raised by a touch or felled by a glance? Had it not been for him, raged a Nurse son and son-in-law, each for over an hour, Rebecca Nurse would still be alive. To their minds Parris was “the great prosecutor.” The men refused to accept communion from their minister until he apologized.

  The bulk of witchcraft literature on his side, Parris saw no cause to reconsider his views. And he remained a stickler. The “displeased brethren,” as he dubbed them, returned the following day. Sarah Cloyce’s husband climbed to the parsonage study first. A full church member accompanied him. Parris insisted on a second disinterested party. Both sides believed they were resolving their disputes according to the dictates of Matthew 18, a text that mandated two witnesses to a grievance procedure; the disagreement devolved into the proper interpretation of three verses of Scripture. Late in March 1693, the men produced an unsigned, undated petition calling for a church council to determine “blameable cause,” two words that most in Essex County kept painstakingly apart that year. Displeased to discover that the men had consulted with neighboring clergymen, Parris asked who, precisely, subscribed to their document. The Nurse contingent allowed only that they spoke for many in the province. Parris stuck the petition in his pocket. “I told them I would consider of it,” he noted. It was a year to the date since the incendiary, one-of-you-is-a-devil sermon that had sent Sarah Cloyce storming from the meetinghouse. The same day, in Boston, Cotton Mather and his wife lost a newborn son, a death Mather attributed to witchcraft.*

  When an April delegation called—a group that included widowed Francis Nurse—Parris informed them that he could not talk. He was off to a private prayer meeting. Flanked by various Putnams and his deacons, he met the following week with his detractors. Plucking their paper from his pocket, Parris read it aloud. What did they call such a document? Because he termed it a libel. The Nurses produced a second copy, bearing forty-two signatures. Parris cried fraud. All the signatures appeared in the same hand! Had anyone even signed the document—the charge was staggering in light of events—of his own free will? And was he answering to disaffected villagers or to disaffected church members? Because this happened to be purely an ecclesiastical matter. The two sides went back and forth until nightfall. They were evenly matched. In cogent petitions and dramatic exits, no family had expressed themselves as energetically as the Nurses. And no one was so intent on justice or exactitude as Samuel Parris, who—having devoted nine months of his life to meticulous testimony—now found himself accused of having produced garbled notes. (He was a far more conscientious reporter than many, including Thomas Putnam.)

  A large meeting took place at the parsonage a month later. If the Parris children still convulsed, they did so with cause: belligerent, grim-faced men tramped in and out of their home for a series of interminable, bruising debates. Already well familiar with a regime that rarely accepted apologies and issued none, that dealt in chapter-and-verse accusations and fussy, hoop-jumping technicalities, the children grew accustomed to the heavy footfalls in the entryway porch. After prayers that Thursday, Parris turned to the dissenters. What had they to say? They asked to air their grievances publicly. Parris managed to hold them off. Some fierce, un-Christian name-calling ensued, the kisses on which Parris had so tenderly expounded in October nowhere in evidence. The dissenters appealed to Phips and the provincial authorities. They got nowhere. In the fall of 1694 they turned to the Boston clergy. Willard directed Noyes, Hale, and Higginson to persuade Parris to settle the festering matter before a council of ministers. The word “witchcraft” figured nowhere in those communications.

  Cotton Mather was in Salem town that fall and surely reiterated the message: Parris was causing a scandal. (It was on that visit that specters made off with Mather’s papers. He returned home to find his young neighbor Margaret Rule tormented by eight demons—and asking, unprompted, about his missing notes. The seventeen-year-old had heard specters b
rag that they had stolen them.) Parris explained the village feud to his well-meaning colleagues. He had not been obstructionist. He did however insist on order. The dissenters subjected him to repeated abuse. He had tried to coax them back with his sermons; the church doors, insisted Parris, remained open. (“And as you are my sheep, I expect you hear my voice” did not strike the Nurses as an invitation, much less an olive branch.) He felt he had attempted any number of “kind and heart-affecting wooings.” Still the defectors would not return for the Lord’s Supper. His troubles, Parris insisted, were without parallel. The stalemate persisted. The Nurse men would not share the particulars of their grievances until Parris named a council. Parris would not name a council until he had reviewed the grievances.

  On the afternoon of November 13, 1693, still unable to agree on how to proceed, Parris read his own complaints aloud to his critics. He had seventeen. The Nurse clan breached the covenant. They set an evil example. They were disorderly, accusatory, uncharitable. They reproached the community at home and defamed it abroad. They libeled their minister and harassed him in his own home, spreading word—to the governor, the court, and the Boston ministers—that Parris was “unpeacable.” They claimed that he had made prayer impossible for over a year when they had been in their pews long after “the breaking forth of the late horrid witchcraft.” The meeting consumed an afternoon. Two weeks later Parris informed the Nurses that the church had rejected their demand for a council. They might care to consider what Scripture had to say about making peace. He suggested a few texts. A full year went by.

  Weeks after Phips had finally received a reply from the Crown to his February 1693 letter regarding the trials—Queen Mary signed off on a vague response, commending the care with which the governor had managed the crisis and advising him to proceed against any future witchcraft or possession with “the greatest moderation and all due circumspection”—seven ministers again exhorted Parris to resolve the dispute. He spent July 5, 1694, praying, fasting, and mulling over the issue with his stalwarts. He also rejected the ministers’ advice. Weeks later they wondered if they had been unclear. They outlined a simple arbitration strategy. Parris was to resolve the matter before winter. Anglican and Baptist steeples had begun to rise in Boston. Mary Esty climbed to the gallows two years earlier.