The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  In 1693 Calef had begun work on More Wonders of the Invisible World, its very title a provocation. Completed in 1697, the book was later printed in London. Already Calef had circulated a salacious paper accusing Mather of attempting to ignite another Salem with his treatment of seventeen-year-old Margaret Rule, who had delivered the news of Mather’s missing notes. Calef suggested that both Mathers had handled the teenager indecently. They had done no such thing, Mather assured him. He had not asked how many witches sat on Margaret; he had expressly asked she not reveal names. His father had by no means touched her belly. Why would he, when the imp that afflicted her was said to be on her pillow? (He worked over those lines with uncharacteristic care, crossing out more than was his habit.) A Mather friend supplied Calef with the minister’s account of Margaret’s bedroom ravings and levitations, which Calef shared, a wholesale embarrassment five years after Salem. Mather denounced him from the pulpit and nearly had him arrested for libel. Calef agreed that witches existed but argued that Scripture provided no reliable means of identifying them. Hanging them in no way inconvenienced the devil. Men, Calef believed, should desist from dabbling in divine affairs. They tended to make a botch of them.

  The immediate wrangling was with reputations rather than consciences; for the most part it was easier to settle than offer accounts. When George Corwin died on a snowy spring day in 1696, Philip English evidently threatened to seize the body. He would return it, he bellowed, only in exchange for some portion of the fifteen-hundred-pound estate the late sheriff had confiscated.* The sight of his bobtailed cow in Corwin’s yard infuriated him. English turned up repeatedly in court thereafter for withholding his church taxes (an offense that landed him in jail) and for undermining the authority of the Salem selectmen (an office to which he had been elected weeks before his accusation). He called ministers and justices robbers. He refused to worship in a meetinghouse “infested” by Puritans. Salem’s was “the devil’s church.” He was still blasting the clergy in 1722, when the court indicted him for calling Nicholas Noyes—dead for twenty-one years—a murderer. Family lore has him excoriating Hathorne on his deathbed.

  Naturally no one took more shots at an analysis than Cotton Mather. Typically he inched closer and closer to the scene, placing himself more often at Salem than he had suggested in 1692; a reader of his later pages would assume he had attended the trials. Given how insistently he positioned himself at the center of events, it is understandable that he would come to be blamed for them, when he had urged every kind of moderation, denounced spectral evidence, attended no hearing, and played no prosecutorial role.* For once causality was not a burning issue; the origin of the plague of evil angels interested Mather less than its utility. So that proper use might be made of those “stupendous and prodigious things,” he had written Wonders of the Invisible World. He regretted no page of that volume, despite the abuse the “reviled book” had earned him. Nor did he for a moment question the judges’ “unspotted fidelity.” He put his finger on something that remained invisible to him: political considerations had grossly disfigured moral ones. Mather did have one theory, either late in 1692 or very soon thereafter. Was this infestation of evil angels, he mused in his diary, not “intended by hell, as a particular defiance, unto my poor endeavors, to bring the souls of men into heaven?” He credited others with that idea.†

  Mather folded something more of an explanation into his 1697 life of William Phips, a fairy tale written to exonerate a disastrous administration and the men behind it. In those pages he attributed the Salem epidemic to youthful spell-casting and fortune-telling. Books of superstition had poisoned adolescent minds, inviting down devils in “as astonishing a manner as was ever heard of.” He insisted still on diabolical compacts but jettisoned the witches’ meetings. Fortunately Phips had arrived in the nick of time to assemble a distinguished court. The judges had acted effectively, perhaps too effectively. Government subversion was at stake, however; Satan attempted to wrest their hard-won new charter from their hands. Mather reprinted the June “Return of Several Ministers,” or did in part; he omitted the introductory call to arms as well as the concluding recommendation for “a speedy and vigorous prosecution.” Writing to political ends, Mather was thrilled to report, upon publication, that his enemies were “in much anguish at the book.”

  He did not forget Sweden, although he no longer advertised the smile of God he had promised the witchcraft justices in exchange for their labors. Rather he allowed that that affair too had ended in confusion. How could Massachusetts Bay have fared better when the kingdom of Sweden could not penetrate their witchcraft? (They had. The children had lied.) Like the jurors, he fingered the devil and man’s blinkered understanding. “Whole clouds of witnesses” could swear to what they had seen. As a last word on the subject he could only paraphrase a favorite early Christian writer: “Devils can cause men to see things that do not exist as if they did.” Everyone was a victim.

  Mather expressed no remorse; his doubts never escaped his diary. He could not however stay away from the subject, which he worried like a loose tooth. He would not let the curtain fall on the witchcraft, struggling for years afterward to keep it onstage, something he would have cause to regret. Stoughton took the silent route and escaped all odium. Mather wrote himself into the story. In his 1702 Magnalia—the epic New England history that would include the Phips hagiography—he devoted a full book to wonders. He elaborated on the Goodwin story. He slipped Indian chiefs into the Salem epidemic. He had long suspected that those “horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers” had played the precipitating role in that “inexplicable war.” An executed witch, he claimed, had seen them at the diabolical meetings, along with a crew of Frenchmen. In concert they plotted to ruin New England.

  By the time the Magnalia was published, Beverly minister John Hale had produced a very different account of the trials. He had waited five years for someone else to make sense of the episode. No one had. Blind though he was to the pilfering in his household, Hale was uniquely qualified for the task. He had witnessed the girls’ initial distress. He had spent countless hours in the courtroom, at hearings and hangings, alongside Parris and Noyes and in their confidence. He had testified against three women. He plainly labored to square the incontrovertible truth that innocents had died with the conviction that the judges had acted righteously. “But such was the darkness of that day,” Hale lamented, “the tortures and the lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former precedents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.” Desperately he tried to dispense with the guilt—more must be done for the relief of those whose estates and reputations lay in ruins—and settle on a sufficient, safe method for the detection of witchcraft. He came closer to admitting error than anyone; still, he lurched confusedly. They might have been too vigorous in their prosecution but must not be too lenient in the future. Hale hints he had “special reasons” to address the matter before he died; he may or may not already have realized that he had testified against one woman thinking she was another. He settled on the same causes as did Mather, minus the Indians, the political agenda, and the personal affront. Hale admitted to what none of us does easily; the events of 1692 had brought him “to a more strict scanning of the principles I had imbibed, to question, and questioning at length, to reject many of them.” He brushed uneasily past a half-articulated idea: the belief in witchcraft rather than witches themselves had unsettled Salem.

  Crises invite two kinds of memoir: the don’t-blame-me-I-wasn’t-on-hand version, and the it-would-have-been-far-worse-had-I-not-been. Salem got only the first treatment. No heroes identified themselves. John Higginson, the senior town minister, introduced Hale’s pages. He too fingered Satan. Twenty had met with a “tragical end.” Some might have been innocent. Others who had escaped prosecution might have been guilty. He acknowledged qualms about court procedures despite the impeccable judges and juries. He then dissociated himself entirely from the trials. “I stirred little,” he wro
te, deferring to his age (he had been seventy-six), “and was much disenabled (both in body and mind) from knowing and judging the occurrents and transactions of that time.” Higginson had testified against no one but was intimately involved. He had offered courtroom prayers. He knew every detail of the proceedings. His son spent days recording testimony, his daughter some of 1692 in custody. Hale’s was a brave essay on a perilous subject, one he chose not to publish in his lifetime. Surely by design, A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft appeared only in 1702, the year after Stoughton died.

  Remarkably few traces of disapproval survive among or toward the authorities.* Parents still sent children to be educated by Reverend Noyes. Cotton Mather preached Moody’s funeral sermon five years after Moody had helped the Englishes escape. Sewall dedicated a 1697 apocalyptic tract to Stoughton, who would devote his administration to fending off Indian incursions and frustrating French designs. Already chief justice, councillor, and lieutenant governor, Stoughton served for several years as commander in chief of the colony’s troops; he assumed as well the responsibilities of judge of the admiralty. It would take several men to replace him. Sewall was at his bedside on July 4, 1701. “Pray for me!” were sixty-nine-year-old Stoughton’s last words to his longtime colleague. He reached out a hand as his visitor left; Sewall kissed it. Three days later he was dead. Willard preached the funeral sermon, dwelling perhaps a note too long on the failure to repent. On occasion even the best of men provoked God, noted Willard, so that “though he loves their persons, yet he dislikes the things that are so done by them.”

  Two days after Sewall’s visit, Stoughton had finalized his will. He opened it “most humbly begging and believing the pardon of all my great and many sins both of heart and life,” a formulaic phrasing. The document is a model of enlightened largesse; if a man can be judged by his last wishes, Stoughton was as compassionate as he was methodical. He forgot no one, from his housekeeper to the council doorkeeper to Harvard College, to which he left land, a four-story building, and scholarship monies. He provided for an indigent and deserving scholar. He stipulated that several Stoughton Hall rooms be reserved for Indian students, gratis. Separately, he set aside monies for Indian education. He settled a vast sum on Dorchester’s school and forty acres on Milton’s poor. For a century he had no rival among Harvard College benefactors.*

  Mather and Maule continued their battle, Mather writing the Indian war down to Quakers, Maule the witchcraft down to Wonders, that “parcel of dark confused airy matter.” Still the cloud would not dissipate; appeals for economic reparations and for the clearing of names piled up. As ever, they distinguished between the “errors and mistakes” in the trials and “the care and conscientious endeavor of the honorable judges,” as a group of Topsfield petitioners had it, lobbying for relief. (Ministers submitted petitions for the convicted, although no Salem town or village minister signed one.) A curse lay on the land. Where once witches had explained God’s frown, the bungled prosecution now did. As Brattle had warned, it was not easy to discharge the guilt. It festered, as the memory of an insult proves more potent than the insult itself, something 1692 had made abundantly clear.

  Twelve years after Ann Foster, her daughter, and her granddaughter had incriminated one another, Michael Wigglesworth, the seventy-three-year-old Malden cleric, himself a punctilious and sensitive soul, weighed in, writing Increase Mather of his concerns.† An elder statesman, Wigglesworth had taught Sewall and both Mathers. As it so often does, the preoccupation with justice grew out of a perceived injustice. A drought that year threatened New England’s farms; Wigglesworth feared “that God hath a controversy with us what was done in the time of witchcraft.” The judges had been imposed upon by the devil or by “the devil’s impostures.” They had shed innocent blood, for which they had never personally assumed responsibility. He understood the subject was off-limits but no choice remained. He was especially appalled by the plundering of estates, something that had not accompanied earlier witchcraft prosecutions. (Nor had there been many wealthy witches before 1692.)* The failure properly to compensate families of those condemned in the “supposed witchcraft” compounded the shame; the curse would not lift until the court made proper amends. He urged Mather to pursue the matter. (Five years later, Philip English and twenty others still clamored for reparations, always with a respectful word for the judges. English submitted a claim for nearly twelve hundred pounds. He would receive three hundred in 1718.) No justice stepped forward, as Wigglesworth advised. The only one who had, regretted his courage soon enough; when in 1720 Samuel Sewall saw how the history books were being written, he was mortified. There was his humiliating confession for all posterity!

  One bit of reckoning remained. On August 25, 1706, Ann Putnam Jr. stood amid the Salem village congregation to be admitted as a full church member. She was twenty-seven. Both her parents had died, leaving nine siblings in her care. Ann had not married. In more prosperous times, she had been afflicted by at least sixty-two people, among them her former minister, now dead; a neighbor, now dead; and teenage Dorothy Good, now insane. Of the nineteen who had been hanged, she had testified under oath against all but two. For over eight months whole communities had hung on her every syllable. She now stood silently as, from the same pulpit on which she had wildly pointed to a yellow bird during Lawson’s sermon, Salem’s new minister read aloud her confession. The onetime prophet begged forgiveness of those whose relatives she had caused to be arrested or accused. She profoundly regretted the calamity she had caused. In particular she apologized to the Nurse, Esty, and Cloyce families, their ranks thin in the village pews by 1706. They were innocent. She twice reminded the congregation that she had acted in concert “with others.” Whoever drafted her statement had the jurors’ apology before him; as had they, Ann declared she had acted “ignorantly and unwittingly.” She too had been neither able “to understand, nor able to withstand, the mysterious delusions of the powers of darkness and Prince of the air.” Three times in her short statement she notes she had been an “instrument” in his designs.

  There was no need to look any farther for a culprit. Their constant and implacable companion, so much in the air they breathed, an occupant of every Massachusetts town, had made them do it. In Salem village as elsewhere he crept back into the discourse. In a particularly ebullient 1693 address, Mather had devils everywhere in the air, “watching, wishing, snatching, to devour us.” Meanwhile, the ground shifted gradually underfoot. The witches gradually became martyrs. It would be years before anyone asked whose delusion it had been anyway, before anyone dared to suggest that the judges were themselves the sorcerer’s apprentices, that they rather than the village girls had been the “blind, nonsensical” parties, the ones possessed, if “with ignorance and folly.” Which did not answer the question of what had happened either.

  The petitions for redress grew increasingly emotional; in 1710 the Massachusetts legislature established a committee to process claims and clear Salem names. (Even in doing so they suggested they had simply prosecuted the wrong witch suspects.) In October 1711, the names of most victims were cleared and some families reimbursed for prison costs, still without any acknowledgment of responsibility. That ruling cleared jailers, constables, and sheriffs of any wrongdoing. It did not mention the justices. Many quarreled with the logic of the committee, which left open wounds and produced fresh indignities all around. Mather made a point of visiting Salem afterward “to endeavor an healing of all tendency to discord there.” Abigail Hobbs was rewarded for her inflammatory confession. William Good, who had denounced his own wife, made out especially well. Pleas for further redress continued. Still no one scurried off in disgrace. We know of only one witness who recanted, on his deathbed, admitting that his charges against Bridget Bishop had been groundless. It seemed pointless to attribute blame, just as it seemed impossible to make sense of the events of 1692. Few were innocent aside from those who had been hanged.

  BEFORE PARRIS CONCEDED they were bewitch
ed, before they turned into visionaries or martyrs, before anyone dismissed them as “vile varlets,” Abigail Williams and Betty Parris were thought to be diabolically possessed. They returned to that diagnosis as they grew to womanhood.* In every way the early Salem symptoms conformed to those of Elizabeth Knapp, the Goodwin children, and the two young women to whose bedsides Mather rushed post-Salem. We will never know what felled the girls, whether it had more to do with their souls or their chores, with parental attention or inattention. The prickling sensations, the twitching, stammering, and grimacing, the ulcerated skin and twisted limbs, the curled tongues and convex backs, the deliriums, the “furious invectives against imaginary individuals” do however conform precisely to what nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, with Freud following him, termed hysteria. Where the seventeenth-century authority saw the devil, we tend to recognize an overtaxed nervous system; what an earlier age called hysteria we term conversion disorder, the body literally translating emotions into symptoms. When sublimated, distress will manifest physically, holding the body hostage. Charcot’s drawings of convulsing hysterics agree in every detail with the scenes that left Deodat Lawson reeling.

  Conditions favored such an outbreak. The talk around Betty and Abigail was fraught, angry, apocalyptic. The house was cold and growing colder. Disaffected churchmen thumped heavily in and out of the parsonage to air powerful resentments. Betty and Abigail had no escape from those furies in early 1692, the dark, bleak, and confined months when death felt closer, when witchcraft accusations tended to peak. It helped that the girls occupied the kind of small, sealed-off place that makes good theater (and good detective fiction); witchcraft charges less often emanated from urban addresses. In an isolated community, in a tightly wound household, the people who observed and conceivably caused the girls’ distress were the only ones to whom they could appeal. Whether precipitated by a visit from Sarah Good, a message from the pulpit, or an interior anguish, something disabled them.