The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  XII

  A LONG TRAIN OF MISERABLE CONSEQUENCES

  People were chasing the wrong rabbit.

  —DONALD RUMSFELD

  ROUGHLY HALF OF the afflicted girls grew up, found husbands, and had children, if not necessarily in that order. Betty Parris married late and raised a family in Concord. No trace remains of her cousin Abigail, the exuberant witch hunter. She may have been the girl reported to have experienced “diabolical molestations to her death” and who died, still single, in 1697. Like Ann Putnam, Susannah Shelden failed to marry, highly uncommon in seventeenth-century New England. She wound up in Rhode Island charged as a “person of evil fame,” which was more common. Betty Hubbard found a husband only at thirty-six. Sarah Churchill, the Jacobs servant, married at forty-two, having earlier paid a fine for fornication. Mercy Lewis, the Putnams’ maid, bore an illegitimate child; she later married and moved to Boston. Mary Walcott, Abigail Hobbs, and Mary Lacey Jr. raised their families the old-fashioned way, several of them in the immediate area. For all of the deviations, at least some of the village girls appear to have turned out like the afflicted Goodwin girl, described in adulthood as “a very sober, virtuous woman”—and who never for a minute denied that she had witnessed witchcraft.

  The village ministers fared less well. James Bayley, who had introduced the future Ann Putnam Sr. to the village, fell on hard times in Roxbury. Samuel Sewall visited with cakes, with money for firewood, and, less helpfully, with verses by Reverend Noyes. Suffering from pleurisy, Bayley died an excruciating death in 1707. Having provided the most indelible portrait of the Salem shrieks and teeth marks, Deodat Lawson returned to England. Hemming and hawing a little, he republished his witchcraft account in 1704, to lift the enduring censure on his friends and insist yet again on the “operations of the powers of darkness.” The first to attempt to make sense of the epidemic, he remained the last retailing an account of it, the surviving 1963 Dallas Secret Service agent hawking his wares. Not long thereafter Lawson committed an indiscretion that left him issuing solemn apologies to the London ministry. He acknowledged having dishonored his profession with his “uneven and unwary conversation.” He battled for several years to clear his name. The offense may have had nothing to do with sensationalistic witchcraft pronouncements; he may simply have drunk too much. He had however spoken carelessly, as he could be said to have done in 1692. By 1714 he lived in abject poverty, his family starving, his three young children infected with smallpox, his wife debilitated. He tried unsuccessfully to raise funds for a collection of sermons, throwing himself on the mercy of friends. If no relief were forthcoming, he warned, “we must unavoidably perish.” He would be remembered as “the unhappy Mr. Deodat Lawson.”

  Samuel Parris remarried and fathered a second family. Trailed by the “difficulties and disturbances” of his ministry, he drifted about, landing in six communities over twelve years. He taught school, raised livestock, sold fabrics and sundries, preached in the smallest settlement in Massachusetts, and speculated in land. He overreached in one transaction; arrested for debt, he spent a few weeks of 1706 in jail in Cambridge. Having written and rewritten his will, Parris died in Sudbury at sixty-seven, a moderately wealthy man though one who continued to feel the world had shortchanged him. If he wrote another word on what he deemed that “very sore rebuke, and humbling providence,” it has not survived. His estate did not include his Salem pasture, which he had sold earlier.

  The village replaced Parris with a newly minted minister half his age. A Cambridge native, Joseph Green had been at Harvard in 1692; he well knew the singular history of the parsonage into which he moved, also with an Indian slave. A more temperate man, Green inherited a chastened flock. He welcomed back the dissenting brethren and reseated the meetinghouse, placing Nurses alongside Putnams, a daughter of Rebecca Nurse beside her accuser’s mother, where the women would have heard Ann Putnam Jr.’s 1706 apology. Against much opposition, Green reversed Martha Corey’s excommunication sentence.* It required less effort to convince his parishioners that they might breathe more easily in a new meetinghouse. They moved down the road, to the corner of Centre and Hobart Streets, where the First Church of Danvers stands today. The lumber of the old meetinghouse was left to decay, which it could not do quickly enough. Closure proved elusive; the Burroughs children petitioned still for redress in 1750. Green preached against fortune-telling a decade after Salem. Parishioners still slept in their pews. And Putnams complained of Salem village preaching.

  A 1704 visitor found Massachusetts an uncomfortable place where no one knew “on his lying down to sleep, but that he might lose his life before the morning, by the hands of a merciless savage.” Sewall woke from nightmares about the French in 1706. Mather nearly crossed paths with marauding Indians outside Andover that year; a niece disappeared into captivity at around the same time. While talk of evil angels quieted, the Apocalypse remained imminent. Mather forecast it for 1715. Sewall and Noyes still heatedly disputed passages of Revelation. Six-foot-long mermen with forked tails appeared on the rocks of Branford, Connecticut, as Cotton Mather alerted London’s Royal Society. In the early 1730s, the Boston clergy stepped in to heal “the mischievous unChristian divisions and contentions arising and prevailing” among the Salem town parishioners, their minister as “unpeacable” as Parris had been.

  The trials did not upend the church, but—assisted by the new charter and in conjunction with forces already in motion—they did erode its foundation. Attempting to prove one thing, the Puritan orthodoxy had proved quite another. The very idea of confession had been contaminated. Mather had warned that the Lord sent down devils to “stop the mouths of the faithless”; not incorrectly, Robert Calef noted that those evil angels created a fair number of atheists. Hale was not alone in more strictly scanning his principles. When the new Massachusetts governor took the oath of office a decade after Salem, he did so in a traditional, Bible-kissing Anglican ceremony. Mather found himself ordaining Baptists. Sewall lived to see Christmas celebrated. There had been no flying before 1692 and there would be none afterward. People accused one another of witchcraft well into the eighteenth century, but Massachusetts would not execute another witch.*

  We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways. Increase Mather turned from the study of devils to the study of angels. In 1721, a smallpox epidemic raged through Boston. Cotton Mather faced down the entire medical establishment to advocate something that seemed every bit as dubious as spectral evidence: inoculation. He had studied medicine at Harvard; he had come to well understand infectious disease. Moving from imps and witches to germs and viruses, he finally located the devils we inhale with every breath. The battle turned so vitriolic that it dragged Salem out of hiding, allowing Mather to be bludgeoned for lunacy on two counts. (It also allowed him to drag the devil back onstage. Given the “cursed clamor,” Satan seemed to have taken possession of Boston.) He remained as steadfast on the subject of inoculation as he had been equivocal on witchcraft. A homemade bomb came sailing in his window at three o’clock one morning. His reputation never recovered.*

  The trials claimed more casualties than were clear at the time; the devil himself failed to recover. Present though the Old Deluder remained—if you committed adultery in Massachusetts in 1721, you did so “by instigation of the devil”—“the roaring lion, the old dragon, the enemy of all righteousness,” as Parris had it in his apology, faded from the scene. He grew more abstract as evil retreated inside, less the master conspirator than the shadow of our poor judgment. By the end of Betty Parris’s lifetime, he had come, as a modern scholar has put it, to bear more resemblance to “a leprechaun than to the old grandmaster of hell.” Women also fared poorly after Salem, or at least went back to being invisible, where they remained, historically speaking, until a different scourge encouraged them to raise their voices, with suffrage and Prohibition.

  In 1728, the year of Mather’s death, a Medford minister could write off witchcraft as the stuff of fairy tales. Salem was ve
ry nearly ready to become one itself, to be recast and retold. At the same time Sewall resigned as chief justice. He lived two more years, attuned as ever to birdsong and rainbows, concerned with safeguarding the Massachusetts charter at all costs, to the end tripping over his conscience for the sake of consensus. In 1728 Topsfield and Salem resolved their border dispute. By the time of his death at 109, Martha Carrier’s widower had the satisfaction of seeing that Salem witchcraft had become the “supposed witchcraft” and that the villain of the piece was no longer his wife, the queen of hell, or even her so-called confederates. Sorcery yielded to possession, by the middle of the eighteenth century to fraud. It would require only another few decades for Brattle’s suggestion that the witches had more likely been the accusers to register, for anyone to note that authorities get feverish, too.

  The trials would take their place among those historical events that never happened until a generation or two after they did. Once they flickered back to life they refused to dim. Of all the portents and prophecies—those of the visionary girls, the boastful specters, the Mathers, the Salem woman who forecast a second storm of witchcraft—only Thomas Brattle’s came true. Ages would not “wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land.”* John Adams cited the trials as a “foul stain upon this country,” an irony for proceedings that had been intended to purify. The frenzy unleashed by a three-pence duty on tea seemed to one 1773 Massachusetts lawyer absurd, “and more disgraceful, to the annals of America than that of witchcraft.” Salem came in especially handy over the second half of the nineteenth century; it provided an effective piece of shrapnel when North and South took aim at each other. Frederick Douglass asked how the belief in slavery was any bit less objectionable than that in sorcery. Abolition, argued others, was a hallucination on par with Salem witchcraft. The 1860 election of Lincoln struck terror in the slave-owning South, leading a popular magazine to screech: “The North, who having begun with burning witches, will end by burning us!” All could agree on one matter: when you wanted to reach the emotional high notes, you reached for Salem.

  New England’s enemies arguably did more than anyone to keep Salem alive, as for so long the church had sustained the devil. The South woke in the nineteenth century to the fact that “those bigoted, fanatical, mischief-making, would-be enlighteners” north of the Mason-Dixon Line wrote the schoolbooks, with lasting effects. Something needed to be done; the Salem misstep helped to remodel the New England past. In the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln officially established Thanksgiving, Pilgrim feasts being preferable to Puritan fasts. Decades earlier, Daniel Webster had delivered his Plymouth Rock oration, and people who had not persecuted witches or left a paper trail—or left much of any kind of trail at all—became the ur-Americans. Blameless, if colorless, the Pilgrims made better ancestors than did peevish, intolerant, urban, upper-class witch hunters. For a century or so they replaced their fanatical cousins.

  It turns out to be eminently useful to have a disgrace in your past; Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious. It endures in its lessons and our language. In the 1780s, enemies of the Federalists accused that party of launching a “detestable and nefarious conspiracy” to restore the monarchy. Anti-Illuminists warned of prowling Jesuits, of the Catholic serpent already coiled about, with sinister political designs. “We must awake,” they warned in 1835, “or we are lost.” The judge sentencing the Rosenbergs for espionage in 1951 termed theirs a “diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation.” A network of subversives, night-and-day vigilance, the watchtowers of the nation, and reckless cruelty returned with the 1954 McCarthy hearings. It took very little in 1998 to turn Linda Tripp into the nosy Puritan neighbor and Ken Starr into a witch hunter.

  English monarchs would continue to conspire—or appear to conspire—against the people. It is no surprise that the seventeenth-century Massachusetts authorities so often sounded like understudies for the Founding Fathers. Somewhere along the line those men had decided that obedience to God did not tally with allegiance to monarchs; it was less a love of democracy than a hatred of authority that is their chief contribution to the national DNA. As John Adams saw it, Massachusetts had compromised itself more by accepting Increase Mather’s 1691 charter than by prosecuting witches. The same defiance, the same brooding sense of sanctified purpose that delivered the trials culminated in a revolution, the legacy of further hand-wringing about property lines, tax rates, and trespass.*

  As dogma, the crusade against evil, and the ecstatic embrace of justice combined in Salem, they do too in what has been termed the paranoid style in American politics. When Richard Hofstadter described “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” the national distempers that occasionally descend upon us, he could have been describing Essex County in 1692. That apocalyptic, absolutist strain still bleeds into our thinking. English officials in Massachusetts wrote off the ludicrous papist talk. “There are not two Roman Catholics betwixt this and New York,” snorted an imprisoned Andros adviser in 1689; as for the rest of the designs against New England, they were delusional, “false and strangely ridiculous.” But they very well might have been real. We are regularly being sacrificed to our heathen adversaries; in troubled times, we naturally look for traitors, terrorists, secret agents. Though in our imaginations, the business is indeed sometimes not imaginary. A little paranoia may even be salutary, though sometimes when you anticipate a hailstorm, one eerily comes crashing down on your head.

  A great number of Americans have made the same startling discovery that Francis Dane did: They are related to witches. American presidents descend from George Jacobs, Susannah Martin, and John Procter. Nathan Hale was John Hale’s grandson. Israel “Don’t Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes” Putnam was the son of John Putnam. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louisa May Alcott descended from Samuel Sewall; Clara Barton from the Townes; Walt Disney from Burroughs. (In a nice twist, the colonial printer who founded the American Antiquarian Society, where Cotton Mather’s papers reside today, was also a Burroughs descendant.) The Nurse family includes Lucille Ball, who testified before an investigator from the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Yes, she had registered with the Communist Party. No, she was not a Communist. In 1953, a husband leaped to a wife’s defense: “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair,” Desi Arnaz explained, “and even that’s not legitimate.”)

  No one reprocessed the toxic spill of 1692 as creatively as did Nathaniel Hawthorne, at whom the guilt of his great-grandfather gnawed.* Hawthorne redeemed that most Puritan of legacies in kind: with a shelf of literature, chilly, twilit pages that fall somewhere between sermons and stories. Others had put Salem on the literary map before he wrote “Young Goodman Brown,” The Scarlet Letter, or his 1851 bestseller, The House of the Seven Gables, but Hawthorne proved that territory still radioactive. Guilt and blame have grown up lushly on the scene, attracting writers from Walt Whitman to John Updike. Arthur Miller read the court papers under the spell of McCarthyism. He discovered, as New England itself had, that events must be absorbed before monuments can be raised. The Crucible was not a success in 1953. Only when it outgrew the headlines and matured into allegory did the play find its audience. The Puritans come to most of us today through The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, which we read, appropriately enough, as adolescents.

  AS GENERAL WASHINGTON was presiding over the Constitutional Convention on July 10, 1787, a mob attacked an old woman in the Philadelphia street outside. Accusing her of witchcraft, they pelted her with a slew of objects. She had cast a fatal spell on a child; weeks earlier, someone had cut her forehead “according to ancient and immemorial custom,” as a newspaper had it—and precisely as a Salem visitor had attempted to slash Bridget Bishop. The 1787 woman died from her injuries. Witches might well rank
among ghosts and fairies, as the Philadelphia papers noted, but they were not as easily dismissed. Alaska contended with a witchcraft epidemic in the late nineteenth century. In 1908 a Pennsylvania woman landed in jail for enchanting a cow. Sporadic assaults continue today, although the modern American witch is dangerous rather than malicious, more likely to exude steamy sexuality than to wield a scalding tongue. In a stunning inversion, empowered, nubile teenage witches—the new vampire-slayers—have taken over from the afflicted girls.

  Salem village finally won its independence from Salem town in 1752. It renamed itself Danvers sixty years after the trials, which remained still the stuff of the recent unpleasantness. An 1895 reporter found town residents reluctant to talk about the past. When they did, it was to impress upon him that they had not burned a single witch. Years later Arthur Miller met with the same silence while researching The Crucible. “You couldn’t get anyone to say anything about it,” he complained of 1692. The two communities have since resolutely gone their separate ways. When current Danvers archivist Richard B. Trask began an excavation of the parsonage site in 1970, two elderly sisters waved fists at him from across the way, the kind of behavior that in another age elicited witchcraft accusations. “What are you bringing this up for?” they demanded. Meanwhile in Salem, Justice Corwin’s gabled home has become “the Witch House,” a misreading akin to making Dr. Frankenstein the monster. The town opted for brash commercialization, easier in the post-Bewitched era, when perky enchantresses twitched noses at vacuum cleaners. The mascot for Salem’s sports teams is a witch on a broom. She sails across the local newspaper masthead and along doors of police cruisers; the best bakery in town has a Caffiend Club. In a turn of events that would have mystified Ann Foster, it is easy to buy a broomstick in Salem, home to a large Wiccan community. Hotels are booking now for next Halloween.*