The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  murderer repented: Hugh Stone in Magnalia, 2: 356–62.

  “spread the distemper”: Cited in Karlsen, The Devil, 100; earlier suspicions of Carrier, R, 734.

  late January: Tituba testified on March 2, 1692, that the enchantment had begun just over six weeks earlier; R, 135.

  “invisible agents”: JH in Burr, 413. JH reported the symptoms conformed exactly to those of the Goodwins; CM makes them more acute in Magnalia, 2: 409.

  “foolish, ridiculous speeches”: Robert Calef in Burr, 342.

  “exemplary temper” to “intolerable anguish”: Magnalia, 2: 396–403. Such epidemics had broken out at least three times previously; Koehler, Search for Power, 175. Since CM had set down the Goodwin history, another case of witchcraft had emerged. The Goodwin children had also relapsed. The “aerial steed”: MP, 29. “Grievous fits” were not uncommon: see RFQC, 3: 54, and Demos, Entertaining Salem, 166–72; they were assumed to be sent by the devil. According to Joshua Moody, both Glover women were accused and jailed; letter to IM, MHS. The convicted Glover appears to have been Mary; Massachusetts Archive Series, vol. 35, 95–96, 254, Massachusetts State Archives.

  “agitations, writhings”: Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jury Men (London: Felix Kyngston, 1629), 45.

  knitting, spooling: For Puritan chores, see Alice Morse Earle, Child Life in Colonial Days (Stockbridge, MA: Berkshire House, 1993); David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America (New York: Harper and Row, 2003).

  Others allotted: “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 5 (1836), 187. SP would not be remembered today for his sermons alone.

  In a Connecticut case: See Richard Godbeer’s concise and elegant Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25. In a post-Salem case CM too made a point of rounding up “disinterested witnesses.” For how seldom the sick were left alone, see for example Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS. On sickbeds, Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 197.

  “odd postures”: Calef in Burr, 242. CM noted that as many as fifty observers gathered around Mercy Short in 1693. The prayer and psalms, CM in Burr, 276.

  “perniciously bad”: Sanford J. Fox, Science and Justice: The Massachusetts Witchcraft Trials (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), 55. There were “wise, tender, and faithful” physicians, but they were physicians of the soul; doctors had often trained for the ministry.

  basic medical kit: Harriet S. Tapley, “Early Physicians of Danvers,” Historical Collections of the Danvers Historical Society 4 (1916): 73–88. The hedgehog fat is from Lawrence Hammond, Diary Kept by Captain Lawrence Hammond, 1677–1694 (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1892). For the raw state of medicine: George Francis Dow, Every Day Life in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1935), 174–98; Patricia A. Watson, The Angelical Conjunction: The Preacher-Physicians of Colonial New England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); and “Z. Endicott Book of Remedies,” Frederick Lewis Gay Papers, Ms. N-2013, MHS.

  William Griggs: See Anthony S. Patton, “The Witch Doctor,” Harvard Medical Alumni Bulletin (Winter 1999): 34–39. See also Robinson, The Devil Discovered, 117–18.

  “Am I bewitched”: Thomas Ady, A Candle in the Dark (Boston, 1656), 120.

  seizing, strangled Groton girl: Samuel Willard, “Samuel Willard’s Account of the Strange Case of Elizabeth Knapp in Groton,” Mather Papers, MHS.

  “evil hand”: JH in Burr, 413.

  witchcraft versus possession: Mather on the affinity, Burr, 136; “It is an ordinary thing,” David C. Brown, “The Salem Witchcraft Trials: Samuel Willard’s Some Miscellany Observations,” EIHC 122 (1986): 228. IM in IP, 198, asserted that you could suffer the two simultaneously. David Harley, “Explaining Salem: Calvinist Psychology and the Diagnosis of Possession,” American Historical Review 101 (April 1996): 307–30, is best on the subject; as he notes, “New England at this time had no tradition of demonic possession” (313). Michael Dalton, The Country Justice (Boston, 1678), listed seven signs of bewitchment; IM offered six of possession. They overlap. Richard Raiswell and Peter Dendle, in “Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon and Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 47 (October 2008): 738–67, note that the symptoms are identical.

  “angry and sending” to “spiritual enemies”: SPN, 188–90.

  “I am a man”: CM Diary, 1: 471.

  “If we want” and “den for devils”: Goodwin in Burr, 131; “school of piety”: CM Diary, 2: 265.

  the concoction: John resorted to an old English recipe cited in previous cases on both sides of the Atlantic (and explicitly denounced by IM in IP). See Roger Thompson, “Salem Revisited,” Journal of American Studies 6 (December 1972): 332. A variation on the experiment would come up again in Salem testimony, R, 318 (in that version, the healer suggested you would find the witch dead the next morning). SP was explicit; the idea was Sibley’s and the execution John’s. He had no reason to minimize Tituba’s role, especially as she was at the time he discussed the incident already in prison. She nonetheless comes down to us as a witch-cake baker, beginning with JH in Burr, 413, and Lawson in Burr, 162. JH either misremembered or elicited some information from Tituba on his own; see JH, 44. SP would later apologize for the behavior of his servants—plural.

  “going to the devil”: Parris in B&N, 278; “she has done”: SP in the church record book for March 27.

  town of Salem: See Richard Trask’s invaluable “The Devil Amongst Us: A History of the Salem Village Parsonage,” Danvers Historical Society (1971): 1–12; Richard P. Gildrie, Salem, Massachusetts, 1626–1683: A Covenant Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975); and Gildrie, “Salem Society and Politics in the 1680s,” EIHC 114 (October 1978): 185–206. There is much granular detail in the Higginson Family letters, MHS, 1838.

  “in a wilderness” to “have been absent”: B&N, 229–31. The petition dates from 1667.

  “not seldom great”: SPN, 184. For CM’s twist, CM Diary, 2: 581.

  Bayley meanwhile filed a slander suit: RFQC, 7: 248–49.

  “that in case any difference”: Salem Village Book of Transactions, November 25, 1680, DAC. See Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 187–94, on the rise of contractualism in ministers’ contracts.

  John Putnam had lent Burroughs funds: RFQC, 9: 30–32, 47–49. “When brother”: B&N, 171; see also Perley, History of Salem, vol. 2, 172. Burroughs was not alone in borrowing money from the congregants who elected not to pay him.

  “given to God”: Lawson, October 6, 1713, Ms. Rawlinson, D839, Bodleian Library. There is no record of Lawson’s having studied at or graduated from Cambridge, Oxford, or Trinity College, Dublin, although he claimed he had attended Cambridge, the center of Puritan learning. I am grateful to Suzanne M. Stewart of the NEHGS and Tim Wales in England for extensive Lawson research. For his turns of phrase, see May 22, 1680, Massachusetts Archives Collections, vol. 39, 658, Massachusetts State Archives. “God is not moved”: Lawson, The Duty and Property of a Religious Householder (Boston, 1692). See also Charles Edward Banks, The History of Martha’s Vineyard (Boston: George H. Dean, 1911), vol. 2, 149–50.

  “uncharitable expressions” to “If you will unreasonably”: B&N, 344–45.

  pastor and flock: Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 332.

  warming pan: RFQC, 9: 448.

  the Topsfield-Ipswich line: See George Francis Dow, History of Topsfield, Massachusetts (Topsfield, MA: Topsfield Historical Society, 1940), 320–30.

  the demoralized clergy: Willard to IM, July 10, 1688, MHS; cheating and starving: CM, “New England’s Choicest Blessing,” 1679, 8; CM, “A Monitory Letter Concerning the Maintenance of an Able and Faithful Ministry, 1700; Konig, Law and Society, 98–108.

  Harvard tuition: Samuel Eliot Morison, Harvard College in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 1: 103–6.

  “Are you, sir, the parson”: From Claude M.
Fuess, Andover: Symbol of New England (Andover, MA: Andover Historical Society, 1959), 105. Hall, Faithful Shepherd, thinks the story apocryphal. The sentiment was very real.

  “some nebulous and distant”: Gildrie, The Profane, 148. Also on the ministers’ maintenance, see Samuel Swett Green, The Use of the Voluntary System in the Maintenance of Ministers (Worcester, MA: Charles Hamilton, 1886).

  “that might render”: CM Diary, 1: 351.

  “sit and sleep”: IM, “Practical Truths Tending to Promote the Power of Godliness,” 1682.

  “useless whispering” and “unnecessary gazing”: SPN, 290.

  hours of sermons: Stout, New England Soul, 4. Stout estimates the average to have been 7000 sermons in a lifetime, for 15,000 listening hours.

  On Parris: See Gragg, Quest for Security, and Gragg, “The Barbados Connection,” New England Historical and Genealogical Record 140 (April 1986): 99–113; Gragg, “Samuel Parris: Portrait of a Puritan Clergyman,” EIHC 119 (October 1983): 209–37. For the economic climate, Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness (New York: Capricorn Books, 1964); Richard S. Dunn, “The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,” William and Mary Quarterly 26 (1969): 3–30. In fairness, Parris’s timing was lousy. The Barbados years were ones of devastating weather and, at the end of his stay, a smallpox epidemic. NE trade was next to impossible under Andros, who had strangled it with strict enforcement of the Navigation Acts. Interviews with David Hall, November 29, 2012, and September 21, 2013.

  “The work was weighty”: Cited in Samuel P. Fowler, An Account of the Life, Character, Etc. of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village (Salem: William Ives, 1857), 1. It was not unusual to emphasize the enormity of the task, though generally one did so differently, to point up one’s inadequacies. See “Memoir of Rev. John Hale,” Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 7 (1838), 257.

  The Puritan mind: Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson, eds., The Puritans: A Sourcebook of Their Writings (New York: Harper, 1963), 1: 60. For the NE palette, see David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 140. He credits it with Harvard’s muddy crimson.

  “this poor little”: SPN, 84.

  “rather discouraging”: “A General Account of the Transaction between the Inhabitants of Salem Village and My Self, Samuel Parris,” W. L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  “Isn’t that pretty soft”: Alice Morse Earle, The Sabbath in Puritan New England (Charleston, SC: Bibliolife, 2008), 140. With two fireplaces, you needed 30 cords of wood—or an acre of standing timber—to survive the year; Hawke, Everyday Life, 55. The fine for cutting a tree of more than 24 inches in diameter was 100 pounds, or twice the annual ministerial salary. Journal of Lords of Trade, 2 September 1691, CO 391/7, 42–4, PRO. The new charter reserved all trees of that size for the Royal Navy.

  “After much urging”: SP, “A General Account,” W. L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  “You are to bear” to “love me best”: SPN, 51. Interview with David Hall, September 21, 2013.

  “consolations dropped”: Dunton, Dunton’s Letters, 255. He was citing Noyes. For Higginson, see Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 16 (1902), 478–520.

  longtime ministerial service: Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 193. Beverly granted Hale a much smaller parsonage and two acres after three decades.

  “I cannot preach” to “some other place”: SP’s October 28, 1690, list of proposals, Simon Gratz Collection, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. On SP’s church record book, Marilynne K. Roach’s superb “Records of the Rev. Samuel Parris,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 157 (January 2003): 6–30. The record book is in the DAC.

  “had scarce wood”: Record book, 18 November 1691, DAC. The rattling coughs: Earle, The Sabbath, 53–63; Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill, 56.

  too cold to go on: SP may well have dismissed the January congregants on account of the cold. Or he may have done so on account of the distractions in the pews, which could already have begun.

  “So perplexing”: Cited in David H. Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial New England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972), 135. Squirrel-killing: Joseph Green diary, DIA 72, PEM. See also Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS; “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” 219, 233; CM, “A Monitory Letter,” 1700.

  the Cambridge meeting: Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 17 (1879), 263.

  “one chief project”: The Old Deluder Act of 1647, in the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in NE (1853), vol. 2, 203.

  the delinquent father: RFQC, 5: 378.

  three times through the Bible: “Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard,” 178. The dozen readings: William L. Joyce et al., eds., Printing and Society in Early America (Worcester, MA: AAS, 1983), 22.

  “Wise parents”: SPN, 236 on food, 318 on rod. For CM, see for example “Some Special Points, Relating to the Education of My Children,” in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 2: 724–27. Exercises for his children recur throughout CM’s diaries.

  “seeing their young” to “farther off”: SPN, 183, 193.

  III: THE WORKING OF WONDERS

  “I have seen too much”: Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (New York: Norton, 2005), 183.

  rainstorms: For the apocalyptic weather, Hammond diary, P-363, MHS. The farmers filed charges in all four names, although the Putnam household alone was affected.

  Sin and crime: See Eli Faber, “Puritan Criminals: The Economic, Social, and Intellectual Background to Crime in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” Perspectives in American History 11 (1978): 83–144; David Flaherty, “Law and the Enforcement of Morals in Early America,” Perspectives in American History 5 (1971): 203–53.

  local menace: Good fit even the skeptic’s idea of a witch. See Reginald Scot’s 1584 description of “these miserable wretches” in Katherine Howe, ed., The Penguin Book of Witches (New York: Penguin, 2014), 20; RFQC, 9: 579–80.

  “turbulent a spirit” to “unusual manner”: R, 423; similarly R, 411. The Herrick testimony: R, 424.

  “shameful vanity”: Sewall in 1714, cited in Richard Francis, Judge Sewall’s Apology (New York: Harper and Row, 2005), 326. There does not appear to have been a copy of Shakespeare yet in America; no estate inventory included a painting. The organ: Thomas Wertenbaker, The Puritan Oligarchy (New York: Scribner’s, 1947), 128.

  seating was nearly toxic: See Abbot, Our Company, 181–82, for the baroque formulations; Robert J. Dinkin, “Seating the Meeting House in Early Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 43 (September 1970): 450–56.

  Hathorne presided: See J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 43; Langbein, “The Criminal Trial Before the Lawyers,” University of Chicago Law Review 45 (Winter 1978): 263–316. Beattie points out that the emphasis in hearings was on preserving the witness’s words rather than the defendant’s, and that the task was less to prove the charges than the suspect’s guilt; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 29, 2014. R, 127–30, for Good’s hearing. Mercy Short would later describe her as having been in tatters. For the hearing choreography, R, 46.

  evaluate Indian defenses: Documentary History of the State of Maine (Portland: Maine Historical Society, 1869), 5: 92–93.

  “What day of the week”: RFQC, 9: 398–99; reduced responsible men to gibberish: RFQC, 3: 398.

  Sarah’s muttering: See Matthew Hopkins, The Discovery of Witches (Essex, UK: Charles Clark’s, 1837), 2; CM, Optanda, Good Men Described and Good Things Propounded (Boston: 1692), 88; Samuel Willard, The Character of a Good Ruler (Boston: 1694), 30; CM, Fair Weather, or Considerations to Dispel the Clouds and Allay the Storms of Discontent (Boston: 1692), 33, 37; CM, The Present State of New England (Boston: 1690), 42. “The devil’s music” is from Fair Weather, 49.

/>   “Her answers”: R, 127. In her sleep: Ibid., 127–28.

  “Order in the court”: Interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014.

  diligent search: JH, 73.

  Tituba: See Chadwick Hansen, “The Metamorphosis of Tituba, or Why American Intellectuals Can’t Tell an Indian Witch from a Negro,” New England Quarterly 47 (March 1974): 3–12. Rosenthal, “Tituba’s Story,” is especially clear-minded about how Upham dismantled CM and installed Tituba, working in part from fictional sources. For a fine-grained study of Tituba and a case for her South American origins, see Elaine G. Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem (New York: New York University Press, 1996). On Tituba’s testimony: See Matti Rissanen, “‘Candy No Witch, Barbados,’” in Language in Time and Space, ed. Heinrich Ramisch and Kenneth Wynne (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997), 183–93. Rissanen, 191, notes that we have 130 words of Good’s versus 700 of Tituba’s; Dawn Archer, “‘Can Innocent People Be Guilty?,’” Journal of Historical Pragmatics (2002): 220, notes that in all, Hathorne asked Tituba 39 questions; Kathleen L. Doty, in “Telling Tales: The Role of Scribes in Constructing the Discourse of the Salem Witchcraft Trials,” Journal of Historical Pragmatics (2007): 35, notes that the justices treat Tituba more gently than they had Sarah Good. See also Risto Hiltunen’s excellent “‘Tell Me, Be You a Witch?’: Questions in the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 9 (1996): 17–37. Tituba had provided some clues to her testimony already: the court had enlisted a number of reporters, as if they expected something momentous; R, 128–36.

  show more love: Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 145.

  William Allen and John Hughes: R, 141; Sibley, R, 425. Rosenthal, Salem Story, 17–19, points out the inconsistencies in the accounts. Sibley strikes Tituba’s back in one, her arm in the other.

  “He tell me”: R, 135.

  actual pact with the devil: They turned up rarely in NE, but they had turned up; see David D. Hall, ed., Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991), 119. None had played a central role in a witchcraft case before. After Tituba, pacts were everywhere.