The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  “he was a very sharp”: R, 246–47.

  “My God makes known”: R, 532. The Sarah Burroughs divorce, Records of the Court of Assistants of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1901), 3: 146.

  “an amazing” to “cannot name it”: R, 241.

  “a very puny”: CM in Burr, 219.

  “None of us could do”: R, 249.

  George Jacobs hobbled: R, 251–52. The location of the hearing is not clear. See Matti Rissanen, “Power and Changing Roles in Salem Witch Trials,” Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 119–29; Rissanen, “‘Candy No Witch, Barbados’”; Rissanen, “Salem Witchcraft Papers as Evidence of Early American English,” English Linguistics (2003): 84–114. On the trespassing animals: RFQC, 5: 428.

  another wizard nervously quipped: R, 288. It was John Willard.

  “Hollowed be thy name”: Calef in Burr, 347.

  “I verily believe”: R, 254 or 256 or 257; David L. Greene, “Salem Witches II: George Jacobs,” American Genealogist 58 (April 1982): 65–76.

  Mary Warren, the Procter maid, waffled: R, 356–57. Her tongue protruded from her mouth: R, 268–69.

  “altogether false” to “believe her”: R, 355.

  Salem farmer Bray Wilkins: R, 527–28. Wilkins would live another decade, dying at ninety-two. The villagers complained that SP had recruited Mary Walcott and Abigail as visionaries; SP swore to an account Mercy Lewis had provided at a bedside as well, however. The idea that Willard balked at arrests originates with Upham.

  “if he could”: R, 281–82, 295, 296, 297.

  “What do you say” to “really believe it”: R, 286–88. On the proliferation of family in the Willard case, Rosenthal, Salem Story, 118–19.

  “suburb of hell”: Dunton, Dunton’s Letters, 119. CM wrote down the impious household as the very suburb of hell in his Batteries upon the Kingdom of the Devil (1695), 62. A man had “better live in a prison, in a dungeon, than in such a family!”

  VI. A SUBURB OF HELL

  On the politics, Richard A. Johnson’s very fine Adjustment to Empire (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981); Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Massachusetts (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981); Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England (New York: Ungar, 1960); Edward Randolph, Documents and Letters. For excellent portraits of colonial administration, Gertrude Ann Jacobsen, William Blathwayt: A Late Seventeenth-Century English Administrator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932), and Michael Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies. Especially astute on the intercharter period—and the new, destabilizing role of the people in civic affairs—is Breen, Puritans and Adventurers, 81–105. The coup served the Puritan orthodoxy well. It also introduced them to an empowered populace, many of whom expected to make their voices heard.

  “Hell seems a great deal”: Flannery O’Connor, A Prayer Journal (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 6.

  What could not yet happen: While there is general agreement that Governor Dudley Bradstreet held off, there is no hard evidence that he did so. The delay certainly allowed allegations to accumulate. See Benjamin C. Ray, “The Salem Witch Mania,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2010): 5.

  “between government and no government”: Calef in Burr, 349.

  “Salem is one of the few”: Arthur Miller, introduction, The Crucible (New York: Penguin, 1995), ix.

  Boston’s majestic harbor: For Boston, see Samuel Maverick, “Account of New England,” Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 1 (1884), 231–51; Josselyn, New-England’s Rarities, 32; Fisher, Report of a French Protestant Refugee. For the lost cow: SS Diary, 1: 63; for hogs in the street: Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 56.

  “shaken and shattered”: Magnalia, 1: 183.

  “thousand perplexities”: CM, The Present State, 35.

  The rugged forty-one-year-old: On the militiamen, Richard Trask interview, April 1, 2013. The best source on Phips is Baker and Reid’s meticulously researched volume New England Knight. See also Viola F. Barnes, “The Rise of William Phips,” New England Quarterly (July 1928): 271–94, and Barnes, “Phippius Maximus,” New England Quarterly (October 1928): 532–53, from which come the Indian divers, and T. H. Breen, The Character of a Good Ruler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974). For Keynes, see A Treatise on Money (London: Macmillan, 1930), vol. 2, 151. Philip F. Gura is excellent on CM’s mythologizing of the governor; “Cotton Mather’s Life of Phips,” New England Quarterly 50 (September 1977): 440–57. For the Golden Fleece comparison: SS Diary, 1: 172. The arrival: Jacob Melyen letter book, May 25, 1692, AAS.

  “did not care a turd”: John Knepp journal, Egerton Ms. 2526, 5r, 9r, British Library.

  “dropped from the machine”: Magnalia, 1: 184.

  “distressed, enfeebled”: Cited in Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 78. The charter was vacated on October 23, 1684; news that the colony no longer had one reached its governor on April 17, 1685. See Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 128.

  the delayed rite: Magnalia, 1: 165.

  a clerk’s art: Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 39.

  “a shameful and cowardly”: Cited in Baker and Reid, New England Knight, 113.

  “poor people”: Benjamin Bullivant letter, May 19, 1690, CO 5/855, no. 94, PRO.

  “a knot of people”: MP, appendix 8.

  “alien incubus”: Cited in Johnson, Adjustment to Empire, 93.

  “an unthankful murmuring”: IM, The Great Blessing of Primitive Counsellors (Boston, 1693), 19–21.

  “a people fit only”: CM, Midnight Cry, 63.

  “vultures and harpies” to “breaches in God’s hedge”: CM, Optanda, 70–87. He recycled the “spit of reproach” from The Present State, 12.

  One prominent New Englander: It was Elisha Cooke, far from alone in repudiating a document that reimposed royal authority.

  “that the people”: Nottingham to Blathwayt, Add. Ms. 37991, fol. 138r, British Library; IM to Nottingham, June 23, 1692, CO/5/571, no. 7, PRO.

  “I found this province”: Phips to William Blathwayt, October 12, 1692, R, 686.

  Sweden’s earlier scourge: That account, which reached NE via Glanvill, featured a more classically configured Miltonian devil who played harp for the children and arranged for dancing, feasting, and sex. See the English summary of Birgitta Lagerlöf-Génetay, De Svenska Haxprocessernas Utbrottsskede 1668–1671 (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1990); Thomas Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic (London: Bentley, 1851), 2: 244–60. Wright notes that those elements derive from earlier French and German cases. Most of the visionaries were boys.

  “with a remarkable smile”: CM to Richards, May 31, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

  “by reason of witchcrafts”: IM, “The Autobiography of Increase Mather,” May 14 entry, 344. The word “possession” does not turn up in the testimony until seventeen-year-old Margaret Jacobs used it in January 1693.

  Carrier jostled a twelve-year-old: R, 510–11. The disembodied voice: CM in Burr, 243.

  round up the extended family of George Jacobs: Calef in Burr, 371. On Jacobs, Greene, “Salem Witches II.”

  nineteen different afflictions: The tally is Norton’s, In the Devil’s Snare, 174.

  Mercy Lewis hovered near death: R, 311–12, 624.

  “enemy he had”: R, 309.

  “to sink that happy”: WOW, 21.

  Nathaniel Cary: R, 309–311. Bernard Rosenthal suspects that Elizabeth Cary may actually have been Hannah, as Upham suggested in “Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather,” The Historical Magazine, September 1869. That would make sense of several dating discrepancies—as would Rosenthal’s theory that two Cary women, Elizabeth and Hannah, were accused; Rosenthal e-mail, May 21, 2015. For an earlier Cary suit, se
e Records of the Court of Assistants, 1: 106. For the generous liquor allowances, Gildrie, “Taverns and Popular Culture,” 178. For Tituba and John’s presumed marriage, Rosenthal, “Tituba,” 48.

  the touch test: Brattle in Burr, 171; R, 34; Lawson, appendix to Christ’s Fidelity, 102.

  “to sit in the stocks”: Cited in Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishments in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 34. See also Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (New York: Book League of America, 1929), 30.

  facility announced itself: Randolph to Robert Chaplin, October 28, 1689, CO 5/855, no. 46, PRO; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 299; R, 311; RFQC, 8: 335–57; Perley, History of Salem, vol. 3, 241. For the prison visit, Calef in Burr, 259–60. The released prisoners: RFQC, 7: 243.

  “the fierceness”: Dunton, Dunton’s Letters, 120. The rain in the cell: Randolph to Robert Chaplin, October 28, 1689, CO 5/855, no. 103, PRO.

  “a noisome place”: RFQC, 2: 227; “almost poisoned”: RFQC 8, 335. The ship captain who had jailed the sailor came regularly to rail at him at the top of his lungs. Fourteen weeks in a freezing, fetid prison was bad enough, the youngster complained. Did he really have to hear his father denounced in the street outside as “an Anabaptistical quaking rogue” in league with the devil?

  William Dounton: Esther I. Wik, “The Jailkeeper at Salem in 1692,” EIHC 111 (1975): 221–27; RFQC, 8: 31. Many suspects made the tour of prisons. Sarah Wilds, the constable’s mother, spent April in Salem, to be removed for two months to Boston and afterward confined at Ipswich, before being moved again to Salem. The family was responsible for the costs of those guarded trips. Dounton was the official who met with a warming pan when collecting the minister’s salary. He himself had attacked a fellow Salemite who resented his many appointments and opposed his nomination to yet another. It was probably no coincidence that he was relieved of the post shortly after the trials.

  Phips established a special court: R, 322. A quorum of five would suffice, stipulated the order, so long as Stoughton, Richards, or Gedney was present.

  One Scotswoman preferred to burn: MacKay, The Witch Mania, 505. See Thompson, Cambridge Cameos, 96, for the puddle-drinking.

  Civic leaders produced civic leaders: Kenneth A. Lockridge and Alan Kreider, “The Evolution of Massachusetts Town Government,” William and Mary Quarterly 23 (October 1966): 566; Gildrie, “Salem Society,” 199. Samuel Sewall would be elected to the Massachusetts council thirty-three times.

  “people of the best”: Phips to the privy council, October 12, 1692, R, 686. On the Salem justices, Benjamin C. Ray, “Satan’s War Against the Covenant in Salem Village, 1692,” New England Quarterly 80 (March 2007): 72. As Baker points out in A Storm of Witchcraft, 180, Sergeant alone was not a substantial landowner. At least several of the same men presided over the Goodwin case; Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, 382n; e-mail with Elizabeth Bouvier, May 5, 2015.

  “all the councilors”: CM Diary, 1: 148.

  John Alden: Kences, “Some Unexplored Relationships,” 191; Hull, Diaries, 159. Interview with Richard Johnson, August 20, 2014; Louise Breen, Transgressing the Bounds, 197–208.

  “honest and lawful”: R, 332. For their experience, Langbein, “The Criminal Trial,” 276–77.

  the Alden interrogation: R, 334. Norton, In the Devil’s Snare, provides the estimate of the frontier trips, 186. For Alden and the munitions, Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft, 144–45. Alden in 1690 requisitioned Marblehead’s cannon, leaving the town vulnerable. For the instructions with the “bears and wolves,” Robinson, The Devil Discovered, 38. On Alden see also Louise Breen, Transgressing the Bounds, 199–206.

  “They will dissemble” to “you will not believe”: R, 335–36.

  “she should be Queen”: CM in Burr, 244.

  “Staring in people’s faces”: R, 334.

  “had always looked” to “these say of me”: R, 334; similarly, Brattle in Burr, 170. For Alden and the Indian captives, Magnalia, 2: 360.

  “I have beheld”: R, 348.

  It was not unusual: Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints, 215–16; Haskins, Law and Authority, 61. Nor was it surprising that Richards should do so. Along with Gedney and Stoughton, he had served on the court that presided over the Elizabeth Morse witchcraft case eleven years earlier. She was found guilty; reprieved; retried; reprieved a second time. There was cause for confusion.

  Willard affirmed: Samuel Sewall, notes on sermons, May 29 entry, Ms. N-905, MHS; Mark Peterson, “‘Ordinary Preaching,’” EIHC 129 (1992): 95–98.

  “murmuring frenzies” to “lisping witches”: CM to Richards, May 31, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Already the colonists marked the date of the November 5, 1605, Gunpowder Plot. It would give way in the eighteenth century to effigies of the pope and the devil being paraded around Boston and torched. Richards was not the first to confer with CM about Salem; there is evidence that Lawson already had and unmistakable hints that SP had, too.

  Henry IV: Fox, Science and Justice, 80.

  consulted precedent in witchcraft cases: Hale in Burr, 415–16.

  “If there were a witch”: Calef in Burr, 383.

  A school occupied: For courtroom geography and process, see Trask on legal procedures, R, 44–63; Martha J. McNamara, “In the Face of the Court” Winterthur Portfolio 36 (Summer 2001): 125–39; William D. Northend, “Address Before the Essex Bar Association,” EIHC 22 (1885): 276; interview with Richard Trask, January 21, 2015; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014. Generally on the courtroom attitudes and procedures: Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial; Langbein, “The Criminal Trial”; Beattie, Crime and the Courts; Edgar J. McManus, Law and Liberty in Early New England: Criminal Justice and Due Process (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Murrin, “Magistrates, Sinners, and a Precarious Liberty: Trial by Jury in Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Hall, Saints and Revolutionaries, 152–206. Interviews with John Murrin, December 11, 2014, and Richard Trask, November 29, 2012.

  “that according to your best”: R, 356.

  “hurt, tortured, afflicted”: R, 334.

  witch’s teats: Louis J. Kern, “Eros, the Devil, and the Cunning Woman,” EIHC 129 (1993): 20, 31. Koehler, Search for Power, 84–85, notes that the language of female genitalia is altogether missing from Puritan literature. A panel of Connecticut women: Godbeer, Escaping Salem, 95. The woman at the gallows: Hall, Witch-Hunting, 79.

  The heart that passes for a stomach: Watson, Angelical Conjunction, 141. On the literature of witch’s marks, see Pavlac, Witch Hunts. Rosenthal, Salem Story, 77, thinks at least some of the women who examined the six suspects refused to sign anything, knowing what was at stake.

  A Quaker woman: Thomas Maule, Truth Held Forth and Maintained (Boston, 1695), 214.

  “a preternatural excrescence”: R, 362.

  William Stoughton called: Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 332; Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 308; RFQC, 4: 153; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014. CM on the trial, Burr, 223–29.

  honest attorneys: Randolph to Povey, January 24, 1687, in Thomas Hutchinson, A Collection of Original Papers Relative to the History of the Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1769), 557.

  caused an apple to fly: R, 367; the son of the miller: R, 331.

  “smooth, flattering”: R, 369.

  “You devil” to “me and you”: R, 368.

  “answer was thought”: Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven (Hartford, CT: Case, Tiffany, 1857), 260.

  Bishop’s trial proceeded smoothly and swiftly: Langbein, “The Criminal Trial,” 282–85; Northend, “Address Before the Essex Bar Association,” 258; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 29, 2014.

  “There was little”: CM in Burr, 223.

  A seventeenth-century magistrate: Brattle in Burr, 187. See R, 35; even Bernard rejected spectral evidence as a bas
is for conviction. It would be used in England in 1690 and 1695 but—largely discredited—did not secure convictions.

  “on diverse other days”: R, 394.

  Bishop appears to have been confused: Rosenthal, Salem Story, 72–81.

  Nurse could account: R, 413–14.

  “detestable arts”: R, 366. The wording was standard.

  Ann Dolliver: R, 390. For Dolliver’s husband leaving Massachusetts, John J. Babson, History of the Town of Gloucester (Gloucester, MA: Procter Brothers, 1860), 81.

  “crazed in her understanding”: John Higginson Sr. to his son, August 31, 1692, Higginson Family Papers.

  “Not with intent”: R. 390.

  “soft words but hard”: Dunton, Dunton’s Letters, 255. For Higginson on drinking, see his letter to the court, June 25, 1678, in EIHC 43 (1907): 180. It was probably he who warned the Salem villagers in 1687, when they were at odds over Lawson, “If you will unreasonably trouble yourselves, we pray you not any further to trouble us.” The angry, obstinate Baptists: Hull, Diaries, 226.

  “under the infirmities”: Higginson in Burr, 401.

  “and there cause her”: R, 394. On the uncommonly severe phrasing, e-mail with Elizabeth Bouvier, April 30, 2015.

  on the morning of June 10: Interview with Richard Trask, January 21, 2015. The five-syllable words: Earle, Child Life, 29. For details of earlier executions on which this one is based, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 178–84 (which includes the execution sermons, as well as the point about the suspenseful last-minute admissions); Dunton in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 2: 415–19; John Rogers, Death the Certain Wages of Sin to the Impenitent (Boston, 1701). At a later execution, all was “hurry and confusion, racket and noise, praying and oaths,” according to Robert Ellis Cahill, New England’s Cruel and Unusual Punishments (Salem, MA: Old Saltbox, 1994).

  “in a frame extremely”: MP, 63.

  “and turned the knot”: John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), vol. 2, 319. The blow of an ax: Jacob Milborne execution, Collections of the New-York Historical Society (1868): 425–26. The agonized cries: SS Diary, 1: 509.