The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  “flatten the fury”: CM to WS, September 2, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Reproduced in part in Silverman, Selected Letters, 43–44. CM prayed for the release of NE from the “evil angels” who had ensnared them. He prayed as well that the Lord would direct him in publishing “such testimonies as might be serviceable to the occasion.”

  “zeal to assist” to “encounters with hell”: CM to Stoughton, September 2, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

  “mutinous and murmuring”: SPN, 203–5.

  “very obdurate” to “of excommunication”: B&N, 280.

  witchcraft judges found themselves related: For the web of relations among the justices, see Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft, 168, and his fine chart, 163. CM had dedicated MP to Winthrop; Sergeant and Sewall were partners in a Braintree ironworks and a sawmill. An alliance that may have proved crucial in 1692 was that between Willard and Joseph Dudley, twice related by marriage. It was evidently Dudley, Stoughton’s disgraced political ally, who applied to the New York ministers for some answers to Massachusetts’s witchcraft questions. Also not incidentally, Mrs. Parris was related to court recorder Stephen Sewall.

  Together they had conspired: Eight years earlier Dominion officials had ordered Winthrop to arrest CM for sedition; he neglected to do so. On Stoughton greeting Andros, Lustig, Imperial Executive, 196. As the English saw it, the coup had been encouraged by “crafty ministers”; the Mathers were its prime movers. Indeed NE preferred to answer to God than to a king.

  “there is not a government”: IM, “The Autobiography of Increase Mather,” 351. He felt the charter with which he returned was one for which his countrymen would, a few years earlier, have happily traded half their estates.

  “willingly cast dirt”: Brattle in Burr, 169.

  “I petition”: R, 658.

  guards led Corey: By some accounts the torture began on September 16; it lasted several days. For the details, C. L’Estrange Ewen, ed., Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (New York: Dial, 1929), 28; “have no sustenance”: Brown, “The Case of Giles Corey,” 288. On repenting for his obstinacy, Richard D. Pierce, ed., The Records of the First Church in Salem (Salem, MA: Essex Institute, 1974), 218. The Salem-born Nantucket friend was a brother-in-law of an accused man then in hiding.

  “with his cane”: Calef in Burr, 367.

  “Now, Sir” to “against Giles Corey”: R, 671. For the earlier Corey case, RFQC, 6: 190. 317 “stamped and pressed”: SS Diary, 1: 296. A quiet note of resistance sounded about now. Instructed at her hearing to recite the Lord’s Prayer, a Gloucester suspect provided a variation. To the line “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us,” she added a plucky “So do I”; R, 672.

  “the heinous crime” to “death and eternity”: R, 673.

  “hanging there”: Calef in Burr, 367–69. The careful account-keepers included Lawrence Hammond, Diary, Ms. SBd-98, MHS. “hanging one another”: Thomas Wilson and James Dickinson, November 11, 1692, in the Library of the Society of Friends, vol. 1, portfolio 31/93, partly summarized in The Epistle to the monthly and Quarterly Meetings of Friends of England, Wales and Elsewhere, from Our Yearly Meeting (London, 1693).

  “hotly and madly”: WOW, 84. The English seemed forever to undo themselves quarreling, far more than did other peoples, clucked CM, a statement that revealed him to be a man who, for all his erudition, traveled little.

  X. PUBLISHED TO PREVENT FALSE REPORTS

  “For prophecy is history”: Noyes, New-England’s Duty.

  “timorous women”: R, 739; also R, 687–88, 697. For the inventory, Francis Foxcroft to Colonel Lidget, October 6, 1692, Frederick L. Gay Family Papers, Ms. N-131, box 1, MHS. He reported 120 in jail and twice as many accused.

  “that in a place of so much”: Hale in Burr, 423.

  “the more capable”: CM to Stephen Sewall, September 20, 1692, NEHGS.

  “almost a continual conversation”: CM Diary, 2: 267.

  On September 22: The Sewall interior is from LaPlante, Salem Witch Judge, 22; SS Diary, 1: 297; e-mail with David Hall, July 6, 2014.

  “a most horrible”: Phips letter of October 12, 1692; R, 686–78.

  “agitated controversy”: WOW, 84; “strange ferment”: R, 686. CM too referred to the “dreadful ferment.”

  “they would proceed differently”: Phips to Nottingham, February 21, 1693; R, 810. Brattle indicated as much in early October; these men were ready to “throw up their commissions.”

  “not a God in Boston”: Brattle in Burr, 179–80.

  “so that perhaps” to “honest woman as a witch”: IM, Cases of Conscience. On the meeting, Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 17 (1879), 267–68.

  “It is, after all”: Michel de Montaigne, Essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 244.

  “A black thing”: R, 681.

  “We here hope”: Haefeli, “Dutch New York,” 306.

  “unkindness, abuse”: Brattle in Burr, 187.

  “enchanted into a raging”: CM Diary, 1: 151.

  “like mad men”: CM to John Cotton, October 20, 1692, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

  “any man, much less”: To IM, January 9, 1693, cited in Thomas Hutchinson, History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), vol. 2, 18.

  “besides its nature”: Samuel Willard, Sermon 53, April 19, 1692, in Compleat Body of Divinity, 184.

  “subvert this government” to “misinformed”: Willard preface to IM, Cases of Conscience.

  Elizabeth Knapp: See Willard, “Samuel Willard’s Account.” In a 1679 case that, like Knapp’s, IM included in IP, 151, a Newbury boy “barked like a dog, and clucked like a hen.” IM discussed Knapp in IP; see Burr, 21–23; CM included her in Magnalia, 2: 390–91, reducing the story to four paragraphs. Both also bled the pathos from it. She comes off more as a curiosity than a girl in pain, either bored or frightened out of her wits. As he did with Salem, CM emphasized her cries of “Money! Money!” He took liberties with the neighbor, who causes Knapp “grievous agonies,” something she did not have in the original. And he inserted a demon into the story. On Willard and his matchless preaching, Seymour Van Dyken, Samuel Willard, 1640–1707: Preacher of Orthodoxy in an Era of Change (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972), 44. For not pausing in his preaching, SS Diary, 1: 287. “belched forth”: IM in Burr, 22. I am grateful to Robert J. O’Hara for information on Elizabeth Knapp’s fate and to Reverend Nancy S. Taylor for details about Willard’s arrival at the Third (Old South) Church. Willard wrung evangelical mileage: See Samuel Willard, Useful Instructions for a Professing People in Times of Great Security and Degeneracy (Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green, 1673), 29–43.

  “What will you do”: Magnalia, 2: 493.

  “the greatest and most amazing”: SS Diary, 1: 44.

  S. objects: Brown, “The Salem Witchcraft Trials.” Mary Rhinelander McCarl is excellent on the 1692 publishing climate; see “Spreading the News of Satan’s Malignity in Salem: Benjamin Harris, Printer and Publisher of the Witchcraft Narratives,” EIHC 129 (January 1993): 39–61. Haefeli, “Dutch New York,” 279, suspects Willard wrote the piece in reaction to IM’s about-face of a postscript to Cases.

  Thomas Brattle: Reproduced in Burr, 168–90; see also Rick Kennedy’s splendid “Thomas Brattle and the Scientific Provincialism of New England,” New England Quarterly (December 1990): 584–600. Brattle went on to master trigonometry; he qualifies as one of those rare men who could legitimately blame his college education for his future miscalculations. He and Sewall had contemplated another riddle together several years earlier, in Stonehenge. The identity of his 1692 correspondent remains a mystery. The men he identified as the prime movers were also those who had endorsed Lawson’s March sermon. His letter is notably lacking in scriptural references.

  the New York ministers: Joseph Dudley, who directed the Glover trial, appears to have submitted the questions; Burr, 195n; Proceedings of
the MHS, vol. 50 (1884), 348–53; Calef claimed he did as well. If so, neither the Mathers nor Stoughton enlisted him to do it. Thomas Newton or Willard (twice his brother-in-law, and in close touch with the New York clergymen) might have done so. Interview with David Hall, January 12, 2013, the letter constituted a clear brush-off toward the Massachusetts clergy. In John Miller, New Yorke Considered and Improved A.D. 1695, ed. Victor Hugo Paltsits (New York, 1901), 123. John Miller said an uneasy Phips requested the advice. See also Selyns letter of December 30, 1692, in Ecclesiastical Records: State of New York, vol. 7 (Albany: University of the State of New York, 1916), 1046.

  “generously given”: Miller, New Yorke Considered, 15.

  “lies, miracles” to “nourishment than before”: Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 1 (1884), 353–58.

  Phips’s October letter: Phips in Burr, 196–98. He hews closely to IM’s Cases. In a separate letter that day he touched on subjects he preferred to sorcery, reporting on his success in battling the French and Indians, proposing a new attempt on Canada. He assured London the country was behind him. With six hundred men he had defeated NE’s enemies; with sufficient ships, he could rout them in the spring. He sounds eminently capable if not downright invincible; see Phips to Nottingham, October 12, 1692, UK file, CO 5/751, no. 15, PRO. Norton, in In the Devil’s Snare, 237–39, first noted that Phips’s absence from Boston was fictitious.

  “the spirit of lying”: David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 185. See McCarl, “Spreading the News,” 49–50; Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 130–31. As for wheels within wheels, Benjamin Harris’s business partner was the nephew of Reverend James Allen, a Mather intimate, a signatory to Cases, a minister to whom Procter appealed, and a participant at the Sewall fast for Alden.

  “like the production of elephants”: Cited in Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 476. On communication between the two worlds, David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

  “considering the place”: Stoughton preface to WOW, 6.

  “Penitent confessors” to “and trouble”: R, 687–88.

  “distempered persons” to “good fame”: R, 690. That a change was in the air is clear from the penmanship; justice of the peace Dudley Bradstreet had resurfaced. The petition is strangely lacking in Fosters and Laceys.

  “It is deplorable”: R, 692.

  “and so thought”: R, 693. IM has been credited with that visit. As Rosenthal and others make clear, R 694n, there is no hard evidence that he did. Brattle was surely on the scene, if not the sole witness to the recantations. Either he had already paid a visit or this is the visit to which he refers in the October 8 letter. The women do not sound as if they are talking to a minister. And the scientific nature of the questions seems more like Brattle than anyone else. The touch test, R, 737–38.

  How did cats: Briggs, Witches and Neighbors, 28–30, 108–10.; Dennis C. Turner and Patrick Bateson, eds. The Domestic Cat: The Biology of Its Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 189–90. Witches had long been known to prefer feline to canine form; British witches had confessed as much. The “archenemy”: MacKay, The Witch Mania, 491.

  “We desire your prayers”: Sewall letter book, 1685/86–1737, Ms. N-905, MHS. The letter is dated October 19, 1692.

  “mire and mud”: WOW, 22; “false reports”: WOW, 5. Again CM and Lawson’s language chimed: The devil launched his attack from the heart of NE piety, “the first-born of our English settlements.” Both men mention courtroom pins, brimstone, a suspect nearly hanged before their very eyes (“one thing which I had like to forget,” as Lawson put it), none of which appears in the extant documentation.

  “horrible plot against”: WOW, 14. Calef took CM to task for this in More Wonders: Was it not enough for things to happen; must they also turn out to have been prophesied? For IM proving how correct his forecasts had been with King Philip’s War, Hall, Faithful Shepherd, 241.

  “our most compassionate”: WOW, 100. The reluctance to name GB may have indicated Burroughs had allies; interview with David Hall, January 4, 2015. In vain, CM had also denounced torture.

  “matchless curiosities”: WOW, 159. The typographical help: WOW, 167.

  the English publisher: See Albert B. Cook, “Damaging the Mathers: London Receives the News of Salem,” New England Quarterly 65 (June 1992): 302–8; Athenian Mercury, December 24 and 31, 1692, January 14, 1693.

  “With what sinful” to “rashest mobs”: CM to John Cotton, October 20, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

  Father and son shared: David Levin, “Did the Mathers Disagree About the Salem Witchcraft Trials?,” Proceedings of the AAS (1985): 19–37. They did not see eye to eye even on the specifics; IM had warned against the Lord’s Prayer experiment, which CM endorsed. They differed too on the swim test.

  “pity and prayers” to “could perform”: IM postscript to Cases.

  “to lift up a standard”: Stoughton preface to WOW, 7. He was quoting from CM to Stephen Sewall, September 20, 1692, NEHGS.

  “after some jars” to “cursed by him”: SPN, 211–15; interview with David Hall, October 29, 2012; e-mail with David Hall, August 6, 2014. See Richard Sibbes, “The Spouse, Her Earnest Desire After Christ,” in The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862), 200–208. Increase Mather owned a copy of the Sibbes; one of the Mathers may well have suggested the sermon to SP.

  “with a great rage” to “clouds of darkness”: R, 696. On the acrimony, SS Diary, 1: 299; Murrin, “The Infernal Conspiracy,” 343. Among those in the room were Dudley Bradstreet and a Bradbury son-in-law, whose presence surely made an impression. The charter empowered Phips to dissolve the court unilaterally.

  “perish with cold”: R, 697.

  Dane’s daughter: R, 705. The cause of her husband’s incapacity was fits, of which he now suffered his second bout in five years.

  “impartially administer”: SS Diary, 1: 302. No such qualifying rule had existed before November, although it should have.

  What use should they make: Calef in Burr, 382.

  “We were in a way” to “this country”: Calef, More Wonders, 152, and Lawson, letter appended to A Further Account.

  “If any in the world”: Lawson, letter appended to A Further Account; R, 833. She died in jail before her release.

  “too violent” to “well composed”: Phips letter of February 21, 1693, in R, 810–11.

  taken a fall: Colonial State Papers, Massachusetts council minutes, February 22, 1693, CO 5/940, no. 201, PRO.

  “restraint of enemies”: Massachusetts council minutes, February 2, 1693, February 23, 1693, CO 5/785, fols. 108v–109v, PRO.

  “a supposed witchcraft”: Phips to Lords of Trade and Plantations, April 3, 1693, CO 5/857, no. 46, PRO.

  a little backslapping: Phips to the Earl of Nottingham, September 11, 1693, CO/751, no. 37, PRO.

  new storm: CM Diary, 1: 172.

  “Yet considering” to “abruptly”: Hale in Burr, 422. “I inquired”: Hale in Burr, 418.

  declined to indict: R, 820. See Rosenthal, Salem Story, 31, 226n, for her fate. She appears to have spent twenty-two months in prison.

  XI. THAT DARK AND MYSTERIOUS SEASON

  “The truly terrible”: The Rules of the Game, Jean Renoir (1939).

  “Oh Mother”: Hale in Burr, 419.

  10 percent of Andover: Sher, “Brand of Infamy,” 2.

  John Alden failed to turn up: SS Diary, 1: 302, 310; e-mail from David Hall, August 6, 2014. Alden was acquitted in April of 1693; R, 733. Sewall would be in the room when Alden died in March 1702. The Aldens had taken in an English daughter when the couple fled; R, 917.

  Philip English returned: See Le Beau, “Philip English”; R, 687.

  “saints abroad” to “cove
nant with him”: Lawson, The Duty and Property. Delivered on December 25, 1692, the sermon was published in 1693 with a dedication to Samuel Sewall. David Hall thinks Lawson may also have intended the rebuke for parents of unbaptized children.

  “to gratify neighbors”: January 17, 1693, Corwin Family Papers, Mss. 45, PEM.

  “indefinable peculiarity”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 15.

  “for they say”: R, 844.

  “only as a malefactor” to “brand of infamy”: R, 848.

  “damned crew” to “New Witch-land”: Scottow, A Narrative, 43–44.

  “persons of profligate”: R, 889; Hale in Burr, 422; Magnalia, 1: 191–92.

  “matchless enchantments”: CM, The Day, and the Work of the Day (Boston, 1693), 65.

  “wicked and malicious”: Melyen letter of January 12, 1693, cited in Haefeli, “Dutch New York,” 308. For his background, Reis, Damned Women, 129n.

  the widow of George Jacobs: Many marriages took place among families of the survivors. It is unclear if it did so because they had known a similar trauma or because no one else would go near them. Roach, Six Women of Salem, 379, notes that Bridget Bishop’s widowed son-in-law married the daughter of another executed witch.

  Burroughs’s widow: Greene, “The Third Wife”; Ian Nelson Glade, “Mary (Burroughs) (Homier) (Hall) Tiffany,” American Genealogist 48 (1972): 141–43. The marriage was short; a year later, her new husband would be in court for abusing her.

  “a machine moved”: Benjamin Fletcher to Earl of Nottingham, March 8, 1693, CO 5/1081, no. 31, fols. 139r–140r, PRO.

  “have been grievous”: Salem Book of Records, February 18, 1687, DAC.

  Raiding Indians: I am grateful to Carol Majahad at the North Andover Historical Society for the observation.