The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  lopped an accuser: It was Susannah Shelden. On commemoration, Kenneth E. Foote’s astute “To Remember and Forget: Archives, Memory, and Culture,” American Archivist (Summer 1990): 378–92. The entire year disappeared from other journals, like that of John Marshall, MHS; Willard did not include his mid-June warning against spectral evidence in his Compleat Body of Divinity. On Danforth, see Roger Thompson’s fine “The Case of Thomas Danforth.” For Norton on Winthrop, see In the Devil’s Snare, 2003, 13; Peterson on Bromfield’s Willard notes, EIHC 129, 101. As for the court record book, Higginson never let those pages out of his sight during the Hutchinson trial.

  retrospective glosses: David Levin, “When Did Cotton Mather See the Angel?,” Early American Literature 15 (Winter 1980): 271–75; David Levin, “Cotton Mather’s Misnamed Diary,” American Literary History 2 (Summer 1990): 183–202.

  the disaffected Nurse clan: B&N, 280–312; “the great prosecutor”: B&N, 283. Not only had Parris testified against Rebecca Nurse, but so had no fewer than six members of Deacon Putnam’s family.

  “little knew”: CM Diary, 1: 163–64.

  Cotton Mather was in Salem: CM Diary, 1: 171. The Mrs. Carver who felt the witch business abandoned prematurely was probably Dorothy Carver, whose husband had recently been held hostage by pirates.

  “the greatest moderation”: R, 800.

  William Phips sailed: Gura, “Cotton Mather’s Life of Phips,” 442. Phips had managed to cane not only an English sea captain but one whose right arm was in a sling at the time, then to imprison the royal officer “in the common jail, amongst witches and other felons.” On boycotting the farewell dinner, Baker and Reid, New England Knight, 246.

  they petitioned for him: The witch-cake baker, the farmers whom the spectral Sarah Good had terrified, Ingersoll, Dr. Griggs, and the men whom Martha Corey had warmly greeted on her doorstep in March 1692 all signed.

  “been the beginner”: B&N, 266. The search for a new minister began that July. Among the eight candidates interviewed was the village’s first minister, James Bayley, which suggests that the Putnams may earlier have angled for his return.

  “foolish people” and Beacon Hill: SS Diary, 1: 354. It was Melyen. As early as November 22, Sewall prayed both that the Lord would save NE from witches and that he would vindicate the judges. However he understood that pardon, he believed that the court had something for which to answer.

  a disconcerting trial: SS Diary, 1: 359. Thomas Maule, New England Persecutors Mauled with Their Own Weapons (Boston, 1697). On Maule, see Matt Bushnell Jones, “Thomas Maule, the Salem Quaker, and Free Speech in Massachusetts Bay,” EIHC (January 1936): 1–42. From “rogues and whores” to “wicked lies”: Maule, New England Persecutors, 36–37. The sputtering justice was Danforth, who had deposed the girls in April then sat out the next months, uneasy about the witchcraft court and (seemingly) silent.

  “upon the brink”: CM Diary, 1: 211. The other “nevertheless”: Ibid., 151.

  “unto those errors”: George H. Moore, “Notes on the History of Witchcraft in Massachusetts,” AAS Proceedings (1882): 174; CM Diary, 1: 214–16, 361–63. Also see William DeLoss Love Jr., The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England (Boston: Houghton, 1895), 265–69; Calef in Burr, 385–86.

  “wheedled and hectored” to “Salem tragedy”: SS Diary, 1: 363–64. The entire household was on edge, eighteen-year-old Sam weeping about leaving home, Betty at her prospects for salvation.

  “pardon all the errors”: Calef, More Wonders, 154.

  “reiterated strikes”: For Sewall’s apology, SS Diary, 1: 366–67; LaPlante, Salem Witch Judge, 199–205. Two of Sewall’s court colleagues may well have been present that day. On Stoughton’s disapproval, SS Diary, 1: 403. Easily slighted, he did not like to take a stand alone; SS Diary, 11: 1027; David S. Lovejoy, “Between Hell and Plum Island: Samuel Sewall and the Legacy of the Witches,” New England Quarterly 70 (1997): 355–67.

  ensnaring judicial procedures: “A Narrative of the Proceedings of Sir Edmund Andros and His Complices,” by several gentlemen who were of his Council, 1691, 10. Stoughton was named chief justice again in 1695, three years after Salem.

  “willing to make”: Sibley, 200.

  “divine displeasure” to “assaulted the country”: CM Diary, 1: 216. It was his last explicit note of regret.

  “such things” to “general delusion”: Calef in Burr, 387–88. They are the only twelve jurors whose apology survives—or who made one.

  worked over those lines: “Another Brand Pluck’d,” in CM Papers, Ms. N-527, MHS.

  English evidently threatened: Suffolk Files Collection, vol. 144, 135–38, General Sessions of the Peace Record Book, 4: 76–78, Massachusetts State Archives. He imitated Noyes at prayer “in a scoffing ridiculous manner”; he charged the Salem ministers and justices in particular with having murdered Rebecca Nurse and John Procter. Indicted, he apologized, August 2, 1722. On English and the evolving legend of Corwin’s corpse, Marilynne K. Roach, “The Corpse in the Cellar,” New England Ancestors (Fall 2007): 42–43. See also Belknap, “Philip English”; Cheever, “Philip English,” 198; Le Beau, “Philip English,” 8–10; Calef, More Wonders, 119.

  “And why”: CM on Margaret Rule, reproduced in Burr, 320; “haunted chambers,” ibid., 322. Calef wrote as much to indict Mather as to attack the trials, as Mather had written as much to exonerate friends as to elucidate events.

  “intended by hell”: CM Diary, 1: 156.

  “as astonishing a manner”: Magnalia, 1: 136. See also Gura, “Cotton Mather’s Life of Phips,” and David H. Watters, “The Spectral Identity of Sir William Phips,” Early American Literature 18 (Winter 1983): 219–32. Calef accused CM of erecting the monument to Phips as an elaborate decoy from the witchcraft. He was not wrong. As Watters emphasizes in CM’s retelling, the arrival of Phips and the new charter brings down the devil, intent on establishing a rival kingdom.

  “in much anguish”: CM Diary 1: 245. Trading shepherding for nautical metaphors, CM has Massachusetts befogged in what another minister called “the mortiferous sea of witchcraft,” with Phips steering it from shipwreck. CM stole the image and most of the line.

  “Whole clouds of witnesses”: Magnalia, 1: 193.

  “horrid sorcerers”: Magnalia, 2: 537. The retrofitted Indians and Frenchmen, Burr, 281–82. CM could not help himself.

  “But such was the darkness”: JH, 131. It was probably no accident that Hale wrote immediately following the 1697 retractions. Still, the project discomfited Sewall, who feared Hale would upset the apple cart all over again. “Special reasons” and “to a more strict scanning”: Hale in Burr, 404–5. CM takes light, interesting liberties with JH’s account in Magnalia, 2: 409–16.

  “tragical end” to “of that time”: Higginson in Burr, 400–401.

  “who are fast”: Wait Still Winthrop to Ashurst, August or September 1699, Collections of the MHS, sixth series, vol. 5, 1892, 50.

  “Pray for me”: SS Diary, 1: 450.

  “though he loves”: Willard, “Prognosticks of Impending Calamities,” 12. Stephen Foster, in The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 266–67, notes the Mather potshots.

  “most humbly begging”: Stoughton’s will, Suffolk County Probate, 2675, judicial archives, Massachusetts State Archives. I am grateful to Tamara Elliott Rogers for the information on Stoughton’s enduring Harvard College bequest.

  “parcel of dark”: Thomas Maule, An Abstract of a Letter to Cotton Mather (New York, 1701), 17.

  “errors and mistakes” to “honorable judges”: R, 851.

  “that God hath” to “impostures”: Wigglesworth to IM, Mather Papers, MHS. Increasingly, the witchcraft became the “supposed witchcraft.”

  he was mortified: SS Diary, 2: 948.

  Stoughton took care: R, 713, 889. See Rosenthal, Salem Story, 195–200.

  “ignorantly” to “Prince of the air”: Her
apology is in the Salem minister’s record book, DAC; Interview with Richard Trask, April 1, 2015. Again, the numbers vary; Ann was bewitched by between sixty-two and sixty-eight people.

  “watching, wishing”: CM, Winter Meditations: Directions How to Employ the Leisure of the Winter for the Glory of God (Boston, 1693), 59.

  “blind, nonsensical” and “ignorance and folly”: Brattle in Burr, 172, 188.

  “to endeavor an healing”: CM Diary, 2: 112. William Good demanded compensation for the infant Sarah lost in prison, R, 871.

  one witness who recanted: Calef in Burr, 356.

  “vile varlets”: Calef, More Wonders, 7.

  “furious invectives”: Charcot, as cited in Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem, 17. Pierre Janet in 1907 described hysteria’s symptoms as beginning with pains in the lower body that spread upward to the throat, where they produced choking sensations and facial rictus.

  “they who are usually”: “Mather-Calef Paper on Witchcraft,” Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 47 (1914), 244.

  death felt closer: Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety, 171–72; Kenneth Lockridge, cited in Weissbach, “Townes of Massachusetts,” 207; Oster, “Witchcraft, Weather.” Elizabeth Knapp convulsed in November; the Goodwins toward midsummer. It is doubtful that anyone would have had time for a witchcraft crisis in November, the busiest month of the year. As Larner, Witchcraft and Religion, has pointed out, such panics did not break out under actual alien occupation. Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 19, notes that epidemics of hysteria tend to erupt at jittery ends of centuries.

  Hysteria prefers: See George Rosen, Madness in Society (New York: Harper, 1968); Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000); and Sander L. Gilman et al., eds., Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  “If I cannot move”: Cited in Carol Gilligan, Joining the Resistance (New York: Polity, 2011), 87. The line is alternately translated: “If I cannot deflect the will of heaven, I shall move hell.”

  “Before I knew what affliction”: Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), 72.

  “labor was burdensome”: Willard, “Samuel Willard’s Account,” 565.

  “seemed to be more”: Ebenezer Turell, “Detection of Witchcraft,” MHS, 15. Margaret Rule too fretted about salvation just before her symptoms began, Burr, 310.

  “consumed, pined”: R, 82.

  “her mother spoke”: R, 373–74.

  The hysteric’s skin: Huxley, The Devils, 253. Ekirch, in At Day’s Close, 294, points out that skin tends to be most sensitive at 11:00 p.m. For “very pinching”: CM, Winter Meditations, introduction, 70. See William Ames, The Marrow of Theology (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1968), 57–59, on the pricking, piercing words from the pulpit.

  “having killed 500”: Randolph to the Lords of Trade, October 24, 1689, CO 5/855, no. 41, fols 117r-188v, PRO.

  ingenious seventeenth-century physician: MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, 202–9.

  “dullest calendar”: Hawke, Everyday Life, 91; Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 17–18.

  clarify the mental imagery: Prayer works that effect for women more often than men. See T. M. Luhrmann’s brilliant When God Talks Back (New York: Vintage, 2012), especially 216–26. Or as Ambrose Bierce defined the word ghost: “the outward and visible sign of an inward fear.”

  an intelligent, outspoken, orphaned eleven-year-old: See the English summary of Lagerlöf-Génetay, De Svenska Haxprocessernas; E. William Monter, “Scandinavian Witchcraft in Anglo-American Perspective,” in Early Modern European Witchcraft, ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 425–34. The majority of the afflicted Swedish children could read, according to Horneck, An Account, 3; Sweden alone had a higher literacy rate than NE.

  “In other words”: Richard P. Gildrie, “The Salem Witchcraft Trials as a Crisis of Popular Imagination,” EIHC 128 (June 1992): 276. As Luhrmann points out in When God Talks Back, Buddhists tend to have visions of Buddha. On what we see with our eyes closed, Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (New York: Vintage, 2012).

  erotic fear and longing: No one is better on the subject than Demos, Entertaining Salem, 2004. See especially Mary Warren and her struggle with John Procter in her spectral lap, R, 263; the routine trip to grandmother’s house can drip with sexual menace too. On the sexual thrill for the spectators, Delbanco, The Death of Satan, 60; for the flirtations, afflicted Margaret Rule, in Calef, Burr, 327.

  an identical case: Turell, “Detection of Witchcraft,” 6–22. In his account, the minister blamed “unguarded tenderness and affection” for encouraging the children in their folly. Rosenthal, Salem Story, sees more conspiring than he does hallucinating; interview with Bernard Rosenthal, January 15, 2015. As Bernard warned in his 1627 Guide to Grand-Jury Men, 54, those who counterfeited witchcraft symptoms did so for gain, for revenge, to please others, “some of a pleasure they take to gull spectators, and to be had in admiration.”

  “it was ordinary”: Calef, More Wonders, 120. There was adult collaboration too. Reverend Noyes plucked pins from throats of the bewitched; R, 514. The broken cane: Calef in Burr, 355.

  hungered for sport: R, 537. “These prayer meetings”: Cited in Rosen, Madness in Society, 220.

  “a sane adolescent”: Phillips, Going Sane, 97.

  “was better than the Bible”: “Revolution in New-England Justified,” 31. Murrin, “The Infernal Conspiracy,” 345, describes a massive act of transference on the part of those who had collaborated with the Dominion government. To expiate their sins in plotting to undermine a holy commonwealth, they prosecuted others. Norton is convincing on the subject, In the Devil’s Snare. T. H. Breen, Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 105, puts it differently: “If the Massachusetts government had been able to defend the colonists from the French and Indians, the witch hunting episode might never have occurred, much less gotten out of hand.”

  “summoning the massive”: Mencken, cited in Adams, Specter of Salem, 150. Nor could the girls have guessed the extent of their powers. L. Frank Baum did: “Didn’t you know water would be the end of me?” asked the witch in a wailing, despairing voice. “Of course not,” answered Dorothy, “how should I?”

  “believing the devil’s accusations”: B&N, 266. From the smoldering Reichstag in 1933 to weapons of mass destruction, there is nothing like a specter to legitimize power or rally the troops. See Randolph letter of May 16, 1689, on the colonists’ bending the French and Indian threat to their own ends. Certainly there was a great deal of redirected guilt, a hot-potato emotion as Arthur Miller noted in Timebends, xiii.

  the very word “nightmare”: Only the rare incubus turned up in Essex County. When women complained of bedroom attacks, they tended to name other women. On sleep paralysis: Owen Davies, “The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations,” Folklore (August 2003): 181–203; David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Selma R. Williams, Riding the Nightmare: Women and Witchcraft (New York: Athenaeum, 1978); R, 27.

  read everything in sight: Cremin, American Education, 212, observes that Massachusetts may have represented the most educated commonweal in the history of the world to that point. The John Wise remark is in Sibley, 435. Mather’s library, Dunton, cited in Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York: Viking, 1973), 11.

  “poisoned,” as Calef sniffed: In Richard M. Gummere, Seven Wise Men of Colonial America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 23. C. S. Lewis wrote about the fever that turned into Narnia in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Mariner, 2002): 46. He began with two images, “a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them;
that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling.”

  Swedish epidemic: That epidemic too was built on a preexisting myth and allowed children to target their own families. See Lagerlöf-Génetay, De Svenska Haxprocessernas; Monter, “Scandinavian Witchcraft.” Calef, More Wonders, 19, notes that a white spirit turned up in Salem as it did in Sweden; Mather tended to bury it. Bengt Ankarloo points out that the clergy and justices shaped that narrative; see Ankarloo’s “Blakulla, ou le sabbat des sorciers scandinaves,” in Le sabbat des sorciers en Europe (Grenoble, France: Millon, 1993), 251–58. The Bury St. Edmunds trials too—to which both JH and CM turned in their accounts of Salem, as did the justices—began with entranced, Scripture-resistant, pin-spitting preadolescent girls.

  “who think that they have”: Calef, cited in “Mather-Calef Papers on Witchcraft,” 250.

  “it is not usual”: IM, in Cases, 20.

  “There is no public”: WOW, 171. CM cleaned up Horneck’s language a little.

  fists jammed in mouths: Fists went into mouths at the Esty hearing as well; R, 208. It may not have been a coincidence that Foster and Carrier were of Scots clans. Or it may have been a perfect coincidence.

  “had she visited”: Some intuited that it could also be dangerous to leave the room. When Margaret Rule asked those at her bedside to withdraw, “One woman said, I am sure I am no witch, I will not go.” Rule’s other callers followed suit; it was impossible to know what might be asserted in your absence. Calef in Burr, 326.

  gender differences: For women hallucinating more, see Gildrie, “The Salem Witchcraft Trials,” 276. It is Roger Thompson who observes that women come off better. The tongue-holding good Christian woman appears only in the movie of Oz. The male victims claim Sewall’s attention; CM gave Burroughs top billing.

  original village covenant: Over 70 percent of the accused were however non-church members. Ray, Satan and Salem, 190.

  it has been suggested: The point is Norton’s, In the Devil’s Snare. CM located “the most unanimous resolution perhaps that ever was known to have inspired any people” behind the Andros coup. That was essential to the deed; Burroughs would have been unlikely to have subscribed to it. Maule too acknowledged the clergy’s hatred of Burroughs in Truth Held Forth, 189. He does not say he was a Baptist. For the inability to protect the frontier post-Andros, see Bullivant to Col. Lidget, CO 5/855, no. 103, PRO. As one Crown official put it seven years later, the Massachusetts leaders “have not a public spirit and, so long as they can sleep securely in this town of Boston, they [think] nor look no further”; Earl of Bellemont to the Council of Trade, August 28, 1699, CO 5/860, no. 65, PRO.