The Witches: Salem, 1692

by Stacy Schiff

  “The design of the devil”: CM, Batteries Upon the Kingdom of the Devil, 24.

  “It is evident that”: IM, IP, 102.

  “that the reverence I bore”: Hale in Burr, 404.

  day-care worker: Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern Witch Hunt (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 157. “turned him into a mouse”: Dorothy Rabinowitz, No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times (New York: Free Press, 2003), 13. With child-abuse scandals, Rabinowitz points out, 29, it was understood that if a child said he had been molested, he told the truth. If he denied the abuse, he was simply not ready to talk yet. For a modern case of hysteria and hallucination, Lawrence Wright’s extraordinary two-part “Remembering Satan,” New Yorker, May 17 and May 24, 1993.

  “uncharitable expressions”: B&N, 344. At other times raving women were said to be witches and men dreamed of the devil without anyone thinking twice about it, Hull Diaries, 181.

  “They look upon me”: Dudley to Blathwayt, February 25, 1692, cited in Philip Ranlet, Enemies of the Bay Colony (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), 184.

  English officials who sniffed: Edward Randolph Papers 1v: 283.

  “a place where none do”: Andros to Lord Sunderland, March 30, 1687, in John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Providence: Knowles, 1858), 3: 224.

  “like young conjurers”: Randolph cited in Ranlet, Enemies of the Bay Colony, 107. In deriding the coup that unseated him, an English official wondered if rebellion was not akin to the sin of witchcraft; Palmer in Andros Tracts, 1: 36. Some liked to harp on the chaos there. “New England is worse than bedlam,” Randolph scoffed in a March 14, 1693, dispatch. Boston was in the grip of “fantastical delusions,” its people “more stupid than their governer.” Randolph Papers, 7: 433–44.

  “were a people fit only”: Cited in Lustig, Imperial Executive, 213, and echoed by CM, Midnight Cry, 63.

  “perhaps a more gross diabolism”: WOW, 16.

  “preached up a rebellion”: Randolph to Samuel Shrimpton, July 26, 1684, Letters and Official Papers, 3: 318.

  ministers were as blindsided: The point is David Hall’s; interview with Hall, January 12, 2013.

  “lively demonstrations” to “hinder this good”: CM in Burr, 322–23.

  Calef credited: Calef, More Wonders, 164–65.

  all wonder tales harvested: For the political utility of those tales, Perry Miller, The England Mind from Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 142–45.

  small, supernatural figure: When Mary Marston confessed in August, she literally said the devil had made her do it; R, 565.

  “demons in the shape”: Magnalia, 2: 541. John Emerson, who wrote up the chimerical invaders, had been minister at Salmon Falls when the town was burned in 1690. He had also earlier warned the authorities of Gloucester’s distress. So many of their men were off at the frontier that the town felt utterly exposed, “every day and night in expectation” of assault, all the more so given their harbor, the best in NE. So depleted were their forces that they could barely man a watch; they preferred to abandon the town than to “live in continual hazard and fear of their lives.” They sound precisely like the Salem villagers begging off town-watch duty in 1667.

  XII. A LONG TRAIN OF MISERABLE CONSEQUENCES

  Whole volumes have been devoted to Salem’s legacy. See, in particular, Gretchen Adams’s sterling 2010 work The Specter of Salem as well as her “The Specter of Salem in American Culture,” OAH Magazine of History (July 2003): 24–27; Owen Davies, America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, eds., Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). On digesting history more generally, see Foote, “To Remember and Forget.”

  “long train of miserable”: “Return of Several Ministers Consulted,” B&N, 117–18.

  “People were chasing”: Cited in Mark Danner, “Donald Rumsfeld Revealed,” New York Review of Books, January 9, 2014, 65.

  Betty Parris married: See Marilynne Roach’s excellent “‘That Child, Betty Parris’: Elizabeth (Parris) Barron and the People in Her Life,” EIHC 124 (January 1988): 1–27.

  “diabolical molestations”: Norton, “George Burroughs,” 311, suggests this was Shelden; Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft, 109, thinks Warren or Shelden; Roach, “‘That Child,’” thinks Abigail.

  “a very sober”: Cited in Justin Winsor, The Memorial History of Boston (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), vol. 2, 146.

  “operations of the powers”: Lawson in Burr, 149. Burr theorized that Lawson left NE because of his role in the Salem proceedings. There is no evidence to support that assertion.

  “uneven and unwary”: Lawson letters of October 6, 1713, and July 12, 1715, Ms. Rawlinson, D839, fol. 169r, Bodleian Library.

  “we must unavoidably perish”: Lawson to Jeremy Dummer and Henry Newman, December 24 1714, Ms. Rawlinson, C128, fol. 12r, Bodleian Library.

  “the unhappy Mr. Deodat”: Edmund Calamy, A Continuation of the Account of the Ministers, Lecturers, Masters and Fellows of Colleges and Schoolmasters, Who Were Ejected and Silenced After the Restoration (London: R. Ford, 1727), 11: 629.

  “difficulties and disturbances”: Journal of the Rev. Israel Loring, January 25, 1720, Sudbury, Massachusetts, archives. The best source on the later years is again Gragg, Quest for Security, 153–75; see B&N, 195–96, for the will.

  Joseph Green: Joseph Green diary, DIA 72, PEM; Sibley.

  lumber of the old meetinghouse: Richard B. Trask, The Meetinghouse at Salem Village (Danvers, MA: Danvers Alarm List, 1992), 20.

  “on his lying down”: John Kendall, The Life of Thomas Story (Philadelphia: Crukshank, 1805), 172. When John Alden sailed to England twelve years later with an official request for matériel, he was captured by the French. Dudley Bradstreet was taken prisoner by Indians in his snowbound house.

  Six-foot-long mermen: CM, July 5, 1716, in Silverman, Selected Letters, 211.

  “the mischievous unChristian”: A Faithful Narrative of the Proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Council Convened at Salem in 1734 (Boston: Henchman, 1735), 3.

  Calef noted: Calef, More Wonders, 7.

  smallpox epidemic: See Ernest Caulfield, “Pediatric Aspects of the Salem Witchcraft Tragedy,” American Journal of Diseases of Children (1943): 788–802; CM Diary, 2: 632, 657, for “cursed clamor” and the bomb. It is interesting that CM, who—while studying medicine at Harvard, claimed to contract “almost every distemper that I read of in my studies”—seemed not to ponder a psychosomatic angle in 1692. Naturally both IM and CM claimed to have foretold the 1721 epidemic.

  a Westfield girl: Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints, 124.

  “by instigation of”: Francis, Judge Sewall’s Apology, 321.

  “a leprechaun”: Delbanco, The Death of Satan, 64–69; similarly, Reis, Damned Women, 164–93.

  “little short of a proper satanical”: CM Diary, 2: 749. For a fresh analysis of the marriage, see Virginia Bernhard, “Cotton Mather’s ‘Most Unhappy Wife’: Reflections on the Uses of Historical Evidence,” New England Quarterly (September 1987): 351. As she notes, it is not difficult to make the case that CM had a touch of paranoia. As Arthur Miller observed, paranoia however secretes its pearl around a grain of fact.

  “wear off that reproach”: Brattle in Burr, 190.

  “foul stain”: Cited in Adams, Specter of Salem, 36.

  “The North”: Ibid., 118.

  Pilgrim feasts: See Peter Gomes’s wonderful “Pilgrims and Puritans: ‘Heroes’ and ‘Villains’ in the Creation of the American Past,” Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 95 (1983): 1–16.

  “detestable and nefarious”: Cited in Jesse Walker, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 113.

  “We must awake”: Cited in Richar
d Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 2008), 20.

  “diabolical conspiracy”: Cited in Michael Heale, The United States in the Long Twentieth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 133.

  obedience to God: Best on the point is Innes, Creating the Commonwealth, 200.

  John Adams: Adams, Specter of Salem, 35. He was voicing precisely the sentiment Phips and IM battled.

  “the sense of heated”: Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style, 3. The line appeared in a November 1964 Harper’s; it is reworked slightly.

  “There are not two”: Andros Tracts, 1: 37. The official reply and these assertions fell to Samuel Sewall.

  American presidents: See Gary Boyd Roberts, “Notable Kin: The Progeny of Witches and Wizards,” Nexus (June 1992).

  “I think we stood”: Cited in Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer (New York: Knopf, 2013), 50.

  The Crucible was not a success: Miller, Timebends, 347–49; Miller, “Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible,’” New Yorker, October 21, 1996, 164.

  “according to ancient”: Independent Journal, July 18, 1787; Massachusetts Centinel, August 1, 1787; Pennsylvania Evening Herald, October 27, 1787. For Edmund S. Morgan on the incident, “The Witch and We, the People,” American Heritage 34 (August 1983), 6–11. The last colonial trial for witchcraft took place in Virginia in 1706.

  “You couldn’t get”: Cited in Morrison and Schultz, Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory, 55. See also Miller, Timebends, 335–49; Miller felt the town began exploring and exploiting its past only after The Crucible.

  “What are you”: Interview with Richard Trask, April 2, 2015.

  tussle today over Sarah Wilds: I am grateful to Topsfield archivist Amy Coffin for the detail.

  “fooling with history”: Daniel Lang, “Poor Ann,” New Yorker, September 11, 1954, 100. Lang follows the history of the remaining six unexonerated women. An earlier refusal to exonerate them seemed ridiculous; the 1959 Massachusetts senate did not care to make itself “a laughing stock in the eyes of enlightened society all around the world.” The 2001 Act (Session Laws, Acts of 2001, chapter 122) makes no reference to executions.

  “Do you think” to “think they are”: R, 230. In his draft, SP records Hathorne’s question differently: “Do not you think they are bewitched?” he has the chief justice ask, R, 228. Her answer remains the same.

  * Most accomplish only part of the job. As a proponent of the witchcraft theory conceded: “There are departments in twentieth-century American universities with as long and as vicious a history of factional hatreds as any to be found in Salem, and the parties to these hatreds accuse each other of all sorts of absurdities, but witchcraft is not one of them.”

  * To prepare his seventeen-year-old for a suitor, Sewall read her the story of Adam and Eve. It proved less soothing than expected; she hid from her caller in the stable.

  * He was citing Caesar on the Scythians, from whom Mather understood the Native Americans descended. Others believed them in some vague way descended from a tribe of Israel.

  * And some of those who tittered wound up thereafter in meeting with signs reading “I Stand Here for My Lascivious and Wanton Carriages” around their necks.

  * In a Connecticut case later in 1692, the father of a convulsing girl encouraged callers; it was important they observe the unnatural happenings for themselves. He wanted to make it clear that no one was playacting.

  * If a serious discussion of witchcraft versus possession took place, it is lost to us. Not everyone distinguished between them or so much as attempted to; the symptoms were largely the same. Mather noted their “near affinity,” conjoining the two even in the title of Memorable Providences. One could invite the other: “It is an ordinary thing,” the minister at the center of the Groton case observed, “for a possession to be introduced by a bewitching.” (In that he followed Mather’s father, Increase, who believed one could simultaneously suffer from both.) Fumbling toward an explanation, Parris early on hinted at demonic possession. It was understood that the possessed experienced no bodily harm, however; visible marks bloomed on the girls’ bodies. Soon enough apparitions corroborated the witchcraft, a diagnosis Parris had cause to prefer. Complicity made all the difference: a willing host to impurity, the possessed person was guilty. The bewitched was innocent.

  * Many sympathized with a farmer whose home—just north of Salem village—straddled the Topsfield-Ipswich line. When a constable approached from one direction, the farmer removed to the far side of his house. (Constable Wilds finally settled the matter by force. Enlisting some sturdy friends, he seized a choice pig and declared the account settled. The collecting of witches, he was about to discover, was less straightforward.)

  * Harvard tuition—which ran about fifty-five pounds for the four-year course of study—was paid the same way, most commonly in wheat and malt. The occasional New England father sent his son to Cambridge with parsnips, butter, and, regrettably for all, goat mutton. A 141-pound side of beef covered a year’s tuition. Translating in another direction, four years’ tuition amounted to the cost of a small home.

  * In the same vein, Cotton Mather felt it necessary to prepare his eight-year-old daughter for his imminent death. He went on to outlive her by twelve years.

  * In the minds of most Indian captives, there was only one thing worse. An English settler would prefer to have his brains dashed out by a hatchet than to kiss a crucifix. Fearing for his soul, one starving youngster refused even a Jesuit-proffered biscuit. He buried it under a log.

  * The phenomenon was not new. Under repeated interrogation, hardy details tend to blossom and grow more lush. The same had happened with an earlier “infernal nuisance,” Joan of Arc.

  * Following a prickly conversation with the governor in which he asserted that more drunkenness could be observed in six months in North America than in the course of an English lifetime, Increase Mather noted in his diary: “No wonder that New England is visited when the head is so spirited.” At around the same time, his son complained that every other house in Boston was an alehouse. The Salem town minister shared their concern. The New England visitor eager to write the Puritans off as sanctimonious hypocrites found them “the worst of drunkards,” muddy-brained at the end of each day but never so incapacitated as to desist from spouting Scripture. All exaggerated, to different ends. Strong cider was nonetheless as constant a feature of seventeenth-century New England as the belief in witchcraft. As one modern historian noted, “The ‘Puritan’ who shuddered at the very sight (or thought) of a glass of beer or wine, not to mention hard liquor, did not live in colonial Massachusetts.”

  † One New England witch did nearly sink a Barbados-bound ship. That witch was a man.

  * The New England minister could barely entertain the possibility of an erotic encounter even when a witch confessed to it. When several such cases came to his attention, Increase Mather insisted that the devil had planted false memories. Those poor women hallucinated!

  * The devil boasts a similarly catholic heritage, as he reminds Daniel Webster in Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1937 story: “’Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself—and of the best descent—for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours.”

  * A Swedish volume that turned up in seventeenth-century Delaware included the warning that a cross be cut in brooms to prevent witch hijackings.

  * This too Cotton Mather attributed to witchcraft. She had communicated with her employer perfectly well in English. Clearly a confederate had cast a spell on her “to prevent her telling tales, by confining her to a language which ’twas hoped nobody would understand.” He certainly did not and spoke to her through interpreters.

  * Logic worked some wonders of its own in the realm of witchcraft. Argued one German authority: “Many things are done in this world by the force of demons which we
in our ignorance attribute to natural causes.”

  † At the apogee of this coiled logic sits Thomas Hobbes, himself a vicar’s son. The great political philosopher was a skeptic. He felt witches should however be prosecuted for perpetuating a blatantly false belief.

  * He met his match in the Barnstable man who credited the devil with the law exacting ministers’ maintenance.

  * It says something about the relative expectations of a New England slave and a minister’s daughter that the devil promised Tituba “pretty things” and a pet canary. He enticed Betty with a visit to the “Golden City.”

  * And had a neighbor not peered through the window, the mystery of William Morse’s haunted house—through which cats, hogs, spoons, stones, and chairs periodically flew—might never have been solved. There was Morse, deep in prayer. And there was the teenage grandson, flinging shoes at his grandfather’s head. Having grown up nearby, Ann Putnam Sr. would have known every wrinkle of that long-running mystery, one that had produced an earlier witchcraft accusation.