Far too many fine upstanding Puritans from the best families were being packed off to jail. Besides that, the main accusers seemed perfectly healthy outside of the courtroom, and the sheer number of suspects was so high that it was impossible to believe this many people could all be witches. A Beverly, Massachusetts, minister named John Hale said it best: “It cannot be imagined that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small compass of land should abominably leap into the Devil’s lap at once.”
What’s more, every single one of the 19 people who were hanged denied the crime of witchcraft right up until the moment they died. If these denials had been a pack of lies, God would never allow their souls to enter heaven, and the accused people knew it. Since nobody wants to go to Hell for lying about being a witch, surely this meant that none of them was guilty. Until now, many townsfolk who thought the trials were unfair had been afraid to say a word for fear of being accused themselves. But it was becoming quite clear that unless the trials were stopped, an entire generation of innocent Puritans could be condemned as witches.
On October 3, Boston Reverend Increase Mather preached a sermon arguing against the witch hunts. He agreed with his son Cotton that the Devil could make himself look exactly like any innocent person he chose. But Increase added that the Devil could play his dirty tricks without a person’s permission. (The judges had always claimed that the Devil needed a person’s permission before he could use that person’s likeness as a disguise.) The upshot was that Increase thought it could be the Devil, not the accused people, who was causing all the trouble. Like Cotton, he again urged the courts to exclude every bit of spectral evidence from now on, saying it would be “better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned.”
On October 6, six young suspects in the Salem prison were released on bail. This was something entirely new.
On October 8, eight powerful men (a former governor and deputy governor, the Reverend Increase Mather, a major who had resigned as a judge during the witch trials, and several other justices from various towns) signed a letter declaring their objections to the witch trials. The letter was written by Thomas Brattle, the same man who wrote earlier that the accusers had purposely injured themselves in court with pins and thorns hidden in their clothing. Brattle said that the group was “very much dissatisfyed with the proceedings; also several of the present Justices; and in particular, some of the Boston Justices were resolved to throw up their commissions rather than be active in disturbing the liberty of their Majesties’ subjects, merely on the accusations of these afflicted, possessed children.”
On October 19, a group of sobbing women reversed their previous confessions and revealed that not a single person they had accused of witchcraft had done them a bit of harm. They said their examiners had harassed them over and over to make them confess, and their families begged them to confess, too, so that they wouldn’t hang. Finally they’d had no other choice than to wrong themselves and lie about their friends.
On Saturday, October 29, Massachusetts’s Royal Governor William Phips put a halt to all further arrests and disbanded the notorious Court of Oyer and Terminer. He also released a lot of the people who were still in jail. On December 14, a brand new Superior Court of Judicature was established, though Chief Justice Stoughton and friends were still included. Their new job was to figure out what to do with accused witches who hadn’t yet been tried. And this had to be done without basing any cases on spectral evidence; all those stories from the Invisible World had been banned at last.
The upshot was that out of 52 people tried before the new court in January and February 1693, only three were convicted, and each of them had already confessed. (This rule had changed, too. If you confessed, you no longer got off scot-free or received special privileges.) The governor later released all three anyway, and nine suspects who had been sent to jail earlier weren’t even called into court. The Salem witch trials had ended.
We may never know exactly what caused the tragedy in Salem. The root of all this horror and pandemonium lies buried in a dark and misty past. Oh yes, every single sentence in surviving trial transcripts, every surviving letter written by eyewitnesses, each legal document, and all of the books written during the period have been scrutinized by scholars for well over 300 years. And yes, every new explanation about the cause of the dread disease or the motives of the accusers has been debated over and over again by professional historians. Some of the most well-known ideas have been ruled out, but even so, plenty of questions and theories still remain.
WHAT CAUSED THE FITS AND THE HYSTERIA OVER WTICHES?
Was there really a dread disease running rampant in New England? If so, could it have been encephalitis or Lyme disease, both of which exhibit many of the symptoms described by the victims? Were any sick people and animals poisoned by hallucinogenic jimson weed or a fungus in rye called ergot?
Did people who had originally lived on the frontier during the Indian wars suffer from fits and see visions of specters because they had post-traumatic stress disorder? After all, many members of their own families had been massacred right before their eyes. And did the Puritans’ belief that Indians were devils and witches worsen their fear of attacks by unknown forces as well?
WERE THE ACCUSERS CROOKED OR HONEST? A
Were the families of at least some of the afflicted simply trying to protect their loved ones from the Devil and his witches? That might make perfect sense because most everyone believed in witches and the Devil back in those days. And it does seem that some people and animals were really sick.
Was there an evil plot by Reverend Parris, Thomas Putnam, and their supporters to take advantage of hysteria over the dread disease by doing away with their personal enemies? Did the Putnams’ jealousy and anger over the perceived loss of their property spur a desire to destroy the Porters’ supporters by making them look like witches?
Rebecca Nurse’s son and son-in-law and Sarah Cloyse’s husband thought so, and they later helped force Parris to leave the community. And a series of letters and documents Putnam wrote or co-wrote in 1691 and 1692 indicate that he may have set up the accusations against Reverend George Burroughs, Burroughs’s arrest, and his daughter Ann’s testimony against the minister. He may even have worked with the judges to see that Burroughs was found guilty and hanged.
Was some of the witch hunting the result of that big fight between Reverend Parris and the members of his congregation who refused to pay his salary? These members had also been incensed over a 1689 contract with Parris that had given him the house he lived in. (Usually, the church would own the house, and the minister working there at the time would live in it.)
What about the testimony of the young girls? Had a group of them joined in a secret conspiracy to fake their fits and tortures? Did they purposely stick pins into their own skin during the trials or secretly bite themselves before accusing the witches of harming them? If so, why? Were some of them simply helping their parents by making their enemies look bad in court? Were they bored thrill seekers trying to get attention? Was it all a big game to pull the wool over the eyes of the adults? After all, John Proctor’s servant Mary Warren, who had once accused the accusers of lying, reported that one girl said they went after the innocent suspects “for sport…we must have some sport.”
WERE THE JUDGES CROOKED OR HONEST?
Were the judges, consciously or unconsciously, eager to put blame for their blunders during the Indian Wars at the feet of witches and devils to avoid responsibility themselves? Did they use the minister George Burroughs as their scapegoat because they disapproved of his unusual religious views? Or did the judges conspire to make off with a share of the arrested citizens’ money and property. Three of the judges were related to George Corwin, the 25-year-old high sheriff of Essex County. They included the sheriff’s uncles, Jonathan Corwin and Wait-Still Winthrop, and his father-in-law, Bartholomew Gedney. Sheriff Corwin was in charge of arrests and property seizures amon
g other duties.
In those days, a witch’s property was supposed to be turned over to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the King of England after she or he was hanged. What’s more, large fees could be collected from the accused witches and their families. But Sheriff Corwin ignored the King and the Colony and kept all that booty, even before anyone was hanged.
If certain judges connived with Corwin to convict wealthy people, maybe they got a cut of the action. Chief Justice Stoughton wrote out a warrant that allowed the estates and property of people who were executed to be seized and disposed of without ever telling Governor Phips or asking for his consent. This was illegal, too. And one time, when a Quaker woman asked why the court had seized her oxen, a judge replied, “Would you have us starve while we sit about your business?”
It seems likely that several of these theories are correct: Perhaps all of the disease, superstition, paranoia, hysteria, past resentments, cowardice, religious fervor, greed—and even boredom—boiled and bubbled together to foment a perfect storm in 1692 that finally exploded in the little town of Salem Village, to horrendous and tragic effect.
CHAPTER 10
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT
Even though the almanacs continued to predict rain and snow and phases of the moon, and even though Salem’s town clerks still registered new births and collected taxes as usual, not all of the troubles came to an end once the witchcraft hysteria began to die down. Some people still thought the trials should continue. Others who had been afraid to speak up were mortified by the hangings. Newly freed “witches” and their families were embittered and impoverished. The church fell into disrepair due to lack of funds, and divisions among its members continued to fester. And despite Governor Phips’s attempts to achieve a much wider peace with the French and Indians, the Second Indian War would grind on and on until 1699.
But when a 22-year-old Harvard graduate named Joseph Green was ordained as the minister of the Salem Village Church in 1698, things began to look up. A natural negotiator, Green initiated a “Meeting of Peace” so that families who had left the church could reconcile with those who had stayed, and a sense of normality finally began to return.
Eighteen long years later, on October 17, 1711, the Province of the Massachusetts Bay signed a Reversal of Attainder, an act that declared a general amnesty and removed the witchcraft charges against George Burroughs and certain others. This was both good and bad. The good part was that it restored the rights and good names of some (but not all) of the living and dead “witches” and awarded some money to their heirs.
There were two bad parts. One was that the legislature only gave money to people who asked for it or whose names were included on a list that left lots of people out. The other bad part was that not one single person would ever be prosecuted for any of the crimes they had committed during the witch trials, whether they had falsely accused their neighbors of being witches, hanged the innocent, ruined their reputations, or stolen all of their property.
Meanwhile, here’s what happened to a few of the people who were tangled up in witchcraft’s wicked web.
THE OFFICIALS
Chief Justice William Stoughton
Stoughton believed he had done a great job of ridding the land of witches and was furious that Governor Phips had set them free. On January 3, 1693, he ordered the hanging of everyone who had been exempted because they were pregnant. But Governor Phips—whose wife was among those accused of witchcraft—blamed Stoughton for the entire tragedy and wouldn’t allow him to hang the women. So Stoughton angrily quit his job as a judge.
Phips’s slap in the face to the chief justice didn’t hurt Stoughton’s career one bit, though. When Phips was ordered to return to London later that year, Stoughton became the acting governor of Massachusetts, serving until his death in 1701 and even doing double duty as chief justice until 1699. He never once apologized for his role in the trials.
The Other Judges
On January 14, 1697, Judge Samuel Sewall took “the blame and shame” for his role in the witch trials and asked for the people’s pardon. The same day, 12 other jurors signed a document apologizing for unwittingly shedding innocent blood, and the Massachusetts legislature declared the first annual Fast Day as everyone’s penance for all the sins committed during the trials. Each year after that, Sewell made sure to observe a fast and to pray for forgiveness.
High Sheriff George Corwin
On May 15, 1694, Justice Stoughton’s court helped out Sheriff Corwin once again by exempting him and his heirs from any liability for his failure to return all the goods he had stolen. Sheriff Corwin died at home of a heart attack in 1696. He was only 31 years old. Not one cent he extorted or stole from his innocent victims was ever turned over to the Crown, or the Colony, or the victims themselves during his lifetime.
THE ACCUSERS
Reverend Samuel Parris
Parris was the only person who offered any restitution to the accused witches and their families. In an attempt to keep his job by appeasing church members who had lost their loved ones because of the trials, he offered to subtract six pounds from his salary for 1692 and six pounds for 1693. The offer seems strange indeed: His total yearly salary was supposed to have been 66 pounds sterling (22 in money and the rest in provisions), but ever since 1691, the church committee had refused to pay him a cent. In 1694, he apologized for his mistakes and tried to make peace with the congregation. Placing the blame on his servants and “Satan the devil, the roaring lion, the old dragon, the enemy of all righteousness,” he said, “I do humbly own this day before the Lord and his people that God has been righteously spitting in my face.”
But in the end, neither Parris’s offer of restitution nor his apologies comforted his opponents. In fact, after Rebecca Nurse’s son and son-in-law and Sarah Cloyse’s husband directly accused Parris of destroying the innocent people in their families, they withdrew from his church. On May 3, 1695, 16 young men, 52 householders, and 18 church members sent a petition to Reverend Increase Mather and eight other area ministers, requesting that they advise Parris to quit and find a job someplace else. Parris refused, even though the ministers offered him a good job elsewhere if he would leave gracefully.
On July 14, 1696, Parris’s wife, Elizabeth, died, but by then most of the townspeople had lost all sympathy for him. Forced out of his job in 1697, he finally left town, but his reputation preceded him. Though he remarried and had two more children, the only jobs he could find were in the impoverished little frontier towns of Stow, Concord, and Dunstable. He died in Sudbury in 1720.
Betty Parris
During the trials, Mrs. Parris had been worried sick about her daughter Betty’s fits and absolutely refused to keep using the child to find witches. Toward the end of March 1692, Reverend and Mrs. Parris sent Betty off to Salem Town to live with Stephen Sewall,* Parris’s distant cousin. Most of Betty’s symptoms stopped practically right away, but not all of them. One night, Betty told Mrs. Sewall that “the great Black Man came to her and told her if she would be ruled by him, she should have whatsoever she desired, and go to a Golden City.” New England Puritans believed that the Devil was dark skinned like the Indians. So Mrs. Sewall warned Betty that she had just seen the Devil “and he was a Lyar from the Beginning, and bid her tell him so, if he came again: which she did.” In 1710, Betty married Benjamin Baron of Sudbury. She was 27 years old. Baron was a yeoman farmer, a trader, and a shoemaker. The couple had four children, one boy and three girls. We still don’t know whether Betty was really sick from the dread disease back in 1692, though she was one of the two people who were most likely to have truly been ill. Did she ever admit, even to herself, the damage she had done when she testified against her slave Tituba and against her neighbors? We will never know.
Abigail Williams
Parris’s niece Abigail stopped giving testimony against the accused witches by June 1692, long before the trials ended. Nobody knows why she disappeared from the hearings, but Abigail is the other accus
er who may actually have been sick. She never did fully recover from the fits she had suffered and was no older than 17 when she died.
Ann Putnam Jr.
When Ann was 19 years old, her parents died within two weeks of each other, and she was left alone to raise her nine brothers and sisters. Putnam never got married, but in 1706 when she was 29 years old, she asked to join the Salem Village Church. Always the peacemaker, Reverend Joseph Green offered his help. He guided her efforts to write an apology for lying in court, and he read it aloud in front of his congregation on August 25. Here’s a part of her confession:
I desire to be humbled before God for that sad providence that befell my father’s family; that I then being in my childhood should be made an instrument for accusing severall persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away. I now have good reason to believe they were innocent, and I justly fear I have been instrumental with others, though unwittingly, to bring upon myself the guilt of innocent blood; I can truly say before God, I did it not out of any anger or ill will; but was ignorantly deluded by Satan. And as I was a chief instrument of accusing of Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lye in the dust and be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity; for which I earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence.
Putnam was only about 35 years old when she died.
Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem Page 6