Conceived in Liberty (81 page)

In February 1692, at the town of Salem Village (now Danvers), these reactionary forces found their chance. The stage had been set by the solemn findings of the Mathers. Now a group of young girls of Salem Village became “bewitched” and began the delightful game of accusing other people—at first mostly personal enemies—of witchcraft. The leaders of the bewitched girls were the two daughters of the Puritan divine, Rev. Samuel Parris, and so their accusations were taken all the more seriously. At first, neighbors who had annoyed the girls were accused of being witchtormentors. But like an infection, the accusations spread with great speed throughout the colony. Legal proceedings commenced. Since spectral evidence was now accepted by the courts, the supposed witches were quickly condemned, imprisoned, and hanged. After the classic pattern of intimidation and informing, reprieve came only if the witch would confess his or her guilt; and the confession was deemed sincere only if
other
people— accomplices—were named. Many of these confessions were extracted under torture. The circle of accusations thus became ever wider. The first hanging was that of a neighbor of the Parris family, Sarah Good, whose five-year-old daughter was even imprisoned as a witch.

Beginning with helpless old women, the circle of victims of the witchhunt soon expanded. The Reverend George Burroughs, a retired Puritan minister himself, had the bad fortune of incurring the dislike of the Parrises. Burroughs was duly accused of being a leading witch (witches are male as well as female), of “confederacy with the Devil,” etc. Reverend Mr. Burroughs was accused by several of the girls of witchcraft. The unfortunate minister became the most prominent victim of the witch-hunt. Although the more moderate Increase Mather was dubious of the spectral evidence, his son Cotton had no such doubts, and eagerly whipped up the witch-hunt generally, and specifically against Burroughs. Plagued by dishonest or deluded witnesses and biased judges, Burroughs was sentenced to be hanged.

It was no wonder that Burroughs, a good Puritan, was led by these proceedings to disbelieve in witchcraft altogether—a dose of rationalism imbibed by many who were falsely accused in their turn. On the day of Burroughs’ execution, he made a brief and moving statement of his innocence, concluding with the Lord’s Prayer. The crowd, convinced of his innocence, began to move to free the unfortunate Burroughs, but Cotton Mather—playing a role reminiscent of Reverend Mr. Wilson’s at the
hanging of Mary Dyer a generation before—stepped to the fore and explained to the crowd that it was easy for an agent of the Devil to simulate innocence. Thanks to Cotton Mather, the hanging of the venerable wizard proceeded according to schedule.

The witch-hunt flourished. One unfortunate woman, Martha Carrier, denounced by Cotton Mather as a “rampant hag,” found that her four children had been induced to testify against her. In a Boston court, even a “bewitched” dog was solemnly tried, convicted, and executed.

When Sir William Phips arrived in Boston he found the colony under a full head of witch-hunt steam. He found over one hundred accused witches in prison and awaiting trial. In over his depth, he turned unfortunately to the Mathers for advice. The Mathers and the rest of the clergy called for continual efforts to detect and root out witchcraft in the colony. The crime must meet “speedy and vigorous prosecution.” The Mathers did warn that more than spectral evidence should be required for conviction, but this was a mere
pro forma
note of caution, unheeded by them or by the judges. Phips then centralized the witch trials. On advice of the Council, he turned over all witch trials to a special court of seven councillors. Naively, Phips wrote William Blathwayt that the seven judges were “persons of the best prudence.” Chief judge and strongman of the new court was Lieutenant Governor Stoughton. The other councillors constituted, in the words of Professor Dunn, a “perfect microcosm of the Massachusetts ruling coalition”—Puritans and Tory opportunists. Trustingly believing that all was safe and in sober hands, Phips left for Maine to fight Indians; Stoughton was left in charge of the court, which opened in Salem in early June.

Too many writers have treated the Salem witch-hunt in psychological terms: childish neuroses and mob hysteria. The vital point is not the hysteria of children, but the
use
made of it by the adult society. Neither can the witch-hunt be treated as a case study in mob psychology; for the witch-hunt was not a lynching bee, but a program carried out by the elite of the colony and directed by the lieutenant governor himself, the man whose major aim had long been the exercise of power.

During the summer, the witch-hunt centering in Salem spread through the colony. Other young girls joined in the business of being bewitched and of leveling accusations, until their number rose to fifty. Favorite targets of accusations were any who dared to raise their voice to criticize the witchhunt, or even to assert that witches didn’t exist at all. Concentration on these targets served to intimidate critics of the veritable reign of terror. This same cause was served by executing, as evident proof of diabolism, any conscience-stricken informer who dared to recant his implication of other persons.

To make sure of verdicts against the accused, Lieutenant Governor Stoughton decided, remarkably, to operate under the old charter rules. As a result, the jurors were chosen only from the ranks of Puritan church members,
and the hapless defendants were allowed no rights of counsel. And, crucially, the special high court decided to admit all spectral evidence, under the rather dubious assumption that the devil could not assume the spectral shape of nonwitches. All of the witch executions, including Burroughs’, were the handiwork of the Stoughton court. By the end of September, the high court had condemned twenty-seven for witchcraft and had executed twenty. Fifty witches had escaped punishment by confession, an additional hundred were in prison awaiting trial, and some two hundred more were accused but not yet imprisoned. This amounted to almost one percent of Massachusetts’ population being accused of witchcraft during a period of only a few months.

Here and there brave men literally took their lives in their hands by coming out openly against the monstrous proceedings. Young Joseph Putnam, a relative of one of the bewitched girls, offered his home as refuge to any accused witch, and announced with loaded guns that anyone who should come to arrest him for witchcraft would come at his own peril. More silently, Councillor Nathaniel Saltonstall, one of the judges on the special court, withdrew in disgust from the proceedings. The eminent young liberal Puritan of Ipswich, Rev. John Wise, who had led Massachusetts’ opposition to the Andros regime, now spoke up in defense of two accused parishioners, as did twenty neighbors of the accused couple. And the prominent liberal merchant of Boston, Thomas Brattle, widely distributed an open letter, “A Full and Candid Account of the Delusion Called Witchcraft Which Prevailed in New England.” Brattle denounced the “new Salem philosophy,” and attacked the suppression of personal liberty upon spectral evidence. Prophetically, Brattle warned: “What will be the issue of these troubles, God only knows. I am afraid that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land.”

As the bewitched girls and their adult supporters felt their newfound power, the social level of their accusations continued to rise. Beginning with poor crones, the accusers now began to strike at some of the most eminent men of the colony. The renowned Puritan minister of Boston, Rev. Samuel Willard, was accused of witchcraft (though this was understandable in view of Willard’s criticism of the witch trials). But soon the girls moved to strike at some of the leaders of the witch-hunt itself: the wife of Rev. John Hale of Beverly, one of the most ardent of the witch-hunters, was accused of being a witch; so too the mother-in-law of one of the most zealous of the judges in prosecuting the witches. It is not surprising that Hale soon came to see chat the witch-hunt was a double-edged sword, and he joined the outspoken critics of the witch trials. Perhaps the most interesting, and tactically the most mistaken, of the accusations was the one leveled against none other than Lady Phips, wife of the governor. The Phipses were liberally inclined, and during her husband’s absence,
Lady Phips angered the hard-line witch-hunters by ordering that one of the accused witches be freed. And so, in the full heady exercise of its terrorizing power, the witch-hunt reached too far. It moved against the Phipses themselves; against, in short, the major obstacle to Stoughton’s assumption of power in Massachusetts.

The witch-hunters had made their fatal mistake. Phips, never enthusiastic about the witch-hunt, now turned flatly against it. At the end of September he suspended the special court and all its proceedings for a three-month period. As Phips explained to the Crown, “Some were accused of whose innocency I was well assured and many considerable persons of unblamable life and conversations were cried out upon as witches and wizards....” Increase Mather concurred in suspending the infamous court, but his son Cotton tried his best to have the witch trials continued. In fact, the witch-hunt was not yet over. Phips again journeyed to Maine, and a large number of colonists—including ministers and judges—seized this opportunity to press for a continuation of the trials, even though in defiance of Phips’ order. The Reverend Samuel Torrey was particularly eager to get on with the prosecutions.

The matter now came before the General Court and debate was intense. The hard-liners were determined to continue the trials as before; the moderates called instead for a convocation of ministers to advise the government, with the trials to be suspended meanwhile. The resolution for a convocation passed the General Court by a very close 33-29 vote. The margin of victory included those who either had been themselves accused of witchcraft or had had relatives so accused. If not for their votes, the General Court would have continued the witch-hunt. When Phips returned, such councillors as the old Puritan Samuel Sewall and James Russell tried desperately to persuade him to change his mind and continue the prosecutions, but to no avail.

When the convocation of Puritan ministers assembled, the hard-line old guard, sensing its defeat, remained away, and so the proceedings were dominated by such relative liberals as William Hubbard, Samuel Willard, and John Wise. The ministers put the question to Increase Mather, who gave the expected moderate advice. The devil, Mather maintained, is capable of taking the shape of innocent persons. This could be seen, he shrewdly noted, by the fact that many ardent believers in the guilt of the witches were themselves soon accused or found a close relative in that position. And with the devil that able, spectral evidence was clearly worth little or nothing.

Using the moderate Mather formula, Phips ended the old special court, and after the General Court incorporated the Massachusetts judicial system into the charter, Phips created in January 1693 a new Superior Court, which heard the witch cases. The court, under Phips’ orders to prohibit the use of spectral evidence, found it difficult to indict or convict witches. Of
over fifty suspect witches, twenty-six were tried and only three convicted and sentenced to death. William Stoughton, chief justice of the old court, now assumed that office in the new. A hard-liner to the end, he happily prepared to execute the three convicted women, along with five who had been condemned by the old court. But despite Stoughton’s indecent haste, the eight executions were barred at the end of January by a last-minute reprieve from Governor Phips. The reprieve was cheered by thousands in the colony, but it infuriated Stoughton. Rising in “passionate anger,” Stoughton thundered that the court, if left unhampered, would have cleared Massachusetts at last of witches. But now, justice was obstructed and the task unfulfilled, thus advancing the kingdom of Satan. Stoughton left the implied question unstated: Was Phips
consciously
doing the devil’s work?

With this diatribe, Stoughton tempestuously quit the court. The court proceedings dragged on for several months, but the heart was now out of it. The juries began to acquit everyone despite the anger of the judges. Finally, in April, a servant girl, May Watkins, was indicted for witchcraft and acquitted by the jury. The court forced the jury to reconsider, but the panel was adamant. About this time, the remaining prisoners were released. The Salem reign of terror was over.

The side of the coin opposite that of the myth of mob hysteria should be noted. For one thing, the witch-hunt was led and directed by the elite of the colony, the magistrates and the ministers. In addition, by no means were all the masses caught up in the witch frenzy. On the contrary, it was the revulsion of the people—as shown at the Burroughs execution and particularly by the jury acquittals—that was instrumental in bringing the witch trials to an end. In addition, popular petitions had flowed into the government, denouncing the informers and defending the accused.

The end of the witch-hunt left Phips in a very weak political position in the colony. Hated by the hard-liners for stopping the witch trials, Phips had equally disenchanted his natural supporters—the liberals—by condoning the trials in the first place. The whole prosecution, after all, had been conducted by officials of his administration and so Phips bore ultimate responsibility.

The fanatical Puritan old guard, meanwhile, was not so constituted as to give up without a fight. The people of Massachusetts had almost been won back to the old faith and zeal by the frenzy of the witch-hunt. Perhaps they could yet be won back with a further campaign against witchcraft. The indefatigable Cotton Mather now dug up the case of Margaret Rule, a bewitched girl of seventeen. Mather found the case, asked the girl numerous leading questions, gave her great publicity, tried in vain to get some accusations, and then wrote up the case in the monograph “Another Brand Plucked out of the Burning.” Mather distributed the essay widely as an open letter (Phips had banned any publication on witchcraft).

Mather might have been successful in reviving the witch-hunting spirit
had it not been for a courageous Boston cloth merchant, Robert Calef, who stopped him in his tracks. Bitter at the clergy’s whipping up of the Salem witch-hunt, Calef attended Margaret’s public examination by Mather and refuted it in 1694 in an open letter of his own. Infuriated, Mather denounced Calef as “one of the worst of liars” and had him arrested for slander. But Mather prudently decided not to press charges, and Calef kept peppering Mather with letters pointing to the unreliability of the evidence and the absurdity of the accusation of witchcraft. Ministers and magistrates joined in reviling Calef as an atheist, but he stood his ground. President Increase Mather and the fellows of Harvard College, all but one of them Puritan ministers, joined the fray in March 1694, trumpeting the “remarkables” of supernatural intervention in the natural world, and asking people to send to the Harvard fellows more such evidences. Calef, with cutting sarcasm, sent in his own list of “remarkables”: the deaths of one of the witch-hunting judges, of two sons of another judge, etc. Finally, in 1700 the intrepid Calef gathered the whole inflammable discussion into one book,
More Wonders of the Invisible World,
published in London, as no Boston printer would dare to publish it. Increase Mather had the book publicly burned in Harvard Yard, but this only served to spread the book more widely. Calef’s
More Wonders,
indeed, had served to crystallize the popular revulsion against the whole witch-hunt episode and its leadership. The instigator of the witch-hunt, Rev. Samuel Parris, was now driven out of his Salem parish by the aroused congregation, and one of the main “bewitched” girls of Salem confessed her dishonesty and begged forgiveness. The Massachusetts General Court itself admitted in 1696 that it had committed wrongs by participating in the witch-hunt. And in the same year, Councillor Samuel Sewall, one of the witch-hunt judges, confessed his errors publicly, and had the liberal Rev. Samuel Willard read the confession aloud in church. Willard read the noble words: “Samuel Sewall... being made sensible that as to the guilt... at Salem, he is... more concerned than any that he knows of, desires to take the blame and shame of it, asking of men and especially desiring prayers that God... would pardon that sin.” Perhaps the supreme irony of the entire affair was that Margaret Rule (who, like so many of the other “afflicted,” turned to promiscuity in later life), after prodding by Cotton Mather to tell the name of the witch who was afflicting her, named Mather
himself
as the guilty wizard. Unsurprisingly, Cotton Mather’s interest in witchcraft dwindled markedly after that.