Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (14 page)

Deputy-Governor Jones had prepared carefully for the joint trial, but even he may have doubted whether he grasped fully the finer points in the works he had read. Most ministers were, in sharp contrast, trained for their vocation either at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or at one of England’s universities; there they acquired extensive learning and the specific knowledge with which to make sense of cases involving preternatural phenomena. The judges accordingly asked a group of ministers to meet in Hartford, read the depositions against the two women, and submit a written opinion. On 17 October, four days after the assembly resolved that the special court should resume its proceedings as soon as possible, Timothy Woodbridge, the pastor in Hartford for almost a decade, delivered to Governor Treat the ministers’ report.

Mister Jones, who was doubtless eager to compare the ministers’ recommendations with his own notes, must have read the document with a growing sense of assurance that he had understood the issues involved.

As to the evidences left to our consideration respecting the two women suspected of witchcraft at Fairfield, we offer: 

1. That we cannot but give our concurrence with the generality of divines that the endeavor of conviction of witchcraft by swimming is unlawful and sinful and therefore it cannot afford any evidence.

This condemnation of ducking—or swimming, as the ministers put it—was entirely consistent with William Jones’s own reading on the subject. He continued to read:

2. That the unusual excrescences found upon their bodies ought not to be allowed as evidence against them without the approbation of some able physicians.

Here was an interesting twist. The ministers accepted the Devil’s mark as a basis for conviction, but also insisted that “able physicians”—by which the ministers meant male doctors—must confirm that the markings were “unusual” and in all likelihood diabolical. Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough had been searched for the Devil’s mark on three separate occasions, but always by local women. Their examiners were experienced in midwifery and had intimate knowledge of the female body. But the ministers now argued that such expertise was insufficient. If the court abided by the ministers’ advice, the only tangible evidence of Satan’s involvement before the court would have to be deemed inadmissible.

In the third section of their response the ministers had much to say about Katherine Branch:

3. Respecting the evidence of the afflicted maid, we find some things testified carrying a suspicion of her counterfeiting, others that plainly intimate her trouble as coming from her mother, which improved by craft may produce most of those strange and unusual effects affirmed of her, and those things that by some may be thought to be diabolical or effects of witchcraft. We apprehend her applying of them to these persons merely from the appearance of their specters to her to be very uncertain and fallible from the easy deception of her senses and subtle devices of the Devil, wherefore we cannot think her a sufficient witness. Yet we think that her affliction, being something strange, well deserves a further inquiry.

The prospect of “further inquiry” must have made William Jones flinch, but in other respects this paragraph would have heartened the deputy-governor. Whereas Stamford’s pastor, John Bishop, had quickly concluded that Kate’s fits were the result of witchcraft, these ministers were much more skeptical. They were by no means alone in expressing doubts about the maidservant’s claims: some of Kate’s neighbors also suspected that her fits were staged; others recalled that her mother had suffered from similar symptoms and wondered if Kate’s behavior was inherited. Perhaps, as the ministers suggested, her torments were a combination of involuntary fits and crafted performance. The deputy-governor must have noted that the statement included an unequivocal rejection of spectral evidence as a reliable basis for conviction. Katherine Branch’s affliction was, they acknowledged, “something strange,” but she was clearly not “a sufficient witness.”

The ministers’ final recommendation related to the bulk of the evidence against the accused:

4. As to the other strange accidents such as the dying of cattle, etc, we apprehend the applying of them to these women as matters of witchcraft to be upon very slender and uncertain grounds.

Here again the ministers confirmed William Jones’s own understanding. No responsible court would send a suspect to the gallows based on cirumstantial evidence such as this.

William Jones must have been reassured by the consistency of his own notes with this report, compiled by learned men of God. The ministers did not reject the possibility that Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough were witches, but they did repudiate the evidence before the court as a sound basis for conviction. Their advice would provide an important reinforcement as Mister Jones and his fellow magistrates urged caution upon the jury.

On 28 October 1692, the court reconvened in Fairfield. The meetinghouse was again packed with local residents, relatives and friends of the defendants, and those who had testified against the accused. The atmosphere must have been electric with anticipation. After the proceedings were called to order, the governor once again instructed the jury to leave the room in order to reach a verdict, starting with Mercy Disborough. Were the jurymen told about the ministers’ recommendations? Was the ministers’ report read out loud in court? We do not know. But the governor doubtless reminded members of the jury that their decision must be based on the precise wording of the indictment against the defendant. When the jurymen returned (we do not know how long they took), the nervous whispers of the crowd must have faded into silence as the governor asked the jury to deliver its verdict. The jury spokesman announced that they found Mercy Disborough “guilty according to the indictment.”

This was not what William Jones and his colleagues had expected. Other than the supernatural markings, there was no clear indication that Mercy Disborough had formed an alliance with the Devil; and no male physician had authenticated the markings as diabolical. After conferring briefly with his fellow magistrates, the governor reminded the jurymen that they could convict with a clear conscience only if they found indisputable evidence of “familiarity with Satan.” He sent them back to re-consider their verdict.

When the jurymen returned, they declared that they saw “no reason to alter their verdict” and found Mercy Disborough guilty as before. The judges again took counsel. The consistent opinion of women who examined Goody Disborough’s body that she had supernatural markings, in combination with other evidence against her, must have swayed the jury. Should they accept that physical evidence as grounds for conviction, even though no male physician had confirmed what the women said? The ministers had urged otherwise, but surely in matters such as these experienced goodwives could be trusted. The magistrates decided, albeit reluctantly, to approve the verdict and Governor Treat proceeded to deliver the prescribed sentence: 

Mercy Disborough, you have been found guilty of the felonies and witchcrafts whereof you stand indicted. The court now passes sentence of death upon you as the law directs. You shall be carried from this place to the gaol from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and there hang till you be dead. May the Lord have mercy on your soul.

As he listened to the sentence, the deputy-governor doubtless cast his eyes over the courtroom to see the reaction of those in attendance. If Daniel Wescot was seated among the spectators, what did his facial expression reveal? Grim satisfaction? It was the fate of his neighbor Goody Clawson that Wescot was most eager to hear, but the judgment against Mercy Disborough would have given him encouragement.

The jurymen then left the room to consider the case of Goody Clawson. They returned to pronounce her “not guilty according to the indictment.” The judges must have been much relieved. The failure of repeated searches to find a Devil’s mark on Goody Clawson’s body would have made it impossible to support a conviction. Overturning a jury’s verdict was always a serious business and doing so would have angered those convinced of Elizabeth Clawson’s guilt even more than a straightforward acquittal. The magistrates approved the verdict and ordered Goody Clawson’s release from jail.

Witches being hanged
Contrary to popular mythology, witches in England and New England were hanged, not burned, either from scaffolds as shown here or from trees. It is no coincidence that all seven of the condemned witches shown here were women. Though a sizeable minority of those accused on both sides of the Atlantic were
men, women were much more vulnerable to witch accusations ( four-fifths of those accused in seventeenth-century New England were female).
(Source: From Ralph Gardiner,
England’s Grievance Discovered
[1655].)

When witch trials ended in acquittal, New England magistrates sometimes urged accusers to accept the verdict with good grace and to leave the defendant unmolested on condition that she did likewise. At the end of a previous trial in Connecticut, the court had instructed neighbors to “carry neighborly and peaceably, without unjust offence” to the accused and her family. In September 1692, on dismissing the allegations against Goody Staples and the Harveys, Governor Treat had “commanded” all concerned “to forbear speaking evil of the foresaid persons for the future upon pain of displeasure.” There is no record of whether the magistrates issued a similar “command” now that Elizabeth Clawson was to be set free. But we can imagine Mister Jones rising from his chair, gathering his papers as he prepared to leave the meetinghouse, and turning to see Daniel Wescot still seated on his bench, rigid and stony-faced: this cannot have been the verdict that he wanted or expected. And the expressions of other Stamford residents may also have suggested that any call for “neighborly and peaceable” behavior toward the Clawsons, however well intentioned, might be unrealistic.

However unenthusiastic they may have been about the verdict against Goody Disborough, Mister Jones and his fellow magistrates must at least have been pleased to leave Fairfield with two unequivocal judgments on record. But any notion they may have had that the witch trials were now over was premature. Within days, a group of Mercy Disborough’s supporters submitted a petition pointing out that one of the original jurors from the September trial had failed to attend the second session in October because he was away on business. Someone else had been appointed to serve in his place. The petitioners argued that this substitution was illegal and that therefore the conviction should be overturned. The General Court appointed a committee of three magistrates (Samuel Wyllys, William Pitkin, and Nathaniel Stanley) to investigate the claim, empowering them to “take such action as they saw fit.” Meanwhile, Mercy Disborough was granted a stay of execution.

Six long months passed before the three magistrates submitted their report. Then, as now, the wheels of justice could turn all too slowly for those under confinement. Goody Disborough had now been imprisoned for almost a year. When the report finally arrived in May 1693, William Jones must have worried as he made his way to the governor’s house: if the committee had sided with the petitioners, it would be highly embarrassing for him and the other judges. Sure enough, the report declared that the jury change was illegal:

It is so inviolable a practice in law that the individual jurors charged with the deliverance of a prisoner in a capital case and on whom the prisoner puts him or herself to be tried must try the case, and they only, that all the precedents in Old England and New confirm it. And not only precedent but the nature of the commission enforces it, for to these jurors the law gave this power and vested it in them. They had it by right of law. It is incompatible and impossible that it should be vested in these and in others too, for then two juries may have the same power in the same case. One man altered, the jury is altered.

The committee insisted that the court’s proceedings must be free from any irregularity, even if the defendant was clearly guilty, “lest they bring themselves and the whole county into inextricable troubles.” “Due form of law,” they wrote, “is that alone wherein the validity of verdicts and judgments in such cases stands. And if a real and apparent murderer be condemned and executed out of due form of law, it is indictable against them that do it, for in such a case the law is superceded by arbitrary doings.” All those involved in adjudicating this case should “take heed that what they do now will be rolled to their door.” The report concluded with a dramatic declaration: “Blood is a great thing and we cannot but open our mouths for the dumb in the cause of one appointed to die by such a verdict.” The deputy-governor may well have blanched on reading these words: “what they do now will be rolled to their door.” In convicting a murderer without due process, the authors were hinting, those responsible were themselves guilty of murder.