In the Devil's Snare (21 page)

During these two weeks immediately following Governor Phips’s arrival, with trials apparently imminent, the pace of accusations accelerated and the number of complaints multiplied. Various male Putnams, Ingersolls, Walcotts, and their allies filed formal charges against three people on May 21, four on May 23, four on May 26, and nine on May 28. Moreover, the specters of those already imprisoned repeatedly reappeared to torment the afflicted. On May 23, Sir William Phips directed “that Irons should be put upon those in Prison” to quiet the “renewed” outcries against spectral tortures committed by the suspects being held for trial. In short, jail alone was not enough—chains were now required to restrain the witches’ fury. Robert Calef, the trials’ later critic, wrote acidly that Phips’s order constituted “the first thing he exerted his power in.” Even if not precisely accurate, that observation correctly captured the sense of urgency with which the governor approached the witchcraft crisis.
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Another eighteen-year-old, Elizabeth Booth, also joined the ranks of the afflicted in late May. The daughter of a twice-widowed mother who lived in the Village, she accused Daniel Andrew (a well-to-do relative of the Jacobs clan) and John and Elizabeth Proctor of tormenting her. In addition she complained against the Proctors’ fifteen-year-old daughter Sarah and Goody Proctor’s sister, Mary Bassett DeRich (whose husband was a Jerseyan). More sufferers then joined the chorus against Sarah Proctor, and a few days later against Sarah’s older brothers, William and Benjamin. Susannah Sheldon continued to focus primarily on her initial target, Philip English. On May 22 English “brougt his book and drod his knife and said if I would not touch it he would cut my throt,” she declared. The specter of a dead man appeared to accuse English of having “murdered him and drounded him in the se[a].” The apparition directed Susannah to “tell master hatheren and told me that I should not rest tel I had told it.” In response, English threatened to “cut [her] leges of[f]” and insisted that “he would go kill the govenner,” who was “the gretes innemy he had.” If he were captured, the still-fugitive English proclaimed, he would “kil 10 folck in boston before next six day.”
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All in all, living through the last two weeks of May must have left people in Essex County, especially the examining magistrates, feeling overwhelmed by the rapidly expanding crisis. Each day brought new reports of bewitchments caused by both new and existing suspects. Thus, to take random examples, on Sunday, May 15, Mary Walcott complained of being afflicted by Willard and Buckley; and Susannah Sheldon, by Elizabeth Proctor and two others. Two days later, Vibber, Walcott, and Lewis all accused Willard, while Sheldon named a large group of seven tormentors, including Willard, the Englishes, and the Proctors. On Friday, May 20, while various afflicted persons declared that Mary Easty was tormenting both Mercy Lewis and themselves, Elizabeth Booth was accusing the Proctors and their daughter Sarah; Sheldon, too, experienced tortures at the hands of four specters. And so it went, day after day, with even more bewitchments on the days when suspects were examined, May 18 and 23. At the four examinations on the 18th for which some evidence still exists, for instance, nine different complainants endured a total of nineteen separate afflictions. People who attended those interrogations, and who heard the daily gossip about the torments suffered seemingly everywhere in the Village, would have sensed a menacing invisible world all around them.
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Therefore it is hardly surprising that Essex County residents like Joseph Bayley experienced strange phenomena they attributed to witchcraft. On May 25, Bayley was riding with his wife on the road to Boston when at his first sight of John Proctor’s house he felt “a very hard blow strook on my brest which caused great pain in my Stomoc & amasement in my head.” At the Proctor homestead, he saw John and Elizabeth watching him from inside; then, after a period of speechlessness, he felt another painful blow, which made him alight from his horse. While standing in the road, he thought he saw a woman turn herself into a cow. Finally, upon his return home to Newbury, “I was pinched and nipt by sumthing invisible for sumtime.” More serious were the torments experienced by James Holton four days later. Holton’s family, fearing the worst, called in Walcott and Hubbard as witch-finders. The young Villagers reported seeing the specters of the Proctors and their children “a presing of him with there hands one his stomack.” After the teenagers were themselves “dreadfully” afflicted by the Proctors’ apparitions, Holton reported that he “had ease of my pains.”
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Those formally accused on May 21 and 23, including Sarah and Benjamin Proctor and their aunts Mary DeRich and Sarah Hood Bassett, were probably questioned on Tuesday, May 24. Again, the examination records have not survived, but an eyewitness account of that day, probably written about five years later, offers a unique perspective on proceedings in the Salem Village meetinghouse. Captain Nathaniel Cary of Charlestown, a wealthy mariner and merchant, accompanied his wife Elizabeth to Salem Village after they learned disturbing rumors that she had been named as a witch. “By advice,” Cary recalled, they went to the Village on May 24 “to see if the afflicted did know her.”

From a “convenient place” in the meetinghouse, Cary watched as Hathorne and Corwin conducted the interrogations. “The Prisoner was placed about 7 or 8 foot from the Justices, and the Accusers between the Justices and them,” Cary recorded. Suspects were ordered to look directly at the magistrates, “with an Officer appointed to hold each hand, least they should therewith afflict them.” If the accused glanced at the afflicted, “they would either fall into their Fits, or cry out of being hurt by them.” After the examinees had been questioned, they were asked to say the Lord’s Prayer “as a tryal of their guilt.” Cary also witnessed and described the touch test: one of the afflicted would try but fail to approach a prisoner voluntarily, would suffer a fit, and be carried to the accused to be touched. Next, he recounted, “the Justices would say, they are well, before I could discern any alteration.”
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Cary knew John Hale, and at the end of the day asked him to arrange a private meeting between his wife and her principal accuser, Abigail Williams. Instead of the parsonage, as originally planned, the encounter occurred at Ingersoll’s inn, where John Indian served the Carys. “To him we gave some Cyder,” Cary remembered, and “he shewed several Scars, that seemed as if they had been long there, and shewed them as done by Witchcraft.” All the accusers, not just Abigail, entered the room, and “began to tumble down like Swine, and then three Women were called in to attend them.” The afflicted named Elizabeth Cary as their tormentor; the magistrates, who were in a room nearby, ordered her to appear before them. When Elizabeth, forced to stand “with her Arms stretched out,” and denied the chance to lean on her husband or to take his hand, complained of feeling faint, Justice Hathorne retorted that “she had strength enough to torment those persons, and she should have strength enough to stand.” John Indian, brought into the room, suffered from a fit, which the girls attributed to Mistress Cary’s witchcraft. While Nathaniel watched, the magistrates used the touch test to cure John. Captain Cary, protesting against the “cruel proceedings, . . . uttered a hasty Speech (That God would take vengeance on them, and desired that God would deliver us out of the hands of unmerciful men).” The judges initially directed that Elizabeth Cary be held in Boston, but Nathaniel was able to have his wife moved to Cambridge, which was closer to their home, although he could not prevent her being chained.

The Carys had hoped to preempt a formal accusation of Elizabeth by confronting Abigail Williams privately prior to the filing of an official complaint. Only a man accustomed to deference from younger, poorer, and female colonists—perhaps even from justices of the peace—would have tried such a ploy. But the tactic backfired. John Hale either could not arrange such a meeting or connived at the tests of Elizabeth Cary that followed. Captain Cary’s account highlights the magistrates’ belief in the validity of touch tests and the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, demonstrating as well that by late May the questioning of suspects had become perfunctory. At least from the vantage point of the accused and their allies, the actions of the afflicted appeared to determine a suspect’s fate. The examining magistrates were assuming the guilt of everyone brought before them, regardless of sex or status.

At the same time, though, some accusations totally lacked credibility and so were rejected by male gatekeepers. In a particularly notable case, a woman who fit the description of the mysterious “gentlewoman of Boston” was named as a witch, most likely first by her afflicted maidservant but then later by others. Never formally charged, she later became a prime example of selective prosecution cited by critics of the trials.

AN AFFLICTED FORMER CAPTIVE AND HER MISTRESS

Some time during the last two weeks of May, the maidservant Mercy Short, a redeemed captive of the Indians, went to the Boston jail on an errand for her mistress, the widow Margaret Webb Sheafe Thacher, who was the mother-in-law of the magistrate Jonathan Corwin. Although the nature of that errand is nowhere recorded, Mercy was probably carrying gifts, perhaps food or blankets, to the imprisoned Mistress Mary English, who as the wife of a wealthy Salem merchant involved in trade with Maine would have been well known to Mistress Thacher, who was both the daughter and the widow of men of comparable standing and with similar business interests. At the jail, Mercy Short had a fateful encounter with Sarah Good, who asked her for “a little Tobacco.” Instead of complying with the request, Mercy threw “an Handful of Shavings at her,” exclaiming, “That’s Tobacco good enough for you”! In the words of Cotton Mather, who later counseled Mercy Short and who detailed her subsequent afflictions, “that Wretched woman bestowed some ill words upon her, and poor Mercy was taken with just such, or perhaps much worse, Fits as those which held the Bewitched people then Tormented by Invisible Furies in the County of Essex.”
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Inferring an Identity

The story of Mercy Short’s visit to the jail and the rest of this section both make a key inference: that Short, the afflicted girl about whom Cotton Mather wrote at great length, was the maidservant of Mistress Margaret Thacher. On what evidence does this inference rest?

Five crucial pieces of data combine to make the identification likely. First, on May 31 the prosecutor Thomas Newton named “Mrs Thatchers maid” as a potential witness in the upcoming witchcraft trials. Other than Judah White, identified by Abigail Hobbs as a witch and therefore more likely a suspect than a witness, Mercy Short is the only Boston maidservant known to have had any link to the trials before the fall of 1692. Second, Mather recorded that Mercy Short lived with her mistress “near half a mile” from his North Church. Margaret Sheafe Thacher’s longtime residence in the block bounded by Washington, Devonshire, and State Streets, and Dock Square, was almost exactly that distance from Old North, and her house was also located very near the Boston jail.
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Third, Mistress Thacher was herself accused of witchcraft in 1692, for reasons no historian has ever been able to explain. But being the master or mistress of an afflicted servant could lead one to be suspected—recall, for example, the accusation of Goody Griggs after the bewitchment of Betty Hubbard, of George Jacobs Sr. after the affliction of Sarah Churchwell, or of Elizabeth Proctor after the bewitching of Mary Warren. Indeed, Mercy Short herself probably accused her mistress, mimicking Warren and Churchwell. Fourth, the pious Margaret Thacher owned property in New Hampshire, making her a likely mistress for a returned captive. And fifth, the probable friendship of Margaret Thacher and Mary English would explain another point scholars have never even addressed: why did Mercy Short’s mistress dispatch her to the Boston jail that day? Mercy worked for a high-status woman (otherwise Mather would have referred to her as Mercy’s “dame,” not her “mistress”). What errand would a high-status woman have asked her servant to perform in such an unlikely location, other than aiding an acquaintance in need?
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None of these points by itself would be sufficient to draw the conclusion I do. Taken together, though, they suggest a strong probability, in large part because this identification explains much that is otherwise inexplicable. If “Mrs Thatchers maid” was not Mercy Short, who was she? Why would a Boston woman of Margaret Thacher’s prominence and relationship to one of the examining magistrates be accused of witchcraft in 1692, if not through some other direct tie to the events in Essex County? Mercy Short, if a maidservant in a frontier-linked household apparently afflicted by Sarah Good, would provide that missing connection.
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Mercy, the daughter of Clement and Faith Short of Salmon Falls, had been captured by the Wabanakis in the raid that destroyed that town on March 18, 1689/90. She was subsequently redeemed by Sir William Phips in Quebec eight months later, returning to Boston with his fleet. Her parents and three of her siblings died in the attack, while she and six or seven other brothers and sisters were carried off into Canada by their Indian captors. On that long, difficult trek through the forests in the late winter of 1690, she witnessed the torture and death of Robert Rogers, which was recounted in chapter 4. Indeed, that very description probably came from Mercy herself to Cotton Mather, who included it in his published account of the war. The Wabanakis made Rogers’s death by fire and dismemberment an explicit object lesson for Mercy and the other captives. After they “bound him to the Stake,” they “brought the rest of the Prisoners, with their Arms tied to each other, so setting them round the Fire,” Mather recorded. The New Englanders thus, Mather wrote, had “their Friends made a Sacrafice of Devils before their Eyes,” but they could not even shed a tear, “lest it should, upon that provocation, be next their own Turn, to be so Barbarously Sacrificed.”
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Mercy would also have witnessed the violent deaths on that march of other Salmon Falls captives who refused to do their new masters’ bidding— of a five-year-old boy killed by a hatchet blow to the head, whose “Breathless Body” was “chopt . . . to pieces before the rest of the Company”; and of a teenage girl whose master beheaded and scalped her, then showed the scalp to the other captives, telling them “they should all be Served so” if they did not behave. Again, Mercy herself probably served as Mather’s source for these vivid and disturbing depictions of scenes she would have recalled with horror. That Sarah Good’s curse led to her being tormented by “Invisible Furies” is thus hardly surprising.
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Mercy Short’s probable Boston mistress, Margaret Thacher, was the daughter of Henry Webb and the widow of Jacob Sheafe, wealthy merchants who both died in 1660. Webb and Sheafe had business interests in Maine and New Hampshire, and Mistress Thacher retained control of some of their property, most notably land and a mill in Cocheco, not far from Mercy’s home in Salmon Falls. (She also had extensive holdings in Boston, including the home in which she lived and acreage abutting Phips’s house.) Several years after her first husband’s death, she married the Reverend Thomas Thacher, who relocated to Boston from Weymouth after his first wife died in 1664. From 1669 until his death in 1678 Thacher served as the founding minister of the Third Church, also known as Old South, established by dissidents from the First Church. (The split occurred when the First Church recruited as its pastor the Reverend John Davenport, a prominent opponent of the Halfway Covenant.) A number of men with links to Maine and the witchcraft crisis were members of the Third Church, among them Samuel Sewall, Joshua Scottow, Edward Tyng, John Alden, and Thomas Brattle, along with another whose name has not yet been introduced into this narrative, but who will appear later, Hezekiah Usher Jr.
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The one surviving letter in Margaret Thacher’s handwriting, addressed to her daughter Elizabeth Corwin in 1686, reveals a woman of little formal education but great piety. Most of the letter consists of religious reflections; for example, she wrote that she hoped “we may bee com trees of Riteousnes the planten of the Lord that he may onli be glorious and glorified in us.” Sending her “afectinat love” to Jonathan Corwin and her grandchildren, she added with respect to the “three lelest on[e]s” that she was “humbeli beging the Lord allmiti to bles them and make them pillors in his howes and polished stons in his biulding.” Mistress Thacher was, in short, just the sort of person who four years later could well have taken into her home an orphaned former captive of the Maine Indians.
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Mather described Mercy Short in that late spring of 1692 as having endured “a world of misery, . . . for diverse weeks together, and such as could not possibly bee inflicted upon her without the Immediate efficiency of some Agent, or Rational or Malicious.” Eventually, she was delivered from her torments by “the multiply’d prayers of His people,” and she thereafter remained free from fits until the winter of 1692–1693. But then the afflictions returned while she was attending services at Mather’s North Church. The fits were so terrible that instead of returning home to her mistress she was given refuge by a “kind Neighbour,” who offered her housing while Mather tended to her spiritual needs and recorded her visions. Although the discussion that follows, then, is based on Mercy’s agonized statements months after May 1692, there is no reason to believe that her initial fits differed significantly from the later ones, except in that Cotton Mather recorded the latter but not the former.
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Mercy described the devil as “A Short and a Black Man” who was “not of a Negro, but of a Tawney, or an Indian colour; hee wore an high-crowned Hat, with strait Hair; and one Cloven-Foot.” A number of specters came with him to torture her; these resembled “most exactly . . . several people in the Countrey, some of whose Names were either formerly known, or now by their companions told unto her.” The apparitions “assisted, or obeyed, their Devillish Master” in carrying out “hideous Assaults” on their victim. The book the devil offered her to sign was filled not only with signatures but also “with the explicit (short) Covenants of such as had listed themselves in the Service of Satan, and the Design of Witchcraft; all written in Red characters.” After trying and failing to persuade the maidservant merely to touch the book, the specters tormented her by sticking her with pins, sitting on her, or preventing her from eating. “But Burning seem’d the cruellest of all her Tortures,” Mather observed. “They would Flash upon her the Flames of a Fire. . . . The Agonies of One Roasting a Faggot at the Stake were not more Exquisite, than what Shee underwent.” Although Mather described Mercy as “in a Captivity to Spectres,” the resemblance of her current torments and those she had witnessed or endured as a captive of the Wabanakis seems to have escaped him.
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Mercy’s visions, though, explicitly linked her present invisible captors with her former visible ones. She informed Mather that the specters would leave her in chains (just as Sarah Good must have been chained in the Boston jail when they met) while attending their witch meetings, but afterwards “the whole Crew, besides her daily Troublers, look’d in upon her, to see how the work was carried on.” And when they did so, she saw “French Canadiens and Indian Sagamores among them, diverse of whom shee knew, and particularly Nam’d em.” Moreover, they showed her a book of Catholic devotions that they consulted at their gatherings.
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Mercy’s fits also involved conversations with or about an older woman, who could well have been Margaret Thacher, and toward whom she showed considerable ambivalence. “Must the Younger Women, do yee say, hearken to the Elder?” she once asked. “They must bee another Sort of Elder Women than You then! they must not be Elder Witches, I am sure.” Expressing sentiments in which the young women afflicted in Salem Village would surely have concurred, she exclaimed, “Pray, do you for once Hearken to mee,” before adding, “What a dreadful Sight are You! An Old Woman, an Old Servant of the Divel! . . . Tis an horrible Thing!” But at the same time she called the specters “Wicked Wretches” for “show[ing] mee the Shape of that good Woman,” who “never did me any Hurt.” Despite that inoffensiveness, she told them, “you would fain have mee cry out of her.” That Mercy did indeed name names in her fits, presumably including that of her mistress, is evident from Mather’s discreet observations on the subject. The apparitions, he revealed, “wore the shape of several, who are doubtless Innocent as to the Crime of Witchcraft,” as well as others who were probably “as Dangerous and as Damnable Witches as ever were in the World.” But he would not identify any of these people publicly, for “had we not studiously suppressed all Clamours and Rumours that might have touched the Reputacion of people exhibited in this Witchcraft, there might have ensued most uncomfortable Uproars.”
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Uproars as such—that is, formal witchcraft complaints pursued in court—there might not have been, but gossip in Boston about Mercy Short and her visions there definitely was. Mather alluded briefly to stories told about her “by Rash People in the coffee-houses or elsewhere.” And that coffee-house talk eventually led to repeated witchcraft accusations directed against Mistress Margaret Thacher. Thomas Brattle, her fellow member of the Third Church, referred to those charges in his later critique of the trials. “It is well known,” Brattle wrote, “how much she is, and has been, complained of,” yet the judges had never issued a warrant for her arrest. “This occasions much discourse and many hot words, and is a very great scandal and stumbling block to many good people,” he observed. “Certainly distributive Justice should have its course, without respect to persons; and altho’ the said Mrs. Thatcher be mother in law to Mr. Corwin, . . . yet if Justice and conscience do oblige them to apprehend others on the account of the afflicted their complaints, I cannot see how, without injustice and violence to conscience, Mrs. Thatcher can escape.”
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Thomas Brattle drafted his commentary on the trials in early October, after Mistress Thacher had been repeatedly accused but never formally charged. Months earlier, it was not yet clear that nothing would come of the complaints against her. Rather, on May 24 status (though admittedly not as high a rank as Mistress Thacher’s) and a prominent husband did not prevent the magistrates from ordering Mistress Elizabeth Cary jailed. Moreover, included among the thirteen people formally accused on May 26 or 28 were three more high-status folk with links to the frontier: Mistress Mary Bradbury (wife of Thomas Bradbury, a Salisbury magistrate and militia leader), who was not arrested for another month; Captain John Floyd, commander of the colonial troops stationed in Portsmouth; and—most important—John Alden, frequent master of the colony’s sloop
Mary
and a wealthy merchant from one of the founding families of the former Plymouth Colony.
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