Salem Witch Judge (22 page)

Another change was that the chartered province acquired far more territory than before. All of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth Colony, Nova Scotia (Acadia), Maine, the Elizabeth Islands, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard were consolidated under the Province of Massachusetts, which also had control of the armies of Connecticut and Rhode Island. “A vast exposed frontier must bring heavy burdens upon a government,” the historian Thomas Hutchinson noted in the next century. While the old charter gave English settlers clear rights to the soil of New England, this charter left open the question of land ownership.

Finally, and most offensive to Puritans like Samuel, the new charter encouraged religious tolerance. That is, it allowed freedom of religion for all except Catholics. As always, politics was local; the English
court could countenance the Baptist Church and the Society of Friends but not its closer enemy, the Catholic Church. To the men of Boston this change was a direct attack on the New England way. The General Court of Massachusetts had so desired religious purity that it had banished Anne Hutchinson as a heretic in 1637 and executed Baptists and Quakers on Boston Common in 1660.

In May of 1692 Sir William Phips was quick to realize that his first challenge as governor of the province was to drive the Devil out. When he arrived, the jails of Salem, Ipswich, other North Shore towns, and Boston were overflowing with suspected witches. The new charter gave him the power to create a court system with the consent of the legislature, or General Court. Finding himself faced with an emergency, Phips created a new court, a Court of Oyer and Terminer, which in Latin means “it listens and decides.” Legally he was justified: England had a precedent for such courts, and New England was a common-law jurisdiction of England. This Court of Oyer and Terminer was to be a circuit court, meaning that its judges would ride from town to town hearing testimony and presiding over trials in meetinghouses, private houses, inns, and occasionally taverns. By late May Phips had selected nine judges, of whom five had to be present for the court to sit. The legal librarian Edgar Bellefontaine noted that “Phips appointed the most prominent people he could find.”

In the centuries since then the Salem witch court—as the Court of Oyer and Terminer is commonly known—has been perceived as a North Shore phenomenon. In fact, the witchcraft court was created in and from Boston, the center of power in Puritan New England. Fewer than half of its judges lived on the North Shore. They were John Hathorne, Jonathan Corwin, and Bartholomew Gedney, all of Salem, and Nathaniel Saltonstall of Haverhill. The majority—Wait Still Winthrop, John Richards, William Stoughton, Peter Sergeant, and Samuel Sewall—were wealthy merchants, landowners, church members, and magistrates of the ruling court in Boston, on which the North Shore men also served. Long after the witch hunt ended, the Boston judges would try to minimize their involvement by referring to a “delusion” in Salem, Essex County, or the North Shore. The truth was that these nine men were leaders in Boston. Five had attended Harvard College. As a group they had fought to retain and restore the
old charter. As a group they had shipped the royalist and Anglican invaders Andros and Randolph back to England. As a group they believed deeply in the New England way.

On May 27, when Samuel learned that Phips had appointed him to the new court, he did not question whether to serve. The appointment was yet another opportunity for him to aid his beleaguered country and to advance himself.

He knew the other judges well, as they knew each other, from their work on the ruling court, which was now alternately called the General Court, Provincial Council, or Governor’s Council. Wait Still Winthrop, whom historians consider “of ordinary talent,” unlike his remarkable father and grandfather, was one of Samuel Sewall’s closest friends. Winthrop and Sergeant were fellow members of the Third Church. Most of the judges were intimate with the Mathers, father and son. John Richards, now the treasurer of Harvard College, had belonged to the Second Church for three decades, contributed generously to the salary of Increase Mather, and officiated at Cotton Mather’s wedding in 1686.

Toward the new court’s chief justice, William Stoughton, who is generally remembered now for his “ferocious” prosecution of witches, Samuel felt great warmth. The two of them had ridden to and from New York two years before. Samuel often visited Stoughton at his farm in Dorchester, which overlooked the ocean, as he would continue to do after the witch hunt. In the fall of 1697, for instance, Samuel and the Reverend Samuel Torrey breakfasted in Dorchester with Stoughton, who was then the acting governor of Massachusetts. As Samuel arrived that October morning, he observed William Stoughton “carting ears of corn” from his “upper barn.” Stoughton served his friends fresh venison and chocolate, which Samuel spelled “chockalatte.” Relishing the local meat and the warm drink imported from far away, Samuel said to Stoughton, “Massachusetts and Mexico meet at Your Honor’s table.” These men would remain friends as long as they lived.

On June 2, 1692, in the courtroom on the second floor of the Town House of Salem, the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened for a trial. The defendant was a middle-aged innkeeper from Salem Town named Bridget Oliver Bishop. At a prior hearing an afflicted girl had said she
saw Bishop—or her specter—nursing a familiar. Several men testified that Bishop’s ghost visited them in bed at night, pressing a great weight on them. Women who examined her body at the court’s request found on her a “preternatural teat,” presumably for nursing imps. Bishop was known for loose morals. She allowed gambling at her tavern, which she often kept open past the curfew. She had been accused of witchcraft before, in 1679, by the brother of a competing innkeeper. That time she was acquitted; this time she was not.

Samuel said nothing during Bishop’s trial, according to the existing records. But his colleagues, particularly Hathorne, found the evidence against her convincing. During her initial examination, when Hathorne had asked Bishop, “How do you know that you are not a witch?” she had said, “I know nothing of it.” He felt he had “caught [her] in a flat lie.” Stoughton, as chief justice, urged the other judges to accept spectral evidence against Bishop, which he found compelling. Spectral evidence was testimony of a crime committed by the ghost of a person who is not physically present. Throughout the trials Stoughton would argue strongly for admitting spectral evidence although it had no basis in biblical or English common law.

Before adjourning with a prayer, the court found Bridget Bishop guilty of witchcraft and sentenced her to death by hanging. Court records suggest that some judges were silent during proceedings while others, particularly Stoughton and Hathorne, were loquacious. Nevertheless, the whole court decided to convict and execute people for witchcraft. According to archivists and historians, these decisions were unanimous.

The court set June 10 as the date of Bridget Bishop’s execution. Bishop went to the gallows first, historians agree, because of her bad reputation and the apparent strength of the evidence against her. The celebrated event of Massachusetts’s first execution for witchcraft in several years was to take place on Gallows Hill, now known as Witch Hill, Salem’s highest point. This ledge atop a wooded hill on the town’s southwestern side was chosen to afford Satan a fine view of his minions swaying in the wind.

Gallows were found in most New England towns, as was the custom in England. A gallows was a wooden scaffold balanced on a
frame above the ground with a crossbeam above it. On June 10 Bridget Bishop climbed a ladder to the scaffold and stood below the crossbeam. The hangman placed a noose around her neck, leaving a bit of slack rope. The other end of the rope went over the crossbeam and was held firmly or tied below. The hangman knocked out the scaffold, causing the victim to drop. Either the fall killed Bishop instantly by severing her spinal cord or she suffocated while dangling from her neck. Fifteen years later, while viewing an execution on board a ship in Boston harbor, Samuel noted that the scaffold on the deck was “let sink,” causing the convict to hang.

Bishop’s death scene, which some of the judges likely attended, deeply disturbed Nathaniel Saltonstall, who had sat in justice on her. He was not confident in the authority of the spectral evidence. As a result he questioned the morality of her execution. Several ministers who were present would raise similar concerns in the coming days. Learning of this, Governor Phips asked prominent ministers of Massachusetts to meet to consider spectral evidence. In their report, “Return of Several Ministers Consulted,” which appeared June 15, they recommended “speedy and vigorous prosecutions.” At the same time, they suggested that a person is not necessarily responsible for spectral acts. Satan can possess a person’s body, they affirmed, but the person may not have granted his or her permission.

This was not Stoughton’s view of spectral evidence, which was the view that dominated the Court of Oyer and Terminer during the summer. Stoughton influenced the other judges because of his elevated position as chief justice, his forceful personality, and his unstated conviction that if not for all of Sir William Phips’s gold and silver he himself would be governor of Massachusetts. The other judges followed Stoughton in assuming that Satan cannot control a person without that person’s consent and therefore that spectral evidence was allowable. In the process the judges studiously ignored the English common-law principle that a crime must be observed by two credible witnesses, not a gaggle of shrieking girls. As for Samuel, he made no entries in his diary throughout the month of June.

At the end of that month, according to court records, Samuel returned to Salem to sit with the court. Presumably he enjoyed visiting his brother’s family and seeing other relatives and the Reverend
Noyes, as he always did in Salem. He likely met nine-year-old Betty Parris, who was now staying indefinitely with Stephen and Margaret Sewall. The Sewalls, who had three children under age five and were expecting a baby, had taken in Betty in March, when she remained “under an evil hand.” Her father apparently hoped to cure her by removing her from Salem Village, and the Sewalls were willing to help. Margaret Sewall observed several of Betty’s fits, which prompted her to fear the girl would die. She asked Betty to describe her visions. The nine-year-old reported “a dark man” who promised her anything. Margaret reassured Betty that Satan “was a liar from the beginning” and encouraged her to report if the dark man returned. “And so she must have,” the historian Marilynne Roach surmised, “for Betty did recover.” In contrast, her cousin Abigail, who stayed in the Parris household, continued throughout the summer and early fall to provide the court with names of more suspects.

In late June Samuel and several other judges of the court met again at the Salem courthouse. On June 29 the court convicted and condemned to death Sarah Good and four other women—Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Wildes, Susanna Martin, and Elizabeth Howe. Rebecca Nurse was a seventy-year-old, English-born “gospel woman” from Salem Village. Her husband, Francis Nurse, had tussled with the Reverend Parris over how much land and firewood the pastor should expect. The Putnam family, whose daughter Anne was one of the most severely afflicted girls, had engaged in a long feud with the Nurses. Before the court Nurse firmly denied she made a covenant with the Devil. One judge asked her if she was without sin. “Well, as to this thing”—accusations of witchcraft—“I am innocent as the child unborn. But,” she continued honestly, “what sin God hath found out in me unrepented of that He should lay such an affliction on me?” After her conviction, thirty-nine of her neighbors petitioned the court to save her life. As a result, Nurse was briefly acquitted. Stoughton reversed the acquittal. Phips reprieved her but soon, under pressure from Stoughton and others, withdrew his reprieve.

The other three suspects on June 29 were from other North Shore towns, Amesbury and Topsfield. The spread of the problem seemed to confirm that this was Satan’s work. Stoughton and Hathorne felt they could not cease fighting now.

Meanwhile, Nathaniel Saltonstall resigned from the court “in disgust at the outrages on justice,” in the words of the nineteenth-century historian James Savage. Saltonstall himself said, “I am not willing to take part in further proceedings of this nature.” He could see no legal or moral justification for spectral evidence.

Saltonstall was a grandson of Sir Richard Saltonstall, who had come to Boston with Governor Winthrop in 1630 and settled in Watertown. Sir Richard soon returned to England on account of the poor health of some of his children, but his son Richard Jr. stayed, became a magistrate of the General Court, and officiated at the 1646 wedding of Samuel’s parents in Newbury. Richard Jr., who had been educated at Cambridge prior to immigrating, returned to England in 1672 after his father’s death. His son Nathaniel attended Harvard College with the Reverend Samuel Willard in the class of 1659.

In leaving the court just a month after it began, Nathaniel Saltonstall took a stand against the governor who appointed him, the colonial establishment, and most of his colleagues and friends. One year later, after the trials and executions were halted, at the annual election of the members of the Massachusetts court Saltonstall would receive fewer votes than several of his colleagues on the witchcraft court, including Winthrop, Richards, and Sewall. In that May 1693 election, the historian Kenneth Murdock observed, “every [Salem witch] judge received the stamp of popular approval.” The “most popular name was that of Samuel Sewall.”

Samuel did not describe in his diary his reaction to his older colleague’s decision to quit the court. In February 1693, however, after hearing gossip that Saltonstall himself was a witch, Samuel sent him a letter. “I have sympathized with you and your family as to the report that went of some being afflicted by a person in your shape…. I fully believed the letter asserting your innocence.”

However, “I was grieved” recently “when I heard and saw that you had drunk to excess; so that your head and hand were rendered less useful than at other times.” Recollecting the details, Samuel went on, “You may remember, you were sitting in the south side of the Council chamber, on the bench; I drew near to you, and enquired concerning Mr. Ward,” a relative of Saltonstall’s wife. “You answered, He was better, which made you so merry. You also told me of the breaking up
of the ice of the River Merrimac…. Let me entreat you, Sir, to break off this practice” of drinking to excess. “Don’t furnish your enemies with arms,” Samuel warned the man who had abandoned the witchcraft court. “I write not of prejudice but kindness; and out of a sense of duty as indeed I do. Take it in good part from him who desires your everlasting welfare. S.S.” Saltonstall read this letter in Samuel’s presence at the Town House of Boston, thanked him for it, and requested his prayers.