The Enemy Within (27 page)

Indeed, reevaluation of the witch trials proceeded not only in conversation, but also—and perhaps more significantly—in print. Cotton Mather's
The Wonders of the Invisible World
was answered by merchant Robert Calef's highly skeptical and sardonic
More Wonders
of the Invisible World
. Thomas Maule, a Quaker shopkeeper in Salem, authored another, equally critical work, entitled
Truth Held Forth and Maintained
(1695). And at roughly the same time Reverend Hale was preparing his
A Modest Enquiry
. In it, he reconsidered his early support for the trials, admitting to “errors” and “the sad consequences of mistakes” and “grief of heart . . . to have been encouraging of the sufferings of the innocent.”

Some of this discussion crossed the ocean. Mather's
Wonders
was advertised in London within weeks of its Boston publication; the diarist John Evelyn read it right away and remarked on the “considerable” interest it aroused among other English readers. Calef and Hale were published there as well. Phips, meanwhile, was sending lengthy accounts of the trials—part description, part self-justification—to leading officials in the king's government. In midsummer 1693, just as the last of the suspects were being released from prison, he decided to let his prior reprieves stand indefinitely. “Next to divine providence,” he declared in a letter to his superiors in London, “it is the stop to these proceedings which has averted the ruin of this province.”

A
stop:
yes and no. To be sure, the actual witch-hunt was over. But in Salem Village the fallout from the trials—divisions, recriminations, a feeling of
ruin
—would continue well into the future. Even as the trials were unfolding, some local residents had begun to withdraw from participation in the church. Prominent among them were the families of the accused: the Nurses, for example. Their objection, as they later described it, was straightforward enough. They deplored the “tumults and noises made by . . . persons under diabolical power and delusions” and feared that they, too, might be accused “as the Devil's instruments.” Most of all, they felt helpless to protect their loved ones from a lethal attack that had the approval, not to say the encouragement, of the minister himself. In their view, several of Reverend Parris's sermons, during the crucial springtime weeks in 1692, had expounded “principles and practices” that greatly accelerated the rush to prosecution.

But this was just a beginning; after the trials had concluded, the anti-Parris “dissenters” formed a solid, unappeasable bloc. They consistently “absented from communion” with the Village church. They refused to pay any share of the minister's salary, contested his residence in the parsonage, and worked with increasing openness for his dismissal. The struggle went on for three years, with countless internal meetings, bitterly fought campaigns for control of local governance, and strenuous efforts of mediation by outsiders, including a grand “council” of Massachusetts ministers brought to Salem in April 1695—all to no avail. At every juncture, the core issue remained the witch trials, the injustice done to the accused, and Parris's alleged role as their “great prosecutor.” In response, the embattled minister flailed this way and that. Occasionally he proffered olive branches: for example, a post-trials sermon on the theme of “kisses . . . among friends that have been long absent” and a subsequent writing entitled “Meditations for Peace.” He expressed sympathy for the families of all who had suffered, and even made a (heavily qualified) apology: “I do most heartily . . . beseech pardon of all my mistakes and trespasses . . . wherein you see or conceive I have erred or offended.” But he also threatened legal action to throttle his adversaries and repeatedly denounced the “factious and seditious” lies made out against him.

The dissenters would not relent and finally succeeded in bringing him down. In 1696, under pressure from other clergy, Parris resigned his pastorate (though even then he stayed on in the parsonage until awarded a hefty sum in back pay). The Villagers were spent, bruised, and exhausted—but at last they could move on. Their church hired a new pastor in 1698 and immediately took steps to reconcile with the leading dissenter families. The excommunication of at least one accused church member (Martha Corey) was now posthumously reversed, mistakes acknowledged, sorrow expressed. “We were at that dark day,” the congregation declared in a formal statement of apology, “under the power of those errors which then prevailed in the land”; as a result, their actions had not been “according to the mind of God.”

A spirit of apology grew apace, both within the town borders and beyond. A group of a dozen men who had served as jurors during the witch trials offered a public statement of their own to “signify to all in general (and to the surviving sufferers in especial) our deep sense of, and sorrow for, our errors, in acting . . . to the condemning of any person.” Looking back, they considered themselves to have been “sadly deluded and mistaken”; they wished to “heartily ask forgiveness of you all whom we have justly offended.” At around the same time the members of the General Court ordered a “day of prayer, with fasting, throughout this province” in order to seek God's absolution for “the many sins prevailing in the midst of us.” At the heart of their official proclamation was an oblique but unmistakable reference to the witch trials as “the late tragedy raised among us by Satan and his instruments.” Then, on the day appointed—January 14, 1697, almost exactly five years after the “rise and beginning” of the whole affair—came another striking act of apology. In the course of the services in his Boston church, Samuel Sewall passed a note to the minister (Reverend Willard) to be read aloud to the full congregation. In it, Sewall acknowledged the “guilt contracted” from his participation in the Court of Oyer and Terminer, and his readiness to shoulder “the blame and shame of it.” On the same midwinter date in years to come, Sewall would hold a private fast at his home, without exception, to the end of his life.

To be sure, other central figures—Chief Judge Stoughton, for example—did not apologize and resumed the course of their previous lives without apparent difficulty. And even the apologies that did come excluded full personal responsibility. The proximate cause of the “tragedy”—always a tragedy, never a killing spree—was “delusion,” not vengeance or ill will or simple inattention. And the root cause was the malign force of “Satan and his instruments.”

The aftermath would drag on for decades. In 1703 came the first in a torrent of petitions on behalf of the accused “that something may be publicly done to take off the infamy from their names.” In 1709, as part of seeking membership in the Salem church, Ann Putnam confessed her own responsibility for the shedding of “innocent blood”; she made special apologies to the family of Rebecca Nurse, in whose trial she had been so active, desiring now “to lie in the dust, and be humbled for it.” In 1710 the General Court arranged to pay reparations to many of the families involved. In 1711 the court passed a bill of attainder, directly nullifying most of the convictions from two decades before. As late as 1738, and again in 1740, the authorities were considering measures to help “the families as were in a manner ruined in the mistaken mismanagement of the terrible affair called witchcraft” that was now nearly a half century behind them.

The element of “ruin” may have touched even some among the accusers and prosecutors. Several of the famously afflicted girls were reported to have gone on to lives of “dissolution and profligacy.” One (Mercy Lewis) is known to have borne a bastard child. Another (probably Abigail Williams) was said by Reverend Hale to have been “followed with diabolical manifestations to her death”; he meant that she was not thereafter of sound mind. Ann Putnam Jr. never married, was in chronically frail health, and died at age 37. Then, finally, there was Reverend Noyes, a stern and unwavering advocate for the trials, and the man at whom Sarah Good—just prior to execution—had flung her bitter curse
God will give you blood to drink.
Noyes remained for many years a figure of importance, still on duty as minister of Salem Town, until one day in December 1718, when a sudden and massive brain hemorrhage struck him down. According to local lore, he did indeed die with his mouth full of blood—which caused at least a few of his parishioners to wonder whether Good had not been something of a witch after all.

That question has reverberated across the generations, from theirs to our own. What happened? And why did it happen?
How could they . . . ?
The answers proposed by literally dozens of writers—historians, novelists, playwrights, poets, scientists, physicians, and witchcraft enthusiasts of every stripe—span an enormous range. Taken together, they amount to a template of changing values, changing ideas, changing times.

 
Salemwitchcraft as divine retribution

 
John Hale, the Beverly minister, can perhaps be considered the first in this long procession. Though himself directly involved and invested in the trials, he had, during the five years that elapsed prior to writing his
A Modest Enquiry
, achieved a certain distance from them. No longer able to take the multiple accusations at face value, but unwilling to discredit the leaders (judges, clergy, government officials) who had done exactly that, Hale reframed the underlying question as “what the Lord speaks to us in his letting loose Satan upon us in this unusual way.” Why, in short, had God allowed the Devil to orchestrate such an “awful tragedy,” full of lethal “errors and mistakes” ? Hale's answer would become sufficient, indeed standard, for many of those in his own particular cohort (and the one or two that immediately followed). It was, simply: punishment for sin, especially “an inordinate love of the world” and “contempt of God's worship and . . . ordinances.” Put differently: “The Lord sends evil angels to awaken and punish our negligence.” In making such connections, Hale adapted the well-worn Puritan trope of “declension.” The ill-gotten witch trials, like other “chastening strokes” on 17th-century New England, were the Lord's retribution for moral decline among His chosen people.

Salemwitchcraft as deception

 
For almost a century, “declension” and “chastening” remained the favored way of understanding the witch-hunt. But then, in the third quarter of the 18th century, as the European Enlightenment made itself felt across the ocean in America, this religious paradigm began to crumble. A two-volume history of Massachusetts, written in the 1760s by Thomas Hutchinson (soon to become the colony's governor) served to mark the change. For Hutchinson, unlike Hale, belief in witchcraft was fundamentally “superstitious.” And for him the Salem “tragedy”—he, too, favored that word—admitted of only two possible explanations: physical illness (“bodily distempers”) or outright deception. The first idea struck Hutchinson as “kind and charitable,” but also as a way of “winking the truth out of sight”; he much preferred the second. “A little attention,” he wrote, “must force the conviction that the whole was a scene of fraud and imposture, begun by young girls, who at first perhaps thought of nothing more than being pitied and indulged, and continued by adult persons who were afraid of being accused themselves.”

 
Salemwitchcraft and class conflict

 
Another significant contributor to this gradually building discussion (several decades later) was George Bancroft, author of an immensely popular, multivolume
History of the United States
. Bancroft had imbibed, and forcefully contributed to, the buoyant, “go-ahead” spirit of Jacksonian democracy. His
History
(composed in the 1840s and '50s) was celebratory in both theme and tone, and the place of Salemwitchcraft within it took shape accordingly. On one side stood “the authority”—the colony leaders, especially the clergy—a “party of superstition,” blinded by “self-love,” “zeal,” “vanity,” and “self-righteousness,” and bent on dominance through the workings of an “illegal commission” (the Court of Oyer and Terminer). On the other side, “the common mind of Massachusetts was more wise.” Common
mind,
common
people,
common
sense:
to be “common” was, for a man of Bancroft's ideals, a strongly favorable point. Fortunately, proponents of the common had prevailed against “the delusion of witchcraft” and its upper-class sponsors. Indeed, Bancroft declared, “the responsibility of the tragedy, far from attaching to the people of the colony, rests with a very few, hardly five or six . . . [who had] for a season unlimited influence.”

 
Salemwitchcraft and village factionalism

 
In 1867, Charles W. Upham, a Salem resident who served as both the town's minister and its mayor and who was an avid local historian besides, published the first full-scale work devoted entirely to the history of the witch trials. Upham followed Bancroft in setting a scene where “credulity, superstition, and fanaticism” loomed large (at least among the leadership); in the same connection, he stressed “an ignorance of the many natural laws that have been revealed by modern science.” He also followed Hutchinson in charging the afflicted children with “imposture,” with “deliberate cunning” and “cool malice,” as they pursued their work of destruction; “there can be no doubt,” he concluded, “that they were great actors.”

But Upham added some new elements of his own. For one thing, he shone a highly pejorative spotlight on Tituba and her fellow slave (and husband) John Indian; in fact, he wrote, “these two persons may have originated the Salem witchcraft.” Coming as they did from the Caribbean islands, they “in all probability contributed, from the wild and strange superstitions prevalent among their native tribes,” opinions and emotions to which Betty Parris, Ann Putnam Jr., and others in the initial group of accusers were fatally drawn. Here Upham was directly projecting the predominant racial attitudes of his time: Indians, like blacks, were seen as biological and cultural inferiors, liable under suitable conditions to infect “civilized” white folk with their primitivism. Finally, and most important, Upham presented the fruits of some extremely diligent local research on the workings within 17th-century Salem of deep-seated “factionalism.” He had uncovered evidence of bitter “quarrels and controversies,” of long-lasting “feuds”; these, he argued, shaped specific patterns of accusation. The girls at the center were “under the guidance of older heads . . . all the way through”; thus, their targets reflected enmities long established in the town. Perhaps this emphasis on social division, in a work written just after the close of a colossal Civil War, was more than a matter of simple intuition. Little Salem Village had once endured its own civil war.