The Enemy Within (32 page)

As time passes, the Goodwin children will gradually recover their normal lives (and selves). And Cotton Mather will turn from hands-on work with witchcraft victims to writing and publishing about them instead. His book
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions
appears just months later. (He is a prodigiously fluent and prolific writer. The list of his published work will eventually swell to 383 different titles.)
Memorable Providences
includes a long account of the Goodwin case and a careful description of Mather's own part in it. Significantly, young Martha's second accusation is mentioned only briefly and without specific detail. Mather's goal is not, after all, to encourage or instigate projects of witch-hunting. Instead, he aims to refute, from “my own ocular observation,” those who would “deny . . . the being of Angels either good or evil.” “Go tell Mankind that there are Devils and Witches,” he writes in an oddly triumphant tone. “Go tell the world what prayers can do beyond all devils and witches.”

 
The years immediately following the Goodwin case found Mather involved on many fronts simultaneously. Not yet out of his 20s, he was responsible both for his own growing household and for that of his absent father; he was leader of the largest church congregation in Massachusetts; and he was public champion, spokesman, and strategist for the colony's revamped administration. (He would quickly emerge as a close confidante of the incoming governor, Sir William Phips.) His days were filled with pastoral visits, composing and delivering sermons, writing and publishing tracts and books on subjects both spiritual and secular—all mixed with his regular round of private meditations and everyday familial cares. Sometimes it seemed almost too much for him, and a petulant edge began to emerge in his dealings with the world around him. He might complain in his diary about “the calumnies of the people against poor me” or “the spirit of lying that prevails so generally around us.”

But his most urgent preoccupation was still the approach of the new millennium. Growing signs of “blessedness” on the one hand and of imminent disaster on the other pointed equally in the same direction. During the unusually harsh winter of 1691-92 he felt certain that the Last Judgment was “at the door.” Indeed: “I do, without any hesitation, venture to say ‘the great day of the Lord is near . . . and it hastens greatly.' ” At such a time a new outbreak of witchcraft, on a scale unprecedented for New England, would not seem altogether surprising. That, too, might well be a forerunner of apocalyptic change.

 
Cotton Mather's participation in the Salem witch-hunt will be mostly indirect, inherently complex, painfully conflicted—and undeniably important. He does not attend any of the actual trials; instead he follows their course as closely as he can from his base in Boston. To be sure, he is notoriously present on that crucial occasion when five convicts, including Reverend Burroughs, are executed in August; otherwise he does not visit Salem during the entire year of 1692.

Certainly, he has good correspondents—such as Stephen Sewall, clerk of the Court of Oyer and Terminer—to supply him with regular reports from, and about, the scene of the action. And he is not reluctant to offer his opinions in return. In April he delivers (and then publishes) a powerful sermon entitled
A Midnight Cry,
stressing the convergence of recent and current “calamities,” including attack by devils. A short while later, he proposes a personal intervention in the Salem affair. He would have several of the “afflicted girls” brought to his own home for close-up pastoral supervision, just as he had done with Martha Goodwin. Does he imagine that he might thereby close off the rapidly deepening vortex of public accusation? After all, he has succeeded before. No matter—for this time his offer is not accepted.

In August his father publishes yet another cautionary work,
Cases of Conscience, Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men,
with the strongest critique yet of spectral evidence. Fourteen ministers sign a preface of endorsement—but Cotton Mather is not among them. His own focus has shifted by now. He is racing to complete his witchcraft apologia; its full title is
The Wonders of the Invisible World: Observations, as Well Historical as Theological, Upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of Devils
. This work, suggested by “the direction of His Excellency, the Governor,” and stitched together at intervals between the beginning of June and the end of September, will become one of Mather's best-known writings and the chief basis in subsequent years for assessing his involvement with witch-hunting.

The immediate context is a surge of public opposition to the trials;
Wonders
is Mather's response. In it he assembles a broad range of affirmative materials, including two of his own recent sermons, accounts of witchcraft cases from overseas, some scattered reportage on “enchantments and apparitions,” and finally—at its heart—detailed summaries of the trial proceedings against five “of the principal witches that have been condemned” at Salem. Doubts about spectral evidence do not appear; the central theme is other, presumably more credible, means of “discovering” and convicting the guilty. Indeed, Mather never wavers from a goal he announces at the start: “to countermine the whole plot of the Devil against New England, in every branch of it.” Taken in its entirety, the book is nothing less than a full-throated vindication of the work of the Salem judges—whose leader, William Stoughton, is moved to contribute for the front matter a
fulsome letter of “thankfulness to you for so great pains, and . . . [ for your] singular approbation.”

The difference this time is a growing public skepticism about all these “sufferers”—and about Mather's personal efforts of exorcism. The lead is taken by Robert Calef, a local cloth merchant who has visited Margaret Rule while she lay “under affliction” in Mather's care—and who then writes a highly critical account of what he observed. According to Calef the victim was repeatedly drawn into giving a set of coached responses and indulged in “merry” behaviors, while the minister “rubbed her stomach, her breast not covered with the bed clothes.” (This intimation of sexual impropriety is especially wounding.) Mather is appalled—and outraged—that “a sort of Sadducee in this town . . . hath written a volume of invented and notorious lies” about him. But Calef is not, evidently, alone in his opinions.
When Mather vents his deep resentment in the privacy of his diary, he speaks of “this unworthy, ungodly, ungrateful people” and the “hard representations some ill men [note plural usage] have given my conduct.” He and Calef exchange hotly-phrased letters, and Mather begins a lawsuit for libel (which he will subsequently drop). Calef's book is published in London some years later; its title,
More Wonders of the Invisible World
, mockingly riffs Mather's own work.