The Witches: Salem, 1692 (42 page)

When finally the tide turned, it did so abruptly. Those who had flinched silently exhaled loudly. Fingers were pointed; tempers flared. Husbands berated themselves for having bullied wives into confessions. As soon as it was safe to do so, all began to speak at once, rarely with Increase Mather’s circle-squaring, institution-sparing delicacy. When accused, a distinguished Bostonian filed a thousand-pound defamation suit. Cotton Mather observed that as the witchcraft intensified it was as if they fell under a spell, “enchanted into a raging, railing, scandalous and unreasonable disposition.” As that spell lifted, they were more than ever “like mad men running against one another.”

The shift came about less for any single reason than for twenty of them. Terror had worn out its welcome; the system and men’s spirits were exhausted. The court had moved too aggressively and too expansively. It was a tricky business; the government was after all an Increase Mather creation. When the justices applied for advice, they reached out
to him. No one had a greater investment in the Phips administration. Nor had the colony any more accomplished civil servant than the masterful, Mather-appointed Stoughton. He seemed now to stand with the more orthodox rural ministers, Reverends Parris, Noyes, Barnard, and Hale, who rejected all doubts about spectral evidence. The lack of modulation surprised some; how could “any man, much less a man of such abilities, learning and experience as Mr. Stoughton,” subscribe to such a belief? a London correspondent, following events at a distance, would inquire in January. It was destitute of all reason and counter to the facts of history. Anyone who asked the kind of probing question Justice Richards had in May was unlikely to look on equably as a minister hanged; Burroughs’s speech on the gallows rattled more even than had Corey’s stubborn silence. The monolith shuddered a little.

Few could have felt so wholly torn as Samuel Sewall, who heartily endorsed the motto that “agreement makes kingdoms flourish,” who skittered away from the controversial or confrontational. Early in October, his brother Stephen fell ill with a serious and prolonged fever. It is impossible not to wonder about causation; there may have been some soul-searching all around. The illness did not abate. Late in the month the Salem court clerk pledged to serve the Lord better if his life were spared. In and around Boston, his older brother spent October talking and reading about witchcraft, a subject on which everyone had an opinion. Some of the commentary was solicited. Much was not. Quakers predicted that witches would continue to prey on Massachusetts until the colony repented for having hanged their co-religionists.

On a damp Friday morning at the end of the first week of October, Sewall and Samuel Willard rode north to call on a trusted colleague. Sewall regularly appealed to Wenham minister Samuel Torrey for career advice, about legal matters, even about a trip to England. Widowed a month earlier, Torrey was lonely; in his kitchen, the three men discussed the crisis decimating the colony. The Wenham minister believed there had been irregularities. Those could be corrected, he felt, after which the
court should resume its vital work. Heartened, Sewall left under a wintry drizzle. Strong winds moved in by morning. A hard frost fell the following night. Snow followed behind as Sewall settled in for some difficult reading. He may have had a preview of the pages Willard had composed to preface Mather’s
Cases;
he already knew the opinion of his minister. It was not what a judge who had sent eleven to their deaths cared to hear.

As early as April, Willard had lectured on a celebrated instance of Satan abusing an innocent; the serpent in the Garden of Eden had been a mere instrument in his hands. The creature could not be blamed for actions “besides its nature, and beyond its apprehension.” (As Willard exonerated the snake in Boston, Hathorne in Salem ensnared Bridget Bishop with his timeless logic—how could she claim she was not a witch when she did not know what a witch was?) Willard did not doubt the diabolical mischief. When detected, witches were to be exterminated. But the God who had declared as much (Exodus 22:18) also mandated two witnesses to a capital crime (Deuteronomy 17:6). Given the severity of the punishment, more rather than less proof was in order; Willard made an impassioned case for innocent until proven guilty. Nor was prosecution always desirable. Nowhere did God decree that every capital case be pursued. To do so was to “subvert this government” and “reduce a world into chaos”—a Puritan nightmare. In his preface to Mather’s pages can be heard the roiling October objections to the crisis: “overhasty suspecting” “too resolute conclusions,” “too precipitant judging,” “bold usurpations,” the dangers of “being misinformed.”

Sewall had only admiration for his minister. He preached with uncommon genius; he delivered even a substandard sermon with aplomb. A man of discretion and equanimity, he did not pause in the pulpit when a parishioner fainted dead away. He came running when you had a teenager in despair; Sewall would appeal to him for assistance with his fifteen-year-old’s heart-stabbing crisis of faith. Among Massachusetts ministers, only Cotton Mather would exceed Willard’s literary output. When it came to experience with “evil angels” and “hellish designs,” no
one in New England could rival that of Boston’s Third Church minister. As a young clergyman in remote Groton—fifty miles west of Salem village and yet more isolated, also in a snowy season—Willard had found himself contending with some earlier oddities. In 1671, his sixteen-year-old servant had begun to roar and shriek, erupt in “immoderate and extravagant laughter,” engage in “foolish and apish gestures,” and leap about the house. She fell wailing to the ground. She found herself alternately strangled and senseless. She endured forty-eight-hour-long fits of such intensity that six men could not restrain her. Elizabeth Knapp too saw enchanted creatures in the fireplace.

It was all a reprise of Salem, except that it had occurred twenty-one years earlier, seventeen years before the Goodwin children. Where those youngsters had barked like dogs and purred like cats, Elizabeth Knapp barked like a dog and bleated like a calf. She drowned out prayer. She struck at and spit in the faces of the adults who tended her. She met with Satan. Anticipating Cotton Mather, she could report that there were more devils than men in this world, a claim that sounded especially plausible in an outpost like Groton. Willard called in a doctor to treat Elizabeth. He diagnosed a stomach disorder, “occasioning fumes in her brain and strange fancies.” After a second examination, he refused to administer to her further. Whatever ailed the teenager was diabolical in origin.

Elizabeth was much visited that winter—Willard noted that her afflictions peaked under observation and grew more violent as the crowd increased—but no one spent as much time at her side or came in for as much abuse as her master himself. He devoted full days to the sixteen-year-old, praying with her, reasoning with her, consoling her. She too accused a respectable neighbor of having bewitched her. She too acknowledged having signed a satanic pact. The devil had promised “money, silks, fine cloths, ease from labor, to show her the whole world.” He gathered firewood for her even after she refused his help. In the reprieves between fits she wept uncontrollably. She confessed to a cascade of sins: she had snarled at her parents, neglected prayer, contemplated suicide. Willard remained calm throughout, even when Elizabeth
revealed that the devil had instructed her to murder the minister and his children; she was to toss the youngest in the fire. Elizabeth was by turns incoherent, violent, accusatory, apologetic, “sottish and stupid,” entranced, and utterly lucid. She too suffered from a magnetic pull into the fireplace. She nearly dove into a well. She contradicted herself hourly. It was the devil; it was the neighbor; it was the devil disguised as the neighbor; it was all fancies; she met the devil on the parsonage stairs; she had signed a seven-year compact in blood; she had signed no such thing.

It had just been affirmed that she was not possessed when—on a dark Sabbath afternoon in December—a low, male growl began to emanate from her body. Elizabeth’s family rushed to her side from meeting. Willard followed, directly from the pulpit. “Oh! You are a great rogue,” she greeted him, in a husky, adult voice, her lips motionless. Willard’s blood ran cold. “Daunted and amazed,” he called for a light. Some gimmick was surely at work. He challenged the devil to show himself, conversing with the gruff spirit through the teenager for some time. “You tell the people a company of lies,” it taunted him. Willard answered, “Satan, thou art a liar and a deceiver, and God will vindicate his own truth one day.” Ultimately he asked the company to kneel in prayer at Elizabeth’s bedside. Louder this time, the devil growled, “Hold your tongue, hold your tongue, get you gone, you black rogue.” Willard took careful, copious notes but resisted conclusions. One could counterfeit a great deal but this, he was certain, one could not. (Deodat Lawson had sworn the same of the Salem girls. No one could screw her body into such positions by natural means.) As to whether or not Elizabeth had truly covenanted with the devil, “I think,” Willard concluded, “this is a case unanswerable.” More comfortable with irresolution than Parris or either Mather, Willard stopped there, noting, among other curiosities, Elizabeth’s ability to pronounce
P
s and
M
s without the slightest motion of her mouth. He kept her under close observation at an inconvenient time of year. And he did something more taxing yet: he suspended belief.

Elizabeth eventually recovered. No one hanged. Willard’s fine-grained, clinical study of what seemed in the end a clear case of demonic
possession circulated widely. Increase Mather would refer to it in
Cases;
he had included it earlier in
Illustrious Providences
. (He added a few Matherian twists to that infernal assault. In his 1684 version, the devil “belched forth most horrid and nefandous blasphemies.”) Elizabeth Knapp would turn up again thirty years later in Cotton Mather’s epic
Magnalia,
by which time her case was iconic, one of fourteen preternatural wonders of the invisible world. Under different circumstances, the Parris children too might have wound up in a condition that merited only compassion and that created no ripples beyond Salem village.
^*
Willard assigned no blame, though he did wring evangelical mileage from the episode. Satan had targeted Groton for a reason. The inhabitants needed to examine how they had invited that cloven foot into their village; together they needed to drive it out. In 1692 Samuel Willard was one of the few men in Massachusetts who understood, firsthand, the trials of Samuel Parris, who had equal cause to ask himself what he had done to bring down a plague on his own home.

Four years after the Knapp case, Indians descended upon Groton, burning part of the town.
^†
Willard and his family fled to Boston. Already published, a tireless preacher with a mellifluous voice, he had little difficulty finding employment. Willard was newly associated with the Third Church when in 1677 several Quaker women rushed, half dressed, their hair flying, faces black with ash, into the meetinghouse, causing “the greatest and most amazing uproar” Samuel Sewall had yet witnessed. A decade later Andros appropriated Willard’s congregation, Boston’s wealthiest, for Anglican services. In short order then, light-haired, even-featured Willard, a cool, logical thinker with a deeply philosophical bent, had known demonic, Indian, Quaker, and Anglican invasions. He had reason
to be as orthodox as anyone. A
Book of Common Prayer
had sullied his pulpit. His meetinghouse had been reduced to ash. He had conversed if not with the devil then with some spirit in his employ.

Willard served on Harvard’s governing board alongside Increase Mather. He was happy to endorse a text that questioned the court’s methods without undermining its verdicts. But he found he had more to say than he could insert into the introduction to his colleague’s essay. At some point before October, Willard penned a few additional pages. He expressed himself in the only way a distinguished Massachusetts minister could that fall: by tiptoeing into print with a piece of samizdat literature, passed hand to hand and attributed to P.E. and J.A., the initials of two accused wizards Willard had helped to escape. Willard wrote to illuminate rather than indict, crafting an imaginary dialogue between two level-headed adversaries working from the same texts. Published anonymously in Boston, the pages bore a false Philadelphia imprint.

In
Some Miscellany Observations on Our Present Debates Respecting Witchcrafts,
S. and B.—presumably Salem and Boston, as the Bostonians had begun to separate themselves from their rural colleagues—agree on two matters: witchcraft plagues New England. And dissatisfaction regarding the court fosters treacherous animosities. Willard reinforced the points he had made in his Mather preface but went much further, reiterating warnings against state subversion. Judicial restraint alone could avert it. S. objects: But good men might well be sacrificed to the devil in the meantime! B. reminds his interlocutor that wherever the blame ultimately falls, graver matters are at stake. As he could not do elsewhere, Willard questioned the trial evidence. Preternatural knowledge, argues B., has no place in an earthly courtroom. Whether bewitched, possessed, or both, the girls were in league with the devil. How else could they offer their eerie predictions, report on things that had happened before they were born, or accuse people they had never met?

Does B. really mean to “altogether invalidate the testimony of our
afflicted?” objects S. Indeed, B. does. How could a distracted, discontented person qualify as a competent witness or testify about people she did not know? And how could the court trust a witness who did not even face the prisoner at the bar, as was required by law? (“That was because the witches smite them down with their poisoned looks,” S. explains.) The two-witness rule happens to be crucial, B. reminds S., who disagrees. “If one man say that he saw lions in Africa last year, and another comes and says that he saw lions there this year; though it was not at the same time, nor likely the same individual lions: why then may it not do in this case?”