The Witches: Salem, 1692 (46 page)

STOUGHTON’S WORK CAME
to a sudden halt; the return to normality took a little longer. Economically and emotionally, disenchantment came at a price. Orchards and cellars, fences and woodpiles had been sacrificed to justice, which had consumed a prodigious number of hours. Twenty-five years earlier the Salem farmers had warned that households suffered when husbands rode off to battle invaders; they languished when wives rode off to probe for witch marks as well. The lucky families were those who, at crippling expense, welcomed home relatives, in some cases relatives who they themselves had denounced. Festering neighborhood grudges evaporated, supplanted by graver matters, the common cold wiped out by plague. Sorcery had engulfed them; at issue was the punishment rather than the crime. Spectral evidence was extinct. The belief in witchcraft was not.

There were some awkwardnesses. What of the woman whom you had accused from several feet away and who was back on her farm across
the stream? Reprieved witches sat suddenly in the next pew. How to embrace the six-year-old who had sworn her now-dead mother had made her a witch? Mary Lacey Sr. went back to cooking and spinning alongside the eighteen-year-old who had publicly scolded, “Oh Mother, why did you give me to the devil?” At least some Essex County residents must have wrangled with the commandment against false witness. Any number of trusts had been betrayed, by parents, children, neighbors, spouses, in-laws, by the paragons of piety. Was it possible to listen to Reverend Noyes, who had interrupted defendants, or Reverend Barnard, who had organized the surprise Andover touch test, or Reverend Hale, who had testified against parishioners, in quite the same way again? How did Francis Dane minister to the congregation that had denounced nearly his entire family? Nearly 10 percent of Andover had been accused. The averted gaze must have been as well practiced as the strained neck. What kind of marriage prospects could a girl anticipate when her mother had been hanged for witchcraft, implicating her in the process?

There were losses of faith as well as fortune. Newly returned to Boston, John Alden failed to turn up for communion on December 18. While his friends may have prayed for him in his absence, he had every reason to believe that they had sold him down the river. Reverend Willard’s wife spoke sharply about the matter to Sewall, whom she held responsible. Months later he called on the Aldens. He regretted their troubles. He delighted in the captain’s rehabilitation. His was a rare gesture; at least initially, recriminations preceded explanations and far outnumbered apologies. The Nurse and Tarbell families continued to boycott Salem village services; while the door-slamming, sermon-interrupting Sarah Cloyce had survived, her two elder sisters had hanged. She resettled in Boston with her husband. Philip English returned after nearly nine months of allegations against him to a ransacked house, looted down to the thimbles. He soon began rowing from Salem to Marblehead for Anglican services. Religious affiliations aside, it was difficult to believe he would ever again care to pray alongside Stephen Sewall. English
began petitioning for restitution in April 1693. He was still doing so twenty-five years later.

The Sunday after Alden absented himself from the Third Church pews, Deodat Lawson preached in Charlestown. He spoke of family discipline, reminding the heads of households of their obligations to children, servants, slaves. Lawson warned against distraction and the rote discharge of duties. Parents should be neither overly formal nor overtedious. Ministers could be as remiss as anyone on those fronts; they too could prove “saints abroad and devils at home.” For whatever reason, he aimed his lament specifically at children “twelve, fourteen, or sixteen years of age,” a neglected and indulged cohort. Were those youngsters not the cause of New England’s afflictions? No wonder Satan managed to frighten them “into subjection to him, and covenant with him.” Their parents had forsaken them; confusion, rebellion, disobedience, and diabolical pacts followed. Lawson published the text—armored with an Increase Mather endorsement and a Sewall dedication—in 1693. The pages could only have discomfited Samuel Parris. Lawson had strayed some distance from his earlier claim that the pious home was the vulnerable home.

There was as much cause for soul-searching at the Salem village parsonage as anywhere; five accusers and four of the afflicted lived at that address, more than at any other. Parris was not insensitive to the burdens his family had placed on the community. (One wonders what the villagers thought as they passed his much-contested, much-discussed meadow.) Weeks after Lawson’s sermon, Parris offered to forgo six pounds of his 1692 salary, “to gratify neighbors and to attempt the gain of amity.” He would do the same again the coming year. (He could not resist adding that he made the sacrifice although events had cost him dearly, too.) He made no move to retrieve Tituba, an embarrassment and an expense. As the court was disbanded, as prisons emptied and families reunited, she remained behind bars. Someone paid her jail costs at the end of 1693, effectively buying her. She left Massachusetts.

For some, the return to normality proved impossible. The taint of witchcraft endured; one forever carried about one an “indefinable peculiarity.”
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Before his death, John Procter had warned that suspects were condemned before their trials. They remained so after their acquittals. His widow’s case was worse than most: he had made no provision for Elizabeth in his will, which left her contending in vain with her relatives, “for they say,” she informed the court, “I am dead in the law.” They had ample reason to want to wash their hands of a temperamental and tainted stepmother. (She moved to Lynn, where she remarried.) Reverend Dane’s daughter—also reprieved on account of pregnancy—returned to her ailing husband and her six older children. She lived “only as a malefactor.” Having been accused of “the most heinous crime that mankind can be supposed to be guilty of,” her life was in tatters, her family, she feared, vulnerable to new charges. Nor was what she termed the “perpetual brand of infamy” the sole burden. Martha Carrier’s strapping sons had survived torture. Having confessed to flying through the air to a witch meeting, they had helped convict their mother. Orphaned, they discovered themselves to be related to a woman immortalized as the queen of hell.

While the hangings relieved afflictions, the trials crippled many more. Sarah Cloyce emerged from prison decrepit, having spent five months with irons on her hands and legs. Mary English returned from exile an invalid, to die in 1694, at forty-two. At least four witch suspects perished in prison. At the time of her release, little Dorothy Good had spent eight and a half months in miniature manacles. Her infant sister died before her eyes. She had watched her mother, against whom she had testified, head defiantly off to the gallows. Dorothy went insane; she would require care for the rest of her life. Mary Esty and Susannah Martin each left seven children. There were a great number of orphans.

Witchcraft demanded long memories and accountability; no one had
a taste for either in 1693, when villagers who once forgot nothing suddenly found themselves amnesiac. Insofar as any of them searched for reasons, they asked what had brought down the “damned crew of devils or witches” in the first place. Their descent called for piety rather than apologies; Andover and Salem must not become as notorious as Sweden. New England did not care to be remembered as “New Witch-land!” It would be some time before anyone asserted that you could not possibly fly through the air to a remote destination and return in an hour or so (for one thing, you would not be able to breathe, John Hale would point out in 1697), far longer before anyone suggested that twenty innocents had been put to death. (Hale went to his grave believing otherwise.)

As for Brattle’s assertion that when men err, we are duty-bound to point out as much, it too evaporated. Shame obliterated blame; few agreed that there is nothing so honorable as admitting a mistake. The passive tense has rarely had such a workout; in the end the only one who dared point a finger was unruly Governor Phips. He reproached his crusading, calculating chief justice. Stoughton felt no need to defend his decisions, nor did anyone care for him to. Confessors disavowed their stories, some claiming that they had invented them in order to save their lives. Several accusers and witnesses were, it was revealed, “persons of profligate and vicious conversation.” A few admitted they had lied; others insisted that they remembered nothing of what they had testified. It was as if all simply, suddenly awoke, shaking off their strange tales, from a collective preternatural dream.

The Mathers would go on prophesying the Second Coming and calculating its date, which in mid-1693 Cotton Mather promised was but a few years in the future. In the same sermon he railed against Salem’s “matchless enchantments and possessions.” The two words henceforth traveled in tandem. Witches reverted to “evil angels.” Only occasionally did anyone allude to cheats or “distempered creatures,” to “wicked and malicious people who feigned themselves bewitched, possessed or lunatic.” Unneighborly behavior was again just unneighborly behavior; wives could again drag husbands from taverns without being
accused of witchcraft. You could be lewd, just plain wicked, or raving mad. Women disturbed men in their sleep and transformed themselves into cats—as they had done for decades and would continue to well into the nineteenth century—but they no longer wound up in court for these offenses. It has been noted that in the years immediately following the trials women did not have an easy time getting convicted for anything. Villagers scratched their heads over enchanted fireplaces, ambulatory trees, and misplaced saucers but were more circumspect about those oddities, participating in another New England specialty: that of leaving things unsaid. After the acoustical runaway of the witchcraft crisis—the voices rising to a fever pitch—1692 left in its wake a thundering reticence. Naturally most of what Essex County labored to forget is precisely what we want to know.

Some wrongs were immediately righted. In June 1693, John Ruck, the grand jury foreman, became the guardian of George Burroughs’s orphaned, abandoned sons. He arranged for their baptisms. Also that month, the widow of George Jacobs, the salty, stooped wizard, married the widower of Sarah Wilds, the hay-enchanting Topsfield misfit. Their spouses had traveled together to prison in the same mid-May convoy. John Willard’s widow, who had cowered under the stairs after his beatings, married a Towne in 1694.
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Much remained the same. Released from prison, Mary Toothaker had no home to which to return, Indians having destroyed Billerica. Two years later they returned to slaughter her, carrying her twelve-year-old daughter into captivity. The fall of 1693 meant renewed carnage in Maine as well. Massachusetts girls continued to disrupt sermons and convulse; by the fall of 1693 Cotton Mather was at work on a new case of possession, the first of two with which he conjured post-Salem.

The only brooms that played a role in the witch hunt were wielded
afterward by men, to sweep the year under the carpet. The authorities who had fallen all over themselves to vindicate the ouster of a royal governor four years earlier felt no need to justify themselves in 1693. On May 31, every member of the witchcraft court was reelected to the Massachusetts council—Stoughton by the widest margin, and Sewall with more votes than Saltonstall, who had stepped off the court. (Hathorne, Sewall, and Corwin still sat together on the bench twenty years later.) In his blundering fashion, Phips would continue to alienate every Massachusetts constituency. By 1693 many had come to agree with the New York governor’s description of him, as “a machine moved by every fanatical finger, the contempt of wise men and sport of the fools,” a state of affairs that would soon land the lieutenant governor, his popularity undimmed, in Phips’s office. Having prosecuted witches and then advised Phips against the proceedings, Checkley remained attorney general for at least a decade.

Maniacal record keepers, New Englanders did not like for things to fall “in the grave of oblivion.” They made an exception for 1692, as they had for the Burroughs years, when Thomas Putnam retranscribed the village book of transactions, omitting those entries that “have been grievous to any of us in time past or that may be unprofitable to us for time to come.” That account jumps from January 27, 1692, to December 7, leapfrogging over all arrests and trials.
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The eagerness to forget was as great as, for nine months, had been the strong-arming to remember. Parris kept a scrupulous record of village deaths. They included two he attributed to witchcraft and one that others did, but no mention of Giles Corey or any villager who had hanged. One family lopped an accuser off the family tree. Others camouflaged themselves with alternate spellings of their names, not altogether difficult given the extant variations. No one noted precisely where the hangings took place. (It appears to have
been the triangle of land bounded today by Proctor, Pope, and Boston Streets.) For a hundred and fifty years, Giles Corey’s ghost would haunt the field in which he was thought to have been pressed to death. A monument to the events of 1692 would wait another hundred and fifty.

Sewall practically bypasses the events in his diary, an omission he would address five years later. The 1692 pages of the Milton minister—who recorded every thunderclap and haircut—are lost. Even critics of the trials, even men who in the clearest of hands preserved every detail of colonial life—Thomas Danforth was both—left no record. Willard’s sermons for the summer disappeared from his published body of work and from an attentive churchgoer’s notebook. Wait Still Winthrop’s 1692 and 1693 letters are missing from his family correspondence. In what has been described as retrospective glosses, Mather collapsed his account of the trials into a few pages. His writing about 1692 is all rewriting. (He so much aimed his remarks at posterity that he referred to himself in the third person, a different brand of transparent, out-of-body experience.) Anyone looking for a true ghost story might ask what happened to the court’s official record book, of which Stephen Sewall took special care and which he surely kept close at hand. That silence would be the real conspiracy of 1692.
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