The Witches: Salem, 1692 (48 page)

ON AUGUST 12,
1696, Samuel Sewall, burly, flushed-faced, his gray hair thinning, was stung by a sharply worded comment. Out of the blue, an Amsterdam-born friend remarked that he would not think twice about it
were a man to claim he had hoisted Boston’s Beacon Hill on his back, carted it off, then returned it to its rightful place. The gullibility of witchcraft judges and the claims of “foolish people” who believed in diabolical pacts had long astonished him. He was a Boston constable; his implication was clear and pointed. The inexplicably athletic George Burroughs had hanged almost exactly four years earlier. The comment set in motion a process that Parris’s slow fade may have delayed. However grudgingly it had been extracted and at whatever cost to his congregation, Parris’s apology still qualified as the sole public admission of wrongdoing. A dark cloud of shame hung about.

Sewall was not alone in shuddering at the unfinished business. On Sunday, September 16, 1696, Stoughton, the council, and the Massachusetts assembly met for a day of prayer in the Boston town house. Five ministers officiated. When his turn came, Reverend Willard castigated the authorities. Innocents had perished. Why had no official order been promulgated to entreat God’s pardon? The cumulative, collective sin weighed all the more heavily in a dispirited season, when God frowned on New England in crop failures, in swarms of flies, in epidemic illness, in Indian ambushes, in failed expeditions against the French. Mather’s prediction that the millennium would begin in 1697 began to feel misplaced. That winter proved the most brutal in New England memory. Thick ice paralyzed Boston Harbor. With trade at a standstill, grain prices rose to unprecedented heights. Food was scarce. The momentum to address 1692 grew, urged along by the occasional scold.

In mid-November Samuel Sewall rode north for a disconcerting trial. Even before Thomas Maule had built Salem town’s small Quaker meetinghouse, he had taken it upon himself to inform Reverend Higginson that he preached lies. The shrewd merchant seemed to have been sent to New England expressly to irritate its authorities; in a society that afforded little room to flex a nonconformist muscle, he exercised every one. It had been Maule who preferred to beat his servant rather than sell her, Maule who had chastised Hale when the minister prayed for Bridget Bishop at
the gallows. She had killed one of Maule’s children!
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In 1695 Maule published a book, printed in New York, lambasting Massachusetts for its Quaker persecutions. With delight, he noted that the volume created “a great hurly-burly of confusion.” Stoughton ordered his home searched for the offending publication; Sheriff Corwin saw to the task, removing thirty copies and arresting its author, transported to the Salem jail, a less crowded address than it had been earlier. The books burned.
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By the time the case came to trial in November, Maule was on the stand for both his blasphemous publication and his obstreperous, insulting behavior at his preliminary hearing. Sewall joined two other justices for a headache of an afternoon. It did not help that Maule—the kind of man who showed up for a hearing with a Bible under his arm and who breezily referred to the “High Court of Injustice”—hastened to equate Quaker persecutions with witch-hunting. The authorities were as odious as they had made Burroughs out to be. They had fought witchcraft with witchcraft. He mocked the village girls, with their absurd visionary powers. How could anyone imagine them to be “the true martyrs of Jesus Christ”? In November Maule went further, ridiculing the magistrates. Five times imprisoned and twice whipped, he was fearless. Did the court truly dare to sit in judgment of him, decrying his wickedness, when it had executed innocents? Those sanctimonious souls preferred their children to wind up “rogues and whores” rather than Quakers. And presto! Here was Reverend Higginson’s daughter transformed into a witch.

The king’s case presented, Maule addressed the jury. The court, he reminded them, had brought the wrath of God down upon the province.
How could they prosecute him for his “notorious wicked lies” when they had murdered innocents and never repented? They had squandered all credibility; he did not need to point out that they had done so in that very room. It was no easier to speak or publish freely in 1696 than it had been earlier. But it was more difficult to be convicted. Maule had a rather novel defense as well, one that could work only that dismal winter. Indeed his name appeared on the offending volume. But the jurors would need to confer with the New York printer. How else to prove that the words “Thomas Maule” on the title page corresponded to the man who stood before them any more than a man did to his specter?

Maule cautioned the jury: They should deliberate with care. They did not want to incur the same load of guilt under which other Essex County jurors now squirmed. Any ruling was theirs alone, the judges but their clerks, a biting allusion to the reversed Nurse verdict. To the shock of the bench, the twelve men found Maule not guilty. How was that possible, exploded a Sewall colleague; Maule’s odious book sat before them! Patiently the jurors explained that they found the evidence insufficient. The printer had set Maule’s name to the page. Mere mortals could not corroborate what those words represented. The justice sputtered that Maule might have escaped the judgment of man but would not escape that of God, to which the defendant, aglow with triumph, had a retort: the jury delivered him from unrighteous men who worked unrighteous deeds.

In December, momentum built—under conditions similar to those that had produced a witchcraft scare; New England appeared to be “upon the brink of ruin”—for a public acknowledgment. The task of drafting the bill fell to Cotton Mather. He continued to hold that while he could not support their principles, he could speak only honorably of the judges. (There was a “nevertheless” in that statement too.) They had been prudent, pious, patient. They had comported themselves far better than the common people, who had entirely succumbed to delirious brains and discontented hearts. He drew up a laundry list of impieties for the fast
day, inserting “wicked sorceries” about midway through the thicket of drinking, cursing, and insubordinate children, the embarrassing item you buried among sundries at the pharmacy counter. They had brought down storms from the invisible world that had led “unto those errors whereby great hardships were brought upon innocent persons, and (we fear) guilt incurred, which we have all cause to bewail.” To Mather’s draft others appended language acknowledging “neglects in the administration of justice.” The council—on which sat every Salem justice—erupted in fury; Sewall had never seen it so incensed. The “wicked sorceries” could remain. The miscarriage of justice must go. It fell to him to rewrite the bill. In the end the much abbreviated proclamation included neither references to injustice nor the word “witchcraft” or “sorcery.” Massachusetts would repent for whatever errors had been committed on all sides in “the late tragedy.”

The wrangling, and Maule’s imputations, weighed on Sewall. So did the chapter of Revelation he turned over in his mind those weeks, as heavy snow blanketed Boston. Through it he trudged two days after the debate, in distress, to fetch his minister. Both Sewall’s wife and his two-year-old daughter, Sarah, were ill. The former witchcraft judge was that winter more susceptible to guilt, just as the Maule jury had been less susceptible to evidence; the same week a Boston woman upbraided him regarding another verdict, one into which he knew he had been “wheedled and hectored.” The following morning at dawn little Sarah Sewall unexpectedly died in her nurse’s arms. In the family’s grief, the tiny corpse still in the house, Sewall’s sixteen-year-old son read from Matthew 12, in Latin. His father shuddered at the seventh verse, with its reference to innocents condemned.
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It “did awfully bring to mind the Salem tragedy,” he brooded, his first private use of that word in connection with the witchcraft. After the funeral he spent a few melancholy
minutes alone, underground, in the bitter cold, communing with the dead in the family crypt. Sarah was the second child he buried in 1696. In five years he had suffered repeated losses. He was miserable.

On January 14, 1697, the colony observed the province-wide fast of repentance. All work ceased as communities beseeched the Lord to “pardon all the errors of his servants and people,” with special reference to Salem. As the minister passed Sewall on his way to the pulpit that afternoon, the witchcraft judge handed him a note. It may have been extracted; Sewall had sensed Willard’s disfavor through the gloomy season. He was stung by slights; he felt himself ostracized. Midway through the service, the open-faced minister signaled to Sewall, who stood in his pew, head bowed. Before the full congregation, in the presence of Sewall’s grieving wife and children, his minister read his words aloud. Given the “reiterated strikes of God upon himself and his family,” Sewall was acutely aware of the guilt he had contracted on the witchcraft court. He beseeched God to forgive his sin and punish neither anyone else nor New England for his misstep.
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When Willard had finished reading what was in effect a single, jam-packed sentence—one that included “blame,” “shame,” “sin,” and “guilt,” four words Parris had studiously avoided—Sewall bowed from the waist. He then took his seat.

It must have been an agonizing moment for a man who shrank from criticism and who preferred not to stand alone; his was an act of public penance of which he knew Stoughton, at the very least, disapproved. The chief justice snubbed him afterward. Evidently he felt an apology unnecessary; the bill ordering the fast sufficed. In condemning the Andros administration, Stoughton had pointed to unreasonable, ensnaring judicial procedures. Out of favor afterward, he had declared himself “willing to make any amendment for the miscarriages of the late government.” He saw no need to address off-kilter contests or legal missteps in
1697. That evening Sewall transcribed the text of the note carefully in his diary. A few blocks away, Mather fretted at his desk over “divine displeasure.” Might it “overtake my family, for my not appearing with vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the judges, when the inextricable storm from the invisible world assaulted the country?” The guilt lifts from the page. He prayed to the same end the following morning, receiving heavenly assurances that there would be no retribution.

Others also took advantage of the fast day to unburden themselves. Twelve Salem jurors—including at least some of the men who had found Rebecca Nurse not guilty before Stoughton suggested they reconsider—that afternoon begged pardon of God and of all those they had offended. They would never do “such things again on such grounds for the whole world.” Inching toward a justification, they acknowledged that they had been “under the power of a strong and general delusion.” They had made poor decisions. Their statement carries light notes of reproach. No one had managed to enlighten them on the woolly matter; others had joined in shedding innocent blood. Cotton Mather preached that afternoon on the subject to the North Church congregation, including a salute to the magistrates and ministers who had suffered for their righteous service. Afterward Robert Calef, a Boston merchant and constable, accosted him. The two had already been in correspondence for some time. In his remarks Mather defined witchcraft as a pact with the devil. What, demanded Calef, was his source? Mather doubtless knew that Calef had posted Thomas Maule’s bail. He could not have imagined the troubles the exasperating forty-eight-year-old Boston wool dealer was to cause him.

In 1693 Calef had begun work on
More Wonders of the Invisible World,
its very title a provocation. Completed in 1697, the book was later printed in London. Already Calef had circulated a salacious paper accusing Mather of attempting to ignite another Salem with his treatment of seventeen-year-old Margaret Rule, who had delivered the news of Mather’s missing notes. Calef suggested that both Mathers had handled the teenager indecently. They had done no such thing, Mather assured him. He had not
asked how many witches sat on Margaret; he had expressly asked she
not
reveal names. His father had by no means touched her belly. Why would he, when the imp that afflicted her was said to be on her pillow? (He worked over those lines with uncharacteristic care, crossing out more than was his habit.) A Mather friend supplied Calef with the minister’s account of Margaret’s bedroom ravings and levitations, which Calef shared, a wholesale embarrassment five years after Salem. Mather denounced him from the pulpit and nearly had him arrested for libel. Calef agreed that witches existed but argued that Scripture provided no reliable means of identifying them. Hanging them in no way inconvenienced the devil. Men, Calef believed, should desist from dabbling in divine affairs. They tended to make a botch of them.

The immediate wrangling was with reputations rather than consciences; for the most part it was easier to settle than offer accounts. When George Corwin died on a snowy spring day in 1696, Philip English evidently threatened to seize the body. He would return it, he bellowed, only in exchange for some portion of the fifteen-hundred-pound estate the late sheriff had confiscated.
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The sight of his bobtailed cow in Corwin’s yard infuriated him. English turned up repeatedly in court thereafter for withholding his church taxes (an offense that landed him in jail) and for undermining the authority of the Salem selectmen (an office to which he had been elected weeks before his accusation). He called ministers and justices robbers. He refused to worship in a meetinghouse “infested” by Puritans. Salem’s was “the devil’s church.” He was still blasting the clergy in 1722, when the court indicted him for calling Nicholas Noyes—dead for twenty-one years—a murderer. Family lore has him excoriating Hathorne on his deathbed.

Naturally no one took more shots at an analysis than Cotton Mather. Typically he inched closer and closer to the scene, placing himself more
often at Salem than he had suggested in 1692; a reader of his later pages would assume he had attended the trials. Given how insistently he positioned himself at the center of events, it is understandable that he would come to be blamed for them, when he had urged every kind of moderation, denounced spectral evidence, attended no hearing, and played no prosecutorial role.
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For once causality was not a burning issue; the origin of the plague of evil angels interested Mather less than its utility. So that proper use might be made of those “stupendous and prodigious things,” he had written
Wonders of the Invisible World
. He regretted no page of that volume, despite the abuse the “reviled book” had earned him. Nor did he for a moment question the judges’ “unspotted fidelity.” He put his finger on something that remained invisible to him: political considerations had grossly disfigured moral ones. Mather did have one theory, either late in 1692 or very soon thereafter. Was this infestation of evil angels, he mused in his diary, not “intended by
hell,
as a particular defiance, unto
my
poor endeavors, to bring the souls of men into
heaven?
” He credited others with that idea.
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