The Witches: Salem, 1692 (51 page)

The convulsions ratified the witchcraft, but the story belonged to the bench. Once in court, the women played secondary roles, as to some extent they may have done in the first place; sorcery allowed men to attack other men through wives or by way of daughters. (It is interesting that no one accused Francis Nurse.) All three town justices had suffered financial reverses; Putnam’s February complaint may have found them in a score-settling mood. Hathorne did a great deal to see to it that the
evidence fit his ideas, hanging political preoccupations on the clothesline of lore. Only after several weeks did a different brand of evidence emerge, when the girls began to produce tortured dead wives. Those revenants were another New England first. What men fear most came next: Wild beasts and devious, difficult women who took their breath away. The succubus—the suffocating, bed-invading female—is as ancient and pancultural as time itself. That heavy pressure—what Bishop evidently imposed on those men into whose beds she hopped—gives us the very word “nightmare.”

The ministers added the apocalyptic overtones, buttressing context and extracting lessons. In their hands the witchcraft supplied a familiar tale of temptation and deliverance. They imposed design where there was none, but at a conspiracy-weaving, body-snatching moment they did not do so out of ignorance. The Massachusetts elite had read everything in sight, some of it too closely. As would be said of logic-loving Ipswich minister John Wise, those men were not so much the masters as the victims of their learning.
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They had read and reread bushels of witchcraft texts. They parsed legal code. They knew their history. They worked in the sterling name of reason. They were less out of their depths than they were swimming in information, “poisoned,” as Calef sniffed, “in their education.”
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New England came to resemble Sweden primarily because Cotton Mather made sure that it did.
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The Swedish epidemic began with a
nine-year-old and an eleven-year-old. It moved from mischief to heresy and—by way of satanic pacts and witches’ meetings—to a kingdom-upending diabolical plot. Mather missed another similarity: the authorities shaped that story, inviting popular lore and local grudges into the courtroom, to be loaded with political and religious freight. The details Mather chose not to import—the devil’s red beard, the brightly colored scarf around his high-crowned hat, the carnal Sabbath practices, the cat-transported milk pails, the golden witches’ butter—never turned up in Massachusetts. Mather did touch on another affinity when describing the Swedish plague. “There is no public calamity,” he cited from that report, “but some ill people will serve themselves of the sad providence, and make use of it for their own ends, as thieves when a house or town is on fire, will steal what they can.”

He omitted the rest of that line, a nod to the truth in fables, the validity of rumors. People land in court because they are guilty, if not necessarily of the crime at hand. Had Salem village been asked to vote someone off the island, they would no doubt have settled on Sarah Good. They might soon enough have ejected Sarah Osborne as well. How Tituba wound up on the initial list is unclear. She may have exercised some unwelcome authority over the girls. She looked different from nearly everyone else in the community, where there were other slaves but few Indians. She had a magical narrative touch. The circle widened easily as the prosecution channeled fears, griefs, and antipathies, the gristle of communal life. Who doesn’t have a bone to pick with a neighbor? There were as many reasons to accuse someone of witchcraft in 1692 as there were to denounce him under the Nazi occupation of France: envy, insecurity, political enmity, unrequited love, love that had run its course. Unruly households found themselves targeted, as did men who bludgeoned wives. Some wound up in court purely for their refusal to join in the proceedings. (Elizabeth Procter may have been sacrificed for her husband’s misdeeds. There are few other ways to explain the fists jammed in mouths at her preliminary hearing. The girls had not expected to testify against her.) The unsavory, the meddlesome, the touchy and peevish
fared poorly. So did the pillars of the community, the constables, jury members, fence surveyors and their wives, those men who had told people what they preferred not to hear. John Alden consorted too freely, and too profitably, with Maine Indians; he left Essex County feeling insecure. Witchcraft provided a means to eradicate all malignancies at once. One could not litigate thwarted wills or crumpled egos. But one could electrify a courtroom with tales of blighted animals and dancing hay.

While there is a consistency to the indignities, there is little discernible pattern to the charges. Much of what happened in Salem in 1692 had been written when tempers flared over the Topsfield border generations earlier, or in 1679 when the Putnams and Bradburys clashed, or in 1683 when Burroughs abandoned his congregants. To stare at it for too long is to clamber down the rabbit hole, to ask more of miasmic events than they will yield. If you spend enough time in seventeenth-century Salem, you begin to see patterns that are not necessarily there, like a hyper-perspicacious assassination buff or an eminent minister in a renovated Boston kitchen or, for that matter, like a witchcraft judge.

More than half the women who were hanged in 1692 had previously been accused. Rebecca Nurse’s, Mary Esty’s, Elizabeth Procter’s, and Mary English’s mothers had been rumored to be witches. Samuel Wardwell had a Quaker uncle; the Nurses had raised a Quaker orphan; Alden had Quaker relations. Abigail Hobbs was happy to sell her parents down the river as only a fourteen-year-old will. She initiated the violent targeting in which the Willard and Wilds clans would engage, though intrafamilial treachery well predated 1692. Philip English and George Jacobs’s brother-in-law had been voted Salem town selectmen weeks before they were accused; elections produce losers too. As the crisis widened, so did the reasons to name names. It became less dangerous to accuse than to object. Guilt played an active role in many denunciations, bursting in by any number of trapdoors. It explained why prayer—why the very word “prayer”—might grate on the ears, why so many seemed afraid of their own shadows. It may have powered the Sabbath-day afflictions, either because you were at home that afternoon (when Louder met
the flying monkey), or because you crossed paths at meeting with someone who unsettled you (and seemed to appear afterward in your bed in her Sunday clothes), or because you heard terrifying things there.

DID ANN PUTNAM SR.
name Rebecca Nurse because of the border dispute, because her husband opposed Parris and had opposed James Bayley, because—although relative latecomers—the Nurses had managed to secure a large tract of village land, because Rebecca hailed from an intolerably harmonious family, or because she took the sacrament in Salem town, occupying a former Putnam pew in the village when she did not? Would she have been named had she visited the parsonage girls, which she did not do from fear of contagion?

Antipathies and temptations are written in invisible ink; we will never know. Everyone was on edge. Witchcraft localized anxiety at a dislocated time, as atomic war powered McCarthy rumors in the 1950s. Even those who knew themselves to be innocent believed a diabolical plot afoot. Might Ann Putnam Sr. have named Rebecca Nurse simply because the Nurses prospered where the Putnams did not? It is because Miss Gulch owns half the property in town that Auntie Em cannot say what she thinks of her to her face; witchcraft permitted a good Christian woman to speak her mind. It was the men in Salem who complained of being silenced, suffocated, and paralyzed in their beds—and who in their testimony delivered the most outlandish tales.
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If you round up the old enemies, the skeptics, the deviants, the scolds, the daughters of witches, the abusers and bullies, the arrivistes and the
overly advantaged, only George Burroughs remains.
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Of the five men who hanged—and every man who remained in prison was executed—most were related to witches. Burroughs traveled the farthest, to play the largest role. No other member of his family was accused. At the Mather household as on the Putnam farm, special animus was reserved for him. What was the minister’s crime? He stood in the way of no one’s inheritance. He had no designs on anyone’s land. He was related to no female suspect. The Putnams carried a long-standing grudge, Burroughs having replaced their brother-in-law in the village pulpit. The minister was a difficult man and a secretive, disorderly houseguest, as much sinned against as sinning. More people testified against him than against anyone else. They were unlikely to have had the same reasons. Mather claimed that he had been requested specifically to include Burroughs in
Wonders
. He was happy to oblige; the loathing drips from his pen. Sewall may not have forgiven Burroughs for having had the temerity to survive when Maine’s only ordained minister, a cousin, had not.

Hathorne had reason to dislike the Maine minister, his ex-brother-in-law, a dangerous man on another count. It was for the sake of frontiersmen like Burroughs that Massachusetts communities were left defenseless. His triple brush with heroism seems to have passed without comment before the justices, who may not have been able to forgive him their failures. They had removed militiamen from Maine in 1690; Casco had burned as a result. In indicting Burroughs, it has been suggested, the justices exonerated themselves. Burroughs had pleaded in 1691 for frontier troops and a commander. He no doubt had a great deal more to say off the page. The Dominion better protected Maine than did the post-Andros regime. Within weeks of the revolt, the frontier, deserted by troops, was overrun by Indians; its settlers had reason to feel as if they had been thrown to the wolves. Burroughs indeed appears to have been
lax in his religious practices, but his was just as likely a political infraction. He had cause to regret the Andros regime. If he said as much, he did so plainly. In either event there is as little evidence that he was the dreaded Baptist he posthumously became as there was that Tituba was black. He may well have voiced his displeasure before the abrupt departure from his parishioners, who had reason to expect a reprisal.

Across the board, strength of character fared poorly. Even when they did not thumb noses at authority, those who challenged the justices hanged. With one exception, those who confessed did not. (Here New England diverged not only from Sweden but from every other witchcraft trial on record.) More than fifty people falsely incriminated themselves, some purely to save their lives. But it was not difficult to believe in your monstrous powers when your glance knocked a child clear off her feet. Something lurked somewhere in the inner reaches, even if what you dredged up from the muck was not exactly sorcery. Sometimes what surfaced was simply a leaden feeling, the worry that one was impervious to faith. Someone or something stood in the way. “The design of the devil,” Cotton Mather noted in 1695, “is to affright you into a hard and harsh opinion of yourselves.” The boundary between a guilty conscience and diabolical collusion was not yet in place.

Accusers grasped at the names frequently bandied about: alleged witches, a minister’s family, the woman whose daughter had been savagely murdered. (They had adult help. As Increase Mather observed in 1684: “It is evident that the peculiar antipathies of some persons are caused by the imaginations of their parents.”) Andover caught the fever partly because the town suffered tensions of its own. It was on the verge of splitting in two; generations strained against one another in a community that had outgrown its land. But any town with a touch test–endorsing minister would have served just as well. By the time the witchcraft reached Andover, the justices had refined their methods of locating it. Confessions by no means require torture, although torture tends to produce the desired answers. Some were relieved to be spared from sharing a dungeon with Burroughs; others were happy to avoid humiliating public
trials. Many cared only to please. From the tone of the reparations claims it is clear in what esteem the villagers held the authorities. John Hale was not the only one who felt, as he put it, “that the reverence I bore to aged, learned, and judicious persons caused me to drink in their principles.”

A magistrate too can make you believe things of yourself that are not true. With a suggestible witness and an authority figure, it is not uncommon to wind up with a planted, potted memory. In the hands of the right adult, a child will swear that his day-care worker slaughtered rabbits, an elephant, a giraffe or “turned him into a mouse while he was in an airplane on the way to visit his grandmother.” No one rested easily in a seventeenth-century prison; sleep deprivation also produces hallucinations. Where did Ann Foster find the details of her fantastic flight? For three well-spoken, well-dressed men she recycled familiar imagery. Satanic baptisms were all too credible, even if they were in short supply in Massachusetts, where no witch had flown before 1692. As for the aerial crash, what greater fear hounds the flier? Foster may not even have known that such things had happened, or been said to happen, in Sweden. She did not need to fabricate the aching leg. No seventy-two-year-old New England farm woman was without a pain somewhere.

What sets Salem apart is not the accusations but the convictions. At other times raving women had been said to be witches and men dreamed of the devil without anyone thinking twice about it. Why the unsparing prosecution in 1692? Mather implied that the Glover case played a role, the laundress having displayed her spells for all to see. Several on the Court of Oyer and Terminer were better at executing orders than at formulating them; they bent easily to the greater will. Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney—the prime movers—acted in the interests of the orthodoxy, which happened to align with their personal agendas. They knew who the troublemakers were, having been called upon to mediate in Salem village for years. As its “uncharitable expressions and uncomely reflections,” its “settled prejudice, and resolved animosity” fermented into witchcraft, they promoted that transformation. Parris, Noyes, Barnard, and Hale eagerly backed them up. All signs point to their having been in
the thrall of William Stoughton, their elder by a generation, nearly a father to young Mather.