The Witches: Salem, 1692 (52 page)

With the question of why Stoughton—a political contortionist for over a decade—remained inflexible on witchcraft, one comes closest to the riddle of Salem. No documentation survives; it is more difficult to make sense of his intransigence than of Foster’s flight to a satanic Sabbath. Both followed to some extent from their faith. Stoughton embraced spectral evidence, contrary to legal opinion; he departed from all precedent. After the hastily rearranged political allegiances, he took and held a stand. One may well account for the other. Firm hands were in order; Stoughton responded with clenched fists. He had known disfavor. He had no interest in returning to it.
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Along with two other witchcraft justices, Stoughton had collaborated actively with the “alien incubus” that was Dominion rule.
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Here was an opportunity for those men to rehabilitate themselves, to prove their mettle by dispelling a new intruder. They were now the righteous enforcers, the ones lifting that “standard against the infernal enemy.” The only individual who could easily have slowed or reversed Salem’s course, Stoughton elected not to do so. He believed as firmly in spectral evidence in 1693 as he had in 1692, or at least claimed to. He worked under an absent, weak governor who displayed little interest in the trials. Hathorne handed Stoughton a situation that was out of control well before Phips arrived and in which the new governor had no cause to involve himself. Afterward—as with the half-read May commission—he fumbled in attempting both to prove his piety to Massachusetts and his competence to London.

Stoughton labored to prove not only his constancy but a new government’s legitimacy. He was as aware as anyone that to the Crown the colony appeared lax, impertinent, disorderly. They had paid a crushing price for having deviated from the laws of England. In prosecuting witches he simultaneously redeemed himself at home and broadcast New England’s proficiency abroad; the colonists could govern themselves, in an orderly, Old World way. They were no riotous, irresponsible teenagers after all. They prosecuted subversives. They could show up those English officials who sniffed that Massachusetts was without law, courts, justice, or government. The crisis provided a great number of people—Barnard, Noyes, Cotton Mather, several adolescent girls, many Massachusetts authorities, the colony itself—a chance to show up their elders, all too happy to remind them, as the king assured New England, that they existed only by someone else’s grace and favor.
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What they had been given could also be taken away, nails on the blackboard of the adolescent mind.

The new charter reconstituted the judicial system, of which Andros had made a travesty and on which a new administration depended. The colony reeled still from those “barbarous usages.” Stoughton may have set out to prove that New England was not, as the deposed governor had scoffed, “a place where none do and few care to understand (if they can help it) the laws or methods of England.” They had much to lose, a reputation for civil disobedience to live down. Coursing public anger played a role; men who had overthrown a despot had no desire to face a mob. As an ousted Dominion official had warned in 1689, those who removed Andros were “like young conjurers, who had raised a devil they could not govern.” Indeed the New England clergy had promoted the tale of that earlier implacable invader, the red-coated one with his sinister designs who had been heard to sneer that Puritans “were a people fit only
to be rooted off the face of the earth.” They lent it to a witch gang intent on establishing “perhaps a more gross
diabolism,
than ever the world saw before.” They did not have to imagine that story, having themselves participated in it. The trials allowed them to dispel a stain of their own.

The clergy could resist in no meaningful way. They were known to have blown the bellows of sedition against the previous administration, to have preached up a rebellion, to have craftily incited a mob. They could not undermine a government that, at great cost, they had themselves installed. To vindicate the court was to vindicate the new charter; they too looked to prove themselves not in Boston but in London, where Mather aimed
Wonders
. Three years of anarchy and five of Dominion rule had been costly. The justices were moreover their patrons and sponsors, the men who paid their salaries. The ministers were as blindsided by the crisis as everyone else. But witchcraft allowed them to prove God’s special stake in New England. It must be awfully important if Satan stood so intent on destroying it! The assault on Salem allowed a younger generation of clergymen to prove their worth in a cosmic battle. It fulfilled a prophecy too; here was the storm before the much advertised millennial calm, a last-ditch showdown with the devil.

For all of his 1692 fast days, for all of his warnings against spectral evidence, torture, and touch tests, for all of his hand-wringing, Cotton Mather did not find the assault of evil angels entirely unwelcome. In a 1693 document not meant for public consumption, he offered what may qualify as his most genuine assessment of the episode. It was certainly the most damning. Mather wrestled mightily with this statement; it is heavily blotted and redacted. What had Salem witchcraft yielded? No one of worth had been compromised. The “lively demonstrations of hell” had awakened many souls—young souls, especially, of both genders. Mather knew that calamity reliably filled the church; evangelically speaking, little rivaled an earthquake. “The devil got just nothing,” reasoned Mather, as he meditated on the crisis, “but God got praises, Christ got subjects, the Holy Spirit got temples, the Church got addition, and the souls of men got everlasting benefits.” Reversing his position on
his own involvement, he preened a little: “I am not so vain as to say that any wisdom or virtue of mine did contribute unto this good order of things, but I am so just as to say I did not hinder this good.” Any discomfort for having failed to shut down the trials had vanished. He decried only one monstrous injustice: the assault on his reputation.

Cases of Conscience,
the advice of the New York ministers, Mary Esty’s petition, and Giles Corey’s gruesome death may have helped to extinguish the witchcraft. But as the casualties piled up, the terror rushed toward the authorities’ front doors. When it did, the moment had passed. (The skeptic Robert Calef credited whoever had accused Mrs. Phips.) Blame could not be attributed, belonging as it did to too many addresses. Mystification yielded to mortification. It is unclear who actually heard Thomas Brattle’s wise, unwelcome words; by October too many had been recalling (or inventing) twenty-five-year-old slights to be able to accuse anyone else of delusion. Firmly established, witchcraft exerted a magnetic pull on every glinting irritation, fear, grudge, peculiarity, offense; there was as much stray odium and animosity in Essex County as there were mangy dogs and marauding pigs. The community played the chorus, striking at empty air with canes, rapiers, and staffs, marveling as moths flew through the meetinghouse, chipping in oddities and old tales, rumored, recovered, invented. Everyone had his reasons.

The irony that they had come to the New World to escape an interfering civil authority was lost on the colonists, who unleashed on one another the kind of abuse they had deplored in royal officials. So was the fact that the embrace of faith, meant to buttress the church, would tear it irrevocably apart; the wonder tales harvested to prove New England’s special status undermined it in the end. Political concerns outweighed all others, as political concerns had produced both
Illustrious Providences
and
Memorable Providences
. Mather’s account of the witchcraft would be inseparable from his life of Phips; the authorities believed they protected a fledgling administration. They had contracted a kind of autoimmune disorder, deploying against themselves the very furies they so feared. There were in 1692 no perpetrators, and no consequences. Only a small,
supernatural figure remained at the scene of the crime.
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He did resolve one mystery while in Salem: indeed the devil needs conscious human collusion to work evil.

Witchcraft effectively aroused a lapsed, sluggish generation, though not as the clergy had anticipated. When the spell broke, the torrent of recriminations swept away a rich layer of faith. Massachusetts leaders would never again apply to the church for advice. Nor would an additional hint surface of a witches’ meeting or an aerial mishap. As for the phantom Frenchmen and Indians, by 1698 the nattily dressed invaders were understood to be satanic agents, “demons in the shape of armed Indians and Frenchmen.” The best minds in Essex County continued to believe them implicated somehow in the witchcraft. They never reappeared, fading imperceptibly away, like the indelible scene in the book you read as a child and never manage to find again.

ROUGHLY HALF OF
the afflicted girls grew up, found husbands, and had children, if not necessarily in that order. Betty Parris married late and raised a family in Concord. No trace remains of her cousin Abigail, the exuberant witch hunter. She may have been the girl reported to have experienced “diabolical molestations to her death” and who died, still single, in 1697. Like Ann Putnam, Susannah Shelden failed to marry, highly uncommon in seventeenth-century New England. She wound up in Rhode Island charged as a “person of evil fame,” which was more common. Betty Hubbard found a husband only at thirty-six. Sarah Churchill, the Jacobs servant, married at forty-two, having earlier paid a fine for fornication. Mercy Lewis, the Putnams’ maid, bore an illegitimate child; she later married and moved to Boston. Mary Walcott, Abigail Hobbs, and Mary Lacey Jr. raised their families the old-fashioned way, several of them in the immediate area. For all of the deviations, at least some of the village girls appear to have turned out like the afflicted Goodwin girl,
described in adulthood as “a very sober, virtuous woman”—and who never for a minute denied that she had witnessed witchcraft.

The village ministers fared less well. James Bayley, who had introduced the future Ann Putnam Sr. to the village, fell on hard times in Roxbury. Samuel Sewall visited with cakes, with money for firewood, and, less helpfully, with verses by Reverend Noyes. Suffering from pleurisy, Bayley died an excruciating death in 1707. Having provided the most indelible portrait of the Salem shrieks and teeth marks, Deodat Lawson returned to England. Hemming and hawing a little, he republished his witchcraft account in 1704, to lift the enduring censure on his friends and insist yet again on the “operations of the powers of darkness.” The first to attempt to make sense of the epidemic, he remained the last retailing an account of it, the surviving 1963 Dallas Secret Service agent hawking his wares. Not long thereafter Lawson committed an indiscretion that left him issuing solemn apologies to the London ministry. He acknowledged having dishonored his profession with his “uneven and unwary conversation.” He battled for several years to clear his name. The offense may have had nothing to do with sensationalistic witchcraft pronouncements; he may simply have drunk too much. He had however spoken carelessly, as he could be said to have done in 1692. By 1714 he lived in abject poverty, his family starving, his three young children infected with smallpox, his wife debilitated. He tried unsuccessfully to raise funds for a collection of sermons, throwing himself on the mercy of friends. If no relief were forthcoming, he warned, “we must unavoidably perish.” He would be remembered as “the unhappy Mr. Deodat Lawson.”

Samuel Parris remarried and fathered a second family. Trailed by the “difficulties and disturbances” of his ministry, he drifted about, landing in six communities over twelve years. He taught school, raised livestock, sold fabrics and sundries, preached in the smallest settlement in Massachusetts, and speculated in land. He overreached in one transaction; arrested for debt, he spent a few weeks of 1706 in jail in Cambridge. Having
written and rewritten his will, Parris died in Sudbury at sixty-seven, a moderately wealthy man though one who continued to feel the world had shortchanged him. If he wrote another word on what he deemed that “very sore rebuke, and humbling providence,” it has not survived. His estate did not include his Salem pasture, which he had sold earlier.

The village replaced Parris with a newly minted minister half his age. A Cambridge native, Joseph Green had been at Harvard in 1692; he well knew the singular history of the parsonage into which he moved, also with an Indian slave. A more temperate man, Green inherited a chastened flock. He welcomed back the dissenting brethren and reseated the meetinghouse, placing Nurses alongside Putnams, a daughter of Rebecca Nurse beside her accuser’s mother, where the women would have heard Ann Putnam Jr.’s 1706 apology. Against much opposition, Green reversed Martha Corey’s excommunication sentence.
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It required less effort to convince his parishioners that they might breathe more easily in a new meetinghouse. They moved down the road, to the corner of Centre and Hobart Streets, where the First Church of Danvers stands today. The lumber of the old meetinghouse was left to decay, which it could not do quickly enough. Closure proved elusive; the Burroughs children petitioned still for redress in 1750. Green preached against fortune-telling a decade after Salem. Parishioners still slept in their pews. And Putnams complained of Salem village preaching.

A 1704 visitor found Massachusetts an uncomfortable place where no one knew “on his lying down to sleep, but that he might lose his life before the morning, by the hands of a merciless savage.” Sewall woke from nightmares about the French in 1706. Mather nearly crossed paths with marauding Indians outside Andover that year; a niece disappeared into captivity at around the same time. While talk of evil angels quieted, the Apocalypse remained imminent. Mather forecast it for 1715. Sewall and Noyes still heatedly disputed passages of Revelation. Six-foot-long
mermen with forked tails appeared on the rocks of Branford, Connecticut, as Cotton Mather alerted London’s Royal Society. In the early 1730s, the Boston clergy stepped in to heal “the mischievous unChristian divisions and contentions arising and prevailing” among the Salem town parishioners, their minister as “unpeacable” as Parris had been.

The trials did not upend the church, but—assisted by the new charter and in conjunction with forces already in motion—they did erode its foundation. Attempting to prove one thing, the Puritan orthodoxy had proved quite another. The very idea of confession had been contaminated. Mather had warned that the Lord sent down devils to “stop the mouths of the faithless”; not incorrectly, Robert Calef noted that those evil angels created a fair number of atheists. Hale was not alone in more strictly scanning his principles. When the new Massachusetts governor took the oath of office a decade after Salem, he did so in a traditional, Bible-kissing Anglican ceremony. Mather found himself ordaining Baptists. Sewall lived to see Christmas celebrated. There had been no flying before 1692 and there would be none afterward. People accused one another of witchcraft well into the eighteenth century, but Massachusetts would not execute another witch.
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We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways. Increase Mather turned from the study of devils to the study of angels. In 1721, a smallpox epidemic raged through Boston. Cotton Mather faced down the entire medical establishment to advocate something that seemed every bit as dubious as spectral evidence: inoculation. He had studied medicine at Harvard; he had come to well understand infectious disease. Moving from imps and witches to germs and viruses, he finally located the devils we inhale with every breath. The battle turned so vitriolic that it dragged Salem out of hiding, allowing Mather to be bludgeoned for lunacy on two counts. (It also allowed him to drag the devil back onstage. Given the “cursed clamor,” Satan seemed to have taken possession of Boston.)
He remained as steadfast on the subject of inoculation as he had been equivocal on witchcraft. A homemade bomb came sailing in his window at three o’clock one morning. His reputation never recovered.
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The trials claimed more casualties than were clear at the time; the devil himself failed to recover. Present though the Old Deluder remained—if you committed adultery in Massachusetts in 1721, you did so “by instigation of the devil”—“the roaring lion, the old dragon, the enemy of all righteousness,” as Parris had it in his apology, faded from the scene. He grew more abstract as evil retreated inside, less the master conspirator than the shadow of our poor judgment. By the end of Betty Parris’s lifetime, he had come, as a modern scholar has put it, to bear more resemblance to “a leprechaun than to the old grandmaster of hell.” Women also fared poorly after Salem, or at least went back to being invisible, where they remained, historically speaking, until a different scourge encouraged them to raise their voices, with suffrage and Prohibition.

In 1728, the year of Mather’s death, a Medford minister could write off witchcraft as the stuff of fairy tales. Salem was very nearly ready to become one itself, to be recast and retold. At the same time Sewall resigned as chief justice. He lived two more years, attuned as ever to birdsong and rainbows, concerned with safeguarding the Massachusetts charter at all costs, to the end tripping over his conscience for the sake of consensus. In 1728 Topsfield and Salem resolved their border dispute. By the time of his death at 109, Martha Carrier’s widower had the satisfaction of seeing that Salem witchcraft had become the “supposed witchcraft” and that the villain of the piece was no longer his wife, the queen of hell, or even her so-called confederates. Sorcery yielded to possession, by the middle of the eighteenth century to fraud. It would require only another few decades for Brattle’s suggestion that the witches had more
likely been the accusers to register, for anyone to note that authorities get feverish, too.

The trials would take their place among those historical events that never happened until a generation or two after they did. Once they flickered back to life they refused to dim. Of all the portents and prophecies—those of the visionary girls, the boastful specters, the Mathers, the Salem woman who forecast a second storm of witchcraft—only Thomas Brattle’s came true. Ages would not “wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our land.”
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John Adams cited the trials as a “foul stain upon this country,” an irony for proceedings that had been intended to purify. The frenzy unleashed by a three-pence duty on tea seemed to one 1773 Massachusetts lawyer absurd, “and more disgraceful, to the annals of America than that of witchcraft.” Salem came in especially handy over the second half of the nineteenth century; it provided an effective piece of shrapnel when North and South took aim at each other. Frederick Douglass asked how the belief in slavery was any bit less objectionable than that in sorcery. Abolition, argued others, was a hallucination on par with Salem witchcraft. The 1860 election of Lincoln struck terror in the slave-owning South, leading a popular magazine to screech: “The North, who having begun with burning witches, will end by burning us!” All could agree on one matter: when you wanted to reach the emotional high notes, you reached for Salem.

New England’s enemies arguably did more than anyone to keep Salem alive, as for so long the church had sustained the devil. The South woke in the nineteenth century to the fact that “those bigoted, fanatical, mischief-making, would-be enlighteners” north of the Mason-Dixon Line wrote the schoolbooks, with lasting effects. Something needed to be done; the Salem misstep helped to remodel the New England past. In the midst of the Civil War, President Lincoln officially established
Thanksgiving, Pilgrim feasts being preferable to Puritan fasts. Decades earlier, Daniel Webster had delivered his Plymouth Rock oration, and people who had not persecuted witches or left a paper trail—or left much of any kind of trail at all—became the ur-Americans. Blameless, if colorless, the Pilgrims made better ancestors than did peevish, intolerant, urban, upper-class witch hunters. For a century or so they replaced their fanatical cousins.

It turns out to be eminently useful to have a disgrace in your past; Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious. It endures in its lessons and our language. In the 1780s, enemies of the Federalists accused that party of launching a “detestable and nefarious conspiracy” to restore the monarchy. Anti-Illuminists warned of prowling Jesuits, of the Catholic serpent already coiled about, with sinister political designs. “We must awake,” they warned in 1835, “or we are lost.” The judge sentencing the Rosenbergs for espionage in 1951 termed theirs a “diabolical conspiracy to destroy a God-fearing nation.” A network of subversives, night-and-day vigilance, the watchtowers of the nation, and reckless cruelty returned with the 1954 McCarthy hearings. It took very little in 1998 to turn Linda Tripp into the nosy Puritan neighbor and Ken Starr into a witch hunter.

English monarchs would continue to conspire—or appear to conspire—against the people. It is no surprise that the seventeenth-century Massachusetts authorities so often sounded like understudies for the Founding Fathers. Somewhere along the line those men had decided that obedience to God did not tally with allegiance to monarchs; it was less a love of democracy than a hatred of authority that is their chief contribution to the national DNA. As John Adams saw it, Massachusetts had compromised itself more by accepting Increase Mather’s 1691 charter than by prosecuting witches. The same defiance, the same brooding sense of sanctified purpose that delivered the trials culminated in a revolution,
the legacy of further
hand-wringing about property lines, tax rates, and trespass.
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As dogma, the crusade against evil, and the ecstatic embrace of justice combined in Salem, they do too in what has been termed the paranoid style in American politics. When Richard Hofstadter described “the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” the national distempers that occasionally descend upon us, he could have been describing Essex County in 1692. That apocalyptic, absolutist strain still bleeds into our thinking. English officials in Massachusetts wrote off the ludicrous papist talk. “There are not two Roman Catholics betwixt this and New York,” snorted an imprisoned Andros adviser in 1689; as for the rest of the designs against New England, they were delusional, “false and strangely ridiculous.” But they very well might have been real. We are regularly being sacrificed to our heathen adversaries; in troubled times, we naturally look for traitors, terrorists, secret agents. Though in our imaginations, the business is indeed sometimes not imaginary. A little paranoia may even be salutary, though sometimes when you anticipate a hailstorm, one eerily comes crashing down on your head.