The Witches: Salem, 1692 (66 page)

“having killed 500”: Randolph to the Lords of Trade, October 24, 1689, CO 5/855, no. 41, fols 117r-188v, PRO.

ingenious seventeenth-century physician: MacDonald,
Mystical Bedlam,
202–9.

“dullest calendar”: Hawke,
Everyday Life,
91; Innes,
Creating the Commonwealth,
17–18.

clarify the mental imagery: Prayer works that effect for women more often than men. See T. M. Luhrmann’s brilliant
When God Talks Back
(New York: Vintage, 2012), especially 216–26. Or as Ambrose Bierce defined the word
ghost:
“the outward and visible sign of an inward fear.”

an intelligent, outspoken, orphaned eleven-year-old: See the English summary of Lagerlöf-Génetay,
De Svenska Haxprocessernas;
E. William Monter, “Scandinavian
Witchcraft in Anglo-American Perspective,” in
Early Modern European Witchcraft,
ed. Bengt Ankarloo and Gustav Henningsen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 425–34. The majority of the afflicted Swedish children could read, according to Horneck,
An Account,
3; Sweden alone had a higher literacy rate than NE.

“In other words”: Richard P. Gildrie, “The Salem Witchcraft Trials as a Crisis of Popular Imagination,”
EIHC
128 (June 1992): 276. As Luhrmann points out in
When God Talks Back,
Buddhists tend to have visions of Buddha. On what we see with our eyes closed, Oliver Sacks,
Hallucinations
(New York: Vintage, 2012).

erotic fear and longing: No one is better on the subject than Demos,
Entertaining Salem,
2004. See especially Mary Warren and her struggle with John Procter in her spectral lap, R, 263; the routine trip to grandmother’s house can drip with sexual menace too. On the sexual thrill for the spectators, Delbanco,
The Death of Satan,
60; for the flirtations, afflicted Margaret Rule, in Calef, Burr, 327.

an identical case: Turell, “Detection of Witchcraft,” 6–22. In his account, the minister blamed “unguarded tenderness and affection” for encouraging the children in their folly. Rosenthal,
Salem Story,
sees more conspiring than he does hallucinating; interview with Bernard Rosenthal, January 15, 2015. As Bernard warned in his 1627
Guide to Grand-Jury Men,
54, those who counterfeited witchcraft symptoms did so for gain, for revenge, to please others, “some of a pleasure they take to gull spectators, and to be had in admiration.”

“it was ordinary”: Calef,
More Wonders,
120. There was adult collaboration too. Reverend Noyes plucked pins from throats of the bewitched; R, 514. The broken cane: Calef in Burr, 355.

hungered for sport: R, 537. “These prayer meetings”: Cited in Rosen,
Madness in Society,
220.

“a sane adolescent”: Phillips,
Going Sane,
97.

“was better than the Bible”: “Revolution in New-England Justified,” 31. Murrin, “The Infernal Conspiracy,” 345, describes a massive act of transference on the part of those who had collaborated with the Dominion government. To expiate their sins in plotting to undermine a holy commonwealth, they prosecuted others. Norton is convincing on the subject,
In the Devil’s Snare.
T. H. Breen,
Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 105, puts it differently: “If the Massachusetts government had been able to defend the colonists from the French and Indians, the witch hunting episode might never have occurred, much less gotten out of hand.”

“summoning the massive”: Mencken, cited in Adams,
Specter of Salem,
150. Nor could the girls have guessed the extent of their powers. L. Frank Baum did: “Didn’t you know water would be the end of me?” asked the witch in a wailing, despairing voice. “Of course not,” answered Dorothy, “how should I?”

“believing the devil’s accusations”: B&N, 266. From the smoldering Reichstag in 1933 to weapons of mass destruction, there is nothing like a specter to legitimize power or rally the troops. See Randolph letter of May 16, 1689, on the colonists’ bending the French and Indian threat to their own ends. Certainly there was a
great deal of redirected guilt, a
hot-potato emotion as Arthur Miller noted in
Timebends,
xiii.

the very word “nightmare”: Only the rare incubus turned up in Essex County. When women complained of bedroom attacks, they tended to name other women. On sleep paralysis: Owen Davies, “The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations,”
Folklore
(August 2003): 181–203; David J. Hufford,
The Terror That Comes in the Night
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); Selma R. Williams,
Riding the Nightmare: Women and Witchcraft
(New York: Athenaeum, 1978); R, 27.

read everything in sight: Cremin,
American Education,
212, observes that Massachusetts may have represented the most educated commonweal in the history of the world to that point. The John Wise remark is in Sibley, 435. Mather’s library, Dunton, cited in Larzer Ziff,
Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World
(New York: Viking, 1973), 11.

“poisoned,” as Calef sniffed: In Richard M. Gummere,
Seven Wise Men of Colonial America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 23. C. S. Lewis wrote about the fever that turned into Narnia in
On Stories and Other Essays on Literature
(New York: Mariner, 2002): 46. He began with two images, “a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord. It was part of the bubbling.”

Swedish epidemic: That epidemic too was built on a preexisting myth and allowed children to target their own families. See Lagerlöf-Génetay,
De Svenska Haxprocessernas;
Monter, “Scandinavian Witchcraft.” Calef,
More Wonders,
19, notes that a white spirit turned up in Salem as it did in Sweden; Mather tended to bury it. Bengt Ankarloo points out that the clergy and justices shaped that narrative; see Ankarloo’s “Blakulla, ou le sabbat des sorciers scandinaves,” in
Le sabbat des sorciers en Europe
(Grenoble, France: Millon, 1993), 251–58. The Bury St. Edmunds trials too—to which both JH and CM turned in their accounts of Salem, as did the justices—began with entranced, Scripture-resistant, pin-spitting preadolescent girls.

“who think that they have”: Calef, cited in “Mather-Calef Papers on Witchcraft,” 250.

“it is not usual”: IM, in
Cases,
20.

“There is no public”:
WOW,
171. CM cleaned up Horneck’s language a little.

fists jammed in mouths: Fists went into mouths at the Esty hearing as well; R, 208. It may not have been a coincidence that Foster and Carrier were of Scots clans. Or it may have been a perfect coincidence.

“had she visited”: Some intuited that it could also be dangerous to leave the room. When Margaret Rule asked those at her bedside to withdraw, “One woman said, I am sure I am no witch, I will not go.” Rule’s other callers followed suit; it was impossible to know what might be asserted in your absence. Calef in Burr, 326.

gender differences: For women hallucinating more, see Gildrie, “The Salem Witchcraft Trials,” 276. It is Roger Thompson who observes that women come off better. The tongue-holding good Christian woman appears only in the movie of
Oz
. The male victims claim Sewall’s attention; CM gave Burroughs top billing.

original village covenant: Over 70 percent of the accused were however non-church members. Ray,
Satan and Salem,
190.

it has been suggested: The point is Norton’s,
In the Devil’s Snare.
CM located “the most unanimous resolution perhaps that ever was known to have inspired any people” behind the Andros coup. That was essential to the deed; Burroughs would have been unlikely to have subscribed to it. Maule too acknowledged the clergy’s hatred of Burroughs in
Truth Held Forth,
189. He does not say he was a Baptist. For the inability to protect the frontier post-Andros, see Bullivant to Col. Lidget, CO 5/855, no. 103, PRO. As one Crown official put it seven years later, the Massachusetts leaders “have not a public spirit and, so long as they can sleep securely in this town of Boston, they [think] nor look no further”; Earl of Bellemont to the Council of Trade, August 28, 1699, CO 5/860, no. 65, PRO.

“The design of the devil”: CM,
Batteries Upon the Kingdom of the Devil,
24.

“It is evident that”: IM,
IP,
102.

“that the reverence I bore”: Hale in Burr, 404.

day-care worker: Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker,
Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern Witch Hunt
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), 157. “turned him into a mouse”: Dorothy Rabinowitz,
No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times
(New York: Free Press, 2003), 13. With child-abuse scandals, Rabinowitz points out, 29, it was understood that if a child said he had been molested, he told the truth. If he denied the abuse, he was simply not ready to talk yet. For a modern case of hysteria and hallucination, Lawrence Wright’s extraordinary two-part “Remembering Satan,”
New Yorker,
May 17 and May 24, 1993.

“uncharitable expressions”: B&N, 344. At other times raving women were said to be witches and men dreamed of the devil without anyone thinking twice about it, Hull
Diaries,
181.

“They look upon me”: Dudley to Blathwayt, February 25, 1692, cited in Philip Ranlet,
Enemies of the Bay Colony
(Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), 184.

English officials who sniffed: Edward Randolph Papers 1v: 283.

“a place where none do”: Andros to Lord Sunderland, March 30, 1687, in John Russell Bartlett, ed.,
Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations
(Providence: Knowles, 1858), 3: 224.

“like young conjurers”: Randolph cited in Ranlet,
Enemies of the Bay Colony,
107. In deriding the coup that unseated him, an English official wondered if rebellion was not akin to the sin of witchcraft; Palmer in
Andros Tracts,
1: 36. Some liked to harp on the chaos there. “New England is worse than bedlam,” Randolph scoffed in a March 14, 1693, dispatch. Boston was in the grip of “fantastical delusions,” its people “more stupid than their governer.” Randolph Papers, 7: 433–44.

“were a people fit only”: Cited in Lustig,
Imperial Executive,
213, and echoed by CM,
Midnight Cry,
63.

“perhaps a more gross
diabolism
”:
WOW,
16.

“preached up a rebellion”: Randolph to Samuel Shrimpton, July 26, 1684,
Letters and Official Papers,
3: 318.

ministers were as blindsided: The point is David Hall’s; interview with Hall, January 12, 2013.

“lively demonstrations” to “hinder this good”: CM in Burr, 322–23.

Calef credited: Calef,
More Wonders,
164–65.

all wonder tales harvested: For the political utility of those tales, Perry Miller,
The England Mind from Colony to Province
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 142–45.

small, supernatural figure: When Mary Marston confessed in August, she literally said the devil had made her do it; R, 565.

“demons in the shape”:
Magnalia,
2: 541. John Emerson, who wrote up the chimerical invaders, had been minister at Salmon Falls when the town was burned in 1690. He had also earlier warned the authorities of Gloucester’s distress. So many of their men were off at the frontier that the town felt utterly exposed, “every day and night in expectation” of assault, all the more so given their harbor, the best in NE. So depleted were their forces that they could barely man a watch; they preferred to abandon the town than to “live in continual hazard and fear of their lives.” They sound precisely like the Salem villagers begging off town-watch duty in 1667.

Whole volumes have been devoted to Salem’s legacy. See, in particular, Gretchen Adams’s sterling 2010 work
The Specter of Salem
as well as her “The Specter of Salem in American Culture,”
OAH Magazine of History
(July 2003): 24–27; Owen Davies,
America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Dane Anthony Morrison and Nancy Lusignan Schultz, eds.,
Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004). On digesting history more generally, see Foote, “To Remember and Forget.”

“long train of miserable”: “Return of Several Ministers Consulted,” B&N, 117–18.

“People were chasing”: Cited in Mark Danner, “Donald Rumsfeld Revealed,”
New York Review of Books,
January 9, 2014, 65.

Betty Parris married: See Marilynne Roach’s excellent “‘That Child, Betty Parris’: Elizabeth (Parris) Barron and the People in Her Life,”
EIHC
124 (January 1988): 1–27.

“diabolical molestations”: Norton, “George Burroughs,” 311, suggests this was Shelden; Baker,
A Storm of Witchcraft,
109, thinks Warren or Shelden; Roach, “‘That Child,’” thinks Abigail.

“a very sober”: Cited in Justin Winsor,
The Memorial History of Boston
(Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), vol. 2, 146.

“operations of the powers”: Lawson in Burr, 149. Burr theorized that Lawson left NE because of his role in the Salem proceedings. There is no evidence to support that assertion.

“uneven and unwary”: Lawson letters of October 6, 1713, and July 12, 1715, Ms. Rawlinson, D839, fol. 169r, Bodleian Library.

“we must unavoidably perish”: Lawson to Jeremy Dummer and Henry Newman, December 24 1714, Ms. Rawlinson, C128, fol. 12r, Bodleian Library.

“the unhappy Mr. Deodat”: Edmund Calamy,
A Continuation of the Account of the Ministers, Lecturers, Masters and Fellows of Colleges and Schoolmasters, Who Were Ejected and Silenced After the Restoration
(London: R. Ford, 1727), 11: 629.

“difficulties and disturbances”: Journal of the Rev. Israel Loring, January 25, 1720, Sudbury, Massachusetts, archives. The best source on the later years is again Gragg,
Quest for Security,
153–75; see B&N, 195–96, for the will.

Joseph Green: Joseph Green diary, DIA 72, PEM; Sibley.

lumber of the old meetinghouse: Richard B. Trask,
The Meetinghouse at Salem Village
(Danvers, MA: Danvers Alarm List, 1992), 20.

“on his lying down”: John Kendall,
The Life of Thomas Story
(Philadelphia: Crukshank, 1805), 172. When John Alden sailed to England twelve years later with an official request for matériel, he was captured by the French. Dudley Bradstreet was taken prisoner by Indians in his snowbound house.

Six-foot-long mermen: CM, July 5, 1716, in Silverman,
Selected Letters,
211.

“the mischievous unChristian”:
A Faithful Narrative of the Proceedings of the Ecclesiastical Council Convened at Salem in 1734
(Boston: Henchman, 1735), 3.

Calef noted: Calef,
More Wonders,
7.

smallpox epidemic: See Ernest Caulfield, “Pediatric Aspects of the Salem Witchcraft Tragedy,”
American Journal of Diseases of Children
(1943): 788–802;
CM Diary,
2: 632, 657, for “cursed clamor” and the bomb. It is interesting that CM, who—while studying medicine at Harvard, claimed to contract “almost every distemper that I read of in my studies”—seemed not to ponder a psychosomatic angle in 1692. Naturally both IM and CM claimed to have foretold the 1721 epidemic.

a Westfield girl: Oberholzer,
Delinquent Saints,
124.

“by instigation of”: Francis,
Judge Sewall’s Apology,
321.

“a leprechaun”: Delbanco,
The Death of Satan,
64–69; similarly, Reis,
Damned Women,
164–93.

“little short of a proper satanical”:
CM Diary,
2: 749. For a fresh analysis of the marriage, see Virginia Bernhard, “Cotton Mather’s ‘Most Unhappy Wife’: Reflections on the Uses of Historical Evidence,”
New England Quarterly
(September 1987): 351. As she notes, it is not difficult to make the case that CM had a touch of paranoia. As Arthur Miller observed, paranoia however secretes its pearl around a grain of fact.

“wear off that reproach”: Brattle in Burr, 190.

“foul stain”: Cited in Adams,
Specter of Salem,
36.

“The North”: Ibid., 118.

Pilgrim feasts: See Peter Gomes’s wonderful “Pilgrims and Puritans: ‘Heroes’ and ‘Villains’ in the Creation of the American Past,”
Proceedings of the MHS,
vol. 95 (1983): 1–16.

“detestable and nefarious”: Cited in Jesse Walker,
The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory
(New York: HarperCollins, 2013), 113.

“We must awake”: Cited in Richard Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
(New York: Vintage, 2008), 20.

“diabolical conspiracy”: Cited in Michael Heale,
The United States in the Long Twentieth Century
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 133.

obedience to God: Best on the point is Innes,
Creating the Commonwealth,
200.

John Adams: Adams,
Specter of Salem,
35. He was voicing precisely the sentiment Phips and IM battled.

“the sense of heated”: Hofstadter,
The Paranoid Style,
3. The line appeared in a November 1964
Harper’s;
it is reworked slightly.

“There are not two”:
Andros Tracts,
1: 37. The official reply and these assertions fell to Samuel Sewall.

American presidents: See Gary Boyd Roberts, “Notable Kin: The Progeny of Witches and Wizards,”
Nexus
(June 1992).

“I think we stood”: Cited in Joseph J. Ellis,
Revolutionary Summer
(New York: Knopf, 2013), 50.

The Crucible
was not a success: Miller,
Timebends,
347–49; Miller, “Why I Wrote ‘The Crucible,’”
New Yorker,
October 21, 1996, 164.

“according to ancient”:
Independent Journal,
July 18, 1787;
Massachusetts Centinel,
August 1, 1787;
Pennsylvania Evening Herald,
October 27, 1787. For Edmund S. Morgan on the incident, “The Witch and We, the People,”
American Heritage
34 (August 1983), 6–11. The last colonial trial for witchcraft took place in Virginia in 1706.

“You couldn’t get”: Cited in Morrison and Schultz,
Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory,
55. See also Miller,
Timebends,
335–49; Miller felt the town began exploring and exploiting its past only after
The Crucible
.

“What are you”: Interview with Richard Trask, April 2, 2015.

tussle today over Sarah Wilds: I am grateful to Topsfield archivist Amy Coffin for the detail.

“fooling with history”: Daniel Lang, “Poor Ann,”
New Yorker,
September 11, 1954, 100. Lang follows the history of the remaining six unexonerated women. An earlier refusal to exonerate them seemed ridiculous; the 1959 Massachusetts senate did not care to make itself “a laughing stock in the eyes of enlightened society all around the world.” The 2001 Act (Session Laws, Acts of 2001, chapter 122) makes no reference to executions.

“Do you think” to “think they are”: R, 230. In his draft, SP records Hathorne’s question differently: “Do not you think they are bewitched?” he has the chief justice ask, R, 228. Her answer remains the same.