The Witches: Salem, 1692 (67 page)

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Most accomplish only part of the job. As a proponent of the witchcraft theory conceded: “There are departments in twentieth-century American universities with as long and as vicious a history of factional hatreds as any to be found in Salem, and the parties to these hatreds accuse each other of all sorts of absurdities, but witchcraft is not one of them.”

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To prepare his seventeen-year-old for a suitor, Sewall read her the story of Adam and Eve. It proved less soothing than expected; she hid from her caller in the stable.

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He was citing Caesar on the Scythians, from whom Mather understood the Native Americans descended. Others believed them in some vague way descended from a tribe of Israel.

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And some of those who tittered wound up thereafter in meeting with signs reading “I Stand Here for My Lascivious and Wanton Carriages” around their necks.

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In a Connecticut case later in 1692, the father of a convulsing girl encouraged callers; it was important they observe the unnatural happenings for themselves. He wanted to make it clear that no one was playacting.

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If a serious discussion of witchcraft versus possession took place, it is lost to us. Not everyone distinguished between them or so much as attempted to; the symptoms were largely the same. Mather noted their “near affinity,” conjoining the two even in the title of
Memorable Providences
. One could invite the other: “It is an ordinary thing,” the minister at the center of the Groton case observed, “for a possession to be introduced by a bewitching.” (In that he followed Mather’s father, Increase, who believed one could simultaneously suffer from both.) Fumbling toward an explanation, Parris early on hinted at demonic possession. It was understood that the possessed experienced no bodily harm, however; visible marks bloomed on the girls’ bodies. Soon enough apparitions corroborated the witchcraft, a diagnosis Parris had cause to prefer. Complicity made all the difference: a willing host to impurity, the possessed person was guilty. The bewitched was innocent.

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Many sympathized with a farmer whose home—just north of Salem village—straddled the Topsfield-Ipswich line. When a constable approached from one direction, the farmer removed to the far side of his house. (Constable Wilds finally settled the matter by force. Enlisting some sturdy friends, he seized a choice pig and declared the account settled. The collecting of witches, he was about to discover, was less straightforward.)

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Harvard tuition—which ran about fifty-five pounds for the four-year course of study—was paid the same way, most commonly in wheat and malt. The occasional New England father sent his son to Cambridge with parsnips, butter, and, regrettably for all, goat mutton. A 141-pound side of beef covered a year’s tuition. Translating in another direction, four years’ tuition amounted to the cost of a small home.

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In the same vein, Cotton Mather felt it necessary to prepare his eight-year-old daughter for his imminent death. He went on to outlive her by twelve years.

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In the minds of most Indian captives, there was only one thing worse. An English settler would prefer to have his brains dashed out by a hatchet than to kiss a crucifix. Fearing for his soul, one starving youngster refused even a Jesuit-proffered biscuit. He buried it under a log.

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The phenomenon was not new. Under repeated interrogation, hardy details tend to blossom and grow more lush. The same had happened with an earlier “infernal nuisance,” Joan of Arc.

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Following a prickly conversation with the governor in which he asserted that more drunkenness could be observed in six months in North America than in the course of an English lifetime, Increase Mather noted in his diary: “No wonder that New England is visited when the head is so spirited.” At around the same time, his son complained that every other house in Boston was an alehouse. The Salem town minister shared their concern. The New England visitor eager to write the Puritans off as sanctimonious hypocrites found them “the worst of drunkards,” muddy-brained at the end of each day but never so incapacitated as to desist from spouting Scripture. All exaggerated, to different ends. Strong cider was nonetheless as constant a feature of seventeenth-century New England as the belief in witchcraft. As one modern historian noted, “The ‘Puritan’ who shuddered at the very sight (or thought) of a glass of beer or wine, not to mention hard liquor, did not live in colonial Massachusetts.”

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One New England witch did nearly sink a Barbados-bound ship. That witch was a man.

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The New England minister could barely entertain the possibility of an erotic encounter even when a witch confessed to it. When several such cases came to his attention, Increase Mather insisted that the devil had planted false memories. Those poor women hallucinated!

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The devil boasts a similarly catholic heritage, as he reminds Daniel Webster in Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1937 story: “’Tis true the North claims me for a Southerner, and the South for a Northerner, but I am neither. I am merely an honest American like yourself—and of the best descent—for, to tell the truth, Mr. Webster, though I don’t like to boast of it, my name is older in this country than yours.”

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A Swedish volume that turned up in seventeenth-century Delaware included the warning that a cross be cut in brooms to prevent witch hijackings.

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This too Cotton Mather attributed to witchcraft. She had communicated with her employer perfectly well in English. Clearly a confederate had cast a spell on her “to prevent her telling tales, by confining her to a language which ’twas hoped nobody would understand.” He certainly did not and spoke to her through interpreters.

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Logic worked some wonders of its own in the realm of witchcraft. Argued one German authority: “Many things are done in this world by the force of demons which we in our ignorance attribute to natural causes.”

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At the apogee of this coiled logic sits Thomas Hobbes, himself a vicar’s son. The great political philosopher was a skeptic. He felt witches should however be prosecuted for perpetuating a blatantly false belief.

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He met his match in the Barnstable man who credited the devil with the law exacting ministers’ maintenance.

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It says something about the relative expectations of a New England slave and a minister’s daughter that the devil promised Tituba “pretty things” and a pet canary. He enticed Betty with a visit to the “Golden City.”

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And had a neighbor not peered through the window, the mystery of William Morse’s haunted house—through which cats, hogs, spoons, stones, and chairs periodically flew—might never have been solved. There was Morse, deep in prayer. And there was the teenage grandson, flinging shoes at his grandfather’s head. Having grown up nearby, Ann Putnam Sr. would have known every wrinkle of that long-running mystery, one that had produced an earlier witchcraft accusation.

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The great Enlightenment thinkers were not altogether different. Robert Boyle proposed interviews with miners who in their excavations had met with “subterraneous demons.” Newton divided his time between the occult and physics, practicing alchemy and devoting 300,000 words to the book of Revelation; Keynes termed him “the last of the magicians.” Isaac Newton identified the Antichrist. John Locke applied astrology to the harvest of medicinal herbs.

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The 1692 almanac warned that the March alignment of the stars portended feuds and skirmishes: “In short mankind in general are about this time inclined to violence.”

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Rare was the New Englander who agreed with Samuel Sewall’s suit-adverse father-in-law who remarked, “I observe the law to be very much like a lottery—great charge, little benefit.”

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The saints who appeared to Joan of Arc also thoughtfully identified themselves.

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Consciously or not, Putnam deferred to two prophets who experienced trances and visions.

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Or as Dumbledore assures Harry Potter: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

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His verses, it was said, “certainly ought to establish the fame of Nicholas Noyes as the most gifted and brilliant master ever produced in America, of the most execrable form of poetry to which the English language was ever degraded.” No surviving evidence contradicts that claim.

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The reluctance was particularly odd as Lewis did know Hobbs. Evidently she had more to lose by admitting as much than she did by feigning ignorance. We too are left squinting in the pewter light; there were many more agendas in Hathorne’s courtroom than are visible to the twenty-first-century eye.

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One long-haired, severely pockmarked Topsfield man was released when the girls could not agree he was the witch in question. The authorities led him outside the meetinghouse, where the light was better. Still the girls hesitated. “How did you know his name?” Hathorne challenged, puzzled by their indecision. “He did not tell me himself, but other witches told me,” one of them explained. Sixty-year-old Nehemiah Abbott would be the only accused witch to walk free from a Hathorne hearing.

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Excepting the work of Parris, Cheever, and a few others, the written record is a sampler of phonetic idiosyncrasies. Proper names appear in every conceivable variation, as if conjugated. Indeed “Tituba” could be spelled eight different ways (three of them on the same day), but “Hollingworth” appeared in nearly as many mutations as well. The governor, his wife, and his son each spelled “Winthrop” differently. Individuals submitted affidavits that suggested their authors were, as was said of one Burroughs (or, as he sometimes wrote, “Burrough”) accuser, “sublimely unaware of punctuation and a pioneer in spelling reform.” Orthography proved as fluid as the Salem-Topsfield border.

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“When the devil finds an idle person,” Cotton Mather warned in 1689, “he as it were, calls to more of his crew, ‘Come here! Come here! A brave prize for us all!’”

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Betty’s would not be the last meltdown in the pious Sewall household. In 1713 a servant knocked on her master’s bedroom door after midnight; the day’s sermon had left her too petrified to sleep. The Sewalls comforted her before the fire. She illustrated a familiar Salem phenomenon: visions—whether in the form of suffocating women, apple-scattering goblins, or avenging ghosts—tended to appear on the Sabbath, when people had been (or should have been) in church.

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The Indians did childhood differently. Indian mothers bore fewer children, doled out liberties rather than punishments, and wept freely over the children they lost. The kids had leisure time! That pampering was not lost on the Puritans. “Let not English parents be as indulgent and negligent as they report the Indians are,” warned Mather, defensive on the subject. A fair number of Indian captives elected to remain. One boy returned only when bound, arms and legs; he escaped soon afterward to rejoin his Indian family.

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Mather however hesitated to share tales of evil angels with his children, a son remembered, lest they “entertain any frightful fancies about the apparitions of devils.”

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By 1692 Justice Jonathan Corwin had lost seven children, among them three boys named John.

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The hired help was in no danger of disappearing. The moment anyone went missing, a Huguenot settler observed, you had only to notify the Indians, who for a modest fee would locate him for you. Flight was in any event rare, “for they would know not where to go, there being few trodden roads.”

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Mather acknowledged their formidable force when, late in life, he griped that women had heaped more opprobrium on him than on any man alive. Were there more than twenty women in Boston who had not “at some time or other, spoken basely of me?” he asked.

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As Hilary Mantel writes retrospectively of her six-year-old self: “What I am experiencing is the beginning of compunction, but is it the awakening of a sense of sin, or is it the beginning of femininity?”

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It was a lousy bargain. Eager to discuss the area’s defense, the newly installed New Hampshire lieutenant governor complained to Crown authorities in the fall of 1692 that he “could after tedious waiting get no other answer but neglect, slights, and reproaches” out of Massachusetts governor William Phips, despite the enemy skulking in the woods. In April 1693, he warned that “by the next ships you will hear the province of Massachusetts and the province of Hampshire are in civil war.”

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To encourage others to settle among the ruins, town officials asked Burroughs if he might relinquish three-quarters of his waterfront tract. They could offer a hundred acres farther inland in exchange. Graciously Burroughs ceded an even greater part of the original property. And in an unprecedented move for a New England minister, especially one with a large family, he declined the offer of additional land, settling for thirty coastal acres of salt marsh.