Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (15 page)

But the three magistrates voiced an additional concern. None of the evidence presented against Mercy Disborough could, in their view, satisfy the criteria laid down by experts such as “Mr. Perkins, Mr. Bernard, and Mr. Mather” so as to be “sufficiently convictive of witchcraft.” The magistrates specified the same grounds for conviction that William Jones had entered into his notes prior to the trial: either confession or “two good witnesses proving some act or acts done by the person which could not be but by help of the Devil.” “This there was none of,” they declared succinctly.

“As for the common things of spectral evidence, ill events after quarrels or threats, teats, water trials, and the like,” the report continued, these were “all discarded and some of them abominated by the most judicious as to be convictive of witchcraft.” The committee also pointed to the grim lesson provided by recent events in Salem: “the miserable toil” in which the Massachusetts court found itself for convicting defendants on the basis of dubious evidence should be “warning enough” to the magistrates in Connecticut dealing with Goody Disborough’s case. “Those who will make witchcraft of such things will make hanging work apace,” they declared, “and we are informed of no other but such kinds of evidence brought against this woman.”

Accordingly, the three magistrates reprieved Mercy Disborough from being put to death until the assembly could reconsider her case in the light of their findings. It would have to decide, they wrote, “how far these proceedings do put a difficulty on any further trial of this woman.”

And, indeed, in due time, the assembly would follow the report’s recommendation by acquitting Mercy Disborough and ordering her release. But what if Mercy Disborough
was
a witch? How could the court protect those who had accused her from the threat of retribution? And what if she was truly innocent? Who could protect her from the anger and resentment of neighbors who were so anxious to have her removed?

Ever since her arrest in June 1692, Mercy Disborough had faced the threat of execution; that threat was finally removed, and she was free to go. There is, unfortunately, no record of what happened on the day that Mercy Disborough was released from her year of imprisonment. Perhaps a crowd gathered to watch her emerge from the jail—some of the onlookers sympathetic, others sullen or even loudly hostile. Perhaps Thomas Disborough anticipated such a response and came for his wife at first light when the street would be empty, the first moments of their reunion undisturbed by curious bystanders. Perhaps he embraced his wife and helped her to their cart, where they sat side by side, husband and wife, for the first time since her arrest. Perhaps she turned to him and smiled as she realized that at long last she was going home.

But such intimate knowledge is far beyond our scope. Goodman Disborough may have greeted his wife coldly, resentful of all she had cost him in respect and money. (As was the custom, he had to pay all fees and prison charges for the period of her confinement, even though she had been acquitted.) They may have ridden homeward in stony silence. And any pleasure Goody Disborough took in observing the open fields and ripening crops along the road may have been overshadowed by a sense of foreboding as to what awaited her in Compo.

Mercy Disborough was alive and free, but were her troubles over? A decade earlier a woman in Massachusetts had been acquitted of witchcraft. But a year or so later neighbors suspected her of striking again when an elderly man in the town fell ill. One night a group of young men visited the woman: they dragged her outside, hanged her from a tree until she seemed to be gasping her last breath, then cut her down, rolled her in the snow, and buried her in it, leaving her for dead. Amazingly, she survived, though barely. The law was only one way of dealing with a witch...

If Mercy Disborough did worry that her release from prison might not end her ordeal, later events proved her fears to be well founded. On 3 June 1696, the Reverend Gershom Bulkeley of Wethersfield, Connecticut, wrote a letter to his nephew, Joseph Bulkeley, a Fairfield resident and relative of Mercy’s. The minister was writing to clear Goody Disborough of a slander recently cast on her by one James Redfin. Before her marriage to Thomas Disborough, Mercy (then Holbridge) had lived for a while with the Reverend Bulkeley in New London. According to James Redfin, Mercy was pregnant at the time and several months later, after moving to Wethersfield with the minister, gave birth to an illegitimate child. The father of the child, Redfin claimed, was "a great man" and so "it was smothered up."
¹

The Reverend Gershom Bulkeley, who realized that “the scandal” arising from James Redfin’s allegations reflected on him as well as Mercy, insisted that this was “a most malicious lie from the beginning to the end of it.” She had indeed lived with him in New London, but her behavior had been “blameless and in-offensive.” When he moved to Wethersfield, Mercy did not go with him. This was actually a case of mistaken identity, the pastor explained: another young woman, named Elizabeth Walker, who also lived in the house did (“to my grief ”) turn out to be pregnant. The minister had purchased Elizabeth as an indentured servant in Boston. She gave birth in Wethersfield, but the baby died soon afterward. There were suspicions about the cause of death, but a formal investigation cleared her. The alleged father, Bulkeley added, was at the time “no great man,” appeared in court to answer Elizabeth’s charge of paternity, and denied having fathered the child.

Gershom Bulkeley was convinced that Mercy Disborough’s enemies, driven by “bloody malice” and “having by a good Providence missed their mark of taking away her life by one project [accusing her of witchcraft in 1692], would now do it, if possible, by another [having her tried for infanticide, also a capital offense].” But Thomas and Mercy Disborough had seized the initiative and sued James Redfin for slander. The Reverend Bulkeley was writing to refute Redfin’s claims and to support the case against him. He told his nephew that he could show the letter to whomever he pleased, “if it may be any ways beneficial.” The pastor warned that “wise men, who would not imbrue their hands in blood,” should “take heed how they give ear to such malicious liars, lest they be partakers of their sin.”

The formal record of this slander case does not survive, but evidently Goody Disborough was not left in peace following her acquittal of witchcraft in 1693. Just over a decade after she and her husband accused James Redfin of slander, Thomas Disborough died. His precise date of death is not known, but the local court recorded the inventory of his estate in March 1709, at which time the magistrates granted Mercy, as was the custom, a portion of the property as his widow; the couple’s only son received the balance. How long Mercy lived after that we do not know: there is no surviving record of her death.
²

During the months and years that followed Elizabeth Clawson’s acquittal, she neither did nor said anything that survived in the historical record, though we do know that she spent the rest of her life in Stamford with her family. Her husband Stephen died around 1700. A record of Elizabeth Clawson’s death does survive: she passed away on 10 May 1714, at the age of eighty-three.
³

What was Goody Clawson’s life like in the aftermath of her ordeal? Did she forgive the women and men whose hostile testimony brought her so close to death? Or did she bear a grudge and, if so, how much of an effort did she make to conceal her resentment? Were those neighbors who still believed her guilty willing to behave “neighborly and peaceably” toward her? Would they avoid her for fear of arousing a witch’s anger, or look for opportunities to gather further evidence against her? Was there tension between those who had supported Goody Clawson during the trial and those who believed in her guilt? And, if so, how long did it linger?

Unfortunately, no information survives that would enable us to answer such questions. Most accused witches made a brief and dramatic appearance in the records at the time of their trial and then returned to obscurity once the ordeal was over. The transcripts from witch trials often seem like narrow-beamed spot-lights that play upon an otherwise darkened landscape. What happened after the trial ended is in most cases a mystery, unless the defendant was condemned to death (and even then we do not always know for certain that the sentence was carried out) or unless the accused was acquitted and then put on trial again at some later date. The silence of the records regarding Elizabeth Clawson’s life after her release is, then, not unusual. It does tell us that whatever tensions remained in Stamford, they did not reach a level of intensity requiring formal intervention by the courts. That does not mean, of course, that Elizabeth Clawson and her family never encountered hostility from members of their community—but whatever tensions there were went unrecorded.

Reconstructing what happened before or even during a trial for witchcraft can prove equally challenging. In most cases we cannot be sure that we have all the official papers and in some instances only a few depositions or none at all have survived. Even relatively complete court transcripts rarely provide all the information that we would like to have about the context from which an accusation emerged. Other sources sometimes shed light on the history of growing suspicion that culminated—often after many years—in a formal charge of witchcraft. Accusers and the accused may have been involved in earlier disputes described in court records, the minutes from town meetings, or church records. But for every useful piece of information that historians unearth, there remain many questions that cannot be answered. This is particularly true of suspects and accusers who were women: far fewer women than men could write and thus leave behind diaries or letters; women were, moreover, much less likely to engage in commercial transactions or public activities that were likely to be recorded. But most nonelite men present similar challenges: the day-to-day details of their lives also went largely undocumented and so we have to rely on the often incomplete trial records.

Some documents are more tantalizing than revealing. Consider the petition defending Elizabeth Clawson, signed by seventy-six residents of Stamford. Bearing in mind that the total population of the town was only around five hundred, that most of the town residents lived in close proximity to one another, and that by the end of the seventeenth century many families had intermarried, we might well wonder how signing the petition affected the lives of Goody Clawson’s supporters. But we do not have that kind of information. We do not even have a map showing where each family lived in the late seventeenth century. One of the signers, Stephen Bishop, was the Reverend John Bishop’s son. How did Stamford’s pastor react to his son signing the petition? It is striking that John Bishop did not give testimony before the court (unless it has been lost). The minister had, after all, visited the Wescots’ home to offer counsel and support, yet he does not seem to have shared with the court his impression of what had happened to Kate. Was he anxious to avoid becoming embroiled in the witch hunt because it had already caused so much division within the town? Did he not believe Kate’s specific accusations? Did Stephen have his father’s blessing in supporting Elizabeth Clawson? Or was the minister convinced of Goody Clawson’s guilt and angered by his son’s position? Was he perhaps also worried by Stephen’s becoming so openly involved in the controversy over Kate’s claims? John Bishop’s silence would be intriguing enough even if the petition did not exist, but the presence of his son’s signature on the petition raises many more questions that cannot be answered.

In sharp contrast, the survival of a memorandum in the hand of Deputy-Governor Jones, summarizing his notes taken from books that gave advice on the prosecution of witches, constitutes an extraordinary gift. That document enabled me to reconstruct how one magistrate presiding over the trials would have reacted to the evidence presented in court and it provided a framing device for Chapter 5. The transcripts of depositions given by neighbors of the accused are also invaluable, providing detailed and richly colored vignettes of the social and cultural world that early New Englanders inhabited. Many of the depositions were given by townsfolk and villagers who could not write themselves but who gave oral testimony that was then recorded for the court. We should bear in mind that whoever recorded that testimony may have added or deleted words either by accident or based on their own whims; but most scholars agree that the transcripts from trials in early New England provide a fairly accurate record of what people actually said. These documents present us with a rare opportunity to “listen” as ordinary folk described the pattern of their lives, their interactions and arguments with each other, their fears, and their belief in the supernatural. Their words and the stories they told are the building blocks for this book.

In relating the chain of events that led to the Connecticut witch trials of 1692, my primary goal has been to reconstruct the ways in which New Englanders responded to mysterious “afflictions” and why many of them came to believe that such afflictions were caused by witchcraft. Most of us today would react quite differently and it is perhaps tempting to dismiss the reactions and beliefs described in this book as superstitious or ignorant. Yet New Englanders interpreted ailments or mishaps as malicious acts of witchcraft not because they were less enlightened or innately intelligent than us but because their culture taught them to do so. Explaining illness or misfortune in terms of witchcraft made good sense to early New Englanders, given the ways in which they viewed and experienced the world around them.

If we are to understand why an accusation of witchcraft would have seemed neither peculiar nor unreasonable to people living in a premodern society, we have to set aside our own ways of looking at the world and imagine it through their eyes. The court transcripts make that possible: in recording what witnesses said about the accused, they enable us to become time travelers, embarking on a journey into the lives and minds of seventeenth-century New Englanders.