Escaping Salem: The Other Witch Hunt of 1692 (16 page)

Given that this book is largely about how people reacted to what they saw and heard, I have sought to reconstruct their observations, remarks, and conversations as faithfully as possible from the depositions. Take, for example, the midwife Sarah Bates’s response to Katherine Branch’s fits. The original transcript of her testimony reads as follows:

The Testimony of Mrs Sarah Bates she saith yt when first ye garl was taken with strang fitts she was sent for to Danll Wescots house & she found ye garl lieing upon ye Bed she then did aprehend yt the garls illnes might be from som naturall cause: she therfore advised them to burn feathers under her nose & other menes yt had dun good in fainting fits and then she seemed to be better with it: and so she left her that night in hopes to here she wold be better ye next morning: but in ye morning Danll Wescot came for her againe and when she came she found ye garl in bed seemingly sence-les & spechless: her eyes half shut but her pulse semed to beat after ye ordinary maner her mistres desired she might be let blud on ye foot in hopes it might do her good then I said I thought it could not be dun in ye capassity she was in but she desired a trial to be made and when every thing was redy & we were a going to let her blud ye garle cried: the reson was asked her why she cried: her Answer was she would not be bludded: we asked her why: she said again because it would hurt her it was said ye hurt would be but small like ye prick of a pin then she put her foot over ye bed and was redy to help about it: this cariag of her seemed to me strang who before seemed to ly like a dead creature: after she was bludded and had laid a short time she clapt her hand upon ye coverlid and cried out and on of ye garls yt stood by said mother she cried out: and her mistres was so afected with it yt she cried and said she is bewitched: upon this ye garl turned her head from ye folk as if she wold hide it in ye pillow laughed.

On first reading the court transcripts, I was immediately drawn to this dense paragraph in which the court clerk recorded Goody Bates’s testimony. Here, it seemed to me, were the words of an observant and astute woman who had much of interest to say not only about Kate herself but also the family with whom she lived. Drawing out the implications of what she said about her two visits to the Wescot household and her evolving prognosis of Kate’s condition involved several stages of adaptation. I began by modernizing the text, which, like most court depositions from this period, is somewhat idiosyncratic in grammar and spelling. Filling out contractions, adopting modern spellings, and inserting additional punctuation produced the following version:

She saith that when first the girl was taken with strange fits she was sent for to Daniel Wescot’s house and she found the girl lying upon the bed. She then did apprehend that the girl’s illness might be from some natural cause: she therefore advised them to burn feathers under her nose and other means that had done good in fainting fits and then she seemed to be better with it. And so she left her that night in hopes to hear she would be better the next morning. But in the morning Daniel Wescot came for her again, and when she came she found the girl in bed seemingly senseless and speechless, her eyes half shut but her pulse seemed to beat after the ordinary manner. Her mistress desired she might be let blood on the foot in hopes it might do her good. Then I said I thought it could not be done in the capacity she was in, but she desired a trial to be made and when everything was ready and we were a going to let her blood the girl cried. The reason was asked her why she cried: her answer was she would not be blooded. We asked her why: she said again because it would hurt her. It was said the hurt would be but small, like the prick of a pin. Then she put her foot over the bed and was ready to help about it. This carriage of hers seemed to me strange who before seemed to lie like a dead creature. After she was blooded and had laid a short time, she clapped her hand upon the coverlid and cried out. And one of the girls that stood by said, “Mother, she cried out!” And her mistress was so affected with it that she cried and said, “She is bewitched.” Upon this the girl turned her head from the folk as if she would hide it in the pillow and laughed.

I then used the information contained within that adapted text to reconstruct in a section of Chapter 1 what happened during those two visits from Sarah Bates’s point of view. I added some background information on the range of a midwife’s knowledge, where that knowledge came from, and the assumptions that underlay treatments such as bleeding. But my description of her visits makes no attempt to provide an “objective” account of what was “really” happening in the Wescot household. Indeed it is not so much an account of “what happened” as a narration of what Goody Bates saw and how she reacted. I fleshed out her testimony so as to clarify the direction of her thoughts as I understood them, but the objective throughout was to build on her own words. Only in the final paragraph of that section did I depart from what Sarah Bates actually said to speculate about her thoughts as she noticed Kate laughing into her pillow: 

Goody Bates did not know what to think. Was Kate convinced that her sickness was natural and so surreptitiously laughing at her mistress for thinking that she was bewitched? Or was she faking her symptoms and enjoying her success in duping the Wescots? Or was the laugh itself a symptom of her fits? Determining the true cause of Kate’s behavior was not going to be easy.

Yet even here the questions that I had the midwife ask herself were based closely on what other townsfolk were saying to each other during those fateful weeks.

Passages describing the circulation of gossip about Kate’s afflictions and the misfortunes that followed quarrels involving Elizabeth Clawson or Mercy Disborough are also based closely on the depositions. Witnesses often acknowledged quite openly that the information they were reporting had passed through a chain of conversations in the neighborhood. Henry Grey, for example, told the court “that he hath been informed by some of his neighbors that Mercy Disborough hath at times discoursed with the wife of Thomas Benit, Sr., and [her] daughter, that the said Mercy Disborough said she could not abide the said Henry Grey ever since he bought a parcel of apples of her mother Mrs. Jones and reported that they wanted of measure, which was about eighteen years since.” I have in a few passages taken some dramatic license in evoking for readers the situations in which such gossip would have been shared by neighbors. I do not know, for example, if John Finch, Mary Newman, and the Penoirs did have the conversation with which I begin Chapter 4, but what I have them say in that passage is taken directly from their court testimony and it is hardly a stretch to envisage Stamford residents sharing such stories as they discussed the allegations brought against Goody Clawson by the Wescots and their servant.

Each of the chapters in this book examines a particular phase of the witch hunt from the perspective of those who had a stake in what was happening. For most of those involved the transcripts provide at least some clues as to how they reacted as the crisis unfolded before them. The one significant exception is Katherine Branch. Kate became the object of horrified curiosity as neighbors visited the Wescot household to observe her fits and to help look after her. Her master and other Stamford residents later described the progression of her torments to court officials and repeated her allegations as to who was afflicting her. Kate herself was questioned by the magistrates, but only after several weeks of debate about the nature and cause of her condition, both inside the Wescot household and throughout Stamford, which may well have shaped what she said to court officials. All that we know about Kate’s initial response to her fits came from those watching over her. We do know about the varied responses of neighbors to what was happening in the Wescot household; we know that Abigail Wescot believed her household to be bewitched and yet considered her servant to be a liar who could twist Daniel Wescot around her little finger; we know that Daniel Wescot boasted of the control that he had over his servant and that some people wondered what that meant. But Kate’s actual condition and her motives for making the accusations remain a mystery.

One of my first decisions when embarking upon this project was to retain that sense of mystery. It is, of course, tempting to speculate. Did Kate really have epileptic fits? Today this would be diagnosed as a medical condition and treated accordingly. Even in the seventeenth century, doctors argued that fits could have physical causes, yet many assumed that symptoms such as Kate exhibited could also be brought about by supernatural means. There was much debate and confusion over which kinds of fits resulted from a physical disease and which from occult attack. The ministers’ written opinion noted that Kate’s mother had suffered from fits similar to those that afflicted Kate in 1692, a tantalizing snippet of information. What did Kate, who was no doctor, make of her condition? And how was she affected by the frightened reactions of those watching over her? We will, most likely, never know.

It is possible that Kate’s torments were a sham, in which case she seems to have enjoyed deceiving her master and mistress: recall Sarah Bates’s description of Kate turning away from the family and laughing into her pillow. The laughter may have been hysterical. But even if so, even if Kate’s fits were largely involuntary, and even if she believed quite sincerely that she was bewitched, there may also have been a element of feigning. After all, the fits transformed an insignificant servant into a local phenomenon: Kate became the center of attention not only within the Wescot household but throughout Stamford and beyond. As she began to accuse specific women of bewitching her, Kate may well have been prompted by her master and mistress to name particular individuals, but it was Kate who made the accusations. In doing so, she wielded tremendous power. It might be tempting to envisage Kate as an embittered and rebellious teenager, resentful of her position in the Wescot household and now reveling in her sudden acquisition of power; or alternatively as a young woman eager to please her perhaps beguiling and beguiled master.

In each of these possible scenarios the boundary between performance and sincere belief was most likely blurred. In a world where everyone believed in the supernatural, what began as pretense may have ended up scaring the deceiver—feigning may have slid imperceptibly into terrified belief. Nor did Kate become empowered in any straightforward or complete sense. To be sure, she consigned her alleged tormenters to jail and potentially the gallows. Yet the women whom she accused were not, after all, her own enemies but those of her master and mistress; Kate was, in a sense, exacting revenge on the Wescots’ behalf even as she turned their world upside down and became the center of their lives.

But all this is mere speculation. To settle on a particular interpretation of Kate’s behavior strikes me as problematic, not only because of the lack of evidence but also because people at the time were clearly uncertain and divided as to whether Kate was bewitched and if her allegations against specific women could be trusted. That uncertainty was a key component of the situation and has to be retained if we are going to understand just how perplexing Kate’s ordeal was for those around her. There swirled around Kate a maelstrom of sensational images and reports, but at the center of it all was an enigma.

We know almost nothing about Kate’s prior history. One deposition claimed that she was French. If so, it is puzzling that no one else mentioned her nationality, especially given English hostility toward the French at the time. It was certainly not unknown for New Englanders to blacken the names of those they disliked or feared by invoking their national or regional origin, ethnicity, race, or religious affiliation. In 1688, when Mary Glover was tried and executed as a witch in Boston, her identity as a Gaelic-speaking Irish Catholic was clearly an issue. Puritans believed Catholics to be servants of the Antichrist and France was officially a Catholic country. But even if Kate’s family was French, it was not necessarily Catholic: French migrants to British colonies in North America were often Huguenot Protestants.
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Nor do we know anything about what happened to Kate after the witch trials. Her master served again as Stamford’s representative to the colonial assembly in May and October 1694, but the family later moved away with a group of migrants from Fairfield County to resettle in Cohancey, New Jersey, where Daniel Wescot died in 1704.
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It is possible that the Wescots found their position in Stamford problematic in the aftermath of their neighbor’s trial. Many townsfolk believed Elizabeth Clawson to be guilty as charged, but the petition on her behalf made it abundantly clear that many others did not. Daniel Wescot’s reelection as representative in 1694 indicates that he did not become a pariah in the town, but he and his family must have figured prominently in tensions and recriminations that followed Goody Clawson’s acquittal. Whether Kate accompanied the Wescots to New Jersey is unclear; she simply fades into oblivion.

During 1692, Katherine Branch became a slate on which the people of Stamford could etch their own fears, doubts, and convictions. She figured in the witch hunt not as a person in her own right but as an object of horror and pity, as a representation of the afflictions undergone by other townsfolk, and as an inspiration for those who wanted to strike back at those responsible for their torments by accusing them. Though we cannot know for certain what Kate was experiencing, we can at least watch the residents of Stamford as they watched her and pondered the meaning of her condition. That in turn helps us to understand how New England towns dealt with the threat that witchcraft seemed to pose.

The challenge of relating for a modern audience the ways in which Kate’s neighbors reacted to her fits takes us to the very heart of this book and my reasons for writing it. In particular I wanted to capture the blend of supernatural belief and deliberate caution that underlay responses to Kate’s condition. New Englanders believed wholeheartedly in an invisible world and the reality of witchcraft. Yet they did not immediately or without question accept claims that a particular person was bewitched or that a specific individual was responsible. Proponents of new scientific theories and methods in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the so-called scientific revolution) often contrasted their own experimental and reasoned approach with theological models for understanding the world, which they derided as based on blind faith and superstition. We should, however, beware of accepting that contrast at face value: it was, after all, self-serving. Interpretation based on careful observation and rationality was not quite so innovative as propagandists for these new scientific paradigms claimed. Theological discussions of witchcraft and other supernatural phenomena throughout the medieval and early modern periods were usually framed as logical arguments and supported by a large body of evidence, gathered from witnesses and the interrogation of witch suspects: they were self-consciously rational and empirical.