In the Devil's Snare (10 page)
The councilors next formally convened to consider the results of the examination Danforth had just conducted. After Parris read over his notes, Abigail and Ann Jr. accused John Proctor of having afflicted Bathshua Pope, among others. Mercy and Mary also formally charged him with hurting them. The council ordered John and Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Cloyce to be held in custody, and the next day it directed that they, Rebecca Nurse, Martha Corey, and Dorcas Good all be sent to prison in Boston.
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Although the jailing of suspected witches had previously eased the sufferings of the afflicted at least temporarily, this time that did not happen. Indeed, the next day at the Salem Village parsonage John Indian, Mary Walcott, and Abigail Williams all complained of being tortured by both John Proctor and Sarah Cloyce. Parris, who was trying to write a report on their behavior for the authorities, found himself unable to focus on that task because “so great were the interruptions” from the fits his niece and slave experienced in his presence. John Indian “cryed out of Goody Cloyse, O you old Witch, & fell immediately into a violent fit that 3 men & the Marshall could not without exceeding difficulty hold him,” Parris commented. Mary, “who was knitting & well composed,” identified his attackers as Cloyce and the Proctors. Meanwhile, Abigail, in a fit, declared that she saw John Proctor’s specter sitting in the marshal’s lap. Parris had to send John and Abigail out of the room “that I might have liberty to write this without disturbance.” He ended with a final observation: “Just now as soon as I had made an end of reading this to the Marshall Mary W[torn] immediately cryed O yonder is Good: Proctor & his wife & Goody Nurse & Goody Korey & G[torn] Cloyse & Goods child & then said O Goodm: Proctor is going to choke me & Immediately she was choakt.”
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By the middle of April, then, according to the afflicted, the witches were no longer exclusively acting alone; they were cooperating in groups of two or more to torture their targets. They had even met twice in large numbers at central locations in the Village. Each time new reports of such malefic activity reached the ears of New Englanders, the perception of a spectral attack on the region was reinforced.
For example, the two-month-old baby daughter of John Putnam Jr. (a cousin of Sergeant Thomas) was seized with “strange and violent fitts” like those of the bewitched. John’s mother declared that “she feared there was an evell hand upon it,” and although the family called in the doctor immediately, the baby girl died “a cruell and violent death being enuf to peirs astony hart.” John subsequently attributed his daughter’s death on April 15 to his having “Reported sum thing which I had hard consarning the mother of Rebekah Nurs: Mary Estick and Sarah Cloyes”—in other words, to his gossiping about a witchcraft accusation once made against Joanna Towne.
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Not surprisingly, consequences also followed elsewhere. In Malden, Mistress Mary Swayne Marshall, sister of a militia major, declared that on April 8 the specter of Elizabeth Colson of Reading, the teenage granddaughter of a woman long believed to be a witch, had knocked her down, “Strikeing of me deafe and Dumm Tortering my body in most parts; Chokenig [
sic
] of me quite dead for Some time.” Colson, she declared, had bruised her head, wrung her neck, and even dislocated her shoulder. And much farther away, in Stamford, Connecticut, a maidservant named Kate Branch (who was described as being of French origin) began having fits resembling those suffered by the Salem Village afflicted. Although the case record does not date the onset of her torments precisely, they seem to have begun during the first full week of April, after people in coastal southern New England would have had time to learn of the examinations of Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse ten days to two weeks earlier.
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Kate’s master, Daniel Wescott, who accepted the truthfulness of her complaints and acted as her ally and supporter throughout the proceedings, later described her symptoms in a statement presented to the magistrates. She had felt “a pinching & pricking at her breast,” and she had sobbed uncontrollably, falling down “on the flooer with her hands Claspt.” She said she saw a cat that spoke to her and promised her “fine things” but also threatened to kill her. Her master recounted that “some times for severall dayes togather she’d be almost wholly dumb at other times singing Laughing, Eating, Rideing.” After two weeks of fits she saw an apparition of a witch in the middle of the night, “a woman . . . having on a silk hood, & a blew apron.” Eventually, she identified a particular tormentor, Elizabeth Clawson, describing her clothing. Her master called on Goody Clawson “& saw the woman named Exactly atired as she was described per the person afflictted.” Thus a test that could not be carried out with Martha Corey in Salem Village was successfully applied to Elizabeth Clawson in Stamford. Kate named another witch as well, Mercy Holbridge Disborough, and on April 25 her master filed formal charges against the two women on her behalf.
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The Connecticut accusations are notable for the contrast they provide to the contemporaneous Salem Village outbreak. Southern Connecticut remained almost untouched by the war to the north; the region suffered few significant losses of men, houses, livestock, or crops. Although Kate Branch’s fits mimicked those of the Village afflicted, no one else ever followed her lead in the Stamford area. Moreover, the only people she named as witches fell into the most common categories: women with longtime local reputations for malefice and their relatives. The authorities, too, moved slowly and cautiously against those Kate accused. Still, at least one magistrate found Kate’s accusations entirely credible. Jonathan Selleck of Stamford penned what seems to be the only surviving personal letter from a 1692 justice of the peace who examined an afflicted person. Writing to his brother-in-law, Selleck matter-of-factly described Kate Branch’s fits and spectral conversations, showing no inclination to question the validity of her visions. Deeming her a “poore gail,” Selleck complained of delays in pursuing her accusations by other magistrates who had not had direct contact with her. “I feare that all the persons: the gail names are nought [guilty]: & I desyr the lord to make discovery of them,” he commented. Justice Selleck, like his Essex counterparts, did not doubt the reality of agonies he personally witnessed. But the atmosphere in which those torments occurred differed greatly from that in Essex County, and so the consequences were equally different.
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Historians have not recognized the connections between Kate Branch’s afflictions in Stamford and those in Salem Village, because trials in the Connecticut cases (as shall be seen later in this book) postdated the cases heard by the Salem Court of Oyer and Terminer. Scholars have, in fact, classified the Stamford cases as “not-Salem.”
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Yet Kate’s fits closely resembled those she would have learned about in news from Massachusetts, and their timing was too exact to be coincidental. Of course, the absence of a Connecticut crisis comparable to that in Essex County does not by itself prove that the looming presence of the war on the northeastern frontier was
the
crucial factor in creating the contrast between the two regions. Yet at the same time it is highly suggestive that a teenage maidservant could experience severe and prolonged fits in 1692 in southern New England and not set off a regionwide panic like that which occurred simultaneously two hundred miles north in Massachusetts.
THE THIRD CONFESSION
In the memoir of the witchcraft crisis he wrote in 1697, John Hale recalled that its beginning was “very small, and looked on at first as an ordinary case which had fallen out before at several times in other places, and would be quickly over.” Hale referred primarily to the first afflictions in Samuel Parris’s household, but his observation could have been applied almost as accurately to all the occurrences in Salem Village through April 17. Until then, even though church members and their spouses now numbered among the accused, the outbreak still had a precedent: the rash of witchcraft accusations in Hartford and environs in 1662.
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But circumstances changed dramatically on April 19 with the examinations of two people officially complained against the day before. For reasons explored in this section and the next two chapters, the two—the elderly Bridget Oliver Bishop of Salem Town and the teenager Abigail Hobbs, daughter of William Hobbs of Topsfield—established new patterns that would endure throughout the remainder of the crisis. Because both suspects lived outside the Village, the accusations themselves signaled that a new phase of the witchcraft episode was beginning. Even more significant, the fourteen-year-old Abigail joined Tituba and Dorcas Good in confessing to witchcraft, and the substance of her revelations brought immense consequences.
Over the previous year and a half, Abigail Hobbs had displayed a notably cavalier attitude toward the devil, thus supplying wagging tongues with more than enough information to ensure that her name would quickly surface as a suspect in 1692. For example, when chided by others for her “wicked cariges and disobedience to hir father and Mother” or for her “rude” and “unseemly” behavior, she had replied that she was not “a fraid of any thing” because of a compact with Satan. Abigail spoke freely to several people about having “Sold her selfe boddy & Soull to the old boy” and about having “seen the divell and . . . made a covenant or bargin with him.” Another teenager reported that Abigail, shortly before she was formally accused of being a witch—asked why she was not “ashamed” of her poor conduct—told her to “hold my tonge . . . & bid me look there was old nick . . . sate over the bedsted.” Such playfulness extended to religion as well. Once, while she and her stepmother Deliverance were visiting a youthful neighbor, she remarked that “my mother is not baptized. but said I will baptize hir and immediatly took watter and sprinckeled in hir mothers face and said she did baptized [
sic
] her in the name of the ffather Son and Holy Ghost.”
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Thus it was perhaps not surprising that on April 13, two days after the examination in Salem Town, the younger Ann Putnam complained of tortures at the hands of the specter of Abigail Hobbs, her irreverent approximate contemporary in age. The same apparition next attacked Mary Walcott, then Mercy Lewis. Less than a week after the first recorded accusation against her, Abigail Hobbs was questioned at the Salem Village meetinghouse.
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Hathorne began his interrogation of the teenager on Tuesday, April 19, with the same injunction to speak the truth he had given others.
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“Are you guilty, or not?” he asked her. Abigail admitted, “I have seen sights & been scared. I have been very wicked. I hope I shall be better: if God will keep me.” When the magistrate asked her to explain the “sights,” she revealed that she had indeed seen the devil, but only once, “at the Eastward at Casko-bay.” In response to the magistrate’s further questions, she indicated that they had met one day in the woods three or four years earlier. Satan had promised her “fine things” if she would make a covenant with him, and she had done so, but, she added, “I hope God will forgive me.” A cat and “things like men” had asked her to sign their books; she had done that as well, promising to serve the devil for two years (or perhaps four; her subsequent answers were inconsistent).
Hathorne then explored the details of her covenant with Satan. “Are you not bid to hurt folks?” he inquired. Abigail replied that yes, she had hurt Mercy and Ann Jr. by pinching them, with the devil as an intermediary. He “has my consent, & goes & hurts them . . . in my shape,” she explained. With what witches did she associate? Hathorne asked, and Abigail admitted knowing Sarah Good in the invisible world. “The Devil told me” Goodwife Good was a witch, she disclosed. Questioned about the “great meetings” of witches, Abigail denied having attended any, although she acknowledged having heard about “great hurt done here in the village.”
Abigail next contradicted the earlier statement that she had met the devil only once years earlier by describing a conversation with him “about a fortnight agoe.” Satan, she said, at that time appeared to her “like a black man with an hat.” She admitted speaking to animal familiars, but under close questioning from the magistrate denied that they sucked her body. Confronted with further detailed inquiries about exactly how the animal familiars spoke to her, Abigail suddenly and conveniently could no longer hear. The afflicted then declared that “they saw Sarah Good & Sarah Osborn run their fingers into the examinants ears; by & by, she this examinant was blind with her eyes quite open.” Eventually Abigail exclaimed, “Sarah Good saith I shall not speak,” and so Hathorne and Corwin directed that she be removed to prison.
At the end of his transcript Parris commented that none of the bewitched people was tormented during Abigail’s confession, and that after she finished, Mercy, Ann Jr., and Abigail Williams “said openly in Court, they were very sorry for the condition this poor Abigail Hobbs was in: which compassion they expressed over & over again.” The afflicted were probably as surprised by Abigail’s statement as was everyone else, and their reaction reflected their confusion.
John Hathorne finally had extracted the second major confession he had sought for the six weeks since Tituba first appeared before him to confess her dealings with Satan. A teenager had acknowledged contracting with the devil and consenting that he appear in her shape to torment several of the afflicted. During her confession, no one had been tortured, which seemed to validate her revelations. Significantly, Abigail Hobbs had met the devil—in the shape of a “black man”—on the Maine frontier about four years earlier, or just a few months before the Wabanakis renewed their attacks on the English settlements. Furthermore, she encountered Satan in the woods (the Indians’ domain) near her residence in Falmouth, one of the Indians’ chief targets in both the first and second wars. Those who heard her confession readily grasped the connection between Satan and the Wabanakis.
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Abigail Hobbs’s statement on April 19 set off a chain of events that within thirty-six hours explicitly linked the witches’ and the Wabanakis’ assaults against New England. As a result, witchcraft complaints exploded, expanding both geographically and numerically. During the next seven weeks, fiftyfour people were formally accused of being witches, a sharp increase from the ten who had been complained against in the seven weeks prior to April 17. The nature of the witchcraft episode had changed dramatically and irrevocably. To understand why, it is now necessary to begin this tale anew, in another time and place: a small settlement on the New Hampshire frontier during the early summer of 1689.