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Authors: Mary Beth Norton

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BOOK: In the Devil's Snare
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Nothing in Hale’s account links the two stories except for both women’s experimenting with the same common form of fortune-telling, yet authors have conflated them to create group activity by the afflicted girls. Hale himself seems to have regarded them as separate incidents: the first he was only “credibly informed” about, the second he participated in; the first involved one of the youthful “Afflicted persons,” the subject of the second could have been any woman of any age; the first occurred in 1692, the second is undated. Even if both incidents occurred in 1692, the second could easily refer to someone like the accused witch Sarah Cole (of Lynn) who claimed to be afflicted, and who confessed at her examination that years earlier, before her marriage, “she & some others toyed with a Venus glase & an Egg what trade their sweet harts should be of.”
31

Hale’s
Modest Enquiry,
in short, provides evidence that
one
of the afflicted girls—someone who died single before 1697 (when Hale himself died, although his book was not published for another five years)— engaged in fortune-telling of a rather ordinary sort, probably although not necessarily prior to her affliction in 1692.
32
That Hale regarded this story as irrelevant to the development of the crisis, and that careful scholars today should regard it as equally irrelevant, is indicated by the fact that he failed to include it in his central narrative, which occupies pages 1–40 of his book. It appears instead much later, in the middle of a discussion of Satan’s various relationships with human beings. Hale states that he intends it as a warning “to take heed of handling the Devils weapons,” never identifying the tale in any way as a cause of the witchcraft crisis.

THE FIRST EXAMINATIONS

With four afflicted and three accused now among them, Villagers decided to take action. On February 29, Thomas Putnam, his brother Edward, and two men unrelated to any of the afflicted—Joseph Hutchinson and Thomas Preston—filed formal complaints with the Salem magistrates, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, charging the three women with “Witchcraft, by them Committed and thereby much injury don” to the three children and Betty Hubbard. The accusations thus moved from the religious to the legal realm, and out of the three affected households into the wider community. That Hutchinson and Preston (both of whom later became skeptics) joined in the initial complaints reveals the extent of Villagers’ concern over the condition of the tormented children in their midst. Ann Jr.’s complaints of new tortures that very night, and Betty Hubbard’s early the following day, must have confirmed Villagers in their belief that legal steps had to be taken.
33

Hathorne and Corwin were in their early fifties and related by marriage. Members of prosperous families that had settled in Salem early in the town’s history, they both also had extensive links to the northern frontier. (Hathorne speculated in large tracts of Maine land, and Corwin owned valuable sawmills at Cape Porpoise, which he had acquired in 1676 by marrying the wealthy widow Elizabeth Sheafe Gibbs, who inherited them from her first husband.)
34
Experienced justices of the peace who had handled hundreds of cases previously, they soon made a crucial decision with immense consequences. Rather than following the customary procedure of conducting preliminary examinations in private, they would interrogate suspects in public. Moreover, in addition to preparing their own summaries of the evidence, they would ask that detailed transcripts be kept.

Nowhere did they record the rationale for these actions, but they were probably responding to intense community interest in the witchcraft accusations. Possibly Samuel Parris, Nicholas Noyes (of the Salem Town church), or other clergymen also urged them to adopt this course of action for the religious edification of local residents. Whatever their reasoning, the magistrates moved the first examinations from Nathaniel Ingersoll’s tavern, the original location, to the meetinghouse, the largest building in the Village, so that many more people could attend. That first week in March, with the ground still frozen, there would have been little pressing work for farmers or their families, and the room was undoubtedly packed.
35

John Hathorne conducted the first three examinations; he later seems to have run most of the others as well. These interrogations, like others he had undoubtedly orchestrated in the past, had a single purpose: to elicit a confession of guilt. In common with other seventeenth-century colonial magistrates, he assumed that the accused had committed the offenses in question. Indeed, that assumption was usually correct. People formally charged with crimes in early New England were convicted far more often than not. Even when a suspect won acquittal or conviction on a lesser offense, that outcome occurred not because the person was thought to be innocent of the serious crime, but rather because juries and judges often proved reluctant to condemn miscreants to death. Thus, earlier in the century people undeniably guilty of adultery (a capital offense in Massachusetts) were convicted instead of “lascivious conduct,” and others thought to be witches were acquitted or jailed rather than hanged.
36

Accordingly, when Sarah Good, the first to be questioned, stood before him in the crowded meetinghouse on March 1, Hathorne began with what to him was the central inquiry under traditional Bay Colony law.
37
The 1648
Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts
had defined a witch as one who “hath or consulteth with a familiar spirit.” (Such familiars, frequently in the shapes of animals, were believed to link witches to the devil and to suck nourishment from their bodies.) Even though the law referring to familiars had been superseded in the mid-1680s, Hathorne—simultaneously assuming and hoping to confirm her guilt—started by asking Goodwife Good, “What evil spirit have you familiarity with?” When she responded, “None,” he inquired, “Have you made no contract with the devil?” Again, she answered with a negative. “Why doe you hurt these children?” he continued, trying to win an admission that if she had not personally hurt them, she had employed a “creature” to do so. Good persisted in her denials, and so Hathorne shifted tactics. Adopting a technique that would characterize all subsequent examinations and the trials, he “desired the children all of them to look upon her, and see, if this were the person that had hurt them.” They did so, identified her, and “presently they were all tormented.” Asked to explain the agonies of the afflicted, Sarah Good insisted that Sarah Osborne (not herself) was tormenting them.

The official note-taker, Ezekiel Cheever, probably expressed the skepticism about her responses felt by many other listeners. “Her answers were in a very wicked, spitfull manner reflecting and retorting against the authority with base and abusive words and many lies shee was taken in,” Cheever inscribed at the end of his transcript of the examination. Even her husband, William, publicly voiced doubts about Sarah. William told the magistrates he feared “that shee either was a witch or would be one very quickly.” Pressed by Hathorne for specifics, he admitted he had none, but “her bad carriage to him” made him think that “shee is an enimy to all good.” A day later he added that he thought he had seen “a wart or tett a little below her Right shoulder which he never saw before,” thus suggesting the presence of the devil’s mark on her body.

Next came Sarah Osborne.
38
Hathorne began with the same sequence of questions concerning familiarity with an evil spirit, contracting with the devil, and hurting the children, receiving similar denials. Then he explored her relationship to Sarah Good. Osborne indicated that she rarely saw her fellow defendant and hardly knew her. Undoubtedly hoping to spring a trap, Hathorne informed Osborne that Good had accused her of tormenting the children. “I doe not know [but] that the deveil goes about in my likeness to do any hurt,” Osborne retorted, offering what would eventually turn out to be an important line of defense for accused witches. After Hathorne asked the afflicted to look at her, they readily identified her as one of their tormentors.

Then the interrogation took a different turn, based on remarks by Villagers in the audience. Someone reported that “shee said this morning that shee was more like to be bewitched than that she was a witch,” a statement Hathorne asked her to explain. Osborne responded that once she was frightened in her sleep, “and either saw or dreamed that shee saw a thing like an indian all black which did pinch her in her neck and pulled her by the back part of her head to the dore of the house.” That nightmare would have been hardly unusual for a woman in northern New England familiar with reports of scalping and the recent raid on York, and Hathorne did not explore it further. Instead, he pursued a point raised “by some in the meeting house”: that “shee had said that shee would never be teid to that lying spirit any more.” Wasn’t that the devil to whom you referred? he pressed her. Osborne reluctantly admitted that “a voice” had told her not to attend meeting, but insisted she had resisted its message. Yet “her housband and others” declared that she had not been to church for over a year. Although she claimed she had been ill, Hathorne accused her of “yeild[ing] thus far to the devil as never to goe to meeting.”

The transcripts of the examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne reveal dynamics that would continue inside various makeshift courtrooms for the duration of the crisis. Four distinct elements combined to create an unstable, often explosive mixture: the magistrates, assuming guilt; the accused, struggling to respond to the charges; the afflicted, demonstrating their torments; and the audience, actively involving themselves in the exchanges by offering information and commentaries. These early records disclose another aspect of the crisis as well: even the closest relatives of the accused sometimes questioned their innocence. William Good and Alexander Osborne were but the first of many to express doubts publicly about their spouses or other relations.

After the magistrates finished with Goody Osborne, they turned to Tituba. Undoubtedly Hathorne and Corwin had been among the “Worthy Gentlemen of Salem” who questioned Tituba previously at Parris’s request, and to whom she had acknowledged some acquaintance with witchcraft but denied being a witch. Perhaps they anticipated similar responses. If so, they were to be surprised, because Tituba confessed to committing malefice— because, she later informed a critic of the trials, Parris beat her until she agreed to admit guilt.
39

After starting by again denying that she was a witch, Tituba gradually made a series of shocking disclosures in response to Hathorne’s persistent questioning.
40
The devil had appeared to her “and bid me serve him.” Good and Osborne had hurt the children; she had seen them do so, along with the specters of two women and a man from Boston whom she could not identify. Sarah Good’s familiar spirit was a yellow bird that “suck[ed] her between her fingers.” Sarah Osborne had two familiars: “a thing with a head like a woman with 2 leggs and wings,” and “a thing all over hairy” that “goeth upright like a man” and was two or three feet tall. Tituba herself had seen strange creatures. A hog, a “great black dogge,” a red cat, and a black cat, all emissaries of the devil, had urged her to hurt the children. Finally, when they threatened to do worse to her, she had given in and attacked first Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, then Ann Putnam Jr. and Betty Hubbard. “I am very sorry for itt,” though, she added, detailing her attempts to resist the pressures the devil and the witches had brought to bear on her to win her cooperation.

The four victims were, Samuel Parris later attested, “grievously distressed” at the outset of Tituba’s examination but “immediately all quiet” during her confession. At the end of the examination, they again complained of tortures, assenting when Tituba identified Sarah Good as a guilty party. The day’s session ended in disorder as Betty Hubbard experienced “an extreame fit” and Tituba was herself “very much afflicted,” charging Good and Osborne with attacking her for confessing. Tituba claimed that the specters “blinded hir,” also rendering her unable to speak freely.

Neither of the transcribers recorded the immediate reactions of the multitude in the meetinghouse to Tituba’s revelations. But that her words deeply affected at least some of the hearers became evident that evening.
41
About an hour after nightfall, “a strange noyse not useually heard” frightened the Villagers William Allen and John Hughes. The two men saw “a strange and unuseall beast lyeing on the Grownd,” which disappeared as they came closer, metamorphosing into “2 or 3 weemen” who flew swiftly away, “which weemen wee took to bee Sarah Good Sarah Osburne and Tittabe.” Sarah Good’s specter was seen as well at Dr. Griggs’s house. There Betty Hubbard was watched over by Samuel Sibley (Mary Sibley’s husband), among others. When Betty said that she saw Sarah Good’s apparition on the table, “with all hear naked brast and bar footed bar lagded,” Sibley was sufficiently convinced by her vision that, he later reported, “I Struck with my Staf wher She Said Sary good Stud.” Betty then informed him that “you have heet har right acors the back you have a most killd hear.”

That night, Sarah Good was jailed at the house of the constable, Joseph Herrick. In the morning, watchers (who quickly heard about the spectral appearance at Dr. Griggs’s) told Herrick that she “was gon for some time from them both bare foot and bare legde,” and Herrick’s wife observed that Sarah’s arm was “Blooddy from a little below the Elbow to the wrist,” whereas the previous night her arms had been unmarked. So the reported blow on the back turned into a perceived one on the arm; and Villagers had convincing proof of Good’s spectral rambling.

The magistrates had not completed interrogating the accused women. On March 2 and 3, they again questioned Tituba and Sarah Osborne, and on March 5, Tituba and Sarah Good. Of these six additional examinations (all of which seem to have taken place in jail), only one record survives, that of Tituba on March 2. Still, the others probably did not yield any significant revelations.
42
The second examination of Tituba certainly did, however, for Hathorne questioned the slave woman closely about her dealings with the devil. She indicated that she had enlisted in the devil’s legion by signing his book with a mark “with red Bloud,” and that the devil had showed her Good’s and Osborne’s marks in the same book. She also declared that Good had admitted signing the book, although Osborne would not confess. Further, the book contained nine signatures in all, “Some in Boston & some herein this Towne.” She divulged the stunning news that the witches had held a meeting at Parris’s own house, but “my master did nott See us, for they would not lett my Master See.” Even though this testimony was not offered in public, its contents undoubtedly spread throughout the Village, as knowledgeable gossipers shared the additional information with others.
43

Tituba’s disclosures about the witch conspiracy continued to affect the impressionable William Allen and John Hughes, this time separately. On the evening of March 2, Allen was in bed when Sarah Good “vissabley appeared to him,” sitting on his foot surrounded with “an unuseuall light,” but she disappeared when he kicked her. As for Hughes, he was on his way home after dark from Samuel Sibley’s (where the chief topic of conversation was undoubtedly Goody Good’s spectral visit to Dr. Griggs’s house the previous night) when he saw “a Great white dogg” that followed him before disappearing mysteriously. Later, in bed “in a clossd Roome and the dore being fast,” he saw “a Great light” and “a large Grey Catt att his beds foot.” Accounts of such apparitions must have circulated around the Village in conjunction with Samuel Braybrook’s report that while he was carrying Sarah Good to jail in Ipswich that same day she had leapt off her horse three times, and that Ann Putnam Jr. had “declared the same att her fathers house,” thus demonstrating the accuracy of her spectral sight.
44

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