In the Devil's Snare (33 page)
The first to be afflicted seems to have been sixteen-year-old Martha Sprague (occasionally referred to as “alias Tyler” because of her widowed mother’s remarriage to Moses Tyler), quickly followed by Rose Foster, who was thirteen, and a few days later by Abigail Martin, age nineteen. Rose Foster was Rebecca Eames’s granddaughter, and because Moses Tyler’s first wife had been one of Rebecca’s sisters, Rose and Martha were step-first-cousins, once removed. The girls were both, therefore, related to Rebecca and Daniel Eames—Rose by blood, Martha by marriage.
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Although the formal complaints have not survived, the first people these Andover girls complained against were also their relatives: three daughters and a stepdaughter of Mary Tyler Post Bridges. Both Goody Bridges and Mary Post, a daughter by her first marriage, had already confessed to witchcraft. In all likelihood, Moses Tyler (who was simultaneously Martha’s stepfather, Rose’s great-uncle, and Mary Tyler Bridges’s brother) filed the charges on August 23 or 24 with Dudley Bradstreet, an Andover justice of the peace. The four accused young women were then arrested by Ephraim Foster, Rose’s father, who was the current Andover constable. Such familial links among accuser and accused, nonexistent in Salem Village, would be perpetuated in the coming weeks by many Andover confessors, who tended to identify relatives as their accomplices in witchcraft, just as relatives were their companions in daily life.
The Salem justices questioned Hannah Post (26), Sarah Bridges (17), Mary Bridges Jr. (13), and Susannah Post (31), probably in that order, on Thursday, August 25. After some initial resistance, all of them confessed to being witches, naming each other and their sister/half sister/stepsister Mary Post as their associates, but resisting implicating their mother. They described signing the devil’s book in blood, being baptized, and attending Andover meetings involving two hundred or more witches, who convened at John Chandler’s garrison house. Mary Warren, Richard Carrier, Mary Post, and probably other afflicted and confessing persons attended and participated in the interrogations. The sisters who confessed earlier also interjected observations into the later examinations. For example, Susannah Post at first refused to acknowledge having tortured Martha and Rose, but after her half sister Mary Bridges accused her of “afflict[ing] by sticking Pins into Cloaths,” Susannah conceded that she had done so. Mary and Sarah Bridges, the two youngest girls, proved the most cooperative. Mary informed the judges that she had “bin in this Snare” since the spring, having been recruited by the devil’s false promises of “fine Cloathes,” and that, in addition to that in Andover, she had attended a Village witch meeting, carried on a pole “over the tops of the trees” by “the black man.” Collectively, the sisters confirmed that nine people already in custody were witches.
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They also named three new ones, none of whom proved willing to confess, despite being confronted by a large group of sufferers that comprised three Village and two Andover afflicted persons, and five Andover confessors.
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Also on August 25, Moses Tyler filed charges against other people his great-niece and stepdaughter accused of having “woefully afflicted & Abused” them. On this occasion he was joined by Samuel Martin, whose daughter Abigail too had begun to complain of torments. William Barker Sr. (46), his niece Mary Barker (13), and Goody Mary Osgood Marston (27) were arrested by Ephraim Foster and questioned in Salem Town on Monday, August 29. Mary Marston and Mary Barker concurred that the devil, a black man, had persuaded them to sign his book and to afflict Rose, Martha, and Abigail. Both also acknowledged having been at a Village witch meeting, but they offered few other details about their malefic activities or their accomplices.
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William Barker Sr. was much more forthcoming. In two confessions that day, he admitted having been “in the snare of the devil” for three years. Satan, he explained, had promised to “pay all his debts” and allow him to live “comfortably,” which he found very attractive because “he had a great family, the world went hard with him.” After signing the devil’s book, he had attended a witch meeting and sacrament in Salem Village with about one hundred others, “upon a green peece of ground neare the ministers house.” George Burroughs, “a ringleader in that meeting,” had summoned the witches there with a trumpet that could be heard “many myles off.” Some of the witches had “Rapiers by their side,” Barker disclosed, thereby continuing the military theme suggested by Burroughs’s use of a trumpet. Satan chose to attack the Village first “by reason of the peoples being divided & theire differing with their ministers,” but the witches planned “to fall next upon Salem and soe goe through the countrey.” Once they had established the devil’s kingdom, “all persones should be equall” and there would be “neither punishment nor shame for sin” and “no day of resurection or of judgement.” Some unnamed leaders of the conspiracy had told him that there were “about 307 witches in the country” (surely close enough to the number supplied by Ann Foster and Mary Toothaker to be regarded as accurate by the justices). And he added a new piece of information as well, one revealing that residents of Essex County knew about the concurrent witchcraft cases to the south: “In the spring of the yeare the witches came from Connecticut to afflict at Salem Village but now they have left it off.”
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William Barker Sr. declared flatly that the sisters Elizabeth Dane Johnson and Abigail Dane Faulkner “have been my Enticers to this great abomination,” thus leading the justices to issue a warrant that same August 29 for the immediate arrest of Elizabeth Johnson, her eleven-year-old daughter, and her fourteen-year-old son. On Tuesday, August 30, the magistrates reexamined Abigail Faulkner in prison. This time she confessed, explaining that “she did look with an evil eye on the afflicted persons & did consent that they should be afflicted: becaus they were the caus of bringing her kindred out: and shee did wish them ill.” The next day, Goody Faulkner’s sister and nephew both joined her in acknowledging guilt. Their admissions echoed those of their neighbors: the devil had baptized them; they had attended meetings at Chandler’s and the Village (with George Burroughs, said Elizabeth); they had afflicted Martha, Rose, Abigail, and others in Andover. Although Satan came to them in the form of a white bird and a black cat, he “mostly apears . . . like a black man.”
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The Johnsons did not name any new witches (Elizabeth claimed, “I do not know any but them that are brought out”), but another person examined that Wednesday did. William Barker Jr., 14, admitted that, like his father, he had been baptized by Satan, had signed his book, and had tormented Martha Sprague. And he identified other afflicters: Samuel Wardwell, his wife, and his daughter and stepdaughter. Members of the Wardwell clan were consequently arrested and interrogated that very day. All of them confessed. Samuel, a forty-nine-year-old carpenter from New Hampshire, conceded that he had been “discontented” and had “foolishly” become involved with fortune-telling and the black man; his stepdaughter Sarah Hawkes, 21, and wife Sarah, 41, described attending a Village witch meeting with three other Andover residents; his daughter Mercy, 18, acknowledged having been baptized and signing the devil’s book with “a red Mark Upon a peace of Paper wher she saw no other names.” During Sarah Wardwell’s examination (and probably during the others too), Mary Warren, the three most active Andover afflicted, and three Andover confessors endured the usual torments. In these and in many other examinations, then, the earlier confessors regularly joined the Village and Andover afflicted in accusing new examinees. For their part, the magistrates no longer seemed to distinguish among the different groups of sufferers. The justices appear to have accounted all the testimony equally credible. Their conflation of the afflicted and the confessors once again raised questions about the possible alliance of the accusers with the devil and his witches.
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William Barker Jr.’s confession also led the magistrates to the widow Mary Ayer Parker. Her wealthy husband, Nathan, an original settler of Andover, had died in 1685. She too was related to Moses Tyler and thus to Martha Sprague and Rose Foster, for one of her daughters had married Moses’ brother. At her examination on September 2, confessors from both Salem Village and Andover had fits and required her touch to release them from their sufferings. Accused of having previously tortured Martha Sprague, Timothy Swan, and Sarah Phelps, Mary responded, “I know nothing of it,” claiming to have been a victim of mistaken identity, for “there is another woman of the same name in Andover.” But her step-great-niece Martha insisted, “this is the very woman,” and Mary’s defense fell on deaf ears. After William Barker Jr. “to her face” identified her as “one of his company,” and Mary Warren endured a fit that left her with “blood runeing out of her mouth,” Goody Parker was held for trial.
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Between mid-July and the first two days of September, the witchcraft crisis was largely confined to Andover. People from only a few other towns (neighboring Rowley and Boxford, Haverhill, and Billerica) were accused in those six weeks. But starting on September 3, it must have seemed likely that the crisis would explode throughout all of northeastern Essex County, as accusations surfaced nearly simultaneously in Gloucester, Reading, and Marblehead. Little is known about many of these cases, for few complaints or examinations have survived. Yet a significant number involved accused or accusers with ties to the Maine frontier. Perhaps not coincidentally, Lieutenant Governor John Usher feared an imminent attack by the French and Indians at that very moment. On September 5, he successfully requested a loan of seven barrels of gunpowder from the Massachusetts government to assist in preparing his province of New Hampshire to counter the expected invasion.
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At that precise juncture, the recently widowed Mary Swayne Marshall, sister of Major Jeremiah Swayne, a frontier militia leader, complained against three female afflicters from Reading. Nicholas Frost of Kittery, the son of another militia major, Charles Frost, himself became the subject of an accusation. And when on September 3 Ebenezer Babson of Gloucester—the man whose family served as the focal point of the spectral assault on the town in July—filed two witchcraft charges on behalf of his widowed mother, one of the accused was Elizabeth Dicer, a former resident of Saco who later described herself as “of Piscataqua.”
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For this flurry of defendants questioned on Monday, September 5, four examination records are still extant: those of Margaret Prince of Gloucester and the three Reading residents accused by Mary Marshall. Betty Hubbard, who had relatives in Gloucester, accused Prince of having killed a woman there; she, Mary Warren, and two young women of the Booth family were afflicted at Prince’s examination, where the suspect resolutely insisted on her innocence. So too did two of the Reading women, but the third, Mary Taylor (a forty-year-old mother of five), though at first proclaiming her innocence, eventually broke down under the pressure. As always, the afflicted and previous confessors collapsed at her glance. Simon Willard recorded that “Tayler was told she had a dangerous eye: that struck folk down which give ground to think she was a witch.” But she did not admit guilt until after Samuel Wardwell and Major Swayne both chimed in, accusing her of involvement in the death of Wardwell’s brother-in-law. She conceded first that “she had in a passion wished bad wishes” against Mary Marshall after Marshall accused her, then that she had signed the devil’s “birch Rhine” and had associated with the jailed Lydia Dustin. But she insisted that she had not been baptized by the devil, nor had she bewitched Wardwell’s relative.
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Attention shifted back to Andover two days later, where a formal touch test was staged with a large group of suspects. Although no one knew it at the time, this extraordinary event (probably precisely because of its remarkable nature) put an end to the most active phase of accusations and examinations during the witchcraft crisis. A few new formal charges were filed thereafter (the last came in early November, with witch-finding by the indefatigable Betty Hubbard), but after the touch test in Andover on September 7 and follow-up activities involving a group of children a week later, the Andover magistrates stopped issuing arrest warrants. Reported afflictions did not cease so abruptly, yet once the chain of Andover examinations and confessions was broken, the witchcraft crisis essentially disintegrated. And so the small but growing numbers of accusations in places like Gloucester, Reading, and Marblehead remained just that—a few scattered charges—rather than starting yet another phase of a burgeoning crisis.
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The circumstances of the Andover touch test are known only through an account drafted later by several of the women. Mistress Mary Osgood, Mary Tyler (whose husband was the brother of Moses Tyler and Mary Tyler Bridges), Hannah Tyler (Mary’s daughter), Deliverance Dane (sister-in-law of Elizabeth Johnson and Abigail Faulkner), and Abigail Barker (sister-in-law of William Sr.) recounted that they and others, having been accused by the afflicted persons, were summoned to the Andover meetinghouse. After a prayer, they were all blindfolded, and their hands placed on the tormented accusers. “Then they said they were well, and that we were guilty of afflicting them,” the women indicated. “We knowing ourselves altogether innocent of the crime, we were all exceedingly astonished and amazed, and consternated and affrighted even out of our reason,” the women recalled. In those circumstances “some gentlemen” (presumably, the Salem magistrates) told them that “we were witches, and they knew it, and we knew it, which made us think that it was so.” Because “our understandings, our reason, our faculties, [were] almost gone, we were not capable of judging our condition.” Besides, the justices had used “hard measures” (which they did not identify) against them. All these factors “rendered us incapable of making our defense,” and consequently we “said any thing and every thing which they desired, and most of what we said, was but, in effect, a consenting to what they said.”
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