In the Devil's Snare (36 page)

The primary public advocate of the trials, other than the judges themselves, was of course the younger Mather, who developed his ideas most fully in
Wonders of the Invisible World,
which was printed in mid-October but carried a date of 1693 because Governor Phips had ordered a halt to publications on the trials. Increase Mather declared at the close of
Cases of Conscience
that it was “strange” for people to think he and his son disagreed, for “I perused and approved of that Book before it was Printed,” yet readers then and now have recognized the different emphases of the contemporaneous works by father and son—a divergence of opinion that Increase publicly denied, yet could not wholly obscure. Where the senior Mather’s treatment of the trials suggests caution and doubt, his son’s exudes certainty and confidence that the court had not erred in the past, and would not err in the future.
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Describing 1692 as “this extraordinary Time of the
Devils coming down in
great Wrath upon us,
” Cotton Mather informed his readers that he had set himself the task of exposing “the whole PLOT of the Devil, against
New-England.
” That there was such a plot should astonish no one, he explained, for New Englanders had settled in “those, which were once the Devil’s Territories,” and Satan had in the past also attempted to expel them, although his current efforts were “more Difficult, more Surprizing” than ever. And so “an Army of
Devils
” had “horribly” attacked “the
First-born
of our
English
Settlements” and had subsequently assaulted other places as well. No one could doubt the existence of the “terrible Plague,” he contended, especially because of all the confessions that concurred in their
“main strokes.”
Indeed, if the devils could somehow force “Scores of Innocent People [to] Unite, in
Confessions
of a Crime,” then that result was so “prodigious” that “it threatens no less than a sort of a Dissolution upon the World” and “all the Rules of Understanding Humane Affayrs are at an end.” Acknowledging that some guiltless persons might have been accused, Mather expressed the hope and expectation that such defendants would ultimately be cleared, but insisted simultaneously that God might well have allowed the devil to represent the shapes of people who had committed lesser offenses than witchcraft “for their perpetual Humiliation.”
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Yes, Mather admitted, the Salem justices of the peace had adopted some “disputed Methods” in their fight against the witches, but “none but what have had great Precedents in other parts of the World” (and he summarized long passages from Richard Bernard, John Gaule, and William Perkins to prove the point). He defended the use of such spectral evidence as the ghostly accusations and confessions, for those sightings provided “a sufficient occasion for Magistrates to make a particular Enquiry” even though such reports “may be defective enough in point of Conviction.” Mather then proceeded to establish the context for his treatment of selected Salem prosecutions by describing the Bury St. Edmunds trial presided over by Sir Matthew Hale in 1662; he also cited another precedent, the witch trials at Mora, Sweden, in 1669–1670, during which “Hundreds of their Children” taken to a “Diabolical Rendezvouz” at night had afterwards confessed to writing their names in the devil’s book in blood, to eating and drinking with him, and to attempting to kill a minister and other people.
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In what he clearly regarded as the most important part of the book, Mather, drawing on the materials supplied him by Stephen Sewall, wrote at length about the five prosecutions he chose as exemplars: George Burroughs, Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Martha Carrier (in that order). With the exception of Burroughs, whom he was directed to include, all were “usual suspects”; all except Martin had been named by confessors; and every one of them had been accused of maleficium by numerous witnesses. These particular prosecutions, Mather had obviously concluded, best supported his defense of the trials. Just as obviously, he avoided writing about more controversial and questionable convictions (such as those of Martha Corey or Rebecca Nurse), nor did he address the specifics of any of the confessions he cited in general terms. The discussion of the trials closed with a statement dated October 11 and signed by William Stoughton and Samuel Sewall, confirming that the clergyman had accurately reported
“Matters of Fact and Evidence”
and the “Methods of Conviction” employed in the Salem proceedings.
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In early to mid-October, then, Sir William Phips faced a major dilemma. Hitherto a supporter of the trials, he now found himself trapped in a heated debate involving a leader of the Second Church on one side and the chief pastor of the Third on the other, with the other minister of Old North (Increase Mather) wedged somewhere uncomfortably in the middle; and between the judges of his special court, on the one hand, and their former colleague Nathaniel Saltonstall and other distinguished present and past leaders of the colony (Simon Bradstreet, Thomas Danforth, Robert Pike), on the other, along with the articulate critic Thomas Brattle.
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It was in exactly this context that the governor wrote the first letter to England in which he acknowledged the existence of the witchcraft crisis.
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On October 12, he addressed four separate missives to colonial officials. Two described his activities at Pemaquid and advocated “the Conquest of Cannada”; a third complained that too many men among Massachusetts’ leaders still clung to “that Idoll the old Charter”; and the fourth simultaneously informed London officials of the crisis and distanced himself from it. Phips briefly described the complaints of the afflicted, explained that he had established the Court of Oyer and Terminer with his lieutenant governor as the chief judge, revealed that more than twenty people (including some confessors) had been convicted of witchcraft, and parroted the standard line that the judges “began their proceedings with the accusations of the afflicted and then went upon other humane evidences to strengthen that.”

Next, to be blunt, he lied. “I was almost the whole time of the proceeding abroad in the service of Their Majesties in the Eastern part of the Country,” Phips falsely claimed (as shown herein, he had in fact been in Boston during most of the court sessions). “As soon as I came from fighting against their Majesties Enemyes and understood what danger some of their innocent subjects might be exposed to . . . I did before any application was made unto me about it put a stop to the proceedings of the Court.” Elsewhere in the letter, Phips more precisely described his directives, which had not in fact halted all legal activity in the witchcraft trials. He had ordered that no new arrests should be made, except in cases of “unavoydable necessity”; and he had decided to “shelter from any Proceedings against them” anyone about whom the “least suspition” of innocence could be entertained. He concluded by indicating that he would await the monarchs’ further orders before taking further steps.

The governor’s interim solution probably satisfied no one and clearly did little to stifle the debate then roiling the colony’s political and religious elite. Supporters of the trials must have decried the partial halt to the proceedings, while opponents would have been upset that arrests and prosecutions would continue during the many months it would take to receive definitive answers from London.

Yet even before at last writing to London, Phips had taken additional steps to resolve his dilemma by looking elsewhere in America for advice. On October 5, he dispatched a series of questions about witchcraft to the clergymen of New York, but their reply, dated October 11, would not have arrived until after he sent his letters of October 12. The eight inquiries addressed topics ranging from the general—Are there witches? What constitutes witchcraft?—to the specific: Can a specter represent an innocent person? Does the sighting of an apparition supply proof sufficient for conviction? Can the evidence of an apparently blameless life offset a spectral accusation? Could people tortured by the devil remain in relatively good health? In response, four Dutch and French ministers from New York concurred that witches existed, that witchcraft required “an alliance with the Devil,” and that Satan could “assume the shape of a good man, and present this shape before the eyes of the afflicted, as the source of the afflictions which they suffer.” God could “thrust a sinful, though faithful and pious man into such calamitous experience in order to try his piety and virtue,” and therefore employing spectral evidence to convict anyone would be “the greatest imprudence.” The devil might in fact be attacking the afflicted and the supposed afflicter at the same time, trying to bring the latter “into bad repute and danger of his life.” Thus far the New Yorkers had aligned themselves largely with the trials’ critics. But then they gave some credence to the other side, declaring that an apparently good life could indeed conceal “devilish practices,” and that the afflicted could have been tormented for months with “no wasting of the body, and no weakening of their spirits.” Satan could even have made his victims stronger, they contended.
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A fifth New York cleric, a minister of the Church of England who served as chaplain to English troops stationed in the town, replied separately to the same questions. He essentially agreed with the others but placed greater emphasis than they on the devil’s many deceptions. “The minds of men, especially of the ignorant or depraved, can easily be and frequently are deceived by the Devil,” John Miller wrote. Accordingly, spectral visions could not be trusted, nor did people’s previous lives (good or bad) convey reliable information about whether or not they were witches. He also asserted that afflicted people such as those in Massachusetts were probably not “maliciously enchanted by any sorcerer, but deluded by the Devil to promote the misery and ruin of the human race,” thus raising once again the likelihood that Satan had acted directly, without any human intermediaries.
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At about the same time he was reading these statements from New York, Sir William Phips would have learned that Samuel Wardwell was not the only Andover confessor to disavow his self-incriminating statements. On October 18, twenty-six men from that town petitioned the governor and council on behalf of their wives and other relatives, pointing out that some of the penitents now said that “they have wronged themselves and the truth in their confessions.” Further, Increase Mather could well have informed his friend the governor about the contents of his and Thomas Brattle’s conversations with a group of Andover women in the Salem jail on October 19, during which many of them retracted both their confessions and their accusations of others. Abigail Barker, for example, “bewail’d and lamented her accusing of others, whom she never knew any evill by in her life time; and said that she was told by her examiners that she
did
know of their being witches and
must
confesse it; that she did know of their being baptised, &c.: and must confesse it; by the renewed urgings and chargings of whom at last she gave way, and owned such things as were utterly false, which now she was in great horrour and anguish of soul for her complying with.”
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Phips could also have heard about the contents of a statement approved on October 17 by a group of Connecticut ministers, who directly addressed the issue of what evidence would be adequate to convict a witch. The colony of Connecticut had also established a Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle several witchcraft trials, including those of Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough. As will be recalled from chapter 2, the two women had been originally accused by the afflicted servant Katherine Branch back in April. Their intertwined trials began on September 14, but the court adjourned five days later after the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict in either case. Before the court reconvened, the justices asked a group of clerics for their advice on the matter. In their formal response, the Connecticut ministers rejected any evidence of witch’s marks unless confirmed by “some able physitians,” suggested that maleficium stories provided “very slender and uncertain grounds” for conviction, and declared themselves unable to determine whether Kate’s fits had been caused by “counterfeiting,” hysteria, the devil, or witchcraft. Most significant, however, they pronounced the evidence of “the appearance of their spectres to her to be very uncertain and failable from the easy deception of her senses & subtile devices of the devil.” Therefore, they indicated, they did not “think her a sufficient witness.”
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Even though Governor Phips was not a particularly skillful politician, he must have realized that the best way to quiet the political and theological firestorm raging during the third week of October would be to dissolve the court permanently rather than merely suspend some of its proceedings, as he had done by October 12. In addition, now that prominent Bostonians were challenging the court, he and his wife were no longer so vulnerable to possible accusations. Yet political and personal reasons could not by themselves provide adequate justifications for halting the trials before the Court of Oyer and Terminer. Which arguments carried the most weight with him is not wholly clear. In his reports to England, Phips stressed his growing realization that apparitions could appear in the form of innocents, despite Stoughton’s insistence to the contrary. Perhaps he also concluded that spectral evidence had played a greater role in leading to convictions than the judges, or Cotton Mather, had previously admitted. Many of those similar confessions Mather found so convincing, after all, involved reports of spectral witch meetings and baptisms, and either the Andover men’s petition or Increase Mather or both had informed him of the multiple withdrawals of such confessions. The Connecticut clergy’s emphasis on Satan’s “subtile devices” could have carried great weight with him.

Because such a notion had a known advocate on the council, it is also possible that Miller’s stress on the devil’s ability to afflict the sufferers without the assistance of witches provided the clinching argument. The councilor Robert Pike, it will be recalled, had forcefully advanced that very contention in his letter to Jonathan Corwin in early August. For the first time since mid-June, too, the elderly Pike traveled from Salisbury to Boston to attend council meetings. He was there on October 14 and 22, along with a majority of the judges. Pike, a sharp critic of the legal proceedings who had a history of outspokenness, would not have allowed the matter to drop.
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