In the Devil's Snare (37 page)
The surviving minutes fail to record that the court’s future was a subject of discussion at these meetings or during those which followed on October 25 and 26. Yet Samuel Sewall noted in his diary on the 28th that William Stoughton had raised the issue in council meetings “several times before” that day. Surely the topic engaged the councilors’ attention both inside and outside their official gatherings. On October 26, Sewall recorded the results of what appear to have been many formal and informal conversations. A bill calling for a fast and a “Convocation of Ministers” to consult about the witchcraft crisis had passed in the assembly by a vote of 33 to 29. Even though the governor and council did not concur, “the season and manner of doing it, is such, that the Court of Oyer and Terminer count themselves thereby dismissed.” Two days later, Sewall remarked that Stoughton had once more “desired to have the advise of the Governour and Council as to the sitting of the Court of Oyer and Terminer next week; [he] said should move it no more; great silence, as if should say do not go.” On Saturday the 29th, Phips finally declared flatly that the court “must fall.”
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Just over two weeks later a teenager named Mary Herrick, who had been afflicted for about two months, came to John Hale and his fellow clergyman, Joseph Gerrish of Wenham, to offer a remarkable statement. For several days she had been afflicted by two apparitions, one of Mistress Hale, the other of the dead Mary Easty. Although John Hale’s wife tormented her “by pinching, pricking and Choaking,” Goody Easty’s specter had appeared for a very different reason. Easty announced that “she Came to tell her She had been put to Death wrongfully and was Innocent of Witchcraft.” Easty, indeed, “Came to Vindicate her Cause and she Cryed Vengeance, Vengeance.” The apparition directed Herrick to go to the two clergymen with an account of her vision. “Then she would rise no more, nor should Mrs. Hayle Afflict her any more,” Goody Easty promised. Herrick also disclosed that Easty had first appeared to her the night before her execution on September 22. “I am going upon the Ladder to be hanged for a Witch, but I am innocent,” the specter declared, adding, “and before a 12 Month be past you shall believe it.” Herrick indicated that she had at the time doubted the truth of her vision, and so she had not reported it; “but now she believeth it is all a delusion of the Devil.” That one of the afflicted herself would so soon come to question the origins of her suffering and reject the guilt of such an active spectral tormentor as Mary Easty reveals above all else the rapidly changing climate of opinion in the colony.
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THE FINAL TRIALS
One of the most controversial tasks in which the Massachusetts legislature engaged during the fall of 1692 was setting up the colony’s new judicial system. The substance of the disagreements is not recorded, but not until November 25, after at least seven full days of debate stretching over nearly a month, did the assembly members reach consensus. At the top of the new system sat the Superior Court of Judicature, which thus acquired the responsibility for dealing with the many suspected witches who were either still jailed or had recently been released on bond to await their trials. On December 7, the council selected the new judges. William Stoughton continued as chief justice. The veterans John Richards, Wait Winthrop, and Samuel Sewall were also chosen, along with one new member: Thomas Danforth, a prominent critic of the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
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By contrast, the passage of a new witchcraft law seems to have aroused little controversy; the bill was introduced on December 12 and adopted two days later. As was indicated in chapter 6, it essentially mirrored then-current English law. But it omitted the provision of the 1604 English statute that preserved dower and inheritance for the heirs of executed witches, and that omission caused the Privy Council to disallow the statute three years later. Historians have concluded, undoubtedly correctly, that the altered language was intended primarily to protect the Essex County sheriff, George Corwin, who had already seized all or part of the estates of several of those who had been hanged.
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As the judges of the new court contemplated their responsibilities in an atmosphere of skepticism about the trials in which most of them had participated under different auspices, they could well have looked south to Connecticut for divergent precedents. Since Wait Winthrop corresponded regularly with John Alleyn, one of the Connecticut judges, he would have learned that when that colony’s Court of Oyer and Terminer reconvened on October 28 to deal with the suspended prosecutions of Elizabeth Clawson and Mercy Disborough, Clawson had been acquitted and Disborough convicted. Yet the latter was found guilty only after one member of the original jury had been replaced, a procedure the colony’s Court of Assistants thought so irregular that they soon reprieved her death sentence. The assistants further insisted that the evidence presented in court against Disborough had not sufficiently satisfied the criteria for conviction set forth by William Perkins, Richard Bernard, and Increase Mather. The “miserable toyl they are in in the Bay” served as “warning enof” that inadequate proof would “make hanging work apace,” the Connecticut magistrates wrote. Any reader of those words would have understood their implicit rebuke of the Massachusetts judges. The language suggesting that questionable verdicts had been reached must have stung someone like Samuel Sewall, coming as it did from peers and colleagues.
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The Massachusetts legislature took its final action of the fall session on December 16, when—“Upon Consideration of many persons now in Custody within the County of Essex, charged as Capital Offenders”—it authorized a meeting of the new Superior Court in the form of “a Court of Assize and General Gaol Delivery” on January 3, 1692/3. On December 23, the court issued a new call for men to serve on the necessary grand and petty juries. Some of the judges, Governor Phips reported in late February to the secretary of state in London, “were convinced and acknowledged that their former proceedings were too violent and not grounded upon a right foundation,” and so in the 1693 trials they adopted “another method.”
In particular, persuaded by Increase Mather and others that Satan could appear in the shape of an innocent person, and that “the look and touch of the suspected persons was not sufficient proofe against them,” the justices did not place “the same stress” on such evidence as they had before. Phips observed that of the fifty-two people tried in two court sessions in January and February, only three were convicted. Although he did not say so, at least nine of the defendants (including Philip and Mary English) were not even indicted. Among those tried and acquitted were Richard Carrier, Mary Lacey the younger, Mary Toothaker, and Mary Marston.
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The three suspects convicted, even under the stricter new rules of procedure, were Sarah Wardwell, Betty Johnson, and Mary Post. All three had confessed. On September 1, Sarah Wardwell (Samuel’s widow) had admitted covenanting with the devil six years earlier, attending Village witch meetings, and afflicting Martha Sprague. Betty, described as “but simplish at the best” by her grandfather, the Reverend Francis Dane, had on August 11 given a full confession in which she described witch meetings and devilish baptisms and named other witches. And Mary Post, one of the unmarried daughters of Mary Tyler Post Bridges, had accused ten others of witchcraft in addition to acknowledging her own complicity with the devil. The three were all indicted twice: for covenanting with Satan and for afflicting others—Timothy Swan (Post), Ann Putnam Jr. (Johnson), and Martha Sprague (Wardwell). Yet, as Anthony Checkley informed the governor, all three condemned women were “under the same circumstances” as “some of the cleared.” Mary Post’s sister Hannah and her stepsister Sarah Bridges, for example, had also confessed and named others as witches. Why had they been acquitted and she convicted? Following his attorney general’s logic, Phips issued reprieves for the three women.
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By several accounts, Lieutenant Governor Stoughton was outraged at Phips’s action. He had already signed a death warrant encompassing the three and five more convicted earlier; Phips reprieved the others as well, “untill their Majesties’ pleasure be signified and declared.” Stoughton, “filled with passionate anger,” left the bench in disgust at a court session in Charlestown in early February. “Who it was that obstructed the Execution of Justice, or hindred those good proceedings they had made, he knew not,” Stoughton reportedly declared, “but thereby the Kingdom of Satan was advanc’d, &c and the Lord have mercy on this Country.” Thomas Danforth took over as chief judge for the rest of that session, although Stoughton returned to preside over the final set of trials in late April and early May.
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Only a few people remained to be tried by then. Captain John Alden, who had returned from New York by December 22 and had posted bond on December 31, appeared before the court on April 25 and was freed without further proceedings. Most of the remaining defendants were Andover confessors, many of them young people who presumably had been released from prison on bail over the winter. Every one of them was acquitted, including Mary Bridges Jr., William Barker Jr., Susannah Post, and two young daughters of Mary Tyler. Among the last to be freed was Tituba, who had languished in jail longer than anyone else. On May 9, a grand jury in Ipswich declined to indict her, writing “ignoramus” on a document charging that “Tittapa an Indian Woman Servant to mr Samuel Parris of Salem village” had “Wickedly & felloniously . . . Signed the Devills Booke” and “become A detestable Witch.” Reportedly, Parris refused to pay the costs of her imprisonment, and she was sold to an unidentified person who supplied the necessary funds.
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Indeed, even after acquittals, prisoners in general could not be released until their fees were paid. Accordingly, some remained in jail for weeks or months after they were cleared of all charges. Thus, for example, Lydia Dustin, acquitted in early February, was still imprisoned when she died in mid-March. Such a delay too was the fate of Mary Watkins, a maidservant from Milton who had accused her dame (a Goody Swift) of being a witch and a child-murderer. Called up for examination in May 1693, Mary admitted that “they were falsce reports and that she had ronged” her dame. According to Robert Calef, she then “accused herself of being a Witch,” but the grand jurors so distrusted her confession that they refused to indict her. Watkins was sent to jail until she found sureties for her good behavior, yet was unable to do so “by reason of her deep poverty & want of Friends.” In July, the justices of the Superior Court ordered her freed once her fees had been paid. But she could not accomplish even that. In August, she and another young woman who had been held in Boston petitioned the jailer, asking him “to provide master or masters to carry us out of this country into Virginia, our friends, relations, and kindred, slighting us to extremity.” Calef later noted that she had been indentured to a Virginia master.
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Much, then, had changed in a year. A maidservant had accused her dame of being a witch (as Mary Warren had accused Elizabeth Proctor thirteen months before), but unlike Warren, Watkins was not believed. She had then confessed to being a witch herself (as Sarah Churchwell had done almost exactly a year earlier), but again was not believed. Yet one part of the story remained the same. Like Churchwell, Mercy Lewis, Susannah Sheldon, and Mercy Short, Mary Watkins was a refugee from the Maine frontier.
Daughter of Thomas and Mary Watkins, who had lived on the Kennebec River, Mary was (after about 1672) the stepdaughter of Thomas Stevens, who owned an Indian trading post north of Casco Bay. Her stepfather sold Bartholomew Gedney his property at North Yarmouth, the settlement that became one of the flashpoints of conflict in the early stages of the Second Indian War. Thomas Stevens himself was one of the hostages taken by the Wabanakis in retaliation for Captain Benjamin Blackman’s seizure of twenty Indian captives in late August 1688.
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No record suggests that Mary Watkins was ever afflicted, as were her Salem Village counterparts, but another young Maine refugee was. Margaret Rule, the oldest daughter of John Rule, a mariner based in Saco until the mid- to late 1680s, began to suffer fits in Boston in the fall of 1693. Her neighbor and pastor, Cotton Mather, described her torments as resembling Mercy Short’s “in almost all the circumstances of it, indeed the Afflictions were so much alike, that the relation I have given of the one, would almost serve as the full History of the other.” Margaret too described the devil as
“a short and
Black Man,”
suffered from pinches and pinpricks that left her black and blue, and contorted her body into strange shapes. And she accused a neighbor woman of bewitching her, but Mather persuaded the family to seek relief for her through prayer rather than prosecution. After weeks of prayer and fasting, Mather recorded, the evil spirits finally left her, saying,
“Go, and the Devil
go with you, we can do no more.”
After that, Margaret was “extream
weak and
faint,
” but she slowly recovered. Hers was the last recorded affliction of a young frontier refugee in the early 1690s.
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When the Wabanakis surveyed their group of sixteen captives in August 1688, they chose the seventy-year-old Thomas Stevens as their messenger to Sylvanus Davis at Falmouth because, as they informed the old man, he could “neither doe us good nor hurte.” Tell Davis, they directed Stevens, that they would observe a truce until they heard from Boston, and that they wanted “all [their] Indeans or none.” Then they added, “if ever it were a war again, it would not be as it was formerly.”
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As this book has shown, the next four years proved the Wabanaki leaders to be remarkable prophets. No other war fought on North American soil has ever had such extraordinary consequences.
Conclusion
NEW WITCH-LAND
THAT REALLY HAPPENED at Salem in 1692? Why were so many people charged with witchcraft? And why were so many of the defendants convicted and hanged? Such questions still haunt Americans at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Numerous responses to those inquiries have been proposed over the years, yet this book has shown that too many of the answers have failed to take into account the specific late-seventeenth-century context in which the witchcraft crisis occurred. In particular, historians have not fully recognized how two quite distinct phenomena combined to help create the crisis, and how examining the chain of events within a chronological framework can reveal the key patterns.
The foundation of the witchcraft crisis lay in Puritan New Englanders’ singular worldview, one they had inherited from the first settlers of Massachusetts Bay more than sixty years earlier. That worldview taught them that they were a chosen people, charged with bringing God’s message to a heathen land previously ruled by the devil. And in that adopted homeland God spoke to them repeatedly through his providences—that is, through the small and large events of their daily lives. Remarkable signs in the sky (comets, the aurora borealis), natural catastrophes (hurricanes, droughts), smallpox epidemics, the sudden deaths of children or spouses, unexpected good fortune: all carried messages from God to his people, if only they could interpret the meanings properly. New England’s Puritans, even in the third generation, believed themselves to be surrounded by an invisible world of spirits as well as by a natural world of palpable objects. Both worlds communicated God’s messages, because both operated under his direction. Satan, whom they understood to be (as Samuel Willard put it in a sermon in late May 1692) “the power of the air,” leader of the “evil angels,” played a major role in the invisible world. Yet because the devil was one of God’s creatures even though he had revolted against divine authority, Puritans knew that Satan could do no more than God allowed. To believe otherwise would be to deny God’s omnipotence.
1
Then in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, two successive, devastating wars on the northeastern frontier, King Philip’s War and King William’s War—or the First and Second Indian Wars—together wreaked havoc with what had been prosperous settlements along the coast northeast of Massachusetts. The continued and seemingly unstoppable successes of the Indians and their French allies called into question New Englanders’ ability to sustain the northern outposts that contributed significantly to the prosperity of their economy through the production of fish and timber. That their Wabanaki enemies were Catholic (or at least aligned with French Catholics) made matters worse, suggesting that the settlers’ own Protestantism might not be destined for the triumph they had long assumed to be inevitable.
The First Indian War, though extremely costly, ended with a victory in southern New England in late summer 1676 and with a standoff in the northeast in spring 1678. When hostilities began again “to the eastward” a decade later, the precarious nature of the earlier truce became evident to all. Nevertheless, the colonists at first anticipated renewed success in the second war. Yet those expectations were not met. New Englanders instead suffered repeated, serious losses of men and women, houses, livestock, and shipping. In the aftermath of each devastating defeat, they attributed their failures not to mistakes by their military and political leaders but rather to God’s providence. He had, they concluded, visited these afflictions upon them as chastisements for their many sins of omission and commission. They had developed similar interpretations of the causes of earlier setbacks, but the consequences of those beliefs never extended far beyond the walls of their meetinghouses, primarily affecting their religious attitudes. This time, however, something was different.
In early 1692, several children and teenage girls began having fits of a sort previously recorded elsewhere in old and New England. The wartime context could well have influenced the onset of those fits—that the afflicted first accused an Indian of tormenting them certainly suggests as much—but more important than such plausible, if not wholly provable, origins was the long-term impact of the young women’s charges in the context of Puritan New Englanders’ belief system. Since Puritans insisted that the devil could do nothing without God’s permission, they logically decided that God bore the ultimate responsibility for the witches’ malefic activities. As the Reverend Deodat Lawson instructed his former parishioners in Salem Village on March 24, 1691/2, “The LORD doth terrible things amongst us, by lengthening the Chain of the Roaring Lyon, in an Extraordinary manner; so that the Devil is come down in great wrath.” God, who was “Righteous & Holy,” would not afflict them “without a Cause, and that Cause is always Just.” What was the Lord saying to them? they needed to ask themselves, for “these malicious operations of Satan, are the sorest afflictions [that] can befal a person or people.”
2
So too had God brought about their losses in the war, especially through providential actions during the 1690 campaigns against targets in New France. As will be recalled from chapter 3, in November 1690 Governor Simon Bradstreet attributed the failure of Sir William Phips’s Quebec expedition to “the awfull Frowne of God.” The contrary winds that halted the ships’ progress at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, Bradstreet declared, showed “the providence of God, appearing against us.” Additional “particular providences” to the same effect included “the loss of so many of our ffriends sent out in the Expedition, in and at their return by the contagion of the small Pox, Fevers and other killing distempers,” amounting perhaps to two hundred men. Likewise, when Fitz-John Winthrop reflected on the disasters that had befallen his attempt to lead colonial militia against Montreal that same year, he concluded that the “Devine hand that governes the world, and pointes out the sorrowes and succes of all mankinde” had caused the plan to collapse. To God’s “good pleasure in this matter, as in all things,” he told the governor and council of Connecticut, “wee must submit, remembring that not one hayre of our heades fall to the ground without Gods appointments.”
3
The Lord, in short, was simultaneously punishing New England in two different ways—through the Second Indian War on the northeastern frontier and through the operations of witchcraft in Essex County. As the evidence presented in this book has demonstrated, the assaults from the visible and invisible worlds became closely entwined in New Englanders’ minds. Those connections permeated the witchcraft examinations and trials, as revealed by repeated spectral sightings of the “black man,” whom the afflicted described as resembling an Indian; and in the threats that the witches and the devil— just as the Wabanakis had—would “tear to pieces” or “knock in the head” those who opposed them. The links evident in legal proceedings are underscored by events elsewhere as well: the attack by apparitions on Gloucester in midsummer; Joseph Ring’s repeated encounters with the spectral demonic militia; Mary Toothaker’s pact with the “tawny” devil, who protected her for a time from his Wabanaki minions; Mercy Short’s visions of meetings attended by both Indian sachems and witches; and Cotton Mather’s later history of the war, which repeatedly described the Wabanakis as “devilish.”
Joshua Scottow’s “Narrative of the Planting of the Massachusetts Colony,” written shortly after the end of the witchcraft crisis, also tied the two themes inextricably together. Scottow, a longtime resident of Black Point who had earlier referred to several Wabanaki sachems as “Satan’s Emissaries,” presented the Wabanakis’ attacks and those of the witches as related phenomena, both instigated by God. “These wicked Cannibals,” he explained to his readers, are “Gods Sword, and have been so for many years together.” But the “Cruel Cannibals, Scalping and Fleaing of our Bodies, burning us as Sacrifices,” only killed their material selves, he observed, while “the Devourer out of the Bottomless Pit,” the “Do-evil,” threatened their very souls. God, he asserted, “calls us, now being Alarmed by these Spirits,” to assess our spiritual estates. Pointing out that those “upon whom this Great Wrath is fallen . . . are chiefly the members of our Churches, or their Hearers and Dependants,” and furthermore that the witches observed diabolic sacraments, he predicted that “
New England
will be called, new Witch-land.” Had the settlers not misbehaved, Satan would never have gained such an advantage over them, and they would never have experienced so many accusations, convictions, executions, and even “some Accused among our Rulers in Commonwealth and Churches.” The combined assaults, Scottow contended, should rouse New Englanders from “our Læthal Lethargy” and return their churches to “the good Old Way we have walked in.”
4
Accordingly, had the Second Indian War on the northeastern frontier somehow been avoided, the Essex County witchcraft crisis of 1692 would not have occurred. This is not to say that the war “caused” the witchcraft crisis, but rather that the conflict created the conditions that allowed the crisis to develop as rapidly and extensively as it did. In its early stages (that is, prior to mid-April 1692), the episode that originated in Salem Village resembled several other witchcraft incidents in seventeenth-century New England. Although the afflictions of Abigail Williams and Betty Parris were unusual, they were by no means unique, nor were adults’ initial reactions to those afflictions unprecedented. But the girls’ fits occurred in a supercharged atmosphere marked by ongoing conflict within Salem Village itself and, even more important, by the broader conflict on New England’s northeastern borders. The afflictions that began in the Salem Village parsonage, after all, did not stop there, as did the fits in the home of Sergeant Daniel Wescott in Stamford, Connecticut, in April 1692, or as had the earlier afflictions in the Groton parsonage of Samuel Willard in 1671. Instead, the sufferings soon spread to other households, especially to those inhabited by youthful refugees from the frontier wars (Mercy Lewis, Susannah Sheldon, Sarah Churchwell) and by others with close ties to the frontier (Mary Walcott). All the afflicted joined in accusing others of bewitching them.
Under normal circumstances, New England’s magistrates displayed a notable skepticism when confronting witchcraft charges. The judges believed in the existence of witches, but understood that providing legally acceptable proof of guilt in specific cases could be extremely difficult. In 1692, though, circumstances were not normal. For the reasons explored above and throughout this book, Bay Colony magistrates had good reason to find a witch conspiracy plausible in 1692.
It must always be remembered that the judges of the
Court of Oyer and Terminer were the very men who led the colony both politically
and militarily.
William Stoughton, the chief judge, had unaccountably failed to effect a key hostage exchange at Casco in the fall of 1688, thus bungling possibly the last chance to avert the bloodshed that followed.
John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin had most likely caused the devastating losses of Fort Loyal and Falmouth, and so all of Maine north of Wells, by recommending the withdrawal of Captain Simon Willard’s militiamen on May 15, 1690, without provision for replacements. All councilors at the time (among them a near majority of the 1692 judges) were also implicated in that decision, with its catastrophic consequences.
Samuel Sewall and Stoughton (again) had committed Massachusetts’ resources to the failed expedition against Montreal.
On that campaign, Fitz-John Winthrop, brother of Judge Waitstill Winthrop, had led men from New York and Connecticut into an unmitigated disaster north of Albany. (Indeed, Jacob Leisler, then in control of New York, adopted precisely that view when he ordered Winthrop’s arrest after the expedition collapsed.)
Sir William Phips had, it was true, taken Port Royal, but that success was more than offset by the fiasco at Quebec and its terrible aftermath of a raging smallpox epidemic and seemingly endless indebtedness.
The colony’s leading merchants—among them Sewall and Bartholomew Gedney, and presumably Peter Sergeant and John Richards as well—had promoted and encouraged the catastrophic attempt on Quebec, perhaps as much for anticipated profits from plunder as for the colony’s welfare.
Gedney and Nathaniel Saltonstall both held senior positions in the Essex County militia, and Winthrop served as the major general of the colony’s militia and was ultimately responsible for all its operations.
If the devil was operating in their world with impunity—if God for his own inscrutable reasons had “lengthened the chain” that usually limited Satan’s active malevolence against mankind, to adopt Lawson’s memorable phrase—then the Massachusetts leaders’ lack of success in combating the Indians could be explained without reference to their own failings. If God had providentially caused the wartime disasters and he had also unleashed the devil on Massachusetts, then they bore no responsibility for the current state of affairs.
Thus first the Essex justices and then all the members of the court proved receptive to charges they would otherwise have most likely dismissed. In traditional witchcraft cases, neighbors alleged difficult-to-prove malefic activities by a vengeful witch at some point in the past. Judges, mindful of the rules of English law requiring two witnesses to a capital crime, had rarely convicted—and even more rarely agreed to execute—people accused solely of such offenses. But the Essex County cases appeared to be dramatically different. The initial accusations came from young girls, then later from teenagers and older women, whose terrible sufferings seemed obvious to all who beheld them. (For that reason, the 1692 indictments most often focused on the tortures endured by the afflicted during suspects’ examinations, because many witnesses could attest to the severity of the fits and the painful nature of the sufferings thereby inflicted. Indeed, later members of the grand jury had themselves probably witnessed the torments of the complainants during examinations.)