Salem Witch Judge (20 page)

“Welcome, my children,” said the dark figure [Satan], “to the communion of your race…. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness….”

Samuel Sewall never saw anything like that scene, invented in the nineteenth century. But as a seventeenth-century Puritan he believed firmly that a witch was a soul in whom the Devil abides, just as a saint—a God-fearing English Congregationalist—kept Christ in his soul.

In the Salem Village parsonage at the end of January 1692, the Reverend Samuel Parris began to observe disturbing changes in his nine-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old niece. Betty would not pray when she was supposed to. She refused to do chores. She had fits of kicking and screaming. Abigail and a playmate, twelve-year-old Anne Putnam, began to have strange fits and spasms of pain. The three girls would creep under a table on their hands and feet, barking like dogs, mewing like cats, and grunting like hogs. The minister had never seen such strange behavior.

Suspecting an evil spirit, he sent for a physician, William Griggs, who examined the girls at the house. Griggs could find no medical
reason for their afflictions. When he asked, “Who tortures you?” the girls said three women “afflicted” them. They named the first three “witches” of 1692, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba Indian.

These three women were typical victims of witchcraft accusations. In both America and Europe, suspected witches were mostly women, in their forties or older, who lacked social power or violated social norms or both. Tituba Indian was a slave. Her tawny skin made her suspect to the English, whose Satan was “dark” or “black.” Sarah Osborne, a destitute old Englishwoman, begged at neighbors’ doors. Sarah Good, though only in her thirties, was visibly pregnant and so haggard she looked almost as old as Osborne.

“How did they bewitch you?” the doctor wondered. The girls said the women’s ghosts, which they called “specters,” urged them to sign the Devil’s book. It was common knowledge that the Devil could assume any shape except that of an innocent person. So if someone’s ghost, or disembodied spirit, was observed doing ill, that person was considered a witch. And everyone knew that Satan carried a black book in which he induced his followers to write their names in their own blood. The notion of a witch making a pact with the Devil was the comprehensible antithesis of the covenant a Puritan made with God.

The girls told the doctor that they resisted the Devil and refused to sign his book. In response to their defiance, the girls reported, the witches—or perhaps their ghosts—hurt the girls, making them act like animals and flinging their bodies around.

Dr. Griggs, horrified, told Parris that the girls in his house were “under an evil hand.” The news that the Devil was assailing the occupants of the Salem Village parsonage spread rapidly, to Salem Town and Andover, then Gloucester and Newbury, and finally to Boston. To most of those who heard it, the next question was, When will the Devil arrive here?

Samuel Sewall may have spoken briefly to the Reverend Parris during Thomas Cheever’s church trial four years before, but he did not know the minister (who had attended but not graduated from Harvard) or his family. When Sewall first set eyes on the two girls from the parsonage, ages nine and eleven, in the Salem Village meetinghouse in early April, he too found their testimony chilling. “It was awful to see how the afflicted persons were agitated.”

The girls’ symptoms spread as fast as news of their affliction. Before long more girls and young women, many of them servants, reported similar troubles. The tales of affliction spun by older teenagers—Mary Walcott, Mary Lewis, Elizabeth Hubbard, Elizabeth Booth, and Susanna Sheldon—and Mary Warren and Sarah Churchill, who were twenty, gave these young women access to public power they had never known. The doctor, minister, and local authorities recorded their every word.

Spurred on by the attention, these “victims” of witchcraft “became quite skilful and expert in the arts” of magic and spiritualism, the historian Charles Upham observed. They “put themselves into odd and unnatural postures, make wild and antic gestures, and utter incoherent and unintelligible sounds. They would be seized with spasms, drop insensible to the floor, or writhe in agony, suffering dreadful tortures, and uttering loud and piercing outcries.” They were objects of “compassion and wonder.” When they shrieked in church they were not punished for their rudeness but pitied. The Devil was to blame.

By late February the people of Salem Village were “alarmed to the highest degree,” Upham wrote. Looking back from the late twentieth century to this widespread hysteria, which would be considered delusional a year later, even by active participants, the historian Elizabeth Reis wrote, “We will never know exactly why, but whether accusers and witnesses sincerely believed that the accused had signed a devil’s pact and afflicted others, whether they contemplated political or familial revenge, whether they simply continued to play a game that had gotten out of hand, whether they pursued a strategy to deflect suspicion from themselves, or whether they calculated fraud, they knew that their stories would be believed.” Accusations of witchcraft, “particularly against women,” were “credible and demanded action.”

In the face of an attack by the Devil, local authorities quickly mounted a response. In the informal but highly centralized system of justice that had evolved in Massachusetts, two local justices of the peace, John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, issued warrants for the arrest of Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba Indian. On the last day of February a sheriff arrested the three women and brought them in carts to Ingersoll’s ordinary, an inn and tavern in Salem Village, where they would be questioned by Judges Hathorne and Corwin.
Hathorne and Corwin both served with Sewall on the General Court, although Samuel knew Hathorne better. Samuel’s longtime friend the Reverend Nicholas Noyes was also present at the hearing as the officiating minister, offering prayers.

“Are you a witch?” Judge Hathorne asked Tituba Indian.

The slave denied it repeatedly. The judges ridiculed her until she said, “I am.” She went on to implicate the other two women. “I go to witch meetings riding upon a stick, with Sarah Good and Osborne behind me. We ride taking hold of one another.” At a later hearing she told the judges that Good and Osborn “are very strong and pull me and make me go with them…. Last night they tell me I must kill somebody….”

One might suspect Tituba of irony. Long afterward, however, she revealed that her master, the Reverend Parris, had flogged her before the hearing and ordered her to confess and implicate the other women named by the girls. Parris’s goal was to deflect the blame for the devilish affliction, which so far affected only members of his family, in his house.

It is human enough to imagine that pointing to someone else’s fault may conceal one’s own. Countless Puritans and other Christians accused their opponents of worshiping Satan. “This was said by Protestants of Catholics, by Catholics of Protestants, and by Christians of” Native Americans, Keith Thomas observed. People “saw the Devil in any manifestation of social wickedness or religious unorthodoxy. A Protestant iconoclast in 1540 could describe the image of Christ in the [medieval Catholic] roodloft as a picture of the Devil, while in 1704 a Yorkshire Nonconformist [Puritan] declared that people who received the sacrament according to Anglican rites were serving not God but the Devil.”

Tituba Indian had a second compelling reason to confess to witchcraft. As the local judges likely told her, the court’s policy was to spare those who confessed. A confession would guarantee she faced no trial, no prosecution, and no punishment. After the witch hunt, one of the bewitched and afflicted girls, Margaret Jacobs, admitted to authorities that the judges had “told me if I would not confess” to being a witch that “I should be put down into the dungeon and would be hanged,
but if I would confess” and name others “I should save my life.” In August, in a letter to the court, more than fifty citizens of Andover signed a letter stating that local women suspected of witchcraft were innocent. They wrote that “confessing was the only way to obtain favor” with the court, which “might be too powerful a temptation for timorous women to withstand.”

Hathorne and Corwin wanted and expected to hear confessions. To them, a confession was the best evidence of witchcraft although the word of two credible witnesses was also acceptable. Hathorne and Corwin considered themselves inspired for having rejected the classic European method of discerning a witch, which involved tying a suspect’s thumbs to her toes and throwing her into deep water. If she floated she was deemed guilty and executed. If she sank and drowned, she was innocent, though unable to enjoy her exoneration. Cotton Mather derided that barbaric method as “the invention of Catholics and Episcopalians.”

Throughout the summer, as scores of suspects came to trial for witchcraft and the nineteen who refused to confess were hanged, Tituba, the first to confess, remained alive. Following the hearing she was carted along Essex Street, Boston Street, and Aborn Street to the Salem jail. The jail, a wooden building about twenty feet square, is long gone, but an iron marker at the corner of today’s Federal and Saint Peter’s Streets marks the spot. Tituba was chained to the wall of the basement dungeon, which was inhabited by a colony of large rats. A tidal river flowed nearby. The air stank. Without clean water and healthy food, many prisoners became ill and some died. Jailers forced the witch suspects to remove their clothes so their private parts could be searched for a Devil’s teat—an extra nipple for suckling a familiar, or devilish beast.

Many suspects were tortured until they confessed. “Prisoner confessed without torture,” the clerk of court noted from time to time. A desire to avoid the noose motivated many to confess. Mary Clements of Haverhill, for instance, told the judges she “signed the Devil’s book,” took “the Devil to be my God,” agreed to “serve and worship him,” was “baptized by the Devil,” renounced her former Christian baptism, and “promised to be the Devil’s, both body and soul forever.”
A few months later, after the witch hunt ended, she retracted this confession before Increase Mather. Some of the Salem confessors remained in prison. Others were freed. No confessors were hanged.

Forced confession and repentance is a perversion of Puritan theology, which relied so heavily on the free confession of saving grace and the process of repentance. Some of the accused made a partial confession, saying their nature was depraved, as is standard Calvinist belief, and suggesting that past sins might have led them to the Devil. This too saved them from the noose. But the judges invariably condemned all who denied that they were filled with sin.

Judge John Hathorne came to these hearings with two convictions, scholars observe. One was that the Devil could use witches to undermine the Puritan church. The other, which arose from his experience as a local justice, was that all (or almost all) the suspects who came before him were guilty. Therefore, a suspect who confessed to witchcraft was immediately less threatening to the judge. In his view, she had begun to turn from the Devil. A confession seemed to offer hope of repentance and a return to God. In this way, the confessions that he and his colleagues elicited from witchcraft suspects had a paradoxical function. They both confirmed the judges’ suspicions and also, strangely, exonerated the confessor.

This twisted pattern of justice endured throughout the 1692 witch trials. Suspects who confessed avoided trial. Those who professed innocence were guaranteed a trial, conviction, and death at the gallows. “None who confessed, and stood to their confession, were brought to trial,” Charles Upham concluded. “All who were condemned…maintained their innocence” to the moment of death.

After disposing of Tituba Indian, Judges Hathorne and Corwin called for the next suspects. As Sarah Good entered the chamber, Samuel’s friend the Reverend Noyes remarked, “She is indeed a miserable witch.”

But Good told the court, “I am falsely accused.” She stated, “I do not torment the children…. I serve God.”

“Who tormented the children?” Hathorne wondered.

“It was Osborn,” Sarah Good replied.

The judges questioned several witnesses, including Good’s husband, who had recently abandoned her. Good’s husband called her “an
enemy of all good,” probably unaware of his pun. The judges called the Goods’ four-year-old daughter, Dorcas, to testify against her mother. Some of the afflicted girls had said that the little girl had bitten them. Prompted by Hathorne and Corwin, Dorcas Good said, “My mother had three birds…that hurt the [afflicted] children.”

The judges found the four-year-old and her mother guilty of witchcraft. Mother and child were sent to jail, where they too were chained to the floor. Sarah Good’s baby was stillborn a few months before she was hanged, on July 19, with several others who refused to confess. Good’s little girl eventually confessed, probably at the coaxing of her mother, who hoped to save her life. Dorcas Good was released from jail in 1693, at five. She was no longer normal, according to her father, who could not care for her.

As a constable brought in Sarah Osborne, the afflicted girls, who attended hearings en masse as witnesses, screamed out in terror. Osborne testified she was not guilty, had “no familiarity with evil spirits,” and hardly knew Sarah Good.

Why had she missed so many meetings at church? the judges asked.

She replied, “Because I was sick.”

The court found Osborne guilty and sent her to jail, where she died in the month of May.

Meanwhile, Samuel Sewall’s peers headed north and east to serve in the war. The court ordered Captain Elisha Hutchinson to Maine to lead the troops. Hutchinson departed on February 18 on a horse that belonged to Samuel. Standing at the ferry landing in the North End watching his dear friend depart for the battlefield in Maine, Samuel consoled himself with the thought, “I gave him my horse.”

Captain John Alden Jr., a member of Samuel’s prayer group, sailed to Maine from Boston in March on a mission to save English captives, including his own son. Alden carried money collected in Boston’s churches and several French prisoners of war, which he intended to exchange for imprisoned Englishmen.