Salem Witch Judge (24 page)

The Reverend George Burroughs, formerly a minister in Salem Village, had been arrested on May 2 at his home in Wells, Maine, while sharing a meal with his wife, Mary, and eight children. Since then he had been kept in irons at the Boston and Salem jails. He and several other accused witches were to be tried on August 5. Samuel rode to Salem on the fourth to prepare for the frontier minister’s trial. Of all
the witchcraft suspects who had come before him, Burroughs was the one he knew best.

Samuel and the Reverend Burroughs had been students together at Harvard, Burroughs graduating a year ahead of Samuel. In a list of Harvard graduates at the back of a commonplace book, Samuel had recorded both “Georgius Burrough (1670)” and “Gulielmus Stoughton, Master Oxoniae (1650).” Samuel and Burroughs had kept up a friendly correspondence. Burroughs, now a short, dark, muscular man of forty, had visited the Sewall mansion as recently as November 18, 1685, when Samuel noted in his diary, “Mr. G. Burroughs dined with us.”

Samuel was not the only player in the drama with personal links to George Burroughs. Judge Hathorne, who had served on the Salem Village committee to find a replacement for Burroughs in 1686, was related to Burroughs by marriage. Sarah Ruck Hathorne, the young widow of the judge’s younger brother, had become Burroughs’s second wife in 1682. The judge had heard stories that Burroughs was “unkind” to Sarah, and they “fell out.” One afflicted teenager, Mary (Mercy) Lewis, had lived as a child with Burroughs’s family in Salem Village. She was now a servant for Thomas and Anne Putnam, who with their daughter, Anne, made scores of accusations. Mary Lewis testified that Burroughs killed his wife. When Burroughs first arrived in Salem Village to preach, he and his wife briefly boarded with relatives of the Putnams, who recalled him being “very sharp” to his “dutiful” wife. A neighbor recalled his wife saying she was afraid of him. Anne Putnam Jr. claimed to see ghosts of Burroughs’s late wife wearing sheets. The ghost told the twelve-year-old that Burroughs had killed her and that Putnam should report this to the court.

A man named William Baker, himself an accused witch, testified before the judges that George Burroughs and Bridget Bishop had summoned more than a hundred young men armed with knives and swords to attack Salem Village, to “destroy the village, destroy the church of God, and set up Satan’s kingdom.”

Burroughs’s physical strength struck some people as suspicious. Four people testified they saw Burroughs carry a barrel of molasses with only two fingers, an impossible feat. A man named Thomas Greenslit reported that the minister lifted up a heavy, six-foot-long gun with only “the forefinger of his right hand.” Burroughs had been
in Falmouth, Maine, on May 20, 1690, when the Indians attacked that English settlement. Simply surviving the slaughter made people think he must be in league with the Devil.

Burroughs had unorthodox opinions too. A free-thinking Puritan, he was relaxed about how often one should partake of the Lord’s Supper. One judge asked him when he last received that sacrament. “It was so long since, I could not tell,” Burroughs replied. The historian Bernard Rosenthal conjectured that Burroughs inclined toward the Baptist faith. He no longer believed in baptizing infants, he told the court, and he had not baptized his younger children. Being a Baptist was no longer a capital offense in Massachusetts, as it had been thirty-three years earlier, but witchcraft was.

Samuel voted with the court to convict and execute Burroughs on August 5, but he chose not to attend Burroughs’s execution. On the day scheduled for the execution of Burroughs and four other convicted witches, Samuel arranged to be in Watertown on business, advising townspeople on whether to “settle a minister” and “where the [new] meeting house should be set.” He may not have relished the spectacle at Salem of the hanging of a college friend and erstwhile dinner companion whom he had just sentenced to death.

Several days after condemning Burroughs, whose trial he did not record in his diary, Samuel made this mundane note: “I carried my mother, Mrs. Jane Sewall,” who was visiting from Newbury, “to visit Sam [Jr.] at Mr. Hobart’s at Newton,” the school where the fourteen-year-old now boarded. For Sam Jr. this placement with the Reverend Nehemiah Hobart (Harvard class of 1667), an old friend of his father, “was the indifferent scholar’s last hope for becoming qualified for admission to the college,” the historian Judith Graham surmised. Samuel also recorded the wedding of his fellow Salem witch judge John Richards to Anne Winthrop, Wait Still’s sister, “before William Stoughton, Esquire, the Lieutenant Governor, at the house of Madame Usher.” The latter, practically a member of Samuel’s family, was the former Bridget Hoar, who had taken as her second husband the Boston merchant Hezekiah Usher Jr.

Even before the day of George Burroughs’s hanging, an unrelated event threw Samuel into mourning. His friend Nathaniel Gookin, the thirty-six-year-old minister who served as Harvard College’s acting
president, died suddenly in Cambridge on August 14. Nathaniel’s brother, the Reverend Daniel Gookin, was married to Hannah Sewall’s cousin Elizabeth Quincy. The Gookins’ father, Major General Daniel Gookin, an ally of the Reverend John Eliot who had been one of Samuel’s mentors, was the author of An historical account of the doings and sufferings of the Christian Indians in New England, in the years 1675, 1676, 1677. The elder Gookin was born in England in 1612, arrived in Boston in 1644, and served the colony as a soldier, magistrate, and “protector of Indians” until his death in 1687. A year later, as thirty-six-year-old Samuel Sewall headed for England on board the America, he dreamed of the late Daniel Gookin Sr. In the dream the major general, “well clad from head to foot” in a “coat and breeches of blood-red silk” and “of a very fresh, lively countenance,” beckoned Samuel “out of the room where I was—I think ’twas the Town House—to speak to me.” The death of Gookin’s son Nathaniel, “one of the best friends I had left,” particularly affected Samuel. Faced with so much bad news, he could not tell if God were punishing New England for its sins or if Satan were finally taking over.

Three days after Gookin’s funeral, on Friday, August 19, the constable of Salem carted five condemned witches to Gallows Hill to be executed. To the amazement of the throng of spectators, the doomed men and women not only proclaimed their innocence but also remained calm.

John Proctor steadfastly declared he was innocent. Centuries later Arthur Miller would make Proctor the heroic central character in his play The Crucible. (The love triangle involving the Proctors and Abigail Williams is the playwright’s invention.) Elizabeth Proctor, nearly nine months pregnant, remained in fetters in the jail.

John Willard, another farmer of Salem Village with a family and a comfortable estate, died beside Proctor that day. Willard (who was not related to the Reverend Willard of Boston) had been implicated by a teenager named Susanna Sheldon who claimed he told her he was a wizard. He—or his ghost, she couldn’t be sure—suckled two black pigs. One day she saw him kneel in prayer to a “black man with a long-crowned hat” and then magically vanish.

Yet another prosperous farmer joined John Willard and John Proctor on the gallows. George Jacobs Sr., a tall, white-haired man of eighty, had, like Proctor, been named by a teenage servant. During the
old farmer’s trial he had knelt before the witch judges and begged them to believe he was innocent. Realizing that was impossible, he had told them, “You tax me for a wizard…. You may as well tax me for a buzzard. I have done no harm. Well, burn me or hang me. I will stand in the truth of Christ.”

Martha Carrier, the Andover woman whose sons were tortured into confessing, was also hanged on August 19. As she approached the gallows, having spent several months in jail, Cotton Mather called her a “rampant hag.” He added, “The Devil promised her she should be Queen of Hell.”

Mather’s description of Martha Carrier as a “rampant hag,” which recalls Nicholas Noyes’s description of Sarah Good as a “miserable witch,” captures the emotional content beneath the false legalities. To men in power, women could be terrifying. In a culture dominated by men, according to the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a belief in witchcraft “confirms the social nature of the maternal role…. Because women were perceived to have real, though mysterious, power, they could become the focus of communal fear and anger.” The perceived reality of witches expressed “the depth of conflict and need for security in this often incomprehensible world. There should be no surprise in finding witchcraft in the same time and place as idealized motherhood.”

Meanwhile, the crowd awaited the killing of a minister for witchcraft. This new challenge would be one reason the frenzy would soon end.

The hangman led George Burroughs to the gallows, his hands and legs in chains. Cotton Mather was said to be perched on his horse, high above the mob. The Reverend Burroughs turned to the crowd, which included most of the judges of the special court, and quietly stated his innocence. Then he bowed his head.

“Our Father, which art in heaven,” he said in a firm voice, beginning the Lord’s Prayer. “Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come.” The minister appeared placid. But everyone knew that a wizard cannot pray rightly. Satan invariably trips up his tongue.

“Thy will be done, in earth as it is in Heaven,” Burroughs continued, the prayer seeming to strengthen his resolve. Everyone wondered what small mistake would prove his alliance with Satan.

“Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” He paused, conscious of his debtors who were
present. “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Deliver us from evil.

He stopped, sensing tension in the crowd, which had turned eerily silent. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever,” he said, solemnly. “Amen.”

Someone began to cry. A few sobs grew into wails, which spread through the crowd. George Burroughs had prayed flawlessly. Scores of people heard it. Many wondered now, if they had not already, Is it possible he is not a witch? Should he live?

The judges sensed danger. If the crowd hindered the execution of Burroughs, that could prevent future executions and even trials. Then Satan would win. An unidentified official motioned to the hangman, George Corwin, who quickly knocked the scaffold from beneath the minister’s feet. Burroughs’s neck snapped.

“Burroughs is no ordained minister!” Cotton Mather cried out to the crowd. “He was duly convicted,” he reminded them. “It was a fair trial.” He cautioned that the “Devil may appear among us as an angel of light.”

The weeping subsided. Who could argue with the Reverend Mather?

The bodies of George Burroughs, George Jacobs Sr., John Proctor, John Willard, and Martha Carrier were left for hours, swinging in the wind. Somehow the family of George Jacobs was able to remove his corpse, carry it on horseback to his farm, a mile west along a river, and bury it beneath a tree.

In Boston, Sewall wrote in his diary, “This day George Burroughs, John Willard, John Proctor, Martha Carrier, and George Jacobs were executed at Salem, a very great number of spectators being present…. They all said they were innocent, Carrier and all.” Referring to a private conversation he had just had with Increase Mather, Samuel reassured himself, “Mr. Mather says they died by a righteous sentence.” Samuel was sorry to have heard that “Mr. Burroughs, by his speech, prayer, [and] protestation of his innocence, did much move unthinking persons.” Later, in the margin, he added the words, “Doleful! Witchcraft.”

On the North Shore September was a pivotal month. Even as the virus of accusation continued to spread south to Marblehead and west to Reading, public sentiment turned away from the judges. The Court of Oyer and Terminer met twice that month, on the ninth and
the seventeenth, and convicted fifteen more witches, but opposition to its procedures intensified and the frenzy was soon to end.

But first, nine more people died, more victims than in any other month. Giles Corey of Salem Farms (now Peabody) was next. This “large landholder…of singular force and acuteness of intellect,” in the words of Charles Upham, was the husband of Martha Corey, who had made the mistake of laughing out loud at the accusations against her. Her husband, who was not then charged, attended her trial and after her conviction asked the court’s permission to go with her to jail. The judges refused but decided to examine him too.

The judges hammered him with questions about witchcraft and the Devil, but he refused to speak. Giles Corey was aware of the English law that stated, “No person shall be tried for any offence, but high treason, until he enters a plea.” If he remained silent, he might preserve his last will and testament. “In the belief that his will would be invalidated and his estate confiscated, if he were condemned by a jury after pleading to the indictment,” the editor of Sewall’s diary noted, Corey “resolutely preserved silence, knowing that an acquittal was an impossibility” unless he confessed.

Corey was aware of the immediate consequence of his silence. In English law a person who remained mute before a court received peine forte et dure, or a “slow crushing under weights,” until a plea was forthcoming. In Salem on September 17, with the local judges in attendance, a sheriff led Giles Corey out of the dungeon into a nearby field. He ordered the old man to strip to the waist and lie flat on the earth in a pit dug in the field. Corey complied. Several men lifted a door on top of his chest. They piled boulders atop the door. The sheriff asked Corey if he pleaded guilty or not guilty to the charge of witchcraft. Corey said nothing.

The judges urged him to plead. So did several friends. Corey remained silent. Men added rocks to the pile. Corey’s ribs broke. His tongue hung out. His eyes bulged from their sockets. For more than forty hours, until noon on Monday, September 19, the old man continued to breathe.

Giles Corey succeeded in protecting his land and possessions from the sheriff, who had ransacked the houses and barns of many other
convicted witches. Without a plea from Corey, the sheriff had no legal justification for invading his property.