Salem Witch Judge (25 page)
Authors: Eve LaPlante
In Boston Samuel learned of Corey’s death later that day. He noted in his diary, “Giles Gory was pressed to death for standing mute. Much pains [were] used with him two days…but all in vain.” It occurred to Samuel that the old man’s torture was a fitting judgment of God. The next day he heard news that seemed to confirm this.
“About eighteen years ago,” he learned, Giles Corey “was suspected to have stamped and pressed a man to death, but was cleared. ’Twas not remembered till Ann[e] Putnam [Jr.] was told of it by said Corey’s specter [ghost]” on Sunday night. This gossip came by post from Thomas Putnam, the Salem Village man whose family members were responsible for roughly half of the accusations of witchcraft. Putnam’s letter asserted that his daughter was “grievously tormented by witches” and spirits on the Monday evening after Corey died. She told her father that a man appeared to her in a white sheet saying Corey had pressed him to death years before.
The same day that Samuel received this information from the Putnams, the Swan arrived in the harbor, “a rich French prize of about 300 tons, laden with Claret, white wine, brandy, salt, linen, paper, etc.” Meanwhile, in the North End, Cotton Mather penned a letter to Stephen Sewall in Salem, reminding him as clerk of the special court to give Mather the transcripts of the witchcraft trials. In light of declining public support for the proceedings of the court, the growing number of accusations against socially influential people, and the urgings of the governor, Mather wished to study these documents and attempt to explain their meaning to the world. The report he would later write, which was rushed into print by November, although the title page says 1693, was The Wonders of the Invisible World.
“My dear and my obliging Stephen,” Cotton Mather began on September 20. “That I may be the more capable in lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy,
I must renew my most importunate request, that you would please quickly to perform what you kindly promised, of giving me a narrative of the evidence given in at the trial of half a
dozen, or if you please a dozen, of the principal witches that have been condemned.
Please also [speak] to…some of your observations about the confessors and the credibility of what they assert, or about things evidently preternatural in the witchcrafts, and whatever else you may account an entertainment, for an inquisitive person, that entirely loves you and Salem.
…your grateful friend, C. Mather
P.S…. His Excellency the Governor laid his positive commands upon me to desire this favor of you; and the truth is, there are some of his circumstance with reference to this affair, which I need not mention, that call for the expediting of your kindness….
The next day Stephen and his wife arrived in Boston to stay with Samuel and his family. Stephen likely carried the transcripts with him. On September 22 Cotton Mather called at Samuel’s house, where Mather, Judge Stoughton, Judge Hathorne, and the Sewall brothers jointly discussed whether and in what form to publish “some trials of the witches.” Stoughton departed the gathering early but returned because “it began to rain and was very dark.” Samuel offered him a room for the night, which the chief justice accepted, but “he went away early in the morn.” Before Samuel fell asleep that night he studied John 1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
In Salem on September 22, three days after the death of her husband, Martha Corey and six other women and one man were hanged. Samuel, who was not present, was told that Goodwife Corey walked to the gallows in prayer. The other people who were killed that day, most of whom he and his colleagues had convicted in September, were a fisherman’s wife from Salem named Alice Parker; Samuel Wardwell, an Andover farmer; Ann Pudeator, of Salem Village; Margaret Scott, of Rowley; an Andover widow, Mary Parker; a Marblehead woman named Wilmot Reed; and Mary Esty, a mother of seven in her late fifties from Topsfield.
Esty’s older sister Rebecca Nurse had preceded her to the gallows, and her younger sister Sarah Cloyse was still in jail, convicted and condemned. “I know not the least thing of witchcraft,” Mary Esty had
told Samuel and the other judges during her examination. They condemned her to death. She wrote to them from jail. “I would humbly beg of you, that Your Honors would be pleased to examine these afflicted persons strictly, and keep them apart some time, and likewise to try some of these confessing witches….” If the court tried the confessed witches, many of whom were accusers, then there would be no incentive to make false confessions. Similarly, the testimony of the accusers would not hold up if they testified separately and without the accused being present. If the court adopted these practices, she added, “I question not but you will see an alteration of these things.”
After these executions, which would turn out to be America’s final executions for witchcraft, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes studied the eight bodies hanging from ropes. Loud enough for the crowd to hear him, Samuel’s old friend remarked, “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of hell hanging there.”
The witch court adjourned on September 22 and never met again. The witch hunt ended, but not because the judges came to realize their course was wrong. In fact, “there is no doubt of there ever having been any doubts or misgivings on the bench,” Charles Upham, Salem’s seminal chronicler, concluded in the nineteenth century. “It is not probable, and it is scarcely possible, that any considerable number could be at once doubters and accusers.”
The witch hunt ended because the tide of public opinion turned. By late summer many powerful people openly questioned the reliability of the evidence accepted by the court. Summing up the change, Thomas Brattle—merchant, mathematician, and Harvard College treasurer who had attended the Sewalls’ doomed dinner party in February 1690—wrote on October 8, 1692, “There are several about the Bay, men for understanding, judgment, and piety, inferior to few (if any) in New England that do utterly condemn the said proceedings.” Brattle mentioned former governor Simon Bradstreet, former deputy governor Thomas Danforth, the Reverend Increase Mather, the Reverend Samuel Willard, and Judge Nathaniel Saltonstall, who “left the court, and is very much dissatisfied with the proceedings of it. Excepting Mr. [John] Hale [of Beverly, Massachusetts], Mr. [Nicholas] Noyes,
and Mr. [Samuel] Parris, the Reverend elders, almost throughout the whole country, are very much dissatisfied” with the witchcraft court, and so too “several of the present justices; and in particular, some of the Boston justices….” While no one doubted the existence of witches and satanic spirits, many questioned the court’s methods of determining guilt. Most of the convictions by the Court of Oyer and Terminer were based solely on spectral evidence, which had no basis in any system of law, including the Bible.
In early October Governor Phips disbanded the Court of Oyer and Terminer, dismissed its judges, freed most of the accused on bail, and stayed all further indictments. He justified the timing of this decision by noting, in an October 12 letter to the English court, that he had been away all summer fighting French and Indians in Maine. “As soon as I came from fighting against their majesties’s enemies” at the frontier, he wrote, only half-truthfully, “and understood what danger some of their innocent subjects might be exposed to, [I] put a stop to the proceedings of the court.” In fact, during the four months the witchcraft court sat, throughout the summer and into early fall, Phips spent as much time in Boston as in Maine. In addition, according to the historian Mary Beth Norton, “Phips was well informed about the trials and firmly supported them while they lasted.” The significant change in the fall was that his wife joined the ranks of the accused.
The precursor to the accusation of Lady Mary Phips is believed to have been her effort to free an imprisoned witchcraft suspect from the Boston jail. During one of her husband’s absences in August or September, and apparently without his knowledge, Lady Mary signed an order to release an accused witch whose name is lost to history. The jailer followed the order, which cost him his job. This daring act on the part of the governor’s wife led to gossip and ultimately to her being named as a witch.
Lady Phips was not alone. By October many well-placed people stood accused of witchcraft. They included Dudley Bradstreet, an Andover justice of the peace whose father was the beloved old colonial governor. Judge Jonathan Corwin’s mother-in-law was said to be a witch. Ministers’ families were suspect. The witchcraft court had tried and sentenced two daughters of Andover’s senior minister, Francis Dane, in September, and both were now in jail. Close relatives of the
Reverends Joshua Moody, Samuel Willard, Increase and Cotton Mather, John Hale, Nicholas Noyes, and the late Thomas Thatcher were named. One woman said the Reverend Willard himself “afflicted” her, prompting the judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer to dismiss her as “mistaken.” The witchcraft accusers and witnesses became “over-confident, and struck too high,” the historian Charles Upham explained. It was obvious, according to Elizabeth Reis, another historian, that “if the delusion…lasted much longer under the rules of evidence that were adopted,” then “everybody in the colony except the magistrates and ministers” would be charged with witchcraft. Everyone in the country—high or low, rich or poor, saved or damned—was at risk.
Nearly every leader of Massachusetts welcomed Phips’s decision to halt the witchcraft trials. The notable exceptions were Cotton Mather, William Stoughton, and John Hathorne, who believed the trials and executions should continue. But most men of power were now willing openly to attack the procedures and proceedings of the court. Still, no one blamed the individual judges. Less than two months later, when Governor Phips created a new and far more important court, four of its five members would be former Salem witch judges.
In October, even after the Court of Oyer and Terminer was disbanded, the witchcraft problem was not solved. More than 150 suspects remained in prisons, where three women and one baby had already died. Roughly 50 people, including many accusers, had confessed they were witches. Some accusers were now retracting their accusations against people who had been hanged or remained in jail. At the same time new accusers emerged, naming more names. In total, 185 people—141 women and 44 men—were accused of witchcraft. Of the 59 people tried, 31 were convicted and 20 were executed. Of those executed, 14 were women and 6 were men. Some of them were humble, but many were prosperous and respected.
Many socially prominent victims had managed to escape from jail, most of them to New York. Mary English, the wife of a wealthy Salem merchant, Philip English, slipped out of the Boston jail with assistance from the Reverend Moody. Mistress Elizabeth Cary, of Charlestown, was released from the Cambridge prison in late July after her husband, Captain Nathaniel Cary, gave his life’s savings to the jailer.
Captain Cary told Samuel Sewall, whom he knew, that the jailer tortured her: he put eight-pound “irons on my wife’s legs,” causing her to develop “convulsion fits.” Fearing she would die, he had begged the jailor to removal the irons but “in vain.”
In the middle of September, after fifteen weeks of incarceration, John Alden Jr. broke out of the Boston jail. Influential friends helped him travel to Duxbury, where he had grown up among the Pilgrims, and relatives hid him for several months. The following April he returned to Boston, surrendered to authorities, and was discharged of “suspicion of witchcraft” by the new court. Six weeks later, on June 12, 1693, Samuel visited Alden and his wife at home, hoping to make amends for his role in the witch hunt.
Samuel Sewall said to John Alden, “I am sorry for your sorrow and temptations by reason of your imprisonment. I am glad of your restoration.” These words, which Samuel recorded in his diary, are one of the earliest signs of his growing shame and remorse. In the coming years Samuel would often call at the Alden house by way of making restitution to someone he had harmed. On March 14, 1702, Samuel “happened to be there” when the eighty-year-old sea captain died.
In the autumn of 1692, as the judges, ministers, and governor of Massachusetts struggled to set their troubled land aright, most of the documents pertaining to the witch hunt were destroyed. Persons unknown contributed to this “suppression and destruction of the ordinary material of history,” the historian Charles Upham wrote. Unlike most colonial court records, which have been carefully preserved, the journal of the Court of Oyer and Terminer disappeared. The parish records for Salem Village contain a thorough accounting of every other period in the church’s history but no mention of witchcraft trials or executions. Upham believed that most participants in the witch hunt, except perhaps the victims and their families, wished to “obliterate the memory of the calamity.”
On October 26 the Governor’s Council called for a fast day so that, in Samuel’s words, the province “may be led in the right way as to the witchcrafts.” Two days later Samuel observed Chief Justice Stoughton pressure Governor Phips to restore the Court of Oyer and Terminer. “It must fall,” the governor replied. Phips was acutely aware of the continuing danger of King William’s War in Maine, where he and his
wife had family. Moreover, according to the historians Emerson Baker and John Reid, the witch hunt was especially “threatening to Phips and his authority because a significant number of those involved,” both accusers and accused, “were connected with his family or that of his wife, or were known to them through their former association with the Casco Bay region and adjoining settlements” in Maine. The safest course for the governor was to ensure public safety by working to create a court system for the province, as the new charter required. Still, the vote of the Governor’s Council to end the proceedings of the witchcraft court was close—thirty-three in favor, twenty-nine opposed.
Regarding the gradual nature of the shift in public opinion and public policy, the historian Richard Weisman wrote, “The Court of Oyer and Terminer was the first judicial commission in over thirty years to have acted decisively to protect villagers against malefic harm. And while some residents may have been troubled by the imprisonment of their more respectable neighbors, others were undoubtedly relieved to be spared further contact with persons whom they had suspected for years.” People like John Alden, Philip English, and Rebecca Nurse “did not ordinarily participate in witchcraft proceedings,…and it was largely through their efforts that the court was dismantled. But those of their neighbors who were less prosperous and who were forced to deal directly with reputed practitioners of malegic magic…had a different outlook. The Court of Oyer and Terminer was one of the very few official tribunals to have taken their suffering seriously. It is not so surprising, after all, that requests for legal protection [against witchcraft] continued well into November of 1692 and that, for some members of the village laity, the court was terminated before it had finished its work.”