The Enemy Within (16 page)

From Connecticut the witch-hunt trail swings north and east, to the communities surrounding Massachusetts Bay. An obscure case in Cambridge, possibly as early as 1647 or 1648, resulted in the execution of a certain Goodwife Kendall. Another proceeding, in 1648 against Margaret Jones of Charlestown, brought a similar outcome, this one more fully recorded. Jones had been acting as a fortune-teller and healer; perhaps she was a regular cunning woman. In any case, it was the details of her “practicing physic” that first aroused suspicion. “Her medicines . . . though [seemingly] harmless . . . had extraordinarily violent effects.” Moreover, she showed “such a malignant touch as many persons (men, women, and children) whom she stroked or touched with any affection or displeasure . . . were taken with deafness or vomiting or other pains or sickness.” When searched for the Devil's mark, she was found to have “an apparent teat in her secret parts.” And a witness to her nights in prison (while awaiting trial) noted the comings and goings of a “familiar” spirit in the shape of “a little child.”

In sum: four different towns, four suspects, four trials, four convictions, four executions—all within the short span of two years. To be sure, in Europe at the same time these numbers would not have seemed large. The Hopkins-Stearne witch “panic” had just recently concluded in the English countryside, where the total of those accused reached more than 300 (perhaps a third of whom were executed); many more cases would be prosecuted there during the 1650s. In southern Germany the craze rolled on unabated, with a toll in convictions and in lives too high for ready calculation. Still, given New England's infant state—two dozen towns and a few thousand people as of midcentury—four witch trials was considerable. And the pace would continue through the years that followed.

In 1651 Wethersfield tried and convicted two more of its inhabitants, a married couple named Carrington, for “having entertained familiarity with Satan, and by his help . . . done works above the course of nature.” Little else is known about this pair, and nothing at all about their trial. Around the same time there were slander cases in several communities (Watertown, Marblehead, and Springfield, Massachusetts; Windsor, Connecticut): lawsuits filed on behalf of women against neighbors who had defamed them by intimating, or openly charging, their involvement in witchcraft. (Example: “She said . . . that there were diverse strong lights seen of late in the meadow that were never seen before the widow Marshfield came to town.” And again: “it was publicly known that the Devil had followed her house in Windsor.”)

In 1652 a much more substantial and serious case took place in Springfield. As one correspondent would describe it for a London newspaper: “Sad frowns of the Lord are upon us in regard of fascinations [magic] and witchcrafts. . . . Four in Springfield were detected, whereof one was executed for murder of her own child, and was doubtless a witch, another is condemned, a third under trial, a fourth under suspicion.” The author of an early treatise on New England noted that the same little cabal had, “as is supposed, bewitched not a few persons, among whom [are] two of the reverend elder's children.” At the center of these events was another married couple, Hugh and Mary Parsons; it was Mary who had allegedly killed her infant son. And there was much else as well, all of it fully laid out in numerous depositions that have come down to the present. The list included mysterious “disappearances,” strange illness and injury, “threatening speeches” (especially by Hugh Parsons), and, perhaps most important, “fits” in several apparent victims. Mary seems to have admitted her guilt; her own testimony recounted startling details of “a night when I was with my husband and Goodwife Merrick and Bessie Sewell in Goodman Stebbins' lot. . . . We were sometimes like cats and sometimes in our own shape, and we were a-plotting for some good cheer. . . .” Her conviction, and execution, followed in due course. Hugh, though denying everything, was also convicted and condemned; however, the verdict was later reversed, and he fled to Rhode Island. The disposition of the other suspects is not recorded. But it seems clear enough that Springfield was convulsed for many months by this unfolding sequence; participants in the Parsons trial came from over half the town's households.

Taken as a whole, the 1650s would prove to be the single most active period for witchcraft prosecutions in New England (if the very large count from the Salem trials of 1692-93 is excluded as a kind of anomaly). The decade-long totals are: 27 separate trial proceedings with witchcraft at the center (including a few for slander), involving accusations against 35 different people, yielding 8 convictions and 7 executions. The towns represented were 22 in all—12 in Massachusetts, 7 in Connecticut, 2 in New Hampshire, and 1 in Maine. Only little Rhode Island escaped, perhaps because its culture was uniquely heterodox (an amalgam of religious sectarians and “freethinkers”).

Another striking case within this same subset occurred in Boston, in 1656. The defendant, Mrs. Ann Hibbens, was a person of unusually high social position; indeed, she stood right at the pinnacle of the local elite. Her husband, William Hibbens, was a merchant of substantial wealth; moreover, he was an admired and important civic leader, a magistrate and member of the Court of Assistants, the colony's highest governing body. Mrs. Hibbens doubtless shared in the prestige of her husband's position. However, her personal style and ways of acting would frequently bring her to grief. In 1640 she had engaged in a long and bitter dispute with a group of carpenters hired to refurbish her house; she accused them of overcharging and other “false dealing.” A resultant lawsuit in civil court went in her favor. But the manner in which she had pursued her case was so abrasive that the Boston church soon called her to account in a widely noticed ecclesiastical inquest. When she refused to apologize for her “very turbulent . . . actions” toward the carpenters, the church first admonished, then excommunicated her. Her husband pleaded on her behalf, yet also implicitly acknowledged her “uncharitable . . . and unChristian-like” behavior. Church authorities accused her of wronging him, too; as one of them put it, she had “against nature usurped authority over him [whom] . . . God hath set to be your guide.” And the congregation itself suffered “offense” when she “obstinately” resisted its efforts of censure. Thus were her original “miscarriages” in several ways compounded.

Apparently she experienced (or caused) still other difficulties with her fellow townspeople; a contemporaneous writing, William Hubbard's
A General History of New England
, mentions her widespread reputation for “natural crabbedness of temper.” And when her husband died in 1654, it was as if she had lost a protective shield. At this point, in Hubbard's words, “the
vox populi
went sore against her”; within months she was accused, and arraigned, as a witch. The details of her final trial have been lost, but we do know its outcome—conviction and a sentence of death by hanging.

At about the same time suspicion was aroused toward several people whose career as supposed witches would last for decades. Mary Parsons of Northampton, Massachusetts, was one such. Eunice Cole (Hampton, New Hampshire) was another; also Elizabeth Godman (New Haven, Connecticut), Jane James (Marblehead, Massachusetts), and John Godfrey (Andover, Massachusetts). These individuals fit a classic pattern, in which a reputation for practicing witchcraft might never be shaken off; hence, they were subject to repeated court prosecutions.

Godfrey's was an especially remarkable story. In one respect it was unusual; he was male. Within the relatively small subgroup of accused men, most were husbands of previously suspected women; theirs was a form of guilt by association. But Godfrey was unique in being unmarried; he had no wife nor, for that matter, any other identifiable kin. He had reached Massachusetts by or before 1642, and had almost immediately plunged into a blizzard of legal proceedings. Before he was through, he would set a new standard for litigiousness in a generally litigious society. Suits and countersuits piled up around him by the dozens: for debt, for breach of promise, for defamation, for “abusive carriages” and “contempt to authority,” among others. Often he appeared as the plaintiff—Godfrey versus, Godfrey going after, one or another of his neighbors—with more cases won than lost. However, he was also a frequent defendant, and the charges against him sometimes involved criminal conduct. He was accused of theft, of arson, of suborning witnesses, of physical assault. And he was accused, again and again, of practicing witchcraft. The testimonies generated by his nonstop legal involvement are large in quantity and consistent in quality. Taken together, they depict a man continually at odds with his peers over a host of quite specific, personal, and mundane affairs. They reflect, too, his typical manner: his roughness, his unpredictability, his “threats” and “provocations” and “rages.” In all this he directly epitomized the character New Englanders expected of their “witches”; he served, in effect, as an extreme example of a typical pattern.

It is notable, finally, that Godfrey remained in and around his Essex County home for more than three decades until his death in 1675. Five times he stood in court under formal indictment for witchcraft—which was, after all, a capital crime. And five times he (more or less narrowly) escaped conviction. At least once a jury declared him “suspiciously guilty of witchcraft, but not legally guilty according to law and [the] evidence we have received.” Put on notice again and again, he kept coming back for more. Why not move off, and try for a new start elsewhere? Why take the chance that sooner or later he might indeed be found “legally guilty,” and die as a consequence? The answer is elusive; but it seems that, at some level, his life and the lives of his Essex neighbors were forever locked together. Perhaps Godfrey's baleful presence served to focus a good deal of community distress, and even to explain a variety of personal (and social) misadventures. Meanwhile, he may himself have derived some covert gratification from his special notoriety as a “witch.” Thus he could not—or, at any rate, would not—go away.

Eunice Cole of Hampton was a female version of John Godfrey. She, too, was repeatedly accused and often prosecuted for witchcraft, but never convicted. She, too, was an uncommonly rough and abrasive presence, given to “unseemly speeches” and outright physical brawling. Her reputation, like Godfrey's, was widely known; indeed, it would long outlive her. Tales of her supposed witchcraft entered into local folklore; some were recounted (as one Hamptonite of the 19th century put it) “from generation to generation.” In 1938, on the 300th anniversary of the town's founding, its people took official action to reconcile with her: “Resolved, that we, the citizens of Hampton . . . believe that Eunice (Goody) Cole was unjustly accused of witchcraft . . . in the 17th century, and we do hereby restore . . . her rightful place as a citizen of this town.” Even today, children in Hampton know her name and reenact her supposed misdeeds, and shudder a bit when they pass near her old homesite.

Goodwife James, Goodwife Godman: their stories, too, were variations on the same theme. Suspicion that went on and on; occasional court trials; acquittals each time (but, in some cases, accompanied by a stern warning). Also: uninterrupted residence among the very people whose enmity and suspicion threatened their lives. With the passage of many years, such “witches” became fixtures of local culture, almost as familiar as Sabbath services and barn raisings.

The decade of the 1660s was nearly as prolific of witchcraft cases as the one preceding, with 25 trials all told, 32 people charged, 5 convictions, 4 executions, and 16 different towns represented. However, now a new element was added: the years 1662-64 brought New England's first experience of “panic witchcraft”—the sort that spreads and multiplies in contagious fashion, with one accusation feeding another and another and another. Its seat and source was Hartford, Connecticut. Its exact origins are obscure, but the “very strange fits” of a young woman in the town seem to have been central. As these developed, “her tongue was improved by a Demon to express things which she herself knew nothing of.” Strangely, too, her “discourse passed into a Dutch-tone,” and then revealed “mischievous designs . . . [by] such and such persons” against several neighbors.

“Such and such” included, first of all, a certain “lewd and ignorant woman . . . by the name of Greensmith,” who was already imprisoned “on suspicion for witchcraft.” (Those are the words of Boston's Reverend Increase Mather, writing about the Hartford trials some years later. Rebecca Greensmith appears, from other evidence, to have been a fairly ordinary New England goodwife, with no public record of lewdness or any similar misconduct.) In accordance with established procedures, the accused was examined by a group of magistrates and ministers, who gradually drew out of her an expansive confession. She described all sorts of “familiarity with the Devil . . . [including] carnal knowledge of her body,” and witch meetings “at a place not far from her house . . . [where] some appeared in one shape, and others in another; and one came flying amongst them in the shape of a crow.” Why did she admit to so much? Was she delusional? Had she yielded to intolerable social and legal pressures? (An apparent eyewitness to her interrogation described her feeling “as if her flesh had been pulled from her bones . . . and so [she] could not deny [her guilt] any longer.”) Her statements were more than enough to bring about her conviction and a sentence of death. Moreover, they directly implicated her husband, and he, too, was executed, “though he did not acknowledge himself guilty.”

With a victim whose Devil-fueled “discourse” had identified a variety of possible suspects, and a self-confessed witch whose statements did essentially the same, there was every reason to press for further inquiry. So now the net of accusation spread out across Hartford, and into neighboring towns such as Wethersfield and Farming-ton. The full sequence can no longer be recovered, but at least a few striking details are known. Suspicion fell on another couple, and a group of townspeople decided to try the notorious “ducking” test. Accordingly, both husband and wife “had their hands and feet tied, and were cast into the water.” When they appeared to float “after the manner of a buoy,” bystanders concluded that the Devil must be holding them up. The ministers, including Increase Mather, who reported on the use of this procedure, regarded it as ignorant superstition; perhaps they even tried to intervene. One way or another, the accused couple managed to escape; as Mather described it, “however doubting that a halter [i.e. for hanging] would choke them, though the water would not, they fairly took their flight, not having been seen in that part of the world since.” Among the additional suspects—about a dozen were prosecuted over a period of nearly three years—four were acquitted, six convicted, and at least two (plus the Greensmith pair) executed. It made for a total unmatched in any other single episode, until the Salem trials.