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Authors: John Demos

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Their line of descent begins with John Putnam Sr. (born 1579), an emigrant to Massachusetts from the English countryside just west of London. In 1641 this man received a handsome land grant of 100 acres in what would later become Salem Village. Over the next two decades he prospered impressively, accumulating property totaling approximately 800 acres by the time of his death in 1662. Moreover, he was in a position to assist his sons, Thomas (born 1615), Nathaniel (born 1619), and John Jr. (born 1627) in reaching the same local pinnacle of wealth and prestige. All three became major property holders, church members, and officeholders. Their lands comprised a considerable portion of Salem's northwest interior, with some overlapping into the adjacent towns of Topsfield and Rowley. (It was in this border area that various Putnams engaged in repeated legal battles with neighbors and abutters, most especially several from Rebecca Nurse's natal family, the Townes, and also somewhat later including her husband, Francis.) For the most part, they made their living as farmers. At least once they did seek to branch out in a more commercial direction, by joining in the construction of an ironworks on Putnam-owned land in Rowley. However, this venture ended in failure, with little iron ever produced or sold, numerous lawsuits among the partners and operators, and, finally, a disastrous fire (quite possibly arson).
As the second generation of Putnams gave way to the third, the family's situation began to look less favorable. By now, their abundant landholdings had been repeatedly subdivided from three main initial parcels into what would eventually become eleven, in order to meet the needs of maturing sons. Among the most conspicuous victims of this process was Thomas Putnam Jr., whose father had long rated as the single largest property holder in the entire Village. To be sure, in 1678 Thomas Jr. made an apparently fortunate marriage to Ann, the daughter of George Carr, a well-to-do shipwright, merchant, and locally prominent resident in the neighboring town of Salisbury. At this point his future must still have looked bright—resting, as it clearly did, on the prospect of substantial inheritance from the estates of his father and father-in-law. However, on both counts he would soon be badly disappointed. When George Carr died intestate in 1682, his administrators assigned the bulk of his property to his widow and two youngest sons. His other sons and his sons-in-law (including Thomas Putnam Jr.) challenged these arrangements in court, eventually winning at least partial redress. Much worse was what followed on the paternal side. Thomas Putnam Sr., upon the death of his first wife, had remarried; this woman bore him one more child, a son, to add to the eight he had previously raised. And upon
his
death in 1686, the widow and this final son became his prime beneficiaries. Once again, Thomas Jr. was caught short. And, once again, he ( joined by several of his siblings) went to court—but this time without success.
This third generation of the family was, in sum, set on a markedly downward course of steadily diminishing wealth and influence. It seems striking, in retrospect, that most of Thomas Jr.'s children would leave Salem when grown, never to return (except for three daughters who remained as spinsters). In effect, his family simply disappeared and left no lasting mark on the place for later generations to remember. No mark, that is, unless one counts the devastating result of its role in the witch trials: for the two Ann Putnams, Sr. and Jr., whose charges weighed so heavily against Rebecca Nurse (and others) were Thomas Jr.'s wife and daughter.
 
Soon after the shocking events of Rebecca's March 24 “examination,” her many friends and supporters move to create a line of defense around her. Thirty-nine of them put their names on a petition in her behalf: “We can testify that we have known her for many years, and according to our observation her life and conversation [personal conduct] was according to her profession [as a church member], and we never had any cause or grounds to suspect her of any such thing as she is now accused of.” In addition, several give evidence disputing the specific charges of “injury” lodged against her.
But her accusers press on. According to testimonies given later, those in the core group continue to experience periodic bouts of affliction. Specific occasions include: March 25 (Ann Putnam Jr.); April 13 (Abigail Williams); May 2, 3, and 4 (Mary Walcott, Mercy Lewis, and Abigail Williams); May 29 (Abigail Williams); May 31 and June 1 (Ann Putnam Sr., described now as being “re-assaulted” at the exact moment her previous deposition is read aloud in court). Moreover, the accusations are broadened to include various recent deaths directly attributed to Rebecca's witchcraft. A neighbor had clashed with her because his “pigs got into her field,” upon which she “fell a-railing at him”; soon afterward, he became “strangely ill” and died. An infant child (in one of the Putnam family branches) had died around the time of Rebecca's examination, after being “taken with strange and violent
fits.” An older man had been killed in a roadside accident; supposedly his ghost was later observed in angry dispute with Rebecca, saying “she did murder him by pushing him off the cart, and struck the breath out of his body.” Finally, Ann Putnam Sr. reports seeing the ghosts of no fewer than “six children in winding sheets which called me aunt . . . and told me that they were my sister Baker's children of Boston, and that Goody Nurse [along with two other accused witches] had murdered them.”
All such evidence is destined for use in a formal trial proceeding. Another part of the legal preparation is a careful examination of the defendant's body. Accordingly, she is strip-searched by a committee of local women, who proceed to identify a “supernatural mark” in her genitalia. Rebecca tries to counter this result by mentioning “difficult exigencies that hath befallen me in the time of my travails”—an allusion to physical anomalies caused by childbearing—but her claim is not heard. Meanwhile, from the other side, her kin and supporters mount new efforts to defend her by challenging the credibility of several of her leading accusers.
On June 2, the special court created for the express purpose of trying witches holds a grand jury hearing on Rebecca (and several others). The result is a set of official indictments, charging that “she . . . hath used . . . detestable arts called witchcraft and sorceries” by means of which her numerous victims have been “hurt, tortured, afflicted, consumed, pined, wasted, and tormented.” The climax comes on June 29, when the court meets again and the evidence is presented to a sitting jury. Unfortunately, records of this final stage have not survived—except for the outcome. The initial verdict is not guilty. Rebecca is cleared of all charges; evidently the pleas of her supporters have proved persuasive. But almost immediately her accusers respond with a “hideous outcry”—that is, a renewal of their fits—and the trial judges themselves feel “strangely surprised.”
Now comes a crucial turning point. The chief judge calls attention to a previous comment by Rebecca that some have construed as implying a link with two confessed witches; supposedly she said they were “of our company.” This prompts the jurymen to ask that Rebecca clarify her meaning. But instead of explaining herself, she sits in a kind of daze, making no reply; her silence seems implicitly damning. Later she will say of the same moment: “Being somewhat hard of hearing, and full of grief, [and] none informing me of how the Court took up my words . . . [I] therefore had not opportunity to declare what I intended when I said they [the confessors] were of our company.” Elderly, deaf, distraught, confused, cornered: thus her fatal predicament.
The jurors go out again, and decide to reverse their previous decision. Now they find the defendant guilty, and the judges condemn her to death by hanging. Even so some in Rebecca's family continue their struggle; apparently at their urging, the colony‘s governor, Sir William Phips, orders a reprieve. But once more the afflicted raise “dismal outcries,” and Phips, too, reverses himself; the previous sentence will stand.
There are still some loose ends to tie up. A few days after her trial, Rebecca—presumably in chains and leg-irons by now—is brought from prison to a meeting of her church. There the elders propose, and the congregation concurs “by a unanimous vote, . . . that our sister Nurse, being a convicted witch . . . and condemned to die, should be excommunicated”; their purpose is to free themselves from the stain of her sin and to proclaim her everlasting damnation in the afterworld. There will be no further efforts to save her; perhaps there is nothing left to try. Three weeks later her life ends on the spot that later generations in Salem will call Gallows Hill. Those same generations will preserve a “tradition” that she died in a prayerful manner, asking God, from the scaffold, to forgive her accusers for the wrong they had done her.
According to the same tradition, the members of her defiantly loyal family add a postscript of their own. On the night following her execution, under cover of darkness, some of them climb the hill and retrieve her body from the “crevice” in which it had been rudely cast down. They bring Rebecca back for a proper burial in a little family cemetery not far from their—and her—home.
 
Her home still stands. The cemetery is still there. Gallows Hill still rises, above the modern town center.
And now an author's postscript.
July 21, 2005. We are looking for Rebecca's ghost this morning. Or at least some kind of aura. Something to connect with her. Something different from—and deeper, more direct, more personal than—all we've found on the yellowing page. Words take us only so far.
Her house seems the right place to start. We approach it from in front; its south exposure opens onto a long expanse of fields, wavy and green in midsummer, with a woodland behind, and the haze of a distant shoreline. The modern town is mostly invisible from here; thus the view may well resemble what she would have seen many a time.
We enter through the old battened door—once her door—into a little vestibule. A right turn takes us into the “keeping room”: the central household space and, most assuredly, hers. The furnishings—not hers, but of the same period, and roughly equivalent to what she would have had—suggest a traditional “goodwife's” round of domestic chores: wheels for spinning, vats for brewing, buckets for churning, molds for candle making. Of course, the most important of all the activities performed here was cooking, the myriad small and delicate operations which together comprised food preparation in pre-modern times. A huge fireplace, 10 feet across, strongly evokes that part of her life, with its densely arrayed cranes, broilers, and cookpots, and two cavernous bake ovens recessed in the old bricks at the rear. There are chairs, too, and benches, and a fair-size table. Was it perhaps in this room that she received the four friends sent to report her being “cried out” by the afflicted girls?
We return to the vestibule, and climb a tight little stairway to the upper floor. This is her “chamber” (bedroom); its contents include another fireplace, a few chairs (including one purportedly made by her son Samuel), a sprawling “trundle bed” (with its retractable frame, designed for use by young children), and not much more. Was it from here that the town marshal dragged her away on the morning of her pretrial examination?
The cemetery lies in a little glen about 200 yards west of the house. Ringed with tall pines, it feels almost sublimely calm, secluded, beautiful. Her grave-marker has not survived. (We must assume she had one.) Other Nurse family headstones are scattered here and there, but none from before the time of the American Revolution. In the center of this verdant plot stands
an eight-foot granite shaft. On one side is inscribed her name, the place and year of her birth and death, and some rather florid verse by the celebrated 19th-century poet John Greenleaf Whittier; on the other side, the bitter truth of her last days:
 
Reportedly, 600 people attended the ceremony held to mark its dedication.
 
Accused of witchcraft
She declared,
“I am innocent and God will
clear my innocency.”
Once acquitted yet falsely
condemned, she suffered
death, July 19, 1692.
In loving memory of her Christian character
Even then truly attested by forty of her neighbors
This monument is erected in 1885.
Gallows Hill stands roughly four miles to the south of the Nurse homestead, on the other side of the line that once separated Salem Village (now the town of Danvers) from the Town center (now the city of Salem). It is at present a densely populated, fully urbanized space, with industrial buildings and warehouses ringing its base, residential neighborhoods along its sides, and a good-size park on its upper slope. Because the landscape is so utterly changed, we must strain to imagine what Rebecca saw as she approached it—pulled along in an executioner's cart—more than three centuries ago.
Her journey would have begun in the original town prison (long since disappeared) just off the common. From there she would have been taken down Prison Lane (today's St. Peter's Street), west along Main Street (now Essex Street), out the old Boston Road, across Town Bridge (over an inlet, now gone, below the North River), onto a path that turned sharply to cross the lower section of what was known as the Great Pasture, through little groves of pines and hemlocks, and up the fateful hill.
So far, we can follow at least the approximate route today. But then it
becomes more difficult. Where, exactly, did she perish? In what part of this rather jumbled expanse would they have erected their gallows? The question has intrigued and perplexed students of Salem history for many generations. Recently something of a consensus has emerged: the site seems not to have crowned the hill at its very top (as previously thought) but to have been instead a cluster of rocky ledges partway up (between the present-day Proctor and Pope streets).

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