The Enemy Within (25 page)

Phips arrived in Boston from England in the tense days of mid-May, with the jails already full of the accused and further charges emerging nearly every day. It was up to him, with the assistance of his councillors, to craft legal machinery for resolving the crisis. Their choice was a “Commission of Oyer and Terminer” (a term borrowed from French legal parlance, meaning “to hear and determine”). Nine judges were appointed to sit on this special court; at its head was the new lieutenant governor, a famously stern and uncompromising lawmaker named William Stoughton. (One of the others was Boston merchant Samuel Sewall, whose diary would provide a lasting—and very personal—commentary on key courtroom events.) While these preparations went forward, witnesses and confessors were asked to confirm their previous testimonies. Further accusations were added to the original list, and several of the core accusers underwent a fresh round of affliction.

With the empaneling of a jury at month's end, all was in readiness for the first full-fledged trial. The setting was an upstairs courtroom in the Salem Town House. The proceedings opened at midmorning on June 2, in an atmosphere of the keenest possible anticipation. The lead-off defendant, chosen because the evidence against her seemed especially broad and damning, was Bridget Bishop of Salem Town. Unfortunately, the official records of this and succeeding trials have not survived, but important details are known through subsequent writings. Typically, the proceedings began with an appearance by several of the afflicted, whose “torments” might now be reenacted for the benefit of both judges and jurors. Next came the confessors, primed to reconfirm their crucially important accounts of spectral collaboration with the accused. The final part of the prosecution's agenda involved the calling of witnesses attesting to various
maleficia
in years past. All in all, it made for a tight and potentially unanswerable case.

The trial of Goody Bishop included each of these elements. The afflicted accusers thrashed about in anguish, all the while complaining that “the shape of the prisoner did oftentimes grievously pinch them, choke them, bite them.” The confessor Deliverance Hobbs described Bishop's participation in “a general meeting of the witches, in a field at Salem Village,” an event that had featured “a diabolical sacrament in bread and wine.” No fewer than ten neighbors and acquaintances recalled past misfortunes—illnesses in people and cows, accidents, disappearances—following quarrels with the defendant, some dating back nearly two decades. There were some additional flourishes, too: the supposed discovery in her cellar of “poppets,” and a report by a court-appointed committee about “preternatural excrescences” (witch marks) appearing on her body. Cotton Mather would comment later that her guilt was “evident and notorious to all beholders.” In very short order, the jury brought in its verdict—guilty as charged—and the magistrates pronounced sentence. A week later, she was hanged.

Bishop's trial was followed by the first real pause in the pace of the witch-hunt. Over the next several weeks, spectral sightings, afflictions, and accusations became much less frequent (though they did not cease entirely). Perhaps the elimination of an important suspect brought a sense of relief, a generalized lowering of tension; or perhaps some participants were sobered by the high stakes of what they were about. Indeed, it was now that an initial round of doubts and questions began to rise, however tentatively, toward the surface of public consciousness.

In mid-June the governor and his Council asked members of the clergy for their opinions about the proceedings to date. (This in itself implied the beginnings of doubt.) The result was a long, carefully worded, and manifestly ambivalent document entitled “The Return of Several Ministers.” On the one hand, the ministers praised the court's “exemplary piety and . . . agony of soul . . . [in seeking] the direction of Heaven.” On the other, they raised some troubling questions about the “principles” behind the actual conduct of the trials. They seemed especially concerned that persons “of an unblemished reputation” were becoming ensnared by the witch-hunt; in such cases, they affirmed, “a very critical and exquisite caution” must be exercised. But their most pointed and difficult question—one that would loom increasingly large in the weeks to come—was about the reliability of spectral evidence. Chief Justice Stoughton (like many others) believed that God would not allow the Devil to represent innocent people as specters; hence, wherever and whenever such representation occurred, guilt was certain. But the ministers demurred, declaring it “an undoubted and a notorious thing that a demon may, by God's permission, appear in the shape of an innocent, yea, and a virtuous, man.” To take such a position was to challenge a vital weapon in the hands of the prosecution.

And there was more. At around the same time another minister (not involved in the “return”) gathered signatures on a pair of petitions to the colony's legislative assembly. These, too, noted the way “persons of good fame and unspotted reputation” had come under suspicion. And these, too, construed “bare specter testimony” as liable to mean “that the innocent will be condemned.” A third line of opposition emerged in the struggle of the Nurse family to defend its own Rebecca; there the main strategy was to attack the credibility of the foremost accusers.

But the thrust of these convergent efforts was decisively—if temporarily—turned back. The Court of Oyer and Terminer simply ignored the questions put forward in the ministers' “return.” The two petitions meant for the assembly were officially condemned as being “scandalous and seditious”; their chief author was rebuked and put on notice against further attempts of the same sort. And the trial of Rebecca Nurse proceeded as before. The time for wholesale reconsideration and regret would come, but not yet.

On June 28 the court met for its second full session; there would be five separate trials this time. The defendants, in order of their appearance, were: Sarah Good (one of the three initial suspects at Salem Village), Susanna Martin (Amesbury), Rebecca Nurse (Salem Village), Elizabeth Howe (Topsfield), and Sarah Wilds (also Topsfield). All were convicted, on the usual mix of evidence—“torments” in the core accusers, charges by one or more confessors, testimony about past
maleficia.
All were condemned to die. Moreover, hearings were conducted and indictments handed down for four additional suspects, and new examinations begun with several more. A few days later a Dutchman temporarily living in Boston wrote to a friend in New York, describing at length the panicked atmosphere that now prevailed “throughout the countryside.” He particularly lamented “the gullibility of the magistrates” in allowing “trivial circumstances to be taken as substantially true and convincing testimony against the accused.” The root of it all, he felt, was nothing more or less than “superstition and mistakes.”

But his was a lone voice, impossible to hear amidst the rising gale of accusation. On July 12, two weeks after their trial, the court issued death warrants for the five women most recently convicted; a week later they were hanged. This was the first of several multiple executions—and it produced a tumultuous scene. There was the usual procession to Gallows Hill, where crowds of onlookers jostled for position. Clergy were present as well, hoping to extract last-minute confessions. When Reverend Nicholas Noyes, minister of the church in Salem Town, pressed that idea on Sarah Good, it brought a scathing—and unforgettable—retort. “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard,” she shot back, “and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.”
God will give you blood to drink:
soon there would be enough to gag on.

After another brief pause, the trials moved into their truly climactic phase. The entire crisis has been associated ever since with Salem, its undoubted source point. But it also encompassed many of the neighboring Essex County communities, and now it made its most far-reaching impact, on the town of Andover. There, throughout the summer months, a constable's wife named Elizabeth Ballard lay ill from mysterious causes. In due course, the possibility of witchcraft was raised, and two of the young accusers from Salem (probably Mercy Lewis and Elizabeth Hubbard) were invited in “to tell what it was that did afflict her.” (The source of this information is a letter from a Boston merchant, written some months after the fact. The same man would also comment that “poor Andover does now rue the day that ever the said afflicted went among them.”)

After a half-day's journey by carriage through the intervening countryside, the witch-finders reached Andover and began their work on July 14. They directed suspicion toward three women in a single family: an elderly widow named Ann Foster, her married daughter, and her teenage granddaughter. Under harsh questioning, the widow confessed, the others followed suit shortly thereafter. Then, together, the three of them spun out a vast web of incriminating testimony. Once again the primary focus was spectral activity with other witches. Their accounts overflowed with lurid details: of large witch conclaves (“near a hundred in company”); of encounters with Satan, appearing sometimes “in the shape of a horse” or as “a black man . . . [with] a high-crowned hat,” and always exhorting them “to make more witches if we can”; of making and using “poppets”; of traveling about “above the trees . . . upon a pole”; of hearing a kind of roll call of “77 witches' names”; of watching their confederates suckle “imps”; of child-murders, and magical swords, and the infamous “red book,” and extravagant talk of “throwing down the kingdom of Christ, and setting up the Devil on his throne.” It went on and on, prompted at every turn by eager questions from behind the magistrates' bench.

Meanwhile, in Salem, the Court of Oyer and Terminer was preparing to hold its third session; begun on August 2, and lasting four days, this one would yield five more convictions. The most important—not to say sensational—of the new trials was that of Reverend Burroughs, by now considered “the head and ringleader of all the supposed witches in the land.” Burroughs went into the dock on August 5 before “a vast concourse of people”; the latter included clergy from several neighboring towns and, quite likely, Governor Phips himself. According to subsequent accounts, “about thirty testimonies were brought in against him.” There were the usual “actings” of the afflicted girls, with special emphasis on injury from “biting.” (Their bodies appeared to show imprinted wounds exactly corresponding to Burroughs's teeth, “which could be distinguished from those of other men.”) There were spectral sightings of the “ghosts” of his deceased victims, some of whom “looked red, as if the blood would fly out of their faces with indignation at him.” There were new accounts of his “preternatural strength”; though of small stature—one witness called him “puny”—he had performed such “extraordinary lifting” and other feats “as could not be done without a diabolical assistance.” Finally, there were lengthy reports of his central role at the numerous witch gatherings: of his preaching the Devil's message and administering a kind of inverted “sacrament.” (He was even said to own a “diabolical trumpet” useful in summoning his “horrible crew” of followers to action.)

Once again warrants of execution followed conclusion of the trials within a scant few days. Thus, on August 19, this latest group of convicts made their own final journey up Gallows Hill. But the scene that unfolded then was quite different from the one of a month before. From the same platform where Sarah Good had cursed her persecutors so bitterly, Burroughs made a dignified speech “for the clearing of his innocency” that won “the admiration of all present”; his concluding prayer “drew tears from many.” Others among the condemned explicitly “forgave their accusers” and cast no blame on the judges and jurymen; they wished only that theirs “might be the last innocent blood shed on that account.” All this proved “very affecting and melting to the hearts of . . . spectators.” As Burroughs finished speaking and was about to be “turned off” (hanged), some in the crowd seemed of a mind to “hinder the execution.” But at that critical moment, Reverend Cotton Mather, watching from astride his horse, spoke out “to possess the people of his guilt, and saying that the Devil had often been transformed into an angel of light.” This did “somewhat appease” their doubts, and the proceedings reverted to plan. Burroughs's corpse was then dragged off “by the halter,” and stuffed into “a hole . . . between the rocks . . . [with] one of his hands and his chin . . . left uncovered.” Even in death, a witch deserved the utmost ignominy.

With this latest batch of executions behind them, the magistrates could turn their full attention toward Andover, where afflictions, accusations, and confessions were fast piling up. Fits of the familiar sort had begun in several local girls; these led on to official complaints. Examinations followed, with many, if not most, of the accused apparently ready to confess their guilt. Presumably, it was clear by now that straightforward denials availed little against the rush to prosecute, whereas cooperation might at least gain the advantage of delay. Indeed, some of those examined, having once confessed, would subsequently join the ranks of the afflicted to accuse still other suspects. Moreover, community pressure wore down any lingering impulse to resist; confessors would later recount how they had been “urged and affrighted” into saying “anything that was desired.” The Andover cases, unlike the rest, set close kin against one another—a child accusing a parent, a brother condemning a sister, a husband suspecting a wife. It was as if all protective human structures—village, neighborhood, and family itself—had caved in under the weight of raw panic.

By late August, some 40 Andover residents had been examined and charged, while dozens more lay “under suspicion.” Then came a turning point—for Andover, for the trial process, for this entire history. Its exact nature is obscure (since the surviving records grow vague just here). But apparently, the magistrates ordered some version of a touch test, with several of the leading suspects put in blindfold and obliged to lay hands on one or another of the accusers—thus to relieve their “torments.” Did the procedure somehow miss its mark? Did the accusers respond in ways not anticipated—become confused, try to change course, fall into dispute? Did they then retreat into renewed affliction? We can only imagine, for the records are silent. (Did the record-
keepers
feel chagrined, or embarrassed, by what they had witnessed? And were they, as a result, wont to omit crucial details?) What we know for certain is that the Andover magistrates declined thereafter to order additional arrests. For this, one of them was himself accused as a witch and obliged to flee the town.