The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 13

Samuel Sewall dreamed: SS Diary, 1: 328.

Sewall children wept: Ibid., 145. Mary Rowlandson could not bear to be in the room with a corpse. On children and corpses, Michael MacDonald's highly original Mystical Bedlam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 76.

reordered affections and complicated successions: RFQC, 8: 355, 424, 430; "Autobiography of the Rev. John Barnard," 179.

"art, craft, and mystery": Mintz, Huck's Raft, 33.

"Binding out": See Katz and Murrin, Colonial America, 136; Stannard, "Death and the Puritan Child," 466; Thompson, "Adolescent Culture," 129. Some aspects of the indenture agreements had a familiar ring: The apprentice was to serve his master faithfully, keep his secrets, obey his lawful commandments. In turn, the master agreed to provide the apprentice with "sufficient meat, drink, apparel, lodging, and was.h.i.+ng." Those agreements were for seven years; diabolical ones were often said to last for six or eight.

"p.u.b.erty," it has been said: Adam Phillips, Going Sane (New York: Harper, 2007), 121. Demos notes, in A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford, 1999), 145, that a NE childhood was short-lived and that no seventeenth-century word existed for that period between p.u.b.erty and adulthood.

a full inventory of hara.s.sments: Beales, "In Search of the Historical Child," 398; Faber, "Puritan Criminals," 101; RFQC, 8: 103; RFQC, 2: 238.

"A married man": William E. Nelson, "The Persistence of Puritan Law: Ma.s.sachusetts, 16601760," Willamette Law Review (2013): 389.

"She is so fat": Cited in Alice Morse Earle, Customs and Fas.h.i.+ons in Old New England (New York: Scribner's, 1896), 101. See also Faber, "Puritan Criminals"; RFQC, 7: 419; Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS; Towner, "'A Fondness for Freedom,'" 208.

"for they would know not": E. T. Fisher, The Report of a French Protestant Refugee in Boston, 1687 (Boston, 1868), 21.

"this orphan plantation": Hull, Diaries, 130; Bowle, Diary of John Evelyn, 235. See Stout, New England Soul, 10530, on the insubordination of the 1690s. Richard S. Dunn is incisive on the settlers' attempts to retain their dignity while following orders, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962).

"disobedient, disobliging": Joshua Scottow, Old Men's Tears for Their Own Declensions (Boston: 1691), 12.

one of his servants had been stealing: RFQC, 7: 4450.

Ministers devoted sermons: Towner, "'A Fondness for Freedom,'" 2056; Cotton Mather, A Good Master Well Served (Boston, 1696), 5, 52.

"Pray sooth": From Sarah Knight's journal, in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 2: 434. For the best account of Puritan hooligans and practical jokers, Thompson, "Adolescent Culture," 13435. The ideal adolescent-deferential, disciplined, sober, and chaste-remained a mythical creature.

"exceedingly addicted": RFQC, 7: 4255.

"who were much given": Publications of the Colonial Society of Ma.s.sachusetts, vol. 22 (Boston: Colonial Society, 1920), 274.

"could not tell ink" and "upon her head": RFQC, 1: 390; RFQC, 4: 108. Koehler, Search for Power, is best on the misbehavior; also see Ulrich, Good Wives, 184202. A "fl.u.s.tered Cotton Mather": CM Diary, 1: 457. The "lousy s.l.u.t": RFQC, 2: 10. They landed in court with regularity: N.E.H. Hull, Female Felons: Women and Serious Crime in Colonial Ma.s.sachusetts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). They managed to suffocate: R, 25657, 372.

"has a better faculty": SS Diary, 1: 496. The biblical precedent: Cotton Mather, Small Offers, 30, 44. A group of Ipswich men pet.i.tioned: Winslow, Meetinghouse Hill, 128.

Cotton Mather said she did: With nine daughters on whom he doted, CM devoted a great deal of time to pondering women and their worth. They were no more evil or immoral than their male counterparts, though he could not help but note that they gossiped avidly and tended to be more lewd and vain. He knew however who filled his pews. Adapting Luther in A Good Master Well Served, 34, he preached that "the work of a poor milk maid, if it is done with an exercise of grace, is more glorious than the triumphs of Caesar."

the Holy Ghost: Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 41; "It amazes me": Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints, 228; "in a worse condition": Cited in Elizabeth Reis, d.a.m.ned Women: Sinners and Witches in Puritan New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 43. CM practically reveled in his depravity. As he explained: "By loathing of himself continually, and being very sensible of what are his own loathsome circ.u.mstances, a Christian does what is very pleasing to Heaven." Women blamed their souls: See Reis, d.a.m.ned Women, 12164, and Reis, "Confess or Deny? What's a 'Witch' to Do?," OAH Magazine of History (July 2003): 1113. She makes the fine point that in conversion narratives women tended to focus more on their vile nature while men cited drinking or gambling. For "ready to draw up," Peter Thacher diary, P-186, MHS. The non-eater, David Hall, ed., Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 131.

The captivity narrative: E-mail with David Hall, December 27, 2013; Alden T. Vaughan and Edward W. Clark, eds., Puritans Among the Indians: Accounts of Captivity and Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

kept a horse saddled: Harriet S. Tapley, Chronicles of Danvers (Danvers, MA: Danvers Historical Society, 1923), 28.

Dorcas h.o.a.r: R, 22527, 59394, for the hearing; R, 315, for stamping her feet. See also Barbara Ritter Dailey, "'Where Thieves Break Through and Steal': John Hale Versus Dorcas h.o.a.r," EIHC 128 (1992): 25569. The elf-lock is from Lawson, appendix to Christ's Fidelity, 112.

Susannah Martin: See Karlsen, The Devil, 8995; R, 22829, 256, 392, 426; RFQC, 4: 12935; Jesse Souweine, "Word of Mouth" (thesis, Cornell, 1996), 5362.

"No, I do not think": A number of suspects stopped short of diagnosing witchcraft. Wilmott Reed would say only that the afflicted "were in a sad condition"; R, 209, 344.

Sarah Bibber: R, 24243.

"or the other" to "If ever there were": SPN, 2023. CM would also evoke the Baxter pa.s.sage.

"Well, what will" to "take your prisoner": RFQC, 9: 4849.

grandson of a Cambridge-educated: On Burroughs, Gilbert Upton, The Devil and George Burroughs (London: Wordwright, 1997); Mary Beth Norton, "George Burroughs and the Girls from Casco: The Maine Roots of Salem Witchcraft," Maine History 40 (Winter 2001/2002): 25877; Edward E. Bourne, The History of Wells and Kennebunk (Portland: B. Thurston, 1875), 17178. GB appears to have preached for IM in 1675. On Burroughs and Church, see Francis Baylies, An Historical Memoir of the Colony of New Plymouth (Boston: Wiggin and Lunt, 1866), 7578. For the raids, Lincoln, Narratives of the Indian Wars, 21840; Benjamin Bullivant journal, Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 16 (1878), 1038. For the Casco 1690 raid, John Usher and Colonel Lidget correspondence, CO 5/855, nos. 100, 101, PRO.

"could after tedious": Usher to the Earl of Nottingham, October 20, 1692, John Usher Papers.

"It is taken": Roland L. Warren, Loyal Dissenter: The Life and Times of Robert Pike (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 167. As London heard it, Thomas Danforth informed the poor Maine settlers that if the Lord Jesus could not help them, he could not; Bullivant letter, April 11, 1690, CO 5/855, no. 103, PRO.

They were well armed: Josselyn, in Baker and Reid, New England Knight, 8.

"pillars of smoke" to "pluck you up": Burroughs letter of January 27, 1692, Ma.s.sachusetts Archives Collection, vol. 37, 259, Ma.s.sachusetts State Archives. See also Kences, "Some Unexplored Relations.h.i.+ps," 190.

"barbarously murdered": Captain Lloyd letter of January 27, 1692, Ma.s.sachusetts Archives Collection, vol. 38, 257, Ma.s.sachusetts State Archives.

encouraged the enemy: Andros Tracts, 1: 17678.

"no peace, order or safety": Bullivant letter, July 1690, CO 5/855, no. 103, PRO.

careful case against Burroughs: R, 241. The doc.u.mentation for the preliminary examination is scant. Some of the charges against Burroughs may have surfaced only at the August trial, though the hearing notes indicate that all the themes were touched upon in May. Trask points out that some testimony was rewritten; R, 47. On the back of his account, SP scrawled a series of scriptural pa.s.sages about purification.

"he was a very sharp": R, 24647.

"My G.o.d makes known": R, 532. The Sarah Burroughs divorce, Records of the Court of a.s.sistants of the Colony of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay (Boston, 1901), 3: 146.

"an amazing" to "cannot name it": R, 241.

"a very puny": CM in Burr, 219.

"None of us could do": R, 249.

George Jacobs hobbled: R, 25152. The location of the hearing is not clear. See Matti Rissanen, "Power and Changing Roles in Salem Witch Trials," Studia Neophilologica 84 (2012): 11929; Rissanen, "'Candy No Witch, Barbados'"; Rissanen, "Salem Witchcraft Papers as Evidence of Early American English," English Linguistics (2003): 84114. On the trespa.s.sing animals: RFQC, 5: 428.

another wizard nervously quipped: R, 288. It was John Willard.

"Hollowed be thy name": Calef in Burr, 347.

"I verily believe": R, 254 or 256 or 257; David L. Greene, "Salem Witches II: George Jacobs," American Genealogist 58 (April 1982): 6576.

Mary Warren, the Procter maid, waffled: R, 35657. Her tongue protruded from her mouth: R, 26869.

"altogether false" to "believe her": R, 355.

Salem farmer Bray Wilkins: R, 52728. Wilkins would live another decade, dying at ninety-two. The villagers complained that SP had recruited Mary Walcott and Abigail as visionaries; SP swore to an account Mercy Lewis had provided at a bedside as well, however. The idea that Willard balked at arrests originates with Upham.

"if he could": R, 28182, 295, 296, 297.

"What do you say" to "really believe it": R, 28688. On the proliferation of family in the Willard case, Rosenthal, Salem Story, 11819.

"suburb of h.e.l.l": Dunton, Dunton's Letters, 119. CM wrote down the impious household as the very suburb of h.e.l.l in his Batteries upon the Kingdom of the Devil (1695), 62. A man had "better live in a prison, in a dungeon, than in such a family!"

VI. A SUBURB OF h.e.l.l.

On the politics, Richard A. Johnson's very fine Adjustment to Empire (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981); Owen Stanwood, The Empire Reformed: English America in the Age of the Glorious Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); William Pencak, War, Politics, and Revolution in Provincial Ma.s.sachusetts (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981); Viola Florence Barnes, The Dominion of New England (New York: Ungar, 1960); Edward Randolph, Doc.u.ments and Letters. For excellent portraits of colonial administration, Gertrude Ann Jacobsen, William Blathwayt: A Late Seventeenth-Century English Administrator (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932), and Michael Hall, Edward Randolph and the American Colonies. Especially astute on the intercharter period-and the new, destabilizing role of the people in civic affairs-is Breen, Puritans and Adventurers, 81105. The coup served the Puritan orthodoxy well. It also introduced them to an empowered populace, many of whom expected to make their voices heard.

"h.e.l.l seems a great deal": Flannery O'Connor, A Prayer Journal (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 6.

What could not yet happen: While there is general agreement that Governor Dudley Bradstreet held off, there is no hard evidence that he did so. The delay certainly allowed allegations to acc.u.mulate. See Benjamin C. Ray, "The Salem Witch Mania," Journal of the American Academy of Religion (2010): 5.

"between government and no government": Calef in Burr, 349.

"Salem is one of the few": Arthur Miller, introduction, The Crucible (New York: Penguin, 1995), ix.

Boston's majestic harbor: For Boston, see Samuel Maverick, "Account of New England," Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 1 (1884), 23151; Josselyn, New-England's Rarities, 32; Fisher, Report of a French Protestant Refugee. For the lost cow: SS Diary, 1: 63; for hogs in the street: Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness, 56.

"shaken and shattered": Magnalia, 1: 183.

"thousand perplexities": CM, The Present State, 35.

The rugged forty-one-year-old: On the militiamen, Richard Trask interview, April 1, 2013. The best source on Phips is Baker and Reid's meticulously researched volume New England Knight. See also Viola F. Barnes, "The Rise of William Phips," New England Quarterly (July 1928): 27194, and Barnes, "Phippius Maximus," New England Quarterly (October 1928): 53253, from which come the Indian divers, and T. H. Breen, The Character of a Good Ruler (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974). For Keynes, see A Treatise on Money (London: Macmillan, 1930), vol. 2, 151. Philip F. Gura is excellent on CM's mythologizing of the governor; "Cotton Mather's Life of Phips," New England Quarterly 50 (September 1977): 44057. For the Golden Fleece comparison: SS Diary, 1: 172. The arrival: Jacob Melyen letter book, May 25, 1692, AAS.

"did not care a t.u.r.d": John Knepp journal, Egerton Ms. 2526, 5r, 9r, British Library.

"dropped from the machine": Magnalia, 1: 184.

"distressed, enfeebled": Cited in Silverman, Life and Times of Cotton Mather, 78. The charter was vacated on October 23, 1684; news that the colony no longer had one reached its governor on April 17, 1685. See Jacobsen, William Blathwayt, 128.

the delayed rite: Magnalia, 1: 165.

a clerk's art: Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 39.

"a shameful and cowardly": Cited in Baker and Reid, New England Knight, 113.

"poor people": Benjamin Bullivant letter, May 19, 1690, CO 5/855, no. 94, PRO.

"a knot of people": MP, appendix 8.

"alien incubus": Cited in Johnson, Adjustment to Empire, 93.

"an unthankful murmuring": IM, The Great Blessing of Primitive Counsellors (Boston, 1693), 1921.

"a people fit only": CM, Midnight Cry, 63.

"vultures and harpies" to "breaches in G.o.d's hedge": CM, Optanda, 7087. He recycled the "spit of reproach" from The Present State, 12.

One prominent New Englander: It was Elisha Cooke, far from alone in repudiating a doc.u.ment that reimposed royal authority.

"that the people": Nottingham to Blathwayt, Add. Ms. 37991, fol. 138r, British Library; IM to Nottingham, June 23, 1692, CO/5/571, no. 7, PRO.

"I found this province": Phips to William Blathwayt, October 12, 1692, R, 686.

Sweden's earlier scourge: That account, which reached NE via Glanvill, featured a more cla.s.sically configured Miltonian devil who played harp for the children and arranged for dancing, feasting, and s.e.x. See the English summary of Birgitta Lagerlf-Genetay, De Svenska Haxprocessernas Utbrottsskede 16681671 (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1990); Thomas Wright, Narratives of Sorcery and Magic (London: Bentley, 1851), 2: 24460. Wright notes that those elements derive from earlier French and German cases. Most of the visionaries were boys.

"with a remarkable smile": CM to Richards, May 31, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College.

"by reason of witchcrafts": IM, "The Autobiography of Increase Mather," May 14 entry, 344. The word "possession" does not turn up in the testimony until seventeen-year-old Margaret Jacobs used it in January 1693.

Carrier jostled a twelve-year-old: R, 51011. The disembodied voice: CM in Burr, 243.

round up the extended family of George Jacobs: Calef in Burr, 371. On Jacobs, Greene, "Salem Witches II."

nineteen different afflictions: The tally is Norton's, In the Devil's Snare, 174.

Mercy Lewis hovered near death: R, 31112, 624.

"enemy he had": R, 309.

"to sink that happy": WOW, 21.

Nathaniel Cary: R, 309311. Bernard Rosenthal suspects that Elizabeth Cary may actually have been Hannah, as Upham suggested in "Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather," The Historical Magazine, September 1869. That would make sense of several dating discrepancies-as would Rosenthal's theory that two Cary women, Elizabeth and Hannah, were accused; Rosenthal e-mail, May 21, 2015. For an earlier Cary suit, see Records of the Court of a.s.sistants, 1: 106. For the generous liquor allowances, Gildrie, "Taverns and Popular Culture," 178. For t.i.tuba and John's presumed marriage, Rosenthal, "t.i.tuba," 48.

the touch test: Brattle in Burr, 171; R, 34; Lawson, appendix to Christ's Fidelity, 102.

"to sit in the stocks": Cited in Adam Jay Hirsch, The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishments in Early America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 34. See also Alice Morse Earle, Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (New York: Book League of America, 1929), 30.

facility announced itself: Randolph to Robert Chaplin, October 28, 1689, CO 5/855, no. 46, PRO; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 299; R, 311; RFQC, 8: 33557; Perley, History of Salem, vol. 3, 241. For the prison visit, Calef in Burr, 25960. The released prisoners: RFQC, 7: 243.

"the fierceness": Dunton, Dunton's Letters, 120. The rain in the cell: Randolph to Robert Chaplin, October 28, 1689, CO 5/855, no. 103, PRO.

"a noisome place": RFQC, 2: 227; "almost poisoned": RFQC 8, 335. The s.h.i.+p captain who had jailed the sailor came regularly to rail at him at the top of his lungs. Fourteen weeks in a freezing, fetid prison was bad enough, the youngster complained. Did he really have to hear his father denounced in the street outside as "an Anabaptistical quaking rogue" in league with the devil?

William Dounton: Esther I. Wik, "The Jailkeeper at Salem in 1692," EIHC 111 (1975): 22127; RFQC, 8: 31. Many suspects made the tour of prisons. Sarah Wilds, the constable's mother, spent April in Salem, to be removed for two months to Boston and afterward confined at Ipswich, before being moved again to Salem. The family was responsible for the costs of those guarded trips. Dounton was the official who met with a warming pan when collecting the minister's salary. He himself had attacked a fellow Salemite who resented his many appointments and opposed his nomination to yet another. It was probably no coincidence that he was relieved of the post shortly after the trials.

Phips established a special court: R, 322. A quorum of five would suffice, stipulated the order, so long as Stoughton, Richards, or Gedney was present.

One Scotswoman preferred to burn: MacKay, The Witch Mania, 505. See Thompson, Cambridge Cameos, 96, for the puddle-drinking.