The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 14

Civic leaders produced civic leaders: Kenneth A. Lockridge and Alan Kreider, "The Evolution of Ma.s.sachusetts Town Government," William and Mary Quarterly 23 (October 1966): 566; Gildrie, "Salem Society," 199. Samuel Sewall would be elected to the Ma.s.sachusetts council thirty-three times.

"people of the best": Phips to the privy council, October 12, 1692, R, 686. On the Salem justices, Benjamin C. Ray, "Satan's War Against the Covenant in Salem Village, 1692," New England Quarterly 80 (March 2007): 72. As Baker points out in A Storm of Witchcraft, 180, Sergeant alone was not a substantial landowner. At least several of the same men presided over the Goodwin case; Norton, In the Devil's Snare, 382n; e-mail with Elizabeth Bouvier, May 5, 2015.

"all the councilors": CM Diary, 1: 148.

John Alden: Kences, "Some Unexplored Relations.h.i.+ps," 191; Hull, Diaries, 159. Interview with Richard Johnson, August 20, 2014; Louise Breen, Transgressing the Bounds, 197208.

"honest and lawful": R, 332. For their experience, Langbein, "The Criminal Trial," 27677.

the Alden interrogation: R, 334. Norton, In the Devil's Snare, provides the estimate of the frontier trips, 186. For Alden and the munitions, Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft, 14445. Alden in 1690 requisitioned Marblehead's cannon, leaving the town vulnerable. For the instructions with the "bears and wolves," Robinson, The Devil Discovered, 38. On Alden see also Louise Breen, Transgressing the Bounds, 199206.

"They will dissemble" to "you will not believe": R, 33536.

"she should be Queen": CM in Burr, 244.

"Staring in people's faces": R, 334.

"had always looked" to "these say of me": R, 334; similarly, Brattle in Burr, 170. For Alden and the Indian captives, Magnalia, 2: 360.

"I have beheld": R, 348.

It was not unusual: Oberholzer, Delinquent Saints, 21516; Haskins, Law and Authority, 61. Nor was it surprising that Richards should do so. Along with Gedney and Stoughton, he had served on the court that presided over the Elizabeth Morse witchcraft case eleven years earlier. She was found guilty; reprieved; retried; reprieved a second time. There was cause for confusion.

Willard affirmed: Samuel Sewall, notes on sermons, May 29 entry, Ms. N-905, MHS; Mark Peterson, "'Ordinary Preaching,'" EIHC 129 (1992): 9598.

"murmuring frenzies" to "lisping witches": CM to Richards, May 31, 1692, Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. Already the colonists marked the date of the November 5, 1605, Gunpowder Plot. It would give way in the eighteenth century to effigies of the pope and the devil being paraded around Boston and torched. Richards was not the first to confer with CM about Salem; there is evidence that Lawson already had and unmistakable hints that SP had, too.

Henry IV: Fox, Science and Justice, 80.

consulted precedent in witchcraft cases: Hale in Burr, 41516.

"If there were a witch": Calef in Burr, 383.

A school occupied: For courtroom geography and process, see Trask on legal procedures, R, 4463; Martha J. McNamara, "In the Face of the Court" Winterthur Portfolio 36 (Summer 2001): 12539; William D. Northend, "Address Before the Ess.e.x Bar a.s.sociation," EIHC 22 (1885): 276; interview with Richard Trask, January 21, 2015; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014. Generally on the courtroom att.i.tudes and procedures: Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial; Langbein, "The Criminal Trial"; Beattie, Crime and the Courts; Edgar J. McMa.n.u.s, Law and Liberty in Early New England: Criminal Justice and Due Process (Amherst: University of Ma.s.sachusetts Press, 1993); Murrin, "Magistrates, Sinners, and a Precarious Liberty: Trial by Jury in Seventeenth-Century New England," in Hall, Saints and Revolutionaries, 152206. Interviews with John Murrin, December 11, 2014, and Richard Trask, November 29, 2012.

"that according to your best": R, 356.

"hurt, tortured, afflicted": R, 334.

witch's teats: Louis J. Kern, "Eros, the Devil, and the Cunning Woman," EIHC 129 (1993): 20, 31. Koehler, Search for Power, 8485, notes that the language of female genitalia is altogether missing from Puritan literature. A panel of Connecticut women: G.o.dbeer, Escaping Salem, 95. The woman at the gallows: Hall, Witch-Hunting, 79.

The heart that pa.s.ses for a stomach: Watson, Angelical Conjunction, 141. On the literature of witch's marks, see Pavlac, Witch Hunts. Rosenthal, Salem Story, 77, thinks at least some of the women who examined the six suspects refused to sign anything, knowing what was at stake.

A Quaker woman: Thomas Maule, Truth Held Forth and Maintained (Boston, 1695), 214.

"a preternatural excrescence": R, 362.

William Stoughton called: Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 332; Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 308; RFQC, 4: 153; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014. CM on the trial, Burr, 22329.

honest attorneys: Randolph to Povey, January 24, 1687, in Thomas Hutchinson, A Collection of Original Papers Relative to the History of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay (Boston: Thomas and John Fleet, 1769), 557.

caused an apple to fly: R, 367; the son of the miller: R, 331.

"smooth, flattering": R, 369.

"You devil" to "me and you": R, 368.

"answer was thought": Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven (Hartford, CT: Case, Tiffany, 1857), 260.

Bishop's trial proceeded smoothly and swiftly: Langbein, "The Criminal Trial," 28285; Northend, "Address Before the Ess.e.x Bar a.s.sociation," 258; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 29, 2014.

"There was little": CM in Burr, 223.

A seventeenth-century magistrate: Brattle in Burr, 187. See R, 35; even Bernard rejected spectral evidence as a basis for conviction. It would be used in England in 1690 and 1695 but-largely discredited-did not secure convictions.

"on diverse other days": R, 394.

Bishop appears to have been confused: Rosenthal, Salem Story, 7281.

Nurse could account: R, 41314.

"detestable arts": R, 366. The wording was standard.

Ann Dolliver: R, 390. For Dolliver's husband leaving Ma.s.sachusetts, John J. Babson, History of the Town of Gloucester (Gloucester, MA: Procter Brothers, 1860), 81.

"crazed in her understanding": John Higginson Sr. to his son, August 31, 1692, Higginson Family Papers.

"Not with intent": R. 390.

"soft words but hard": Dunton, Dunton's Letters, 255. For Higginson on drinking, see his letter to the court, June 25, 1678, in EIHC 43 (1907): 180. It was probably he who warned the Salem villagers in 1687, when they were at odds over Lawson, "If you will unreasonably trouble yourselves, we pray you not any further to trouble us." The angry, obstinate Baptists: Hull, Diaries, 226.

"under the infirmities": Higginson in Burr, 401.

"and there cause her": R, 394. On the uncommonly severe phrasing, e-mail with Elizabeth Bouvier, April 30, 2015.

on the morning of June 10: Interview with Richard Trask, January 21, 2015. The five-syllable words: Earle, Child Life, 29. For details of earlier executions on which this one is based, see Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 17884 (which includes the execution sermons, as well as the point about the suspenseful last-minute admissions); Dunton in Miller and Johnson, The Puritans, 2: 41519; John Rogers, Death the Certain Wages of Sin to the Impenitent (Boston, 1701). At a later execution, all was "hurry and confusion, racket and noise, praying and oaths," according to Robert Ellis Cahill, New England's Cruel and Unusual Punishments (Salem, MA: Old Saltbox, 1994).

"in a frame extremely": MP, 63.

"and turned the knot": John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal (New York: Scribner's, 1908), vol. 2, 319. The blow of an ax: Jacob Milborne execution, Collections of the New-York Historical Society (1868): 42526. The agonized cries: SS Diary, 1: 509.

Corwin arranged for the corpse: R, 395. Roach thinks Corwin crossed out the line because someone claimed the body; Six Women of Salem, 252. Puritan interments were simple and in unconsecrated ground. For the site of the burial, Marilynne Roach, Gallows and Graves (Watertown, MA: Sa.s.safras Grove, 1977); Sidney Perley, "Where the Salem Witches Were Hanged," EIHC 57 (January 1921): 119. According to Lawson, graves for a later hanging were dug in advance.

"painful, grotesque": Saul Bellow, Herzog (New York: Penguin, 1964), 23.

"a vexation to herself" to "recovered their senses": CM in Burr, 249.

"a formidable crew": Magnalia, 2: 534. That was the attack during which the Wells women fired at the enemy or, as CM proudly declared, "took up the Amazonian stroke."

"a very doleful time": CM Diary, 1: 150.

VII. NOW THEY SAY THERE IS ABOVE SEVEN HUNDRED IN ALL.

"Nature has given": Samuel Johnson to the Reverend Dr. Taylor, August 18, 1763, in The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1: 228.

"a relatively spontaneous bicker": Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 253. See also Murrin, "Magistrates, Sinners, and a Precarious Liberty," Saints and Revolutionaries, 152206; interview with Richard Trask, April 1, 2014; interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014.

"If you sued a lot": William Offutt Jr., cited in Hoffer, Law and People, 78. Offutt was speaking of Delaware Quakers.

"I am no thief": Langbein, Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, 57.

"will pry": Bernard, Guide to Grand-Jury Men, 244.

"much harm and little good": SS Diary, 1: 277. For the Mather contretemps, ibid., 45455; for the pardoned pirate, ibid., 250.

Willard's afternoon sermon: See Peterson, "'Ordinary Preaching,'" 9598. Also on Willard, Stephen Robbins, "Samuel Willard and the Spectres of G.o.d's Wrathful Lion," New England Quarterly 60 (December 1987): 601; Brown, "The Salem Witchcraft Trials."

"now they say": Joshua Brodbent to Francis Nicholson, June 21, 1692, CO 5/1037, no. 112, fol. 227r, PRO.

"he has left the court": Brattle in Burr, 184. The facts are elusive, as no commission for the Court of Oyer and Terminer has come down to us.

"she was a witch": RFQC, 3: 420. The point about defamation is from Thompson, "'Holy Watchfulness,'" 50422.

To fail to report: McMa.n.u.s, Law and Liberty, 68. Thompson, "'Holy Watchfulness,'" 521, makes the point that turning in a suspected witch s.h.i.+elded one from accusations of complicity. See Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion, 2048, for a chart of prior defamation suits involving witchcraft. David Hall thinks the lack of defamation actions indicates a shock to the system; interview with Hall, October 19, 2012.

"The Return of Several Ministers Consulted": June 15, 1692, B&N, 11819. CM's original is in the Cotton Mather Letters, John J. Burns Library, Boston College. He would later claim to have offered to take in some of the afflicted, as he had Martha Goodwin; he may have done so now.

"that I should be": CM Diary, 1: 311. Mather wrote half of the published Ma.s.sachusetts sermons to the end of 1692, before he had yet turned thirty.

"Several persons": R, 399; Milborne pet.i.tion, Ma.s.sachusetts council minutes, CO 5/785 PRO. On the Milborne brothers, David William Voorhees, "'Fanatiks' and 'Fifth Monarchists': The Milborne Family in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World," New York Genealogical and Biographical Record 129 (July 1998): 17482.

"seditious and scandalous" to "public justice": R, 399.

Thomas Newton outlined his case: R, 40913.

"The same evidence": The observation was Cary's, R, 311.

"all the delectable things": CM in Burr, 236.

"that some she-devil" to "creature in the world": CM in Burr, 23234. Even those who knew Martin and had reason to be well inclined toward her did not rise to her defense. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 649, cites a seventeenth-century observer on the vicious circle.

Topsfield's Elizabeth How: CM in Burr, 23740; see also Philip Graystone, Elizabeth Jackson of Rowley (Hull, UK: Lampada Press, 1993). "If you are a witch": R, 438. Equal numbers of witnesses spoke for and against her.

"No, never" to "she is a witch": R, 37374.

when Sarah Wilds came: Years earlier her stepsons had been accused of witchcraft as well; two stepdaughters soon would be. She had been whipped for fornication in 1649; RFQC, 1: 179.

"almost saw revenge": R, 46263.

"as the child unborn": R, 349.

John Putnam Sr. seems to have been: R, 435, and R, 429. A. P. Putnam, Rebecca Nurse and Her Friends (Boston: Thomas Todd, 1894), 138.

"the most ancient, skillful": R, 41213.

"the jury of women": R, 380.

the jury returned: Calef in Burr, 358. We know little of how a seventeenth-century jury worked. They did not proceed by ballot or formal vote; they did not always excuse themselves from the courtroom to deliberate; the majority seem to have deferred to the foreman; Beattie, Crime and the Courts, 396. On asking a jury to re-deliberate, e-mail with John Langbein, March 10, 2014. The opposite happened in Connecticut; see G.o.dbeer, Escaping Salem, 119.

"I could not tell" to "evidence against her": R, 465.

"What? Do these persons": Calef in Burr, 359. On accomplices, interview with J. M. Beattie, September 9, 2014.

"hard of hearing": R, 465. The devil whispered at her ear: Lawson, appendix to Christ's Fidelity, 110; see also Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 546, on the roar in the courtroom.

nothing on paper: Cited by Trask, R, 53.

sentence of excommunication: David C. Brown, "The Keys of the Kingdom: Excommunication in Colonial Ma.s.sachusetts," New England Quarterly 67 (December 1994): 53166. For the language, David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 16361638 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 388; Demos, Remarkable Providences, 277; Hall, Witch-Hunting, 89, on Ann Hibbins; CM Diary 1: 180. Interview with David Hall, May 21, 2014.

late-summer meeting: Proceedings of the MHS, vol. 17 (1879), 268.

"struck dumb, deaf, blind": June 10, 1692, letter appended to Lawson, A Further Account.

"was mistaken": Calef in Burr, 360. She may have meant John Willard.

To the job Stoughton brought: On Stoughton, Convers Francis, An Historical Sketch of Watertown (Cambridge: Metcalf, 1830), 59; SS Diary, 1: 148; Records of the First Church at Dorchester (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1801), 5065; Northend, "Address Before the Ess.e.x Bar a.s.sociation," 258n. A respected jurist, Stoughton had in 1680 reviewed and revised NE law. The a.s.sertion that there were but three qualified men in all of Ma.s.sachusetts: Randolph to Blathwayt, in Letters and Official Papers, 6: 218.

"an impudent, saucy": Governor Fletcher, in John Usher to Nottingham, Colonial State Papers, January 31, 1693, CO 5/571, no. 18, PRO.

"Christ is against him": Stoughton, New England's True Interest (Boston, 1668), 1823. On Stoughton and the seminal sermon: E-mails with David Hall, May 11, 2013, and October 3, 2014. Michael G. Hall, The Last American Puritan, 87, names Stoughton among the handful of men who created NE; Stoughton is cited in CM's The Present State, 36. On Stoughton and the pulpits, Hull, Diaries, 231.

public office and land speculation: John Frederick Martin, Profits in the Wilderness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 9099. For the dense pine, Cronon, Changes in the Land, 75.

"ama.s.sed great quant.i.ties": Randolph to Blathwayt, May 21, 1687, Letters and Official Papers, 6: 221.

"I find all are mad": Randolph to Shrimpton in ibid., 3: 310. On WS in London, see especially Hall, Edward Randolph, 2152.

enemy of the people: Everett Kimball, The Public Life of Joseph Dudley (London: Longmans, 1911), 17; Randolph letter, CO/1/54, no 51, fol. 121, PRO.

"he might thank himself": Mary Lou l.u.s.tig, The Imperial Executive in America: Sir Edmund Andros (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh d.i.c.kinson University Press, 2002), 196. She is best on the Andros coup. See also Charles M. Andrews, Narratives of the Insurrections (New York: Scribner's, 1915), 199203.