The Witches: Salem, 1692 Part 7

If Pike received a response, it has not survived. Cotton Mather wrangled with a similar query on August 17, over a quiet week, as antic.i.p.ation of a hanging registered as a pause in the proceedings. One of Boston's wealthiest merchants, council member John Foster, appealed to Mather. Did he still believe a horrid witchcraft was afoot? Mather feared he did. Ten weeks had elapsed since he had set out his freewheeling thoughts for Justice Richards. Six witches had been executed in the interim. Five more were scheduled to hang in forty-eight hours. Again Mather warned against spectral evidence. Nevertheless, he saw that some use could be made of it. Its effects, he conceded, could well serve to "strengthen other presumptions." All Protestant writers agreed that the devil abused innocents. As if heading off a jinx, Mather twice mentioned that he should not be surprised were his specter to begin to molest his neighbors. Again he stressed that neither the touch test nor the evil eye should offer grounds for conviction. Again he opted for lesser punishments. Why not set bail, at least for those imprisoned solely on spectral charges? (That category did not include a malefactor against whom G.o.d had "strangely sent in other, and more human, and most convincing testimonies." The allusion was clear: the court had not sentenced Burroughs on invisible evidence alone.) He would be happier if reprieves were offered, if those under suspicion were simply deported. Again he could not write a letter on the subject without recourse to the word "nevertheless." With reason, he apologized for the "incoherency of my thoughts." They had grown no more lucid since May.

Mather steered clear of the illogic that so troubled Pike. He added a new refrain, however, harping on the virtues of the magistrates, "so eminent for their justice, wisdom, and goodness," discerning men for whom no one had "a greater veneration" than he. Whatever their personal beliefs, they would not, he a.s.sured Foster, proceed on a contested principle. A master of inconsistency, the devil might act the same way nineteen times, only to reverse course the twentieth. "It is our singular happiness," Mather a.s.sured Foster, "that we are blessed with judges who are aware of this danger." He hoped Foster would strengthen their hands. He broadly hinted that the court might include a minister or two. In an English case a generation earlier, a clergyman had seen to it that an outbreak of witchcraft was extinguished. (No fewer than eighteen, including a vicar, had been executed in that outbreak.) "Our case is extraordinary," he too concluded.

The following day another Harvard-trained minister heard of a different set of misgivings. Seventeen-year-old Margaret Jacobs had been shackled in the foul Salem prison since early May, when Parris's niece had accused her. Margaret may have been on hand when her grandfather had guffawed that Hathorne and Corwin could burn him or hang him, he was as likely a buzzard as a wizard. Arrested the same day, she had quickly confessed at Beadle's Tavern. She was a witch. She had signed the devil's book. (Held next door, Jacobs was appalled to learn as much. He had urged her not to make herself an accessory to her own death, an outburst that further incriminated him.) The following day Margaret accused a Salem woman. She became a regular at that week's hearings; she watched an iridescent Burroughs bite the Procters' maid. She had been in manacles ever since. Her father and uncle had fled. Her half-crazed mother was in chains, awaiting trial.

On August 18 she could bear it no longer. Her grandfather was scheduled to hang the next morning, along with Burroughs and John Willard, whom she had helped to convict. There was a problem with her confession, the teenager announced on the eve of their execution; it was "altogether false and untrue." At her hearing, the afflicted girls had crumpled at the sight of her, startling Margaret. The justices had offered her a choice. "They told me, if I would not confess, I should be put down into the dungeon and would be hanged, but if I would confess I should have my life," she explained. She had opted for her life. She had since suffered "in such horror of conscience that I could not sleep for fear the devil should carry me away for telling such horrid lies."

Miserable, she requested permission to speak with Burroughs, whom she would have known as a child. She begged her former minister's forgiveness. Burroughs prayed "with and for her," in chains, as ever resolute in his faith. Margaret was a conscientious, emotional girl with a lively mind. She shared her grandfather's facility with language. She was also one of the "false witnesses" whom Burroughs blamed for his conviction. It is unclear when the news that she had recanted escaped the prison; she was one of only two suspects to do so. (The fortune-telling Wardwell would be the other.) It did Margaret little good; the magistrates would not believe her. For her reversal, they consigned her to the stifling dungeon. Fortunately she discovered that she preferred "death with a quiet conscience" to a load of crippling guilt. From the dungeon she wrote her father. She had seen her mother, who remained insane but sent her love. She knew her family was effectively ruined. She was wretched, not knowing how soon she would hang. She a.s.sured her father that she antic.i.p.ated "a joyful and happy meeting in heaven." She remained his dutiful daughter.

Others remembered the evening of August 18 differently. While in the dungeon Burroughs comforted the sobbing teenager who had helped convict him, he managed to preside over a witches' meeting in central Andover, where he administered the sacrament. Removing his hat, he took solemn leave of his recruits. He urged them to continue steadfast; they should admit nothing. He does not appear to have explained why he elected not to torture the confessors who had betrayed him. An old farmer warmly expressed his hope that he would see Burroughs again. The spectral minister demurred. He did not think that likely.

Early the next morning officials led George Burroughs, John Willard, John Procter, and George Jacobs through the Salem prison yard and into a cart. Martha Carrier-Ann Foster's flying guide, the queen of h.e.l.l, and the intemperate mother of five children, all but one of whom were now incarcerated-joined them, convicted for having served alongside Burroughs, whom she had no reason ever to have met before their trials. Though sentenced to die on the same day as her husband, Elizabeth Procter did not. Stoughton had granted a stay of execution in light of her pregnancy. The largest throng to date turned out to inspect the first men Ma.s.sachusetts was to execute for witchcraft. Two Boxford constables carrying a suspect to her village examination crossed paths with the procession as it wound its way up the rocky slope; they dropped the accused witch at a house at the foot of the hill so as not to miss the affecting spectacle. As Parris had noted in a 1689 sermon: "To see a man taking his last steps, and going to the place of execution (though worthily) moves everyone whose heart is not harder than adamant." Unlike the pirates and murderers whose hangings had attracted crowds and whose execution sermons thousands had flocked to hear, all five insisted as the cart creaked up the hill that they were falsely accused. They hoped the real witches would soon be revealed; they "declared their wish that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed upon that account." Willard and Procter struck one onlooker as especially dignified. So "sincere, upright, and sensible of their circ.u.mstances" did they remain that they provoked tears all around. They forgave their accusers, the justices, the jury. They did not snarl that suffering children would continue to suffer after their death, as had Glover in 1688. They prayed they would be pardoned for their actual sins.

They did so before an especially distinguished crowd. As Increase Mather had made a courtroom appearance to observe the Burroughs conviction, so Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for his execution. The presence of Mather-tall, clear-eyed, handsome, an imposing figure at any time-spoke to the significance of the occasion. At least some of the condemned appealed to him, in heartrending terms. Would he prepare them spiritually for the journey ahead? It is unclear if Mather did so or if he held to the same hard line as Noyes, who did not pray with witches. Some hearts remained adamantine.

By a corollary to the logic that determined that he should be tried last, forty-two-year-old Burroughs was executed first. He mounted the ladder with composure, pausing midway to offer what many expected to be a long-delayed confession. Again the dark little man-a wisp of his former self after fourteen weeks in the dungeon-proved a contrarian. Perched above a crowd that included his former in-laws and paris.h.i.+oners, a noose around his neck, he burst into an impa.s.sioned speech. He had a full command of Scripture; he had had time to prepare. He outdid himself. Burroughs knew how to deliver a sermon, gravely and fervently, his voice rising for emphasis and sinking for effect, producing an awe "like that would be produced on the fall of thunderbolts." Those he cast down that Friday earned, noted an eyewitness, "the admiration of all present." He spoke genuinely, heart-meltingly, the hangman a few steps below him on the ladder. With his last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some heart-stoppingly familiar lines. "Our Father, who art in Heaven," he began, continuing, from the ladder, with a blunder-free recitation of the Lord's Prayer, an impossible feat for a wizard, one any number of other suspects had not managed. Burroughs left his audience fl.u.s.tered. For a few moments it seemed-tears welling in the eyes even of prominent men-as if the crowd would obstruct the execution.

That feat on the part of a bona fide wizard called for an explanation, one his accusers speedily furnished. The devil stood beside Burroughs, dictating to him. Who else could preach so eloquently? Minutes later the minister dangled from a semi-finished beam. The life had not gone from his body when Mather stepped in to smother the sparks of discontent. He spoke firmly, always with much deliberation. From his horse, the lanky, light-haired twenty-nine-year-old reminded the spectators that Burroughs had never been ordained. (That was also true of Bayley and Lawson, at least one of whom was on the hill that day, but made the dying minister seem unorthodox.) What better disguise might the devil choose on such an occasion than to masquerade as "an angel of light"? It was a time-honored tactic. In the encyclopedia of backhanded compliments, that one qualified among the greatest; to the last, George Burroughs was to be condemned for his gifts. His sentence had been a just one, Mather a.s.sured the crowd. The protests quieted, as did the minister who dangled in midair. He may have heard a portion of Mather's remarks. Willard and Procter climbed the ladder next, followed by Martha Carrier and glib George Jacobs, Margaret's grandfather.

When cut down, the bodies were apparently dragged by their nooses to a common grave, about two feet deep, between the rocks. According to the sole surviving account, Burroughs's s.h.i.+rt and pants were removed and his corpse fitted with a shabbier set; one did not waste a fine pair of pants. The man who eleven years earlier, in the presence of Ann Putnam's father, had agreed to settle among the villagers and "live and die in the works of the ministry among them" was then buried carelessly, with Willard and Carrier, "one of his hands and his chin, and a foot of one [of] them being left uncovered."

THE EXECUTION OF a beguiling, articulate, Scripture-spouting minister who protested his innocence to the end created nearly as much disquiet as the idea that a beguiling, articulate, Scripture-spouting minister had actively recruited for the devil. The material facts-as even Procter and Willard acknowledged en route to their deaths-were not in dispute. Only the question of liability was. Did John Higginson, who had seen nearly everything there was to see in his fifty-three years in the Salem ministry, who had resisted offering Andros the answer the royal governor sought, and who had reprimanded the Salem villagers in 1687 for their "uncharitable expressions and uncomely reflections," their "settled prejudice and resolved animosity," truly believe his jailed daughter to be a witch? Evidently so. While she acknowledged that she had helped to convict innocents, even Margaret Jacobs thought witches flew about Salem. The August executions sent Cotton Mather to his desk, scrambling to make sense of the story. Samuel Sewall had been elsewhere that Friday, but in his diary entry for August 19, he almost unconsciously allowed his former schoolmate the last word. "Mr. Mather," Sewall wrote of the executed five, "says they all died by a righteous sentence." He continued, in a less comfortable vein: "Mr. Burroughs, by his speech, prayer, protestation of his innocence, did much move unthinking persons." Sewall permitted himself no note of sympathy for a colleague he and his family had entertained at their table over the years, who was never to see the refurbished Sewall kitchen. Nor did he allow a hint of doubt to creep into his lines.

Six days after the Burroughs execution, Hathorne and Corwin examined an eighteen-year-old Andover girl, a niece of Elizabeth How's. She denied any knowledge of witchcraft until, learning that her older sister had accused her, she admitted she had met the devil the previous winter. She submitted to a satanic baptism, flew on a pole, and attended a meeting of two hundred witches. (The older sister confirmed that figure but warned that five hundred witches infested Ma.s.sachusetts.) The eighteen-year-old incriminated two additional sisters in the process. She also fielded several questions not posed before Burroughs had been hanged: Did she know of any innocents in jail? (She did, but only one.) And was it possible, the magistrates asked, suddenly rounding an unfamiliar corner, that the bewitched girls were themselves witches? "No," the teenager a.s.sured them. "They were honest persons that helped to bring out the witches." Either fl.u.s.tered by Pike's queries or for their own reasons, the Salem justices cast about for rea.s.surance.

It arrived in floods of confessions. As the summer wore on they grew quicker, the poles more crowded. More witches were named in August than in July. Yet more identified themselves in September, in uniform accounts that continued prominently to feature Reverend Burroughs. Forty-six-year-old William Barker and forty-nine-year-old Samuel Wardwell, the Andover fortune-teller, confessed within days of each other. Both were financially strapped Andover farmers. Wardwell made no mention of the diabolical Sabbath, only of the afflictions he had caused. He had signed a decades-long pact with the devil. It would expire when he was sixty. Barker was a newer recruit. He supplied one of the largest estimates of the diabolical crew-in his version, it was more than half as large as Salem village-and the most compelling story line. He too fielded the court's unsettling new questions, to which he provided new answers. Did he know of any jailed innocents? He did not. What did he make of the girls? They performed an invaluable service. He warned the court against misinterpretation. Furious at having been discovered, the witches connived to make the bewitched appear guilty.

As Stoughton prepared to empanel jurors for the next court session, Barker delivered up additional riches. Little notoriety rivals courtroom notoriety; a rapturous moment in the spotlight was another diabolical lure. And Barker considered himself on a mission. Begging forgiveness of the honorable magistrates and all G.o.d's people, he pledged "to set to my heart and hand to do what in me lyeth to destroy such wicked wors.h.i.+p." He offered a rationale for the choice of the Salem meadow for the infernal a.s.sembly, an explanation that gratified the authorities, Parris in particular: the devil aimed to destroy the villagers because they bickered among themselves and with their ministers. (In fairness, were those the criteria, Satan would have had his choice of New England congregations.) He confirmed what the court had warned the villagers seventeen years earlier: in their incessant squabbling, they had given Satan a leg up.* Barker revealed the devil's plan, one that demanded urgent attention all around: the archfiend intended to see to it that "there should be no day of resurrection or judgment and neither punishment nor shame for sin." He promised that "all persons should be equal," an equally heretical notion in 1692.

Andover meanwhile could not seem to get enough of the Salem soothsayers. They sent for the village girls on multiple occasions, stationing them in sickrooms, at the head and the feet of the ailing. Probably early in September, the junior Andover minister, Thomas Barnard, convened them for another purpose. Without explanation, he a.s.sembled seven local women in the meetinghouse. They included a thirteen-year-old girl and her mother, as well as Dane's forty-one-year-old daughter. Barnard led the group in prayer, then blindfolded them. As the Salem girls twitched and tumbled, Barnard instructed the Andover women to lay their hands upon the visitors. Each calmed immediately. The seven were arrested and carried off, trembling. "We were all exceedingly astonished, and consternated and affrighted even out of our reason," they reported. Their examiners hectored them, "telling us that we were witches, and they knew it, and we knew it."

As the confessions piled up, the accusations did too, which meant new arrests and more intricate accounts. The first time she confessed, fifty-one-year-old Rebecca Eames had not been baptized by the devil; had been in his employ for seven years; was reluctant to agree her son was a wizard; did not name names. After twelve days in prison, she had practiced witchcraft for twenty-six years and been baptized. She revealed her son had been a wizard half as long. She named names. Five Andover sisters confessed. It had been a long time since anyone dared ask if the justices were all out of their wits or chuckled that he was as likely to be a buzzard as a wizard; Martin and Jacobs had both hanged. Just as everyone had known a victim of King Philip's War, everyone now knew an accused witch. In the free-for-all men accused women, girls their elders, children their mothers. Eleven members of one family stood accused, nine by relatives. The newly accused ranged in age from seven to eighty; nearly half were teenagers. Husbands continued to prove ready to believe the worst of their wives. Elizer Keyser, whose fireplace Burroughs had enchanted, accused another man, a Manchester cordwainer.

From the outset there were holes in the record. As Stephen Sewall explained, it was simply impossible to get everything down on paper. Several scribes were minimalists to begin; any number of accusations went unrecorded. After a point in the summer, denials barely materialized on the page. The toll of the trials registered across the judicial system, which-its magistrates tied up in daily witchcraft hearings-deferred all less pressing business. Exhaustion made itself felt from the highest levels on down; it was "difficult and troublesome work," the attorney general himself pointed out, the more so because he enjoyed no settled salary. The wealth of detail was too much for anyone. Even Hale, writing later, grew "weary with relating particulars."

For the jail keeps and for tavern keepers like the Ingersolls, the trials were good business. For everyone else, they introduced a season of hards.h.i.+ps. Local constables worked overtime as they rode great distances to deliver warrants, escort suspects to and from hearings, track down escapees, and arrange jail transfers. The strain-at once brain-teasingly epistemological and entirely mundane-manifested in different ways. The Andover justice of the peace who had worried that he was unfit for the service he had entered upon signed his last arrest warrant toward mid-September. He had issued nearly forty summonses. Whether doubt or fatigue cramped his hand is unclear; he simply refused to sign another. The result was predictable, similar to what had happened after (the late) John Procter scoffed that the girls should be returned to their spinning and (the late) John Willard hesitated to round up suspects: the official and his wife were accused of witchcraft. His brother was named as well, along with his nonspectral dog accomplice, on which he was seen riding about. Both families-the men descended from Governor Bradstreet and poet Anne Bradstreet and could claim any number of minister relatives-fled north. The dog was put to death, one of Andover's two canine victims. The other sent the girls into frenzies each time it looked at them. It was shot.

All around hay went unhayed, corn unharvested, fences unrepaired, crops untended. Orchards were neglected and woodpiles depleted. Meanwhile a breeze began to lift off the water; the nights grew brisk. The most labor-intensive weeks of the year lay ahead. Fall was cider-making season, the time to dry and salt and pickle winter stores, to pick turnips and apples, husk corn and gut carca.s.ses. It was difficult to do so among divided families, between prison visits-Mary Esty's husband rode to see her twice every week for five months-short-handed, after long days in court, or while tending to bewitched, or bewitching, relatives. (It was yet more difficult to do so in custody. As Stoughton's closest political a.s.sociate complained in the wake of the Andros coup, how was he to run his farm, on which his family depended, from prison?) Many found themselves near ruin, having sold off livestock at bargain prices to support jailed relatives. It is almost impossible not to feel sorry for the deputy sheriff who at the end of the year pleaded not only exhaustion but penury. Since March he had done nothing but serve warrants, apprehend suspects, attend arraignments and trials, and convey witches from prison to prison. Those activities had "taken up my whole time and made me incapable to get anything for the maintenance of my poor family." He was now impoverished. (It did not help that Ma.s.sachusetts believed paying public servants to be optional.) The sheriff begged Phips and Stoughton for a.s.sistance "this hard winter that I and my poor children may not be dest.i.tute of sustenance and so inevitably perish." He was depleted from serving his king and country, the more so as-having been bred a gentleman-he was "not much used to work." The Middles.e.x county sheriff and the Cambridge jail keep had paid for horses and men on the road and wood for the prison, for guards to accompany carts and for the constables who raised a hue and cry to pursue suspects, all from their own funds. They had devoted countless hours to those in their custody, for whom they bought provisions. They received no reimburs.e.m.e.nt. John Higginson Jr., the minister's son serving as clerk, found himself in debt solely given the expense of his public appearances.

It is more difficult to sympathize with Justice Corwin's twenty-five-year-old nephew, the Ess.e.x County sheriff. George Corwin wore himself out dismantling the households of the accused. He would have been within his rights emptying them after convictions; he did not always wait so long. Even as she begged Reverend Burroughs's forgiveness, Margaret Jacobs knew that Corwin had ransacked her grandfather's riverside estate. He and his men stripped the household bare, confiscating cattle, hay, barrels of apples and bushels of corn, a horse, five pigs, the beds and blankets, two bra.s.s kettles, a quant.i.ty of pewter, the chickens, and the chairs. They removed even the gold wedding ring from the finger of Margaret's mother. She managed to reclaim it but was left with no choice but to buy provisions from Corwin. While the Englishes safely escaped, their gabled mansion did not. Corwin unblus.h.i.+ngly looted the property, afterward leaving it open to plunder. Furniture, household goods, and family portraits disappeared, a haul worth some fifteen hundred pounds. Only a single servant's bed remained. (Here Corwin was surely overeager. The Englishes had not been convicted, having fled before they could be tried.) After a sixty-one-year-old woman hanged in September, a deputy rode to her central Andover home. He seized the family's cattle, corn, and hay, and advised her sons to speak with Sheriff Herrick to avoid the sale of what remained of their possessions. In that conversation, Herrick-the born gentleman-kindly offered "an opportunity to redeem" the property, suggesting the sum of ten pounds. He settled for six, so long as the bribe materialized within the month.

The seizures introduced another complication. What to do with the orphaned children? Many were left to s.h.i.+ft for themselves, the Procters' without a sc.r.a.p of food or a pot in which to cook. Soon after Burroughs's arrest, his third wife "laid hands on all she could secure," including her husband's library. She then sold the family's goods and loaned out money, at interest. With her daughter she headed south, deserting her seven stepchildren, of whom the eldest was sixteen. "We were left, a parcel of small children of us, helpless," they pet.i.tioned later. They retained not even a token by which to remember their father. Late in September, the Andover selectmen turned for guidance to the Ipswich court. Both the fortune-telling Wardwell and his wife were in prison.* What to do with the couple's seven children? They were in "a suffering condition," one the town could not alleviate. The court ordered that most or all of them be placed with "good and honest families." The youngest had just turned five. The eldest wound up with his uncle, John Ballard, whose brother had accused Wardwell and conducted him to jail.

Hathorne, Corwin, and Gedney devoted the greatest number of hours to witchcraft. They conducted hearings every week and sat on the court through September. Parris made the five-mile trip to town countless times a week, devoting what has been estimated to be fifty days between late March and early September to witchcraft. He neglected duties at home to do so; family prayer must have fallen regularly to overtaxed, overwrought Elizabeth Parris. At night he returned to a disordered household, resounding still with Abigail's shrieks. He would not write in his sermon notebook for months. (Nor did he bleat about his salary, which went unpaid.) He accompanied his niece to court, testifying against ten suspects. He felt it his duty to a.s.sist in the mission at hand, a mission in which no one proved as tireless as Chief Justice Stoughton. Laboring to clear the land of witches once and for all, Stoughton convened the Court of Oyer and Terminer for a third session, to begin at noon on Tuesday, September 6.

The court that week indicted nineteen witches, the greatest number to date. It did so on more meager evidence and at an accelerated pace; Stoughton had a crisis to contain. He also met with several complications. While her own niece testified against her, Mary Esty confounded the court, which had already once found it difficult to reconcile the gentle fifty-eight-year-old with witchcraft charges. In September even the Ipswich prison keepers defended the mother of seven, a model prisoner, unfailingly civil and sober. In nearly the same words-there were campaigns on all sides-the Boston jailers weighed in as well. Esty submitted a pet.i.tion to the bench. She had been removed from her vast Topsfield farm in April, arrested and rearrested. Her eldest sister had been hanged in July. She and her sister Sarah Cloyce had but three requests. The court allowed them neither counsel nor the privilege of pleading their case under oath. Would the judges advocate for them? Second, might they call witnesses on their behalf? Topsfield's minister stood ready to swear to their innocence. Echoing Robert Pike, they asked if they might be tried by some other evidence than-the wording is notable-"the testimony of witches, or such as are afflicted, as is supposed, by witches." The women requested "a fair and equal hearing of what may be said for us, as well as against us." With each demand they subtly censured the court; English law guaranteed those rights. Stoughton sentenced both sisters to hang.

He met with another headache as the grand jury heard the attorney general's case against Giles Corey. At least seven Salem girls attested to the village farmer's supernatural gifts. ("I verily believe in my heart that Giles Corey is a dreadful wizard," swore Mercy Lewis. "I verily believe that Giles Corey is a dreadful wizard," swore Ann Putnam Jr. "I verily think he is a wizard," swore Elizabeth Hubbard.) He had turned up spectrally in their beds, in the meetinghouse (where he claimed a prime seat; witches attended a surprising number of sermons), at Bishop's hanging. When called before the grand jury on September 9, Corey stepped forward, raising his hand. The charges read, he pleaded not guilty. The court then inquired: "Culprit, how will you be tried?" Only with the words "By G.o.d and my country" could the trial proceed. Corey had uttered those five words in front of sentencing magistrates before; that September Friday he withheld them, stalling his case. Corey proved no more amenable to the attorney general's demands than he had to those of his wife when in March she had attempted to unsaddle his horse. (The court had convicted Martha the previous day.) Fortunately for Stoughton, a few men remained ready to rally the troops and circle the wagons. On September 2 Cotton Mather wrote to the chief justice. The world knew well of his "zeal to a.s.sist" in Stoughton's weighty, worthy task. Already Mather had done more behind the scenes than Stoughton could possibly know. (The claim rather upended the muddled, equivocal letters to Foster and Richards.) He had been fasting almost weekly through the summer for an end to the sulfurous a.s.sault. He felt the ministers ought to support the court on its extraordinary mission; none had yet done so. He volunteered to step into the breach. He had begun to write up a little something, partially "to set our calamity in as true a light as I can." He promised to dispel any doubts about endangered innocents, a pa.s.sage he underlined. He hoped to "flatten the fury, which we now so much turn upon one another." Mather promised to submit every syllable of his narrative to Stoughton so that "there may not be one word out of point." (He knew full well that he could publish nothing without permission, but had in mind an official history.) He would recount the Swedish epidemic, stressing those aspects that most resembled Salem's, an exercise a.n.a.logous to reconst.i.tuting a person from his shadow. Might Stoughton and his colleagues sign off on his little labor, which would remind the people of their duties in such a crisis? As he knew how many momentous matters weighed on the chief justice, he troubled him with only a partial ma.n.u.script. He could skip its first thirty-four pages. In a singular valediction, Mather wished Stoughton "success in your n.o.ble encounters with h.e.l.l." Unlike Mary Esty, Mather got the answer he wanted. Stoughton began his fulsome reply on the verso. The best account we have of 1692 comes down to us then-shaped by the swelling public outcry in August-as a propaganda piece.

Parris knew firsthand of the furies of which Mather spoke. As Stoughton pressed ahead, the village minister sounded very much like a man who understood that the destruction of the church was to begin at his home. He chose Revelation 17:14 as his September 11 text. Surveying the battle at hand, he cribbed shrilly and liberally from Cotton Mather. The war in which they engaged had long been prophesied. It pitted "the devil and his confederates" against Christ and his followers. They were the chosen; they would prevail. Besieged by doubters as much as by devils, Parris tamped down dissent; those who opposed the court were no better than those "mutinous and murmuring Israelites" who rebelled against Moses, wondering if it might be better to return to Egypt than die in the wilderness. To resist the magistrates was to side with the devil. A call to unity as much as piety, Parris's was a fiery address and doubtless a rousing one. In its wake Parris asked for a vote to excommunicate Martha Corey, who in March had derided Parris's niece and her coevals as "poor, distracted children." The vote carried but was not unanimous.

That Wednesday Parris visited Martha Corey in prison, accompanied by Nathaniel Putnam and the church deacons, two of them uncles of afflicted girls. Corey greeted her callers coolly, without the eagerness with which she had received them six months earlier, when she had looked forward to enlightening magistrates and ministers. She was no less forthright; Parris-who had transcribed the record of her husband's hearing-found her "very obdurate, justifying herself and condemning all that had done anything to her just discovery and condemnation." He suggested they pray. The self-described gospel woman had no interest; her callers did so largely for themselves. Afterward Parris p.r.o.nounced "the dreadful sentence of excommunication" against his embittered paris.h.i.+oner, cutting her off from all church privileges and expectations and delivering her soul to Satan, perhaps a redundant exercise. The visit was brief.

ON SEPTEMBER 1, three days after William Barker exposed Satan's depraved scheme to make all men equal, witchcraft judge John Richards married in Boston. A little rough around the edges, Richards was a relative newcomer to Ma.s.sachusetts, if a vastly successful one. He took as his bride Ann Winthrop, Wait Still Winthrop's sister. Stoughton performed the ceremony, which Samuel Sewall attended. Two other justices likely joined them; the s.h.i.+pbuilder Bartholomew Gedney was a Winthrop relative by marriage. The bride's sister was Mrs. Jonathan Corwin.* That no fewer than four witchcraft judges found themselves related by marriage and together on a Thursday afternoon was not unusual. Narrow to begin, the Ma.s.sachusetts power base was yet more attenuated at the top. Just as the same men served as deacons and selectmen, the colony's largest taxpayers, its most storied names, dominated civic, legal, and religious affairs. Drawn from a tiny cohort, they made for a self-perpetuating elite precisely because of unions like the Richards-Winthrop one. The marriage was Richards's second. His first wife had also been a Winthrop, an aunt of his new bride.*

Ministerial circles overlapped and intersected in the same ways. The wife of Salem court clerk Stephen Sewall, the woman who cared for Betty Parris, was the daughter of an influential, conservative Cambridge minister, a longtime friend of the Mathers. Reverends Noyes and Hale were related by marriage, as were Hale and Gloucester's John Emerson, as were Samuel Parris and the Milton minister. As a group, the clergy-like the court-was somewhere between close-knit and inbred, a fraternity as much as a family. They shared beds when they gathered for meetings. They laid relatives to rest in one another's tombs. Nicholas Noyes felt so close to the family of senior Salem minister John Higginson that he plunged directly into their personal affairs with but the barest-boned of apologies.

As Chief Justice Stoughton had taken nearly every political side over the previous tumultuous decade, it could not be said that the members of the court always saw eye to eye politically. Politics and business-and the politics of defending their commercial interests-joined the justices, however. Nearly every one had sizable interests in the frontier. They had suffered the greatest financial losses in 1689 and 1690, when Indians destroyed their mills. Stoughton and Sewall had traveled to New York together to enlist support for a joint attack on Montreal; Hathorne and Corwin had traveled to Maine and New Hamps.h.i.+re to review frontier defenses. In 1681 Stoughton was chosen to sail again to London to attempt to negotiate a new charter, an errand that fell to Richards-Stoughton had heard enough about New England insolence-when he refused.

Samuel Sewall socialized regularly with most of the other justices. Stoughton and Winthrop figured among his closest friends; he was more intimate yet with Noyes. The frantically busy Sheriff Corwin-on October 7 attempting another confiscation-was the nephew of Justice Winthrop and the son-in-law of Justice Gedney. The same pattern prevailed all over New England, where a tight weave bound a small number of families. The witchcraft judges-and the ministers to whom they appealed, whose salaries they largely paid-observed fasts and debated the meaning of Revelation together, prayed, dined, swam, and sailed together. They baptized, taught, and mourned one another's children (Willard would baptize and bury seven of Samuel Sewall's); courted one another's widows; settled one another's estates. They would bear one another's coffins.

Together they had conspired against and toppled a government. Cotton Mather had written the declaration justifying the revolt against Andros, read to a vast crowd from the council chamber gallery. Surrounded by several future witchcraft judges, Stoughton had censured the deposed governor inside the town house. In London Increase Mather had lobbied hard for the new charter; he would defend himself for having betrayed his compatriots in agreeing to it for some time. Lieutenant Governor Stoughton-who also happened to be the chief justice and the senior Ma.s.sachusetts statesman-had every reason to prove that they had returned the colony to a stable footing. Having agitated for the coup, having advertised cabals well in advance of a coven, those men needed to demonstrate that New England could regulate its own affairs. It could repel invaders. For a bunch of nonconformists, they took well to lockstep; it was some time before a hint of disaffection escaped the court. They had every inclination to fall in line and every political incentive to do so. Increase Mather's 1691 boast that "there is not a government in the world that has been laid under greater obligations by a particular man than the government here has been by me" had as much to do with what happened in Salem as any flying monkeys or chimney jellyfish. Writing in October, a critic of the court prefaced his remarks with a disclaimer: he would prefer to chew off his own fingers than "willingly cast dirt on authority, or anyway offer reproach to it." A member of Willard's congregation, he was a Sewall intimate. He would soon be related to Winthrop by marriage.

Through the parched summer, the story belonged purely to those who accused and confessed. Their accounts hung together. As of mid-September, the court repeatedly hit snags. Around midmonth, Reverend Hale's wife was named; the mother of three young children, she was seven months pregnant. Hale had raised some unpleasant questions, as he did at the Burroughs trial. (The charge introduced another awkwardness as well; Mrs. Hale was Reverend Noyes's first cousin.) It was about now that Andover justice of the peace Dudley Bradstreet, finding no reason to detain another witch, rested his pen. Nor had Stoughton heard the last from Mary Esty, who submitted a second pet.i.tion. This time she addressed herself to the bench and beyond it, to Governor Phips. Scheduled to hang in a week, she was reconciled to her fate. "I pet.i.tion to your Honors not for my own life," she wrote, "for I know I must die." The court was doing its best to eradicate witchcraft. But it proceeded wrongly. She ventured a few thoughts. Might the justices carefully depose the afflicted girls-and separate them for an interval? She recommended they try a confessed witch. Several had perjured themselves.

It remained to be seen what to do with old Giles Corey, with whom the court made no progress. Late in July, in the Ipswich prison, "very weak in body but in perfect memory," he had written his will, leaving his hundred-acre farm to two of his sons-in-law. John Procter, the neighbor with whom Corey alternately tussled in court and drank conciliatory toasts, had been hanged. Excommunicated Martha was to hang in a matter of days. Her husband had no intention of confessing, less of gratifying the justices, before whom he appeared several times, refusing on each occasion to deliver up the essential phrase. Obstinate to begin, he was all the more so having made the tour of New England prisons. He knew that anyone who set foot in Stoughton's courtroom was doomed. The girls would prattle on about his turtle familiars and his see-through knives all over again.

Entirely the man who boasted that he had never had recourse to the term "frightened" in his life, Corey declined to utter the obligatory five words. Failure to do so, Stoughton warned him, would result in the dreadful, medieval sentence of peine forte et dure, or "painful and severe punishment." Stones and lead would be piled atop him; the procedure was to be repeated until the suspect relented or died. It was a punishment invoked but never before used in New England. When last it had been threatened the 1638 defendant-a woman accused of having murdered her three-year-old-opted for the gallows.

Probably on September 17 guards led Corey either to the enclosed Salem prison yard or across the street to a field. He removed his shoes and stripped to near nakedness before stretching out spread-eagled on the cool ground. Officials covered him with a plank, on which they piled rocks; Dounton, the overemployed jail keep, presumably a.s.sisted. The authorities worked directly from established legal code. It called for the defendant to be pressed under "as great a weight as he could bear, and more." Corey was to "have no sustenance, save only, on the first day, three morsels of the worst bread, and, on the second day, three draughts of standing water, that should be nearest to the prison door." In its earliest hours the torture could yield results. After a certain point it was too late. Spectators cl.u.s.tered around, among them a friend of Corey's, a prosperous, truculent Nantucket sea captain. Salem-born, he had served as a selectman. He understood the situation as well as the odds; a brother-in-law counted among the fugitives. He attempted to reason with Corey.

While Giles Corey no doubt had a great deal to say between labored breaths, the sacrosanct phrase did not figure among his p.r.o.nouncements. He repented but would not reconsider his obstinacy. For a second time that week the church excommunicated a Corey; the sentence appears to have been delivered in the midst of the torture. As he could not be declared guilty of witchcraft, he was excommunicated as a suicide. In the last moments of his multiple-day ordeal, his tongue protruded from his mouth; evidently Sheriff Corwin "with his cane, forced it in again." The old man expired soon after, at about noon on September 19. Corwin ventured out immediately to claim his estate, a curious irony as forty-three years earlier Giles Corey had made his first court appearance for having stolen wheat, tobacco, bacon, and a host of other goods from the sheriff's family. A son-in-law managed to hold off Corwin by agreeing to a ruinous fine.

As George Burroughs won the distinction of being the sole Harvard graduate to hang for witchcraft, Giles Corey would prove the only individual pressed to death in America. We have no record of how Martha-who could not have guessed where a quarrel over a saddle was to lead-received the news or if, in prison, the condemned woman heard her husband's groans. Others shrank from the abominable ordeal as they had shuddered at the execution of a minister. The extent of the revulsion can be read in a letter dispatched the following day to Justice Sewall. As Corey gasped under boulders, witches again a.s.saulted Ann Putnam Jr. They threatened to press her to death that Sabbath evening, even before Corey expired. She finally had some respite when-reported her father-a ghost materialized. It delivered a convoluted tale that Putnam felt compelled to share with Justice Sewall. The ghost was that of the man Corey had allegedly murdered years earlier. He reported that while the devil had promised Corey that he would not hang, G.o.d decreed he would suffer a painful and appropriate death. Ann's ghostly conversation, Putnam marveled, was unusual for two reasons. He himself had known Corey's victim. The report was true! Yet it had all happened before his daughter was born. The twelve-year-old seemed to be in charge of the past as well as the future.

Why had no one mentioned this earlier? wondered Putnam. "Now, Sir, this is not a little strange to us; that n.o.body should remember these things, all the while that Giles Corey was in prison, and so often before the court." The earlier jury had found him guilty of murder, "but as if some enchantment had hindered the prosecution of the matter, the Court proceeded not against Giles Corey." (Putnam explained that magic: the verdict had cost Corey a hefty sum.) Sewall read the letter just after Corey's death and in precisely the spirit in which it was intended. The righteous had prevailed. The Sabbath-evening apparition rea.s.sured; again, the pieces fit together with a satisfying click, though Sewall only half grasped them. From the letter, he took the ghost to be Corey's. And Sewall understandably inferred that Corey had "stamped and pressed a man to death." (Putnam had written that he had murdered his victim "by pressing him to death with his feet.") What the jury had heard in 1676 was that Corey had delivered nearly a hundred blows with a stick. It had also found him not guilty.

Martha Corey was to be a widow for only two days. Under colorless skies on the morning of September 22 she made the plodding trip across Salem to what would be known much later as Gallows Hill. It was a lecture day, probably chosen as such. Mary Esty rode with her, as did Samuel Wardwell and five others. Although scheduled to join them, Dorcas h.o.a.r did not. Shorn of her elf-lock, h.o.a.r was still very much alive. She preferred to remain so; days earlier, she had confessed to "the heinous crime of witchcraft." Noyes and Hale intervened on her behalf, appealing to Phips or Stoughton-they were unclear as to whether the governor or his deputy was in charge-for a stay of execution. Hale could not explain why h.o.a.r had signed the devil's book but was sensitive to her confession. Given her distress, might she have a month, pleaded the ministers, "to perfect her repentance" and "prepare for death and eternity"? She posed no further danger. They dangled some bait, adding that h.o.a.r was divulging names of her confederates. The stay was granted. Sewall noted that this was the first time a condemned witch confessed. It would also be the only time.

Others displayed more concern for their souls than their lives in the days leading up to the September execution. Fortune-telling Samuel Wardwell too experienced a change of heart. He had no interest in hearing further reports that he had attended a June sermon, muscling his way into the middle of the men's pews, when he had been roasting in prison that day. He was not a witch. How could the court convict him solely on spectral evidence? He recanted, only to discover that it was not as easy to renounce a diabolical baptism as a proper one. By the logic of the day, Dorcas h.o.a.r-declaring herself guilty-remained in prison, while Wardwell-maintaining his innocence-rode to the gallows.* He discouraged those who might have considered following in his footsteps; Wardwell would be the sole confessor to hang. He may have guessed as much but preferred, like Margaret Jacobs, not to live with a mutilated conscience. Corwin's men swooped in to seize Wardwell's livestock, carpenter's tools, eight loads of hay, and six acres of corn, which they presumably picked themselves. A little prematurely, Corwin showed up at the h.o.a.r address as well. He rode off with the curtains and bed.

As the ox-drawn cart trundled up the path that parched, dull Thursday, a wheel stuck. It was some time in being liberated. The girls narrated: the devil hindered its progress. (The truth may have been more prosaic. Wheeled vehicles tended to be useless outside town on rough, rutted paths. This one was overloaded.) a.s.serting her innocence to the end, Martha Corey, the Salem gospel woman, ended her life with an ardent prayer, delivered from the ladder. As Wardwell addressed the crowd, a cloud of smoke from the executioner's pipe drifted into his face. He began to choke; the devil interrupted him, sneered his accusers, who could not have liked what the freewheeling Wardwell had to say. He was innocent. No court could prove otherwise. The extended Nurse family sobbed as Mary Esty climbed the ladder, bidding husband, children, and friends farewell. She spoke in the selfless, sober tones of her pet.i.tion. Nearly all present found themselves in tears as the executioner fixed a hood over Esty's head and nudged her from the rung.

Nicholas Noyes remained dry-eyed. Turning to the bodies dangling from the primitive structure, he scoffed: "What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of h.e.l.l hanging there!" None left a trace in Mather's history, on which he was already well advanced; they died a little out of time. They denied any part of witchcraft, as had, over four sessions, every one of the twenty-seven suspects who had come before the court, each of whom it sentenced to death. All were convicted for having tortured the Salem village girls, of whom some had never heard, and upon whom most had never before set eyes. Many in the Bay Colony kept careful count. With less exact.i.tude but much relish, Puritan enemies marveled at the Ma.s.sachusetts frenzy. They were eagerly "hanging one another" for precisely the crime, noted two Quaker merchants who visited Salem that fall, of which they liked to accuse their supposedly devil-wors.h.i.+pping sect. Indeed they were "hotly and madly, mauling one another in the dark," as Cotton Mather wailed. Witch-hunting seemed to encourage you to act like the very creatures-Catholics, Frenchmen, wizards-you abhorred.

X.

PUBLISHED TO PREVENT FALSE REPORTS.

For prophecy is history antedated; and history is postdated prophecy: the same thing is told in both.

-NICHOLAS NOYES, 1698 ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY soiled, underfed witch suspects were that fall in custody. Some were pregnant. Several had fallen dangerously ill; others had nursed now-dead suspects. Living atop one another in squalid hives of rumor, they made for unruly company. Nearly half had confessed. Reverend Dane's daughter-in-law and William Barker's sister-in-law described frantic, exhausting accusations, impossible for "timorous women to withstand." They had agreed to all that was imputed to them, "our understandings, our reason, our faculties almost gone." Bewildered and ashamed, they had little idea what to expect. Should confessed and accused witches antic.i.p.ate the same fate? Some had insisted as fiercely on their innocence as others had testified to diabolical pacts. The satanic recruits hissed and spat at the holdouts. They knew perfectly well they were witches too! The confessors meanwhile reinforced one another's accounts. But where through the summer their uniformity had corroborated a diabolical plot, by late September it began to strain credibility. The scope of the crisis disconcerted as well. Was it truly possible, John Hale would wonder, his disquiet growing, "that in a place of so much knowledge, so many in so small compa.s.s of land should abominably leap into the devil's lap at once?" The court met with mounting resistance. They needed an authoritative version of the invasion, one that would validate their hard work, underscore the present danger, and ease all doubts. Fortunately, they already had their volunteer.

Early in September Cotton Mather had requested the court transcripts from Stephen Sewall. The Salem clerk agreed to provide them but did not deliver. It is difficult to read anything into his hesitation. The court sat almost continuously through mid-September; Sewall's wife was pregnant with their fourth child. He fielded all kinds of requests and queries, including those from Parris, regularly in town, and the Nurses, repeatedly on his doorstep. He had enough paperwork to manage without transcribing additional copies of trial doc.u.ments. Impatiently, cloyingly, Mather attempted again to wink the pages out of him days before the September 22 hanging. So that he might prove "the more capable to a.s.sist in lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy," he begged Sewall to make good on his promise. He needed accounts of only six or-were Sewall feeling indulgent-a dozen of the princ.i.p.al cases. The additional effort would pale in light of its benefits.* Mather reminded him that he was going out on a limb for the sake of their friends. He did not need to point out that one of those friends was Sewall's elder brother.

Recasting a favor as a command, Mather dictated his terms. The court recorder should submit the pages to him in narrative form. At the very least, he should elaborate on what he had so often related; would Sewall repeat what he had said about the confessors' credibility, about the dumbfounded jurors and their interpretation of spectral evidence? Mather did not sound like a man who had repeatedly inveighed against it. He wanted the most convincing morsels; he would take Sewall's account and run with it. Witchcraft was after all more difficult to disbelieve now that eleven witches had hanged. (He had an additional reason to jump promptly into the fray: Both Hale and Noyes contemplated books of their own. Whatever they were witnessing, the Salem partic.i.p.ants recognized it to be historic.) In a postscript Mather pulled out the heavy artillery: He worked at the command of their governor. He hinted at dire political repercussions.

Sewall had little opportunity to delay further; he and his family traveled the following day to Boston. He may have delivered a clutch of doc.u.ments then, although he was never to furnish the eyewitness account. That Thursday found Stephen Sewall at his brother's richly appointed mansion-the decor was all oak and mahogany-with Stoughton, Hathorne, John Higginson Jr., and Cotton Mather. On September 22, as Salem hanged eight witches, the men wrangled with criticisms of the court. All continued fully satisfied with their work, including even Higginson, whose sister was jailed and who had signed a warrant for the arrest of a new Gloucester suspect days earlier. It was imperative that the justices, rather than Mary Esty or Giles Corey, remain the heroes; they were in the business of exterminating witches, not creating martyrs. It was a lecture day; they joined in prayer. If they were looking for a nod of divine approval, it arrived that evening in the form of a torrential, much-needed downpour.

Although on his May arrival Governor Phips had found his const.i.tuents miserably plagued by "a most horrible witchcraft or possession of devils," he had left the infestation entirely to Stoughton, preferring visible enemies, or at least those he could properly bludgeon. He could afford to ignore it no longer. On September 29 he returned to "agitated controversy." It impeded all other business. Those inclined to malign the new charter and administration exploited the trials to discredit Phips, coaxing the "strange ferment of dissatisfaction" into an open contest. Even if he had expected politically to sidestep the issue, he could not personally escape it; by fall he found himself related to an afflicted child and an accused witch. In his absence, his wife too had been named.* Phips grappled with the future of the court, scheduled to reconvene in October.

The justices labored, Mather had noted, "under heart-breaking solicitudes, how they might therein best serve G.o.d and man," another way of saying that they were downright confused. A squeak of dissent soon escaped the court; several justices shared their concerns with the governor. They feared they had been overly severe. Were they to sit again, they allowed, "they would proceed differently." (We do not know the names of the dissenters. They were most likely the newlywed Richards, or both Richards and Boston merchant Peter Sergeant. Richards-whose mother had fended off a witchcraft accusation years earlier-had already applied for direction. Sergeant was protected by a large fortune and free from the web of business a.s.sociations that bound the rest of the court. Sewall deferred to Stoughton; Winthrop did not take stands. The three Salem justices remained steadfast.) Eminent churchmen posed good and pointed questions. Other esteemed citizens stood accused, even while a prominent Bostonian carried his ailing child the twenty miles to Salem, suddenly the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by the village girls. He incurred the wrath of Increase Mather. Was there "not a G.o.d in Boston," exploded Harvard's president, the most ill.u.s.trious of New England ministers, "that he should go to the Devil in Salem for advice?" Things were wholly out of hand when a Boston divine was up against an adolescent oracle.

Again a golden age of witchcraft coincided with a golden age of witchcraft literature; both Mathers toiled away at books. Increase Mather finished first. On Monday, October 3, the a.s.sociation of ministers a.s.sembled in the bright Harvard library, just above the hall where most of them had years earlier attended chapel and lectures. They had expected to tackle a question of propriety: Might a clergyman administer communion to a neighboring congregation that found itself without a minister? More urgent matters had intervened. As moderator, Cotton Mather read aloud late that morning from his father's newly completed Cases of Conscience, pages that had grown out of the a.s.sociation's August discussion. The essay const.i.tuted a nod to a 1646 English work that Increase Mather recommended to witchcraft jurors. He enlarged upon and urgently reiterated his May argument, dismantling spectral evidence. For a third time he insisted that although the devil could impersonate innocents, his ruse rarely succeeded.* Courts seldom convicted wrongfully, "so that perhaps there never was an instance of any innocent person condemned in any court of justice on earth" through sheer satanic delusion, a sentence contorted in its syntax-it included another court-clearing, twelve-ton "nevertheless"-if not its logic. Nor did the devil ordinarily arrange for persons to fly for miles through the air. Indeed he had done so in Sweden. But the visible and invisible worlds tended not to intermingle so freely.

Increase Mather set out to countenance a court; he dealt largely with forensics. While spectral sight existed, it was by no means certain that the Salem girls enjoyed it. Nor was it even clear that they were bewitched. He suspected possession. (Except in his son's pages, the two words would be conjoined from this point on.) Possession easily accounted for the convulsions, the elastic limbs, the prophetic statements, the lunges into fireplaces, and the girls' blooming health. In his estimation, the evil eye was "an old fable." If witches emitted a physical venom from their eyes, all within their range of vision would be affected. (Alden had made the same point in vain.) As for the touch test: "Sometimes the power of imagination is such as that the touch of a person innocent and not accused shall have the same effect." He rejected those "magical experiments" as he did the witch cake, a "great folly." (Mary Sibley could have had no idea how an idle afternoon's experiment would be immortalized.) Familiar with every detail of the proceedings, Mather knew even of the diabolical dog, shot for having afflicted a bewitched girl. "This dog was no devil," he explained, "for then they could not have killed him." He mentioned no other Ma.s.sachusetts fatality in the body of his text. Nor did he mention that the court had disregarded every shred of the minister's June advice.

What const.i.tuted sufficient proof of witchcraft? A "free and voluntary confession" remained the gold standard. That said, some innocent blood had been shed in Sweden several years after their great epidemic, when a youngster accused her mother of having flown her to nocturnal meetings. The woman burned. The daughter afterward came before the court "crying and howling." She had accused her mother falsely, to settle a score. Evidence of spell-casting or secret-divining was dispositive, as were feats of unusual strength. (Both Mathers went out of their way to squelch doubts about Burroughs, who raised a special flurry of them.) When credible men and women in full possession of their faculties attested to these things, the evidence was sound; fifty-three-year-old Mather had no patience for mewling teenage girls. If one did not accept testimony from "a distracted person or of a possessed person in a case of murder, theft, felony of any sort, then neither may we do it in the case of witchcraft."* He cast a vote for clemency: "I would rather," he wrote that fall, "judge a witch to be an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch."

Eight ministers endorsed Mather's October 3 statement. By the time the pages went to press, six more had joined them, including some whose paris.h.i.+oners had been executed and others whose paris.h.i.+oners awaited trial. On the morning that Cotton Mather read his father's cogent essay aloud, the Salem justices heard testimony against a thirty-four-year-old Lynn witch. Oversize cats galloped ferociously across a roof. A grown man had for three nights been too terrified to sleep in his own home. "A black thing of a considerable bigness" brushed past a woman as she dressed. The justices summoned a writhing Mary Warren. A touch of the suspect's hand calmed her. With two glances the woman struck Mary to the floor. Warren went home, the Lynn witch to jail. The wind had s.h.i.+fted but gusted still in two countervailing directions at once. Around this time, Phips or someone in his confidence dispatched a series of questions to a group of New York clergymen, applying for a crash course in witchcraft. At least some believed the Ma.s.sachusetts ministers out of their depth.

For the first time, seven suspects went home on bail the following day. All were under the age of eighteen. The youngest were Carrier's seven-year-old daughter and Reverend Dane's eight-year-old grand-daughter. Among the eldest was Mary Lacey Jr., Ann Foster's headstrong, voluble eighteen-year-old granddaughter. Not everyone felt rea.s.sured by those releases; three suspects escaped from the Boston prison that week. William Barker, the Andover farmer who revealed the diabolical plan to make all men equal, seized the moment, as did a couple who had spent over nine months in custody. Sheriff Corwin promptly turned up to confiscate what was left of their Salem village estate. He had already once paid a call, rounding up cattle with which to settle their prison bill. Twelve children remained on the farm; on October 7 an elder son managed to hold off Corwin with a ten-pound bribe. It was the last attempted forfeiture. Wrote a Boston merchant that week to a friend in New York: "We here hope that the greatest heat and fury has stopped."

THROUGH OCTOBER, ONLY the silence had proved as eerie as the caterwauling girls. Even men who had boldly deposed English governors and landed in prison for civil disobedience went mute. Skeptics kept to themselves. Former deputy governor Thomas Danforth had conducted the April hearing at which Parris's niece first mentioned the a.s.sembly of witches in her backyard, at which the girls thrust hands into mouths rather than identify Elizabeth Procter, at which Mrs. Pope had levitated and Abigail's hand was singed. Since that time Charlestown's largest landowner had had his doubts. He seems to have remained quiet, allowing only in mid-October that he did not believe the court could continue without the support of the people and the clergy. Its practices were dangerously divisive. Michael Wigglesworth, the renowned sixty-one-year-old clergyman, author of the much-read The Day of Doom, endorsed Cases of Conscience on October 3 but voiced no opinion on the trials until much later. The cost was high, the confidence in intelligent, able-bodied Stoughton higher still. All too often dissenters wound up named or fined. Fifty-two-year-old Samuel Willard, Increase Mather's only equal among ministers, had sounded not