So stay tuned because within the next few weeks I'll review the book but right now I just wanted to showcase it on its release day.
ISBN-13: 9780316200608
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Release Date: 10/27/2015
Length: 512pp
Buy It: B&N/Amazon/Kobo/IndieBound/Audible
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Release Date: 10/27/2015
Length: 512pp
Buy It: B&N/Amazon/Kobo/IndieBound/Audible
Overview
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials.
It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death.
The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.
As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, THE WITCHES is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story-the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians.
Read an excerpt courtesy Little Brown and Company:
The Witches of Salem
In 1692, The Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen
women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The sorcery materialized in January. The first
hanging took place in June, the last in September; a stark, stunned silence
followed. Although we will never know the exact number of those
formally charged with having “wickedly, maliciously, and feloniously” engaged
in sorcery, somewhere between a hundred and forty-four and a hundred and
eighty-five witches and wizards were named in twenty-five villages and towns. The youngest was
five; the eldest nearly eighty. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts;
daughters their mothers; siblings each other. One minister discovered that he
was related to no fewer than twenty witches.
The population of New England at that time would fit into
Yankee Stadium today. Nearly to a person, they were Puritans. Having suffered
for their faith, they had sailed to North America to worship “with more purity
and less peril than they could do in the country where they were,” as a
clergyman at the center of the crisis later explained. On a providential
mission, they hoped to begin history anew; they had the advantage of building a
civilization from scratch. Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves
by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it
has been argued, America its independence.
New England delivered greater purity but also introduced
fresh perils. Stretching from Martha’s Vineyard to Nova Scotia and
incorporating parts of present-day Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire,
and Maine, it perched on the edge of a wilderness. That was a precarious
position well before 1692, when the colony teetered between governments, or,
more exactly, as a Boston merchant put it, “between government and no
government.”The settlers unseated their royal governor in a deft 1689 military
coup. They had endured without a charter for eight years.
From the start, the colonists tangled with that American
staple, the swarthy terrorist in the back yard. Without a knock or a greeting,
four armed Indians might appear in your parlor to warm themselves by the fire,
propositioning you, while you cowered in the corner with your knitting. You
could return from a trip to Boston to find your house in ashes and your family
taken captive. The Indians skulked, they lurked, they flitted, they committed
atrocities—and they vanished. “Our men could see no enemy to shoot at,” a
Cambridge major general lamented.
King Philip’s War, a fifteen-month contest between the
settlers and the Native Americans, had ended in 1676. It obliterated a third of
New England’s towns, pulverized its economy, and claimed ten per cent of the
adult male population. Every Bay Colony resident lost a friend or a relative;
all knew of a dismemberment or an abduction. By 1692, another Indian war had
begun to take shape, with a series of grisly raids by the Wabanaki and their
French allies. The frontier had recently moved to within fifty miles of Salem.
From the pulpit came reminders of New England’s many
depredations. The wilderness qualified as a sort of “devil’s den”; since the
time of Moses, the prince of darkness had thrived there. He was hardly pleased
to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans. He was in fact stark raving mad about
it, preached Cotton Mather, the brilliant twenty-nine-year- old Boston
minister. What, exactly, did an army of devils look like? Imagine “vast
regiments of cruel and bloody French dragoons,” Mather instructed his North
Church parishioners, and they would understand. He routinely muddied the
zoological waters: Indians comported themselves like roaring lions or savage
bears, Quakers like “grievous wolves.”The French, “dragons of the wilderness,”
completed the diabolical menagerie. Given the symbiotic relationship of an
oppressed people and an inhospitable landscape, it was from there but a short
step to a colluding axis of evil.
The men who catalogued those dangers—who could discern a
line of Revelation in a hailstorm—protected against them, spiritually and
politically. They assisted in coups and installed regimes. Where witches were
concerned, they deferred to the Biblical injunction: “Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live,” Exodus commands. The most literate men in Massachusetts in 1692
were also the most literal. Among them, few probed the subject of witchcraft as
intently as did the lanky, light-haired Mather, who had entered Harvard at
eleven and preached his first sermon at sixteen. He knew that the hidden world
was there somewhere. He would relinquish no tool to exhibit it.
Mather shared the North Church pulpit with his illustrious
father, Increase Mather. The president of Harvard, Increase was New England’s
best-known and most prolific minister. (His son would eventually eclipse him on
both counts, publishing four hundred and thirty-seven books, twenty-six of them
in the next four years.) The elder Mather was returning from England that
spring with a new charter. The fruit of three years’ negotiation, it promised
at last to deliver Massachusetts from chaos. The colonists awaited it in
jittery suspense; all manner of rumor circulated as to its terms. So unreliable
was the news that a monarch could be dead one minute and alive the next.
In isolated settlements, in smoky, fire-lit homes, New
Englanders lived very much in the dark, where one listens more acutely, feels most
passionately, and imagines most vividly, where the sacred and the occult thrive. The
seventeenth-century sky was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black that
it could be difficult at night to keep to the path, so black that a line of
trees might freely migrate to another location, or that you might find yourself
pursued by a rabid black hog, leaving you to crawl home on all fours, bloody
and disoriented. Even the colony’s less isolated outposts felt their fragility.
A tempest blew the roof off one of the finest homes in Salem as its ten
occupants slept. A church went flying, with its congregation inside.
A visitor exaggerated when he reported that New Englanders
could “neither drive a bargain, nor make a jest, without a text of Scripture at
the end on it,” but he was not far off. If there was a book in the house, it
was the Bible. The early modern American thought, breathed, dreamed, disciplined,
bartered, and hallucinated in Biblical texts and imagery. St. John the Baptist
might well turn up in a land dispute. A prisoner cited Deuteronomy 19:19 in his
own defense. When a killer cat came flying in your window— taking hold of your
throat and crushing your chest as you lay defenseless in your bed— you scared
it away by invoking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You also concluded
that your irascible neighbor had paid a call, in feline form.
Human frailty was understood to account for inclement
weather: teeth chattering, toes numb, the Massachusetts Puritan had every
reason to believe that he sinned flamboyantly. He did so especially during the
arctic winter of 1691, when bread froze on Communion plates, ink in pens, sap
in the fireplace. In tiny Salem village, the Reverend Samuel Parris preached to
a chorus of rattling coughs and
Weeks later, word got out that something was grievously
wrong in the Parris household. The minister’s eleven-year-old niece and
nine-year-old daughter complained of bites and pinches by “invisible agents.”
Abigail and Betty launched into “foolish, ridiculous speeches.”Their bodies
shuddered and spun. They went limp or spasmodically rigid.
In 1641, when the colonists established a legal code, the
first capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. “If any man or woman be a witch,
that is, has or consults with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death,”
read the Massachusetts body of laws. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder,
poisoning, and bestiality. In the years since, New England had indicted more
than a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The first person to
confess to having entered into a pact with Satan, a Connecticut servant, had
prayed for his help with her chores. An assistant materialized to clear the
ashes from the hearth and the hogs from the fields. The servant was indicted in
1648 for “familiarity with the devil.” Unable to resist a calamity,
preternatural or otherwise, Cotton Mather disseminated an instructive account
of her compact.
In 1688, four exemplary Boston children, the sons and
daughters of a devout Boston stonelayer named John Goodwin, suffered from a
baffling disorder. “They would bark at one another like dogs, and again purr
like so many cats,” noted Mather, who observed Goodwin’s family and wrote of
their afflictions in “Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and
Possessions” the following year. (The 1689 volume was a salute to his father’s
“Illustrious Providences,” a grab bag of apparitions and portents, published
five years earlier.) The Goodwin children flew like geese, on one occasion for
twenty feet. They recoiled from blows of invisible sticks, shrieked that
they were sliced by knives or wrapped in chains. Jaws, wrists, necks flew out
of joint. Parental reproof sent the children into agonies. Chores defied them.
But “nothing in the world would so discompose them as a religious exercise,”
Mather reported. Thirteen-year-old Martha could read an Oxford compendium of
humor, although she seized up when handed a volume he deemed “profitable and
edifying,” or one with the name Mather on the cover.
To observe her symptoms more closely, Mather that summer
took Martha Goodwin into his home. She cantered, trotted, and galloped about
the household on her “aeriel steed,” whistling through family prayer and
pummelling anyone who attempted it in her presence—the worst house guest in
history. She hurled books at Mather’s head. She read and reread his pages on
her case, lampooning their author. The sauciness astonished him. “And she
particularly told me,” Mather sputtered, four years before the Salem trials,
“that I should quickly come to disgrace by that history.”
The cause of Martha’s afflictions was identified soon
enough. The witch was the mother of a neighborhood laundress. On the stand, the
defendant was unable adequately to recite the Lord’s Prayer, understood to be
proof of guilt. She was hanged in November, 1688, on Boston Common.
Samuel Parris, the Salem minister, would have known every
detail of the Goodwin family’s trials from Mather’s much reprinted “Memorable
Providences.”The book included the pages Martha wildly ridiculed. The
“agitations, writhings, tumblings, tossings, wallowings, foamings” in the
parsonage were the same, only more acute. The girls cried that they were being
stabbed with fine needles. Their skin burned. One disappeared halfway down a
well. Their shrieks could be heard from a distance.
Through February, Parris fasted and prayed. He consulted
with fellow-clergymen. With cider and cakes, he and his wife entertained the
well-wishers who crowded their home. They prayed ardently, gooseflesh rising on
their arms. They sang Psalms. But when the minister had had enough of the “odd
postures and antic gestures,” the deranged speeches, when it became clear that
Scripture would not relieve the girls’ preternatural symptoms, Parris called in
the doctors.
In 1692, a basic medical kit looked little different from an
ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried
dolphin heart. In plasters or powders, snails figured in many remedies. Salem
village had one practicing physician that winter. He owned nine medical texts;
he could likely read but not write. His surgical arsenal consisted of lances,
razors, and saws. The doctor who had examined a seizing Groton girl a
generation earlier initially diagnosed a stomach disorder. On a second visit,
he refused to administer to her further. The distemper was diabolical in
origin.
Whoever examined Abigail and Betty arrived at the same
conclusion. “The evil hand” came as no surprise; the supernatural explanation
was already the one on the street. The diagnosis likely terrified the girls,
whose symptoms deteriorated. It may have gratified Reverend Parris. Witchcraft
was portentous, a Puritan favorite. Never before had it broken out in a
parsonage. The Devil’s appearance was nearly a badge of honor, further proof
that New Englanders were the chosen people. No wonder Massachusetts was
troubled by witches, Cotton Mather exulted: “Where will the Devil show most
malice but where he is hated, and hateth most?”The New England ministry had
long been on the lookout for the apocalypse, imminent since the
sixteen-fifties. The Book of Revelation predicted that the Devil would descend
accompanied by “infernal fiends.” If they were about, God could not be far
behind.
Soon the twelve-year-old daughter of a close friend of
Parris’s began to shudder and choke. So did the village doctor’s teen-age
niece. A creature had followed her home from an errand, through the snow; she
now realized that it had not been a wolf at all. The girls named names. They
could see the culprits clearly. Not one but three witches were loose in Salem.
What exactly was a witch? Any seventeenth century New Englander
could have told you. As workers of magic, witches and wizards extend as far
back as recorded history. The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century,
when sorcery and heresy moved closer together. She came into her own with the
Inquisition, as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness. The western Alps
introduced her to lurid orgies. Germany launched her into the air. As the
magician molted into the witch, she also became predominately female,
inherently more wicked and more susceptible to satanic overtures. An
influential fifteenth-century text compressed a shelf of classical sources to
make its point: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” As is often the
case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the
paranormal. Though weak willed, women could emerge as dangerously, insatiably
commanding.
The English witch made the trip to North America largely
intact. She signed her agreement with the Devil in blood, bore a mark on her
body for her compact, and enchanted by way of charms, ointments, and poppets,
doll-like effigies. Continental witches had more fun. They walked on their
hands. They made pregnancies last for three years. They rode hyenas to
bacchanals deep in the forest. They stole babies and penises. The Massachusetts
witch disordered the barn and the kitchen. She seldom flew to illicit meetings,
more common in Scandinavia and Scotland. Instead, she divined the contents of
an unopened letter, spun suspiciously fine linen, survived falls down stairs,
tipped hay from wagons, enchanted beer, or caused cattle to leap four feet off
the ground. Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or inexplicably
strong and unaccountably smart. They could commit the capital offense of having
more wit than their neighbors, as a minister said of the third Massachusetts
woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.
Matters were murkier when it came to the wily figure with
six thousand years of experience, the master of disguise who could cause things
to appear and disappear, who knew your secrets and could make you believe
things of yourself that were not true. He turned up in New England as a hybrid
monkey, man, and rooster, or as a fast-moving turtle. Even Cotton Mather was
unsure what language he spoke. He was a pervasive presence, however: the air
pulsed with his minions. Typically in Massachusetts, he wore a high-crowned
hat, as he had in an earlier Swedish invasion, which Mather documented in his
1689 book. Mather did not mention the brightly colored scarf that the Devil
wound around his hat. Like the Swedish devil’s gartered stockings or red beard,
it never turned up in New England.
By May, 1962, eight Salem girls had claimed to be enchanted
by individuals whom most of them had never met. Several served as visionaries;
relatives of the ailing made pilgrimages to consult with them. They might be only
eleven or twelve, but under adult supervision they could explain how several
head of cattle had frozen to death, several communities away, six years
earlier. In the courtroom, they provided prophetic direction, cautioning that a
suspect would soon topple a child, or cause a woman to levitate. Minutes later,
the victim’s feet rose from the floor. With their help, at least sixty witches
had been deposed and jailed by the end of the month, more than the
Massachusetts prisons had ever accommodated. Those who had frozen through the
winter began to roast in the sweltering spring.
On May 27th, the new Massachusetts governor, Sir William
Phips, established a special court to try the witchcraft cases. He assembled on
the bench nine of the “people of the best prudence and figure that could be
pitched upon.” At its head he installed his lieutenant governor, sixty-year-old
William Stoughton. A political shape-shifter, Stoughton had served in five
prior Massachusetts regimes. He had helped to unseat the reviled royal
governor, on whose council he sat and whose courts he headed. He possessed one
of the finest legal minds in the colony.
The court met in early June, and sentenced the first witch
to hang on the tenth. It also requested a bit of guidance. During the next
days, twelve ministers conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their reply, a
circumspect, eight-paragraph document, delivered mid- month. Acknowledging the
enormity of the crisis, he issued a paean to good government. He urged
“exquisite caution.” He warned of the dangers posed to those “formerly of an
unblemished reputation.”
In the lines that surely received the greatest scrutiny,
Mather reminded the justices that convictions should not rest purely on
spectral evidence—evidence visible only to the enchanted, who conversed with
the Devil or with his confederates. Mather would insist on the point throughout
the summer. Other considerations must weigh against the suspected witch,
“inasmuch as ’tis an undoubted and a notorious thing” that a devil might
impersonate an innocent, even virtuous, man. Mather wondered whether the entire
calamity might be resolved if the court discounted those testimonies. With a
sweeping “nevertheless”—a word that figured in every 1692 Mather statement on
witchcraft—he then executed an about-face. Having advised “exquisite caution,”
he endorsed a “speedy and vigorous prosecution.”
A month later, Ann Foster, a seventy-two-year-old widow from
neighboring Andover, submitted to the first of several Salem interrogations.
Initially, she denied all involvement with sorcery. Soon enough, she began to
unspool a fantastical tale. The Devil had appeared to her as an exotic bird. He
promised prosperity, along with the gift of afflicting at a glance. She had not
seen him in six months, but her ill-tempered neighbor, Martha Carrier, had been
in touch on his behalf.
At Carrier’s direction, Foster had bewitched several
children and a hog. She worked her sorcery with poppets. Carrier had announced
a Devil’s Sabbath in May, arranging their trip by air. There were twenty-five
people in the meadow, where a former Salem village minister officiated. Three
days later, from jail, Foster added a malfunctioning pole and a mishap to her
account. The pole had snapped as the women flew, causing them to crash,
Foster’s leg crumpling beneath her.
She appeared entirely coöperative, both in a jail interview
with a minister and before her interrogators. The justices soon learned that
Foster had failed to come clean, however. It seemed that she and Carrier had
neither flown nor crashed alone on that Salem-bound pole: a third rider had
travelled silently behind Foster. So divulged forty-year-old Mary Lacey, a
newly arrested suspect, on July 20th. Foster had also withheld the details of a
chilling ceremony. The Devil had baptized his recruits, dipping their heads in
water, six at a time. He performed the sacrament in a nearby river, to which he
had carried Lacey in his arms. On July 21st, Ann Foster appeared before the
magistrates for the fourth time. That hearing was particularly sensational: Mary Lacey, who
supplied the details missing from Foster’s account, was her daughter.
“Did not you know your daughter to be a witch?” one justice
asked Foster. She did not, and seemed taken aback. Mary Warren, a pretty,
twenty-year-old servant, helpfully chimed in, a less dramatic witness at
Foster’s hearing than she appeared on other occasions, when blood trickled from
her mouth or spread across her bonnet. Warren shared with the court what a spectre had confided in her: Foster had
recruited her own daughter. The authorities understood that she had done so
about thirteen years earlier. Was that correct? “No, and I know no more of my
daughter’s being a witch than what day I shall die upon,” Foster replied,
sounding as unequivocal as she had been on the details of the misbegotten Salem
flight. A magistrate coaxed her: “You cannot expect peace of conscience without
a free confession.” Foster swore that if she knew anything more she would
reveal it.
At this, Mary Lacey was called. She berated her mother: “We
have forsaken Jesus Christ, and the Devil hath got hold of us. How shall we get
clear of this evil one?” Under her breath, Foster began to pray. “What God do
witches pray to?” a justice needled. “I cannot tell, the Lord help me,” the
befuddled old woman replied, as her daughter delivered fresh details of their
flight to the village green and of the satanic baptism. Her mother, Lacey
revealed, rode first on the stick.
Court officers removed the two older women and escorted
Lacey’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary Lacey, Jr., into the room. Mary
Warren fell at once into fits. At first, the younger Lacey was unhelpful.
“Where is my mother that made me a witch and I knew it not?” she cried, a yet
more disturbing question than the one posed in June, when a suspect wondered
whether she might be a witch and not know it. Asked to smile at Warren without
hurting her, Mary Lacey failed. Warren collapsed to the floor. “Do you
acknowledge now that you are a witch?” Lacey was asked. She could only agree,
although she seemed to be working from a different definition: a recalcitrant
child, she had caused her parents plenty of trouble. She had, she insisted,
signed no diabolical pact.
The ideal Puritan girl was a sherling amalgam of modesty,
piety, and tireless industry. She was to speak neither too soon nor too much. She read her
Scripture twice daily. Increase Mather warned that youths who disregarded their
mothers could expect to “come to the gallows, and be hanged in gibbets for the
ravens and eagles to feed upon them.”The attention to a youngster’s spiritual
state intensified at adolescence, when children became simultaneously more
capable of reason and less reasonable. Fourteen was the dividing line in law,
for slander among other matters. One was meant then to embrace sobriety and to “put away childish things,” as a
father reminded his Harvard- bound son.
The father was the master of the family, its soul, the
governor of all the governed. He was often an active and engaged parent. He sat
vigil in the sickroom. He fretted over his children’s bodies and souls. A
majority of the bewitched girls had lost fathers; at least half were refugees
from or had been orphaned by attacks in “the last Indian war.”Those absences
were deeply felt. A roaring girl wrestled aloud with the demons who would
assault her the following year: she was well aware that she was fatherless—how
often did they need to remind her as much? But she was hardly an orphan. In a
heated, one-sided conversation, observed and preserved by Cotton Mather, the
seventeen-year-old admonished her tormentors, “I have God for my father and I
don’t question but he’ll provide well for me.”
The justices reminded Mary Lacey, Jr., that if she desired
to be saved by Christ she would confess. “She then proceeded,” the court
reporter noted. She was more profligate with details than her mother or her
grandmother had been. It was a hallmark of Salem that the younger generation—Cotton Mather included—could be
relied on for the most luxuriant reports. It appeared easier to describe
satanic escapades when an adolescent had already been told, or believed, that
she cavorted with the Devil. The record allows a fleeting glimpse of Mary’s
sense of herself. “I have been a disobed—” she began, after which the page is
torn.
Following Mary’s testimony, her mother was returned to the
room. The older womanhad so often scolded that the Devil should fetch her away.
Her wish had come true! Tears streaming down her face, the teen-ager now managed a
spot of revenge: “Oh, mother, why did you give me to the Devil twice or thrice
over?” Mary sobbed. She prayed that the Lord might expose all the witches.
Officials led in her grandmother; three generations of enchantresses stood
before the justices. Mary continued her rant: “Oh, grandmother, why did you
give me to the Devil? Why did you persuade me and, oh, grandmother, do not you
deny it. You have been a very bad woman in your time.”The three returned to
jail as a clutch of warrants made their way to Andover.
By the end of July, it was clear that – with the help of a
minister mastermind – the Devil intended
to topple the Church and subvert the country, something he had never before attempted in New England. Certain patterns
emerged as well. To cast aspersions on a bewitched girl, to visit one’s
imprisoned spouse too regularly, was to risk accusation. It bordered on heresy
to question the validity of witchcraft, the legitimacy of the evidence, or the
wisdom of the court. The skeptic was a marked man. It could be wise to name
names before anyone mentioned yours. It was safer to be afflicted than accused.
Increasingly, you slept under the same roof, if not in the same bed, as your
accuser.
Bewitched women choked with fits, whereas men—who stepped
forward only once the trials had begun—tended to submit to paralyzing bedroom
visits. Imputations proved impossible to outrun. The word of two ministers
could not save an accused parishioner. Neither age, fortune, gender, nor church
membership offered immunity; prominent men stood accused alongside homeless
five-year-old girls. No one ever suffered afflictions without being able to
name a witch. Many braced for a knock at the door.
The court met again early in August, when three men were
convicted: George Jacobs, an elderly farmer; John Willard, a much younger one;
and John Proctor, the first village man to have been accused. In Cotton
Mather’s first Thursday sermon that month, he addressed the trial that all of
Massachusetts awaited. Tipping his hand a little, he called once for compassion
for the accused, twice for pity for the justices. They were, after all, up
against the greatest sophist in existence. They labored to restore the innocent
while excising the diabolical; it made for a hazardous operation. The following
day, Mather wrote excitedly to an uncle in Plymouth. God was working in
miracles. No sooner had they executed five witches—all impudently protesting
their innocence—than God had dispatched the Andover witches, who offered “a
most ample, surprising, amazing confession of all their villainies,”
acknowledging the five executed that had been their confederates, and naming
many more. They identified their ringleader, who came to trial that afternoon.
“A vast concourse of people,” noted Mather, made their way to Salem for the
event, his father among them.
The demonic mastermind was a minister in his early forties
named George Burroughs. He had grown up in Maryland and graduated from Harvard in 1670,
narrowly missing Samuel Parris. He was in his late twenties when he first
arrived in Salem village, where he spent three contentious years. He was
never ordained. Before and after that tenure, Burroughs served on the
vulnerable Maine frontier. During a 1689 raid, he had joined in a seven-hour
battle, waged in a field and an orchard. A veteran Boston militia captain
lauded the Reverend for his unexpected role. The assault cost the settlers
dearly; two hundred and fifty of them were killed or taken captive. Twice
widowed, Burroughs retreated down the coast to Wells, eighty miles north of
Boston. From a lice- infested garrison, he several times in the winter of 1692
appealed to the colonial authorities, who had withdrawn troops from the
frontier, for clothing and provisions. The enemy lurked outside. They could not
hold out for long.
Burroughs’s spectre had been terrifying Salem villagers
since April, when he first choked the twelve-year-old daughter of the Parris
stalwart. He nearly tore her to pieces, bragging afterward that he outranked a
wizard—he was a conjurer. (Days later, he introduced himself with the same
credentials to Parris’s niece, whom he also bewitched.) He had murdered several
women and—evidently a secret agent, in the employ of the French and the
Indians—dispatched a number of frontier soldiers as well. His mission was a
frightful one, he informed the twelve-year-old: he who should have been
teaching children to fear God had now “come to persuade poor creatures to give
their souls to the Devil.” It was he who presided over the satanic Sabbaths.
Sixteen people had given evidence at Burroughs’s preliminary
hearing. Nearly twice as many testified at his trial. Eight confessed witches
revealed that he had been promised a kingship in Satan’s reign. Nine witnesses
accused the short, muscular minister—a “very puny man,” in the estimation of
Cotton Mather—of feats that would have taxed a giant. (Mather provided the sole
surviving account of the trial, although we have no evidence that he ever
entered the courtroom.) “None of us could do what he could do,” a forty-
two-year-old Salem weaver recalled. He had attempted to lift a shotgun that
Burroughs had fired but, even with both hands, could not steady the seven-foot
weapon. Asked to account for his preternatural strength, Burroughs said that an
Indian had assisted him in firing the musket. Lurking behind the testimony was
what may have been the most pertinent charge against the former village
minister: he had survived every Indian attack unscathed. Several of the
bewitched had not been so lucky. Others who might have testified about the
musket handling were dead.
The girls delivered up their own reports with difficulty,
falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that Burroughs bit them. They
displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected the minister’s mouth.
The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings;
the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover. During one delay,
Chief Justice Stoughton appealed to the defendant. What, he asked, did
Burroughs think throttled them? The minister replied that he assumed it was the
Devil. “How comes the devil then to be so loath to have any testimony born
against you?” Stoughton challenged. A brainteaser of a question, it left
Burroughs without an answer.
He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about
the overcrowded room. Some observers who were not bewitched saw them too.
Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight: she explained
that she stared into the blood-red faces of his dead wives. The ghosts demanded
justice. By no account an agreeable man, Burroughs managed to join abusive
behavior at home with miraculous feats abroad. If those in the court did not
know already that, as Mather had it, Burroughs “had been famous for the
barbarous use of his two late wives, all the country over,” they did soon
enough. He monitored their correspondences. He made them swear never to reveal
his secrets. He berated them days after they had given birth. All evidence
pointed to the same conclusion: he was a bad man but a very good wizard. At one point, a former brother-in-law testified, Burroughs
had vanished in the midst of a strawberry-picking expedition. His companions
hollered for him in vain. They rode home to find that he had preceded them, on foot and with a
full basket of berries. He had divined as well what was said about him in his absence.
The Devil could not know as much, the brother-in-law protested, to which
Burroughs replied, “My God makes known your thoughts unto me.” Was it possible,
the chief justice suggested, that a devil had fitted Burroughs into some sort of invisibility cloak, so
that he might “gratify his own jealous humor, to hear what they said of him”?
Burroughs’s answer is lost; Mather deemed it not “worth considering.”The
evidence dwarfed the objections. Burroughs does seem to have bungled his
defense. He stumbled repeatedly, offering contradictory answers—a luxury
afforded only the accusers. As for “his tergiversations, contra-dictions, and
falsehoods,” Mather chided, “there never was a prisoner more eminent for them.”
Out of excuses, Burroughs extracted a paper from his pocket.
He seemed to believe it a deal-clincher. He did not contest the validity of
spectral evidence, as had others who came before the court, who did not care to
be convicted for crimes they committed in someone else’s imagination. Instead,
Burroughs, reading from the paper, asserted that “there neither are, nor ever
were witches, that having made a compact with the Devil can send a Devil to
torment other people at a distance.” It was the most objectionable thing he
could have suggested. If diabolical compacts did not exist, if the Devil could
not subcontract out his work to witches, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had
sent six innocents to their deaths.
A tussle ensued. Stoughton—who had graduated from Harvard
around the time Burroughs was born—recognized the lines at once. Burroughs had
lifted them from the work of Thomas Ady. A leading English skeptic, Ady
inveighed against “groundless, fantastical doctrines,” fairy tales and old
wives’ tales, the results of middle-of-the-night imaginings, excessive
drinking, and blows to the head. Though witches existed, they were rare. The
Bible nowhere connected them with murder, or with imps, compacts, or flights
through the air.
Early on the morning of August 19th, the largest throng to
date turned out to inspect the first men whom Massachusetts was to execute for witchcraft. Martha
Carrier joined them on the trip to the gallows. As the cart creaked up the
hill, George Burroughs, George Jacobs, John Proctor, and John Willard insisted
that they had been falsely accused. They hoped that the real witches would soon be
revealed. They “declared their wish,” a bystander reported, “that their blood
might be the last innocent blood shed upon that account. ”They remained
“sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances, on all accounts.“They
forgave their accusers, the justices, the jury; they prayed they might be
pardoned for their actual sins. Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for the
execution. Some of the condemned appealed to him in heartrending terms.
Would he help them to prepare spiritually for the journey ahead? It is unclear
if he did so or if he held the same hard line as the Salem town minister, who did
not pray with witches.
Burroughs appears to have climbed the ladder first. With
composure, he paused midway to offer what many expected to be a long-delayed
confession. A wisp of his former self after fourteen weeks in a dungeon, he
remained a contrarian. Perched above a crowd that included his former in-laws
and parishioners, a noose around his neck, he delivered an impassioned speech.
With his last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears
rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some disquieting lines.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven,” Burroughs began, continuing, from the ladder,
with a blunder-free recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—an impossible feat for a
wizard, one that any number of other suspects had not managed. For a few
moments, it seemed as if the crowd would obstruct the execution.
Minutes later, the minister dangled from a roughly finished
beam. The life had not gone from his body when Mather, on horseback, pressed
forward to smother the sparks of discontent. He reminded the spectators that
Burroughs had never been ordained. (That was also true of others on the hill
that day, but at least made the dying minister seem unorthodox.) What better
disguise might the Devil choose on such an occasion, Mather challenged, than to
masquerade as “an angel of light”? To the last, George Burroughs was condemned
for his gifts. The protests quieted, as did the minister hanging in midair. He
may have heard a portion of Mather’s remarks.
The execution of a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister,
protesting his innocence to the end, created nearly as much disquiet as had the
idea that a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister recruited for the Devil. It
raised qualms about the court and on the bench. Several of the justices soon allowed
that their methods had been “too violent and not grounded upon a right
foundation”; were they to sit again, they would proceed differently. And it
sent Cotton Mather to his desk.
On September 2nd, he wrote to the chief justice. Already,
Mather claimed, he had done far more behind the scenes than Stoughton could
possibly know. He had been fasting almost weekly through the summer for an end
to the sulfurous assault. He felt that the Massachusetts ministers ought to
support the court in its weighty, worthy task; none had sufficiently done so.
He volunteered to step into the breach, to “flatten that fury, which we now
much turn upon one another.” He had begun to write up a little something, “to
set our calamity in as true a light as I can.” With this new book, he proposed
to dispel any doubts that innocents were in danger, a passage he underlined.
Mather promised to submit his narrative to Stoughton, so that “there may not be
one word out of point.” Might the chief justice and his colleagues sign off on
his endeavor, which would remind the people of their duties in such a crisis?
In a singular valediction, Mather wished Stoughton “success in your noble
encounters with Hell.”
Increase Mather, too, was at work on a book. As father and
son wrote, confessions and concerns multiplied. Reports circulated that seven
hundred witches preyed on Massachusetts. A prominent Bostonian carried his ailing
child the twenty miles to Salem, the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by
the village girls, incurring the wrath of Increase Mather. Was there “not a God
in Boston,” he exploded, “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. On October 4th, for the first time, seven suspects, all under the age
of eighteen, went home on bail. Among the eldest was Mary Lacey, Jr., Ann
Foster’s headstrong granddaughter.
“I found this province miserably harassed with a most
horrible witchcraft,” Governor Phips wrote on October 12th, in his first report
to London on the supernatural plague. He sounded as if he were writing from
Sweden rather than from Boston, borrowing Mather’s details of that infestation.
Grappling with the future of the court, which was scheduled to reconvene in two
weeks, he insisted that the justices had always ruled with empirical evidence,
but admitted that many now condemned their work. He placed a ban on witchcraft
books. “I saw a likelihood of kindling an inextinguishable flame if I should
admit any public and open contests,” Phips explained. That ban applied only to
volumes that did not bear the name Mather on the cover. “The Wonders of the
Invisible World” soon slipped into print, followed by Increase Mather’s “Cases
of Conscience,” both artfully postdated to 1693.
“The Wonders of the Invisible World” was America’s first
instant book Garlanded in credentials, it advertised itself as having been
“published by the special command of his Excellency the Governor.” Stoughton
prefaced the volume, professing himself mildly surprised but immensely
gratified by the work. What a timely account, so carefully and moderately
composed! The chief justice was particularly grateful for Mather’s painstaking
efforts, “considering the place that I hold in the Court of Oyer and Terminer, still
laboring and proceeding in the trial of the persons accused and convicted for
witchcraft.” Cotton Mather introduced the text with a tribute to his own
courage. It was crucial that proper use be made of the “stupendous and
prodigious things that are happening among us.” He did so only, he professed,
because no one else volunteered. Weeks earlier, he had promised that his work
would in no way interfere with that of two colleagues, whom he effectively cut
off at the pass.
What constituted sufficient proof of witchcraft? Father and
son disagreed. Fifty-three- year-old Increase explained in “Cases” that a “free
and voluntary confession” remained the gold standard. When credible men and
women could attest to these things, the evidence was sound. He had no patience
for mewling teen-age girls. 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, “judge a witch to be an honest woman than
judge an honest woman as a witch.”
Cotton Mather worried less about condemning an innocent than
about allowing a witch to walk free. In “Wonders,” he set out “to countermine
the whole plot of the devil against New England.” He would not be surprised if
the witchcraft reached even farther than was suspected, folding into his volume
an account of a celebrated thirty-year-old English
He expressed his fervent hope that some of the witches in
custody might prove innocent. They deserve “our most compassionate pity, till
there be fuller evidences that they are less worthy of it.” Twenty pages later,
he wrote of George Burroughs, “Glad I should have been if I had never known the
name of this man.” His very initials revolted Mather. He wrote up five trial accounts
in all; Burroughs alone was so powerful a wizard that he could not be named.
As quickly as Mather worked, “The Wonders of the Invisible
World” arrived as a case of too much too late. Conceived as a justification,
billed as a felicitous accident, advertised in the author’s own words, the
volume read as a full-throated apologia. Governor Phips disbanded the
witchcraft court at the end of October. Days after the book’s publication,
Mather wailed to his Plymouth-based uncle. A cataract of “unkindness, abuse,
and reproach” roared his way. People said lovely things to his face and hideous
things behind his back. He meant only to tamp down dissent at a critical time.
He found himself under fire for another infraction as well: filial disrespect.
He had not endorsed his father’s volume. (Nor had his father endorsed his.)
Among all the freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a
son or a son implicated a father. He could see little to do but die.
The new administration could ill afford a rift at this
juncture; Increase Mather added a postscript to his pages. He remained
convinced that witches roamed the land. He meant not to deny witchcraft but to
make its prosecution more exact. He had declined to endorse his son’s volume
only out of an aversion to nepotism; he was most grateful to him for having
established that no one had been convicted purely on spectral evidence. He too
made a point of including Burroughs, who had, Increase Mather assured his
readers, accomplished things that no one who “has not a devil to be his
familiar could perform.” Burroughs had deserved to hang. As Cotton Mather saw
it, he had made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting
the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing? An early death no longer appealed.
A year after the trials, Cotton Mather treated two newly
afflicted girls. A seventeen-year-old servant began to convulse after insulting
a woman who had been imprisoned in 1692. The girl interrupted sermons and fell
into trances. She went twelve days without food. She discoursed with spectres
who tempted her with diabolical pacts; she shrieked so loudly that well-wishers
fled the room; she tore a leaf from Mather’s Bible. He followed the same
protocol he had with the Goodwins, four years and nineteen executions earlier,
assembling groups to pray and to sing Psalms at her bedside.
Both girls eventually recovered. Mather devoted thirty-eight
pages to the initial case but left them unpublished. Given the tenor of the
times, he wrote, “No man in his wits would fully expose his thoughts unto them,
till the charms which enrage the people are a little better dissipated.” He did
not care in 1693 to cultivate what, centuries later, would be termed the
paranoid strain in American politics, with its “sense of heated exaggeration,
suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Political stability remained
paramount.
“There is no public calamity,” Mather noted, in “Wonders,”
“but some ill people will serve themselves of the sad providence, and make use
of it for their own ends, as thieves when a house or town is on fire, will
steal what they can.” Twenty-eight years later, a smallpox epidemic raged
through Boston. Cotton Mather faced down the entire medical establishment to
advocate something that seemed every bit as dubious as spectral evidence: inoculation.
He had studied medicine at Harvard. Over the decades, he had come better to
understand infectious disease. Moving from imps and witches to germs and
viruses, he at last located the devils we inhale with every breath. The battle
turned so vitriolic that it dragged Salem out of hiding; Mather was bludgeoned
for lunacy on two counts. Yet again, Massachusetts seemed to be in the grip of
distemper. The people
The Witches of Salem
Diabolical doings in a Puritan village.
In 1692, The Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen
women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft. The sorcery materialized in January. The first
hanging took place in June, the last in September; a stark, stunned silence
followed. Although we will never know the exact number of those
formally charged with having “wickedly, maliciously, and feloniously” engaged
in sorcery, somewhere between a hundred and forty-four and a hundred and
eighty-five witches and wizards were named in twenty-five villages and towns. The youngest was
five; the eldest nearly eighty. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts;
daughters their mothers; siblings each other. One minister discovered that he
was related to no fewer than twenty witches.
The population of New England at that time would fit into
Yankee Stadium today. Nearly to a person, they were Puritans. Having suffered
for their faith, they had sailed to North America to worship “with more purity
and less peril than they could do in the country where they were,” as a
clergyman at the center of the crisis later explained. On a providential
mission, they hoped to begin history anew; they had the advantage of building a
civilization from scratch. Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves
by what offended them, which would give New England its gritty flavor and, it
has been argued, America its independence.
New England delivered greater purity but also introduced
fresh perils. Stretching from Martha’s Vineyard to Nova Scotia and
incorporating parts of present-day Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire,
and Maine, it perched on the edge of a wilderness. That was a precarious
position well before 1692, when the colony teetered between governments, or,
more exactly, as a Boston merchant put it, “between government and no
government.”The settlers unseated their royal governor in a deft 1689 military
coup. They had endured without a charter for eight years.
From the start, the colonists tangled with that American
staple, the swarthy terrorist in the back yard. Without a knock or a greeting,
four armed Indians might appear in your parlor to warm themselves by the fire,
propositioning you, while you cowered in the corner with your knitting. You
could return from a trip to Boston to find your house in ashes and your family
taken captive. The Indians skulked, they lurked, they flitted, they committed
atrocities—and they vanished. “Our men could see no enemy to shoot at,” a
Cambridge major general lamented.
King Philip’s War, a fifteen-month contest between the
settlers and the Native Americans, had ended in 1676. It obliterated a third of
New England’s towns, pulverized its economy, and claimed ten per cent of the
adult male population. Every Bay Colony resident lost a friend or a relative;
all knew of a dismemberment or an abduction. By 1692, another Indian war had
begun to take shape, with a series of grisly raids by the Wabanaki and their
French allies. The frontier had recently moved to within fifty miles of Salem.
From the pulpit came reminders of New England’s many
depredations. The wilderness qualified as a sort of “devil’s den”; since the
time of Moses, the prince of darkness had thrived there. He was hardly pleased
to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans. He was in fact stark raving mad about
it, preached Cotton Mather, the brilliant twenty-nine-year- old Boston
minister. What, exactly, did an army of devils look like? Imagine “vast
regiments of cruel and bloody French dragoons,” Mather instructed his North
Church parishioners, and they would understand. He routinely muddied the
zoological waters: Indians comported themselves like roaring lions or savage
bears, Quakers like “grievous wolves.”The French, “dragons of the wilderness,”
completed the diabolical menagerie. Given the symbiotic relationship of an
oppressed people and an inhospitable landscape, it was from there but a short
step to a colluding axis of evil.
The men who catalogued those dangers—who could discern a
line of Revelation in a hailstorm—protected against them, spiritually and
politically. They assisted in coups and installed regimes. Where witches were
concerned, they deferred to the Biblical injunction: “Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live,” Exodus commands. The most literate men in Massachusetts in 1692
were also the most literal. Among them, few probed the subject of witchcraft as
intently as did the lanky, light-haired Mather, who had entered Harvard at
eleven and preached his first sermon at sixteen. He knew that the hidden world
was there somewhere. He would relinquish no tool to exhibit it.
Mather shared the North Church pulpit with his illustrious
father, Increase Mather. The president of Harvard, Increase was New England’s
best-known and most prolific minister. (His son would eventually eclipse him on
both counts, publishing four hundred and thirty-seven books, twenty-six of them
in the next four years.) The elder Mather was returning from England that
spring with a new charter. The fruit of three years’ negotiation, it promised
at last to deliver Massachusetts from chaos. The colonists awaited it in
jittery suspense; all manner of rumor circulated as to its terms. So unreliable
was the news that a monarch could be dead one minute and alive the next.
In isolated settlements, in smoky, fire-lit homes, New
Englanders lived very much in the dark, where one listens more acutely, feels most
passionately, and imagines most vividly, where the sacred and the occult thrive. The
seventeenth-century sky was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black that
it could be difficult at night to keep to the path, so black that a line of
trees might freely migrate to another location, or that you might find yourself
pursued by a rabid black hog, leaving you to crawl home on all fours, bloody
and disoriented. Even the colony’s less isolated outposts felt their fragility.
A tempest blew the roof off one of the finest homes in Salem as its ten
occupants slept. A church went flying, with its congregation inside.
A visitor exaggerated when he reported that New Englanders
could “neither drive a bargain, nor make a jest, without a text of Scripture at
the end on it,” but he was not far off. If there was a book in the house, it
was the Bible. The early modern American thought, breathed, dreamed, disciplined,
bartered, and hallucinated in Biblical texts and imagery. St. John the Baptist
might well turn up in a land dispute. A prisoner cited Deuteronomy 19:19 in his
own defense. When a killer cat came flying in your window— taking hold of your
throat and crushing your chest as you lay defenseless in your bed— you scared
it away by invoking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You also concluded
that your irascible neighbor had paid a call, in feline form.
Human frailty was understood to account for inclement
weather: teeth chattering, toes numb, the Massachusetts Puritan had every
reason to believe that he sinned flamboyantly. He did so especially during the
arctic winter of 1691, when bread froze on Communion plates, ink in pens, sap
in the fireplace. In tiny Salem village, the Reverend Samuel Parris preached to
a chorus of rattling coughs and
sniffles, to the shuffling of cruelly frostbitten feet. For
everyone’s comfort, he curtailed his afternoon sermon of January 3, 1692. It
was too cold to go on.
Weeks later, word got out that something was grievously
wrong in the Parris household. The minister’s eleven-year-old niece and
nine-year-old daughter complained of bites and pinches by “invisible agents.”
Abigail and Betty launched into “foolish, ridiculous speeches.”Their bodies
shuddered and spun. They went limp or spasmodically rigid.
They interrupted sermons and fell into trances. Neither
appeared to have time for prayer, though until January both had been perfectly
well behaved and well mannered. At night they slept like babies.
In 1641, when the colonists established a legal code, the
first capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. “If any man or woman be a witch,
that is, has or consults with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death,”
read the Massachusetts body of laws. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder,
poisoning, and bestiality. In the years since, New England had indicted more
than a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The first person to
confess to having entered into a pact with Satan, a Connecticut servant, had
prayed for his help with her chores. An assistant materialized to clear the
ashes from the hearth and the hogs from the fields. The servant was indicted in
1648 for “familiarity with the devil.” Unable to resist a calamity,
preternatural or otherwise, Cotton Mather disseminated an instructive account
of her compact.
In 1688, four exemplary Boston children, the sons and
daughters of a devout Boston stonelayer named John Goodwin, suffered from a
baffling disorder. “They would bark at one another like dogs, and again purr
like so many cats,” noted Mather, who observed Goodwin’s family and wrote of
their afflictions in “Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and
Possessions” the following year. (The 1689 volume was a salute to his father’s
“Illustrious Providences,” a grab bag of apparitions and portents, published
five years earlier.) The Goodwin children flew like geese, on one occasion for
twenty feet. They recoiled from blows of invisible sticks, shrieked that
they were sliced by knives or wrapped in chains. Jaws, wrists, necks flew out
of joint. Parental reproof sent the children into agonies. Chores defied them.
But “nothing in the world would so discompose them as a religious exercise,”
Mather reported. Thirteen-year-old Martha could read an Oxford compendium of
humor, although she seized up when handed a volume he deemed “profitable and
edifying,” or one with the name Mather on the cover.
To observe her symptoms more closely, Mather that summer
took Martha Goodwin into his home. She cantered, trotted, and galloped about
the household on her “aeriel steed,” whistling through family prayer and
pummelling anyone who attempted it in her presence—the worst house guest in
history. She hurled books at Mather’s head. She read and reread his pages on
her case, lampooning their author. The sauciness astonished him. “And she
particularly told me,” Mather sputtered, four years before the Salem trials,
“that I should quickly come to disgrace by that history.”
The cause of Martha’s afflictions was identified soon
enough. The witch was the mother of a neighborhood laundress. On the stand, the
defendant was unable adequately to recite the Lord’s Prayer, understood to be
proof of guilt. She was hanged in November, 1688, on Boston Common.
Samuel Parris, the Salem minister, would have known every
detail of the Goodwin family’s trials from Mather’s much reprinted “Memorable
Providences.”The book included the pages Martha wildly ridiculed. The
“agitations, writhings, tumblings, tossings, wallowings, foamings” in the
parsonage were the same, only more acute. The girls cried that they were being
stabbed with fine needles. Their skin burned. One disappeared halfway down a
well. Their shrieks could be heard from a distance.
Through February, Parris fasted and prayed. He consulted
with fellow-clergymen. With cider and cakes, he and his wife entertained the
well-wishers who crowded their home. They prayed ardently, gooseflesh rising on
their arms. They sang Psalms. But when the minister had had enough of the “odd
postures and antic gestures,” the deranged speeches, when it became clear that
Scripture would not relieve the girls’ preternatural symptoms, Parris called in
the doctors.
In 1692, a basic medical kit looked little different from an
ancient Greek one, consisting as it did of beetle’s blood, fox lung, and dried
dolphin heart. In plasters or powders, snails figured in many remedies. Salem
village had one practicing physician that winter. He owned nine medical texts;
he could likely read but not write. His surgical arsenal consisted of lances,
razors, and saws. The doctor who had examined a seizing Groton girl a
generation earlier initially diagnosed a stomach disorder. On a second visit,
he refused to administer to her further. The distemper was diabolical in
origin.
Whoever examined Abigail and Betty arrived at the same
conclusion. “The evil hand” came as no surprise; the supernatural explanation
was already the one on the street. The diagnosis likely terrified the girls,
whose symptoms deteriorated. It may have gratified Reverend Parris. Witchcraft
was portentous, a Puritan favorite. Never before had it broken out in a
parsonage. The Devil’s appearance was nearly a badge of honor, further proof
that New Englanders were the chosen people. No wonder Massachusetts was
troubled by witches, Cotton Mather exulted: “Where will the Devil show most
malice but where he is hated, and hateth most?”The New England ministry had
long been on the lookout for the apocalypse, imminent since the
sixteen-fifties. The Book of Revelation predicted that the Devil would descend
accompanied by “infernal fiends.” If they were about, God could not be far
behind.
Soon the twelve-year-old daughter of a close friend of
Parris’s began to shudder and choke. So did the village doctor’s teen-age
niece. A creature had followed her home from an errand, through the snow; she
now realized that it had not been a wolf at all. The girls named names. They
could see the culprits clearly. Not one but three witches were loose in Salem.
What exactly was a witch? Any seventeenth century New Englander
could have told you. As workers of magic, witches and wizards extend as far
back as recorded history. The witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth century,
when sorcery and heresy moved closer together. She came into her own with the
Inquisition, as a popular myth yielded to a popular madness. The western Alps
introduced her to lurid orgies. Germany launched her into the air. As the
magician molted into the witch, she also became predominately female,
inherently more wicked and more susceptible to satanic overtures. An
influential fifteenth-century text compressed a shelf of classical sources to
make its point: “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” As is often the
case with questions of women and power, elucidations here verged on the
paranormal. Though weak willed, women could emerge as dangerously, insatiably
commanding.
The English witch made the trip to North America largely
intact. She signed her agreement with the Devil in blood, bore a mark on her
body for her compact, and enchanted by way of charms, ointments, and poppets,
doll-like effigies. Continental witches had more fun. They walked on their
hands. They made pregnancies last for three years. They rode hyenas to
bacchanals deep in the forest. They stole babies and penises. The Massachusetts
witch disordered the barn and the kitchen. She seldom flew to illicit meetings,
more common in Scandinavia and Scotland. Instead, she divined the contents of
an unopened letter, spun suspiciously fine linen, survived falls down stairs,
tipped hay from wagons, enchanted beer, or caused cattle to leap four feet off
the ground. Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents or inexplicably
strong and unaccountably smart. They could commit the capital offense of having
more wit than their neighbors, as a minister said of the third Massachusetts
woman hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.
Matters were murkier when it came to the wily figure with
six thousand years of experience, the master of disguise who could cause things
to appear and disappear, who knew your secrets and could make you believe
things of yourself that were not true. He turned up in New England as a hybrid
monkey, man, and rooster, or as a fast-moving turtle. Even Cotton Mather was
unsure what language he spoke. He was a pervasive presence, however: the air
pulsed with his minions. Typically in Massachusetts, he wore a high-crowned
hat, as he had in an earlier Swedish invasion, which Mather documented in his
1689 book. Mather did not mention the brightly colored scarf that the Devil
wound around his hat. Like the Swedish devil’s gartered stockings or red beard,
it never turned up in New England.
By May, 1962, eight Salem girls had claimed to be enchanted
by individuals whom most of them had never met. Several served as visionaries;
relatives of the ailing made pilgrimages to consult with them. They might be only
eleven or twelve, but under adult supervision they could explain how several
head of cattle had frozen to death, several communities away, six years
earlier. In the courtroom, they provided prophetic direction, cautioning that a
suspect would soon topple a child, or cause a woman to levitate. Minutes later,
the victim’s feet rose from the floor. With their help, at least sixty witches
had been deposed and jailed by the end of the month, more than the
Massachusetts prisons had ever accommodated. Those who had frozen through the
winter began to roast in the sweltering spring.
On May 27th, the new Massachusetts governor, Sir William
Phips, established a special court to try the witchcraft cases. He assembled on
the bench nine of the “people of the best prudence and figure that could be
pitched upon.” At its head he installed his lieutenant governor, sixty-year-old
William Stoughton. A political shape-shifter, Stoughton had served in five
prior Massachusetts regimes. He had helped to unseat the reviled royal
governor, on whose council he sat and whose courts he headed. He possessed one
of the finest legal minds in the colony.
The court met in early June, and sentenced the first witch
to hang on the tenth. It also requested a bit of guidance. During the next
days, twelve ministers conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their reply, a
circumspect, eight-paragraph document, delivered mid- month. Acknowledging the
enormity of the crisis, he issued a paean to good government. He urged
“exquisite caution.” He warned of the dangers posed to those “formerly of an
unblemished reputation.”
In the lines that surely received the greatest scrutiny,
Mather reminded the justices that convictions should not rest purely on
spectral evidence—evidence visible only to the enchanted, who conversed with
the Devil or with his confederates. Mather would insist on the point throughout
the summer. Other considerations must weigh against the suspected witch,
“inasmuch as ’tis an undoubted and a notorious thing” that a devil might
impersonate an innocent, even virtuous, man. Mather wondered whether the entire
calamity might be resolved if the court discounted those testimonies. With a
sweeping “nevertheless”—a word that figured in every 1692 Mather statement on
witchcraft—he then executed an about-face. Having advised “exquisite caution,”
he endorsed a “speedy and vigorous prosecution.”
A month later, Ann Foster, a seventy-two-year-old widow from
neighboring Andover, submitted to the first of several Salem interrogations.
Initially, she denied all involvement with sorcery. Soon enough, she began to
unspool a fantastical tale. The Devil had appeared to her as an exotic bird. He
promised prosperity, along with the gift of afflicting at a glance. She had not
seen him in six months, but her ill-tempered neighbor, Martha Carrier, had been
in touch on his behalf.
At Carrier’s direction, Foster had bewitched several
children and a hog. She worked her sorcery with poppets. Carrier had announced
a Devil’s Sabbath in May, arranging their trip by air. There were twenty-five
people in the meadow, where a former Salem village minister officiated. Three
days later, from jail, Foster added a malfunctioning pole and a mishap to her
account. The pole had snapped as the women flew, causing them to crash,
Foster’s leg crumpling beneath her.
She appeared entirely coöperative, both in a jail interview
with a minister and before her interrogators. The justices soon learned that
Foster had failed to come clean, however. It seemed that she and Carrier had
neither flown nor crashed alone on that Salem-bound pole: a third rider had
travelled silently behind Foster. So divulged forty-year-old Mary Lacey, a
newly arrested suspect, on July 20th. Foster had also withheld the details of a
chilling ceremony. The Devil had baptized his recruits, dipping their heads in
water, six at a time. He performed the sacrament in a nearby river, to which he
had carried Lacey in his arms. On July 21st, Ann Foster appeared before the
magistrates for the fourth time. That hearing was particularly sensational: Mary Lacey, who
supplied the details missing from Foster’s account, was her daughter.
“Did not you know your daughter to be a witch?” one justice
asked Foster. She did not, and seemed taken aback. Mary Warren, a pretty,
twenty-year-old servant, helpfully chimed in, a less dramatic witness at
Foster’s hearing than she appeared on other occasions, when blood trickled from
her mouth or spread across her bonnet. Warren shared with the court what a spectre had confided in her: Foster had
recruited her own daughter. The authorities understood that she had done so
about thirteen years earlier. Was that correct? “No, and I know no more of my
daughter’s being a witch than what day I shall die upon,” Foster replied,
sounding as unequivocal as she had been on the details of the misbegotten Salem
flight. A magistrate coaxed her: “You cannot expect peace of conscience without
a free confession.” Foster swore that if she knew anything more she would
reveal it.
At this, Mary Lacey was called. She berated her mother: “We
have forsaken Jesus Christ, and the Devil hath got hold of us. How shall we get
clear of this evil one?” Under her breath, Foster began to pray. “What God do
witches pray to?” a justice needled. “I cannot tell, the Lord help me,” the
befuddled old woman replied, as her daughter delivered fresh details of their
flight to the village green and of the satanic baptism. Her mother, Lacey
revealed, rode first on the stick.
Court officers removed the two older women and escorted
Lacey’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary Lacey, Jr., into the room. Mary
Warren fell at once into fits. At first, the younger Lacey was unhelpful.
“Where is my mother that made me a witch and I knew it not?” she cried, a yet
more disturbing question than the one posed in June, when a suspect wondered
whether she might be a witch and not know it. Asked to smile at Warren without
hurting her, Mary Lacey failed. Warren collapsed to the floor. “Do you
acknowledge now that you are a witch?” Lacey was asked. She could only agree,
although she seemed to be working from a different definition: a recalcitrant
child, she had caused her parents plenty of trouble. She had, she insisted,
signed no diabolical pact.
The ideal Puritan girl was a sherling amalgam of modesty,
piety, and tireless industry. She was to speak neither too soon nor too much. She read her
Scripture twice daily. Increase Mather warned that youths who disregarded their
mothers could expect to “come to the gallows, and be hanged in gibbets for the
ravens and eagles to feed upon them.”The attention to a youngster’s spiritual
state intensified at adolescence, when children became simultaneously more
capable of reason and less reasonable. Fourteen was the dividing line in law,
for slander among other matters. One was meant then to embrace sobriety and to “put away childish things,” as a
father reminded his Harvard- bound son.
The father was the master of the family, its soul, the
governor of all the governed. He was often an active and engaged parent. He sat
vigil in the sickroom. He fretted over his children’s bodies and souls. A
majority of the bewitched girls had lost fathers; at least half were refugees
from or had been orphaned by attacks in “the last Indian war.”Those absences
were deeply felt. A roaring girl wrestled aloud with the demons who would
assault her the following year: she was well aware that she was fatherless—how
often did they need to remind her as much? But she was hardly an orphan. In a
heated, one-sided conversation, observed and preserved by Cotton Mather, the
seventeen-year-old admonished her tormentors, “I have God for my father and I
don’t question but he’ll provide well for me.”
The justices reminded Mary Lacey, Jr., that if she desired
to be saved by Christ she would confess. “She then proceeded,” the court
reporter noted. She was more profligate with details than her mother or her
grandmother had been. It was a hallmark of Salem that the younger generation—Cotton Mather included—could be
relied on for the most luxuriant reports. It appeared easier to describe
satanic escapades when an adolescent had already been told, or believed, that
she cavorted with the Devil. The record allows a fleeting glimpse of Mary’s
sense of herself. “I have been a disobed—” she began, after which the page is
torn.
Following Mary’s testimony, her mother was returned to the
room. The older womanhad so often scolded that the Devil should fetch her away.
Her wish had come true! Tears streaming down her face, the teen-ager now managed a
spot of revenge: “Oh, mother, why did you give me to the Devil twice or thrice
over?” Mary sobbed. She prayed that the Lord might expose all the witches.
Officials led in her grandmother; three generations of enchantresses stood
before the justices. Mary continued her rant: “Oh, grandmother, why did you
give me to the Devil? Why did you persuade me and, oh, grandmother, do not you
deny it. You have been a very bad woman in your time.”The three returned to
jail as a clutch of warrants made their way to Andover.
By the end of July, it was clear that – with the help of a
minister mastermind – the Devil intended
to topple the Church and subvert the country, something he had never before attempted in New England. Certain patterns
emerged as well. To cast aspersions on a bewitched girl, to visit one’s
imprisoned spouse too regularly, was to risk accusation. It bordered on heresy
to question the validity of witchcraft, the legitimacy of the evidence, or the
wisdom of the court. The skeptic was a marked man. It could be wise to name
names before anyone mentioned yours. It was safer to be afflicted than accused.
Increasingly, you slept under the same roof, if not in the same bed, as your
accuser.
Bewitched women choked with fits, whereas men—who stepped
forward only once the trials had begun—tended to submit to paralyzing bedroom
visits. Imputations proved impossible to outrun. The word of two ministers
could not save an accused parishioner. Neither age, fortune, gender, nor church
membership offered immunity; prominent men stood accused alongside homeless
five-year-old girls. No one ever suffered afflictions without being able to
name a witch. Many braced for a knock at the door.
The court met again early in August, when three men were
convicted: George Jacobs, an elderly farmer; John Willard, a much younger one;
and John Proctor, the first village man to have been accused. In Cotton
Mather’s first Thursday sermon that month, he addressed the trial that all of
Massachusetts awaited. Tipping his hand a little, he called once for compassion
for the accused, twice for pity for the justices. They were, after all, up
against the greatest sophist in existence. They labored to restore the innocent
while excising the diabolical; it made for a hazardous operation. The following
day, Mather wrote excitedly to an uncle in Plymouth. God was working in
miracles. No sooner had they executed five witches—all impudently protesting
their innocence—than God had dispatched the Andover witches, who offered “a
most ample, surprising, amazing confession of all their villainies,”
acknowledging the five executed that had been their confederates, and naming
many more. They identified their ringleader, who came to trial that afternoon.
“A vast concourse of people,” noted Mather, made their way to Salem for the
event, his father among them.
The demonic mastermind was a minister in his early forties
named George Burroughs. He had grown up in Maryland and graduated from Harvard in 1670,
narrowly missing Samuel Parris. He was in his late twenties when he first
arrived in Salem village, where he spent three contentious years. He was
never ordained. Before and after that tenure, Burroughs served on the
vulnerable Maine frontier. During a 1689 raid, he had joined in a seven-hour
battle, waged in a field and an orchard. A veteran Boston militia captain
lauded the Reverend for his unexpected role. The assault cost the settlers
dearly; two hundred and fifty of them were killed or taken captive. Twice
widowed, Burroughs retreated down the coast to Wells, eighty miles north of
Boston. From a lice- infested garrison, he several times in the winter of 1692
appealed to the colonial authorities, who had withdrawn troops from the
frontier, for clothing and provisions. The enemy lurked outside. They could not
hold out for long.
Burroughs’s spectre had been terrifying Salem villagers
since April, when he first choked the twelve-year-old daughter of the Parris
stalwart. He nearly tore her to pieces, bragging afterward that he outranked a
wizard—he was a conjurer. (Days later, he introduced himself with the same
credentials to Parris’s niece, whom he also bewitched.) He had murdered several
women and—evidently a secret agent, in the employ of the French and the
Indians—dispatched a number of frontier soldiers as well. His mission was a
frightful one, he informed the twelve-year-old: he who should have been
teaching children to fear God had now “come to persuade poor creatures to give
their souls to the Devil.” It was he who presided over the satanic Sabbaths.
Sixteen people had given evidence at Burroughs’s preliminary
hearing. Nearly twice as many testified at his trial. Eight confessed witches
revealed that he had been promised a kingship in Satan’s reign. Nine witnesses
accused the short, muscular minister—a “very puny man,” in the estimation of
Cotton Mather—of feats that would have taxed a giant. (Mather provided the sole
surviving account of the trial, although we have no evidence that he ever
entered the courtroom.) “None of us could do what he could do,” a forty-
two-year-old Salem weaver recalled. He had attempted to lift a shotgun that
Burroughs had fired but, even with both hands, could not steady the seven-foot
weapon. Asked to account for his preternatural strength, Burroughs said that an
Indian had assisted him in firing the musket. Lurking behind the testimony was
what may have been the most pertinent charge against the former village
minister: he had survived every Indian attack unscathed. Several of the
bewitched had not been so lucky. Others who might have testified about the
musket handling were dead.
The girls delivered up their own reports with difficulty,
falling into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that Burroughs bit them. They
displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected the minister’s mouth.
The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and thrashing stalled the proceedings;
the court could do nothing but wait for the girls to recover. During one delay,
Chief Justice Stoughton appealed to the defendant. What, he asked, did
Burroughs think throttled them? The minister replied that he assumed it was the
Devil. “How comes the devil then to be so loath to have any testimony born
against you?” Stoughton challenged. A brainteaser of a question, it left
Burroughs without an answer.
He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about
the overcrowded room. Some observers who were not bewitched saw them too.
Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a horrible sight: she explained
that she stared into the blood-red faces of his dead wives. The ghosts demanded
justice. By no account an agreeable man, Burroughs managed to join abusive
behavior at home with miraculous feats abroad. If those in the court did not
know already that, as Mather had it, Burroughs “had been famous for the
barbarous use of his two late wives, all the country over,” they did soon
enough. He monitored their correspondences. He made them swear never to reveal
his secrets. He berated them days after they had given birth. All evidence
pointed to the same conclusion: he was a bad man but a very good wizard. At one point, a former brother-in-law testified, Burroughs
had vanished in the midst of a strawberry-picking expedition. His companions
hollered for him in vain. They rode home to find that he had preceded them, on foot and with a
full basket of berries. He had divined as well what was said about him in his absence.
The Devil could not know as much, the brother-in-law protested, to which
Burroughs replied, “My God makes known your thoughts unto me.” Was it possible,
the chief justice suggested, that a devil had fitted Burroughs into some sort of invisibility cloak, so
that he might “gratify his own jealous humor, to hear what they said of him”?
Burroughs’s answer is lost; Mather deemed it not “worth considering.”The
evidence dwarfed the objections. Burroughs does seem to have bungled his
defense. He stumbled repeatedly, offering contradictory answers—a luxury
afforded only the accusers. As for “his tergiversations, contra-dictions, and
falsehoods,” Mather chided, “there never was a prisoner more eminent for them.”
Out of excuses, Burroughs extracted a paper from his pocket.
He seemed to believe it a deal-clincher. He did not contest the validity of
spectral evidence, as had others who came before the court, who did not care to
be convicted for crimes they committed in someone else’s imagination. Instead,
Burroughs, reading from the paper, asserted that “there neither are, nor ever
were witches, that having made a compact with the Devil can send a Devil to
torment other people at a distance.” It was the most objectionable thing he
could have suggested. If diabolical compacts did not exist, if the Devil could
not subcontract out his work to witches, the Court of Oyer and Terminer had
sent six innocents to their deaths.
A tussle ensued. Stoughton—who had graduated from Harvard
around the time Burroughs was born—recognized the lines at once. Burroughs had
lifted them from the work of Thomas Ady. A leading English skeptic, Ady
inveighed against “groundless, fantastical doctrines,” fairy tales and old
wives’ tales, the results of middle-of-the-night imaginings, excessive
drinking, and blows to the head. Though witches existed, they were rare. The
Bible nowhere connected them with murder, or with imps, compacts, or flights
through the air.
Ady believed that witches were a convenient excuse for the
ignorant physician. He suggested that when misfortune struck we should not
struggle to recall who had last come to the door. Burroughs denied having
borrowed the passage, then amended his answer. A visitor had passed him the
text in manuscript. He had transcribed it. He had already several times agreed
with the justices that witches plagued New England. It was too late for such a
dangerous gambit.
Early on the morning of August 19th, the largest throng to
date turned out to inspect the first men whom Massachusetts was to execute for witchcraft. Martha
Carrier joined them on the trip to the gallows. As the cart creaked up the
hill, George Burroughs, George Jacobs, John Proctor, and John Willard insisted
that they had been falsely accused. They hoped that the real witches would soon be
revealed. They “declared their wish,” a bystander reported, “that their blood
might be the last innocent blood shed upon that account. ”They remained
“sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances, on all accounts.“They
forgave their accusers, the justices, the jury; they prayed they might be
pardoned for their actual sins. Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for the
execution. Some of the condemned appealed to him in heartrending terms.
Would he help them to prepare spiritually for the journey ahead? It is unclear
if he did so or if he held the same hard line as the Salem town minister, who did
not pray with witches.
Burroughs appears to have climbed the ladder first. With
composure, he paused midway to offer what many expected to be a long-delayed
confession. A wisp of his former self after fourteen weeks in a dungeon, he
remained a contrarian. Perched above a crowd that included his former in-laws
and parishioners, a noose around his neck, he delivered an impassioned speech.
With his last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears
rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some disquieting lines.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven,” Burroughs began, continuing, from the ladder,
with a blunder-free recitation of the Lord’s Prayer—an impossible feat for a
wizard, one that any number of other suspects had not managed. For a few
moments, it seemed as if the crowd would obstruct the execution.
Minutes later, the minister dangled from a roughly finished
beam. The life had not gone from his body when Mather, on horseback, pressed
forward to smother the sparks of discontent. He reminded the spectators that
Burroughs had never been ordained. (That was also true of others on the hill
that day, but at least made the dying minister seem unorthodox.) What better
disguise might the Devil choose on such an occasion, Mather challenged, than to
masquerade as “an angel of light”? To the last, George Burroughs was condemned
for his gifts. The protests quieted, as did the minister hanging in midair. He
may have heard a portion of Mather’s remarks.
The execution of a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister,
protesting his innocence to the end, created nearly as much disquiet as had the
idea that a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister recruited for the Devil. It
raised qualms about the court and on the bench. Several of the justices soon allowed
that their methods had been “too violent and not grounded upon a right
foundation”; were they to sit again, they would proceed differently. And it
sent Cotton Mather to his desk.
On September 2nd, he wrote to the chief justice. Already,
Mather claimed, he had done far more behind the scenes than Stoughton could
possibly know. He had been fasting almost weekly through the summer for an end
to the sulfurous assault. He felt that the Massachusetts ministers ought to
support the court in its weighty, worthy task; none had sufficiently done so.
He volunteered to step into the breach, to “flatten that fury, which we now
much turn upon one another.” He had begun to write up a little something, “to
set our calamity in as true a light as I can.” With this new book, he proposed
to dispel any doubts that innocents were in danger, a passage he underlined.
Mather promised to submit his narrative to Stoughton, so that “there may not be
one word out of point.” Might the chief justice and his colleagues sign off on
his endeavor, which would remind the people of their duties in such a crisis?
In a singular valediction, Mather wished Stoughton “success in your noble
encounters with Hell.”
Increase Mather, too, was at work on a book. As father and
son wrote, confessions and concerns multiplied. Reports circulated that seven
hundred witches preyed on Massachusetts. A prominent Bostonian carried his ailing
child the twenty miles to Salem, the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by
the village girls, incurring the wrath of Increase Mather. Was there “not a God
in Boston,” he exploded, “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. On October 4th, for the first time, seven suspects, all under the age
of eighteen, went home on bail. Among the eldest was Mary Lacey, Jr., Ann
Foster’s headstrong granddaughter.
“I found this province miserably harassed with a most
horrible witchcraft,” Governor Phips wrote on October 12th, in his first report
to London on the supernatural plague. He sounded as if he were writing from
Sweden rather than from Boston, borrowing Mather’s details of that infestation.
Grappling with the future of the court, which was scheduled to reconvene in two
weeks, he insisted that the justices had always ruled with empirical evidence,
but admitted that many now condemned their work. He placed a ban on witchcraft
books. “I saw a likelihood of kindling an inextinguishable flame if I should
admit any public and open contests,” Phips explained. That ban applied only to
volumes that did not bear the name Mather on the cover. “The Wonders of the
Invisible World” soon slipped into print, followed by Increase Mather’s “Cases
of Conscience,” both artfully postdated to 1693.
“The Wonders of the Invisible World” was America’s first
instant book Garlanded in credentials, it advertised itself as having been
“published by the special command of his Excellency the Governor.” Stoughton
prefaced the volume, professing himself mildly surprised but immensely
gratified by the work. What a timely account, so carefully and moderately
composed! The chief justice was particularly grateful for Mather’s painstaking
efforts, “considering the place that I hold in the Court of Oyer and Terminer, still
laboring and proceeding in the trial of the persons accused and convicted for
witchcraft.” Cotton Mather introduced the text with a tribute to his own
courage. It was crucial that proper use be made of the “stupendous and
prodigious things that are happening among us.” He did so only, he professed,
because no one else volunteered. Weeks earlier, he had promised that his work
would in no way interfere with that of two colleagues, whom he effectively cut
off at the pass.
What constituted sufficient proof of witchcraft? Father and
son disagreed. Fifty-three- year-old Increase explained in “Cases” that a “free
and voluntary confession” remained the gold standard. When credible men and
women could attest to these things, the evidence was sound. He had no patience
for mewling teen-age girls. 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, “judge a witch to be an honest woman than
judge an honest woman as a witch.”
Cotton Mather worried less about condemning an innocent than
about allowing a witch to walk free. In “Wonders,” he set out “to countermine
the whole plot of the devil against New England.” He would not be surprised if
the witchcraft reached even farther than was suspected, folding into his volume
an account of a celebrated thirty-year-old English
case, similar to Salem’s, except perhaps for a combusting
toad. He chose that trial with reason: it was one in which spectral evidence
had served to convict. Mather seems occasionally to have embroidered on court
reports with details that appear nowhere in the surviving pages: the smell of
brimstone, money raining down, a corner of a sheet ripped from a spectre. He
otherwise adhered closely to the evidence while working some magic with his
pages; no witnesses for the defense or petitions on their behalf appear in
“Wonders.” Mather included all the crowd-pleasing spectral stories, while
issuing regular reminders that flights and pacts played only supporting roles
in the convictions.
He expressed his fervent hope that some of the witches in
custody might prove innocent. They deserve “our most compassionate pity, till
there be fuller evidences that they are less worthy of it.” Twenty pages later,
he wrote of George Burroughs, “Glad I should have been if I had never known the
name of this man.” His very initials revolted Mather. He wrote up five trial accounts
in all; Burroughs alone was so powerful a wizard that he could not be named.
As quickly as Mather worked, “The Wonders of the Invisible
World” arrived as a case of too much too late. Conceived as a justification,
billed as a felicitous accident, advertised in the author’s own words, the
volume read as a full-throated apologia. Governor Phips disbanded the
witchcraft court at the end of October. Days after the book’s publication,
Mather wailed to his Plymouth-based uncle. A cataract of “unkindness, abuse,
and reproach” roared his way. People said lovely things to his face and hideous
things behind his back. He meant only to tamp down dissent at a critical time.
He found himself under fire for another infraction as well: filial disrespect.
He had not endorsed his father’s volume. (Nor had his father endorsed his.)
Among all the freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a
son or a son implicated a father. He could see little to do but die.
The new administration could ill afford a rift at this
juncture; Increase Mather added a postscript to his pages. He remained
convinced that witches roamed the land. He meant not to deny witchcraft but to
make its prosecution more exact. He had declined to endorse his son’s volume
only out of an aversion to nepotism; he was most grateful to him for having
established that no one had been convicted purely on spectral evidence. He too
made a point of including Burroughs, who had, Increase Mather assured his
readers, accomplished things that no one who “has not a devil to be his
familiar could perform.” Burroughs had deserved to hang. As Cotton Mather saw
it, he had made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting
the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing? An early death no longer appealed.
A year after the trials, Cotton Mather treated two newly
afflicted girls. A seventeen-year-old servant began to convulse after insulting
a woman who had been imprisoned in 1692. The girl interrupted sermons and fell
into trances. She went twelve days without food. She discoursed with spectres
who tempted her with diabolical pacts; she shrieked so loudly that well-wishers
fled the room; she tore a leaf from Mather’s Bible. He followed the same
protocol he had with the Goodwins, four years and nineteen executions earlier,
assembling groups to pray and to sing Psalms at her bedside.
Both girls eventually recovered. Mather devoted thirty-eight
pages to the initial case but left them unpublished. Given the tenor of the
times, he wrote, “No man in his wits would fully expose his thoughts unto them,
till the charms which enrage the people are a little better dissipated.” He did
not care in 1693 to cultivate what, centuries later, would be termed the
paranoid strain in American politics, with its “sense of heated exaggeration,
suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” Political stability remained
paramount.
Mather did, however, retail the teen-ager’s report that
Frenchmen and Indians—“horrid sorcerers and hellish conjurers”—had colluded in
Salem witchcraft. He insisted on it for years.
“There is no public calamity,” Mather noted, in “Wonders,”
“but some ill people will serve themselves of the sad providence, and make use
of it for their own ends, as thieves when a house or town is on fire, will
steal what they can.” Twenty-eight years later, a smallpox epidemic raged
through Boston. Cotton Mather faced down the entire medical establishment to
advocate something that seemed every bit as dubious as spectral evidence: inoculation.
He had studied medicine at Harvard. Over the decades, he had come better to
understand infectious disease. Moving from imps and witches to germs and
viruses, he at last located the devils we inhale with every breath. The battle
turned so vitriolic that it dragged Salem out of hiding; Mather was bludgeoned
for lunacy on two counts. Yet again, Massachusetts seemed to be in the grip of
distemper. The people
talked, he huffed in his diary, “not only like idiots but
also like fanaticks.” He remained as steadfast on the subject of inoculation as
he had been equivocal on witchcraft. In November, 1721, a homemade bomb came
sailing in his window at 3 A.M. His
reputation never recovered.
Praise for The Witches:
From the Publisher
"[A] must-read."—Joanna Coles, Cosmopolitan"
Schiff's account is better written than any I have encountered....you are likely to find yourself turning the pages (as I did) with a sense that until now you'd never quite taken in what happened...[a] brilliantly assured narrative."—John Wilson, Christianity Today"
Fantastic."—Kristin Van Ogtrop, Time
Library Journal
09/01/2015
In 1692, nearly two dozen people accused of being witches were hanged in and around Salem, MA. What started as a few adolescent girls writhing and convulsing soon metastasized into dozens of "victims," hundreds accused, and communities torn apart. While witchcraft trials weren't unfamiliar to New England, clemency and uncertainty were the norm until this outbreak. Schiff (Cleopatra) traces the course of the witch hunts, detailing each player, accusation, confabulation, court appearance, and execution. The author also provides exciting digressions into the nature of continental and New World witchcraft, local political and social disputes, religious instruction, and Puritan life; though these find odd placings among the overlong courtroom reporting. Schiff's goal appears to be creating a complete accounting—it's hard to tell, though, because the work is weak in structure and organization and lacks a solid thesis. The last 50 pages are the strongest as they pose possible explanations for why the craze occurred and the various motivations of the afflicted, the inquisitors, and confessors. VERDICT This fully documented narrative, if a bit exhausting and disorganized, will find a welcome audience among readers of witchcraft or colonial histories as well as Schiff's legion of fans. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15.]—Evan M. Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA
Kirkus Reviews
2015-08-03
The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer provides an account of a foundational American tragedy of mass hysteria and injustice. At its best, the latest work from Schiff (Cleopatra: A Life, 2010, etc.) ably weaves together all the assorted facts and many personalities from the 1692 Salem witch trials and provides genuine insight into a 17th-century culture that was barely a few steps away from the Dark Ages. Religious belief and superstition passed for reality, science had no foothold whatsoever, and both common folk and their educated ministers could believe that local women rode broomsticks, turned into cats, and had the power to be in two places at once. Furthermore, it was a world in which an accusation was as good as a conviction, where seemingly possessed girls flailed and contorted themselves in court, while judges bore down upon helpless defendants with loaded questions. The accused, under the spell of their own culture, could likewise turn on themselves—and not just to save their skin. "Confession came naturally to a people who believed it the route to salvation, who submitted spiritual biographies when they entered into church membership, who did not entirely differentiate sin from crime," writes the author. "By the craggy logic of the day, if you had been named, you must have been named for a reason. Little soul-searching was required to locate a kernel of guilt." While Schiff has marshaled the facts in neat sequential order, the book lacks either a sense of relevance or compelling narrative drive. The author writes in a sharp-eyed yet conversational tone, but she doesn't have anything new to say or at least nothing that would come as a revelation to even general readers, until the final pages. This is the type of book that yearns from the beginning for a fresh approach or a new angle. As history, The Witches is intelligent and reliable; as a story, it's a trudge over very well-trod ground.
Publishers Weekly
09/07/2015
Pulitzer-winner Schiff (Cleopatra: A Life) applies her descriptive prowess and flair for the dramatic to the Salem witch trials. The book is packed with details and delivered with a punch, but it suffers from a dearth of nuance. Schiff’s passionate use of the active tense places the reader right in the midst of the action, about 15 miles north of Boston during the spring of 1692. However, this laudable effort also causes some confusion over place and time, and it’s hard to distinguish the facts from Schiff’s imaginative attempts at turning the trial reports into narrative action. There are disorienting shifts between passages in which the reader is immersed in the spooky, supposedly magical environment of Salem, and more prosaic sections describing what actually happened in the trials and town. Schiff provides background context for the events and focuses on the action, but her efforts to apply an overarching fairy tale theme miss their mark, and she avoids deep cultural, historical, and societal analyses of the trials. This retelling succeeds as a work of gripping popular nonfiction, but for those already familiar with the subject, it will serve only as light reading. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Endeavor. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
"[A] must-read."—Joanna Coles, Cosmopolitan"
Schiff's account is better written than any I have encountered....you are likely to find yourself turning the pages (as I did) with a sense that until now you'd never quite taken in what happened...[a] brilliantly assured narrative."—John Wilson, Christianity Today"
Fantastic."—Kristin Van Ogtrop, Time
Library Journal
09/01/2015In 1692, nearly two dozen people accused of being witches were hanged in and around Salem, MA. What started as a few adolescent girls writhing and convulsing soon metastasized into dozens of "victims," hundreds accused, and communities torn apart. While witchcraft trials weren't unfamiliar to New England, clemency and uncertainty were the norm until this outbreak. Schiff (Cleopatra) traces the course of the witch hunts, detailing each player, accusation, confabulation, court appearance, and execution. The author also provides exciting digressions into the nature of continental and New World witchcraft, local political and social disputes, religious instruction, and Puritan life; though these find odd placings among the overlong courtroom reporting. Schiff's goal appears to be creating a complete accounting—it's hard to tell, though, because the work is weak in structure and organization and lacks a solid thesis. The last 50 pages are the strongest as they pose possible explanations for why the craze occurred and the various motivations of the afflicted, the inquisitors, and confessors. VERDICT This fully documented narrative, if a bit exhausting and disorganized, will find a welcome audience among readers of witchcraft or colonial histories as well as Schiff's legion of fans. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15.]—Evan M. Anderson, Kirkendall P.L., Ankeny, IA
Kirkus Reviews
2015-08-03The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer provides an account of a foundational American tragedy of mass hysteria and injustice. At its best, the latest work from Schiff (Cleopatra: A Life, 2010, etc.) ably weaves together all the assorted facts and many personalities from the 1692 Salem witch trials and provides genuine insight into a 17th-century culture that was barely a few steps away from the Dark Ages. Religious belief and superstition passed for reality, science had no foothold whatsoever, and both common folk and their educated ministers could believe that local women rode broomsticks, turned into cats, and had the power to be in two places at once. Furthermore, it was a world in which an accusation was as good as a conviction, where seemingly possessed girls flailed and contorted themselves in court, while judges bore down upon helpless defendants with loaded questions. The accused, under the spell of their own culture, could likewise turn on themselves—and not just to save their skin. "Confession came naturally to a people who believed it the route to salvation, who submitted spiritual biographies when they entered into church membership, who did not entirely differentiate sin from crime," writes the author. "By the craggy logic of the day, if you had been named, you must have been named for a reason. Little soul-searching was required to locate a kernel of guilt." While Schiff has marshaled the facts in neat sequential order, the book lacks either a sense of relevance or compelling narrative drive. The author writes in a sharp-eyed yet conversational tone, but she doesn't have anything new to say or at least nothing that would come as a revelation to even general readers, until the final pages. This is the type of book that yearns from the beginning for a fresh approach or a new angle. As history, The Witches is intelligent and reliable; as a story, it's a trudge over very well-trod ground.
Publishers Weekly
09/07/2015Pulitzer-winner Schiff (Cleopatra: A Life) applies her descriptive prowess and flair for the dramatic to the Salem witch trials. The book is packed with details and delivered with a punch, but it suffers from a dearth of nuance. Schiff’s passionate use of the active tense places the reader right in the midst of the action, about 15 miles north of Boston during the spring of 1692. However, this laudable effort also causes some confusion over place and time, and it’s hard to distinguish the facts from Schiff’s imaginative attempts at turning the trial reports into narrative action. There are disorienting shifts between passages in which the reader is immersed in the spooky, supposedly magical environment of Salem, and more prosaic sections describing what actually happened in the trials and town. Schiff provides background context for the events and focuses on the action, but her efforts to apply an overarching fairy tale theme miss their mark, and she avoids deep cultural, historical, and societal analyses of the trials. This retelling succeeds as a work of gripping popular nonfiction, but for those already familiar with the subject, it will serve only as light reading. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Endeavor. (Nov.)
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Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Exupéry, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d'Amérique. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions.
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This time period in our history really does fascinate me, I will be looking for your review Debbie!
ReplyDeleteI'm anxious to get to read the book Ali!
DeleteI'm not the biggest non-fiction fan, either but if it has to do with history hell yeah, I'm a fan!
ReplyDeleteAnd her non-fiction is better than most fiction Sarah :)
DeleteEEe! I am not sure that I'd want to read this, must have been an awful time. Hate to think of the fear this must have engendered.
ReplyDeleteIt was actually right around the time that England was also ridding themselves of "witches" which was Elizabeth's way to get rid of the Catholics. Thanks Kathryn!
DeleteNot a fan of nonfiction with few exceptions usually history related..so this totally appeals to me..thanks Debbie!
ReplyDeleteMe too Kim, thanks for stopping by
DeleteI feel the same as you there has to be something that really grabs me with a non-fiction read for me to have any interest. I'll be interested to see your review.
ReplyDeleteHi Sharon, I can't wait to read it!! Thanks for stopping by!
Delete