The Witches: Salem, 1692 Read online

  Glanvill elaborated on Perkins’s contention that we should not deny the existence of something because one fails to understand it. We did not know how the soul operated either, observed Glanvill. Why did the Bible warn against witches if they did not exist? Every nation had a word for the phenomenon. How had they all managed to name a nonentity? There were moreover plenty of confessions. Here as elsewhere, consistency proved the point. “We have the attestation of thousands of eye and ear witnesses, and those not of the easily deceivable vulgar only, but of wise and grave discerners, and that, when no interest could oblige them to agree together in a common lie,” asserted Glanvill. It was inconceivable that “imagination, which is the most various thing in all the world, should infinitely repeat the same conceit in all times and places.” Proof was elusive but by no means impossible. By the same logic, argued the royal academician, among the keenest minds of his century, touching up against the nature of knowledge, how can we prove that Julius Caesar founded the Roman Empire? (In Mather’s version, this was tantamount to ranking the entire history of Great Britain among the tales of Don Quixote.) To disbelieve was to reduce history to fiction.†

  Indeed the imagery was startlingly similar, as were the convulsions, trances, shrieks, and stranglings. A New Englander knew what a witch looked like as today we recognize a leprechaun or a vampire, although we have (presumably) never met one. Which was no proof of anything. Just because you did not see the robbers on the road, argued Mather, did not mean they failed to exist. The skeptic insisted witchcraft was absurd and impossible, a fantasy, as one doubter would contend, propagated by “little imposters.” But that was precisely the point, countered Glanvill. Witchcraft was so far-fetched, so preposterous, so improbable, it had to be true. You couldn’t make this stuff up! To the impossibility of a shared delusion was added the most compelling reason to believe in witchcraft, one pinched from the title page of the Malleus: “Not to believe in witchcraft is the greatest of heresies.” The seventeenth-century skeptic was made to appear an appeaser. “Flashy people may burlesque these things,” sniped Mather in 1702, taking aim at the “learned witlings of the coffee-house,” the latte-sipping liberals of the day. But sober minds did not make sport of the invisible world, especially in light of the evidence. Mather was very close to a larger theme from his father’s 1684 Illustrious Providences, stuffed with mind-boggling portents and prodigies, an occult Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Without mystery there was no faith. To deny witchcraft was to deny religion, a small step from a more provocative assertion: to deny witchcraft was to advocate it.

  As for the wily figure who came to the job with six thousand years’ 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? Here matters grew murkier. Perkins assigned the devil a concrete form but did not describe him. No New Englander seemed particularly clear as to who he was or what he looked like. There were no bat wings or forked tails in sight, though in one Salem account, he stuck out a cloven foot, and in another he turned up as a hybrid monkey, man, and rooster. It was uncertain whether he was male or female. One accused witch wondered if he might be a mouse or a fast-moving turtle. If he had a physical existence, the devil the New Englander knew was a “little black man” or a “great black rogue” or a “black hog.” In the more or less official 1692 version, he was barely taller than a walking stick, tawny, with straight, dark hair and a high-crowned hat. While he was allergic to Scripture—the Swedish girl had fallen from the air because she uttered the Lord’s name in flight—it was unclear what language the devil spoke. Even Cotton Mather did not know. He was however a pervasive presence. The air pulsed with his minions. There were more devils than men in the world, warned the Mathers. We inhaled them with every breath.

  Not only were his infernal armies everywhere, but the devil was invoked regularly. Having beaten her and turned her out in the January snow, a Haverhill husband bellowed that his wife “was nothing to him but a devil in woman’s apparel.” The young woman discovered in the wrong bed when giggling erupted late one night was convicted as a “lying little devil.” An Ipswich man testified that his abusive neighbor “had so much of the devil in him that he was a great affliction to those who lived near him.” The fiend emerged often in the heat of argument—“the devil take you” served precisely as do two short, spiked syllables today—though that was not a necessary precondition. He took well to the uncongenial New England climate; naturally, the Indians worshipped Satan, as did the Quakers. (Which justified appropriating the Friends’ Salem land. On it stood the 1692 prison.) With their “spirit of contention,” the Salem villagers had, according to the 1675 court ruling, offered the devil a leg up. In the opinion of at least one Massachusetts cleric, religious tolerance qualified as a satanic idea. The starving of ministers, Cotton Mather warned, was a way for Satan to take over the land.* The foreigner in an unusual hat was a devil. He figured as the codefendant in most criminal indictments and graced a fair number of sermons, the ravening wolf to the minister’s shepherd. Parris’s were no exception, reliably though not disproportionately Satan-heavy. On January 3, 1692, Parris noted that the village church seemed on stable footing. He also cautioned that “it is the main drift of the Devil to pull it all down.”

  In a New England twist, a group of ministers observed that sometimes God sent devils expressly to silence the naysayers. That was the lesson Mather extracted from the Goodwin episode. He vowed to make ample use of that assault and, with Memorable Providences, to settle the matter once and for all. With a gentle pat on its spine, he sent forth his little volume—a lackey to the great British works, as he saw it—to assure mankind that there were devils at large. Massachusetts knew of the little Swedish girl, her flying accident, the un-English, clandestine meeting in the meadow, the blood pact, and the man in the high-crowned hat, thanks to Mather, who plucked them from Glanvill. No wonder Massachusetts was troubled by witches, noted Mather, quoting a Glanvill disciple who, in a bit of transatlantic log-rolling, was quoting him. “Where will the Devil show most malice but where he is hated, and hateth most?” Mather demanded. The devil’s appearance was nearly a badge of honor, further proof that New Englanders were the chosen people. He touched down like spiritual lightning on the ministerial roof. He was not altogether unwelcome; if the devil was about, God could not be far behind. The book of Revelation predicted that he would descend accompanied by his “infernal fiends”; Mather had long been on the lookout for the Apocalypse, imminent in New England since the 1650s. And the devil earned a promotion in 1692. He became a megalomaniacal conspirator laboring to subvert God’s kingdom, a feat he had never before attempted in Massachusetts.

  By the time the Massachusetts witches took flight, the European witch craze had exhausted itself. Holland had abolished prosecutions in 1610, Geneva in 1632. France’s Louis XIV dismissed all witchcraft cases fifty years later, although several shepherds burned in 1691. In the age of Boyle, Newton, and Locke (all of whom believed in witchcraft), prosecutions stuttered to a stop all over Europe. Any number of texts discrediting witchcraft existed, although you could not read a skeptical page on the subject printed in Boston before 1692. Faith and a tightly controlled press insulated the Massachusetts settler; by 1692 the New England witch differed from her English counterpart primarily in that she was more real. What you could read in Massachusetts were the tirades against witchcraft with which Cotton Mather throttled its doubters, few of them in evidence. It was like studying ecstatic creationist literature without knowing that Darwin had ever lived. To that end, Mather laid out the Goodwin case in explicit detail. He included only those particulars he had personally observed or for which he could unequivocally vouch. They were conclusive; he defied anyone again to deny witchcraft. He would never trust another man who did.

  PRAYER, EVERY MASSACHUSETTS minister agreed, was the sole powerful and effective remedy against the devil. And it was prayer that Parris embraced i
n 1692. Massachusetts had held colony-wide fasts to counteract witchcraft as early as 1651. Parris convened a series of them at his home, in the village, and in nearby congregations. On Friday, March 11, a group of ministers assembled at the parsonage for a day of devotions. The girls remained largely quiet, though at the conclusion of each prayer, noted Hale, himself the father of three children under the age of seven, “they would act and speak strangely and ridiculously.” More severely affected, blond Abigail Williams wound up in a fit, her limbs pretzeled. At some point thereafter Parris decided to separate the children, opting to send off his daughter. The choice may have been practical; the family could not spare Abigail, the servant. They lodged nine-year-old Betty with Stephen Sewall, the town court clerk, soon to grapple with contorting young women both day and night. A distant cousin, he was a magnanimous man. The Sewalls were themselves parents of three children under the age of four. And Betty’s fits persisted, leaving her hosts disheartened. Late in the month, the “great black man” of whom Tituba spoke visited, offering Betty anything her heart desired. He would carry her to the city of her dreams, evidently neither Salem village nor Salem town.* That was the devil, explained Mrs. Sewall, herself a minister’s daughter. If he returned, the child was to inform him he was a liar from beginning to end.

  All talk was of witchcraft; increasingly, the day began with an account of what had transpired in the night and how the afflicted had fared. It was the wrong moment to sound a dubious note, as it was the wrong season to be the one whose premonitions turned out to be true. Between the time the Boston jailer clapped irons on the three Salem suspects and March 12, a new specter began to pinch Ann Putnam Jr. Her distraught father turned to his brother, Edward Putnam, and Ezekiel Cheever, the horse-borrower, serving as court recorder. A church deacon, Edward Putnam had joined in pressing the initial witchcraft charges. On Saturday morning, March 12, the two resolved to call on Ann’s latest tormentor. She was a church member in good standing. Before riding the few miles south they stopped at the Putnam farm to speak with Ann. Was the twelve-year-old possibly mistaken about the identity of her afflicter? Could she describe her clothes? Unfortunately, that afternoon Ann could converse with the witch but not see her. The spirit had blinded her until evening, when she vowed to reckon with her. In doing so she had however also introduced herself by name.

  Martha Corey was alone at her home in southwestern Salem when her visitors arrived. All smiles, she invited them in. She also anticipated their question—a misstep. Putnam and Cheever had barely settled when she announced: “I know what you are come for. You are come to talk with me about being a witch.” She was not one. “I cannot help people talking of me.” Corey shrugged. Edward Putnam revealed that his bewitched niece had indeed named her. Corey was prepared, or thought she was: “But does she tell you what clothes I have on?” she asked. So flabbergasted were her callers by the prescient question that they asked her to repeat it. The twelve-year-old had been unable to do so, they reported, as Corey had “blinded her and told her that she should see you no more before it was night, that she might not tell us what clothes you had on.” Corey could only smile at this subterfuge. She had no cause for concern, she assured her callers. She was a devout woman who “had made a profession of Christ and rejoiced to go and hear the word of God,” as both men knew she unfailingly did. Her deacon reminded her that professions of faith alone would not clear her name. Witches had infiltrated churches for centuries. Neither party appears to have mentioned the only obvious stain on Corey’s record: before her first marriage, in Salem town, she had borne a mulatto son, now a teenager.

  Cheever and Putnam had no need to resurrect that fifteen-year-old history, as Corey incurred a new stain that afternoon. She took her doctrine seriously; she relished the opportunity to discourse on it. She considered herself “a gospel woman.” She found herself explaining why she had unsaddled her husband’s horse in her failed attempt to keep him from the hearing. It struck her as distasteful; how could any good come of such a thing? In that she was correct. Her husband had reported that the girls identified specters by their clothing, a dangerous shard of information. Cheever and Putnam emphasized the seriousness of the charge. Corey remained unmoved, intent on squelching idle gossip. She did not necessarily believe there were witches about, an inflammatory assertion at the best of times but impossible now. Tituba had confessed, Putnam and Cheever reminded her. The evidence was conclusive.

  Corey backtracked a little, though not without acknowledging another form of blindness. She promised to “open the eyes of the magistrates and ministers,” a particularly imprudent remark. The three spoke for some time; Corey was articulate and steadfast, a little given to lecturing. She proved an attentive listener too, paraphrasing their minister’s apocalyptic assertion that the devil had come down in a great rage among them. As for Tituba, Good, and Osborne, she would not be altogether surprised if the three turned out to be witches. “They were idle, slothful persons and minded nothing that was good,” Corey huffed. Her case was altogether different. Secure in her piety, she believed herself invulnerable. Her callers rode home by way of the Putnam household, where they discovered Ann to be at peace. Only that evening did the fits resume. They continued through the following day, when another unidentified specter shimmered into the room. Ann did not know her by name, though she could say that the pale, serious woman sat in the meetinghouse pew Ann’s grandmother had previously occupied.

  Two days later Martha Corey rode north to the Putnam household, to which she had been summoned, presumably by Thomas Putnam. He may have wanted to charge Corey to her face. She had no sooner dismounted and entered the house than Ann began to choke. In a strangled voice she accused her visitor; her tongue then darted from her mouth, to be clamped sharply between her teeth. Her hands and feet twisted. When she regained her ability to speak, she pointed to a canary sucking between Corey’s second and third finger. “I will come and see it,” she announced. “So you may,” challenged Corey, rubbing the spot. The bird vanished, after which Ann lost her sight. Drawing near Corey, she crumpled to the planked floor. Ann accused Corey of blinding another woman in meeting that week, demonstrating with her hands, which could thereafter not be unfastened from her face. She described a spectral spit on which a man was impaled, roasting, under Corey’s supervision. No one else saw the spit but all knew of it from the Goodwin children. At this, the Putnams’ nineteen-year-old maid, Mercy Lewis, stepped in, waving a stick at the apparition. It disappeared, only to return. She offered to strike again. “Do not if you love yourself!” warned Ann, but too late. Mercy recoiled from a terrific blow to her arm. “You have struck Mercy Lewis with an iron rod,” Ann informed the nonspectral Corey, who must have been as stunned as everyone else. She had not budged. She saw no spit. So severe were the girls’ pains that the Putnams demanded that Corey leave. Mercy’s condition deteriorated. As she sat before the glowing fire that evening, her chair crept toward the hearth, propelled by invisible hands. Only with difficulty did three adults manage to save her from being delivered feetfirst to the flames. As he stepped in to help, one man observed bites along Mercy’s skin. Her fits lasted until eleven that night.

  With both her daughter and her maid afflicted—the two in no way conformed to Cotton Mather’s 1692 description of women as “the people who make no noise at all in the world”—Ann Putnam Sr. weighed in four days later. She had been the child who arrived in Salem with Reverend Bayley, the first village minister, when he had married her older sister. Now thirty, she had in the intervening years lost that sister and a brother. The previous spring, she had lost her mother as well. She had also recently lost a crucial court case. After a decade of litigation, she was deprived of any claim to her father’s large estate, one that had included several islands, meadows, and a ferry. In thirteen years she had borne seven children, of which Ann Jr. was the eldest. Having lost an eight-week-old baby in December, she was again pregnant. To those strains was added a new one. As she reported, she found
herself exhausted on March 18, consumed by “helping to tend my poor afflicted child and maid. About the middle of the afternoon I laid me down on the bed to take a little rest, and immediately I was almost pressed and choked to death.” Soon Martha Corey’s specter materialized, inflicting indescribable tortures; had it not been for the men of the household, she would have been torn to shreds. Between assaults, Corey offered “a little red book in her hand and a black pen.” Corey commanded Ann to inscribe her name in it.

  The warrant for Martha Corey’s arrest went out the following morning, a Saturday. Corey could not be apprehended until after the Sabbath, which left her time to attend meeting along with her accusers. It was no doubt a sensational occasion; congregants did not often pray with a flesh-and-blood witch in their midst. Already she had claimed several additional victims, including Parris’s niece and Dr. Griggs’s maid. That Saturday evening, Giles Corey, now in his seventies—no model citizen himself—sat by the fire alongside pious Martha. She was his third wife; the two had married seven years earlier. She encouraged him to go to bed. He attempted first to pray but found himself speechless; he could not so much as open his mouth. Martha noticed as much and ministered to him, after which the spell lifted. Her arrest seemed generally to jog her husband’s memory. Five days later he confided in a Salem town minister that there had been—as William Perkins termed it in the book in Samuel Parris’s study—some “working of wonders” on the Corey farm that week. His ox had suffered a strange episode. A cat had behaved oddly. Needlessly, Martha had suggested he put the animal out of its misery. Now that he thought about it, his wife had lately been given to sitting up after he went to bed. “I have perceived her to kneel down on the hearth as if she were at prayer, but heard nothing,” he mused. The unheard words proved nearly as incriminating as mangled, muttered ones. Why would a woman drop silently to her knees by herself, late at night, before the fire? Corey intimated she was casting spells. It was equally possible that his wife had come to wonder, heart sinking, if she had perhaps spoken too plainly when her deacon had called two weeks earlier.