The Enemy Within Read online

  Hear, now, a sampling of Puritan invective against folk magic. Reverend Cotton Mather (Boston): “Tis in the Devil’s name that such things are done, and in God’s name I do this day charge them as vile impieties.” Reverend Increase Mather (Boston): “God in his word doth with the highest severity condemn all such practices . . . declaring . . . that all who do such things are an abomination to him.” Reverend John Hale (Beverly, Massachusetts): “[Magic] serves the interest of those that have a vain curiosity to pry into things God has forbidden, and concealed from discovery by lawful means.” A “consociation” of ministers (Connecticut): “Those things, whether past, present, or to come, which . . . cannot be known by human skill in arts or strength of reason . . . nor are made known by divine revelation . . . must needs be known (if at all) by information from the Devil.” Reverend Cotton Mather (again): “They are a sort of witches who thus employ themselves.” Indeed, Puritan ministers particularly emphasized the matter of links to witchcraft and the Devil; thus counter-magic was also fatally compromised. Reverend Deodat Lawson (Salem, Massachusetts): “Unwarrantable projects . . . [such as] burning the afflicted person’s hair, or stopping up and boiling the urine . . . [amount to] using the Devil’s shield against the Devil’s sword.”

  As this controversy—folk magic versus orthodox religion—simmered along, ordinary New Englanders were frequently caught in the middle. And the middle is where at least some of them preferred to remain. Resisting the clergy’s pressure to choose, these persons would remain Christians, remain churchgoers, remain adherents of Puritan doctrine—yet would also avail themselves of magical “remedies” when need and opportunity coincided. In the language of our own time, they were (perhaps unwittingly) eclectics and syncretists, inclined to move back and forth between rival systems despite strong pressures to the contrary. Sometimes, to be sure, they paid a price in local reputation or feelings of guilt. A case in point was Reverend John Hale’s experience in dealing with a woman parishioner much given to fortune-telling. She admitted to consulting “a book of Palmistry,” and professed her sorrow and “great repentance.” Hale told her this was, most assuredly, “an evil book and an evil art,” after which she appeared “to renounce and reject all such practices.” But some years later she was found to have resumed her former interest, to the point of obtaining additional books on the same subject.

  Moreover, certain forms of magical practice seemed in themselves to bridge the gap to religion. The charms used in healing rituals could include “Scripture words” alongside others; for example, “Nomine patris, Filii, et Spritus Sancti. Preserve thy servant, [and] such . . .” (The Latinate phrasings here may suggest a Catholic derivation, which for devout Puritans would create a special objection.) The Bible itself was subject to magical deployment, with its aura of sanctity harnessed to efforts of healing or divination or counter-magic. The touch of a Bible on the forehead of a sick child might serve to begin a cure. A key placed between its pages could help reveal the location of objects gone missing. In one extraordinary instance, a group of New Hampshire townsmen marched out to brawl with some local opponents, led by their minister, who carried a Bible raised aloft on a long pole. In another, a Rhode Island man sought to insure his personal safety by ostentatiously reading his Bible in the town square while an Indian attack raged fiercely around him. Such behaviors, amounting to a kind of totemism, came as much from the magical side of traditional culture as from the formally religious one.

  It was against this cultural backdrop that New England’s notorious part in witch-hunting would begin to unfold. Of course, the most notorious part—and for many today the only known part—is everything that happened at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692-93. Thus it seems necessary to emphasize here the very considerable amount of thought, feeling, and motivated action that swirled around witchcraft during the four or five decades preceding the Salem trials.

  There are intimations of witchcraft in the records of the important and intensely felt “Antinomian controversy,” in Massachusetts, as early as 1637. Anne Hutchinson, who led the movement at the center of this struggle and whose doctrinal claims seemed to challenge the very foundations of the Puritan establishment, was a unique presence: deeply thoughtful, eloquent, visionary, and charismatic, qualities that seemed somehow enhanced by her being also a woman. Her large following, composed of the many Boston folk who attended her special worship meetings, was another attention-getting element. Governor John Winthrop, her chief antagonist, referred to her as a “prophetess,” and the term does seem apt. But such a woman would invite suspicion as well as admiration; she was, in a sense, too strong, too “nimble” of wit, for her own good. Her prophesying, in particular, would be held against her; her gifts that way seemed to some “beyond Nature.” For example, a fellow passenger on the ship that had carried her to New England recalled her commenting as Boston came in sight, “if she had not a sure word that England should be destroyed, her heart would shake.” A sure word? From where? In what sense? It seemed “very strange and witchlike that she should say so.” Two years later, when the authorities brought her to account in a full-dress ecclesiastical trial, Winthrop would write more pointedly that her doings “gave cause of suspicion of witchcraft.”

  In fact, she was never formally accused as a witch; her trial, conviction, and subsequent banishment focused instead on her “heretical opinions” and “traducing authority.” But she was charged with having been, at the very least, “deluded by the Devil.” Moreover, two of her “confederates,” Jane Hawkins and Mary Dyer, were similarly accused. Hawkins, like Hutchinson, was a midwife, whose practice allegedly included the use of traditional fertility potions; as a result, according to Winthrop, she became “notorious for familiarity with the Devil.” Dyer and Hutchinson both experienced problematic childbirth—in Dyer’s case, a stillborn and obviously deformed infant (perhaps the condition known to modern medicine as anencephaly); in Hutchinson’s, a more extreme anomaly (probably what is today called a hydatidiform mole). Such “monstrous” outcomes—for so they struck her contemporaries—seemed a clear sign of diabolical connection.

  That these suspicions did not lead straight to witchcraft prosecution was probably owing to a pair of convergent factors. First, heresy was itself an enormously compelling, and damning, charge (especially in New England). Second, the usual prelude to witchcraft cases—the gradual, piece-by-piece buildup of worry and doubt, over many years, fostered always by a vigorous climate of local gossip—was lacking here. Hutchinson, Hawkins, and Dyer were relatively recent arrivals in Boston; so, too, were their adversaries. In a sense, neither side knew the other sufficiently well to support a full measure of witchcraft accusation. Indeed, there would be no actual witch trials in New England during the entire decade and a half following the initial settlement in 1630. This pot needed a lengthy period of brewing and stirring before it would boil. But eventually its time would come, and trials would begin. And, once begun, they would go on almost to the end of the century.

  The earliest firm documentation of a formal proceeding against witchcraft comes from the town of Windsor, Connecticut, in 1647. Sometime that spring a local diarist recorded the following: “One ______ of Windsor arraigned and executed for a witch.” The blank is filled in the notes of the town clerk: “May 26, ’47 Alse Young was hanged.” Thus it was Alice Young’s unfortunate distinction to have been New England’s first legally certified witch—and the first to have suffered the prescribed punishment. About this woman only a very few, very bare facts can now be discovered. She was apparently the wife of a certain John Young (or Youngs, as the name is sometimes written) and the mother of at least one daughter. She was probably middle-aged, in her 40s, when charged and convicted. John Young was a man of limited means, perhaps a carpenter. He, and presumably his wife, had settled in Windsor by or before 1640. He sold his land there, and moved away, soon after his wife’s death. And that is the extent of her, and his, known story.

  Within barely a year of Alice Young�
�s execution at Windsor, the nearby town of Wethersfield began its own involvement with witch-hunting. Again, the official record is sparse, saying only: “The jury finds the bill of indictment against Mary Johnson, that by her own confession she is guilty of familiarity with the Devil.” Fortunately, a later writing by Cotton Mather offers more. Johnson was evidently a domestic servant; Mather refers to the Devil’s readiness to play tricks on “her master” in her behalf. Indeed, “she said that her first familiarity with the Devil came through discontent, and wishing the Devil . . . to do that and t’other thing, whereupon a Devil appeared unto her, tendering what services might best content her.” From this she progressed to “uncleanness [sexual contact] both with men and with devils”; somewhere along the way, she also “murdered a child.” Such confessions, rare enough in the record of witch trials, left no room for doubt; a sentence of death was assured. Her minister preached at her execution, “taking great pains to promote her conversion from the Devil to God.” She seemed in her last moments “very penitent. . . . And she died in a frame extremely to the satisfaction of them that were spectators of it.”

  From Connecticut the witch-hunt trail swings north and east, to the communities surrounding Massachusetts Bay. An obscure case in Cambridge, possibly as early as 1647 or 1648, resulted in the execution of a certain Goodwife Kendall. Another proceeding, in 1648 against Margaret Jones of Charlestown, brought a similar outcome, this one more fully recorded. Jones had been acting as a fortune-teller and healer; perhaps she was a regular cunning woman. In any case, it was the details of her “practicing physic” that first aroused suspicion. “Her medicines . . . though [seemingly] harmless . . . had extraordinarily violent effects.” Moreover, she showed “such a malignant touch as many persons (men, women, and children) whom she stroked or touched with any affection or displeasure . . . were taken with deafness or vomiting or other pains or sickness.” When searched for the Devil’s mark, she was found to have “an apparent teat in her secret parts.” And a witness to her nights in prison (while awaiting trial) noted the comings and goings of a “familiar” spirit in the shape of “a little child.”

  In sum: four different towns, four suspects, four trials, four convictions, four executions—all within the short span of two years. To be sure, in Europe at the same time these numbers would not have seemed large. The Hopkins-Stearne witch “panic” had just recently concluded in the English countryside, where the total of those accused reached more than 300 (perhaps a third of whom were executed); many more cases would be prosecuted there during the 1650s. In southern Germany the craze rolled on unabated, with a toll in convictions and in lives too high for ready calculation. Still, given New England’s infant state—two dozen towns and a few thousand people as of midcentury—four witch trials was considerable. And the pace would continue through the years that followed.

  In 1651 Wethersfield tried and convicted two more of its inhabitants, a married couple named Carrington, for “having entertained familiarity with Satan, and by his help . . . done works above the course of nature.” Little else is known about this pair, and nothing at all about their trial. Around the same time there were slander cases in several communities (Watertown, Marblehead, and Springfield, Massachusetts; Windsor, Connecticut): lawsuits filed on behalf of women against neighbors who had defamed them by intimating, or openly charging, their involvement in witchcraft. (Example: “She said . . . that there were diverse strong lights seen of late in the meadow that were never seen before the widow Marshfield came to town.” And again: “it was publicly known that the Devil had followed her house in Windsor.”)

  In 1652 a much more substantial and serious case took place in Springfield. As one correspondent would describe it for a London newspaper: “Sad frowns of the Lord are upon us in regard of fascinations [magic] and witchcrafts. . . . Four in Springfield were detected, whereof one was executed for murder of her own child, and was doubtless a witch, another is condemned, a third under trial, a fourth under suspicion.” The author of an early treatise on New England noted that the same little cabal had, “as is supposed, bewitched not a few persons, among whom [are] two of the reverend elder’s children.” At the center of these events was another married couple, Hugh and Mary Parsons; it was Mary who had allegedly killed her infant son. And there was much else as well, all of it fully laid out in numerous depositions that have come down to the present. The list included mysterious “disappearances,” strange illness and injury, “threatening speeches” (especially by Hugh Parsons), and, perhaps most important, “fits” in several apparent victims. Mary seems to have admitted her guilt; her own testimony recounted startling details of “a night when I was with my husband and Goodwife Merrick and Bessie Sewell in Goodman Stebbins’ lot. . . . We were sometimes like cats and sometimes in our own shape, and we were a-plotting for some good cheer. . . .” Her conviction, and execution, followed in due course. Hugh, though denying everything, was also convicted and condemned; however, the verdict was later reversed, and he fled to Rhode Island. The disposition of the other suspects is not recorded. But it seems clear enough that Springfield was convulsed for many months by this unfolding sequence; participants in the Parsons trial came from over half the town’s households.

  Taken as a whole, the 1650s would prove to be the single most active period for witchcraft prosecutions in New England (if the very large count from the Salem trials of 1692-93 is excluded as a kind of anomaly). The decade-long totals are: 27 separate trial proceedings with witchcraft at the center (including a few for slander), involving accusations against 35 different people, yielding 8 convictions and 7 executions. The towns represented were 22 in all—12 in Massachusetts, 7 in Connecticut, 2 in New Hampshire, and 1 in Maine. Only little Rhode Island escaped, perhaps because its culture was uniquely heterodox (an amalgam of religious sectarians and “freethinkers”).

  Another striking case within this same subset occurred in Boston, in 1656. The defendant, Mrs. Ann Hibbens, was a person of unusually high social position; indeed, she stood right at the pinnacle of the local elite. Her husband, William Hibbens, was a merchant of substantial wealth; moreover, he was an admired and important civic leader, a magistrate and member of the Court of Assistants, the colony’s highest governing body. Mrs. Hibbens doubtless shared in the prestige of her husband’s position. However, her personal style and ways of acting would frequently bring her to grief. In 1640 she had engaged in a long and bitter dispute with a group of carpenters hired to refurbish her house; she accused them of overcharging and other “false dealing.” A resultant lawsuit in civil court went in her favor. But the manner in which she had pursued her case was so abrasive that the Boston church soon called her to account in a widely noticed ecclesiastical inquest. When she refused to apologize for her “very turbulent . . . actions” toward the carpenters, the church first admonished, then excommunicated her. Her husband pleaded on her behalf, yet also implicitly acknowledged her “uncharitable . . . and unChristian-like” behavior. Church authorities accused her of wronging him, too; as one of them put it, she had “against nature usurped authority over him [whom] . . . God hath set to be your guide.” And the congregation itself suffered “offense” when she “obstinately” resisted its efforts of censure. Thus were her original “miscarriages” in several ways compounded.

  Apparently she experienced (or caused) still other difficulties with her fellow townspeople; a contemporaneous writing, William Hubbard’s A General History of New England, mentions her widespread reputation for “natural crabbedness of temper.” And when her husband died in 1654, it was as if she had lost a protective shield. At this point, in Hubbard’s words, “the vox populi went sore against her”; within months she was accused, and arraigned, as a witch. The details of her final trial have been lost, but we do know its outcome—conviction and a sentence of death by hanging.

  At about the same time suspicion was aroused toward several people whose career as supposed witches would last for decades. Mary Parsons of Northam
pton, Massachusetts, was one such. Eunice Cole (Hampton, New Hampshire) was another; also Elizabeth Godman (New Haven, Connecticut), Jane James (Marblehead, Massachusetts), and John Godfrey (Andover, Massachusetts). These individuals fit a classic pattern, in which a reputation for practicing witchcraft might never be shaken off; hence, they were subject to repeated court prosecutions.

  Godfrey’s was an especially remarkable story. In one respect it was unusual; he was male. Within the relatively small subgroup of accused men, most were husbands of previously suspected women; theirs was a form of guilt by association. But Godfrey was unique in being unmarried; he had no wife nor, for that matter, any other identifiable kin. He had reached Massachusetts by or before 1642, and had almost immediately plunged into a blizzard of legal proceedings. Before he was through, he would set a new standard for litigiousness in a generally litigious society. Suits and countersuits piled up around him by the dozens: for debt, for breach of promise, for defamation, for “abusive carriages” and “contempt to authority,” among others. Often he appeared as the plaintiff—Godfrey versus, Godfrey going after, one or another of his neighbors—with more cases won than lost. However, he was also a frequent defendant, and the charges against him sometimes involved criminal conduct. He was accused of theft, of arson, of suborning witnesses, of physical assault. And he was accused, again and again, of practicing witchcraft. The testimonies generated by his nonstop legal involvement are large in quantity and consistent in quality. Taken together, they depict a man continually at odds with his peers over a host of quite specific, personal, and mundane affairs. They reflect, too, his typical manner: his roughness, his unpredictability, his “threats” and “provocations” and “rages.” In all this he directly epitomized the character New Englanders expected of their “witches”; he served, in effect, as an extreme example of a typical pattern.