The Enemy Within Read online

  Listen to Cotton Mather, as he forged his own chain of connections: “I believe there never was a poor plantation more pursued . . . than our New England. . . . First, the Indian powwaws . . . Then seducing spirits . . . After this a continual blast upon some of our principal grains . . . Herewithal wasting sicknesses . . . Next many adversaries of our own language . . . Desolating fires also . . . And losses by sea . . . Besides all which . . . the devils are come down upon us with such a wrath as is justly . . . the astonishment of the world.” Mather wrote this in 1693, under the direct shadow of the Salem trials, but his perspective was that of New England’s entire history to date. And now we must ask—as he did—why? Why was this one region so much more deeply preoccupied with witchcraft than any of its neighbors? Mather’s answer was sure: “If any are scandalized that New England, a place of as serious piety as any I can hear of under Heaven, should be troubled with so many witches, I think ’tis no wonder: where will the Devil show the most malice but where he is hated, and hateth, most?”

  Such claims to “serious piety” should be accepted. Though never completely homogeneous in this or any other regard, New Englanders did conform their life patterns to religious principle in ways quite extraordinary even by the standard of their own time. Their church-going, their spiritual “watchfulness,” their sense of transcendent “mission”: such things truly set them apart, and raised the stakes of moral value—for witchcraft and much else. The Devil, in his unceasing quest to control the universe, might be anywhere around them (or among them); thus, against his “wiles” they must be ever vigilant.

  Alongside their own explanation for New England’s preeminence in witch-hunting, we may add another yielded by hindsight. Nowhere else in colonial America was the social web so tightly enveloping. To the south (Virginia, for example), settlement was widely dispersed, in direct antithesis to New England’s typical nucleated-village plan. In the middle colonies (New York, Pennsylvania), clustered communities more generally prevailed but lacked New England’s intensely intramural focus. Only in Cotton Mather’s “poor plantation”—poor, yet proudly self-congratulating—was there such interactive pressure and density. “We must be knit together,” John Winthrop had said long before; and so, for the most part, they were. In this context especially, witchcraft seemed plausible, if not quite a logical necessity. For witchcraft coupled one important category of events—sudden misfortune, loss, suffering—with a critical nexus of personal and social, no less than supernatural, forces.

  As the 17th century’s final decade began, New Englanders were feeling sorely beset by events both near at hand and far away. On the political front, a seven-year sequence of jolting changes was still in process; its effect was to challenge, and ultimately to reduce, the region’s autonomy. Further upheaval seemed likely though hard to predict; hence, the outlook was, to say the least, unsettling. On the military front, the major European powers, together with their various colonial possessions, were at war. In America this meant New England versus New France (Canada), with sharp, if sporadic, bursts of fighting throughout the wilderness borderlands; targets particularly included English villages in Maine, New Hampshire, and New York, several of which suffered devastating surprise attacks.

  And then came a renewal of witchcraft. Accusations surfaced—though without producing full-fledged trials—in Boston (1689 and 1691), New Haven (1689), and Northampton (1691). In 1692 a more significant outbreak gripped the coastal Connecticut towns of Stamford and Fairfield; indeed, for a time this one approached panic dimensions. It began in March, in the household of a locally prominent family, when a servant-girl named Katherine Branch suddenly “fell into fits.” The details conformed to long-established precedent: wild physical contortions, trance, fainting spells, “naughty” words and looks, spectral confrontations with the Devil—all in the presence of numerous enthralled onlookers—and with the naming, finally, of supposed witch “tormentors.” No fewer than six women were thus brought under suspicion. A special court was convened, and dozens of witnesses offered testimony as to their own dealings with the accused; following more lengthy precedent, they reported quarrels, threats made and received, cows that died strangely, “injuries” of every sort. The proceedings continued throughout the summer months, in an atmosphere of mounting acrimony and excitement. Local townsfolk divided into opposite camps, with some supporting, others doubting (or rejecting outright) the main charges. The doubters included several members of the court and a group of ministers whose opinion was sought and given. In the end their viewpoint prevailed; only two of the original six suspects were indicted, and the trial jury convicted but one. She, in turn, was eventually “reprieved” by a committee of magistrates.

  But at almost exactly the same moment that Katherine Branch plunged into fits, something similar was gradually taking shape 100 miles off to the north, where a group of impressionable young girls had a notion to “try fortunes,” hoping thereby to learn something of future husbands, by using an age-old divining trick of dropping an egg white into a glass and decoding the patterns it formed. Except that the appearance, this time, was not of husbands but of “a specter in likeness of a coffin,” a sure token of death—leading, then, to shock and terror and “strange antics” and whispered accusations. All in a place with the softly beautiful, biblical name of . . . Salem.

  CHAPTER VI

  Mary Parsons: A Life Under Suspicion

  November 1655. Inside a farmhouse, in the village of Northampton, Massachusetts, three women fall into heated conversation.

  “Mark my word, our Mary’s a witch, a foresworn witch. Always was; always will be.”

  “Aye, Sarah, a witch indeed! Come, let us hang some bay leaves beside the doorstep to stop her from entering here anymore.”

  “Wait! wait! We must not think so. She’s long been our friend and boon companion. The Lord says, ‘Love thy neighbor.’ ”

  “Fool! No boon of mine. I’ve seen too many of her tricks already. She took my child; watch that she take not yours.”

  “Took your child? The one we buried these two months past? How mean you, Sarah?”

  “ ’Tis easily told. I, being kept to childbed, and having the babe in my lap, there was something gave a great blow on the door. And at that very instant, my child changed. I thought to myself and I told my girl I feared the child would die. Presently, looking towards the door, through a hole I saw Mary Parsons stand nearby with a white sheet bound to her head; then I knew my child was lost. And I sent my girl out, but suddenly the woman vanished away. And the child breathed its last the very next morn. May dear God spare me such friends hereafter.”

  Thus the conversation begins; thus it will continue. And there are other, similar conversations—in other farmhouses, in “yards” along the main street, in the nearby fields and byways. Mary Parsons, this; Mary Parsons, that. Mary, Mary, Mary.

  By the middle of the next year, the sum of it grows very large indeed. Everyone in the village has heard the gossip, felt the tension, and—likely as not—contributed his (or her) particular piece. Their opinions are sharply divided. For many, Mary’s witchcraft is a certainty—and a rising menace. (They have long suspected she was “not right.”) Others find this a dubious notion at best. (They see no sure evidence of witchcraft at all. And Mary seems eccentric, yes, but nothing worse.) Some are perched precariously in the middle, wavering back and forth between the two sides.

  As summer ends, Mary and her husband Joseph decide on action of their own. In August Joseph files a legal complaint against “Sarah, the wife of James Bridgman, for slandering . . . [Mary] in her name.” By seizing the initiative this way, they hope to head off what otherwise might soon become a full-scale prosecution—against Mary herself for the crime of witchcraft.

  The court takes evidence from two dozen witnesses, about half in support of the plaintiff, the rest for the defendant. Clearly, Sarah Bridgman has played a leading role in fostering the alleged slander. But other Northamptonites share her concerns. The
ir testimony covers a broad range: bizarre injuries and illnesses, “swooning fits,” spectral “appearances,” frightening “imps,” cows that wouldn’t give milk, yarn that couldn’t be spun—usually following some sort of hostile encounter with Mary, from which she would “go away in anger . . . [and] showing her offense.” The plaintiff ’s witnesses, for their part, discount such reports; in most cases, perhaps in all, “they . . . conceive nothing but what might come to pass in an ordinary way.” Moreover, they stress Sarah Bridgman’s extreme “jealousies and suspicion,” as if to suggest that her accusations are rooted in personal spite.

  The case rolls on into the early fall. Gradually the weight of local “influence” tilts toward the plaintiff; a local selectman and a county magistrate come forcefully to her aid. In due course, the court decides in Mary’s favor and orders Sarah to make “public acknowledgment” of the wrong she has done. A few weeks later she complies, rising after Sabbath services in the Northampton meetinghouse to offer Mary a formal apology. And so—for the time being at least—the matter is laid to rest.

  But who were Mary Parsons and Sarah Bridgman? And what chain of experiences had brought them to such a bitter point of confrontation? First, Mary.

  She was born Mary Bliss, in England, around the year 1628. Her father, Thomas, belonged to a large, well-to-do, and influential family in the town of Belstone, Devonshire. There, in the first decades of the 17th century, the Blisses had joined the Puritan movement—had indeed become local leaders of the movement. For this they would eventually suffer irreparable harm to their fortune and social position. According to later reports, several of the Bliss men-folk, including Mary’s father, were imprisoned after mounting a series of open challenges to the established church leadership. Additional punishment took the form of heavy fines, which greatly reduced the family patrimony. Eventually, in about 1635, a considerable number of them decided to leave home and join the exodus of their fellow Puritans to New England.

  The group included Thomas, his wife Margaret, their daughter Mary, and three or four of their other children; Mary was now around seven years old. Thomas and family went first to what is today Braintree, Massachusetts, and then, by or before 1640, to Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford would remain their base for at least a decade, while Mary and her siblings grew to adulthood. Thomas died within a few years; Margaret began a long period of widowhood. Their position and property was “middling” at best, showing no hint of the Blisses’ previously high rank in England. But in 1646 Mary met and married Joseph Parsons, and this marked another turning point.

  Parsons lived 20 miles to the north along the Connecticut River, near Springfield, Massachusetts, where Mary joined him. He was, by all accounts, an unusually resourceful young man on the make: initially a farmer, but also drawn to “mercantile” pursuits. In 1654 Joseph and Mary moved again, still farther upriver to Northampton. There Joseph would quickly assume a role of prominence, holding numerous public offices, including those of “cornet” (leader of the local militia) and town selectman. There, too, his activities in trade and commerce would greatly expand. He opened a retail store, owned and operated at least two mills, ran an ordinary, bought and sold lands at a rapid rate, and, perhaps most important, developed a vigorous fur trade with the nearby Indians. Eventually, the range of his enterprise would extend through all the Connecticut Valley towns and eastward to the coast. In 1675 he bought a large warehouse and ship’s wharf in Boston—for by now much of his trade was overseas—and obtained the privileges of a merchant in that city.

  Considered as a whole, this was a success story matched by few others in 17th-century New England. And, as Joseph rose toward greater and greater heights, Mary rose right alongside him. There are hints scattered through the surviving records that the Parsonses’ ascent aroused widespread comment and jealousy. Joseph was frequently in court, mostly as a plaintiff (claiming debts, enforcing contracts), but sometimes, too, as a defendant. He was prosecuted more than once for “contemptuous behavior” toward local authorities; this included episodes of “scuffling” with the constable “whereby blood was drawn between them.” Mary, for her part, was resented for having a rough and “challenging” style with others. Many years later, she would be remembered as a woman “of great beauty and talents, but . . . not very amiable . . . exclusive in the choice of her associates, and . . . of haughty manners.”

  Their life together had its own difficulties. Testimony given in the 1656 slander trial made much of their marital quarrels. (In one such, “he had in a sort beaten [her]”; in another, he “locked her into the cellar.”) However, they were notably prolific as parents. Mary’s pregnancies totaled an even dozen, including two sets of twins; the last came when she was well past age 40 and already a grandmother. Her twins, all four, died young, but nine of her ten other children survived to adulthood. The latter, in turn, would populate various parts of New England with a multitude of Parsons descendants.

  Whatever advantages she may have enjoyed, Mary seems to have been something of a tormented soul. In 1652, when still living in Springfield, she and the daughters of that town’s minister simultaneously succumbed to “fits”; an eyewitness recalled that “just as Mr. Moxon’s children acted [Moxon being the minister], so did Mary Parsons—just all one.” Together, in their “afflicted” state, they were “carried out of the meeting, it being a Sabbath day.” (In fact, such fits were unusual in a fully grown person; for the most part, they happened to children. Mary was 24 or 25 at the time, the Moxon daughters a good 10 to 15 years younger.) Around the same time, Mary began to speak of harassing encounters with “spirits.” Once she had been accosted “as she was washing her clothes at the brook . . . [when] they appeared . . . like poppets.” On another occasion they entered her house, “and she threw the bedstaff at them and her bedclothes and the pillow, and yet they would not be gone.” Such claims, from her own mouth, helped fuel additional rumor and gossip among her fellow townspeople. For example, it was said by some that she could walk on water “and not [be] wet.” In this way she would come to seem less a victim than a perpetrator of magic. Even her husband supposedly remarked “that she was led by an evil spirit.”

  In sum, her own career was scarcely less remarkable than Joseph’s. From troubled beginnings, when driven out of her English home as the child of reviled radicals (Puritans), and losing at an early age a life situation of considerable ease and high social rank, she had traveled across the wide ocean to an utterly strange “wilderness.” There she passed through a seemingly modest later childhood, on a farmstead in a newly founded village—then to begin a process of recouping when, as a young bride, she shared in the mounting successes of her entrepreneurial husband, and when, too, she entered a long, fecund stretch of motherhood. But this coincided with several years of deep personal difficulty, including marital discord and the sense of being directly targeted by malign, occult forces. Finally, she arrived at the status of a woman admired for her “beauty and talents,” respected for her elevated social position, envied for the same reasons, resented for her abrasive manner, and feared for her own alleged involvement with the malign and the occult.

  What seemed to run through it all was the element of extreme dislocation—social, economic, psychological, and geographic dislocation. Up, down, up again; here, there, everywhere; family troubles, angry neighbors, “spirits”; a woman, a life, in zigzag motion.

  Did this distinctive biographical profile, this unique package of behavior and circumstance, predestine Mary to the role of “witch”? Perhaps. However, we should not scant the complementary role of “accuser”—filled most effectively by her neighbor Sarah Bridgman. Suspicions about Mary were held, in varying degrees, throughout the Northampton community. But again and again the record shows Sarah’s primacy in fueling them. Hence her story, too, deserves careful attention.

  She was born Sarah Lyman, into a locally prominent family in the English town of High Ongar, county Essex, and baptized there in February 1620. Her kin incl
uded people of real distinction—for example, a lord mayor of London. Her parents, like many of their Essex neighbors, had become Puritans; hence, in 1629 her father Richard sold the family lands, in anticipation of removing to New England. The Lymans reached Massachusetts in 1631, and lived for a time in Roxbury. But five years later they again pulled up stakes, joined one of the first migrant parties to Connecticut, and resettled at Hartford.

  According to later accounts, Richard Lyman had crossed the ocean “with considerable estate, keeping two servants.” And his sizable land allotments at Hartford placed him in the upper tier of that town’s inhabitants. However, his several moves seem to have taken a toll—first on his property, then on his morale. His Roxbury pastor described him as “an ancient Christian but weak [doubt-ridden]”; moreover, while en route to Connecticut he “underwent much affliction, for . . . his cattle were lost in driving . . . And the winter being cold, and [the settlers] ill-provided, he was sick and melancholy.” Indeed, he would not survive much longer. Death took him in 1640 and his wife a few months later; thus their several children, the eldest just now reaching adulthood, were left to fend for themselves. Sarah soon married one of their Hartford neighbors, a farmer and carpenter named James Bridgman. She and James moved twice more in the ensuing years, first to Springfield (1644), then to Northampton (1654).

  So far, Sarah’s life track had roughly paralleled that of Mary Parsons: high-status family background, followed by a kind of plunge (just before or just after resettlement in New England), parental death, marriage at a young age, frequent removals. Indeed, their respective tracks had also converged; for surely they became personally acquainted, either at Hartford or at Springfield, somewhat before they both moved (in the same year) to Northampton.