The Enemy Within Page 18

  It wasn’t always so. Before 1692 Salem was one among many New England towns—larger than most, more prosperous than most, and more diverse—but very much within the social and cultural mainstream. Its beginnings, in 1629, belonged to the earliest phase of colonial American history. Its fine harbor marked it as a likely hub of maritime trade; merchants would quickly assume a leadership role in its development. However, it also rested on a broad base of farmsteads, which stretched out for many miles into its hilly interior. Its initially large territorial expanse was reduced, during the middle years of the 17th century, as several of its outlying settlements broke off to become independent communities (Wenham, Manchester, Marblehead, Beverly). What remained after 1675 or so was a coastal strip, including the center and known henceforth as Salem Town, and a hinterland section variously called Salem Farms or Salem Village. It had a settled church, a town-meeting form of local governance, and an ostensibly Puritan lifestyle of the sort that prevailed all across its parent colony of Massachusetts Bay.

  But beginning in the first months of 1692, and increasingly thereafter, one could not think of Salem as conforming to some larger type. On the contrary, Salem came to seem utterly special and distinctive. And it was, for certain, the witch trials that made all the difference.

  Salemwitchcraft: by now virtually one word, whose four syllables roll together in a strangely mellifluent blend.

  The Opening Phase

  The trials were the outcome of a process begun long before—exactly how long would be hard to say. The personal and social tensions that found expression in legal charges went back years or decades. Witchcraft had itself been a fully acknowledged presence, with notorious suspects, irate accusers, and beleaguered victims—and even some actual trials—probably since the town’s formative days. The Devil was thought to be present, too, directly tempting errant souls to “mischief” of many sorts. And everywhere “Providence” left its mark in a wide of range of baffling, apparently supernatural happenings. All this was no more true of Salem than of other parts of early New England.

  Thus it did not seem initially remarkable when, sometime in midwinter, 1691 (which, according to the “old calendar” still in use, did not end until March 25), two local girls began behaving in “odd and . . . unusual” ways: “getting into holes, and creeping under chairs and stools, . . . [and] uttering foolish, ridiculous speeches, which neither they themselves nor any others could make sense of.” Probably, though not provably, this pair—Betty Parris, the 9-year-old daughter of the Village minister, Reverend Samuel Parris, and Abigail Williams, her 12-year-old cousin—had participated in the egg-and-glass conjuring that produced the dark omen of a spectral coffin. Perhaps they were privy to additional “little sorceries” mentioned in some post-trials writings. And, certainly, their “antic gestures” were noticed by other young girls in their tight circle of neighborhood peers and friends. Soon, at least two of these others—Ann Putnam Jr. (age 12) and Betty Hubbard (age 17)—were behaving in similar ways. Together this group progressed rapidly toward full-blown “fits.” As an eyewitness would later remember it: “Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move an heart of stone to sympathize with them, with bowels of compassion for them.”

  Sympathy, yes; compassion, certainly; but the reaction of the adults closest to them encompassed a good deal more. There was alarm. There was anger. There was rapidly mounting suspicion. A local doctor came to assess the girls in their various “distempers”: were they, after all, subject to some “natural disease”? To the contrary, the doctor concluded, no such diagnosis would hold; instead, he found them to be “under an evil hand.” For Reverend Parris and other “sober-minded” folk, the meaning of this was clear—the children were bewitched. And so, too, was the appropriate response clear. Prayer, and fasting, and “earnest supplication” to God: only thus might such diabolical forces be overcome. But then one of the neighbors proposed a different strategy, based on traditional counter-magical folkways. Without Parris’s knowledge, she persuaded his two Indian slaves, Tituba and John—themselves close-up observers of the unfolding scene—to bake a “witch-cake” incorporating some urine taken from “the afflicted persons,” to feed to the family dog. This procedure did nothing to lessen the symptoms of bewitchment, but apparently helped to identify its source. For within a short time, Betty and Abigail “cried out of the Indian woman” as the cause of their “grievous afflictions.”

  Thus, in early March, was Tituba pushed to center stage. It is tempting to think that without her—or, to be more accurate, without the suspicions and pressures directed against her—the rest might never have happened. Tituba’s personal history is now mostly obscure; what seems clearest is her slave status, her Indian descent (with a probable connection to the Arawaks of northeastern South America), and her childhood within the “creole” society of the West Indies (specifically, Barbados). There she had imbibed a lively mix of cultural traditions, African as well as Indian, together with some from the English slave-owning class. This background no doubt made her seem quite exotic when, with her minister-master, she arrived in Salem in the late 1680s.

  Pushed hard (perhaps beaten) by Parris to confess to witchery, she at first resisted but then yielded at least partway. She admitted to baking the witch-cake, which good Puritans like the Parrises could only regard as a “devilish” act, and also to having been familiar with witchcraft “in her own country” (the Caribbean). Meanwhile, the afflicted girls were naming two additional Village women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, as additional witch-attackers. Crucially, they attributed more and more of their torment to “specters”—apparitions not visible to others, but imbued with supernatural powers and inseparably identified with the accused.

  The Investigation Phase

  This was enough to move the process of “examination” from private to public auspices, from the Parris household to the Village meetinghouse. With formal complaints duly filed, and local magistrates henceforth in charge, the three accused were closely interrogated before a large and clamorous “multitude” of the local citizenry. Sarah Good went first.

  The magistrates’ opening questions set a definite pattern. “What evil spirit have you familiarity with?” they asked—immediately followed by, “Why do you hurt these children?” In short, guilt was assumed; the aim was simply to obtain confirmation. When Good responded with firm denials, the magistrates “desired [the afflicted] . . . to look upon her, and see if this was the person that had hurt them.” They did as directed, and showed their assent by becoming again “tormented.” This, too, would become an important pattern: eye contact with the accused causing fits in the supposed victims.

  Sarah Osborne came next, and the same sequence was repeated for the first of many times. Then it was Tituba’s turn. Initially hesitant, she was threatened and coaxed, step by step, into an astonishing set of confessions. Her long tale of malefic activity included her own reluctant participation, but shifted most of the blame elsewhere. She spoke of blasphemous conversations with the Devil and “persuasions” to sign her name in his “book,” of strange spectral creatures (a yellow bird, a red cat, a “great black dog,” a “thing all over hairy . . . that goeth like a man”), of riding through the sky on a pole to a witch meeting in Boston, and of being forced by some witch confederates to attack her master’s child and niece. Before she was done, she had amply confirmed the guilt of the previously accused pair (Good and Osborne) and had also implicated a half-dozen others whom she did not name.

  From this dramatic account emerged two immediate and important results. First, Tituba saved her own life, apparently because her accusers and judges hoped to continue using her as a witness against future suspects (the start of yet another enduring pattern). Second, the sense of a broad witchcraft “plot”—not just the maleficia of a few scattered miscreants—began to take hold within the community at large. That very same evening, local folk variously heard �
�strange noises,” saw “a strange and unusual beast,” encountered apparitions of the accused, and so forth. From now on, Salem Village would feel itself to be in a state of siege.

  As part of her confession Tituba had mentioned seeing nine separate signatures inscribed “in red blood” in the Devil’s book—in effect, a kind of enrollment list. Whose were they? The magistrates made every possible effort to find out, questioning Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba herself through five consecutive days. The anguished performances of the bewitched continued apace, and the tumult carried over into Sabbath services (held, of course, in the same meetinghouse) whenever Parris and other clergy tried to carry on in the usual way. Their preaching and prayer was repeatedly interrupted by renewals of “howling fits,” and a rising mood of terror undercut their strained efforts of reassurance. The victim group grew, as other local girls (and two married women) fell “under affliction.” New names were added to the list of the accused. The previous three had come from the outer margins of local society: a down-on-her-luck vagrant and occasional beggar (Good), a quarrelsome misfit (Osborne), an enslaved Indian (Tituba). But the next few were more favorably positioned: Elizabeth Proctor, wife of the local innkeeper; Martha Corey, church-member wife of a prosperous (though conflict-prone) farmer and landowner; and the elderly, widely-admired matriarch Rebecca Nurse.

  The accusation of “gospel witches” (church members) was only the first in a series of crucial changes. Encounters with spectral shapes spread from the households of the original victims to the Village at large—and to all sorts of people, young and old, male and female. Two new elements emerged in the “complaints” of the afflicted: the hovering presence of a “black man,” obviously a Devil figure; and the holding of large witch meetings at which participants consumed “red bread and red drink,” in evident parody of Christian worship and the Christian sacrament. (This was, of course, a Protestant counterpart to the notorious “Black Mass” as described in the witch trials and witchcraft-related literature of European Catholics.) The ministers, for their part, stressed the cosmically significant stakes of “this infernal assault” on the Village, and Satan’s “malicious designs” therein. Salem, they said, had become “the rendezvous of Devils”; in response, right-thinking men and women must “ARM, ARM, ARM.” Such overheated rhetoric would both build on and enhance a sense of conspiracy that was wide, deep, and still unfolding.

  By this point the process of “discovery” had developed a pattern as well. Afflicted victims, mostly teenage girls, were the immediate source of accusation. (As such, they stepped far out of the modest role prescribed for persons of their age and sex, overshadowing even the magistrates who were officially in control. Within their families they engendered a similar reversal, as regular household routines became reorganized around their ongoing “torments.”) But they responded to cues that reached them from many different directions, especially through the gossip and rumor that swirled ever more thickly within their community. Their specific charges had to be accepted by a variety of adult men who served, in a sense, as gate-keepers: first, the heads of their own households; second, the local authorities responsible for the preliminary hearings; and third, the judges and juries in full court proceedings.

  At about the same time, the web of suspicion began to push out across the borders of Salem Village toward neighboring communities; “witches” were accused in Salem Town, in Ipswich, in Malden, and in Topsfield. Farther away, in Boston, topmost colony officials felt increasing pressure to intervene. Thus, in mid-April a second venue for examination was opened, this time in the Town center. Here the audience would become much larger—indeed, “a very great assembly,” according to one account. And here the prosecutorial role fell not to local magistrates but to members of the colony’s ruling Council, newly arrived from the capital and led by Lieutenant Governor Thomas Danforth.

  Yet another turning point came in mid-April, with the accusation and examination of an apparently wayward teenager from Topsfield named Abigail Hobbs. Ever since Tituba’s extraordinary revelations two months earlier, the examiners had been trying to secure a second major confession; they had succeeded only with a four-year-old child (Dorcas Good) and clearly needed more. Hobbs gave them exactly what they were looking for: a detailed account of meeting with the Devil, of making an explicit covenant with him (in exchange for his promise to give her “fine things”), and of agreeing to allow him the use of her “shape” when afflicting his victims. She also admitted to (invisible) collaboration with others among the accused, thus enlarging the conspiracy theme.

  Strikingly, none of the key victims experienced “torments” while Hobbs was in the midst of her confessing. Indeed, when she finished, they expressed “compassion [for her] over and over again.” Hobbs was then remanded to prison for subsequent trial; found guilty, she was nevertheless reprieved. She had, perhaps unwittingly, discovered an escape route for those who might later fall “under accusation”: confess, and you may gain some traction with your accusers; confess, and save your skin. A few weeks later this linkage was, in effect, officially ratified when the magistrates advised another suspect that “if I would not confess I would be put down into the dungeon and . . . hanged, but if I would confess I should have my life.” As events played out over the coming months, many confessors to witchcraft were indicted, tried, convicted, and jailed; but none of them were executed.

  A recurrent theme in the Hobbs confession, the ministers’ sermons, and the formal investigations was the Devil’s intense determination to gain additional recruits to his nefarious cause; the witch plot would surely grow as weak-minded persons came, one after another, under his sway. And here lay an opening for local gossip to weave a spreading dragnet of accusation. For example, Bridget Bishop, of Salem Town, had been tried for witchcraft some 12 years before. Though officially acquitted on that previous occasion, the suspicions about her had lingered; now they resurfaced in the explosive atmosphere emanating from the Village nearby. In mid-April she was summoned for examination—whereupon several of the previously afflicted girls immediately “fell into fits.” Her examiners then invoked long-standing rumor that “you bewitched your first husband to death.” This she met with “angry” denials—which, however, availed nothing against the effect of her “evil” reputation.

  The list of the accused caught in the same web also included:

  Rachel Clinton, of Ipswich. She, like Bishop, had been prosecuted for witchcraft years before; several of her neighbors had accused her of afflicting them, especially a young woman repeatedly “pricked with pins.”

  Sarah Wilds, of Topsfield. A deceased sister of her husband’s first wife had complained that Wilds “assaulted [her] by witchcraft . . . and afflicted her many times grievously.”

  Dorcas Hoar, of Beverly. Her minister would later comment that “when discourses arose about witchcrafts at the village [of Salem], then I heard discourses revived of Goody Hoar’s fortune telling.” This latter practice seemed dangerously close to witchcraft; moreover, Hoar’s “shape” had appeared at untimely moments here and there in the local community.

  Giles Corey, husband of Martha. (As was true elsewhere, most of the men prosecuted in the Salem trials were the spouses of women already charged.) Corey was known for his persistent “miscarriage” (bad conduct), some of which verged on the supernatural.

  Wilmot Redd, of Marblehead. She was believed to have bewitched one Mistress Syms following a lengthy quarrel over a missing parcel of linens.

  Roger Toothaker, of Billerica. He was a “physician” and adept in the use of counter-magic, supposedly for combating maleficia; yet according to local rumor, he had turned those skills around so as to become himself a witchcraft practitioner. (His wife and daughter would also be accused.)

  Susanna Martin, of Amesbury. Her alleged bewitchments went back more than three decades, including attacks on a number of her neighbors with invisible but deadly “nails and pins.”

  Margaret Scott, of Rowley. Her fel
low townspeople remembered the long-ago sufferings of a man named Robert Shilleto, and how he “complained of [ her] . . . for hurting of him, and often said that she was a witch . . . until he died.”

  Mary Bradbury, of Salisbury. She had allegedly targeted a ship at sea eleven years previously. Sailors blamed her for raising storms, causing “a leak in the hold,” and spoiling their food supplies; moreover, they “would often say they heard she was a witch.”

  Sarah Cole, of Lynn. According to local gossip, she had occasionally bewitched cows in the town herd.

  “Discourses” here, “discourses” there: before it was over, many, if not most, Essex County communities had disgorged their own particular witch suspects into the rapidly spiraling mix. The sequencing of these charges within the 1692 witch-hunt was variable; some came earlier, some later. A few were not much pursued, but most led to full-scale trials. Several produced verdicts of guilty, and death on the gallows (Wilds, Corey, Redd, Scott).

  On the evening of April 20 came the most astonishing, and frightening, development so far: Ann Putnam Jr. was suddenly confronted with “the apparition of a minister.” She was “tormented,” just as she had been by others before. This time, however, it was much worse: “He tore me all to pieces.” After initially refusing to reveal his identity, her assailant opened up. “He told me that his name was George Burroughs . . . that he had three wives . . . [and] that he had bewitched the first two of them to death . . . that he had killed Mistress Lawson . . . and also killed Mr. Lawson’s child . . . [and] had bewitched a great many soldiers to death . . . [and] had made Abigail Hobbs a witch, and several witches more . . . and also . . . that he was above a witch, for he was a conjuror.”