The Enemy Within Read online

  Cotton Mather’s participation in the Salem witch-hunt will be mostly indirect, inherently complex, painfully conflicted—and undeniably important. He does not attend any of the actual trials; instead he follows their course as closely as he can from his base in Boston. To be sure, he is notoriously present on that crucial occasion when five convicts, including Reverend Burroughs, are executed in August; otherwise he does not visit Salem during the entire year of 1692.

  Certainly, he has good correspondents—such as Stephen Sewall, clerk of the Court of Oyer and Terminer—to supply him with regular reports from, and about, the scene of the action. And he is not reluctant to offer his opinions in return. In April he delivers (and then publishes) a powerful sermon entitled A Midnight Cry, stressing the convergence of recent and current “calamities,” including attack by devils. A short while later, he proposes a personal intervention in the Salem affair. He would have several of the “afflicted girls” brought to his own home for close-up pastoral supervision, just as he had done with Martha Goodwin. Does he imagine that he might thereby close off the rapidly deepening vortex of public accusation? After all, he has succeeded before. No matter—for this time his offer is not accepted.

  In May he composes a long letter of advice to one of the trial judges. His chief aim is to discourage undue reliance on spectral evidence, since “it is very certain that the devils have sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only innocent but also very virtuous.” Should such testimony be allowed, “a door may be . . . opened for the devils . . . to proceed with the most hideous desolations upon the repute and repose” of perfectly upstanding citizens. He believes that only “a credible confession” can provide a clear and solid basis for establishing guilt. At the same time he condones harsh prosecutorial tactics: for example, the use of “cross and swift questions” and forced body searches for “witch-marks.” Moreover, he will not impeach the trials as a whole. “The business thus managed,” he writes, “may not be called imaginary. The effects are dreadfully real. Our dear neighbors are most really tormented.”

  The same divided attitude will inform other Mather writings in the months to come. When, in mid-June, leading Boston clergymen are asked for counsel on trial procedure, Mather becomes the author of their written response. This is the (previously noted) “Return of Several Ministers,” which emphatically disapproves “things received only upon the Devil’s authority”—in short, spectral evidence—and urges “exceeding tenderness towards those that may be complained of .” Retreating somewhat from Mather’s previous endorsement of harassing interrogations, the “Return” also argues against allowing “such noise, company, and openness as may too hastily expose” the accused. Furthermore, touch tests and similar “experiments” must be firmly excluded as “liable to be abused by the Devil’s legerdemains.”

  These cautions take Mather and his colleagues almost to the end of their chosen agenda. If they stop there, the “Return” might serve to check the momentum of prosecution—and be hailed later on as an admirably liberal statement. But they don’t stop there. Instead they declare, in conclusion: “We cannot but humbly recommend unto the government the speedy and vigorous prosecution of such as have rendered themselves obnoxious, according to the direction given in the laws of God and the wholesome statutes of the English nation for the detection of witchcraft.” Here is a ministerial license for the court to continue as before.

  Mather will reiterate both his concerns about procedure and his general approval of the witch-hunt in additional comments made through the remainder of the summer. At one point he suggests a moderating tactic: the use of banishment—instead of trial, conviction, and capital punishment—for persons who may have been “innocently” represented by specters. (He even volunteers to accept such a fate for himself, should he too be implicated that way.) At the same time, he repeatedly and strenuously summons the faithful to uncompromising struggle against the Devil’s “infernal” designs.

  In August his father publishes yet another cautionary work, Cases of Conscience, Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, with the strongest critique yet of spectral evidence. Fourteen ministers sign a preface of endorsement—but Cotton Mather is not among them. His own focus has shifted by now. He is racing to complete his witchcraft apologia; its full title is The Wonders of the Invisible World: Observations, as Well Historical as Theological, Upon the Nature, the Number, and the Operations of Devils. This work, suggested by “the direction of His Excellency, the Governor,” and stitched together at intervals between the beginning of June and the end of September, will become one of Mather’s best-known writings and the chief basis in subsequent years for assessing his involvement with witch-hunting.

  The immediate context is a surge of public opposition to the trials; Wonders is Mather’s response. In it he assembles a broad range of affirmative materials, including two of his own recent sermons, accounts of witchcraft cases from overseas, some scattered reportage on “enchantments and apparitions,” and finally—at its heart—detailed summaries of the trial proceedings against five “of the principal witches that have been condemned” at Salem. Doubts about spectral evidence do not appear; the central theme is other, presumably more credible, means of “discovering” and convicting the guilty. Indeed, Mather never wavers from a goal he announces at the start: “to countermine the whole plot of the Devil against New England, in every branch of it.” Taken in its entirety, the book is nothing less than a full-throated vindication of the work of the Salem judges—whose leader, William Stoughton, is moved to contribute for the front matter a fulsome letter of “thankfulness to you for so great pains, and . . . [ for your] singular approbation.”

  Even as Mather is completing this text, showing it to colleagues, and packing it off to the printer, he finds himself suddenly face-to-face with another living specimen of witchcraft. Mercy Short, a girl of 17, recently arrived in Boston from the Maine frontier where she had been for a time a captive of Indians, begins in the summer of 1692 to show the unmistakable signs of “affliction.” The link to concurrent events in Salem is direct; Sarah Good, one of the convicted witches there, is being temporarily held at the jail in Boston, where Mercy encounters her in the course of an errand. The two of them exchange “ill words,” following which Mercy is “taken with just such . . . fits as those that held the bewitched people in the county of Essex.” Thus begin months of torment—and notoriety—for this latest young victim. Her fits run the usual gamut, from “swooning” (fainting episodes), to “fasting” (inability to eat), to many sorts of physical hurt (pinches, pricks, sensations of “burning” and “roasting,” forced ingestion of poisonous liquids), all at the hands of a vividly personified Devil and a host of his spectral “confederates.”

  Mather is nearby, and eager to take charge. For him this is another chance to demonstrate the correct way of responding to such “assaults.” (To that end he will record the entire performance in a carefully-kept journal, for the benefit of posterity.) The gist of his treatment approach, as in the Goodwin case, is sustained prayer and fasting. Indeed, this becomes a community-wide project, involving several different ministers and numerous “pious people in the north part of Boston.” Mather’s personal attentions to Mercy remain foremost, however; she is in and out of his house and church on a regular basis. He endures, as a result, not only the recurrent “spectacle” of her sufferings but also her occasional “insolent and abusive . . . frolics”; at some points, she seems “as extravagant as a wildcat.” Then, after four months, her assailants suddenly vanish, affording her a “complete deliverance.” And Mather feels a rush of triumph. As he will later write in his diary, “I had the satisfaction of seeing her . . . so brought home unto the Lord that she was admitted unto our church.” His accomplishment extends also to “many other . . . young people [who are] awakened by the picture of Hell exhibited in her sufferings, to flee from the wrath to come.”

  Through it all Mather maintains his principle of discretion about the ident
ity of the witches supposedly involved. Several of the attacking specters take “the shape of [actual persons] . . . who are doubtless innocent as to the crime of witchcraft”—while others represent “as dangerous and damnable witches as ever there were in the world.” The problem lies in deciding who is who (or which is witch!); just there the Devil’s “legerdemains” prove impossible to sort out. “For my part, I did all I could that not so much as the name of any one good person in the world might suffer the least ill report on this occasion”: herewith a centerpiece of Mather’s “example” to other witch-hunters in Boston, at Salem, everywhere.

  If his work with Mercy Short seems a triumph, a similar experience just a few months later will prove the exact opposite. It begins when another young woman “in the north part of Boston,” named Margaret Rule, falls into “odd fits” that quickly blossom into “an affliction . . . marvelously resembling” that of Short. There are pinchings, prickings, force-fed poisons, and “exorbitant convulsions,” inflicted once again by the Devil and a group of “cruel specters.” Mather’s response, as he will describe it in yet another journal, is just as before: prayer and fasting, and an absolute determination “to prevent the excessive credit of spectral accusations.” (He will claim later to have explicitly “charged the afflicted that they should cry out of nobody for afflicting ’em.”)

  The difference this time is a growing public skepticism about all these “sufferers”—and about Mather’s personal efforts of exorcism. The lead is taken by Robert Calef, a local cloth merchant who has visited Margaret Rule while she lay “under affliction” in Mather’s care—and who then writes a highly critical account of what he observed. According to Calef the victim was repeatedly drawn into giving a set of coached responses and indulged in “merry” behaviors, while the minister “rubbed her stomach, her breast not covered with the bed clothes.” (This intimation of sexual impropriety is especially wounding.) Mather is appalled—and outraged—that “a sort of Sadducee in this town . . . hath written a volume of invented and notorious lies” about him. But Calef is not, evidently, alone in his opinions. When Mather vents his deep resentment in the privacy of his diary, he speaks of “this unworthy, ungodly, ungrateful people” and the “hard representations some ill men [note plural usage] have given my conduct.” He and Calef exchange hotly-phrased letters, and Mather begins a lawsuit for libel (which he will subsequently drop). Calef’s book is published in London some years later; its title, More Wonders of the Invisible World, mockingly riffs Mather’s own work.

  All of which leaves Mather feeling bitter and bruised, and more than a little self-pitying. In writing about the Rule case he defends “all my unwearied cares and pains to rescue the miserable from the lions and bears of Hell,” and compares the “danger attending me” to a trek of “ten thousand steps over a rocky mountain filled with rattlesnakes.”

  He lived on for more than three decades. (He died in 1728.) His ministry continued, as did his writing and involvement in public affairs. But he never again returned to a front-line position in the battle against witchcraft. He would attempt no more exorcism of “the miserable” victims; give no further advice on such matters to magistrates and other officials; offer little, if any, preaching about them from his pulpit. His leading modern biographers agree that the apex of his life—his greatest influence and widest acclaim—came just before his direct participation in witch-hunting. Calef’s viewpoint—“that there are witches . . . but what this witchcraft is, or wherein it does consist, is the whole question”—would, with the passage of time, become the dominant one. And Mather’s rather different view would, for generations, cast a shadow on his public standing.

  But what, finally, was Mather’s view? And how should we summarize his career as a witch-hunter? All in all, it made something of a zigzag; depending on the circumstances, he could be a force for restraint—or for unsparing attack. His aim to “prevent the excessive credit of spectral evidence” lest “any one good person . . . suffer the least ill report on this occasion” was real, was principled, was consistently maintained, was put into action. Yet he unwaveringly believed that actual witches—and undeniable witchcraft—posed the deepest possible threat to “the people of God,” especially those in New England. His language, which always tended toward hyperbole, reached new heights in discussing these dangers. Thus: the Salem witches aimed at nothing less than “rooting out the Christian religion in this country, and setting up instead of it perhaps a more gross diabolism than ever the world saw before.” And: “I believe there never was a poor plantation more pursued by the wrath of the Devil than our poor New England.” And: “This people . . . [must] make a right use of the stupendous and prodigious things that are happening among us . . . [and] the amazing dispensations now upon us.” Ever saw, never was; stupendous, prodigious, amazing: he could scarcely find a sufficient standard of comparison. Given such extremities, the response must be total, with “all due steps taken for the utter extinction of witchcraft.”

  There was, finally, an additional source for his vigilance—something more personal, more practical, yet no less urgent. To credit the activity of witches, and of the Devil alongside them, was to acknowledge the immanence and power of the entire “invisible world.” Conversely, to discount such things was to call that world into question. God and Satan, angels and demons, divine miracles and diabolic witchcraft belonged to opposite halves of the same package; remove one, and the other would disintegrate. Ironically, then, faith in God depended (at least in part) on belief in witchcraft. “Go tell Mankind that there are devils and witches,” Mather had urged after finishing his work with Martha Goodwin. For him, and for many others too, this blunt affirmation was a barrier and bulwark against a different kind of specter—the awesome, awful, deeply undermining possibility of religious doubt.

  Will he, in later years, reflect on—perhaps even reconsider—his role in the Salem witch-hunt?

  In December 1696, with a new round of “calamities” engulfing New England (Indian warfare, epidemic illness, the loss of ships at sea, an unusually poor autumn harvest), the governing authorities of Massachusetts approach the local ministry for help in preparing a public fast. The ministers then invite Cotton Mather to compose a draft for an official proclamation detailing “the sins whereby divine anger has been provoked against this country.” He responds with the usual sort of list, including worldliness, evil business practices, the prevalence of social contention and “controversy,” and so on. But he does add something else: “The late inexplicable storms from the Invisible World [meaning the whole Salem affair] . . . whereby . . . we were led unto errors and great hardships were brought upon innocent persons and (we fear) guilt incurred, which we all have cause to bewail with much confusion of face before the Lord.”

  The fast is held a few weeks later. People flock to their churches all over the land. A spirit of profound sorrow and contrition is everywhere apparent. In Boston’s First Church, Samuel Sewall’s famous apology is read aloud to the full congregation.

  At roughly the same hour, in Boston’s Second Church, Cotton Mather turns his fast-day proclamation into a sermon, with further reference to “errors,” and “guilt,” and “confusion . . . before the Lord.” But, unlike Sewall, he offers no personal retraction. At home that evening he seems uncertain and anxious; he writes plaintively in his diary of “the Divine displeasure” manifest in the illnesses of several in his family, and links this to “my not appearing with vigor enough to stop the proceedings of the judges, when the inextricable storm from the invisible world assaulted the country.”

  In 1709 he addresses the colony’s House of Deputies to urge approval of a new petition “to restore the reputations . . . of the sufferers [in the trials]” and make reparation to their survivors. After all, he notes, the same body had previously announced a “General Day of Humiliation . . . to bewail the errors of our dark time.”

  As late as 1711, he is still holding private vigils about Salem, to ponder “the meaning of
the descent from the invisible world.”

  In sum: reconsideration, yes. Regret, yes. Acknowledgment of “error,” even of “guilt,” yes. But apology? no—almost, but not quite. And for that, history will not easily forgive him.

  PART FOUR

  MODERN AMERICA

  After the 17th century, the history of American witch-hunting becomes harder to follow. At that point trials and other officially recorded proceedings against witches came virtually to a stop. However, the central beliefs continued in at least attenuated form. And so, too, did the emotional basis continue—the projection of fear, hatred, contempt. This, in turn, was sufficient to fuel informal, unofficial actions against witchcraft, lasting through the 18th century and beyond.

  Meanwhile, there began a series of events with characteristics strikingly similar to witch-hunts; hence the term itself has survived, as a way to describe these (figuratively) even now. Chapter X offers a close-up account of one such episode, an angry struggle to suppress the Order of Freemasons in the early 19th century. Though ostensibly a political and social movement, anti-Masonry’s moral tone and countersubversive theme strongly evoked the Salem “hysteria” of the early 1690s and the long, bitter “craze” years in Europe.

  Chapter XI traces the same theme—what some have called, from a different perspective, a “paranoid” strain in American public life—across a broad historical canvas from the Revolutionary era to the present. Six public “scares” are singled out for special consideration. In the last of these, Satan himself (if not quite witchcraft in the old sense) makes a startling reappearance.