By their own lights, the magistrates—first John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, then the other judges of the Court of Oyer and Terminer—did the best they could to properly assess the evidence against the accused and to apply the advice given in such English treatises as Michael Dalton’s
The
Countrey Justice
and Richard Bernard’s
Guide to Grand-Jury Men
. Although bystanders from mid-January on pitied the afflicted children and unhesitatingly accepted the reality of their torments, not until such older accusers as Betty Hubbard, Ann Carr Putnam, and Sarah Vibber joined the group of complainants did crucial legal steps proceed. But the judges had too much personally at stake in the outcome. They quickly became invested in believing in the reputed witches’ guilt, in large part because they needed to believe that they themselves were
not
guilty of causing New England’s current woes. Simon Bradstreet alluded to such an interpretation in his November 1690 letter. The governor informed the colony’s London agents that upon reading the dismal narrative he was enclosing of the Quebec debacle, “some may charge as matter of blame upon these or those Instruments Imployed in the conduct of that Affayre.” Bradstreet, though, declined to do so, placing the responsibility instead (as was already indicated) on “the providence of God, appearing against us.”
5
Even before mid-April, most of the people of Salem Village and environs found the sufferings of the afflicted completely credible. When the accusations moved from the confines of the Parris, Putnam, and Griggs households to various makeshift courtrooms, the examining magistrates—Hathorne and Corwin, joined occasionally by Sewall, Gedney, Thomas Danforth, and others—too did not question the truth of the charges they were hearing. Not only did they, like all their contemporaries, believe in the existence of witches, witchcraft, and the devil, they also, like seventeenth-century judges in general, commonly dealt only with defendants who had committed the offenses with which they were charged. And so, assuming the guilt of those they questioned, they sought to elicit the expected confessions that played a ritual role in most New England legal proceedings. With the exception of Tituba and the little girl Dorcas Good, they failed miserably until they encountered Abigail Hobbs.
Then the young teenager, a Maine refugee, made the crucial connection explicit. After Abigail proclaimed in the Salem Village meetinghouse at her April 19 examination that the devil had recruited her in Maine four years earlier—just prior to the resumption of hostilities—Essex County residents first fully perceived the challenge they faced in the visible and invisible worlds combined. Not only were their menfolk being drawn off to the frontier to fight an elusive and often victorious enemy, witches in their midst had allied themselves spectrally with the Wabanakis. The younger Ann Putnam— mouthing opinions that could only have come from Mercy Lewis—revealed that George Burroughs, former pastor of the Village and longtime Falmouth resident, had admitted bewitching the soldiers during Andros’s winter expedition of 1688–1689, the very campaign that, in its failure to engage the enemy, had set the pattern for future blunders throughout the war.
Other afflicted accusers, especially those with ties to the frontier, then started to identify as witches men like John Alden and John Floyd, whose actions during the war suggested that they had joined Burroughs in an alliance with malevolent spirits. And given the logic that lay behind such charges, it was not surprising that the accusers also identified councilors and wealthy merchants as among the demonic conspirators. Even though most such names were never publicly recorded, several contemporary accounts reported the allegations. Far from being inexplicable, accusations of the colony’s leaders and their spouses—as Sir William Phips seems to have understood altogether too well—were possibly the most obvious of all. Residents of the northeastern frontier believed their region’s leaders had betrayed them, and they readily conflated visible traitors with invisible attackers. Indeed, Mercy Short and Samuel Wardwell did just that when they described spectral meetings attended by both Indians and witches. Although neither named the witches they saw at those meetings, by identifying the Wabanaki attendees as sachems, they implied that the witch-representatives had equivalent stature in colonial society. Wabanaki leaders would certainly have negotiated only with men of their own rank, not with the stereotypical elderly female practitioners of the malefic arts.
As the nature of the conspiracy against New England described by the afflicted accusers became clear, ordinary Essex folk started to tell each other stories about those among them whom they had long believed to be witches, and about people whose recent activities—perhaps fortune-telling (like Samuel Wardwell), experimenting with countermagic (like Martha Emerson), or drunken mutterings (like Thomas Farrar Sr.)—had aroused their suspicions. The large number of people identified as witches in 1692, in short, provides historians today with an oral snapshot of prevailing gossip.
Imagine a camera pointed at Essex County in 1692 that captured not visual images but rather aural ones. The crisis revealed the gossip about witchcraft that spread through the towns and villages of Essex County over the period from mid-April through mid-September 1692. Some of that gossip would have existed at any time, and some was generated by the crisis. But it is preserved today only through a special lens, one provided by the willingness of Massachusetts judges to entertain in court (and thus to record for posterity) the charges about which the common folk were talking. As explained in this book, the accusations emanating from elsewhere in the county—from Beverly, Salisbury, Salem Town, Andover, and so forth—made their way to Salem Village, where they were repeated and confirmed by the core group of afflicted children and teenagers.
The charges were validated too by those who followed Abigail Hobbs in choosing to confess to being witches. Because confessors, having admitted an alliance with the devil, were not allowed to swear in court to the truth of their statements, the significance of their role in leading to convictions and executions has been overlooked by historians relying solely on written records. But, as such contemporaries as Cotton Mather, Deodat Lawson, and Thomas Brattle revealed, confessors’ oral, unsworn testimony played a major role at most of the trials. After all, the English legal authorities consulted by the judges insisted that although the best proof of guilt in witchcraft prosecutions was a confession by the guilty party, the next-best proof was a confession from another witch, naming the suspect as a fellow supporter of the devil.
Although it is impossible to know exactly what such early confessors as Deliverance Hobbs, Mary Warren, Margaret Jacobs, and Sarah Churchwell said during the trials, their initial statements, augmented by the later, more detailed revelations elicited by the judges in repeated interviews in the Salem prison, offer at least an approximation of what must have been their official testimony. And in Andover in August and September many confessors— notably Mary Lacey Jr., Richard Carrier, the Post-Bridges daughters, and Samuel Wardwell—participated actively in the examinations of those whom they had named as witches, urging them to confess as well. By then, as other scholars have pointed out, it had become clear to the accused that confessors were not being tried. Accordingly, self-interest, deference to authority or age, and physical or psychological coercion combined to cause many Andover residents to confess a guilt that they were later to deny. But their subsequent retractions could not retroactively alter the confirming impact of their confessions at the time they were initially given.
Before the magistrates achieved much success in extracting confessions from examinees, the witches’ specters had already started to confess freely to the afflicted female Villagers. After the apparition of George Burroughs told Ann Putnam Jr. on April 20 that he had killed his first two wives, fifteen other specters obligingly offered confessions to the children and young women who were serving as conduits between the visible and invisible worlds. Some of those confessions consisted of identifying themselves as witches or admitting having recruited additional malefic practitioners, while others detailed murders going back to the 1680s. Significantly, almost all such confessions were offered between late April and early June, or before the justices encountered the willing Andover confessors after mid-July. At a time when the justices could not extract confessions, in short, the afflicted filled in as their surrogates. Once the justices achieved success, the specters ceased to speak to the afflicted and instead the witches spoke “in bodily form” during their examinations. The timing thus underscored the complementary relationship between the magistrates in the visible world and their young female counterparts in the invisible one.
6
In other ways as well the accusers took on “official” duties in the invisible world. They solved crimes, disclosing who had committed murders both recently and in years past. They spied on the enemy, warning their fellow settlers of the militant witch conspiracy by reporting the musters of the spectral militias and by describing the nature of the meetings the conspirators attended. (If only the vulnerable outposts of Salmon Falls and Falmouth had received similar timely warnings of Wabanaki assaults!) By their adamant refusal to join the witches and their revelations about the conspiracy, they were defending New England against some of the most powerful enemies the region had ever faced. In fact, one might contend that the youthful female “magistrates” were defending New England far more effectively than had their male counterparts in the visible world during the previous few years.
That young women, especially servants such as Betty Hubbard and Mercy Lewis, would dare to assume those “public duties” was extraordinarily audacious, but nevertheless it accorded with the role they played throughout the crisis. From at least late February on, the afflicted served as intermediaries with the spirits in the invisible world, at the same time as they worked to establish their distance from the devil and his minions. Their repeated torments and the conversations in which they constantly said “no” to the requests that they sign Satan’s book constituted the proof that, although they communicated with the malevolent spirits in the invisible world, they were not a part of it. Yet they remained potentially vulnerable to the charge that they had become
too
close to Satan, as was indicated, for example, in the Nurse family’s attempts to implicate Abigail Williams in devilish doings because she conversed too easily with him. Over and over again the afflicted had to deny involvement with the witches in order to maintain their own credibility. By the late summer such critics as Robert Pike had begun to suggest that the accusers might themselves be complicit in the attack on New England: this reveals how fine a line they had been walking from the very beginning.
In the end, the fact that the afflicted girls and a few older women (especially Ann Carr Putnam and Sarah Vibber) had provided so much of the courtroom testimony caused the rapid collapse of support for the prosecutions. What had initially seemed the most compelling evidence—the torments the children and young women endured in the sight of many witnesses, and their testimony as to the identification of their spectral torturers— disintegrated once too many observers began to believe that Satan could assume the shape of an innocent person. The identifications then became the utterly untrustworthy “devil’s testimony,” and although few as yet charged them with dissembling (that would come later), Thomas Brattle called them decisively “these blind, nonsensical girls.”
7
The trials’ eventual critics focused on the young female accusers, ignoring all the maleficium witnesses and the older confessors who had also testified against those who had been convicted and hanged. The critics understood at some level that the most effective way to attack the trials was to attack the core group of accusers. When they and their charges had been successfully discredited, support for the prosecutions melted away.
The strange reversal that had placed women on top was then righted, and young women were relegated once again to what contemporaries saw as their proper roles: servers, not served; followers, not leaders; governed, not governors; the silent, not the speakers. Those momentarily powerful became once more the powerless. And only one of them ever went back to Maine.
Interpreting the Behavior of the “Afflicted Girls” and
Assessing Responsibility for the Crisis
Although this book has asked many new questions about the Essex County witchcraft crisis, until now I have deliberately not addressed an issue that has preoccupied many scholars and others intrigued by the 1692 crisis: How should the behavior of the so-called “afflicted girls” be interpreted in modern terms? Were they faking? Had they ingested some sort of psychotropic material that made them hallucinate? Were they hysterical? If so, what led to that hysteria? I chose this course of action (or, perhaps, non-action) because I wanted to focus on narrating the crisis as it was understood in the late seventeenth century, not as we might understand it today. I often tell my students that one cannot answer historical questions one has not asked, but even so, in the case of Salem witchcraft, responses to such inquiries must, in the end, be considered.
The group commonly referred to as the “afflicted girls” actually comprised three distinct sets of people: first, five little girls, three from Salem Village and later two from Andover, age thirteen and under; second, older young people (including one male) living in both towns, in their late teens and early twenties, some of them servants; and, finally, married women in their thirties, most notably Sarah Vibber and Ann Carr Putnam. Although these accusers often acted as a group, they also need to be examined individually. Some (for example, Abigail Williams) were active early in the crisis, but then seem to have withdrawn from involvement; some (Susannah Sheldon and Elizabeth Booth) chimed in later; some (for instance, Betty Hubbard and Mary Walcott) persisted in offering accusations and testimony for many months. (See appendix 3 for these patterns.)