Diabolical doings in a Puritan village.

By Stacy Schiff

I n 1692, the Massachusetts

Bay Colony executed
fourteen women, five men,
Where will the Devil show most malice but where
he is hated, and hateth most? Cotton Mather
wrote.

and two dogs for witchcraft.

The sorcery materialized in January. The first hanging took place
in June, the last in September; a stark, stunned silence followed.
Although we will never know the exact number of those formally
charged with having wickedly, maliciously, and feloniously
engaged in sorcery, somewhere between a hundred and forty-four
and a hundred and eighty-five witches and wizards were named in
twenty-five villages and towns. The youngest was five; the eldest
nearly eighty. Husbands implicated wives; nephews their aunts;
daughters their mothers; siblings each other. One minister
discovered that he was related to no fewer than twenty witches.

The population of New England at that time would fit into

Yankee Stadium today. Nearly to a person, they were Puritans.
Having suffered for their faith, they had sailed to North America
to worship with more purity and less peril than they could do in
the country where they were, as a clergyman at the center of the
crisis later explained. On a providential mission, they hoped to
begin history anew; they had the advantage of building a
civilization from scratch. Like any oppressed people, they defined
themselves by what offended them, which would give New
England its gritty flavor and, it has been argued, America its
independence.

New England delivered greater purity but also introduced fresh

perils. Stretching from Marthas Vineyard to Nova Scotia and
incorporating parts of present-day Rhode Island, Connecticut,
New Hampshire, and Maine, it perched on the edge of a
wilderness. That was a precarious position well before 1692, when
the colony teetered between governments, or, more exactly, as a
Boston merchant put it, between government and no
government. The settlers unseated their royal governor in a deft
1689 military coup. They had endured without a charter for eight
years.

From the start, the colonists tangled with that American staple,
the swarthy terrorist in the back yard. Without a knock or a
greeting, four armed Indians might appear in your parlor to warm
themselves by the fire, propositioning you, while you cowered in
the corner with your knitting. You could return from a trip to
Boston to find your house in ashes and your family taken captive.
The Indians skulked, they lurked, they flitted, they committed
atrocitiesand they vanished. Our men could see no enemy to
shoot at, a Cambridge major general lamented.

King Philips War, a fifteen-month contest between the settlers

and the Native Americans, had ended in 1676. It obliterated a
third of New Englands towns, pulverized its economy, and
claimed ten per cent of the adult male population. Every Bay
Colony resident lost a friend or a relative; all knew of a
dismemberment or an abduction. By 1692, another Indian war
had begun to take shape, with a series of grisly raids by the
Wabanaki and their French allies. The frontier had recently
moved to within fifty miles of Salem.

From the pulpit came reminders of New Englands many

depredations. The wilderness qualified as a sort of devils den;
since the time of Moses, the prince of darkness had thrived there.
He was hardly pleased to be displaced by a convoy of Puritans. He
was in fact stark raving mad about it, preached Cotton Mather,
the brilliant twenty-nine-year-old Boston minister. What, exactly,
did an army of devils look like? Imagine vast regiments of cruel
and bloody French dragoons, Mather instructed his North
Church parishioners, and they would understand. He routinely
muddied the zoological waters: Indians comported themselves like
roaring lions or savage bears, Quakers like grievous wolves. The
French, dragons of the wilderness, completed the diabolical
menagerie. Given the symbiotic relationship of an oppressed
people and an inhospitable landscape, it was from there but a
short step to a colluding axis of evil.

The men who catalogued those dangerswho could discern a

line of Revelation in a hailstormprotected against them,
spiritually and politically. They assisted in coups and installed
regimes. Where witches were concerned, they deferred to the
Biblical injunction: Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, Exodus
commands. The most literate men in Massachusetts in 1692 were
also the most literal. Among them, few probed the subject of
witchcraft as intently as did the lanky, light-haired Mather, who
had entered Harvard at eleven and preached his first sermon at
sixteen. He knew that the hidden world was there somewhere. He
would relinquish no tool to exhibit it.

Mather shared the North Church pulpit with his illustrious

father, Increase Mather. The president of Harvard, Increase was
New Englands best-known and most prolific minister. (His son
would eventually eclipse him on both counts, publishing four
hundred and thirty-seven books, twenty-six of them in the next
four years.) The elder Mather was returning from England that
spring with a new charter. The fruit of three years negotiation, it
promised at last to deliver Massachusetts from chaos. The
colonists awaited it in jittery suspense; all manner of rumor
circulated as to its terms. So unreliable was the news that a
monarch could be dead one minute and alive the next.

I n isolated settlements, in smoky, fire-lit homes, New

Englanders lived very much in the dark, where one listens
more acutely, feels most passionately, and imagines most vividly,
where the sacred and the occult thrive. The seventeenth-century
sky was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black that it could
be difficult at night to keep to the path, so black that a line of
trees might freely migrate to another location, or that you might
find yourself pursued by a rabid black hog, leaving you to crawl
home on all fours, bloody and disoriented. Even the colonys less
isolated outposts felt their fragility. A tempest blew the roof off
 one of the finest homes in Salem as its ten occupants slept. A
church went flying, with its congregation inside.

A visitor exaggerated when he reported that New Englanders

could neither drive a bargain, nor make a jest, without a text of
Scripture at the end on it, but he was not far off. If there was a
book in the house, it was the Bible. The early modern American
thought, breathed, dreamed, disciplined, bartered, and
hallucinated in Biblical texts and imagery. St. John the Baptist
might well turn up in a land dispute. A prisoner cited
Deuteronomy 19:19 in his own defense. When a killer cat came
flying in your windowtaking hold of your throat and crushing
your chest as you lay defenseless in your bedyou scared it away
by invoking the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. You also
concluded that your irascible neighbor had paid a call, in feline
form.

Human frailty was understood to

The math is right. Its just in poor taste.
account for inclement weather:
teeth chattering, toes numb, the Massachusetts Puritan had every
reason to believe that he sinned flamboyantly. He did so especially
during the arctic winter of 1691, when bread froze on
Communion plates, ink in pens, sap in the fireplace. In tiny
Salem village, the Reverend Samuel Parris preached to a chorus of
rattling coughs and sniffles, to the shuffling of cruelly frostbitten
feet. For everyones comfort, he curtailed his afternoon sermon of
January 3, 1692. It was too cold to go on.

Weeks later, word got out that something was grievously wrong
in the Parris household. The ministers eleven-year-old niece and
nine-year-old daughter complained of bites and pinches by
invisible agents. Abigail and Betty launched into foolish,
ridiculous speeches. Their bodies shuddered and spun. They
went limp or spasmodically rigid. They interrupted sermons and
fell into trances. Neither appeared to have time for prayer, though
until January both had been perfectly well behaved and well
mannered. At night they slept like babies.

I n 1641, when the colonists established a legal code, the first

capital crime was idolatry. The second was witchcraft. If any
man or woman be a witch, that is, has or consults with a familiar
spirit, they shall be put to death, read the Massachusetts body of
laws. Blasphemy came next, followed by murder, poisoning, and
bestiality. In the years since, New England had indicted more
than a hundred witches, about a quarter of them men. The first
person to confess to having entered into a pact with Satan, a
Connecticut servant, had prayed for his help with her chores. An
assistant materialized to clear the ashes from the hearth and the
hogs from the fields. The servant was indicted in 1648 for
familiarity with the devil. Unable to resist a calamity,
preternatural or otherwise, Cotton Mather disseminated an
instructive account of her compact.

In 1688, four exemplary Boston children, the sons and daughters

of a devout Boston stonelayer named John Goodwin, suffered
from a baffling disorder. They would bark at one another like
dogs, and again purr like so many cats, noted Mather, who
observed Goodwins family and wrote of their afflictions in
Memorable Providences, Relating to Witchcraft and
Possessions the following year. (The 1689 volume was a salute to
his fathers Illustrious Providences, a grab bag of apparitions and
portents, published five years earlier.) The Goodwin children flew
like geese, on one occasion for twenty feet. They recoiled from
blows of invisible sticks, shrieked that they were sliced by knives
or wrapped in chains. Jaws, wrists, necks flew out of joint.
Parental reproof sent the children into agonies. Chores defied
them. But nothing in the world would so discompose them as a
religious exercise, Mather reported. Thirteen-year-old Martha
could read an Oxford compendium of humor, although she seized
up when handed a volume he deemed profitable and edifying, or
one with the name Mather on the cover.

To observe her symptoms more closely, Mather that summer took

Martha Goodwin into his home. She cantered, trotted, and
galloped about the household on her aeriel steed, whistling
through family prayer and pummelling anyone who attempted it
in her presencethe worst house guest in history. She hurled
books at Mathers head. She read and reread his pages on her
case, lampooning their author. The sauciness astonished him.
And she particularly told me, Mather sputtered, four years
before the Salem trials, that I should quickly come to disgrace by
that history.

The cause of Marthas afflictions was identified soon enough. The

witch was the mother of a neighborhood laundress. On the stand,
the defendant was unable adequately to recite the Lords Prayer,
understood to be proof of guilt. She was hanged in November,
1688, on Boston Common.

Samuel Parris, the Salem minister, would have known every detail
of the Goodwin familys trials from Mathers much reprinted
Memorable Providences. The book included the pages Martha
wildly ridiculed. The agitations, writhings, tumblings, tossings,
wallowings, foamings in the parsonage were the same, only more
acute. The girls cried that they were being stabbed with fine
needles. Their skin burned. One disappeared halfway down a
well. Their shrieks could be heard from a distance.

Through February, Parris fasted and prayed. He consulted with

fellow-clergymen. With cider and cakes, he and his wife
entertained the well-wishers who crowded their home. They
prayed ardently, gooseflesh rising on their arms. They sang
Psalms. But when the minister had had enough of the odd
postures and antic gestures, the deranged speeches, when it
became clear that Scripture would not relieve the girls
preternatural symptoms, Parris called in the doctors.

In 1692, a basic medical kit looked little different from an ancient

Greek one, consisting as it did of beetles blood, fox lung, and
dried dolphin heart. In plasters or powders, snails figured in many
remedies. Salem village had one practicing physician that winter.
He owned nine medical texts; he could likely read but not write.
His surgical arsenal consisted of lances, razors, and saws. The
doctor who had examined a seizing Groton girl a generation
earlier initially diagnosed a stomach disorder. On a second visit,
he refused to administer to her further. The distemper was
diabolical in origin.

Whoever examined Abigail and Betty arrived at the same

conclusion. The evil hand came as no surprise; the supernatural
explanation was already the one on the street. The diagnosis likely
terrified the girls, whose symptoms deteriorated. It may have
gratified Reverend Parris. Witchcraft was portentous, a Puritan
favorite. Never before had it broken out in a parsonage. The
Devils appearance was nearly a badge of honor, further proof that
New Englanders were the chosen people. No wonder
Massachusetts was troubled by witches, Cotton Mather exulted:
 Where will the Devil show most malice but where he is hated,
and hateth most? The New England ministry had long been on
the lookout for the apocalypse, imminent since the sixteen-fifties.
The Book of Revelation predicted that the Devil would descend
accompanied by infernal fiends. If they were about, God could
not be far behind.

Soon the twelve-year-old daughter of a close friend of Parriss

began to shudder and choke. So did the village doctors teen-age
niece. A creature had followed her home from an errand, through
the snow; she now realized that it had not been a wolf at all. The
girls named names. They could see the culprits clearly. Not one
but three witches were loose in Salem.

From Marthas Vineyard to Nova Scotia, New England perched on the edge of a wilderness.

W hat exactly was a witch? Any seventeenth-century New

Englander could have told you. As workers of magic,
witches and wizards extend as far back as recorded history. The
witch as Salem conceived her materialized in the thirteenth
century, when sorcery and heresy moved closer together. She
came into her own with the Inquisition, as a popular myth yielded
to a popular madness. The western Alps introduced her to lurid
orgies. Germany launched her into the air. As the magician
molted into the witch, she also became predominately female,
inherently more wicked and more susceptible to satanic overtures.
An influential fifteenth-century text compressed a shelf of
classical sources to make its point: When a woman thinks alone,
she thinks evil. As is often the case with questions of women and
power, elucidations here verged on the paranormal. Though weak
willed, women could emerge as dangerously, insatiably
commanding.
The English witch made the trip to North America largely intact.
She signed her agreement with the Devil in blood, bore a mark on
her body for her compact, and enchanted by way of charms,
ointments, and poppets, doll-like effigies. Continental witches
had more fun. They walked on their hands. They made
pregnancies last for three years. They rode hyenas to bacchanals
deep in the forest. They stole babies and penises. The
Massachusetts witch disordered the barn and the kitchen. She
seldom flew to illicit meetings, more common in Scandinavia and
Scotland. Instead, she divined the contents of an unopened letter,
spun suspiciously fine linen, survived falls down stairs, tipped hay
from wagons, enchanted beer, or caused cattle to leap four feet off
the ground. Witches could be muttering, contentious malcontents
or inexplicably strong and unaccountably smart. They could
commit the capital offense of having more wit than their
neighbors, as a minister said of the third Massachusetts woman
hanged for witchcraft, in 1656.

Matters were murkier when it came to the wily figure with six
thousand years of experience, the master of disguise who could
cause things to appear and disappear, who knew your secrets and
could make you believe things of yourself that were not true. He
turned up in New England as a hybrid monkey, man, and rooster,
or as a fast-moving turtle. Even Cotton Mather was unsure what
language he spoke. He was a pervasive presence, however: the air
pulsed with his minions. Typically in Massachusetts, he wore a
high-crowned hat, as he had in an earlier Swedish invasion, which
Mather documented in his 1689 book. Mather did not mention
the brightly colored scarf that the Devil wound around his hat.
Like the Swedish devils gartered stockings or red beard, it never
turned up in New England.
B y May, 1692, eight Salem girls had claimed to be enchanted
by individuals whom most of them had never met. Several
served as visionaries; relatives of the ailing made pilgrimages to
consult with them. They might be only eleven or twelve, but
under adult supervision they could explain how several head of
cattle had frozen to death, several communities away, six years
earlier. In the courtroom, they provided prophetic direction,
cautioning that a suspect would soon topple a child, or cause a
woman to levitate. Minutes later, the victims feet rose from the
floor. With their help, at least sixty witches had been deposed and
jailed by the end of the month, more than the Massachusetts
prisons had ever accommodated. Those who had frozen through
the winter began to roast in the sweltering spring.

On May 27th, the new Massachusetts governor, Sir William

Phips, established a special court to try the witchcraft cases. He
assembled on the bench nine of the people of the best prudence
and figure that could be pitched upon. At its head he installed
his lieutenant governor, sixty-year-old William Stoughton. A
political shape-shifter, Stoughton had served in five prior
Massachusetts regimes. He had helped to unseat the reviled royal
governor, on whose council he sat and whose courts he headed.
He possessed one of the finest legal minds in the colony.

The court met in early June, and sentenced the first witch to hang
on the tenth. It also requested a bit of guidance. During the next
days, twelve ministers conferred. Cotton Mather drafted their
reply, a circumspect, eight-paragraph document, delivered mid-
month. Acknowledging the enormity of the crisis, he issued a
paean to good government. He urged exquisite caution. He
warned of the dangers posed to those formerly of an
unblemished reputation.
In the lines that surely received the greatest scrutiny, Mather
reminded the justices that convictions should not rest purely on
spectral evidenceevidence visible only to the enchanted, who
conversed with the Devil or with his confederates. Mather would
insist on the point throughout the summer. Other considerations
must weigh against the suspected witch, inasmuch as tis an
undoubted and a notorious thing that a devil might impersonate
an innocent, even virtuous, man. Mather wondered whether the
entire calamity might be resolved if the court discounted those
testimonies. With a sweeping neverthelessa word that figured
in every 1692 Mather statement on witchcrafthe then executed
an about-face. Having advised exquisite caution, he endorsed a
speedy and vigorous prosecution.

A month later, Ann Foster, a seventy-two-year-old widow

from neighboring Andover, submitted to the first of several
Salem interrogations. Initially, she denied all involvement with
sorcery. Soon enough, she began to unspool a fantastical tale. The
Devil had appeared to her as an exotic bird. He promised
prosperity, along with the gift of afflicting at a glance. She had
not seen him in six months, but her ill-tempered neighbor,
Martha Carrier, had been in touch on his behalf.

At Carriers direction, Foster had bewitched several children and

a hog. She worked her sorcery with poppets. Carrier had
announced a Devils Sabbath in May, arranging their trip by air.
There were twenty-five people in the meadow, where a former
Salem village minister officiated. Three days later, from jail,
Foster added a malfunctioning pole and a mishap to her account.
The pole had snapped as the women flew, causing them to crash,
Fosters leg crumpling beneath her.
 She appeared entirely coperative, both in a jail interview with a
minister and before her interrogators. The justices soon learned
that Foster had failed to come clean, however. It seemed that she
and Carrier had neither flown nor crashed alone on that Salem-
bound pole: a third rider had travelled silently behind Foster. So
divulged forty-year-old Mary Lacey, a newly arrested suspect, on
July 20th. Foster had also withheld the details of a chilling
ceremony. The Devil had baptized his recruits, dipping their
heads in water, six at a time. He performed the sacrament in a
nearby river, to which he had carried Lacey in his arms. On July
21st, Ann Foster appeared before the magistrates for the fourth
time. That hearing was particularly sensational: Mary Lacey, who
supplied the details missing from Fosters account, was her
daughter.

Did not you know your

Behind the back, between the legs, around my
disappointed parents, nothing but net.
daughter to be a witch? one
justice asked Foster. She did not,
and seemed taken aback. Mary Warren, a pretty, twenty-year-old
servant, helpfully chimed in, a less dramatic witness at Fosters
hearing than she appeared on other occasions, when blood
trickled from her mouth or spread across her bonnet. Warren
shared with the court what a spectre had confided in her: Foster
had recruited her own daughter. The authorities understood that
she had done so about thirteen years earlier. Was that correct?
No, and I know no more of my daughters being a witch than
what day I shall die upon, Foster replied, sounding as
unequivocal as she had been on the details of the misbegotten
Salem flight. A magistrate coaxed her: You cannot expect peace
of conscience without a free confession. Foster swore that if she
knew anything more she would reveal it.
At this, Mary Lacey was called. She berated her mother: We
have forsaken Jesus Christ, and the Devil hath got hold of us.
How shall we get clear of this evil one? Under her breath, Foster
began to pray. What God do witches pray to? a justice needled.
I cannot tell, the Lord help me, the befuddled old woman
replied, as her daughter delivered fresh details of their flight to the
village green and of the satanic baptism. Her mother, Lacey
revealed, rode first on the stick.

Court officers removed the two older women and escorted Laceys
seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary Lacey, Jr., into the room.
Mary Warren fell at once into fits. At first, the younger Lacey was
unhelpful. Where is my mother that made me a witch and I
knew it not? she cried, a yet more disturbing question than the
one posed in June, when a suspect wondered whether she might
be a witch and not know it. Asked to smile at Warren without
hurting her, Mary Lacey failed. Warren collapsed to the floor.
Do you acknowledge now that you are a witch? Lacey was
asked. She could only agree, although she seemed to be working
from a different definition: a recalcitrant child, she had caused her
parents plenty of trouble. She had, she insisted, signed no
diabolical pact.
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T he ideal Puritan girl was a sterling amalgam of modesty,

piety, and tireless industry. She was to speak neither too
soon nor too much. She read her Scripture twice daily. Increase
Mather warned that youths who disregarded their mothers could
expect to come to the gallows, and be hanged in gibbets for the
ravens and eagles to feed upon them. The attention to a
youngsters spiritual state intensified at adolescence, when
children became simultaneously more capable of reason and less
reasonable. Fourteen was the dividing line in law, for slander
among other matters. One was meant then to embrace sobriety
and to put away childish things, as a father reminded his
Harvard-bound son.

The father was the master of the family, its soul, the governor of
all the governed. He was often an active and engaged parent. He
sat vigil in the sickroom. He fretted over his childrens bodies and
souls. A majority of the bewitched girls had lost fathers; at least
half were refugees from or had been orphaned by attacks in the
last Indian war. Those absences were deeply felt. A roaring girl
wrestled aloud with the demons who would assault her the
following year: she was well aware that she was fatherlesshow
often did they need to remind her as much? But she was hardly an
orphan. In a heated, one-sided conversation, observed and
preserved by Cotton Mather, the seventeen-year-old admonished
her tormentors, I have God for my father and I dont question
but hell provide well for me.

The justices reminded Mary Lacey, Jr., that if she desired to be

saved by Christ she would confess. She then proceeded, the
court reporter noted. She was more profligate with details than
her mother or her grandmother had been. It was a hallmark of
Salem that the younger generationCotton Mather
includedcould be relied on for the most luxuriant reports. It
appeared easier to describe satanic escapades when an adolescent
had already been told, or believed, that she cavorted with the
Devil. The record allows a fleeting glimpse of Marys sense of
herself. I have been a disobed she began, after which the page
is torn.

F ollowing Marys testimony, her mother was returned to the

room. The older woman had so often scolded that the Devil
should fetch her away. Her wish had come true! Tears streaming
down her face, the teen-ager now managed a spot of revenge:
Oh, mother, why did you give me to the Devil twice or thrice
over? Mary sobbed. She prayed that the Lord might expose all
the witches. Officials led in her grandmother; three generations of
enchantresses stood before the justices. Mary continued her rant:
Oh, grandmother, why did you give me to the Devil? Why did
you persuade me and, oh, grandmother, do not you deny it. You
have been a very bad woman in your time. The three returned to
jail as a clutch of warrants made their way to Andover.

B y the end of July, it was clear that with the help of a

minister mastermindthe Devil intended to topple the
Church and subvert the country, something he had never before
attempted in New England. Certain patterns emerged as well. To
cast aspersions on a bewitched girl, to visit ones imprisoned
spouse too regularly, was to risk accusation. It bordered on heresy
to question the validity of witchcraft, the legitimacy of the
evidence, or the wisdom of the court. The skeptic was a marked
man. It could be wise to name names before anyone mentioned
yours. It was safer to be afflicted than accused. Increasingly, you
slept under the same roof, if not in the same bed, as your accuser.

Bewitched women choked with fits, whereas menwho stepped

forward only once the trials had beguntended to submit to
paralyzing bedroom visits. Imputations proved impossible to
outrun. The word of two ministers could not save an accused
parishioner. Neither age, fortune, gender, nor church membership
offered immunity; prominent men stood accused alongside
homeless five-year-old girls. No one ever suffered afflictions
without being able to name a witch. Many braced for a knock at
the door.

The court met again early in August, when three men were
convicted: George Jacobs, an elderly farmer; John Willard, a
much younger one; and John Proctor, the first village man to have
been accused. In Cotton Mathers first Thursday sermon that
month, he addressed the trial that all of Massachusetts awaited.
Tipping his hand a little, he called once for compassion for the
 accused, twice for pity for the justices. They were, after all, up
against the greatest sophist in existence. They labored to restore
the innocent while excising the diabolical; it made for a hazardous
operation. The following day, Mather wrote excitedly to an uncle
in Plymouth. God was working in miracles. No sooner had they
executed five witchesall impudently protesting their
innocencethan God had dispatched the Andover witches, who
offered a most ample, surprising, amazing confession of all their
villainies, acknowledging the five executed that had been their
confederates, and naming many more. They identified their
ringleader, who came to trial that afternoon. A vast concourse of
people, noted Mather, made their way to Salem for the event, his
father among them.

T
he demonic mastermind
Peggy, can we find someone to misuse a few of
these campaign funds for a run to the deli to get
was a minister in his early
us some lunch?
forties named George
Burroughs. He had grown up in Maryland and graduated from
Harvard in 1670, narrowly missing Samuel Parris. He was in his
late twenties when he first arrived in Salem village, where he
spent three contentious years. He was never ordained. Before and
after that tenure, Burroughs served on the vulnerable Maine
frontier. During a 1689 raid, he had joined in a seven-hour battle,
waged in a field and an orchard. A veteran Boston militia captain
lauded the Reverend for his unexpected role. The assault cost the
settlers dearly; two hundred and fifty of them were killed or taken
captive. Twice widowed, Burroughs retreated down the coast to
Wells, eighty miles north of Boston. From a lice-infested
garrison, he several times in the winter of 1692 appealed to the
colonial authorities, who had withdrawn troops from the frontier,
for clothing and provisions. The enemy lurked outside. They
could not hold out for long.
Burroughss spectre had been terrifying Salem villagers since
April, when he first choked the twelve-year-old daughter of the
Parris stalwart. He nearly tore her to pieces, bragging afterward
that he outranked a wizardhe was a conjurer. (Days later, he
introduced himself with the same credentials to Parriss niece,
whom he also bewitched.) He had murdered several women
andevidently a secret agent, in the employ of the French and
the Indiansdispatched a number of frontier soldiers as well. His
mission was a frightful one, he informed the twelve-year-old: he
who should have been teaching children to fear God had now
come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil.
It was he who presided over the satanic Sabbaths.

Sixteen people had given evidence at Burroughss preliminary

hearing. Nearly twice as many testified at his trial. Eight
confessed witches revealed that he had been promised a kingship
in Satans reign. Nine witnesses accused the short, muscular
ministera very puny man, in the estimation of Cotton
Matherof feats that would have taxed a giant. (Mather provided
the sole surviving account of the trial, although we have no
evidence that he ever entered the courtroom.) None of us could
do what he could do, a forty-two-year-old Salem weaver recalled.
He had attempted to lift a shotgun that Burroughs had fired but,
even with both hands, could not steady the seven-foot weapon.
Asked to account for his preternatural strength, Burroughs said
that an Indian had assisted him in firing the musket. Lurking
behind the testimony was what may have been the most pertinent
charge against the former village minister: he had survived every
Indian attack unscathed. Several of the bewitched had not been so
lucky. Others who might have testified about the musket
handling were dead.
The girls delivered up their own reports with difficulty, falling
into testimony-stopping trances, yelping that Burroughs bit them.
They displayed their wounds for court officials, who inspected the
ministers mouth. The imprints matched perfectly. Choking and
thrashing stalled the proceedings; the court could do nothing but
wait for the girls to recover. During one delay, Chief Justice
Stoughton appealed to the defendant. What, he asked, did
Burroughs think throttled them? The minister replied that he
assumed it was the Devil. How comes the devil then to be so
loath to have any testimony born against you? Stoughton
challenged. A brainteaser of a question, it left Burroughs without
an answer.

He was equally bewildered when ghosts began to flit about the

overcrowded room. Some observers who were not bewitched saw
them too. Directly before Burroughs, a girl recoiled from a
horrible sight: she explained that she stared into the blood-red
faces of his dead wives. The ghosts demanded justice. By no
account an agreeable man, Burroughs managed to join abusive
behavior at home with miraculous feats abroad. If those in the
court did not know already that, as Mather had it, Burroughs
had been famous for the barbarous use of his two late wives, all
the country over, they did soon enough. He monitored their
correspondences. He made them swear never to reveal his secrets.
He berated them days after they had given birth. All evidence
pointed to the same conclusion: he was a bad man but a very good
wizard.

At one point, a former brother-in-law testified, Burroughs had

vanished in the midst of a strawberry-picking expedition. His
companions hollered for him in vain. They rode home to find that
he had preceded them, on foot and with a full basket of berries.
He had divined as well what was said about him in his absence.
The Devil could not know as much, the brother-in-law protested,
to which Burroughs replied, My God makes known your
thoughts unto me. Was it possible, the chief justice suggested,
that a devil had fitted Burroughs into some sort of invisibility
cloak, so that he might gratify his own jealous humor, to hear
what they said of him? Burroughss answer is lost; Mather
deemed it not worth considering. The evidence dwarfed the
objections. Burroughs does seem to have bungled his defense. He
stumbled repeatedly, offering contradictory answersa luxury
afforded only the accusers. As for his tergiversations, contra-
dictions, and falsehoods, Mather chided, there never was a
prisoner more eminent for them.

Out of excuses, Burroughs extracted a paper from his pocket. He

seemed to believe it a deal-clincher. He did not contest the
validity of spectral evidence, as had others who came before the
court, who did not care to be convicted for crimes they committed
in someone elses imagination. Instead, Burroughs, reading from
the paper, asserted that there neither are, nor ever were witches,
that having made a compact with the Devil can send a Devil to
torment other people at a distance. It was the most objectionable
thing he could have suggested. If diabolical compacts did not
exist, if the Devil could not subcontract out his work to witches,
the Court of Oyer and Terminer had sent six innocents to their
deaths.

A tussle ensued. Stoughtonwho had graduated from Harvard

around the time Burroughs was bornrecognized the lines at
once. Burroughs had lifted them from the work of Thomas Ady.
A leading English skeptic, Ady inveighed against groundless,
fantastical doctrines, fairy tales and old wives tales, the results of
 middle-of-the-night imaginings, excessive drinking, and blows to
the head. Though witches existed, they were rare. The Bible
nowhere connected them with murder, or with imps, compacts, or
flights through the air.

Ady believed that witches were a convenient excuse for the

ignorant physician. He suggested that when misfortune struck we
should not struggle to recall who had last come to the door.
Burroughs denied having borrowed the passage, then amended
his answer. A visitor had passed him the text in manuscript. He
had transcribed it. He had already several times agreed with the
justices that witches plagued New England. It was too late for
such a dangerous gambit.

E arly on the morning of

When I was your age, I was an adult.
AUGUST 6, 2007 August 19th, the largest
throng to date turned out to
inspect the first men whom Massachusetts was to execute for
witchcraft. Martha Carrier joined them on the trip to the gallows.
As the cart creaked up the hill, George Burroughs, George
Jacobs, John Proctor, and John Willard insisted that they had
been falsely accused. They hoped that the real witches would soon
be revealed. They declared their wish, a bystander reported,
that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed upon that
account. They remained sincere, upright, and sensible of their
circumstances, on all accounts. They forgave their accusers, the
justices, the jury; they prayed they might be pardoned for their
actual sins. Cotton Mather journeyed to Salem for the execution.
Some of the condemned appealed to him in heartrending terms.
Would he help them to prepare spiritually for the journey ahead?
It is unclear if he did so or if he held the same hard line as the
Salem town minister, who did not pray with witches.
Burroughs appears to have climbed the ladder first. With
composure, he paused midway to offer what many expected to be
a long-delayed confession. A wisp of his former self after fourteen
weeks in a dungeon, he remained a contrarian. Perched above a
crowd that included his former in-laws and parishioners, a noose
around his neck, he delivered an impassioned speech. With his
last breaths, Burroughs entrusted himself to the Almighty. Tears
rolled down cheeks all around before he concluded with some
disquieting lines. Our Father, who art in Heaven, Burroughs
began, continuing, from the ladder, with a blunder-free recitation
of the Lords Prayeran impossible feat for a wizard, one that
any number of other suspects had not managed. For a few
moments, it seemed as if the crowd would obstruct the execution.

Minutes later, the minister dangled from a roughly finished beam.

The life had not gone from his body when Mather, on horseback,
pressed forward to smother the sparks of discontent. He reminded
the spectators that Burroughs had never been ordained. (That was
also true of others on the hill that day, but at least made the dying
minister seem unorthodox.) What better disguise might the Devil
choose on such an occasion, Mather challenged, than to
masquerade as an angel of light? To the last, George Burroughs
was condemned for his gifts. The protests quieted, as did the
minister hanging in midair. He may have heard a portion of
Mathers remarks.

T he execution of a beguiling, Scripture-spouting minister,

protesting his innocence to the end, created nearly as much
disquiet as had the idea that a beguiling, Scripture-spouting
minister recruited for the Devil. It raised qualms about the court
and on the bench. Several of the justices soon allowed that their
methods had been too violent and not grounded upon a right
foundation; were they to sit again, they would proceed
differently. And it sent Cotton Mather to his desk.

On September 2nd, he wrote to the chief justice. Already, Mather

claimed, he had done far more behind the scenes than Stoughton
could possibly know. He had been fasting almost weekly through
the summer for an end to the sulfurous assault. He felt that the
Massachusetts ministers ought to support the court in its weighty,
worthy task; none had sufficiently done so. He volunteered to step
into the breach, to flatten that fury, which we now much turn
upon one another. He had begun to write up a little something,
to set our calamity in as true a light as I can. With this new
book, he proposed to dispel any doubts that innocents were in
danger, a passage he underlined. Mather promised to submit his
narrative to Stoughton, so that there may not be one word out of
point. Might the chief justice and his colleagues sign off on his
endeavor, which would remind the people of their duties in such a
crisis? In a singular valediction, Mather wished Stoughton
success in your noble encounters with Hell.

Increase Mather, too, was at work on a book. As father and son

wrote, confessions and concerns multiplied. Reports circulated
that seven hundred witches preyed on Massachusetts. A
prominent Bostonian carried his ailing child the twenty miles to
Salem, the Lourdes of New England, to be evaluated by the
village girls, incurring the wrath of Increase Mather. Was there
not a God in Boston, he exploded, that he should go to the
Devil in Salem for advice? Things were wholly out of hand when
a Boston divine was up against an adolescent oracle. On October
4th, for the first time, seven suspects, all under the age of
eighteen, went home on bail. Among the eldest was Mary Lacey,
Jr., Ann Fosters headstrong granddaughter.
I found this province miserably harassed with a most horrible
witchcraft, Governor Phips wrote on October 12th, in his first
report to London on the supernatural plague. He sounded as if he
were writing from Sweden rather than from Boston, borrowing
Mathers details of that infestation. Grappling with the future of
the court, which was scheduled to reconvene in two weeks, he
insisted that the justices had always ruled with empirical evidence,
but admitted that many now condemned their work. He placed a
ban on witchcraft books. I saw a likelihood of kindling an
inextinguishable flame if I should admit any public and open
contests, Phips explained. That ban applied only to volumes that
did not bear the name Mather on the cover. The Wonders of the
Invisible World soon slipped into print, followed by Increase
Mathers Cases of Conscience, both artfully postdated to 1693.

T he Wonders of the Invisible World was Americas first

instant book. Garlanded in credentials, it advertised itself
as having been published by the special command of his
Excellency the Governor. Stoughton prefaced the volume,
professing himself mildly surprised but immensely gratified by the
work. What a timely account, so carefully and moderately
composed! The chief justice was particularly grateful for Mathers
painstaking efforts, considering the place that I hold in the Court
of Oyer and Terminer, still laboring and proceeding in the trial of
the persons accused and convicted for witchcraft. Cotton Mather
introduced the text with a tribute to his own courage. It was
crucial that proper use be made of the stupendous and prodigious
things that are happening among us. He did so only, he
professed, because no one else volunteered. Weeks earlier, he had
promised that his work would in no way interfere with that of two
colleagues, whom he effectively cut off at the pass.
 What constituted sufficient proof of witchcraft? Father and son
disagreed. Fifty-three-year-old Increase explained in Cases that
a free and voluntary confession remained the gold standard.
When credible men and women could attest to these things, the
evidence was sound. He had no patience for mewling teen-age
girls. One did not accept testimony from a distracted person or
of a possessed person in a case of murder, theft, felony of any sort,
then neither may we do it in the case of witchcraft. He cast a
vote for clemency: I would rather, he wrote, judge a witch to be
an honest woman than judge an honest woman as a witch.

Cotton Mather worried less

Hey, Sisyphus, when youve got a minute Id
like to discuss this progress report with you.
about condemning an innocent
JUNE 1, 2009
than about allowing a witch to
walk free. In Wonders, he set
out to countermine the whole plot of the devil against New
England. He would not be surprised if the witchcraft reached
even farther than was suspected, folding into his volume an
account of a celebrated thirty-year-old English case, similar to
Salems, except perhaps for a combusting toad. He chose that trial
with reason: it was one in which spectral evidence had served to
convict. Mather seems occasionally to have embroidered on court
reports with details that appear nowhere in the surviving pages:
the smell of brimstone, money raining down, a corner of a sheet
ripped from a spectre. He otherwise adhered closely to the
evidence while working some magic with his pages; no witnesses
for the defense or petitions on their behalf appear in Wonders.
Mather included all the crowd-pleasing spectral stories, while
issuing regular reminders that flights and pacts played only
supporting roles in the convictions.
He expressed his fervent hope that some of the witches in custody
might prove innocent. They deserve our most compassionate
pity, till there be fuller evidences that they are less worthy of it.
Twenty pages later, he wrote of George Burroughs, Glad I
should have been if I had never known the name of this man.
His very initials revolted Mather. He wrote up five trial accounts
in all; Burroughs alone was so powerful a wizard that he could not
be named.

As quickly as Mather worked, The Wonders of the Invisible

World arrived as a case of too much too late. Conceived as a
justification, billed as a felicitous accident, advertised in the
authors own words, the volume read as a full-throated apologia.
Governor Phips disbanded the witchcraft court at the end of
October. Days after the books publication, Mather wailed to his
Plymouth-based uncle. A cataract of unkindness, abuse, and
reproach roared his way. People said lovely things to his face and
hideous things behind his back. He meant only to tamp down
dissent at a critical time. He found himself under fire for another
infraction as well: filial disrespect. He had not endorsed his
fathers volume. (Nor had his father endorsed his.) Among all the
freewheeling accusations in 1692, not once had a father accused a
son or a son implicated a father. He could see little to do but die.

The new administration could ill afford a rift at this juncture;

Increase Mather added a postscript to his pages. He remained
convinced that witches roamed the land. He meant not to deny
witchcraft but to make its prosecution more exact. He had
declined to endorse his sons volume only out of an aversion to
nepotism; he was most grateful to him for having established that
no one had been convicted purely on spectral evidence. He too
made a point of including Burroughs, who had, Increase Mather
assured his readers, accomplished things that no one who has not
a devil to be his familiar could perform. Burroughs had deserved
to hang. As Cotton Mather saw it, he had made a case for
prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting the innocent.
Were they not saying the same thing? An early death no longer
appealed.

A year after the trials, Cotton Mather treated two newly

afflicted girls. A seventeen-year-old servant began to
convulse after insulting a woman who had been imprisoned in
1692. The girl interrupted sermons and fell into trances. She went
twelve days without food. She discoursed with spectres who
tempted her with diabolical pacts; she shrieked so loudly that
well-wishers fled the room; she tore a leaf from Mathers Bible.
He followed the same protocol he had with the Goodwins, four
years and nineteen executions earlier, assembling groups to pray
and to sing Psalms at her bedside.

Both girls eventually recovered. Mather devoted thirty-eight

pages to the initial case but left them unpublished. Given the
tenor of the times, he wrote, No man in his wits would fully
expose his thoughts unto them, till the charms which enrage the
people are a little better dissipated. He did not care in 1693 to
cultivate what, centuries later, would be termed the paranoid
strain in American politics, with its sense of heated exaggeration,
suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy. Political stability
remained paramount. Mather did, however, retail the teen-agers
report that Frenchmen and Indianshorrid sorcerers and hellish
conjurershad colluded in Salem witchcraft. He insisted on it
for years.
There is no public calamity, Mather noted, in Wonders, but
some ill people will serve themselves of the sad providence, and
make use of it for their own ends, as thieves when a house or town
is on fire, will steal what they can. Twenty-eight years later, a
smallpox epidemic raged through Boston. Cotton Mather faced
down the entire medical establishment to advocate something
that seemed every bit as dubious as spectral evidence: inoculation.
He had studied medicine at Harvard. Over the decades, he had
come better to understand infectious disease. Moving from imps
and witches to germs and viruses, he at last located the devils we
inhale with every breath. The battle turned so vitriolic that it
dragged Salem out of hiding; Mather was bludgeoned for lunacy
on two counts. Yet again, Massachusetts seemed to be in the grip
of distemper. The people talked, he huffed in his diary, not only
like idiots but also like fanaticks. He remained as steadfast on the
subject of inoculation as he had been equivocal on witchcraft. In
November, 1721, a homemade bomb came sailing in his window
at 3 A.M. His reputation never recovered.

MORE: CULTURE HARVARD UNIVERSITY MASSACHUSETTS NEW ENGLAND EXECUTIONS

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